Festus :: :: University of Virginia Library

Festus

A poem [by P. J. Bailey]

Bailey, Philip James (1816-1902)

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DEDICATION.

MY FATHER! unto thee to whom I owe
All that I am, all that I have and can;
Who madest me in thyself the sum of man
In all its generous aims and powers to know,
These first-fruits bring I; nor do thou forego
Marking when I the feat thus closed, began,
Which numbers now near three years from its plan,
Not twenty summers had embrowned my brow.
Life is at blood-heat every page doth prove.
Bear with it. Nature means Necessity.
If here be aught which thou canst love, it springs
Out of the hope that I may earn that love,
More unto me than immortality;
Or to have strung my harp with golden strings.

1839.

L'ENVOI.

Read this, world! He who writes is dead to thee,
But still lives in these leaves. He spake inspired:
Night and day, thought came unhelped, undesired,
Like blood to his heart. The course of study he
Went through was of the soul-rack. The degree
He took was high: it was wise wretchedness.
He suffered perfectly, and gained no less
A prize than, in his own torn heart, to see
A few bright seeds: he sowed them—hoped them truth.
The autumn of that seed is in these pages.
God was with him; and bade old Time, to the youth,
Unclench his heart, and teach the book of ages.
Peace to thee, world!—farewell! Be God, whose power's
Infinite, love and grace deific, ours!

PROEM.

This time is equal to all time that's gone
Of like extent, nor heeds to hide its face
Before the future: each is missioned here
To ends like worthy of its sender, God.
Him therefore let us bless too, and take heart;
All ages are his offspring, and all worlds
Form from his breath, like dewdrops out of air;
He life in all infusing. Nor is earth's orb
Outlawed or excommunicate. This our God
Is still as kind, his gifts like wondrous fair,
Unlimited, even as when the wind first blew.
Still shines his sun on the grey rotting rock
Keen, pure, as o'er the primal matter once;
Ere floods, marmoreal now, had smoothed their couch
Of perdurable snow, or granite wrought
Its skyward impulse from earth's hearth of fire
Up to insanest heights; or thunder oped
His cloudy lips, and spake. Immutable he,
All things to himwards, spiritual, natural, show
Unvaryingly of change. God, nature, man,
Life's universal Trinity, man perceives
Aye to each other that they have been; all souls
God makes, we feel, he blesses and inspires
With special gifts, duties and joys, that each
Teaching themselves and others him may learn.
To those come gifts to enjoy the world, to gain,
To cultivate, amuse, adorn; to these,
Who live alone with God and nature; smile
With the sun for mirth, or with the waning moon
Sadden, the elements their kin as men,
Boons, too, unasked, unmeasured as the light,
Which lights at countless points the formless whole.

Such now, heaven's seers, in things eternal taught,
Skilled soulwise to lay bare the heart of the world,
Know that while elemental change, locked round
In self-succedent course, may nature serve

As God, in spirit; progress alone of soul
Is to him dear as its existence; know
The moral realm in us expansible, ever
Greatening with speed accumulative, the rays
Of heaven's authentic sphere pierce more and more
The obstructive dark of ignorance; know, in fine,
This age, ours, happier, amiabler than all
Passed, in that God who witness lacks not ever
His ways to vindicate, now breathes 'mong men
More of his own humanity; and earth
Mellowed by westering suns, her teachers teach
A broader kindlier message; show how need,
Sown in our nature for divine commune,
Trust in a holy future largelier planned
Than doubtful pride deems safe to trust; though all
Schemes fruit of noblest strain, and social life
Made saintly, art supreme fine earth to gas,
Or desiccate the sea to a vapoury film;
A future filled by faith,—supplanter not
Of reason but supplementer, tends to adjust
And perfect Being; and while with simplest fare
Content themselves,—for wisdom's board aye lacks
Mere dainties, nor to any sets she forth
More than her homely bread, sweet olives, wine,
Right hospitable, and sacred salt, a meal
Such, with God's blessing, they their best meed find
To spread her stintless welcome, and invite
All blameless spirits to share the feast of God.

Each race hath had its revelation here
Through saint or bard, or lawgiver moved of God,
And will have better. Man, in spirit one,
Shall in the spirit receive the only true.
Who now the world's wide scripture, God writ, best
Interpret, the interlinear version use
Of spiritual light, given in ourselves, inspired;
Poesie being a thing divine, of God,
Who made his prophets poets; and the more
We feel of poesie, we become like God
In love and power creative; under-makers.
And song being of the supernatural
Natural utterance, solely can the world's
Unbounded beauty speak; immortal soul's
Perfective fall; terrestrial tests; re-rise;
And the premortal concords of pure mind,
Made, and creative, show, at last resumed.

True fiction hath a higher end, and scope
Wider, than fact: it is nature's possible,
Contrasted with life's actual mean, and gives
To the conceptive soul, an inner world,
A loftier, ampler heaven than that wherein

The nations sun themselves. In that bright sphere,
Behold the mental creatures of the men
Whose names are writ highest on the rounded crown
Of fame's triumphal arch; the shining shapes
Which star the skies of that invisible land,
Where earthly immortality dwells, with sage,
Hero and seer, her sceptred lieges, bard,
And all souls vowed to truth. Among such, let ours,
Whom fabulous wars, nor wars too true, nor rise
Of realms, or fall, nor thrones o'erthrown allure,
One spirit, as with the elements of mind's orb,
Stern quatrain of the moral world, good, ill,
Choice and necessity, battling, sing; the field,
And what we are deepliest mixed with, God and man,
Boots most to know,—where God the all good, the world's
Evil, and man, in whom are both,—all said
Of Deity's said in reverence, and in love,—
Deploy their forces. These, thought's ultimate forms,
In mutual bearings traced, all teach us, good
Immortal, as of God; for God to know
In nature, nature know in God, unites
Both reason and faith; teach, evil here active, there
Passive, but test of spirits; and choice and need,
Like light's electric force, twin poled in us
And all life; teach, that we our being have,
We of this mortal mixture, in the same law
As heaven's intelligences, of all ill pure,
And the dread Hadean shades; law given of God
Himself to prove by arbitrary grace
Above necessity in his action; teach,
Virtue, because of origin in him,
Deathless, divine; and while to struggling man,
For voluntary offence punition just
Be due, renewal righteous of pure will,
And self-amendment, his approof secures;
Souls virtuous are the souls elect of God;—
And virtue and reason, attributes divine,
Not finite, but his qualities, though in us
By causal distance dwindled, proof proclaim
Of common Being in all divinity.

Now, that infinite wisdom when he freed
Soul, should soul's choice foresee needs all must judge;
While such preview infallible, act nor thought
Of ours irremediable implies. Who views
Reverently God's nature in itself, will own
He only hath free-will whose will is fate;
Know too that in humanity, Godwards viewed,
Free-will is but necessity in play;
The clattering of the golden reins which guide
The thunder-footed coursers of the sun.

But that soul create, seen self-wise, in all deeds,
In all our words, our wills, through this brief life,
This petty segment of eternity, though
Seized but of limited freedom, yet, in truth,
Even as the ship, with fire informed, that seeks
The sea, obeying but its own iron force,
Reckless of adverse tide, breeze dead, or weak
As infant's parting breath too faint to stir
The feather held to it; and howbeit at last,
Appointed thrall as much of the elements
As the white-bosomed barque which woos the wind
To her welcoming breast, is rightly for its course
Prejudged responsible; course and end alike
Chosen by us, and planned, and well, if laden
Not inconsistently. But who, because
Men know not, nor can see act's end, until
We see with God, shall deem, that man, set he
His heart, contrarious as he may, 'gainst God,
Can aught do but work out his ultimate will,
Though at an infinite angle, he thenceforth
Acting unanswerably,—and thus confounds
The law of being with doing, deepliest errs.
Laws there are twain man serves: the law of law,
Race, custom, creed, time, conscience, circumstance,
Chance; superficial this; who breathe the light
Of spiritual virtue know God's will towards good
The law of laws; all central, vital. These
To imblend by holy art, to cultured man
All excellence, and all blessing means. Who join
With love sincere of truth, good deeds, good will,
Just life and innocent conscience; 'scaping so,
The world's self-sentenced thraldom to desires
Inequitable, and selfish pride to outvie,
And not by bettering, serve, men; reunite,
In free perfection, with divinity here.
Such are heaven's secret heirs, the adopt of God,
Unknown, unnamed, unblazoned. These be they
Whose souls though chastened aye yet chose from first,
Born of the eternal seed of heavenly life,
Light's golden generation, into time
Breathed Godwise, God translates to bliss divine,
The primal, final, total state of heaven,
And normal perfectness in him. But while
God's boundless and predestinating love
Shown in the soul world-chosen, his power displays,
His sovereignty, his freedom, God's great end,
Touching all moral being, its progress just
In virtue and judgment by the pure plain law
Of right and truth, like needful seems to prove
Heaven's equity, and to separate good from ill.

Evil and good are God's right hand and left.
There is but one great right and good; ill, wrong,
Dense, vast, howbeit to finite mind, to him
Omniscient, shadows show, not substances.
Nothing can be antagonist to God.
Let contest be 'twixt equals. He is all.
Not less, to us, of limited potencies
By ministry of evil,—whose reason sole
Of being, is that it prove, conscious or not,
Promoter of God's ends, in testing souls
Finite, but free, for good,—good stands forth clear.
God ever makes for bliss twofold, his own,
And theirs he hath made, all life: no meaner end
Worthy of him can be, or just towards them.
Who read not in the blessed belief that souls
All may be saved, read to no end. We were
Created, to be saved. We are of God.

Swayed by these truths, and compassed, as by stars,
Earth in her course, our story, mingling life,
Not cursorily, with things on high, but scenes
Showing of heaven and earth, as body and soul
In our humanity, mixed, we thankful, learn
How God by ever creating, and his own
One Being diffusing through the sentient whole;
How, too, by ruin of evil, and good's great field
By finite force for God won, for that cause
Tried, tested, and when failing, made in the end
Just, pure; he doth eternize bliss, and make
Good infinite by making all in him.
Our thoughts are bounded but by the infinite.
What comes before and after the great world,
Deep in light's secretest abyss, and life's
Immensity most reserved, is ours to muse,
Not to declare; where finite reason ends
Faith leaps, and finds firm ground in the divine.
God, thus, our Saviour, still with spirit humane
Communes; with some in life-long sacrament,
Faithwise; which, rounding all activities
Of soul, a higher faculty than reason
Shows, though of brightest revelative power,
As the snow-headed mountain riseth o'er
The lightning, and applies itself to heaven;
A faculty which meaning gives to time;
Sanctity to man's kingly blood; and like,
And equal, interest in God's bounteous ends.
Wherefore the world, of mean believings sick
And sophistries, waits, wearying for the truth,
Now, like an angel, on the wing from heaven.
For as when, storms gone, each cloud-ghost, vapoury, vast,
Each shape, sky-menacing, the uneternal brood

Of misconceptive fear, by ministering wind
Routed, and hurled to absolute void;—we, strewn
Luxurious, on the crag's crown, nought thence seen
Save ocean's quivering outline, sharp as death,
Cutting the horizon of the after world,
And all heaven's luminous and exhilarant blue,
Eternity made visible, which o'erhangs
Changeless, this changeful sphere,—complacent, eye
Those unimagined heights, aërial, calm,
Of tempests hidden, not touched; so, once earth's creeds
Foul, foolish, or of mountainous falsity,
Fled from the face of never mutable truth,
One, indivisible, sole, we feel in this
Like verity, God's infinite fatherhood,
A faith, if formless, boundless, and the soul
All satisfying with permanent peace. The world
Is God's great will in act, heaven in repose.
Earth is heaven's floor; and as, of time's vast shows
Or small, our God,—the omnipotent operative,
World sire, the all parent, first and last of Being,
Whose eye-blink kindles suns, whose breath in sad
Reproof congeals, imbreasts, doubt not, of all
The eternal image; and, as in temporal wise,
The sun, sole habitant of the tented sky,
Lightener of all the planets, world adored,
Who yet with minute beauty all life's fields
Impearls, and things most momentary sublimes,
Still dwelling in each fairy orb of dew,
Ere to his breast he assumes; so, too, the bard,
Who heavenly objects owns with earth's, while light
And beauty scattering over all he loves
And feels with, trusts but to himself all hopes,
Artwise, of lasting record in man's mind.

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.
All nature in the poet's heart is limned
In little; as now in landscape-stones we see
The swell of ground, green groves, and running streams
Fresh from the wolds of Chaos; hints of life,
Foreworldly, pencilled by pre-solar light,
Or Paradisal sun; so, in his mind
Ingrained, in primal purity, the main
Conditions of existence, be and bear,
Wisdom he seeks not only for himself,
But sacred rites participates in, which give,
To souls like willed, the privilege he hath earned,
And all prepared makes partners of his light.
'Twixt priestly powers and laic stands the bard,
A living link; now chanting odes divine,
Now, holy and austere, with sacred spell
Inviting angels; with fine magic, fiends

Evoking; whiles, in festive guise, his brow
With golden fillet bounden, earnest alone,
The throng to charm that seeks, or celebrates,
The games, here, there, the mysteries of life,
With truths ornate, and pleasure's choicest plea.
Man's minion thus, and monitor, though all else
Be mute, he, armed with the instinct both of rule
And right, in privilege only potent speaks
His spirit in self-rewarding song. So, ours,
Who from his youth up, save in adorning this,
His life's chief business, mission, end, with all
Fair addings; and who all time brought, so brooked
As to his soul's intent subservient, knew
Elsewise, scant joy; but this achieved, enough:
Even as the ormer, pearly ear o' the sea,
Whose aim nor tide nor tempest shakes, but shapes;
Who, taught by orient suns and vesper skies,
Where steers the crescent star her silvery ark
O'er azure deeps, gold rippled,—many a year
Splendidly toiling, his mysterious shell,
Born of himself, a life-long miracle, gifts,
Daily, with goodlier dyes and tenderer hues;
In bulk, in beauty vastening aye; he, now,
The quivering rose-blush kindles, now, the blue
Haunts as with memory of some flame-plumed wave
Horsing the seas by night, adventurously,
Lone, errant; or of ruddiest lightning snatched
While diving; now with prismy pencil fires
Finelier, the green of travelled seas, surcharged
With tropic sunsets; now the iceberg's spell
Which binds the enchanted rainbow in its breast
Steals holily; but, chastened every gleam,
Each soft ubiquitous flash fused flickering; whilst
Vanishing, fixed; till at last one master tint,
Thinned to a thought, all hues commuting, shot,
Quick, through the whole, his lonely life-work he
Indifferently perfects; and moon by moon,
Known but to silence and the all-aidant God,
Lives self-imparadised. So tasked, his time,
Our bard, like minded nature's ends and heaven's
To accomplish, passed; for man and nature, each,
Give signals of perfections not in them
Inherent; part prophetic, part reflex;
Blind rudiments, hap, of qualities divine
Originally; our poor mean force, of power
Boundless; our cunning and coarse art, of skill
Heaven's plenary inbreath fills and fines; our ends
Finite, of the universal cause; in him
We, as in nature, not through Being, alone,
But operation, like exampled. Think!

God worketh slowly; yea, a thousand years
He takes to lift his hand off that he hath made,
When seemingly most finished. Layer on layer,
Laid as by fingers skilled in lengths extreme,
And thrilled progressive through all elements,
He formed earth; fashioned, balled, and hardened it,
Into the great, bright, useful thing it is;
Water he heired with marl, flame stilled by stone;
Its seas life-crowded, and soul-hallowed lands,
He, with the sun's broad girdle that sets aglow,
Like love's embrace close clinging as for life,
Earth's orbèd breast, girt; fanned with tempests; veiled
With nebulous ocean clouds, now bright, now dark;
With virgin gold veined, dusted thick with gems;
Lined it with fire; and round its heart-fire bowed
Rock-ribs unbreakable; until, whole at last,
Earth took her shining station, as a star,
In heaven's dark hall, high up the throng of worlds.
All this did God, and thus. Nor, meanly, blame
Man, mediator 'twixt the whole and God,
Who causes like in essence, if diverse
In value would collate; nor this conceive
Extern to that most in us, the divine
And universal reason of things; but own,
That even as when in summer's sultriest heats,
At night, o'er heaven, the harmless flash looms wide,
With faint, far fulminings, and we learn, all day
We have breathed invisible lightnings, and our breasts
Arched on unvolumed thunder; so, once taught
Clearly in spirit, to realise our own
Uncredited divinity, we first feel
True consciousness of life, as filled, sphered, skied,
With Deity. Be it aye so. For aught else,
Most rests with those who read. A work, a thought,
Is that each makes it to himself, of great
Dark meanings capable, rushing like the sea,
In life shoals measurelessly; may be, as air
By the wild doves' wing beclouded, while they sweep,
Miles broad, o'er western woods, with, here and there,
Vast glimpses of heaven's central light; or, nothing;
Bodiless, spiritless. Be but ours conceived
With adequate force, and lo! we add a star
To the serene of heaven. And for man's soul,
As shown in actual, and in ultimate times
Foreshadowed, note the elements of such sphere,
Feasible, in thought; grace destinative, the strife
Of good and ill, man's judgment of himself,
And his heart's natural religion, God
Contrasting with humanity, the spirit
Uniting aye; the test of virtue tried;

Temptation, and its workings in the heart;
Ambition; thirst of secret lore; joy; love,
Riverlike, sometimes doubling on itself;
Adventure, travel, earthly and heavenly;
Friendship and pleasure, passion, poesie,
Viewed ever in their spiritual end, and power;
Celestial happiness, and earth's foretaste
Millennial; ill, of God annihilable;
The angels lost, restored,—of him all made;—
Life pre-existent; and like marvels, much
Unnamed; one visible remnant of pure faith,
The soul incoronating, when most eclipsed;
Most nigh gone; these, the mainland of our orb,
Might form; its isles, its seas. But if less vast
Our soul-grasp, be content: the whole a fane
Intelligible, conceive, the spirit which holds
To whom, and his by whom, it is consecrate;
From whose porch, now through passed, is something seen,
As in saintly shrine by Seine's blue wave, the shell
Colossal, from seas southern shipped, since filled
With waters purificative, immirroring, shows
The main dome's pillared vast beyond,—of what
At large succeeds; the all-intempling law
Of moral being, progressive good; the course
And scope of faith in the individual soul,
With time's distractions, with the world's deceits
Contestant, ere yet gained celestial life.

FESTUS.

[I.]

Behold us spiritwise in heaven; unite
In angel worship of the infinite God
World destinative. Evil, all tempting, man
Maligned, God vindicates himself, and prove
Earth bettering through all ages, best the last;
Ill's double attack permits, and names the strife
Testful of evil and good that all shall close.
The kind sweet offices hear of angel guard;
The privileged joys of chosen souls, which choose
Themselves, in God, all goodness; how perdures
The spirit premortal and perfectible; awed,
The final doom of things terrestrial, learn.
Yet while from time's broad chart the accumulate dust
Sweeping of vast eternity, and to heaven
Opening his boon design, God all foreshows
Accomplished, grieves one angel still; 'tis Earth's.
An outline this of world-life which begun,
Will end, and rightly, in heaven, and with God:
God, too, i' the midst, substantive of the whole.

Heaven. Deity. The Angelic Hierarchy Guardian Angel. Angel of Earth. Lucifer.
God.
Eternity hath snowed its years upon them;
And the white winter of their age is come;
The world, and all its worlds; and all shall end.

Seraphim,
worshipping.
God! God! God!
As flames in skies
We burn and rise,
And lose ourselves in thee;
Years on years,
And nought appears
Save God to be.
To us no thought
Hath Being brought
Towards thee that doth not move.
Years on years,
And what appears
Save God to love?
All thou dost make
Lies like a lake

Below thine infinite eye;
Years on years,
And all appears
Save God, to die.

Cherubim.
As sun and star,
How high or far,
Show but a boundless sky,
So creature mind
Is all confined
To show thee, God most high.
The sun still burns,
The sun still turns
Round, round himself, and round
So creature mind,
To self's confined,
But thou, God, hast no bound.
Systems arise,
Or a world dies,
Each constant hour in air;
But creature mind,
In heaven confined,
Lives on, like thee, God, there.

Seraphim and Cherubim.
Thou fill'st our eyes
As were the skies,
One burning, boundless sun;
While creature mind,
In path confined,
Passeth, a spot thereon.
God! God! God!

Angel of Earth.
I hear the beat of a strange, strong wing in heaven,
Wild, inharmonious. Now it nears the throne.
It is the spirit of evil. Woe is me!
Woe to the earth, to man. What seeks he here?

Lucifer.
Ye thrones of heaven, how bright ye are, how pure!
How have ye brightened since I saw ye first;
How have I darkened since ye saw me last!
What 'vails hell's murk abyss of fire, that cave
Loathsome, of falsest oracles, where Ill's host
Endure, inflict, or plot perdition; what,
Air's ravenous heights I reign over, and roam
Wreckful, tempestuous, with all lackeying plagues
Vaporously impomped; in self-wrought agony, I
The while, misglorying 'gainst these seats serene,
On good based; with the incense canopied
Of universal worship, echoing, round
Heaven's templed dome, God's sun-words, lifeful aye?

Yet must I work through world and life my fate;
And winding through the wards of human hearts,
Steal their incarnate strength. Death does his work
In secret and in joy intense, untold;
As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O'er some thick-peopled city. But for me
Exists not peace nor pleasure, even here,
Where all beside, the very faintest thought,
Is rapture. I will speak to God, as erst;
If wrong, no matter. Wrong's mine instinct now.
Father of spirit, as is the sun of air;
Beginning of all ends, end of all means
Essential, through the infinite whole; in whom
Eternity, and all other attribute
Perfect, of pure cause self-existent, is;
Originator without all origin; end
Without end; precreator of all ages;
Being, above all being, God the life;
Maker and perfector of all, the one;
Thou too the way wherein the world proceeds
From God, all making, and whereby returns
The ever-generated universe; thou
Who all worlds rulest in the law of light,
Thy nature and their own; who art before
All ages, angels blessèd times and worlds;
Primal humanity of the Deity, self
Unfolding, emanant first of natures pure;
And thou the Eternal Spirit of Deity
Sole sanctifier of things created; thou
By whom, in part communion, separate soul
Identifies its source with God, and ones
Being and life and spirit; who all dost make,
Destroyest, recreatest, makest God,
God, one and trine, thou seest me here again;
Still, sunlike, though eclipsed, of blinding power,
And fiery cause, and everness of ill;
Behold, I bow before thee. Hear thou me.

God.
What wouldst thou, Lucifer?

Lucifer.
The world-apple
Shows dead ripe. It wants plucking. Touch it thou,
Or I, and lo! the poor perfection falls.

God.
What may to thee seem perfect, here in heaven
Far other showeth.

Lucifer.
Man through ignorance, first,
And need of knowing, fell. Now, grown so wise,
He thinks he lacketh nothing; no, not God.
Science so self-sufficient shows, she makes
Each day such vast advances through the world
Inly and outwardly, that even now she aims
Thee to dethrone; and miracles all disproven

As fabulous breaches of eternal law,
Not now nor ever possible, men to teach
Her own more marvellous worship, and thenceforth
Herself aye deify.

God.
All things to know
Subordinate even to law, precludes not faith
Towards one who every law first made, first willed.

Lucifer.
Faith I have missed from earth this many an age.
Faith! Is she here?

God.
Faith is both there and here;
Participant of divine ubiquity.
Thy knowledge is defective. Still on earth
Are those who, knowing most, the most believe.

Lucifer.
More like myself, who, knowing much, most doubt.

God.
Perfected from the first by grace divine
The heaven-born spirit and pre-immortal, fraught
With luminous fulness, though a moment dimmed
By sin, not tarnished, knowledge conciliates
With wisdom; both with faith. Were I once more,
Future as passed to test by proof of one,
Or many, thou'dst fail as heretofore.

Lucifer.
How fail?
I deemed me passably successful there,
In Eden once, and everywhere, since then,
Where'er man's heart hath planned his Paradise.

God.
To finite mind, divergent from the light
Eterne, it doubtless seems so, But in sight
Of spirits who stand concentric with all truth,
Howbeit of bounded gaze, like these thy peers,
Who loved thee once, loved, monished, mourned in vain,
Thy failure shows foreordered and complete.

Lucifer.
God I oppose; must, can opposal fail
If foreordained? Then he appoints his own
Failure in mine. Such failure seems success.
Nought see I more. Can any further see?
Let me accept the test. Or blessed, or cursed,
All seems indifferent now, with thirst of power,
Love, lore divine and human of all time,
Been, being, or to be, nought made can quench,
Save waters of celestial life which flow
Hence, sunwards ever, a youth among the sons
Of men, there is, I fain would have, given up
Wholly to me.

God.
I know him. He is thine
To tempt.

Lucifer.
I thank thee, Lord.

God.
Upon his soul
Thou hast no absolute power. All souls be mine
For aye.

Lucifer.
This means still, I may so torment
With dubiety his conscience, ruining all
Godward assurance; so with pleasures ply
Passions and creatural vanities, his heart
Trained downwards; with world-wisdom, and profound
Knowledge of surfaces, so his spirit corrupt;
Make proud with gifts stupendous; with all use
Of mundane power inordinate, and forepledge
Of superhuman privileges, his soul,
That,—be it! I leave to thee the absolute.

God.
And I give thee leave to this that he may know
My love than all his sin more; and to himself
While proving nought save God can satisfy
The soul he maketh great, prove both to thee,
And to the world, faith peer of knowledge.

Guardian Angel.
Thanks
For this, Lord! endless thanks and ceaseless praise.
To know at hand truth's trial, trust in thee
Strengtheneth; and proof of principle perfects
Man's noblest resolutions for his own
Or the world's weal, here, blessedly, at one.

Lucifer.
Thou, God, art all in one. Thine infinite
Bounds being. Thou hast said the world shall end.
The world is perfect as concerns itself,
And all its parts and ends; not as towards thee.
So man, unlikest, likest God of all
Existence, thee resembleth as act, mind.
In him of whom I ask, I seek once more
To tempt the living world; and then depart.

God.
Time ceaseth. All the thousands of the chosen
Called, counted, all the innumerous hosts of souls
Of ages passed, their self-conditioned doom
Fulfilling, hear, ye heavenly, on earth's end,
And man's, my judgment. Mark this mortal soul,
Many a long lustre working out his own
Election, with success most variable,
As seems; all souls else struggling in the flesh,
Alike with him, shall, by one choiceful act
Contemporary with nature's end, their fate
Freely decide; and in faith's final fight,
Spiritual, sole blessed, their meet reward attain.
Who fail, fail not to expiate pains most just,
Be sure, ere I, long-suffering, too, forgive.
Who rightly choose make heaven; bliss instant theirs;
Bliss ever. So shall mercy neither tax
Grave justice with inequitable extremes;
Nor justice mercy lawless call, e'ermore.

Guardian Angel.
Oh! who hath joy like mine,—joy first by me
Felt, when in dim eternity, far back,

From out thy boundless bosom, as a star
In the air, that soul was kindled, Lord, and given
To me through every age of world-life gone,
To guard and guide; the while by spheral strains
Amidst heaven's depths hailed, we both at thy feet fell
In worship? joy of joys, now, e'er assured.

Lucifer.
Vaunt not thyself nor aught too hastily.

Guardian Angel.
Peace
To you ye saints and angels let me speak;
For ye, I see, rejoice with me. Ye know
What 'tis to triumph o'er temptation; what
To fall before it; how the young spirit faints;
The virgin tremor, the heart's ebb and flow,
When first some vast temptation calmly comes
And states itself before the unequal soul,
For conflict not prepared; prepared not even
To entertain its semblance; as the sun
Low looming in the west, startles the wave
Of whimpling brook, which yet, its waters grown
Aortal 'mongst earth's veins, shall mainward pour
The riverine flood; full many a broadening league
Of land o'ermantled. Than the Tempter's self
Can be no greater peril. Less the shame
Of yielding, more the glory of conquering,
In him, this soul elect, of Ill so sought.
Expert of time's accumulated tests
Till now, earth given, his crowning trial comes;
With mine, I trust, his triumph. Know, ye saints,
From infancy through childhood up to youth
Have I this soul attended; marked him blessed
With all life's sweet and sacred ties; the love
Prayerful of parents, pride of friends, health, ease,
Prosperity, social converse with the good,
The gifted, and a heart all lit with love,
Like a summer sea aflow with living light.
Hopeful and generous and earnest; rich
In commerce with high spirits of all time,
Knowledge and truth for their own divinest selves
Loving; earth's deeds of glory tracking, now;
Now conning wisdom's words, as, heaven inspired,
In bright effectual ray the mind they tinge
Of bard or sage, thenceforth for ever fixed.
Morning and eve he,—as some hermit rock
All earth's lone outguard, daily of the sea
Takes baptism, and in the elemental rite,
While over its head the tidal function pours
Full-handed, gladdens; he, so, to serve his race
And strengthen him for best aims, in praise and prayer
Constant, for good asked, granted bliss, with heaven
Joyed in commune. Thus, fraught with peace his days

And studious nights, star-armied, or moon-crowned,
In good, in joy, all radiantly elapsed;
His grateful heart opening to the Lord of life
Our spiritual sun, flowerwise. All this, long while
I marked. A slow but palpable change at length
His spirit eclipsed, from what o'ershadowing sphere
Showed not to me; and I a fall from good
Fatal and final feared.

Lucifer.
Regard me, friend.
Deem'st thou I roam the earth for nothing now?

Guardian Angel.
An aching wish to know the world, I knew
Lorded, latewhile, his spirit; ambition, love,
Eldest of things, that dawn life of the soul,
Youth's passionate pleasures and frivolities, all,
Had thrown cross-lights, and dazed his once so clear
Purview of life. Life's simple aims lacked zest.
God's love seemed lost upon him. Oh! he grew
Heart-deadened. Watching, warning vain, I fled
Hither to intercede with God our Lord
To bless him with salvation. Plead we may
Always for those we love, by leave divine.
And now thou summ'st all bounties, Lord! in him
Choosing as test of human faithfulness,
My ward, my charge. But, Lord! thou knowest the mould
Of mortals, and the infinite end the souls
Thou savest are all predestined to in heaven.
So be thy mercy mighty to this soul
Fiend-threatened; nor permit him, who presides
O'er hell's eternal holocaust, too far
To tempt or tamper with man's mutable heart.

God.
My mercy doth all outstretch the universe.
Shall it suffice not for one soul?

Lucifer.
God's wrath
Am I to myself; and for that wrath inheres
In evil, am by him made to do my part.
Angel, do thou thine: they be far enough
Asunder.

Guardian Angel.
Are the heaven-strung chords of man's
Immortal spirit for thee to wreck at will?
Bear witness all ye blessèd to the word,
Angels, intelligences, the sons of God;
Ye who know nought but truth; nought feel but love;
Save bliss, will nought; nought do save righteousness;
Whose life was ere the heavens were yet conceived,
The stars begotten, or all the ages born;
Ye first who move all heavens, in whose great names
God's name is rooted deepliest, though it live
Germwise in all light's hierarchies; the crown,

Of Deity; wisdom; and the intelligence;
Kindness and strength and beauty, splendour, worth,
Original and rule; and numbered, known
Below by mystic seer of old, inspired,
Ye many ordered sanctities, God's love,
God's truth, God's justice; majesty his, his might,
His dominance; glory, knowledge, bliss; all God's;—
And ye who, restless mid perpetual peace,
Move watchful round the throne, ye burning seven;
The virtue, power, salvation, fire and rest,
Blessing and praise of God; ye all who rule
Regions, states, kingdoms, races, families, tribes,
Times, ages, seasons and cycles; elements,
Systems and influences; material powers
Mental and spiritual; ye too who bear
Souls from the heavens to earth, from earth to heaven;
Or ye whose life 'tis to present all souls
Reborn to their Creator; or the skies
Golden-globed search for junctures grace may bless;
Ye through whose ministry of mercy, his
Immediate, all sustaining, spirits and worlds
Are governed and made blessed; ye who, the throne
Sought, stirless stand, joy-tranced, and on your Lord
Gaze, and in gazing gain divinity; ye
Glad tenants all of the archetypal worlds,
And spheres intelligible; and you, ye spirits
Freed once on earth into the privilege born
Of grace, God crowns all soul-redeemed with; yours
Are the multitudes of testful stars; yours power
For aye; progressive joy; ye are gods, and live,
Divine, with God; bear witness all, that not
More surely bliss with godliness dwells and ones,
Than that, even spite of sin, man's purblind race
Might, and they would, with you, while awed and raised,
Recognise in time's scenes, though cloud-belts bar,
In provident mystery, half its burning disk,
The o'erruling power, through miracle tempering law,
Which by our creature purposes worketh out
Its deeds, and by our own deeds its purposes.

Angels.
Devoted spirit, proceed; bloom forth in act.
The powers of heaven are with thee, and with vast
Consent accept thy true, thy just appeal.

Lucifer.
God, for thy glory only it is I act,
And for thy creatures' good. If lightning smite not,
Nor serpent fang to achieve thy bounteous ends,
I have lost since here the clue of things. Meanwhile
The more of death-chilled venom one can pour
Transfusive into careless nature's veins,
The more, mayhap, thou wouldst. When creatures stray
Farthest from thee, then warmest towards them burns

Thy love, even as yon sun-star hotliest beams
On earth, when distant most, or seems.

God.
The earth
This soul indwells, this grain chose from life's sands,
Dies with him; fine and sum of miracles, this;
That spirit the most incredulous, demon, man,
May know, who all doth, all sustains, can all
Undo; and every law sphere-based, withdrawn;
Each act of legislature divine, revised
Perfective, by all Being's great Head, the whole
Even yet may wholly cease.

Lucifer.
Lord! now go I
To do thy will. So, he I have lighted on, seems
Of the forechosen. But will their fate involve
All men's? And if all man's, creation's, too?
Knew I but this infallibly, not I
Would thwart God's purposes, nor seek to wage
War bootless with the Eternal of the heavens.

Guardian Angel.
Spirit depart, the secrets of the skies,
God's counsels, it is not meet thou learn nor share.

Lucifer.
All wisdom speaks his will; all substance waits,
All power performs; all spirits his ends fulfil.

God.
Hearing he understands not that he hears,
Nor seeing sees. Nought wists he perfectly
Who loves not God.

Lucifer.
Heaven's oracles in heaven
Speechless, still doubt I.

God.
Who doubts only, exists
Vainliest. Thou, too, who watchest o'er the world
Whose end I fix, prepare to have it judged.

Angel of Earth.
Lord! let me not then have watched o'er it in vain.
From age to age I have hoped, from hour to hour
It would better grow, grow holier; hope so still.
Better it is than once—hath more of mind,
Freedom, good willingness; man's more man than erst.
I love it more than ever. Thou gavest it me
As a child ward. To me earth is as even
To thee the boundless universe; nay, more,
For thou couldst make another. It is my world.
Take it not from me, Lord! Thou Son of God,
Divine ideal of pure humanity, word
Whereby the eternal Reason with itself,
And with the world communes; word, safe to save
All spirits impregned of Spirit Deific, thou
Madest it the altar, whereon thou offeredst up
Thyself for the creation. Let it be
Immortal as thy love. And altars are
Holy; and sister angels, sister orbs

Hail it afar so titled. Oh! I have seen
World questioned, comforting world; yes, seen them weep
Each other, if but for one red hour eclipsed.
And of all worlds most generous was mine own,
The tenderest and the fairest.

Lucifer.
Knowest thou not
God's Son, God's own humanity wherewithal
The Maker suffereth evil, and partakes
The sorrows of the world he hath made, knows, loves,
Brother and friend of spirit everywhere?
Or bound hast been to thy foolish world for aye?

Angel.
Star unto star speaks light, and world to world
The password of all souls to God, the name
Of God in us, repeats, word reunitive
With Deity, worth all tongues in earth and heaven.

Son of God.
Think not I have lived in, died for, thine alone;
And that no other sphere hath hailed me lord.
In teaching, judging, saving worlds is spent
Mine everlasting being.

Lucifer.
And earth he next
Will judge; for so saith God.

Angel of Earth.
Be it not, Lord.
Thou art a God of love and goodness. He,
The evil of the universe, loves not earth,
Not man, thy Son, nor thee.

Lucifer.
Love I not earth,
Fair earth, well-zoned?

Angel of Earth.
Thou knowest best, Lord.

Lucifer.
Behold
Now, all yon worlds. The space each fills shall be,
And that right soon, its successor. Accept
The trivial consolation.

Angel of Earth.
Earth, O Earth!

Lucifer.
It is earth shall head destruction. She shall end.
The worlds shall wonder why she comes no more
On her accustomed orbit; and the sun
Miss one of his apostle lights; the moon,
An orphaned orb, shall seek for earth for aye
Through time's untrodden depths, and find her not.
No more shall morn, out of the holy east,
Stream o'er the amber air her level light;
Nor evening, with the spectral fingers, draw
Her star-sprent curtain round the head of earth;
Her footsteps never thence again shall grace
Heaven's blue, sublime. Her grave—Death's now at work—
Gaps deep in space. See tombwards gathering all
The stars, in long procession, sad, night-clad;

Each lights his funeral brand, and ranks him round.
And one by one shall all yon wandering worlds,
Whether in orbèd path they roll, or trail,
Gold-tressed, in length inestimable of light,
Their train, returnless from extreme space, cease;
The sun, bright keystone of heaven's world-built arch,
Be left in burning solitude. The stars,
As dewdrops countless on the æthereal fields
Of the skies, and all they comprehend, shall pass.
The spirits of all the spheres shall all depart
To their great destinies; and thou and I,
Greater in grief than worlds, shall live as now.

Angel of Earth.
Thou knowest not the to-come.

Lucifer.
Who knows? 'Tis safe,
For all that, to predict woe. Woe impends
Always.

Son of God.
In hell's dark future that is writ
Shall amaze yet man and angel.

Angel of Earth.
Spirit, hear!
All heaven at thee shall peer.

Lucifer.
There, to thy earth.

Angel of Earth.
There's a blind world, dislumined late of God,
Smote into blackness thrice of darkness, such
As spreads where light, God's shadow, not is; by storms
Of stars meteoric wrecked; and by base force
Invert, of dissolute elements, dragged to the verge
Of chaos, rolling round space utmost. There,
The outcast of all being, good alone
Lacking from every rudiment of things,
Reigns ruin permanently; disaster sows,
Decay reaps; naught aught fits; that, fit for thee
If fit to be promoted out of hell—
Be thy world. Leave, leave me the lifeful earth;
Home, shrine of every virtue, every law
Spatial or spiritual God hath given the world.
Stretch forth thy shining shield, O God! the heavens
Over the prostrate earth, an armèd friend,
And save her from the swift and violent hell
Her beauty hath enchanted; from the woe
Of love like his, Oh, save her, though by death.

Lucifer.
Go tell the earth, I come.

Angel of Earth.
Tidings of ill
Announce, thyself. Be thine own fiend-spell, thou.

Son of God.
O'er all things are eternity and change
And special predilection of our God.
Thou, Lord, who souls createst as the sun clouds
From the sea of spirit, Sire, thou, of man thy Son's
Spiritual and bodily nature both; in whom
Maker and made one Being make divine;

Free, mediative; who aye in every world
Payeth creation's penalties, the fines
Of imperfection, ignorance, and the sins
Such weakness leads to, and the original lack
Of all consummate qualities; yet in all
Is heir of God and nature, and in thee
Attempering Deity with humanity, lives
Ever and equality claims supreme in heaven
With all divinity, thrice being purified;
And you, blessed spirits regenerate now from taint
Of ill-directed will, for whom—to prove
God's self-exception arbitrary from law—
He hath founded for the world, from the first called,
First chosen; and you the unnumbered throng to be
Last in the infinite proof of spiritual life's
Probational advance all time; for whom
All heaven the fulness of its bliss reserves;
Creator and created, witness, both,
How I have loved ye, as God-natured life
Can only, and suffer, not annulled. Let earth,
And every orb, offspring of fire-fraught space,
Perish materially: while lasts in spirit
Creation's evil, prince of the world, 'gainst good
Thine it will be to strive, I know; and though
Not I, nor nature, wholly, neither, void
Of the holy spirit prophetic, wist the end
Of Being, yet fear I not for good's success
Final, or in the skies, or earth's broad field,
Or in these lists, delimited of one soul.

God.
Earth, when her Sabbath ends, in the high close
Of order, shall not be.

Lucifer.
Now, heaven, farewell!
Hell seems less terrible than is nothingness.

God.
Destruction and salvation are two hands
Upon Being's face. When both unite, at close
Of time's course hourful, death's dark day begins,
Which yet shall dawn. Each orb to its end forefixed
Exists; and earth, my creature, the elect
Of worlds, ere all death stricken, but passed through fire,
Renewed, made pure past primal innocence,
Is saved. The world shall perish like a worm
Upon destruction's path; the universe
Evanish as a ghost that scents the sun,
Yea, like a doubt before the truth of God;
Yet nothing more than death shall perish. Then,
Rejoice ye souls of God regenerated,
Ye indwellers divine of Deity, know
In him ye are immortal as himself.

Angel.
So shall the All in All be all in One.

God.
Know, angel-guard, thy charge from first ordained

To prove his faith in God, that ultimately
Wide fields of blessed salvation may be reaped
Timely. Go, search the scroll of fate, thou wilt find,
Writ in that holy and everlasting word,
This soul forechosen, long tested, simpler made
By wisdom, by rise humbler in belief,
Outwaked doubt's night, revert in worthship here.
And though so largely he knew, and all with him,
Of nature's source, at last, the birth of things,
Creation's laws and principles; knowledge gained
Gradually, by wise behest; not less he loved,
Not less believed, than when, in earlier years
Of inscience, Auz' afflicted patriarch clave
To my name submiss, in me self-justified.
Heaven's secret this, till I permit, reserved,
Even from himself, and he of man's race last.

The Holy Spirit.
And lo! I hallow him to the ends of heaven,
That though he plunge his soul in sin, like a sword
In water, it shall nowise cling to him.
Souls are of God. All ends are known in heaven
Ere aimed at upon earth. The child is chosen.

Saints.
Another soul the All-Holy One
Hath chosen out of perishing earth;
And when is done the life begun
Throughout the whole shall heaven see none
More joyful of the immortal birth.

Guardian Angel.
How is thy secret love adorable ever,
Sole amiable, in whose eternal plans,
Things not yet made re-rise, and sacred ends,
Momentous, vast, lie hidden in certainty
Transpicuous; howbeit nor seraph, saint,
Nor I, knew, till this instant, with all heaven,
That soul was saved. Praise God, ye blessed, with joy.

God.
Nor he, nor any soul were saved, had not
The world's original evil, by my decree
From all time framed, been capable of use,
With good compatible. Evil is not a power
By one mind miscreate, malevolent grown,
Maugre my will, foisted into the world:
But of defectible nature born, were't not
Of greater ultimate gain than present grief,
To soul free, answerable, or than could else
Be, it had never been; rest sure. Let, now,
Yon erring, infidel spirit, in act as doom
Precipitate; there by angel eyeable scarce,
So swiftlier than the wind hath he down sped;
By me e'er seen through; who, deformity being
Essential, every fount of life with death
Embittereth, taints each separate birth with sin,

And the soul-world fouls with self; so prompt to aid
Creation's foes, destruction, death—his worst
Dare; yet shall God, before even reason create,
Show just; and sin's sire, false and faithless, learn
Soul's progress due to free-willed strife 'gainst ill;
Evil o'erruled to good, transmute to use
Most fit whereby to administer the world,
Spiritual; imperfect caused; but if without
Free-will, of Being's amplest dignity void,
How infelicitous; nor amenable ye,
Intelligences, which people it. For not only
To me, free sovereign of free servants, 'longs
Necessity, but still holier liberty; both
Offspring, twin-born of God, in whom abides
All fulness, sole, perfection. So, in fine,
Evil's constrictive knot from life's lithe limbs
Released, sin expiate and abolished, all
Shall with God's righteousness be satisfied.

Thrones.
Thou, God, art Lord of Being, and thy just thoughts
Are high above the star-dust of the world;
The spheres themselves are but as glittering noughts
Upon these imperial robes, thy skies, impearled.
Life's thousand thrones, mid spaces infinite,
Beam joyous 'neath love's universal sight;
We who thine ordered Thearchy divine
Set forth, who with thy glow effluxive shine,
We angel raylets gladden in thine interior light.

Dominations.
Between creation and destruction, now
The lull of creatural action intervenes.
God rests; and the world is working out its week.
His hand is in his bosom, and at peace.
But what was gradually create shall be
Most suddenly unmade. That arm which now
Slumbers upon his breast shall yet wave forth;
And from the lightning pathway of his feet
The æthereal web, world-studded, of the skies
Like to the gossamer woof, beaded with dew,
Stretched o'er the morning traveller's walk, shall pass
Annihilate, and for ever. For behold!
His oath uncancellable on heaven's altar rests;
The whole shall end. All matter, erst conceived
Of God the eternal, and the virgin void,
The firmament of material worlds, shall cease;
By spheres may be replaced of spiritual light;
But thee, who hold'st in thine all-moulding hand
The infinite as a ball, all worlds, or gross,
With elements, or to spirit refined, shall serve
Yea, o'er the universe aye omnipotent thou
As over meanest atomie, reignest Lord.

Powers.
Thy might is self-creative, God: thy works,
Immortal, temporal, or destructible, all,
Ever in thy sight are blessed there. The heavens
Thy bosom, o'er all existence stoops thine eye;
The worlds thy shining footprints show in space.

Princedoms.
Eternal Lord! Thy strength compels the worlds,
And bows the heads of ages; at thy voice
Their unsubstantial essence wears away.

Virtues.
All-favouring God! we glory but in thee.
Ye heavens, exalt, expand yourselves. They come,
The infinite generations, all divine
Of Deity, come, our brethren, come, our friends.

Archangel.
Thou who hast thousand names as night hath stars
Which light thee up to mind finite, yet scarce
Thy limitlessness illume, nor that abyss
Of Being, wherein thy wondrous attributes
Themselves constellate, Lord! thy light, the light
We dwell in, shall at last, all times consumed,
Fulfil the universe, and all be bliss.

Angels.
Thee, God of heaven, of all, we praise,
Through our ne'er sunsetting days,
And thy just ways, divine.
In thine hand is every spirit;
Cleansing pain, and meed of merit;
All things souls and worlds inherit,
Of thee all born, are thine.
Not unto creatures be it given
To scan the purposes of heaven,
Alway just and kind;
But before thy holy breath,
All-quickening where it operateth,
Life and spirit, dust and death,
The boundless all is driven,
As clouds by wind.

God.
Can God refuse this angel's innocent prayer?
Fate learn to reconcile thyself with joy.

Angel of Earth.
Woe, woe, at last in heaven!
Earth to death is given.
The ends of things hang still
Over them as a sky;
Do what, do how we will,
All's for eternity.

God.
Earth's angel-warden, lift thine head. Thy prayer
Ungranted wholly, graceless yet falls not
Back to its generous source. Thy love-task once
Achieved, to guide that sphere's tempestuous life
Through all vicissitudes, this reward be thine—

Thy ultimate hopes to know made truths; its mien
Of beauty purified, she shall be known 'mong stars
By the name of Peace; true end to godly strife
'Gainst evil, of good, which heaven with joy shall fill,
And calm delights inviolable of love,
Eternal, spiritual, love divine of God.

II.

From heaven, soul-like, to earth. It is sundown. Mark
The heart's state, empty and collapsed, the world's
Vain pleasures leave us in, dissatisfied,
Distraught, not penitent of them, in ourselves;
Youth's natural fitful unavailing struggle
Note, 'gainst temptation come unlooked for; power,
Love, wisdom; who shall slight the three convened?
To know man's future as a race; the soul's
Passed, individually; to be beloved
By the world's paramount beauty and sit earth's throne?
Know yet, to sin is to curse God in deed;
The soul, long used to truth, keeps fain, somewhile,
Its strength, though plunged on sudden, mid the false,
As hands thrust into the dark, a season retain
Their sun-lent light. So now with this, the scene
Of self-forgetfulness, and of indecision
Breaks off, not ends.

Wood and Water, lawn and flowering thicket bordering a lakelet. Sunset. Festus, alone; afterwards Lucifer.
Festus.
This is to be a mortal and immortal!
To live within a death-bound circle, and be
That dark point where the shades of all things round
Meet, mix, and deepen. All things show to me
Their dark sides. Somewhere must be truth-light. Where?
Oh! I feel like to a seed in the cold earth;
Quickening at heart, and pining for the air.
Passion is destiny; the heart is its own fate.
It is well youth's gold so soon rubs off; for soon
The heart gets dizzied with its drunken dance,
And life's voluptuous vanities enchain,
Enchant, and cheat no more. That spirit's on edge
Which nought enjoys sin's honeyed sting not taints;
That soothing fret which makes the young untried
Unwise, unwarned, swift to forestall all dues,
Longing to be beforehand with their nature,
In dreams and loneness cry, they die to live;
That wanton whetting of the soul which, while
It gives a finer, keener edge for pleasure,

Wastes more, and dulls the sooner. Rouse thee, heart.
Bow of my life, thou yet art full of spring;
My quiver still hath many a purpose. Yet,
Of all life's aims what's worth the thought we waste on't?
How mean, how miserable seems every care;
How doubtful, too, the system of the mind;
And then, the ceaseless, changeless, hopeless round
Of weariness, and heartlessness, and woe,
And vice, and vanity! Yet these make life—
The life, at least, I witness, if not feel.
No matter, we are immortal. How I wish
I could love men, for still, 'mid all life's quests,
There seems but worthy one, to do men good.
It matters not how long we live, but how.
For as the parts of one manhood, while here,
We live in every age; we think, and feel,
And feed upon the coming and the gone
As much as on the now time. Man is one,
And he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel,
With a gigantic throb athwart the sea,
Each other's rights and wrongs. Thus are we men.
Let us think less of men—man fills not half
The measure of man's mind—and more of God.
Sometimes the thought comes swiftening over us
Like a stray birdlet winging the still blue air;
Again it rises slow, like a cloud which scales
Breathless the skies; and, just overhead, upon us
Down plunges; we, with excess of witness, stunned.
Sometimes we feel the wish across the mind
Rush, like a rocket tearing up the sky,
That we should join with God, and give the world
The slip; but while we wish, the world turns round,
And peeps us in the face, the wanton world;
We feel it gently pressing down our arm,
The arm we had raised to do for truth such wonders;
We feel it softly bearing on our side;
We feel it touch and thrill us through the body;
And we are fools, and there's an end of us.
'Tis a fine thought that sometime end we must.
There sets the sun of suns; dies in all fire,
Like Asshur's death-great monarch. God of might!
It is power we love, and live on. Spirit's end,
And reason of being, seems somewhat, if 'tis this.
Mind must subdue. To conquer is its life.
Why madest thou not one spirit, like the sun,
To king the world? And oh! might mine have been
That sun-mind, how would I have warmed the world
To love, and worship, and bright life!

Lucifer,
suddenly appearing.
Not thou!
Hadst thou more power—put case thou hadst thy wish,

'Tis vastly feasible—more wouldst thou misuse.
But other matters first.

Festus.
Who art thou, pray?
It seems as thou hadst grown out of the air.

Lucifer.
Thou knowest me well. If stranger to thine eye,
I am not to thine heart.

Festus.
I know thee not.

Lucifer.
Come nearer. Look on me. I am above thee,
Beneath thee, and around thee, and before thee.

Festus.
Why, art thou all things, or dost go through all?
A spirit, or an embodied blast of air?
I feel thou art a spirit.

Lucifer.
Yea, I am;
The creditable presentment of a man,
I flatter myself I may be, too.

Festus.
Thou art spirit.
I knew it. I am glad, yet tremble so.
What hours, what years, say, have I longed for this,
And hoped that thought or prayer of force might win;
How oft besought the stars, with tears, to send
A power to me, and have set the clouds until
I deemed I saw one coming; but ah! too soon
The shadowy giant alway thinned away,
And I was fated unimmortalised;
Unsceptred with the sway I would o'er souls.
What shall I do? Oh! let me kneel to thee.

Lucifer.
Nay, rise! and I'll not say, for thine own sake,
That thou dost pray in private to the Devil.

Festus.
Father of lies, thou liest.

Lucifer.
I am he;
It is enough to make the Devil merry,
To think that men, me deeming dungeoned fast
Ever in hell, call on me momently;
Swearers and swaggerers jeer at my name;
And oft indeed it is a special jest
With witling gallants. Let me once appear!
Woe's me! they faint and shudder; pale and pray;
The burning oath which quivered on the lip,
Starts back, and sears and blisters up the tongue;
Confusion ransacks the abandoned heart;
Quells the bold blood; and o'er the vaulted brow
Slips the white woman-hand. To judgment, ho!
The very pivot of the earth seems snapped;
And down they drop, as when, in days of ire,
Nations, revoltant at rank juggleries,
Their sacred shrines wrack; here, a pillar falls

To its fluted knee; a pediment there, that once
O'erbrowed the state; and there, some delicate arch,
Whose marble arms, as petrified in prayer,
Long drew heaven's pitying glance, now rudest earth's,
Ruinous, dishallowed lies,—so these, so thou,
By anarch fears prostrated—to repent.
Such be the bravery of mighty man!

Festus.
I must be mad; or mine eye cheats my brain
And this strange phantom comes from overthought,
Like the white lightning from a day too hot.
It must be so. But I will pass it.

Lucifer.
Stay!

Festus.
O save me, God! He is reality!

Lucifer.
And now thou kneel'st to heaven. Fye, graceless boy!
Mocking thy Maker with a cast-off prayer;
For had not I the first-fruits of thy faith?

Festus.
Tempter, away! From all the crowds of life
Why single me? Why score the young green bole
For fellage? Go! Am I the youngest, worst?
No. Light the fires of hell with other souls;
Mine shall not burn with thee.

Lucifer.
Thou judgest harshly.
Can I not touch thee without slaying thee?

Festus.
Why art thou here? What wouldst thou have with me?

Lucifer.
'Fore all I would have gentle words and looks.

Festus.
I pray thee, go.

Lucifer.
I cannot quit thee yet.
But why so sad? Wilt kneel to me again?
This leafy closet is most apt for prayer.

Festus.
Yes; I will pray for thee, and for myself.

Lucifer.
Waste not thy prayers; I scatter them: they reach
No further than thy breath—a yard or so.
And as for me, I heed them, need them, not.
My nature God knows and hath fixed; and he
Recks little of the manners of the world;
Wicked he holdeth it and unrepentant.

Festus.
Therefore the more some ought to pray.

Lucifer.
To blow
A kiss, a bubble and a prayer, hath like
Effect and satisfaction.

Festus.
Let me hence!
Go tell thy blasphemies and lies elsewhere.
Thou scatter prayer! Make me thy minister
One moment, God! that I may rid the world
For ever of its evil. Oh, thine arm!

Lucifer.
Canst rid thyself?

Festus.
Alas, no. Get thee gone!
Can naught insult thee nor provoke thy flight?

Lucifer.
I laugh alike at ruin and redemption.
I am the one which knows nor hope nor fear;
Which ne'er knew good, nor e'er can know the worst.
What thinkest thou now can anger me, or harm?

Festus.
Wherefore didst thou quit hell? to drag me there?

Lucifer.
Thou wilt not guess mine errand. Deem'st thou aught
Which God hath made all evil? Me he made.
Oft I do good; and thee to serve I come.

Festus.
Did I not hear thee boast with thy last breath,
Not to have known what good was?

Lucifer.
From myself
I know it not; yet God's will I must work.
I come, I say, to serve thee.

Festus.
Well I would
Thou never hadst; but speak thy purpose straight.

Lucifer.
I heard thy prayer at sunset, scarce yet passed,
Where, still, yon dim and filmy cloudlet, drooped
Like to God's eyelid, thinned with unshed tears
Of watching, over a worthless, faithless world,
Screens the orb now vanished. I was there: was here,
I saw thy secret longings, unsaid thoughts,
Which prey on the breast like night-fires on a heath.
I know thy heart by heart. I read the tongue,
When still astutely, as well as when it moves.
And thou didst pray to God. Did he attend?
Or turn his eye from the great glass of things,
Wherein he worshippeth eternally
Himself, to thee one moment? He did not.
I tell thee naught he cares for men. I came;
And come to proffer thee the earth; to set
Thee on a throne—the throne of will unbound—
To crown thy life with liberty and joy;
And make thee free and mighty even as I am.

Festus.
I would not be as thou art for hell's throne;
Add earth's—add heaven's.

Lucifer.
I knew thy proud high heart.
To test its worth and mark I held it brave,
In shape and being thus myself I came;
Not in disguise of opportunity;
Not as some silly toy, which serves for most;
Not in the mask of lucre, lust, nor power;
Not in a goblin size nor cherub form;
But as the soul of hell and evil came I
With leave to give the kingdom of the world;
The freedom of thyself.

Festus.
Good; prove thy powers.

Lucifer.
Do I not prove them? Who but I, that have
Immortal might o'er mine own mind, and o'er
All hearts and spirits of the living world,
Would share it with another, or forego,
One hour, the great enjoyment of the whole?
And who but I give men what each loves best?

Festus.
Open the heavens, and let me look on God.
Open my heart, and let me see myself.
Then I'll believe thee.

Lucifer.
Thou shalt not believe
For that I give thee, but for that I am.
Believe me first; then I will prove myself.
Though sick I know thee of the joys of sense,
Yet those thou lovest most I will make pure,
And render worthy of thy love: unfilm them,
That so thou mayst not dally with the blind.
Thou shalt possess them to their very souls.
Pleasure, and love, and unimagined beauty;
All, all that be delicious, brilliant, great,
Of worldly things are mine, and mine to give.

Festus.
What can be counted pleasure after love?
Like the young lion which hath once lapped blood,
The heart can ne'er be coaxed back to aught else.

Lucifer.
I will sublime it for thee all to bliss:
As yet it hath but made thee wretched.

Festus.
Spirit,
It is not bliss I seek: I care not for it.
I am above the low delights of life.
The life I live is in a dark cold cavern,
Where I wander up and down, feeling for something,
Which is to be—and must be—what I know not;
But the incarnation of my destiny
Is nigh.

Lucifer.
It is thy fate which weighs upon thee.
Necessity, like to the world on Atlas' neck,
Sits on humanity. It is this; nought more;
And the sultry sense of overdrawn life.

Festus.
True;
The worm of the world hath eaten out my heart.

Lucifer.
I will renew it in thee. It shall be
The bosom favourite of every beauty,
Even like a rosebud. Thou shalt render happy,
By naming who may love thee. Come with me.

Festus.
Power spiritual forbidden nor lowlier quest
Me suiting, soon, as sweep o'er fertile fields
Sea-bordering, deathful sands, so waste of life
My spirit deformed, until, and I was glad
My heart spake in me suddenly, and said
Come, let us worship beauty! and I bowed;

And went about to find a shrine; but found
None that my soul, when seeing, said enough to.
Many I met with where I put up prayers,
And had them more than answered; some where love
Filled the whole place as 'twere oppressed with heaven.
And I worshipped, partly because others did;
Partly because I could not help myself.
But none of these were for me; and away
I went, champing and choking in proud pain;
In a burning wrath that not a sea could slake.
So I betook me to the sounding sea;
And overheard its slumberous mutterings
Of a revenge on man; whereat almost
I gladdened, for I felt savage as the sea.
I had only one thing to behold—the sea;
I had only one thing to believe—I loved;
Until that lonesome sameness grew sublime
And darkly beautiful as death, when some
Bright soul regains its star-home; or as heaven,
Just when the stars falter forth, one by one,
Like the first words of love from a maiden's lips.
There are points from which we can command our life;
When the soul sweeps the future like a glass;
And coming things, full-freighted with our fate,
Jut out, dark, on the offing of the mind.
Let them come! Many will go down in sight;
In the billow's joyous dash of death go down.
At last came love; not whence I sought nor thought it;
As on a ruined and bewildered wight
Rises the roof he meant to have lost for ever.
On came the living vessel of all love;
Terrible in its beauty as a serpent;
Rode down upon me like a ship full sail,
And, bearing me before it, kept me up,
Spite of the drowning speed at which we drave
On, on! Was this not love?

Lucifer.
I know not, I.
Is't likely I can tell? I am not in love;
But I have ofttimes heard mine angels call
Most piteously on their lost loves in heaven;
And, as I suffer, I have seen them come;
Seen starlike faces peep between the clouds,
And hell become a tolerable torment.
Some souls lose all things but the love of beauty;
And by that love they are redeemable;
For in love and beauty they acknowledge good;
And good is God—the great Necessity.

Festus.
I loved her for that she was beautiful;
And that to me she seemed to be all nature,
And all varieties of things in one:

Would set at night in clouds of tears, and rise
All light and laughter in the morning: fear
No petty customs nor appearances;
But think what others only dreamed about;
And say what others did but think; and do
What others would but say; and glory in
What others dared but do; so pure withal
In soul: in heart and act such conscious, yet
Such careless innocence, she made round her
A halo of delight; 'twas these which won me;—
And that she never schooled within her breast
One thought or feeling, but gave holiday
To all; and that she made all even mine,
In the communion of love: and we
Grew like each other, for we loved each other;
She, mild and generous as the air in spring;
And I, like earth, all budding out with love.

Lucifer.
And then, love's old end, falsehood; nothing worse
I hope?

Festus.
What's worse than falsehood? to deny
The god that is within us, and in all
Is love? Love hath as many vanities
As charms; and this, perchance, the chief of both:
To make our young heart's track upon the first,
And snowlike fall of feeling which overspreads
The bosom of the youthful maiden's mind,
More pure and fair than even its outward type.
If one did thus, was it from vanity?
Or thoughtlessness, or worse? Nay, let it pass,
The beautiful are never desolate;
But some one alway loves them—God or man.
If man abandons, God himself takes them.
I know not why love falters. Sense perchance
Of other's perfectness discourageth us.
However this, there came, between our twin stars,
A cloud, and when it lifted, this had set;
That, mingled with heaven's day. It was even thus.
I said we were to part. She nothing spake.
There was no discord; it was music ceased;
Life's thrilling, bounding, glorying joy, ceased. Sate
Like a house-god, she, her hands fixed on her knee.
Her dark hair loose and long, the wild bright eye
Of desolation flashed through, lay around her.
She spake not, moved not; more than act or speech
Her eye I felt. I came and knelt beside her.
And my heart shook this building of my breast,
Like a live engine booming up and down.
It is the saddest and the sorest sight,
One's own love weeping. But why call on God

This, now, or that decree, crude, as we think,
Or cruel, to recast for us, or reverse,
But that the feeling of the boundless bounds
All feeling as the welkin doth the world?
Then first both wept, then closed and clung together.
Then, like snow-wreath of peerless purity
That upon mountain heights, by daily veer
Of just one light-ray, loosening, line by line,
Its hiddenest heart-hold, slowly absolves itself
From all its haughty coldness, and seeks peace
Even at the cliff's foot; so she, white, by mine;
Weird, much unchanged, as seemed, in outward cheer,
But love's preeminence lost in life, life lost.
Never were beauty, love, and woe so wrought
Together into madness, as that hour.
Then comes the feeling which unmakes, undoes;
Which tears up by the roots the sealike soul,
And lashes it in scorn against the skies.
Twice did I madly swear, hand clenched, to heaven,
That not even he nor death should tear her from me.
Profane defiance 'twas, 'gainst each. Here, last,
Upon this breast, she swooned; here, midst these arms;
Here, cloudlike, poured she forth her love which was
Her life to freshen this parched heart. In vain.
Nor looked I e'er again on her alive.
She wished, she said, to die. She wished; she died.
The lightning loathes its cloud; such souls their clay.
Can I forget that hand I took in mine,
Pale as pale violets? that eye where soul
And sense met, like divine? Ah no, may God
That moment judge me when I do! Oh! fair
Was she, her nature once all brightness, spring.
And ominous beauty, like a maiden sword,
Startlingly beautiful, whose dark flashes hide
Deaths many, more triumphs. I see thee now.
Whate'er thou art, thy spirit is in my mind;
Thy shadow hourly lengthens o'er my brain,
And peoples all its pictures with thyself.
Gone, not forgot, passed, not lost; thou shalt shine
In heaven, as even a bright spot in the sun.
And now I am alone. Say on! What more
Can tempt save union of love with death?
But yester-eve it was she died, and now
Scarce hath the spirit yet aspired to heaven.
I feel it hovering round me. Let mine eyes
But realize their faith, and I am thine.
The soul first, then the body and the grave
Are welcome or indifferent as may be.

Lucifer.
With those whom Death hath drawn I meddle not.

My part is with the living solely here.
I have not told thee half I will do for thee.
All secrets thou shalt ken—all mysteries construe;
At nothing marvel. All the veins which stretch,
Unsearchable by human eyes, of lore
Most precious, most profound, to thine shall bare
And vulgar lie like dust. The world within,
The world above thee, and the dark domain,
Mine own thou shalt o'errule; and he alone
Who rightly can esteem such high delights,
He only merits—he alone shall have.

Festus.
And if I have, shall I be happier? Say
What's pleasure? What is happiness?

Lucifer.
It is that
I vouchsafe to thee.

Festus.
Am I tempted thus
Unto my fall?

Lucifer.
God wills or lets it be.
How thinkest thou?

Festus.
That I will go with thee.

Lucifer.
From God I come.

Festus.
I do believe thee, spirit.
He will not let thee harm me. Him I love,
And thee I fear not. I obey him.

Lucifer.
Good.
Both time and case are urgent. Come. But see!
Nay; night hath one more marvel than the moon.

Festus.
I glimpse the pale flash of an angel's wing,
But whose I see not, nor, though seer-born, know.

Lucifer.
Spells too have I, thou knowest; and my ring,
The round horizon of the visible world,
Will hold a ghost or two. But what is this?
Superfluous were all evocation here.
No interruption, sure; no afterthought?

Guardian Angel.
Spirit of Ill, who round the spherèd air
Roamest, thy interference ratified
By God's will, for the time my task annuls;
And I, by word supreme my charge resign.

Lucifer.
Happy relief 'twere, doubtless for thyself,
And many a myriad like thee, angel motes!
Ye are a race superior far to doves;
Whiter in plume, and in the pen-feather
More potent, notably. Thy cure be mine.

Festus.
I hear a mixed sound as of light and night
In shadowy conference.

Lucifer.
It concerneth thee,
And yet thou mayst not know.

Festus.
Be as it may
That, canst thou say me truly?

Lucifer.
Wherefore not?

Falsehood and truth to me indifferent be;
Nor more than that, this penal. Not to know
All things, so much still knowing; to what end
The universe is tending, when fulfilled
Its spatial orbitation; in what die
The metamorphic essence lastly cools;
Nor how, in finite creature, good and ill
Should infinitely differ, forms the curse
And penalty all pay. I, most, whom Fate
Aye drives contrarious on the fiery lines
I break not, and which cannot bear me down.
I grow impatient of this goalless race,
Recessions and precessions: and this change
Of elemental atoms without end;
Of self-paid dues, and plagues the world enjoys;
And renovative ruin; swarms of life
In the corrupting corse creation seems.
It is time that something should begin to end.
I have beheld the inflation of the world;
And dogged the huge delusion; I await
The cloudy wreck, trailed o'er the tract of time.

Festus.
Where imperfection ceaseth heaven begins.
Where sin ends, bliss.

Lucifer.
To thee mayhap is joy;
Or ultimate or immediate, here or there.
But I who deathless seem to myself and live
With these world-shadowing skies life's primal form,
Life's final, like compeer, shall woeful hail
Woe's abrogation; for if God saith—threat
To me, to all else promise—let all woe
Cease, cease I too with woe; my total power
O'er being perforce then closed. But as the sun,
Opening with fiery key the locks of ice
Slow yielding, and from breasts of barrenness
A fruitful flood drawing that with new life
Redeems creation, endless store still leaves
Of frost unloosed, so, if to me, supposed
Evict from nature, God shall yet retain
The evil of mine own Being, it were enough
This sensible to eternize. I, meanwhile,
With doom unsure but menacing crowned, the round
Termless, of fixed finality to all things,
Myself except, and mine own sorrows, tread
E'er, and re-tread. To waste, to spoil's to live.

Guardian Angel.
Do thou thy best, thy worst, thou still art foiled.
And while ingriding even thy gravest wound,
Losest thine aim; that wound is healed of death.

Lucifer.
Art thou not hence, celestial sinecure?

Instead of lolling on his shoulders, him
Thou yet mayst see on mine.

Festus.
Again I hear,
As though some Titan cloud, gold-lipped, at ease
Immense, held passing word-play with the sun.

Guardian Angel.
Yet not in idlesse, holy though it were,
Nor marble meditation, nor mere thought
Of the supreme perfection,—thought alone
Worthy the name of thought in soul create;
The river homaging its ocean fount
In every whispering wavelet—wrap I me;
Far other aim be mine. Yes, he shall know
The hidden extremes of nature; earth's, sea's, air's;
The central fires; both world and wilderness
Like tempting, though with diverse offering; power,
Love, knowledge blent; nor—though by Ill devised
To obscure God's truth, the consciousness of soul
Ever existent; its individual source,
Its universal end—shall all things prove
But tests and purifiers; nay, thou thyself
The evil of all things made, Ill's forceful soul,
Naught else than foil of good.

Lucifer.
Bereaved of thee,
We may prepare to see strange sights indeed;
Earth's polar linch-pins loosened, and the wheels
Of light and dark that the world drags on, smashed.

Guardian Angel.
I leave him, not desert: for, fortifie
With the pure love of one, he God shall love
For granting him that blessing. For the rest,
In heaven's eternal archives all is writ,
Pertaining to the mountain-thronèd end.
I will prepare my loved one's destiny;
And with my kindred angels smoothen his ways
So among men, that he o'er all may cope,
Throneworthy through all ages; hallowed, blessed;
Born of the lofty lineage of the light,
And gifted with the sceptre of a star,
In state pre-temporal, fated to earth's end.
Prophets shall preach of him, and wise men win,
By secret power, the world to choose him chief;
The universal faith impersonate.
Peace to the soul-world, and the grand belief
Wherein are blended truth and bliss, shall he,
By aidance of the blessed, install on earth,
Calmly at once, as heaven instates its stars.

Lucifer.
Athwart this web, then, must I throw my warp.
Can I not dim the intelligence with eclipse
Of sagest-seeming doubt, owl-eyed to mark
Small ills, of reason's light-broad world of good,

Noteless? With specious theories of the rise
Eterne of things, and end of temporal means,
His spirit confuse, and ravelling every thought
Inexplicably that shows God's simple will
Not chance, not mere development as cause
Of progress always heightening, better ever,
Than stand-point passed, God he may cease to see?
Can I not poison all the springs of life
And founts of feeling? friendship make a void,
And love a golden snare wherein his heart
Shall rage like a trapped lion? Hath wit power
To satisfy the soul, or power then wit
To save the spirit from despair?

Guardian Angel.
Ordained
To nobler ends than aught thou reck'st of, he,
As in time passed from all perfective rites,
From every test, soul-tried, shall wisdom win,
As flowers sweet sustenance from the invisible air,
And common elements.

Lucifer.
I mine own ends seek,
Not God's. Ordained or not, means nought to me.
Sin and be saved, can God's elect, if he
Elect be? Prove it, time. Love, knowledge, power,
These are my costliest baits; and on his path
Must these be spread. Distracted with delights
I know, too, let me fancy he escapes.

Guardian Angel.
God's servant is man's master. So shall rule,
One with heaven's spiritual sun whose light
Soul-quickening, Being with truest life impregns,
The spirit I have all life tended on, endowed
Henceforth with plenar powers of virtual sight,
And sense extreme of primitive perfectness,
By him, all-ordering, the infinite One. And now,
Scion of life eterne, and ward of heaven,
Mine earthly charge, for a time farewell!

Festus.
What's that?
I saw a light, like earth-born lightning, shoot
Up, through night's infinite sanctuary.

Lucifer.
It was nothing.

Festus.
Give me a breathing-time to fortify,
Within myself, the promise I have made.

Lucifer.
Expect me, then, at midnight, here. Remember,
That thou canst any time repent.

Festus.
Ay, true.

Lucifer.
Repentance never yet did aught on earth.
It undoes many good things. Of all men,
Heaven shield me from the wretch who can repent!

III.

Follows a starry night
Where in the talk of man and spirit we see
Foreproven, the all-grasping mind's inordinate love
For marvels, mysteries, than for goodness more
Nay even for greatness. Miracles we must have.
Whence comes this dream of immortality
And the resurgent essence? Death is change.
But spirit's return, allowed of heaven, is now
To strengthen a fine but fainting faith, and show
Such change for better. Soul reborn, we see,
Stalls not in death; but like the polar sun,
One moment balanced on life's infinite verge,
Rises in roseate splendour to renew
Always a mightier day. The spell, as pledge
Of gifts to come and prouder privilege, works.
Man and his foe shake hands upon their bargain.

Water and Wood. Midnight.
Festus,
alone.
All things are calm, and fair, and passive. Earth
Looks as if lulled upon an angel's lap,
Into a breathless dewy sleep: so still
That we can only say of things, they be.
The lakelet now, no longer vexed with gusts,
Replaces on her breast the pictured moon,
Pearled round with stars. Sweet imaged scene of time
To come, perchance, when, this vain life o'erspent,
Earth may some purer beings' presence bear;
Mayhap even God may walk among his saints,
In eminence and brightness like yon moon,
Mildly outbeaming all the beads of light
Strung o'er Night's proud dark brow. How strangely fair
Yon round still star, which looks half suffering from,
And half rejoicing in its own strong fire;
Making itself a lonelihood of light,
Like Deity, where'er in heaven it dwells.
How can the beauty of material things
So win the heart and work upon the mind,
Unless like-natured with them? Are great things
And thoughts of the same blood? They have like effect.
Would one were here who could these knots unloose!

Lucifer.
Why doubt on mind? What matter how we call
That which all feel to be their noblest part?
Even spirits have a better and a worse:
For every thing created must have form;
Form meaning limitation. God, alone,
Is formless and illimitable mind.

Passions they have, somewhat like thine; but less
Of grossness and that downwardness of soul
Which men have. It is true they have no earth;
For what they live on is above themselves.

Festus.
There seems a sameness among things; for mind
And matter speak, in causes, of one God.
The inward and the outward worlds are like;
The pure and gross but differ in degree.
Tears, feeling's bright embodied form, are not
More pure than dewdrops, nature's tears, which she
Sheds in her own breast for the fair which die.
The sun insists on gladness; but at night,
When he is gone, poor nature loves to weep.

Lucifer.
There is less real difference among things
Than men imagine. They overlook the mass,
But fasten each on some particular crumb,
Because they feel that they can equal that,
Of doctrine, or belief, or party cause.

Festus.
That is the madness of the world—and that
Would I remove.

Lucifer.
It is imbecility,
Not madness.

Festus.
Oh! the brave and good who serve
A worthy cause can only one way fail;
By perishing therein. Is it to fail?
No; every great or good man's death is a step
Firm set towards their end, the end of being;
The good of all, and love of God. The world
Must have great minds, even as great spheres or suns,
To govern lesser restless minds, while they
Stand still and burn with life; to keep in place,
Light, heat them. Life immortal do I seek,
For aught, it were most to learn mind's mystery,
And somewhat more of God. Let others rule
Systems or succour saints, if such things please;
To live like light, or die in light like dew;
Either, I should be blessed.

Lucifer.
It may not be.
For as not the sun himself thou viewest, but only
The light about him, like the glory ringed
Round a saint's brow; so, God thou wilt never see,
Darkness of light eradiative. Nor seek.
His naked love were terrible. Saints dread more
To be forgiven than sinners do to die.

Festus.
Men have a claim on God; and none who hath
A heart of kindness, reverence, and love,
But dare look God in the face and ask his smile.
He dwells in no fierce light—no cloud of flame;
And if it were, Faith's eye can look through hell,

And through the solid world. We must all think
On God. Yon water must reflect the sky.
Midnight! Day hath too much of light for us,
To see things spiritually. Mind and Night
Will meet, though in silence, like forbidden lovers,
With whom to see each other's sacred form
Must satisfy. The stillness of deep bliss,
Sound as the silence of the high hill-top,
Where thunder finds no echo—like God's voice
Upon the worldling's proud, cold, rocky heart—
Fills full the sky; and the eye shares with heaven
That look, so like to feeling, nature's bright
And glorious things aye wear. There's much to think
And feel of things beyond this earth; which lie,
As we deem, upwards, far from the day's glare
And riot. They are Night's. Oh! could we lift
The future's sable shroud!

Lucifer.
Behind a shroud
What should'st thou see but death?

Festus.
Spirit; the thread
Sightless, whereon are strung life's world-great beads.
It may be here, I shall live again; or there,
In yon strange world whose long nights know no star;
But seven fair maidlike moons attending him
Perfect his sky; perchance in one of those;
But live again I shall, wherever it be.
We long to learn the future; love to guess.

Lucifer.
The science of the future were to man
What the wind's shadow might be, sought he screen
From fire or flood. Save in the effect of act,
And the interlinkèd sequences of things,
Whereby to ourselves we make passed, present, coming,
There is no future. Why so fret this string?
Such thoughts are vain and useless.

Festus.
Forced on us.

Lucifer.
All things are of necessity.

Festus.
Then best.
But the good are never fatalists. The bad
Alone act by necessity, they say.

Lucifer.
It matters not what men assume to be
Or good or bad, they are but what they are.

Festus.
What is necessity? Are we, and thou,
And all the worlds, and the whole infinite
We cannot see, but working out God's thoughts?
And have we no self-action? Are all God?

Lucifer.
Then hath he sin and all absurdity.

Festus.
Yet, if created Being have free-will,
Is it not wrong to judge it may traverse
God's own high will; and yet impossible
To think on't otherwise?

Lucifer.
It may be so.
All creature wills, and all their ends and powers
Must come within the boundless scope of God's.

Festus.
And all our powers are but weaknesses
To what we shall have, and to that God hath.
Doth not the wish, too, point the likelihood,
Of life to come?

Lucifer.
Boys wish that they were kings.
And so with thee. A deathless spirit's state,
Freed from gross form and bodily weightiness,
Seems kingly by the side of souls like thine.
And boys and men will likely both be balked.
What if,—death after—spirit were loosed, like flesh,
Into its elements? Hold yon worlds, man maps
Constellate, fellowship in nature? Life,
Mind, soul, as he hath planned, perchance no more.
But sooth to say, I know not aught of this.
I have no kind. No nature like to me
Exists; and human spirits must at least
Sleep till the day of doom—if ever it be.

Festus.
Hast never known one free from body?

Lucifer.
None.

Festus.
Why seek then to destroy them?

Lucifer.
It is my part.
Let ruin bury ruin. Let it be
Woe here, woe there, woe, woe be everywhere.
It is not for me to know, nor thee, the end
Of evil. I inflict; and thou must bear.
The arrow knoweth not its end nor aim.
And I keep rushing, ruining along,
Like a great river rich with dead men's souls.
For if I knew, I might rejoice; and that
To me by nature is forbidden. I know
Nor joy in ill's success, such as elates
Lesser malevolences; nor sorrow sours
My soul at sight of heaven's unwearying love
Manwards. With me through time, a changeless tone
Of sadness like the nightwind's is the strain
Of what I have of feeling. I am not
As other spirits,—but a solitude
Even to myself; I the sole spirit, sole.

Festus.
Can none of thine immortals answer me?

Lucifer.
None, mortal!

Festus.
Where then is thy vaunted power?

Lucifer.
It is better seen as thus I stand apart
From all. Mortality is mine—the green
Unripened universe. But as the fruit
Matures, and world by world drops mellowed off
The wrinkling stalk of Time, as thine own race
Hath seen of stars now vanished, all is hid

From me. My part is done. What after comes,
I know not more than thou.

Festus.
Raise me a spirit!

Lucifer.
Command o'er natural essence, space, time, matter,
I yield thee. Can I give thee power o'er soul?

Festus.
Awake, ye dead! out with the secret, death;
The grave hath no pride, nor the rise-again.
Let each one bring the bane whereof he died.
Bring the man his, the maiden hers! Oh! half
Mankind are murderers of themselves or souls.
Yea, what is life but lingering suicide?
Wake, dead! Ye know the truth; yet there ye lie
All mingling, mouldering, perishing together,
Like run sand in the hour-glass of old Time.
Death is the mad world's asylum. There is peace:
Destruction's quiet and equality.
Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths:
Though many, yet they help not; bright, they light not.
They are too late to serve us; and sad things
Are aye too true. We never see the stars
Till we can see nought but them. So with truth.
And yet if one would look down a deep well,
Even at noon, we might see those same stars
Far fairer than the blinding blue—the truth.
Probe the profound of thine own nature, man!
And thou mayst see reflected, e'en in life,
The worlds, the heavens, the ages; by and by,
The coming come. Then welcome, world-eyed Truth!
But there are other eyes men better love
Than Truth's: for when we have her she is so cold,
And proud, we know not what to do with her.
We cannot understand her, cannot teach;
She makes us love her, but she loves not us;
And quits us as she came and looks back never.
Wherefore we fly to Fiction's warm embrace,
With her to relax and bask ourselves at ease;
And, in her loving and unhindering lap
Voluptuously lulled, we dream at most
On death and truth; she knows them, loves them not;
Therefore we hate them and deny them both.

Lucifer.
But could I make that visible always there?

Festus.
Call up the dead.

Lucifer.
Let rest while rest they may.
For free from pain and from this world's wear and tear,
It may be a relief to them to rot;
And it must be that at the day of doom,
If mortals should take up immortal life,
They will curse me with a thunder which shall shake

The sun from out the socket of his sphere.
The curse of all created. Think on it.

Festus.
Those souls thou meanest whom thou hast ruined, damned.

Lucifer.
Nor only those; when once the virgin bloom
Of soul is soiled; and rudely hath my hand
Swept o'er the swelling clusters of all life;
Little it matters whether crushed or touched
Scarcely: each speaks the spoiler hath been there.
The saved, the lost, shall curse me both alike:
God too shall curse me, and I, I, myself.
That curse is ever greatening, quick with hell;
The coming consummation of all woe.

Festus.
O man, be happy. Die and cease for ever.
Why wear we not the shroud alway, that robe
Which speaks our rank on earth, our privilege?
To know I have a deathless soul I would lose it.

Lucifer.
Believest thou all I tell thee?

Festus.
All, I do.
Stringing the stars at random round her head,
Like a pearl network, there she sits—bright Night!
I love night more than day—she is so lovely.
But I love night the most because she brings
My love to me in dreams which scarcely lie;
Oh, all but truth and lovelier oft than truth;
Let me have dreams like these, sweet night, for ever,
When I shall wake no more; an endless dream
Of love and holy beauty amid the stars;
And earth and heaven for me may share between them
The rough realities of other bliss.

Lucifer.
I see thy heart, and I will grant thy wish.
I have lied to thee. I have command over spirits;
And e'er behold them, bodiless as space.
Whom wilt thou that I call?

Festus.
Mine Angela!

Lucifer.
There is an Angel ever by thine hand.
What seest thou?

Festus.
It is my love. It is she!
My glory, spirit, beauty! let me touch thee.
Nay do not shrink back; well then I am wrong:
Thou wert not wont to shrink from me, my love.
Angela! dost thou hear me? Speak to me.
And thou art there—looking alive and dead.
Thy beauty is then incorruptible.
I thought so, oft as I have looked upon thee.
Thou art too much even now for me as once.
I cannot gather what I raved to say;
Nor why I had thee hither. Stay, sweet sprite!
Dear art thou to me now, as in that hour
When first love's wave of feeling, spray-like, broke
Into bright utterance, and we said we loved.

Yea, but I must come to thee. Move no more!
Art thou in death or heaven, or from the stars?
She speaks not. 'Tis a phantom maybe, only.
Have I done wrong in calling for thee thus?
What art thou? Say, love; whisper me as wont,
In the dear times gone by; or durst not here,
Unfold the mystery of thine own bright being,
And mine? Was't meddling death who hushed thy lips?
Is his cold finger there still? Let me come!
She is not!

Lucifer.
And thou canst not bring her back.

Festus.
I will not, cannot be without her. Call her.

Lucifer.
I call on spirits and I make them come:
But they depart according to their own will.
Another time and she shall speak with thee.
For, of thy state no more, to know her thou
Into her sphere must rise.

Festus.
What most I'd know
Is how soul acts, how suffers; how the God
Treats, death achieved, man's mind.

Lucifer.
She of the passed
Shall there fulfil thy spirit; and, holding forth
The bright clue, which like lightning's friendly flash
Before one, night-lost in a wood, shall guide
The soul its path through life's returnless maze,
And teach the mystery of thyself. All this
Ere long—and she shall show thee where she dwells,
And how doth pass her immortality;
If lengthening decay can so be called.
Can lines finite one way be infinite
Another? And yet such is deathlessness.

Festus.
It is hard to deem that spirits cease, that thought
And feeling flesh-like perish in the dust.
Shall we know those again in a future state
Whom we have known and loved on earth? Say yes!

Lucifer.
The mind hath features as the body hath.

Festus.
But is it mind which shall revive?

Lucifer.
Man were
Not man without the mind he had in life.
But, think. When dead and buried what remains,—
That such an obscure, contradictory thing
Should be perpetuated anywhere?

Festus.
Oh! if God hates the flesh, why made he it
So beautiful that e'en its semblance maddens?
Am I to credit what I think I have seen?
Or am I suffering some deceit of thine?

Lucifer.
I am explaining, not deluding.

Festus.
True.
Defining night by darkness, death by dust.
I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts,

Each one of which down hurls me to the ground.
I ask a hundred reasons what they mean,
And every one points gravely to the ground
With one hand, and to heaven with the other.
In vain I shut mine eyes. Truth's burning beam
Forces them open; and when open, blinds them.

Lucifer.
Doubly unhappy!

Festus.
I am too unhappy
To die; as some too way-worn cannot sleep.
Planets and suns, that set themselves on fire
By their own rapid self-revolvements, are
But like some hearts. Existence I despise.
The shape of man is wearisome; a bird's;
A worm's; a whirlwind's; I would change with aught.
Time! dash thine hour-glass down. Have done with this.
The course of nature seems a course of death;
The prize of life's brief race, to cease to run;
The sole substantial thing, death's nothingness.

Lucifer.
Corruption springs from light; 'tis one same power
Creates, preserves, destroys; matter whereon
It works, one aye self-transmutative form,
Common to now the living, now the dead.

Festus.
I'll not believe a thing which I have known.
Hell was made hell for me, and I am mad.

Lucifer.
True venom churns the froth out of the lips;
It works, and works, like any waterwheel.
And she then was the maiden of thy heart.
Well, I have promised. Ye shall meet again.
But stay; take this, a final warning. Aught
Thou hast seen, hold not too sure. Ofttimes the brain
Dreams waking; with vitality endows
Its own creations; argues; thought's best proofs
Refutes; what not?

Festus.
What, all illusion?

Lucifer.
Nay;
I say not so. This, that is probable.
Now, shall we go?

Festus.
This moment. I am ready.
Farewell ye dear old walks and trees; farewell
Ye waters; I have loved ye well. In youth
And childhood it hath been my life to drift
Across ye lightly as a leaf; or skim
Your waves in yon skiff, swallowlike; or lie
Like a loved locket on your sunny bosom.
Could I, like you, by looking in myself,
Find mine own heaven—farewell! Immortal, come!
The morning peeps her blue eye on the east.

Lucifer.
Think not so fondly as thy foolish race,
Imagining a heaven from things without;

The picture on the passing wave call heaven—
The wavelet, life—the sands beneath it, death;
Daily more seen till, lo! the bed is bare.
This fancy fools the world.

Festus.
Let us away!

Lucifer.
Wings of the wind, be ours! once, twice, away!

IV.

Now sets the youth out for joy, the city of joy,
Whose walls illuminated with all-hued spheres
Beacon the immense of life. He, 'neath the care
Of his kindly enemy, begins his course;
Each aiding other; all beside abused.
Heaven, hell, life pre-existent, things not yet,
Things passed, immemorable, foreshadowy, show
Briefwise before the all-questful spirit, intent
To prove its dominance o'er the world, till taught
Earth, air, nor fire, nor all the elements fused
Into one subtlest essence, aught avail
The soul to assist or to divert, once charged
God's mighty but mysterious ends to achieve;
Ends more substantial than all solidest things.

A Mountain. Sunrise.
Festus and Lucifer.
Festus.
Morn on the mountains! Mark her lifening glow,
Light's blessèd advent prophesying; and now
The awful signals, sensible, but scarce seen,
Of the under-welkin'd sun. Here, midst this fane,
With the awe of space domed, let me, sole with God,
In privacy of his omnipresence, pray;
And while the unboundedness of earth and sky
Seizes in silence all the spirit, let me,
With nature one, for like dependent life,
Grateful, adore.

Lucifer.
Oh, pray adore: I'm dumb.

Festus.
In silence soul most nears the Infinite.
Hail beauteous Earth! Gazing o'er thee, I all
Forget the bounds of being; and I long
To fill thee, as a lover pines to blend
Soul, passion, yea, existence, with the fair
Creature he calls his own. I ask for nought
Before or after death but this—to lie,
And look, and live, and bask, and bless myself
Upon thy broad bright bosom.

Lucifer.
Earth's the Lord's.

Festus.
True; I should be more reverent. Thou hast all

Nature's supremest sanctities, earth. From thee
Sprang I, to thee I turn, heart, arm, and brain.
Yes, I am all thine own. Thou art the sole
Parent. To rock and river, plain and wood,
I cry, ye are my kin. While I, O earth!
Am but of thee an atom, and a breath,
Passing unseen and unrecorded, like
The tiny throb here in my temple's pulse.
Thou art for ever; and the sacred bride
Of heaven—worthy the passion of our God.
Oh! full of light, love, grace!—the grace of all
Who owe to thee their life; thy maker's love;
His face's light. All thine rejoice in thee;
Thou in thyself for aye; rolling through air,
As seraphs' song, out of their trumpet lips,
Rolls round the skies of heaven. But who is this,
Burning the clouds before him; the round world
Apt to his golden grasp? his fingers all
Streaming with light effectual to impart
Full fellowship of illuminate life; from out
The depths extreme, who comes, of orient space?
Undo those gilded bars: fling wide yon gates
Eastwards, of changeful pearl; wide o'er his ways,
Strew palms, as 'fore heaven's conqueror, and the night's
Flying hosts, star-standarded, oh, make pure his paths
With rain of liquid crystal. He shall see
How earth can put on majesty, to meet
The king in her own mansion. Let the morn
Pour, penitent for the passed, o'er all his head,
Her wealthful waste of perfumed sweets; his feet
Let kiss, with all her dews. It is he, the sun!
God's crest upon his azure shield the heavens.
Canst thou, a spirit, look upon him?

Lucifer.
Ay.
I led him from the void, where he was wrought,
By this right hand, up to the glorious seat
His brightness overshadows; laid on piles
Of gold his chambers, and upon beams of gold
His throne built; flung a fire-veil round his face;
Crowned him with rays reverberant from all clouds:
And bade him reign, and burn, like me. Like me
Fall, too, he must. I have done, do, nought else
From my first thought to this and to my last.
No matter; it is beneath this mind of mine
To reck of aught. I bear, have borne the ill
Of ages, of infinities—and must.
I care not. I shall sway the world as now;
Which worse and worse sinks with me as I sink,
Till finite souls evanish as a vapour;
Till immortality, the proud thing, perish;

And God alone be and eternity.
Then will I clap my hands and cry to him,
I have done; have thy will now; there is none but thee.
I am the first created being. I
Will be the last to perish, and to die.

Festus.
Thou art a fit monitor, methinks, of pleasure.

Lucifer.
To the high air sunshine and cloud are one;
Pleasure and pain to me. Thou and the earth
Alone feel these as different; for ye
Are under them; the heavens and I above.

Festus.
But tell me, have ye scenes like this in hell?

Lucifer.
Nay, not in heaven.

Festus.
What is heaven? not the toys
Of singing, love, and music? Such a place
Were fit for glee-maids only.

