To The Ideal. Prefatory Poem To The Pilgrims Of The Rhine Poem by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

I.
Like the sweet Naiad of the Grecian's dreams,
A Spirit born of Song - unseen, all-seeing-
Lives deep within our dark Life's wandering streams-
Nymph of our soul, and brightener of our being:
She makes the common waters musical-
Binds the rude night winds in a silver thrall-
Bids Hybla's thyme, and Tempe's violet dwell
Round the green marge of her moon-haunted cell:
She - The Ideal, in the Wells of Truth -
Moves, gladdening all things with a Godhead's youth!

II.
Angel, that o'er this dark and blinded earth
Walk'st like a dream, dim-showing worlds above -
Arch-Vanquisher of Time and Care, thy birth
Is of the morning! - And the Incarnate Love,
Yea, the same Power that erst in Galilee,
When the bark travail'd on the adverse sea,
O'er the grim dark the meekening silence cast,
And bade the Deep's broad bosom hush the blast-
Still in thy presence moves with looks of light,
Smiles in the storm, and comforts through the night.

III.
There is a world beyond the visual scope,
Where Memory, brightening, wears the hues of Hope;
A life as
this
to youth's first gaze may seem
Vague, but intense - a passion and a dream.
There, when the earth glooms dark, we glide away,
Soft breathes the air, and golden glows the day -
Flowers bloom and forests wave, - the wild-bird calls,-
The noon laughs loud along the waterfalls:

Man
is not there; yet every mayst thou mark
The River-Maid her amber tresses sleeking;
Or, when the day is done, and through the dark
That bathes the sky, the twilight stars are breaking,
Oft mayst thou view, afar and faintly seen,
The glancing fairies on the silver'd green:
Or there, what time the roseate Urns of Dawn
Scatter fresh dews, and the first sky-lark weaves
Wild meshes of glad song, the bearded Faun
Comes piping cheerly through the odorous leaves,
Dim shapes sink, mist-like, down the crystal fountain,
And fades the Oread through the green caves of the mountain.

These are thy work and world, bright Habitant
Of our own hearts; all beings of all creeds,
So they be fair or wondrous, all are thine,
Born of thee, but undying! and each want
Of our soul's deep desire - the eternal seeds
Planted by Heaven within the ungenial earth-
Hopes all august, and wishes all divine-
Tears, not of sadness - smiles, but not of mirth-
Seeds - wert thou
not
- all buried, till our tomb,
Spring at thy breath, and at thy bidding bloom!

IV.
We love, and, loving, aye ourselves deceive,
For Custom chills what Fate may not bereave,
And still, as Passion sobers in its vow,
The Angel darkens from the mortal's brow.

In vain we yearn, we pine, on earth to win
The Being of the Heart, our boyhood's Dream;
Thou, the Egeria of the world within,
The creature of the West-wind and the Beam-
The embodied music of most sweet emotion;
The
seem'st
, but
art
not in each human love;
Thou shinest starlike o'er this nether ocean,
And, starlike, hold'st thy unreach'd home above.
Still from thy light we turn the gaze away,
To feel the more, the cumber of our clay,
For dimly-guess'd and vague desires to sigh,
And ask from earth the
Eureka
of the sky!

Thus round thy joys the soft regret adheres,
As tones that charm, but, charming, melt to tears:
Yet if the pain, the recompense is thine,
And to Imagine conquers To Repine!
And still, as Persia's tender minstrel told,
The Rose's breath inspires the common mould,
If not for us the eternal flow'ret springs,
Still round our dust the aerial odour clings;
By the loved scent the exalted earth is known,
And grows of worth from fragrance not its own.
Thus gave thy power the imperishable name
To souls whose veriest frailties cradled Fame;
Struck the bright fount of hallowing tears from woe,
And lit with prophet fires the wild Rousseau.

And HE, the erring great, and dimly wise,
O'er whom stern Judgement, while it censures, sighs;
'The young, the beautiful' - whose music cast
A haunting echo where his shadow past,
And with a deep, yet half disdainful, art,
Chain'd to his wandering home the world's mute heart;
Was he not thine - all thine? - his failings, powers,
Faults, fame, and all that make his memory ours?

