Our human nature's daily bread.

We are but men: no gods are we
To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak,
Each separate, on his painful peak,
Thin-cloaked in self-complacency!

Better his lot whose axe is swung
In Wartburg woods, or that poor girl's
Who by the Ilm her spindle whirls
And sings the songs that Luther sung,

Than his, who, old and cold and vain,
At Weimar sat, a demigod,
And bowed with Jove's imperial nod
His votaries in and out again!

Ply, Vanity, thy wingèd feet!
Ambition, hew thy rocky stair!
Who envies him who feeds on air
The icy splendors of his seat?

I see your Alps above me cut
The dark, cold sky,--and dim and lone
I see ye sitting, stone on stone,
With human senses dulled and shut.

I could not reach you, if I would,
Nor sit among your cloudy shapes;
And (spare the fable of the Grapes