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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Ideal And The Actual Life</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Forever fair, forever calm and bright,<br>Life flies on plumage, zephyr-light,<br> For those who on the Olympian hill rejoice--<br>Moons wane, and races wither to the tomb,<br>And 'mid the universal ruin, bloom<br> The rosy days of Gods--With man, the choice,<br>Timid and anxious, hesitates between<br> The sense's pleasure and the soul's content;<br>While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,<br> The beams of both are blent.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Seekest thou on earth the life of gods to share,<br>Safe in the realm of death?--beware<br> To pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye;<br>Content thyself with gazing on their glow--<br>Short are the joys possession can bestow,<br> And in possession sweet desire will die.<br>'Twas not the ninefold chain of waves that bound<br> Thy daughter, Ceres, to the Stygian river--<br>She plucked the fruit of the unholy ground,<br> And so--was hell's forever!<br>The weavers of the web--the fates--but sway<br>The matter and the things of clay;<br> Safe from change that time to matter gives,<br>Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray<br>With gods a god, amidst the fields of day,<br> The form, the archetype [39], serenely lives.<br>Would'st thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?<br> Cast from thee, earth, the bitter and the real,<br>High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring<br> Into the realm of the ideal!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Here, bathed, perfection, in thy purest ray,<br>Free from the clogs and taints of clay,<br> Hovers divine the archetypal man!<br>Dim as those phantom ghosts of life that gleam<br>And wander voiceless by the Stygian stream,--<br> Fair as it stands in fields Elysian,<br>Ere down to flesh the immortal doth descend:--<br> If doubtful ever in the actual life<br>Each contest--here a victory crowns the end<br> Of every nobler strife.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not from the strife itself to set thee free,<br>But more to nerve--doth victory<br> Wave her rich garland from the ideal clime.<br>Whate'er thy wish, the earth has no repose--<br>Life still must drag thee onward as it flows,<br> Whirling thee down the dancing surge of time.<br>But when the courage sinks beneath the dull<br> Sense of its narrow limits--on the soul,<br>Bright from the hill-tops of the beautiful,<br> Bursts the attained goal!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If worth thy while the glory and the strife<br>Which fire the lists of actual life--<br> The ardent rush to fortune or to fame,<br>In the hot field where strength and valor are,<br>And rolls the whirling thunder of the car,<br> And the world, breathless, eyes the glorious game--<br>Then dare and strive--the prize can but belong<br> To him whose valor o'er his tribe prevails;<br>In life the victory only crowns the strong--<br> He who is feeble fails.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But life, whose source, by crags around it piled,<br>Chafed while confined, foams fierce and wild,<br> Glides soft and smooth when once its streams expand,<br>When its waves, glassing in their silver play,<br>Aurora blent with Hesper's milder ray,<br> Gain the still beautiful--that shadow-land!<br>Here, contest grows but interchange of love,<br> All curb is but the bondage of the grace;<br>Gone is each foe,--peace folds her wings above<br> Her native dwelling-place.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light,<br>With the dull matter to unite<br> The kindling genius, some great sculptor glows;<br>Behold him straining, every nerve intent--<br>Behold how, o'er the subject element,<br> The stately thought its march laborious goes!<br>For never, save to toil untiring, spoke<br> The unwilling truth from her mysterious well--<br>The statue only to the chisel's stroke<br> Wakes from its marble cell.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But onward to the sphere of beauty--go<br>Onward, O child of art! and, lo!<br> Out of the matter which thy pains control<br>The statue springs!--not as with labor wrung<br>From the hard block, but as from nothing sprung--<br> Airy and light--the offspring of the soul!<br>The pangs, the cares, the weary toils it cost<br> Leave not a trace when once the work is done--<br>The Artist's human frailty merged and lost<br> In art's great victory won! [40]</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If human sin confronts the rigid law<br>Of perfect truth and virtue [41], awe<br> Seizes and saddens thee to see how far<br>Beyond thy reach, perfection;--if we test<br>By the ideal of the good, the best,<br> How mean our efforts and our actions are!<br>This space between the ideal of man's soul<br> And man's achievement, who hath ever past?<br>An ocean spreads between us and that goal,<br> Where anchor ne'er was cast!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But fly the boundary of the senses--live<br>The ideal life free thought can give;<br> And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill<br>Of the soul's impotent despair be gone!<br>And with divinity thou sharest the throne,<br> Let but divinity become thy will!<br>Scorn not the law--permit its iron band<br> The sense (it cannot chain the soul) to thrall.<br>Let man no more the will of Jove withstand [42],<br> And Jove the bolt lets fall!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">If, in the woes of actual human life--<br>If thou could'st see the serpent strife<br> Which the Greek art has made divine in stone--<br>Could'st see the writhing limbs, the livid cheek,<br>Note every pang, and hearken every shriek,<br> Of some despairing lost Laocoon,<br>The human nature would thyself subdue<br> To share the human woe before thine eye--<br>Thy cheek would pale, and all thy soul be true<br> To man's great sympathy.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But in the ideal realm, aloof and far,<br>Where the calm art's pure dwellers are,<br> Lo, the Laocoon writhes, but does not groan.<br>Here, no sharp grief the high emotion knows--<br>Here, suffering's self is made divine, and shows<br> The brave resolve of the firm soul alone:<br>Here, lovely as the rainbow on the dew<br> Of the spent thunder-cloud, to art is given,<br>Gleaming through grief's dark veil, the peaceful blue<br> Of the sweet moral heaven.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So, in the glorious parable, behold<br>How, bowed to mortal bonds, of old<br> Life's dreary path divine Alcides trod:<br>The hydra and the lion were his prey,<br>And to restore the friend he loved to-day,<br> He went undaunted to the black-browed god;<br>And all the torments and the labors sore<br> Wroth Juno sent--the meek majestic one,<br>With patient spirit and unquailing, bore,<br> Until the course was run--</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=393402" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Until the god cast down his garb of clay,<br>And rent in hallowing flame away<br> The mortal part from the divine--to soar<br>To the empyreal air! Behold him spring<br>Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing,<br> And the dull matter that confined before<br>Sinks downward, downward, downward as a dream!<br> Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul,<br>And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream,<br> Fills for a god the bowl!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Friedrich+Schiller">Friedrich Schiller</a></strong></div>