Lucifer.
Heaven is no place;
Unless a place with God, allwhere; no more
Therefore conceivably to come than now.
It is the being good; the knowing God;
The consciousness of happiness and power;
With knowledge which no spirit e'er can lose,
But doth increase in every state; and aught
It most delights in the full leave to do.
But why consume me with such questions? Why
Add earth to hell, in the great chain of worlds
God in his wrath hath bound about me?

Festus.
Why!
'Twas therefore that I closed with thee, great Fiend!
That thou might'st answer all things I proposed,
Or bring me those who would do.

Lucifer.
All these things
Thou wilt know sometime, when to see and know
Are one; to see a thing and comprehend
The nature of it essentially; perceive
The reason and the science of its being,
And the relations with the universe
Of all things actual or possible,
Mortal, immortal, spiritual and gross.
This, when the spirit is made free of heaven,
Is the divine result; proportioned still
To the intelligence as human; for,
There are degrees in heaven, as everything,
By God's will. Unimaginable space,
As full of suns as is earth's sun of atoms,
Faileth to match his boundless variousness:
And ever must do, though a thousand worlds,
As diverse from each other as is thine
From any of thy system's, were elanced
Each minute into life unendingly.
All of yon worlds, and all who dwell in them,

Stand in diverse degrees of bliss and being.
Through the ten thousand times ten thousandth grade
Of blessedness, above this world's, and man's
Ability to feel or to conceive,
The soul may pass and yet know nought of heaven,
More than a dim and miniature reflection
Of its most bright infinity; for God
Makes to each spirit its peculiar heaven.
And yet is heaven a bright reality,
As this or any of yon worlds; a state
Where all is loveliness and power and love;
Where all sublimest qualities of mind
Not infinite, are limited alone
By the surrounding godhood; and where nought,
But what produceth glory and delight,
To creature and Creator, is; where all
Enjoy entire dominion o'er themselves,
Acts, feelings, thoughts, conditions, qualities,
Spirit, and soul, and mind; all under God,
For spirit is soul deified;—while earth,
To the immortal, vast, god-natured spirit,
Is but a spell which, having served to light
A lamp, is cast into consuming fire.

Festus.
And hell? Is it nought but pits, and chains, and flames?

Lucifer.
An ever greatening sense of ill and woe,
The exhausted soul down crushing, filling never
Its infinite capacity of pain.

Festus.
But human nature is not infinite,
And therefore cannot suffer endlessly.

Lucifer.
God may create in time what shall endure
Unto eternity. With him is no
Distinction, nor in that which is of him.

Festus.
Then is not soul of God, but man and earth.
Soul when made spirit is of earth no more,
Nor time, but of eternity and heaven.
It is but when in the body, and bent down
To worldly ends, that human souls become
Objects of time, as most are, till the hour
Comes when the soul of man shall be made one
With God's spirit; made eternal, made divine,
And where shall woe be then? sin? suffering?

Lucifer.
How
Can souls thus favoured, then, predestined thus,
To glory afore all worlds, be deemed of earth,
Earthy?

Festus.
Things spiritual as belonging God
Are to and from eternity, by him,
Predestined, known; nor these alone; but flesh
Forms not, nor doth it need the care of fate.

Lucifer.
The object of eternal knowledge must
Have like existence.

Festus.
Then it cannot be
Bound into torment, that would dreadly bring
Torture on godlike essence.

Lucifer.
What if thine
Existence on this sphere were but, as told,
In mystic tales of old spread over earth,
The dark and narrow section of a life
Which was with God, long ere the sun was lit:
And shall be yet, when all the bold bright stars
Are dark as death-dust—Immortality
And Wisdom tending thee on either hand,
Thy divine sisters? What if earth-life prove,
Of thee and thy conceptions head and end,
Who were to blame? Thou canst not surely expect
Me to know all things.

Festus.
Truly, I have heard
Sometimes, or deemed, what deepest musings failed
To explain, or render more than dubious, lips,
Uncorporal lips, articulate in mine ear,
Lessons, long ages back learned; deemed I have felt
Oft-times a shadowiest conception seize
My spirit, as though the echo of a life
Far passed, rang through one's being, and thrilled the heart
With sense of joys requickened, of thought rethought,
Of difficulties fore-vanquished, and of truth
Taught by a sacred death regenerative,
Which, justified from sin, as though were mine
A life half conscious of sublimer spheres,
A mind transessenced through all faiths, refined
Through ends divine fulfilled.

Lucifer.
Ends thou mayst yet
Clear from the tangled passed, if one sole clue
Thou gloriest in.

Festus.
Could thought but realize!—
No, it is incredible.

Lucifer.
Well, do thou believe
Even as thou wilt. The science of the passed,
The science of the future, lack them both.
Why seek such? Seize the present.

Festus.
'Tis all doubt.

Lucifer.
Doubt's all-where, doubtless, but in heaven.

Festus.
And thou
Whose life shows, cataract-like, one ceaseless fall,
Mayst match it! But if doubt bide not in heaven,
Neither dwells certainty upon earth. But say,
Is it the nature or the deed of God,
To render finite follies infinite,
Or to eternize sin and death in fire?

For so long as the punishment endures,
The crime lasts. Were it not for thy presence,
Spirit! I would not deem hell were.

Lucifer.
Let not
My presence pass for more than it is worth,
I pray, nor yet my absence. Trust me, I
Could wish, with thee, that hell were blotted out
Of utmost space. 'Tis man himself e'er makes
His own God and his hell. But this is truth.

Festus.
The truth is perilous never to the true,
Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool,
And to the false, error and truth alike.
Error is worse than ignorance. But say:—
How can eternal punishment be due
To temporal offences, to a pulse
Of momentary madness?

Lucifer.
Pardon me.
Sin is not temporary. Nothing is,
Of spiritual nature, but hath cause
Premortal and immortal end in all,
As spirits. Therefore till the soul shall be
By grace redeified, as is the soul,
So is the sin, for ever before God.

Festus.
Sin is not of the spirit, but of that
Which blindeth spirit, heart and brain.

Lucifer.
Believe so.
The law of all the worlds is retribution.

Festus.
But is it so of God?

Lucifer.
The laws of heaven
Are not of earth; there law is liberty.

Festus.
Thou thundercloud of spirits, darkening
The skies and wrecking earth! Could I hate men
How I should joy with thee, even as an eagle,
Nigh famished, in the fellowship of storms;
But I still love them. What will come of men?

Lucifer.
Whatever may, perdition is their meed.
Were heaven dispeopled for a ministry
To warn them of their ways; were thou and I
To monish them; were heaven, and earth, and hell
To preach at once, they still would mock and jeer
As now; but never repent until too late;
Until the everlasting hour had struck.

Festus.
Men might be better if we better deemed
Of them. The worst way to improve the world
Is to condemn it. Men may overget
Delusion—not despair.

Lucifer.
Why love mankind?
The affections are thy system's weaknesses;
The wasteful outlets of self-maintenance.

Festus.
The wild flower's tendril, proof of feebleness,

Proves strength; and so we fling our feelings out,
The tendrils of the heart, to bear us up.
O earth! how drear to think to tear oneself,
Even for an hour, from looks like this of thine;
From features, oh! so fair; to quit for aye
The luxury of thy side. Why, why art thou
Thus glorious, and 'twere not to sate the soul,
And chide us for the senseless dream of heaven?
The still strong stream sweeps seaward to its end,
Unrestful, unrestrainable, like one
Of God's great purposes; or like may be,
A soul that seeks the Eternal; like mine own.
Along yon deep blue vein upon thy bosom,
Earth! I could float for ever. See it there—
Winding among its green and smiling isles,
Like charity amidst her children dear;
Or peace, rejoicing in her olive wreaths,
And gladdening as she glides along the lands.

Lucifer.
And yet all this must end; must pass; drop down
Oblivion, like a pebble in a pit:
For God shall lay his hand upon the earth,
And crush it up like a red leaf.

Festus.
Not be?
I cannot root the thought, nor hold it firm.

Lucifer.
This same sweet world which thou would'st fondly deem
Eternal, may be; which I soon shall see
Destruction suck back as the tide a shell.

Festus.
It will not be yet. I'll woo thee, world, again;
And revel in thy loveliness and love.
I have a heart with room for every joy:
And since we must part sometime, while I may,
I'll quaff the nectar in thy flowers, and press
The richest clusters of thy luscious fruit
Into the cup of my desires. But who
Would care to live unless he were loved, and loved
Unless he had all things young and beautiful,
Bound up like pictures in his book of life?
It is vanity, of all things most, makes bear
With life. Some live like unenlightened stars
Of the first darkness; lifeless, timeless, useless;
With nothing but a cold night air about them;
Not suns; not planets; blankness, limbed and framed;
Orbs of a desert gloom: with not one soul
To light its watch-fire in their waste of being;
Or seem so, miserably; but how or why
They live I know not. This to me is life;
That if life be a burden, I will join
To make it but the burden of a song:

I hate the world's coarse thought. And this is life;
To watch young beauty's budlike feelings burst
And load the soul with love; as that pale flower
Which opes at eve, spreads sudden on the dark
Its yellow bloom, and sinks the air down with sweets.
Let heaven take all that's good—hell all that's foul;
Leave us the lovely, and we will ask no more.

Lucifer.
To me it seems time all should end. The sky
Grows grey. It is not so bright nor blue as once.
Well I remember, as it were yesterday,
When earth and heaven went happy, hand in hand,
With all the morning dew of youth about them;
With the bright unworldly hearts of youth and truth,
And the maiden bosoms of the beautiful:—
Ere earth sinned, or the pure indignant heavens
Retreated high, nigh God; ere grossening age
Had thicked the eyes of stars; or land was all
A creeping mass alive with shapeless things:
Nay, when there were but three things in the world—
Monsters, mountains, and water; and the sea,
Rejoicing like a ring of saints round God,
Or heaven on heaven about some new-born sun,
Cloud swathed, in holy hilarity laughed out,
And cried, Nor I, like God, I never rest.

Festus.
God hath his rest, earth hers. Let me have mine.
Yet must I look on thee, fair scene, again,
Ere I depart. The glory of the world
Is on all hands. In one encircling ken,
I gaze on river, sea, isle, continent,
Mountain, and wood, and wild, and fire-lipped hill,
And lake, and golden plain, and sun, and heaven,
Where the stars brightly die, whose death is day.
City and port and palace, ships and tents,
Lie massed and mapped before me. All is here.
The elements of the world are at my feet,
Above me and about me. Now would I
Be and do somewhat beside that I am.
Canst thou not give me some æthereal slave,
Of the pure essence of an element;
Such as my bondless brain hath ofttimes drawn
In the divine insanity of dreams;
To stand before me, and obey me, spirit?

Lucifer.
Call out, and see if aught arise to thee.

Festus.
Green dewy earth, who standest at my feet
Singing, and pouring sunshine on thy head,
As naiad native water, speak to me!
I am thy son. Canst thou not now, as once,
Bring forth some being dearer, liker to thee

Than is my race—titan or tiny fay,
Stream-nymph or wood-nymph?

Lucifer.
She hath ceased to speak,
Like God, except in thunder; or to look,
Unless in lightning. Miracles, with earth,
Are out of fashion, as with heaven; and more's
The pity. Call elsewhere. Old earth is hard
Of hearing, maybe.

Festus.
I beseech thee, sea!
Tossing thy wavy locks in sparkling play,
Like a child awakening with the warmthful light
To laughter; canst not thou disgulph for me,
From thy deep bosom, deep as heaven is high,
Of all thy sea-gods one, or sea-maids?

Lucifer.
None?

Festus.
Canst not from out that palpable vapour rolled
Shorewards, in misty gusts, thy wave's salt breath,
Mould me some voluntary shadow endowed
With powers of suit or aid?

Lucifer.
Shadow, appear!

Festus.
I half despair. Fire! that art slumbering there,
Like some stern warrior in his rocky fort,
After the vast invasion of the world,
Hast not some flaming imp, or messenger
Of empyrean element, to whom
In virtue of his nature, are both known
The secrets of the burning, central, void below,
And yon bright heaven, out of whose aëry fire
Are wrought the forms of angels, and the thrones?
Hast none at hand to do my bidding? Come!
Breathe out a spirit for me; not fierce, not gross,
Nor of strength destructive, but of finest force;
Such as flames forth in flowerets, sets, in spring,
The hills ablaze with gorse-light, and with pyres,
Odorous, of floral gold, crowns; one I ask
To be with me always as a friend, an aid;
Not, spirit, like thee, who despotizest o'er
The heart thou seekst to serve. I must be free.

Lucifer.
All finite souls must serve: their widest sway
Is but the rule of service. This fair earth
Whose parti-coloured robe thou boast'st of so;
Seest not, in truth, all this but scummy dross
Of the original element whence were framed
She, and her fiery peers? Conditioned still
To the end, by birth-laws, thou and they alike
Must keep at cost of being?—What freedom thou
Canst from that teat draw, draw.

Festus.
Air! and thou wind!
Which art the unseen similitude of God

The Spirit, his most meet and mightiest sign:
The earth with all her steadfastness and strength,
Sustaining all, and bound about with chains
Of mountains, as is life with mercies; ranging round
With all her sister orbs the whole of heaven,
Is not so like the unlikenable One
As thou. Ocean is less divine than thee;
For although all but limitless, it is yet
Visible, many a land not visiting.
But thou art, lovelike, everywhere; o'er earth,
O'er main-sea triumphing; and aye with clouds,
That like the ghosts of ocean's billows roll,
Decking or darkening heaven. The sun's light
Floweth and ebbeth daily like the tides;
The moon's doth grow or lessen, night by night;
The stirless stars shine forth by fits and hide;
And our companion planets come and go,
In maze concentric, intercycling, vast;
And all are known, their laws and liberties.
But no man can foreset thy coming, none
Reason against thy going; thou art free,
The type impalpable of spirit, thou,
God's vital breath, great purifier of earth.
Thunder is but a momentary thing,
Like a world's death-rattle, and is like death;
And lightning, like the blaze of sin, can blind
Only and slay. But what are these to thee,
In thine all-present variousness? So light
As not to awaken, now, the snowiest down
Upon the dove's breast, winning her bright way
Calm and sublime as grace to suffering soul,
Towards her far native grove; now, stern and strong
As ordnance, overturning tree and tower;
Cooling the white brows of the peaks of fire;
Turning the sea's broad furrows like a plough;
Fanning the fruitening plains; breathing the sweets
Of meadows; wandering over blinding snows;
And sands like sea-beds; and the streets of cities,
Where men as garnered grain lie heaped together;
Freshening the cheeks, and mingling oft the locks
Of youth and beauty 'neath star-speaking eve;
Swelling the pride of canvas, or, in wrath,
Scattering the fleets of nations like dead leaves;
In all, the same o'ermastering sightless force;
Bowing the highest things of earth to earth,
And lifting up the dust to the stars; fatelike,
Confounding finite reason, and like God's
Spirit, conferring life upon the world;
Midst all corruption incorruptible:
Monarch of all the elements! hast no soft

Æolian sylph, with strong but sightless wing,
To spare a suppliant for an hour?

Lucifer.
Peace, peace!
All nature knows that I am with thee here;
And that thou need'st no minor minister.
To thee I personate the world—its powers,
Beliefs, and doubts, and practices.

Festus.
Are all
Mine invocations fruitless, then?

Lucifer.
They are.
Let us enjoy the world.

Festus.
'Twere well.

Lucifer.
'Tis time.
As when, in boreal climes, the southening sun,
One hour on heaven's aërial rood suspense,
The ecliptic cleared, thereafter, east and west,
More liberal day flings round; pleased earth responds;
And the ice-fettered rivulet, joyed, breaks up,
Clattering, in fluvial freedom, thenceforth flowing
Deeplier and more impulsive; so thy heart
For a season chilled, contracted, in unseen
Currents constrained, shall now its course resume,
Leaping with life redundant.

Festus.
Wer't God's will
That thou shouldst visit me, he shall not send
Temptation to my heart in vain. Sweet world!
We all still cling to thee. Though thou thyself
Passest away, yet men will hanker about thee,
Like mad ones by their moping haunts. Men pass
Cleaving to things themselves which pass away,
Like leaves on waves. Thus all things pass for ever,
Save mind and the mind's meed.

Lucifer.
Let us too pass!

V.

Soul solemnized by dear one's death, belief
In heavenly life confirmed of reason finds.
Here round her bier they meet who several rule,
After, the heart to each in turn their fate.
World-knowledge, fruit both sweet and bitter, shows
Its green and ruddy sides, mean, generous thought.
Trial of ill and folly gives best right
To warn, denounce: to the inventor now,
And now, his aid, of vanities. But little
Good comes of sermons, prophesies or warnings,
Though every sign be fore-detailed of doom,
And though from the steps of an old grey market-cross,
The Devil is holding forth to the faithless. There,
Even, and not less predictions gravest oft
Most slighted, may the spirit of truth provide
Conviction just, fit utterance. So to God
A social prayer is offered up for man
Of all strains, countries, politics, creeds.

A Country Town—Market-place. Noon. Lucifer and Festus.
Lucifer.

These be the toils and cares of mighty men;
Earth's vermin are as fit to fill her thrones
As these high heaven's bright seats.

Festus.
Men's callings all
Are mean and vain; their wishes more so: oft
The man is bettered by his part or place.
How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!

Lucifer.
What men call accident is God's own part.
He lets ye work your will—it is his own:
But that ye mean not, know not, do not, he doth.

Festus.
What is life worth without a heart to feel
The great and lovely harmonies which time
And nature change responsive, all writ out
By preconcertive hand which swells the strain
To divine fulness; feel the poetry,
The soothing rhythm of life's fore-ordered lay;
The sacredness of things, for all things are
Sacred so far,—the worst of them, as seen
By the eye of God, they in the aspect bide
Of holiness; nor shall outlaw sin be slain,
Though rebel banned, within the sceptre's length;
But privileged even for service. Oh! to stand
Soul-raptured, on some lofty mountain thought,
And feel the spirit expand into a view
Millennial, life-exalting, of a day
When earth shall have all leisure for high ends
Of social culture; ends a liberal law
And common peace of nations, blent with charge

Divine, shall win for man, were joy indeed:
Nor greatly less, to know what might be now,
Worked will for good with power, for one brief hour.
But look at these, these individual souls:
How sadly men show out of joint with man!
There are millions never think a noble thought:
But with brute hate of brightness bay a mind
Which drives the darkness out of them, like hounds.
Throw but a false glare round them, and in shoals
They rush upon perdition: that's the race.
What charm is in this world-scene to such minds
Blinded by dust? What can they do in heaven,
A state of spiritual means and ends?
Thus must I doubt—perpetually doubt.

Lucifer.
Who never doubted never half believed.
Where doubt there truth is—'tis her shadow. I
Declare unto thee that the passed is not.
I have looked over all life, yet never seen
The age that had been. Why then fear or dream
About the future? Nothing but what is, is;
Else God were not the Maker that he seems,
As constant in creating as in being.
Embrace the present. Let the future pass.
Plague not thyself about a future. That
Only which comes direct from God, his spirit,
Is deathless. Nature gravitates without
Effort; and so all mortal natures fall
Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil;
But inspiration cometh from above,
And is no labour. The earth's inborn strength
Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence
She fell; nor human soul, by native worth,
Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call
Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance,
Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth;
Until God maketh earth and soul anew;
The one like heaven, the other like himself.
So shall the new creation come at once;
Sin, the dead branch upon the tree of life,
Shall be cut off for ever; and all souls
Concluded in God's boundless amnesty.

Festus.
Thou windest and unwindest faith at will,
What am I to believe?

Lucifer.
Thou mayest believe
But that thou art forced to.

Festus.
Then I feel, perforce,
That instinct of immortal life in me,
Which prompts me to provide for it.

Lucifer.
Perhaps.

Festus.
Man hath a knowledge of a time to come—

His most important knowledge: the weight lies
Nearest the short end: and the world depends
Upon what is to be. I would deny
The present, if the future. Oh! there is
A life to come, or all's a dream.

Lucifer.
And all
May be a dream. Thou seest in thine, men, deeds,
Clear, moving, full of speech and order; then
Why may not all this world be but a dream
Of God's? Fear not! Some morning God may waken.

Festus.
I would it were. This life's a mystery.
The value of a thought cannot be told;
But it is clearly worth a thousand lives
Like many men's. And yet men love to live
As if mere life were worth their living for.
What but perdition will it be to most?
Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood;
It is a great spirit and a busy heart.
The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.
One generous feeling—one great thought—one deed
Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem
Than if each year might number a thousand days,
Spent as is this by nations of mankind.
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most—feels the noblest—acts the best.
Life's but a means unto an end—that end
Beginning, mean and end to all things—God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.
Why will we live and not be glorious?
We never can be deathless till we die.
It is the dead win battles. And the breath
Of those who through the world drive like a wedge,
Tearing earth's empires up, nears Death so close
It dims his wellworn scythe. But no! the brave
Die never. Being deathless, they but change
Their country's arms for more—their country's heart.
Give then the dead their due: it is they who saved us.
The rapid and the deep—the fall, the gulph,
Have likenesses in feeling and in life.
And life, so varied, hath more loveliness
In one day than a creeping century
Of sameness. But youth loves and lives on change,
Till the soul sighs for sameness; which at last
Becomes variety, and takes its place.
Yet some will last to die out, thought by thought,
And power by power, and limb of mind by limb,
Like lamps upon a gay device of glass,
Till all of soul that's left be dry and dark;

Till even the burden of some ninety years
Hath crashed into them like a rock; shattered
Their system as if ninety suns had rushed
To ruin earth—or heaven had rained its stars;
Till they become, like scrolls, unreadable,
Through dust and mould. Can they be cleaned and read?
Do human spirits wax and wane like moons?

Lucifer.
The eye dims and the heart gets old and slow;
The lithe limbs stiffen, and the sun-hued locks
Thin themselves off, or whitely wither; still,
Ages not spirit, even in one point,
Immeasurably small; from orb to orb,
Rising in radiance ever like the sun
Shining upon the thousand lands of earth.
Look at the medley, motley throng we meet!
Some smiling, frowning some; their cares and joys
Alike not worth a thought; some sauntering slowly,
As if destruction never could overtake them;
Some hurrying on, as fearing judgment swift
Should trip the heels of death, and seize them living.

Festus.
Grief hallows hearts even while it ages heads;
And much hot grief, in youth, forces up life
With power which too soon ripens and which drops. [A funeral passes.

Ah! what is this? A mystery, sure resolved.
I felt as fascinated towards this spot.
Meseemed I saw a beckoning, as of bright
Invisible hands I could not choose but follow.
'Twas for this, doubtless.

Lucifer.
Strange coincidence!
Behold those three fair maiden mourners. Well,
It is something, in default of other means,
To leave fair friends behind one. Speak to them.

Festus.
That were I nowise loth to do. But stay;
My heart is not an anvil; and the blow
Which grief hath struck me, needs not to be paired;
Or they might breed for ever.

Lucifer.
Speak to them.

Festus.
Why, yes, I'll speak to them; I know them all,
As they know her they follow. Yet, methinks,
All knowing, to ask curiously seems ill.

Lucifer.
To learn what others know seems only well.

Festus.
Whose funeral is this ye follow, friends?

Lucifer.
Would ye have grief, let me come. I am woe.

Mourner.
We want no grief, Festus! she died of grief.

Festus.
Said'st thou she died? Oh, then, I knew her.

Mourner.
True.

Festus.
Set down the body; I would look yet on her.

Not lovelier now than ever, only not.
And garlanded, as for bridals.

Mourner.
True. What then?
Say not thou knewst not, thou, this crownèd maid,
Willed as death's bride, not thine, to be thus interred.

Festus.
Her hopes knew I too well. Oh, no! I nought
Deny. I am doomed too many to offend,
To prove the end of. Not the less, let be.
When died she?

Mourner.
But the o'er-last night when the sun
His purple sea-couch pressed, and high in air
Heaven glorified itself with every hue
The world holds loveliest. 'Twas to those who watched
That deathbed as if nature yearned to express
By all tints gorgeousest her inmost joy
To know this soul's reunion with its God.

Festus.
I mind the hour, the moment. 'Twas the breath
As of a thousand lilies, witness pure
Of her spirit's sanctity, lingering by this bier,
Still, compassed me unconscious of the event,
And marvelling of the miracle. Let me look!

Mourner.
In sooth, a piteous sight.

Festus.
A heavenly sight!
Now, Son of God! what dost thou now in heaven,
While one so beautiful lies earthening here?
I will give up the future for the passed;
The wingèd spirit and the starry home,
If thou wilt let her live and make me love.

Clara.
I feel as though her spirit hovered near;
Holy and pure it wafts me with its wings.

Elissa.
Their shadows strike across me. Let us move.
Friends wait us sorrowing where, hard by, her sires
Sleep in the marbled minster.

Festus.
Heed them not;
Our duty, this day, waits on destiny. Stay.

Lucifer.
Canst thou not spare to these her sister friends,
Whose eyes with grief's salt baptism run o'er;
And who, like mourning starlets, weep the end
Of their once brightest, one consoling word?

Festus.
Their solace mine; her, sometime, to rejoin.
Were ye not with her when she died?

Helen.
We were.
She left among us a bequest which I
Dare not accept nor now name; but it drew
From our torn hearts a promise as the steel
Magnetic from a wound the painful speck.

Festus.
For me to know might haply both console.

Clara.
But never wilt thou know it from my lips.

Helen.
She bade all cherish thee for her dear sake;
And gave thee her forgiveness.

Festus.
Shade divine!
Spirit immortal and immaculate, hear!
Speak!

Elissa.
What! Art mad? Wouldst have a spirit here;
And in the day's broad eye?

Lucifer.
Why not?

Elissa.
Grant, heaven!
I only swoon.

Festus.
Swoon not, but brace thy heart
To its true tension. It may have yet to bear
Unheard-of woes. Speak, spirit, that our poor ears
May grow rich treasuries of thy golden words.

Elissa.
Nay, wish not back from her paternal heavens
The pure ghost, self-congratulative ere now,
Of its translated life.

Festus.
She comes no more.

Clara.
Nor would she, save by night, when her fair feet,
Threading the shiny mazes of the stars,
May bring us helpful hope, by grace divine;
Or us perchance premonish.

Lucifer.
Voice is none.

Festus.
No, all is still; and still right well I know,
If aught behoves me learn by token, dream,
Vision, or sign, or visitation, I
Shall learn it; and like truly do ye know,
Ye heedful, faithful, faultless few, her friends,
Where'er her spirit dwells, she dwells in full
Regality of nature; crowned with power,
With purity clothed and girt with grace. Her air
Was an immortal's always. I have seen
Stars look upon't kinwise, with sympathy.

Mourner.
She was a love-gift heaven once gave to earth,
And took again, because unworthy of her.

Festus.
And will ye gaze again upon her face?
Draw nigh. But knee the majesty of death.

Helen.
Speak, thou beloved sister of my heart!
Death shall be loyal to thee; nought shall change
Thy form's marmoreal loveliness. All truth
Thou holdest now, all knowledge. Speak to us!

Clara.
No: she is silent in the hand of death;
Soothed by his touch perchance, like a young bird,
Dreadless; incredulous of cruel fate.

Festus.
Soul of my spirit!

Clara.
Oh, ne'er could she have dreamed
This wrong from thee!

Festus.
This wrong! Hear, Clara, thou
Whose name stands first in memory, even ere hers,
Nor know I when I loved not thee.

Clara.
Be dumb.
Never until we have mourned for mourning ceased,
Shall hope herself have hope to exculpate one,
Would dim thy name, sweet spirit, with even a plaint.
Thou didst but dip thy wing in life's dark stream,
And then away. We, wondering, watched thee whilst.

Elissa.
How hath the white rose conquered on this cheek!
This fair and final field of death and life.
Life is no match for death, since thou art fled;
The balance of existence is no more.
Let us begone, where thou art gone, to heaven.

Mourner.
And yet we weep thee, weep thee, all of us.

Festus.
How could I be so cruel? Who but I?
O faithful as the mooncrowned night to heaven,
In pure recurrent beauty, is then this
Saddest of trysts our last; or do we yet
Meet in the far-off future?

Lucifer.
Much depends.

Elissa.
And is there no remorse?

Clara.
No blame?

Helen.
No wrong?

Festus.
Why are ye troubled thus, and your clear souls
Made for a moment turbid? Can ye grieve
As I grieve; ye, as I be wretched? No!
But though it claim no pre-established course,
Yet give a torrent place; 'twere wise; 'twere wise.

Mourner.
The moment after thou desertedst her,
A cloud came over the prospect of her life;
And I foresaw how evening would set in,
Early, and dark and deadly. She was true.

Festus.
Did I not love thee, too? pure perfect thing;
This is a soul I see and not a body.
Go, beauty, rest for aye; go, starry eyes,
And lips like rosebuds peeping out of snow;
Go, breast love-filled as a boat's sail with wind,
Leaping from wave to wave as leaps a child
Thoughtless, o'er grassy graves; go, locks which have
The golden embrownment of a lion's eye.
Yet one more look; farewell, thou well and fair!
All who but loved thee shall be deathless; nought
Named, if with thee, can perish. Thou and death
Have made each other purer, lovelier seem,
Like snow and moonlight. Never more for thee
Let eyes be swollen, like streams with latter rains.
To die were rapture, having lived with thee.
Thy soul hath passed out of a bodily heaven

Into a spiritual. Rest! pure after love;
In love pure; pure before. The dead are holy.
I would I were among them.

Elissa.
Let us hence.

Festus.
Nay, not so soon shalt thou unbless mine eyes.
I turn, and turn, to tread the round of fate,
As worshippers of old their templed tombs;
And lo! thy tomb, thy temple is my heart.

Clara.
She is no more in man's hand; but in God's.

Festus.
So young, so lovely, so adored. Thy years
The moon's sweet cycle scarce had run; and now,
Oh! recommence in heaven thy dateless course.
Our souls were so, so delicately attuned,
A scarce discernible discord, a lapsed word,
An inconsiderate eyeglance, thrilled through both,
With well-nigh fatal jar. But here, this hour,
What is there I'd not give, again to know
That bosom's lightest swell, which once, 'gainst mine,
For pardon craved, or granted, a mere thought,
Beat like the billows of the sea of life?
And now corruption, come; sit, sate thyself.
This is the choicest revel thou hast been at.
Thou art my happier, only rival, thou
Who takest love from the living; life from beauty;
Beauty from death; whole robber of the world.

Helen.
Oh, heaven is happier, now that thou art there,
Sweetest of human spirits; and for us
Enough, the blessing to have known thee here.

Festus.
It is so. All life's blessings, hope and peace;
And innocence of youth's prime, seem sweeping past,
As with the footfall of a cataract,
Deathwards precipitately; and, fled with these,
Thou, happy spirit, serene, seraphic! Yes!
Thou, too, art gone. Upon thy brow, no more
Fair seer of lucent eye shall see ray forth
The inborn crownlet: crown of light, or fire,
All wear, all work, unweeting, for themselves;
Dewbright was thine. Closed are thine eyes for aye.
Those deep dark jets of light; that pearly hand,
Gifted with whitest witchery to convoke
Pure beings that oft beset our sunshot path,
Gleams with the seal of power no more. No more
The star-throned rulers of the spheral heavens
Obey thy bidding here. On other shores
The kings of thought salute thee. Thou hast passed
The river of judgment; and the saintly land
Of the elect immortals guests thee now.
Wait thou awhile to welcome me: not long;
For thought's substantive shadows, things create

Of our own mind vivific, me forewarn,
Like eastern slaves, lip-fingered, menacing mutes;
Death is at hand. O injudicious judge!
Justice unjust; what though the world must die,
Was this her time? What more can time unrol?
Can life replevy upon the house of death?
Can truth unteach the promise of the passed?
Can earth remass the wealth of worship thou
Outpouredst at my feet, more than numb age,
That feast of lips, that banquet of the breast,
Which Paradisal youth yields yet to all?
No! thou art gone. Oh, never till the hour
When the great Gatherer, with his spirit hand,
Hath culled the ripe worlds from the tree of life,
Shall, sunlike, set in its illumined grave
Another head, sacred as thine. Farewell,
Thou fair perfection of the universe;
I turn to thee, the prayer-point of my soul;
And swear, by all the hopes I have of death,
I had more prized all wretchedness with thee,
Than joy with others. Fate, fulfil thy scheme.
Demand thy fee. There's nought worth reckoning left.
The fair configurations of my life
Are passed away. Lingers alone in air
One pale malignant star; that star, mine own.

Lucifer.
Oh, we'll think better sometime of our stars;
Myself, by fits, feel faintly saturnine;
Given to low spirits, and so forth. But have care,
Or thou wilt drain these lovely eyes of tears
That may be wanted yet.

Festus.
This in thine ear.
Blood is more easily shed than tears, by men;
And I would spare some heart-drops from their fount,
When every drop were worth a year of life,
Rather than now these glittering traitors fell.
But not less be thou silent. Let these weep.
It is well that I have mingled tears with theirs.
Fair Eden's rivers had one only head,
And flowed into one outfall: our great dole,
Like vent. And now though I wander round the world,
Each step but brings me nearer to the grave;
Her grave.

Elissa.
Perchance, there, we may meet again?

Lucifer.
Lovely lamenters! We again will meet.

Festus.
Peace, soulless spirit.

Lucifer.
Peace is all I ask.

Festus.
Let us rejoice for her; for ourselves mourn;
Wholly and separately. Art thou, say, blithe?
Remember whom we grieve for now; art sad?
Reflect that she is bliss. Mere happiness

Is of ourselves; but blessedness of God.
And so, rejoice, fair mourners, and farewell.

Lucifer.
O ignorance sublime! O innocence!
What would I risk to know ye, and believe!

Festus.
Behold them slowly westering on their way,
Like those bright lights that head heaven's starry bier.

Lucifer.
Each hath a special grace.

Festus.
But as I live—

Lucifer.
Come, that is cheering; not a minute since
At the last gasp I deemed thee.

Festus.
I marked not
Their several charms, opponent or in trine.

Lucifer.
Thou shalt love all at will.

Festus.
I hear thee not.
Suffer my silence. One thing seems. Henceforth
I have a love on earth and one in heaven.

Lucifer.
That I misdoubt not. This is somewhat dull.
There is a mean with him as all: and now,
Ere my free promises too soon condense
Into more gross utilities, it were well
I from this sacred and supernal love
His heart should alienate; and, time by time,
With some calm passion, or—I have them yet
Before me in mine eye, with rival fair
Not frivolous, oh no, spiritual, scarce less
Serious this next than her late canonized;
More provident of the future, may be, vowed
To active piety more,—assort him, till
A weary of all these animate ice-maidens
Dolorous, he seek life's luxuries, in despair,
And youth's gay converse; shallow joys, but still
Quite deep enough to drown. I'll think on't.

Festus.
Hope!
Where dwells she?

Lucifer.
Hope? In dreamland. Sometime soon
Or never, at the furthest, we'll hie thither.
I have seen her house by moonlight, travelling once
Nigh Ouranus sixth satellite. Much I fear
It is mostly moonshine there, by tremulous wastes
Of darkness intervalled. Sweet spot, Hope's home!
Grounds? What it stands on, true; but everywhere
Vast outlooks. All well fenced about with towers
Planned, to reach heaven, but failing that, doubt not
They touch the feet of clouds. Her closeless gates
No janitor haunts, suspicious, souring air
With his writhed countenance; fact, to me, who own
A key that opens walls, let alone doors,
Less than to some momentous. Strange to note,
The house will show all sizes; now a dwarf
Might fork it; now 'twould guest a giant.

Festus.
Good.
Perhaps we both may lodge there some fine day.

Lucifer.
But in the meanwhile more substantial ends
Will better suit us. Life hath claims on thee.

Festus.
Living is but a habit; and I mean
To break myself of it soon.

Lucifer.
Too soon thou canst not,
When that is preappointed stands achieved.
Meantime I half think with thee; and much grieve
Men heed not of the day, how nigh none knows,
Which brings the consummation of the world.
But in mine ear the old machine already
Begins to grate. They would not credit warning,
Or I would up and cry, repent! I will.
Here's a fair gathering and I feel moved.
Mortals, repent! the world is nigh to its end;
On its last legs, and desperately sick.
See ye not how it reels round all day long?

Boys.
Oh! here's a ranter. Come, here's fun. Amen.
I know the church service by heart.

Bystander.
Be off!
You'll serve the church by keeping out of it.

Lucifer.
I am a preacher come to tell ye truth.
I tell ye too there is no time to be lost;
So fold your souls up neatly, while ye may;
Direct to God in heaven; or some one else
May seize them, seal them, send them—you know where.
The world must end. I weep to think of it.
But you, you laugh! I knew ye would. I know
Men never will be wise till they are fools
For ever. Laugh away! The time will come,
When tears of fire are trickling from your eyes,
You will blame yourselves for having laughed at me.
I warn ye, men: prepare; repent; be saved.
I warn ye, not because I love, but know ye.
God will dissolve the world, as she of old
Her pearl, within his cup, and swallow ye
In wrath: although to taste ye would be poison,
And death and suicide to aught but God.
Again I warn ye. Save himself who can!
Do ye not oft begin to seek salvation?
You? you? and fail, as oft, to find? Sink? Cease?
And shall I tell ye, brethren, why ye fail
Once and for ever? why, there is no passed;
And the future is the fiction of a fiction;
The present moment is eternity.
It is that ye have sucked corruption from the world
Like milk from your own mothers; it is in
Your soul-blood and your soul-bones. Earth does not
Wean one out of a thousand sons to heaven.

Beginnings are alike: it is ends which differ.
One drop falls, lasts, and dries up, but a drop;
Another begins a river: and one thought
Settles a life, an immortality:
And that one thought ye will not take to good.
Now will I tell ye just one other truth:
Ye hate the truth as snails salt, it dissolves ye,
Body and soul; but I don't mind. So, now:
Up to this moment ye are all, each, what?
Suppose I leave you to infer. 'Twill be
The same, we know, the next day—and the next:
Till some fine morning, ye will wake in fire.
Observe, I mince not, I, the truth for ye.
Belike you think your lives will dribble out,
As brooks in summer dry up. Let us see!
Try: dike them up: they stagnate; thicken; scum.
That would make life worse than death. Well, let go!
Where are ye then? for life, like water, will
Find its last level; what level? The grave.
It is but a fall of five feet after all;
That cannot hurt ye; it is but just enough
To work the wheel of life; so work away!
Ye may think that I do not know the terms
And treasures whereupon ye live so high.
But I know more than most men, modestly
Speaking. I know I am lost, you too I fear.
Could God, save by destroying me, me save,
I ofttimes ask myself, self-tormenting. So,
With none advantage over you, I have thought
Rather ye might, perhaps, the freelier bear
One in your own state to advise for ye.
Now don't you envy me, good folks, I pray;
Envy's a coal comes hissing hot from hell.
'Twill be such coals will burn ye, by the way.
Your other preachers first think they are safe.
Then run they to and fro to serve ye, slave,
Slay themselves well nigh; sweating like a bone
Unburied, alway. I, too, for your sakes.
But I, alas! boast no such perfectness.
Nay, I say broadly I am the worst among ye;
And God knows I have no need to wrong myself,
Nor you. I boast not of it, but as truth;
It is little to be proud of, credit me.
What is salvation? What is safety? Think!
Who wants to know? Does any?

The Crowd.
All of us.

Lucifer.
Then I will not tell ye. You shall wait until
Some angel come and stir your stagnant souls:
Then plunge into yourselves and rise redeemed.

Oh! but say you, we are redeemed, long since,
Our faults condoned, debts cancelled, all. God ran
One winter eve, the yuletide holidays,—
His pen right down the black accompt, choke full
Of columned figures, row on row, and smiled;
Passed your poor pot-hooks palliative of play;
Your sham excuses of mistaken feasts;
Sick headaches, paltry truantries, what not?
And ticked off all, bills, extras, dues, as paid.
So ye are new men, you; most, at least. Look to it!
But don't take rights for granted; nor all said
Of gospel, gospel: nor because one dies,—
How miserably defunct you would fain not know,—
But a would-be friend, and leaves you all he had,
His charity, think you e'er forsooth must live
In lack-nought ease, and unconditioned joy.
There's not much logic, I can tell ye, there.

A Voice.
You look quite fresh from college. Who's your coach?
Do spend your long vacation here.

Lucifer.
Our term's
Not yet quite over. Make the most of chance.
Think, lucky for your sakes I'm here. But here
Nought tempts my stay. You are unjust. Could I see
One hoised for my offence, nor cry, Let go!
I did it: punish me? Indeed not. Come,
Play fair, now: don't be always crying ‘Kings!’
And think to sneak, unnoted, to the goal.
Some odd day, mark me, you'll be caught; and then—
Why then, so much precisely as you have shirked
Your proper share, you'll earn worse buffettings.
Quit your own forfeits. Sin like demi-gods,
If sin ye will; but pay your scot, like men.
Don't run up a huge score, and leave a friend,
A mere acquaintance, rather, of whose name
You have taken advantage, to pay for you. Tush!
You know heaven's terms, and right and wrong, both know
As well as up and down, or north and south.
Heed, then, which way you wend. If that way, sure
You will one day knock the pole. Don't say, you thought
It only led to Babylon; led to Rome;
Geneva, Jericho, or where not? please don't.
I hate such wriggling fibs. Due north, the pole!
Sin leads, as straight,—make no mistake,—to hell.
Well, come; you never held that you were saints;
Not even angels: but, the race looks up.
You improve, you'll swear: advance; march; grow less bad;
Less fatuous, less ferocious, every day;
Grind out old flaws in ye; don't, you say, as once,

Roast all who differ from you. Good, but listen.
As when some shore-bred urchin, spit o' the brine,
Hatched just above high-watermark, first quits
His boulder-cumber'd beach, to earn hard bread
From harder hands; and eyes, as slips the coast
From sight, cliff, jetty, his dad's nets, and cot;
And, last thing marked, the out-beetling village crag,
Capped,—no, not quite,—with granate toad, or eft
Hugeous, that creeps, creeps, but ne'er crowns the top;
Or stone-struck hag, still irritable, her spell
Tempestuous muttering o'er rock-chaldron; years,
Long years lapsed, he returns: within himself
All changed; enriched, mature; and nearing, views,—
Through something bitterer than the blinding spray,
Or is't a sudden spume-drift blurrs his sight?—
The unbettered spot:—a few deciduous huts
Replaced by sundry of like leaf; the same,
Surely the same, wild tangled knot of brats,
Sun-coiffed, sand-shod; one missing, who? the same
Witch-pot, that never boils, nor will, till earth
Spouts up again her molten slag; the same
Unspeakable monster scaling aye the height
It fails, footstalled, to reach. So you; you are,
Just what you were, just where, as once when I
First saw ye forty years since; and next week,
Or fifty centuries hence, 'twould be all one.
You are quite the same, in bulk; a trivial law,
A surface custom varied, here, as there
A moss-patch more, or less; but oh! the back
O' the creature; oh, the fissurous grin; the crawl;
Identic; unmistakeable. Zounds! I know ye.

The Crowd.
And if ye know, what then?

Lucifer.
Why, I'll not say.
Come, I'll unroll your hearts and read them to ye.
'Tis a long strip, Death's ritual. Hear not less.
To say ye live is but to say ye have souls,
That ye have paid for them, and mean to play them,
Till some brave pleasure wins the golden stake,
And rakes it up to death as to a bank.
Ye live and die on what your souls will fetch;
And all are of different prices: therefore hell
Cannot well bargain for mankind in gross;
But each soul must be purchased, one by one.
This it is makes men rate themselves so high:
While truly ye are worth little: but to God
Ye are worth more than to yourselves. By sin
Ye wreak your spite against God; that ye know;
And knowing, will it. But I pray, I beg,
Act with some smack of justice to your Maker,
If not unto yourselves. Do! It is enough

To make the very Devil chide mankind;
Such baseness, such unthankfulness! Why he
Thanks God he is no worse. You don't do that.
I say be just to God. Leave off these airs:
Know your place; speak to God; and say, for once,
Go first, Lord; take your finger off your eye.
It blocks the universe and God from sight.
Think ye your souls are worth nothing to God?
Are they so small? What can be great with God?
The sun and moon he wears on either arm,
Seals of his sovereignty. What now, huge men!
What will ye weigh against the Lord? Yourselves?
Bring out your balance: get in, man by man:
Add earth, heaven, hell, the universe; that's all.
God puts his finger in the other scale,
And up we bounce, a bubble. Nought is great
Nor small, with God—for none but he can make
The atom imperceptible, and none
But he can make a world: he counts the orbs,
He counts the atoms of the universe,
And makes both equal; both are infinite.
Giving God honour, never underrate
Yourselves: after him ye are everything.
But mind! God's more than everything; he is God.
And what of me? No, us? no! I mean the Devil?
Why see ye not he goes before both you
And God? Men say, as proud as Lucifer;
Pray who would not be proud with such a train?
Hath he not all the honour of the earth?
Why Mammon sits before a million hearths,
Where God is bolted out from every house.
He'll not forget that. Some day there'll be haply,
A pretty general eviction. Then,
Mind me, he'll break your bars and burst your doors,
Which slammed against him once, and turn ye out,
Roofless and shivering, 'neath the doom-storm; heaven
Shall crack above ye like a bell in fire,
And bury all beneath its shining shards.
He calls, ye hear not. Lo! he comes—ye see not.
No; ye are deaf as a dead adder's ear:
No; ye are blind as never bat was blind,
With a burning, bloodshot blindness of the heart;
A swimming, swollen, senselessness of soul.
Listen. Whom love ye most? Why, him to whom
Ye in your turn are dearest. Need I name?
Oh no! But all are devils to themselves;
And every man his own great foe. Hell gets
Only the gleanings; earth hath the full wain;
And hell is merry at its harvest home.
But ye are generous to sin, and grudge

The gleaners nothing; ask them, push them in.
Let not an ear, a grain of sin be lost;
Gather it, grind it up; it is our bread:
We should be ashamed to waste the gifts of God.
Why is the world so mad? Why runs it thus
Raving and howling round the universe?
Because the Devil bit it from the birth!
The fault is all with him. Fear nothing, friends;
It is fear which beds the far to-come with fire,
As the sun does the west: but the sun sets;
Well: still ye tremble—tremble, first at light,
Then darkness. Tremble! ye dare not believe.
No, cowards! sooner than believe ye would die;
Die with the black lie flapping on your lips,
Like the soot-flake upon a burning bar.
Be merry, happy if ye can: think never
Of him who slays your souls, nor him who saves.
There is time enough for that when ye are a-dying.
Keep your old ways; it matters not this once.
Be brave; ye are not men whom meat and wine
Serve to remind but of the sacrament;
To whom sweet shapes and tantalizing smiles
Bring up the Devil and the ten commandments;
And so on. But I said the world must end.
I see some old men 'mong ye, and they know,
Discomfortably enough, the heart in age,
Lower and lower, like the wintering sun,
Sets daily, and is troubled more to rise.
Let them be rather gay to miss earth's end.
I am sorry; it is such a pleasant world;
With all its faults it is perfect—to a fault;
And you, of course, end with it. Now how long
Will the world take to die? I know ye place
Great faith upon death-bed repentances;
The suddener the better. I know ye often
Begin to think of praying and repenting;
But second thoughts come and ye are worse than ever;
As over new white snow a filthy thaw.
Ye do amaze me verily. How long
Will ye take heart on your own wickedness,
And God's forbearance? Have ye cast it up?
Come, now; the year, and month, day, hour, and minute,
Sin's golden cycle? Know ye, pray, how long
Exactly, heaven will grant ye; how long God,—
Who when he had slain the world and wasted it,
Hung up his bow in heaven, as in his hall
A warrior after battle—will yet bear
Your contumely and scorn of his best gifts,—
Man's mockery of man? But never mind!
Some of us are magnificently good,

And hold the head up high, like a giraffe
You, in particular, and you; and you.
Good men are here and there, I know; but then
You must excuse me if I mention this,
My duty is to tell it you; the world,
Like a black block of marble, jagged with white,
As with a vein of lightning petrified,
Looks blacker than without such; looks, in truth,
So gross the heathen, gross the Christian too,
Like the original darkness of void space,
Hardened. Instead of justice, love, and grace,
Each worth to man the mission of a God,
Injustice, hate, uncharitableness,
Triequal reign round earth, hell's trinity, sure.
Ye think ye never can be bad enough;
Nay, as ye sink in sin ye rise in hope.
And let the worst come to the worst, you say,
There always will be time to turn ourselves,
And cry for half an hour or so to God:
Salvation, sure, is not so very hard;
It need not take one long; and half an hour
Is quite as much as we can spare for it.
We have no time for pleasures. Business! business!
No! ye shall perish suddenly and unsaved.
The world shall stand still with a rending jar,
As though it struck at sea; or, as when once,
An arm Titanian, say not whose, but jogged
By earthquakes, wryed the pole, and o'er the dry
Poured competitive mains. The unsleepful sea,
Mooning and bellowing now round caverned coasts,
Now, drawing hard through thirty thousand teeth,
Upon the shingly shore, his pauseful breath,
Like some monogamous monster which hath lost,
Poor fool! his mate; and every rock-hole searched
By torch of foam-light, dogs her steps with sad,
Superfluous faithfulness, shall rest at last,
Nor wist which way to turn him; ebb nor flow
No more to choose. All elements as though smote
With reasonablest disloyalty to man's
Usurpful claim, their constrained suit shall cease,
And natural service: men their mightiest wont,
Their meanest use and craft. The halls where parle
The heads of nations shall be dumb with death.
The priest shall dipping, die: can man save man?
Is water God? The counsellor, wise fool,
Drop down amid his quirks and sacred lies,
The judge, while dooming unto death some wretch,
Shall meet at once his own death, doom and judge.
The doctor, watch in hand and patient's pulse,
Shall feel his own heart cease its beats, and fall.

Professors shall spin out, and students strain
Their brains no more. Art, science, toil, shall cease,
Commerce. The ship shall her own plummet seek,
And sound the sea herself and depths of death.
At the first turn Death shall cut off the thief,
And dash the gold-bag in his yellow brain.
The gambler, reckoning gains, shall drop a piece:
Stoop down and there see death;—look up, there God.
The wanton, temporizing with decay,
And qualifying every line which vice
Writes bluntly on the brow, inviting scorn,
Shall pale through plastered red: and the loose low sot
See clear, for once, through his misty, o'erbrimmed eye.
The just, if there be any, die in prayer.
Death shall be everywhere among your marts;
And giving bills which no man may decline—
Drafts upon hell one moment after date.
Then shall your outcries tremble amid the stars:
Terrors shall be about ye like a wind;
And fears fall down upon ye like four walls.

Festus.
Yon man looks frightened.

Lucifer.
Then it is time to stop.
I hope I have done no good. He will soon forget
His soul. Flesh soaks it up as sponge does water.

The Crowd.
He's a mad ranter: down with him.

Festus.
Let him be!

Lucifer.
Stand by me, Festus! and I will by thee.
Said I not what they were? When am I wrong?
Why, heaven and earth! this is the second time
I have run for my life.

Festus.
Nay, nay, come back! I'll see
These rustics harm thee not: they would chair thee round
The market-place, knew they but whom thou art.
I'll make it mine to soothe them for a space.
Peace there, my friends! one minute; let us pray.
Grant us, O God! that in thy holy love
The universal people of the world
May grow more great and happy every day;
Mightier, wiser, humbler, too, towards thee.
And that all ranks, all classes, callings, states
Of life, so far as such seem right to thee,
May mingle into one, like sister trees,
And so in one stem flourish: that all laws
And powers of government be based and used
In good, and for the people's sake; that each
May feel himself of consequence to all,
And act as though all saw him; that the whole,
The mass of every nation, may so do
As is most worthy of the next to God;
For a whole people's souls, each one worth more

Than a mere world of matter, make, combined,
A something godlike, something like to thee.
We pray thee for the welfare of all men.
Let monarchs who love truth and freedom feel
The happiness of safety, and respect
From those they rule, and guardianship from thee.
Let them remember they are set on thrones
As representatives, not as substitutes,
Of nations, to implead with God and man.
Let tyrants who hate truth, or fear the free,
Know that to rule in slavery and error,
For the mere ends of personal pomp and power,
Is such a sin as doth deserve a hell
To itself sole. Let both remember, Lord!
They are but things like-natured with all nations;
That mountains issue out of plains, and not
Plains out of mountains, and so likewise kings
Are of the people, not the people of kings.
And let all feel, the rulers and the ruled,
All classes and all countries, that the world
Is thy great halidom; that thou art king,
Lord, only owner and possessor. Grant
That nations may now see, it is not kings,
Nor priests, they need fear so much as themselves;
That if they keep but true to themselves, and free,
Sober, enlightened, godly; mortal men
Become impassible as air; one great
And indestructible substance as the sea.
Let all on thrones and judgment-seats reflect
How dreadful thy revenge through nations is
On those who wrong them; but do thou grant, Lord,
That when wrongs are to be redressed, such may
Be done with mildness, speed, and firmness; not
With violence or hate, whereby one wrong
Translates another; both to thee abhorrent.
The bells of time are ringing changes fast.
Grant, Lord! that each fresh peal may usher in
An era of advancement, that each change
Prove an effectual, lasting, happy gain.
And we beseech thee, overrule, O God!
All civil contests to the good of all;
All party and religious differences
To honourable ends, whether secured
Or lost; and let all strife, political
Or social, spring from conscientious aims,
And have a generous, self-ennobling end,
Man's good, and thine own glory in view always.
The best may then fail and the worst succeed,
Alike with honour. We beseech thee, Lord!
For bodily strength, but more especially

For the soul's health and safety. We entreat thee
In thy great mercy to decrease our wants,
And add autumnal increase to the comforts
Which tend to keep men innocent, and load
Their hearts with thanks to thee as trees in bearing:
The blessings of friends, families, and homes,
And kindnesses of kindred. And we pray
That men may rule themselves in faith in God,
In charity to each other, and in hope
Of their own soul's salvation: that the mass,
The millions in all nations, may be trained,
From their youth upwards, in a nobler mode,
To loftier and more liberal ends. We pray
Above all things, Lord! that all men be free
From bondage, whether of the mind or body;
The bondage of religious bigotry,
And bald antiquity; servility
Of thought or speech to rank and power; be all
Free as they ought to be in mind and soul,
As well as by state-birth right; and that Mind,
Time's giant pupil, may right soon attain
Majority, and speak and act for himself.
Incline thou to our prayers, and grant, O Lord!
That all may have enough, and some safe mean
Of worldly goods and honours, by degrees,
Take place, if practicable, in the fitness
And fulness of thy time. And we beseech thee
That truth no more be gagged, nor conscience dungeoned,
Nor science be impeached of godlessness;
Nor faith be circumscribed, which as to thee,
And the soul's self affairs, is infinite;
But that all men may have due liberty
To speak an honest mind, in every land;
Encouragement to study, leave to act
As conscience orders. We entreat thee, Lord!
For thy Son's sake, for total man's, in whose
Name first spake he, prophet supreme of earth,
As man's son thine, to take away reproach
Of all kinds from thy church; and all temptation
Of pomp or power political, that none
May err in the end for which they were appointed
To any of its orders, low or high;
And no ambition, of a worldly cast,
Leaven the love of souls unto whose care
They feel propelled by thy most holy spirit.
Be every church established, Lord! in truth.
Let all who preach the word, by the word live,
In moderate estate; and in thy church,—
One, universal, and invisible,
World-wards, yet manifest unto itself,

May it seem good, dear Saviour, in thy sight,
That orders be distinguished, not by wealth,
But piety and power of teaching souls.
Equalize labour, Lord! and recompense.
Let not a hundred humble pastors starve,
In this or any land of Christendom,
While one or two, impalaced, mitred, throned
And banquetted, burlesque, if not blaspheme
The holy penury of the son of Man;
The fastings, the footwanderings, and the preachings
Of Christ and his first followers. Oh that the son
Might come again! There should be no more war,
No more want, no more sickness; with a touch,
He should cure all disease, and with a word,
All woe; and with a look to heaven, a prayer,
Provide bread for a million at a time.
But till that perfect advent, grant us, Lord!
That all good institutions, orders, claims,
Charitably proposed, or in the aid
Of thy divine foundation, may much prosper,
And more of them be raised and nobly filled;
That thy word may be taught throughout all lands,
And save souls daily to the thrones of heaven!—
Enriched, empowered, emboldened by thy Spirit,
We dare to ask for all things in thy name;
We dare to pray for all that live or die.
Man dies to man; but all to thee, God, live.
We pray thee, therefore, for the general dead;
Man's universal race, extinct in flesh.
But in the spirit immortal; not alone
For those who died unwitting of all truth,
But whose souls opening after like a flower
In finer air, may compass more than we;
Not only for the sage, saint, seer of old
Who saw thy truth but darkly, felt thy light
But feebly, yet, unfaltering, held the faith,
That the good God who made all, all decrees,
Allots and blesses all, in this life, man
May trust like lovingly for life to come.
Not only therefore for the wise of yore,
But for the mass unwise of all times, now,
Passed and to come; who boast not of thy love,
Nor glory in thy name; but spurn thy law,
Nor keep thy precepts; for the wicked man
Who hates thy righteousness; and for the good
Who his own preacheth; for the scorner who
Despiseth thy humility, most high!
The ignorant who thy providence misdoubts;
The dark inverted soul who sees not thee;
The bigot who maligns thee, Lord! for all,

Quick, dead, we ask thy boundless mercy, more
Than all sin, all defect, as infinite
O'erlaps all finites. But by us be none
Condemned. Shall culprits take the judge's seat?
Christ's lesson of forgiveness mote not we
Forget. If they who wrought earth's crowning crime
Were of his intercession worthy, Lord!
Of whom shall fellow-sinners, like ourselves,
Despair? To whom shall mercy hope deny?
And we entreat thee, that all men whom thou
Hast gifted with great minds may love thee well,
And praise thee, for their powers, and use them most
Humbly and holily, and, lever-like,
Act but in lifting up the mass of mind
About them; knowing well that they shall be
Questioned by thee of deeds the pen hath done,
Or caused, or glozed; inspire them with delight
And power to treat of noble themes and things,
Worthily, and to leave the low and mean;
Things born of vice or day-lived fashion, in
Their naked native folly: make them know
Fine thoughts are wealth, for the right use of which
Men are and ought to be accountable,
If not to thee, to those they influence.
Grant this, we pray thee, and that all who read
Or utter noble thoughts may make them theirs,
And thank God for them, to the betterment
Of their succeeding life; that all who lead
The general sense and taste, too apt, perchance,
To be led, keep in mind the mighty good
They may achieve, and are in conscience bound,
And duty, to attempt unceasingly
To compass. Grant us, all-maintaining sire!
That all the great mechanic aids to toil
Man's skill hath formed, found, rendered, whether used
In multiplying works of mind, or aught
To obviate the thousand wants of life,
May much avail to human welfare now;
And in all ages henceforth and for ever.
Let their effect be, Lord! to lighten labour,
And give more room to mind; and leave the poor
Some time for self-improvement. Let them not
Be forced to grind the bones out of their arms
For bread, but have some space to think and feel
Like moral and immortal creatures. God!
Have mercy on them till such time shall come;
Look thou with pity on all lesser crimes,
Thrust on men almost when devoured by want,
Wretchedness, ignorance, and outcast life.
Have mercy on the rich, too, who pass by

The means they hold at hand to fill their minds
With serviceable knowledge for themselves,
And fellows; and support not the good cause
Of the world's better future. Oh, reward
All such who do, with peace of heart, and power
For greater good. Have mercy, Lord! on each
And all, for all men need it equally.
May peace, and industry, and commerce, weld
Into one land all nations of the world,
Rekinning those the deluge once estranged.
Oh! may all help each other in good things,
Mental and moral, and of bodily kind.
Vouchsafe, kind God! thy blessing to this isle,
Specially. May our country ever lead
The world, for she is worthiest; and may all
Profit by her example, and adopt
Her course, wherever great, or free, or just.
May all her subject colonies and powers
Have of her freedom freely, as a child
Receiveth of its parents. Let not rights
Be wrested from us, to our own reproach,
But granted. We may make the whole world free,
And be as free ourselves as ever, more!
If policy or self-defence call forth
Our forces to the field, let us in thee
First trust, and in thy name we shall o'ercome;
For we will only wage the righteous cause.
Let us not conquer nations for ourselves,
But for thee, Lord! who hast predestined us
To fight the battles of the future now,
And so have done with war before thou comest.
Till then, Lord God of armies! let our foes
Have their swords broken and their cannon burst,
And their strong cities levelled; and while we
War faithfully and righteously, improve,
Civilise, Christianise, the lands we win
From savage or from nature, thou, O God!
Wilt aid and hallow conquest, as of old,
Thine own immediate nation's. But we pray
That all mankind may make one brotherhood,
And love and serve each other; that all wars
And feuds die out of nations; whether those
Whom the sun's hot light darkens, or ourselves
Whom he treats fairly, or the northern tribes
Whom ceaseless snows and starry winters blench;
Savage or civilised, let every race,
Red, black, or white, olive, or tawny-skinned,
Settle in peace and swell the gathering hosts
Of the great Prince of Peace. Oh! may the hour
Soon come when all false gods, false creeds, false prophets,

Allowed in thy good purpose for a time,
Demolished, the great world shall be at last
God's mercy-seat, the heritage of a pure
Humanity, made divine, and the possession
Of the spirit of comfort and wisdom; shall all be
One land, one home, one friend, one faith, one law;
Its ruler God, its practice righteousness,
Its life peace. For the one true faith we pray;
There is but one in heaven, and there shall be
But one on earth, the same which is in heaven.
Prophesy is more true than history.
Grant us our prayers, we pray, Lord! in the name
And for the sake of universal man,
Who thee like Saviour as Creator, holds
Over all worlds, one holy Spirit God.

The Crowd.
Amen!

Lucifer.
Well, friends, we'll sing a hymn; then part.
I give it out, and you sing—all of you.

Oh! earth is cheating earth
From age to age for ever;
She laughs at faith and worth,
And dreams she shall die never;
Never, never, never!
And dreams she shall die never.

And hell is cursing hell
From age to age for ever;
Its groans ring out the knell
Of souls that may die never;
Never, never, never!
Of souls that may die never.

But heaven is blessing heaven
From age to age for ever;
And its thanks to God are given
For bliss that can die never;
Never, never, never!
For bliss that can die never.

My blessing be upon ye all; now go!

Festus.
I wonder what these people make of thee.

Lucifer.
Ay, manner's a great matter.

Festus.
They deserve
All the rebuke thou gavest them, and more.
What mountains of delusion men have reared!
How every age hath bustled on to build
Its shadowy mole—its monumental dream!
How faith and fancy, in the mind of man,
Have spuriously immingled, and how much
Shall pass away for aye, as before yon sun,
Lord, he alike, of steadfastness and change,
The visionary landscapes of the skies;
The golden capes far stretching into heaven;

The snow-piled cloud crags; the bright wingèd isles,
Which dot the deep impassive ocean air,
Like a disbanded rainbow, of all hues,
Fit for translated fairy's Paradise;
Or as before the eye of musing child,
The faces fancy forms in clouds, or fire,
Of glowing angel, now; now, darkening fiend's.
Arts, superstition, creeds, philosophy,
This solid called because material,—each
Hath held in turn man's mind, betrayed and mocked;
Thou, too, vain science, who wouldst level man,
And all create with God, thine hour is come;
Thy lips were lined with the immortal lie,
And, dyed with all the look of truth; men saw,
Believed, embraced, detested, cast thee off.
Thou wouldst not take in vain God's name. Wouldst take
His being into thine apprehension? No!
Those lights the morn of truth's immortal day,
As thou didst falsely swear them, have not all
Vanished, the mere auroras of an hour?
Yet didst thou vow to gather up, clear again,
The fallen waters of humanity, smoothe
The flaw from an eye; piece even a pounded pearl.

Lucifer.
I bet she failed.

Festus.
Thank God, I am a man,
Not a philosopher.

Lucifer.
Of that brand, oh no:
Not a materialist. Another cast,
Science may yet succeed.

Festus.
She never can.
Rivers may rot the root of oak fire-bolted;
Revive it, never.

Lucifer.
True; for once be gay.

Festus.
Oh, let me to the hills, where none but God
Can overlook us; for I hate to breathe
The breaths, and think the thoughts, of other men,
In close and clouded cities where the skies
Frown like an angry father, mournfully.
Oh, but I love the hills; love loneliness,
Allwhere of desert shore, or wold scant-lifed.
Where there is nothing else, there is always God.
Yes, wearied soon of borough crowds, I love
My fellows most at arm's length, not too near—
In the mid distance, somewhat,—nature seems
A holier mediatress 'tween God and man,
Mean mightier than aught else. But when alone
Braced by life-searching thought, I go to meet
Heaven on the hills, my soul, with love of his
Creations filled, I feel expand at ease,
In sensefulness of Deity; and amidst

Star-mimicked snows, indigenous of the skies,
Conscious of spirit made capable to accept
Celestial intimations, and in deeps,
Deeps luminous and profound of utter thought,
Implunged, of God's perfections infinite,
His simple ways I muse, all kind; him, soul
Substantial of the universe, and his ends,
Divining better from those goodliest acts
In world foundations traceable, than in tomes
Named revelative, too oft to his nature false,
His boundless bounteousness. And, wotting well,
How to be sought he loves, not only in prayer
And praise, not only in virtue helped, wrong crushed,
But for himself essential, seek betimes,
Softly and solitary, nor deem to miss
Always the spot surpriseful, where he might
Self secretive, have hidden him; there no less
Conceivably, than in columned temples; now,
In sea halls echoing tidal thunders, walled
With wave-scooped rock, piled mightily crag on crag,
Like masonry of gods; in chasmy caves,
Cool, oozy, unsuspect of brangling crowds,
Where ocean oft his white steeds stalls; impaved
With gore-dyed granite, as though God, concerned
For private weal and suffering, had in wrath
And very truth, for ravaged lands, and fields
Depopulated, some pest enorme, hide-winged,
Horn-lidded as to his eyes, trode down to death,
And drowned in his own poisonous blood, gall-greened;
Then, 'neath earth's threshold buried, hot;—and now
Midst woods, O awful woods, ye natural fanes,
Whose very air is holy, and we breathe
Of God; he, while we worship, there for us.

Lucifer.
All this done leisurely, and some other things
Of like necessity, say, and a green old age
Waits sweetly both. Had I more faults than one
My favourite failing would be found, I fear,
In fondness for society. Much beside
Mountains and groves me 'lure.

Festus.
Ah true; there's man,
So rich in wants.

Lucifer.
And woman, wealthier still
In that particular, seeing she wants just now,
To want her master. There are maids I know
Look to be asked for yet, ere they grow grey.

Festus.
Oh, but I am put to the ban, this day.

Lucifer.
Let grief
Weep her eyes dry to their last tear, to-night;
She hath a trick of brightening up, ere morn,
Would startle many a ghost, could he but wait.

Exile mayhap, who knows? commute, our time,
With such accomplishments as I to thee
Own owed, such gifts and potencies as erst
Were promised, will be well filled up. Meanwhile
It is fit that something more were done for man,
By those who aim to benefit him, than aught
He now enjoys. Some social Paradise,
Some practicable Elysium, canst not plan,
Devise, imagine, scheme? It is scarce my cue.

Festus.
Long have I pondered such. But ne'er, while earth's
Incongruous nations each, as now, its end
Selfish would gain by force or fraud, exists
One chance that good men's dreams be verified.
Never till peace one-minded sway the whole.

Lucifer.
The sole equality now on earth is death;
The rich have ne'er enough of everything;
The poor have never enough of anything.
I am for judgment: that will settle all.
Nothing is to be done without destruction.
Death is the universal salt of states;
And blood the base of all things, law and war.
Society broken up and well ground down;
The world in short macadamised, might serve;—
The road to hell wants mending. Come away!

Festus.
But can such peace be attained without all war?

Lucifer.
Think so.

Festus.
Who lives to see were surely blessed.
And now, take note, I climb yon hills.

Lucifer.
Yon hills?
There's no one, sure, lives there, who—

Festus.
When shall I
Return?

Lucifer.
I'll think. When gorse, say's, out of bloom.

VI.

Our next
Adventure seems to promise fair, for be there
One scene, in life whence evil may be ruled
Absent, 'tis sure pure early love. But not
Love sole, with the world untried before one's eye,
Eager to search all being, though of gross cares
Freed, and in easefullest obscurity lapped,
Can make soul happy. Doubts of things divine,—
Generate spontaneously, or thought inborne
By rumour of the world, as pestful seeds
Mist-sown, or of spirit in self-forced fellowship
Colleagued, from far conveyed; as dominant soul
Remote Seer's tranced intelligence shakes,—distract.
But see love's star now rise, which, ere it set,
Shall, many a mischance bettered, perfect life,
And lead to heavenward; hear of holy ends,
Goaded into man's heart; and worth of faith.

Alcove—Lawn and Garden.
Festus and Clara.
Festus.
Days are to me of light when I rejoice
In earth, man, all things round me, and strong faith
Rules, as a prevalent wind the world, my mind;
The stars instil their virtues in the schemes
I muse, so much doth generous reason joy
In rich forecasts of full-orbed happiness;
And the all-fatherly Deity smiles. Anon,
Come surging from afar, dark doubts like wrecks
Of fore-spent storms we deemed we had done with. Wave
On wave of darkness, like the shadowy tides
Of that tenebrous sea which billowing breaks
Soundless, on lunar shores, o'erfloods my soul;
And nothing satisfies. All ends seem mixed
With means that make for evil, and if I see
God's hand, it is everywhere distinct from things;
Moulding them not, nor guiding.

Clara.
How! Life's goods,
Heaven's gifts, health, beauty; earth's, wealth, culture, love,
Are means, not ends. A mind absorbed in means
Means but a mind that's mean, which, endless, errs.

Festus.
It may be, nay, 'tis probable. Say it's true.

Clara.
Let us do more than this. Have noblest ends:
Ends which will bear the eye of God, nor flinch.

Festus.
But this means strife. Why should I strive with men?
No ends have I to gain that man can give.

Clara.
But thou, I thought, hadst highest intents, and these
It was that drew my soul to thine, resolved,
I deemed, to head the advance of men. And now,
Wouldst note at ease the bubble of fountains rise,
Or count the May-thorn's bloomlets as they fall,
Fragrant, in faëry showers? Shall I attune
Mine harp-strings strained into their subtense beam,
Luminous and hollow as is a golden flame,
To songs commemorative of perfect bliss
Earth now enjoys; of war, of woe extinct,
Sin, ignorance, penury? Or are all these
Ills, yet to be o'ermastered?

Festus.
These be thoughts
Do scare the spirit that rouses them.

Clara.
May be.
And sometimes self-love scared is self-love cured.

Festus.
Turn for the hour to things that leave us not
Inconsolable i' the end; to know the day
Is filling up with feelings that will last
Memorially, all life.

Clara.
All time, I hope.

Festus.
Hope, and its lunes, its tides to their very heart,
Ebbed out, with me are at dead water. Come!
Let us consider deeplier, things that be.
What happy things, to wit, are youth, love, sunshine;
How sweet to feel the sun upon the heart;
To know it is lighting up the rosy blood;
And with all joyous feelings making shine
The dark breast, like a grot with prismy spar.

Clara.
Yes, there are feelings so serene and sweet,
Plumed as with musical lightness, that they more
Than make amends for their passingness, and God's
Condition balance to surcease for aye;
As yon light fleecy cloudlet, floating along,
Like golden down from some high angel's wing,
So breaks and beautifies the blue, we lose
Just reckoning of its imminent end. And love
Hath some such very semblance, or I err
At large. I wonder if I could ever love
Another. How I should start to see on the sward
A shadow not thine own, arm-linked with mine.

Festus.
Thou art happy, I doubt not. I, if nothing else,
I have renewed my youth.

Clara.
When wert thou deemed
Aged?

Festus.
Oh! thou knowest not then, how old I am.
Know in my brain I bear each several age

Whose spirit I have by study absorbed, and so
Assimilated, that morally we are one.
If not yet accurately defined my years,
I am of full age; I have come into mine own,
By grief-right. Take me, peer of want and woe;
Proud thrall of doubt, my liege.

Clara.
Be not so sad.
See, here's a garland I have bound for thee.

Festus.
Nay, crown thyself: it will suit thee better, love.
Place wreaths of everlasting flowers on tombs,
And deck with fading beauties forms that fade.
Put it away, I will no crown save this;
And could the line of dust which here I trace
Upon my brow, but warrant dust beneath,—
Nor more, for aye; or could this bubble frame
Informed with soul, lashed from the stream of life
By its own impetus, but burst at once
And vanish, part on high and part below,
I would be happy, nor would envy death:
Could I, like heaven's bolt, earthing, quench myself,
This moment would I burn me out a grave.

Clara.
What canst thou mean?

Festus.
Mean, is there not a future?
Passed, present, coming, be accursèd, each?

Clara.
Oh say not so. The future sure is filled
With promises, are not even promises sweet
From one we love and trust, of bliss. And we,
Shall we not ever live and love, as now?

Festus.
For love, I know not: live I fear we must.

Clara.
And love, because we then are happiest, love;
We shall lack nothing having love; and we,
We must be happy everywhere, we twain.
Life spiritual, changeless even as is the sea
In essence, though of variablest aspect,—
Rolling the same through all earth's ages, now
O'er mountain tops where only snow abides,
And the sunbeam hurries coldly by, or, o'er
The vales, ship guesting now, of some old world,
Older than ancient man's,—is ever great,
Clear, self-continuative, reflecting heaven:
So then with us. Our natures raised, refined
From these poor forms, our days shall pass in peace
And love; no thought of human littleness
Shall cross our high calm souls, shining and pure
As the gold gates of heaven. Like some deep lake
Upon a mountain summit they shall rest
High above cloud and storm of life like this,
All peace and power and passionless purity.
Or, if a thought of other troublous times

Like a chance raindrop, ruffle but for a moment
Their heavenward face, it shall regardless pass,
Recordless, momentary.

Festus.
Oh! who so wise
As thou in things incredible, things unknown?

Clara.
I love to meditate upon bliss to come.
Not that I am unhappy here, but given
To hope more perfect bliss may rectify
The lower feeling we enjoy now. Earth,
This world, this life is not enough for us;
They are nothing to our amplitude of mind;
For place we must have space, for time must have
Eternity, and for a spirit godhood.

Festus.
Mind means not happiness; power not good.

Clara.
True bliss
In holy life seek, charity menwards, love
To God. Why should such duties cease, such powers
Decay, of nature spiritual, boundless scope,
And worthy of high uplifted life for ever?
Man, like the airborn eagle who remains
On earth only to feed and sleep and die;
But whose delight is on his lonely wing,
Wide-sweeping as a mind, to force the skies
High as the light-fall, ere, begirt with clouds
It dash this nether world, immortal man,
If measuring not with equal mind the All,
His aspirations yet by nought below
Divinity coped, up rushes, aye, towards heaven,
As his essential home. O faith! most pure
Of things; the world's sole honour!

Festus.
Come, what's faith?
Let us make believe like children; faith? A tower
Reared of round boulders on fear's quakeful bog;
A belfry built of dominoes on the palm
A pulse's throb o'erthrows;—that's my faith. Thine?
Proceed; past doubt thy faith works miracles.
Work one in me now. Granted I have sinned,
Sin would I not for ever. I repent.
I would again be blameless. Hear, Lord. Speak
To me thy child in thine invisible likeness,
The wind, as once of yore. Let me be pure;
Let me be once more as an innocent child!
As ere the clear could trouble me; when life
Was sweet and calm as is a sister's kiss;
And not the wild and whirlwind touch of passion
Which though it scarcely 'light upon the lips,
With breathless swiftness sucks the soul out of sight,
So that we lose all thought of it. Speaks he? No!
Though meanest of all possible miracles,
The vast inviolate silence answers, No.

Clara.
Dost thou dictate to God?

Festus.
Now God forbid;
But faith and all its promises and forms,—
And save religion's forms what know men,—show
On heaven's part, most divine indifference.

Clara.
True faith nor biddeth nor abideth form.
Knee bended, eye uplift, with heart prostrate;
Is all man need to render, all God asks.
What to the faith are forms? A passing speck,
A crow upon the sky. God's worship is
That only he inspires! and his bright words
Writ in the red-leaved volume of the heart,
Return to him in prayer, as dew to heaven.
We quit the right way wantonly, and life
Call error: truth we shun, court soulless wit;
And say it is ignorance to adore. Our peace,
Our proper good we rarely seek or make,
Mindless of soul's beneficent powers and end
Immortal, as the pearl is of its worth,
The rose its scent, the wave its purity.

Festus.
My soul is like to die of unproved ends.

Clara.
But helps not here thy friend the spirit to arm
With proofs irrefutable of God's good rule
Life deathless, conquered ill?

Festus.
With proof of nothing.
He hath a dispensation, but of doubt,
Which umbers all my days. Spheres are, he avers,
And souls migrate in death to other stars—
Where contraries exist not; well's not well,
Nor ill ill; verity proveable not.

Clara.
The false one.
Truth is the same in every world as here.

Festus.
Quit we these saddening themes. My mind too long
Hath been begloomed by them. Sing then; for I love
Thy singing sacred as the sound of hymns,
On some bright sabbath morning, mid the moor,
Where all is still save praise, of rustic saints
Gathered beneath some wide-branched oak; high heaven
Sheds on the spirit its kindred calm; hard by,
The ripening grain its bright beard shakes i' the sun;
The wild bee hums more solemnly; the deep sky,
The fresh green grass, the sunny brook, the sun,
All look as if they knew the day, the hour,
And felt with man the need and joy of thanks.

Clara.
I cannot sing love's lightsome lays; thou knowst
Who can; but none who love as I; for I
Thy soul love, and would save it, Festus. Listen:

Is heaven a place where pearly streams
Glide over silver sand?
Like childhood's rosy dazzling dreams
Of some far faëry land?
Is heaven a clime where diamond dews
Glitter on fadeless flowers?
And mirth and music ring aloud
From amaranthine bowers?

Ah no; not such, not such is heaven!
Surpassing far all these;
Such cannot be the guerdon given
Man's wearied soul to please.
For saint and sinner here below
Such vain to be have proved:
And the pure spirit will despise
Whate'er the sense hath loved.

There we shall dwell with Sire and Son,
And with the mother-maid,
And with the Holy Spirit, one!
In glory like arrayed:
And not to one created thing
Shall our embrace be given;
But all our joy shall be in God:
For only God is heaven.

Festus.
I know that thou dost love me. I, in vain
Strive to love aught of earth or heaven but thee,
My first, last, only love: nor shall another
Tempt even my steadfast heart. Like far-off stars,
A thousand, sweet and bright and wondrous fair,
A thousand deathless miracles of beauty,
They shall e'er pass at all but eyeless distance,
And never mix with thy love, but be lost,
All meanly in its moonlike lustrousness.

Clara.
How still the air: the tree-tops stir no leaf,
But stand and peer on heaven's bright face as though
It slept, and they were loving it: they would not
Have the skies see them move, for summers, would they?
See that sweet cloud. It is watching us I am certain.
What have we here to make thee stay one second?
Away! thy sisters wait thee in the west,
The blushing bridesmaids of the sun and sea.
Would I were like thee, little cloud, to live
Ever in heaven; or, seeking earth, let fall
My spirit down only in droplets bright of love;
Sleep on night's dewy lap; and the next dawn,
Back with the sun to heaven; and so for aye,
Sweet cloudlet! Senseless seeming things there are,
One must, almost, count happy. Oft have I watched
A gossamer line sighing itself along
The air, as it seemed, and so thin, thin and bright,
Like a stray threadlet woven in light's gay loom,

I have envied it, a moment, followed: oft
Eye-tracked the sea-bird's down, blown o'er the wave,
Now touching it, spirited again, aloft,
Now out of sight, now nigh, till in some bright fringe
Of streamy foam, as in a cage, at last,
A playful death it dies;—and mourned its death.

Festus.
Surely thou camest straightwise from the stars,
And instantly from heaven: thy calm bright thought,
Pure as the roseate snow on polar plains,
In starlike flakelets falling, stamped with proof
Of its high geniture, suits and soothes my mind.
O well thou deemest of celestial things,
And high-born duties dedicate to earth.
To dignify the day with deeds of good,
And eve constellate with all holy thoughts,
This is to live, and let our lives narrate,
In a new version, solemn and sublime,
The grand old legend of humanity.
But think'st thou now the future is a state
Like positive with this, or e'er can be aught
Than another present, toilsome, full of cares,
Duties, perhaps; that soul will e'er be nigher
To God than now, save as may seem by mind's
Debility, as from weakness of the eye,
And the illusions matter forms, yon sun
Shows, hot and wearied, resting upon the hill?
It would be well I think to live as though
Nought more were to be looked for; to be good
Because it is best here; and leave hope and fear
For lives below ourselves. If earth persuades not
That I owe prayer and praise and love to God,
While all I have he gives, will heaven? will hell?
No, neither, never.

Clara.
I think not all with thee.

Festus.
And how, unless worst ills revive, how live?
Shall all defects of mind and fallacies
Of feeling be immortalised? All needs,
All joys, all sorrows, be again gone through?
Shall heaven but be old earth created new?
Or earth, tree-like, transplanted into heaven,
To flourish by the waters of life; we, still,
Within its shade cropping the fruit life-cored?

Clara.
Not so! Man's nature bodily, soul-wise, both,
Shall be changed throughout, exalted, glorified;
And all shall be alike, like God; and all
Unlike each other, and themselves. The earth
Shall vanish from the thoughts of those she bore,
As have the idols of the olden time
From men's hearts of the present. All delight

And all desire shall be with heavenly things,
And the new nature God bestowed on man.

Festus.
Then man shall be no more man; but an angel.

Clara.
Have I not heard thee hint of spirit friends,
Other than him thou spakest of now?

Festus.
Thou hast heard.

Clara.
Where are they now?

Festus.
Ah close, mayhap, at hand.
And since now other miracles lack, observe!
I have a might immortal, and can ken
With angels. Neither sky, nor night, nor earth,
Hinders me. Through the forms of things I see
Their essences; and thus, even now, behold—
But where I cannot show to thee—far round,
Nature herself—the whole effect of God.
Mind, matter, motion, heat, time, love, and life,
And death, and immortality—those chief
And first-born giants all are there—all parts,
All limbs of her their mother: she is all.

Clara.
And what does she?

Festus.
Produce: it is her life.
The three I named last, life, death, deathlessness,
Glide in elliptic path round all things made—
For none save God can fill the perfect whole;
And are but to eternity as is
The horizon to the world. At certain points
Each seems the other; now the three are one;
Now, all invisible; and now, as first,
Moving in measured round. To me there seems
A mocking, flickering likeness in their mien,
To some I know. Not seldom all I see,
Or mix with, seems a fleeting masque prepared
By some obsequious tyrant, bent on fraud;
Some despot servile to necessity; who,
For his own ends, plants before our inward eyes,
The eternal phantom of the universe,
And bids us call it real.

Clara.
How look these beings?

Festus.
Ah! Life looks gaily and gloomily in turns;
With a brow chequered like the sward, by leaves,
Between which the light glints; and she, careless wears
A wreath of flowers; part faded and part fresh.
And death is beautiful; and sad; and still.
She seems too happy; happier far than life—
In but one feeling, apathy: and on
Her chill white brow frosts bright a braid of snow.

Clara.
And immortality?

Festus.
She looks alone;
As though she would not know her sisterhood.
And on her brow a diadem of fire,

Matched by the conflagration of her eye,
Outflaming even that eye which in my sleep
Beams close upon me till it bursts from sheer
O'erstrainedness of sight, burns.

Clara.
What do they?

Festus.
Each strives to win me to herself.

Clara.
How?

Festus.
Death
Opens her sweet white arms and whispers, peace!
Come say thy sorrows in this bosom! This
Will never close against thee; and my heart,
Though cold, cannot be colder much than man's.
Come! All this soon must end; and soon the world
Shall perish leaf by leaf, and land by land;
Flower by flower; flood by flood; and hill
By hill away. Oh! come, come! Let us die.

Clara.
Say that thou wilt not die!

Festus.
Nay, I love death.
But Immortality, with finger spired,
Points to a distant, giant world—and says
There, there is my home. Live along with me!

Clara.
Canst see that world?

Festus.
Just—a huge shadowy shape;
It looks a disembodied orb; the ghost
Of some great sphere which God hath stricken dead.
Or like a world which God hath thought—not made.

Clara.
Follow her, Festus! Does she speak again?

Festus.
She never speaks but once: and now, in scorn,
Points to this dim, dwarfed, misbegotten sphere.

Clara.
Why let her pass?

Festus.
That is the great world-question.
Life would not part with me; and from her brow
Tearing her wreath of passion flowers, she flung it
Around my neck, and dared me struggle then.
I never could destroy a flower; and none
But fairest hands like thine grace even with me
The culling of a rose. And Life, sweet Life,
Vowed she would crop the world for me, and lay it
Herself before my feet even as a flower.
And when I felt that flower contained thyself,
One drop within its nectary kept for me,
I lost all count of those strange sisters three,
And where they be I know not. But I see
One who is more to me.

Clara.
I know not how
Thou hast this power and knowledge; I but hope
It comes from good hands, be it not thine own
Force, simply of mind.

Festus.
Consider man's employ
So many years, and his few minutes' thought

On heaven, and own 'tis less even, what we do,
Than what we think, that fits us for the future.

Clara.
I would we had a little world to ourselves
With none but we two on it.

Festus.
And if God
Gave us a star, what could we do with it
But what we can, without it? Wish it not.

Clara.
I'll not wish then for stars; but I could love
Some peaceful spot where we might dwell unknown;
Where home-born joys might nestle round our hearts
As swallows 'neath our roofs, and rustic peace,
With blessings of the lowly, innocent aims,
And kindliest neighbour charities, blend their sweets,
As dewy tangled flowerets midst one bed,
In pure and unimpassioned life.

Festus.
A cot
I know, rose-roofed, by myrtle masked, with porch
Twixt vine and honeysuckle embowered; near by,
A rill, heath-braided, crowned with flowering fern,
Repeats the silvery tattle of the hills
To rocks, less garrulous, maybe; pleasance, grove,
Silent, while song-birds sleep, with pensive gloom,
With florid gaiety, each in turn lure. There,
Summer's wild roselet scents the unthoughtful step
That stills its pleading fragrance; see, the head
Pardoning, peeps up, unharmed. The comforting hum
Of bees is always audible; allwhere seen
Fruit sweetly eagering, that not cloys. There, backed
By every sunset, ocean, in his heart,
Changeful, but charmful aye, heaven's glories now
Liberally redoubles; now conceals in's breast,
Rivallous and agitated. There, friendliest morn
Wakes you through latticed jasmin; eve, retiring,
Breathes of dew-beaded eglantine; and night
Her luminous forces, starwise, oft deploys,
To unveil, for sage,—so much as sage to unveil
May list, the fates premonitory of men.

Clara.
That spot thou knowest?

Festus.
Oh yes, my feet could find it,
Eyes had I none. Sometime, when leisure calls,
In virtue's vacancies, we will search it out.

Clara.
Sometime may never come. But look! Day dies
Surely, of too much beauty, which becomes
In its intensity holy; and we fear.
See how yon cloudlet climbs the welkin, lone,
Like lambling strayed from some gold-fleeced flock
Low folded by the sun; now, dimmer grown
Upon the aëry mountain's side, and now,
High in the infinite heavens, it disappears,

Saint-like updrawn to God's invisible breast,
Wherein is rest for all things; thunder, there,
Nor the blue flashing levin, dread seraphim
And cherubim of storms, complain no more;
But hushed to silence, and their eyes, tearblind,
Crushed to his fatherly bosom who now bids forth
The elements, now recalls them, sleep in peace.
Peace, how divine; peace love I more than love.

Festus.
The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.
Earth's taints, the odours of the skies are in't.
Would man were aught but that he seems, the mean
Of all extremes. Brute's death, the deathlessness
Of fiend or angel better shows than all
The doubtful prospects of our painted dust.
And all morality can teach is, bear;
And all religion can inspire is, hope.

Clara.
It is enough. Fruition of the fruit
Of the great tree of life, is not for earth.
Stars are its fruit, its lightest leaf is life.
The heart hath many a sorrow beside love,
Yea, many as are the veins which visit it.
The love of aught on earth is not its chief,
Nor should be.

Festus.
True; inclusive of them all
There is the one main sorrow, life: for what
Can spirit, dissevered from the great one, God,
Feel but a grievous longing to rejoin
Its infinite, its author, and its end?

Clara.
And yet is life a thing to be beloved,
And honoured holily, and bravely borne.
A man's life may be all ease, and his death
By some dark chance unthought of agony;
Or, life may be all suffering, and decease
A flower-like sleep; or both be full of woe;
Or each comparatively painless. Heaven
Blame not for inequalities like these,
They may be justified; how canst thou know?
They may be only seeming; canst thou judge?
They may be done away with utterly
By loving, knowing, fearing God the truth.
Nor should love's self be grievous; but so blent
With the world's dues, life's future, nature's claims,
As it is, all woes their dolorous kinship prove
With it. Nor deem then aught ill remediless.
In all distress of spirit, grief of heart,
In bodily agony, or in mental woe,
Rebuffs and vain assumptions of the world,
Or the poor spite of weak and wicked souls,
Joy even in thine own anguish. Suffering
Assimilates thee to him, not less than good.

Think upon what thou shalt be. Think on God.
Then ask thyself what is the world? What time?
And all their mountainous inequalities? What?
Are not all equal as dust atomies strewn
On heaven's bright concave?

Festus.
What is, thou hast not
Power to persuade me of?

Clara.
I now go. Farewell!
For the night darkens fast, and the dews are falling.
Remember what thou saidst about the stars.

Festus.
Oh, yes. I ofttimes think of them and thee
Together.

Clara.
True?

Festus.
Star of my life art thou.

Clara.
Another night, and thou wilt tell me more
Of wonders thou canst see?

Festus.
Ay, thou shalt view
Thyself celestial marvels.

Clara.
Nay, I dread.
But hap me weal or woe, I am thine.

Festus.
Farewell!

Clara.
Grant me but heaven, that I this soul incline,
Though mine go void of joy, to thy good ends.

VII.

A man in love sees wonders naturally.
Ours sole,—abnormal gifts but gradual given,
Can make participable his starry views,
And intuitions spiritual instilled,
May be, by angel kind of other worlds.
An ominous parable told by his love, endured,
Heart-faltering, he his constancy asserts:
Still, who can thought control? Who shun one wish,
That, like a stranger in the street, we meet
But can't aside from, dreamwise, haunts us;—see;
The first leaf falls of heart's bloom. Discontent
With nature, strong desire, implanted how?
Springs up to know all life, the secrets learn
Of science and time's truths arcane; projects
Evil would fulfil, that thus forebusied, soul,
All virtue of self-ascription to its Lord
Might lose. The heart, doubt-torn, disposed to death;
End, if e'er written within Fate's book, erased.

Lawn and Parterre—Bridge; and Village Church in distance. Evening.
Festus and Clara.
Festus.
My soul's orb darkens, as a sudden star
Which, heaven and earth of wonder emptied, wanes;
Passes for aye; eclipsed not; self-consumed:

All but a cloudy vapour, dimming there,
The spot in space it once illumed. To myself
Once seemed I as a mount of light; but now
A pit of night. I dare no more of this.
For, like a shipwrecked stranger in a lighthouse,
I have looked down upon the utter side
Of such thoughts, from the leeming room of reason,
And beheld all beyond black roaring madness.
Meanwhile, have done with this or that; between
This angel incomplete, and finished fiend,
Choose I must. Say, I have chosen. What, if still,
As earth through all her polar midnight feels
The o'erbearing strain which warps her sunwards, I
That know I may not rid me of; the sense
Of late success, disastrous, to be gained
At price of present happiness. It is done.
I am due but to mine end. The world itself
Shall reconcile to virtue, ere I part
Unsatiate of the world. Fate! ask not, sole,
One sacrifice, this heart faithful to me,
Nearer which ought to be each hour; but, asked,
The incommunicant future yields no sign,
More than the silvery mirror of the sea
Mist-veiled, all imagery, of hers; nor more,
Though sought with prayers, foretells me heaven through those
Lights and perfections of our nature, God
Hath shrined in us. It is by events we live.
Come nearlier to me, Clara. Where hast been
This long, long hour?