Not in this world his life: he breathed an air,
Its light thy hope - its vapour thy despair.
If earthlier passion, snake-like, crept within-
If stung suspicion nursed ungenial sin-
If his soul shrunk within one sickly dream
Till self became his idol as his theme;
Yet while we blame, his mournful image chides,
As if we wrong'd the memory of a friend.
As moonlight sways the trouble of the tides,
Wild Minstrel, didst
thou
sway the soul, and blend
Thyself with us as in a common cause;
And when thy wayward heart its rest had won,
The eternal course of Nature seem'd to pause:
We stood stunn'd - shock'd: thy very life had grown
A part - a power - a being of our own!

Oh! who shall tell what comforts yet were thine,
In the lone darkness of the unwatch'd mind;
What time thou stood'st beside the rushing Rhine,
Or heard, through Nero's towers, the moaning wind;
Or watch'd the white moon, in thy younger day,
O'er shrunk Hyssus shed the dreaming ray?
Victim and Votary of the Ideal, none
Shall sound thy joys, or measure thy despair!-
The harp is shatter'd, and the spirit gone,
And half of heaven seems vanish'd from the air!

Yet still the murmurs of the Adrian sea
Shall blend with Tasso's song wild thoughts of thee;
Thy shade shall gloom through old Ravenna's lair
'Till ev'n the forest leaves seem stirr'd with prayer;'
And when the Future, envious of the Past,
Shall break the Argive's iron sleep at last,
Thy reverent name the Albanian youth shall keep-
Thy shape shall haunt the Ionian maiden's sleep-
Thy song shall linger by the Oread's hill,
By Love's own isle, and Music's ancient rill;-
And one grey halo, all unknown before,
Crest the drear wastes by Missolonghi's shore!

V.
But not to them, the Lyre-God's sons, is given
Alone the light of the Ideal Heaven:
Alike thy power o'er souls more arm'd and stern,
And Earth's great Truths drink freshness from thy urn!
In the dim cell where lofty Sidney told
The hours before the Morn on which his soul
Trod, with unfaltering steps and firm, the old
But unworn bridge to our eternal goal,
Arching the Drear Invisible,- the vast
Abyss that wombs The Secret of the Past:-
In that lone cell what thoughts, what white-robed dreams,
Kept watch, like vestals o'er the holy fire,
Round the bright altar of his high desire!
Thou, his Unfound Ideal! thou, whose beams
His creature - yet creator - Liberty!
Thou that didst twine around the Athenian's sword
The wreaths made sacred when Hipparchus fell,
Wert Thou not with him in that glorious cell?
Didst thou not fill the darkness with bright things,
And mighty prophecies of times to be?
Thy love had wrought those fetters, but the wings,

No
chains could curb, were Eagle-plumed by thee!
Thou gavest the dungeon,- but the key to Heaven:
Thou gavest the death-blow,- but the deathless fame:
The thunder roll'd around, but through the riven
And stormy clouds, the Future's Angel came,
And in the chamber where the doom'd man sate,
Foretold the brightening march of human Fate!
Yes! it is thou, - when life's last hope is o'er,
And the soul sails affrighted from the shore,-
While the eternal deep spreads wide and dark,
Light'st the Ione star and guidest the helpless bark.
On the grim scaffold, with the axe on high,
To thee the patriot lifts his dauntless eye,
Reeks not the crowd below, the headsman near-
The gaze - the pause - the pity and the fear.
Bright through the waste the burning column beams,
Lights the blest land - the Canaan of his dreams;
By Freedom's blood Futurity is freed,
And from each drop springs forth the Dragon Seed!

VI.
Is not thy name Consoler? Do we ask
A gift, thou calm'st us with its gilded seeming!
Life is a wayward child - thy mother-task
Is still to rock its cradle to sweet dreaming!-
Exalter as Consoler! Dost thou not
Build altars in our hearts to The Sublime?
What were our thoughts without thy worship? What
Were this dark islet in the seas of Time,
Hedged round by petty wants and low desires,
But for thy lore - the commune of the skies,-
Great Magian of the Stars?- Thy creed inspires
All that we ween of Noble! Poesy,-
Religion,- and the Soul's Archangel, Fame,-
Unconquer'd Liberty - the wish to be
Better and brighter than we are - our claim
To make men great and blest, and consummate
Our likeness to the glorious shapes of heaven-
The yearnings to outleap our mortal state,
And climb Olympus - are they not all given
By thee - all thine; - but longings to obey
The haunting oracles that stir our clay,
To make the Unseen with actual glories rife,
And call the starr'd Ideal into life?

