After Paradise or Legends of Exile :: :: University of Virginia Library

When, at the archangelic bidding (blest
With one brief vision of his happy past
In all the lost delights of Eden drest)
Adam on Paradise had look'd his last,
There every form of loveliness beloved
Whose beauty, dear to his adoring eye,
Had breathed delight thro' all the haunts of yore,
And clothed in gladness all the days gone by,
The man beheld, save one.

For Eve no more
Among the abandon'd bowers of Eden moved.
Eden was Eveless.

Thus, Man's memory
Of Woman as in Paradise she was
The archangelic sword had not transfixt.
This memory made in Adam's mind, alas,
A visionary image, vaguely mixt
With that stray glimpse of Eden's light that fell
Into his slumber, and became a dream,
The dream of Adam's life. And there, too well
Remember'd, with her beauty's phantom gleam
Mocking him, moved the Eve of Paradise;
Immeasurably fairer than the Eve
That walk'd by Adam's side with sullen sighs
And faded cheek—condemn'd, like him, to grieve
And to grow old; like him, to brave the bleakness
Of life's long desert; and, with him, to share
The weight of many a burden, borne in meekness
Or borne in bitterness, still hard to bear;

An earthly woman, with a woman's weakness,
A woman's faults.

That phantom, faultless fair,
(The unforgotten Eve of Paradise,
Beautiful as he first beheld her there,
Ere any tear had dimm'd her glorious eyes)
Long after Paradise itself had been
By him forgotten, haunted Adam's gaze.
And Adam made comparison between
The faithful partner of his faultful days,
Who stray'd, and sinn'd, and suffer'd by his side,
And that imagined woman. With a sigh,
Her unattainable beauty, when he died,
Adam bequeath'd to his posterity,
Who call'd it The Ideal.

And Mankind
Still cherish it, and still it cheats them all.
For, with the Ideal Woman in his mind,

Fair as she was in Eden ere the Fall,
Still each doth discontentedly compare
The sad associate of his earthly lot;
And still the Earthly Woman seems less fair
Than her ideal image unforgot.

And Adam slept and dream'd and waked again
From day to day, from age to age. Apace
Time trod his self-repeating path. To Men
Man grew, and Adam became Adam's Race.

The Race of Adam, by his granted prayer
Born as it was oblivious of life's source,
Went onward, lighted only here and there
And now and then, along its eyeless course,
By visionary flashes brief and rare
Of unexplain'd remembrance, that appear'd

Vague prescience. For the goal whereto Man goes
Is his recover'd starting-point—tho', rear'd
In a profound forgetfulness, he knows
No longer whence or whither winds the track
His steps have enter'd, and so lives like those
Who, dreaming, dream not that sleep leads at last
To waking, that to wake is to come back,
And that what seems the Future is the Past.

But round that Ghost of Human Loveliness
Which over Human Life's unlovely way
Hover'd afar, evading the caress
It still invoked, the reminiscent ray
Of Eden's glory (lost in Adam's Dream
And mingled with his soul) so shone and glow'd,
That on Man's spirit the reflected gleam
Of its divine effulgence oft bestow'd
A supersensuous potency of sight,

Piercing, without an effort of his will,
The Universal Veil that dims the light
Of Universal Truth. A teeming thrill
Of recognition thro' his senses ran
From things that power reveal'd to him: and he
To Nature cried, “Behold thy missing plan!
For is not this what thou hast tried to be?”
Whereto, from all her conscious deeps, to Man
Nature responded, “Yes!”

In toil and pain
At other times, by other ways, Man's wits
Search after knowledge, but can ne'er attain
The flying point that on before him flits.
For he is as a voyager in vain
Sailing towards horizons that recede
From phantom frontier lines of sky and main,
With furtive motion measured by the speed
Of their pursuer. But wherever shines

That sudden ray of reminiscence rare,
There, and there only, the convergent lines
Of the orb'd Universe shut fast, and there
Man's knowledge rests, untravell'd, at the goal.
For, be it ne'er so trivial, ne'er so mean,
The one becomes the All, the part the Whole,
When, thro'them both, what each conceal'd is seen.

And age by age, man after man essaying
To fix for endless worship and delight,
In shrines of permanence for ever staying,
These gleams of truth for ever taking flight,
Men fashion'd forth new forms of Time and Space,
Idealising both. The work they wrought
In Space was Beauty, and in Time 'twas Grace.
These two ideals everywhere they sought;
But the ideal human form and face
Were still the fairest, still the loveliest.

And still thro' human action, human thought,
And most of all thro' human love, men's quest
With fondest fervour roams to find the sphere
Of that Ideal World wherein the part
Includes the Whole, the one the All. For there
Men are to Man transform'd, and life to Art.