"Step, step, step," snaps the whip of the sky:
"Hurry up, race along, rest when you die!"
He maddens in the breathless race,
Nor misses station, power or pelf;
And only loses in the chase
The hunted lord of all,--himself.
His gain is loss,
His treasure dross.
"Step, step, step," mocks the whip of the sky,
"Hurry up, limp along, rest when you die!"
With care he burthens all his soul;
Heaped ingots curve his willing back;
Submissive to that fierce control,
He needs at last the sky-whip's crack,
Till at the grave,
No more a slave,--
"Rest, rest, rest," sighs the whip of the sky:
"Hurry not, haste no more, rest when you die!"
Celia Thaxter, the finest of poetic readers, read this to me one
September morning at the Isles of Shoals, and at the conclusion she
remarked: "If that could only be read every year in our public schools it
might do the American people some good."
As compared with this, the sonnet on Pompeii has the effect of a strong
complementary color,--for instance, like orange against dark blue. It
echoes the pathetic reverie that we feel on beholding the monuments of
the mighty past. It contains not the pathos of yesterday, nor of a
hundred years ago, but as Emerson says, "of the time out of mind.
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