Clara.
I have been but here, hard by;
Planting these flowerets by the brook, that they,
Not of felicitous feeling void, their own,
Or other's beauties might, reflective, note
In the swift sparkling wave; and odorous gifts
Uncustomary, exchange.

Festus.
Ah happy flowers!
When shall I know such calm? But I have vowed
To be joyous in myself. I will be. See!
Here have I lain all day in this green nook,
Shaded by larch and hornbeam, ash and yew,
A living well and runnel at my feet;
And wild flowers dancing to some delicate air:
An urn-topped column, and its ivy wreath,
Skirting my sight, as thus I lie and look
Upon the blue unchanging sacred skies;
And thou too, gentle Clara by my side,
With lightsome brow and beaming eye, and bright,
Long glorious locks which drop upon thy cheek
Like gold-hued cloudflakes on the rosy morn.

Oh when the heart is full of sweets to o'erflowing,
And ringing to the music of its love,
Who not an angel, nor a hypocrite,
Could speak or think of happier states?

Clara.
In truth
I know not; but a sadness that to me
Feels mortally prophetic, charged with threats
Of severance, coldness, fears of possible death,
Change in the faith maybe of one of us,
And suchlike sad contingencies, weighs down
At times, my heart much; sadlier more than all
Life's promises seem to lighten or lift.

Festus.
Away
With baleful thoughts; let joyaunce be our life.
Well art thou Clara hight, for soul more bright,
More lovely, lives not out of Paradise.

Clara.
I have another name whose element
Is tears, they tell me. In the coming time,
Who knows? it may become me more than this.

Festus.
'Gainst that sad augury set thou my resolve;
And be it fordone for ever.

Clara.
Fate will prove.
But oh! I dread estrangement, dread to dream;
Lest even dreams should wrong thee, and thou act
As in time's great betrothals, legends tell,
Man brake his vows, and nature's holy heart.
For I have heard how once in the head of days
Man lived with nature as his sacred bride,
In union pure and perfect. All her wealth,
Which God had dowered her with, from the rich gems
Which starred her sandals, and so lit her path,
To the predominant virtues of the spheres,
And latent life of elements, she to him,
For that her lord was poor though potent, gave.
He too with ampler thought and vital truths,
Strewn in divine disorder like the stars
Which to the ignorant mean nought, but to the eye
Instructed, oft configure boundless good;
With deep conceit of mysteries, than all rocks
Fire-grained, sea-couched, elder, and stories fraught
With wisdom, in eternal fable penned;
Aught worthy knowing was right early known;
So sanctified her spirit, that she became
Like a created goddess. Her he taught
The life in life of faith, and what on earth
Was powerfullest of things, the bended knee,
Which can prevail o'er God; and how, all years,
For one clear hour, earth hath the option now
To rest and ruin all things, but renew
Her maiden splendour and primæval bliss;

Or, bearing fate, like chance of equal meed
Secure the starry skies. These mark her thread,
Amid the hush of heaven, their thronging spheres,
And her light footsteps lauding, breathless wait
Her choice in charmèd silence; she sweeps on.
Such holy confidence hath earth in heaven,
Her surety, that though favourite nay elect
Herself, now, all shall ultimately be blessed.
Thus intimate with time's deep things and high
They reigned, like regal angels. To his kin
All powers and pleasures he promulged; and rites,
Omen and augury hallowing, rayed round shrines
Where gods might worship; and beyond this, fed
His soul on secret wisdom, as on fasts
The spirit thriveth. These espoused, inspired
With their own harmonised perfections, lived
Long while in bliss and honour, each content
With faith-life, mythic, vast; all arts to them,
All science ancillary. But ah! in fine,
And in the heel of time which treads us down,
There came a change. The wrong was surely man's;
For nature fails not; but how none hath shown.
Whether a too approving smile misled,
Dim her ascent but brilliant in her fall,
Some emulative handmaid; and what first
Seemed zeal to serve grew rivalry to please;
Or fair confederates, faultless till they fell,
Made strength vaunt of his failure; this we know;
Imperfect wearieth of perfection sole.
So he, the keystone loosed of loyalty,
Lapsed from his liege love, warps his heart from her,
Beauteous and bounteous as a sovereign saint;
And to a thousand lax and painted arts,
Of barren glitter and unholy wiles,
Like sultan flaunting through his gay hareem,
Flowered with the carnal beauties of all climes,
Vows the idolatrous homage of his lips.
His home he left, and leaving, lost his rights
O'er nature's secret treasures; for in belief
Walking no more; nor with the miracles
Himself of old, divine magician, wrought,
Faith instigating, and storied in the stars,
Earth's holy primer, versant; he, in art's
Sensuous conceits, or idol imagery,
Lewd solace seeks; or else with science, guide
Guideless, self-nominated, through life's wide maze
Roams with no saving clue. Keys all in vain,
He forges; locks he forces; nought is there.
In vain conjures the elements; these are born
Of nature's household, and are sworn to her;

100

No mysteries, now, soul-thrilling, prodigies all
Repressed or ridiculed, faith made thrall to fact,
And life, well nigh sabbatic wholly, once,
With scarce one hour left of a holy day.
His tongue hath lost the simple spell of truth.
Neither believing nor believed, he roams,
Peaceless and powerless, round his forfeit realm,
Free, though as outcast. Yea, till he redeem
His troth to nature, she who was his queen,
Ere consort, and at her immaculate feet,
Whiter than moonlit water, shall lay down
For aye his falsehoods, brave through penitence, rest,
Nor holy home, shall ever again be man's.

Festus.
Neither was nature perfect, as I thought.

Clara.
Oh, is it possible thou hast never known
How both derived their fates? Wilt hear?

Festus.
Proceed.

Clara.
Yon sun, just set, all seeing, all beseen,
Filling the sacred seven and urns of fire,
Had, time unlimited, lived debarred of life
Soul-hallowed; when our God, his kind intent
Now agefully matured, all things prepared,
Incorporated its spirit, and for mate
Made him the lucid moon, now rolling round
His disk immense, at fatal distance doomed.
O Sun, O Moon, king of the skies and queen;
Hero and heroine of the universe, ye;
Lovers divine, daughter and son of God,
How shall a feeble, humble tongue like mine
Your fall sublime, sad but illustrious lapse,
To mortal mind convey? Free were they both
To roam the skies; or, if forbidden aught
Were named in heaven's infinitude, so vast
Their spatial liberty, no laws they knew.
But written within the book divine of fate
One law there was. For ages unconceived,
They nothing knew but light unshadowed, life,
Love, liberty, all unhaunted, undeformed
By one divisive moment, or mere fear;
Till, in the plains celestial wandering once,
And heaven till then no happier orbs embraced,
A radiant path as though by feet of gods
Trodden, star-littered, as earth with golden seed
Autumnal, on the gleaner's yellow road,
They neared; and where it brightly branched in twain,
One listless moment separated.

Festus.
Alas!
Thenceforth one sole tradition streaks time's stream,
From the dumb ages of the passed, to truth's
Eternal future. Ah yes, I see the sun

101

Unguarded, now betrayed, incarcerate, bound,
Blinded, insulted, mocked, to incessant toil
Doomed, wageless; bound; now, ready to be slain
In bonds on heaven's high hill; yea, see him at last,
Smote by the star-bear's wide and wintry wound,
To yearly death, set 'neath the snake-wreathed pole,
Hiding in Hadean tomb, his disrayed crown.
Tales though traditionary, still hopeless not.
For again I see him majestic and serene,
Though suffering from the unkindly detriment
Which earthly nature treacherous him hath wrought.
He quits the aërial desert; lifts his head
Glad, like wrecked swimmer, shorewards, and salutes,
As with a kiss of fire our hallowed earth,
The threshold of his old abode the heavens.
Once more in heaven, the reascendent light
Beams from the burning cross which marks his course
Triumphant over lessening night; once more
The lord of nature lifts his conquering brow
As though from death eterne.

Clara.
These lovers twain
For a space though separated, I said, full soon
Their spheral courses recombining, came
To the vast portal of a luminous fane
Guarded by living forms of shapes unknown,
But void within. A vacant throne was all
The dome sublime contained; upon whose steps
A star-scaled serpent slumbered. Roused—

Festus.
No more!
If only as some cloud-giant hurled from heaven,
And vapouring as he falls, thy words to me
Seem threatful of time future, and my mind
Give sensible unease. Peace will lastly come,
Howe'er disseverance loving souls may grieve.
The wise well know true union is in heaven,
And there alone.

Clara.
It may be.

Festus.
Types of truth,
These pressed upon creation through all spheres
Material, mental, by God's hand and seal:
Truths which time's ear for ages hears with awe
Servile, nor knows their meaning; as earth stunned
With thunders, said, of gods; till some sage earns
Heaven's humble secret; and from man's freed mind
The fiery fiction fades. Think thou no more
On ill-houred apologue or of man or star.
Hear rather thou what glads me to have seen
Trance-wise, a bright miraculous mystery
Of God; a vision worth all sequels lost
Of love estranged. The great reunion hear:

102

The divine marriage of the moon and sun.
The sun was flaming high in heaven; the moon
Mighty though mild, and all the saintly stars
Beaming at once in grandeur and grave joy.
'Twas the world's All-Sire gave the bride. The Hours,
Companions of her course, forewrit on high,
And all its sevenfold Sanctities, virgin peers,
Were her immortal bridemaidens; and strewed
On her white way, by many a mansion lamped
With festive radiance, astral wreath, and robe,
Girdle, and palm-branch,—palm, sole tree that greens
Both heaven and earth, to where in dayless time,
Degreeless space, her absolute home, prepared
Nigh to the infinite, stood. Struck loud their lyres
Of light, the angels; and to the feet of those
Divine ones bowed them, as to spirit and soul
Conjoined, of things celestial; with acclaim
Ecstatic, far off hailing each and crying,
Welcome thou lord, thou bride of light; all joy
In everlasting being be yours; and all
The universal blesser, God, can give.
Choicest of all the chosen, thy love is more
To the soul delicious than, to scent, the rose,
Purer than is the lily or is the light.
Lord of the dawn, thee now the wearied world
Awaits; earth's eyes with watching for this day
Fail. The bread's broken and the wine is poured,
And all the guests are gathered, from the bounds
Of heaven's imperial horizon, to this,
Our bright palatial centre. All things serve
The hallowing rite, which nature owns with God.
And so they became one. In golden he,
In silver car came she, down the blue skies.
But on return they clomb the clouds in one;
And vanished in their snow. The marriage feast
Was held, throughout the intelligible world,
An universal holiday; all now 'lumed
With light than sunlight softer, than the moon's,
Mightier and more intense; nor since have ceased
The great congratulations. Peace and love
Pervade the perfect state, and all is bliss.

Clara.
True prophet mayst thou be. But list; that sound
The passing-bell the spirit should solemnise;
For, while on its emancipate path, the soul
Still waves its upward wings, and we still hear
The warning sound, it is known, we well may pray.

Festus.
But pray for whom?

Clara.
It means not. Pray for all.
Pray for the good man's soul

103

He is leaving earth for heaven,
And it soothes us to feel that the best
May be forgiven.

Festus.
Pray for the sinful soul;
It flëeth, we know not where;
But wherever it be let us hope;
For God is there.

Clara.
Pray for the rich man's soul;
Not all be unjust, nor vain;
The wise he consoled; and he saved
The poor from pain.

Festus.
Pray for the poor man's soul;
The death of this life of ours
He hath shook from his feet; he is one
Of the heavenly powers.
Pray for the old man's soul;
He hath laboured long; through life
It was battle or march. He hath ceased,
Serene, from strife.

Clara.
Pray for the infant's soul;
With its spirit crown unsoiled,
He hath won, without war, a realm;
Gained all, nor toiled.

Festus.
Pray for the struggling soul;
The mists of the straits of death
Clear off; in some bright star-isle
It anchoreth.
Pray for the soul assured;
Though it wrought in a gloomy mine,
Yet the gems it earned were its own
That soul's divine.

Clara.
Pray for the simple soul;
For it loved, and therein was wise;
Though itself knew not, but with heaven
Confused the skies.

Festus.
Pray for the sage's soul;
'Neath his welkin wide of mind
Lay the central thought of God,
Thought undefined.
Pray for the souls of all
To our God that all may be,
With forgiveness crowned, and joy
Eternally.

Clara.
Hush! for the bell hath ceased;
And the spirit's fate is sealed;
To the angels known; to man
Best unrevealed.

Festus.
Stay; what wouldst say, yet? Something, surely, sad
Darkens thy mind's disk. Speak it.

104

Clara.
Nay, not sad.
Some other time.

Festus.
Why now, love.

Clara.
Well then thus.
These vast unearthly powers thou hast, thou saidst
I should myself for once partake. Let me
Assure mine own heart they be innocent.
Refused, I judge them evil; if harmless they,
Thou wilt permit me share, or view, the means.
This ask I therefore, not from vain desire
Of prying into mysteries, nor as test
Of words of thine; for thee believe I truly:
But as a proof of love and harmlessness,
To view with these same marvelling eyes of mine,
The sensible form of some obedient sprite,
Or invocable angel. Wilt thou?

Festus.
Ay.
Wouldst parley Luniel on her silvery seat,
Or the star-tiared Ourania? for the night
Deepens in heaven; and even now I see
Earth's cardinal world-watchers, each prepare
His wing to poise for paradisal flight,
Relieved by darker angel.

Clara.
None of these.
Behold yon star just trembling into light.
Hath it a tutelar spirit?

Festus.
Yea, every star.

Clara.
Prepare thy spell then. I would see its form;
And hear its voice.

Festus.
Weird charm nor spell I use;
Nor incantation. My sole magic, might.
Mine only sign, this; this my spirit ring.
Prayer, faith, and a pure heart can draw down heaven.
Most surely then one star. Kneel thou with me.
Spirit of yon star, that now
Peer'st through God's all-clothing sky,
List, we need thee here below;
Leave thy mystic light on high.
By the all-compelling name,
Thought alone, but uttered never;
Word in heaven and earth the same,
Come thou now, and come thou ever.

Clara.
I feel a light, a voiceable power.

Festus.
Arise!
What wilt thou of't?

Clara.
Nought. Let it speak.

Festus.
Attend.

Star Spirit.
Man's vital frame of the elements is ta'en;
And when by sacred energy of mind,
He nature's robe can thread by thread unwind,

105

Till death's proved nothingness, show sunwise plain
Life's allness; heaven's true science then ye gain;
Learn how God yearns all souls in bliss to bind;
How, too, through heaven and angels, stars and earth,
He, All-Sire, bounteous, wise as just, through light,
Light natural and intelligible which springs
From Deity, both, eternal outflowings,
Spread through the universe of death and birth,
Sweet surety of immortal essence brings
To spirit advised of reason infinite,
And ultimate content of all living things.
For as even all mere existence hath due worth,
End justified by God, who caused to be;
So, knit together by wisest amity,
Plant, planet, star, gem, life instinctive, life
Angelic; all, man's soul, by like decree,
Teach, each through noble or virtuous quality,
The whole with order, goodness, happiness rife,
His being and progress through eternity.
Know mortal, then, that with or gem or flower,
Love's glance, or earth-lent ray of farthest star,
To such as, faith-led, seek in doubt's dark hour
Truth, holiest influences may be, yea are;
And gracious interchange of special power.

Clara.
Star-spirit, it is so.

Star Spirit.
Who his soul-path knows
To the one universal Spirit, and rightly seeks
How long or sore soe'er his struggles, falls,
Relapses, shall, by penitent labour nerved,
And in spirit refreshed by heavenly counsels brought
By the angel of the day, who gives to God
His hourly record of men's deeds, at last,
Soul-perfectness enjoy; his life's long course,
With all best purposes strengthened,—as a stream
Sea-bound, that with a thousand rills empowered
No meet recipient save the main knows; summed
In the eternal Good.

Festus.
So be it with all.

Clara.
Oh I have gazed on spiritual beauty, known
Till now, by none.

Festus.
Let both rejoice in truths
We may hold, loyally, supreme. As when
Before some mighty suzerain, crowned of God,
A vassal sultan, tribute to discharge,
Or homage yield, kneels, resolutely content;
Nations kneel with him, and in his prostrate brow,
A people of pride kiss dust; so I, with all
Truth-lovers, though a half-tribe scarce of man,
And dizzied yet with soul-light, Spirit, to thee.
Thy starry name?

106

Star Spirit.
Pneumaster.

Clara.
Where dost dwell?

Star Spirit.
I in my star abide, yet oft in heaven.
Not where the ante-formal seraphs beam,
Nor cherubim with countenance winged; who round
Heaven circling, as with whirlwind wings of light,
A holy and living throne for the Spirit, form,
All-hallowing; but where sainted souls attain,
Heroical; chanting now, God's mercy thrice
Victorious o'er all worlds sin-treasoned, sworn
To evil and vanity; who the mysteries now
Of wisdom hymn, the holy inspiring light
Which Deity sows in nature and in stars,
Sows, reaps, and in men's souls replants, blessed heirs
Of either world, above beloved, below
Accepted; now, with guardian spirits of spheres,
Angelical and elect, mixed, I, too, serve;
All orders of each other inpenetrant, now;
For, by the fall of Lucifer, pride's no more,
If e'er in heaven; in heaven, as now on earth,
Humility, highest of all virtues, known.
I thus at thy behest, immortal, come
To obey a mortal's will, thine own, whose sleep
The angels guard, with dreams bestarred, of heaven;
Dreams that oft check, with suspensory charm,
The wing of wandering heavenly; dreams I ask
To inspire, then, on mine own bright ray return.

Clara.
Holy and lovely sprite, be thou with God.

Star Spirit.
Cherished of heaven, earth's choicest souls, farewell!

Clara.
Farewell, too, thou.

Festus.
Adieu, sweet soul; may night,
Earth's healing shadow, from her sphere-bright form
Unfolded virtuously, thy soul release
From all ill, all defect; that so through dreams
Thou mayst in spiritual Edens taste the joys
Anticipative, thou hopest, and feel the sense
Of heavenly patterned powers, whereof day owns
But a mean, blenched, copy. Go; I do commend thee
To all good angels, maiden; and if so much
I love thee, yet I dare not as I would.
For all the heart most longs for, most deserves,
Passes the soonest and most utterly.
The moral of the world's great fable, life.
All we enjoy seems given but to deceive,
Or, may be, undeceive us; and when done
The sum and proved, why work it over again?
They are gone, the heavenly and the earthly. I,
As a lone column, cold in sunshine, stands
Projecting darkness only,—around me cast

107

Soul-saddening shadows. What, indeed, is life,
This life-world, Lord! wherein thou hast founded me,
But a bright wheel which burns itself away,
Benighting even night with its grim limbs
When it hath done and fainted into darkness?
For say we are promised life immortal, how
Even then shall we exist? Hath soul a soul
Grosser without, and spiritual fine within?
Are grades in deathlessness, and bounds which mark
From existence essence, as in our bodily frame
Flesh seems but fiction, for it flies away;
While this, the gaunt and ghastly thing we bear
In us, and hate, and fear to look upon
Is truth;—in death's dark likeness limned, truth sole?
Both perishable, impermanent both. No more!
Dark, wretched thoughts, like ice-isles in a stream,
Choke up my mind, and clash; and to no end.
In spite of all we suffer and do enjoy,
All we believe we know, and deem we have proved,
There comes this question, over and over again;
Driven into the brain as a pile is driven;
What shall become of us hereafter? What
Is't we shall do? how live; how feel; how be?
For granting us not perfect here, nor ill
Wholly, shall soul be moveless after death?
Or shall't be all one dread remembrance crushed
Into a being, unfutured save of woe?
And so conserved by burning memory, poured
In on the mind, that saving we would lose;
Life's pettinesses, futilities, trivial cares,
That, like the lava-floods which choked of yore
The city Cyclopæan, brimming up,
As with torrent brass its mighty mould, our own
Annoy we perpetuate? And shall the passed
Thus ruinously perfected e'er remain;
Our grandest moiety of being, our soul's
Capacities for more good and greater power,
Than life allows, unused? Or ends death all,
With his despiteful trick? Like snow which lies
Down wreathed round the lips of some black pit,
Thoughts, which obscure the truth, accumulate;
Which solve it, in it lose themselves. There's no
True knowledge till descent; nor then, till after.
What shall make visible truth as 'tis in God?
We glimpse the light through medium dense or clear,
As reason rarifies, and yet so distort
That through the smoky glass of sense, the sun
All-blessing, scarce would know himself. So with truth.

Lucifer.
Life is the one great truth; the fiction, death.
Art never satisfied? Must thou still, and aye,

108

Revel in bootless questings?

Festus.
Lo, I speak
To heaven, and earth makes bold to answer me.
It is better, too, than silence. What, if stars
Invoking, earth now, in forbiddance stern,
Rumbles her caverned threatenings at my feet!
Or midnight clouds low muttering in long lines
Uncomprehended thunders, stun mine ear?
Call'st thou this power?

Lucifer.
Yon pretty little star
Shines, methinks, on a vasty falsehood. Power
Thou hast o'er finite agencies, but none,
I tell thee, over the infinite. Confess
Therefore unjust presumption, and receive
Obediently meet means. What wouldst thou do?

Festus.
I sicken of this mean and shadowy nature
And shallow life.

Lucifer.
Well; is death deep enough?

Festus.
Life uneternal's nought. All life's in God.
My heart's blood is in ebb. Not rarely I think,
The sameness 'tis, and tameness of the times,
Prostrates my spirit. I want an upward change.
What do they in the asteroids? What in the orb,
Whose months are years of earth? But more, I'd see
The roots of Hanokh, earth's metropolis
Cain built in Nodland; see the fanes and tombs
Of buried states; cities of wicked gods,
Clouded with profane incense, now 'neath sea,
Whelmed, and washed out.

Lucifer.
Be it as thou wilt. In time
Thou shalt know many a mystery.

Festus.
This I know;
I have been told, and taught, and trained to pray.
I pray, and have no answer: may, as well
Wrestle with the wind. I feel as might a cloud,
Which, on the golden threshold of the skies,
Fearing to rise, and fainting, men suspect
As a spy of night; when it had but to soar,
And with its excellent beauty ravish earth.

Lucifer.
There's reason now and then in similes.
Souls are like clouds, born of the infinite stock
Of ever formless essence, and their race
In bounteous beauty run, or ruinous storm;
Objects of love and gladness, or of ill,
And wrong and wrath, as nature predicates;
Which, having blessed or blasted in their life,
Die, and rejoin the universe, to rise
Like emanant dew on earth, in future forms
Of retributive nature; she herself
Being, and doing, and enduring, all.

109

Festus.
This life is as a question, to which comes
No audible answer, save an echo.

Lucifer.
Hark!

Festus.
Where thou art all is dumb. I would repent.
What shall be done to expiate offence?

Lucifer.
Well, sacrifice a butterfly to the wind.
As soon expect thy life's flood-tide to rise
Out of death's baseless depths, depths yet by me
Unplumbed, as look to be wise and innocent, both.
Heart up! If virtue loses, wisdom wins.
And evil and good, like the light's rays traversed
By bandlets black, or chequered chart of old
Sun dedicate, show originally immixed.

Festus.
Good to extract from evil were not hard;
Ill transmute into good, were science, cross
And crown. Such would I mine.

Lucifer.
It is not in man.
Set clouds on fire; go sow the sea with sand;
Then reap your crop of foam, and harvest it.

Festus.
The time shall come when every evil thing
From being and remembrance both shall die;
The world one solid temple of pure good.

Lucifer.
Never, while thou art conscious of thyself.
Never till from that shining sheaf of days,
Behind him, God the annihilator shall pluck
Earth's death-day, and his wrath burns white for aye.

Festus.
Let all the earth be lightning, the dark blue
Of ever-stretching space substantial fire;
Still God is good; still tends o'er those he loves.

Lucifer.
Why therefore comes no answer to thy prayer?

Festus.
It may be silence is the voice of God.

Lucifer.
Assent, or dissent; whether of the twain?

110

VIII.

Comes on a quarrel stormy and stern, if brief,
'Tween the two foe friends, this demanding what
Cannot be;—who immunity shall secure
'Gainst self-sought evil?—that, safe grants withholding,
And easily made: their taunts recriminative
Resultless; even as when some summer eve,
Two emulous youths, from dull scholastic toil
Set free by holy night, looser of bonds,
Rush, bounding, to the main, slumbering hard by,
With latent light inly aflame; and quick
Implunged, rise gameful, glittering like star-gods;
Lean, arrogant, on the lightning wave; launch, each
'Gainst other, liquid meteors, thunderless;
The foam, handsmote, in showerlets, arch-wise, falls,
Flashing about them;—neither gains. So part
Our disputants, these in earnest: the attack
To come resolved on secretly, by one,
Through sadd'st inconstancy.

A wide open Heath, by the Sea. Evening.
Festus and Lucifer meeting.
Festus.
God hath refused me: wilt thou do it for me?
Or shall I end with both; remake myself?

Lucifer.
Now that is the one thing which I cannot do.
Am I not open with thee? Why choose that?

Festus.
Because I will it. Thou art bound to obey.

Lucifer.
The world bears marks of mine obedience.
Well, 'tis a judgment doubtless. Heaven is just;
And justly asking faith of all that all,
Ill even, served ultimately his own wise ends,
He all disposing, I rebel; and now,
In my turn, asking nothing but belief
Unfaltering in oneself, say,—I foresee
Thou wilt bring to an end the whole, ere well begun.

Festus.
My heart, like an insurgent king, no more
Brooks the accustomed tribute.

Lucifer.
Well; I waive it.

Festus.
Off! I am torn to pieces. Let me try,
And gather up myself into a man,
As once I was. I cannot live, and live
In endless doubt. The day hath lost its charm,
The night its holy beauty, when from heart,
Even if not whole with God, faith fled, hope fails
Of better things.

Lucifer.
Oh, an' thou lovest a creed,
Be pessimist; nihilist, if thou wilt. There are
Who deify the devil in their own hearts,
In dreams of everlasting nothingness.

111

Festus.
Be what I may, I have done with thee. Dost hear?

Lucifer.
Thou canst not mean this?

Festus.
Once for all, I do.

Lucifer.
It is men who are deceivers, not the devil.
The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat
Oneself. All sin is easy after that.

Festus.
I feel that we must part; part, now or never:
And I had rather, of the two, 'twere now.

Lucifer.
This is my last walk through my favourite world;
And I had hoped to have enjoyed it with thee.
For thee I quitted hell; for thee my soul
Shrivelled and warped into a man; for thee
Shed I my shining wings; for thee, this mask
Of flesh put on, and seeming shape like thine;
This moveless mockery of mere motion brooked;
And now by my woe I swear that were I once
For thy false heart to give my spirit spring,
I would scatter soul and body both to hell;
And let one burn the other.

Festus.
If thou darest
Lift but the finger of a thought of ill
Against me, and—thou durst not, mark, we part.

Lucifer.
Well; as thou wilt. Remember soon thy heart
Will shed its pleasures as thine eye its tears,
And both leave loathsome furrows.

Festus.
Thinkest thou
I will have no pleasures without thee, vain friend,
Who marrest all thou mak'st, and even more?

Lucifer.
Thou canst not; save indeed some poor trite thing,
Called moderation, everyone can have.
And modesty, heaven knows, is suffering.

Festus.
Now will I prove thee liar, for that word:
And that the very vastest out of hell.
With perfect condemnation I abjure
My soul; my nature doth abhor itself,
For giving thee one moment's right to touch me.
Hence! let me pass. I have a soul to spare.

Lucifer.
A hundred, I. He is gone; though but for a time.
He braves me, he! even as on cave-rent coast,
Hard driven by hurricane blast, the mounting tide
Like a white wild beast, chased, flashes into its den;
The assault turns; heads the attack; the slackening flood
O'ertakes, and raging, quells for a moment;—soon
The sea, inveterate victor, smoothens all;
Torrent, cave, crag, who knows strife was? Meanwhile,

112

I have him yet; for he is mine to tempt.
Beside the greed of power and rage to know
All knowable, there's much magic in life's waste
On abstruse studies that can benefit none;
Ignoring wilfully, so, men's proper end
Of mutual good. Of such I know, and may,
Him stimulating with somewhat of all lures,
Perchance, in time, take due avail. It may be,
Gold hath the hue of hell flames; but for him
I will lay some brilliant and delicious lure,
Shall be worth perdition to a seraph. Only
Consider beauty's argument, how it tells;
Her eye's close reasoning smile; delicious proof,
Her fingers' clasp; her lips' soft summing up;
The delicate peroration of her sigh;
Scarce audible; visible rather, oh! I know.
And if he love not now, while woman is
All bosom to the young, when shall he love?
Who ever paused on passion's fiery wheel?
Who by the side of her he loved, whose touch,
Lightest, brings rapture, trembling, e'er stopped short
His eloquent speech, coldly to count his pulse?
The car comes, and they lie, and let it come,
Triumphant. See it crushes, kills, what then?
It holds their god, their idol, so, they die,
Doubtless, of joy. And he! he looks not one
Enough shall fool: but sick of skill in foils
He flings away, risks never less than life.
Nay, let him look, methinks, on aught which casts
The shadow of even a royal joy, he'd dare
Embrace a bride of fire. Such love is. Arms!
To arms, so, beauty, they be thine. For love,
Like nature, is war; sweet, sensible war. And now
Pleasure, shall any part thee from my use?
Let wring God's lightnings from the grasp of God.
But who his tactics blabs? Or I an end
More summary might forefix. One beauty may
Be played against other; and faith, once uncaged,
Whistles with oh! such sweetness, from the bough.
Most men glide quietly and deeply down.
Some, hell's abysses seek, like cataracts;
And passion it is which plunges fierceliest men
Into mine arms, as find they will, who will.
But it matters not; hell burns before them all.
It is by hell-light, which through their life's thick fog
Glares red and round; which gone, would leave to grope
In utter dark, these heirs of heaven, they shine
To each other; and their chiefest deeds achieve.

113

IX.

Meanwhile, as nought
Had passed, we see them presently, meet. Who knows
How 'tis we reconcile ourselves to evil?
But in this bird's-eye view of earth, and track
Of dust stirred through all nations, note we whilst
His friend malevolent triumphs by control
Of superficial miracles, compassing
With him, as day and night, together, earth,
Man, shown all forms and fanes of faith as vain
Alike, in God's esteem, knows, in truth's light
Her total season, sunlike, blossoming here,
Here ripening, God his secret will, well-pleased,
Sees gradually mature; domes old or new
Misdedicate, or mean, with his presence filled,
To himself, the all-shrinèd One reserves; until,
In all earth's living tabernacles, each land
Him worship, God, the untempled, whom all creeds
Concelebrate.

Earth's Surface—An Hour's Ride.
Lucifer and Festus.
Lucifer.
Wilt ride?

Festus.
I'll have an hour's ride.

Lucifer.
Be mine the steeds; be me the guide.
I something know of almost every land,
Their features, products, legends. Understand
My lot has been to know men's sagest teachers;
Their prophets, patriots; and, go to!—their preachers.
Apart from any prejudice, let me add,
They are, most of them, indifferently bad.

Festus.
Quick! I'll not question what you say.

Lucifer.
It's odd I never make a call
But it's—Long looked for, after all!

Festus.
Come, call your hacks.

Lucifer.
Oh, they'll not stay.
It may not be with me as some;
What I invoke is pretty safe to come.
Come hither, come hither, my brave black steed;
And thou too, his fellow, hither with speed;
Though not so fleet as the steeds of death,
Your feet are as sure; ye have longer breath;
Ye have drawn the world without wind or bait,
Six thousand years, and it waxeth late;
So take me this once, and again to my home;
And rest ye, and feast ye.

Festus.
They come, they come.
Tossing their manes like
Pitchy or snowy surge; and lashing

114

Their tails into a tempest; their eyes flashing
Like shooting thunderbolts.

Lucifer.
So! know your masters, colts.
Choose.

Festus.
The white one.

Lucifer.
Be it so,
Mourning suits me best, we know.
Up and away.

Festus.
Hurrah! hurrah!
The noblest pace the world e'er saw.
I swear by heaven, we'll beat the sun,
In the longest heat that ever was run,
If we keep it up, as we've begun.

Lucifer.
I told thee my steeds were a gallant pair.

Festus.
And they were not thine, they might be divine.

Lucifer.
Thine is named Ruin, and Darkness mine.

Festus.
Like all of thy deeds, now, that's unfair.

Lucifer.
A civiller and gentler beast
Than thine, thou hast never crossed, at least.
Now, look around.

Festus.
Why, this is France!
Nature is here like a living romance.
Look at its vines, and streams, and skies;
Its glancing feet, and dancing eyes.

Lucifer.
Well worth no doubt a second glance.
But now, one glimpse with me, from Alp to main!
See its wide glebe, with rooted seas of grain
Billowing; its cities bowered mid fruit-groves, here,
Such as by Adour, or Dordogne, a life
Flowerful all years enjoy; there, heights cave crowned,
Where lordly savage, long ere time could count
How many his fingers, or his horn-book knew,
Warful 'gainst the elements, pampered babe and mate,
On the pink silvered pith of fawnling's limbs,
And marrow of all he slew; and there, his life's
Last chase achieved, to the end superb, his neck
With rough red amber gorgeous, greatly died.

Festus.
Now, Europe's head, all others scorning;
Model of states, now; then, their warning;
Strangest of nations, light yet strong,
Fierce of heart, and blithe of tongue,
Prone to change, so fond of blood,
She wounds herself to quaff her own,
Shows, aye, a brave, bright, lovely land;
And well deserving every good
Which others wish themselves alone;
Could she but herself command.

Lucifer.
On, on, no more delay
Or we'll not ride round the world, all day.

Festus.
Good horse get off the ground.

115

Lucifer.
Sit firm; and if our coursers please
We'll take at once the Pyrenees.
'Twas bravely leapt.

Festus.
Ay, this is Spain;
Europe's last land twill e'er remain.
Last in the progress of the earth
To moral light, and liberty;
In all things last, to prove how bigotry
Can waste all wealth, and banish worth.
Studded with many a gloomy shrine
What is't men worship here, I pray?

Lucifer.
This fane, once Moslem, Christian now,
Refuses obstinately to say.

Festus.
But mean not men to one, the same, divine,
However rites may vary, e'er to bow?

Lucifer.
Away, nor loiter now for pictured art,
Or natural scene by miracle consecrate
Or patriot war, mock chivalry or true;

Festus.
Not where the rivulets flow of life, and death,
Nor Tayo's wave gold-footed? Not even to spy
The Iberian vault, where, sire of swords, Tubal
Abode, first; great Alcides, after, famed
For magic, marvels necromantic, wealth
Untold, unhallowed?

Lucifer.
Not an instant. Come!
Turn thy steed, and slacken rein;
Quick, we must be back again;
Oer the vale hid in the mountain;
O'er the merry forest fountain;
Ruin and Darkness, we must fly
O'er crag and rift, swift, swift, swift
As the glance of an eye.

Festus.
See here is Italy, the grave
Of freedom slaughtered once; who now
Accomplishing her prophet's vow,
In resurrection from the dead
Uplifts her pure and graceful head,
Content to keep her wise and brave.

Lucifer.
Oh, yes; and here where Alp and Alp Pennine
Force, snowy-tented, heaven: shall many a hill,
His head with olive wreathed, and his foot bathed
In fat of flour, and milk, ring loud with joy,
O'er superstition's end.

Festus.
Be not so sad,
Since worse may happen, even here; where Tiber, stream
Cloud-born, of empire, rolls; and that, the Hun,
God's scourge, lies coffined under; may so sleep
One time, all evil beneath love's covering flood!

116

Lucifer.
And there lies Greece, whose soul, men say, hath fled.

Festus.
Some god perhaps may come and raise the dead.
For birthplace once of gods;—such, ancient Time,
Lord of the golden age; and he, self-styled,
Monarch of space, and all celestial orbs,
Heaven, fount of light; such Zeus the All-living One
Hight Saviour; such the Titan sage and good,
Who upon Caucasus suffered; birth-place, too,
Of something more than gods, philosophy;
Art, science, polity; what yet thence may come,
Who knows?

Lucifer.
Not I. Time nips us.

Festus.
Athens, home
Of heroes, and of gods Olympus, not
To stay our steps, one instant; not to see
Parnassus, heaven of bards, nor Delphi?

Lucifer.
No!
What hours have we to waste on gods, or, worse
By one degree,—on bards? let heroes be.
Not he of hyperborean fame who earth
Rounded, on golden arrow, white winged, was like
To sleep more on his path. But see, the isles;
The starry islet wandering with the wind
Once, rooted now, the cradle of twins divine;
The Rhodian, sovereign of the sacred sea;
God-nursing isles, isles god-entombing; graves
Of demigods who made believe to die.

Festus.
Legends like these, once pleased.

Lucifer.
But now,
Through yonder dark and winding rift,
Pass we, where Mounts Kropakhian lift,
Each one, his lightning-scarred, but dauntless brow;
Hard by the sensitive fount, whose wave obeys,
With an obsequious volume, the moon's wane,
Or increment; and that funereal spur
Of night-hued marble, that round beglooms the air.
Lo! there the unpeaceful Euxine, womb and tomb
By turns, of many nations; nor far off
Twin cities, keys of empire, mark, blood-dyed,
Matched but by Troy of host devouring fame.
The pool Mæotic here, worshipped as god
By Scythian, and the Amazon, militant dame,
Jealous of the archer breast.

Festus.
Away! away!
From Pesth to Worms seems but a trot. This day
I feel the gad.

Lucifer.
But first, a double, I pray.
Norward, a time, we'll hold our course,
Thine I think is the bolder horse,

117

But bear him up with a harder hand;
Rough riding this o'er Swisserland.

Festus.
So all have found it, who have tried;
High as their Alps the people's pride,
Never to have bowed before
The tyrant, or the conqueror.
One glance.

Lucifer.
Oh two I'd have thee take.

Festus.
'Tis Leman; freedom's sacred lake
Whose shores by genius hallowed, stand
Its Eden, and its holy land.

Lucifer.
Away, away; before thee lie
The fields and floods of Germany;
From legendary Rhine, whose bed's
The crypt of goblin gold; hills bare,
The Demon Shadow seems to stride;
Demon indeed, a man self magnified;—
Hills, forested to their crown; and where,
By virgins' bones and magians' heads,
'Gainst harm forefended, who would dare
Attempt it, even of fiendish foes?
To steep Schaffhausen's seething snows,
That know not, more than time, repose,—
To founts Danubian, and their fall
Through the Iron Gates, behold it all!

Festus.
Well I love thee, fatherland;
Sire of Europe as thou art;
Be free, and crouch no more, but stand;
Thy noblest son will take thy part.
Oh sooner let the mountains bend
Beneath the clouds, when tempests lower,
Than nations stoop their sky-compeering heads
In homage to some petty despot's power.
The worm which suffers mincing into parts
May sprout forth heads and tails but grows no hearts.

Lucifer.
There lies Austria, famous land
For fiddlesticks and sword-in-hand.

Festus.
And Poland whom truly unhappy we call;
Unable to stand, unwilling to fall,
Forge into swords thy feudal chain;
Smite even the souls of foes in twain;
The shackles have been bound in vain
Round England's arms, and we are free,
As the souls of our sires in heaven which be.
That earth should have so few
Men, fathers! like to you!

Lucifer.
What matter who be free, or slaves?
For all there is one tyranny, the grave's;—
Or freedom, may be. On, on, haste!

Festus.
What land is yonder wide, white, waste?

Lucifer.
Ha! 'tis Russia's gentle realm;

118

Whose sceptre is the sword, whose crown the helm.
Wouldst know the difference 'twixt the bond and free?
'Tis that these will, those will not, liberty.

Festus.
Truly, though strange it sound to some,
All government's by rule of thumb.

Lucifer.
Thou seest, mid air, that darling little cloud?
To us, I think, 'twill be allowed
To pass beyond, above, that we may spy
Rightly, the things which round us lie;—
From Zemlia, and the sistering islets seven,
And Thulé ultimate hiding-place of man,
By the hill Altaic, named, in the age of mounds,
The Almighty God, by Tchudic tribelets, now
In the book of nations known no more; there, still,
Higher than lark soars, cloudlet scuds, it stands;
To Volga, holy Boug, and warlike Don;
Divine Alborz, the sacred mountain, site
Of the Promethean agony, where he spilled
His blood, who, a god, the end of gods foretold;
And Caspian, 'neath whose shallowing wavelets hides
God's Eden.

Festus.
O rich in secrets!

Lucifer.
See, where towers
Baghavan upon whose brow the holy flame
Incessant burns to Aurmazda, lord of light.

Festus.
I swear by every atom that exists
I better love this reckless ride
O'er hill and forest, lake and river wide,
O'er sunlit plain and through the mountain mists,
Than aught thou hast given to me beside.

Lucifer.
Kerman's sands, salt-white, swept by torrid wind,
Plague-breath'd, there, see; which, roused the desert dust,
Blinds man's bright eye, and mummifies his frame.
There oft, in arid dell, the cool suhrab
Calm mockery of sweet waters, overhung
With green and succulent shrubs, you seem to hear
The ripple of the waves, delusive lurks;
Shamo and Koom and Kobi, Heraut; and Balkh,
Mother of cities, murally encrowned,
Mourning mid endless ruins, but hiding yet
His marble throne, milkwhite, who of mortals king
First reigned:—shall we seek, and fit it for the last?
Now from our Mount of prospect to descend,
Our gryphon flight 'twere better here to end,
And solid earth reseek. Bear, downwards, friend.

Festus.
Look, my way I can only read
By the sparks from the hoof of my giant steed.

Lucifer.
There, by the gilded roof, which from afar,
Gleams o'er the desert like an earth-propped star,

119

Observe Thibetian L'hassa, templed seat
Of an incarnate Deity, where still
Mix Shamans and the Lama's lieges; those
Urging the stars, and with sublime deceit
Announcing fate; these, with machine-made prayers,
Their transmigrative God, who immanent aye
In your humanity leaps from frame to frame,
Deathless, nor ever fails.

Festus.
Still eastwards, ho!
See what a long, long track
Of dust and fire behind;
For leagues and leagues aback;
And shrill and strong, as we shoot along,
Whistles and whirrs, like a forest of firs
Falling, the cold north wind.

Lucifer.
Where art thou now?

Festus.
In Tartar land;
I know by the deserts of salt and sand.
Nor aim nor end hath the wandering life,
Rest reaps but rest, and strife but strife;
With the nations round they ne'er have mixed,
For good or for ill, they stand all still,
Their bodies but rove, their minds are fixed.

Lucifer.
Miss not the chance, Manswara's lake!
The sight alone, some pilgrims say,
Immortally blessed the soul will make.
There, feast thine eyes with it, and away!

Festus.
Father of fables, much I fear
Thy creed more liberal than sincere.

Lucifer.
Pray fancy not what I repeat
I have any faith in; men will cheat
Their souls with legends in all ages;
And I,—I'm only eighth of all the sages.
Start not, we are on earth's roof ridge here,
The watershed of nations, old Pamir.
Courage, we need not fall. There, Kokonoor,
Sea subterranean, once, of wandering fame;
Here Baikal, holy lake, of mountain meres
Vastest; and those twin pools, named eyes of heaven;
Shelinga, there!

Festus.
Ancestral seat, first home
Of perfected humanity, ice-chill now,
But glowing once with the heart-heat of new earth!
Haunt of the young immortal's golden years,
Ere nations boasted names, base wile; 'twas here
The primal people of angel seed outlined
All human knowledge, taught with difference fine
Tongues of diverse roots; wise, themselves, and free,
While culturing earth they charactered the skies;
Their veritable divinity penned in signs

120

Celestial; and in heaven's constellate lights
One natural creed eternized.

Lucifer.
So?

Festus.
Are these
The hills sepulchral talked of, sodden with blood
Of slaughtered henchman, slave or steed; far round
Earth heaves with tomblets, as the sea with waves;
These old, old wilds Kathayan; graves as yet
By art or avarice unprofaned, where lie
Kings fameless, of unstoried states, entombed,
Forgot, together?

Lucifer.
These! And there, not far,
Lo! mounds even mightier, where two summer days,
The shepherd sheik, as a lion of the sands
Lean, keen, brown-maned, shall mark both herd and flock
Content, depasture; underfoot, the Khan,—
God's shadow; brother, may be, of the moon;
Sole refuge of a wretched world, the whiles
He plundered, and to those who asked, gave bread,—
Sceptred, and swathed within his leaf-gold shroud,
Sleeps, doubtless, sound; though o'er that sacred head
Shrill sings the boor; who, striding round the base,
In meditative measurement, and round,
Twirls his long lance, contemptuous of the time
He lives in; which but likes great things, not makes.

Festus.
And yonder see old China's wall!
Where gods of gold men's minds enthral;
Gods whose gold's their only worth.

Lucifer.
Well, is not gold the god of earth?

Festus.
Whate'er, meseems, men's gifts; their clime,
Their race, their ends, their lore, their time;
Round earth one universal instinct reigns;
Hear allwhere talked of, gods; see allwhere fanes.

Lucifer.
True; here men worship mighty Brahma; there,
Pure Buddh alone is named in prayer;
And yonder, nought save heaven;
Far round, Islam hath conqueror been;
And Moses, and the holy Nazarene,
O'er half the world hath driven.

Festus.
I doubt not; each of variant rite,
But all concerned with the Infinite;
The one, the sole; in whose kind hand
Lie all things by him formed or planned,
All orbs, all souls; to none denied,
Save hearts of prejudice and pride,
Grace, whereby each is sanctified.
O'er all the world one faith I deem,
Howe'er unlike the expression be,
In type, tradition, liturgie,
The life immortal, God supreme.

121

Lucifer.
True; and to such conclusions come,
One might almost have stayed at home.

Festus.
A moment breathe we. Every land,
Beside the sacred trivialities
Which most the unthinking millions please,
Hath its own sanctity.

Lucifer.
Oh, I understand.

Festus.
Here Konfutsé, pure sovereign sage, who realm
By realm, truth-seeking, knew but, named but God,
The great one, ere all nature, ere all law;
The eternal reason that had arched the heavens;
The universal essence; here Meng-tse
Superbly taught all acts,—the human soul
Not self-condemned by inborn pravity,
To ever-deepening sin,—essays towards good,
As water aye its level seeks; here, son
Of truth, self-styled but truthless, Lao, preached
Of deathly souls, and pleasure's quest, life's end;
And, head of earthly immortals, held that God,
From whom the world, as life from light, in death
His gift supreme, eternal life, resumes.

Lucifer.
But now for time's sake, let us rise
A thought superior, towards the skies;
We have but to reach a certain height,
And everything appears in sight.
See there; one instant cast thine eye
Where, on the world's edge, isle-crowds lie;
Massed nebulous; great, small, rich in gold, spice, gems;
From far Niphon, where, shrined, the bull of light
Butts first, with fiery horn, the egg mundane;
And Miako's gilded idol, hugest he
Of hand-wrought gods, sits placid, to the isle
Earth's equatorial scores as with a sword,
Midstwise, Sumatra, hundred-citied; seats
Palatial boasting built by gods; to that
Immensest isle, gold-grounded, whose least rill
Outbids Pactolus; where the tameless tribes
Witch-queened, who the boomerang hurl, dwell; and, food-pined,
Do mess on their own blood, disseised of sense;
And Tonboro, neighbour dread to the Khersonnese
Aureate, there lying like some rich reprobate,
With ashes strewn by stern and dominant priest,
Ere absolutive of sin: which seen, and cooled
Our horses' feet in freshening clouds, away!

Festus.
Lo! southwards, hey for Hindustan;
The sun beats down both beast and man;
Herb, insect, tree, for life do gasp;
The river reeks, and faints the asp,
But blithe are we, and our steeds, I trow,

122

And the mane of mine yet bears the snow
Which fell on us, by Caucasus.
By the four beasts, but this is warm.

Lucifer.
Away, away, nor stint nor stay,
We'll reach the sea before yon storm.

Festus.
Wilt take the sea?

Lucifer.
Ay, that will we
And swim as we ride our steeds astride;
Come leap, leap off with me.

Festus.
What! from this steep, a mile above the sea?

Lucifer.
Check not thy steed one pace, but passing glimpse
Dhawalageri's pinnacle, earth's supreme,
Kailas, Merou, celestial mounts, mid-sky
Dazzling their divine denizens; Ganges, dropped,
Tradition true, from Siva's solar eye;
And Chandra-bagha, holy to the moon;
But not for these, nor where earth's loftiest leap
Of waters lights the forest gloom, stay we
Our horse-flight: nay, nor for the Edenic isle,
And peak, where foot of Buddh, the last of gods,
Or Adam's first of men, impressed, the land
Hallows to pilgrims desperate, of all creeds.

Festus.
There is a rapture in the headlong leap,
The wedge-like cleaving of the closing deep,
A feeling full of hardihood and of power,
With which we court the waters that devour.
Oh! 'tis a feeling great, sublime, supreme,
Like the ecstatic influence of a dream,
To speed one's way, thus, o'er the sliding plain,
And make a kindred being with the main.

Lucifer.
By Chaos, this is gallant sport,
A league at every breath;
Methinks if I ever should have to die,
I'll ride this rate to death.

Festus.
Away, away upon the whitening tide,
Like lover hastening to embrace his bride,
We hurry faster than the foam we ride;
Dashing aside the waves which round us cling,
With strength like that which lifts an eagle's wing
Where the stars dazzle and the angels sing.

Lucifer.
We scatter the spray, and break through the billows,
As the wind makes way through the leaves of willows.

Festus.
In vain they urge their armies to the fight;
Their surge-crests crumble 'neath our strokes of might.
We meet, fear not, we mount; now rise, now fall;
And dare with full-nerved arm the rage of all.
Through anger-swollen wave, or sparkling spray,
Nothing it recks; we hold our perilous way

123

Right onward till we feel the whirling brain
Ring with the maddening music of the main;
Till the fixed eyeball strives and strains to ken,
Yet loathes to see the shore and haunts of men:
And the blood half starting through each ridgy vein
In the unwieldy hand, sets, black with pain.
Then let the tempest cloud on cloud come spread,
And tear the stormy terrors of his head;
Let the wild sea-bird wheel around my brow,
And shriek, and swoop, and flap her wing, as now;
It gladdens. On, ye boisterous billows, roll;
And keep my body, ye have ta'en my soul.
Thou element, the type which God hath given
For eyes and hearts too earthy, of his heaven;
Were heaven a mockery never I would mourn
While o'er thy billows I might still be borne;
While yet to me the power and joy were given
To fling my breast on thine and mingle earth with heaven.

Lucifer.
'Twas always one of my profoundest wishes,
The sea to study, and consider fishes.
And now that, well; behold us come;
Nor e'er before could I the time
Spare to such end, though so sublime
Let us explore the great aquarium.
Soon shall we see the denizens of the deep
Dart by us; shapes primæval claimed by gods
Vishnu, and mixed Oannes; ork, and whale,
The oceanic beast, whose jaws like hell's gates once
Yawned to ingulph the recreant prophet, cast
By crew forefated in the ravening deep;
Sea-horse and seal, old ocean's flocks; and all
That flout the whirlpool, down whose swirling maw
Voracious of all life, the shrieking ship
Plungeth; bright dolphin, lover of the lyre,
For more than one sublime adventure starred;
And, dubious those, behold, whom air and sea
Alternate please, now fly with fins, and now
With wings swim; lords of richest wrecks be these;
All who, or lonely and deathful, haunt the deeps;
All that by coast, by firth, in endless shoal,
Vanwise, or rear, heave shoreward; all who glide
Through streets of submerged cities, weed-draped, thronged
With waves, where, once, as in sumptuous Valipûr,
Fluctuated the courtier crowd; through magic Ys;
By its silver flood-gates lost; or gilded marts
Of Vinborg, greed-fouled,—spitefully content,
Nor wink their cold white eye; clang may the bells
Still pendulous in those tide-swept towers, as though
In calm, for prayer; storm-clashed, for victory; they
Reck not, nor death-peal heed; through marble grove

124

Of pillars, once impalaced, as through copse
Of coralline branchery, they their wavy way
Fan flexuously; uncharmed, unhindered, fan.

Festus.
Land! this the island supplement
To Africa's great continent?

Lucifer.
Not here, not here, nor yet we land;
Though grateful doubtless were the strand
Where, nature's alms, we might the traveller's tree
Meet, in whose veins condensed the essential dew
Flows fontal; while its flowerets, lamp-like, light
To its restful tent of leaves, the wayfarer.
One minute more. We quit the main;
We make the shore. Here's land again;
The Cape! now scour o'er Afric's plain,
From the head of storms, and lion by the sea
High couchant; and God's table, draped with clouds;
By stream Kaffrarian, endless called, and that
Rock-brinked, which through Mataman, townless land,
Rolls; where, too, flourishes first and best of things,—
So by Damaras deemed,—the all-fructuous tree
From whose far-shadowing limb-wood, human fruit
Ripe, deathless dropped; where, half by gumwoods girt,
And palm, barbarian Quorra steals; there, men
In ivory, gold, blood, trade; nor, far remote,
Who the divine child, babe eterne, adore;
Unconscious Deity; haste we, haste we, on.

Festus.
Away, away, on either hand,
Nor town nor tower, nor shade nor shower,
Nothing save sun and sand.

Lucifer.
But here, see many a treeful tract with wood
Well seasoned, as to feed the final fires;
Here, there, a naked realmlet, centred round
Some vast baobab, like aged with ocean's tides;
Within whose cavernous and sepulchral trunk,
Meet village senates, lawing peace, war, now,
To dusky clans; now, in its templed bole,
The idol gods adoring of the land;
Arboreal fane; some dragon-blooded tree,
Like-yeared with the cloud-bow, or one eve, one morn,
Than the stars younger; ranged wherewith the stock
That, willowy, waves above the ruined wreck
Of Babylon, or even that, nigh Memphian well,
Rifted yet vital, 'neath whose honoured boughs
Paused once the sainted pair, who, angel-warned,
Bare in their bosom o'er Zin's isthmian sands,
An unweaned child-god, but a sapling seems
Of yesterday.

Festus.
What are these hills we have just
O'ervaulted?

Lucifer.
These, Lupata, spine o' the world

125

Kumara, there, the emerald mount; and there,
See, there they are, I knew right soon
We'd light on the Mountains of the Moon.
Over them, over; nought forbids.

Festus.
Yonder the Nile and the Pyramids?

Lucifer.
Nay, we can't stay to search them. Rise, good steeds;
Let us enjoy another earthscape. See
Louqusor, Medina Thabou; all that rests
Of hundred-palaced Thebes, where, shrineless, dwelt
One who supreme, the unknown, the invisible reigned
'Midst many idolatrous, o'er one tribe devout,
Godwise; and long ere cometary earth
The stars disturbed, with presages of woe
To heaven's great family, in herself to be
Concentrate, and accomplished to the death,
As in a fiery vortex, himself named
To worshipping worlds, as here, the imageless,
The infinite, the eternal. There, behold,
O'er the Erythræan gulf dyed red with blood
Of Pharaoh's hosts, the free, wide sandy wastes
Of kingless Arabie; Mecca, seat of power
Prophetic, and the city of the tomb,
By angels haunted.

Festus.
And thy sacred well,
Seem I to recognise from storying pens,
Divine Zemzem, from founts celestial strained
Through astral strata, and the musky loam
Of Paradise; whence moonbrowed maids of light,
Fearless, their life-cups fill with bliss.

Lucifer.
And there,
El Kodsh, and substitutive mosque, rock-based,
Upon whose crest, intempled now, shall stand
The archangel stern, when he, by judgment trump
All souls shall summon; and with fate-fraught rod
Inevitable, call forth what Hades holds.
Here, well-walled Joppa, towered before the flood;
There, Tyre, where once Astarte, round the earth
Pacing, moonlike, a star picked up, new fallen,
Which she, at her own altar, stretching out
Her sceptral cross, to herself hallowed. There,
Once, Olybama rose; there, Œnosh; home
Of the giant race, earth dominating, sites now
Sightless to all save eyes endowed like thine.
Here, Byblos, Orchöe there; Bab-El, God's gate,
Where hides mayhap 'neath thunder-thwarted pile,
With archives of mid earth's initial throne,
The foreworld's infant speech; here Nin-evech,
There Arach, Arkite city of the moon;
Whose golden-crownèd shades shall all precede

126

Kingly, at doom; through Persargadæ's graves,
Roman, and Russ, and Norman's castled tomb
Yield up their tyrannous ghosts; his even who yet
In sepulchre secrete still lies; and once,
Mid alabastrine halls. approached through forms
Cherubic, of ubiquitous wing, now, see,
In unearthed sculpture, leagues a thousand hence,
Divining 'fore his gods, with wine; or, now
Immingling arrows, mark him draw, perchance,
Self-sought, his fiery fate; and if, more near,
Thine eye still keep its edge, that wandering vill,
Builded, men say, in test of faith, times passed,
Mid Arab wilds, by great Shedaad, whose walls
In tiers alternate towered of silver and gold;
Invisible since to dulled belief. Dost see it?

Festus.
Is't now a structural mass, dreamlike out-drawn
In vanishing perspective, with pillars winged,
Translucent, quivering up like columned air
Of resurrective dew, sun-fired; dim domes,
And spacious sanctuaries? Or, plainer now,
Is it like a shadowy palace, rich in rest,
The feverous brain of worn-out traveller draws
Upon the heatful noon, that as with glimpse
Of comforting things allures, but while we move
Nearer, retreats?

Lucifer.
Ah, good; thou seest it not.
Turn, sudden now, and coast this midland sea,
By Carthage, Barca, Tripoli;
Crete, there, Jove's grave; there, Sicily,
Isle of the sun, whence Hades' equal bride;
And 'twixt whose templed cliffs and us, that barque,
Laden with the sack of Rome, tyrannic queen
Of bonded nations—the tile-gilded roof
Of Jove's high capitol; the seven-starred lamp
And golden table of God's own temple, won
By Vandal king self-crowned of earth and sea,
And their affiliate isles,—storm-sunk, but served,
With ivory thrones, and busts marmoreal, gems
And jewelled caskets, armlets, torques, and rings,
And carquanets impearled, and coffered coin
Of conquered states, to startle, or to adorn
Sicilian sea-nymphs in their billowy play.
By Syrts Cyrenean now we hie,
By Atlas range and Barbary;
By the desert heart of slave-land; waterless sea,
Where tide once haply broke tempestuous, now
Heaves, ponderous, the slow sand-wave, stormy dust
Scattering in poisonous clouds.

Festus.
Not far I deem
The Hesperidean gardens, serpent-watched

127

Once, watched in vain. The honeyed opiate, there,
Was quite too much.

Lucifer.
The land of serpents this;
Haunted by adder, cockatrice, those the Moor
Wreathes round his limbs, or, in his bosom, curled
Confederate, cades; those that, by glistering glance,
Charmed song-birds to their death transfix; or those
More fascinative, that oft the innocent breath
Of babes, suck, viperously, away; and once,
By him enormous, on these banks, just cleared,
Of Bagradas; who, memorable worm,
Rome's hosts braved singly; singly suffered siege;
War waged; till by arblast and by catapult,
And burning darts, self-firing as they flew,
Quelled, he at last capitulates with death;
His shining slough to swell the conqueror's pomp.

Festus.
A learned demon past all contradiction.

Lucifer.
Why, look; I'm naturally strong in fiction.
And then it rather piques one to describe
The triumphs of the serpent tribe;
Whether of cobras, god-kinned, thought to have missed
Their way from heaven; or crownèd basilisk, type
Of demon good, and mundane genius; such
As round his healthful staff Asclepias twined,
And saviour named; or such, perchance, as now
Mid Cæsarean isle, 'neath mound tower-topped,
Lies tombed, redoubtable dragon; be the tale
Not rather told of ethnic faith, o'erthrown
By conquering cross.

Festus.
Their crown is, to have striven.

Lucifer.
See Mong Mæsoba, Mount of God, first marked
Of Punic mariner, when from seas unkeeled
Since Argo, or dark diluvian barge, as car
Of gods he hailed it, once fire-ringed; of flame,
Of fume, even, naked now. And now still on!

Festus.
Hurrah! by my soul at every bound,
I feel, I see the earth rush round;
I see the mountains slide away,
That side night, and this side, day.

Lucifer.
Wilt see the New World?

Festus.
Well; a peep.

Lucifer.
One dainty run, then; one more leap
And lo! we quit this lion ground,
Plunging from palmy steep, once more into the deep.

Festus.
To cross indeed the Atlantic tide,
And far as southmost Fire-land ride,
Would I, if time be ours.

Lucifer.
Oh, plenty;
Be there, too, ere we reckon twenty.

128

Festus.
The sea again, the swift bright sea!

Lucifer.
Hold hard; give rein; and follow me.
See there, the Elysian islets, of eld thought
Home for the heroic blessed, who years divine
Enjoyed, and life eternal as of heaven;
Now, only fortunate deemed, their mountlets crowned
By that beneficent stem, whose top, with clouds
Nightly encompassed, soon as morning beams,
From leaf and ramage sheddeth cool bright showers,
Freshening the fountless soil; matron and maid,
God thanking for his daily boon, with joy
Brim high their globular gourds from every bough.

Festus.
It is somewhere hereabouts I count to have heard
Of other happy spots being found.

Lucifer.
No lack
Of such demesnes; the winged isle, to wit,
Walled high with gold-bright crystal, giant kinged,
Round the world flying, oft-sighted, good; but found?

Festus.
And Bolotoo, joint paradise of gods
And men, 'mid ocean isolate, land of shades;
Where, to chance wanderer for the future bound,
And for lost secrets searching, all spent thought
There hoarded, temple, tower, and grove-clad hill
Show but forms permeable; through all he stalks
As through a solid vision; wall, cliff, bark,
Close round him, as over diving gull the main.

Lucifer.
'Tis odds we have gone through it, and not known.

Festus.
Look; listen. There is music in the cave
Where ocean sleeps, and brightness in the wave
The sea-bird makes its pillow, and the star,
Last born of heaven, its azure mirror; far
And wide, the pale, fine gleam of sea-fire glows,
Softly sublime, like lightnings in repose;
Till roused anon, afar its flaming spray it throws.

Lucifer.
Well, now we have travelled above the waves,
Wilt travel a time beneath?
And visit the sea-born in their caves;
And look on the rainbow-tinted wreath
Of weed; pearl-starred, and gemmed, wherewith
The mermaid binds her long, green hair?
Or rouse the sea-snake from his lair?
See where he gambols for us there!

Festus.
Ay, ay; down let us dive.

Lucifer.
Look up; we lack not stars, I swear;
And every star thou seest's alive;
A little globe of life, light, love;
Whose every atom is a living being,
Each into other's bosom seeing;
Each enlightening the other.

129

Festus.
Oh how unlike man's world above,
Where mainly, vainly, each must strive
To dim, or to outshine his brother.
Would only I were ocean's son,
The solitary brave,
Like yon sea-snake,—no end hath he
To fear because his soul is free,
No future heaven to crave,
Whose life's but to sun all his folds upon
The crest of the highest wave.

Lucifer.
Yon reptile men call serpent of the sea,
Eldritch, huge, ocean-churner, hight in Ind,
In Norland, world circler; whose hoary mane
And visage, sadly human, reared mast-high,
Till suddenly down implunged, it disappearing,
Appals the homebound mariner, as at eve
Rounding his last of headlands blue, he weens
In its eye to have hailed some Pharos, newly erect,—
May be less caitiff than he looks.

Festus.
Enough
I have seen of him; some fathoms.

Lucifer.
Know this soil
Thou treadst, the continent, once, in ages passed,
Neptunian, where the sea-god righteous ruled,
And his sons ten; here, trace the beds of streams
Foreworldly, such as with voluminous surge
Atlantis cantoned, and, in main long lost,
Their tusky spoil disbogued; or, swollen with doom
Of yearly freshet, scared the rock-scooped booths
Of savage tribelets trembling; there, the bounds
Mark, once of jealous states war-mad, all stilled
By watery and necessitous peace, unhoped,
Unlooked for; here, the isle Triphylian Jove
Judged from his imminent chair.

Festus.
And now behold
Drowned lands and verdurous meadows submarine,
Where water turtles wander, pasturing free.

Lucifer.
Come on, come on; the dew, last night
Was heavy.

Festus.
Are those spars, so bright,
Or eyes of things which ne'er forgive
That seem to play on us, and glare
With rage, that we so far should dare
To search the hidden deeps
Where tide, the moon-slave, sleeps;
And ork, and kraken, world-forgotten, live?
Where the wind breathes not, and the wave
Walks softly, as above a grave;
Where coral worms, in countless nations,
Build rocks up from the sea's foundations;

130

Where the islands strike their roots
Far from the old main-land;
And spring like desert fruits,
Shook off by God's strong hand,
Up from their bed of sand.

Lucifer.
There; now we stand on the world's end land;
Over the hills, away we go;
Through fire and snow, and rivers whereto
All others are rills.

Festus.
Through the lands of silver, the lands of gold;
Through lands untrodden, and lands untold;
Lands where his age-long skirmish still maintains
The conquering Araucanian; who from his bounds
The pale face waiving aye, still, manly, serves
The world's essential Spirit; and on whose shore
The mount of thunder, o'er the orb-wrecking flood
Sole buoyant of all things, self-steered, in times
Long gone, first grounding, paused; then ceased, content;
Ceased, from its world-wide wanderings; lands where trined
With son and moon eterne, the rainbow, dream
Of the elements, was adored. Near by, of old,
A marvellous hill towered; is't, I wonder, now?
That crystal mount, cloud-crested, once which stood
In western Tucuman, with acute reply
Answering the solar messages of light,
As equal, equal? deep below its base,
O'erarched, a river navigable will run.

Lucifer.
Nay, if 'twas ever here, it is here, this hour.
Lo! Andes, outer wall of earth; and here
Light-wise, in pardonable idolatry,
Pure Pachacamac, lord of the universe,
By kingly Yngas was adored, and choirs
Sun-dedicated, of virgins; fairer they
Than all the flowers their golden gardens grew;
Or silvern shrubs scarce imitative, and gemmed
With ruby bud or beryl, could show. And now,
Nor mine, nor mountain lake though choked with gold,
Like Titicaca, from whose sacred shores
Long ages lapsed; the scions of the sun,
Mango Capac and Mama Oëllo, stepped
Ancestral, to the sceptre of Berou,—
Our course must stay; nor yet, though nigh, the spot
Where that unbearded brood,—whose gnarlèd knees
Ranked level with the poll of general men;
Whose eyen glared like shields rimmed round with brass;
Where fell their shadow grass nor floweret grew;
At sight of whom men swooned and women died;—
Debarked; whence God best knoweth, here at foot
Of Andes' highest; but them, his vengeance roused

131

For vast offence—a fiery falchion quelled;
Sudden it swept from heaven, and in one swathe
Laid all their giant trunks.

Festus.
What sin was theirs?

Lucifer.
The story's quite apocryphal, I admit;
'Tis nothing, maybe, but a round, sound, lie;
Who told it first, is answerable.

Festus.
Thou, too.
Words are deeds spoken. Aught we do is writ
Brief-wise in God's eternal diary.
All acts seem echoed to the skies. We live
As in a bell.

Lucifer.
Meanwhile, be it ours to hie
Unstayed by aught above earth, or beneath,
Not even by bass of rivers subterrene,
Booming through caves, each with his several roar,
I hear them plain, down to earth's focal fires,
Still inextinct, and flaming floods; whence dashed,
They reascend volcanic, melled with ice,
Lava, and fishy mud, and so explode
Vaporous, the solid hills; by the mount of stars;
By Chuquibamba's cone of carmined snow;
And Rupurini's demon cliff, dark browed
With wood self-procreate, must we swiften on,
To the equatorial groves that mat the shores
Of Maracaÿbo, and Maragnon's tide,
The sea's tide mastering; Temi, gold-dyed stream,
And falls of Tequendama; rent ere yet
The moon rode, aëry.

Festus.
Haste we!

Lucifer.
Nature, here,
Of life like lavish as the sun of light,
Leaves all this foodful paradise unbarred,
Ungated even; while almost every tree
Hangs heavy with vital bread, man's simplest board;
Or fruit lactifluous, from whose flower-tipped stem,
High trembling, the earth-gorged Indian, thirstful, drains
At sundown, creamy draughts; to all his kin
Dispensing, patriarchal, bowl on bowl.

Festus.
Our high road narrows shrewdly, here;
A stumble might—

Lucifer.
Bah! what a tale!
Thy pad is surefoot, past all fear;
And mine; well, when shall Darkness fail?
But see; not oft the eye comprises,—
Not even when quickened to embrace
A circle wish-wide of pure space,—
View fairer than upon our vision rises.
Behold the isle-gemmed western sea;
Black Hayti, once the imperial negro's throne;

132

Bahamas, and the Virgins, those to lee;
And that, of all earth's westlands earliest known.

Festus.
This road's a trifle rugged.

Lucifer.
On!
We have far to prance ere the hour is gone.
By strait and bay, by swamp and plain
Through torrent flood; through hurricane;
Have we our pathless course to find.

Festus.
As quick we ride, on either side,
Atlantic or Pacific tide,
Thoughts legendary of spots where hide
The Aztek's mythic realms, come o'er the mind;
Coy Iximaya, and the precipitous gates
Of that recondite capital, mountain scarped,
Of sacred dwarf-kings, haply, with all theirs
To vanish into cloudland, doomed; thenceforth
With ghosts, of fabulous crowns, such ghosts as haunt,
Easeless, the cots of nations, walk for aye.

Lucifer.
So many rarities will be lost, one day,
No need to moan for a trinket like a town.
See here, Copan's, Uxmal's insculpturèd domes,
Mysterious, tombed alive in matted woods,
Buried erect, unruinous: here, the toils
Combined of royal patriots, and leal crowds,
All limbs who strained to upbuild, and their throats tore
To applaud, complete, what now the bat, the snake,
The wight who hath lost his way, alone know; there,
Serf-reared, the fire fanes of Palenque, cross-famed,
And towers she-eagles nest on imperturbed;
Cholula's terraced pyramid, and those vast,
Mid pathway of the dead, to sun and moon
Hallowed, o'er minor mounds more mean than stars
Which rise, supreme; Subtiaba's palaces;
Cities and holds of dynasties unknown;
Less glorious, may be, than the soldans named
By proud Fardusi, paradisal bard;
Less numerous, not; who natural signs here graven,
Charged with intensest meaning, now all lost;
Wrecked on some rock uncharted in time's flood,
No ebb shall e'er dismask.

Festus.
But little seems
To hinder, or to attract.

Lucifer.
Wood, river, lake,
Earth's widest, mightiest, spread around,
Beset in vain the path we take,
Intent alone to gain our starting ground.
Some pools, indeed, we'll pass, ere the hoar woods
Of growth eternal, continental reach,
That all enclose,—from florid lands which seas
Columbian lave, to gold-rocked Labrador;

133

From ocean's gilded sands, by Kalamath,
To silveriest Secklong, we have overswept.

Festus.
There's a dark cloud of slaves, which mars;—
But look! it lifts beneath one's eyes,
The fairest views that round us rise;
Though nought shall blot the bannered stars,
From freedom's skies.

Lucifer.
Here the Aztek's, bowered with floating pleasances
Where sailed the swans of sway symbolic; see,
There Yutah's lake, where the polygamous crew,—
Misled by one self-unctioned, not anoint
Of genius, nor from world-life spiritual, strained;
Who from the brook, the lines of lacquered lead
Sham angel forged, dug out; who, after, fell
Death-shotten, with Cæsar's trickling wounds thrice told;
Ill doer he, ill done by,—their starred hour
Dreadless abide, of doom. Here note these hills
With cedars prediluvian, towerlike, crowned;
And yon demarking gap, far blazed through woods,
Where day begins, and east from west divides.

Festus.
I would yon shining chain of waters, now
Slave, Athabascan, down to the Huron, coast.

Lucifer.
Mark, too, those mightiest rivers, tributaries
From Firm-land to their Sea-lord; there, not far,
Ohio broadens; here, gross Missouri dims
The deepening sire of floods, aye tiding on
His current deluge to the ingulphing breast
Of central seas; he, clearing oft his banks
Of secular secrets, too long kept, strange frames
Of mammoth shows, or kindred monster; brutes
Dreadest, whose teeth might nigh with tombstones match;
Limbed, like an oak; but all swept off by heaven,
Creation at the flood revising: such
Burial made they and osseous monument,
To themselves, 'mid riverine swamps; swamps, too, the snake
By red men hallowed, haunts, which multiplies
Annual, its rattling rings; and once, which hid
Nigh sacred well, by priestly craft, the man
Divine, to all of irksome sanctity, fanged
To the death; and so, held amiablest of worms,
And kin, by common treachery, to mankind.

Festus.
What mean these mounds we skim shaped animal-wise,
Turtle's, wolf's, serpent's, favouring, or uncouth,
The vulture's wide-winged brotherhood of death?

Lucifer.
Clan-roots of nations these, one common source
Shadowing, and, reared ere all imburghing walls,
By stalwarth savages, in arts of life

134

Less skilled than feats of death, and who, where now
State-capitals stand, hounded the hills; as, far
Eastwards, in older sphere, and stony shape
Snake-headed, volumed over downs, and piled,
Progressive, from the Aleutians to the Basque,
Dracontian fanes, oracular logan, cirque
Slab-pillared, tell one vast and simple faith,
Rudely divine; perchance, from heaven. But now,
To reach where Erie through Niagara hurls
Precipitant all her thunderous waters down
His crescent steep, and so to Ontario breaks
A continent's discontent which else, bulged up,
Might the whole Firm-land flood.

Festus.
One sound all drowns;
'Tis as Earth's tongue.

Lucifer.
Away! Ice now and snow
And frozen firth our echoing hoofs invite
Towards the sacred grove to Esquimo known,
Whence, chipped by giant woodman, man and brute
Fell earthwards, upwards, birds, in sea dropped, fish;
So fable Arctic folk, tribes sparse and spare;
Whose crooked crones, in glittering huts of ice,—
When the vivific sun, world conqueror, ends
Yearly his serpent path, in silent snow
His thunder hiding,—to their home-cloyed youth,
Sharpening the bone-tipped shaft for morse, or seal,
Quaint legends gabble of primal Eld. But see!
Here we are not sole travellers.

Festus.
Ah! yon sledge.
Half hound's land this; brave hound; of souls create
Sub-human gifted highliest; most to man
Faithful,—both where the auroral arch o'erbroods
Graves lost, unsearched for not, and the city's heart,
Through life to his last sigh; and so, worthy judged
Such skiey deathlessness as men can give,
Or dogs divine, of Dian's nebulous chase,
Can joy in, led by their leash of light; or he,
Staunch grew, man-hearted, starred in holiest writ,
Who, burning, bays Orion's spacious steps;
Or good Dherreem, sung in the mighty war,
'Twixt chiefs of lunar lineage, and the sun's,
For the empery of Ind;—four-footed friend
To righteous rajah; he, that kingly kin
All blessed and deified,—lonely left, at last
Shakes off, disguiseful test, the shape canine,
And shines heaven's primal virtue, peer of gods.

Lucifer.
Take credit for quite candid praise:
Nor dogs need we, nor sluggard sleighs.

Festus.
I feel the iron in my blood
Drawn curiously towards the Pole;

135

But oh this cold congeals me; and twere good,
All said and done, to make our goal.

Lucifer.
Thou carest not, then, to tread the terrible ways
Which lead to nature's mightiest mysteries, down
To the humming axis of these surface lands,
Where, earth-guiding, the magnet mountain stands,
Brainlike, ensconced beneath her snowy crown.

Festus.
Not now; as yet, enough to view
Earth's outward.

Lucifer.
So then, hence!

Festus.
Adieu
America, thou, half-brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land;
Greater than thee have lost their seat;
Greater scarce none can stand.

Lucifer.
Just touch the Arctic ring will we;
For our horses snort and snuff the sea,
And pant for where they ought to be.

Festus.
Well, here's the sea; and as we flew in,
I said, let Darkness follow Ruin.

Lucifer.
'Twas right, spur on. Come, Darkness, come,
Think of thy well-strown stall.

Festus.
And Ruin?

Lucifer.
Oh yes; there's a stable-home
For Ruin, too, after all.

Festus.
For me, I fear no fate to come,
Not that which bids me fall.
Oh happy, if at last I lie
Within some pearled and coralled cave;
Where high o'erhead the booming surge,
And moaning billow, shall chant my dirge;
And the storm-blast, as it hurrieth by,
Shall, answering, howl to the mermaid's sigh,
And the nightwind's mournful minstrelsy,
Their requiem over my grave.

Lucifer.
Through morn and midnight, sunset and high noon,
One hour hath ta'en us; o'er all land and sea,
O'er earthquake opening, and iceberg have we
Swept in swift safety.

Festus.
Hour, o'er now, too soon.
Greenland and Iceland far a-lee;
The crests of mountains now I see
Through rolling mists, grey-gilded, burst;
And islands still beloved by me;
Ben-Loda, mount of God, and Nevis, first
Saluted of the sun; and, Erin's isle
Westmost whereon day's lord his parting smile
Through groves of worship, dedicate to fate,

136

Utters, ere yet, kinglike, in fickle state
He turns to flatterers of his greeting ray.

Lucifer.
There, see the causeway, we'll not foot, to-day,
Of giants, who from Ierne through deep sea,
By long columnar jetty, and pillared pier
Basaltic, crystal-capped, and close as canes
In Javan jungle, treacherous access sought
To Albyn's kingly clans, and fate-stoned throne;
'Twixt Erin, thence, and Cambria steer
The lands are close, but be it known
I have been in sharper straits ere now.

Festus.
See Snowdon's bossy back, and more
Remote, in ice, and snow-light hoar
Plinlimmon's ravine-wrinkled brow.

Lucifer.
By Severn's sea our sinuous course now bends;
Yon windy cliff, your isle of isles that ends;
And Lizard porphyry caved.

Festus.
'Twas here of old,
And old world tales the air load, gods uncouth,
Ogres iniquitous, dwelled, whom Corin, proud
Of Tyrrhene monsters slain, slew, and at once
Sheer o'er the crags dashed; Cormoran, and those vile,
Whose far descendant Rhytho, Uther's son
Brained with red brand on the high Cornubian mount
That still o'erpeers the Atlantic; once, as well,
The Llionnese viewed, and all the Armoric shore
Inundate now for aye, but haunt of brood
Like these enorme, in lays chivalric famed;
Who in towers of brass abode, or burnished steel,
That all the region round imblazed; with throng
Of damsels dungeoned, and brave knights unhorsed;
Fire-breathing dragons, guardians of their gates;
But all, in fine, by some proud paladin
Of table round, or peer imperial quelled.

Lucifer.
Behold the common narrow sea,
Which like a strong man's arm,
Keeps back two foes whose lips, wrath-white,
Prove hearts with rage oft warm.
It is very sure, this land we near
Should all things take their natural course,
Sometime in sea will disappear.

Festus.
And if they do, it might be worse;
In peace and war she is with the sea,
By fate conjoined inseparably.
How shall my country fight,
When her foes rise against her;
But with thine arm, O sea,
The arm which thou lentst her?
Where shall my country be buried,
When bounden to die?
Let her choose out her place in the sphere,

137

Where she shall lie.
She hath brethren more than a hundred,
And they all want room;
They may die, and may lie where they live;
They shall not mix with her doom.
Where, but within thine arms, O sea, O sea?
Wherein she hath lived and gloried, let her rest be.
When we dream of her end, and her tomb,
We will rise, and will say to the sea, flow over her;
We will cry to the death of the deep, Cover her.
England, my country, great and free,
Heart of the world, I leap to thee.

Lucifer.
It's land; and that's enough for me.

Festus.
What were the world's without thine history?
Let faith her rites, her creeds to Israel trace;
Earth's lore, earth's art, let flow from Græcia's race;
Owe Christendom to Rome its states, its laws;
The freedom of mankind is England's cause.
To science, learning, law, religion, she
Adds nature's grace supreme, of liberty.
Mother of empire, native to command,—
Whose stern self-rule to fickler realms makes known
A love which serves, but serving, awes, the throne;
Hope, yet, and aid, of thrall, in every land;
She first refused with slavery to defile
Her shores; and God looked down, and blessed the Isle;
Saying:—In this cause, Albion, fare thou forth;
Thy fleets, thy hosts, thy peoples, round the earth;
Elect of powers! be first in wealth, as worth;
To lands less blessed teach thou fair freedom's charms;
Fear not the snares of peace; nor war's alarms;
And leave with heaven the issue of Our arms.

Lucifer.
'Tis not for that, she is dear to me,
What I admire is her humility.

Festus.
Sanctuary of peace and song; of toil colleagued
With science, ever largening this, like the orb
Loaded with golden rain of annual stars,
Preponderative, prolific; kingly wealth
Bringing to many a black mechanic burgh
Gas-breath'd, steam-pulsed; and which, by day obscure,
Strangely at night, bright, oft to star-seer skilled,
Who in neighbouring planet notes, maybe, with lens
Than ours more potent, earth's pale spherelet, gives
Sore brain-ache to divine;—isle, with all charms
Natural and social blessed: here, cultured plain,
Green hill, there; grainy level, and fruit-fraught vale;
Downs, dear to freedom; dim and misty moor,
Where aches the eye with objectless survey;
And long dun moss, by cairn or cromlech crowned;

138

Or lithic dance of giants, 'neath the moon;
Hurlers, or wrestlers, who by sport profaned
Hours holy; or bridal revellers, like beguiled,
That, scornful of Sabbatic peace, till primes,
Footed their fool's reel; and so, fitly earned
Their stony transformation; days of rest
Are theirs, now, unpervert; now, o'er their ears,
The gold-stacked thunder-pipes grave anthems drone,
And voluntaries, in vain; in vain to them
Church-chimes, for aye.

Lucifer.
Indeed 'tis very sad.
Legends are these quite touching in their tone:
Instructive, too, remark, when left alone.
Now get on land; quick, hie along;
O'er forest, copse, and glade;
We have but a league or two more to go,
Before our journey's made;
With speed that flings the sun into the shade,
See the gold sunshine, patching,
And streaming and streaking across
The grey-green oaks; and catching,
By its long brown beard, the moss.

Lucifer.
I have shown thee as I promised, earth,
That rightly thou mightst count its worth,
To have and hold. To me it seems
Like valuable with last month's dreams.

Festus.
It favours virtue to have been
But witness of a glorious scene,
Where truth hath taught, and wisdom dwelt;
Where freedom fought, and faith aspired
To earn the love her soul desired;
Where right hath triumphed, wrong hath knelt;
And peace the heaven diffused she felt.

Lucifer.
It may be. Should I find it so,
Another time, and elsewhere, thou shalt know.
But now; ah, here's an open plain;
Here, we'll get down.
Away, good steeds: be off, again.

Festus.
We must be near to town.
I am bound to thee for ever
By the pleasure of this day;
Henceforth let us never sever,
Come what come may.

139

X.

After travel, homelier life,
A country merry-making, a village feast
May even please, where, with the local world
We mix in private; seriously converse
Of light things, lightly enough of serious. Skilled
To revive dead lore, and magnify extinct
Arts, and extol symbolic wisdom, here
The world-man in the student finds a friend.
Henceforth a power in life, or open, or hid,
The new star mounts the mid-sky; from his stance
Acts fateful; now opposing, now conjoined.
Record of strange spheres hear, scarce stranger still
Than ours. Let hope just thought of deathless soul
Kind Deity, and the dole which aye itself
Recrowns from ruin's fruit, form. Spirit is here
As at dead water balanced: back no more
Can it; advance 'twill not. How ends the strife?
Weight well with worlds the star-scale, and with ends
Incompassable of man unhelped, who'd win
This soul.

A Village Feast. Evening Twilight.
Festus and Lucifer. Afterwards Others.
Festus.
It is getting dark. One has to walk quite close
To see the pretty faces that we meet.

Lucifer.
A disagreeable necessity, most
Truly.

Festus.
We'll rest upon this bridge. I'm tired.
Yon tall slim tree! does it not seem as made
For its place just there, a kind of natural maypole?
Beyond, the lighted stalls with the good things stored
Of childhood's simple world: and behind them
The shouting showman, and the clashing cymbal;
The open-doored cottages and blazing hearths;
The little ones running up with naked feet,
And cake in either hand, to their mother's lap;
Old and young laughing; schoolboys with their playthings;
Clowns cracking jokes; and lasses with sly eyes,
And the smile settling on their sun-flecked cheek,
Like noon upon the mellow apricot;
Make up a scene I can for once give in to;
It must please all, the social and the selfish:
Are they not happy?

Lucifer.
Why, what matters it?
They seem so: that's enough.

Festus.
But not the same.

140

Lucifer.
Yet truth and falsehood meet in seeming, like
The falling leaf and shadow on the pool's face.
And these are joys like beauty, but skin deep.

Festus.
Remove all such, and what's the joy of earth?
It is they create the appetite for life;
Give zest and relish to the lot of millions.
And take the gust for them away, what's left?
A skeleton of existence, soulless, mean.

Lucifer.
It is pleasure men prefer to power. To stoop
Is easier than to climb; and power's above,
Pleasure, below the soul. They are but few
Who feel not, this, a weakness, that a woe.

(Children at play.)
Festus.
Play away, good ones. I could romp with you.
To look, sometimes, upon a child's fair face
Such innocence, outward, and intense, of life
Is resurrection to the heart; and oft,
To those who mole-like grope through an earthy life,
What know they else so indicative of heaven,
So vast in blessing, as these god-sent kings
And queens, according to love's dynasties?
The might and the delight of nations lies
In them, and 'tis for them earth's what it is.

Lucifer.
Another row of dragon's teeth, a row
Of grinders, look ye.

An Old Man.
Pity the poor blind man.

Festus.
Here is substantial pity.

Old Man.
Heaven reward you.

Festus.
Blind as the blue skies after sunset! Blind!
Well I too tire of looking upon what is.
One might as well see beauty never more,
As view with empty eye. Would all were over!
Our pleasures leave us as sighs leave the heart,
Though each sigh leaves it lower; still relieved.
Nought happens but what happens to oneself.
It is sad to think how few life's pleasures are,
Wherefor men risk eternal good. What else,
One's self except, one's self can satisfy?

Lucifer.
Too much, soon tells its tale. I quite feel for you.

Festus.
It is sad success, to antedate life, and reap
'Gainst rule, one's field, ere noon. For what results
But laborous restitution, sowing, reaping,
Losing again? Such toil, such gain alike,
Tire. Live too slowly, can we, to be good,
And happy?

Lucifer.
Nay, how suddenly wise!

Festus.
But youth,

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Burning to forestall nature, will not wait Time,
Stern sculls-man with his barge, to ferry it o'er
Life's stream, but flings itself into the flood,
Intolerantly, and perisheth. Well, what charm's
In time, as time, what good? Are longest days
Happier than short ones? What then can age offer?
It is sometime now since I was here. We leave
Our home in youth—no matter to what end;
Study—or strife—or pleasure, or what not;
And coming back in few short years, we find
All as we left it, outside; the old elms,
The house, grass, gates, and latchet's self-same click;
But lift that latchet,—all is changed as doom:
The servants have forgotten our step, and more
Than half of those who knew us know us not.
Adversity, prosperity, the grave,
Play a round game with friends. On some the world
Hath shot its evil eye, and they are passed
From honour and remembrance; and a stare
Is all the mention of their names receives;
And people know no more of them than they know
The shapes of clouds at midnight, a year hence.

Lucifer.
Let us move on to where the dancing is;
We soon shall see how happy they all are.
Here is a loving couple quarrelling;
And there, another. It is quite distressing.
See yonder. Two men fighting!

Festus.
What avail
These vile exceptions to the rule of joy?

Lucifer.
Behold the happiness of which thou spakest!
The highest hills are miles below the sky;
And so far is the lightest heart below
True happiness.

Festus.
To one who knows so well
What that is, doubtless 'tis a snake-like world,
Tail aye in mouth, as if it ate itself,
And moralled time. To others kindlier masked,
A make-believing cheat, it shows; to me,
The world seems like yon children's merry-go-round;
What men admire are carriages and hobbies,
Which the exalted manikins enjoy.
There is a noisy ragged crowd below
Of urchins drives it round, who only get
The excitement for their pains—best gain perhaps;
For it is not they who labour that grow dizzy
Nor sick; that's for the idle proud, above;
Who soon dismount, more weary of enjoying,
Than those below of working; and but fair.
It is wretchedness or recklessness alone
Keeps us alive. Were we happy we should die.

142

Yet what is death? I like to think on death:
It is but the appearance of an apparition.
One ought to tremble; but oughts stand for nothing.
I hate the thought of wrinkling up to rest;
The toothlike, aching, ruin of the body,
With the heart all out, and nothing left but edge.
Give me the long high bounding sense of life,
Which cries, let me but leap into my grave,
And I'll not mind the when, nor where. We never
Care less for life than when enjoying it.
Youth, youth, shrink not to die. What is, to die?
I cannot grasp the meaning more than can
An oak's arms clasp the blast that blows upon it.
There is an air-like something which must be,
And yet not to be seen, nor to be touched.
I am bound to die; for having been to myself,
Every thing, there is nothing left but nothing,
To be again.

Lucifer.
Hark! here's a ballad-singer.

Ballad-Singer.
All of my own composing!

Festus.
Yes, yes—we know.

Singer.

My gipsy maid! my gipsy maid!
I bless and curse the day
I lost the light of life, and caught
The grief which maketh grey.
Would that the light which blinded me
Had saved me on my way!

My night-haired love! so sweet she was,
So fair and blithe was she;
Her smile was brighter than the moon's,
Her eyes the stars might see.

I met her by her lane-spread tent,
Beside a moss-green stone,
And bade her make, not mock, my fate
My fortune was her own.
Thou art but yet a boy, she said,
And I a woman grown.

I am a man in love, I cried:
My heart was early manned:
She smiled, and only drooped her eyes,
And then let go my hand.
We stood a minute; neither spake
What each must understand.

I told her, so she would be mine,
And follow where I went,
She straight should have a bridal bower
Instead of gipsy tent.

Or would she have me wend with her,
The world between should fall;
For her I would fling up faith and friends,
And name, and fame, and all.

143

Her smile so bright froze while I spake,
And ice was in her eye;
So near, it seemed ere touch her heart
I might have kissed the sky.

I said that if she loved to rule,
Or if she longed to reign,
I would make her Queen of every race
Which tearlike trod the world's sad face,
Or bleed at every vein.

She laid her finger on her lip,
And pointed to the sky;
There is no God to come, she said:
Dost thou not fear to die?

And what is God, I said, to thee?
Thy people worship not.
The good, the happy, and the free,
She said, they need no God.

I looked until I lost mine eyes;
I felt as though I were
In a dark cave, with one weak light—
The light of life—with her;
And that was wasting fast away;
I watched, but would not stir.

Again she took my hand in hers,
And read it o'er and o'er;
Ah! eyes so young, so sweet, I said,
Make as they read love's lore.

She held my hand—I trembled whilst—
For sorely soon I felt
She made the love-cross she foretold,
And all the woe she dealt.

Unhappy I should be, she said,
And young to death be given:
I told her I believed in her,
Not in the stars of heaven.

Hush! we breathe heaven, she said, and bowed;
And the stars speak through me.
Let heaven, I cried, take care of heaven!
I only care for thee.

She shrank; I looked, and begged a kiss;
I knew she had one for me;
She would deny me not, she said,
But give me none would she.

My gipsy maid! my gipsy maid!
'Tis three long years like this,
Since there I gave and got from thee
That meeting, parting kiss.

I saw the tears start in her eye,
And trickle down her cheek;
Like falling stars across the sky,
Escaping from their Maker's eye:
I saw, but spared to speak.

144

Go, and forget! she said, and slid
Below her lowly tent;
I will not, cannot;—hear me, girl!
She heard not, and I went.

At eve, by sunset, I was there,
The tent was there no more;
The fire which warmed her flickered still—
The fire she sat before.

I stood by it, till through the dark
I saw not where it lay;
And then like that my heart went out
In ashy grief and grey.

My gipsy maid! my gipsy maid!
Oh! let me bless this day;
This day it was, I met thee first,
And yet it shall be and is cursed,
For thou hast gone away.

