THE SPIRIT OF SCHOPENHAUER

Rush on, rush on, humanity, and fill

Your hours with toil-wrought pain. Rush on, rush on

Upon your prizeless race. Where is your gain

In luxury, or seas of swimming gold,

Or starry ether chained to conquerdom?

You do but add new wheels, new chains to man's

Machine to govern man. You build a tower

More high than Babel's, hoping for earthly heaven

Upon this structure formed of luxuries,

And squander here stored-up celestial bliss

Which your poor Wills would mortgage before gained.

Your little lives were never made for racks

And fettered strainings of this new-wrought world

That quivers your nerves with life-intensity.

Death marks your race upon his hour-glass;

And Madness moves upon your city streets.

Your fevered minds reel downward to the gulf

Where knowledge fails, and luxuries lose charm,

Where passion flickers out, and haste seems slow.

Rush on, rush on, destruction marks your goal.

Rush on, rush on, till Death has breathless felled

The last of all your human progeny;

And leaves him lying there alone — alone,

Like him who first had shape of man — unburied,

Lost in a race with no competitor,

And nothing as the goal — unburied, staring

At the passing clouds, his only winding-sheet.

And then the Great Intelligence — if such

There be — will see his moment's pastime o'er,

And turn his arts to other constellations,

Until in rolling aeons e'en his mind

May lose the memory of Man which was —

Rush on, rush on, humanity, and fill

Your hours with toil-wrought pain, rush on, rush on!

Death is your hope, your pilot, and your goal,

And Nothingness your only consolation —