OSWALD Give not to them a thought.  From Palestine
              We marched to Syria:  oft I left the Camp,
              When all that multitude of hearts was still,
              And followed on, through woods of gloomy cedar,
              Into deep chasms troubled by roaring streams;
              Or from the top of Lebanon surveyed
              The moonlight desert, and the moonlight sea: 
              In these my lonely wanderings I perceived
              What mighty objects do impress their forms
              To elevate our intellectual being;
              And felt, if aught on earth deserves a curse,
              ’Tis that worst principle of ill which dooms
              A thing so great to perish self-consumed. 
             —­So much for my remorse!

MARMADUKE Unhappy Man!

OSWALD When from these forms I turned to contemplate
              The World’s opinions and her usages,
              I seemed a Being who had passed alone
              Into a region of futurity,
              Whose natural element was freedom—­

MARMADUKE Stop—­
              I may not, cannot, follow thee.

OSWALD You must. 
              I had been nourished by the sickly food
              Of popular applause.  I now perceived
              That we are praised, only as men in us
              Do recognise some image of themselves,
              An abject counterpart of what they are,
              Or the empty thing that they would wish to be. 
              I felt that merit has no surer test
              Than obloquy; that, if we wish to serve
              The world in substance, not deceive by show,
              We must become obnoxious to its hate,
              Or fear disguised in simulated scorn.

MARMADUKE I pity, can forgive, you; but those wretches—­
              That monstrous perfidy!

OSWALD Keep down your wrath. 
              False Shame discarded, spurious Fame despised,
              Twin sisters both of Ignorance, I found
              Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way
              Cleared for a monarch’s progress.  Priests might spin
              Their veil, but not for me—­’twas in fit place
              Among its kindred cobwebs.  I had been,
              And in that dream had left my native land,
              One of Love’s simple bondsmen—­the soft chain
              Was off for ever; and the men, from whom
              This liberation came, you would destroy: 
              Join me in thanks for their blind services.