University of Virginia Library

Here then, alas! their future place they knew!
For heaven's all-glorious beams, a solid dark!
For heaven's seraphic music, a dead load
Of silence, crushing! for unspeakable joy,
Gloom evermore! and, for the presence of God,
Death, universal death!—such their new home
They felt; and such, throughout eternity,
Dreaded would be their doom.

A thousand years,
As mortals measure time,—even as at first,
Wide scattered, on the sun-wreck they had fallen,—
Silent, and motionless, by terror fixed,
The outcast spirits remained. But then, at length,—
By the All Merciful permitted so,—
From torpor waked, their leader's mighty voice
Once more they heard; throughout all Essences
Piercing, as light through darkness; and from death,
To a new life uprousing. In the heart
Of that dead sun, vacuous and huge, where, erst,
With light intensest had the heaven-fire blazed,
He bade them gather. At the welcome call,
From their long trance all started. Down at once,
Mid utter darkness, through the adamant bones
Of the great skeleton, as through air, they pierced:
And lo! within the void—though as of flame,
Blood-red and gloomy—light! light! once more light!
The long lost, glorious light!

As, to the eye
Of lonely shepherd, on some tall hill's brow
Watching by night, seems heaven's stupendous round,—
So vast to these astonished, in mid way
Pausing to gaze, on every side alike,
Showed that immense rotund. A solid sphere
Of lurid fire—an atmosphere of fire,
All seemed; yet only seemed; for heat was none;
But, from the genial beams of living sun
So inconceivably far, a cold intense,
That earth's thin air to solid had congealed,
Made flesh as granite.

Yet nor cold, nor heat,
In Spiritual Natures, as in bodily nerves,
Shoots the sharp sting of pain. Bad dream of man,
Which, in the All Wise, All Just, All Merciful,
Sees but the worst Inquisitor's prototype,
The avenger, the tormentor infinite!
All love is God: Heaven but His Presence is;
Hell, banishment from Heaven; and dread remorse,—
“The worm that never dies, the fire ne'er quenched,”—
Which, like the ravening tiger o'er his prey,
Mangles and gnaws the spirit ceaselessly,
Though undestroying; till,—the sin purged out,
By utmost penitence, submission full,
And prayer intense for pardon and for help,—
Again upon the erring spirit beams
The smile divine of God. Such the mild law
Of the All Merciful, Omnipotent,
To fallen angels; and to man, by them
Seduced. To those, at least, of men, whose day
Was, ere the Mediator, filled with love
And pity for lost creatures, came on earth,
An easier, swifter means of Grace to give.
And to those, surely, also, who, though born
After His wondrous advent, yet of Him,
His life, His teaching, nay His very name,
Nought hear; or, hearing, fail to understand:
Else, for one half mankind, His gracious scheme
Its end would fail to accomplish;—argument
Of insufficiency, with Power Supreme
Impossible!

But nought, as yet, knew they
Of God's unbounded mercy. Sin they knew,
By them committed; wrath eternal feared,
And punishment unending; if themselves,
By victory, gained not freedom. Yet even then,
Like the first tinge of day on the dark night,
Was God's great goodness opening. Not for aye
Designed He that dead orb their prison-place;
Not to a blackness never ending, doomed
Spirits for Heaven create; to whom was light
Even as life; darkness a worse than death.