Farmer.
And glad we'd be if the whole tribe should follow.

Lucifer.
Another, please—not quite so gloomy, friend.

Girl.
I wonder if the tale it tells be true.

Singer.
I dare say—but you want a merrier. Do you?
Every man's life hath its apocrypha;
Mine has, at least. I have said more than need be.
It happened, too, when I was very young.
We never meet such gipsies when we are old;
And yet we more complain of age than youth.
Now, make a ring, good people. Let me breathe! [Sings.

Oh! the wee green neuk, the sly green neuk,
The wee sly neuk, for me!
Whare the wheat is wavin' bright and brown,
And the wind is fresh and free.
Whare I weave wild weeds, and out o' reeds
Kerve whissles as I lay;
And a douce low voice is murmurin' by,
Through the lee-lang simmer day.
Oh! the wee green neuk, &c.

And where a' things luik as though they lo'ed
To languish in the sun;
And that if they feed the fire they dree,
They wadna ae pang were gone.
Whare the lift aboon is still as death,
And bright as life can be;
While the douce low voice says, na, na, na!
But ye mauna luik sae at me.
Oh! the wee green neuk, &c.

Whare the lang rank bent is saft and cule,
And freshenin' till the feet;
And the spot is sly, and the spinnie high,
Whare my love and I mak' seat:

145

And I teaze her till she rins, and then,
I catch her roun' the tree;
While the poppies shak' their heids and blush:
Let them blush till they drap, for me!
Oh! the wee green neuk, &c.

Festus.
And all who know such feelings and such scenes
Will, I am sure, reward you. Here—take this.

Others.
And this, and this—too!

Singer.
Thank ye all, good friends!

Festus.
There's much that hath no merit but its truth,
And no excuse but nature. Nature does
Never wrong: it is society which sins.
Look at the bee upon the wing among flowers;
How brave, how bright his life. Then mark him hived,
Cramped, cringing in his self-built social cell.
Thus is it in the world-hive: most where men
Lie deep in cities as in drifts, death drifts;
Nosing each other like a flock of sheep;
Not knowing and not caring whence nor whither
They come or go, so that they fool together.

Lucifer.
It is quite fair to halve these lives, and say
This life is nature's, that society's,
When both are side-views only of one thing.

Farmer.
Here comes his reverence. Sir, it does one good
To see you come among us, in these days.

Parson.
Why, I have but little comfort in these pastimes;
And any heart, turned Godwards, feels more joy
In one short hour of prayer, than e'er was raised
By all the feasts on earth, since their foundation.
But no one will believe us; as if we
Had never known the vain things of the world,
Nor lain and slept in sin's seducing shade,
Listless, until God woke us; made us feel
We should be up and stirring in the sun;
For everything had to be done ere night.
What is all this joy and jollity about?
Grant there may be no sin. What good is it?

Farmer.
I can't defend these feasts, sir, and can't blame.

Parson.
Good evening, friends! Why, Festus! I rejoice
We meet again. I have a young friend here,
A student—who hath stayed with us of late.
You would be glad I know to know each other;
Therefore be known so.

Festus.
You are a student, sir.

Student.
I profess little. But it is a title
A man may claim perhaps with modesty.

146

Festus.
True. All mankind are students. How to live
And how to die forms the great lesson still.
I know what study is: it is to toil
Hard, through the hours of the sad midnight watch,
At tasks which seem a systematic curse,
And course of bootless penance. Night by night,
To trace one's thought as if on iron leaves;
And sorrowful as though it were the mode
And date of death we wrote on our own tombs:
Wring a slight sleep out of the couch, and see
The self-same moon which lit us to our rest,
Her place scarce changed perceptibly in heaven,
Now light us to renewal of our toils.
This, to the young mind, wild and all in leaf,
Which knowledge, grafting, paineth. Fruit soon comes;
And more than all our troubles pays us powers;
So that we joy to have endured so much:
Slaved, slain ourselves, almost. More; it is to strive
To bring the mind up to one's own esteem:
Who but the generous fail? It is to think,
While thought is standing thick upon the brain,
As dew upon the brow—for thought is brain-sweat—
And gathering quick and dark, like storms in summer,
Until convulsed, condensed, in lightning sport,
It plays upon the heavens of the mind;
Opens the hemisphered abysses here,
And we become revealers to ourselves.

Student.
When night hath set her silver lamp on high,
Then is the time for study: when heaven's light
Pours itself on the page, like prophesy
On time, unglooming all its mighty meanings;
It is then we feel the sweet strength of the stars,
And magic of the moon.

Lucifer.
It's a bad habit.

Student.
And wisdom dwells in secret, and on high,
As do the stars. The sun's diurnal glare
Is for the worldly herd; but for the wise,
The cold pure radiance of the night-born light,
Wherewith is inspiration of the truth.
Time was, I ne'er sought rest before the sun
Rose broad; and, maybe, for that sacrifice,
Through a like length of time as that now gone,
The world shall speak of me six thousand years hence.

Lucifer.
How know you that the world won't end to-morrow?

Parson.
I, now, an early riser, love to hail
The dreamy struggles of the stars with light,
And the recovering breath of earth, sleep drowned,
Awakening to the wisdom of the sun,
And life of light within the tent of heaven;

147

To kiss the feet of Morning as she walks
In dewy light along the hills, while they,
All-odorous as an angel's fresh-culled crown,
Unveil to her their bounteous loveliness.

Student.
I am devote to study. Worthy books
Are not companions; they are solitudes;
We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.
The further back we search the human mind,
Mean in the mass, but in the instance great;
Which starting first with deities, and stars,
And broods of beings earth-born, heaven-begot,
And all the bright side of the broad world, now
Doats upon dreams and dim atomic truths;
Is all for comfort and no more for glory;
The nobler and more marvellous it shows.
Trifles like these make up the present time;
The Iliad and the Pyramids the past.

Festus.
The future will have glory not the less.
I can conceive a time when the world shall be
Much better visibly, and when, as far
As social life and its relations tend,
Men, morals, manners shall be lifted up
To a pure height we know not of nor dream;
When all men's rights and duties shall be clear,
And charitably exercised and borne;
When education, conscience, and good deeds
Shall have just equal sway, and civil claims;
Great crimes shall be cast out, as were of old
Devils possessing madmen; truth shall reign,
Nature shall be rethroned, and man sublimed.

Student.
Oh! then may heaven come down again to earth;
And dwell with her, as once, like to a friend.

Lucifer.
As like each other as a sword and scythe.
Oh! then shall lions mew and lambkins roar.

Festus.
And having studied—what next?

Student.
Much I long
To view the capital city of the world.
The mountains, the great cities, and the sea,
Are each an era in the life of youth.

Festus.
There to get worldly ways, and thoughts, and schemes;
To learn to detect, distrust, despise mankind;
To ken a false factitious glare amid much
That shines with seeming saintlike purity;
To gloss misdeeds; to trifle with great truths;
To pit the brain against the heart, and plead
Wit before wisdom; these are the world's ways:
It learns us to lose that in crowds, which we

148

Must after seek alone, our innocence;
And when the crowd is gone.

Student.
Not only that:
There, all great things are round one. Interests
Mighty and mountainous even of estimate,
Are daily heaped or scattered 'neath the eye.
Great deeds, great thoughts, great schemes, world-bettering, all
In practice possible, or in purpose great,
Of human nature, there, are common things.
Men make themselves be deathless as in spite;
As if they waged some lineal feud with time;
As though their fathers were immortal, too;
And immortality an every-day
Accomplishment.

Festus.
Fie! fie! it is more for this:
Amid gayer people, and more wanton ways,
To give a loose to all the lists of youth;
To train your passion flowers high ahead,
And bind them on your brow as others do.
The mornlit revel and the shameless mate;
The tabled hues of darkness and of blood;
The published bosom and the crowning smile;
The cup excessive; and if aught there be
More vain than these or wanton,—that to have—
Have all but always in intent, effect,
Or fact. Nay, nay, deny it not: I know.
Youth hath a strange and strong desire to try
All feelings on the heart: it is very wrong,
And dangerous, and deadly: strive against it!

Student.
It might be some old sage was warning us.

Festus.
Youth might be wise. We suffer less from pains
Than pleasures.

Student.
I should like to see the world,
And gain that knowledge which is—

Festus.
Barrener
Than ice; possessing and producing nought
But means and forms of death or vanity.
The world is just as hollow as an eggshell.
It is a surface, not a solid, mind:
And all this boasted knowledge of the world
Means but acquaintance with low things, it seems
To me, things evil, or things indifferent.

Farmer.
Much more is said of knowledge than its worth.
A man may gain all knowledge here, and yet
Be, after death, as much in the dark as I.

Lucifer.
What makes you know of living after death?

Farmer.
Why, nothing that I know, and there it is!—

149

But something I am told has told me so.
No angel ever came to me to prove it;
And all my friends have died and left no ghosts.

Festus.
All that is good a man may learn from himself;
And much, too, that is bad.

Parson.
Nay, let me speak!
Aught that is good the soul receives of God,
When he hath made it his; and until then,
Man cannot know, nor do, nor be, aught good.
Oh! there is nought on earth worth being known
But God and our own souls—the God we have
Within our hearts; for it is not the hope,
Nor faith, nor fear, nor notions others have
Of God can serve us, but the sense and soul
We have of him within us; and, for men,
God loves us men each individually,
And deals with us in order, soul by soul.

Lucifer.
But this is not the place for sermons.

Parson.
True.
We heard once, Festus, you were travelling:
Pray, in what parts?

Festus.
Among the outer orbs.

Parson.
Nay, surely not so far; except in thought,
Perchance, or calculation.

Festus.
A month back
I was in giant land.

Parson.
Ah! fee-faw-fum?—
They did not eat you, there?

Festus.
Oh! no. They much
Preferred their usual fare.

Parson.
What might it be?
Not Englishmen and hasty pudding, eh?

Festus.
They are no more cannibals than you or I;
But are of various tastes, and patronize,
I know, rich diet.

Parson.
It's excusable.
And they are great consumers, I dare say.

Festus.
A wheat-stack of our friend's here would but make
One loaf of bread for them. Oak trees they use
As pickles, and tall pines as toothpicks; whales,
In their own blubber fried, serve as mere fish
To bait their appetites. Boiled elephants,
Rhinoceroses, and roasted crocodiles—
Every thing dished up whole—with lions stewed,
Shark sauce, and eagle pie, and young giraffes,
Make up a potluck dinner,—if there's plenty.
Then as for game, the pterodactyles
And ichthyosauri are great dainties there,

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Coming in season only once an age.
They reckon there by ages, not by years.

Student.
And as to beverage?

Festus.
Oh; if thirsty, they
Will lay them down and drink a river dry,
Nor once draw breath.

Parson.
Ah! camel, gnat, and all.

Festus.
Others are more abstemious, and consume
Egg-broth and simples chiefly. There was one
Who when I saw him first sat by a fire:
An egg, an hour-glass, and a water bowl
Being before him. All he said was this:—
When the sand is run
The egg is done.
This he first boiled, then roasted, and then ate.

Student.
What sort of one? Perhaps an ostrich egg?

Festus.
Much larger. Here is nothing of the kind.
The yolk was like the sun seen in a fog;
The white was thin and clouded, and the shell,
Heavy and hard, as is our earth-pie crust.

Lucifer.
What kind of bird it was that laid it—guess!

Parson.
Continue. You have travelled in the dark;
But wisdom sometimes inns with ignorance.
What of their persons, habits, language, creed?

Festus.
Huger than Napheleim of old, whose bulk
Cast cloudlike shadows on the eclipsèd earth;
Huger than those our childhood's chap-books brand;
Or all whose deeds till now defile romance;
Albadan, and those monstrous, sire and son,
Whom Amadis, the flower of knights, o'erthrew,
Not counting much of giants—so to win
His Oriana bright at Miréfleur;
In form and stature, these, as mountain-sized,
Could walk through woods like ours as through long grass.
They live seven thousand years of years like man's,
And then die suddenly; when death takes place
They burn the bodies always in a lake,
The spray whereof is ashes, and its depths
Unfathomable fire; and never mourn;
Use little verbal language, but express
All thought by action, and oracular use
Of eye or hand. Their chief religion seems
Self punishment by sin and rites of fire.
'Twould do the godless good to visit once,
One of this awful race whom late I saw;
And who, were time and place more fitting—

Student.
Nay,
We are apart from others. Nothing save
Yon heavenly ark which floats among the stars,

151

Now resting on an Ararat of clouds,
Hath leave to overlook us.

Parson.
Pray proceed.

Festus.
Once I had travelled through a weary world,
Than all in heaven more barren and forlorn;
Dark as the wild heart of a thunder-cloud;
Strewn with the wrecks and ashes of all orbs,
Firestranded, rolling in quick agony;
Peopled with burning ghosts dislimbed and charred;
And in the midst a giant, by a fire,
Kindled of burning passions, and full fed
With sins long seasoned; at whose feet there stood
A crystal cistern, brimmed with human tears,
Which sprinkled but inflamed the fire withal;
The giant all while watching with stern mien,
And ruthless interest the whole. Dread sir!
Said I, as I drew near, what angers thee?
He answered not, but pointed; and I saw,
Full in the midst of that infernal fire,
Blazing aghast in solar solitude,
A panting shadow, which, with skeleton eyes,
And woe-gouged countenance, whereon was hung
A white eclipse, like darkness pale with pain,—
Watched for the disappearance of the heavens
With a despairing hope: entranced it lay
In palpitant torments self-perpetuate, racked
Ever; anon turned restlessly, and cried
Woe, woe is me! Eternal Spirit God!
Thy wrath is heaviest when made bearable.
Put forth thy strength and sweep the universe,
With me, into the night of nothingness,
That sin and soul may perish. Woe is me!
Still shine the blessed heavens, and still, like ice
By art fire-frozen, my dole my dole renews.
And the giant laughed, glad in his ministery
Of scathe; and blew, with all his breath, his hell,
Still fiercer—till it bellowed, and the orb
Beneath my foot sole seared, and I took leave;
For there was somewhat in the giant's air,
And his huge balefire, and the naked plain—
Bald as the scalp of Time—which caused me dread.

Parson.
I doubt not all you say is memory's birth,
Conceived of fiction. Never mortal man
Hath travelled in another sphere than this.
It was a vision, Festus, say, a dream.

Festus.
Say as you will, is not a dream a fact?

Parson.
Dreams you have dreamed till you believe in them;
But such as these are awesome. Not the less
View them vouchsafed as warnings. Oft the mind,

152

Freed by angelic sleep from bodily bonds,
Knows scenes and themes like these you have named, which tend
To edifying much. Such travel is
Like mine, the travail simply of the brain.

Festus.
It is pure reality.

Parson.
Well, say no more.
We may pursue the sense of things too far.
True travellers they through all the lands of life,
Moral, emotional, or love's sunny zone;
The palm-graced pilgrims of truth's holy land,
Who, all experienced, reason, wisdom find,
And virtue less without than in themselves.
So through all moral schools, the cold, stern porch,
Divine, impassive; garden gay, where still
Dwelled pleasure scarce than virtue less severe
And stately grove of lofty lore select;
The truth sought soul progresses, till we find
Our home is where she leads; and we are guests
But of our guide; the shrine she shows, herself.
The golden side of heaven's great shield is faith;
The silver, reason. You see this, I that;
The junction is invisible to both.

Student.
One thing is sometimes said, another meant.

Lucifer.
What are your politics?

Farmer.
I have none.

Lucifer.
Good.

Farmer.
I have my thoughts. I am no party man.
I care for measures more than men, but think
Some little may depend upon the men;
Something in fires depends upon the grate.

First Boy.
What are your colours?

Second.
Blue as heaven.

Third.
And mine
Are yellow as the sun.

First.
Mine, green as grass.

Second.
Green's forsaken, and yellow's forsworn;
And blue's the colour that shall be worn.

Student.
As to religion, politics, law, and war,
But little need be said. All are required,
And all are well enough. Of liberty,
And slavery, and tyranny we hear
Much; but the human mind affects extremes.
The heart is in the middle of the system;
And all affections gather round the truth,
The moderated joys and woes of life.
I love my God, my country, kind and kin;
Nor would I see a dog wronged of his bone.
My country! if a wretch should e'er arise,
Out of thy countless sons, who would curtail

153

Thy freedom, dim thy glory,—while he lives
May all earth's peoples curse him—for of all
Hast thou secured the blessing; and if one
Exist who would not arm for liberty,
Be he, too, cursèd living: and when dead,
Let him be buried downwards, with his face
Looking to hell; and o'er his coward grave
The hare skulk, in her form.

Lucifer.
Nay, gently, friend.
Curse nothing, not the Devil. He's beside you—
For aught you know.

Student.
I neither know nor care.

(They pass some card-players.)
Festus.
Kings, queens, knaves, tens, would trick the world away,
And it were not now and then for some brave ace.

Student.
You see yon wretched starved old man; his brow
Grooved out with wrinkles like the brown dry sand
The tide of life is leaving?

Lucifer.
Yes, I see him.

Student.
Last week he thought he was about to die:
So he bade gold be strewn beneath his pillow,
Gold on a chest that he might lie and see,
And gold put in a basin on his bed,
That he might dabble with his fingers in.
He's going now to grope for pence or pins.
He never gave a pin's worth in his life.
What would you do to him?

Lucifer.
I would have him wrought
Into a living wire, which beaten out,
Might make a golden network for the world;
Then melt him inch by inch, and hell by hell,
Where is the law of wrath.

Student.
Oh, charity!
It is a thought the Devil might be proud of—
Once and away. Misers and spendthrifts may
Torment each other in the world to come.

Lucifer.
And thus do men apportion their own lot;
A grain of comfort and a sack of sin.

Festus.
Men look on death as lightning, always far
Off, or in heaven. They know not it is in
Themselves, a strong and inward tendency,
The soul of every atom, every hair:
That nature's infinite electric life,
Escaping from each isolated frame,
Up out of earth, or down from heaven, becomes
To each its proper death, and adds itself
Thus to the great reunion of the whole.
There is a man in mourning! What does he here?

154

Student.
He has just buried the only friend he had,
And now comes hither to enjoy himself.

Festus.
Why will we dedicate the dead to God,
And not ourselves the living? Oft we speak,
With tears of joy and trust, of some dear friend
As surely up in heaven; while that same soul,
For aught we know, may be shuddering even in hell
To hear his name named; or a wandering ghost,
Moon-eyed, which gasps to read on marble slab
His virtue-lauding epitaph; or there may be
No soul i' the case, and the fat icy worm,
Give him a tongue, can tell us all about him.

Student.
Here is music. Stay. That simple melody
Comes on the heart like infant innocence,
Pure feeling pure; while yet the new-bodied soul
Is swinging to the motion of the heavens,
And scarce hath caught, as yet, earth's backening course.

Festus.
The heart is formed as earth was—its first age
Formless and void, and fit but for itself;
Then feelings half alive, just organized,
Come next,—then creeping sports and purposes,—
Then animal desires, delights, and loves—
For love is the first and granite-like effect
Of things—the longest and the highest: next
The wild and winged desires, youth's saurian schemes,
Which creep and fly by turns; which kill and eat,
And do disgorge each other; comes at length
Humanity to perfect life, and divide,
By woman. Great their bliss, but ill arrives.
Or the insipidity of an innocent soul
Palls: or some fatal act, a curse, a death,
An exile's laid upon it, and it goes—
Quits its green Eden for the sandy world,
Where it works out its nature, as it may;
In sweat, smiles, blood, tears, cursings, and what not.
And giant sins possess it; and it worships
Works of the hand, head, heart—its own or others—
A creature worship, which excludeth God's:
The less thrusts out the greater. Warning comes,
But the heart fears not—feels not; till at last
Down comes the flood from heaven; and that heart,
Broken inwards, earthlike, to its central hell:
Or like the bright and burning eye we see
Inly, when pressed hard backwards on the brain,
Ends and begins again—destroyed, is saved.
Every man is the first man to himself,
And Eves are just as plentiful as apples;
Nor do we fall, nor are we saved, by proxy.
The Eden we live in is our own heart;
And the first thing we do, of our free choice,

155

Is sure and necessary to be sin.
Each to himself is also the last man,
And with him bears and earns the world's vast doom.

Lucifer.
The only right men have is to be damned.
What is the good of music, or the beauty?
Music tells no truths.

Festus.
True; but it suggests
And illustrates the highest of all truths,
The harmony of all things—even of earth,
With its great Author. Oh! there is nought so sweet
As lying and listening music from the hands,
And singing from the lips, of one we love;
Lips that all others should be tuned to. Then
The world would all be love and song; heaven's harps
And orbs join in; the whole be harmony;
Distinct, yet blended—blending all in one
Long and delicious tremble like a chord.
But to thee, God! all being is a harp
Whereon thou makest mightiest melody.

Lucifer.
Hast ever been in love, friend?

Student.
Never, I.

Festus.
Spite of morality or of mystery, love
It is, which mostly destinates our life.
What makes the world in after life I know not;
For our horizon alters as we age:
Power only can make up for the lack of love;
Power of some sort. The mind at one time grows
So fast, it fails; and then its stretch is more
Than its strength; but, as it opes, love fills it up,
Like to the stamen in the flower of life,
Till for the time we well-nigh grow all love;
And soon we feel the want of one kind heart
To love what's well, and to forgive what's ill,
In us,—that heart we play for at all risks.

Student.
How can the heart, which lies embodied deep,
In blood and bone, set like a ruby eye
Into the breast, be made a toy for beauty,
And, vane-like, blown about by every wanton sigh?
How can the soul, the rich star-travelled stranger,
Who here sojourneth only for a purchase,
Risk all the riches of his years of toil,
And his God-vouched inheritance of heaven,
For one light taste of love? which makes forget
By force of juice Lethean all beside
Of lore, or studious gain, or so I have heard;
Love being itself most perishable of things,
A vanishing quantity, at the best.

Lucifer.
No matter!
It is so; and when once you know the sport,
The crowded pack of passions in full cry,

156

The sweet deceits, the tempting obstacles,
The smile, the sigh, the tear, and the embrace,
With kisses close as stars in the Milky Way,
In at the death, you cry, though 'twere your own;
Or, so I have heard.

Student.
Most sound morality!
Nothing is thought of virtue, then, nor judgment?

Lucifer.
Oh! everything is thought of—but not then.
And—judgment—no! it is nowhere in the field.

Student.
Slow-paced and late arriving, still it comes.
I cannot understand this love; I hear
Of its idolatry, more than its respect.

Festus.
Respect is what we owe; love what we give.
And men would mostly rather give than pay.
Meanwhile let no vain teachings lead aside:
Morality's the sole right rule for all.
Nor could society cohere without
Virtue were loved; there are whose spirits walk
A breast of angels and the future, here.
Respect and love thou such.

Lucifer.
Of course you wish
Women to love you rather than love them.
Well, mind! it is folly to tell women truth!
They would rather live on lies so they be sweet.
Never be long in one mind to one love.
You change your practice with your subject. All
Differ. But yet, who knows one woman well
By heart, knows all. It is my experience;
And I advise on good authority.

Festus.
Time laughs at love. It is a hateful sight,
That bald old grey-beard jeering the boy, Love.
Passion is from affection; and there is nought
So maddening and so lowering as to have
The worse in passion. Think, when one by one,
Pride, love, and jealousy, and fifty more
Great feelings column up to force a heart,
And all are beaten back,—all fail—all fall:
The tower intact; but risk it: we must learn.
To know the world, be wise and be a fool.
The heart will have its swing—the world its way:
Who seeks to stop them, only throws himself down.
We must take as we find: go as they go,
Or stand aside. Let the world have the wall.
How do you think, pray, to get through the world?

Student.
I mean not to get through the world at all
But over it.

Festus.
Aspiring! you will find
The world is all up-hill when we would do;
All down-hill when we suffer. Nay, it will part
Like the Red Sea, so that the poor may pass.

157

We make our compliments to wretchedness,
And hope the poor want nothing, and are well.
But I mean, what profession will you choose?
Surely you will do something for a name.

Student.
Names are of much more consequence than things.

Festus.
Well; here's our honest, all-exhorting friend,
The parson—here the doctor. I am sure
The Devil might act as moderator there,
And do mankind some service.

Lucifer.
In his way.

Student.
But I care neither for men's souls nor bodies.

Festus.
What say you to the law? Are you ambitious?

Student.
Nor do I mind for other people's business.
I have no heart for their predicaments:
I am for myself. I measure everything
By, what is it to me? from which I find
I have but little in common with the mass,
Except my meals and so forth; dress and sleep.
I have that within me I can live upon:
Spider-like, spin my place out anywhere.

Festus.
To none of all the sciences, nor arts,
Astral, or earthy, you feel your mind, then, drawn!

Student.
Why no; there are so many rise and fail and fall,
One knows not which to choose. As for the stars,
I never look on them without dismay.
Earth hath outrun them in our modern mind
By worlds of odds. We have lost all sympathies
With the e'er moving skies, and seem, ourselves,
To the eternal less, and less concerned
In act and use of heavenly things, than when
Poor earth was almost all. Enough for us
It seems, and our cold reckoners to jot down
Their revolutions, distances, and squares;
While the bright laws which stars and spirits rule,
From deep-toned Saturn; from the sea-god's star,
And thunderous bass of heaven's immediate orb,
Whose inefficient ray, or good or ill
Fails to decide here, to the shrill-voiced moon,
Are buried, grave on grave. Who now will care
To learn of things more spiritual than facts
Totalled up, day by day? Who now aspires,
Aweful, to attain the spells of secret power,
And safety, say, 'gainst spirits supernal, taught
By ancient seers and sages? Who now knows
Of fourfold worlds and elemental spheres
Concentric, like the ring the wizard draws
Round him, which lord our earth; yet in such wise
That still, through them, we may conjoin our souls
To the starry guardians of all worlds, beyond

158

Moon-mansions, and heaven's burning heart, where dwell
Celestial spirits all-knowing, and divine
Demons? All, infinitely unsought, are deemed
Doubtless, extinct. No danger now of aught
Knowing, which ought not justly to be known.
And you, ye planetary sons of light,
Your aspects, dignities, gifts, and detriments,
And all your heavenly houses and effects,
Unknown to shallow sciolists, shall no more
Meet here, devout expounders. Ye shall shine
Henceforth, in vain, to man; cease to reward,
Or instigate; and you, too, ye juried signs,
Earth's sun-surrounding path illuming, mind
Move ye no more; nought more of faith feel men
In the eternal order, God was deemed
To have made common once 'tween heaven and earth;
But all the starry inclusions of all signs
Shall rise, and rule and pass, and no one know
There are worlds whose spirit-rulers fraternize
With ours; and unsuspect, high commune hold,
In the shining voices of the spheres, with souls
Of astral purity. The mystic charm
In numbers, and the all-various unity
Of being, repetitive, which ones with God
The whole, and coming from, to him returns,
Allures no more man's mind, debased; nor, now,
The mysteries of names; yet wot we well
That natural perfection multiplied
By spiritual, on monadic deity based,
God's names, as known to men and angels, gives;
And how thus Fate rules, really all, by means
Mediate, and nominal. Take, too, chemic art;
What do men now? Weigh atoms; count them; rate
Their mean affinities, laws. The starry stone,
Golden, invisible, principle of life,
Fine quintessence of all the elements,
Is still unbought; still flows the stream of pearl
Beneath the magic mountain; still the scent
As of thousand amaranth wreaths, all life which lures,
Though vainly, unto its sweetness, floats around
Mistlike, the shining bath where Luna laves,
Or Sol, bright brother of that moonèd maid,
Triumphs. The earth celestial, the live land,
Still is, though veiled; still breathe for those who will,
The airs of Paradise. The watery fire,
Destructive, recreative, impalpable,
The initial and conclusion of the world,
The secret of creation shared 'tween God
And man, now nature's only, timewise, still
Waits man's deific choice; soul's simple light

159

Divine, wherein all rudiments blend, still burns
Our spirits within. The snowy gold, the seed
Nucleate of stars,—by wind impregned, of God,
If arbitrary of favour,—bound, being tracked,
Dismasked, to render rich and deathless all,
Hides not. The water of deathless life still flows;
Still bounds through nature's veins the sanative juice
Absolvent of disease; and still, in fine,
The secrets only to be told by fire,
Starry, or beamless, central and extreme,
Burn to be born. And other natures may
Use them, and do. In Demogorgon's hall
Still sits the universal mystery, life
Hidden in itself, but cognizable in cause,
By its own willing members: of man, sole,
The recreant spirit of the world ignored.
He surface-knowledge loves; the crimes of crowds
Calls virtue; adores the useful vices; licks
The gory dust from off the feet of war,
And swears it food for gods, though fit for fiends
Only; reversing, in his own vile plight,
The Devil's, when first he boarded this our orb,
A fallen angel's form, a reptile's soul.

Lucifer.
Oh! this is libellous to man and fiend
And brute together.

Student.
All are art and part
Of the same mystic treason. But enough!
I have seen the end of all earth's loftier lore.
There shall be no more cabala, nor magic;
Nor Rosicrucian nor alchymic skill;
Nor fairy fantasies: no more hobgoblins,
Nor ghosts, nor imps, nor demons. Conjurors,
Enchanters, witches, wizards, shall all die
Hopeless, and heirless; their divining arts
Supernal or infernal, dead, with them.
And so it will doubtless be with other things
In time; therefore will I my brain commit
To none of them.

Festus.
Perchance it were wiser not:
Man's heart hath not half uttered itself yet,
And much remains to do as well as say.
The heart is some time ere it finds its focus.
And found, with the whole light of nature strained
To a hair's-breadth through it, oft, the things it burns
To search, it lights, oblivious, to their death.
I had not thought the world within its walls
Held one so versed in ignorance, so expert
In things impracticable. You must have lived
So centrally apart as not to know
That studies once perchance thought loftiest, since,

160

Have lost their footing by proved uselessness;
While lowlier ones, which merely better man,
Bring him more near his Maker.

Student.
I believe
The world will neither better end nor worse
For aught I do, or wish to do, or mean.

Lucifer.
Signs of a conscientious recklessness,
Such thoughts, as touch me and attract. I never
So fortunate seem as in 'lighting upon friends
Bent on their own ends, openly. Good; be wise.

Student.
Wisdom is not to know what others know.
For public science patent to mankind
I reck nought. Secret truth is that I seek.

Lucifer.
And rightly. Pure intelligence alone,
Unmixed with moral aims, is truly wise.
To cheapen truth that every one may buy,
You must so thin the gold as makes it worthless.

Festus.
Nay, but contrariwise; the more you spread
The more you emulate truth's deity,
In his best attribute, the gift of bliss
To others. Truth for its own sake's worth little;
Communicated, priceless. Mix with men;
Not slavewise to the mass; but having gained
In secret freedom, truth, that moral gold
Which mind transmutes, perfective from all thought,
And hath in noblest souls most potent rule,
Impart to all prepared.

Student.
This alchemy
How shall I learn, whereby thought truth becomes,
And knowledge, wisdom;—magistery divine?

Lucifer.
We'll speak of this sometime at leisure. I
Know one, who could unseal this hidden lore;
And hold the wine of wisdom to their lips,
Who can appreciate her divinest draught.
Nay, more; perchance can reconcile the aims
Of both; and knowledge supplement with power.

Festus.
Well, farewell, Mr. Student. May you never
Regret those hours which make the mind, if they
Unmake the body; for the sooner we
Are fit to be all mind, the better. Blessed
Is he whose heart is the home of the great dead,
And their great thoughts. Who can mistake great thoughts?
They seize upon the mind; arrest and search,
And shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind;
Rush over it like a river over reeds,
Which quaver in the current; turn us cold,
And pale, and voiceless; leaving in the brain
A rocking and a ringing; glorious,
But momentary, madness might it last,

161

And close the soul with heaven as with a seal!
In lieu of all these things whose loss thou mournest,
If earnestly or not I know not, use
The great and good and true which ever live;
And are all common to pure eyes and true.
Upon the summit of each mountain-thought
Worship thou God, with heaven uplifted head
And arms horizon stretched; for deity is seen
From every elevation of the soul.
Study the light; attempt the high; seek out
The soul's bright path; and since the soul is fire,
Of heat intelligential, turn it aye
To the all-Fatherly source of light and life:
Piety purifies the soul to see
Visions, perpetually, of grace and power,
Which, to their sight who in ignorant sin abide,
Are now as e'er incognizable. Obey
Thy genius, for a minister it is
Unto the throne of Fate. Draw towards thy soul,
And centralize, the rays which are around
Of the divinity. Keep thy spirit pure
From worldly taint, by the repellant strength
Of virtue. Think on noble thoughts and deeds,
Ever. Count o'er the rosary of truth;
And practise precepts which are proven wise.
It matters not then what thou fearest. Walk
Boldly and wisely in that light thou hast;—
There is a hand above will help thee on.
I am an omnist, and believe in all
Religions; fragments of one golden world
To be relit yet, and take its place in heaven,
Where is the whole, sole truth, in deity.
Meanwhile, his word, his law, writ soulwise here,
Study; its truths love; practise its behests,
They will be with thee when all else have gone.
Mind, body, passion all wear out; not faith
Nor truth. Keep thy heart cool, or rule its heat
To fixed ends; waste it not upon itself.
Not all the agony maybe of the damned
Fused in one pang, vies with that earthquake throb
Which wakens soul from life-waste, to let see
The world rolled by for aye, and we must wait
For our next chance the nigh eternity;
Whether it be in heaven or elsewhere.

Student.
Sir,
I will remember this most grave advice
And think of you with all respect.

Festus.
Well, mind,
The worst of men may give the best advice.
Our deeds sometimes are better than our thoughts.

162

Commend me, friend, to everyone you meet.
I am an universal favourite.
All turn to me whenever I speak, full-faced,
As planets to the sun, or owls to a rushlight.
Farewell.

Student.
I hope to meet again.

Festus.
And I.

Lucifer.
Fear not. Chance favours like recurrences.

Festus.
Yonder's a woman singing. Let us hear her.

Singer.

In the grey church tower
Were the clear bells ringing,
When a maiden sat in her lonely bower
Sadly and lowly singing;
And thus she sang, that maiden fair
Of the soft blue eyes and the long light hair.

This hand hath oft been held by one
Who now is far away;
And here I sit and sigh alone
Through all the weary day:
Oh when will he I love return?
And when shall I forget to mourn?

Along the dark and dizzy path
Ambition madly runs,
'Tis there they say his course he hath,
And therefore love he shuns;
Oh fame and honour crown his brow,
For so he would be with me now.

In the grey church tower
Kept the clear bells ringing,
When a bounding step in that lonely bower
Broke on the maiden singing;
She turned, she saw; oh happy fair!
For her love who loved her so well was there.

Lucifer.
And we might trust these youths and maidens fair,
The world was made for nothing but love, love.
Now I think it was made most to be burned.

Festus.
The night is glooming on us. It is the hour
When lovers will speak lowly, for the sake
Of being nigh each other; and when love
Shoots up the eye, like morning on the east,
Making amends for the long northern night
They passed, ere either knew the other loved;
The hour of hearts! Say grey-beards what they please,
The heart of age is like an emptied wine-cup;
Its life lies in a heel-tap: how can age judge?
'Twere a waste of time to ask how they wasted theirs;
But while the blood is bright, breath sweet, skin smooth,
And limbs all made to minister delight;
Ere yet we have shed our locks, like trees their leaves,
And we stand staring bare into the air;

163

He is a fool who is not for love and beauty.
It is I, the young, to the young speak. I am of them;
And always shall be. What are years to me?
You traitor years, that fang the hands ye have licked,
Vicelike; henceforth your venom-sacs are gone.
I have conquered. Ye shall perish: yea, shall fall
Like birdlets beaten by some resistless storm
'Gainst a dead wall, dead. I pity ye, that such
Mean things should have raised, in man, or hope or fear;
Those Titans of the heart that fight at heaven,
And sleep, by fits, on fire, whose slightest stir's
An earthquake. I am bound and blessed to youth.
None but the brave and beautiful can love.
Oh give me to the young, the fair, the free,
The brave, who would breast a rushing, burning world
Which came between him and his heart's delight.
Mad must I be, and what's the world? Like mad
For itself. And I to myself am all things, too.
If my heart thundered would the world rock? Well
Then let the mad world fight its shadow down.
Soon there may be nor sun, nor world, nor shadow.
But thou, my blood, my bright red running soul,
Rejoice thou, like a river in thy rapids.
Rejoice, thou wilt never pale with age, nor thin;
But in thy full dark beauty, vein by vein
Serpent-wise, me encircling, shalt, to the end,
Throb, bubble, sparkle, laugh, and leap along.
Make merry, heart, while the holidays shall last.
Better than daily dwine, break sharp with life;
Like a stag, sunstruck, top thy bounds, and die.
Heart, I could tear thee out, thou fool, thou fool;
And strip thee into shreds upon the wind.
What have I done that thou shouldst maze me thus?

Lucifer.
Let us away; we have had enough of hearts.

Festus.
Oh for the young heart like a fountain playing,
Flinging its bright fresh feelings up to the skies
It loves and strives to reach; strives, loves in vain.
It is of earth, and never meant for heaven,
Let us love both and die. The sphinx-like heart
Loathes life the moment that life's riddle is read.
The knot of our existence solved, all things
Loose-ended lie; and useless. Life is had,
And lo! we sigh, and say, can this be all?
It is not what we thought; it is very well,
But we want something more. There is but death.
And when we have said and seen, done, had, enjoyed
And suffered, maybe, all we have wished, or feared,
From fame to ruin, and from love to loathing,
There can come but one more change—try it—death.
Oh it is great to feel that nought of earth,

164

Hope, love, nor dread, nor care for what's to come,
Can check the royal lavishment of life;
But, like a streamer strown upon the wind,
We fling our souls to fate and to the future.
For to die young is youth's divinest gift;
To pass from one world fresh into another,
Ere change hath lost the charm of soft regret;
And feel the immortal impulse from within
Which makes the coming, life, cry alway, on!
And follow it while strong, is heaven's last mercy.
There is a fire-fly in the south, but shines
When on the wing. So is't with mind. When once
We rest, we darken. On! saith God to the soul,
As unto the earth for ever. On it goes,
A rejoicing native of the infinite,
As is a bird, of air; an orb, of heaven.

XI.

That aëry lodestone, operant still,
The love of boundless knowledge, leads us down
Deeplier than ever leadline went, to search
The central rayless light we have within,
And learn, that, touched albeit all mysteries, traced
Orb-founding theories sagest, handled fire
Deftliest, unfit, as discontent, to abide
Longwhile by nature's hearth, 'twere better seek
Our proper good in act. Such light to love,
To hope for, strive for, live for, as best shows
Our Maker, fellow labourer for man's good,
Working, within us charitably; and shows,
To souls, high aimed, who others claim to serve
Supremely, they themselves need, lowliest rule,
Life makes most blessed. Even science finds in God
Its ultimate form, the unknown; all utmost truth
To inmost faith, responds; all heavens externe.
Arched, sphere o'er sphere conformably, to soul's
Interior lines. It is from research like this,
True aspiration riseth.

Earth—The Centre.
Lucifer and Festus.
Lucifer.
Behold us in the fire-crypts of the world;
Through seas and buried mountains, tomb-like tracts
Fit to receive Death's skeleton when he is dead;
Through earthquakes and the once proud structured bones
Of earthquake-swallowed cities, have we wormed,

165

Down to fire's ever-burning forge, whence breathes
That fluent life-heat, penetrative, which clothes
Itself in lightnings, scaping hence through air,
And pierces to the last and loftiest pore
Of earth's snow-mantled mountains. In these vaults
Are hidden the archives of the universe.
There screened, in awful and omnipotent ease,
Nature, the delegate of God, brings forth
Her everlasting elements; and here,
The reverend ashes of all ages gone
See, finally inurned.

Festus.
All solid now
Was fluid once, air, water, fire, or some
Vast, permeant, element; communal, all in one;
As in this focal, world-evolving heat;
Moisture all mothering; or the vacuous power
We are based on, I must deem.

Lucifer.
The original
Of all things, all existence being one
Derivative whole, is one. The differences
Seen, show diverse but to the finite mind.

Festus.
This marble-walled immensity, overroofed
With pendant mountains glittering, awes my soul.

Lucifer.
Here mayst thou lay thine hand on nature's heart,
And feel its thousand yearèd throbbings beat,
As through a sea-strait, till to beat, it cease.
High overhead, and deep below our feet,
The sea's broad thunder booms, scarce heard; bowed round,
Yon arches, like to suspended continents
Of starry matter burning inwardly, stand:
Hard by, earth's gleaming axle sleeps, unmoved,
All movement centering.

Festus.
Age, here, on age
Lie heaped like withered leaves. And must it end?

Lucifer.
All here hath holden fellowship with gods,
With eldest time and primal matter, space,
Stars, air, and all inherent fire, the abyss
Unluminous, chaos, night. These rocks retain
Proof of those times, earth's ancient youth, when she
With heaven had holy bridals; royal gods,
If turbulent, combative, discontent, nathless
Their bright, immortal issue; when, too, lived,
Prehuman and heroic, the broad-eyed race,
Whose science, as these rocks the seas sustain,
Hath formed the base of the world's fluctuous lore;
When, too, by mountainous travail, human thought
Sought to obtain the untouched heavens, by right
Of lineal virtue; when the artful powers,
Forecounsel and experience, by meet aid

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Of wisdom, teachers of all social good,
With godhead strove; and gloriously they failed;
In failure half successful; when even men's
Minds were as continents vast, and not, as now,
Seed-plots minute, with acres, here and there,
Of brains untilled.

Festus.
Minds still which know by proof
What those could but assume, that all these rocks,
Hand-wrought of One, these solid fires; the air
Nebulous, commixed with starry spore, and earth's
Waters, with unborn continents heavy, all
The rude original seen of nature, here,
Being ordered, now, informed, all procreant mate
Of heaven; these crude products of matter, once
Like firstlings on the axis, altarwise,
Laid, of the globe, earth's testimony still stand
To her creative God; who, in the heart
Of nethermost darkness, his miraculous name
Scores legible, as upon the sun's broad brow,
Mid blaze chaotic, and liquescent plains
Of ever-seething flame, where sink and rise
Alp-blebs of fire, vast, vagrant; name which reads
Perfection infinite in all ways; all names
Other of gods, obliterates.

Lucifer.
How but one?
Each star, canst tell? may its divinity boast.

Festus.
God's hand hath scooped the hollow of this world;
His, sole, who all doth, and remembereth all!
Or aim, or deed; nor, like an atomie dropped
Of meteoric light, some star, in's lightning rush,
Hath brushed off, which is quenched in last night's dew;
Nor as, when fiery monarch, ireful, starts
In jewelled arms war-wards, a sudden gem
Falls, and, 'neath tramp of shouting hosts, is lost
Am I, even I, forgotten. Ere blended, here,
As in a bowl, the spheral rudiments lay;
Whence all elaborated in turn, and raised
From shining star-seed into embryon orbs
And germs gigantic of the universe;
Each mighty change a thought of God, each thought
An act substantial of perfective power,
Leaving at last prolific earth life-stored
With light impregned, I know right well 'twas planned
For me, for man, his favourite. Even here,
These blasts that tear tempestuous from the deep;
These throes that rack the centre, nature's wail
For her directing lord, this many an age
Missed from her midst, these elemental hells,

167

Conflictive, earth's upheavals, founts of fire,
And island vomitings, fail the sense to quench
Of divine wardship; nought permitting he,
Though for a time self-hidden, and changeless laws,
In mutable types, through ever-varying forms,
Dispensing, proof of one continuous end,
To happen his beloved of harm; and this
As holiest truth I hold. Didst bring me hither,
Trusting to lose God's track?

Lucifer.
Nay, but to show
How things begin to end. Why, then, e'er made?
This ball so rolled and rounded, melts away
Even now, to its constituent atoms. See,
This weary axis wavers in its end;
It will sometime snap.

Festus.
Though here were posited
All secrets of existence, natural those,
These supernatural, dwell not here would I,
Not science' founts profoundest even, to drain.
I long to know again the fresh green earth,
Breeze life-breath'd; sea, and sacred stars; and feel
In active comity with the world's wide powers.
These recollections crowd upon my mind,
Like constellations on the evening skies,
And will not be forbidden. Oh! let us leave.

Lucifer.
Aught that reminds an exile of his home
Is surely pleasant. I, friend, am content.

Festus.
I cannot be content with less than heaven;
Living, and comprehensive of all life.
Thee, universal heaven, celestial all;
Thee, sacred seat of intellective time;
Field of the soul's best wisdom: home of truth,
Star-throned; by whom, and old oracular night,
Our spirit compeers in every orb are taught;
Who can but love? To me, by night, by day,
Thou art, thou must be reverend, world-whole sphere!
Whether the sun all light thee, or the moon,
In clouds embayed, mid astral islets, air
With beauty inundate; or some god-star, sole,
As a great drop of light, shed tremulously
Out of her full flowing urn; yea, tearlike, fallen
From her, Night's eye, o'er nature's tome, as she
Reads, softening so our present fates; or when
In radiant thousands, each star reigns, unshared
His royalty, and leaderless, uncontrast
With the light their light is lost in, sons of fire,
Arch element of the heavens; thee, even, when storm
And rack, our vision from thy threshold bar,
More love I, thinking upon the splendid calm

168

Which bounds the deadly fever of these days,
The higher, holier, spiritual heaven wherein
Soul, predisposed to expatiate, shall start forth
On joy's relapseless course; and such progress
As counts the infinite only in its midst,
Felicitously partake. Come, let us rise;
Nay, quit this world, within whose heartstrings still
I know me encoiled. The deeplier I descend,
The higher rise, the nearer seem I God.

Lucifer.
It is knowledge only makes thee near to aught,
Whence ignorance most eloigns. These rocks, which hold
Time's cavernous footsteps printed in raw fire
Detain thee, then, no more?

Festus.
I would be gone.
The world hath made such comet-like advance,
Lately on science, men may almost hope
Before it die of sheer decay, to learn
Something about their infancy, as this day
I have taught me of earth's original.

Lucifer.
True; but me
This troubles not.

Festus.
Were all earth's mountain chains
To utter fire at once, what a grand show
Of fireworks for our neighbour moon.

Lucifer.
The passed
Hath seen such sights; and I; seen grander. Rise!
Let us ascend.

Festus
But not through the charred throat
Of an extinct volcano.

Lucifer.
This way; down;
So thread we at once the world-bead.

Festus.
Haste, away.
Life is too brittle, time too brief to waste.

169

XII.

All man's acts,
Serious or trivial, all man's thoughts perchance
Pass not unmarked of angel eye, or God's.
We know in daytime there are stars about us,
Just as at night, and name them what and where,
By sight of science; so by faith we know,
Though till our night we see them not, that spirits
Are round us, and believe heaven may be full
Of angels, as of star-motes night's white zone.
A brief but solemn parley o'er a grave,
Earth's hollow threshold of futurity,
Observed by spirit invisible, aptly heads
Holiest resolves; and, be they kept, enough
To assure the heart of peace. Each soul must tread
His doubt-press solitarily. Time soon fulfilled,
Leads to a promised proof of progress gained
By spirit on high, late loved, enlightening thus,
Premonstrative, our end.

A Church-Yard.
Festus and Lucifer beside a Tomb.
Festus.
It is not God we doubt of: it is one's self.
How can the separate soul, and most, if pure,
Exist distinct from God; if perfect not,—
As who shall vaunt, even hers? how re-unite?
Is he the perfect, the defectible, too?
Here, everywhere, the spirit one holy word,
Preacheth, in multitudinous tongues; in birth,
Growth, blossom, fruit, collapse of life, and rise
Regenerative of being; the saving truth,
Congruous with man's first faith, world-wide, in God
And in the soul-adjusting future, shown
Resurgent by these grave-sprung flowers. For grant
We die, nor nature cherish more man's frame,
Than her dead leaflets, still to have lived conform
With reason's law, and virtue's fine delights;
To have kept intact the spirit's purity;
To have revered, believed in others; hoped
And suffered for, in pains we would not lack;
The soul's inborn religion, dear to God,
And those who nature love; while but to have dreamed
Of one great Being, the absolute good; who joys,
And waits, to impart to spirit, duly affined,
Reunion with himself, true bliss; the just;
The supreme virtue; whose immense repose,
Actful, not idle, while to him vast scope
Leaving administrative, to us reserves
Deliberate choice; our fleeting, cloudlike lives,

170

Of his persistent firmamental soul,
Contrast and like; seems in itself to assure
Our being of permanency; and well nigh proves
Not immortality only, but cognate
Divinity, that such vast and godlike dreams
Man's brain could sanely guest.

Lucifer.
How sanely, friend?

Festus.
Oh yes, this sense of the infinite, born in man,
Cultured or wild, of one sole essence, God,
The governing conscience of all spirit, the same,
Continuous, his and ours; salvation seems;
A rock æthereal, this, sky-based, which shows
Us, like originate with the eterne of heaven.
For, as who the leaflets of the aye-moving plant,
Though of proportions delicatest, first eyes,
Instinct with circular freedom, even of spheres
Suggestive, ultimately, and heaven; and, awed,
Marks, as in preference moved, this frond or that,
By some sufficing motive, if to us,
Occult; so shapes mysteriously, through ghost
Or natural spirit of earth and air, man's mind
As out of self-necessity, to pursue
This grandest and most perfect mould of thought,
The thought of deity; man's best good, of all
Rich, poor, participable.

Lucifer.
Good; let the world
Work out its mingled fates, closed thus, or thus.
'Twere well, not grow too heavenly, all at once.

Festus.
When life is most about one, power and proof
Of human foresight; some new conquest won
By science from the vast unknown; some gift
Of art, which shall outworth a nation's debt,
Heirloom of ages, sealed to earth for good;
And through all lands, one smile man's general face
Lights up, self-glorifying; oft, then, I feel
Sunkenest in soul, most faltering in the sense
Of spiritual reality: and, in turn
'Midst base corruption's trophies mazed, as here,
And stony tablets dropped from Death's grim tome,
Most hopeful, most assured of being.

Lucifer.
To see
Nature's sad wreck, on this, life's undercoast,
Cast, and to deem still, something, somewhere, 'scapes
By salvage, speaks strong faith.

Festus.
How is't I love
The spirit of this fair creature, earthening here,
If not in nature?

Lucifer.
May it not be, thou lov'st
Her memory, less herself?

Festus.
Nay, hear, sweet spirit!

171

Let years crowd in, and age bow down
My bosom to the earth, which gave;
As yon grey, worn out, crumbling stone
Dips o'er the grave;
Though passion me no more should thrill,
Nor pleasure please, nor beauty move;
Though the heart stiffen, and waxed still,
No more make love;
Still, in my breast, like river gold,
Imbedded bright, thy love shall lie;
Sun-grains, that with the sands are rolled
Of memory.
Still, let me hold what bliss the spirit enjoys
Is that thou hopedst here, couldst ne'er forget.

Lucifer.
It may be that death's dewy slumber cloys
The soul, as yet.

Festus.
Surely, that soul hath burst the tomb,
Long while, enrobed in living light;
Not being accursed, wormlike, to eat the gloom
And dust of night.

Lucifer.
Oh surely life, in sporting on earth, lies
Till death share up the rich green sod;
But soul! if there it lives, or here it dies,
Why try ye God?
What should it never smile nor sigh
From cheeks or lips but those beneath?
Outweighs not love the world's vast lie,
Bests life not death?

Festus.
I ask why man should suffer death?

Lucifer.
Answer, what right to life hath he?
God gives, and takes away, your breath.
What more have ye?
Breath is your life, and life your soul;
Ye have it warm from his kind hands;
Then yield it back to the great Whole,
When he demands.
Why, deathling, wilt thou long for heaven?
Why seek a bright, but blinding way?
Go, thank thy God that he hath given
Night upon day.

Festus.
It may be but illusion, then, the all
Of marvels thou hast shown?
It may be that the wreath-tricked, trailing pall
Closes all known?

Lucifer.
Go, thank thy God, that thou hast lived;
And ask no more. 'Tis all he gave;
'Tis all he wills, to be believed;
God and the grave.

Festus.
For thee, God, will I save my heart
For thee my nature's honour keep;

172

Then, soul and body, all or part,
Rest, wake, or sleep.
Yet, might it be, a strange desire my breast
Hath seized, I know not how; it is as though
A meteor of the night had there sought rest,
And burns within me, her to view once more
Whose form here lies.

Lucifer.
In sooth, I saw a light
But now, to thee, it may be, invisible,
Which showed me here her spirit, close urging on
Its moonbeamed path, some sister soul to impress
With the arms of fortitude, or widowed heart
Perchance, with patience' humbler crest. Perchance,
We are like to have enough of that.

Festus.
There are,
Who her help merit and need; and doubtless have,
Should others justly lack.

Lucifer.
If, once for all
To gorge thy passion for the unknown, I show
Herself to thee, with clear sight in her own,
Blessed home, thou wilt aid me first to other ends
More pressantly required.

Festus.
More than to view
Goodness perfected?

Lucifer.
Yea, even power assured.

Festus.
Command. Thou art ambitious for me.

Lucifer.
Good.
The inevitable sequences of things
Like an art-ordered torrent, made to amuse,
Run themselves dry.

Festus.
Heaven speed the time with me.
The sun of life shall mount the skies no more,
It is one eternal setting. My burden is
Henceforth, the spirit.

Lucifer.
Nay, divers quests be ours;
And at the occurrent season each shall claim
Of us, due recognition.

Festus.
Be it. Away!

173

XIII.

In one of earth's
Head cities, awaiting this, the effect unknown,
Of evil, not, truly, all-wise, we towerlike rise;
With eminent but indifferent eye survey,
Subdue, in thought, society, now in all
Its greater grades seen. Secret science, since
Divert to aims of power mysterious, schemes
For freedom, wealth, airs; war's surcease; and spread
Of mind-light, social virtue. Here the germ
Of universal sway, sought from the first,
See posited, striking, round an inner world,
Its roots intelligible, but not till the end
Destined to fruit; love, friendship, faith, all things
Ministrant. Plans all feasible, shadowed out,
Of one sublime humanity purified,
Warm even the civic air. And shall not God's
Own peace crown man pacific?

A Metropolis; Public Place.
Festus and Lucifer, Student, and Others.
Festus.
My thoughts go, cloudlike, round the world, nor rest.
I am on fire to realize the fate
Which darkly, in the future's depths, thou hast shown;
Or else am with the mightiest folly mocked
E'er imped a soul to madness? How, meanwhile
Our ends defer? Can we for mellowing suns
Wait? When shall earth acknowledge me?

Lucifer.
Not now.
Never, till self-compelled. The time will come.
Have patience. It is the blessing of the angels.

Festus.
Patience! say slow self-murder.

Lucifer.
Wait for what
Is on the wing already, or reach the end
As of an aimless lunge i' the empty air.
Knowledge, love, power, are thrones thy soul shall sit
In order due as promised. Patience, man!
We are as yet but minors, both of us.

Festus.
Of pleasure one has hardly had a glimpse.

Lucifer.
Each pleasure hastes thee to thine end, and man's.
Each new sought joy, each freshly proven power,
But draws the ends of all things like a hood,
Around thy fated head the closer. Come.
Bethink thee of thy pact.

Festus.
I do; a pact
Where abstinence only serves to quicken pain;

174

Indulgence, shorten pleasure. Which to choose,
To let alone, which, wiser?

Lucifer.
In them both
Is reason; but all-wise, man will never be.

Festus.
Nay, come then, pretty patience. Sand by sand,
The world is worn away;—the sea hath sapped,
How oft! earth's vaulted base; times countless whelmed,
'Neath his abysmal bowl, the mountain tops.
'Tis but a matter of days. Most greatest things
Are gradual. Star on star, the heavens fulfil
Their issue; and truth quickens here the soul,
Dipped in substantial lightning of the sun
Spiritual, and with the eternal saving saved,
By every breath inspired of God. I yield.
Let us to that near hand: the end, deferred.
Life to enjoy, not only one must conform
To the world's laws, but bye-laws, customs, moods.
What can be done here?

Lucifer.
Oh, a thousand things
As well as elsewhere.

Festus.
True; it is a place
Where passion, occupation, or reflection,
May find fit food or field.

Lucifer.
Take we our ease
Beside this feathery fountain. It is cool,
And pleasant; and the people, passing by,
Fit subjects for twin moralists like us.
Here, we can speculate freely on policy;
On social manners, fashions, and the news.
Now the political aspect of the world
At present, is most cheerful. To begin,
Like charity, at home. Out of all wrongs
The most atrocious; the most righteous ends
Are happiest wrought.

Festus.
Ofttimes it chances so.

Lucifer.
Take of the blood of martyrs, tears of slaves,
The groans of prisoned patriots, and the sweat
Wrung from the bones of famine, like parts; add
The stifled breath of man's free natural thought;
The tyrant's lies, the curses of the meek;
Vapour of orphan's sigh, and wail of all
Whom war hath spoiled, or law first fanged, then gorged;
The usurpations of the lawful heir,
The common weal, which comes to its own, all done;
The treasonous rebellions of the wise;
The poor man's patient prayers; and let all these
Simmer some centuries, o'er the slow red fire
Of human wrath, and there results at last,
A glorious constitution, and a grand

175

Totality of nothings; for what's all
Weighed with man's destiny?

Festus.
Of recipes
Enough. That man's a warful animal, [Soldiers pass; music.

Glories in gunpowder, and loves parade,
Prefers them to all things, see present proof.
Life's but a sword's length at the best.

Lucifer.
Past doubt.
Bar-iron, duly smelted, rules the world.

Festus.
How many things want remedying. What next?

Lucifer.
Well, in this seat of empire, by this head,
And nucleus of a nation world-famed, sit
And name your remedies; for, sick to death
Well-nigh, and perishing of rank rotting sores,
That gilded plasters hide, are all these burghs;
Huge populous solitudes, where penury pines
Mid havoc of excess; while guileful wealth
Serves, tremblingly, behind the public board,
Pale want, his stomach stiff from sheer default
Of exercise, is pressed to join, and thank
Compulsory charity, interested to give;
Or, back to shadowy feasts where all things lack;
Save appetite to destroy. What's wanted here?

Festus.
Nought but a total change; true, honest, life,
Holy and simple; peace; a cheerful faith
In God; and nothing spent not purely earned.

Lucifer.
Utopian, I much fear. But look here comes
A man thou knowest.

Festus.
I do. Stop, friend, of late
I have not seen thee. Whither goest thou now?

Student.
I am upon my business, and in haste.

Festus.
Business! I thought thou wast a simple schemer;
A theorist of most nebulous mark and views;
Founder of many imaginary states;
And student of all arts impracticable.

Student.
Mayhap, I am. There is a visionary
Business, as well as visionary faith.
My nature is more to sympathize with men,
Than in their actual aims participate.
What these by traffic strive to attain for themselves,
I seek, by the hidden mastery, to achieve
For others. Let but fruit my next thought,—then,
Bid me compete with states, and watch who wins.

Festus.
And holdst thou faith in the art alchemic still?
Still seekst secluded in the ravenous search
For gold to verify thine earlier hopes?

Student.
Though mingling more with men, my mind is yet

176

Leased to the great invention. I, in sooth,
Have all my life been living in a mine,
Lancing the world for gold. I have not yet
Fingered the right vein. Oh! how oft I wish
The time might come again, pert science prates of,
When earth's bright veins ran ruddy virgin gold.

Lucifer.
When next the world's gold melts 'twill run, I fear,
A pretty steep course towards its natural end.

Student.
Oh! I am not without my moderate hopes.
When in earth's first foundation as an orb,
Her giant elements held, like god-kings, sway
Free, and successive heritage, each his gift
Made earth, to mark his long illustrious reign.
Air, water, with prolific forms and fair,
Their realms made vital; with grain, herb, the mould;
With tall trees towering cloudwards, thousand yeared;
Fire, with all ore, gem, marble, stained with dyes
Stolen from the infant sun, when feeble he lay,
In the orient cradled; and that earth might not,
Mid the first passion of her golden prime,
Exhaust all joy, each power some art arcane
Penned for the cherished future; and to Time,
Earth's scribe and heaven's remembrancer, consigned
The opening of their treasured archives. These,
We, who now hold the keys of wisdom, read;
Translate the fiery tongues of obelisks;
Revive the blackened brain-craft of old scrolls,
A score of centuries tombed; light's radiant chords
Peel naked to the stars; weigh air, theirs, ours;
Count off the sun's vast rudiments, and his brow;
With vaporous iron crown; apt compliment
To our own stern age. One secret only, still,
Of moment, lacks; and this found, earth may rest,
And reap unusual joy. It is my main hope.

Festus.
Were all rich, nothing left but gems and gold,
All things less pure, less precious, all beside
Were worthless, penniless. But what crowds of things
Life hath, more worth than wealth! When, viewed the world,
We mark the mighty ignorance of the mass,
In all lands, their huge servitude of mind,
And think, what sometime it would be, to see
Freedom and wisdom substituted, thought
Fails; and the heart faints at the vast conceipt.

Student.
Truly; but not for gold, as ore, I slave.
As means subservient only to some end,
Great and beneficent, world-wide; end I scarce
Thus casually can name, but holy, high,
And in the face of all earth's worn-out frames

177

Of civil power, dynastic, popular, all
Alike effete, right justified.

Festus.
So? I hear.

Lucifer.
For this end, gold is needed.

Festus.
I perceive.

Student.
For universal liberty, gold, and more,
Wrongs must be rectified, rights established.

Festus.
True;
Where'er a wrong exists, a right is quelled;
And wrongs seem everywhere. Serfs I despise,
For nations, if so, must so be, by choice.
Tyrants, or many or one, elect or born,
I hate. But how will justice-loving time
Reckon with all the despots, many and mean,
Who falsify, by weight of brands and chains,
The balance civil hath over savage life;
Who knows? That Mercy may be satisfied
By so much Justice sweeps, with level hand,
From off the measure's head, we'll hope.

Lucifer.
Yes, hope.

Festus.
Hope retributive Mercy may succeed
Her sterner sister Justice, and aye reign
In parity with love. For know, while God
Sits, judging 'mid the heavens, and all things made
Governs by infinite laws, each several sphere
Owns yet his special equity. Even on earth,
A vast invisible seat he hath, like aged
With the unwandering hills. In every soul's
Instinct of right; in all just sympathies;
In every conscience, sensitive to the truth,
As skies to light; in every innocent heart,
Whose strings, like angel lyres, are tuned in heaven;
Built into being, as though its corner-stone,
Towers, core of rule, this seat; and when, crushed down
By popular wrong of kings, or tyrannous crime
Of crowds, man's prayer, to him appealing, steals
Skywards, a shock convictive through all hearts
Shoots: and men's eyes, disfilmed, strange sense receive,
Undreamed of: view, there, in their veriest midst,
The eternal Presence, throned. His judgments, there,
Be very sure are executed. His fines
To the last blood drop paid. Oh may at last
Earth's Lord to all be merciful; but now,
Let God be just; 'tis all we need. I hear,
As faith his gifts recounts, by man misused,
Heaven's reasonable demands withstood, the groans,
Like to an earthquake thundering underground,
That shake, tempestuous, Time's repentant breast.

Student.
Wait, wait; not long. The Rectifier will rise;

178

A purer and more righteous æra come.
Deep in earth's caverned heart, self-hidden, I see,
Her loins with wisdom's silver serpents girt,
The Nemesis of nations. Stern she sits
Her monumental throne. The hush of death
Spreads round her, halo-like. Even Hope, her friend,
Oft deems her dead. Yet lives she; live she will.
She hath a vital secret in her breast,
As though she nursed a god which scarcely breathes,
The freedom of the future. To all else
Superior, in that secret, nought beside
Heeds she: but hears indifferent o'er her head,
The ebb, or flow, of empire, and the march
Of militant generations; and but smiles,
And rocks her foot, contemptuous. Not for these
Moves she, nor is she moved; nor cares she watch.
Wordless of joy or woe, say why is she
Incarcerate? why abandoned? why suspect
Even of the pure? why in her cell by all
Her lover kings forgot,—could one who hath eyed
Her pale and dominant brow, and mounded breast
Elate with life, nor shuddering shrunk to meet
That stately stare, ever forget? Away!
Name not old wrongs. If wrongs have been, be sure
Some day will right them. Know, she hath never been
Save by her own serene assent, exiled
From the upper earth's face. What then doth she there,
Darkling in central solitudes? Alas!
Of her divine prevision all devoid,
Unwelcome and unworthy suitors she
Hath, many an one, who her to rash attempt
Of empery would entice, and so secure
Her forfeit royalty; wicked these nor reck
God's patience, or her own, prayer-wrung, to abide
The hour of destiny, and the award of love,
The liberator, fore-chosen. For when the dew
Now wet, hath ripened into the thunder-cloud,
And man's breath made God's lightning, one shall come
Who, of things passed intolerant, but divine
In mercifulness, and prompt ere all to free
The captive, and, to the exiled, home restore,
Shall ope her sealèd hand; tear out the spell
Of silence' self invoked eclipse, for ends
Then gained; and give a spear; her queenly brow,
Which ne'er hath stooped before, shall sanctify
With a crown, more holy than the wall-culled wreath
Obsidional of cities saved; and, so,
Lead her compassionate forth with him to head
Revived, regenerate manhood. Speed it heaven!
That we the dawn of that great day may see,

179

If not for all its mightiest outcomes spared.

Lucifer.
This is the spirit I want to see abroad.
We two can aid each other. Spread these views.

Student.
The wise and good wish well to liberty,
Throughout all lands; but aim to win her cause
By some bold movement, from the heart of all
United nations. Generous souls all joy
To see man's serf, risen up, a prince with God.

Lucifer.
The movement might be secret, nor its end
Till finally, divulged.

Festus.
Be it as ye will.
Not, e'er, by war.

Lucifer.
From age to age old Time
Hath washed his hands in the heart's blood of earth.
It's rather late to speak against it, now.

Student.
If without war the world could live one year
'Twere well. Yet fields of death, ye are earth's pride,
For what is life to freedom? War must be
While men are what they are; while they have bad
Passions to be roused up: while ruled by men;
While all the powers and treasures of a land
At beck of the ambitious, wrongs may be
Offered, with insult; yea, while rights are worth
Maintaining, freedom keeping, or life having,
So long the sword shall shine.

Festus.
Yet war shall cease
All save the heavenly war we wage within.
What of thy next thought?

Student.
Ah, the crowning scheme
I hinted?

Festus.
Yes, this golden badge; what may it
Imply, so patently concealed, displayed
So critically?

Student.
It means, I have joined myself
To certain circles of the wise; a new
Consociate power, intrinsic to all states,
Self vowed in sacred bonds to holiest ends;
Who, worshipping one sole Lord in heaven, would choose
One sole on earth, peace thus ensured; mankind's
Free brotherhood, and whole unity. To this end
What want we? Wealth, time, numbers, secresy.
For this, all powers subordinate of the earth,
All social schemes, all frames of government
Are now essayed, tried, treated with; all wealth
Sought variously; all wisdom of the passed,
All faiths that move men's souls, and dominate still;
Convergent forces, are folded one by one
Within our politic plan; plan which, at last,
By virtue of rational necessity, must
Make sure, God aidant, earth's whole common-weal.

180

But how this unity to achieve of choice;
And how, by act, inaugurate and complete
This grand concerted good, seems yet a knot
Time's wearied fingers work at till they bleed,
And baffled races vainly pray for. Such
Our failure.

Lucifer.
Such shall be no more. My plans
Are ripening faster than I thought, than need.

Student.
Wilt come with me and join this lordly host
Of brethren, friends of God, to whom pertains
The gift of the world's future?

Lucifer.
Well, we have plans.
Our auricrucian friend could doubtless make
His banded brotherhoods well subservient here,
To views, but lateliest treated, of our own.

Festus.
True, if a few, illumined with all truth,
Initiate in all wisdom, hidden and open,
Armed with all wealth, could but forefit the world
For perfect freedom, Man might wish no more
Than add to freedom, peace; and to peace, power.

Student.
Be ours.

Festus.
I love the initiates wise; but doubt
If freedom e'er, with wisdom, prove the lot
Of all, or most.

Lucifer.
Hands seem for manacles made:
And feet for fetters.

Student.
Join with us.

Festus.
I'll think.
I have passed through all the elements of the world;
Sea's depths, air's heights, the central fires, while 'neath
My feet antipodal thunders pealed; round earth,
Coast, continent, desert, isle, and fruit-fraught plain,
In all their various vastness; and have viewed
Nought venerable in them, of source, nor force,
Self-causative or divine; save vassal powers,
Obsequious to the ends designed of God,
Cohærent made, and vivified, by laws
Inborn with them, imbreathed, nought. Ocean's tides
Poured o'er my head, in seas, for ages, never
My spirit to meaner faith could disbaptize
Than God's most proveable fatherhood of the world,
Material, mental, spiritual; his just
Rule of't, and loveful care; himself the soul's
Sole trust, judge, saviour, meed. In this faith firm
No tests I dread. And why change faith? Can aught
Than mine be truer?

Student.
Change not; keep all thou canst
Of faith. Thus minded thou art most meet to join
Our rational rites, and sacred feasts, truth holds;
Orgies divine.

181

Festus.
Of God, or nature? Comes
Of this, a sorrow unfruitful, and woe-filled.
Her mysteries teem with shrieks of struggling souls,
Doubt's cavernous darkness, and remorseful fires,
I'd not endure for worlds. But heaven's bring bliss;
Light, peace, and soul-joy, such as he the sun,
Felicitative, instils in all that live.

Student.
Fear nought, but prove them. Else am I losing time.

Lucifer.
Nay, time is never lost, if friends are made.
Promise. They all shall aid in our great aim.

Festus.
I will advise me. And when again we meet—

Student.
We surely all again meet.

Lucifer.
Haply not.
For me I am but poor company. Deem me, rather,
As some returnless meteor, from all ties
Of amity or obedience loosed, that flings,
Careless, his starry store mid space's fields;
Nor, in revisited spheres, dreams e'er to reap
The harvest of his hand. But, touching gold
I have a secret I would fain impart
To one who would make right use of it. Now, mark.
There are fifty elements, chemists say, and more.
Get, then, these fifty principles, or what not.
Mix up together: put to the question, all.
Teaze well with vapour, fire; much triturate.
Add the right quantity of lunar rays.
Boil whole, and let it cool; and watch what comes.

Student.
Thrice greatest Hermes! but it must be. Yes!
I'll go and get them; good day,—instantly.

Lucifer.
He'll be astonished probably.

Festus.
He will;
In any issue of the experiment.
The nostrum may perhaps explode, and—

Lucifer.
Nonsense.

Festus.
There needs no satire on men's rage for gold,
Their nature is the best; and best excuse.
Some news seems stirring.

Lucifer.
One of Saturn's moons,
I heard, had flown on his face, and blinded him.
It was also said, in circles I, at times,
Enter, his outer ring was falling off.
If I should find, I'll keep it. It might fit
A little finger such as mine. I doubt
Poor Saturn's breaking up. But for these news;
Some one perhaps has lit on a new vein
Of stars in the far void, or made out at last,
The circulation of the light; or what
Think'st thou?

Festus.
I know not. Ask!

182

Lucifer.
Sir, what's the news?

Passer-by.
The news are good news, being none at all.

Lucifer.
Your goodness, sir, I deem of like extent.
We heard the Great Bear was confined of twins.

Stranger.
It is not unlikely; stars do propagate.

Festus.
And so much for civility and news.
This city is one of the world's social poles.
Round which events revolve; here, dial-like,
Time makes no movement but is registered.

Lucifer.
Yon gaudy equipage! hast ever seen
A drowning dragon-fly, floating down a brook,
Topping the sunny ripples as they rise;
Till, in some ambushed eddy, it is sucked down,
By something underneath? Thus with the rich!
Their gilding makes their death conspicuous.

Festus.
This man is nobly rich, that, nobly poor;
These, the reverse. Rank makes no difference.

Lucifer.
The poor may die in swarms, unheeded. They
But swell the mass of columned ciphers earth
Runs up without a thought. Oh wretched poor,
Woe-bowed, thank God for something, though but this,
He fire, ye ashes!

Festus.
Thou art surely mad.

Lucifer.
I meant to moralize. I cannot see
A crowd, and not think on the fate of man;
Clinging to error, as a dormant bat
To a dead bough. Well, 'tis his own affair.

Festus.
All homilies, on the sorts and lot of men,
Are vain and wearisome. I desire to know
No more of human nature. As it is,
I honour it, and hate it. Let that do.

Lucifer.
Here is a statue to some mighty man,
Who beat his name on the drum of the world's ear,
Till it was stupefied; and, I suppose,
Not knowing what it was about, reared up
This marble mockery of mortality;
Which shall outlive the memory of the man,
And all like him, who water earth with blood,
And sow with bones, or any good he did,
As eagles, gnats. But failures why indict?
Why carp at insect sins, or crumb-like crimes?
The world, the great imposture, still succeeds;
Still, in Titanic immortality, writhes
Beneath the burning mountain of its sins.

Festus.
There's an old adage about sin and some one.
The world is not exactly what I thought it,
But pretty nearly so; and after all,
It is not so bad as good men make it out,
Nor such a hopeless wretch.

Lucifer.
For all the world

183

Not I would slander it. Dear world, thou art
Of all things under heaven by me most loved;
The most consistent, the least fallible.
Believe me ever thine affectionate
Lucifer. P.S. Sweet, remember me!

Festus.
Wilt go to the cathedral?

Lucifer.
No, indeed;
I have just confessed.

Festus.
Well, to the concert, then?

Lucifer.
Some fifteen hundred thousand million years
Have passed since last I heard a chorus. How?
In sooth, can I time calculate? æras none
Are in the eternal. Time is as the body;
Eternity, the spirit, of existence.

Festus.
That would I learn and prove.

Lucifer.
The finite soul
Can never learn the infinite, nor may be
Informed by it, unaided.

Festus.
Be it so.
What shall we do?

Lucifer.
I put myself in your hands.

Festus.
Wilt go on 'Change?

Lucifer.
I rarely speculate.
Steady receipts are mostly to my taste.

Festus.
But something must be done to pass the time.

Lucifer.
Let us, then, pass all time.

Festus.
Good! pass; but how?

Lucifer.
I have the power to make thy spirit free
Of its poor frame of flesh, yet not by death;
And reunite them afterwards. Wilt thou, think,
Entrust thyself to me?

Festus.
In God I trust,
And in his word of safety. Have thy will.
Where shall it be effected?

Lucifer.
Here and now.
Recline thou calmly upon yon marble slab,
As though asleep. The world will miss thee not;
Its complement is perfect. I will mind,
That no impertinent meddler troubles there,
Thy tranced frame. The brain shall cease its life
Engrossing business; and the living blood,
The wine of life, which maketh drunk the soul,
Sleep in the sacred vessels of the heart.
Three steps the sun hath taken from his throne,
Already downwards, and ere he hath gone,
Who calmeth tempests with his mighty light,
We will return; and until then, the bright rain
Of yonder fountain fails not.

Festus.
Thus be it.
Come; we are wasting moments here that now

184

Belong, of right, to immortality,
And to another world.

Lucifer.
Prepare!—

Festus.
And thou?

Lucifer.
I vanish altogether.

Festus.
Excellent!

Lucifer.
Body and spirit part!—

XIV.

Even while a star
Might twinkle twice, or calm, retiring sea,
Irresolute yet to leave, his moonlit kiss
Shimmering repeat upon the impassive shore,
The arch-fiend and youth, bound skyward, soaring hold
Darkly, commune, like twilight and midnight,
Of being and things to be, 'mid interspace
Of worlds. The angelic fall is touched on. Souls—
Imperfect, mixed, not seeing how deity could,
Pure spirit, by act of will aught earthy, gross
Frame; nor ill's source, end, understand; mistaught
By adulterate truth which poisons more than pure
Falsehood, hears how, of angels made, not God
Who would not with the earthy soil his hand, our orb
Had all its parts constituent cast by palms
Depute, tale told to mislead perchance. Yet who
Heaven granting place and means of penitence,
Irrestorable shall name the angelic race?
Who fiction blame, mother of fairest hope?

The Interstellar Space.
Festus and Lucifer.
Festus.
Where, where am I?

Lucifer.
We are in space and time, just as we were
Some half a second since; where wouldst thou be?

Festus.
I would be in eternity and heaven;
The spirit, and the spirit made blessed, of all
Existence.

Lucifer.
And thou shalt be, and shalt pass
All secondary nature; all the rules
And the results of time. Upon thy spirit
These things shall act no more; their hand shall be
Withered upon thee; in thee they shall cease,
Like lightnings in the deadening sea. Not now.
We have worlds to go through first. But see, just turn
Thy face, see earth.

Festus.
How beauteous, brighter thrice
Than e'er our lamp to man; just mean 'twixt sun
And moon, its mighty members, sea and land,
Shining, in revelry of light.

Lucifer.
Cleared now,

185

All atmosphere terrene, and meteor zones,
Into this darkening azure, deeper aye
At every breath, where reigns eternal night,
Haste we; thy longings shall be satiate soon.

Festus.
Ah! many have been my longings, many and deep,
To learn the mysteries of creation; things
Not published on earth's surface.

Lucifer.
Such as,—say!

Festus.
As thou didst promise me to unfold—and now
Our time, and this vast progress, seeming smooth,
Continuous, e'er unsummed, converse invites.

Lucifer.
Speak confidently.

Festus.
Before man's fall I'd know
How was't the angels fell?

Lucifer.
Nor all by one
Revolt, nor one decline.

Festus.
Say how.

Lucifer.
Time was,
When God, one, sole, in ancientry eterne,
In essence, inconceivable, all extent
A luminous fulness filling, willed to make;
Withdrew a portion of his essence; breathed
The angels into being; and in that space,
Girt by the infinite, the world became;
Near to him, spirit, life; matter, last of all,
And farthest from him; willed, still. With this rose
The evil of life create, all possible sin.
The happy angels, to enlarge God's reign
Thinking, besought his leave to make a world,
From matter's vast residuous mass;—time was,
Earth beamed heaven's youngest orb—which granted, they,
Armed with imputed deity, began
Instant the work orbific; fire and all
The elements freed, the land from sea demarked,
Rock igneous from aquatic, clay from ooze;
The continents made, the isles, the mountains, streams,
Lakes, fountains, plains, tree, herb and flower, all life
Vegetive, in fine, and brutish; all that wings
Air, or swims sea, or treads, four-footed, earth;
Or creeps, or glides. These giants made, these elves,
Apes, pygmies, such, the tall indignant cranes,
Angered by broken treaties, drave and drowned
In sea-pools, first of victories hight marine.
Those, Œmim and Zamzummim of old writ;
And those Hrymthursar called, who norwards held
Frore Jotunheim, fleering oft at gods and men;
Vain rivals of one heaven-planned shape, of man
By God in just majestic medium made.
And this, accepted, they with all gifts decked.

186

God taking thought, himself, of sun and star,—
With whom to think indeed is to create,—
He, to the formative angels gave the world
They had thus wrought out of chaos, and adorned
With every living miracle, and man
As head and end of all its dignities,
In delegate royalty to rule. Thus earth,
Thine earth, embraced of heaven, and core of space,
Was plenished, furnished, finished. The angels now
Longing to instruct man's mind, a chosen band,
Out of their fair fraternity, depute
Who straight ascending, quit for heaven. So all,
Bright and more bright, while starward they progressed,
And touched the invisible threshold of the skies,
These angels grew; till as they neared the seat
Where, close below the throne, bright Nature sits,
Perpetual maid, perpetual mother-bride;
Sits, gladdening in her splendid offspring, spread
Through space, star-spirits of seed divine, blessed heirs
Of deity; sits, serene;—they, pondering, paused,
Who seemed a constellation, all of suns,
Tempting the zenith. Here, their quest resigned
To God's sole will, 'twas here, accordant Fate
The predetermined boon they asked, conveyed,
Due powers of God to perfect, that they loved;
And more, he, hearkening to such fervent prayer,
Grants; but ere yet dismissed, to them, to all
In heaven assembled, speaks thus: ‘Spirits divine,
Immortals, hear; go rule each one his lot,
Self-sought, of grace appointed. To all tribes
Of men shall prophets speak, and holiest souls
Heaven-seeking; heed they be of you truth taught.
So teach them, that however with faith and truth
Inspired, they serve God only; reverence due
Pay you, pay all; but adoration sole
To him who all things made and sole, can save.’
Angels and spirit-hosts of prehuman strain,
Levies of light divine innumerous, rapt
All, sate in still assent, until one soul,
Interpretant of heaven, and mind create,
Tuneful and luminous as a singing star,
Stepped into light, and in the immarbled ear
Of the convergent infinite, sang to God
Larklike, his lone lay, gratulant, worshipful
Of him All-Wise. A cherub-choir the same
In stateliest revolution, traced, truth-taught,
Of power project through all effluxive spheres,
Returning fined, exalted, perfected,
In a perduring emblem all the heavens
Still study, and with their centre-searching eyes.

187

These things, though wholly comprehending not,
Things passed, things coming, God the angels showed;
Whereat they trembled, and were troubled. Some,
In place of proffering lowliest praise to God,
And holiest thanks for leave to do his will,
In those harmonious lauds the hosts had sung,
Pleased with their works, cried, These created we.
Sudden, the stars stood silent. Every sphere
Ceased its divine accord. The sun paled. All,
That proud presumptuous vaunt, shuddered to hear.
Divisions reigned. There were, who Godwards kept
Due loyalty; and these withdrew to heaven,
The Angel of Salvation, Phanuel pure;
Sun-ruling Ouriel, Luniel, and the rest,
Peers of the fallen, once, and holy seven,
Supplanted, round the throne, their brethren. These,
For some were more sin-tainted, others less;
Earthwards rewinging, in prospective pride
Enriched it thousand-fold with all delights.
For men they sowed herb, spice, grain; planted flower;
Fruits luscious graffed on trees; silver and gold
Dight earth with, ore, and marble, and every gem;
Gems larger lovelier these, than all now known;
And that smaragdine mirror, their chief toy,
Which all the angels wrought, each gifting it
With some unique perfection, after owned
By Israel's wisest, who the tongues of bird,
Brute, angel, men, all, knew; and who therein
Looking, the wished-for passed, of any age,
Beheld apparent, as in the instant fact;—
And when, solicitous of the future, he
Had breathed thereon, with the evanishing reek
From its talismanic disk, limned clear, he saw,
And all the coming, conned. For men they chose
The sites of cities, after, seats of power,
Wealth, law, religion, learning, freedom; one,
The city of the dead, men for themselves
Founded in ominous haste, and fast bestrewed
With skeleton foliage of the tree of life.
God made man free. He fell. His freedom seen,
The angels asked allegiance of man's race.
And while some mixed with carnal follies drift
Hellwards, on storms of passionate covetise;
By rank and vile inventions, to man's ill,
Earn othersome God's wrath; no few through pride
In their first formative privileges; in thought
Reigning triumphant, independent gods,
O'er men, shared sept and tribe among them; each,
Launched on his own wild will; and thus they ceased,
Those once most virtuous angels, that pure choice,

188

And grateful excellence they first had, to own;
Seeking at first their names, each to his clan
To magnify, and so become, by aid
Of mean, or monstrous, miracle, their gods;
In lieu of teaching men, the One Supreme
To worship, God. Fell many an angel thus.
The fall is universal in all spheres.
For finite spirit, wherever tasked to keep
The counsels of divine perfection fails.
The starry story of one primal pair,
Twin pillars to the portals of life's fane,
Or free-born deities, free as stars are fixed,
And the celestial serpent, sun-conceived,
Invader of heaven's annual paradise,
Wants not, where'er is life; but graved in rocks,
Rude missals of millennial patriarchs,
Incised in arrowy Zend, on tabled clay—
On palm foil penned, or purple pulp of flowers
Illumed with every literal grace, or writ
On virgin vellum rose-gilded and perfumed,
Shrined in the bosom of some cloistered saint,
The same sad tale perpetually commands
The astral annals of the universe.
A separate interest 'twixt themselves and God
Insinuate once, like conflicts 'mong themselves,
And schemes of empire basely politic, sprang.
One name of God each took, or masculine
Or feminine, deity having justly both
Who Father is, and bringer-forth of all;
Some title of divinity, none save God
Could equitably assume, that so they, vain,
Might, as lords substitute, the rights receive
Due to the alone Eternal, and his name
Blot from the hearts and memories of mankind.
Such were Baal Semim, Lord of heaven, whom old
Phœnicia worshipped; such too, league-invoked
In Syria as the lord of waters, he
Whose covenant witness was the e'erlasting well;
He, such, by Nile, Hephaistos, father of fire;
Aurmazd or Ilus, such; who when he had bade
The Persian bow before his so-called throne,
The sun, and claimed, phantastic, to have made
Espendermad, earth's fair tutelar, bright Khourdad,
And all the seven great angels, lit the stars,
Father himself of light; his strength reserved,
So feigned he to his prophet, for that strife
Final and all composing, 'gainst his power
I name not, lord of evil, but in Yezd
Prudentially still worshipped, from the world
Routed, to be, with three-fold thunder fires,

189

As chiselled glorious on the Assyrian slab;
Vain boasters all these mock divinities; such
Whom Asian tribes hailed, dove-born, mother of heaven,
And 'mong their mingled gods the Nasairÿ claimed,
Lady of light; those who in sequent years
In the holy and lovely island of the west,
As lords of light, of fate, of wealth, of power,
Gifts, glories were adored; such, latelier known,
Mid deeps Pacific, isled, Möooi, stretched
Full length, gigantic shorer-up of earth;
High title his, Sustainer of the world.
But soon in angel breasts, ill passions bred,
And multiplied to wrongs; developed ill
Evolved more perfect sin, till, frantic stricken,
Men cursed their benefactors, cursed and scorned.
These, fabling of the future, bade their seers
Read signs in moving spheres, coin chanted lies
Which, doubly feigned, deceivers self-deceived,
From tripod trolled, or maundered from dim shrines,
And brazen idols, inwardly excavate,
Whereby false faith, or rich voluptuous fraud,
Might in the murk of night be satiate. Thus,
Contentious 'mong themselves who most should reap
From man's credulity, all where triumphed wrong.
Oppression followed rivalry; full soon
Symbols and signs of terror were, in place
Of love, God's own and holiest title, ta'en;
And the divine to finite passion changed.
Then first the primal lamb whom spring's warm breeze,
Its pearly flowers and brooklets bubbling clear,
Welcome, newborn, 'neath sign connate in heaven;
Next, human victims bled; and passed the babe
Through baptistry of blood or fire, to peace.
Such offerings, loathed by heaven; while stormiest wars,—
Each striving most to widen his domain,
Propelling his adorers to invade,
Root out, and ruin all of faith opposed,—
Angel with angel waged, and god 'gainst god.
The heavens were rent with lightnings, and the fields
Of interjacent space, as the high powers,
Now heated to malignity, oft closed
In thunderous conflict, till the fire breath'd hills
Grew iced with fear; and quaking earth beneath
Reeked with the gore of brethren, brethren slain.
So, while 'gainst heathen, heathen, kin 'gainst kin
Streamed foe-wise in embattled war-waves; mowed,
With scythed cars, earth's man-eared crops; of wealth,
Peace, culture, states despoiled; while every land
Red rapine reaped, and idiot famine fed;
While maid and mother, eld and childhood, ate

190

Grief's heart, and drank the tears of woe, hell, know,
Agape for pitiless spirits, and o'er men's wrongs
Retaliative, content, groaned deep delight.
The angel of the ocean-flowing Nile,
And he who Hermon's heights and Lebanon held;
These, who the honours of the plains, and those
Who river, sea, or several planet claimed;
And he who, where Hiddekel gulphward darts,
Ruled with an absolute crown, for ages, strove,
With changeablest success, but changeless woe.
So, too, the Median angel and the Greek,
Contending, fanes and altars were o'erthrown,
Defiled; and myriads, militant devotees,
Through vain ambition of immortals, slain.
One thing was common to all nations, woe.
Sin, vice and luxury, with their flower-wreathed rods,
Ruled and chastised the nations; race by race,
Slaughtered, made, like that cruel tower Shirauz
Once held, of bodies breathful, limed with blood,
Time's generations, layers of death.

Festus.
Not all:—
Or vainly read I earth's recorded passed,
Was surely bale, nor with life blight; to man
One sweet exemption, by God's grace, pertained;
One gift diviner than the angels gave,
Or took away, by them o'erlooked, but given
From heaven's own treasury, all their mutual ire
Could ruin not, nor pervert; love, nought but love;
Parental, filial, conjugal, and divine.
Life's armies were recruited still by love;
Fond hearts still grew affection, as fields grain;
Still bloomed and fruited with an inward life,
And vintage of delight; still youthful breasts,
Reciprocally fired, imparted joy,
Imported rapture; tenderest converse, still,
Sweet as the whisperings of imblossomed trees,
Or the low lispings of night's silvery main,
Lived on the lips of lovers, then as now,
By fount or mead, or wandering, moon beguiled,
'Neath tall white cliffs, along the unshadowed shore.

Lucifer.
In sooth not all was sorrow, nor all sin;
Many too reckless lived to grieve; who died
Early, died guiltless of much crime; not all
Was ill, then. Not the less, priest, bard, nor mage,
From oracles, nor from mystic orgies; none
From secret source, nor patent; ghostliest runes,
Nor rolls of birchen bark, with mighty lay
Of divination, graven in branchèd signs,
Ere dim tradition; not from tablets rich
With Auscan god-lore, and augurial rites

191

Of volant fowl; from cane, nor palm-leaf, drenched
With sacred scents, in gilded Pali penned,
Could whisper to the world one saving spell;
One sacred secret snatched from jealous heaven;
That might the house of death illume; nor aught
From oracles Sibylline, or of Klarian fane,
Delphic, of holiest ambiguity, sought;
Not Rabbin versed in Kabalistic lore,
Nor echoing daughter of the spirit voice;
Nor spheral talismans, nor star-graved seals,
Whose influences, worlds, elements, all pervade
Could raise in life one soul to peaceful hope,
Death-passed, of ultimate union with the Light
Intelligible, of being. Nought hence could save.
Retrack their steps the angels scorned; nor deigned,
From holiest truths eliminating all false,
To help reharmonize with God, man's mind;
But, as misplaced of purpose, blent their rites,
That so from mystery mystery still might come,
And no solution, no salvation, soul
Sufficing, issue. Virtue, without end
Was preached of, taught, discussed, belauded, sung;
But as in theories of best life, men grew
More skilled and perfect, so in practice worse.
Nor all philosophies, nor their devotees,
'Vailed aught; not his, who held the all was God;
Not his who first from heaven to earth deduced
Philosophy, and then from earth to heaven
Retraced the soul's path by immortality;
Nor his, the sometime slave's, surnamed divine,
Rich in Egyptian wisdom, and all lore
Hellenic, who in Academe taught, well pleased,
The teacher of earth's conqueror, and the hearts
Of tyrant kings softened by gratitude;
Not they who, in the Porch, oft dreamed aloud
Their passionless figment of humanity;
Nor he who, in the Garden, vainly taught
Pure pleasure as man's truest mark and end;
The pleasure of just virtue, one with God's;
Whose words the hearts corrupt corrupted they
Aimed but to purify; not he who scorned
All things, nor he, all doubting; not even they,
Manly and moderate, honest friends of truth,
Who all the tenable points of others chose,
And in one system starred. Nor better fared
The dubious mind, elsewhere, intent on truth.
To some, in every land, of soul reborn,
The gifts pertained of wisdom, life and peace;
But who the multitudinous mass should teach;
What truths unfold, and what more shrewd reserve,

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The wisest men were doubtfullest, and believed
The ultimate indifference of all deeds,
All thoughts, all motives, all intents; the best
Were erring guides; to most man's life but showed
A bridge of groans across a stream of tears.
Again the giant world-sphinx, winged with air,
Sun-faced, star-maned, tailed with the rolling sea,
And breasted as beseems the dam of all;
Who nourisheth men and beasts; her riddle reads.
And this time, she the knot divine propounds,
Of how may man with God be reconciled?
Who solves, earns well the purple; and thenceforth,
With ominous and curse-worthiest glory, wears
His gold-spiked crown. But ah! his end is woe.
He to his fate uneyes himself in vain;
His tomb is in Time's chasm; and all along,
Oracular thunders further quest forefend.
In every generation of his kind,
Hero, or priest, or bard, or sage, or king,
There lives but one can solve.

