No More Learning

Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower _120
Into the gap--wrench off the roof!
[ENTER HASSAN. ]
Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud still.

HASSAN:
Your Sublime Highness
Is strangely moved.

MAHMUD:
The times do cast strange shadows
On those who watch and who must rule their course, _125
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:--and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, _130
Leaving no figure upon memory's glass.
Would that--no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him:--'tis said his tribe _135
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.

HASSAN:
The Jew of whom I spake is old,--so old
He seems to have outlived a world's decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he;--his hair and beard _140
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift _145
To the winter wind:--but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The Present, and the Past, and the To-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery, _150
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence _155
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts _160
Which others fear and know not.

MAHMUD:
I would talk
With this old Jew.

HASSAN:
Thy will is even now
Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him _165
Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle, _170
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
'Ahasuerus! ' and the caverns round
Will answer 'Ahasuerus! ' If his prayer _175
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him _180
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion--but that shout _185
Bodes--

[A SHOUT WITHIN. ]

MAHMUD:
Evil, doubtless; Like all human sounds.
Let me converse with spirits.

HASSAN:
That shout again.

MAHMUD:
This Jew whom thou hast summoned--

HASSAN:
Will be here--

MAHMUD:
When the omnipotent hour to which are yoked
He, I, and all things shall compel--enough! _190
Silence those mutineers--that drunken crew,
That crowd about the pilot in the storm.
Ay! strike the foremost shorter by a head!
They weary me, and I have need of rest.
Kinks are like stars--they rise and set, they have _195
The worship of the world, but no repose.