My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.
The poem _Rephan_, the title of which was taken from the Book of Acts,
has the same pleasant teaching we find in the play by Ludwig Fulda,
called _Schlaraffenland_, published in 1899. In this drama, a boy,
ragged, cold, and chronically hungry, falls asleep in a miserable
room, and dreams that he is in a country of unalloyed delight.
Broiled chickens fly slowly by, easy to clutch and devour: expensive
wardrobes await his immediate pleasure, and every conceivable wish
is instantly and completely fulfilled. For a short time the boy is
in ecstasies of joy: then the absence of effort, of counterbalancing
privation, begins to make his heart dull: finally the paradise
becomes so intolerable that he wakes with a scream--wakes in a dark,
cold room, wakes in rags with his belly empty: and wakes in rapture
at finding the good old earth of struggle and toil around him.
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