University of Virginia Library

Scene III.

—By the Tree of Knowledge. Moonlight.
Cœlis, alone.
CŒLIS.
‘Sibyl of Mystery, Soul of the Sky!
Thou speakest in symbols that voiceless are spread
O'er thy dwelling, the star-haunted azure on high;
That diffused o'er the earth by no mortal are read.
Deeper than sunshine the beams of thy face
Stir man's mystic spirit, yet hold it aloof;
The thoughts they engender with thine interlace
To be borne from our reach through the world's wondrous roof.
By day we may wander and muse, but its light
Is so real it chides the vain spirit that strives:
More bold are the feelings that blend in thy night,
Pensive Soul! and with thee into mystery dive.
Thine is the dream-time, the dream without sleep
That poet may enter: ah! what doth it yield?
He watches thy ways in the uppermost deep;
To emotion, not sense, is thy secret revealed.’


The apple-tree has lost its pride
Though moonlight glitters on its bark,
And rings of phosphorescence slide
Round trunk and branches frore and stark.
Among the ferns its fruits are rotten,
But ruddier than in summer-time
Burst forth the scintillating rings of slime,
Like shooting stars of serpent-fire begotten.
The demon's haunt! And is he truly here?
Shall next the fascinating gaze appear?
The verdurous coil is changing; now to skin,
Now to round flesh seen quivering within.
The parasite assumes the reptile's strength!
It might a mammoth fold within its length.
Cœlis, Kausis.
‘Fear not this everlasting Shape,’
He seems to hear the Serpent say:
‘My power, embracing all, can none escape,
But flesh and blood are not my prey.
I am the wisdom wherein ever lies
The naked truth that nature falsifies,
And gilds in hope that with the body dies.
O thou vain searcher! canst thou trace
The lines upon a serpent's skin?
There is the map of thy outgoing race,
That yet afresh seems ever to begin;
There mayst thou learn man's day shall surely end
And with the pregnant Nothing that precedes it blend.’

CŒLIS.
Who art thou, O voiced Serpent, thus encoiled
As when our mother of the fruit partook,
Of her first happiness despoiled,—
As to this day records the holy book!

KAUSIS.
These coils, my prison-house, hold earth's Co-Heir:
Welcome were death; that boon is not for me;
A brighter God looks down on this despair,
This hopeless side of an eternity.
Wouldst thou my lot assume and satiate
Thy thirst for life; the weary days devour,
Which, ere they come, with mocking sameness sate?
Look on these loveless orbs! wouldst thou relieve
Their watch that constant as the waves
In vain the alternating quiet craves
But still goes on without reprieve?
With all coeval are these wakeful eyes:
All they behold and meet no new surprise.
Then envy not their ceaseless watch
That would the uneventful death-wink snatch,
And never more on this stale nature gaze!
They look upon the sun and only glaze
In the dead stare that never dies.
Accursèd vision, which has seen
All that can be, all that has ever been,
Till time itself has ceased to be
And counts as one eternity!
To thee the days are new; they fall
As unto one who has forgotten all.
Could I forget, and nothing see behind;—
And cast this skin, and rush into the sun,—
There the untasted, fresh emotion find
As though the world had just begun,
How would I revel in so new a lot,
Fast as the pleasures came, as fast forgot,
Hid from my sense the springs of love and hate,
That at their common source each other desecrate.
But Nature must play on her worthless game,
And only can herself repeat:
Cycle on cycle she is still the same;
Her ends and her beginnings ever meet.
Then how beneficent the lot of man!
He stretches out his narrow span,
To live a day, a night to rest;
When tired, to die, and so be doubly blest.
While through uncounted cycles I remain,
Thy race goes out, to yet revive again,
Though not till every grain of sand
Has been the centre of a sun,
And all that forms the sea and land
Has through the universal hour-glass run.
Man's long abeyance, 'tis but as a day;
Death after death appears a moment's sleep,
While time still trundles round with busy sweep,
And glides once more into the olden way.

CŒLIS.
What art thou, Spirit?

KAUSIS.
With the hours I change:
In Nature's toil of ceaseless ebb and flow
I turn the tide, that else would onward range
And immortality on all bestow.

CŒLIS.
Breathless, I doubt thee, who wouldst arrogate
To thy cold will the balancing of fate.
There is a Power beyond thee; to her call
My spirit answers, rescued from thy thrall.

KAUSIS.
She hath her separate realm; what is to be,
Throughout all contest, is foreknown to me:
The antagonist I am in double destiny.

CŒLIS.
O Psyche! 'tis not thus!

KAUSIS.
Even she who keeps
The sun and stars,—eternally she weeps
Her unrequited love, that fails at last,
And in the vortex at my call is cast.
She is the sympathetic Soul
Whose light I feel enwreathe the icy pole.
'Tis only there we meet, or we might breed
Death-worlds, but beauteous, from our common seed,
Of whose charmed being none should taste, and none
With eyes that love and wonder, look upon!
But, change must triumph; the hard firmament
To thee so high, is to my purpose bent;
Its seeming beauty burns and wastes;
And to a long decay its transient glory hastes.
Yon moon that doth thy inmost spirit stir
Is but the death-lamp of a sepulchre;
Fed by the sun's expiring rays,
To gather up the wrecks of the departed days.


As the soul-charmer ends, the Serpent's train
Has shrunk into the parasite again;
Its leaf-tipped sprays that loosely hang about,
Like straggling locks, innocuous stand out
In the blue night whose calm the scene invests,
But not the listener's wretchedness arrests.