The Judgement of the Flood :: :: University of Virginia Library

The frosted Sun, half shaded by a cloud,
Set like a crescent, during harvest time;
Red as a bloody banner in the air.
—Zateel and Hori stood alone, within
The Vale of Abel's Sacrifice, and Death.

‘Here are the altars, Hori,’ said Zateel:
And Hori, pensive, murmured, ‘Which is Abel's?’

‘This,’ he replied;—‘by memory arboured round
With flowers; but now they all are dead, as he
For whom love planted them.’

Both, pausing, mused;
But Hori spake at last. ‘It is the season,
And suits my mood, Zateel. More rude was Cain
Than winter. Wherefore smote he, like a blast,
The lovely and the loving?’

Sadly looked
Zateel, while thus he answered: ‘Cain was tempted.
Wisdom had left him; but his Fury came
To Cain, deep musing, and dissatisfied
With toil, with sickness, and with threatened death.
The Tempter came; and both high commune held
On good, and evil; freedom, and fixed fate;
God, and creation; man, and his dominion;
The heavens, and this dim earth. Spiritual Law
With Nature strove; and, with creative force,
Resurgent from the human soul, wrought out
The form desired, from quarry, newly bewn,
Of the material elements around,
And in the very flesh—the heart—of man.

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Hence labour, and hence pain: and much of both,
By circumstantial evil, is required
For its removal; but far more the flesh
Demands, for that in it the spirit lives,
And works, and by it, and a law creates
Against its own, in organ sensuous,
Which, but for spiritual influence, were as none,
Blind, tasteless, deaf, intactual, nor of smell
Sagacious. Of this double task, had Cain
Toil so extreme in conquering the first,
(Else flesh had wanted life) that, in his person,
The harder labour had not time to prosper.’

Whereto thus Hori, low of tone, and mild:
‘But God, Zateel, had of the better law
Provided him a witness, in a Brother.
In concert, would together both had worked,
Mutual defect had mutual been supplied,
And unreluctant Abel—’

Suddenly
Zateel drew up, exclaiming: ‘Son of Abel:
Nature is proud of her priority.
The spiritual but succeeds her; and she scorns
To yield to second comer; nor e'er yet
Submitted, Hori, without agony.
This I have felt, and so may testify.
Nor would his natural delights man yield,
But that short of the infinite they fall,
(Whereto the senses would their organs task,
Being spiritual,) and so of happiness,
(Which must for infinite capacity
Be infinite, or fail to satisfy,)
And soon expire in pain Him to redeem
From their indulgence, fatal even to death;
By labour God suspended it, and raised
Man to exert high faculty of skill,

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To vanquish Nature in the outer world,
And inner.’

Hori, thus reproved, more meek
Responded: ‘O'er the outer world, as first,
Was Cain appointed victor, blessed to eat
Bread by his brow's sweat; and to Abel was,
As second, given that inner world to rule.
But aye the sensual is averse from toil,
Moral, or carnal; yet would be divine,
In knowledge absolute, obtained by theft,
Not earned; and, stretching beyond bounds desire,
Leaps the abyss of space; and what finds there?’

Whereto Zateel replied, in kindlier tone:
‘Ay, Hori; what, indeed, but utter Chaos?
O Reason's self oft wanders there unwise.
And thither led the Fiend the First-born Man;
Beyond the habitable world, into
The Abyss of Space; there, with one sudden flight,
To learn at once the story of all worlds,
Past, present, and to come, and of them ask
Questions that might experience supersede,
And please imagination indolent,
With phantasms, and vagaries; to the realms,
Anon, of Death arriving, Space surpassed,
And Hades entered, yet at length to earth
Returning, all as ignorant as before.
—So, much perplexed and maddened, Cain came back,
Wearied with speculation, uninformed,
And troubled with the Mystery of Blood;
But, in his phrenzy, shedding what he loathed,
Giving to God the victim he misdeemed
Wroth Heaven of Earth demanded.’

To such words
Hori these gravely added: ‘Still the race
Of Cain present in worship but earth's fruits,
And shudder at the life-blood, which the seed

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Of Abel offer.’

Meditative, then,
Zateel spake, mildly: ‘To the sense still chained,
The race of Cain, though grown in diligence,
Read no high meaning in the life of man,
No revelation in the sealèd book,
Which God has written in the things he made.
The stars to them, indeed, a language speak
For seasons, and for years; but not as signs.
Good workmen are they; and, with cunning hand,
Controul material substance, and employ
In uses, worthy deemed. Even thus instruct
Fathers their sons; but unintelligent
Of scientific principle, and rule,
And only careful of the body's good.
Hence, Cain could understand not, in the blood,
Aught more than victim slain to Wrath Divine;
Not that the merely animal was doomed,
For man's perfection, to be sacrificed;
And carnal death despised, so that the soul
Be quickened, rising glorious from the grave
Of mortifièd flesh.’

