Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye Are for the happy, for the souls at ease, Who dwell on a firm basis of content! But he who has outlived his prosperous days; But he whose youth fell on a different world From that on which his exiled age is thrown,-- Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained By other rules than are in vogue to-day; Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change, But, in a world he loves not, must subsist In ceaseless opposition, be the guard Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards, That the world win no mastery over him; Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one; Who has no minute’s breathing-space allowed To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy,-- Joy and the outward world must die to him, As they are dead to me. _A long pause, during which EMPEDOCLES remains motionless, plunged in thought. The night deepens. He moves forward, and gazes around him, and proceeds_:-- And yon, ye stars, Who slowly begin to marshal, As of old, in the fields of heaven, Your distant, melancholy lines! Have you, too, survived yourselves? Are you, too, what I fear to become? You too once lived; You too moved joyfully, Among august companions, In an older world, peopled by gods, In a mightier order, The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven. But now ye kindle Your lonely, cold-shining lights, Unwilling lingerers In the heavenly wilderness, For a younger, ignoble world; And renew, by necessity, Night after night your courses, In echoing, unneared silence, Above a race you know not, Uncaring and undelighted, Without friend and without home; Weary like us, though not Weary with our weariness. No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you, No languor, no decay! languor and death, They are with me, not you! ye are alive,-- Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world, That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand,-- Thou, too, brimmest with life! the sea of cloud, That heaves its white and billowy vapors up To moat this isle of ashes from the world, Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down, O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads To Etna’s Lipareän sister-fires And the long dusky line of Italy,-- That mild and luminous floor of waters lives, With held-in joy swelling its heart: I only, Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has failed, I, who have not, like these, in solitude Maintained courage and force, and in myself Nursed an immortal vigor,--I alone Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read In all things my own deadness. _A long silence. He continues_:--