Festus.
And all were dumb!

Lucifer.
But now that times, of old foretold, drew nigh,
God, the most highest, compassionating the plight
Of wretched mortals, thus with reason blessed
But with material nature cursed, devoid
Of guide infallible, or of standard pure,
And ground beneath the crushing rivalries
Of disobedient angels, sent on earth
His spirit-anointed prophet, soul heaven-born,
To preach true knowledge of heaven's Lord, that faith
In him alone supreme, he might retrieve
To earth's bewildered nations, and the reign
O'erthrow of angel-kings who thralled the world
With their most false misrule; and, in their front,
The haughty and presumptuous spirit-chief,
Who, one stern family of Semitic seed
Choosing, inhibiting brotherhood from the hour
When out of Nembrod's wrath, and Assur's land,
The idolatrous Chaldees' demoniac fires,
And city, itself a realm, of Nin-Evech,
He brought the father of the faithful; ruled
His wayward chosen in all their wanderings,
Rebellions, servitudes; and, by him led forth
Lateliest from Goschen, in K'naan now 'bode:
He, boasting God to teach, the sole, most high,
But elsewhere with the unequal angels linked,
Confused of doctrine:—tremble not, but hear.
Men cried aloud to God, God, pitying man,
Eyes, in sublime compassion, man below;

193

And mercy, unto the semi-angel, man,
Flows from the vision. God, long-suffering, acts.

Festus.
At length we touch the hem of history's robe.

Lucifer.
This chosen, and all the gentile tribes, like gusts
Blew rivalrous from their lips of prophecy.
What, then was so predicted, could but come.
Comes now the liberator of soul, the saint
Of saints; the preacher of forgiven sin;
The great Pacificator.

Festus.
Went not wild
The world with joy?

Lucifer.
Indeed not.

Festus.
Was no clash
Of sword on shield, hence useless but for hive
Of swarmful bees? No bruit of brazen trump,
Pealing its joyous requiem o'er dead war?
No world-wide murmurs of expectant joy,
Too mighty to be uttered, or repressed,
From myriads heard? No arch triumphal reared?
Earth's cities showed no revelry? No domes,
Nor Parian pillars chapiter'd with flame
Of flower-wreathed lamps, respiring odorous oils?
No festal halls with floral rainbows spanned,
And bannered silks with silvery ciphers wrought?
No gilded car? No team of creamwhite steeds,
In housings pranked of purple and pearl? Came forth
No mitred priest, his path of peace to charm
With benedictions, pouring at his feet
Long-templed treasures, ransom of a race?
Their trenchant trade nor smith, nor armourer, ceased?
Seemed there no universal pause from pain;
War; now of heaven discountenanced, and God's truce
Of promise, made perpetual?

Lucifer.
Since that day
The world hath made more war than e'en before;
And this man's followers, mad to prove him prince
Of peace, have soaked, and still steep, earth in blood.

Festus.
In grace of such high advent, figured forth,
By sagest seer, in sacred dance and game,
Showed not the sphered skies their mysteries, then,
In honour of God's fatherhood first preached
Of all men, and man's brotherhood?

Lucifer.
Nay, thou dreamest.

Festus.
Glared not the hills with joy-fires? Made the kings
No feast imperial? Bled not fountains wine,
With gush luxurious into marble meres?
Nor prince nor kingling largesse gave to churl,
Nor freedom to those bond? No? Loosed not heaven,

194

When, masked in manhood, earth he dignified
By touching with his feet, as once the wave
While he to faith a golden pathway showed,—
Self-interested, from out its depths, some noon
Eclipsing orb, that missioned thus of God
Man's spirit to purify, and exalt with proof
Of immortality, all earth's souls might learn
His entrance into life?

Lucifer.
Thou knowst the tale.
So it was not.

Festus.
No; thus. Like that lone star
Which on the thronèd lady's lap, fresh coined
Of God, leapt forth for later worlds, one pure
Pale starlet, marked of none but three, through air
Glode slowly, and towards a newborn babe that night
Of wintry snows, by her who bare, cave-cribbed,
'Mid lowing oxen, and adoring herds,
Pointed with rayonnant finger, and retired.

Lucifer.
Foretold or not by stars, or wingèd suns,
This seer of seers who humbliest lived, his words
Well-like profoundly clear, and, deeplier drawn,
The purer showing, his entire life one long
Perpetual miracle, who to preach the truth
And men buy back to true faith in one God,
Lived solely, was by treachery base,—inspired
Of th' apostate angels colleagued—seized and slain.
Thousands revered and loved him; one betrayed.
For this, for man's own sake, and for the ills
Strife rivalrous 'mong these celestial powers,
Caused, God deposed the angels; and, their seals
Of sovereignty annulled, they cast, as bidden,
All, into black oblivion; even as since
In mountain tarn volcanic, throne and crown,
Sceptre, and all regalia, golden gauds,
The imperial pagan of the west,—though he
Justly, to baulk his conquerors base,—implunged;
In time to come, some needy fisherman,
At close of day, with his last throw, perchance,
Shall joyful net, a mass,—if weed-webbed, foul,
And once a despot's diadem,—may yet
Burnish to brightness fit for holiest shrines.

Festus.
Thus, too, may it be with the angels, once consigned
To purifying penance, loth henceforth
Even in thought, God's unity, like intense,
Like infinite with this onemost heaven, to break.
Is there for such no hope? None? Nay, I see
Hope's dawn in far-off skies.

Lucifer.
Keen-eyed one, cease.
When spirit that springs from Being's eternal fount

195

Led down through all life's elements, lapse of time
And tact of sense concurring, hath at last
Its earthlier dross precipitated, and again
Bound lightwards, in its course self-clarified,
Reflecting God, as ocean in his breast,
Booklike, the starry transcript of the skies,
Holds, so all virtuous and celestial powers
May look for like communion; but so long
As separateness of self, and turbid touch
Of world-love or of passion, dim the soul,
Never; be it theirs or thine. But thine, even now,
Bears the design of earthliest discontent,
Not sacred satisfaction. Now to him
Whose soul is saved all things are clear as stars,
And to the chosen is sense of safety: this
None else, nor cold insurgent heart, nor mind
Menial, can compass. It is the way of God,
The starry path none tread but spirits heaven-high,
Who were of him before all worlds, and are
Beloved and saved for ever, while they live.
Thou of the world art yet, with motives, means,
And ends, as others.

Festus.
I will no more of it.

Lucifer.
Oh dream not that. Thou knowest not the depth
Of nature's dark abyss, thyself, nor God.
Thou mayst yet rise and fall oft as the sea.

Festus.
And those thou tell'st of?

Lucifer.
Darkness overlong
With them, as light with thee o'er strong, may blind
Alike the eye.

Festus.
But I foresee.

Lucifer.
Forejudge.

Festus.
How comes it then, being spirit, I see not all
As spirit should?

Lucifer.
Thou lackest both life and death;
Earth's death, heaven's life. Then wouldst thou see with God,
And know creation's strife in harmony
With him, and 'mong its separate parts, how raised,
And ordered why.

Festus.
Death alters not the spirit.

Lucifer.
Death must be undergone ere understood.

Festus.
One world is as another. Rest we here.

Lucifer.
See, thus men compt of destiny. All is chance.

196

XV.

Thence to a happier planet—for 'twas his,
Whose soul, streamlike, the images of stars
Immirrored in its surface, stealing, while
At its boldness trembling, knowledge of all spheres
Predisciplinary, to reap;—where, blessed, we meet
The spirit just glimpsed the first night of temptation;
Thenceforth the soul's instructress. The prime steps
See, of the angel spirit, earth-trained to good;
Immortal, self-perfectible; whose deep thoughts
And lofty musings sow in us the seeds
Of higher nature, brighter being. The muse,
Especial faculties raised and vivified, there,
Hail; heavenly poesie hail; all mental powers
Outlustring, even as this, eve's dewy star,
All worlds. The searchful soul, bent to evoke
From all intelligence its especial spell
Of union with truth universal, seeks,
Earth meditating, and in the future plunged
Of mind's advance, our nearest, saddest light.

Another and a better World.
Festus, Lucifer, Angela.
Festus.
Sweetest of worlds! which, Lucifer, is this?

Lucifer.
This is the star of evening and of beauty.

Festus.
Otherwise Venus. I will stay here.

Lucifer.
Nay:
It is but a visit. As the morning star
Some know it, too; but these, a wakeful few.
I have no interest in it.

Festus.
Let us look
About us. Heaven, it is, it must be! Aught
So beauteous, must have feeling. Cannot worlds live?
Least things have life: why not things greatest, too?
An atomie is a world, a world an atom,
Seen relatively; and death an act of life.

Lucifer.
This is a world where every loveliest thing
Lasts longest; where decay lifts never head
Above the grossest forms, and matter here,
Is all transparent substance; the flower fades not;
But every eve gives forth a fragrant light;
Till, by degrees, the spirit of each flower
Essentially consuming it, the fair frame
Refines itself to air; rejoining thus
Its archetype, and preexistent. Here,
The beautiful die not ever. Death lies all
Adreaming; he hath nought to do: the babe
Plays with his darts. Nought dies but what should die.
Here are no earthquakes, storms nor plagues; no hell

197

At heart; no floating flood on high. The soil
Is ever fresh, and fragrant as a rose;
The skies, like one wide rainbow, stand on gold;
The clouds are light as roseleaves, and the dew,
It is of the tears which stars weep, sweet with joy.
The air is softer than a loved one's sigh;
The ground is glowing with all priceless ore,
And glistening with gems, like a bride's bosom;
The trees have silver stems and emerald leaves;
The fountains bubble nectar; and the hills
Are half alive with light.

Festus.
The very blush
Of being; it is surely too a maiden world,
Unmarred by thee. Touch it not, Lucifer.

Lucifer.
It is too bright to tarnish.

Festus.
Didst thou fail?

Lucifer.
I cannot fail. Success with me is nature,
I who am cause, means, consequence of ill.
Yet is't not heaven.

Festus.
Oh, no. And would I change
Earth, with her desert breast, and wood-wavy brow,
Fickle though oft, even fatal, for this round
Of delicatest realities? Nay, I love
Earth's woods to haunt when the storm bends his bow,
And volleys all his arrows off at once;
And when the dead brown branch comes crashing close
To my feet, to tread it down, because I feel
Decay my foe; and not to triumph's worse
Than not to win. It is wrong to think on earth;
But terror hath a beauty, even as mildness.
And I have felt more rapture even on earth
When, like a lion, or a day of battle,
The storm rose, roared, shook out his shaggy mane,
And leapt abroad on the world, and lay down red,
Licking himself to sleep, as it got light;
Ay, in the cataract-like tread of a crowd,
And its irresistible rush, flooding the green,
As though it came to doom, than ever I could
Feel in this faëry orb of show and shine.
I love earth!

Lucifer.
Thou art mad to dote on earth,
When with this sphere of beauty. Nay, conceive.
Thou canst not yet enjoy a sensuous world,
Refined though ne'er so little o'er thine own,
And still wouldst enter heaven. Valhalla's halls,
And skulls o'erbrimmed with mead; cities of gold,
Cities of silver; temples roofed with light;
God-home and glory-land; Elysian plains,
Where peace and pleasure, endless, cloudless joy,
And ever-ripening bliss, enrapture all;

198

The Buddhist's blessed Nirvana, half between
What is, and what is not; the Chaldee's orbs
Of gold, where wons the primal light intense;
The high celestial mountains, bright with hues
Spiritual of heaven, Brahm loves, and Siva holds,
So pure that snow would stain, and dew defile;
Where music, and her sister, beauty, dwell,
And the waters flow of immortality;
The pearly palaces and odorous groves;
Forms heavenly, infinite brightness, and of souls
The starry transmigrations, they who home
By the amber main, believe their lot, past death;
The Aztec's burning heaven, where living clouds
By warrior souls informed, sweep round the sun
Ceaseless; rise, fall, at will; an earth-life now,
Or heaven-life had, in turn; whose sword-play makes
Lightning, whose voice in battle, thunder, they
Warring on high; the Moslem's love-bowers, streams
Of wine, and tents palatial, gem illumed;
Where dark-eyed houris with the endearing arms
White, ever virgin, woo and welcome ye;
Eden, where life, toilless, at least, gave man
All things to live with, nothing to live for;
Were, all, too pure for thee. Yet shalt thou be
Surely in heaven, ere death unlock the heart.

Festus.
Lo, here are spirits, denizens of the sphere,
I doubt not, fitly fair; and, strange! all seem
To love each other.

Lucifer.
He hath but half a heart
Who loves not all.

Festus.
Speak for me to some angel.
See, here is one, a very soul of beauty.
Nay, 'tis the Muse. I know her by the lyre
Hung on her arm, and eye like fount of fire.

Muse.
Mortal, approach. I am the holy Muse,
Whom earth's best spirits adore; her chosen choose.
It is I who imbreathe my soul into the lips
Of those great lights whom death nor time eclipse;
It is I who wing the loving heart with song,
And set its sighs to music on the tongue;
It is I who watch, and with high thoughts reward,—
For every thing I love that's pure and bright,—
The holy aspirings of the youthful bard.
'Twas but this morn, with the first wink of light,
A sunbeam left the sun; and as it sped,
I followed, watched, and listened, what it said:—
‘Straight from the sun I part; and though have passed
Since bidden of God, and in heaven's centre cast,
Worlds, ages, dooms, yet I am light to the last.
And though, foreseen, the world's air warps our way,

199

And crops the roses from the cheek of day;
As some false friend who holds man's all in trust,
Oils his decline, and hands him to the dust,
Yet all our God shall once bend to his will,
Is sacred, to be loved, or borne with, still;
We know not what may be; we bide what must.
If such then fate, to speed unwavering on
My path, be mine; though fate and fall be one.
For what's this swift, this bright, but downward being,
Too burning to be borne, too brief for seeing?
What is mine aim, mine end? Would I expire
Grovelling in common dust, in sea, air, fire?
Help avarice pelf to heap, war wreak his ire,
Or light the loveless to their low desire?
No; but if favouring fate which, urged from God,
Here vivifies a heaven, and there a clod,
Grant me but this request, death's pang to assuage,
'Twould be to perish on the poet's page,
Where, kissing from his beauty's brow all age,
Bespelled for ever fair, and wrinkle scorning,
As when first that brow brake on him like a morning,
He, with adoring spirit, creates the line
Which leads, by mortal beauty to divine,
Man's soul. For this end, earthbound though, I come,
I'd live, die, go down gladdening, to my doom.’
It said; and saw earth! and one moment more
Fell bright beside a vine-shadowed cottage door.
In it came; glanced above a glowing page
Where youth foreshortening and forestalling age,
Weak with the work of thought a boyish bard
Sate suing night and stars for his reward;
The unwrought crownlets which to bards belong,
And bloom perennial in their sacred song.
The sunbeam swerved and grew, a breathing, dim,
For the first time, as it lit and looked on him;
His forehead faded, pale his lip, and dry;
Hollow his cheek, and fever fed his eye;
Doubt-clouds lay round his brain, as on a hill
Broods the incipient storm, unvoiced; and still,
Quick with the thunder thought, and lightning will.
His clenched hand shook from its more than midnight clasp;
And his pen fluttered like a wingèd asp;
Save that no deadly venom blacked its lips;
'Twas his to enlighten life, and not eclipse,
Nor would he shade one merit owned by other,
To have a sphere his slave, a god his brother.
Still sate he, though his lamp sunk: still he strained
His eyes to work the nightness which remained.
Vain pain! he could not make the light he wanted;

200

And soon thought's wizard ring gets disenchanted.
When earth was dayed, was morrowed; the first ray
Perched on his pen, and diamonded its way;
The sunray that I watched, which, proud to cease
Mid some fair line, inspired of love and peace,
Died, in the only path it would have trod,
Were there as many ways, as worlds, to God;
Died; in his eye again to live and burn,
As nature's glory all to heaven's shall turn,
When truth's immortal sunbeams guide his pen,
And love his heart who, God-taught, teaches men
They may be all they most aspire to be,
Their longed-for end, their earliest destiny,
Whose aim in life is truth and sanctity.
For earth-life is but being's dawning ray;
And hadst thou suns in day as stars in night,
And each, of heaven perfective, towards God's day
Thy soul brought, still, its highest, truest right
Were, luminous, to rejoin his full-sphered light,
Before whose face creations pass away,
As pass all cloudlets 'fore the steadfast sky,
Or as year, time's arrows 'fore eternity.

Festus.
Thanks, thanks! With the Muse is always love and light,
And self-sworn loyalty to truth. For know,
Poets are all who love, who feel, great truths,
And tell them: and the truth of truths is love.
There was a time—oh, I remember well!
When, like a sea-shell with its sea-born strain,
My soul aye rang with music of the lyre;
And my heart shed its lore as leaves their dew—
A honey dew, and throve on what it shed.
All things I loved; but song I loved in chief.
Imagination is the air of mind;
Judgment its earth and memory its main;
Passion its fire. I was at home in heaven.
Swiftlike, I lived above; once touching earth,
The meanest thing might master me: long wings
But baffled. Still and still I harped on song.
Oh! to create within the mind is bliss;
And, shaping forth the lofty thought, or lovely,
We seek not, need not heaven: and when the thought,
Cloudy and shapeless, first forms on the mind,
Slow darkening into some gigantic make,
How the heart shakes with pride and fear, as heaven
Quakes under its own thunder; or as might,
Of old, the mortal mother of a god,
When first she saw him lessening up the skies.
And I began the toil divine of verse,
Which, like a burning bush, doth guest a god.

201

But this was only wing-flapping—not flight;
The pawing of the courser ere he win;
Till by degrees, from wrestling with my soul,
I gathered strength to keep the fleet thoughts fast,
And made them bless me. Yes, there was a time
When tomes of ancient song held eye and heart;
Were the sole lore I recked of: the great bards
Of Greece, of Rome, and mine own master land,
And they who in the holy book are deathless;
Men who have vulgarized sublimity;
And bought up truth for the nations; held it whole;
Men who have forged gods—uttered—made them pass:
Sons of the sons of God, who, in olden days,
Did leave their passionless heaven for earth and woman,
Brought an immortal to a mortal breast,
And, rainbowlike the sweet earth clasping, left
A bright precipitate of soul, which lives
Ever; and through the lines of sullen men,
The dumb array of ages, speaks for all;
Flashing by fits, like tire from an enemy's front;
Whose thoughts, like bars of sunshine in shut rooms,
Mid gloom, all glory, win the world to light;
Who make their very follies like their souls;
And like the young moon with a ragged edge,
Still, in their imperfection, beautiful;
Whose weaknesses are lovely as their strengths,
Like the white nebulous matter between stars,
Which, if not light, at least is likest light;
Men whom we build our love round like an arch
Of triumph, as they pass us on their way
To glory, and to immortality;
Men whose great thoughts possess us like a passion,
Through every limb and the whole heart; whose words
Haunt us, as eagles haunt the mountain air;
Whose thoughts command all coming times and minds,
As from a tower, a warden; fix themselves
Deep in the heart as meteor stones in earth,
Dropped from some higher sphere; the words of gods,
And fragments of the undeemed tongues of heaven;
Men who walk up to fame as to a friend,
Or their own house, which from the wrongful heir
They have wrested, from the world's hard hand and gripe;
Men who, like death, all bone but all unarmed,
Have ta'en the giant world by the throat, and thrown him;
And made him swear to maintain their name and fame
At peril of his life; who shed great thoughts
As easily as an oak looseneth its golden leaves
In a kindly largesse to the soil it grew on;
Whose names are ever on the world's broad tongue,

202

Like sound upon the falling of a force;
Whose words, if wingèd, are with angels' wings;
Who play upon the heart as on a harp,
And make our eyes bright as we speak of them;
Whose hearts have a look southwards, and are open
To the whole noon of nature; these I have waked,
And wept o'er, night by night; oft pondering thus:
Homer is gone: and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives
Time, tower, and god—all that then was, save heaven.

Muse.
Yea, but the poor perfections of thine earth
Shall be as little as nothing to thee here.

Festus.
God must be happy, who aye makes; and since
Mind's first of things, who makes from mind is blessed
O'er men. Thus saith the bard to his work:—I am
Thy god, and bid thee live as my God me:
Strength of my soul! thou camest and went'st, sunlike,
From morn to eve; fire-smiling on this heart,
Aforetime calm, until by passion's tides,
Roused, and ambition's tyrannous gales it rose
And dashed about its house all might and mirth,
Like ocean's tongue in Staffa's stormy cave.
But wert thou fragile as the reed once filched,
From heaven, in theft heroic, and with gifts
Of world-vast change charged, still I hail thee fraught
With fire immortal, deathless as the breath
Of God's lips,—every breath a soul.

Muse.
It is well.
Mortal, the Muse is with thee: leave her not.

Festus.
Once my ambition to another end
Stirred, stretched itself, but slept again. I rose
And dashed on earth the harp, mine other heart,
Which ringing, brake; its discord ruinous
Harmony still; and coldly I rejoiced
No other joy I had, wormlike, to feed
Upon my ripe resolve. It might not be:
The more I strove against, the more I loved it.

Lucifer.
Come, let us walk along. So say farewell.

Festus.
I will not.

Muse.
No: my greeting is for ever.

Lucifer.
Well, well, come on!

Festus.
Oh! show me that sweet soul
Thou brought'st to me the first night that we met.
She must be here, where all are good and fair:
And thou didst promise me.

Lucifer.
Is that not she
Walking alone, up-looking to thine earth?
For, lo! it shineth through the mid-day air.

Festus.
It is, it is!

203

Lucifer.
Well, I will come again.
The more he views, the more 'tween God and him.

Festus.
Knowest thou me, mine own immortal love?
How shall I call thee? Say, what mayst thou be!

Angela.
I am a spirit, Festus; and I love
Thy spirit, and shall love, when once like mine,
More than we ever did or can even now.
Pure spirits are of heaven all heavenly.
Yet marvel not to meet me in this guise,
All radiant like a diamond as it is.
We wander in what way we will through all,
Or any of these worlds, and wheresoe'er
We are, there heaven is; there, and here too, God.
Nor deem still less thou art unwatched on earth.
Even when I saw thee by the grave, and knew
I was purely in thy thoughts, 'twas my soul's prayer
To God, who o'erorders all things in unseen
Control, and bends to his praise what hates him most
As what most loves, thou mightst, sometime with me
Here meet, and quit thy mind of doubts. For here
Dwell many and wisest angels, many souls
Who have run pure through earth, or been made pure
By their salvation since. It is a mart
Where all the holy spirits of the world
Effect sweet interchange of knowledge; truth
Barter for love, for love truth; each enriched.

Festus.
Thou dost remember me?

Angela.
Ay, every thought
And look of love which thou hast lent to me,
Comes daily through my memory as stars
Wear through the dark.

Festus.
And thou art happy, love?

Angela.
Yes: I am happy when I can do good.

Festus.
To be good is to do good. Who dwell here?
Are they all deathless—happy?

Angela.
All are not:
Some err, though rarely—slightly. Spirits sin
Only in thought; and they are of a race
Higher than thine; have fewer wants and less
Temptations, more joys, greater powers. They need
No civil sway; each rules, obeys, himself.
All as they choose, live; choose but good. Who have come
From earth, or other orb, use the same powers,
Passions, and purposes, they had ere death;
Although enlarged and freed, to nobler ends,
With better means. Here the hard warrior whets
The sword of truth, and steels his soul against sin.
The fierce and lawless wills which trooped it over
His breast; the spearèd desires that overran

204

The fairest fields of virtue, sleep and lie
Like a slain host 'neath snow; he dyes his hands
Deep in the blood of evil passions. Mind!
There is no passion evil in itself;
In heaven we shall enjoy all to right ends.
There sit the perfect women, perfect men;
Minds which control themselves, hearts which indulge
Designs of wondrous goodness, but so far
Only as soul extolled to bliss and power
Most high sees fit for each, divinely. Here,
The statesman makes new laws for growing worlds,
Through their forefated ages. Here, the sage
Masters all mysteries, more and more, from day
To day, watching the thoughts of men and angels
Through moral microscopes; or hails afar,
By some vast intellectual instrument,
The mighty spirits, good or bad, which range
The space of mind; some spreading death and woe
On far off worlds; some great with good and life.
And here the poet, like that wall of fire
In ancient song, towers o'er the universe;
Lighting himself, where'er he soars or dives,
With his own bright brain: this is the poet's heaven.
Here he may realize each form or scene
He e'er on earth imagined; or bid dreams
Stand fast, and faëry palaces appear.
Here he hath heaven to hear him; to whose love,
Which lent him his whole strength, with mainlike voice,
And song he thankful sings as is the wont
Of all great spirits and good throughout the world.
Oh! happiest of the happy is the bard!
Here, too, some pluck the branch of peace to greet
A suffering saint with, and foreshow his flood
Of woe hath sunken: this I love to do;
Who, late on Mercy's mission charged, thee heard
Now, here; but wherefore ask not: thou sometime
Shalt know, and known, and loving me, approve;
Rejoice in knowing.

Festus.
Be it, loved one, as thou wilt.

Angela.
My love, we shall be happy here.

Festus.
Shall I
Ever come here?

Angela.
Thou mayst. I will pray for thee,
And watch thee.

Festus.
Thou wilt have, then, need to weep.
This heart must run its orbit. Pardon thou
Its many sad deflections. It will return
To thee and to the primal goal of heaven.

Angela.
Practise thy spirit to great thoughts and things,
That thou mayst start, when here, from vantage ground.

205

By ceasing to be little on earth, a soul
Effectually, grows here, half boundless, where
Knowledge of that we would, in being, ends.
Our spirits what there they know and love, of things
Divine, here greaten to; for their final cause
Their inmost end, their highest source in us
Being God, soul-consciousness of whom is bliss,
This, our celestial aptness for high ends;
World-lording will, ceaseless progress of mind,
Ambition to do good, the mastery, sought
With tears, of mysteries, and the exalting love
Of all perfections, virtuous and divine,
Our birth, our worth, proves; and the rational soul's
Most choice endowment shows; whereby, demarked
From lower intelligence, and with heavenly life
Collate, we test the future as of God,
Whose sealed recognizance we embosom here.
For his eternal knowledge, rounding time,
And all things in it happening, makes the world,
To us one vast contingency, to him
All certainty appear, whose note of things
Their actual being precedes, as being, with us,
Its noteableness; who in himself all cause
Or absolute or conditioned holds, and knows
Of all his works by him begun, by man
Continued, or let lapse, which sole shall end
In sanctified perfection. If by us
Conceived, accordant with his pure design,
O happy we! our life-leaf beams in heaven's
Bright archives; but time's parable misjudged,
Misconstrued wilfully, defiled, distort
To ends of him and us unworthy, find
We may, to our cost, or blotted out, erased,
Or, shrieking, from the eternal volume, torn.
Thus, while each fateful only is to himself,
We can foretell our future; we foremake.

Festus.
Speak to me of the future.

Angela.
Why alone
Of the to come?

Festus.
Because I love and dread,
As might a vessel laden o'er-deep with gold,
To cross a stream upon whose further side
Safety allures, but in whose midst is death,
The untold pleasures of the life my soul
Is richliest freighted with.

Angela.
God's supreme gift,
Whereby all beings gauge their high advance
In heaven, to perfect joy, is this; to learn
The everlasting future. Less or more,
All happy spirits can, as one with him.

206

The more their power their longing is the less;
Contented with divinity; but I
Am only at his feet, not yet his breast.
A natural sadness born, O Festus, born
Of the sad passed; though passed, though sad, still dear;
Clouds yet my vision of eternal things;
And human love yet more than nothing seems.
Oh! speak not of the future. Speak to me
Thou, of the passed.

Festus.
Immortal! from thine eye
Wipe out the tear of time. The gates of hell
Are barred upon the passed. Their hold is like
The grasp of gravitation. Shall the passed
Ever evade the death-clutch of the world?
No, they shall, like two cars, wheel locked in wheel,
Roll down together to destruction's depths.
Nay, rede me of the future what thou canst,
Divine one! heaven is in the possible.

Angela.
Oh, once ere now I cast my spirit sight
Into the orient future, to preview
The features of thy lifelot; but, alas!
I saw what I were fain to have remained
Unweeting of for ever. Now, once more,
Thou wouldst revive my woe.

Festus.
Nay, if it grieve thee,
I will not wake the future. Let it sleep
Till its time come.

Angela.
Yet with that woe I saw
A web of joy was woven for thyself,
For me, for many, by the love of God;
Who, granting his own spirit to the form
Of divinized humanity, unbuilds
The superseded soul, and making all
Spirits anew in him, doth make all one.
This is the infinite calm which circumscribes
All local lifestorms; this the law of peace
Constrains all strife; the rule of bliss all woe
Which disannuls. Haste, haste, thou blessèd hour,
To the divine fulfilment of the end
Of total being.

Festus.
Thus serened, speak on;
And with the sequence of my life forearm
The soul that is within me. Angel, speak!—

Angela.
Once at my prayer 'twas given me, as I said,
The future to foresee; and I beheld
A vision of thyself begirt with forms—
Nay, more than one—of beauty; though to one
Lovely and pure as loving, I thy heart
Had trustfully bequeathed; but sad was this;
And that was blithe of blee; and that—enough!

207

I cannot all denote them; but I know
Malign I felt at first to see the heart
I loved, by them usurped. But when I thought
From these calm heights, of all earth's cares and woes,
And life's brief paradise, the hour of love,
And knew it aye a failure, as of old,
Though a divine experiment, I wept,
And prayed, and found forgiveness for my fault.
Seek to them; choose. They all are in thy life
Blent, and as elements mingled in the cup
Creative of thy world. These twain are bound,—
One, with temptations which the soul divert
Creature-wards from its Maker, not of need,
Not wisely, but too oft; one, with the charms
If not forbidden, of secret knowledge, hidden
As harmful, to the spirit that seeks not truth
For herself sole. This dearest, first and last,
Shall teach thee perfectness, and guide thy mind
On earth, from truth to truth, as I from star
To star unseen, shall have led thee through the skies.
With her be happy. And as I looked, I found
Though 'fore each one, successive, as the fates
Thy spirit did bow; and none but in herself
Chastened, than I was happier; yet in the end
All formed one family spiritual of love.
My soul then gladdened, and I knew that joy
The seal of my salvation. I beheld
All things rejoice beneath the light of love,
Which seemed to burn within me, and beam through,
Lost in the boundless loneliness of God.
I saw earth's war-scarred countenance sweetly glide
Into the angel lineaments of peace;
And gentlest sorrow dream herself to joy.
Tears shed on earth were reaped in heaven in smiles,
And what was sown in sighs was raised in songs.
Rapt in this vision with ecstatic bliss,
Myself secure from all external chance,
As though the one pure atomie of light
Impounded in the centre of the sun—
Ere yet the end of all, methought I saw
Each beauty gathered by the careful hand
Of the great gatherer who forgetteth none.
I felt my being brightened and made fit
For heavenly regions, gladdening in their glee,
And grieving in their grief; as, with thine own,
One blessed fate I viewed involving all,
One everlasting end. All earthly love
Consumm'd with thine, I saw, made love divine.
For as the countless globelets of the dew
Image each one the sun, so, in the dawn

208

Of heaven's great day, the seed of God shall shine
Each with his golden likeness in his breast.
Thus far my vision. May the all-kind God,
Who crowns creation with o'erflowing love,
Bless it to thee! And wouldst thou further know,
Or of the passed, or the calm coming time,
Seek yonder sphere serene; for changeless there,
In lofty and in lonely light sedate,
The sibyl angel sits, star studying;
Two only things before her—heaven and earth.
Her ask, and she will answer all; nay, show
Sometime, if friendliest trust mayhap, prevail,
A wider scope of things, than spirit like mine
Of heaven's novitiate, can control. And now,
By each forebode, and fortified in soul,
Retrieve thou the terrene. Endure, enjoy.
Who rightly all conditions of life's law
Fulfils, from death to happiest deathlessness,
Proceeds, divinized. Mayst thou in holy joy,
Thy spiritual birthright here reclaimed, aye live!

Festus.
So shall it be: thy will and my deed, one.
I do not fear to die; for though I change
The mode of being, I shall ever be.
World after world shall fall at my right hand;
The glorious future be the passed despised:
All now that seemeth bright will soon seem dim,
And darker grow, like earth, as we approach it;
While I shall stand upon yon heaven which now
Hangs over me. If aught can make me seek
Other to be than that lost soul I fear me,
It is that thou lovest me. Heaven were not heaven
Without thee.

Lucifer.
I am here now. Art thou ready?
Let us go.

Angela.
Well—farewell. It makes me grieve
To bid a loved one back to yon false world;
To give up even a mortal unto death.
Thou wilt forget me soon, or seek to do.

Festus.
When I forget that the stars shine in air;
When I forget that beauty is in stars;
When I forget that love with beauty is;
Will I forget thee: till then, all things else.
Thy love to me was perfect from the first,
Even as the rainbow in its native skies:
It did not grow; let meaner things mature.

Angela.
The rainbow dies in heaven and not on earth;
But love can never die: from world to world,
Up the high wheel of heaven, it lives for aye.
Remember that I wait thee, hoping here.

209

Life is the brief disunion of that nature
Which hath been one and same in heaven ere now,
And shall be yet again, renewed by death.
Come to me, when thou diest!

Festus.
I will, I will.

Angela.
Then, in each other's arms, we will waft through space,
Spirit in spirit, one; or, grateful, dwell
Among these immortal groves; watching new worlds,
As, like the great thoughts of a Maker-mind,
They are rounded out of chaos: will be oft,
On earth with those we have left and love, and help them;
For God hath made it lawful for good souls
To make souls good; and saints, to help the saintly.
That thou right soon mayst fold unto thy heart
The blissful consciousness of separate
Oneness with God, in whom alone the saved
Are holy and deathless, shall become, for thee,
My earliest, earnest, and most constant prayer.
Oh! what is dear to creatures of the earth?
Life, love, light, liberty? But dearer far
Than all, and oh! an universe more divine,
The gift, God crowns his chosen with, of heaven's
Unimageable glory, ere all worlds,
And after all reserved for those he loves.
As when the eye first views some Andean chain
Of shadowy rolling cloud-crags, air-based, height
On height, in sunny snowsheen, up the skies
'Spiring, like angels' pinions, when heaven's host
Self-hushed, God's utterance listens, nor can tell
Which loftiest, nor which loveliest, be; as when
An army awakening with the sun, all hope,
Starts to its feet, spear answering spear, line, line
Reundulative; white plumes, like war-foam, wave
Far round; the light of sword-born lightning gleams
Generously; while reek themselves away, unwatched,
Night's watchfires dull: so feels the spirit when first
Doubt quelled, faith's conquering arms flash certainty
On reason's field; so, too, when now the soul,
God's bright and mountainous mysteries receives,
Containing heaven; moving themselves towards us,
In their free greatness, as, by ships at sea,
Come icebergs, imminently upon their base
Heaving, poised; pure and pointed as a star,
Afar off glittering, of invisible depth,
And in the light above, dissolving.

Festus.
Dear one!
My prayer shall be that thy prayer be fulfilled.
And now, to earth again. Farewell, sweet soul.

Angela.
Farewell. I will be oft with thee if maybe.

210

But if, as fate may order, me thou meet'st
Elsewhere than here, demand of me no word,
But imitative of virtues not yet thine,
Thou shalt learn sometime, why, where silence is
Worthless; and reticence only hath wise praise.

Lucifer.
Earth like I more than this: I rather love
A splendid failing than a petty good;
Even as the lightning's bolt, whose course is downwards,
Is nobler still than any fire which soars.
I scarce can say wherefore I had thee hither,
It was wrong, I fear.

Festus.
Mayhap 'twas destiny,
Life's special charm.

Lucifer.
Go to—reasons are plenty,
Nor ever absent, but when wanted. Come!

Festus.
I am determined to be good again.
Again? When was I otherwise than ill?
Doth not sin pour from my soul like dew from earth,
And, vapouring up before the face of God,
Congregate there, in clouds, between heaven and me?
What wonder that I lack delight of life?
For it is thus—when amid the world's delights,
How warm soe'er we feel a moment among them—
We find ourselves, when the hot blast hath blown,
Prostrate, and weak, and wretched, even as I am.

Lucifer.
I have done nothing for thee yet. Thou heaven
Shalt see, and hell, and all the sights of space,
Whene'er thou choosest.

Festus.
Not then now.

Lucifer.
Up! rise!

Festus.
No; I'll be good; and will see none of them.

Lucifer.
Remember, there's the moon.

Festus.
My memory
Is most tenacious of the things of light,
And the commands of love.

Lucifer.
Oh, happy thought!

211

XVI.

Charged by the spirit e'er upwards ripening, man
And evil, his mightier minister, invade
Peaceful, that sacred sphere, the queen of heaven,
Whose passive utterances of light reveal
The birth of things, their subjectness to soul,
Spiritual and human; sin's source, and the means
Whereby perfection reattained, and men
And angels joined in bliss with God, all good
Shall be at full; and Time, his crown resigned
After his day's reign, to Eternity,—
Mother of him, and of ages all, cease. Here,
Inspired by love of soul-life progressive,
Though for a season thwarted the daring spirit
Promise exacts unforfeitable, from one
Who can fulfil vow made to test the skies
Perfective, elevative of life.

The Moon.
Festus, Lucifer, and Luniel.
Festus.
Thus far along these silent wastes of light
Have we, unseeing and unseen, held on.
Time's sands seem turned to seed-pearl as they glide,
In luminous slumber, through his shadowy glass,
To glorified repose; while snowy Peace
Hushes the infant soul, here born again,
To wonder and delight. And yet these rocks,
Whose flames once flourished in the face of heaven,
Like burning banners o'er a fiend host, there
Arrested in ignition, fire made stone,
Speak out of other state than quiet once.
Not Chaos when in travail of the earth,
And groaning with the birth-pang, nor the sun's
Deserts of fire, sea-deep with drifting flame;
Nor all contortions of the solemn clouds,
Can match the immarbled madness of this orb:
As though some vast wild passionate soul, ablaze
Through all its nature with volcanic sin,
By God's one word translated into light,
And the pure beauty of celestial peace,
With adamantine silence seized, had 'come
That instant changeless, deathless and divine.
Still meet we not what in this sphere we seek.
Methinks my mission here may fail, and might,
Were not my soul by force of faith in her
Assured, who urged our hither steps, mine most
Investigative, as like to light on truth
Here hidden; and though long baffled, as to me

212

Seems, who from sea-bed dry to hill-top have sought
Vainly, the angel virtue of this orb,
Still trust I to behold her, not as yet
Rightly, perhaps, invoked. Or shall I call
Her aid, who willed us here?

Lucifer.
And if I knew not
To an ace our whereabouts, though groping, now
And then, through manifold darkness, as we have done;
And of our failures, quite enough! I, too,
Might deem this changeful spherelet just the spot,—
It is bounded, west by light, and east by night,
And north and south by nothing and the wind,
For all poetic possibles, and believe
Truth captured, might romance to us all the night,
Two se'nnights long, in allegories. At last!

Festus.
Lo now the angel, as foretold. She makes
Hither. O beauty, holy and divine,
Life-eyed, soul-crowned, illuminated with truth.
Mark how unearthly fair and pure; her air
Of sad felicity, and her mingled mien
Of innocent life and knowledge absolute.

Lucifer.
Ere Time had whet his infant scythe, or left
His cradling clouds, or yon pale watery star,
Heaven's giant tear, first cast its shade o'er space,
That angel knew I well; but now, no more.
Nor wished I here to meet, nor thou with her.

Festus.
Mind's silent invocacy hath oft such end.

Luniel.
Earth-child, behold the angel of this orb.
Long have I marked thy wonder at these scenes,
Thy search for me; this ceased, that satiate now.
Much of the passed thou 'mindst me, and the race
These hills and plains, once populous, teemed with, thee
Not wholly like; of purer strain than thine,
Aërial more, meseems; for virtue, hence,
Translate, entire to heaven. I, thus, charge-freed,
Rejoice to bid thee welcome, from what orb
Ever thou hailest, the sun, which, day by day,
All forces of the world converts to light,
Exhaustless, and the hoards he spends, renews;
Or further star; thrice welcome; whencesoe'er,
Welcome! What tidings bringst thou? say, art thou
The earnest of the line to come, foretold
By skiey spirits and friendliest, as once more
Soul-wise, to people these silvery solitudes
Of light, whose advent I these ages wait?

Festus.
O holy and divine one. I am man,
And not the hero of the destined race
Thou hopest; not here inducted; just allowed
Latewhile, by leave divine, I, touching thus
At yon bright wanderer of the solar realm

213

Hesperian, like thyself of crescent brow,
Nigher the sun one grade than we, where now
Aspirant of heaven, a spirit blessed of God,
A sweet and sacred sister of my soul,
Sojourns; and, tending thence, towards earth mine own,
Am by her hither bidden, that I might learn
From thee, lone watcher of the skies, and sole
Mediatress 'tween the sun and earth, the fates
Spiritual to be fulfilled of those we love,
And mighty-minded man. And such we hold
Thy sanctity of nature, thine unweighed
Largesse of light intelligible, and calm
Control of ill, thou wilt for me unseal
The fountain of the future, and charm forth
Wave after wave of wonder.

Luniel.
Thou, too, who?

Lucifer.
Master and servant am I here of him;
Thine equal, more and less. But come not I
Inquiring or desiring aught of thee.
The future is to me mere nothingness;
The passed but as a dream; the present is
My portion; therein only do I live.
Among these soulless solitudes, in sooth,
Seems little call for me. But here I am.

Luniel.
Oh well, I ween, do we each other know;
For all things, soul or spirit, here show clear.
Within the radiant region of this orb,
Diaphanous as light, nor mist nor cloud
The unconditioned vision dims; and thou,
Tempter of life, to me art throughly known.
I know thee as the evil spirit of time.
But mystery is there in thine origin,
Thy ministry, thy fall, which, none create,
Not even thou thyself canst fathom. God
Only can read what he hath written there
In hieroglyphic darkness, and he will;
That his great works may know themselves and him,
Ere all the ages end. From God I own
Power to foretell what only he foreknows;
And ye are both predestined beings. Such
His pleasurable will, that they who serve
Rule with him—who obey not, serve him still.

Lucifer.
It is even so; thou sayest truth.

Festus.
Thy words,
More precious to mine ear than seaborn pearls,
Pierce me with light. Speak on, pray.

Luniel.
Mortal, know
Our spirits are the keys to all we see;
And whoso, first permitted and inspired
Of heaven, but pondereth well the page of life

214

Before him, shall unlock at last the store
Hid in it and all others. To predict
The coming it is needfullest to con
The passed and present. As to things of time,
Time is divisional; eternity
All unitive. Perfection is to come.
I thus the mutual destinies have learned
Of thine orb and mine own.

Festus.
Inform me, then,
O holy and divine one! who now tread,
On this sole purpose bent, these shores of light,
Silently shining, by thy spirit graced,
The god-state of the future.

Luniel.
Be it so.
Attend ye; for ye witnesses are both
To wisdom, of her world-comprising plan.
One is the end and origin of all.
God, from the first, was solely in himself;
Nor aught was in existence, God except:
Nor time, nor world, life, flesh, sense, soul, nor sin
Nay, there was no negation; God sole all.
But willing to create, his hand he spread
From east to west, and constituted space;
From north to south he planned the boundless map,
And consecrated it. The universe
Is but a state of being, and a life
And time condition of the will divine;
A veil whose web is light embossed with stars;
Through which the eternal essence kindly deigns
To manifest itself; and all he makes,
As buds and tender branches bourgeoning,
From Being's sacred stem, making to bless.
Deep in the universal centre of things,
Infixed the Infinite, for gods God made,
Therefore, the heavens; and dark æthereal space,
For the immortal angels, love sustained,
Which occupy with him eternity,
And sin not, err not, doubt not. Next he made,
By might omnific and deific love,
Matter, for beings of a nature mixed,
Whose forms should be material, blessed with life,
Vegetive, fleshly; these instinctive, those
Unconscious; and for these and him to come,
With starry globes innumerable, suns,
Planets, and moons, and meteors, circumvolved
Each round the other, round their central sun,
In countless clouds and firmamental wholes,
Whose orbits scarce demean infinitude,
Did he the void impeople; he the suns
Of self-genetic, space-creating light,

215

As types and tokens of his heavenly love
And beatific power, with spirits vast
And world ordained intelligences, fined
From all creation, through its thousand grades.
For man, the mighty earth, and all the orbs
Revolving round the middle thrones of fire,
Compacted of the elements, wherein
Dwell separately all less perfect souls;
For him the moon, reflective, ministrant.
Of all he chose one system as a law,
The great ensample of his starry scheme,
One sun, one earth, one moon, one race, one tribe
He rules by choice the universal whole.
All that are angels, therefore, held, or gods,
And worshipped by the ignorant soul, are man;
Man, self-inclusive of all lower forms,
All higher natures less than the Most High.
For man is of two kinds, the spiritual
And fleshly; yet we both have but one name;
Since angelhood is manhood glorified;
Raised up distinctly to divinity;
And homed and heavened within the embrace of God.
The final sum that science crowns her with,
This; between God and nature, man alone;
However various his conditions be,
Through space's universal round, and all
The countless orbs of viewless skies, exists;
Nature's essential summit he and God's
Deific incarnation: this weigh well;
For spirit is refracted in the flesh,
And shows as crooked what is straightness' self.
Call all not God nor nature, man; nor fiend
Nor angel but his kin; God, thus, the world,
And man, are all: man midst, the third great form,
Wherein unite the two divine extremes,
In vital essence. Partly viewed, to each
His double nature is allied; conjoined
They embrace themselves in him, compact effect
Of God and the lone universe; he the mean
Immortal, vital, of all things, brute life,
And heaven's divine eternity. In man
Do God and nature reconcile themselves;
God's image he, and the world's. In mental kind,
In moral and spiritual his sire's; in frame,
This elemental and transitional shape,
His mighty mother Nature's favourite son.
Soul, quintessential element, unto her
Heaven's love-gift he alone heirs of her fruit;
She perfected in him most; of her line,
Head-glory. As man the quality of all life

216

Thus shares above, below, and matter inert,
So, in his nature sanctified, all things back
To their final origin return, in round
Totality of life. For our dear sakes,
Life mortal is exalt to life eterne,
And God with justest love still saves from death,
To heaven's divinest destinies, the son
Of his eternal bridals.

Festus.
Whence are we?

Luniel.
Child of the royal blood of man redeemed,
The starry strain of spirit elect, create
Before all worlds, all ages, thence we are.
This, therefore, be thy future and thy fate.
As water putrefied and purified,
Seven times by turns, will never more corrupt;
So thou and thine whole race, all change endured,
Through doubt, sin, knowledge, faith, love, power, and bliss,
Shall practise every note of Being's scale,
Till the whole orb coharmonize with heaven,
And pure imperial peace rule all below;—
Till, star by star, these bright and sacred seats,
Whose ancestry of sempiternal suns
Comes of the vast and universal void,
And in whose lineage of light yon earth
Seems but a new possession, scarcely worth
Accepting or rejecting, shall at last
Into primordial nothingness relapse;
And man, the universal son of God,
Who occupied in time those starry spheres,
Regenerate and redeemed shall live for aye,
Made one with deity; all evil gone,
Dispersed as by a thunderclap of light.

Lucifer.
Spirit serene! Hath evil no effect?

Luniel.
Timeous it hath, being the shadow of good.
With man all good hath evil, but with God
Evil itself is good.

Festus.
And sin and hell?

Luniel.
Evil and sin are twin with time and man.
Sin from a selfish, sensual, source sprung, seeks
An individual end; whereby we stand
Opposing deity, and the great commonwealth
Of worldly life; sin voluntary evil;
Ill nature's sin involuntary 'gainst God;
But good, wherein with God we concentrate,
Though bound on Being's very utmost verge,
Unites us with the infinite, and rules
Right through us, as a radius of the law
Eternal of intelligence which bounds,
Quickens, upholds, and rectifies all things.

217

Sin is the birth of evil; hell, of sin;
Destruction of corruption forms the end.
Heat is not in the sun, nor wrath in God,
Who, though our faith may waver, still is love.
'Tis the eye twinkles, not the star. When him
We spurn we suffer: suffer and inflict,
On him our suffering, gracious he, all time.
Revenge, wrath, judgment, all are names of love;
The crowned effect of being, and therein
Result. Such retribution is our God's:
Such glorious retribution as the sun
Inflicts on fogs and shadows. Hell is part
Of nature. Human retribution stands
Divine in ordination; but divine
Judgment on human souls by torturing fires,
In everlasting blast, a blind reproach
To the pure God, who blesseth all he makes.

Lucifer.
Destruction I believe in. Mercy may
What it once made, unmake; scarce re-create
Into its opposite. Between man and man
Justice is sacred, and 'tween man and God,
Whose equity all embraces, mercy is sure.
But between God and fiend no middle power
Exists, save man, and no creator he.

Luniel.
Thee God! all creatural nature more or less
Denies; but thou, above all contraries,
All lovest, all affirmest, as of thee.

Festus.
As when two clouds, such differences delight,
By controvertive currents blown of air,
Each other's path cross, vast in seeming grace,
As knowing heaven both ample and apt enough
Even opposites to tolerate; each to me
Truth's footsteps seems to track. From both I learn,
Scanning the depths of Deity, what fate
Inexplicable judgment first pronounced,
By arbitrary rule, in reason's light
Shows righteous, shows humane, shows worthy God.
Yea even here as everywhere, let man
Worship his Recreator, and the world's,
Made perfect blissward, by preparative fire.
O thou, who holdst the universe in thyself,
Not only as we may mentally, but in act;
Cause uncontaminate by effect, all else
Effect with cause creatively connexed;
Who in Being's inaccessible depths dost dwell
Central, thence self-diffused through all; whose course
Through space uncomprehended, we but track
By the evanishing star-dust of thy feet
Left on heaven's roads; from world nathless to world,
From firmament to firmament can we trace

218

Each soul his individual link with thee;
The pure invisible touch which makes us thine;
The something more substantial than the sun,
More general than the void, yet nested here;
As through the aëry silence of the soul,
Swifter than eagle rushing upon the wind,
Thou sweepst into possession, when thou wilt.
So many are thy mercies, what is left
Save this, to ask? continue to us that
Thou givest. To cease pertaineth not to thee.
The elements may all confusedly fail;
Systems, now burning, stiffen corselike; or slide
Into their graves of darkness and decay;
The sun at length exhausted in the strife
For fiery aliment from the self-thinned air,
With his æthereal victor, sleep, and die;
And firmaments conglobe them, till at last
The universe in one orb concentrate, fit,
Then, for thy footstool only. Change like this
Ten thousand times may happen, until it fall
To the observant spirits at thy right hand
Noteless, by reoccurrence; man, the while,
Restored to the essential whence he came
Consorting but with the infinite, nor knowing
To utter what is not divine and true,
Shall ripen in thy bosom, till he grow
Through endless heavens, triumphant and serene,
Into the thronèd God thou badst him be.

Luniel.
Depart. Thou knowest all things, knowing this.
The world is God's broad word, whose sense is heaven,
To those who wisely read; time's trilogy,
The mighty drama of the Lord; the rest
Man, angels, act and hymn. To him devote
Be all the paradisal world to come;
Each hill an altar named to God, where man
Saintly, may pray and praise; a covenant heap
Of witnessed commune 'tween them; oh, may earth
Sea-like, but render back the heaven she nears;
Be every flower a censer of delight
Spiritual; each wing an augury of the skies.

Festus.
A future this, to live for.

Lucifer.
I abhor
The self-delusions men affect. With them
The future is a god-king, born in heaven,
Rich with hereditary royalties,
And entail of interminable times.
Morn's roseate breath, fresh blown o'er night's bright dew,
Is foul before this urchin's as a sough;
His hand is like the lily's fragrant snow;

219

And he is robed in weeds of whitest sheen;
Pet godling of the world! The present, what?
A ragged, beggared dotard, sick to death
Of the grey years, and round returning skies.
But what's the truth? Nor passed, nor future, is;
The present only is all time.

Festus.
Too much
Thou hast taught me, spirit, of the passed, to shun
The surety 'tis in me, for good or ill;
And thou, too much, sweet angel, not to feel
The hopes first planted in my mind by her
Who bade me here, of commune blessed to come,
Make henceforth life's best part, that I the more
Concede me to the future.

Luniel.
Know then, friend
Of her I love with thee, that limited though
In sphere, each spirit celestial, yet the extent
To all seems well nigh vergeless; and if thou,
Prepared, wouldst ken what more of human fates,
Even of the individual spirits that star
Earth's passed, renowned; and how the eternal years
Find them and leave; or lapped in thought, as these,
Or fired to act, as those, perpetual, say!

Festus.
Dear angel! If through all these radiant spheres,
Thou show'st, so stimulant to the inquisitive mind,
Of dreams of miracles wrought, mayhap, by son,
Prophet, or saint of the Supreme; not masked
In mean or stable state, but as a god,
Carrying his kingdom with him, and his court,
His converts, and his heaven; that so, though plunged
In death's abyss, death passed, it is in his train's
Triumph, and the effluence of his conquering light,
They enter deity; if, nay, trust me, e'er
Mine it might be, more proofs of God's just love
Than ever earth shows, to learn, such would I rather
In thy care tutelar, than 'neath other wing
Angelic, these mine eyes have yet beheld.

Luniel.
God's are the ultimate ends of life; but these,
Sun, planet, satellite, heaven's all-typèd spheres,
Of evervariant being, it is mine to search,
Sojourn in, pass through; if abide in not.
Mean mundane these, and just remedial spheres
Meedful, preliminary, where meet, death passed,
Men's spirits; for whose can His pure eyelids, heaven's
Passive rebuke, sustain? Such hovering search
Our possible privilege, leave being had, to enrich
The spirit with royal liberties but fulfilled
In thy kind, deathwise; and thus the freed soul fit
For truth, orbed perfectly in heaven alone:

220

High thought and pure, it is mine to hallow aye,
And guide through heaven the meditative soul,
Slightful of luxuries. Let not world-life warp
Thy heart from its strain upwards. Shun, severe,
Seclusive, youth's frivolities and deceits.

Lucifer.
Oh yes, I'll help in all austerities.
There's nothing like extremes. The mean's too good.

Festus.
Earth was my future once, but now 'tis heaven.

Luniel.
Earth is the emerald tablet, by God's throne,
He writes his laws upon, and his open fates;
That all the heavens his starry rede may learn,
Even to the end. Thither ye therefore hie.
Earth's angel waits thee next, estranged by woe
From all her kindred world-wardens, she weeps
The impending end of things, nor ceases haunt
Heaven with thrice deprecated prayer. Farewell.

Lucifer.
Come then, since earth and heaven have willed it thus,
Let us fare forth; our mutual destinies
Coeval, and concurrent with the world.
This life thou findst not, say, a thought too grave?
Who seeks creation's mysteries;—well, a change,
Now and again, seems reasonable, I own.

Festus.
How can the aspiring spirit, whose faith is sure,
Whose aims, experiences like these, converse
With pure intelligence, and advance in paths,
Heavenward, divine, prove reach their mark e'er change
Its end, and change for meaner?

Lucifer.
Pleasure, love,
And mirth, ye graces three, make up for this,
Right soon, or something will go wrong. We want
Some merry chirupping friends, that's clear. But wait.
A sunny pool 'mid life's brief stream, I seem
To see, where glides, scarce sensible of the flow,
Youth's gilded shallop calmed 'mong lilies; seem
To catch a song; quaff wine.

Festus.
What sayst?

Lucifer.
I say,
Me unconditioned being charms not; nor things
Certain; contingencies are enough for me;
And serve me passing well.

Festus.
Farewell, sweet orb.
Earth draws us like a lodestone. See, we are coming.

221

XVII.

But dimmed,
Drowned, lost all this, like an eye in tears of mirth,
Like a star setting in a twinkling sea,
Mid revellings, song and dance, wild glee and wine,
Where beauty's orb rules, lady of the hour,
More astral than terrene, o'er lovelorn youth,
And damsels on whose lily necks the blue
Veins branch themselves in hidden luxury,
Hues of the heaven they seem to have vanished from.
By new loves lured, by life's sheer levities, swift
The tempted takes his leap, as cloud-lapped stream
Vaults o'er its crags, self-dissipative in air,
To end in watery dust without all end;
Mere spells the spirit's eye to daze 'gainst needs
Of nobler being; mock substitutes for aims
Truth asks; but saddened penitently, at close,
By sweet remembrance of the sainted soul
Once loved, aye hallowed; still a force on high,
Heart-purifying. Oh! still in scenes like this;
Youth lingers longest, drawing out his time
As goldbeater his wire attenuates, till
It would reach round earth, and be of no use, then.

Party and Entertainment.—Garden: Fountains.
Festus, Helen, Lucifer, Charles, Lucy, and Others.
Festus.
My Helen, let us rest awhile,
For most I love thy calmer smile;
We'll not be missed from you gay throng,
They dance so eagerly and long;
And were one half to go away,
I'll bet the rest would scarce perceive it.

Helen.
With thee I either go or stay,
Prepared, the same, to like or leave it;
These two perhaps will take our places;
They seem to stand with longing faces.

Festus.
Then sit we, love, and sip with me,
And I will teach thyself to thee.
Thy nature is so pure and fine,
'Tis most like wine;
Thy blood, which blushes through each vein,
Rosy champagne;
And the fair skin which o'er it grows,
Bright as its snows.
Thy wit, which thou dost work so well
Is like cool moselle;
Like madeira, bright and warm,
Is thy smile's charm;
Claret's glory hath thine eye,

222

Or mine must lie;
But nought can like thy lips possess
Deliciousness;
And now that thou'rt divinely merry,
I'll kiss and call thee sparkling sherry.

Helen.
I sometimes dream that thou wilt leave me
Without thy love, even me, lonely;
And oft I think, though oft it grieve me,
That I am not thy one love only:
But I shall alway love thee till
This heart like earth in death, stand still.

Festus.
I love thee, and will leave thee never,
Until my soul leave life for ever.
If earth can from her children run,
And leave the seasons, leave the sun;
If yonder stars can leave the sky,
Bright truants from their home in heaven;
Immortals who deserve to die,
Were death not too good to be given;
If heaven can leave and live from God,
And man tread off his cradle clod;
If God can leave the world he sowed,
Right in the heart of space to fade;
Soul, earth, star, heaven, man, world, and God
May part—not I from thee, sweet maid.
Ah, see again my favourite dance,
See the wavelike line advance;
And now in circles break,
Like raindrops on a lake:
Now it opens, now it closes,
Like a wreath dropping into roses.

Helen.
It is a lovely scene,
Fair as aught on earth;
And we feel, when it hath been,
At heart a dearth;
As from the breaking up of some bright dream;
The failing of a fountain's spray-topped stream.

Will.
Ladies—your leave—we'll choose a queen
To rule this fair and festive scene.

Charles.
And it were best to choose by lot,
So none can hold herself forgot.

[They draw lots: it falls to Helen.
Festus.
I knew, my love, how this would be;
I knew that fate must favour thee.

All.
Lady fair! we throne thee queen:
Be thy sway as thou hast been—
Light, and lovely, and serene.

Festus.
Here, wear this wreath. No ruder crown
Should deck that dazzling brow;
Or ask yon halo from the moon—

223

'Twould well beseem thee now.
I crown thee, love; I crown thee, love;
I crown thee queen of me;
And oh! but I am a happy land,
And a loyal land to thee.
I crown thee, love; I crown thee, love;
Thou art queen in thine own right:
Feel! my heart is as full as a town of joy;
Look! I've crowded mine eyes with light.
I crown thee, love; I crown thee, love;
Thou art queen by right divine;
And thy love shall set, neither night nor day,
O'er this subject heart of mine.
I crown thee, love; I crown thee, love;
Thou art queen by the right of the strong;
And thou didst but win where thou mightst have slain,
Or have bounden in thraldom long.
I crown thee, love; I crown thee, love;
Thou art my queen for aye;
As the moon doth queen the night, my love;
As the night doth crown the day.
I crown thee, love; I crown thee, love;
Queen of the brave and free;
For I'm brave to all beauty but thine, my love;
And free to all beauty by thee.

Helen.
Here, in this court of pleasure, blessed to reign,
If not the loveliest, where all are fair,
We still, one hour, our royalty retain,
To out-queen all in kindness and in care.
Love, beauty, honour, bravery, and wit;
Was ever queen served by such noble slaves?
The peerage of the heart—for heaven's court fit:
We'll dream no more that earth hath ills or graves.
With mirth and melody, and love we reign:
Begin we, then, our sweet and pleasurous sway;
And here, though light, so strong is beauty's chain,
That none shall know how blindly they obey.
We have but to lay on one light command;
That all shall do the most what best they love;
And Pleasure hath her punishments at hand
For all who will not pleasure's rule approve.
But no! there's none of us can disobey,
Since, by our one command, we free ye thus;
And, as our powers must on your pleasures stay—
Support—and you will reign along with us.

Festus.
Ha! Lucifer! How now?

Lucifer.
I come in sooth to keep my vow.

Festus.
Thy vow?

Lucifer.
To revel in earth's pleasures,
And tire down mirth in her own measures.

224

Festus.
Go thy ways: I shrink and tremble
To think how deep thou canst dissemble;
For who would dream that in yon breast
The heart of hell was burning?
Or deem that strange and listless guest
Some priceless spirit earning?
I hear methinks from every footstep rise
A trampled spirit's smothered cries.

Lucifer.
But for yon jocund wight, I fear,
—Just in the nick of time we met,
I stopped, and asked him where you were;
His kindness I shall ne'er forget—
Small chance had I of being here.
I think it quite ungenerous in you,
At such gay gatherings as the present,
My once-loved converse to eschew,
Just as I meant to make things pleasant.
It's rather hard when one has called
The club, to be yourself black-balled.

Charles.
Fest, engage fair Marian's hand.

Festus.
Pass me; she is free no less
Than I, who by my queen will stand;
May it please her loveliness!

Helen.
Festus, we know the love, and see,
Which was with Marian and thee,
Our early friend, once Clara called,
But now from us long while estranged;
In all, except her hopeless love
For thee, her faithless lover, changed;
And we would see ye once again,
I nothing doubt, resume—

Marian.
In vain,
I wish it not. I do but strive,
A love though buried still alive,
To hallow with the dearer name
That sheltered its first flickering flame.
He seeks another. Though he range
From heart to heart, not I shall change.
Love veered unbidden; he yet may learn
Unsought, unsolaced, to return.

Helen.
I hold him not against his will;
Thine he may be, thine only still.

Lucifer.
Well-rooted plants soon fruit. A lighter love
Will lighter instincts in him move.
These joys, these raptures of mere sense,
Senseless, enjoyment's pure pretence,
Must surely cloud all innocence.
And as he gains in knowledge high
Of spirit, nature, destiny,
Faith, fostered by yon faithful soul,

225

So ripe in love, so rich in dole,
Faith must as surely in him die.

Festus.
I marvel at myself. There seems
A power within me bids me claim
A freedom like space-filling dreams,
Which are, and are not, but in name;
A fateful freedom, all the same;
Wherefrom I vainly try to shape
Some way of conquest or escape.

Lucifer.
My schemes succeed as soon as planned;
Needs must, if so and so but drive;
When once you know your neighbour's hand,
It's wondrous how your game will thrive.

Charles.
Of freedom we'll have no abuse.
Dance with your royal fair.

Lucifer.
Make no excuse.

Festus.
Rebellion pleases most, though little use.
I will not dance to-night again,
Though bid by all the queens that reign.

Helen.
What, Festus! treason and disloyalty
Already to our gentle royalty?

Festus.
No—I was wrong—but to forgive
Be thy sublime prerogative!

Helen.
Most amply, then, I pardon thee;
In proof whereof, come dance with me.

[A dance.
Laurence.
How sweetly Marian sweeps along;
Her step is music, and her voice is song.
Silver-sandalled foot! how blest
To bear the breathing heaven above,
Which on thee, Atlas-like, doth rest,
And round thee move.
Ah! that sweet little foot: I swear
I could kneel down and kiss it there.
I should not mind if she were Pope;
I would change my faith.

Charles.
Works, too, we hope.

Laurence.
Ah! smile on me again with that sweet smile,
Which could from heaven my soul to thee beguile;
As I mine eye would turn from awful skies
To hail the child of sun and storm arise;
Or, from eve's holy azure, to the star
Which beams and becks the spirit from afar;
For fair as yon star-wreath which high doth shine,
And worthy but to deck a brow like thine;
Pure as the light from orbs which ne'er
Hath blessed us yet in this far sphere;
As eyes of seraphs lift alone,
Through ages on the holy throne;
So bright, so fair, so free from guile,

226

And freshening to my heart thy smile;
Ay, passing all things here, and all above,
To me, thy look of beauty, truth, and love.

Marian.
Pray, heed me not. 'Twere vain to me
To pay thy heart's lost fealty.

Harry.
Thy friend hath led his lady out.

Festus.
He looks most wickedly devout.

Fanny.
When introduced, he said he knew her,
And had been long devoted to her.

Emma.
Indeed—but he is too gallant,
And serves me far more than I want.
He vows that he could worship me—
Why—look! he is now upon his knee!

Lucifer.
I quaff to thee this cup of wine,
And would, though men had nought but brine;
E'en the brine of their own tears,
To cool those lying lips of theirs;
And were it all one molten pearl,
I would drain it to thee, girl;
Ay, though each drop were worth of gold
Too many pieces to be sold;
And though for each I drank to thee,
Fate add an age of misery:
For thou canst conjure up my spirit
To aught immortals may inherit;
To good or evil, woe or weal—
To all that fiends or angels feel;
And wert thou to perdition given,
I'd join thee in the scorn of heaven!

Emma.
Oh fy! to only think of such a fate!

Lucifer.
Better than not to think on't till too late.
They'd not believe me, Festus, if I told them,
That hell, and all its hosts, this hour behold them.

Festus.
Scarcely; that demon here again!
But though my heart burst in the strain
I will be happy might and main!
So wreathe my brow with flowers,
And pour me purple wine,
And make the merry hours
Dance, dance with glee like thine.
While thus enraptured, I and thou,
Love crowns the heart, as flowers the brow.
The rosy garland twine
Around the noble bowl,
Like laughing loves that shine
Upon the generous soul;
Be mine, dear maid, the loves, and thou
Shalt ever bosom them as now.
Then plunge the blushing wreath
Deep in the ruddy wine;

227

As the love of thee till death
Is deep in heart of mine;
While both are blooming on my brow
I cannot be more blessed than now.

Lucifer.
Thou talkst of hearts in style to me quite fresh:
The human heart's about a pound of flesh.

Festus.
Forgive him, love, and aught he says.

Helen.
What is that trickling down thy face?

Festus.
Oh, love, that is only wine,
From the wreath which thou didst twine;
And, casting in the bowl, I bound,
For coolness' sake, my temples round.

Helen.
I thought 'twas a thorn which was tearing thy brow;
And if it were only a rose-thorn was tearing,
Why, whether of gold or of roses, as now,
A crown, if it hurt us, is hardly worth wearing.

Lucy.
From what fair maid hadst thou that flower?
It came not from my wreath nor me.

Charles.
Love lives in thee as in a bower,
And sure this must have dropped from thee;
From thy lip, or from thy cheek:
See, its sister blushes speak.
Nay, never harm the harmless rose,
Though given by a stranger maid;
'Tis sad enough to feel that flower
Feels it must fade.
And trouble not the transient love,
Though by another's side I sigh;
It is enough to feel the flame
Flicker and die.
And thou to me art flame and flower,
Of rosier body, brighter breath;
But softer, warmer than the truth—
As sleep than death.

Festus.
The dead of night: earth seems but seeming;
The soul seems but a something dreaming.
The bird is dreaming in its nest,
Of song, and sky, and loved one's breast;
The lap-dog dreams, as round he lies,
In moonshine, of his mistress' eyes:
The steed is dreaming, in his stall,
Of one long breathless leap and fall:
The hawk hath dreamed him thrice of wings
Wide as the skies he may not cleave;
But waking, feels them clipped, and clings
Mad to the perch 'twere mad to leave:
The child is dreaming of its toys;
The murderer, of calm home joys;

228

The weak are dreaming endless fears;
The proud of how their pride appears;
The poor enthusiast who dies,
Of his life-dreams the sacrifice,
Sees, as enthusiast only can,
The truth that made him more than man;
And hears once more, in visioned trance,
That voice commanding to advance,
Where wealth is gained—love, wisdom won,
Or deeds of danger dared and done,
The mother dreameth of her child;
The maid of him who hath beguiled;
The youth of her he loves too well;
The good of God; the ill of hell;
Who live of death; of life who die;
The dead of immortality.
The earth is dreaming back her youth;
Hell never dreams, for woe is truth;
And heaven is dreaming o'er her prime,
Long ere the morning stars of time;
And dream of heaven alone can I,
My lovely one, when thou art nigh.

Helen.
Let some one sing. Love, mirth, and song,
The graces of this life of ours,
Go ever hand in hand along,
And ask alike each other's powers.
Lucy sings.

For every leaf the loveliest flower
Which beauty sighs for from her bower;
For every star a drop of dew;
For every sun a sky of blue;
For every heart a heart as true.

For every tear by pity shed
Upon a fellow-sufferer's head,
Oh! be a crown of glory given;
Such crowns as saints to gain have striven,
Such crowns as seraphs wear in heaven.

For all who toil at honest fame,
A proud, a pure, a deathless name;
For all who love, who loving bless,
Be life one long, kind, close caress;
Be life all love, all happiness.

Will.
How can we better time employ,
Than celebrate, with every breath,
Through hours that laugh themselves to death,
This bridal feast of love and joy?

Festus.
That song reminds me,—but it may not be;
No! I am sailing on another sea.

Lucifer.
Tell me what's the chiefest pleasure
In this world's high heapèd measure!

229

All.
Power—beauty—love—wealth—wine!

Lucifer.
All different votes!

Fanny.
Come, Frederic—thine?
What may thy joy-judgment be?

Frederic.
I scarce know how to answer thee;
Each, apart, too soon will tire;
Altogether slake desire.
So ask not of me the one chief joy of earth,
For that I'm unable to say;
But here is a wreath which will lose its chief worth,
If ye pluck but one flower away.
Then these are the joys which should never dispart—
The joys which are dearest to me:
As the song, and the dance, and the laugh of the heart,
Thou, girl, and the goblet, be.

Lucifer.
Oh, excellent! the truth is clear;
The one opinion, too, I love to hear.

Helen.
Is this a queen's fate—to be left alone?
I wish another had the throne.
Festus! why art thou not here,
Beside thy liege and lady dear?

Festus.
My thoughts are happier oft than I,
For they are ever, love, with thee;
And thine, I know, as frequent fly
O'er all that severs us, to me:
Like rays of stars, that meet in space,
And mingle in a bright embrace.
Never load thy locks with flowers,
For thy cheek hath a richer flush;
And than wine, or the sunset hour,
Or the ripe yew-berry's blush.
Never braid thy brow with lights,
Like the sun, on his golden way
To the neck and the locks of night,
From the forehead fair of day.
Never star thy hand with stones,
For, for every dead light there,
Is a living glory gone,
Than the brilliant far more fair.
Nay, nay; wear thy buds, braids, gems;
Let the lovely never part;
Thou alone canst rival them,
Or in nature, or in art.
Be not sad;—thou shalt not be:
Why wilt mourn, love, when with me?
One tear that in thy eye could start
Could wash all purpose from my heart
But that of loving thee;
If I could ever think to wrong
A love so riverlike, deep, pure, and long.

230

Helen.
I cast mine eyes around, and feel
There is a blessing wanting;
Too soon our hearts the truth reveal,
That joy is disenchanting.

Festus.
I am a wizard, love; and I
A new enchantment will supply;
And the charm of thine own smile
Shall thine own heart of grief beguile.
Smile, I do command thee, rise
From the bright depths of those eyes;
By the bloom wherein thou dwellest,
As in a rose-leaved nest;
By the pleasure which thou tellest,
And the bosom which thou swellest,
I bid thee rise from rest;
By the rapture which thou causest,
And the bliss while e'er thou pausest,
Obey my high behest.

Helen.
Dread magician! cease thy spell;
It hath wrought both quick and well.

Festus.
Ah! thou hast dissolved the charm;
Ah! thou hast outstepped the ring;
Who shall answer for the harm
Beauty on herself will bring?
Come, I will conjure up again that smile—
The scarce departed spirit. There it is!
Settling and hovering round thy lips the while,
Like some bright angel o'er the gates of bliss.
And I could sit and set that rose-bright smile,
Until it seemed to grow immortal there;
A something abstract even of all beauty,
As though 'twere in the eye or in the air.
Ah! never may a heavier shadow rest
Than thine own ringlets on that brow so fair;
Nor sob, nor sorrow, shake the perfect breast
Which looks for love, as doth for death despair.
And now the smile, the sigh, the blush, the tear,
Lo! all the elements of love are here.
Nay, wither not, with doubt's mistrustful sigh,
Love's tender, ah! too quickly perishing leaf:
Nor let one bring tearlet beauty's eye
O'ercloud with life embittering grief.
Oh! weep not, sigh not; woe, nor mortal wrath,
Should taint with sad defect a soul like thine;
Say, is it given the rule-less lightning's path
Earth-blinding, e'er to strike the stars divine?
Sing, then, while thy lover sips,
And hear the truth that wine discloses;
Music lives within thy lips
Like a nightingale in roses.

231

Helen sings.

Oh! love is like the rose,
And a month it may not see,
Ere it withers where it grows—
Rosalie!

I loved thee from afar;
Oh! my heart was lift to thee,
Like a glass up to a star—
Rosalie!

Thine eye was glassed in mine,
As the moon is in the sea:
And its shine was on the brine—
Rosalie!

The rose hath lost its red;
And the star is in the sea;
And the briny tear is shed—
Rosalie!

Festus.
What the stars are to the night, my love,
What its pearls are to the sea;
What the dew is to the day, my love,
Thy beauty is to me.

Helen.
I am but here the under-queen of beauty,
For yonder hangs the likeness of the goddess;
And so to worship her is our first duty.
The heavenly minds of old first taught the heavenly bodies
Were to be worshipped; and the idolatry
Holds to this hour; though, Beauty! but of thine.
I am thy priestess, and will worship thee,
With all this brave and lovely train of mine;
Lo! we all kneel to thee before thy pictured shrine.
Yes—there, thou goddess of the heart,
Immortal beauty, there!
Thou glory of Jove's free-love skies,
E'en like thyself too fair,
Too bright, too sweet for mortal eyes,
For earthly hearts too strong;
Thy golden girdle liftst and drawest
The heavens and earth along.
Oh! thou art as the cloudless moon,
Undimmed and unarrayed;
No robe hast thou, no crown save yon—
Goddess! thy long locks' soft and sunbright braid.
And there's thy son, Love—beauty's child—
World-known for strangest powers;
Boy-god! thy place is blest o'er all;
Smil'st thou at thoughts of ours?
And there, by thy luxurious side,
The queen of heaven and Jove
Stands; and the deep delirious draught
Drinks, from thy looks, of love,
And lips, which oft have kissed away

232

The thunders from his brow,
Who ruled, men say, the world of worlds,
As God our God rules now.
And thou art yet as great o'er this
As erst o'er olden sky;
Of all heaven's darkened deities,
The last live light on high.
God after god hath left thee lone,
Which lived on human breath;
When prayers were breathed to them no more,
The false ones pined to death.
But in the service of young hearts
To loveliness and love,
Live thou shalt while yon wandering world,
Named unto thee, shall move.
No fabled dream art thou: all god,
Our souls acknowledge thee;
For what would life, from love, be worth,
Or love from beauty be?
Come, universal beauty, then,
Thou apple of God's eye,
To and through which all things were made,
Things deathless—things that die.
Oh! lighten, live before us there;
Leap in yon lovely form,
And give a soul. She comes! It breathes,
So bright—so sweet—so warm.
Our sacrifice is over; let us rise;
For we have worshipped acceptably here;
And let our glowing hearts and glimmering eyes,
O'erstrained with gazing on thy light too near,
Prove that our worship, goddess, was sincere.

Festus.
I read that we are answered. The soft air
Doubles its sweetness; and the fainting flowers,
Down hanging on the walls in wreaths so fair,
Bud forth afresh, as in their birth-day bowers.
Dew-laden, as oppressed with love and shame,
The rose-bud drops upon the lily's breast;
Brighter the wine, the lamps have softer flame;
Thy kiss flows freelier than the grape first pressed.
Life lightly lies on us, as in time's first hours,
Olympian, when the immortals went and came,
And skies crystalline heaven and earth both blessed.

Will.
A dance, a dance!

Helen.
Let us remain.

Festus.
We will not tempt your sport again.

Helen.
Behold where Marian sits alone,
The dance all sweeping round,
Like to some goddess hewn in stone,
With blooming garlands bound.

233

Festus.
Tell me, Marian, what those eyes
Can discover in the skies,
Whereon thou gazest with such ecstasies?

Marian.
For earth my soul hath lost all love,
But heaven still loves and watches o'er me;
Why should I not, then, look above,
And pass, and pity all before me?

Festus.
Oh! if yon worlds that shine o'er this,
Have more of joy—of passion less—
I would not change earth's chequered bliss
For thrice the joy those orbs possess;
Which seem, so strange their nature is,
Faint with excess of happiness.

Marian.
Thy heart with others hath its rest,
And it shall wake with me;
And if within another breast
That heart hath made itself a nest,
Mine is no more for thee.
Heart-breaker, go! I cannot choose
But love thee, and thy love refuse;
And if my brow grow lined while young,
And youth fly cheated from my cheek,
'Tis that there lies below my tongue
A word I will not speak:
For I would rather die than deem
Thou art not the glory thou didst seem.
But if engirt by flood or fire,
Who would live that could expire?
Who would not dream, and dreaming die,
If to wake were misery?

Festus.
Whose woes are like to my woes? What is madness?
The mind exalted to a sense of ill
Soon sinks beyond it into utter sadness,
And sees its grief before it like a hill.
Oh! I have suffered till my brain became
Distinct with woe, as is the skeleton leaf
Whose green hath fretted off its fibrous frame,
And bare to our immortality of grief.
Deep in my heart there lies, as in truth's well,
The image of thy soul;
But ah! that fountain once so sweet, by spell
Of power is sealed, beyond my will's control.

Marian.
Like the light line that laughter leaves
One moment on a bright young brow,
So truth is lost ere love believes
There can be aught save truth below.

Festus.
But as the eye aye brightlier beams
For every fall the lid lets on it,
So oft the fond heart happier dreams

234

For the soft cheats love puts upon it.

Marian.
I never dreamed of wretchedness;
I thought to love meant but to bless.

Festus.
It once was bliss to me to watch
Thy passing smile, and sit and catch
The sweet contagion of thy breath—
For love is catching—from such teeth;
Delicate little pearl-white wedges,
All transparent at the edges.

Marian.
False flatterer, cease.

Festus.
It is my fate
To love, and make who love me hate.

Marian.
No! 'tis to sue—to gain—deceive—
To tire of—to neglect—and leave:
The desolation of the soul
Is what I feel;
A sense of lostness that leaves death
But little to reveal;
For death is nothing but the thought
Of something being again nought.

Helen.
Cease, lady, cease those aching sighs,
Which shake the tear-drops from thine eyes,
As morning wind, with wing fresh wet,
Shakes dew out of the violet.
Forgive me if the love once thine
Hath changed itself unsought to me;
I did not tempt it from thy heart,
I planned no treason against thee;
And soon, perchance, 'twill be my part
As thou now art, to be.

Marian.
I blame no heart, no love, no fate;
And I have nothing to forgive:
I wish for nought, repent of nought,
Regret nought but to live.

Helen.
Nay, sing; it will relieve thy heart.

Marian.
I cannot sing a mirthful strain;
And feel too much to act my part,
E'en of an ebbing vein.

Festus.
Our hearts are not in our own hands;
Why wilt thou make me say
I cannot love as once I loved?

Marian.
Hear!—'tis for this I stay—
To say we part—for ever part;
But oh! how wide the line
Between thy Marian's bursting heart,
And that proud heart of thine.
And thou wilt wander here and there,
Ever the gay and free;
To other maids wilt fondly swear,
As thou hast sworn to me;

235

And I—oh! I shall but retire
Into my grief alone;
And kindle there the hidden fire,
That burns, that wastes unknown.
And love and life shall find their tomb
In that sepulchral flame:
Be happy—none shall know for whom—
I will not dream thy name.

Festus.
As sings the swan with parting breath,
So I to thee;
While love is leaving—worse than life—
Forewarningly.
Speak not, nor think thou any ill of me,
The son of destiny, the crown of fate,
The pen of power which writes earth's future state,
If thou wouldst not die soon, and wretchedly,
Oppressed with sense of passed felicity;
Passed yet perchance to dawn again on thee.
Behold me bound beneath the threefold spell,
Which heaven hath laid upon me, earth, and hell.
It may be that I love thee even now
More than my tortured spirit dare avow;
It may be that the clouds which dim my gaze,
Though rich with roseate gold, are full of scath,
And may disperse 'neath thy soul's purer rays;
But now I cannot waver on my path;
Nor condescend the world to undeceive,
Which doth delight in error and believe.
Time will unfold whate'er we have of truth,
As ripening years the greener growth of youth.
Thus then, farewell, dear maiden, ere I go;
Thus dearly have I earned my rightful woe.

Oh! if we e'er have loved, lady,
We must forego it now;
Though sore the heart be moved, lady,
When bound to break its vow.
I'll always think on thee,
And thou sometimes—on whom, lady?
And yet those thoughts must be
Like flowers flung on the tomb, lady.
Then think that I am blest, lady,
Though aye for thee I sigh;
In peace and beauty rest, lady,
Nor mourn, and mourn, as I.

From one we love to part, lady,
Is harder than to die;
I see it by thy heart, lady,
I feel it by thine eye.
Thy lightest look can tell
Thy heaviest thought to me, lady;
Oh! I have loved thee well,
But well seems ill with thee, lady!

236

Though sore the heart be moved, lady,
When bound to break its vow.
Yet if we ever loved, lady,
We must forego it now.

Marian.
Whate'er thou dost, where'er thou goest,
My heart is only thine, thou knowest.

Lucifer.
Come, I must separate you two:
Such wretchedness will never do.
The little cloud of grief which just appears,
If left to spread, will drown us all in tears.

Emma.
Oblige us, pray, then, with a song.

Charles.
I'm sure he has a singing face.

Will.
At church I heard him loud and long.

Lucifer.
Pardon—but you are doubly wrong.

Helen.
Obey, I beg. Here—give him place.

Lucifer.
I have not sung for ages, mind:
So you must take me as you find.
This is a song supposed of one—
A fallen spirit—name unknown—
Fettered upon his fiery throne—
Calling on his once angel-love,
Who still remaineth true above.

Thou hast more music in thy voice
Than to the spheres is given,
And more temptations on thy lips
Than lost the angels heaven.
Thou hast more brightness in thine eyes
Than all the stars which burn,
More dazzling art thou than the throne
We fallen dared to spurn.

Go search through heaven—the sweetest smile
That lightens there is thine;
And through hell's burning darkness breaks
No frown so fell as mine.
One smile—'twill light, one tear—'twill cool;
These will be more to me
Than all the wealth of all the worlds,
Or boundless power could be.

Helen.
Entreat him, pray, to sing again.

Lucifer.
Any thing any one desires.

Festus.
Your loveliness hath but to deign
To will, and he'll do all that will requires.
Lucifer sings.

Oh! many a cloud
Hath lift its wing;
And many a leaf
Hath clad the spring;
But there shall be thrice
The leaf and cloud,
And thrice shall the world
Have worn her shroud;
Ere there's any like thee,
But where thou wilt be.

237

Oh! many a storm
Hath drenched the sun;
And many a stream
To sea hath run;
But there shall be thrice
The storm and stream,
Ere there's any like thee,
But in angel's dream;
Or in look, or in love,
But in heaven above.

Lucy.
What is love? Oh! I wonder so:
Do tell me—who pretends to know?

Frank.
Ask not of me, love, what is love!
Ask what is good of God above;
Ask of the great sun what is light;
Ask what is darkness of the night;
Ask sin of what may be forgiven;
Ask what is happiness of heaven;
Ask what is folly of the crowd;
Ask what is fashion of the shroud;
Ask what is sweetness of thy kiss;
As of thyself what beauty is;
And if they each should answer, I!
Let me, too, join them with a sigh.
Oh! let me pray my life may prove,
When thus, with thee, that I am love.

Festus.
I cannot love as I have loved,
And yet I know not why;
It is the one great woe of life
To feel all feeling die:
And one by one the heartstrings snap
As age comes on so chill:
And hope seems left that hope may cease,
And all will soon be still.
And the strong passions, like to storms,
Soon rage themselves to rest;
Or leave a desolated calm,
A worn and wasted breast;
A heart that like the Geyser spring,
Amidst its bosomed snows,
May shrink, not rest—but with its blood
Boils even in repose.
And yet the things one might have loved
Remain as they have been;
Truth ever lovely, and one heart
Still sacred and serene;
But lower, less, and grosser things
Eclipse the world-like mind,
And leave their cold dark shadow where
Most to the light inclined.
And then it ends as it began,

238

The orbit of our race,
In pains and tears, and fears of life,
And the new dwelling place.
From life to death, from death to life,
We hurry round to God;
And leave behind us nothing but
The path that we have trod.

Helen.
In vain I try to lure thy heart
From grief to mirth;
It were as easy to ward off
Night from the earth.

Festus.
Fill! I'll drink it till I die—
Helen's lip and Helen's eye!
An eye which outsparkles
The beads of the wine,
With a hue which outdarkles
The deeps where they shine.
Come! with that lightly flushing brow,
And darkly splendid eye,
And white and wavy arms which now
Like snow-wreaths on the dark brown bough,
So softly on me lie.
Come! let us love, while love we may,
Ere youth's bright sands be run;
The hour is nigh when every soul,
Which 'scapeth evil's dread control,
Nor drains the furies' fiery bowl,
Shall into heaven for aye,
And love its God alone.

Helen.
Now let me leave my throne; and if the hours
Have measured every moment by a kiss,
As I do think, since first ye gave these flowers,
It was to teach us how to dial bliss.
Farewell, dear crown, thy mistress will not wear,
Save when she sitteth royally alone.
Farewell, too, throne! not quickly wilt thou bear
A happier form, if fairer than mine own.

Will.
The ladies leave us!

Lucifer.
Oh; by all means let them;
But say, for heaven itself, we'll not forget them;
Say we will pledge them to the top of breath,
As loud as thunder, and as deep as death.

Festus
(apart).
Methinks I hear in every sigh
Of wind, that stirs the illumined bowers,
A whisper of the immortal powers
Reproachful, from death's spoils that lie,
In happiest alchemy,
Transfiguring themselves to flowers.
Oh! for thy grave, my love!
I want to weep.

239

High as thou art this earth above,
My woe is deep;
And cold my heart is as thy grave,
Where I can neither soothe nor save.
Whate'er I say, or do, or see,
I think and feel alone to thee.
Oh! can it—can it be forgiven,
That I forget thou art in heaven?
Thou wilt forgive me this, and more:
Love spends his all, and still hath store.
Thou wilt forgive, if beauty's wile
Should win, perforce, one glance from me;
When they whose art it is to smile
Can never smile my heart from thee;
And if with them I chance to be,
And give mine ear up to their singing,
It, windlike, only wakes the sea,
In all its mad monotony,
Of memory forth thy music ringing.
Thou wilt forgive, if, now and then,
I link with hands less loved than thine,
Whose goldlike touch makes kings of men,
But wakes no will in blood of mine;
And if with them I toss the wine,
And set my soul in love's ripe riot,
It echoes not—this desert shrine,
Where still thy love from heaven doth shine,
Moon-like, across some ruin's quiet.
Thou wilt forgive me, if my feet
Should move to music with the fair;
When, at each turn, I burn to meet
Thy stream-like step and aëry air;
And if before some beauty there,
Mine eye may forge one glance of gladness,
It is but the ripple of despair
That shows the bed is all but bare,
And nought scarce left but stony sadness.
Thou wilt forgive, if e'er my heart
Err from the orbit of its love;
When even the bliss-bright stars will start
Earthwards, some lower sphere to prove.
And if these lips but rarely pine
In the pale abstinence of sorrow,
It is, that nightly I divine,
As I this world-sick soul recline,
I shall be with thee ere the morrow.
Thou wilt forgive, if once with thee
I limned the outline of a heaven;
But go and tell our God, from me,
He must forgive what he hath given;

240

And if we be by passion driven
To love, and all its natural madness,
Tell him that man by love hath thriven,
And that by love he shall be shriven;
For God is love where love is gladness.
Perchance thy spirit still stays in yon mild star,
In peace and flame-like purity, and prayer;
And, oh! when mine shall fly from earth afar,
I will pray God that it may join thine there;
'Twere doubling heaven, that heaven with thee to share.
And while thou leadest music and her lyre,
Like a sunbeam holden by its golden hair,
May I, too, mingling with the immortal choir,
Love thee, and worship God! what more may soul desire?
Enough for me; but if there be
More it shall be left for thee.

Walter.
If anything I love in chief
It is that flowery rich relief
That wine doth chase on mortal metal
Before good wine begins to settle;
But all seem smilingly, serenely dull,
And melancholy as the moon at full.
Quenched by their company they seem
Like sparks of fire in clouds of steam.

Charles.
They who mourn the lack of wit
Show, at least, no more of it.

Festus.
I cannot bear to be alone,
I hate to mix with men;
To me there's torture in the tone
Which bids me talk again.
Like silly nestlings, warned in vain,
My heart's young joys have flown;
While singing to them, even then,
They left me, one by one.
I envy every soul that dies
Out of this world of care;
I envy e'en the lifeless skies,
That they enshrine thee there;
And would I were the bright blue air
Which doth insphere thine eyes,
That thou mightst meet me everywhere,
And feel these faithful sighs.
E'en as the bubble that is mixed
Of air and wine right red,
So my heart's love is shared betwixt
The living and the dead.
If on her breast I lay my head,
My heart on thine is fixed:—
Wilt thou I loose, as I have said,

241

Or keep the soul thou seekst?
From me thou canst not pass away
While I have soul or sight;
I see thee on my waking way,
And in my dreams thee bright;
I see thee in the dead of night,
And the full life of day;
I know thee by a sudden light;
It is thy soul, I say.
If yonder stars be filled with forms
Of breathing clay like ours,
Perchance the space that spreads between
Is for a spirit's powers;
And loving as we two have loved,
In spirit and in heart,
Whether to space or star removed,
God will not bid us part.

Frank.
As to this seat—its late and fair possessor
Should, ere she went, have chosen her successor.

Festus.
In right of her who sat thereon
I think I might demand the throne;
I rather choose to let it be.

All.
George shall be king of the company!

George.
My loving subjects! I shall first promulge
A few good rules by which to indulge;
They are good, according to my thinking,
And shall be held the laws of drinking.
First—each man shall do what he chooses,
Provided that he ne'er refuses,
But shall be sworn, by stand and stopper,
To drink as much as I think proper.

Will.
Stay!—all of you who think with me,
This law should pass,
Will please to signify the same,
By emptying their glass.

Walter.
Filling again and emptying, and so on,
At each law—pari passu, as we go on.

George.
Secondly—no man shall be held as mellow
Who can distinguish blue from yellow.
Thirdly—no man shall miss his turn or toast;
Nor yet give more than two at once, at most;
Fourthly—if one at table should fall under,
There let him lie—so much extinguished thunder.
Fifthly—let all, in such case, who still stay,
Like living lightning, but the brighter play.
Sixthly—a subject broached,—mind this, there shan't
Be aught said that is not irrelevant.
Seventhly—if any of these edicts should not
Be kept, it shall be good to plead, I would not.

Charles.
Oh, let the royal law

242

Be writ in rosy wine!
And read and kept
At every feast
Where wit and mirth combine.

