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Cosmo de * Medici . 203
Untitled Article
of which had cost him so terrible an effort ) had been utterlywrong , quite crushed him . He had # orked himself up to an act of passionate justice , and he found he had been a murderer . His great pride was thus made
abject , and he found himself left alone , amidst the funeral biers of his family , without one consoling reflection . Mark the difference of tone now , comparing it with our last extract . Truly does Dalmasso say : — -
" There is a hideous mine beneath the earth , And a dark spirit tracks him , pace for pace ! " Cosmo ( advancing slowly and abstractedly ) . My lofty and firm motives that once held United as the Alps , are changed i' the acting To martyr'd ashes—staked humanity ! This world's a bubble : see ! where now it bursts , And men and things fly off , and melt in air I Yon spheres are temporal , and a yawn will end The Ptolemaic dream I Our brain ' s mere dust , Moisten'd and moved by rays and dews from heaven : Soon dark—dry—void I Creation ' s final lord—Oblivion , crown'd with infinite blank stars—Inherits all I I ' ve done a hydra wrong ! Now will its monstrous constellation blazon My deed , till heaven dissolve !"
Priest . My liege I Chiostro . Your highness . Cosmo ( still in abstraction ) . Could I do otherwise ?—I might have waited I Peace , Garcia!—leave me ! Dal . { aside to Chios ) . Hear you that of Garcia ? Chios . Did he say leave me ? Cosmo . Still my soul is strong , And fights up hill against an armed conscience . In vain I—the constant effort proves it vain I Thus nature ' s secret single combat mars The strength 6 f man , which else might brave the spheres With Atlas ' neath his heel . Now all is o ' ! Priest . My lord ! Cosmo . I am cast backward—ne ' er to rise . All that had made me enreat—is ffone . "—pp . 115 , 116 .
The readers of the tragedy will observe in the last line one of those shadowy allusions which we have before noticed as characteristic of our author ; marking , by a suggestion from the hidden depths of our nature , which carried his imagination to the fall of Sesostris , that the idea of suicide had vaguely glanced through the mind .
But there is a point beyond all this . The last words uttered by Cosmo before his death show the great soul clearing itself of mortal coil and circumstance , and expanding in a consciousness of its own nobility of purpose ; as he appeals with his last breath to the Infinite and Eternal .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 1, 1837, page 203, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1835/page/59/
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