Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 07, May, 1858

Action will furnish belief, —but will that belief be the true
one?
This is the point, you know. However, it doesn't much matter
What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action,
So as to make it entail, not a chance-belief, but the true one.
Out of the question, you say, if a thing isn't wrong, we
may do it.
Ah! but this wrong, you see;—but I do not know that it matters.
Eustace, the Ropers are gone, and no one can tell me about them.

Pisa, they say they think; and so I follow to Pisa,
Hither and thither inquiring. I weary of making inquiries;
I am ashamed, I declare, of asking people about it.—
Who are your friends? You said you had friends who would certainly
know them.

But it is idle, moping, and thinking, and trying to fix her
Image more and more in, to write the old perfect inscription
Over and over again upon every page of remembrance.
I have settled to stay at Florence to wait for your answer.
Who are your friends? Write quickly and tell me. I wait for your
answer.

You are at Lucca Baths, you tell me, to stay for the summer;
Florence was quite too hot; you can't move further at present.
Will you not come, do you think, before the summer is over?
Mr. C. got you out with very considerable trouble;
And he was useful and kind, and seemed so happy to serve you;
Didn't stay with you long, but talked very openly to you;
Made you almost his confessor, without appearing to know it,—
What about?—and you say you didn't need his confessions.
O my dear Miss Roper, I dare not trust what you tell me!
Will he come, do you think? I am really so sorry for him!
They didn't give him my letter at Milan, I feel pretty certain.
You had told him Bellaggio. We didn't go to Bellaggio;
So he would miss our track, and perhaps never come to Lugano,
Where we were written in full, To Lucerne, across the St.
Gothard.
But he could write to you;—you would tell him where you were going.

Let me, then, bear to forget her. I will not cling to her falsely;
Nothing factitious or forced shall impair the old happy relation.
I will let myself go, forget, not try to remember;
I will walk on my way, accept the chances that meet me,
Freely encounter the world, imbibe these alien airs, and
Never ask if new feelings and thoughts are of her or of others.
Is she not changing, herself?—the old image would only delude me.
I will be bold, too, and change,—if it must be. Yet if in all things,
Yet if I do but aspire evermore to the Absolute only,
I shall be doing, I think, somehow, what she will be doing;—
I shall be thine, O my child, some way, though I know not in what way.
Let me submit to forget her; I must; I already forget her.

Utterly vain is, alas, this attempt at the Absolute,—wholly!
I, who believed not in her, because I would fain believe nothing,
Have to believe as I may, with a wilful, unmeaning acceptance.
I, who refused to enfasten the roots of my floating existence
In the rich earth, cling now to the hard, naked rock that is left me.—
Ah! she was worthy, Eustace,—and that, indeed, is my comfort,—
Worthy a nobler heart than a fool such as I could have given.

Yes, it relieves me to write, though I do not send; and the chance
that
Takes may destroy my fragments. But as men pray, without asking
Whether One really exist to hear or do anything for them,—
Simply impelled by the need of the moment to turn to a Being
In a conception of whom there is freedom from all limitation,—
So in your image I turn to an ens rationis of friendship.
Even to write in your name I know not to whom nor in what wise.

There was a time, methought it was but lately departed,
When, if a thing was denied me, I felt I was bound to attempt it;
Choice alone should take, and choice alone should surrender.
There was a time, indeed, when I had not retired thus early,
Languidly thus, from pursuit of a purpose I once had adopted.
But it is over, all that! I have slunk from the perilous field in
Whose wild struggle of forces the prizes of life are contested.
It is over, all that! I am a coward, and know it.
Courage in me could be only factitious, unnatural, useless.

Rome is fallen, I hear, the gallant Medici taken,
Noble Manara slain, and Garibaldi has lost il Moro ;—
Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical Venice.
I, meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl, sit
Moping and mourning here,—for her, and myself much smaller.
Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle,
Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes with them?
Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous pinions of angels
Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their labor,
And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and burning moisture
Wiped from the generous eyes? or do they linger, unhappy,
Pining, and haunting the grave of their by-gone hope and endeavor?
All declamation, alas! though I talk, I care not for Rome, nor
Italy; feebly and faintly, and but with the lips, can lament the
Wreck of the Lombard youth and the victory of the oppressor.
Whither depart the brave?—God knows; I certainly do not.

He has not come as yet; and now I must not expect it.
You have written, you say, to friends at Florence, to see him,
If he perhaps should return;—but that is surely unlikely.
Has he not written to you?—he did not know your direction.
Oh, how strange never once to have told him where you were going!
Yet if he only wrote to Florence, that would have reached you.
If what you say he said was true, why has he not done so?
Is he gone back to Rome, do you think, to his Vatican marbles?—
O my dear Miss Roper, forgive me! do not be angry!—
You have written to Florence;—your friends would certainly find him.
Might you not write to him?—but yet it is so little likely!
I shall expect nothing more.—Ever yours, your affectionate Mary.

I cannot stay at Florence, not even to wait for a letter.
Galleries only oppress me. Remembrance of hope I had cherished
(Almost more than as hope, when I passed through Florence the first
time)
Lies like a sword in my soul. I am more a coward than ever,
Chicken-hearted, past thought. The caffes and waiters distress
me.
All is unkind, and, alas, I am ready for any one's kindness.
Oh, I knew it of old, and knew it, I thought, to perfection,
If there is any one thing in the world to preclude all kindness,
It is the need of it,—it is this sad self-defeating dependence.
Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell
you.
But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression,
Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose.
All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something.
Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks,
Is not I will , but I must . I must,—I must,—and I do
it.