“Still what is this to plants and trees, which fade away in their due season?…But stay: there is man, man the divinest of all things. A hundred cares wreck his heart: countless anxieties trace their wrinkles on his brow: until his inmost self is bowed beneath the burden of life. And swifter still he hurries to decay when vainly striving to attain the unattainable, or grieving over his ignorance of that which can never be known. Then comes the whitening hair;―and why not? Has man an adamantine frame, that he should outlast the trees of the field? Yet after all who is it, save himself, that steals his strength away? Tell me, O boy, what right has man to accuse his autumn blast?
“My boy made no answer. He was fast asleep. No sound reached me save that of the cricket chirping its response to my dirge.
AT A GRAVE.
Man-ch‘ing, thy birth gave a hero, thy death a God! Like the vulgar herd thou wast born and didst die, returning to the domain of nothingness. But thy earthly form could not perish like theirs. There was that within which could not decay: thy bright memory will endure through all generations. For such is the lot of the wise and good: their names are inscribed imperishably, to shine like the stars for ever.
Man-ch‘ing, ’tis long since we met. Yet methinks I see thee now, as then, lofty of mien, courage upon thy brow. Ah! when the grave closed over thee, it was not into foul earth, but into the pure essence of gold and gems that thy dear form was changed.[1] Or haply thou art some towering pine some rare, some wondrous plant. What boots it now? Here in thy loneliness the spreading brambles weave around thy head, while the chill wind blows across thy bed moist with the dew of heaven. The will-o’-the-wisp and the fire-fly flit by: naught heard but the shepherd and the woodman
- ↑ Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
