More from Festus:

I should like to macadamize the world;
The road to Hell wants mending.

Yet truth and falsehood meet in seeming, like
The falling leaf and shadow on the pool’s face.

Oh! I should love to die. What is to die?
I cannot hold the meaning more than can
An oak’s arms clasp the blast that blows on it.

The wild and winged desires, youth’s saurian schemes,
Which creep and fly by turns; which kill, and eat,
And do disgorge each other...

Respect is what we owe; love what we give,
And men would mostly rather give than pay.

...--Man, alas! alone,
The recreant spirit of the universe,
Contemns the operations of the light;
Loves surface-knowledge; calls the crimes of crowds
Virtue: adores the useful vices; licks
The gory dust from off the feet of war,
And swears it food for gods, though fit for fiends...

Then let the mad world fight its shadow down;
There soon will be nor sun, nor world, nor shadow.

...What are years to me?
Traitors! that vice-like fang the hand ye lick:
Ye fall like small birds beaten by a storm
Against a dead wall, dead.

Yes, wandering fires wait even on rottenness
Like a stray gleam of thought in an idiot’s brain.

Love is the art of hearts and heart of arts.
Conjunctive looks and interjectional sighs
Are its vocabulary’s greater half.

The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And fatten him on that men pined to death for;
Yea, have a further knowledge of thy beauties
Than ever did thy best-loved lover dream of.

The grey gull balanced on her bowlike wings,
Between two black waves seeking where to dive.

These cursed joys my soul now writhes among,
Like to a half-crushed reptile on a rose...

...The sphinx-like heart,
Consistent in its inconsistency,
Loathes life the moment that life’s riddle is read:
The knot of our existence is untied,
And we lie loose and useless. Life is had;
And then we sigh, and say, can this be all?