The final chapter of “The Worm Ouroboros” has something to say of one failed utopia.
“All were silent awhile. Then the Lord Juss spake saying, “O Queen Sophonisba, hast thou looked ever, on a showery day in spring, upon the rainbow flung across earth and sky, and marked how all things of earth beyond it, trees, mountain-sides, and rivers, and fields, and woods, and homes of men, are transfigured by the colours that are in the bow?”
“Yes,” she said, “and oft desired to reach them.”
“We,” said Juss, “have flown beyond the rainbow. And there we found no fabled land of heart’s desire, but wet rain and wind only and the cold mountain-side. And our hearts are a-cold because of it.”
The Queen said, “How old art thou, my Lord Juss, that thou speakest as an old man might speak?”
He answered, “I shall be thirty-three years old tomorrow, and that is young by the reckoning of men. None of us be old, and my brethren and Lord Brandoch Daha younger than I. Yet as old men may we now look forth on our lives, since the goodness thereof is gone by for us.” And he said, “Thou O Queen canst scarcely know our grief; for to thee the blessed Gods gave thy heart’s desire: youth for ever, and peace. Would they might give us our good gift, that should be youth for ever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms. Would they might but give us our great enemies alive and whole again. For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.”
The final chapter of “The Worm Ouroboros” has something to say of one failed utopia.