The Dreams - the ivory-palaced Dreams - are thine,
The countless brood of Earth's great mother, Sleep;-
The gentle despots whose soft courts combine
Against life's cares;- and with a wondrous power,
Mightier than all men's grinding laws, controul
E'en tears themselves! - They cover hearts that weep
With a wild web of smiles - they bid the tomb
Give back the Loved; and colour forth the hour
With our heart's early hues and vanish'd bloom;
As a nurse leads or lulls her restless child,
They guide at will, or fondling hush, the soul:
Our lords -
thy
slaves;- what wonder that their wild
Voices, with prophet tales, the elder age beguiled?

VII.
Lo! on yon couch pale Austria's crownless Boy,
The sad Scamandrius of a fallen Troy;
His birth the date of what august designs!
Laugh'd France's violet vales and nodding vines;
High swell'd the harp; exulting glow'd the rhyme.
Women, and warriors with a thousand scars,
The veteran race of Austerlitz, the bands
That, o'er the rent Alps, pour'd the avenging wars
Into the heart of the ancestral lands
Of conquest's dark-wing'd Eagle, throng'd around;-
'Hail to Our Mother France, A Son Is Found!'

Hark, at that shout from north to south, grey Power
Quail'd on her weak hereditary thrones,
And widow'd mothers prophesied the hour
Of future carnage to their cradled sons.
'What, shall our race to blood be thus consign'd,
'And Ate claim an heirloom in mankind?
- Years pass - approach, pale questioner, and learn!
Lo! on yon rock the Eagle Lord expires!
Lo! the Son's life the moral of the Sire's!-
What know we of thy
real
self, poor boy,-
If thou wert brave or recreant; if thy soul
Aspired, or drank content from vulgar joy?
If wisdom lurk'd beneath that fair young brow,
Or the dull sense lay lock'd in the controul
Of a court's gaoler customs? - If the blood
Leapt through the proud veins kindling; - or its flow
Oozed from the torpid heart with lagging flood?
If, as thy features in their softer mould
Betoken'd, thou hadst something of thy sire
Writ in thy nature, which perchance foretold,
Had the Fates spared thy thread, that on the pyre
Lit above lone St. Helen's, there should rise
A phoenix from the ashes? - or if all
The guards of slavish tongues and watchful eyes,
The eunuch Luxury, that doth build a wall
Between a court and such thoughts as inspired
Thy Father in the vigorous airs of life,-
Whether
these
quench'd the spark that might have fired
Napoleon's last, unsceptred son, to strife,
And urged again the ravening Eagle's wings
Against the towers of King-descended Kings,
Who now shall tell or guess? - Fate's darkest gloom
Shuts out ev'n dreams from thine unlaurell'd tomb;
And the small web of royal flatteries,
The chamer's gossip, and the lackey's lies,
The prodigal tongues of courtly charity,
Benign alike to Bordeaux or to thee,
Are all thy record! - So the race is run
Of the Great Corsican's world-welcomed son!

Yet this, at least, 'tis ours of thee to deem,
In Thought's wide realms not throneless, that at night,
When the world slept, the wing'd Ideal's dream
Came to thine unwatch'd pillow, and a light
Stream'd o'er that Future never to be thine.
For merciful is youth to all;- and thou,
Son of the sword that first made Kings divine,
Wouldst nurst at least the vision and the vow
The fancy panting for a glorious truth,
Which are the eternal guerdon of that youth.
Then didst thou flame before the paling world-
Fame kept the lurid promise of thy birth;
Then was the Eagle flag again unfurl'd,-
A monarch's voice cried 'Havoc,' to the Earth;
A new Philippi gain'd a second Rome,
And the Son's sword avenged the greater Caesar's doom!

VIII.
Yes! Thou, the wild Armida of the Soul,
Laughest to scorn the arts and arms of Kings;
They share the visible Empires, and controul
The surface of Earth's sides;-its deeper springs,
Its higher ether, yea, unto the stars,
And all the bright world of the Unbounded Hope,
The Heaven of heavens, are
thine!
nor bolts, nor bars,
Nor courts, nor laws, can circumscribe the scope.
The Fates themselves can wither not one leaf
In thy unwinter'd gardens; the dread Three
Knock at thy gates in vain! Heart-gnawing Grief
And false-eyed Love, and Fortune with her wheel,
Sore Shame that dogs poor Pride, and Jealousy
(The shadow of hot Passion), cannot steal
Into thy bowers!-

When from the forfeit space
Of Eden, God sent forth man's fallen race,
One sacred spot,
within the spirit
placed,
(Thee - adored Ideal of Life's waste -)
He left unguarded by the sworded host-
A type - a shadow of the Eden lost!

