Who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity?
To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.--_Paradise Lost_.
Morton recovered slowly. The influences about him were any thing but
favorable to a quick convalescence, and it was months before he was
himself again. Even then, though his health seemed confirmed, a deeper
cloud remained upon his spirits: his dungeon seemed more dark and
gloomy, his prospects more desperate.
One day he paced his cell in a mood of more than usual depression.
"Fools and knaves are at large; robbery and murder have full scope;
vanity and profligacy run their free career; then why is honest effort
paralyzed, and buried here alive? There are those in these
vaults,--men innocent of crime as I,--men who would have been an honor
to their race,--who have passed a score of years in this living death.
And canting fools would console them with saying that 'all is for the
best.' I will sooner believe that the world is governed by devils, and
that the prince of them all is bodied in Metternich. Why is there not
in crushed hope, and stifled wrath, and swelling anguish, and frenzy,
and despair, a force to burst these hellish sepulchres, and blow them
to the moon!
"It is but a weak punishment to which Milton dooms his ruined angel.
Action,--enterprise,--achievement,--a hell like that is heaven to the
cells of Ehrenberg. He should have chained him to a rock, and left him
alone to the torture of his own thoughts; the unutterable agonies of a
mind preying on itself for want of other sustenance. Action!--mured in
this dungeon, the starved soul gasps for it as the lungs for air.
'Action, action, action!--all in all! What is life without it? A
marsh, a quagmire, a rotten, stagnant pool. It is its own reward. The
chase is all; the prize nothing. The huntsmen chase the fox all day,
and, when they have caught her, fling her to their hounds for a
worthless vermin. Alexander wept that he had no more worlds to
conquer. What did it profit him that a conquered world lay already at
his feet? The errant knights who roamed the world with their
mistress's glove on their helmet, achieving impossibilities in her
name,--which of them could have endured to live in peace with her for
a six-month? The crusader master of Jerusalem, Cortes with Mexico
subdued, any hero when his work is done, falls back to the ranks of
common men. His lamp is out, his fire quenched; and what avails the
stale, lack-lustre remnant of his days?
"Action! the panacea of human ills; the sure resource of misery; the
refuge of bad consciences; a maelstroom, in whose giddy vortex saints
and villains may whirl alike. How like a madman some great criminal,
some Macbeth, will plunge on through his slough of blood and
treachery, frantic to dam out justice at every chink, and bulwark
himself against fate; clinching crime with crime; giving conscience no
time to stab; finding no rest; but still plunging on, desperate and
blind! How like a madman some pious anchorite, fervent to win heaven,
will pile torture on torture, fast, and vigil, and scourge, made
wretched daily with some fresh scruple, delving to find some new depth
of self-abasement, and still struggling on unsatisfied, insatiable of
penance, till the grave devours him! Human activity!--to pursue a
security which is never reached, a contentment which eludes the grasp,
some golden consummation which proves but hollow mockery; to seize the
prize, to taste it, to fling it away, and reach after another! This
cell, where I thought myself buried and sealed up from knowledge, is,
after all, a school of philosophy. It teaches a dreary wisdom of its
own. Through these stone walls I can see the follies of the world more
clearly than when I was in the midst of them. A dreary wisdom; and yet
not wholly dreary. There is a power and a consolation in it. Misery is
the mind-maker; the revealer of truth; the spring of nobleness; the
test, the purger, the strengthener of the spirit. Our natures are like
grapes in the wine press: they must be pressed to the uttermost before
they will give forth all their virtue.
"Why do I delude myself? What good can be wrung out of a misery like
mine? It is folly to cheat myself with hope. This hell-begotten
Austria has me fast, and will not loosen her gripe. Abroad in the free
world, fortitude will count for much. There, one can hold firm the
clefts and cracks of his tottering fortunes with the cement of an
unyielding mind; but here, it is but bare and blank endurance. Yet it
is something that I can still find heart to face my doom; that there
are still moments when I dare to meet this death-in-life, this
slow-consuming horror, face to face, and look into all its hideousness
without shrinking. To creep on to my end through years of slow decay,
mind and soul famishing in solitude, sapped and worn, eaten and
fretted away, by the droppings of lonely thought, till I find my rest
at last under these cursed stones! God! could I but die the death of a
man! De Foix,--Dundee,--Wolfe. I grudge them their bloody end. When
the fierce blood boiled highest, when the keen life was tingling
through their veins, and the shout of victory ringing in their ears,
then to be launched at a breath forth into the wilderness of space, to
sail through eternity, to explore the seas and continents of the vast
unknown! But I,--I must lie here and rot. You fool! you are tied to
the stake, and must bide the baiting as you can. Will you play the
coward? What can you gain by that? You cannot run away. What wretch,
when misery falls upon him, will not cry out, 'Take any shape but
that?' In the familiar crowd, in the daily resort, how many an
unregarded face masks a wretchedness worse than this! some shrunken,
cankered soul, palsied and world-weary, more hopelessly dungeoned than
you. Crush down your anguish, choke down your groan, and say,
'Heaven's will be done.'
"Muster what courage you may. Not those spasms of valor that make the
hero of an emergency, and when the heart is on fire and the soul in
arms, bear him on to great achievement. Mine must be an inward flame,
that warms though it cannot shine; a fire, like the sacred Chaldean
fire, that must never go out; a perpetual spring, flowing up without
ceasing, to meet the unceasing need.
"And you, source of my deepest joy and my deepest sorrow,--do not fail
me now. Come to me in this darkness; let your spirit haunt this tomb
where I lie buried. In your presence, the evil of my heart shrank
back, rebuked; its good sprang up and grew in life and freshness. You
rose upon me like the sun, warming every noble germ into leaf and
flower. You streamed into my soul, banishing its mists, and gladdening
it to its depths with summer light. These are no girl's tears. Towards
myself and my own woes, I have hardened my heart like the barren
flint. I should be less than man if I did not weep when I think of
you. You must pass the appointed lot; you must fade with time and
sorrow; but to me you will be radiant still with youth and beauty. So
will I bide my hour, anchored on that pure and lofty memory, waiting
that last release when the winged spirit shall laugh at bolts and
dungeon bars."