Festus.
How sweetly shine the steadfast stars,
Each eyeing, sister-like, the earth:
And softly chiding scenes like this,
Of senseless and profaning mirth.

Lucifer.
Thou art ever prating of the stars,
Like an old soldier of his scars:
Thou shouldst have been a starling, friend,
And not an earthling: end!

Festus.
And could I speak as many times
Of each as there are stars in heaven,
I could not utter half the thoughts—
The sweet thoughts one to me hath given.
The holy quiet of the skies
May waken well the blush of shame,
Whene'er we think that thither lies
The heaven we heed not—ought not name.
Oh, heaven! let down thy cloudy lids,
And close thy thousand eyes;
For each, in burning glances, bids
The wicked fool be wise.

Lucifer.
I can interpret well the stars.

Charles.
Indeed, they need interpreters;
And once, myself, I own, desired
To cast their meanings into verse;
But found the feelings so inspired,
Inapt, as sunshine on a hearse:
And you no doubt will find it worse.

Lucifer.
Then thus, in their eternal tongue,
And musical thunders, all have sung,
To every ear which ear hath given,
From birth to death, this note of heaven:
Deathlings! on earth drink, laugh, and love:
Ye mayn't hereafter—under or above.
Yes, this the tale they all have told
Since first they made old Chaos shrink;
Since first they flocked creation's fold,
And filled all air as flakes of gold
Bedrop yon royal drink.
For as the moon doth madmen rule,
It is, that near and few they are:
And so in heaven each single star
Doth sway some reasonable fool,
Whether on earth or other sphere;
For what's above is what is here.
Moons and madmen only change;
What can truth or stars derange?

243

Edward.
Brave stars, bright monitors of joy
Right well ye time your hours of warning;
For, sooth to say, the eve's employ
Doth wax less lovely towards the morning.
So push the goblet gaily round;
Drink deep of its wealth, drink on;
Our earthly joy too soon doth cloy,
Our life is all but gone;
And, not enjoy yon glorious cup,
And all the sweets which lie,
Like pearls within its purple well,
Who would not hate to die?

Will.
And who, without the cheering glance
Of woman's witching eye,
Could stand against the storms of fate,
Or cankering care defy?
It adds fresh brightness to the bowl;
Then why will men repine?
Content we'll live with heaven's best gifts—
With woman, and with wine.

Harry.
Cups while they sparkle,
Maids while they sigh;
Bright eyes will darkle,
Lips grow dry.
Cheek while the dew-drops
Water its rose;
Life's fount hath few drops
Dear as those.
Arms while they tighten;
Hearts as they heave;
Love cannot brighten
Life's dark eve.

George.
Oh! the wine is like life;
And the sparkles that play,
By the lips of the bowl,
Are the loves of the day.
Then kiss the bright bubble
That breaks in its rise;
Let love be a trouble
As light, when it dies.

Festus.
Well might the thoughtful race of old
With ivy twine the head
Of him they hailed their god of wine:
Thank God! the lie is dead;
For ivy climbs the crumbling hall
To decorate decay,
And spreads its dark deceitful pall
To hide what wastes away;
And wine will circle round the brain,
As ivy o'er the brow,

244

Till what could once see far as stars,
Is dark as death's eye now.
Then dash the cup down! 'tis not worth
A soul's great sacrifice:
The wine will sink into the earth;
The soul, the soul—must rise.

Charles.
A toast!

Frederic.
Here's beauty's fairest flower—
The maiden of our own birth-land!

Harry.
Pale face!—oh for one happy hour
To hold my splendid Spaniard's hand!

Festus.
Why differ on which is the fairest form,
When all are the same the heart to warm?
Although by different charms they strike,
Their power is equal and alike.
Ye bigots of beauty! behold I stand forth,
And drink to the lovely all over the earth.
Come, fill to the girl by the Tagus' waves!
Wherever she lives there's a land of slaves.
And here's to the Spaniard! that warm blooming maid,
With her step superb, and her black locks' braid.
To her of dear Paris! with soul-spending glance,
Whose feet, as she's sleeping, look dreaming a dance.
To the Norman! so noble, and stately and tall;
Whose charms, ever changing, can please as they pall.
Two bowls in a breath! here's to each and to all!
Come, fill to the English! whose eloquent brow
Says, pleasure is passing, but coming, and now;
Oh! her eyes o'er the wine are like stars o'er the sea,
And her face is the face of all heaven to me.
And here's to the Scot! with her deep blue eye,
Like the far-off lochs 'neath her hill-propped sky.
To her of the green isle! whose tyrants deform
The land, where she beams like the bow in the storm.
To the maiden whose lip like a rose-leaf is curled,
And her eye like the star-flag above it unfurled;
Here's to beauty, young beauty, all over the world!

Will.
Hurrah! a glorious toast;
'Twould warm a ghost.

Festus.
It moves not me. I cannot drink
The toast I have given.
There!—Earth may pledge it, and she will—
Herself and her beauty to heaven.
Drink to the dead—youth's feelings vain;
Drink to the heart—the battered wreck,
Hurled from all passions' stormy main;
Though aye the billows o'er it break,
The ruin rots, nor rides again.

Charles.
Friend of my heart? away with care,
And sing, and dance, and laugh;

245

To love, and to the favourite fair,
The wine-cup ever quaff.
Oh! drink to the lovely! whatever they are,
Though fair as snow—as light;
For whether or falling or fixed the star,
They both are heavenly bright.
Out upon Care! he shall not stay
Within a heart like thine;
There's nought in heaven or earth can weigh
Down youth, and love, and wine.
Then drink with the merry! though we must die,
Like beauty's tear we'll fall;
We have lived in the light of a loved one's eye,
And to live, love, and die is all.

Festus.
Vain is the world and all it boasts;
How brief love's, pleasure's, date!
We turn the bowl, and all forget
The bias of our fate.

Charles.
We who have higher things to do,
Might well-nigh feel ashamed
Our faces in these founts to view.

Festus.
Of conscience I, unblamed,
The passing hour enjoy, with all
Delights that youthful hearts enthral;
Enough to know that grief and care,
Remorse, regret, will soon their share
Of life assert.

Charles.
Meantime, to loftier ends,
I would mine own, and friends,
Might timefully revert.
High aims have we to gain;
Behoves us sure, refrain
From follies such as these.

Festus.
To-night it irks me not
That fate to us allot
Some passing hours that please.
Ne'er can we all evade
The future's saddening shade,
Our own fate, nor the passed,
With us, from first, forecast.

Charles.
Some other I must try persuade.
List, stranger guest. Within thine ear,
One word, apart.

Lucifer.
We are private, now,
Beside this fountain falling clear.

Charles.
With aims so vast and bold which thou
Hast for our friend, thou'lt scarce allow
Others, I doubt, to interfere.
But though, 'neath love's and beauty's spell,
Youth lacks true wisdom's just control,

246

Yet from our merry gatherings here
Comes nought of evil to the soul.

Lucifer.
'Tis more than thou, maybe, canst tell.

Charles.
It means not. What I would with thee,
Is to contrive with me, how best
May he, our friend, the verity
Of verities,—such through time confessed,
The truth which men of every rite
Have held in secretest delight—
Acquire.

Lucifer.
I'll see to it some day;
And when my plans are fully laid
Will ask your good advice, and aid
In such designs as, need I say,
Will smooth combinedly the way
To ends each have in separate view
For mutual good.

Charles.
Agreed. Good friends, adieu!

Lucifer.
As proverbs say of every land, in time,
A twig for that bird, too, I'll lime.

George.
How goes the enemy?

Lucifer.
What can he mean?

Festus.
He asks the hour.

Lucifer.
Aha! then I
Advise, if Time thy foe hath been,
Be quick; shake hands, man, with Eternity.

XVIII.

Graced by sweet promise plight on lunar plains,
And 'gainst all ill armoured by spirit divine,
Our seeker of soul's holy mysteries, lift
By spiritual hand from earth's gross vanities;
From cruel lies of false creeds; from all taint
Of treason truthwards, which God's love most just
Towards beings, create aye capable to advance
By self amendment, would impugn, and fain
The fountain of futurity to foretaste,
Dares, angel-led, by God's behest, to trace
Soul, in its reascendant course through all
Heaven's spheres probational, of varied fates,
Essential man, self purifying, must pass;
Views gradually perfectible life's vast whole;
Tells, joyful, wisdom's grand and gracious plan.

A Lake-islet; Lawn; Garden; Grove.—Mountains, Waterfall, and Mainland in the Distance.
Helen, Marian, Student, afterwards Festus.
Helen.
Gone? whither?

Student.
Know not I. He and his friend
Tramp earth untired, or rather seem on wing

247

Trackless to travel, he, not unlikely even
His steed sidereal steers where Cepheus sits
Footing the pole; or where the grim orc, long
Death-stiffened into stoniest stars extends
His spatial bulk, who once to engorge the sun
Three days continuously his jaws stretched.

Helen.
Peace!
I prithee, or we, like maxillary feat
From thee, may have like cause to rue.

Student.
I'm mute.

Helen.
Let me propitiate one who half, I fear,
Distrusts my love. Dear Marian, hate me not.

Marian.
Nay, I would love thee as of old. Cause none
Have I to 'plain me of thee. With lighter heart
How marvel that thou his love attracted more,
His we both mind us of? than mine, grief fraught,
Of woe to all presageful? If I change,
'Twill be to one who changes not.

Helen.
I know
Thy fine and eminent nature, nor believe
Thou wouldst deign to conquer, more than court, the crowd;
As a sacred river, purified of earth,
Albeit bepraised, beprayed, encrowned with flowers,
Ingratiate even by living sacrifice,
Scarce noting its own bounties ripples along,
Reckless of adoration most, so thou,
Calm in life's onflow, towards its endless end.

Student.
Good, were life being only; but to know,
To act, with some, seems scarce less than to be.

Helen.
True, 'tis with me a passion all to learn
Sainted in sacred song of eld, or proved
By science now; but fear, too much, to attain.

Marian.
And when attained, how cheerless!

Helen.
Say not so
To fill the soul with knowledge hidden and high
I would brave death this night. Maid, dame of old
Partook all mysteries with the crownèd crowd
Of happy initiates. We yet—

Marian.
See, yon skiff
Nearing the shore, makes, with recursant wing,
Surely, some sign recognizant.

Student.
Wait. But how
Unless we forcibly and of purpose raise
O'er life's low meannesses the mind, shall we
Fit us for loftier being, powers more intense
Of soul, and mental act; how brook the laws
Compressed into necessities which both rule
And serve the spirit world, we hardily trust

248

To view, nay sometime gain? To reach and grasp
Mind's rational solidity, to construe
The equivocal oracles of life, our frames
With lives extern conjoined, our spirits with God,
Perplexes most, the clearest.

Marian.
Dark howe'er
Time now, like ocean's broadblazed rim of light
Mid-heaven by clouds o'erpent, the future glows
With glory.

Helen.
It may. To me, creation's passed,
Thought's ray re-scaled towards light, howe'er far back,
Seems, than the nearest future, less remote.

Marian.
See now, it is no stranger. Yes, we all
I think that footstep welcome, Festus, thine.

Student.
It is he, not undesired. The time draws nigh
For our most cherished projects wide to spread
Their world roots, ramifying, of vastest change.
Thy presence was well due.

Festus.
I knew it. This
Fair company, one eve at least, shall well
Compensate us for time devote to ends
Eyed sternlier. Yes, it glads me still to meet
Dear Marian, and thee Helen always.

Helen.
But thou!
Whence com'st thou? We were wondering whether earth
Held thee, or some more brilliant sphere had lured.

Festus.
Too wondrous and too various charms are earth's,
For other star to stay me long. But now
Let me not serious converse hinder. While
My foot, this fair pavilion's shadow touched
Entering, I heard in musical challenge charged
Of passed o'er all the future: nearer, more
Momentous, was't.

Helen.
'Twas mine. Soul's link with God
Shows clearlier in its rise than end. Nor seems
The reason of soul's continuance, of like weight
With that of primal being.

Festus.
Seems not? I've seen.

Helen.
Nay, let us know. Thy strange friend's stranger creed
Though simple, of death and God, sufficed not thee?

Festus.
It could not.

Helen.
Oft I think of earth being made;
And here, throned solitary, and face to face,
With the broad universe, I can dream I see
God's very primal act, when earth first showed,
In sudden answer to his thought. Here heaped he
Green hillocks gently uprearing like young colts,

249

Playful in sunny pastures; mountains, there,
Like hoary spectres in the fabulous glass
Of world-famed wizard, eyed their shadowy shapes
Slow lengthening in the lake, nor guessed how high
Their predeterminate heads would rise, but rose
Responsive, stilly, to his rational word
First uttered then, commensurative of form
Fairest, most high; here, echoing rock and crag,
There, the wild waste, voiced with articulate falls
And winds, all variable of tone:—there, see
In yon disrupted cone the visible stress
Of his vast all-mastering hand;—by bloomy meads
Blue streams he drew life-teeming, lakes like this,
With baby Edens isled; traced out the bounds
Of nations, radiate from their shelving shores;
Parted earth's hemispheres; round land the seas
Sateless, unsociable as death, rolled; last,
Savage and sacred in all innocence, man
Sowed broad-cast o'er his fields, he, sole.

Student.
Nor I
Think otherwise, albeit there are who hold
Unmade, self-made, this world, or made by hands
Of angels, 'mongst whose trust the devil his own
So questionable seem some things in their cause,
Their end, their workings. Why are scorpions, snakes,
And poison flowers?

Marian.
Be glad we are bid, forewarned,
Not all things inexplicit, to reject.

Festus.
It was God from the beginning framed the whole,
Earth, heaven, and into being the angels breathed.

Helen.
This, and that all souls made, him reverence owe
For their existence, thanks for life, and hope,
We, duteous, learn from priest and primer; learn
Faith's sacredest traditions, gratefully,
Of life to come; but what's their sum? I'd know
O'er all things, this: how mind's survivable strength
To its elements resublimed, loosed from this build
Organic, lives, acts; how it is soul subsists
Separate; how this that influences, works out
Its kind, here inchoate, in loftier states
Of being. Not all mankind are heroes, saints
Nor predicable angels. Are then the worlds
Peopled by pure intelligences, with one
Sole, fixed idea; one changeless habit; one
Act, mental and eternal? May not some
Fall back even in existence, to low ranks
And lower?

250

Festus.
'Twould please you, doubt I not, to learn
Some late experiences of mine.

Student.
We all
Long much to hear. Not given up all to gold,
Nor merely frivolous, now thou knowst me, not
To lore mysterious only given, if far
From gabble of popular creeds, in one ear droned
By science, in the other by sheer ignorance.
The masses too, I'd serve, and loyally;
And serve them most by ruling them.

Helen.
And I,
All natures I would know; with all I feel
Compassionately; in every generous aim
Join; prize each pure design art, science, owns
As elevative of mind; all projects faith,
Though secularized, can prove of likely good
I love; would further; pray for.

Student.
Make us free
Therefore of these pure mysteries of true life
To come, authentic, spiritual, as I thee
Have helped to learn those truths sublime, chief lights
The passed from all her firmament holds towards us,
Of sensible use, soul-gladdening.

Festus.
Not in vain
Shall any, truthwards tending, self-impelled
Towards wisdom, test of earnest heart, from me
Ask glorious knowledge, ye, of all, with me
Like meditative of fates to come; who now,
On mine assured experience, shall believe
Soul aye regenerate, progressive, all time
Self-sifted upwards; which, transmuting fires
Spiritual, intelligible, pass through, that fit
For states more eminent than their last, till all
Achieve perfection; each in order due.

Marian.
That every soul by penitence hath power
To raise itself to bliss, were joy to know.

Helen.
Sit, let us hear. This verdurous dell, flower-rimmed
Like a green bowl o'errunning at the brim
In blooms; yon woods, thick darkening, where, of old,
Lean solitary, bark-clad, his soul from sins
Of pomp, from luxury his heart assoiled,
Prayerwise; and knight, by faintest footsteps, tracked
To the hermit's cell, his love-lorn fair; still stream,
And sultry sky, all suit. Yon mountain, draped
To the foot, in purple mists, whereto the clouds
Their awful gift, as to an altar, bring
Of thunder, sealed,—seems hearkening: we, with ear
To nature's melodies tuned, the vesper chant
Of birds, in blosmy brake; the solemn lapse

251

Of yon white waterfall, just seen, just heard;
And most, one voice, if with the silvery tones
Resonant, of stars not I should wonder,—wait,
All harmonizing.

Marian.
We listen.

Student.
Soul oppressed
With sense of high experiences so all
Transcendant, well may pause. For who feels not,
Eyeing as we now heaven's expanse, and this,
Accomplished daylight; lit by one, Hope's, star,
A sense in him of like infinity, fill
His being, and speak of equal future?

Festus.
Yes!
Who in clear midnight's starry hush shall stand
On high and heathery peak, o'erpeering sea and land;
The ocean-glassed immensity of sky
Wooing the spirit to inspect its near futurity;
Or who, when spring's faint crescent, in the skies,
Folds to her breast her burthening world of mysteries,
Pacing some gardened height, or tomb-towned hill,
A capital at his feet, moon-haunted, noiseless, chill;
Ponders those holiest shades earth still reveres
That have earned, each one, his star, mid yon soul-ripening spheres,
The heavenly state perceptible, powers may feel
In him expanding, vie with all the heavens reveal;
Mind's vast innate capacities, which thus
Bind in one common chain, the world, our God, and us.
While lowly faith unfalteringly refers
To treasures, keyless knowledge vainly vaunts as hers,
Man still with decent pride may claim to trace
The grounds whereon his rule of all things God doth base;
Whose justice is our justice, and whose powers,
His, infinite, love and truth, are attributes of ours;
With whom we have communion, and enjoy,
Through rational light, what age nor death can e'er destroy;
For soul, with deity consubstantial, feels
All nature does or bears, each mystery fate conceals;
Which though it wind a thousand different ways
Points ultimately towards God, midst of all Being's maze.
If in yon boundless vault we therefore see
Proofs of an all adapting governing deity;
Gracious in heart and bounteous; greatening man
With sacred gifts, to enjoy and glory in all he can;
Ourselves, even here, considerate of times passed
And future, from earth's prime heroical to her last;
May, communing with all, unblamed, conceive
What godlike ghosts of old shall joy in, or achieve;
Nay, justly speculative, man's coming state,
With heaven's most perfect gifts to him, while earth's, collate;

252

And meditating the great and reverend names
Time's luminous roll, within its worldwide margin, claims,
Deem how, perchance, their spirits, in spheres refined,
Walk kingly, self-subject; or, with excursive mind,
Where some felicitous sun serenely reigns,
Lead large æthereal lives mid paradisal plains.
I, musing thus, fair Luniel from her sphere
Collucent, which completes, twelve times, its monthly year,
In ours, with the sun conjoined, and yet once more;
'Lighted on spiry crag riven from the rocky shore,
Saw sudden stand before me; all her charms
By her own light chastened, stand, with welcome-waving arms;
For this with spirit-friends; one ageful hour
Brings to perfection fruit, earth scarce had riped to flower:
She, skilled my bosom's inmost thought to tell,
Called, questioning, ‘Wouldst thou where those astral spirits dwell?’
‘Gladly,’ I answered, ‘Angel! would I wend
The world throughout, with thee; searching from end to end,
The bounds of being.’ ‘Wouldst thou life's issues trace
'Tween God and nature lawed,’ she said, ‘to man's vast race,
Earth's mediatized divinity, and learn
By how steep gradients soul may still to heaven return?’
‘Liefer than aught on earth,’ I answered. ‘Lo!’
Said Luniel, ‘then, what thou from him wouldst never know,
Who tempts thy heart with boons of feebler worth;
I am from God empowered to show thee, while on earth.
Remember thou no more, when once are known
These mysteries of the world's progressive round God's throne,
Canst stoop to trifle with life's vanities, now
Abjured, despised.’ ‘I make, I solemnize the vow,’
Said I, ‘and will abide the wished event.’
‘Enough,’ said she. Each knelt in silence, soul content.
Then, stood. And now the rift she crossed between
Our rocks, in ebon shade half, half in argent sheen;
Saying, ‘Eye well yon starry arch on high,
Wherein the eternal scales of justice cope the sky.
Lo, there the lists of trial; there the fields
Of triumph God, to souls in good persistent, yields.
Thousands of years souls preexistent may,
In line with laws celestial, take earth's downward way;
Who take, death-freed, the ascent towards heavenly life,
Through tests perfective, tests wherewith all worlds are rife,
Are blessed; and these it is mine to mix with: mine
To encourage, to sanctify in striving for divine
Communion; and the spirit elect prepare
Heaven's feast intelligible, boundless, of truth, to share.’

253

‘All this,’ said I, ‘I burn to learn; my breath
Seems worthless, all not known, even parenthetic death.’
Tranced while I stood thus 'neath her fixèd eye,
My spirit stole softly forth towards hers, as midst the sky
Steals forth a starlet in the gloaming, none
Wist how. ‘Behold me,’ I; space-hungering to be gone.
‘Rise,’ said the angel, flashing forth her hand,
Which, touchless, mine sustained as doth the invisible band
Betwixt the aërial fish stretched, both uphold.
Swifter than happiest times winged we, where meteors rolled
Passed; blank vacuity passed, where air most thin
Nought leaves for light's relays to range or revel in.
Far as in space morn's first faint beamlets shine,
From those still steeps of heaven where evening's shades decline,
Rose we, each breath; and ere the sunken sun,
Gloomed by earth's westward limb, our mounting eye might shun,
One glimpse we caught, our last, of the sea-flood broad,
Edged with extremest light like the hem of the garment of God:
Passed all the erratic spheres, where penitent kings
Mid soul-crowds, conscience-touched, all grades, all shades, of things
Terrestrial, sensual, sinful learn to' eschew;
Here, grouped for mutual strength; here, sparse, a loftier few;
But each, their elevance to the All-Pure, above
Out-working:—passed all orbs sun-circling; forward move
Till the whole space our petty system spanned,
Showed like the scattered nest of ostrich on the sand.
‘Worlds variable and changeful,’ spake my guide,
‘Meet for terrestrial spirits are found, sin-purified,
Self saved. Who certain bliss, bliss sealed, have gained
Bide in these steadiest stars, unaltering, unconstrained;
All,—planets, satellites, suns, but as a base
Serve for the greatening powers of man's divinized race,
Imperfect, but aspiring through all time,
Up to the highest heaven ambition's star may climb.
For as a lightning thought, a glint o' the eye,
Will fruit, through dreams, into a life's eternity;
So, all mind's varied faculties which now
Nor time's demands, nor bodily need, due scope allow,
Shall, 'neath God's hallowing eye, matured, expand,
Those wisest ends to attain he from the first hath planned;
And sanctify the simplest soul, their shrine,
Brightening from world to world through every sacred sign.’
While poised, now, o'er the belted clouds we stood
Of a giant sun, and all its marks, its movements, viewed;—
‘Boundless as are God's works, in all these spheres

254

One mediate spirit,’ I said, manlike, ‘allwhere appears.
With whom, I see, commingling free, the soul
Humane now learns to obey, now teaches to control;
Thy word in all confirmed which first I learned
In yon orb, now with earth as double star discerned.’
‘Herein,’ said Luniel, ‘view to whom heaven's Lord
The privileges of power, soul dominance doth accord.
Here, elevated, inspired, and purified,
By conscience, man's inventive mind, so closely allied
To God's creative spirit, revises, mends
Its projects, and passed feats remoulds to worthier ends.
Kings, patriots, heroes, here, and potentates
Found empires day-broad, march to achieve supremest fates;
There, conquerors haste, with armies of the light,
The cloud-topped towers to o'erturn of evil's tyrant might;
Toil, with all moral life-force, wrath's allied
Forces, fivefold to unbind, deceit, doubt, passion, pride;
Wage truceless war on cruelty, and advance
Their fiery hosts to invade thy realms, black Ignorance!
There, just usurpers humiliate, dethrone
Huge errors that devour souls; sins, demoniac grown
By pamperings unrestrained; demurest vice,
Idolatrous; and false faiths that spirits from God entice.
Look, and behold what time thou wilt. This hour
Give I to thee.’ I looked, and, grateful, blessed the Power.
Nimrod, here haughty now, no more, unless
'Gainst pride, pursued, we viewed, through the obscure wilderness
Of worldly life, almost like this of ours,
Monsters, but now, of sin; and so to virtuous powers
Self-thralled, that fearing most the popular frown
He flings, in cavernous depths his loved, star-patterned crown.
Sesostris, there, war's patriarch, seeks his place,
Lowliest, mid chiefs, with joy, captive of conquering grace.
Here, violated states and murdered kings,
Navé's stern son now counts as vilest, worst of things;
And empires to possess, or land's increase,
Leads on God's hosts elect to victories won by peace
Persuadent, which nor woe nor wound e'er leave
No hate, no heart for theft of throne or state to grieve;
Nor deems, now, God, the all-pitying, could dictate
Horrors, that merciless fiends would shrink to perpetrate:
But, with heaven's saving help; 'mong those who have erred
Makes, for his chosen, way, by one conversive word,
Miraculous. Cyrus, there, of life assured
Deathless, forenamed of God, by carnal bribe unlured,
Vast tracts subdues, huge zones of doubt and sin;
The infinite of defect we feel our souls within.

255

Here Indian Rama his generous battle forms,
Routs every demon foe; wrong's every fastness storms
That innocence would constrain, or help defile
The spirit divinely chaste which lives but in his smile,
Her lover's and her lord's; and, grown more pure
Through suffering and suspense, love's union makes more sure.
The youth Pellæan, here, who at Babel died,
And since, through many a sphere hath expiated his pride,—
For spirits of every rank defectible made,
Gain but through time and test and proof, perfection's grade,
Smiles now, as in God's cause new worlds to win,
He hails, and aids to assoil from soul-debauching sin.
There Scipio by victorious virtue more
Spirits enthrals, and frees, than conqueror e'er before.
Alaric, here, his lightning legions heads
Of virtuous spirits 'gainst vice, the spheres o'erruns; nor dreads
To attack the dominant sins that long have ruled
Earth-life,—intemperance, pride; attacks, subdues, self-schooled.
There Xerxes to his will all elements binds
Serve they but plans to enlarge or to enlighten minds.
Here, Brutus, Cæsar, there, firm friends enrolled,
Born social order this, that, sense of rights to uphold,
With Pericles now unite, and Charlemagne,
Soul freedom and God's peace imperial to maintain.
Again through soundless space, windlike through light,
Successive bars we pierced, and passed, of day and night;
Till midst a new celestial group we stood
High 'mong star magnates, first of the solar brotherhood,
Where various angel tribes in ordered grades
Of social mind, I marked, God's law e'er forms or aids.
Here, Solon, prince of the proverbial seven,
Heads his constellate seers, the lawgivers of heaven.
Manou, there, Konfutze, new codes dictate
Of equity, and between vexed orblets arbitrate;
For worlds may wrong each other in thought, as ours,
Far spheres, with doubt that God them fills with sentient powers.
Here Moses, Minos, Numa, laws decree
Morals and faiths that now with truth alone agree,
Humanity and pure right. Zaleucus, there,
God's ordonnances, which e'en, while drawing earthly air,
In part, he knew, prepares; and justice proves
One with the Beauteous Spirit who all things makes and moves.
Lycurgus, here, his soul-state arms; and, life
From luxury freed, with sin bids, heads, perpetual strife.
Pythagoras, there, convokes with potent sign
Of discipline perfect, high societies proved divine

256

By love of concord, and the austere delight,
To serve by good deeds God, the wordless Infinite.
He, lord of golden numbers, gladdening sees
Creation's fourfold fount and heavenly harmonies.
Here, Plato's soul full orbed, the absolute true
Enjoys, the good, the fair; here, labouring to renew
Some holier commonwealth, a crown obtains
Kingly, in the very stars where banished Justice reigns,
God's delegate. Here, Euhemerus, there, More
Found, in Utopian worlds, the states they feigned before.
Mohammed, there, God's unity, end and cause
Boasts of one conquering faith, sole base of rights, dues, laws.
There, Zenghis, here, Akbar God law proclaim;
Fuse and unite all faiths 'neath one world-hallowing name.
Meet Alfred, Ina here, kingwise arrayed;
State-rules and codes confer; and now, a mightier shade
Self-crowned, and matched with great Justinian's fame,
These orbs with heartiest trust, welcome, and shrewd acclaim;
Who conquering all first, vanquished then, his realm,
Inner, of law bequeathed, force none could overwhelm.
Swiftlier through shining æther than the ray
Darts forth of polar light, we spirits our spacious way
Cleave, to seats lovelier, where the ripened fruits
Of wise humanity glow; the errors faith transmutes
To judgments just, as generous; the loves, hates,
Like holy, righteous heaven adopts, reciprocates.
Zenon, here, Stilpon, Epicurus find
Fit spheres to sway, wherein to mould the ductile mind,
Of fallible cast, to wisdom; and incite
Souls purified to adore the Virtue Infinite.
Here, Aristotle's keen discursive sense,
Ranging from tiniest life to sheer Omnipotence,
All things defines, demonstrates Being's cause;
New moral rules propounds; plans new illative laws.
Prodicus, here, the path of righteous life
Points, holy, manly as ere, and soul's ennobling strife
'Gainst treacherous vice. There Socrates, the wise,
Inspired, immortal, death life's fugitive foe, defies;
And knowing now man's thought the measuring rod
Of all things, all things knows, and knows things all in God.
Cebes the tablet there of life mundane
Unrolls, and pious troops leads towards the Eternal's fane,
Truth's temple, on virtue's golden strata based,
And with the o'ersheltering roof of faith celestial graced.
No more, here, Pyrrho doubts; but certified
Of deity, in his soul contemns all thought beside.
Here, to all wisdom's inexhaustible spring
His mind, of truth insatiate, brings, and aye longs to bring,
Tully; here, sifts his philosophic store;

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Fines and refines, till all he owns is purest ore
Of probity, polity, right; the chieftest good
Soul can embrace, where'er in life, in death, pursued.
‘Clear patriot shade,’ I said, ‘to the end of days,
Thy land's applause, God's calm approof hear; all men's praise.’
His dream august, here, Lælius verifies,
And with star-ruling spirits, resumes life's happiest ties,
Eternized. There, the lame Neronian slave
Basks before God; and bids in face of fate, be brave
Earth's trembling orb; on nature's ends relies
Truth, conscious rectitude; still holds those only wise,
Free, who, prepared alike to live or die,
Their natural will with God's—so fate's—identify;
Heaven's thrall, ere man's. With him, the imperial sage
Joins hands; man's inborn sense of God to every age
Revealing, our own being, misconceived
By us, asserts divine, and proves what he believed.
Here world-wise Seneca to shining throngs
God's presence shows by right to sinless souls belongs;
Still holds eternal life their boon and prize
That love God, souls divine their virtue deifies:
Proves coarsest passions may, by tact refined
Of duteousness and faith, broaden and exalt the mind;
And avarice, even, by wondrous holihood
Of spirit, be changed to covetousness of all men's good.
Here, Apuleius from sin's gross disguise
Soul-freed, now hierophant of holiest mysteries,
The reborn soul foreshows, despite its fall,
Its self-wrought rise, and ultimate union with the all
Essential One. Plotinus, there, disrates
His spirit no more, but oned with that he contemplates
In vision beatific, sums the whole,
Man's vast particular, God's the universal soul.
There, Proclus glorying in all bliss to be,
His soul imbathes in depths of fontal divinity.
Instant, as flies man's thought from earth to heaven,
When, peace imploring, God his pardoning grace hath given
To penitent soul—a world we make, whence streamed
Light soothing, strengthening light; the gates of heaven it seemed.
‘Lo! here, the pious priests of every creed
Who the sole One served; and pure themselves, would intercede
For man as race, as people, as tribe, as soul;
No fanes here,’ Luniel said; ‘all heaven one templed whole.’
‘Nor more need we, dear spirit,’ I said, ‘below,
Were purity but a plant earth freelier learned to grow.

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For not in priestly vestments, broidered bright,
And various as the hues wherewith rich autumn dight,
Blazons inbred decadence; not in pile
Of plate, nor golden cup; in arch, nor dim-roofed aisle;
Nor victim crowned with flowers, whose fragrant breath,
Blends with his last low moan, in commonalty of death,
Lies our acceptableness, nor ever lay;
'Tis to man's spirit and heart God sole regard doth pay.
The prayer inspired 's prayer granted. This alone
Know we. We give thee thine. Thou tak'st but that's thine own.
Nor can our limited foresight swerve thee, Lord!
From aught thy heart hath planned, or penned in fate's record.
Nought can we lend thee, Lord! that's first not thine;
Nought add by deed to thy felicitousness divine,
Save this, to serve our fellow men. Who thus
Serve man, serve God. Nought less, 'tis all he asks from us.
Said Luniel, ‘hour, hour urgeth. Ears and eyes,
More than lips, use.’ Abashed, I strove for silence' prize.
Towering mid saintliest throngs, from every clime,
From all spheres culled, from the midst, the end, the birth of time,
Great Origen here I viewed, and heard rehearse
God's love, sire, saviour, soul of the rational universe:
No longer heretic deemed, to all he proves
That all God made in bliss essentially he loves;
And if erring pities. Sage in charity, now he sees
Secured, the first-fruits, there, of God's great victories
O'er rebel evil through triumphant grace,
Which, infinite, must at last all finite foes efface.
There, Anius, Melchi-zedek, in one rite
Of thanks to God most Highest, the Infinite One, unite.
Theano, here, Sibyl, and holy maid,
Virgin of sun, or moon, in dazzling forms arrayed;
Their crowns, inscrutable with sublime device,
And garlands, wove from flowers fadeless of paradise,
Serve now the Fatherly Spirit, whose every beam
Is life-light to the soul inspired by love supreme.
‘So spiritual,’ said Luniel, ‘all things here
That many a sight thou seest more strange may seem than clear.
But know, wherever the divine desire
Of good, burns; heart-born flame conceived of heavenly fire;
Where'er celestial youth may yet be taught
Wisdom, or deeds devout of virtuous valour wrought;
Where purity of mind may yet be instilled;
Or breast with high resolves beneficent, be fulfilled;
Where holy unsuccess, sustaining grace
May ask, receive,—there view, be sure, each angel face,

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In-streaming strength; there, every holy muse,
Her art now hallowed, learns through all spheres to diffuse;
For God all various beings both can make,
And sanctifying, can bless for his dear creatures' sake;
No fleshly god, no man-made idol still,
His solitary repute usurping in their will.’
‘Kindly as God may act,’ said I, ‘towards one,
The spirit elect, unjust can Justice be to none:—
This, favoured by priority and degree
Of bliss; yet all, at last, must taste his clemency.’
Far faring as an eye-blink of the sun
Which,—when some envious cloud, its course abortive run—
Heat-molten, evanisheth—shows to wakeful eye
Star-studying, isle or hill snow-swathed, 'neath Martian sky,
In just such time as thought's from thought discerned,
We arrived, where once to be my mind e'er strongliest yearned;
Where nature's realms with spirits sublimest teemed
Elysian realms, most meet for shadowy gods meseemed.
There, many a bard and prophet, prone to stray
Mid stars, rejoice to enjoy perfection's widening way;
The liberties supreme God aye appends
To rational souls self-vowed to high and virtuous ends.
Here, David jubilant harps his praise; while round
Concordant, angel strings,—as mountains light—the sound
Snatch, and with choicer art, zeal more intense,
Blend with those blessèd lays world-broad benevolence;
In all lands these proclaiming God's elect
Who, him best honouring, strive most good manwards to' effect.
Isaiah's spirit, there, winged with fiery pens,
Soothly forebodes all worlds, as once this world of men's,
Of divinized humanity, in state
E'en lowliest, that o'er death shall yet predominate;
Of Nature, heavenly bride, and mother-may,
By the Holy Spirit impregned, pure still as dawning day;
Man's universal sonship breathing through
The spell predictive, once incredible; now known true.
There, with a billowy grandeur sweeps along,
In strains of tidal strength, more beauteous still than strong,
Valmiki; he his gods heroic leads
Through vast emprises, hymns their world enlightening deeds;
Enfranchised nature glorifies with man;
And animal life, redeemed, rounds in heaven's kindliest plan;
With friendliest Vedists, there, no more the force
Of elements hymns, but serves their sole, creative Source.

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Orpheus anew there chants the adventurous strain,
And starry voyage of saints athwart the aërial main;
Founds, here, new rites; and to perfection brings
The continent soul self-ruled, self-trained to heavenly things.
Here, haply, Homer's awful shade amends
His lay, and powers divine and human, sings, as friends
Pure and impartial, not contestful, urged
By fate to fraud or strife, prayer-bribed these, those sin-scourged.
Seeks Hesiod, there, in heaven's exterior stars
The birth divine of virtue, views Time's Titanic wars,
Of good 'gainst evil—vile Typhonian power!
Not unforedoomed, nor yet slain in its culminant hour;
Renewed to happier issue. Æschylus, here,
Thunders, in verse divine, the same oracular seer
As erst in Greece, his prophesies of man,
Sin-shackled, God-loosed, throned;—heaven's vast triadic plan,
For the educable soul. There Sophocles,
Heart-racked no more by sense of man's mean destinies,
His lyre with joy-wreaths crowns to extol the worth
Of immortality's new career, the spirit's rebirth.
Here, sad Euripides, from earth's orbèd tomb,
Greets all humanity saved; knows wherefore and by whom.
Alcæus, Sappho, here, their loves renew;
Impassioned, now, those twain towards love divine and true.
Cleanthes, and the Pleiad bardlets, now,
Their mutual love, and ends self-less, heart-oned, avow;
In God's perpetual lauds, in justice' praise,
By practice, they both show, and walk in, virtue's ways.
Pindar, Corinna, Flaccus, now sustain
With hymnists of all times, a loftier, holier strain;
God's love teach, and the prize of that pure strife
'Gainst sin, Olympian souls are crowned with, heavenly life.
Here, learns Lucretius' master-mind to see
Amidst heaven's seminal orbs, the indwelling deity,
Not beauty sole, nor yet, for wrong once done,
Mere wrathful force; but love, truth, justice all in One.
Joy Virgil's heart there rays forth, as he sees
The blessed results of soul's abstergent penalties,
And righteous meeds of justice, most divine
When, moderatest, her beam towards grace may most incline.
To worlds here Ovid still their birth chants; strives
Their tribes to instruct with truth; the purity of their lives
Best faith computes; best worship this, to instil,
In all souls, love of good, souls self-transformed from ill.

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Here Lucan views, with philosophic soul,
One deity who creates, contains, rules, loves the whole.
Boethius, here, Synesius, sing and teach
Altern in heartiest hymns the God all natures preach,
The simple infinite Deity, world-adored;
By man, by angel; earth's, creation's, heaven's one Lord.
Fardusi, there, some angel spirit foresent
Of God 'gainst evil—sworn to wreck the firmament,—
Vaunts, and the triumph tells of heavenly good
O'er sin, the enchantress vile, and all her fiendish brood.
Here Saadi, Djami, there, God's mystic love
Whisper, to skiey saints their secret lore to prove,
Sign oral of the Ineffable; or show,
'Neath word-veils, truths half hid, souls dread yet seek to know.
Ossian, there, hails the eternal spirit sun,
The deity who to all gives life-light, takes from none.
Here, Kædmon hymns to listening worlds, the mind
All formative, infinite; yet in finite form defined
In nature, in the soul, in sacred life,
In each sustaining force wherewith the world is rife.
There, Milton soars and sings; here, Dante steers
His spectral barque, night-sailed, o'er time's unfathomed years;
Though neither, happily, finds, by God's good will,
Room in his boundless world for endless woe, nor ill.
While each, with penitent majesty, confess
God everywhere, and where he lives, he lives to bless.
There, Shakespere's spirit, conceptual of the passed,
Sweeps space, a giant ghost; and leaning upon the blast,
Rounds many a sphere, notes all things, and surveys
Sad, penetrative, benign, life's least and largest ways.
Boiardo, Spenser, and of many a lay
The weird inventors there, all nature's vast array
Of marvellous novelties revel in, nor find
Proof but of generous power, where'er creative, kind.
Here Camoens and Ercilla, warlike strains
Alternating with high deeds of courage which disdains
To compass less than conquest of a state,
Some world realm thralled of sin, truth would emancipate,
Him join, who Salem liberate sang; and now
The blessed assaults records, and leads, 'neath saintly vow
Of hosts who time's long battailous path have trod,
To win, as victors, heaven by force, the peace of God.
There Pope's, Young's, Thomson's shades, devout, sublime,
God in all nature trace, trace, in the eternal time.
Here Chatterton's proud spirit, self-humbled, seeks
Sin's forged delights to expose; here, virtue's champion, speaks

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Mid young enthusiasts for the all true and pure,
His love; and shows how faith, most tried, is brave to endure.
There Maddalo's stainless soul, of happiest birth,
Springs to embrace in heaven the God he missed on earth.
Through many an interstellar space, thought winged
We glide, where broods of nebulous stars their sires enringed,
Heat lavishing these, those elemental light
Hoarding, ere on the void, though eager, loosed for flight,
To orbs, where dominate strange new forms of truth;
Where age heart-ripening melts in soul perfective youth;
Where demigods of science faith befriend;
Their theories prove; intent God's glory to extend;
Seeking in him, not apes, nor mites, the rise
Of man's superior life, lost in archaic skies.
With the Phœnician priest, here, deep discourse
On chaos, vital winds and nature's plasmal force
Holds Thales; here, his crude imaginings,
On mundane rudiments mends, and the primal seeds of things.
Here, Euclid his indevious problems frames
For nascent orbs, and proves by space-drawn diagrams
Truths spiritual, eterne, of import vast,
More even than all—not slight—time 'neath his name hath massed.
Meton here, through recurrent cycles trains
Star-spirits to union earth's scarce yet with heaven's attains,
Though urged by many an age. The Assyrian seer
Nameless, who named the stars, fire-christening every sphere,
'Neath skies here thicklier lamped, with Egypt's priest
By Nile celestial, hails, delighted, fields increased
For astral parables wherein sagest mind,
Quick with mysterious truth, can loose the heavens or bind.
There, Archimedes finds the point he would
Of leverage to uplift this world, all worlds, to good;
Finds in God's infinite will all souls to bless
The stand-point whence to start, the goal—his righteousness.
No longer Ptolemy, courtly, celebrates
Feats fabulous of far stars, but judges rational fates
By virtuous influences of saintlier spheres,
Souled with the great and good of heaven's all-hallowing years.
New solar laws, here, Kepler and the Pole,
Wisest of all who watched the worlds round Night that roll,
Interpret spiritually; with finest skill
Showing how all results must gravitate to God's will.
How his attractive love unites and binds,
Godwards, time's general soul, earth's individual minds:

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And how all heavenly systems men devise
Hath each true archetype in God's eternal skies.
Here, Galilei shows how truest creeds
Truths warmliest welcome, such so proved by kindliest deeds.
Learns Newton here new laws orbicular; bides
The age-long lapse of years eternity divides
With time, in conning new organic frames
Of mundane being; life, here, from ignorance reclaims
Heavenwards; and loyal to his gracious force
Who to all beings prescribes their interactive course,
Now shows this world how truth with science sides,
Now, that; and like a god in passing, times their tides.
There, Flamsteed and Laplace through fineless space
Detect in mightiest ease the sunstar's nebulous race;
Through all its varied vastness, and combine
More marvellous proofs to adduce of mechanism divine;
How every system faith unveils to view
Based on one mighty plan, congruous, one end pursue;
Prove how, too, from one solar truth made known,
Godwise, all worship spreads concentric round his throne.
Dalton the ultimate motes of spheres contrasts
As framed by God's good will, which all precedes, outlasts,
Nor anywhere twin atoms meets, to chance
Compellant, prone to ascribe their world-genetic dance.
Lavoisier, there, the elements of all things
Solves, and at will compacts; and their constituent springs
From form crystalline and unmattered force,
With delicacy divine, tracks to their parent source.
Here, Galen's soul devout life's mysteries,
Mid spheral forms more fair than human, loves to seize.
Buffon, there, Cuvier, Harvey, all renew,
Self vowed to God, their worship of the All-good and true;
Still, study as once on earth, the laws of life;
Still, prove with how exact beneficence all are rife;
Still, youthful worlds teach wisdom, as of old,
Earth's sages, truth by truth their holier lore unrolled.
Hutton, Deluc, here, Werner many a globe
Fire-cored, rock girdered search; bent, reverently, to probe,
In emulous love of sacred knowledge, all
The secrets God hath shrined in each celestial ball.
Linné, here proven in vegetive life still sees
Mind; and in moss minute, even as in mightiest trees,
Whose growth is as an empire's—marks One soul
Of ever developing perfection guide the whole.
Lieuwenhoeck, there, in life invisible learns
The infinite hidden, and still, that God, revealed, discerns
Who covenants but with life create, by laws
Inviolable: himself their substance, sum, end, cause.
Here D'Holbach, Volney, Hume while scanning spheres,
And time's concentric course midst heaven's all-arching years,

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Find law itself miraculous; truth imbase
On outward knowledge, faith, in the inmost conscience place;
Science supreme of things known, things believed,
And, faith conceded, truth show as in God conceived.
Swifter than sad Electra, love-wild, driven
In narrowing spirals sunward turned, coursed we through heaven,
Until, full late, one outpost orb of space
We near, and, landing, view, invention's dwelling-place.
Here, daughter of necessity, abide
Thy patient sons, till, by success indemnified
For all their toil, and hallowing every aim
To God's great ends, they graft on his the creature's claim
Ingenuous, to depart to happier stars
Where time all just intents matures, ill only mars;
Gives to oblivion folly, and records
Imperishably, all deeds of good, all wisdom's words;
All truth's thoughts. Here, discoverers of all arts
Reign midst their several crafts, each skill to each imparts,
Soul-generous. Here, explorers search new fields
Of thought to invade; each hint angelic legend yields
Of holy commerce with more genial spheres,
Richer perchance in grace, so globe to globe appears,
Near eyed, and ignorant of the countless plans
God hath to increase the bliss of worlds; the angel man's
Powers to communicate, and such means to use
As, dropped on distant orbs, may boundless good diffuse.
Here, Colon wings his thoughts to far off spheres,
Hid in the viewless deeps of nature's earliest years;
His soul, here, feeds on sparse prophetic strains,
Compared, of sundry suns; oft eloquently sustains
His justly reasoned hope that, there, mid space,
One ultimate earth must be, soul's happier dwelling place,
In virtues, blessings rich, in gold, and gems—
Intelligible—that deck angelic diadems;
And here, his hero followers, pleased, equip
'Neath their high ensigned dove, the Spirit's celestial ship,
Manned by their holy and apostolic crew
Peace minded, who with love all worlds, all souls, subdue.
Fleet as the mindful glance, night come, each star
Sends to his brother spheres, familiar though afar,
Measure to us, how from its central place
To orbit scarce seen light can, leaping, vanquish space,
The angelic wing unwearied rapt our flight
Through rings of dazzling air, walled by untempered night,
To worlds where spirits sincere, of holiest cast,
And lowliest wisdom, life in love and worship passed.
Said Luniel, ‘Start not in this gracious land
Where wider ends than earth's, and loftier heavens expand,

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Time's grandest, holiest, worthiest souls to view
Still speculative of themes that variously the true
Invariable concern; for not alone
Does certainty all suffice; man's spirit adores the unknown;
Nor paradise to one scant spot confined,
But planted once, world-wide spreads various as man's mind.’
As bidden, I look, and every soul-king see
A-glow, like level suns with glad solemnity.
There Verulam's spirit mid nature's highest recess,
Serves, handmaid with herself, the eternal bounteousness;
Wisdom all potent preaches; and proclaims
Omniscience highest of all the Self-existent's names.
Great Albert and Erigena truths exchange
Current 'mong gods; with reach half heavenly prearrange
The philosophic schools of youthening spheres.
Fire-sainted Bruno, there, now freed from ignorant fears
Of blind fanatic priests who shamed the creed
They vainly mouthed, affirms God all in thought and deed;
The world an emanation of his mind;
And man's free spirit in God dilate, not undefined.
The shade Cartesian, here, with thought supreme
Pregnant, still broods on Being's one all comprising theme;
Still seeks of every spirit from stranger star
The inborn truth all hold, ‘because God is, we are.’
Malebranche his quest for truth, there, aye renews;
And verifies—but in God—the vision he pursues;
In him the sovereign truth, the essential whole,
Sees all things, through the mean of the universal soul.
Here, Berkeley's genius quickening all his dreams
In sense supernal blends what is with all that seems;
And shewing naked mind the synonym
Of all perfections, makes it God, or equals him.
There, blessed Spinoza's spirit, as heaven sublime,
In God finds all extent, all thought, all place, all time;
And, as a skiff wind-driven some stream to mount,
Hies, filled with breath divine, towards Being's eternal fount.
Clarke's soul triumphant, here, to all create
God's unity, central truth, inspired to demonstrate,
On high persists adoringly to prove
Him, through all attributes, one, the world constructive Love.
Foretuned on earth, there, Leibnitz' spirit still hears
The harmonies of mental mixed with material spheres,
And hails with righteous and regenerate zest
The eternal heavens as still most perfect, happiest, best.
Ah! paint who can, the sweet and rapturous fire
That thrills the praiseful souls of that God hallowing choir.
Locke, here, and analytic Kant, man's mind,
Though limited by defect, yet virtually undefined,
Search with deliberate piety, test, compare
With demons, angels, or intelligences more rare;

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Nor fixedness find in creatural knowledge; nought
Certain, in scope or grasp of man's most serious thought
Save, base and sum of purest reason, this;
God only is true being, and being true, only bliss.
There the great Swede, ascetic seer, God-graced
In flesh, with speech of spirit, acts monitor-wise; so placed
That conversant whilst with deathless minds afar,
He scrutinises all souls, from earth's sea-glittering star
Launched hourly; fore-ordained to segregate
All spirits whose lot is lawed by their interior state,
Each to its self-judged circle of joy or pain;
For just proportion e'er through heaven as earth must reign;
And correlate spheres agree; with patient zeal
Proving to each whence flowed life's sequent woe or weal,
He with poetic justice—which is God's—
Deals to the pure, palms, peace; deals to the unrighteous rods.
Quicklier than pulsings of heaven's fiery light,
Each wave of Luniel's wing new systems brought in sight.
‘Here realized,’ said she, ‘time's dreams behold,
And that celestial life these happier orbs unfold,
The denizens of these worlds, Being's proper ends,
As pure intelligences seek, God's and nature's friends.
Prompt here, now there, in shrewd and resolute band
The all to explore, depth, height, the all parent Love hath planned,
And so, in orbs diverse, his tracks pursue,
Old as prenatural night, as dayspring ever new,—
Ofttimes, the humble seer, who nature's laws
Loves and reveres, and aims to ally with goodness' cause,
Shows natural rights in virtues all converge,
Conservant of true force; and so, in deity merge,
Whence first they rayed:—oft, hopeful, here, contrives
Subsidiary designs, whence nature, pleased derives
New modes of self-enhancement; oft combines
With God's great plans all good, faith, ancillary divines;
Thence issuant glories in truth's flight sublime
And modes exhaustless joys to avail of hallowing time;
The evolvement watching of each special race,
Exaggerative of good. The inferior to displace
By better, nature progressive fails not;
But with the coming kind casts aye her fateful lot;
Secreting instinct first as base of mind;
Affection, passion, next, as wheels in motion wind;
Till, with demonstrant reason summed, the soul,
Fit to conceive God's being, symmetric stands, and whole.’
Fast as the sun-god's healing arrows fly,
When he his golden quiver is emptying o'er the sky,

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Now in a roseate shadowed sphere we stand
Where dwell those spirits of grace man's spite once basely banned.
‘Behold,’ my guide said, ‘souls that to this shore
Of bliss have passed through straits of rolling flame and gore,—
Souls loved by God and men; and some not less
By their immolant zealots now, heart-changed through conscience' stress.
For not alone are wrongs corrected, here;
But hate, pride, envy changed to feelings pure and dear;
Envy to emulation; hate, to love
Of good; and pride, to pride that all in God live, move.
Here, saints and martyrs all their memory lose
Of wrongs and deaths, each prompt ripe blessings to diffuse,
Full-handed, on faith's friends wherever tried,
And with their bright examples adorn religion's side.
These waste no time I saw in vain lament,
But league themselves to achieve God's alway wise intent;
Each acting as with deity inspired
And conscious of the end by wariest love desired.
There, he of Tarsus, 'mong apostles least,
Self-noted, but by men Christ's best and noblest priest;
Holds it not impious now that man should yearn
Evil to know from good,—good, godlike and eterne;
But all existence, aye, in one divine
Being consummed views, God, man, nature, one and trine.
Savonarola, Huss, Joan, Jerome here
For human ignorance shed the condonative tear;
O'er man's malignance mourn:—not long! with joy
Teresa, Gersen teach how spirits most rapt, employ
In wholesome change, renewed life's total round;
And with high ecstasie blend experience like profound.’
‘To souls,’ I said, ‘of such transcendent strain
Heaven seems an easy prize to win and to retain;
'Tis but to live as ye were wont below;
Add but reward to worth; say, for I trust, I know.’
Guyon there, here Hypatia, Bourignon
High confidences exchange, each vowed to God alone.
Here Calvin and Servetus, side by side,
God one, the same, confess; and in spirit clarified
This, by repentance' fires, and that, by grace
Exalted to forgive, in mutual love embrace.
Here, allwhere, too, meet spirits of every strain,
Searchful of others' fates, good bent to impart or gain:
Renew, improve their love of those on earth
Held admirable, or dear, for truth's sake or just worth.
Charles, Cromwell, Louis, here the tyrant's throne
Friendly, confess pertains not to born kings alone;

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Despots admit of all ranks, worst of things,
Save mobs crowned; and that crowds may sin, not less than kings.
States 'gainst one soul sin even as one 'gainst all;
To each, now godward turned, earth's crowns, how dim! how small!
Here too sit they who kings and peoples both
Rate equitably; and keep to God and man like troth.
Here, Tacitus, sage of incorruptible pen,
Worthiest, heaven's deeds divine, of all the sons of men,
To enregister, with stern but equalled stress
Of judgment, judges kings; eternal righteousness
As 'tis in God, his breast-law; here, ordains
States their amercement vast of pride subjecting pains;
Due penitence for war's brutal gust, their first
Of glories once, now felt with shame and misery cursed;
Of luxury, each convicts, and wanton wrong;
'Fore all, the exemplar sets of virtue's children, strong
In justice, simple and ample; in innocence
Unbarterable; and sweet soul-ignorance of offence.
There, Phocion, Regulus, where'er is heard
One rational voice, set up and sanctify man's word;
Word, worthy, in all spheres, of truest fame,
Self-love, nor popular wrong nor dread of death can shame;
Well-knowing death nor Hades e'er can be
Rival or foe to truth and manly integrity.
Here Aristides, Cato, Howard bless
Worlds with one stringent law, tempered by tenderness;
Law which to break in thought is sin, in act
Death; and salvation sole, to ensue and keep intact,
The law divine, of being and doing good,
Wherein we are one with God; the act he wills, we would.
‘O! ye benevolent spirits,’ I said, ‘on earth,
Who soothed with brotherly love and aidance, suffering worth;
Ye holy of all ages, of all creeds,
Truth-taught, and prompters sage of kindest, justest deeds;
Who fed the poor, the ignorant taught, the weak
Strengthened to do well, truth to gain, and, gained, to speak;
Your prisoning frames exchanged for the opening sky,
Continue still to bless, seek self in deity;
One thing I would intreat of ye, impelled
By anxious thoughts oft risen from scenes mine eye beheld,
O seek, O guard the death-born soul when first
Naked, sin-stained, it stands 'fore God and dreads the worst,
And the clear spirit, O calm! that, eased from breath,
With just one pitying smile salutes and passes death.

269

Such generous cares God will repay!’ Replied
One spirit I knew on earth, and reverenced, to my side
Approached: ‘This needs not. Who, on earth, the state
Of heaven's lost heir hath toiled to amend; to show how great
The space just right, as his, aspires to span;
More venerable to prove the mind and soul of man;
Make worthier of his end, to achieve the sum
Of social right; found faith's pure simple creed to come;
For in all worlds the growth of general mind
Like treatment needs, that law by free rights stand defined;
Rights asking not, as earth's, the patriot's blood
Ever, yet everywhere that ill succumb to good;—
All who have laboured upwards, towards the light
Intelligible, divine, since man, in lowliest plight
Of glacial age or stone, first crouched the knee
To some lone crag, his rock of help, his deity,—
Till now, when soul of all idolatry shriven,
Thine infinite unity, Lord! sees symbolled best by heaven;
Revel in joy unutterable and trace
Their destiny in the calm supreme of his embrace,
Where, worshipper with worshipped once made one,
Live perfect, live divine, in heavenliest union.’
‘Live ye aye thus;’ said Luniel, ‘and because
You have not sought to divide his own from nature's laws,
But striven to spread his realm, the heaven within
Man's mind, loved good and done, shunned ill, detested sin,
God, to his sacred heights of spiritual rest,
Translates ye, well-beloved, his all comprising breast.’
Swift,—as the lord of light's resurgent ray
Shoots o'er expectant earth the warm delights of day;
Swift,—as the sun's tempestuous spires of light,
Ejaculate from his heart, which daze heaven's spatial night;
To farther orbs,—in silence speed we; speech
Being none, which ofttimes nought save surface mind can reach;—
Where many a troop of joy-eyed souls we viewed,
Glad those themselves, these more to glad the multitude
Who circled reverent round their guides, and grew
Better they more enjoyed, happier the more they knew.
The originators of every science, meet
Here its perfectors; both their marvellous ends complete.
The patriarchs of all arts, all sacred, there
Aim steeplier, more sublime discoveries make and share,
As worlds and elements, there, more grand than ours,
Fields vaster, more diverse yield, claim superior powers.
This one, with fanes of every form, to show
One spirit alone divine, made mind, as God, could know;
This, every plan of sacred cast, ornate,
Or simple, or vast, or small, true faith shall consecrate;

270

These, him would honour sole in unity; these,
In countless forms of life, and all life's energies.
Here, they who temples built by Nile, or pitched
Mid desert sands grey booths by badgers' hides enriched,
Hophra, Bezaleel; who, where ocean smiles
Eastwards, on Attic shores, Rhodian or Delian isles,
Their snowwhite shrines and fluted shafts combined,
As purity's sign the soul to raise and charm the mind.
To Pheidias, Zeuxis, there, new skill is given
To adorn with grace, all truth, with use, sanctioned of heaven;
The soul's most sacred dreams to actualize
In sinless shape, or scene, o'erarched by happiest skies.
There, he, the awe-inspiring scene who drew
Of God's last judgment, now, with false contrasts the true,
Exults in legislative love; in peace,
All conquering; and the reign of justice ne'er to cease;
Condemns his erring fancy's fault, nor feigns
Joy, felt to meet one skilled to sketch the Edenic plains,
Fair match for sterner scheme; and, so diffuse
O'er time's remembered scenes heaven's own more glorious hues;
Earth-scopes recalled at will, and studies made
To illustrate saintliest life, Beato, Raphaël aid
Guido or Zurbaran, Barry or Blake; their powers
Used to adorn such lays as charm the immortals' hours,
And happily leisured gods, who crowd to hear
Prophet or bard his song recite; or tome of seer
Turn, marvelling, leaf by leaf, with love imbued
Of mind's miraculous gifts, in solemn solitude.
Tubal, Timotheus, here, Arion, lead
Some virgin sphere to obey the air their lyre or reed
Hath erst inspired a world with; there, to raise
On spiritual harmonies, cities, whose walls are praise,
Of architecture divine; whose gates are prayer;
Whose denizens are all souls attuned to heaven; and where
Earth's mightiest melodists join in one sweet strain,
That peace to express man's soul is maddening yet to attain.
Cadmus, here, Faustus, there, new modes devise
Of symbolling thought unfixed; scheme how to distant skies
To impart intelligence; while Franklin binds
With tameable lightnings spheres, as serpent-charmer winds
Worms wise but unfanged round his breast,—and plans
With Watt, new forms of force for mightier worlds than man's.
Here, souls with gifts engraffed that 'neath the chill
Pressure of want, drear lack of culture, or sage will,
Bloomed not on earth, expand in this; their prime
Of nature, but deferred to heaven's more genial clime.

271

There, innocent souls, foes but to wrong, hate, strife,
Speak with God's special voice, sparing all breathful life.
Far as the mighty sparklings of his crown,
Through space interminable, the sun sends, ceaseless, down
To watchful worlds, in an eye's glance we passed
Commoved in spirit, and late ascending reached the last,
We reach where Enoch, Atlas walk the sky,
Translated through an ever brightening destiny,
There too the thronèd three who long through heaven
Followed the star of God, when Christ to earth was given,
The eternal love pursue; and midst all skies,
Humanity sole proclaim the spirit God deifies.
There, many a soul all creatural virtues graced
Of all earth's faiths, I saw, high in God's favour placed,
Buddhist and Brahman, Mazdyan, Moslem, Jew,
Shaman, and Christ's, of all the world's beliefs no few;
Gladdening, yet griefful that so oft man's mind
Will God's salvation deem to faith or form confined,
Church, temple, ritual, password, sect, or creed;
While all God asks from men is pure thought, righteous deed,
And love of Him, sole; truth this, one and same,
Common to earth and heaven, heaven's saints and earth's proclaim.
Crowned with original innocence, never lost,
A youthful spirit, that late, death's refluent tide hath crossed
There marked I, as, through many a tempering sphere,
Though scarcely changed, or made more spiritually clear,
More amiable,—she, with the immortal blessed,
Up to serenest heights of pure perfection pressed;
And cried, ‘Blessed spirit from first of sinless strain,
Time's dimming dust shook off, gladden in thy source again:
Clear, incontaminate as from God, there live,
Stern but towards self, thou wouldst all others' faults forgive,
As on earth, so in heaven; there, now in right
Of primitive purity, rise; rejoin thine Infinite!’
‘Rejoice, thou, too,’ said Luniel, ‘who hast viewed
With what all various bliss God hath these worlds endued.’
‘Enough;’ I answered; ‘all I have seen; and now,
As a bird, that travelling far, seeks still his native bough:
On Oran's palms, or mid Thessalian plains,
Towards Albion's lowliest eaves, his sight instinctive strains;
Some rustic cot, less lovely, true, than bowers
Where he with spring might spend her borrowed summer's hours;
But ah; his birth-place,—I, with all her woes,
Her griefs, faults, ask earth.’ ‘Be it,’ the angel said; ‘here close
The sights thou hast glimpsed of spheral life. Alway
Ponder the truths these scenes mysteriously convey;

272

And as each separate star by fine degrees,
Nature from taint chaotic, and blind, wild motion frees,
So, spirits dowered with virtuous sense of strife
Upwards, through all the ranks of firmamental life,
Their faculties requicken at his great will,
Who, schooling all in love, bids all his thoughts fulfil:
While these, in heaven's new orders taught and trained,
Their best reward e'er reap in duties love-constrained.
For not on stools of stateliest idleness,
Shall God the immortal soul magnificently distress;
Nor, with monotonous viollings, disarrange
Glad nature's genial course of ever freshening change;
Not he shall doom man's everduring days
To raptures dumb, or thoughts unutterable of praise;
Nor dazzle with one ecstatic blaze, the mind,
That burns in active good God's loftiest love to find;
But progress, to the blessed, shall bliss contain;
And, to the worst, give hope,—through purifying pain,
Remorse, repentance, self-regenerate will,—
Of good gained, virtue loved, vice loathed, abandoned ill.
For, being is probation. Soul create,
By its own act, works out its ever instant fate;
And evil's darkness, what, but possible light?
The field where conquering truth wages her gracious fight.’
‘Life, fire-chordlike,’ I said, ‘at once, both ways,
Truth between God and man, and man and God conveys.
And as, in class, some teacher, when he gains
Full seizure of the minds he elevates while he trains,
And hurrying to impart the final word,
Which shall to each convey ripe meaning of all heard,
Hears,—intercepted from his lips, let fall
His own conclusive proof, conceived, expressed by all;
So man, long taught of heaven through wisest strain
Speaks in one word his soul, 'tis life he would maintain,
Eternal life, which midst yon worlds on high,
Feels but due space for th' expanse of its divinity;
All ours: wherein through nature's infinite years,
Successive world-lives sloughed, the immortal reappears;
Man, finite deity, who in meet employ
God's will fulfils; and so all duty with all joy
Blends, that in every sphere the spirit may see
Clearlier, why being, once regenerate, still should be,
Enamoured of perfection.’ ‘Do thou, then,
Remembering God is God, and men are,—what are men?’
The angel said, ‘all scare of death apart,
Trust to his use and grace; trust wholly and take heart.
Paul, Plato, seest not? live; and Christ the skies
Crowns; dread not thou, dear soul, to join the All-good and wise;

273

Whose end is, so to assimilate to his own,
All spirits, that, love-inspired, they share his boundless throne.’
Paused Luniel, and descending, hand in hand,
Our starry quest we cease, quit the ethereal land,
As when, with instant impulse, down the sky
Shoot, on November's eve, twin meteors from on high.
‘And how,’ I asked, ‘shall these things be?’ Replied
In tenderest tone—earth seen that moment—th' angel-guide,
‘When, in the lapse of ages, time's great year
Fulfilled, the disciplined soul, shows perfect, pure and clear,
All life shall be renewed, and man's great race
Transfigured, bide in heaven, God's spiritual embrace.
There all God's attributes supreme are shown
In essence emanative surround his central throne;
And there, though one, profoundest depths between
God's and all beings create, eternally intervene.
But whither, last, the principle divine
Shall wend, like regal heir exiled, until combine,
Through depurative tests, life's every end
Perfective; and till proved God's champion, liege and friend,
The inmost heavens it gain where, time by time,
Convoked, the hierarchies of blessèd souls sublime,
Rule and sustain—with him who made—the whole,
God will himself impart to man's affiliate soul.
Beings and scenes less blessed than these be, I
Love not. With other aid tempt thou the nether sky
Dimmed by one world, I know, where spirits accursed
By their own acts or lusts, man-fiend, or demon, erst
God's justice satiate through the burning sense
Of his pure law contemned, due penitence for offence
Needing, ere lifed again with freedom, light
Intelligible, with love and conscious sense of right,
Man heaven may face, or any spheral kind,
Blessed with belief in God and crowned with reasoning mind.
For the rational world God made his mirror first,
And his own image 'twas, till man by sin accursed,
Shattering in countless selfs the semblance fine,
Made unreflective dust of once one whole divine.
Souls who love God, who, here, his heaven within
Our hearts, by love and good towards man and hate of sin,
Extend, are they for whom his heavenly rest
On high he saves, and folds in his eternal breast.
But go; thou, never, till life's self be passed,
Wilt 'vail to trace his plan divine from first to last;
Plan, which created mind's whole thought transcends;
Source of its every power, sum endless of all ends.

274

Earth touched, she, poising her space—cheering wings,
Left me, that said, to muse, as erst, celestial things;
Left me, in sacred silence more endowed
With meaning, than all words of earth, though thunderloud.

Helen.
Silence maybe best speaks experience.

Student.
Yes!
Experience of an age may yield an hour's
Contentment; of an hour, an age's awe.

Festus.
'Tis nature's silent miracles most convince,
Most bless, most elevate the soul.

Helen.
And yet
While doubtless, these experiences the passed
And present tend to reconcile with ends
Future, still much inexplicable remains
Of ordinary existence, and the fates
Suffered in soul, in person, here.

Student.
Perchance
We expiate here in pains, faults of passed lives,
And all our joys are but rewards.

Festus.
It may be.
We meet with mysteries everywhere in life,
That, could we solve!—as oft, from tide-stormed crag,
Some desperate rock, surge-hounded, that, at bay,
Faces his white-jawed foes, a wave-path, clear
Mid ruffling seas, scarce tremulous, we discern,
Seeming significative; which neither knows
Beginning of extension, nor fixed end;
Which marches not with cliff on high, nor reef
Below; to no cloud answers; no vague keel
Cut accidently; nor desultory gust
Scored; but aye exquisite to the wondering eye,
Searchful of all substantive cause,—so close
To the secret truth we burn once,—keeps in calm
Tenacity, its unfathomed force of form;
Until, the gaze glanced off, tired, or divert
Casually, we miss, nor ever can regrasp
The grand identity; so, too, mid the world
We trace, we think, at times, God's ways, the more
Pondered, the plainlier manifest; but through
Fatuity, or mere mutable conceit,
Faith's failure, or, what not? we lose in life's
Wide weltering waste the track, which followed, might
Have led, if not to perfectness, to peace.

Helen.
Methinks I too have missed this perfect way;
Else wherefore am I troubled this to know,
Or that, when knowing is so vastlier less
Than being? And can it be, I am being here
Tested and proved, through life? Cares great, cares small,

275

Indifferent, trusted to me hour by hour,
And note of treatment taken? It cannot be.
And yet it may. One's faith indeed so warns,
It is. Who sins against his better light
Sins sadly. Still the sense oppresses me
Of life so cast.

Student.
Nay, here are twain will vouch
Thy perfectness at least: and 'gainst all comers.

Helen.
Hush! seest thou none beside thee?

Festus.
Who is here?
I parted from thee but an hour since.

Student.
I
But an hour since parted from thee.

Festus.
Why so soon?

Lucifer.
So soon? I have traversed earth.

Festus.
Ah! good. No more.
Let us within, friends. Soon the stars and dews
Will take our places. Pray, precede, dear Helen.
Enchant—thou canst—thy company—so that me
They miss not for an hour or twain.

Helen.
But how
Deceive myself?

Festus.
Forget me, too.

Helen.
That word
Deserves no answer.

Student.
None?

Festus.
Adieu.

Helen.
Be sure
When next we meet, we'll be less grave.

Student.
Meanwhile
To tasks beneficent, Festus, thou and I
Reserved, let haste. Oh, earth is ripening fast
But hiddenly to happier ends than e'er
Saint, social seer, or politic sage hath hoped:
One brief creed, simple and of necessity true;
One moral code, in every land the same,
Which, justice realised, shall be each man's good,
And all men's joy; one law, one general rule;
The world one state, and peace perpetual.

Marian.
Heaven
Grant it may be.

Festus.
I come. Good friend; do thou
The requisite dispositions to these ends
Prepare. I follow.

Student.
I obey.

Festus.
And now;—
Wherefore hast sought me here?

Lucifer.
This but to say;
Summoned to farthest space for a time, I come,
Hail and farewell to bid thee.

276

Festus.
Nay, not thus
Part we. I would with thee.

Lucifer.
Reflect.

Festus.
I do.
I would see heaven.

Lucifer.
Behold.

Festus.
Would enter heaven.

Lucifer.
Retire into thyself.

Festus.
I would see God.

Lucifer.
He is the Invisible.

Festus.
And I?

Lucifer.
Thou art
The insatiable. Arise with me.

Festus.
I rise.

XIX.

Law moral one and same all being imbounds,
Compresses, animates, even as natural law
The orb, of light and gravity. Where is soul,
There fallibility, choice, and righteous doom,
Following, of deity. To the bodiless realms
Such abstracts apt, sights spiritually recalled
Our travellers tell; of visioned miracles, this,
All parent nature sees through, not as God
Eternal, but aye immanent in his thought,
Whole impress of the all-creative cause;
Of world-faiths that, each, itself all truth
Boasting, truth sole; its practices foul or vain,
Declaring heaven-imposed, to heaven unknown,
Save by its wrath. Good will, good deed, towards man,
To none confined, in all, like blessed of God,
Like honoured know. To man a prescient view
Of what is true repentance, to the soul
Yet to be realized, spirit-informed, expands.
Heaven's judgments are the spiritual harmonies
On virtues based, the same with earth's, which show
To creatures God's great sceptre justified,
In every sphere. The penitence for sin
God loves, is after holiness of life.

Space.
Festus and Lucifer.
Lucifer.
Mark'st thou this vast half-luminous orb we coast,
Not sun, not star?

Festus.
I note it, and so much
Admire I would see more of't.

Lucifer.
It is a world
God is in act of making. Life not yet

277

Lifts up her head. Sole, order, first of things,
Begins to arrange the elements.

Festus.
There are signs
'Twill be a world where all felicitous ends
Designed by God may be fulfilled; a sphere
Midway 'twixt earth and heaven; a common ground
Where deity and humanity may unite
Forces, and more effect than either 'lone.

Lucifer.
Theories so many, and like this, I have seen
Fall through sheer lack of base, one might despair
Less sanguine than myself. Meanwhile though swift
Our transit, time is ours to hold converse.
Hast aught upon thy mind to impart, or ask?

Festus.
My life is massed with miracles. Wheresoe'er
I be, visions are mine; and late entranced
Some angel surely, upon mine inner eyne,
Life's chart preliminary unrolled, at last,
Ended with painting heaven.

Lucifer.
Ere yet expert,
Repeat, 'twere doubtless curious, false or true.

Festus.
Right veritable it is, I trust, if peace
And love and charity are where most God is.

Lucifer.
Say on. It will while our way through this extense,
Dreamlike, itself.

Festus.
Many, the greatest, truths
Man hath acquired in visions, or in dreams.
For then it is the soul recalls the spheres
Of preexistent nature, and evokes
The ghosts of coming ages, or, unites
Passed, present, future by one windlike touch,
Which loosens the world's zone, and renders mind
The master of creation. So with me
Once proved it, in a vision; for the crown
Of nature is passivity, and man's
Best mood the pure recipient; in a state
Of twilight-like existence, as when light,
Darkness, sun, moon, earth, sky were nigh all one
Universal substance; nought distinct save souls,
Echoes of light intelligible, towards heaven
Reacting. Matter, mind the All now comprise
In contrary perfections, as the twin
Tide-wave inarms the world. Within the pure
Blue lifeless void, where brightest stars, what else
Than blackest dust illumined from without,
Their central fires being self-consummative
Only of death? no light show, till we hail
From ours, or their own ambient: so with man;
It is only through their sensuous atmospheres
That spirits can view each other, or that soul,

278

As light all colourless, yet all colours holds,
By search of Being's supremest spheres of thought
Spiritual and moral, which man's nature rule,
Can, by that art sublime, the scheme conceive
Whereby the vital whole, outrayed from God,
His impress takes, and about his feet revolves
In everlasting period: he, all made,
Suffering, affiliating, inheavening; round,
Of effluent life, or influent; this eterne,
That, temporal; known to some, with power and means
Commemorative, of old, endowed, and now
To him who words the wonders he hath seen.
It was the spirit of the universe
In whose deep breast as on twin founts of life
The worlds of heaven were nourished, I beheld.
The fragrance of heaven's fadeless fields, her breath,
The endless blessings of an act of grace,
Or mercy's matron bosom, filled her words:
And each articulate syllable she expired,
Seemed with the lore of ages laden, as earth
O'erheavily with her old baptismal flood.
Her eye profound, which dazed so mine at first,
I scarce might see, immortal quiet homed;
As though all heaven had settled upon one star.
She spake, and I regarded with such awe
As eaglet, when he first beholds the sun:
And though what I recall be true, so far
As worded, it is less than truth; for how
Can a spar utter how it was crystallized?
She spake, I said, the spirit, and at her word,
Behold the heavens were opened as a book,
‘I am the world soul, nature's spirit am I.
Ere universe was or constellation, space,
System, or sun, or orb, or element,
Darkness, or light, or atomie, I first lived;
I and necessity, though twain in life,
Yet one in essence. God is, men exist.
Man and all finite natures among themselves
Act freely; between God, and man and all
Nature finite, to this unknown, is fate:
What is divine is of necessity free.’
I heard and I received; and from my soul
Intense in quiet, perfect in repose,
Like sleep's fantastic frostwork, all the sense
Melted of death; and the heaven-surrounding state
Entering, of pure existence among gods,
It grew ignited with divinity.
Again the world-soul voiced itself; and I
Indrank the fruitful glories of her words,
As earth consumes the golden skiey clouds.

279

‘Two books there are which must be read; the one,
The elements exist as leaves in; worlds
As symbols; earth, thus, of humanity;
Water of spirit, fire of divinity,
And air of all things; stars the truths of heaven.
Water and fire are elements divine;
Earth and air, human; heaven and the soul
From one proceed, and the blue-heated skies;
Out of the other bodihood and abode.
Judge doubtful things by certainest; things dark
By what is clear, and dangerous by safe;
And prophesy to all which live of God,
Their aboriginal heaven, and total end
Of spirit in his just love. Of soul, believe,
The other tome I spake of—that man's flesh
His spirit not trulier holds, than in divine
Nature, its contrary, God's infinite soul
Imbounds the universe: thine infinite work
But infinitely less than thee, O God!
The universe is simple; God and I.
Cause and effect are all that in it is,
And more; for cause containeth its effect.
Cause, operation and effect are God,
Nature and man; which both partake of one.
Through error human souls accept the truth,
As through distorting air the light whereby
They live, of sun or starlet. Through the world
The soul receives God, but from God the soul
Receives the spirit, the chosen thus, thus the world;
The cloud-led many, the star-guided wise.
For spirit it is makes times and nature clear,
As of old water purified by fire.’
Methought I answered, as it might be, thus:
‘Life, like a floating islet, comes and goes,
We know not, mean not how. From heaven a star
Falls, and we track a cold dark somethingness,
In our conception as unlike all birth
Celestial, astral issue even, as wind
Is unlike wisdom, thunder unlike snow.
We know but that we are, not how, not why.
The distance between finite, howsoe'er
Great, and the infinite being infinite,
Our life shows incomplete and sectional;
And the large unity of the whole, while sought
From morn all musical to blank starred night,
In mind to realize, soon, too soon we see
The wolf-like shadow of death which shameless haunts
With spectre-like eclipse the vital orb,
Creep o'er life's path, and threatening total dark
The fiery marrow freeze of the vauntful world.’

280

While yet these words were vibrant on my tongue,
I saw the sun-god stall his flamy steeds
In customary splendour; these, in turn,
Shaking their lightning trappings off to earth,
And snatching a few golden grains of sleep,
Solaced them with their corner in the west;
Towards where earth uplifts her crystal crown,
White with all yearèd snows and radiant rime;
While, ever and again, the dancing morn,
Even in the mid abyss of solar night,
With roseate blaze impowers the shining skies,
And pure prismatic fire that lights the stars.
Stretching her hand into the nebulous depths
Of space eterne, again the spirit spake.
‘As the æthereal essence of the world,
Matter thereof mere increment, I of earth
Speak to thee now; for, as one Father is
Of all things, and of spirit all act is born,
So, of one substance is all nature made.
Regard not earth as the whole universe;
Nor minify yet the orb into a point
Where all relations vanish. Earth receives
In an immortal influence, from the stars,
And out of her bright and generative heart,
To all conceived and born therefrom, gives back
The vital virtues of the potent heavens,
With their invisible radiance filling up
The interspatial skies. To all the forms
Of plant, fish, brute, bird, insect he who made
Gives, from life's infinite estate, renewal
Ceaseless in mass; to man, soul-crowned, alone
Revival personal; 'mong each other; all
Differing in eminence. Some excel; the rest
Suffer not therefore. Wrong to none is wrought
By honour to a high peculiar few,
Self-meritless, whose sole position stands
By themselves ingenerable. Exists this class
Eclect in all things living; best in man;
In whom heaven's motional harmonies, the world's
Elemental workings, nay the spirit pure
Of fire impassible, and æthereal, all
Incorporate are, in sunlike excellency.
All men, as sons of man, be sons of God;
Yet all like portion nor position have,
In earth, nor heaven: of common promises
Heirs, not like perfectness, nor privilege.
Change arts of earth; the science of the skies,
Immutable, the first man learned of God,
Is elder than the sun; hath hallowed all
Successive firmaments; revealed to man,

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Whose soul-star inly burns with living light,
Who holds the constellations in his hand,
Sign manual of his God, and brief of fate,
Truth highest speaks, and certainties most blessed.
Souls these of luminous birth who penetrate
The core of all best wisdom, know all truth
Hath central commune with the infinite;
All faith with truth; thus kingly, till with God
United, and the heavenly fulness shared.
With carnal minds to outward worship prone
And ordinances the spirit race of light,
Consummate in truth's secret discipline, use
But saintly silence, knowing all, of all
Themselves incognizable, but souls who love
Virtue and God. Souls conscious, self convict,
Of wrong and ill; through trial, to be proved;
Through peril, purified from inbred sin;
From surface righteousness; from faith in gods
Many and false; from scorn of the one true;
From gross and giant passions; souls who roam
Life's wilderness, idolatrous, and believe
Their record of perfective life their proof
Of power to save themselves; but these the elect
Of nature, peers of paradise, pitying, serve.
Men are of one kind, therefore, two sorts. All
Shall find desire unite with destiny.
For those, as said; for these, though all the powers
Of air array themselves in lines of fire,
And arm them with death's armoury; though hell's
Hosts camp them, high as tented mountains round;
Yet, at a wave of his hand, like to slaves,
They vanish from the assiegement of the saints:
Spirits which, dominations incarnate,
And sons of stars that darting out of heaven,
Made themselves mortal for the mother's sake;
Here, with original motion, fling off truths
Of perfect light, oracular even of God;
Truths in their minds who worthily receive,
Of inborn virtue full, accompletive
Of wisdom; and like heaven's luminous rudiments,
Which gradually may gravitate to worlds,
Corroborate their nature, and make free
Their souls to course through the blank void of time,
To the bright fulness of eternity.
Beyond, too, souls unnumberable, unnamed,
And orbs all named, all numbered, mortal, know
These be the great initials of the world:
Being is one, the central infinite, cause
Common to both creator and create,
The great substantive essence of the whole.

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Knowing and doing and the fact of form,
Laws co-existent of its modal life.
The natural creation ended, first
Commenced the spiritual, which in God ever
Aforetime lived, thus time unfolds the seed
Sown in eternity, and reaped therein:—
The great paternal and invisible fire
Which eateth that it issueth, and wherein,
Being an infinite means as well as end,
All filiated nature ceaseth work.
Now matter makes not one continuous orb,
Nor is light all-where massed alike; the stars,
Like thunderbolts perradiate, clustered stand
Or, separative, seek systems omniform.
God is the sole and self-subsistent one;
From him, the sun-creator, nature was;
Æthereal essences, all elements,
The souls therein indigenous, and man
Symbolic of all being. Out of earth
The matron moon was moulded, and the sea
Filled up the shining chasm: both now fulfil
One orbit and one nature, and all orbs
With them one fate, one universal end.
From light's projective moment, in the earth
The moon was, even as earth i'the sun; the sun
A fiery incarnation of the heavens.
When sun, earth, moon again make one, resumes
Nature her heavenly state; is glorified.’
As, to the sleepless eye, form forth, at last,
The long immeasurable layers of light,
And beams of fire enormous in the east,
The broad foundations of the heaven domed day
All fineless as the future, so uprose
On mine the great celestial certainty.
The mask of matter fell off, I beheld,
Void of all seeming, the sole substance mind,
The actualized ideal of the world.
An absolutest essence filled my soul;
And superseding all its modes and powers,
Gave to the spirit a consciousness divine;
A sense of vast existence in the skies;
Boundless commune with spiritual light, and proof
Self-shown, of heaven commensurate with all life.
And I to the light of the great spirit's eyes
Mine hungry eyes returned which, past the first
Intensifying blindness, clearlier saw
The words she uttered of triumphant truth.
For truly, and as my vision heightened, lo!
The universal volume of the heavens,
Star-lettered in celestial characters,

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Moved musically into words her breath framed forth,
And varied momently; and I perceived
That thus she spake of God: I silent still
And hearkening to the sea-swell of her voice.
‘From one divine, all permanent unity comes
The many and infinite; from God all just
To himself and others, who to all is love,
Earth and the moon, like syllables of light,
Uttered by him, were with all creatures blessed
By him, and with a sevenfold blessing sealed
To perfect rest, celestial order; all
The double tabled book of heaven and earth,
Despite such due deficiency as cleaves
Inevitably to soul, till God resume,
Progressive aye, possessing too all bliss
Elect and universal in the heavens.’
And silence settled on me deeplier still,
Like a snow-muffled statue.

Lucifer.
Need was none
To speak.

Festus.
Again, as a gale of light, the spirit
Me wholly in her assumed, so that the words
I heard, like cloudless thunder, wrought in me
Holy recognizance of the source of things.
‘God, first and last of being, from out whose hand
Came all things sensible and eternal, all
Forth flowing from, and ebbing back to, him,
Creation's God, regeneration's lord;
And meet perception of their sum and end.
Man's Saviour, like his Maker, must be God.
And, all effect commensurate with its cause,
Each infinite, creation stands redeemed
By him first, last, and mediate, God in all.
Full in the bosom of humanity, he
As on the waters of the imperfect world,
Came down, the God-spirit, thus in soul uniting
The mortal and eterne, and in one word,
Foreuttered ere all time, which legendwise
Still rounds the world, though nigh obliterate now
The best part,—immortality,—gave the key
All mansions opening of paternal heaven.’
‘Thy name, O Immortality,’ here, I said,
‘Sounds clear essential music, through the soul
Thrilling, as through the heartstrings of a star,
In air and sphere-form yet inconsummate,
Its tidal pulses and dim throbs of light,
Ere fraternized in heaven, yet presage sure
In hope, of state to come; yea, round that hope
So vast yet vague, which, like the northern morn,
One hour usurps the mid-sky, and the next

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Lies buried 'neath the pole, are gathered thoughts
And truths whose gravity oft determine life;
As motion in an atomie leads at last
To a world's orbit, mote and motion given.
For spirit, self-conscious of its inner life,
Makes all externals subject, and o'er thoughts
And things, maintains that rule which in itself,
Is present proof of what the soul most seeks;
Its boundless union with its God.’ Then she,
The world-divining spirit, even as a star
O'erflows with light, still spake of deity. ‘God,
Untermable in essence, being unnamed,
Men grasping ever at his love, his name
Man-given, in pious perpetuity breathe,
And strive to throw thought-light by act reflex
On being, originative of life and thought,
In hope to know the great unknowable,
Within whose ample essence all conceipt
Respecting it, as good, intelligence, life,
Man born, or angel-mind can frame, is lost
Like a stray gust, which from some aëry height,
Soars, suicidal, up the dark inane.

Lucifer.
Pardon; but say, this speaking vision, how long
Endured it?

Festus.
Nay, I know not; hours, it may be,
Moments, perhaps. I was, in truth, entranced.

Lucifer.
Ne'er had I one but once. Ask not, in turn,
How long mine lasted; mine hath lasted me
Thousands of years, in sooth;—I need but shut
Mine eyes, and see it now—and then, I saw
Looking as might be casually towards earth,
Man's sphere, the horizon black with numberless crowds.
Midst these uprose a mountainous altar, shaped
Like a vast inverted pyramid, whereby stood
Four forms stern, solemn: one arrayed in white,
And one in uniformal black; in green,
The third, and of all hues the fourth. And most
I marked at first, the two first named. All bliss
Each claimed, as his alone, denouncing one
The other; both all warning that fierce fire
Burned for their sake who sware not by a creed
Garbled, patched up, and contradictory; text
Confounding oft with comment; by no rule
Interpretative bound; as literal, now,
Now figurative, construing laws like plain.
Love, said this pair, nathless, from first to last,
Its author's nature being, infinite love
To mortal man, his motive sole; their creeds
And deeds, as arctic from antarctic wide.

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At either side they stood, and pressed the world;
And honestly and right earnestly prayed all men
To serve God; their incongruous laws obey;
Accept of heaven's free grace; and something do
To help the Omnipotent how to save a soul.
And myriads sought their several priestly sides,
And did as was enjoined them, and rejoiced.
Then something passed between them; and the twain,
Ceasing opponent duarchy, atoned
In friendship for past enmity, and straight
Culling all contraries from holy grounds,
Built up an idol, of all elements,
Most disaccordant. Thus, his deathly feet
They framed of fire, of earth his lower limbs,
His breast of mass terraqueous; his head, air;
Varying with strange and mutable-featured clouds.
Round him, enthroned on the broad and upturned base
Of that earth-piercing altar-pyramid,
They reared at last, earth aiding in all modes,
A circular temple, patent to the sun;
Sea-lavered; mountain-columned; kingdom-paved.
When as he sat his throne, there rose a shout
From the foregathered multitudes, which caused
The circumspatial skies shake, cold with dread,
And to her inmost base earth vibrate. He
In his right hand held the sun and moon, close-linked;
And in his left a wingèd orb cross-crowned;
By his side hung down, curved comet-wise, a sword
Of fire; a rosary of unluminous stars
Decked either wrist. With stars his breast was mailed,
Like to a knight's of old, with scales steel-gilt;
Or like an ice-plant with perpetual dew;
Or diamond beetle, round beglobed with light:
And the unsphered skies darkened momently.
To him was brought, bound hand and foot, the world,
Which more intensely worshipped than the poor
Bewildered devotee in eastern lands
His golden squatting idols, diamond-eyed,
Whose car grinds human dust. The monarch, there,
Upon that central shrine where sate the god,
Laid down his crown; the warrior cast his sword;
The peer, his glittering badge; the merchant prince,
His hoarded coffer. There, the statesman placed
His seal of power; the priest, his robe; the bard,
And the harmonious master, lyre, and pen.
Who soar, or mine, in science, or in art,
Their elements and implements and gifts;
The scribe, and the physician, and the wright,
His several offering. Thither hied the crowds
Of mediate millions between gain and toil;

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Thither the brawny-armed and brown-browed hind
Whose wealth was in his will and daily work,
Repaired; and earth's luxurious, toilless, tribes
Followed; each with his hand full of good things,
And felt their conscience lightened; blessed their lot;
And all went well, and ended happily.
Round that great altar, thousand lesser were,
With crowds ringed each, though each the hate and scorn
Of the majestic pair who served the highest,
And sware to make all souls believe alike,
In clockwork-like content. Yet might they not.
The many most succeed. The great few fail.
Some of belief thought most, of practice some,
Some thought of God as darkness, some as light.
And worshipped each; some held that space was God;
While others said, and wiselier, God is what?
Some held that deity, and all heavenly powers
Were of one essence like divine and high,
Even as the starry commonwealth of heaven.
These deemed that, wholly contemplating God,
The soul, suffused in deity, required
No active virtue, but on God's own breast
Lay lulled in glory and in communitive
Life with divinity, its best end fulfilled.
These deemed whate'er is done by men is done
By God's spirit, and they thence conclude no sin
Exists, unless to those who so esteem;
And that to live without all doubt or dread
Were to restore to life the paradise
Initiate of the soul, that pleasant place
Erst disafforested, and so realize
The catholic salvation of the world.
Some held that, now and then, there speaks in all
The word of God, his light enlightening all,
If not resisted carnally. Some adjudged
The evil of sin and punishment alike
Reflected, if eterne, on rule divine.
Some that man's spirit had once forelived in heaven,
A holy creature, but that sinning, earth
Was its amercement made, its prison, flesh;
Emerging whence, it shall by grace resume
Its pre-existence and high powers.

Festus.
In dreams
Doubtless, and reveries, oft, sublimed by faith,
Dim glimpses come, I know, of blessed states,
And shadowings of power passed, which to the soul
Seem inborn and accustomed, as a star
To light, when, late immersed, it leaves the sun.

Lucifer.
Some thought perfection gainable still on earth
By their own mean life and efforts, as in heaven;

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And that with man it rests to reinstate
The Adamic Eden; and, by converse pure
And holy life, redeem the sacred day
When nature's every work was miracle;
When man, brute, angel, all in happy ease
Communed, and fruits throat-slaking made good, wise;
As ere the immortal seraph-serpent, hid
By the sunset side of earth, stole forth and stung
Heaven's virgin star; brake nature's innocent seal,
And left his lightning trail through all divine
Traditions. Some, strange speculatists thought he
And Other, were two lower powers, whom God
Had pitted in broad duel during time;
But that the final victory would be heaven's;
Not knowing evil's might. A countless train
Of misbeliefs like pure parhelia, these
Which come and vanish and return, new lifed,
With men unstable; unhinderable of priest;
Some grains of truth-gold starring here and there
The vast formations of the false. Meanwhile,
For meddling with such mysteries unmeant
Surely by heaven to be cleared up on earth,
Who have eyes trained to pierce the dark, outtaken,
These twin compellers of conformity,
Erst marked, condemned from time to time to hell,
Rack, massacre and fire, each bubble sect
That in full-blown emptiness rose, to show their own
Familiar, brotherly, charity, and so prove
The inspiration theirs they claim of God,
Who tells all, he is love. Those sects themselves,
Full of molecular motion, fought like mites
Which fill a water-drop, and day by day
Cursed or consumed each other. For the rest,
Who stood round the great altar muttering creeds,
And each had his dissenting heretics,
The third smote simply by the sword who dared
His chequered tale, not wholly truth nor lie
Doubt, but suspended 'twixt, as utter void
Baseless. The fourth, more meek in general mood,
Willed ignorantly, both true and false, 'like scorned,
To tolerate. Now and then he closed his eyes
Wrathful, and slew promiscuously all round.

