Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity?
To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.—Paradise Lost.
Morton recovered slowly. The influences about him were any thing but favorable to a quick convalescence, and it was months before he was himself again. Even then, though his health seemed confirmed, a deeper cloud remained upon his spirits: his dungeon seemed more dark and gloomy, his prospects more desperate.
One day he paced his cell in a mood of more than usual depression.
"Fools and knaves are at large; robbery and murder have full scope; vanity and profligacy run their free career; then why is honest effort paralyzed, and buried here alive? There are those in these vaults,—men innocent of crime as I,—men who would have been an honor to their race,—who have passed a score of years in this living death. And canting fools would console them with saying that 'all is for the best.' I will sooner believe that the world is governed by devils, and that the prince of them all is bodied in Metternich. Why is there not in crushed hope, and stifled wrath, and swelling anguish, and frenzy, and despair, a force to burst these hellish sepulchres, and blow them to the moon!
"It is but a weak punishment to which Milton dooms his ruined angel. Action,—enterprise,—achievement,—a hell like that is heaven to the cells of Ehrenberg. He should have chained him to a rock, and left him alone to the torture of his own thoughts; the unutterable agonies of a mind preying on itself for want of other sustenance. Action!—mured in this dungeon, the starved soul gasps for it as the lungs for air. 'Action, action, action!—all in all! What is life without it? A marsh, a quagmire, a rotten, stagnant pool. It is its own reward. The chase is all; the prize nothing. The huntsmen chase the fox all day, and, when they have caught her, fling her to their hounds for a worthless vermin. Alexander wept that he had no more worlds to conquer. What did it profit him that a conquered world lay already at his feet? The errant knights who roamed the world with their mistress's glove on their helmet, achieving impossibilities in her name,—which of them could have endured to live in peace with her for a six-month? The crusader master of Jerusalem, Cortes with Mexico subdued, any hero when his work is done, falls back to the ranks of common men. His lamp is out, his fire quenched; and what avails the stale, lack-lustre remnant of his days?
"Action! the panacea of human ills; the sure resource of misery; the refuge of bad consciences; a maelstroom, in whose giddy vortex saints and villains may whirl alike. How like a madman some great criminal, some Macbeth, will plunge on through his slough of blood and treachery, frantic to dam out justice at every chink, and bulwark himself against fate; clinching crime with crime; giving conscience no time to stab; finding no rest; but still plunging on, desperate and blind! How like a madman some pious anchorite, fervent to win heaven, will pile torture on torture, fast, and vigil, and scourge, made wretched daily with some fresh scruple, delving to find some new depth of self-abasement, and still struggling on unsatisfied, insatiable of penance, till the grave devours him! Human activity!—to pursue a security which is never reached, a contentment which eludes the grasp, some golden consummation which proves but hollow mockery; to seize the prize, to taste it, to fling it away, and reach after another! This cell, where I thought myself buried and sealed up from knowledge, is, after all, a school of philosophy. It teaches a dreary wisdom of its own. Through these stone walls I can see the follies of the world more clearly than when I was in the midst of them. A dreary wisdom; and yet not wholly dreary. There is a power and a consolation in it. Misery is the mind-maker; the revealer of truth; the spring of nobleness; the test, the purger, the strengthener of the spirit. Our natures are like grapes in the wine press: they must be pressed to the uttermost before they will give forth all their virtue.
"Why do I delude myself? What good can be wrung out of a misery like mine? It is folly to cheat myself with hope. This hell-begotten Austria has me fast, and will not loosen her gripe. Abroad in the free world, fortitude will count for much. There, one can hold firm the clefts and cracks of his tottering fortunes with the cement of an unyielding mind; but here, it is but bare and blank endurance. Yet it is something that I can still find heart to face my doom; that there are still moments when I dare to meet this death-in-life, this slow-consuming horror, face to face, and look into all its hideousness without shrinking. To creep on to my end through years of slow decay, mind and soul famishing in solitude, sapped and worn, eaten and fretted away, by the droppings of lonely thought, till I find my rest at last under these cursed stones! God! could I but die the death of a man! De Foix,—Dundee,—Wolfe. I grudge them their bloody end. When the fierce blood boiled highest, when the keen life was tingling through their veins, and the shout of victory ringing in their ears, then to be launched at a breath forth into the wilderness of space, to sail through eternity, to explore the seas and continents of the vast unknown! But I,—I must lie here and rot. You fool! you are tied to the stake, and must bide the baiting as you can. Will you play the coward? What can you gain by that? You cannot run away. What wretch, when misery falls upon him, will not cry out, 'Take any shape but that?' In the familiar crowd, in the daily resort, how many an unregarded face masks a wretchedness worse than this! some shrunken, cankered soul, palsied and world-weary, more hopelessly dungeoned than you. Crush down your anguish, choke down your groan, and say, 'Heaven's will be done.'
"Muster what courage you may. Not those spasms of valor that make the hero of an emergency, and when the heart is on fire and the soul in arms, bear him on to great achievement. Mine must be an inward flame, that warms though it cannot shine; a fire, like the sacred Chaldean fire, that must never go out; a perpetual spring, flowing up without ceasing, to meet the unceasing need.
"And you, source of my deepest joy and my deepest sorrow,—do not fail me now. Come to me in this darkness; let your spirit haunt this tomb where I lie buried. In your presence, the evil of my heart shrank back, rebuked; its good sprang up and grew in life and freshness. You rose upon me like the sun, warming every noble germ into leaf and flower. You streamed into my soul, banishing its mists, and gladdening it to its depths with summer light. These are no girl's tears. Towards myself and my own woes, I have hardened my heart like the barren flint. I should be less than man if I did not weep when I think of you. You must pass the appointed lot; you must fade with time and sorrow; but to me you will be radiant still with youth and beauty. So will I bide my hour, anchored on that pure and lofty memory, waiting that last release when the winged spirit shall laugh at bolts and dungeon bars."