The Mind and the Heart

“Ma Vie C’est UN Combat.”

Why, ever wringing life from art
Do men my patient labour find?
I still the murmur of my heart,
My one consoler is my mind.

Though every toil but wakes the spell
To rouse the Falsehood and the Foe,
Can all the storms that chafe the well,
Disturb the silent Truth below?

The Mind can reign in Mind alone.—
O Pride, the hollow boast confess!
What slave would not reject a throne
If built amidst a wilderness?

Before my gaze I see my youth,
The ghost of gentler years, arise,
With looks that yearn’d for every truth,
And wings that sought the farthest skies.

Fresh from the golden land of dreams,
Before this waking world began,
How bright the radiant phantom seems
Beside the time-worn weary man!

How, then, the Heart rejoiced in all
That roused the quick aspiring Mind!
What glorious music Hope could call
From every Memory left behind!

Experience drew not then to earth
The looks that Fancy rear’d above,
And all that took their kindred birth
From thought or feeling,—blent in love.

In vain a seraph’s hand had raised
The mask from Falsehood’s fatal brow;
And still as fondly I had gazed
On looks that freeze to marble now.

Can aught that Mind bestows on toil
Replace the earlier heavenly ray,
That did but tremble o’er the soil,
To warm creation into May?

But now, in Autumn’s hollow sigh,
The heart its waning season shows,
And all the clearness of the sky
Foretells the coming of the snows.

Farewell, sweet season of the Heart,
And come, O iron rule of Mind,
I see the Golden Age depart,
And face the war it leaves behind.

Me nevermore may Feeling thrall,
Resign’d to Reason’s stoic reign—
But oh, how much of what we call
Content—is nothing but Disdain!