He paused upon the river’s brink, a friendless fugitive,
And in despair’s wild moment asked—“Why should I longer live?
Deep are these waters, dark and cold, but deeper is my wo,
And peace, methinks, lies underneath the river’s tranquil flow.”
’Twas but a flash of sulphurous light from the great Tempter’s mind,
On sorrow’s cloud that sudden gleamed, the poet’s soul to blind!
It passed like lightning, and he saw again a living world—
The teeming land, the river free, the snowy sail unfurled.
The glowing sunset, gilding spire, and mast, and forest-tree,
Shed light on his enshrouded mind—he felt ’twas joy to be—
To be _himself_—fair Nature’s child—ay, Truth’s and Freedom’s own,
Born to a boundless heritage—heir to a laurel crown!
“I will not die, but live,” he said, “while lives the truth divine—
For Nature and for Art I’ll live—no common life be mine;
This deathless spirit wounded now in struggling to be free,
Shall in its conscious strength arise and claim its destiny!
“Not that the sovereign, who pursues a rebel with his frown,
May see my coronet all green, when fades his ducal crown;
Not that the sire, whose wrath condemned his reckless son to shame,
May hail that son brought back in the triumphal car of Fame—
“But that I feel the living soul of Poesy within,
Urging the liberated thought its mission to begin;
A work eternal bids me on—I cannot, will not die,
Till the vast deep of human mind shall onto deep reply!”
The traveler to a foreign clime now reverent stands beside
The noble statue of a bard, a nation’s love and pride;
Unto whose living works both worlds in admiration turn,
Philosophy, through beauty’s form and music’s tone, to learn.
In calm, colossal grandeur towers that statue on the spot
Where once a youthful poet stood to mourn his hapless lot—
From whence he fled a fugitive, stamped with the rebel’s name,
There Schiller dead, yet living, speaks his own immortal fame.
* * * * *