Festus.
Much doubtless may be meant in that thou hast seen.
A sacred side there is to everything,
As given or else forbidden, as false or true,
According to the greater truth involved;
One side is always bright, one always dark,
Leaflike and moonlike; and each separate life
Is as a leaf which waits the quickening breath

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Of nature, our mysterious prophetess,
To give 't due place and order in the world.
Heights too there are profound, and depths sublime
Of thought, faith sole can deal with; for as God's
True name, if known, is uttered not in heaven
Highest, nor on earth, so deeps unnameable are
Which cannot be revealed of human life,
And ought not if they could; the elements
Of the premortal manhood which inhered
In the conception of creative mind,
Since shown to few, and only dimly known.

Lucifer.
The spirit thou namest, then, showed thee not these things?

Festus.
Continue; if thy vision more unveiled
Thou wouldst impart, or me behoves to know.

Lucifer.
Modes next I marked of practice, rite and form,
Strangest of human trusts: here, some would burn
There, others, drown, these maim, those clamm themselves
Or fellows, all in proof of piety;
Some sacrificed their children, some their sires;
Some fruits, some flowers; beasts and the young of beasts,
In honest obstinate hope of earning heaven.
Others heaped stone on stone, shrine piled on shrine,
In emulous mimicry of the threefold heavens;
Silver inlaid with gold, gold decked with gem;
Others dug out the earth and worshipped fumes,
Or paid respect to vapours which inhaled
Bred holiest inspiration; some in warm
And reeking entrails read the signs of God,
Or deemed they did, prophetic: others sun,
Moon, stars, those fixed or wandering those,—adored,
For spiritual good thence down-drawn; earth-born fire
Or sun-born; rivers, mountains, seas, stones, herbs,
Brute, insect, bird, fish; earth and air and man;
All these were sworn by, prayed to, in the wild
Sad faith that man's humanity, by them,
Could gain some earnest of divinity.
Some only ate of certain meats, or laid
Under dread ban, all flesh and milk and wine;
Extolling green food and the sparkling spring,
As though brutes only spiritually lived,
And virtue were a vegetable thing.
Others wore iron spikes around their waists,
Burned fire in their bosoms; with their bread
Mixed dust and filth, ate grass, and naked lived;
Or crawled for leagues like serpents in the dust
In sign of self abasement; sign indeed
Not lacked, where proof of fact much overabounds.
Still, for I hasten now to close the tale
Of those who thus believed, thus acted, still,

289

Whene'er I looked around me, hour by hour,
The multitudes departed, yet increased.
But one way came they; countless ways they quit,—
Through age, birth, pestilence, vice and folly and war;
Disease, excess, woe, famine, sin and fate;—
The city of life, twelve gated; gazing thus,
Priest, altar, crowd, god, all I seem to have seen,
Vanish, and are no more; till some near day,
When I would see again the earth, and lo!
The vision all recurs in orderly lapse;
From end to end, parts special only changed.

Festus.
'Tis strange, tis sad, and if I now with man
Conversed, I'd say that spirit and nature known
To act contrarious, yet by God's grace, tend
To ultimate harmony, seeming being opposed
To being in seeming only; rises earth
Sunwards, not sun on earth; yet let not man
Deem creatural elevance into heaven his right,
By force of reason, or end necessitate
Of nature truthwards. So, through life God, sought
By act divinely voluntary illumes
Sunwise, the world of soul. Even here, i' the pure
Black, unbeing void, where but for light of stars
Lit by God's vital hand—the brightest star
But blackest dust illumined from without,
Their central fires their death-source sole,—not life
Could be nor mutual influence; so with man;
It is only through their sensuous atmospheres
Spirits can behold each other; and as light
Which, colourless, all colours holds, by such
Becomes itself enlightening, so, too, soul,
Dowered inly with all varieties of belief,
Born in itself to realize all time,
By search of Being's supremest spheres of thought
Moral and rational, which rule man's life,
Learns, while the universe revolves round God
In everlasting period, and the world
Spiritual within, enlightened inly, how
By sweet attraction towards its source, his love,
Balanced by upward gravity of the whole
Towards his divine perfections, he, himself,
Conceiving, bearing, suffering, ending all,
Affiliates finally, and inheavens. For thus
To me appeared the sign the spirit now gave.

Lucifer.
But though man knows not absolutely, at large,
His God, nor many have been in spirit rapt
To heaven; yet hell to outdo in mutual hate,
And threats reciprocal of quenchless fire,
For speculative creeds, earth's foulest crimes

290

Held easily expiable, seems gross misprise
Of heavenly justice, and God's tolerance.

Festus.
Seems!
Behold now heaven, the spirit exclaimed, and I
One vast and universal heaven behold;
God's world-pervading and perpetual smile,
Which, harmonizing, lights all, all light o'erspreads.
There everything hath life, the elements
All vitalized, and glorified, and named
Love, wisdom, strength and beauty, and all hues
Which nature owns, from earth's original blush,
To heaven's eternal azure, hallowed are;
There sentient clouds, the delicate chariots oft
Of journeying souls, inspired by musical winds,
Winds fragrant as the breath of deity, shed
Grateful, their choicest effluence round the skies.
There, spirit exalting joys abide; there flow
The fountains of eternal life and streams
Of perfect virtue for soul-baptism; there,
Roll faith's abysmal mysteries, darkly clear;
Though soundless, shoreless, luminous with life,
Tempting to be explored. There, grow the groves,
Whose trees of golden boles and pearly fruits
Breathe, as wind moved, the harmonious lauds of souls,
Freed from the illusions of more mortal spheres.
Cities and fanes of diamond crown the hills,
Bright with the sole companionship of heaven,
In this pre-earthly paradise, wherein
Who enter are, by kindliest angels, clad
In garments wrought of rainbows; and in robes
Woven as of sunset clouds; while viny wreaths
Gemberries bearing, form their coronals,
Exuberant of all fruitage. Food they need not
Who live on life, and quaff eternal joy;
And rest in peace as in the down of doves.
There, many pass all time, the hour of God,
In pure and whole contentment. Others, still,
In ceaseless, boundless progress, as from star
To star, from bliss to bliss pass, until all
Like rays of light, light all attractive, all
Delightful light redeemed up to the sun,
Return to God renewed. In one band, there,
Souls of all faiths, earth-holden, gracious live,
In mutual forgiveness blessing each
The other; what too in their several creeds
Is proved false, each casts off; what true all keep,
Uniting and amending, for in all
Was truth, if most in one. Thy soul it joys
She said, the spirit, to see this. Search thy heart;
Search, wouldst thou enter these abodes, and know

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There is a secret sign, whereby the soul
Feels certainty of safety and of power
Imparted, public to the universe,
By a single world unwist of, but to one
Conscious of soul's divinity a sign
Infallible, of the life immortal; sign
Stamped in the spirit, as is the gleaming seal
Thou sawest on brows of those imparadised,
The true, triliteral monogram of God.
I searched, and in my vision deemed I found.
But what avails it now?

Lucifer.
Aught said she more?

Festus.
What need the spirit more speak? No more I heard.
She ceased, the all-create; and gazing down deep,
As into her own breast, she crossed in peace
O'er that abyss her life embracing arms.
She ceased; and all was silence. Earth and heaven,
Like solar seas unfathomably bright,
Rolled forth their inmost radiance in twin tides,
Immeasurable. Since the first begotten day,
Until the last born eve when all shall end,
And life's great vein within the embosoming skies
Be utterly dried up; till night shall come,
As some cloud-monster eats up, star on star,
The children of the light; till dew no more
Shall freshen earth's lip, nor breeze her breast, hath been
Beheld such glory, nor shall be, nor may,
Of nature serving God; she sibyl-like,
Instinct with inspiration, and he her
Endowing with all bliss unendingly.

Lucifer.
The universe is but the gate of heaven.
See from this highest orb, the crown of space
And footstool to the infinite, thou may'st gain
Already, a glimpse of glory unconceived.

Festus.
See how yon angels stretch their shining arms,
Wave their star-haunting wings which gleam like glass,
And locks that look like morning's when she comes
Triumphant in the east. Is this their joy
O'er some world penitent?

Lucifer.
Lo! there it rides;
Blessed to discharge on heaven's all peaceful shores
Its long accumulated load of life;
Its deathless freight, pilgrims of time and space.
Yon guilty orb, of hesitating light,
Slow looming there on its dark path, goes up
At the hour forewritten, as do all worlds, to God,
To judgment; and the earthquake groans I hear,
Which rend its adamantine breast forebode
Its agonizing doom.

292

Festus.
And grieves not heaven
With world or soul lost, as with saved it joys?

Lucifer.
How may mortals mourn at the decree
Of righteous wisdom, in itself to them
A bliss to view, being infinite? Is't not just
That justice should be realized? And there,
See one example in the skies prepared,
To admonish and remind of that's to come.

Festus.
But why repented it not, in time?

Lucifer.
Perchance
It held not penitence needed; what, if proud,
It recked not? Time, maybe, is for it, yet.
Ask of the spirit of the world.

Festus.
I dare not.

Lucifer.
What unto us is time, stands before God
Eternity. Repentance is the grief
For, and effectual abstinence from sin,
Creatures can scarce attain to, without God;
But with him all is feasible.

Festus.
Cloudy and clear
By turns, thy words as heaven. I know not what
To think, nor how to act.

Lucifer.
It is natural. Who
Can hit but as appointed him? Who aim,
But as permitted? God gives all their ground;
Bow, arrow, mark, prize, eye and arm, and all;
All life's conditions, origin, means and end.
Forefixed of God his fates revealed as hid
In words till now concealed of prophet truth,
Under the buried basements of the skies,
Shall yet, I have heard, o'erthrown these, reappear.

Festus.
I seek not of man's fate now. I seek God.
All heavens exterior passed, the seats of soul
Self-purificative, and probational, me
Heaven's threshold now—even where yon radiant sun
Of suns, sphere central and supreme of space,
The aspirant soul forewarns of holier life,
And aims more spiritual than mixed earth needs,
Immediate most to deity,—me attracts
With irresistible force.

Lucifer.
Thereto we tend.
Meanwhile glance downwards from this world-coping,
Ere higher risen, and know that to the extreme
Of utter space, where not an atomie mars
The void invisible, easier 'twere to cast
A lead, and total its velocity; pierce
All space, nor cross light's path, than fathom man's
Dark heart, or sound the hollows of his soul.

Festus.
Whether the greater sinner, that mean nature
All these life-spheres which dominates, or thou

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The spirit of evil, archfoe of God and doomed,
One day to perish within the eternal fire
Of his wrath, even in deity thus, in whom
As they begin may all things end, I know not.
I only feel God loves but perfectly,
And can, his own, the spirit of good. And now!
Listen! I hear the harmonies of heaven
From sphere to sphere and from the boundless round,
Re-echoing bliss to those serenest heights
Where angels sit and strike their emulous harps,
Wreathed round with flowers and diamonded with dew;
Such dew as gemmed the ever during blooms
Of Eden winterless, or as, night by night,
The tree of life wept from its every leaf,
Unwithering. Now, in solemn lapse, I hear
The music of the murmur of the stream
Which, through the bridal city of the Lord,
Floweth all life for ever; nay, catch the breath,
Through its star-shadowing branches, of that tree
Transplanted now to heaven, but once on earth,
Whose fruit is for all beings,—breathed of God.
Oh, breathe on me, inspiring spirit-breath!
Oh, flow to me, ye soul-reviving waves!
Freshen the fading spirit that droops and dies.

Lucifer.
It is plain that, here, what man craves, God hath willed.

294

XX.

Enter now heaven. Even man's deathly life
May be there by God's leave. Once brought to God,
The soul's probation and foredoom, and heaven's
Designs towards man, whole man, man personal, show,
Fuller by light of love parental. There,
God's will shall be our own; all spirits be his.
A lightning revelation of the heavens,
And heavenly life, by spirit whose highest aim
Was lowliest to adore the All-good, mistold
Of old, and ever by truthless tongues; to adore
The unity essential, formless, sole
Of God the All-sire of being, source and end;
And though less hard to shape, o'er air's bright heights,
The wide winged wind, he will forgive who owns
Names like the Zealous, like the Merciful; we,
This moment, and all life, all soul, all spirit,
Mind, matter, being as much within his presence,
And known through, like a glass film in the sun,
As though we stood within the star-stoned courts
Of his celestial city. Where he is,
He is all. There are no degrees in deity.
Earth's final doom, man's triumph, peace supreme,
Foreshown, illative each of other's end.

Heaven.
The Deity, Angels, Guardian Angel. Festus and Lucifer entering.
Archangels.
Infinite God! thy will is done,
The world's last sand is all but run,
The night is feasting on the sun.

Lucifer.
All being God! I come to thee again;
Nor come alone. Mortality is here.
Thou badest me do my will, and I have dared
To do it. I have brought him up to heaven,
That thou, just judge, mayst judge 'twixt him and me.

God.
Thou canst not do what is willed not to be.
Suns are made up of atoms; heaven, of souls;
And souls and suns are but the atomies
Of the body, I God, indwell: the natural form
Of mine infinite essence.

Lucifer.
Mortal, here
Await, the while I parley fate.

Guardian Angel.
Why, now,
Spirit of ill, rufflest heaven's calm?

Lucifer.
I will say.
Is not this creature by successful wile
Yet mine? Have I not caused him waste his years
In search of lore forbidden, forgot? in chase

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Of intermittent dreams philosophy gives
Brief brain-life to, and vague, of wisdom housed
'Mong men, and virtue homed;—realities vain
Such as the eye, true key of heaven, shapes forth
Imaginative, from shifting clouds; essays
Futile to o'erflesh with sense the iron limbs
Cold science moulds, irreverent; or win wealth,—
Of labour liberal most,—his hoards to impart,
Common as air;—what rights have idiot men
To quarter any element?—to the mass. Who life,
God's best gift, wastes in quests irrational, plans
Immoderately benevolent, although fair
His final aims, sins grossly even as wight
Who from air's aureate mists would wring out gold,
Or from seas silver, and his charity stake
On success, clammed meanwhile his poor.

Guardian Angel.
Of good's
Least sparkle God is thrifty. Wish and will,—

Lucifer.
To wish is weakness, mind's strength is to will—

Guardian Angel.
Ends sometimes solid enough beget, as deeds.

Lucifer.
Solidity alas thy charge and thou
Alike lack. Prime in the precipitate reel
Poor Pleasure nightly leads, nought pressed, on earth
More sadly frivolous, headlong whirls this soul.
Rich, saidst thou, in time's coming honours? grave
That should be, with predestined empire's trust?
Heaven's hope? My pampered slave's arch drudge.

Guardian Angel.
Youth's powers,
Life's happier gifts, time's privileges, the heart's
Spring-growth of love, joy-fraught, may e'er be used,
And innocently, even not with views forestrained
To the end of being. Man's pleasure in the world,—
His nature made to each fit,—theirs except,
Who twilight sense of future heaven command,
And promissory being yet unfulfilled,
Sense glorious seeming still to the stone-blind mass,—
Is born of socialty; but in the eterne,
Such joys as vanities smirch not, love of self
Degrades not, folly fouls not, God redeems,
Renews; to all adds his own love and grace,
Which keeps them sealike pure, and in godly will
Incorrupt. Thus, if not in pleasurous life,
God's bliss and man's rises, unites, and ends
In self, in deity, who nor motive, good
Nor end knows, other than himself. Thou err'st
If therefore, him thou deem'st almost thine, thine
By weight accumulate of mere levities. These
Ruin not for aye. Even now this soul hath learned

296

Revulsive to hate vanity, hate the show
Of luxuries and the idlesse of the world
Thou lurest with. Pause! yon constellated scales
Pendent in heaven, whose weights are worlds one soul
Outworths; balanced therein life's well and ill
Show level, as falcon's wings, through every plume
Strained air respiring delicately. What yet,
Imponderable, but all decisive, life's
Brief lapse may add, thou knowest not.

Lucifer.
This I know,
Wide fields be mine yet, many a vowed ally;
Aids irresistible; helldom's strength I'll stretch
To touch mine end. Nor public rite, belief
Nor tenet utterable, shall all content
The aspiring spirit like earnest to explore
Earth's farthest, space's highest. It is his will
Power's trustiest aids to learn, truth's inmost shrine,
Felicitative of soul. He the heart inane
Would now of mystery pierce, the maze where eld's
Misfaiths, with heresies new in endless round
Err; and he may, by commerce of false creeds
Chafing away the impress divine of God.
Presumptuous pride falls quickly.

Guardian Angel.
He shall not.
God through me speaks.

God.
What wouldst thou, Lucifer,
With him thou hast brought here with thee?

Lucifer.
Show him God.

God.
No being on part of whom death's curse, though now
Transfigured into blessing, were it only
Upon his shadow, looks on God and lives.

Lucifer.
Look, Festus, look.

Festus.
God, sole and onemost; God,
Eternal fountain of the infinite, thou
On whose life-tide the stars seem strown like bubbles,
Forgive me that an atomie of being
Hath sought to see its Maker, face to face.
I have viewed all thy works, thy wonders; passed
From star to star, from space to space, and feel
That all to see which can be seen were nothing,
And not to look upon thee, the invisible.
The spirits I met all seemed to say, as on,
Starwards, they sped,—their lightning wings o'er me
One moment slackening,—with superior glance,
I might not look, whate'er I were, on God:
But thou this spirit beside me didst empower
To make me more than them, with gifts immortal;
So when we had winged through thy wide world of things
And marked stars made and saved, destroyed and judged,

297

I said, and trembled lest thou heardst me not,
Nor madest thyself right ready to forgive,
I would see God before I die in heaven.
Forgive me, Lord.

God.
Mortal, rise. Look on me.

Festus.
Nought
Unless like dazzling darkness, see I.

Lucifer.
Good.
I knew how it would be. I am away.

Festus.
Thy creature, God! am I. O slay me not;
But bid some angel take me, or I die.

Guardian Angel.
Come hither, Festus!

Festus.
Who art thou?

Guardian Angel.
I am one
Who hath aye, till late, been by thee from thy birth,
Thy guardian genius, thy good angel, I.

Festus.
I knew thee not till now.

Guardian Angel.
I am never seen
In the earth's low thick light; but here, in heaven,
And in the air God breathes, I, too, am clear.
Withheld from active charge on earth, that God's
Ends, by yon spirit late challenged, might show plain
In his own eyes, I have here sojourned; and now,
Leave asked of God, in view of all to come,
And separation's ends, accomplished, seek,—
Telling to God each night thy thoughts and deeds,
And watching o'er thee on earth, as here,—again
To attend thee through thy life-time. Pray for me,
As I for thee pray daily and intercede.

Festus.
Hear, Lord, the prayers of man and angel oned.
And this is heaven. Lead on. Will God forgive
That I did long to see him?

Guardian Angel.
It is the strain
Of all high spirits towards him. Thou couldst not
Even if thou wouldst behold God; masked in dust,
Thine eye on darkness lights; but when flesh-freed,
And the dust shaken off the shining essence,
God shall glow through thee as through living glass,
And every thought and atom of thy being
Shall guest his glory; be o'erbright with God.
Hadst thou not been by faith immortal made
For the instant, lo! thine eye had been thy death.
Come, I will show thee heaven and angels, all.
Lo! the Recording Angel!

Festus.
Him I see
High seated, and the pen within his hand,
Plumed like a storm-portending cloudlet curved
Half over heaven, and swift in use divine,
As is a warrior's spear?

Guardian Angel.
The book wherein,

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By far to come collation of fixed spheres
Are written the records of the universe,
Passed deeds of wandering worlds contrast with thoughts
Of fixed to come, 'neath his previsive eye
Illumining that it reads, behold!

Recording Angel.
And here,
Thine orb's end, mortal, mark, now nigh.

Festus.
Ah me!

Guardian Angel.
Turn then the leaf.

Recording Angel.
Yet is't not every world
Laid open to its axis thus, by stroke
Of death, hath fate like glorious.

Festus.
It is our joy.

Guardian Angel.
See there, where mighty Michael, dight not now
In panoply sun-blinding, nor on war
Exterminant bent, though looking towards a field
Of thunderous battle to be fought yet, big
With creatural fates,—pacific, joys to scan,
At God's behest, the Book of Life, where beam
The names, in starry brilliants, of God's sons,
The spirit-names which angels learn by heart,
Foregiven.

Guardian Angel.
Wilt see thine own?

Festus.
My name? Enough
It is writ, then, in the scroll of life.

Recording Angel.
It is writ.

Festus.
Henceforth to me that constellated word
Is more and clearer than all stars.

Recording Angel.
To heaven
It is bright or dim as actions cause.

Guardian Angel.
Raise still
Thine eyes: thy gleaming throne, hewn from that mount
Of light, which ere created light, or night
Never create, was; heaven's eternal base,
Whereon God's throne is 'stablished. Sit on it.

Festus.
Nay, nothing more than sight will I forestall.

Recording Angel.
Good. I have seen a brighter seat than thine
Like a dejected star, hurled o'er the brink
Of being, to nothingness unconceived, undreamed.

Guardian Angel.
Turn now, and view yon streams where spirits sport
Quaffing immortal life, the river of God,
Whence draw the heavenlies peace, preparing aye
For higher and intenser being; and here,
The upper fountains of the heavens behold,
Waters of life regenerative, like aged
With the emanations of eternity.
There Raphael, healing angel, once of eyes

299

Terrestrial, purger, bidden of God, presides;
Laving wherewith, the immortals purify
Their sight to penetrate the essential light
In all things hidden, which,—visible but by eyes
Made clear æthereally, like the stone
Of fabulous function, all-conversive seed
O' the sun, conceived of fire, transmutes all touched,
All souls so ones with heaven's great soul. Such bliss
And power, reserved for man; such faculties.
Yet but the surface-shadow canst thou see;
The substance is to be. There Gabriel, chief
Of messengers evangelist to worlds
Desperate of good, or self-condemned, declares
God's warnings; or, predictive, charged with store
Of tidings gracious, towards the spirits around
Expounds his promises. Behold yon group
Of spirits blessed. In their divinest eyes
The spirit now speaks; and shows that in their own
All doubt, all want, have ceased, as death.

Festus.
But see!
Hither they come rejoicing, marvelling. Mark
How all with kindliest wonder look on me.
Mayhap to their pure sense I tell of earth.
Some seem as if they knew me. I know none.
But how claim kinship with the glorified,
Unless with them like glorified? Yet, yes!
It is, it must be; that angelic spirit!
My heart outruns me; mother! see thy son.

Angel.
Child! how art thou here?

Festus.
God hath let me come.

Angel.
Art thou not come unbidden, and unprepared?

Festus.
Forgive me, if it be so. I am come.
And I have ever said there are two who will
Forgive me aught I do, my God, and thou.

Angel.
I do. May he!

Festus.
Dear mother, thou art blessed!
And I am blessèd, in knowing this of thee.

Angel.
Son of my hopes on earth, and prayers in heaven,
The love of God, oh! it is infinite,
Even as our imperfection! Promise, child!
To love him for this privilege, more than e'er,
And for his boundless kindness shown towards me.
Now my son hear me, for heaven's hours are not
As earth's; all's all but lost not given to God.
Oft have I seen with joy thy thoughts of heaven
And holy hopes, which track the soul with light,
Rise from dead doubts within thy troubled breast,
As souls of drownèd bodies from the sea,
Upwards to God; and marked them so received

300

That oh! my soul hath overflowed with rapture,
As now thine eye with tears. But oh, my son,
Belovèd, fear thou ever for thy soul;
It yet hath to be saved. Nought perfect stands
But that which is in heaven. God is all kind;
And long time hath he made thee think of him.
Think on him, yet in time. Ere I left earth,
With the last breath which air would spare for me,
The last look life would bless me with, I prayed,
And half the prayer I brought myself to God,
Thou mightst be wise and happy; and now behold
Thou art unhappy, and unwise.

Festus.
Beloved
And blessed one, I rejoice that thou art clear,
And all who have cared for me of my misdeeds.
Thy spirit was on those who nurtured me.
All word and practice that could be of good
Was to me given, so that my sin is splendid.
Yes if I have sinned, I have sublimely sinned.
And I am glad I suffer for my faults.
I would not, if I might, be bad and happy.

Angel.
God laughs at evil by man made, and allows it
In common with all free life, scope to act;
The vaunt of mountainous evil and the power
To challenge heaven as from a molehill, child.

Festus.
Few better hearts than mine hath God e'er made,
However much it fail in the wise ways
Of the world, as living in the dull dark streets
Of forms and follies wherein men brick themselves.

Angel.
The goodness of the heart is shown in deeds
Of peacefulness and kindness. Hand and heart
Are one thing with the good, as thou shouldst be.
Corruption's splendour hath no vital power.
Content in sin shows apathy, not peace.
Do my words trouble thee? Then treasure them.
Pain overgot gives peace, as martyr's death
Earns heaven. All things that speak of heaven, speak peace.
Peace hath more might than war. High brows are calm.
The host of stars is still. Their silence weighs
More mightily with the mind—than though they spake
Thousand-tongued, musically; and truths, like suns
Stir not; though systems round them come and go.
Mind's step is still as death's, and all great things,
Which cannot be controlled, whose end is good.
This peace, God's peace, seek thou, and learn to love.
Behold yon throne: there love, faith, hope are one;
There judgment, righteousness and mercy work
One same result, salvation. This of God
His vengeance means in heaven; for how should he
All good, of evil avenge himself, unless

301

By substituted good? How wrath keep aye,
Save by ill slain to his glory, as on earth
Destruction restoration means to the pure?
Humanity is perfected in heaven.

Festus.
Myself I did not make, nor plan my soul.
I am no angel nursed in the lap of light;
Nor fed on milk immortal of the stars;
Nor golden fruit grown in the summery suns.
How am I answerable for this my soul?
My master, free with me, as fixed with fate;
As a star which moves a certain course in mode
Certain, its liberties are laws; its laws,
Tyrannic, under God. All that we do,
Or bear, is settled from eternity
Endless, beginningless. To act is ours;
Quite sure, not less, all done, or good or ill,
Is for God's glory always, and is ordered.

Angel.
If soul were but an organ, and no power
Of good or evil had haply within itself,
More than the eye hath power of light or dark,
God fitting it for good, and evil being
Good in another way we are not skilled in,—
The good we do of his own good will, the ill
Of his own letting, man were simply slave
Choiceless, of dignity void, nor grandly impowered
To make law, as to obey; a lustrous failure;
A perfect imperfection; even as nature,
All light in life, shines marshlike, too, in death,
With vagrant fires that haunt even rottenness.
But worse with souls that wilfully unjust
We see, reject their privileged walk with God;
Their source of true vitality, lost; and given
So to degenerate life that all their powers,
And splendid faculties, but decaying seem
In sin, and flying off by elements;
Like wandering worlds which scare the extremes of space
With fiery visitation, or in black
Abyss of preordained destruction, slow
Perish, self dissipative; a continent, now
Sloughing, a climate. Oh to such, woe worth!
What shall be done to them?

Festus.
Probational life
Doubtless endures as long as justice claims.
All may not live again, but all which do
Must change perpetually even in heaven;
And not by death to death, but life to life.

Angel.
No; step by step, and throne by throne, we rise
Continually towards the Infinite;
And ever nearer, never near to God.

Festus.
Yet merit or demerit none I see,

302

In nature, human or material none;
In passions nor affections, good or bad.
We only know that God's best purposes
Are oftenest brought about by dreadest sins.
Is thunder evil? or is dew divine?
Does virtue lie in sunshine, sin in storm?
Is not each natural, each needful, best?
How know we what is evil from what good?
Wrath and revenge God claimeth as his own.
And yet men speculate upon right and wrong,
And good and ill, as each annihilative
Of each, like day and night; forgetting both
One cause, the same original have, God's will;
Each, ultimately, him. That God enjoins,
That God permits, are the twin wheels whereon
The world runs glibly enough, and will, to the end.
All right is right divine. A worm hath rights
Kings leagued cannot despoil him of, nor sin.
Yet wrongs are things necessitate like wants;
And oft are well allowed of to best ends.
A double error sometimes sets us right.

Angel.
But if in man no absolute rule inhere
Of right and wrong, his God-given conscience then
Were of all things most base, which, vacillant, lives
Now justifying, again condemning sin,
Accomplice, traitor, judge and headsman, all.
But conscience knows its business and performs;
And though long cowed and crushed, at last due seat
Regains, and claims to sit God's assessor.
Nor this sole, but through penitence due for sin
Her purifying intent expresses, till
Transfigured, glorified, she soars to heaven.

Festus.
Or falls, for ages lost; mayhap for ever.

Angel.
Nothing is lost in nature, least of all
The immortal spirit to deity, proof and pledge
Triumphant, of his kindliest attributes;
His will to uplift, advance, expand, perfect
Each individual soul, and all unite
In one supreme perfection, of himself
The essential image; every state and sphere
Of universal nature, a holy stage
Of purified amendment for the next
Creative birth, and graduated ascent,
Toward this spiritual, summing, centering, all
The excellences of being. Nay, no soul,
Though plunged within sin's blackest, lowest, depth,
Lost to the world, to angels, to itself,
Is lost to God; but there it works his will,
And burns conformably with justice. Sin
Convinced, bears penitence; and from ignorant vice

303

Converted, springs wise virtue; from mean greed
Active beneficence never satiate, save
With welfare of some rational soul, secured,
Or compassed, charitably: all virtues, means
To some diviner ends, attainable still
By man, majestic in progression. Grace,
Knowledge and love, the sense of harmony,
And beauty of form, used rightly by the spirit
Studious of high ends, are purifying powers.
So, all things that to order and perfectness
Of nature tend, the accomplishments of being,
And blessings of life social, crowned in peace.
For as nature's elements all are harmonized,
And the mind's powers, with thought's perfective rules;
So our emotions trained symmetric, range
Approvedly, with the law of highest good;
In such wise operative, that weakest things
Are yet to be made examples of his might,
The most defective of his perfect grace,
Whene'er he thinketh well.

Festus.
Oh everything
To me seems good, and lovely, and immortal.
The whole is beautiful; nor can I see
Aught wrong in man nor nature, aught not meant,
As from his hands it comes, who fashions all;
Holy as his formative word, the world itself
His mightier revelation; to whose sense,
All writ must be attuned, all miracles made
Like broadly just. He breathes himself upon us,
Before our birth, as o'er the formless void
He moved at first, and we with his spirit are all
Livingly inspired. All things are God or of God.
For the whole is in God's mind, what is a thought
In ours. All that is good belongs to God;
And good and God are all things; or shall be.

Angel.
God, in his own parental nature, knows
All creatures and their possible powers; for he
By universal essence is; and through
His attributes, by limited mind alone
Distinguished from his substance, to all made
Imparts his virtues, and with reason impowers
The creatures he, their author, throughlier knows
Than they themselves; their course, their every lapse,
Exorbitant from the right, and glad return
From firmamental exile, back to him:
Who mercifully forgiving sin, foreseen
By precreative eye, yet not approves
Ill, fruit of imperfection, save as test
Of vital faith and patience in pure hearts.
Thus, all created good, or to good ends,

304

Or sanctified, conduce. Man's highest bliss,
In union with his source and crowning end,
In serving man and loving God; his root,
And finial flower, is when to vast surview
Raised, of God's kingdom, the soul-straitening bounds
Of race, creed, temperament o'ertopped, the spirit
All covetings, vain distinctions, schemes, desires,
To God surrendering, abnegates; to him
Being of beings, who all things vivifies;
Who his own goodness in his creatures seeks;
His own intense perfection; his divine
Beauty and purity, as the sun in dew
His reflex glory. So, too, the liberate soul,
Rapt in the ecstatic gaze of joy he grants,
And into commune raised with its cause, partakes
Freedom divine, divine necessity; nay,
Anticipating eternity, fore-reads
With angels, on God's face, the thoughts of peace,
And miracles of benevolence he conceives
To enrich and bless all life with. But thou, yet,
There lacks in souls like thine unsaved, unraised,
The light within, of perfectness, as in heaven.
How oft the soul, even strong, if tempted falls!
As some rock-towering lighthouse which long years
Rolls its ubiquitous eye, cyclopic, vast,
Sea-searching; but to Time's slow sap and siege
At last consentful, leaves a gap, by groans
Greeted from ruinous barques; and, 'neath the sea
Lurking, exasperates every peril that once
It luminously forbade; so, stable and stern,
The virtuous soul I have seen, long time, command
The future, marked and thanked by thousands saved
Gloriously; but fallen, lie hopeless now as thine
O'ersurged, alas by life's allurements. God,
God only, it is, can raise it and rebuild.

Guardian Angel.
And his, thy son's, he will yet raise. Since with me,
I have shown him infinite wonders. We have oped
And scanned fate's golden scroll wherein are writ
In God's own hand all things to be; have seen
The records of his being, passed, and to come;
His long temptation, sin and suffering.

Festus.
And hear it, O beloved and blessed, mine own
Salvation.

Angel.
God, how great is he, in being,
Infinite infinitely, in power, and grace.
But oh! transcendent truth, when thus to one
Poor spirit, he gives his hand in love, he seems
To impart his own unboundedness of bliss.
Scarce worth destroying, one thinks, less saving; each
Loves he as all his equals were.

305

Festus.
I know
All I must henceforth go through, the doubts, woes,
Passions of life; which knowing, hinders not,
Purificative trials, by whose stern aid
The spirit achieves perfection; sloughing off,
Snakewise, constraint of narrower being; the world's
Entanglements, the snares of youth. I bear
Obeyingly; nor repine as erst when I
Looked back, and saw how life had balked, foiled, fooled me.
Fresh as a spouting spring upon the hills,
My heart leapt out to lifewards; little it thought
Of all the vile cares that would rill into it;
The mean low places it must coast; the falls,
The drains, the crossings, and the millwork after.
God hath endowed me with a soul scorns life;
An element over and above the world's.
But the price one pays for pride is mountain high.
There is a curse beyond death's rack; a woe
God hath put forth his strength in; a pain past
All our mad wretchedness when some sacred secret
Hath flown from out the encaging heart, care-closed,
Vainly; the curse of a high spirit famishing,
Because all earth but sickens it.

Angel.
Nay, confirm
Thy spirit with godlier, say, with manlier thoughts.
Contrast not earth-life with celestial; both
Variants of one existence deem; the same
This, but immutable, save to happier ends.
Here, as the general air, inspired of all,
All speak the mind of God whose world-like thoughts
Heaven's multitudinous being suffuse, as beams,—
To one who curious treads the wavy panes
Of ocean's floor gold framed, through myriad squares
Tempered, the sun, quickening the expanse with light.
Here, all in all, we live, the weakliest soul
His solar spirit partaking, as need bids;
He not alone of things the conscious force,
But conscience of all spirits, who to heaven's
Perfective science, man's nature so adapts,
By gradual growth of virtue, to attain
Divinity, that he may the whole fulfil.
These excellences of godhood are the modes
Whereby to us create, he makes himself
Known, truth's source, end and centre, which supply
With perfect sustenance each benevolent vow;
Each virtuous aim earth owns; as justly fixed
Towards the perpetual betterment of things,
And reascension sourcewards of all souls;
Heaven's only aim extraneous to itself;
Wherewith earth's wisest, holiest spirits, truth-freed,

306

Collaborate, that all reach,—none lost,—divine
Perfection, realized only here, where law
Nature and liberty trined, are blessed. Doubt not
If, as thou sayest, thy future life thou knowest,
And but its rudiments surely, limned, perchance,
By eye imaginative, as yet in block
Unhewn, the pillars of Time's temple;—still,
In all things seek, and that sole, perfectness
In nature, virtue, reason, faith; which, used
Rightly, to God unite the spirit outrayed
From him; and with essential Deity tinged.
For while by various faults and flaws, each soul
Falls,—not irrevocably,—God's saving love
By discipline drawn, by penitence, by pure life,
The spirit self strained from guile, relamps, helps on
Its upward way, steep, devious, painful, dark,
With cheering words; and, not contaminate
By voluntary offence, restores, redeems,
Redeifies. Here, the hopes of earth's best hearts,
The master aims of ages, for man's good,
All nature's properties perfected, man's mind,
In God, the rational unity of the whole,
Embraces, and in meditating grows blessed.

Festus.
How radiant show you blessèd souls!

Angel.
Know, child,
Each faithful thought of God, each saintly hope,
Clear aspiration for earth's weal; pure aim;
Beneficent deed; each reverent service shown
To man's majestic nature, as to him,
The spirit of pure humanity deified,
Each generous thought that warms the social breast
Here beams a ray of life divine, the frame
Fills with e'er heightening beauty, and the whole
Being perradiates with celestial light,
Transfigurative; which known, all choice of good
The soul is capable of, will heaven foretell
In us; and God's embrace, soul-hallowing, show,
Token of the spirit's birth in man, whose mind
Progressive, suffering, but perfectible, crowned,
Divinized, in itself all things made good,
Thus harmonizes with other, and with God.

Festus
Behold the ebb of the life-tide of the world!

Angel.
It grieves not me. We sooner meet. Go, child!
Fulfil thy fate. Be—do—bear, and thank God.
Be good, do good; bear pains heaven sent, resigned
To God's corrective love; and in the light,
Soul-ripening, of his law, prepared for this.
To me it seems as I had lived all ages
Since leaving earth; and thou art yet scarce man
Matured; than that more thou wilt never be.

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Festus.
It was not, mother, that I knew thy face;
The luminous eclipse that is on it now,
Though it was fair on earth, would have made it strange
Even to one who knew as well as he loved thee.
And if these time-tired eyes ever imaged thine
It was but for a moment, and the sight
Passed; and my life was broken like a line
At the first word;—but my heart cried out in me.

Angel.
Thee knew I well. And now, to earth again;
Go, son; and say to all who once were mine,
I love them, and expect them.

Festus.
Blessèd one!
I go.

Angel.
I charge thee, Genius, bear him safely.

Genius.
Through light and night and all the powers of air
I have a passport.

Angel.
God be with thee, child.

Festus.
Where, Angel, is the spirit induced me here?

Genius.
That spirit is no more here. Behold him gone
Like a spent thunder-cloud which, rolled away,
Bears in its shapes chaotic, visible proof
Of the distracting fires that rent its breast,
Of force self dissipative. Not long can he
Heaven's light—foretaste permitted thee—abide:
Thus eminently, wherein all these exult
From saint to seraph, hierarchies of bliss
For known to all ye angels is the good
God hath eternally decreed to man;
The secrets of perfection, yours; but heaven's
High whispers and intense, the soul of ill
Knows not, nor can know; in the source of light
Sightless; and, means for ends misplacing ever,
Of his own acts incomprehensive, he
Glutting life's passionatest desires at full,
And instigating soul's vainest aims, misdeems
To cause thee, spirit of earth!—God lost,—thyself
Forfeit to him; albeit God all o'errules,
To his own great ends, in manner none forecasts.
But this know; and, as spherelet nigh the sun,
Revels in lightful secresy, my soul
With heavenly insight penetrate, perceives,
Down broadening vistas of futurity, how
Him shall God's Son, divine humanity,
Revisiting misreported hell, endure
To meet, and all his hosts with hope inspire
To earn, repentant, pride subject, heaven's peace,
Pardon and restoration.

Saints.
Joyed, we hear.

Genius.
For lo! it is written in the book of God,

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Where spirits may learn aforetime what is fate,
In endless prescience of world-winning love,
That as by angel man through woman fell,
Through her shall this first-fallen again too rise;
All life in ultimate perfection linked
By him who chooseth oft-times meanest means
To compass world vast purposes, whereby
God vindicates himself. Nay, thine own sphere,
The first-fruits of the great destruction, earth,
Born of the mother-night of ages, once,
Into a sad and struggling life, at last
Shall be most blessèd, hailed among the worlds.

Angel.
All time, all place is consecrate to God.
Man may do despite, but the ill redounds
Only to him. The world is holy still,
God's fane is unprofaned. Some graceless wretch
Blasphemes a holy sage; what harm? The throat
Filled with scurrility, only, is defiled;
Not seer, nor his pure word. So too, all means
Have majesty, if used of God; all ends
By him who made, ordained, are sanctified.

Genius.
Come.

Festus.
I feel happier, better, nobler now.

Genius.
See, where now, like a journeying beam of light
From the sun's arched crown she moves, each orblet passed
Enveloping in her shadow aureolewise;
Mark, too where midst those radiant rounds, well-nigh
With spirits elect replete, few void;—in sooth
One only, primary, and its satellite seats,
They welcome her return. How sayest thou, soul?
What seest mid that celestial session?

Festus.
I
See where she smiling sits, who, latewhile, here
Me wiseliest counselled: and now points me out
With finger, used God's gracious deeds to trace,
To those who near her sit; that twain serene;
Brow-mitred with aërial gold unwrought;
Who be they?

Genius.
That, mankind's great mother; this
His who mankind with loftiest creed enriched
Of divine sonship, in God's spirit renewed,
By virtue; by repentance justified; such
The soul's sole way from earth to God the truth.
And nigh these, she, mother of soul God-chosen,
Life's fine, and last of men; for thou art he.

Festus.
Am I? It is enough. I have seen God.

Genius.
God, and his great idea, the universe,
His one and infinite thought aye being evolved,
Are over us, and about us. Be the one,
Being of beings, as thou hast known, in whom

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The spirits finite of all essential spheres,
Progressive and self-purificative, work out
Their everbettering end, God only God,
Worshipped; be the other reverently proved.

Festus.
Surely there's rest in heaven.

Guardian Angel.
As thou, ere now
Hast seen, the spirits of men, the wise, brave, just,
Daring and charitable, in those strange spheres
The angel of thy satellite crescent showed,
Their guerdon of self-completive perfectness
Taken at God's hand, through dateless terms of time,
Triumphs of passed and future, not without
Toil spiritual achieved and earnest deed;
So here behold how holy is well-won rest;
And how the soul finite, by endless life
Enriched, God crowns, betimes, with ease intense,
And renovative repose. The heart of heaven
This, which in silent movement like the soul's
In spiritual commune with God e'er lives.

God.
Hear heaven; and earth, hear! Not in vain shall all
My prophets, sons of God, through time, have preached
Of justice and heaven's peace with man to come.
Let therefore peace, and charity on earth
Start forth, as from the tender herb the dew,
'Mong all mankind one-minded. Let pure schemes,
Just and benevolent souls of ages gone,
Have nursed, mature; let hopes sincere of all
World-patriots, earth's best spirits for nature's weal,
Fulfil themselves; all godly plans bear fruit
Of laudable profit; freedom and the use
Temperate of all heaven's blessings, with just sense
Of mutual rights, and service due 'mong all,
Brethren; heart-purity; holy life prevail
Most presently earth over.

Festus.
Peace, thou saidst,
Lord?

God.
Peace, I say. Be war henceforth reserved
To spiritual ends, and strife of virtuous soul
'Gainst soul ill-willed, 'gainst evil; which not, all life
Create were aimless; such war, war divine,
Emancipative of spirit, as in accord
With fate long uttered, shall the close of things
Terrestrial, mark, decisive, to the amaze
Of all, participant in that final field
Of evil and good. Be thou right strong to bear
Therein thy part.

Festus.
Thine, Lord! the cause, the praise.

God.
This contest we remit to man's last race
And generation, that, by choice of good,

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Rejected sin, soul purity, preferred
As dear to God whose breath is holiness,
Heaven gives and makes cause common with all souls,
For the good, militant. For the time enough.
Guard-angel, let this soul thy charge to earth
Returned, fate's first-fruits cull.

Guardian Angel.
I then may him
Accompany as of old?

God.
Thou hadst need.

Guardian Angel.
O joy!

God.
Angel, thou knowest both mine intent towards man
And him who types his race, the crownèd end;
Whom failing, thou mayst strengthen to all good;
Whom sin-bound check; whom sinning, see thou show,
With the spirit who tempts so prompt to avile him, hell;
And so with pains premonitory of proof,
His soul chastise, that he the fines may feel
Of obstinate fault and purposeful offence;
Yet thence, revisiting earth, the verity tell
Long lost to man, of justly apportioned doom
In realms whence, self-recuperative, the soul
My diffidently again seek to behold
My face; and rightliest balanced equity
Prove by strict mercy administered, that the heart
Of the broad world may gladden in its God.

Angels.
So from all ill, Lord! aye thou bringest good.

God.
All things are overruled to work mine own
Self-satisfactive ends; Being's boundless good,
And everlasting bliss made one with mine.
For all souls shall be judged, condemned not all;
None, without end. These, by me chosen to prove
To creature mind my sovereign freedom; those,
By virtue's law adjudged and natural light
Of conscious right and wrong, the just, so taught
Of heaven's eternal equity, proclaim
In God and man one common righteousness,
One sole; man justified to God, by sense
Of love's, truth's, piety's, laws innate, obeyed;
Or, violate, self-condemned; and God,—free choice
By will, who gave,—like justified to man.

Festus.
O angel, let me welcome thee.

Guardian Angel.
Nay, name me.
For by thy lips invoked at morn and eve,
My name I love.

Festus.
Return we now?

God.
Return!
The day he choosing world-wide power shall think
Men most to serve by ruling and by choice
Of peace infrangible, so ensured as there

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Shall patently appear, the day of days,
Earth's angel, angel-guard! will prove to ye both.

Festus.
How vast it seems, this deep abyss of worlds
Below our feet!

Guardian Angel.
Stars stranger, nobler still
Than those by thee late visited, we may find.
Wilt sojourn for a time among these worlds,
And test their natures?

Festus.
Gladly.

Guardian Angel.
Seek we, then,
All rareness and variety these bright globes
Can offer, ere we reach thine orb. Descend.
Now is the age of worlds: another comes.

God.
Know all ye angels, I have so made man
That his original excellence shall defeat
All he hath ill; his inborn goodness, sin
So outweigh finally, his soul shall live
By royal right of virtue in itself,
Immortal, and here reign in heaven with us.
Nor be ye astound, that Evil, by me permit,
By me, unknown to himself, commissioned life
More even than one, imperishable, to loose
From freshly; and who, so acting, deems himself
But by his own vain ends inspired, should feel
False impulse to triumph;—all souls, be sure,
Have their appointed season, and just reward.

Angels.
Even as in one so may it be in all!
Be it ever as thou, Lord, sayst. Thy word is fate.
O haste, ye times when universal man,
All minor creeds abandoned in one faith,
Thee sole shall worship integrally; the eterne,
The personal infinite, the All-One; who makes,
Sustains, comprises all things and redeems.

Archangels.
All are but particles of One divine,
And never can in holy gladness shine,
Till builded all into one common shrine
Which God shall make his temple. As the woe
Each human heart on earth doth undergo,
Shall be the calm immeasurable flow
Of joy, united man in heaven shall know.

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XXI.

Time's lapse, who notes mid flights like this? Once more
In merry medley mixed, youth's liberal mirth,
Disport we; now, the natural luxuries taste
Of love, trust, amity, un-Circæan cups
Which change to loftier life, by virtuous charms,
The spirit, of joy enchanted; still immasked
Worldwards, in frivolous pleasures. These, one hour,
Our world-seer joins, soul solemnized, to renounce:
And, as of old, when in some sainted shrine,
By secular license, antic play perturbed,
Time and again, the dim-roofed vastnesses,
And dominant sanctities of the place, but passed
Harmless and soon; the hallowed solitude
Leaving, when gone, more grave; so here. Meanwhile,
Deserted long, it may be, the only love
Life sanctifying,—let wit adorn, or grace
Charm as they may,—too sensitive shows, to abide
Constant estrangement, and aye failing faith.

Summer-house and Pleasure-grounds. Groves, walks, fountains.
Marian, Helen, Edward, Charles, Sophia, and Others.
Edward.
Again we meet in this fair scene;
Ah! might we be but ever young!

Harry.
Helen! We pray thee be again our queen.

Helen.
I prithee hold thy tongue:
A royal revolution 'twere, indeed,
That I should twice reign, and myself succeed.

Charles.
No nay, no nay! it must be so:
Permit me.

Helen.
Well, there needs no show
Of more reluctance than I feel;
Both kings and queens must court the commonweal.

Harry.
A bumper at meeting, a bumper at parting!
As many you like be between;
But we will have a right ruddy brimmer at starting;
A health to our beautiful queen!
Long, long may she reign in our hearts and right arms,
And her all but omnipotence last!
She shall fear nothing rougher than love's light alarms;
There is nought in the coming can darken her charms;
There is nought can eclipse in the past.
A brimmer at sitting, a brimmer at starting,
As many you like be between;
But we will have a right ruddy bumper at parting;
A health to our beautiful queen!

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Oh! while beauty shall live in the form of the fair,
And love in the heart of the brave,
The queen of our souls, she shall never despair,
For our hearts we would drain, and our deaths we would dare,
To avenge whom we love, or to save.

Helen.
Born to exert the powers of my state,
Charles, I have named thee poet-laureate.

Harry.
Kiss hands upon appointment.

Charles.
Sovereign fair!
Behold thy grateful servant.

Helen.
Sit thou there,
In all but full equality with me;
Love rules the heart, and the mind poesie:
In youth at least, and when in hours like this,
The rule is pleasure, the exception bliss.

Laurence.
But where is Festus?

Helen.
'Tis to him we owe
The repetition of this scene of joy.
He bids me say he loves ye all ye know,
But deems his presence less attraction than annoy.
Whatever ye can name, and I command,
Is by his bidding welcome thus to all;
But pardon craves; high quests he hath in hand,
Which wait not on his own nor pleasure's call.
And though to me his presence be a power,
His every word with love's bright magic rife,
Yet he—nor him from that height would I lower—
Lives in the upper hemisphere of life;
Where angel thoughts and spiritual orbs
Roll in the majesty of mind profound;
Where Truth's bright disk, all doubt spots dark absorbs,
And inspiration's lightning beams abound.
Whether he e'er return to scenes like this,
I know not—much I question—but can trace
The tone, methinks, of that sad soul of his
Roll ever deepening down an endless bass,
Like an abyss of thunder. But, away!
These tears mine eyes have haunted all the day;
Now they are vanished. Let us change, I pray,
The matter of our converse.

Sophia.
Ay, be gay!

Helen.
Come, we will consecrate the passing hour,
With songs of love, and lays of beauty's power;
For when the tale of Time hath told
A thousand thousand years,
His purple pinions starred with gold,
Wherewith he doth the world enfold,
Will still be stained with dust, and tears;
And still life's sole brief Paradise, in sooth,
Be love and beauty in the hour of youth.

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A song, a dance, one cup to beauty's name;
Music, a jest, or pleasant tale in rhyme;
Sufficient these, with mirth and gentle game,
Alternate with repose, to fill our time.
And first, a dance! for earth and heaven
Are both to choral influence given.
All things their nature that fulfil,
In harmlessness and joy, his will
Worship and do; though dumb and still;
For noteless, countless are the ways
Of nature practising his praise;
And dancing hath a sacred birth
Like all the happiest customs of the earth.

Charles.
The sun in the centre turns solemnly round,
And the pale god of shades, the conductor of souls,
Seems to warm as he circles the glory profound,
Where the goddess of beauty all beamingly rolls;
While earth, with her sister, floats brilliantly by,
Her heart towards the sun, and her love in her eye.
Then Mars, like a warrior gloomy and red,
Impetuous wheels, ever glancing at one;
While nine sister goddesses mazily tread,
In the midst of a nonade each heavenly head,
The bright fields of air which encircle the sun;
And Jove the majestic, serene in his might,
Sweeps cloudy and thunderous aye to the light.
Then Saturn, old grey-bearded emblem of time,
Comes slowly and chilly to join with the rest;
And Ouranus next with young Eros sublime,
Move slowly as though they partook with the blest;
And each, his bright bevy of servitors round,
Complete the vast figure with harmony crowned.

Helen.
This, Sir, is your inaugural ode?

Charles.
If you, fair lady, think it so.
Your word imposes the sole code
Of law, or justice, we may know.

Helen.
Then my authority is absolute.

Edward.
As truth's my liege.

Helen.
We'll soon see if it suit.
So like the stars which circle through the skies,
As Charles hath sung,
Let us too dance with choral harmonies
Ourselves among.

Marian,
apart.
Again that name hath knelled upon mine ear,
Though I have never voiced it. 'Tis to me
Too deeply, yea unutterably dear.
How warmly too she loves him! Let it be.
Who most enjoy the light may best endure,
When come, the darkness; as it now is here.
Whatever his, may my troth-plight keep sure!

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I have turned to thee, moon, from the glance
That in triumphing coldness was given;
And rejoiced, as I viewed thee all lonely advance,
There was something was lonely in heaven.
I have turned to thee, moon, as I lay
In thy silent and saddening brightness;
And rejoiced, as high heaven went shining away,
That the heart had its desolate lightness.
I have turned to thee, moon, from my love,
And from all that once blessed me, in sadness;
And can marvel no more that, abandoned above,
Thou should'st lend thy bright face to make madness.
I have turned to thee, moon, from my heart,
That in love hath long laboured and sorrowed;
And have hoped it might mix, as I watched thee depart,
Like thyself, with the morn which had morrowed.

Laurence.
Can I behold the lady of my love
Mourning alone, from pleasure all apart?
Again I seek thee, though it be to hear
The sentence of destruction to my heart.
Yet if it be so, still one moment stay;
For so it haps whene'er I think of thee,
So blent is thought with love's anxiety,
My spirit doth invariably pray.
Any blessing God can give
Never be withheld from thee;
Nor will I desire to live
If that prayer be lost to me;
Else I were unworthy thee.
If e'er my hand doth aught of good
I do it in thy name;
For well I know thy kind heart would,
If with me, bid the same.
All mirth I check, for well I know
It is not meet for me;
No smile shall ever light this brow,
Nor ought, away from thee.

Marian.
I thank thee, Laurence, and believe;
But this is all I can for thee,
Save grieve that thou should'st vainly grieve
I to another am as thou to me;
In this strange passion which pain sanctifies;
This folly sorrow makes sublime and wise.

Laurence.
Oh! there is nothing in this world of ours
So sad to see,
As the dark worm which dwells wherever flowers
Our destiny;
Eating the heart out of youth's budding hours
Of glee.
Not oft in sunny beds, nor sheltered bowers,

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Life's lot is cast;
But chiefly lost in shade, and chilled by showers,
Or the rude blast;
Till all its delicate and wholesome powers
Are past.
And this then is the end of all the bliss
Which love and beauty offered, and my soul
Made certain of in natural triumph; this
The heritage of life; and this, love's goal.

Marian.
Peace! there is one I name not, came not here
Partly because of me. But think'st thou I
Came to indulge a wretched vanity
With thee, or pry into another's sphere?
With whom I grieve too; which is more unblest,
Whose love is shunned or sought, let time attest!

Lucy.
In his thou lovest we see thy heart,
Engrossed exists but as a part
Of one essential; and there be
Who deem not that too wise in thee;
But as some unwary serpent who her soul's
Pride hath paid down for sweet sounds, and unrolls,
Or intertwines, her body's shining rings,
At his mere will who, touched the silver keys
Of ivory flutelet, opes and seals joy's springs
Within her; gently irritates at ease,
Or soothes; but charms her, wheresoe'er he please;
Until, translated for obedient skill,
Into his breast she, nestling there, lies still,
Pleased, nigh to death, with such dear harmonies;—
So we, more free, thy love confess
Hath more of faith than hopefulness.

Marian.
It may be; mine it is, no less.

Helen.
And now, for pastime, some one tell a tale;
Come, an adventure, Charles.

Charles.
Oh, pray dispense
With my devoirs this time. I fain would try
If any wit be in the company;
By observation, not experience,
Of course I judge: for of my own
The world and I are cognizant alone.

Emma.
Fatigued, no doubt, with over-admiration
Of your sweet self.

Helen.
Well, all then, in rotation.

Walter.
Now I know a delicious tale
Will suit you, Carrie to a T.

Caroline.
Do tell me then, and I'll believe
It more than truth, if need should be.

Walter.
Well; Love is the child of bliss and woe;
So, from his parents dear,
One eye is blinded with a smile,

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One drownèd in a tear.
And on one lip there drops a kiss,
Like honey from the wild woodbine;
And that's the lip he had from bliss—
And that's the lip I will have mine;
But on the other hangs a lie,
And that—but that's 'tween you and I.

Caroline.
How very odd!

Walter.
Why, it's a fact,
And therefore needs no illustration;
But if you think its principle abstract
It is easily shown in operation.

Caroline.
Oh dear! no, no! I'll vow it's true,
Rather than have it proved by you.

Lucy.
How aught than truth can e'er be truer,
Is news than e'en the newest newer.

Edward.
Who thinks to sever life's delights
From happiest duty, woe invites;
A fact which minstrels of all times
Have sanctioned, listen! in their rhymes:

Lucy sings.

As I stood by the lakelet of love, to my view,
Mid the moon's fairy glow, shone a soul-charming scene;
The clouds were all silver, the skies were all blue,
And the shores were all waving with woodlands of green.
In a boat-shell of pearl sailed a maid and a youth,
And the song that she sang sounded sweeter than truth;
But the youth sat all silent; and soon to my sight,
They sped through the gathering shadows of night.

While I watched them departing, the waves seemed to sigh,
And the faintest of halos encircled the moon;
And though love-light the gale, ever feigning to die,
There were signs of a change coming sudden and soon.
But the skies were still beaming, the stars were still bright,
And the lovers still steering their course of delight,
When the sound of the song on mine ear died away,
And the seal of sweet silence concluded the day.

When the sun to its woes first awakened the world,
What a scene! the tall forests lay prostrate and bare;
While the love-freighted bark into fragments was hurled,
And the youth and the maiden, alas! they were—where?
'Gainst the tempest that raged they had struggled in vain;
And the lake rolling wroth as the storm-stricken main;
Then the voice that was silent had shrieked round the shore;
And the song that seemed sweeter than truth was no more.

George.
Well now, hear me, now this is true,
Although of love and the lyre too.
And since with couples wild as they
Who foundered in love's stormy bay,
Our sympathy, I dare say, is small;
For all must from the first expect,
Those reckless could not but be wrecked,

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'Tis a good reason why we may
Replace them by a pair less dismal;
And, as it happened all to me,
I say but what I could but see.
I was with the maid I love,
We were happy and alone;
Eve's star just lit the grove,
And the day had been our own.
And my lyre lay by my side,
But no music from it came;
For as sure as e'er I tried
It was harsh or it was tame.
So I flung it to my feet,
And I feigned the while I said,
Thy love I cannot meet;
Thou must not love me, maid.
And more I might have feigned,
When there came a little boy,
And his step fell as light
As a laugh of joy;
And he laughed, and said, I'm Love!
Shall I teach you how to play?
And I said, My pretty boy,
Teach away, teach away!
So he lifted up the lyre,
And he fingered its strings,
Till I thought they did become
Like spiritual things;
And the gold chords shone,
From the music he clouded,
Like the links of the lightning,
When tempests come crowded;
And the strain rose and fell,
'Neath his pink little fingers,
Like a soul due to earth,
That in heaven still lingers.
He ceased; and all over
He smiled like the strain
Of the music he made me,
Nor made me in vain;
For I snatched at the lyre,
While yet it was ringing,
And I sang, it is love
Gives the poet his singing.
Then I turned to my beauty,
Who kissed her young bard,
As she said, Love and song
Shall have thus their reward.
He laughed till he cried;
I pretended to frown:

319

So my love made him hide
In her bosom of down;
Where at last he gasped out,
Oh, forgive me, I pray!
But I couldn't help laughing;
Boy, I said, get away!
Let none, then, who love not
Ever offer to sing;
Let none who say false
Ever strike the gold string;
He said! and I saw but the
Wave of his wing.

Lucy.
These stories are delightful; I declare,
I never dreamed that love was to be seen,
More than a ghost in these enlightened days.

Laurence.
Thrice wretched he to whom he comes, I ween.

Charles.
I had a strange visit once from Love;
But when,—indeed I dread to date it.
It is so long since, I half forget;
But if it please you, I'll narrate it.

Laura.
Oh do! a poet surely will have something
Pretty to say about the poor dear dumb thing.

Harry.
Dumb! then you know but little of the tyrant!
He'd bellow down a fifth-rate actor by rant.

Charles.
It is true I have met him once or twice
Since the event of which I tell;
He called I find the other day,
And left his card; but T.T.L.
So if we meet again, the little god
Will get the cut celestial, or a nod
At best. But as I fear I am wasting time,
For shortness sake I'll tell my tale in rhyme.
I nursed with care a favourite fire,
In secret and alone;
And oft I blew it with my breath;
And oft 'twas all but gone.
And not a soul beside myself
Cared for my flame or me;
It made me sad, it made me glad.
The very secresy.
At length my absence made me missed;
They sought me far and near,
With muttered scorn, with smile, with sigh;
With silence, and a tear;
And one said, Let the boy alone,
His flame will soon expire;
And others said, 'Tis nought to us;
And still I fed my fire.
And friends and kindred all condemned,

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With stern and fixèd eye,
The love of folly which, they said,
Possessed me; spake not I.
So one by one they went away,
'Twere useless to remain;
Their presence or their absence nought:
I fanned my fire again.
And Beauty came, but blamed me not;
So sweetly did she ask,
Of life and peace, I half forgot
To tend my wayward task;
Till, while her eyes were lift above,
I spied it, as I turned;
Sprang like a bowstring to the bow,
And stirred it till it burned.
And pride, and world-ambition came,
And tried to tread it out;
But every ember found its nerve,
And each with pain did shout;
And Love came, not as he was wont,
With kiss and merry brow,
And eyes like two forget-me-nots,
Dipped in the stream below:—
But up he came with torrent tears,
And pale and reckless look,
And eye as cold as any stone,
In petrifying brook;
His shafts, his bow, he dashed on earth,
And swore he would expire;—
I took his bow and arrows both,
And burned them in my fire.
And all that all or aught could do,
Was useless to its end;
The flame, though fitful, flourished still,
In spite of foe or friend.
It warms me now; I feel it must
Respond to my desire;
For I have heaped both heart and soul
Upon that deathless fire.

Lucy.
Poor thing! I think you served him very ill;
But it accounts for our distressed condition;
For without arms, nor wound can he nor kill:
I'm half afraid he'll die of inanition.

Will.
With poets everything must deathless be;
Now it's the passingness of things that gives
Their most exciting charm to me;
Life has less beauty if it ever lives.
All loveliest things pass soonest; clouds and flowers,
Rainbows, heart-kindling glances, the sweet smile;
Because brief, we admire, or make them ours;
But we should slight them lived they longer while.

321

Charles.
It is sweet to dream we are blessed at last with her
Who first made rapture in our bosom stir;
Whose heart was fiction's home, while pure romance
Came purer from her lips; or was't, perchance,
Her soul was music's shrine, whence with skilled key,
Each clear delicious tone the world of sound
Owns, as akin to airs celestial, she
At will drew forth, and radiated around?
Though fairer, kinder since we may have known,
That first most innocent vision sits her throne;
Still in our sleep plays o'er young passion's part;
As pleasure's ghost still haunts the ruined heart;
Where lie the buried loves of younger years,
Whose rites and requiems are as sighs and tears.
Sleep on, ye living dead, in day, nor rise,
But in night's shadowy shapes and dreamy eyes.
Then, fade not, stir not till the imagined scene,
Brain-wrought, with earliest joy the soul possess:
'Tis bliss to have known the vision that hath been;
To dream of happiness is happiness.
But dearer than that tone, and than the dream
Sweeter, of bliss, or long-remembered love,
It is to feel we shall be deathless, here;
That earth will speak of us, when gone above.

George.
Sweeter and dearer still than all before,
Would be to hear some say, I'll say no more:
A blessing I can scarce expect to be
From those who are more near than dear to me;
You, Charles, for instance.

Charles.
Why, you greedy elf,
Would you have all the nonsense to yourself?

Helen.
Now let us have no argument, I pray.

Frank.
Suppose we have a pretty lively song.

Emma.
Suppose you sing it, then.

Frank.
Well, never say
I don't intend to help you, right or wrong.
Will no one sing? then I'll essay
A song I learned but yesterday.

Oh gaze on her beautiful soft rolling eye,
And revel with bliss in its languishing love;
Oh gaze on its darkness and brightness, and sigh
That truth from that heaven should ever remove.
Oh gaze on her ringlets of raven black hair;
And her delicate eyebrow's soft pencilly line;
Would her heart were but true as her bosom is fair;
That the saint were as worthy of love as the shrine.

I have gazed, I have loved, I have worshipped; but fain
I now would declare it, my madness is past;
But pleasure no more in my heart will remain
Than the sparkle of spray on the sand-beach cast.

322

I loathe her, and love her; I never can rail;
It is passed, and I reck not; my fortune I dare:
Henceforward, the shroud of my hopes is my sail;
And the peace which I sought, I have found—in despair.

Caroline.
If that's called lively, or in part or wholly,
The gods preserve me from your melancholy.

Helen.
If aught additional, of this kind,
Within your memory you should find,
And feel, to sing or say, inclined;
Like mayors' addresses, never read,
We'll take it, please, as sung,—or said.

Harry.
It is no use saying I adore you, Sophy;
For if I do you only cry out, oh fy!
Nathless, as some one else must sing;
Wait only till I screw this string.

I love not horse,
I love not wine;
Nor song, nor dance,
Be joys of mine.
And dull to me
Are the skies above;
I love not lore,
I love not love;
But thee I now
Love, and e'er will,
For love's the best
Point in me still;
And since my heart
Owns nought above thee,
It must be philo-
Sophy, to love thee.

Laurence.
Hast thou got anything there for me?
For surely thou never shouldst bring me near thee,
Unless thou hast some gift with thee
To bribe me to hear thee.

Edward.
I bring thee neither bribe nor boon,
I offer only flowers,
Which gathered thus the hope devise
Each other's hearts are ours.
Receive them lady, in that breast
With peace and purity to rest;
And oh, if not too much for prayer,
With them, my life my love be there.

Laura.
Thou mayst be happy if thou wilt,
Nor envy these poor flowers their spot;
For close as in a clenchèd hand
Thy love within my heart hath lot.

Fanny.
Who mentioned ghosts? In nothing I so glory
As a right thrilling, chilling, good ghost story.

Edward.
But on a soft and fragrant summer eve,
With glistening flowers and flashing waters by,

323

One lacks the proper impulse to believe:—
But then, I don't believe them.

Will.
Oh! nor I.

Lucy.
They want a fireside and a howling storm;
Summer time seems too sensuous and warm.

Frederic.
Oh! you are a parlous little infidel,
Or I could tell a tale; but I am not well.
My head seems wrong, and somehow, altogether,
Feels like a bullet on a peacock's feather.

Walter.
Do you believe that spirits interfere
With men, events, or actions anywhere?

Charles.
Let gold bagged priests, from Ganges to Bermudas,
The gospel preach, according to St. Judas;
It is my opinion, if the truth were known,
That earth pertains to man and beast alone;
And neither saint, nor fiend, nor bright nor dark angel,
Between the south pole and the port of Archangel,
Have any call, or leave, or will, or power
To meddle with a mortal for an hour.

Fanny.
Oh! you're an unbeliever.

Charles.
That is true,
So far as this—I don't believe in you.

Helen.
Sir, you are rude. But since my faith's attacked,
What of immortals? Is it not a fact
That saints and demons ofttimes interact?
Such the belief at least in times of yore,
Which, if we share not, our disgrace is more.
Things sacred and supernal did we mind
More, and omit the meaner cares of life,
Our souls would grow like holy, like refined,
With loftier thoughts and nobler actions rife.
There is an ancient legend I have heard
About a saint, a demon, and a stone,
Which bears upon this matter word for word;
A marvel I myself have seen and known.

Harry.
Enchant us, pray, still further. We will be
Moveless and mute to meet your wishes;
Yours the sole speech, your awful audience we;
Between us, Saint Antonio, and the fishes.

Helen.
A stone stands in a rustic town,
Which once the neighbouring hill did crown;
Nigh to the house of God it lay
Before 'twas set where now it stands;
And how and why there gray-beards say
Was ne'er the work of mortal hands;
But list, and ye eftsoons shall know,
From runes translated into rhyme,
How saint and fiend would have it so
Far back within the olden time.

324

That village church stands fair and free;
Those village bells peal merrily,
As well they might and still they may,
On many a bright autumnal day,
When both in hostel, cot, and hall,
They hold the village festival.
The godly rustics on that day
At church had met to praise and pray,
And thank the Giver of all good,
By him that died upon the rood,
For harvest stored and daily food;
And, as Saint Wilfrid's care they claimed,
Oft in their prayers his name was named.
At morn, at noon, at eventide,
Their task the merry ringers plied,
Pealing each time, with joy increased,
A welcome to the rustic feast.
But it roused the wrath of the fell fiend,
As high o'er minster fane he leaned,
In the dim glooming of the day,
Blent with the moonlight's silvery gray.
Quoth he, ‘I hate that holy peal;
Yon village church my wrath shall feel;’
He said: and from the stately lands,
Whereon the high cathedral stands,
He heaved a huge gray granite stone,
Erst as a druid altar known:
And lifting it between his teeth,
And three times scantly drawing breath,
Wide on the air his arms he spread,
And dropped it on the minster's head:
E'en as an eagle drops a hare
Brought for her callow younglets' fare.
Upon the main tower straight he stands,
And as he glanced o'er field and fell,
He weighed the weapon in his hands,
And took his aim and distance well:
And when the moon's last glimmering ray
Died on the tall church spire away,
Three hours he gazed it through the dark,
Nor winked his eye once on the mark.
As midnight tolled—for mightiest then
Is all demoniac power o'er men—
The rock he raised—foul fiend forbear!
And hurled it, hurtling, through the air.
Saint Wilfrid, from his seat above,
Where with the blessed, whose deathless days
Are passed 'tween deeds of sacred love
And their adored redeemer's praise,
Cast on the house of praise and prayer,

325

The object of his hallowed care,
One glance, and marked the missile fly
Midway betwixt the earth and sky,
A momentary prayer he made,—
And there the mighty mass was stayed;
Aloft in air the altar hung,
As moveless as before 'twas flung.
Then spake Saint Wilfrid: ‘Baffled fiend,
What evil can from heaven be screened?
Though in the depth of midnight thou
Didst ween to crush yon pile below,
Yet know that to celestial eyes
Divinest daylight never dies;
And saints defend the things they love,
As God protects the saints above.
While men invoke their holy names,
And on their prayers for succour call,
So long shall saints fulfil their claims,
So long their shrines shall never fall.’
He ceased; the air-arrested rock
Fell earthwards with a harmless shock,
A long half mile beyond the bound
Of the good church's hallowed ground.
The demon balked made off in rage,
And the stone slept for many an age.
And still, a startling sight I ween,
The foul fiend's teeth-dents may be seen;
And still, though grey and wondrous old,
The stone itself is never cold,
But keeps within its fated form
A gust of the fiend's fire-breath warm.

Charles.
Well, may we speak?

Helen.
Oh, certainly. Give tongue.

Charles.
I know not what is false if that be true;
Nor need we care or reckon what is wrong.

Helen.
You are content to take the shallowest view.
Apollo laid his lyre upon a stone;
The stone was seized with music; and the touch
Of mortal could awake the god's own tone
For ever after. Marvel ye not much.
Wherever God may choose, or man may dwell,
This is an ever-acting miracle.
When once the gift of godlike poesy
Hath touched the heart, it answers everything
In its own tongue, but with a harmony
Instinct of heaven. Let the world then fling
Its arms of honour round the poet's breast,
And heaven may hear earth's music and have rest.
Now true it is the great earth knoweth not
That it is part of heaven and God's own lot;

326

But some there are who know it. So there be
Bards who affect much infidelity;
Although they never can abandon quite
Their loyal love to the pure Infinite.

Charles.
True, my liege.

Helen.
Hush! now Frederic we await
The story that you spoke of. Tell it straight.

Frederic.
Please you, my liege, I'll try then and remember;
And for the rest—why, fancy it's December.
'Twas midnight, and a noble sat in his ancestral hall,
Where many a stern old portrait gloomed along the gilded wall;
And ivory, marble, ebony, and tapestries adorned
The seats he used, the floors he trode; for meaner things he scorned.
And youth, and fame, and might were his—the splendid might of mind;
His spirit swept and bowed all hearts as bending forests wind;
Yet youth and genius oft, too oft, in worship bow the knee,
At pleasure's shrine, in folly's fane; more madly none than he.
He sat, but not in solitude: a damsel by his side,
Of beauty bright and gay of heart, him with the wine cup plied;
Gazing on him with eye as though to him her soul were due:
Oh, nought 'neath heaven itself might match that eye's dark sunny blue!
From which, too, ever and anon smiles o'er her face would fly,
Like the electric flames which flit o'er summer's evening sky;
And pearls were beaded o'er her brow, and gems lit up her breast,
Like dew drops on the morning rose when wakening from rest,
‘One parting goblet,’ cried the youth, ‘ere I away to-night:
Bring me the old monk's skull-cup, girl; peace to his jovial sprite!’
She by the lofty window went,—where, in the moon's pale sheen,
The grey old cloisters arch about their fountain-centred green;
The statued satyrs seemed to grin and gibber 'neath her eye,
And as she looked, a death-like cloud came creeping up the sky,
And in one long and trembling moan the night gust strove to die;
Up to the ebon cabinet with flowery pearl inlaid,
And seized the goblet-skull, and laughed,—how laughed that merry maid!

327

He poured it full with bubbling wine, impatient to be quaffed,
Full to the silver-written rim, and drained it at a draught;
‘Ah, would its owner were but here!’ and gaily both they laughed.
‘Again,’ he cried,—‘but what is that stirs in the far-off gloom?’
The lady looked, and shrieked, and rushed out of that royal room.
Enveloped in a sable cowl, and stole of sightless hue,
A ghostly figure glided swift that noble youth unto.
Why drops the goblet from his grasp? Why trembles he with dread?
The grave hath given birth;—he sees a spirit of the dead!
Another moment, unappalled, erectly still he stands;
Not he would quail to man nor fiend, for half his goodly lands.
Yet, like a tree by sudden gust, his soul was seized with fear
An instant—and his spirit shook as drew the spectre near;
His small white hand, veined like a leaf, close to his bosom clung,
And every nerve and sinew grew like to a bowstring strung,
As with a shadow's voice it said—‘I am the Monk of old,
A fragment of whose mortal frame I at thy feet behold.
For that I plead not, reck not now; a thing of nobler fate
Hast thou perverted and defiled than aught of human state,
Than bone or body; sin, in truth, the soul doth desecrate.’
‘Nay, holy father!’ said the youth, ‘if thou hast left old Death
To preach to me at dead of night, waste not thy pious breath!
Pledge me in this! the night is cold, yet colder is the grave;
And wine will warm thee. Shrink not back: immortals should be brave.
Ah! knowst the cup? Well, heed it not! right welcome shalt thou be
To drain it with me every night, and—benedicite.’
With that he raised the cup to fill and quaff it as before,
Till fast as poured the wine became but dust encrusted gore;
He cast it on the fire,—the lake could not have quenched it more.
Again the spectre spake, and still in cold and tomb-like tone,
‘Drink thou with whom thou wilt, with girls, with gallants, or alone;
I come to warn thee of thy fate; a fate to me made known.’

328

The old monk raised his cowl; nor face, nor feature was there there;
Nay, nothing but two eyes which burned like stars distinct in air.
‘Thou in a foreign clime shalt die, and thy poor fleshly frame
Be borne across the seas to rest by theirs from whom it came.
Thy heart alone shall be inurned upon the spot where thou
Wilt pay the forfeit of thy life; where Death looks for thee now.
Embalmed, enshrined thy heart shall be, in gemmed and costly case,
And as a thing of worship set before a nation's face;
Till, in the lapse of coming years, some sacrilegious thief
Shall filch that relic, set at nought that weeping people's grief.
The sacred dust which dwelt within, the dust which now swells high
Within thy bosom, he shall strew abroad relentlessly.
And this in retribution, youth, for that thou there hast done.’
The voice, the vision ceased, and lo! that instant it was gone.
Again the night wind sweeps along those old and ivied halls;
Again o'er lake and fountain free the witching moonlight falls;
Chequering through the panes the dim old paintings round the walls.
But there was one who never went into that room again;
And prayers, and tears, and jeers were each alike essayed in vain.
That dark unearthly visitor was ever in her mind,
Like to the awe which filleth fanes where gods have once been shrined.
And morning met the youth all pale, and pacing to and fro:—
But ah! the goblet skull he touched never again, I trow.

Lucy.
There; does not that convert you?

Charles.
Not a whit.
I don't believe a single word of it;
Nor yet of summer fairies, winter ghosts,
Nor any other spiritual hosts.

Sophia.
See then how inconsistent you must be
In the sad tale you told us about love.

Charles.
The credit of my creed concerns but me,
Either in earth below or heaven above.

Helen.
You speak more laxly, Charles, than I think prudent;

329

And quite forget your recent life as student.

Charles.
But students, whatsoe'er their kind,
Must now and then unstring the mind.
In years gone by I have believed so much,—
My liege imperial knows I don't deceive her,
That as infinity does on nothing touch,
My next door neighbour's now an unbeliever;
And no one can imagine who has not
Tried incredulity, how blessed his lot.

Emma.
Just now, Charles, you uncourteously named
The fairies.

Charles.
I confess.

Emma.
Then I propose,—
Of your impiety are we so ashamed,
A solemn censure on such loose opinions;
And strict expulsion from these free dominions.

Caroline.
Have mercy!

Helen.
What can be too bad for those
Who'll not believe their senses? I suppose
All here have seen the rings the fairies track
In dancing on the mead; and he must lack
Mere sense who doubts of their existence, when
Their footsteps are as marked as those of men?

Charles.
Commandress of the beautiful! of these thrones
Supreme disposer! star incarnate, hear!
Thy sceptral lily no companion knows;
Thy flowery crown no rival in our sphere.
And though we all have doubtless, curious, viewed,—
While large o'erloaded wealthy looking wains,
Quietly swaggering home through leafy lanes,
In autumn evening's shadowy solitude,
Leave upon all low branches, as they come,
Straws for the birds, ears of the harvest home,—
Those dark green rings where fairies sit and sup,
Crushing the roseate dew in the acorn cup;
Where by his new made bride, the bridegroom sips,
The white round moon upon his longing lips
Shimmering; yet know, 'tis only by report,
By fiction, legend, by mistake, in short,
We smiling tell the old tradition;
And half affect to understand.
But while I grant your loftier position,
Ask any fiery proof which may demand
The fateful service of this loyal hand;
I'll not be reasoned into superstition.

Helen.
Men! I give notice I am sitting here
To answer and console the sad in heart.
Who is in love?

Charles.
I am, sweet judge, I fear,
And hope unbiassed you will take my part.

330

Helen.
What do you wish?

Charles.
Fair justice, if it please—

Helen.
To mock our ears with your mock miseries?
Sit; we'll not hear them. You shall truly tell
That love does oftener than he says, farewell.

Charles.
With truth I cannot; but I'll state my case.

Helen.
May it bear out your miserable face!

Charles.
I have lived on ladies' eyes,
Dined on kisses, supped on sighs;
I have warmed me with their smiles,
I have been wet through with tears;
They've half-slain me with their wiles—
Charming, cheating, pretty dears;
They have scratched me in their play,
Sighed and sucked the wound away;
They have squeezed me black and blue,
Roughed my hair and boxed my ears,
Laughed and looked me through and through:
Oh the cruel angel dears!

Fanny.
Indeed you have been sadly treated.

Charles.
Ah me! how I have been jilted, cheated;
It would move the passion of a stone;
And yet when not with ladies I'm alone.
I like the company of women most,
And after theirs my own:
Among men I feel always lost.
Ladies' society for me, or none.

Helen.
Peace! say no more. We all agree in part.
This court thinks fit to confiscate your heart;
And, till the fine be paid, to one at least—
Some lady here—you cannot be released.
Begone! thank us that you escape so well
From what it is impossible to tell.

Charles.
Oh! I appeal against my fate.

Helen.
Just as a cur a coach may bait.
It nought avails.

Charles.
But what am I to do?
The puzzling power of a pair of eyes!
One pair is black, one grey, another blue:
I am a sacrifice!
They are three—the sweet sisters I love in my heart,
And all so unlike and so fair;
When with all, I am longing to love them apart,
And apart, I would all of them there.
By the world, I dare say, I shall greedy be reckoned,
But my wish I can name in a word:
I would live with the first, I would die with the second,
And immortal I'd be with the third.

Helen.
Go: we have pardoned you with like contrition,
As we condemned—without condition;

331

This point excepted—that you sing a song
In token your deliverance is wrong,
Though just my judgment. Pray don't keep us long;
Or banishment perhaps may be your lot.

Charles.
Oh! I protest against it.

Others.
Despot fair,
Your sentence is too cruel.

Helen.
Hold slaves, what?
Dispute! I fine you each. So now, despair.
Thus We adopt first the most stringent measure;
Our taxes are your songs, your fines our pleasure.
These ladies will assist you now and then.

Laura.
Oh, certainly.

Emma.
Behave yourselves like men.

Charles.
There's no escaping, it appears to me,
However nod and wink, etc., be.

I look on thee while singing,
Thou bright-eyed love of mine,
As misers while they're ringing
The gold they love to shine.

Then while on this poor earth,
Where pain and sorrow bound us,
We'll quaff the wine in mirth,
And music make around us;

We'll drink the wine-god, Bacchus,
And all our merry friends,
And if old Death attack us,
Why, then, the frolic ends.

Laurence.
Pray, is that all? The moral, to my thought,
Is yet to come, as certainly it ought.

Frank.
When a man asks for morals, it's a sign
That he is wanting either them or wine.

Charles.
Let the young be glad! though cares in crowds
Leave scarce a break of blue,
Yet hope gives wings to morning clouds;
And while their shade the sky enshrouds—
By love and wine which through them shine,
They are turned to a golden hue.
Then give us wine, for we ought to shine
In the hour of dark and dew.

Helen.
A broad hint truly. Pay the bard his fee.
I dare say he is thirsty.

Frank and Others.
So are we!

Charles.
What ho! a butt of sack!

Helen.
But no butt here
Or sack you'll get another way I fear.
Remember that, within our sacred sight,
You should continue abstinent, to-night.

332

Indeed I don't approve that sort of song;
And think it very rude and rather wrong.
To make my subjects good is my main plan;
Let them be merry with it, if they can.
Mind, as it is, I am resolved almost,
To make you forfeit your important post.

Charles.
Lady, I swear I never to offend meant.
Our next shall move you all as an amendment.

Helen.
Now seriatim, gentles, if you please;
We are quite resolved to list your melodies.

Lucy.
Come, no more flinching.

Frank, Walter, and Others,
apart.
Let us sing a glee
And so by singing all at once, evade
The separate penalty.

Edward.
Dost think that she,
The tyrant of this fair festivity,
Will bear to have her words so far bewrayed?
No more than ice bear blood-heat in the shade.

Walter.
We can but try.

Charles.
Remember what I told you,
And think upon the bright eyes that behold you.

The crow—the crow! the great black crow!
He cares not to meet us wherever we go;
He cares not for man, beast, friend, nor foe,
For nothing will eat him he well doth know.
Know—know! you great black crow!
It's a comfort to feel like a great black crow!

The crow—the crow! the great black crow!
He loves the fat meadow—his taste is low;
He loves the fat worms, and he dines in a row
With fifty fine cousins all black as a sloe.
Sloe—sloe! you great black crow!
But it's jolly to fare like a great black crow.

The crow—the crow! the great black crow!
He never gets drunk on the rain or snow;
He never gets drunk, but he never says no!
If you press him to tipple ever so.
So—so! you great black crow!
It's an honour to soak like a great black crow.

The crow—the crow! the great black crow!
He lives for a hundred years and mo';
He lives till he dies, and he dies as slow
As the morning mists down the hill that go.
Go—go! you great black crow;
But it's fine to live and die like a great black crow.

Helen.
Your principles are purer, I perceive. You
Are much the same in practice.

Frank.
I believe you.

Edward.
Freedom, authority,—twin poles
Round which revolve all human souls,—

333

The many choose that easier state
Where others for them arbitrate;
These, stronger, liberty prefer,
With livelier pleasure, power to err;
But lest rebellion dare dispute the helm
With her, appointed over us, to be
The crownèd mistress of our joyous realm,
I here maintain her sacred sovereignty.
Firm to her throne, her crown, I stand,
And vouch her irresponsible command.

Helen.
Thanks, Edward; I would knight you on the spot,
But, really, I'm afraid my sword's forgot.
However, take my verbal accolade!
Imagine I embrace you; and in proof
Of your high act of fealty just made,
Sing, sir, I charge you, on your own behoof.

Edward.
Sing I cannot; but if you please to list
A fable, from a fine old moralist,
Whose name I have forgotten—but no matter—
Æsop, or some one—probably the latter—
Mark! In the silver age, ere guile had birth,
While beasts yet spake the mother tongue of earth,
Which the birds set to music, and each kind
Lived in pure order, and with friendlike mind,
The lion and the horse, the ass and mule,
Had shared the earth among them; but each grown
Ambitious to possess all power alone,
They therefore met to settle who should rule.
The eagle they petitioned to preside,
And swore by his decision to abide.
The bird of curvèd beak and radiant eye
Bowed wordlessly, and swept down from the sky.
Imprimis, said the ass, be it known that I,
Beside myself—though now being noon they sleep—
Speak for the beeves, and represent the sheep.
A pack, the lion cried, of lazy elves!
Take notice, that we represent ourselves.
The horse responded, true! The mule concurred.
Now, quoth the eagle, let the cause be heard.
My liege, the lion took him at the word.
He need not say he came of royal race;
His voice was thunder; most he loved the chase;
And hated aught was cowardly or base.
He for his magnanimity was famed;
And only what he killed he fairly claimed.
The deity beside had honoured him
And chose his countenance 'mid the cherubim.
The horse, too, claimed descent from noblest blood:
His fathers formed the sun-god's fiery stud;

334

Foremost in war, in peace, in use, in show,
The choicest he of all the brutes below.
The ass then; what you each have said is true
But hath an angel e'er appeared to you?
I trow not; humbly therefore I precede
Lion and horse, I think; both great indeed,
But ne'er have known the glory to be rode,
As I have, by the Son, on earth, of God;
In memory whereof, across my shoulders,
A cross may be beheld by all beholders.
At this the horse and lion jerked their manes;
Their mouths could boast of honours without reins;
Neither did glory in subjection lie.
I boast not, quoth the ass, heaven knows, not I;
But to be guided by a mightier mind
Than of your own, or man's, your master's kind,
Is honour. Said the horse, in pride self-schooled,
That only proves you fittest to be ruled.
The question now is—as I understand—
Which of us four is fittest to command.
That is the question, said the lion coldly.
Why, then, broke in the mule, a trifle boldly,
If in my own poor person I can prove
All your chief virtues, at but one remove,
Or those of two of you, at least, 'twere best
Choose me at once, and set the thing at rest.
'Tis true I do not roar, nor do I bray;
Some think my whinny very like a neigh;
And with good reason, I am proud to say.
To you, dear ass, upon the sire's side,
To you, sir steed, I'm on the dam's, allied;
Wherefore,—A fig for this vain pedigree,
Exclaimed the lion; what's all this to me?
Shall I my long-lived ancestry declare,
And tawny mothers in their Libyan lair?
My race preceded Adam's; that I swear.
Perhaps, you'll say next who's your son and heir.
His would-be majesty hung down his head.
Mark him! the mule's indulgent kindred said,
Go, child. Content you with an humbler rule.
Seek not the throne. Remember you're a mule.
Your many rare and virtuous parts we own;
But make no pretext to the bestial throne.
We all are sensible—The mule replied,
We are all too sensible, on our own side.
It goes against my nature to contend;
I never was called obstinate—with a friend.
From this dispute I henceforth hold aloof;
And here abjure,—but no, accept my hoof.
Good, said the eagle; on that view I base

335

My judgment in this all important case.
Let each competitor his natural place
Resume. The lion, monarchlike, alone
Hath sympathies with no race but his own;
And therefore may, impartial, fill the throne.
The rest, that with each other kindly blend,
And form one type of being, we commend
To labour and endure, this; that, to fend
The throne against the legioned herd, or those
'Gainst any that may chance to prove their foes.
And if aught hostile 'tween those twain should pass,
Let the great lion guard the burdened ass;
For labour is most honoured, as we see
The ass, by heaven's all working deity.
In rank though last, in honour first he stands,
Conscious of contact with divinest hands.
Let horse, ass, lion, thus to live agree,
Share and obey a mutual sovereignty;
And the fourth aid and mediate 'tween the three;
Intact in nature, ever furthering peace
And moderated temper. So shall cease
All strife among you, and supreme respect
Grace the pure power such good that can effect.
To this the four assented, and retired,
Well pleased. The eagle into heaven aspired.

Caroline.
O happy days! but then, you must allow,
Brutes spoke as sensibly as men do now.

Edward.
If all said square not wholly with the time
Firstly laid down, it matters not in rhyme;
Which, with an all-controlling care of things,
Gives its own laws to chaos or to kings.

Frank.
A heart full of feeling, a cup full of wine;
Come—sip, love; come—sip, love;
There's nothing I lack but that sweet lip of thine;
Thy lip, love—thy lip, love.
Thine eyes are like two romping stars,
That look as they had drank of wine;
And flying from night's brow, had brought
Their liquid love to thine.
But I forget; they're not the words I mean.

Helen.
Wilt sing, Sophia?

Sophia.
I obey thee, queen.
Of knight and lady to each other true,
I sing the generous lay, their due.

Yes, lady dear, for aye—adieu!
The false world I defy, lady;
But thou, sweet soul, so fair, so true,
I would thou couldst not sigh, lady.
Oh! mind thee not of me when gone,
But lay thy memory by, lady:
In light and joyaunce live thou on;
Leave me, leave me to sigh, lady!

336

O fair! O true! for aye I go;
From thee, from thee I hie, lady:
I must not yield me to thy woe,
I dare not list thee sigh, lady.
Yonder thou seest my father's hall,
Whose turrets pierce the sky, lady;
Ah! rather might they on me fall,
Than I would hear thee sigh, lady!

To far-off lands now wends his way;
And, if he there should die, lady,
Oh! let thy true love, happy, say
He never caused thee sigh, lady.
Farewell for aye! It wrings thy heart,
It drowns thy darkening eye, lady.
Farewell! I feel what 'tis to part;
But say thou wilt not sigh, lady!

Will.
May none here ever know as true
The false cold lover's last adieu!
But yet to show things as they be,
The false maid thus ye all may see.

Thou lov'st another, maiden!
And I am free as thou;
My heart with scorn is laden,
To speak but with thee now.
Though through thy glossy ringlets
My hand hath often played,
Here—take it back! I loathe it—
The long imbosomed braid.
Away, away! no more with thee,
Thou falsest, fairest maid!

One heart is ripe and laden
With love for me e'en now;
I'll woo me then the maiden
More kind, more true than thou.
Then give it to my rival,
The black and glossy braid;
And give the hand which twined it,
The cheek whereon it played.
Away, away! no more with thee,
Thou fairest, falsest maid!

Helen.
There beams, methinks, a story in those eyes,
Lucy, of thine, of faithfulness to death,
Unlike the desolate discords which now rise
So oft 'tween hearts love still companioneth.

Lucy.
Most gentle sovereign! sacred be thy hest;
Would the light levy yet were worthier thee.
My lay belongs then to the city bright,
Which, goddess-like, sprang sparkling from the sea.

