Quod petis, hic est,
Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus."
They change their skies but not their mind who run across the seas;
We toil in laboured idleness, and seek to live at ease
With force of ships and four horse teams. That which you seek is
here,
At Ulubrae, unless your mind fail to be calm and clear.
"At Ulubrae" was equivalent to saying in the dullest corner of the
world, or anywhere. Ulubrae was a little town probably in Campania,
a Roman Little Pedlington. Thomas Carlyle may have had this passage
in mind when he gave to the same thought a grander form in Sartor
Resartus: "May we not say that the hour of spiritual
enfranchisement is even this? When your ideal world, wherein the
whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to
work, becomes revealed and thrown open, and you discover with
amazement enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelm Meister, that your
America is here or nowhere. The situation that has not its duty,
its ideal, was never occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor,
miserable hampered actual wherein thou even now standest, here or
nowhere, is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom, believe, live, and be
free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in
thyself. Thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same
Ideal out of. What matter whether such stuff be of this sort or
that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that
pinest in the imprisonment of the actual, and criest bitterly to the
gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth,
the thing thou seekest is already with thee, here or nowhere,
couldest thou only see.
Pages:
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125