cry;
And unto the pile they bore him,
Stark of limb and cold of eye.
She hears the priests chanting--she hears the death-song,
And frantic she rises, and bursts through the throng.
"Who is she? what seeks she? why comes she so nigh?"

VII.

But the bier she falleth over,
And her shrieks are loud and shrill--
"I _will_ have my lord, my lover!
In the grave I seek him still.
Shall that godlike frame be wasted
By the fire's consuming blight?
Mine it was--yea mine! though tasted
Only one delicious night!"
But the priests, they chant ever--"We carry the old,
When their watching is over, their journeys are told;
We carry the young, when they pass from the light!

VIII.

"Hear us, woman! Him we carry
Was not, could not be, thy spouse.
Art thou not a Bayadere?
So hast thou no nuptial vows.
Only to death's silent hollow
With the body goes the shade;
Only wives their husbands follow:
Thus alone is duty paid.
Strike loud the wild turmoil of drum and of gong!
Receive him, ye gods, in your glorious throng--
Receive him in garments of burning array'd!"

IX.

Harsh their words, and unavailing,
Swift she threaded through the quire,
And with arms outstretch'd, unquailing
Leap'd into the crackling fire.
But the deed alone sufficeth--
Robed in might and majesty,
From the pile the god ariseth
With the ransom'd one on high.
Divinity joys in a sinner repenting,
And the lost ones of earth, by immortals relenting,
Are borne upon pinions of fire to the sky!

* * * * *

Let us now take a poem of the Hartz mountains, containing no common
allegory. Every man is more or less a Treasure-seeker--a hater of
labour--until he has received the important truth, that labour alone can
bring content and happiness. There is an affinity, strange as it may
appear, between those whose lot in life is the most exalted, and the
haggard hollow-eyed wretch who prowls incessantly around the crumbling
ruins of the past, in the belief that there lies beneath their
mysterious foundations a mighty treasure, over which some jealous demon
keeps watch for evermore. But Goethe shall read the moral to us himself.

THE TREASURE-SEEKER