IX.
Seraph that art within me! Comforter!
Apostle, preaching holy thoughts and heaven!
Scorner of all things base,- albeit to err
Is our life's lot, yet it may be forgiven
If we err nobly, and one mean desire
Methinks would scare the angel from its ward.
Thus do I feed thine altars with a fire,
Which Thought must wear a priestly robe to guard,
And with a solemn conscience and serene,
Watch the flame chase the mists from every scene;
Making a worship of The Beautiful,
Whether on earth, or in the human heart,
And seeking, from this shadowy vale, to cull
The flowers wherein I learn the gentle art,
To waft an incense of sweet thoughts above;
Thus have I imaged Virtue as a seen
And felt divinity, and fill'd with love -
As I believe God wills us - all the springs
In which life stirs the universe of things!

Lo! as I write, before my lattice waves
The wild wood where the midnight winds rejoice,
And the lone stars are on the stream that laves
The green banks, wailing with a spirit's voice;
And these thy presence consecrates to me;-
'Tis not the common turf, or wave, or sky,-
In every herb thy holiness I see,
And in each breeze thy low voice murmurs by.-
My heart is wed to sadness, and my frame
Bows from the vigour of my earlier youth,
And much it roused my rapture once to name,
Won now too late, hath lost the power to soothe:
But Thou, unscathed by Time's destroying blast,
Cover'st the wintry earth with verdure to the last!-
Still be thou mine, and in the paths of strife,
The public toil, perchance the public wrong,
Through which I labour out the ends of life,
Raise my dark spirit with thy sacred song;
Point to ambition its more noble aim,
To raise the lowly, nor to fear the strong;-
Bid me yet hope to leave a freeman's name
With my land's loftier hopes, not loosely twined,
So that my grave this epitaph may claim,
'Peace To His Errors - He Hath Served Mankind.'

X.
Enough! my song is closing; and to Thee,
Land of the North, I dedicate its lay,
As I have done the simple tale, to be
The Drama of this prelude.-

Far away
Rolls the swift Rhine beneath the mooned ray;
But to my listening ear and dreaming eye
Murmur the pines, the blue wave ripples by;
Through the deep Rheingau's vine-enamour'd vale
I see dark shapes careering down the gale;-
Or hear the Lurlei's moaning Syren call,-
Or walk with Song by Roland's shatter'd Hall!-

Slight is the tale, and simply sad, my soul
Hath woven from some memories deeply stored,
Which should not voiceless die! - Die! - nay, the scroll
On which Thought's cavern streams to-day are pour'd,
Might it endure earth's date, could not outwear
Those mournful memories, if our souls, in truth,
Are deathless, through eternity I bear
Within the tomb that closes o'er my youth
Thoughts that are
of
the soul, whose natures brave,
Decay,- and
with
the soul shall triumph o'er the grave!

XI.
Simple the tale, nor would it lure the ear
From earth's hack sounds one instant, if the glory
Of Fancy, from the Real, did not rear
Its rainbow images, and deck the story
With hues the kind Ideal lends to all,
Who, though with voice untuned, upon her duly call!
Of one fair girl my tale, athwart whose bloom,
In the young May of life, the harsh wind sped,
And, all Hope's blossoms in that soft flower shed,
Left one Ione heart to find the world a tomb!
This all I take from Truth; but Thou, more kind,
Still as our Pilgrims sail, shalt balm the wind;
With many a tale the various way beguile,
And charm ev'n death with love's untiring smile.
Still as the sufferer droops, thy witchery calls
Wild handmaid shapes from Oberon's grassy halls;
Bids Fairies watch the soft life glide away,
And with fond dreams make beautiful decay;-
Brighten the path, keep ward above the heart,
And steal at least the venom from the dart;
Let Love receive the last untortured breath,
And Sleep lend all its loveliest hues to Death!
And when the heart lies dumb, around the tomb
Still shall the Fairies bid the wild flowers bloom,
Woo gentlest moonbeams to the odorous grass,
And smooth the waves to music as they pass;
And still shall Fancy deem, in him who wreathes
These fading flowers, thy power not vainly breathes.
If o'er his task thy angel presence shone,
Hath his soul quaff'd no magic not its own?
No spell to lure the anxious world awhile
From truths that vex to visions that beguile,
Chequering the darkness of surrounding strife
With the brief moonlight of a lovelier life?