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So he, his spirit strengthening. But, when now
The roar enormous, like spent storm, had ceased;
And the great echoes, battering at the vault,
And all sides round, had died,—then once again,
Satan his voice uplift.

“Among you all,
Not one there is who hath not sent the curse,
'Gainst this first traitor,—this foul deadly spot
On our pure Spirit-body. To the depth
Must go the knife that from us cuts it out.
Never again, through all the eternity,
Among the faithful can that false one stand.
To him, the future one long pang must be:
Imprisonment, everlasting solitude;
Without least hope a thing of life to see,—
Light to behold,—motion to feel,—sound hear,—
Or substance touch;—worse dungeoned than, in corpse,
The living soul of man: living, yet dead
To the whole universe; the eternal Night
His grave; no dream of help from even that God
To whom he vilely hath bowed: whom abjectly
To serve he hath striven, in place of us, to whom
Was all his service owed: for, even here,
In this dead orb, on the mere confines placed
Of the interminable Void of ruin and night,—
Far are we from the ken of Him whom, once,
The Omnipresent, the All-seeing we deemed.
But realms there are, in the abyss of space,
With perished suns, wide distant, interspersed,—
So inconceivably farther from all life,
That, hence to heaven, is but a sick man's stride,
Against that infinite measured. Mid those wastes
Of mouldering horrors; in the lowest depths
Of half-chaotic orb; in solitude,
Silence, and blackness,—fixed, and motionless,
As stone, locked up in heart of mountain rock,—
Through the slow-dragging cycles, evermore,
Shall the foul traitor lie; longing for death,
Yet forced to live, and under torment writhe
Of our undying wrath. There let him cry
Unto his God; and see if He can help.”