While Hori listened,
His brow grew heavy with the weight of thought,
Which found in these relief:—‘And Abel's blood,
Zateel, thus shed, reveals an earnest truth;
That he who would redemption for himself,
Or for his race, accomplish, must be brave,
In patience to endure the deadly hate
Of man, from nature undelivered yet;
Content, if so salvation come, to be,
First, an Ensample; next, a Sacrifice.’

Thus moralized the friendly pair: then home,
By the moon's light, returned; for now the stars
With chilling influence smote. When Hori next

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The Vale of righteous Abel visited,
He was alone, and summer had restored
The grave-flowers all their bloom, a beauteous shew:
But not to Hori beauteous; for his heart
Was broken with affliction. Vain all signs
Unto the Cainite; still, with mortal rage,
He followed up his victory, and claimed,
From their retreats, the captives as his slaves.
And Hori thus was seized, and to the will
Of tyrant was subdued. His free-born soul
Revolted, and then drooped, deprived of life,
Of moral life, and motive power of act;
To every influence of joy, and pain,
As bards are ever, all too sensitive.
Thus, in the morning, odours from afar
Attract the Bee, and, in the eve, or ere
The storm come on, the absence of the sun
Chills back the busy creature to her hive—
Like her, much store of honey, and of wax
He gathered, and laid up on his return . .
A mental treasure. Now his work is wrought.
So the poor Bee, of her antennæ shorn,
The instruments, with which she once received
Effluvial motion, broken, and destroyed;
The spell of her activity is dead,
Contrivance, wisdom, ingenuity—
Stupid, and helpless; torpid, and effete;
Order, subordination, loyalty,
Thrift, occupation, all are over now,
Wanderer forlorn, and isolate, and dull:
Such Hori was; and, in the populous world
A stranger grown, he had no interest there.

Scaped from despotic vigilance, he came,
One summer's day, into the Vale of Death;
And laid him down upon a sunny bank,
And looked into the heaven's unclouded blue,

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As his blue eye might blend therein, or that
Melt down into his visionary soul.
Thus he, in silence, and in solitude,
Gazing reposed; nor moved, when night came on,
Nor when the day returned; and, day by day,
And night by night, unmindful of the claims
Of hunger or of thirst, into the face
Of daylit sky or starry, upward still
Looked patient, like a prisoner supine,
Chained to a hill side, doomed to lonely death.
—By chance, Zateel there wandered; led, one eve,
By tender memory, to the sacred spot;
And there beheld him in the loveliness,
And resignation of his lifeless brow.
High meditation in the glazèd eye,
His gifted vision read; and then, aloud,
He prayed the Shepherd, by the flocks he knew,
The pastures, and the rivers that he loved,
The green hills, and the quiet of the heavens,
To wake from that deep sleep. Soon, on his soul
Came twilight, and a haunted gloominess;
And murmurs, and dim sounds of shrieks, and sighs;
And shapes, as in a dream, were struggling there,
Pale even to polished whiteness, terrible.
—Was it a dream? Lo, on the outlined air,
Michael appeared; and, with angelic hand,
Blessed the belovèd Dead on whom he gazed.

‘Thrice blessèd be the sufferer, set now
From the oppressor free.’

Thus Michael said.
But then, as with strange power, permitted him
Since that disastrous night, Azaziel smote
The extended benediction, and uptowered,
With all a victor's insolence, above
The Seraph of the sky.

‘Bless not whom God

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Hath cursed; whom, for the guilty, he hath made
A curse. Curse whom he dooms—the innocent,
Successive victims to atone his wrath,
Until One die for All.’

This to his knee
Brought down the faithful Guardian. Not to him,
But to his God he prayed; and short is now
The demon's triumph. Fallen on earth's face,
Elihu's presence he confessed; who thus,
As on a cloud supported, eloquent,
Bent the right hand of his extended arm
In action of command; and, with the left,
Appointed him his place of prostrate shame.
‘From Abel's blood to that last Sacrifice,’
Exclaimed he, ‘Man must answer. God demands
No victims to his wrath; but man doth make
His prophets martyrs, sent in love to man,
That he might hear, and live.’

This heard Zateel—
On one knee kneeling, one hand on his heart,
One high in air; thus, with the gaze he looked
Of him who sees a vision, wonder-rapt,
Entranced in ecstasy, possessed, inspired.