Charles Brooks

Gaping for something new to make them stare.

Perhaps a little better he had thriven,
Had he not got the show of glimmering light from heaven:
He calls it reason, and it makes him free

Man still must stumble while he strives.

fear no devil, believe no hell;
But with my fear all joy is gone,
All rare conceit of wisdom won;

welled with prophetic joy to leave its sphere,
And live a spirit with spirits, their rightful peer.
Where art thou, Faust?

And what men call the spirit of the age,
Is but the spirit of the gentlemen
Who glass their own thoughts in the pliant page,
And image back themselves.

The godlike essence of our heaven-born powers
Must yield to strange and still more strange intrusion;
Soon as the good things of this world are ours,
We deem our nobler self a vain illusion,
And heaven-born instincts—very life of life—
Are strangled in the low terrestrial strife.

ysterious Nature may not choose
To unveil her secrets to the stare of day,
And what from the mind’s eye she stores away,

The thing we use not a dead burden lies,
But what the moment brings the wise man knows to prize.

Who bore the hard trial
Of self-denial,
And, victorious, ascends to the skies whence