Shall I now again my lyre strike extolling love? A chain
That ’twixt two or sev’ral wooers may be shared, supremely vain.
Must we all, like fools, adoring at the women’s feet down lay us,
Like the operetta chorus that is led by Menelaus?
Nowadays the women, often, like the world, are but a school,
Where one learns humiliation, and to suffer is the rule.
To these colleges of science of the goddess Venus come
Crowding ardently our young men, even of the youngest some;
Till that whole school lies in ruins, go they must the beardless youth,
A veneer is all their knowledge, nought they learn of life and truth.
Do you still those years remember when we sat on benches dreaming,
Listening how the poor old masters Time’s worn coat were patching, seaming;
Corpses only of odd moments gathered from their trashy books,
In the shreds of things deep wisdom seeking with their drowsy looks?
Softly murmuring a fountain deep they were of horum-harum,
With much toil but scarcely earning nervum rerum gerendarum,
With the deepest veneration they wound up the spirit’s pulley,
With Egyptian kings, plants, planets, thus our poor brains cramming fully.
The astronomer methinks I see, how from the chasm’s yawn
Easily as from a drawer one by one the worlds were drawn,
Dark eternity unrolling, he then taught us marvelling
How the epochs, like a necklace, pearl by pearl, thus formed a string,
Like the learned Galileo in our hearts we then could feel
How the whole world’s sphere was whirling round and round as does a reel.
With dead languages, with planets, in the dizziness of dream,
Our old master some moth-eaten mummy of a king would seem;
While he spoke of king Sesostris, on the walls and on the ceiling
I examined all the cobwebs, dreamt of blue eyes, my mind reeling,
And on copybooks, on margins, wrote down verses for some Flora,
With her rosy cheeks, capricious, telling how I did adore her.
So in a confused, wild jumble floated there before my mind
Kings, and animals, and planets; images of every kind,
All things, even boys’ pens scraping, to the silence charm then gave,
In my dream I saw green meadows, cornfields in the wind would wave,
In an infinite all melted, down would fall my heavy head;
When the bell rang, old Sesostris must already have been dead.
