_Par._ (_after a pause_). Are these the barren first-fruits of my quest? Is love like this the natural lot of all? How many years of pain might one such hour O'erbalance? Dearest Michal, dearest Festus, What shall I say, if not that I desire To justify your love; and will, dear friends, In swerving nothing from my first resolves. See, the great moon! and ere the mottled owls Were wide awake, I was to go. It seems You acquiesce at last in all save this-- If I am like to compass what I seek By the untried career I choose; and then, If that career, making but small account Of much of life's delight, will yet retain Sufficient to sustain my soul: for thus I understand these fond fears just expressed. And first; the lore you praise and I neglect, The labors and the precepts of old time, I have not lightly disesteemed. But, friends, Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise From outward things, whate'er you may believe. There is an inmost centre in us all, Where truth abides in fulness; and around, Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, This perfect, clear perception--which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW, Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without. Watch narrowly The demonstration of a truth, its birth, And you trace back the effluence to its spring And source within us; where broods radiance vast, To be elicited ray by ray, as chance Shall favor: chance--for hitherto, your sage Even as he knows not how those beams are born, As little knows he what unlocks their fount: And men have oft grown old among their books To die case-hardened in their ignorance, Whose careless youth had promised what long years Of unremitted labor ne'er performed: While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day, To autumn loiterers just as fancy-free As the midges in the sun, gives birth at last To truth--produced mysteriously as cape Of cloud grown out of the invisible air. Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all, The lowest as the highest? some slight film The interposing bar which binds a soul And makes the idiot, just as makes the sage Some film removed, the happy outlet whence Truth issues proudly? See this soul of ours! How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled By age and waste, set free at last by death: Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones? What is this flesh we have to penetrate? Oh, not alone when life flows still, do truth And power emerge, but also when strange chance Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture, When sickness breaks the body--hunger, watching,