Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

She was bearing the sun to the unsunned spots. The light and the music

of her broken globe were now in her heart and her brain. As she went,

she sang; and I caught these few words of her song; and the tones seemed

to linger and wind about the trees after she had disappeared:

Thou goest thine, and I go mine--

Many ways we wend;

Many days, and many ways,

Ending in one end.

Many a wrong, and its curing song;

Many a road, and many an inn;

Room to roam, but only one home

For all the world to win.

And so she vanished. With a sad heart, soothed by humility, and

the knowledge of her peace and gladness, I bethought me what now I

should do. First, I must leave the tower far behind me, lest, in some

evil moment, I might be once more caged within its horrible walls. But

it was ill walking in my heavy armour; and besides I had now no right

to the golden spurs and the resplendent mail, fitly dulled with long

neglect. I might do for a squire; but I honoured knighthood too highly,

to call myself any longer one of the noble brotherhood. I stripped off

all my armour, piled it under the tree, just where the lady had been

seated, and took my unknown way, eastward through the woods. Of all my

weapons, I carried only a short axe in my hand.

Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, "I

am what I am, nothing more." "I have failed," I said, "I have lost

myself--would it had been my shadow." I looked round: the shadow was

nowhere to be seen. Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but

only my shadow, that I had lost. I learned that it is better, a

thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up

his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will

be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer

of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or

dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself

for a moment beside it.

Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas,

formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my

ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. Now, however, I took, at

first, what perhaps was a mistaken pleasure, in despising and degrading

myself. Another self seemed to arise, like a white spirit from a dead

man, from the dumb and trampled self of the past. Doubtless, this self

must again die and be buried, and again, from its tomb, spring a winged

child; but of this my history as yet bears not the record.