Thus to a fair Venetian maid,
The proudest of the train,
With which the Doge went forth arrayed
To wed his vassal main:
‘This very day,’ her lover said,
‘Will Venice go the sea to wed.’

337

‘Now tell me, lady, what to do,
To win this hand of thine;
I'll risk both soul and body too,
For such a prize divine.’
‘I'll have the bridal ring,’ said she,
‘Wherewith the Doge will wed the sea!

Came forth the Doge and all his train,
And sailed upon the sea;
The banners waved, and music's strain
Rose soft and heavenwardly;
And blue waves raced to seize the ring
Which glided through them glittering.

The lover through the bright array
Rushed by the Doge's side:
A plunge—and plume and mantle gay
Lay lashing on the tide;
He heard a shriek, but down he dived,
To follow where the ring arrived.

He sought so long, that all above
Believed him gone for aye;
Nor knew they 'twas his haughty love
Who shrieked and swooned away.
At length he rose to light—half dead—
But held the ring above his head.

The lady wept—the lover smiled—
She had not deemed he would
Have dared it,—was a foolish child—
And loved as none else could.
‘Take it, and be a faithful bride
To death,’ the lover said, and died.

The lady to a convent hied,
And took the holy vows;
And was till death a faithful bride
To her eternal spouse.
And then the ring her lover gave
They buried with her in her grave.

Walter.
A gem may have a hundred sides,
And glitter bright in each:
Where true philosophy presides
Pleasure it is to teach;
I therefore choose the charms of happy faith,
Secure in love's all present joy;
From aught that might e'en dreams alloy,
With dread of future skaith.

I dreamed of thee, love, in the eve,
And I lay among bright blushing flowers;
I awoke—and, ah! how could I grieve,
If the blooms hurried back to their bowers?

I dreamed of thee, love, in the night,
And the stars stood around by my head;
I awoke to thy beauty so bright,
And the stars hid their faces and fled.

338

I dreamed of thee, love, in the morn,
And a poet's bright dreamings drew nigh;
I awoke, and I laughed them to scorn:
They were black by the blink of thine eye.

I dreamed of thee, love, in the day,
And I wept, as I slept, o'er thy charms;
I awoke, as my dream went away,
And my tears were all wet on thine arms.

Helen.
Ah! who would long for bliss above,
That tastes the joys below?
Or, hanging on the lips of Love,
Would seek to kiss his brow?
Unless to change and clear the taste,
Lest sweets in sameness run to waste.

George.
Come, do you dance?

Laurence.
No; we two here remain.

Marian.
But why indulge in mutual sorrows vain?
And if I grant this one request—

Laurence.
It is the last time I shall be so blessed.
Oh! thou art kind, and I will think
This wine to be thy love I drink;
Blood my heart would gladly miss,
Could it so be filled with this;
And each pulse would madlier move,
Warm with wine, alive with love.
Look upon it, love, and weep
Thine eyelight o'er its purple deep;
So each luminous glance shall be
Like a phosphor globelet in the sea.
Other lovers soon will sue thee—
Let them—they will ne'er possess
More than I enjoy who view the
Lightning of thy loveliness.
It may be love and light in heaven,
But here on earth such love is death;
And such light is blindness driven,
Lance-like, through the breast and breath.
All who love thee sure will die:
Thy beauty hath fatality.
For now is near my heart's last hour;
I feel it fading like a flower,
When folding up its leaves to rest,
And narrowing in its own sweet breast.
I mean not that I die to-day,
But that my spirit wears away.
And, save thyself, sees nought to lure it
Back to earth's falsehoods which immure it.

Marian.
Thou wilt live yet many happy years,
Far more in number than the tears

339

Men shed o'er broken hearts, if not
When first forsaken, aye forgot;
While we, according to old fashion,
With our own tears must slake our passion;
Or weeping in our bosoms lorn and lone,
Try if tears cannot turn the heart to stone.

Laurence.
Promise, dearest, when I die.

Marian.
Such phrase can scarce to me apply.

Laurence.
Not to mourn, nor weep, nor sigh;
Eyes like thine should never weep,
Nor sweet bosom sorrow keep.
Let nor stone, nor verse, nor aught,
Mark where rests—what loved and thought;
If they ask thee where I lie,
Say, within thy memory.
Weep not thou o'er grave of mine;
Sprinkle on it sparkling wine;
That shall keep the grass all new
Like to an immortal dew;
And some fallen star shall stay,
Watching, while thou art away.
Scatter rose and ivy wreath
On the turf I rest beneath;
Dance and sing my favourite song,
Through the deep blue twilight long;
In that rich and ringing tone,
Heaven to thee, love, lends alone.
When I'm gone, then, come again;
Talk to me in lightsome strain;
Should I answer, start not thou!
I'll but say I'm blessed as now;
Should no sound the silence break,
Think me, oh! too blessed to speak.
Let me lie till angels say,
Wake! the world's long week is passed:
Spirit! this is holy-day;
This is God's—the best and last.

Marian.
Well were such feeling, such request,
To any save to me addressed.

Helen.
Come Marian, having finished our parade,
We have leisure now to list another lay:
But since you have not been dancing, I'm afraid
Laurence and you are idle, lovesick, say?

Marian.
Could I comply I'd not remain thus mute.

Frederic.
Shall I sing for you as a substitute?

I saw a rose was fading—
Fading 'neath mine eye;
When thus, with love's upbraiding,
I heard that passed one sigh:—
Oh! give me back one blush—

340

But one from out the many
I loved to give to thee
Ere other I knew any—
Liked or looked on any.

For I am sad and lonely—
Lone and like to die;
Oh! give me back one only,
I am too weak to cry.
The beam, the breeze, the dew,
Shun now my shrinking bosom;
Tears I have need but few,
Their brine can bring no blossom—
Me, nor blight nor blossom.

Then to that rose was failing—
Failing 'neath mine eye,
I said, 'tis useless wailing;
Forget, forgive, and die.
One look to heaven in prayer,
And one to me in kindness;
The deathwind shook its leaves,
And I was one with blindness—
Lone in burning blindness.

Harry.
Although I would not needlessly intrude—

Fanny.
To sing, not being asked, is rude.

Harry.
To cease with such a dull down-hearted ditty,
Would be a wrong, I think, as well as pity.

Lucy.
Pray, sing us something livelier, then.

Sophia.
And don't be personal again.

Annie's eyes are like the night,
Nell's are like the morning gray;
Fanny's like the gloaming light,
Hal's are sunny as the day:
Bright—dark—blue—gray,
I could kiss them night and day:
Grey—blue—dark—bright—
Morning, evening, noon, and night.

Annie's brow's arched like the sky,
Nell's is white without a spot;
Hal's is as a palace high,
Fanny's lowly like a cot:
High—arched—low—white,
I could kiss them day and night;
White—low—arched—high,
Kiss them night and day could I.

Annie's lips are warm and bright,
Fanny's free and full of play;
Hal's are sweetest out of sight,
Nell's are always in the way:
Bright—warm—sweet—play,
I could kiss them night and day;
Play—sweet—warm—bright,
All the day and all the night.

341

Lucy.
Had I a little sister
Just a fairy, six years old;
And with eyes of grey or blue,
Or of dark, or sunny hue,
Why, I think I might have kissed her,
In the way that you have told.
But for sake of sleep and quiet,
'Twould be mad, I think, to try it.

Will.
Mulcted in song I hasten to discharge
The debt I owe, and pay it thus in large.

Oh! Love's a bold pirate—the soul of the sea!
He impresses the proud, and he fetters the free;
His flag's a red heart, in the bows are his guns,
And the wind's always with him—the foe ever runs.

Oh! Love's a bold pirate—the son of the sea!
The winds are his laws, and his laws make him free.
The star that he steers by, her eye he adores,
And the haven he's bound for, earth's infinite shores.

Oh! Love's a bold pirate—the sword of the sea!
For the poor he hath plunder, and fame for the free;
At home in a chase, he nor spares foe nor friend;
Though a stern chase, and long chase, the longest must end.

Oh! Love's a bold pirate—the pet of the sea!
He will do all, and dare all, 'gainst all that may be;
He hails her all fair, just before they fall to't,
And his foe makes his prize and his consort to boot.

Helen.
Were Festus here, and his strange friend,
Who like his shadow, follows him,
We should not feel so lost, nor lend
One's heart to mirth I scarce commend;
Mirth, whose hot breath pure soul will dim.
For he whom all here present, love,
And I adore, fails ne'er to move
Our hearts to dwell on loftier themes
Than pleasure's chase, or joy's vain dreams.

Charles.
Your loveliness is always right,
In fallibility's despite.
Though now as fond of harmless mirth,
As any faithless miscreant on the earth;
Yet cultured mind it scarce beseems,
All art's achievements, wisdom's gains,
And truths, which knowledge justly deems
Outbalance conquest's costliest pains,
For youth's vain joys to sacrifice;
And mute but bright applause of beauty's eyes.

Helen.
Witness, ye stars! the vow to you addressed;
Shall never more such thoughtless hours be given
By me to merest pleasures! Thus confessed,

342

Behold this crosslet, from its velvet rest,
Like birdling bright, from mother's nest
Snatched, I have placed upon my breast;
Sign that for higher aims my soul hath striven;
You, Charles, have seen me, and shall know the rest.

Charles.
I marked a constellation rise in heaven.

Marian.
And what remains for me but rest,
Acceptance, and a soul to peace resigned?
Let me not heaven's decrees contest,
Nor scan with carping mind.
Life to lay down, as love to leave,
If called, I ought without regret;
Comes not the beauty of the eve
Till all the sun be set.
And though they last not quite an hour,
Yet have the vespers more
Of holy evercoming power,
Than all day-rites before.
If soon the sunshine of my day
Hath grown beclouded, who shall say
Life's worse probation is not o'er?

Helen.
Be it, for mercy's sake, I pray.
And now that we enough have laughed and mourned,
This house of kings and queens must stand adjourned.
The day hath darkened into twilight, night
Hath glittered into starlight, since we met;
The restorative dew hangs thick and bright
On herb and tree and flower; yon foamy jet
Flings up its bubbling music chillier now;
And droop the blooms that long have wreathed the brow.
Ladies, and you bold serfs! I now propose
To bring this joyous vigil to a close;
And as all bidden have now paid their fine,
To leave these heroes to their fate—their wine.

Charles.
Except yourself, dear despot, all
Have done their best to hum or squall;
But if your beautyship would condescend
To teach us what true melody might be,
There's not a creature present but would lend
His ears to listen for a century.

Helen.
Sir, I respect you for your flattery;
All compliments of course are strange to me;
The moral strength required for flattery now,
To a fair queen is great you must allow:
I only envy you the power to make them.

Charles.
'Tis sure the better part to take them.

Helen.
We don't believe them when you pay them.

Charles.
Nor we when we say them.
No longer then, ladies, I pray,
At our flattery or fickleness grieve;

343

If you never believe what we say,
We never say what we believe.

Helen.
From our rule and example, gentles, learn,
And lay this to your hearts each one in turn:
Pay compliments, pay visits, pay respects,
But pay your just debts first.

Harry.
Our whole effects!

Helen.
The royal rule of pure equality,
In complaisance and kindness, still shall be
Confided in, and reverenced by me:
So shall my deed of abdication make
All love the loser for the losing's sake.
Attend! my song the constancy discovers
Of a right royal pair of lovers.

Come, beloved, let us roam
Forth into the golden fields;
Yon high palace marks our home,
Ours is all that nature yields:
Come, betrothèd and espoused,
Earth is rising towards the sun,
And with light and joy aroused,
Meets the love within us one.

Open now thy sleep-dewed eyes,
Show the subject soul its queen;
Brighter than the newborn skies
Their delicious depths I ween.
Don thee, love, thy royal white;
Needs no more divine array;
Fairer than the morning light,
Rule thou ever with the day.

Come the morrow, day divine,
All shall wake and bless the sun;
Those thou lovest shall be mine,
They and thou and I be one:
Crown and throne the world shall gain,
Thou the universal state;
Bride of beauty, rise and reign,
Love thy life, and heaven thy fate.

Charles.
The meaning whereof as I take it,—

Helen.
True; it's exactly what you make it.

George.
There's only one thing wanting that could mend
That song;—a blaze of fireworks at the end.

Helen.
Farewell, friends! let us hope to meet again
When others may be present whom we know.

Edward.
Adieu! ye semideities! in vain
The world may worship idols.

George.
Pray, do go!—

Walter.
At last the so-called soulless have departed,
Leaving sundry broken-hearted.

Frederic.
To make the life of perfect mould,
Like that in Paradise of old,

344

Each must give their better part;
We our soul and they their heart.

Laurence.
The night hath gone, and all the stars
Have vanished at the sun's bright warning;
Still the moon, ghostlike, haunts the heaven,
As though she deemed to her 'twas given:
What hath the moon to do with morning?
So love is fled, and all the fair
Gone; some with smiling, some with scorning,
Save one, the fairest far above:
But what have I to do with love,
More than the moon hath with the morning?
The moon hath lost her light, and seems
To dim the scene she was once adorning:
So my poor heart, its lovelight gone,
Still in the heavens where late it shone,
Lags like the moon upon the morning.
But I am likest to that moon in this,
That I am brightest when my love's away;
For when with her my borrowed light is lost,
As is the moon's amid the dazzling day.

Charles.
I hear a step; 'tis his I am sure
By those most wished who forced to endure
These mumbled monologues disdain,
Justly, I think, their selfish strain.

Will.
Friends it becomes friends' trust to seek;
And social, mid such themes as these,
Fit matters fitly treat; nor speak
Of aught not apt to mirth and ease.

Frank.
'Tis Festus! welcome.

Festus.
Glad am I
To light on guests so well disposed,
So well engaged.

George.
One beaker try
Ere yet this flask's account be closed.

Harry.
Good! pass the ruby round. There's nought so dull
As to behold a noble vessel full
Of radiant blessings, halt upon its way;
So fairly give and fairly take, I say.
Progress is nature's unexpected law;
'Twere better e'en to go from bad to worse,
Than 'tween two like degrees of ill see-saw;
Stagnation is an universal curse.
There is nothing stands still—so old sages declare,
But the world's ever changing in earth, sea, and air;
All the powers of nature, in truth if we trace,
What are they?—what are they, but running a race?
The winds from all quarters career through the sky;
They blow hot, they blow cold, they blow swift, they blow high;

345

They follow, they flank, and they fly in our face;
What are they?—what are they, but running a race?
The rivers that run to the ends of the earth,
Flow thousands of miles from the place of their birth;
From the old and the new world they pour out apace;
What are they?—what are they but running a race?
The worlds they call wanderers, rolling on high,
That enlighten the earth and enliven the sky;
Going hundreds of miles in a minute through space;
What are they?—what are they, but running a race?
Then with goblets before us, whatever they hold,
Let the hue of the nectar be purple, be gold,—
Let us say as we sit among friends, face to face,
What are they?—what are they, but running a race?

Frederic.
Thou'rt scarcely, Festus, quite so gay
As when, long since, thou went'st away.

Festus.
I've seen,—what now I cannot say;
But things that tend the mind to free—

Frederic.
From what we'll not discuss. I see!
No more of all our old hilarity!

Laurence.
All this is lively. Beauty, love, and mirth
Might seem to flavour even vapid earth
To a pure spirit's lips. For my own part,
I own it sinks life deeper in my heart,
At every fresh recurrence: but at times
A thought comes tolling o'er the darkened soul
Which we dare hardly guest; but ill it chimes
With scenes of joy like this, which from the roll
Of memory we too oft would fain erase.

George.
Not I, one jot, save your ill-omened face.

Walter.
For sacred riddles this is neither time nor place.

Laurence.
No: but of earth some sacred writings tell
Its flower was paradise, its fruit was hell.
Such is the fruit of worldly pleasure now;
And thus perhaps my meaning you may trace.

Harry.
We do; but think it useless to avow
Such views at festive moments like the present.

Charles.
Indeed they call up notions quite unpleasant.
So, let us rout them by another draught,
And thoughts bright as the beverage quaffed.

Harry.
The future is the world of youth—
The future is our joy;
We dream of honour, love, and truth,
And bliss without alloy.
But harp not now on love or truth,
Forget your dreams of glory;
The wine will double us our youth;
To-morrow dream again of sooth;
But now to what's before ye.

346

Charles.
Some say Truth lies in water, some in wine;
Suppose I mix them; now she must be mine.

Frank.
Nothing again will serve to make us merry.

Frederic.
'Twas stupid in you, Laurence.

Laurence.
Was it?

Will.
Very.

Edward.
Infernal cant you'll always find
Upsets all pleasant parties of this kind.

George.
He has put the company, 'tis plain, to flight.

Walter.
And so I say—

Charles.
I'm going, too.

All.
Good night!

Festus.
Now and again, earth's scenes to me
Grow dearer, as I rarelier see.
So whilst yon streak of lowliest light
Steals, as to kiss the upward steps of night,
Wait I, to watch, alone the birth
Sublime of morning on the earth.
She comes! how beauteous are her smiles,
The ever glorious morn;
Up from old ocean and his isles,
Her car of radiance borne
By the wingèd steeds of light,
Spurning far the shades of night;
While darkness gathers round her head,
Her heavy wings that late lay spread
Wide o'er the sleeping world;
She quits her home, she flies away;
Abandons her usurpèd sway;
To shame and exile hurled;
Thus falsehood fly, in that blessed hour,
When truth for aye resumes her long lost right and power.

347

XXII.

Not all regardless, meanwhile, for dear heart
So lost, but elsewhere bent, through many a sphere,
Celestial precincts quit, our venturous soul,
Heaven's varied vast of worlds having long essayed,
Of spirits sublime consociate, now returned,
To his life's new liege;—and joyously they greet
As boat by breeze, and billow, backed by tide,
His bright experiences of heavenly homes
Relates, where spiritual natures kind and high,
Light-born, which can divine eternal things,
Passed and to come, dwell; of the friendly fiend,
Tells ominously,—uneyeable of the mass,
Strange forms will show;—and something comforting speaks,
From angel lips learned, of lost Eden's crown.
The walls of Paradise are built up of stones,
All virtues. Help we God to edify
Within ourselves, his spiritual temple here.

House, Garden, and Terrace, by a River.
Festus and Helen: afterwards Lucifer.
Helen.
Come to the light, love! Let me look on thee.
Let me make sure I have thee. Is it thou?
Is this thy hand? Are these thy velvet lips,—
Thy lips so lovable? Nay, speak not yet!
For oft as I have dreamed of thee, it was
Thy speaking woke me. I will dream no more.
Am I alive? And do I really look
Upon these soft and sea-blue eyes of thine,
Wherein I half believe I can espy
The riches of the sea? Nay, heavenly hued
As though they had gained from gazing on the skies
Their high and starry beauty. These dark rolled locks!
Oh God! art thou not glad, too, he is here?—
Where hast thou been so long? Never to hear,
Never to see, nor see one who had seen thee—
Come now, confess it was not kind to treat
Me in this manner.

Festus.
I confess, my love.
But there I have been whence tongue, nor pen, nor hand,
Could token thee; and seen enough! It is thee
I see now, and thy shadow to me more
Than all above essential.

Helen.
Where hast been?

Festus.
Say, am I altered?

Helen.
Nowise.

Festus.
It is well.
Then, in the resurrection we may know
Each other. I have been among the worlds;
Angels, and spirits bodiless.

348

Helen.
Is this true?
Can it be so?

Festus.
It is:—and that both here,
And elsewhere. When the stars come, thou shalt see
The track I have travelled through the light of night;
Where I have been, and whence my visitors.

Helen.
And thou hast been with angels all the while,
And still dost love me?

Festus.
Constantly as now.
But for the time I did devote my soul
To their divine society, I knew
Thou wouldst forgive; yet dared not trust myself
To see thee, or to wing one word, for fear
Thy love should overpower the plan conceived,
And acting, in my mind, of visiting
The spirits in their space-embosomed homes.

Helen.
Forgive thee! 'tis a deed which merits love.
And should I not be proud, too, who can say,
For me he left all angels?

Festus.
I forethought
So thou wouldst say; but with an offering
Came I provided, even with a trophy
Of love angelic, given me for thee;
For angel bosoms know no jealousy.

Helen.
Show me.

Festus.
It is of jewels I received
From one who snatched them from the richest wreck
Of matter ever made, the holiest
And most resplendent.

Helen.
Why, what could it be?
Jewels are baubles only; whether pearls
From the sea's lightless depths, or diamonds
Culled from the mountain's crown, or chrysolith,
Cat's eye or moonstone; or hot carbuncle,
That from the bed of Eden's sunniest stream
Extracted, lamped the ark, what time the roar
Of lions pining for their free sands, smote
The hungry darkness; toys are they at best.
Jewels are not of all things in my sight
Most precious.

Festus.
Nor in mine. It is in their use
Their value lies, the pure thoughts they call up
Of beauty unearthly, and the qualities high,
Virtuous, each emblems. For as diamonds show
Purest of things, light densed, which fire restores
To air, nought left, so these let sign to thee
The faith we need, all purity, all light,
Through fervency resolving into heaven.
Each bears his cross; may thine ne'er heavier be,
Nor darker than the jewel which there illumes

349

Thy bosom, as even to wanderer southward bound,
Rises, how lovelily! o'er the calm blue wave,
The star-cross of the skies, so light, so bright.

Helen.
I thank thee for that wish, and for the love
Which prompts it—the immeasurable love
I know is mine, and I with none would share.
Forgive me; I have not yet felt my wings.
Now have I not been patient? Let me see
My promised present.

Festus.
Look, then—they are here;
Bracelets of chrysoprase.

Helen.
Most beautiful!
Henceforth to me these gems more dear shall be,
More sacred, than to followers of Islâm,
The diamond star, where, under golden pall,
The prophet lies of kingless Arabie;
Than that mysterious stone which Japhet's son
Stole from his grandsire, weather foul and fair
Ruling, the tempest-generating gem;
Than the green brilliance of that luminous throne,
Carved from an emerald block, where once sat young
Vieija, king of solar blood, mid towers
Palatial, by Serendib's pearly seas,
Reared airily; topped now by swart diver's heel;
Than those which decked the standard lost for aye
To Persia, and the proud Iranian line,
At Kadesieh, where Khaled, sword of God,
The victory gained of victories; and those gems
Doled to his hosts, for every warrior one;
Though these more numerous than the winged cloud,
Which flays a province of its greenery;
Yea, than that solar jewel, one solid spark
Erupted from the sun, which rife with all
Mysterious powers and virtues, Krishna sought
I' the north's bear-guarded cavern, and one long moon
Fought for, both night and day ere he could gain
Triumphant;—gem divine; their every gleam,
When I speak not, shall thank thee, they are mine.

Festus.
Come, let me clasp them, dearest, on thine arms;
For these of those are worthy, and are named
In the foundation stones of the bright city,
Built, blessed abode! for the immortal saved;
And such their hue, the golden green of plains
Paradisal stretched about it boundlessly;
Tinted intenselier with the burning beauty
Of God's eye, which alone doth light that land,
Than our earth's cold grass garment with the sun;
Though even in the bright, hot, blue-skied east,
Where he doth live the life of light and heaven;

350

Where, o'er the mountains, at midday is seen
The morning star; and the moon tans, at night,
The cheek of careless sleeper. Take them, love.
There are no nobler earthly ornaments
Than jewels of the city of the saved.

Helen.
But how are these of that bright city? I
Am eager for their history.

Festus.
They are
Thereof prophetically; and have been—
What I will show thee presently, when I
The angel's story tell, who gave to me.

Helen.
Well; I will wait till then; it is enough
That I believe thee always;—but would know,
If not in me too curious to enquire,
How came about these miracles? Hast thou raised
The fiend of fiends, and made a compact dark,
Sealed with thy blood, symbolic of the soul,
Whereby all power is given thee for a time,
All means, all knowledge, to make more secure
Thy spirit's dread perdition at the end?
I of such awful stories oft have heard,
And lore, soul-jeopardying; nor know not whither
Conceit like fascinative might lead even me.
Myself have charms; foresee events in dreams;
Can prophesy; and not unskilled to tell
The secret ties between many a magic herb
And mortal feeling, faculty, scarce myself
Condemn for arts so innocent; but thou!
Thy helps are mightier far and more obscure.
Was it with wand and circle, book and skull,
With rites forbid, and backward-jabbered prayers,
In cross-roads, or in church-yard, at full moon,
By strange instruction of the ghostly dead,
Thou hast achieved these wonders, and attained
Such high transcendent powers and secrets? Speak!
Or is man's mastery over spirits not
Of such a vile and vulgar consequence?

Festus.
Were not my heart as guiltless of all mirth,
As is the oracle of an extinct god
Of its priest-prompted answer, I might smile
To list such askings. Mind's command o'er mind,
Spirit's o'er spirit, is the clear effect
And natural action of an inward gift,
God-given, whereby the incarnate soul hath power
To pass free out of earth and death to heaven
And immortality, and with beings mate
Diverse of kind, lot, state. This mastery
Means but communion; means but power to quit
Life's little globule here, and coalesce
With the great mass about us. For the rest,

351

To raise the devil were an infant's task,
To that of raising man. Why, every one
Conjures the fiend from hell into himself,
When passion chokes or blinds him. Sin is hell.

Helen.
How bringst a spirit to thee?

Festus.
It is my will
Makes visible.

Helen.
Shape me one in words.

Festus.
They come,
The denizens of other worlds, arrayed
In diverse form and feature, mostly lovely;
In limb and wing ethereal, finer far
Than an ephemeris' pinion; others, armed
With gleaming plumes, void-conquering, pranked with fire.
These of like offices and unlike strengths,
Powers, orders, tendencies, in such degrees
As men, with even more variety, show
Glories dissimilar, duties, and delights.
Even as the ray of meteor, satellite,
Planet and comet, nebula, sun, or star,
Differ, and nature also, so do theirs.
With them is neither need, nor sex, nor age,
Nor generation, growth, decay, nor death;
Or none I have known; such may be; each mature,
Created, and complete with all required
Experience, seems. Perfect from God they come.
Yet have they different degrees of beauty,
Even as of strength and holy excellence.
Sexless, I said, are angels, but the seals
Mental of either holy kind in all
Prevail. Of milder and more feminine strain
Than others seem some, beauty's proper sex,
Shown but by softer qualities of soul,
More lovable than awful; more devote
To deeds of individual piety, such,
And grace, than mighty missions fit to task
Sublimest spirits; the toil, intense and vast,
Of cultivating nations of their kind;
Of working out from the problem of the world
The great results of God,—result, sum, cause.
These, ofttimes, charged with delegated powers,
Formative or destructive; those, in chief,
Ordained to better and skilled to beautify
Existence as it is; with careful love
To tend upon particular worlds or souls;
Warning and training whom they love, to tread
The soft and blossom-bordered, silvery paths,
Which lead and lure the soul to paradise;
Making the feet shine which do walk on them;
While each doth God's great will alike, and both,
With their whole nature's fulness, love his works.

352

To love them lifts the soul to heaven.

Helen.
Let me, then!
Whence come they?

Festus.
Some from orbs whose rudest mould's
More worth, more fair, than queenly gem; the dust
Dullest they foot is rosy diamond:—
Others from heaven immediate; but in high
And serious love towards those they come to, all.
Free be the blessed, none else, to visit whom,
And where they choose: the lost, slaves ever; here,
Never but on their Master's merciless
Business, nor elsewhere. Still with these dark spirits
Have I conversed, and in their soul's gross shade,
That, like a mountain cavern of the moon,
To fixed sight deepening seems the more we gaze,
Searched them, and wormed from them the gnawing truth
Of their extreme perdition; marking oft
Nature revealed by torture, as a leaf
Unfolds in fire, writhes, burns, yet unconsumed:
Spirits who devastative of weaker soul,
And fighting obstinately the glad belief,
God's foresight and disposure of the world,
Hold all hap-hazard come; from bad to worst
Led mainly, self-tempested. Others are,
Who garlanded with flowers unwithering, come,
Or crowned with sunny jewels, clad in light,
And girded with the lightning; in their hands
Wands of pure rays or arrowy starbeams; some
Bright as the sun self-lit, in stature tall,
Strong, straight, and splendid as the golden reed
Which heaven's all mothering city, seat of saints,
Descendible, God shall sometime tread with man,
Was measured with by the angel; reed that found
Aforetime by that angel, nigh the cross,
And on high taken, God made gold, and now
Stretched sceptrewise o'er all the skies, the scale
'Tis held of power and glory infinite.
Some gorgeous and gigantic, who with wings,
Wide as the wings of armies in the field,
Drawn out for death, sweep over heaven; and eyes
Deep, dark as sea-worn caverns, with a torch
Glaring at the end far back. With pinions some
Like an unfainting rainbow, studded round
With stones of every hue and excellence,
Writ o'er with mystic words which none may read,
But those to whom their spiritual state
Gives correlate meaning. Me do some in dreams
Visit; with some in visions 'mid their own
Abodes of brightness, bliss, and power, have I
Made one; and know full well I shall joy with them

353

Ere long their sacred guest, through ages yet
To come, in worlds not now perhaps create,
As they have been mine here: and some of them,
Have walked with, through their wingèd worlds of light,
Double and triple particoloured suns,
And systems circling each the other, clad
In tints of light and air, earth knows not of,
Nor man; orbs heaped with mountains, ours to theirs,
Mere grave mounds; and their concave flowered with stars,
All-hued; their light now blent, now variant; moons
Many, and planets crescent, waning, full,
In periodic change and intricate beauty,
At once those strange and most felicitous skies,
Illumining. As the nature of those spheres
Their natives are; some human-like, and some
Of great gigantic grace and happiest air,
Yet solemn as the sun; they walk like winds,
Whose dwelling is all immaterial space,
And vanish slowly in the hollow heavens.
Some of still vaster size and mightier mien,
Whose movement is as thunder in a cloud,
Devouring space; some, like to flickering ghosts
Of fire, while underneath their every step
Spring perfumes up and flowers; bedight in rays
Aerial of the purest, brightest skies;
Others, of sanguine hue, whose step is like
An instantaneous trembling of the heavens;
Others, again, whose forms for utter bright
Are indefinable; from place to place
Their feet pass like the twinklings of the stars;
Some of a cold, pure bodily rayonnance
As is the moon's of naked light, ungarbed
In circumspheral air, who glide like clouds;
And some in bands, some singly, some in groups;
For all perchance is starlife after death;
While others sworded, sceptred, crowned, and robed,
Spirits of power who rule each one his star,
Whose form is fire, whose life strength, and as storms
Precipitate, come, and go; nor e'er all known.
For angels can assume the form they please,
And transform things inanimate, as once
With earth's angelic watcher I beheld;
The lonely diamond which bedecked her pale
Transparent brow, was oh! so pure and clear;
Like one large drop of paradisal dew,
Immortalized, it shone; and such, she said,
It was; from a leaflet gathered of the tree
Of perfect life, on Eden's natal morn.

Helen.
I would 'twere mine to visit other worlds,
Or see an angel.

354

Festus.
Wilt thou now?

Helen.
I dare not.
Not now, at least. I am not in the mood.
Ere I behold a spirit, methinks, I'd pray.

Festus.
Light as a leaf they step, or the arrowy
Footing of breeze, upon a waveless pool.
Sudden and soft, too, like a waft of light,
The beautiful immortals come to me.

Helen.
But why art thou of all men favoured thus?
To say there is a mystery in this,
Or aught, is only to confess God. Speak!

Festus.
It is God's will that I possess this power
Thus to attract to mine great spirits, as steel
Magnetically charged, steel draws; himself
The magnet of the whole, round and towards whom
All spirits do tremblingly tend.

Helen.
If, as thou sayest,
'Tis good, be it to thee good, perduring ever.

Festus.
He hath no power who hath not power to use.
Spirit's to soul, as wind to air; and those
Livelier, think less of earth, these duller, more:
Such give me all I seek; at an unsaid wish
Would furnish treasures, thrones, or palaces.
But all these things have I eschewed, and chosen
Command of mind alone, and of the world
Unbodied, and all lovely.

Helen.
Is not this
Pleasure too much for mortal to be good?

Festus.
All pleasure is with thee, God; elsewhere, none.
Not silver ceilèd hall, nor golden throne,
Set thick with priceless gems as heaven with stars;
Or the high heart of youth with its bright hopes;
Nor marble gleaming like the white moonlight,
As 'twere an apparition of a palace;
Inlaid with light, as is a waterfall;
Not angel pinions coloured like yon cloud
Bannering the sun's broad evening tent, can match
Child-musings on life's glorious years to come;
How, then, his faith to whom the All-kind vouchsafes
The heaven of his own bosom? What can tempt
In its performance, equal to that promise?
My soul stands fast to heaven, as doth a star,
And only God can move it, who moves all.
There are who might have soared to what I spurned;
And like to heavenly orders human souls:
Some fitted most for contemplation, some
For action; those for thrones, and these for wheels.

Helen.
Tell me what they discourse upon, these angels.

Festus.
Much speak they of what's passed, or coming; less

355

Of present things and actions. These most tell
Of heavenly histories, rich in vast events;
God's dealings with especial worlds; of tests
Pending, to come, those; others of the gone,
The dim traditions of eternity,
Or time's first golden moments. One there was,
From whose sweet lips elapsed, as from a well,
Continuous, truths, which my soul fertilized
With richest thoughts, spake to me oft of heaven,
Salvation, immortality, angels, God.
Our talk was of divine things alway: soul,
The diverse states of spirit; time's testing grades;
Truth's, faith's progressive steps; the varied kinds
Of Being in different spheres, these physical,
Those intellectual most. I never tired
Preferring questions, but at each response,
My soul drew backwards, sealike, into its depths,
To urge another charge on him. This spirit
Long time came to me daily, and whene'er
I prayed his presence. Many a world he knew
Right well, eye ne'er hath marked on earth, nor may;
Yet perfect variedly. Still more, each time
He came, had grown his knowledge on mind's truths,
Inmost, and spirit's sublimest themes. His thoughts,
Like the immensest features of an orb,
Whose eyes are blue seas, and whose clear broad brow
Some cultured continent, showed from time to time,
Revolved, some mightiest truth. Interpretant, he,
Teaching divine things by analogy, oft,
With mortal and material, thus of God,
Forbidding even, in soul-idolatry,
To shape a mental image of the one
Unlikenable, he showed that as, to mind,
Skimming the abyss of being, like a bird,
Which thinks with its wing's tip to sound the sea,
Godhead triune,—as through three primal rays,
None without other, beams the heavenly light;
So, soul reborn of deity, sees all oned
In God, the alone and infinite unity.
And one of all I knew most, yet the least
Can I of him speak adequately; for oft
Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force,
Which thunders down the echo it creates.
Yet must I somewhat tell of him, the world's
Spirit evil, impersonate; strange and wild to know,
Perdition and destruction in him dwelled
Like to a pair of eagles in one nest.
Hollow and wasteful, whirlwindlike, his soul;
Now, in mysterious grandeur, wasting heaven;
Contracted, now, to human littleness

356

And most minute malevolence, as though God
In life reversing, wrecking one poor soul.
The sphere which met, aside rolled, him to let
Pass on his piercing path, whose space-spread wings,—
Wide as the wings of darkness when she rose
Scowling and backing upwards, as the sun,
Giant of light, first donned his burning crown,
Gladdening all heaven with his inaugural smile,—
Make sad creation. Mightiest in this sphere,
He stood a match for mountains. Ocean's depths
He clave to their rock-bed, as a sword to bone,
With one swoop of his arm. As falls on face
Of some fair planet, lapped in heaven, eclipse
Intimidative, his thought fell on the heart
Shuddering, like angel, who, the thunder curse
O'er-hears, of demon foe. His voice, oppressed
With desolateness, not otherwise than gust
Autumnal, strewing earth with leafy death,
Words bore of fatal cast, both heart and ear
Startling; words harsh, words heavy, like the first
Handfuls of mould, cast on the coffined dead,
Whose end we see for good.

Lucifer
(entering).
Dost recognise
The portrait, lady?

Helen.
Festus, who is this?—
What portrait?

Festus.
Wherefore comest thou? Did I not
Claim privacy, one evening?

Lucifer.
Why, I called
To keep the proverbs simply in countenance.

Festus.
Dost not remember, loveliest, some few moons
Agone, and he, who—

Helen.
Surely, I recall
His presence now. Where all were, he was, too,
Welcome. Bright hours, now faded.

Lucifer.
Queen of joy!
Thy soul-thought, like the fragrance of a flower,
Speaks the bright essence whence it emanates.
Unwelcome I should not be, I felt sure.
Pardon my abrupt entrance; and believe,
If for those hours' contentment, it were e'er
Mine to do thanks, in place of uttering, what
More than that crown of knowledge, high minds like thine
Affect, and if world-hidden, the more, could I
Proffer, as now?

Helen.
And I, could I aught do,
Say, think, were worth reward, would nought else choose.

Festus.
Like the bright fish sphered southwards, fed from age
To age, on midnight's luminous food, and still

357

Of the starry streamlet unreplete, man's mind,
Insaturable of knowledge seems, though bound
To use secrete, most selfish.

Helen.
Be it. For me,
To know more is to live more.

Lucifer.
Both are ripe
For truth's reception. Wherefore not be sealed
With wisdom's sacred seal? One is, I know,
Who underneath the sun nought better loves
Than heaven-aspiring souls to initiate here,
Into those solemn mysteries, which, once proved,
Stretch through death's sea of shadows, and the world
Of mortal and immortal life make one;
Illuminative rites, all times maligned
By shallow wits, which yet o'ertopped the flood,
Known but to the white-souled race of light, who born
In heaven, may insight claim of solar truth,
And evermore receive?

Helen.
Thou givest me
Somewhat to look for, live for, die for, now.
I feel the Sibylline nature in my soul
Uncoil its secret strength. I long to act.

Lucifer.
Who loves or would achieve perfection here,
Lives, like the sun, in restful action, best;
Imparting light, disclosing not its source.
The sage I mean, full well I know, have known
Long, and ye him shall know. Our student friend
Bring with ye, for his earnest soul, athirst
For the pure draught from wisdom's pearl-lipped bowl
And keen with wholesome hunger for the truth,
Shall chant its thankful compline with your own.
The more so as I doubt not that he hath done
In furtherance of our ends is all he can
Accomplish; and 'tis fit he have his meed.
Prepare him secretly for our emprise.
Trust everything to me, and at the hour
And spot, hereafter to be named, we meet;
All eager to enjoy the feast of light.

Festus.
Faith sometimes more expects than truth can grant,
And brings a jar for what scarce fills a phial.
But faith, not knowledge, mates with bliss. To some
Not matters, how much knowing, or unknown.
I have seen a grisly bedesman, in the porch
Of a church he'd weep to enter, all aflaunt
With tatters,—like a tree which sheds its bark,
And begs its way to ruin, up and down,—
Whose starry-headed sceptre, warded, watched
By angels under oath, waits but in heaven
His regal hand; hand here outstretched for alms.

358

The more I know, the quicklier comes the sum
Of all things. Therefore urge me not; nor thou,
Charm of my being, haste me to forego
For even divine accomplishments, this life
In love now lapsing as a summer stream
In the sun, of nought reflective save of heaven.
Rather forgive me, both; if, dreading change,
I feel an ominous instinct to avoid,
Though now might be fulfilled my once best aims,
The mystic science proffered.

Helen.
Nay, I pray,
Beseech, command thee on thine allegiance;
Force me not to compel thee.

Festus.
Still, content
With present drift, I would not.

Helen.
Alas! that I
Should live at once to beg of thee, and spurn
That unaccustomed dulness which slow creeps,
And mosses o'er the marble of thy clear mind.
We yet will gain our point.

Lucifer.
I trust so. Me
It much concerns, for I have ends in view
I cannot yet accomplish, this undone.
There are, whose curiousness were quite enough
To ruin half a galaxy of earths,
Let each but have his, her, bent. Seems to me,
They scent their self-destruction from afar,
And hound themselves to their own stark end. No more!

Festus.
This way and that way swayed, but guideless still,
Like to a sunk skiff, lurching in the ooze,
My heart lies; and the sport of every wave
Of feeling, once contemptuously it keeled,
Nor floats, nor falls. Time must I have to think.

Lucifer.
Then time be thou, as heretofore, my friend.
But what shall I do, all this wretched while,
Thou art engrossed thus?

Festus.
Do as I; make love.

Lucifer.
But that were to fall up. Well, I'll think, too.
For now, as I remember, and to learn
Of equal beauty, doubtless, pleases all;
Last night, not far from hence, a form I marked
Of queenly beauty seated by the sea
As eyeing heaven, the birthland of her soul;
What time the westering sun, magician-like
His golden wand had levelled on the main
And soothed it into silence; face and form
Once seen before by me in saddest wise,
Beside the bier of one, fame held like fair.

Festus.
Name it not now; the harvest of my heart

359

Is always woe, whate'er the joy of bloom;
Nor raise the ghost of grief to haunt henceforth
Life's desolate tenement.

Helen.
Oh! I know her well,
She is the occultation of my soul
Prospective; for I dread lest we should meet.
It is Elissa. Friendship's favourites once
Were we, till lordlier likings since, made us
Distant and cold as earth's opposing poles.
Seek her, sue if thou carest. I wish her much
Too well to wish her here. She makes my dreams
Ghastly.

Lucifer.
Nay, dread her not.

Helen.
Away! 'Twere well.

Lucifer.
As rival elements that strive to impress
Their power on mountains, lower and lessen them,
Nor can aught else; so peradventure, these.
One talks of science, one of knowledge. What's
All science but the last vague certainty,
Safe to be superseded? Soon, in sooth,
We shall have done with knowledge, and their help
Who have best served us; all in time, and turn.
The wise foresee things which,—let fools foretel;
With me it is enough to act. And now;
Any commands for our planetary friends?
I go, make my excuses.

Festus.
A mistake,
Dearest, but rectified.

Helen.
Will he return?

Festus.
No.

Helen.
Thou art troubled.

Festus.
Truly. I, far off
Feel the perturbing influence of his star,
Ere visible: knew him coming, not yet come.

Helen.
Let us rejoice together, and both hope
Such strange effects may cease, or I shall dread
Him to accompany elsewhere, or to meet
As predisposed, but now—

Festus.
And he is gone!
Hell hath its own again. Some sorrow chills
Ever the spirit, like to a cloudlet nursed
In the star-giant's bosom.

Helen.
Tell me, love,
More of these angels.

Festus.
One there was I loved
Of these immortals of a lofty air,
Dimly divine and sad; and side by side
Him I first spake of, she, with me, would stand,—
Listing his converse, shadow illuminate,
Like to the old moon in the young one's arms.

360

She murmured never at the doom which made
Her sorrow, all enfolding, as air earth;
But God's will alway named as good and wise.
Pleasure but little was hers; that, all in plans
Devising of a bliss to come, and tales
Untold of time, or the sweet early earth,
While Eden's dews yet glistened upon her feet.
She was, in truth, our earth's own angel. Oft
In long and luminous sweetness would she treat
These themes, unwearying, pauseless, as a world.
Rise would the sun, and set; the soul-like moon,
In passive beauty, light from him absorbing,
As prophet inspiration aye from God,
Would set, and rise; and the far stars, the third
Estate of light, complete day's round divine.
Still spake our angel; still to the eloquent tongue
On earth heaven's tones retaining, lent I ear.
The shadow of a cloudlet on a lake
The wind is holding now his breath o'er, shows
Not calmlier, fairlier not, than thy dear face,
Consoling spirit, when summing even earth's end!
Save that her eye grew darker, and her brow
Brighter with thought as with galactic light
Mid-heaven when clearest, at such times, not I
Had known our earth meant more, or dearer were
To her, than other visitants divine
Which hallow oft mine hours;—save too that then
As but to touch that chord, numbed icily, thought,
She would cease converse, suddenly; kneeling, pray
In silent earnestness; and, anon, rise
And vanish into heaven. My mind is full
Of stories she hath told me of our world.
No word an angel utters lose I ever.
One I will tell thee, now.

Helen.
Do; let me hear.
Thy talk is the sweet extract of all speech,
And holds mine ear in blissful slavery.

Festus.
It was on a golden summer afternoon
Close by the grassy marge of a deep tarn,
Nigh half way up a mountain, that we stood,
I and the angel, when she told me this.
Above us rose the grey rocks, by our side
Forests of pines; and the bright breaking wavelets
Came crowding dancing to the brink, like thoughts
To our lips. Before us shone the sun. We, peaked
As on some finial of the templed earth,
Peer round the infinite, far and near. Then I,
In ecstasie of thought: What need hath man
Of Eden passed, or Paradise to come,
When heaven is round us and within ourselves?

361

God's peace, if anywhere, is surely here,
So boundless, so intense this sensible awe
Of nature 'neath his eye; my soul, with thine,
With all, this hour consentient. Need, the world
Hath always, said Earth's Spirit, of loftier ends,
And meanings, than men's daily duties raise,
Howe'er well done; of something holier, more
Akin with perfect, or to be, or gone,
To live by, as a pattern. Speak, I said.
The angel waved her hand e'er she began
As bidding earth be still. The birds ceased singing;
The trees scarce breathing: and the lake smoothed down
Each shining wrinklet; and the wind drew off.
Time leaned him o'er his scythe, and listening, wept.
The circling sphere reined in her lightning pace
A moment. Ocean hushed his snow-maned steeds,
And a cloud hid the sun, as hides the face
A meditative hand. Then spake she thus.
Scarce had the sweet song of the morning stars,
Which rang through space at the first sign of life
Our earth gave, springing from the lap of God
On to her orbit ended, when from heaven
Came down a white-winged host, and eastwards, where
Lay Eden's pleasaunce, first their pinions furled,
Alighting reverently. There, marked whate'er
Could be of good, as seemed, for man secured
By care divine, one brief debate in vow
Ended, that they on his behalf should build
Out of the riches of the soil around
A house to God. Here were the ruby rocks;
And there in blocks the unquarried diamond lay;
Topaz and emerald mountain, chrysoprase,
Sardonyx, sunstone, crystal, jacinth, stood
All light, with the stilly action of a star,
Or sea-based iceberg, blinding, to such sight
As men now boast, degenerate. These with tools
Tempered in heaven, the band angelic wrought,
Raised, fitted, polished, aptly imbedding first
The deep foundations of the holy dome
On bright and beaten gold. And all the while,
Songs to God's glory hovered around the work,
Like rainbows round a fountain. Day and night,
Went on the hallowed labour till 'twas done:
And yet but thrice the sun set; more than thrice
Rose not the moon; so quick is work divine.
Tower all, and roof and pinnacle, without,
Were solid diamond. Based on chrysoprase,
Gold-green, of meek humility sign, the wall
Opalline, emblem of all virtues; soared
Lustrous, with amethystine fruitage topped,

362

Of temperance type;—expressive these to man
Of loftiest excellences and deepest needs
In edifying his soul, the angels strove
Symbolically to show how best, by these
Of earthly things transpicuousest, men might
The beauty of purity learn, the joy of peace
With God, and bliss of perfectness in him,
Sole source, sole end of worship, or in heaven
Or earth, to all intelligences. Within,
The dome was eye-blue sapphire, truth supreme,
God's infinite unity, shadowing,—sown with stars
And glittering spheres constellate. The wide floor,
One emerald, earthlike, veined with silver and gold,
Marble and mineral, glowed, of every hue
And marvellous quality. There, the meanest thing
Earth's most magnificent now, was gold, to God
First due, to him sole. Of one ruby shaped
Stood the high altar, heartwise. Columned round
With alabaster pure was all. And now,
So high and bright it shone in the midday light,
It could be seen from heaven. Upon their thrones
The sun-eyed angels hailed it; and there rose
In heaven, a hurricane shout of angel-joy
Which echoed for a thousand years. One dark,
One solitary, and far foreseeing thought
Passed, like a planet's transit o'er the sun,
Across the brow of God. But soon he smiles
Earthwards on the angels, and that smile, to himself
The temple consecrates. And they who built
Bowed themselves down, and worshipped in its walls.
High on the front were writ these words:—To God;
The heavenlies built this for the earthly ones,
That in his worship both might mix on earth,
As afterwards they hope to do in heaven.
Had man stood good in Eden this had been.
He fell, and Eden vanished. The shining shrine,
Piled by the angels of all precious things,
For the joint worship of heaven's sons and earth's,
Fell with him, on the fixed and looked-for day
He should have met God and his angels, there:
The very day he disobeyed, and joined
Death's host black-bannered. Man fell. Eden fell.
The groves and grounds which God the Lord's own feet
Had hallowed; the all-hued and odorous bowers
Where angels wandered, wishing them in heaven;
The trees of life and knowledge, trees of death
And madness as they proved to man, all fell;
And that bright fane fell first. No death-doomed eye
Gazed on its glory. Earthquakes gulped it down.
Long, to the world unknown, and half forgotten

363

In heaven, the angels' temple, reared to embrace
All nations, with God's hosts, in saintliest rites
Ceaseless of sequence worshipping, at once,—
Lay in its grave, the cherubs' flaming swords
The sole sad torches of its funeral; till,
When the just flood sin 'venging pure itself
And purifying, came, doomed, earth's giant heart
Burst shell-like, and so scattered far and wide
The fragments of that angel-builded fane,
High, holy, happy, stainless, as a star,
In Eden once,—whereof all gems men still
Deem precious, are; and yet may find imbased
Potentially in those pure walls whose towers
Of light, the extense of space o'erawing, bar
From ill or false, the abode to be of saints,
Glorious. For they who, truth-taught, now, the right
Significance of things,—more worthful far
Than the things themselves, can recognize—all gems
Perceive, in their best use, but mystic signs
And types of virtue, tests foundational
Of spirit reborn on high, and proofs of soul's
Most perfect qualities: love's deep rubied glow,
Of charity towards mankind; hope's emerald gleam,
Of ultimate grace; faith's adamantine flame,
Godwards; crown these of spiritual life; these, base;
These, midst; of the celestial city of God,
And capital of his kingdom, state divine,
Star-mansioned; state imperishable, of heaven.
The angel ended: and the winds, waves, clouds,
Woods undulative, and merry birds went on
As theretofore in brightness, strength, and music.
One scarce could think that earth at all had fallen,
To see her beauty. If sin's errless brand
Dimmed her predestined brow, 'twas surely hid
In natural art, from every eye but God's.
All things seemed innocence and happiness.
I was all thanks. And look! the angel said;
Take these, and give to one thou lovest best.
Mine own hands saved them from the shining ruin
I late have told thee of; and me she gave
What now are greenly glowing upon thine arms.
Ere I could answer, she was up, star-high,
Winning her way through heaven.

Helen.
How shall I thank thee
Enough, or that kind angel, who hath made
The gift to me dear doubly, by the advice
Hidden in the present? 'Tis that, humility,
Doubtless I lack. We'll see to it. I shall be
Afraid almost to wear; but part with them
I would not, for the treasures of all stars.
How show my thanks?

364

Festus.
Love me as now, dear beauty,
Present or absent, always, and 'twill be
More than enough for me, of recompense.

Helen.
Hast met our angel latewhile?

Festus.
I have not.
Yet oft methinks I see her; catch a glimpse
Of her sun-circling pinions or bright feet
Which, than for earth, for rainbows fitter seem,
Or heaven's triumphal arch more firm and pure
Than whitest marble; see her, seated oft
On some high snowy cloud-cliff, harp in hand,
Singing the sun to sleep, as down he lays
His head of glory upon the rocking deep.
And so sing thou to me.

Helen.
There, rest thy brow.
Bow thyself down, before my feet. Rest! rest!

Oh not the diamond starry bright
Can so delight my view,
As doth the moonstone's changing light,
And gleaming glowing hue:
Now blue as heaven, and then anon,
As golden as the sun;
It hath a charm in every change;
In brightening, darkening one.

And so with beauty, so with love,
And everlasting mind;
Each takes its tint from things above,
And shines as it's inclined,
Or from, or towards, celestial truth,
With blind, or brilliant, eye;
And only lights as it reflects
The life-light of the sky.

He sleeps! the fate of many a gracious moral
This! to be stranded on a drowsy ear.

365

XXIII.

Life's gaudier vanities shunned, or banned, the world
Escaped from; passion dignified; some talk
Of fable and of cabala, mystic lore;
War, actual earth regarded, heaven's reproach
Unanswerable, 'gainst man; the fruitful claims
Of friendship in abeyance long, restored;
Pauses, reposeful, for a time the strain.
In memory we, passed life, passed feat of bard,
Bards best interpreters of life's sad dream,
Review; and plans for peaceful progress aid.
Note, nathless, change impending, schemes conceived
By help of evil, that in dismay will end
Undreamed of, but all innocently ensured
By beauty and hero and friend; marking, who knows?
Heart, soul, and intellect, homed in tranquil ease.
Who mind's interior realm, life's outer treat;
Things passed, to come;—secret in secret cased,
Like balls of ivory carven, enclosing, each,
One than itself less, than itself one more;
And, like life's double enigma, so involved,
The sole solution makes the mystery.

Home; an interior. Festus, Helen at her piano.—Afterwards, the Student. Evening.
Helen.
I cannot live away from thee. How can
A floweret live without its root? Attend!
I am to say and do just as I please.
That's my great charter, is't not? Thou art king;
I am to command thee? May I? That I will.

Festus.
I love to be enslaved. Oh! I would rather
Obey thee, beauty, than rule men by millions.

Helen.
Near, as afar, I will have love the same.
With a bright sameness like this diamond,
Which, wheresoe'er the light, 'like brilliant shines.
And thou shalt say all manner of pretty things
To me; mind, to me only; write love-songs
About me; and I will sing them to myself;
Perhaps to thee, sometimes, as it were now;
If I should happen to feel very kind.

Festus.
Sing now.

Helen.
No!

Festus.
Tyrant, I will banish thee.
Knowst thou what comes of tyrants, in the main?

Helen.
Oh! though an absolutist, I'm bound by laws
Of my own making.

Festus.
Laws that can be sung?

Helen.
Nay, if to sing and play please, I would die
To music. Wrong 'twas to deny thee aught.
But be not anger'd with me, for though heaven

366

Forgave, I'd ne'er forgive myself if I
Brought sorrow on thee.

Festus.
Thou wouldst not, I believe.

Helen.
Nought fear I but an unkind word from thee.
Dark death may frighten children, hell, the wretch
Who feels that he deserves it, but for me,
I do, nor say, aught worthy the pure pain
Thy frown can give, or a cold careless look.
If I do wrong, forgive me, or I die,
And thou wilt then than I be wretcheder;
The unforgiving, than the unforgiven.

Festus.
I do absolve thee beauty of all faults
Passed, present, and to come.

Helen.
Well, that will do.
What was I saying? I love this instrument;
It speaks; it thinks! nay, I could kiss it. Look!
Jealous? three things love I, half killingly:
Thee lastly; and this, next; and myself first.

Festus.
Thou art a teazeful, tiresome thing; and yet
Do I weary of thee? Never; but could gaze,
Faint from delight, upon thy countenance,
In the serious joy with which we eye and eye
Space boundless, visible attribute of God,
Who all things making in himself, makes thus
And there, the heaven we hope for; and can find
No point wherefrom to take its altitude;
For the infinite is upwards, and above
Aught highest create, conceivable; so I,
Musing upon thy face, expression like
Heavenly, and heightening e'er the more I muse,
Believe.

Helen.
I am happy now with thee.

Festus.
And I.
Steeped in the still sweet dew of thy soft beauty,
Like earth at day-dawn lifting up her head
Out of her sleep, star-watched, to face the sun;
So I to front the world on leaving thee.
Oh, there is inspiration in thy look,
Poesie, prophecy. Come thou hither, love.
This evening air, how sweet.

Helen.
It breathes on us,
Fresher and clearer through these dewy vine-leaves,
Fit for the forehead of the young wine-god.

Festus.
A large red egg of light the moon lies like,
On the dark moor-hill; and now, rising slow,
Beams on the clear flood, smilingly intent,
Like a fair face which loves to look on itself,
Saying, ‘There is no wonder that men love me,
For I am beautiful.’

Helen.
Well, I don't mind.
Others first told me.

367

Festus.
Now were soon enough.

Helen.
Nay, nothing comes to us too soon but sorrow.

Festus.
For all were happiness, if all might live
Long, or die soon enough; for even us.
Virtue they tell us lives in self-denial;
My virtue is indulgence. I was born
To gratify myself unboundedly,
So that I wronged none else. These arms were given me
To clasp the beautiful, cleave the wave, or, branched
In tenfold perfectness, prove how supreme
O'er nature, man: to wander where I will,
These limbs; these ears to list my loved one's voice;
These eyes to view all earth claims as fair or grand;
These lips to be divinized by her kiss;
And every sense, pulse, passion, power, to be
Ripened into perfect life.

Helen.
True virtue is one
With nature, or 'tis nothing. It is love.
Remember'st not when, the other eve, thy friend,
The Student called, a tale was on thy tongue,
Out of the poets, about love, and sorrow,
And happiness and such things,—he interrupted?

Festus.
But I forget such tales when thou art by.
Besides I asked him here again to-night,
Here, at this hour, and he is punctual.

Helen.
In truth then I despair of hearing it.
He keeps his word relentlessly; with not
More pride an Indian shows his foeman's scalp,
Than he his watch for punctuality.

Festus.
But tales of love are far more readily made,
Than made, remebered.

Helen.
Tell-tale, make one then.

Festus.
Well then my story says there was a pair
Of lovers, once—

Helen.
Once! nay, how singular!

Festus.
But where they lived, indeed, I quite forget:
Say, anywhere; say here: their names were,—I
Forget those too. Say, anyone's; say ours.

Helen.
So far 'tis not improbable; pertinent too.
No wild vagaries; quite in bounds. I hear.

Festus.
The lady was, of course, most beautiful,
And made her lover do just as she pleased;
He therefore doing unwisely, doing wrong;
Neglecting all in heaven and earth, but her.
They met, sang, walked, talked folly, just as all
Such couples do; adored each other; thought,
Spoke, wrote, dreamed of and for, nought else in life
Than their sweet selves. And so on.

Helen.
Pray proceed.

Festus.
That's all.

368

Helen.
Oh no!

Festus.
Well, thus the tale ends, stay!
No, I cannot remember, nor invent.

Helen.
Do think.

Festus.
I can't,

Helen.
Oh, then I don't like that.
It is not in earnest.

Festus.
Well, in earnest then.
She did but look upon him, and his blood
Pulsed stronglier from his heart her gaze to meet;
For at each glance of those sweet eyes, a soul
Looked forth as from the azure gates of heaven;
She laid her finger on him, and he felt,
As might a formless mass of marble feel,
While feature after feature of a god
Were being wrought from out of it. She spake;
And his love-wildered and idolatrous soul
Clung to the aëry music of her words,
Like a bird on a bough, high swaying in the wind.
Even as a storm charged cloud that in the night,
Will have wept itself away, unseen, nor made
Earth thankless 'ware of its self sacrifice,
That it might richen one pasture; so, too, he,
To endow with all his love, her heart he loved,
Would the whole firmament of his life exhaust
In happying her, unnoisefully:—and she,
Soft as a feather-footed cloud in heaven,
While her sad face grew bright like night with stars,
Would turn her brow to his, and both be happy;
Numbered among the constellations they.

Helen.
As some ambitious wave, far out at sea,
That whitens the wide horizon with just one flash,
And dies for ever, is, I foresee, my life.

Festus.
Helen, my love. Art there? Oh! it has been
Such a day, so bright, as that thou knowest when first
I said I loved thee, that long sunny day
We passed upon the waters, heeding nought,
Nought seeing, save each other.

Helen.
I remember,
The one thing wise, good, I have ever done,
Was to love thee. Would none else were as I,
Wise. Didst not say that student would be here?

Festus.
I think I hear him every minute come.

Helen.
I deemed him in our revellous days gone by,
Intolerably reserved.

Festus.
Not wholly, sure.

Helen.
Once when thou wert afar, he came, and then,
Right sadly entertained me, the whole while,
Themes so recondite, studies so abstruse
Perpending, that he left me much perplexed.

369

Much he explained to me of cabala;
And correspondences, and symbol types;
Angelic tongues and astral alphabets;
All which, quoth he, learned aptly, make for us
An upward reaching lesson to the skies.
And as all souls are but the breath divine,
Dewlike, conglobed into separate entities,
By inimical matter, limited here
Of pure necessity, and by distance cooled,
From heaven's life-giving centre, so, he affirmed
That manhood is but angelhood disguised
In some frustrate condition, earthwards urged;
And angelhood but reascendant—

Festus.
Man?

Helen.
Nay, truly I forget me. In his scheme,
But one thing was, and that was infinite;
But whether man or deity, not now
Can I recall; indifferent which it seemed.
Constrained, in fine, to check him, I averred
Such converse to be awful. Truly it is:
And all commune, he added, when, to its depths,
The soul itself unbosoms, and high thought
Calls to truth's far profound, as to the sea,
The clouds storm-fraught, that groan with thunder-fire,
And passionate flashings blent with blinding rain.

Festus.
He ceased then?

Helen.
Ceased.

Festus.
And this was what he taught?

Helen.
Nay, this was what I learned. Teach could he not;
For he lacks faith, nor can indoctrinate.
All things he seems to know, and nought believes;
Save as a possibility. To me,
His mind shows inconclusive, as an arch
Without its facial keystone.

Festus.
Sad! yet I
Feel my heart ripen towards him as a friend,
More than to other unit of my kind.
All minds must thread the burning shares of doubt;
Who wholly scathless 'scape are blessed; are few.
Thine be it, him to imbue with faith like thine;
And so remunerate with commutual debt.
He for the future will be one of us.

Helen.
It is not kind. We should be more alone.
But let it pass. I am at peace with thee;
And pardon thee, and give thee leave to live.

Festus.
Magnanimous!

Helen.
When earth, and heaven, and all
Things seem so bright and lovely for our sakes,
It were a sin not to be happy. See,

370

The moon is up, it is the dawn of night.
Stands by her side one bold, bright, steady star—
Star of her heart, and heir to all her light;
Whereon she looks, so proudly mild and calm,
As she were mother of that star, and him
Knew, in his sphere a sovran sun; but there
By her dear side, in the great strife of lights
To shine to God, he, filially, had failed,
And hid his arrows and his bow of beams.
Mother of stars! the heavens look up to thee.
They shine the brighter but to hide thy waning;
They wait and wane for thee to enlarge thy beauty;
They give thee all their glory night by night;
Their number makes not less thy loneliness
Nor loveliness.

Festus.
Heaven's beauty grows on us;
And when the elder worlds have ta'en their seats,
Come the divine ones, gathering one by one,
And family by family, with still
And holy air, into the house of God,
The house of light he hath builded for himself;
And worship him in silence and in sadness,
Immortal and immovable. And there,
Night after night, they meet to worship God.
For us this witness of the worlds is given,
That we may add ourselves to their great glory,
And worship with them. They are there for lights,
To light us on our way through heaven to God.
And we, too, have the power of light in us.
Ye stars, how bright ye shine to-night; mayhap
Ye are the resurrection of the worlds,—
Glorified globes of light! Shall ours be like ye?
Nay, but it is! this wild, dark earth of ours,
Whose face shows furrowed like a losing gamester's,
Is shining round, and bright, and smooth in air,
Millions of miles off. Not a single path
Of thought I tread, but leads to God. And when
Her time is out, and earth shall have travailed again
With the divine dust of man, her sons, reborn
Immortal, shall to her due reverence make;
While she, their mother, purified by fire,
Shall sit her down in heaven, a bride of God,
And handmaid of the everbeing One.
Our earth is learning all accomplishments
To fit her for her bridehood.

Helen.
He is here.

Festus.
Welcome.

Student.
I thought the night was beautiful,
But find the in-door scene still lovelier.

Helen.
Ah! all is beautiful where beauty is.

371

Student.
Night hath made many bards; she is so lovely.
For it is beauty maketh poesie,
As from the dancing eye come tears of light.
Night hath made many bards; she is so lovely.
And they have praised her to her starry face,
So long, that she hath blushed and left them, often.
When first and last we met, we talked on studies;
Mingling with men, as even by thee advised,
Abandoning abstruse studies, as of stars,
In their antique relations, thought, with earth
Seed-gold, or medicinal all-heal; now
As profitless, unless to raise the mind
To ends more high and pure; ends better gained
By severe knowledge of time's actual truths,
Than meditation on mere possibles;
All other intellectual aims resigned,
As recreative, apart from duty's aims,
Save metaphysic lore which fines the mind,
And teaches Being's vast necessities,
Poetry only I confess is mine;
The only thing I think of now, or read;
Feeding my soul upon the soft, and sweet,
And delicate imaginings of song;
For as nightingales do upon glowworms feed,
So poets live upon the living light
Of nature and of beauty; they love light.

Festus.
But poetry is not confined to books,
For the creative spirit thou seekest, is in thee,
About thee, and all others; yea, it hath
God's everywhereness.

Student.
Truly. It was for this
I sought to know thy thoughts, and hear the course
Thou wouldst lay out for one who longs to win
A name among the nations.

Festus.
First of all,
Care not about the name, but bind thyself,
Body and soul, to nature hiddenly.
Lo, the great march of stars from earth to earth,
Through heaven how silent! Earth speaks inly alone.
Let no man know thy business, save some friend;
For it is with all men and all living things.
Experience and imagination, sire
And mother are of song, the harp and hand.
The poet, in his lay reflects his soul,
As some lone nymph beside a woodland well,
Whose clear white limbs, like animated light,
Make glad our heart and our sight sanctify,
The soft and shadowy miracle of her form.
Take care that such be perfect; that thou feel
Full sympathy with all life; a sense that e'en

372

In nature's wildest, massiest, may be felt
His rock-sustaining presence. God they serve
Best, who adorn humanity most, and help,
By holiest usurpation of his gifts,
Happy to make all fellow life around.
The bard must have a kind, courageous heart,
And natural chivalry to aid the weak.
He must believe the best of every thing;
Love all below, and worship all above.
All animals are living hieroglyphs.
The dashing dog, and stealthy-stepping cat,
Hawk, bull, and all that breathe, mean something more
To the true eye than their shapes show; for all
Were made in love, and made to be beloved.
Thus must he think as to earth's lower life,
Who seeks to win the world to thought and love,
As doth the bard, whose habit is all kindness
To every thing.

Helen.
I love to hear of such.
Could we but think with the intensity
We love with, one might do great things, I think.

Festus.
Kindness is wisdom.

Helen.
Touching, love, these tribes
Creatural, thou speakst so meetly of, were none
Like them, in lovelier worlds, or what in fine,
Hast thou of other marvels?

Festus.
What is earth,
But one majestic miracle, wrought of God?

Helen.
But didst thou never meet, mid far off orbs
None of those strange commingled shapes which here
Romance and fiction boast of, and bards sing?
Methinks in worlds half finished, one might see,
As earth once saw in the solemn days of old,
Mysterious sphinx, or dragon flamy breathed,
And centaur, lord of all four-footed life,
Who with man's heart and head, and a steed's hoofs
Scoured earth impetuous, windlike: Minotaur
For whose just death in labyrinthine lair,
Bright Ariadne won her star-pearled crown;
Man-bull, or lion winged, cherubic shaped,
Or solar, proud Assyria erst adored;
Simorgh, and rokh, and phœnix cometlike,
Which nested in the sun; and in the deep
Sea-horse fish-tailed; and not unknown, even now,
Or here, to nature, where, by Jura's isle,
Fond mermaid, hybrid of the earth and sea,
Than fair haired Yseult vainer of her locks,
Erect amid the waves, on caudal curve
Poises her form, weed-girdled; in her hand
Her shadow glassed; she, rivals knowing none,

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Beckons the youth belated in his skiff,
Far out of hail of land: seductive, lauds
The charm immortal of the foamy sea;
The quiet cave, surpassing in sweet gloom,
Earth's superficial glare; her bridal home;
Her dower of pearl and amber; wide domain,
And every joy; oft, over shoulders white
Showering the shining tresses, which, as oft
The lapping waves displace; but he, with fear
Half dead, though scarce incurious of the deeps,
Nor to adventure mostly disinclined,
Rows faster, lest the moon set, till he hears
His heart's betrothed, him wailing on the beach,
Some simple cottage maid?

Festus.
Far happier he.

Helen.
I grant ye. But hadst thou no strange-world toy;
No faithful fire-drake, dogging every step;
No spotted wyvern, giant pet, bat-winged;
Lithe libbard, purring panther, cat of God,
Nor shoulder perching harpy? Didst not find
One salamander fire-conceived, oft seen
Luxurious, nestling in the seven yeared flame;
Emblem of him who mid the children three,
Thrown in the furnace, trode the coals serene;
Nor milk white unicorn, not so rare, bestride,
Through greenwood ambled once by faerie power,
Predictive of the damsel of the sea?

Festus.
I can't remember these things, if I saw.

Helen.
There may be savagery in other worlds,
If less than man's exterminative. For see,
How cruel, men; not to themselves-wards less
Than lives below them; lives God hath not thought
Unworthy him to make, we ought not deem
Unworthy of our care; but though create
To serve or suffer, treat, as made by him
With high humanity. Yet in their death
Look how men wanton! till the heart it grieves
Scarcely, when these, in blind revenge of blood
Causelessly shed, retaliate death for death;
As when in icy seas the barb-gored whale
Drags his tormentors deathwards; and though these
For life kill, others slay for play, as still
In Zetland, where betimes some ruthless wight,
Scaling the scaur, in sport the nests despoils
Of auk or gull; they, crowding clamorous round,
Intruded on, insulted, injured, sore
His ears besiege, until with querulous wing,
One stern and ancient fowl assails his eyne;
His hold gives way; he topples headlong down,

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From crag to crag rebounding, till the sea,
For many a ghastly loan responsible,
Seals up the expiring secret; and, avenged,
God's feathered kind scream triumph. Him, at home,
Or dame, or mother, by her drowsy wheel,
Expects; and through the ominous night, her ears
Sharpens to catch his customary step,
Whose ghost now flaunts the breakers; or, far off,
Lamps the lone wold. I cannot brook to see
This needless, useless, senseless, slaughter strewn
Round earth as though death-torments were a boon
We owed it to our kinghood to impart,
Impartially, to all created life.
But how all minor cruelties of man
Are summed in war, conclusive of all crimes;
When not defensive, indefensible!

Festus.
Light of my heart! thou say'st the veriest truth.
How is it Christian nations boast of war,
Practised to steep the earth in brother blood,
Deeper than heathen? Shows not current time
Man's deadliest wit at work how most to slay?
Scan earth, and mark the myriads massed in arms,
Scowling defiant hate; burning to reave
Each other of domain, state, power; or prove
Predominance of race! What hosts arrayed
In battailous pomp meet, east and west, the eye!
Not those so vast, to immemorial age
Sacred, of Scythic birth, which, floodlike, surged
Far round the mount Armenian; nor so wide,
Those once the crutchèd hermit's eyes beheld,
Uprist in bodily answer to his prayers,
By Danube's bank; whence hardy knighthood's shield;
Nor host immixed that, by Propontic wave,
Its ranks deployed by nations to salute
The golden-footed dame, who sheathed in steel
Her lilied breast, and couched her lance for love
Of Christ; and with the hope of wresting back
From infidels his hallowed tomb, led on,
With jewelled rein, and morion snowy plumed,
Her maiden chivalry, and glittering queans,
Luckless; for ah! their virgin valour quailed,
Ere yet upon the spoil, the manlier might
Bounded of stern Islam; nor, till unhorsed,
Unhelmed, knew these the delicate foe they had thrown,
Flower-breathed, as in the moon of blossoms earth.

Student.
Nor that by sunny Tours, where fell the force
Moorish, beneath the Frankland monarch's mace,
Which Europe saved from turban and Koraun;
Nor those above whose heads the flaming sword,
Two-handled, and two-edged with pest and fire,

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Of militant angel, pierced the clouds, and slew,
At one stroke, squadrons.

Festus.
Still, from age to age,
Prevails the universal lust of death
And vulgar slaughter; war of all bad things
Worst, and man's crowning crime, save when for faith
Or freedom waged; but when for greed of ground,
Or mere dominion, cursed of man and God.
As when the clans Mogul—which late had left
Their maze of mountains the high plains that bound—
Whence Buzanghir and all his valorous brood,
Heads of the golden horde, and sons of light,
Whom Alancova to her sun-spouse bare
At treble birth; the lords of throne and crown,
Khaliph's, or king's, or Tzar's, which Zinghis gained,
Or filial Kublai, with all-suasive sword,
Bright ravisher of souls, into one realm
Rounded and died; strict theists they who held
In God and their own swords, a brief, brave creed,—
O'er Europe's quaking heart careered, and like
Sunblast on greensward, graved their fiery name
In blazing towns and harvests blackening; woke,
With tramp terrific of their horses' hoofs,
The slumbering nations; to its stony foot
Burned Breslaw, and at Wollstadt won a field
Red with the gore of Christian chivalry,
But fled from their own conquest; fled aghast;
And perished in the wilds where they were born;
And when in later times and distant lands,
By countless wrongs indignant made, distraught,
The Azteks for their lord, and woe-crowned head,
Stern Moctezuma, archer of the heavens,—
Beset by bigots, falsely named white gods,
Their deeds of black fiends rather savouring,
But, steel-clad cowards, strong in fulminant arms,
Instalment thought of thunder at command,
By the plume-mailed barbarians, gold who held
The sun's bright tearlets—sought in vain to buy
Humanity of Christians, infidel these
To earth's best faith, nor capable to preach,
By bloodshed, creed pacific; or southward, where
His quadripartite world the Ynga ruled;
Earth's universal passion wasting not
On king-faced coin, but hallowing every mote
To beauty, or to deity, till came,
Crowding, the guests profane, with priest and cross,
Who slaughtering thousands of his flock, and him
Incarcerating, bade pile his prison walls
With the soul-soiling dross they hungered for,
Ere he should know release, his sole release
Death;—how humiliated must all men feel,

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Dumb with unmeasurable guilt, to know
That for these vicious ends the self-deemed good,
Have all good illed; and, in faith's peace-pledged name,
Blasphemous, vaunted of the invader's crimes,
And gloried in the havoc of his hand.

Helen.
Yea, even Christians sometimes may do well;
As when by gay Chalons the Paynim Hun,
His hosts arrayed, contemptuous of the faith
Which nerved their arms who conquered, wrongly he
Deeming in godless numbers victory lay;
Just cause had they to thank God, and to wave
The sword of sacred triumph in his cause,
One with the cause of freedom, faith, and life.

Student.
But now with that thou spakest of, before
This privileged interceptress of all speech
Deflect as from a gem's face, thought's bright rays;
Go on, I pray. I came to be informed.
Thou knowest my ambition, and I joy
To feel thou feedest it with purest food.

Festus.
Tell all I feel I cannot; save myself,
Seeming to know but little; yet am not shamed
To have studied mine own life, and know it like
Tear-blistered letter, fruit and proof which holds
Of feeling deeper than poor pen can score,
Or the eye discover; and that, oft, my heart's thoughts
Will rise and shake my breast, as madmen shake
The stanchions of their dungeons, and howl out.

Helen.
But thou wast telling us of poesie,
And the kind nature-hearted bards.

Festus.
I was.
I knew one well, a friend of mine: his mind,
Taste, temper, habits, temperament and life;
Yet with heart kind as beats, he was, earthlike,
No sooner made than marred, for ever. Young,
He wrote amid the ruins of his heart;
They were his throne and theme—like some lone king,
Who tells the story of the land he lost,
And how he lost it.

Student.
Tell us more of him.

Helen.
Nay, but it saddens thee.

Festus.
'Tis like enough.
We slip away like shadows into shade;
We end, and make no mark we had begun;
We come to nothing, like a pure intent.
When we have hoped, sought, striven, and lost our aim,
Then the truth fronts us, beaming out of darkness,
Like a white brow, through its overshadowing hair.

Student.
Unkindly truth; nay, be not so severe.
One of us dies; so end our claims, our plans.
We choose our side, we take our ground, high strung,

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Or meek; most, hopeful; deem life's game our own,
To the third figure; lo! our bails drop down
Plump, or clack skywards; and it is we who have scored
Nothing:—not even a bye. Truly, too true.

Festus.
But I was speaking of my friend. He, quick,
Generous, and simple, obstinate in end,
High-hearted, was from his youth; his spirit rose
In many a glittering fold and gleamy crest,
Hydra-like to its hindrance; mastering all,
Save one thing—love, and that out-hearted him.
Nor did he think enough, till it was over,
How bright a thing he was breaking, or he would
Surely have shunned it, nor have let his life
Be pulled to pieces, like a rose by a child.
But passions cause remorse that make the heart,
Musing the passed, writhe 'neath its ivory vault,
And thin the blood by weeping at a night.
If madness wrought the sin, the sin wrought madness,
And made a round of ruin. It is sad
To see the light of beauty wane away;
Know eyes are dimming, bosom shrivelling, feet
Losing their spring, and limbs their lily roundness;
But it is worse to feel our heart-spring gone,
To lose hope, care not for the coming thing,
And feel all things go to decay with us,
As 'twere our life's eleventh month: and yet
All this he went through, young.

Helen.
Poor soul! I should
Have loved him for his sorrows.

Festus.
It is not love
Brings sorrow, but love's objects.

Student.
Then he loved.

Festus.
I said so. I have seen him, when he hath had
A letter from his lady dear, he blessed
The paper that her hand had travelled over,
And her eye looked on; and would think he saw
Gleams of that light she lavished from her eyes,
Wandering amid the words of love there traced,
Like glowworms among beds of flowers. He seemed
To bear with being but because she loved him.
She was the sheath wherein his soul had rest,
As hath a sword from war: and he at night,
Would solemnly and singularly curse
Each minute he had not thought of her.

Helen.
Now that
Was truly like a lover! and she loved
Him, and him only.

Festus.
Well, perhaps it was so.
But he could not restrain his heart, but loved
In that voluptuous purity of taste

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Which dwells on beauty coldly, and yet kindly,
As night-dew, whensoe'er he met with beauty.

Helen.
It was a pity, that inconstancy—
If she he loved were but as good and fair
As he was worthy of.

Festus.
Dark and bright there is,
To everything but beauty such as thine,
And that's all bright. If fault in him, 'twas one,
Which made him do sweet wrongs. It mattered little.
Or right or wrong, he were alike unhappy.
Ah me! ah me! that there should be so much
To call up love, so little to delight!
The best enjoyment is half disappointment
To that we mean or would have in this world. Oft
There are strange and sudden lights which startle youth,
Prowing adventurously, life's seas, and seem
To beacon it towards them; they are wreckers' lights;
But he shunned these; and gathering, when she rose,
Moon of his years, his true if perilous course,
Though a sea of sorrow struck him, he yet held
On; dashed all grief-ful from him as a bark
Spray from her bow bounding: he lifted up
His head, and the deep ate his shadow merely.

Helen.
A poet not in love, is out at sea,
Indeed; he must have a lay-figure, too.

Festus.
I mean but to describe this friend of mine.

Helen.
Describe the lady, too; she was, say, at once,
Above all praise and all comparison.

Festus.
Why, true. Her heart was all humanity,
Her soul all God's; in spirit and in form,
Like fair. Her cheek had the pale pearly pink
Of sea-shells, the world's loveliest tint, as though
She lived, one half might deem, on roses sopped
In silver dew; she spake as with the voice
Of spheral harmony, which greets the soul,
When at the hour of death, the saved one knows
His sister angels near; her eloquent eye
Deposed, to him who loved, so sweet its hue,
All other lights as grades of gloom; her dark,
Long rolling locks were like a stream the slave
Might search for gold, and searching, find. Her frown—

Helen.
Nay, could she frown?

Festus.
Ay, but a radiant frown,
In common with the stars.

Student.
Stars, fending now
Business, now pleasure or alliance, men
Malignant call, but so malign. Our stars,
Permissive, or averse, are always kind.

Helen.
Enough. I have her picture perfect. Cease.

Student.
What were his griefs?

379

Festus.
Who hath most of heart, knows most
Of sorrow; folly and sin and memory make
A curse the future fires vie with in vain.
The sorrows of the soul are graver still.

Student.
Where and when did he study? Mixed he much
With the world, or was he, in his choice, recluse?

Festus.
He had no times of study, and no place;
All places and all times to him were one.
His soul was like the wind-harp, which he loved,
And sounded only when the spirit blew.
Sometimes in feasts and follies, for he went,
Life-like through all things; and his thoughts then rose,
Like sparkles in the bright wine, brighter still.
Sometimes in dreams; and then the shining words
Would wake him in the dark before his face.
All things talked thoughts to him. The sea went mad,
And the wind whined as 'twere in pain, to show
Each one his meaning; and the awful sun
Thundered his thoughts into him; and at night,
The stars would whisper theirs, the moon sigh hers.
The spirit speaks all tongues and understands;
Both God's and angel's, man's and all dumb things,
Down to an insect's inarticulate hum,
And an inaudible organ. And speak it did
The spirit, to him, of everything create;
And with the moony eyes like those we see,
Thousands on thousands, crowding air in dreams,
Looked into him its mighty meanings, till
He felt the power fulfil him, as a cloud
In every filament feels the forming wind.
He spake the world's one tongue; in earth and heaven
There is but one, it is the word of truth.
To him the eye let out its hidden meaning;
And young and old made their hearts over to him;
And thoughts were told to him, as unto none
Save one who heareth said and unsaid, all.
And his heart held these as a grate its gleeds,
Where others warm them.

Student.
I would I had known him.

Festus.
All things to him were inspiration: wood,
Wold, hill and field, sea, city, and solitude;
Crowds, streets, and man where'er he was; and God's
Blue eye, which is above us. Soundless sands,
Stern cliff with sea-weed sandalled; patient beach,
Storm deprecating; and still, deep, stately stream
Travelling, instinctive, mainwards; mead and plain;
Summer's warm soil and winter's cruel sky,
As a sea eaglet's eye clear, icy blue,
All things to him bare thoughts of minstrelsy.
He drew his light from that he was midst, as a lamp

380

Matter of fire, from air, though it show not. His
Was but the power to light what might be lit.
A muse he met in every lovely maid;
And learned a song from every lip he loved.
But his heart ripened most 'neath southern eyes,
Which sunned their sweets into him all day long:
For fortune called him southwards, towards the sun.

Helen.
Did he love music?

Festus.
The only music he
Or learned or listened to, was from the lips
Of her he loved; and then he learned by heart
Her words, delicious as the candied dew,
And durable, which gems the rose, on shores
Pacific, where the westering sun hath sown
The soil conceptive with the seed of gold;
Albeit she would try to teach him tunes,
And put his fingers on the keys; but he
Could only see her eyes, and hear her voice,
And feel her touch.

Helen.
Why he was much like thee.

Festus.
We had some points in common. When we love,
All air breathes music, as though insucked through lips
Of lyre Æolian; nature's every life
To ours responsive, like the branchy bower,
By Indian bards feigned, which, with ceaseless song,
Answers the sun's bright raylets; nor till eve,
Folds her melodious leaves, and all night rests;
Drinking deep draughts of silence.

Student.
Was he proud?

Festus.
Lowliness is the base of every virtue:
Who goes the lowest builds, doubt not, the safest.
My God keeps all his pity for the proud.

Student.
Was he world-wise?

Festus.
The only wonder is
He knew so much, leading the life he did.

Student.
Yet it may seem less strange when we think back,
How we, in the obscure chamber of the heart,
Sitting alone, see the world tabled to us;
And the world wonders how recluses know
So much, and most of all how we know them.
It is they who paint themselves upon our hearts,
In their own lights and darknesses, not we;
One stream of light is to us from above,
And that is that we see by, light of God.

Festus.
We do not make our thoughts; they grow in us
Like grain in wood: the growth is of the skies,
The skies, of nature; nature of God. The world
Is full of glorious likenesses; and these
'Tis the bard's task, beside his general scope

381

Of story, fancy framed, to assort, and make
From the common chords man's heart is strung withal,
Music; from dumb earth, heavenly harmony;
And for souls parched mid the world's wilds, to draw,
As from his altar's sacred hollows drew
Druid, his dews celestial, holy draught
Of life-thought clear, sweet, nutrient, as spring water,
Welling its way through flowers. As nature teems
With outward symbols fair or saintly, all,
Of our best thoughts,—though not till night we see
Heaven moveth, and a darkness thick with suns,
So faith with clearest proof the thoughts we think,
The eternal truths of science, and divine
Virtue subsist in God, as stars in heaven;
And as these specks of light great worlds will prove,
When we approach them sometime free from flesh,
So too our thoughts will become magnified
To mindlike things immortal. And as space
Seems but a property of God, wherein
All matter abides, so, other attributes
The infinite homes may be of mind and soul.
Rise from our souls thoughts, even as from the sea
The clouds sublimed in heaven. The cloud is cold,
Although ablaze with lightning—though it shine
At all points like a constellation; so
We live not to ourselves, our work is life;
In bright and ceaseless labour, as a star
To all worlds save itself, shines.

Helen.
And thy friend,
And she he loved, happy were they together?

Festus.
True love is ever tragic, grievous, grave.
Bards and their beauties are like double stars,
One in their bright effect.

Helen.
Whose light is love.

Student.
Or is it poesie thou meanest?

Festus.
Both:
For love is poesie—it doth create;
From fading features, dim soul, doubtful heart,
And this world's wretched happiness, a life
Which is as near to heaven as are the stars.

Helen.
Love's heart turns sometimes faint, like a sick pearl.
He needs such delicate diet as the bird
Gold-breasted, which on cloudlets only morn
Hath ambered fed, ere rose-breath'd summer end
Dies, nor can brook the shadow of a decline.

Festus.
They parted; and she named heaven's judgment seat,
As their next place of meeting; and it was kept
By her, at least, so far that nowhere else
Could it be made until the day of doom.

382

Helen.
So soon men's passion passes! yea it sinks
Like foam into the troubled wave which bore it.
Merciful God! let me entreat thy mercy!
I have seen all the woes of men—pain, death,
Remorse, and worldly ruin; they are little,
Weighed with the woe of woman when forsaken
By him she loved and trusted. Hear, too, thou!
Lady of heaven, maid-mother, thou in whom,
Betaking him into mortality,
As in thy son he took it into him,—
God from the temporal and eternal made
One soul-world same and ever, oh! for the sake
Of thine own womanhood, with divinity crowned,
Pray away aught of evil from her soul;
And take her out of anguish unto thee,
Always, as thou didst this one!

Festus.
Who doth not
Believe that that he loveth cannot die?
There is no mote of death in thine eye's beams
To hint of dust, or darkness, or decay;
Eclipse upon eclipse, and death on death;
No! immortality sits mirrored there,
Like a fair face long looking on itself;
Yet shalt thou lie in death's angelic garb,
As in a dream of dress, my beautiful:
The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And feast him on the heart men pined to death for;
Yea, have a happier knowledge of thy beauties
Than best-loved lover's dream e'er duped him with.

Helen.
It is unkind to think of me in this wise;
Beside that I may die by sea, or fire,
Or gulped down quick by earthquakes, who can tell?
Surely the stars must feel that they are bright,
In beauty, number, nature, infinite;
And the strong sense we have of God in us,
Makes me believe my soul can never cease.
The temples perish, but the God still lives.

Festus.
It is therefore that I love thee; for that when
The fiery perfection of the world,
The sun, shall be a shadow, and burnt out,
There is an impulse to eternity
Raised by this moment's love.

Helen.
I pray it may!
Time is the crescent shape to bounded eye
Of what is ever perfect unto God.
The bosom heaves to heaven, and to the stars;
Our very hearts throb upwards, our eyes look;
Our aspirations always are divine.

Festus.
Yet is it in distress of soul we see
Most of the God about us, as at night

383

Of nature's limitless vast; for then the soul,
Seeking the infinite purity, most in prayer,
By the holy Spirit o'ershadowed, doth conceive
And in creative darkness, unsuspect
Of the wise world, ignorant of this, perfects
Its restitutive salvation; with its source
Reconciliate and end; its humanized
Divinity, say, of life. Think God, then, shows
His face no less toward us in spiritual gloom,
Than light.

Helen.
But not all gloom felicity brings;
And hers, I fear, brought somewhat less than bliss.
There is a love which acts to death, and through death,
And may come white, and bright, and clear like paper
From refuse, or from purest things at first:
It is beyond life's accidents. For things
We make no compt of, have in them the seeds
Of life, use, beauty, like the cores of fruit
We fling away.

Student.
But of thy friend; say more.
Perhaps much happiness in friendship made
Amends for his love's sorrows?

Festus.
Ask me not.

Helen.
But loved he never after? Came there none
To roll the stone from his sepulchral heart,
And sit in it, an angel?

Festus.
Ah, my life!
My more than life, mine immortality!
Both man and womankind belie their nature
When they are not kind; and thy words are kind,
Loving, and beautiful like thyself; thine eye
And thy tongue's tone, and all that speak thy soul
Are like it. There's a something in the shape
Of harps, as though they had primarily been made
By music, self-inamorated, that sought
Some form of utterance adequate to exhaust
Her passionate sense of perfectness; so seems
Thine absolute beauty but the effect of soul,
Sublimed and sweetened by the virtuous love
Of others' excellencies; thou, indeed, to me
Reminder of her loving'st sympathies.
And he of whom thou askest loved again.
Couldst thou have loved one unlike men, whose heart
Was wrinkled long before his brow? who would
Have cursed himself if he had dared tempt God
To ratify his curse, in fire; and yet
With whom to look on beauty was a need,
A thirst was, yea, a passion?

Helen.
Yes, I think
I could have loved him; but no, not unless

384

He were like thee; unless he had been, been thee.
Tell me, what was it rendered him so wretched,
At heart?

Festus.
I may not tell thee.

Student.
But tell me,
How, and on what he wrote, this friend of thine?

Festus.
Love, mirth, woe, pleasure, was in turn his theme;
And the great good which beauty does the soul;
And the God-made necessity of things.
And like that noble knight in olden tale,
Who changed his armour's hue at each fresh charge,
By virtue of his lady-love's strange ring;
So that none knew him save his private page,
And she who cried, God save him, every time
He brake spears with the brave till he quelled all—
So he applied him to all themes that came;
Loving the most to breast the rapid deeps
Where others had been drowned; and heeding nought
Where danger might not fill the place of fame.
And 'mid the magic circle of those sounds,
His lyre rayed out, spell-bound himself he stood,
Like a stilled storm. It is no task for suns
To shine. He knew himself a bard ordained,
More than inspired, of God, inspirited:
Making himself like an electric rod
A lure for lightning feelings; and his words
Like things that fall in thunder, things the mind,
In a dark, hot, cloudful state, makes meteor ball-like,
To spirits then spoken with spirit tongue, prevailed;
Compelled by wizard word of truth, they came,
And rayed them round him from the ends of heaven.
For as be all bards, he was born of beauty,
And with a natural fitness to draw down
All tones and shades of beauty to his soul;
Even as the rainbow-tinted shell, which lies
Miles deep at bottom of the sea, hath all
Colours of skies, and flowers, and gems, and plumes;
And all by nature, which doth reproduce
Like loveliness in seeming opposites.
And nature loved him, for he was to her
Faithful and loyal, tending well the weal
Of every life, or blood, or sap, was hers.
To her grand soul, death needless, needless pain,
Is deadly sin. Him, therefore, in august
Silence she edified in deeper things
Than the world's babble robs of; speaking him
In that instinctive paradisal tongue,
Known now to nature, poet-priests, and God,
Who out of clouds, flowers, fountains, dreams, and stars,

385

Weave a commutual language; and conveyed
Clear to his eyes her veilèd blaze of light,
And led him by the hand, and made him trace,
'Neath time's disguising dust, the broad-based truth,
And iron impress, ineffaceable,
Of the eternal die. Divinerlike,
He ate the hearts of things ere yet he could
Prophesy of them; or predict of worlds
By augury of angels; or foresee
Life's round career accomplished in the skies.
As though his ear had been by serpents lipped,
He wist the world of life. Of every tribe
Of living things the key-spell he could speak,
And entered in its presence with the sign
Of perfect acceptation. He of all
Was free; a branch from off the tree of light,
Heaven-planted midst the wood we all indwell.
There was a light in death itself to him,
And the to-come had a clear presence. Thus
Ofttimes, at eve, together, eyeing heaven,
Creating stars, we sat, and stretching forth
The eagle-headed sceptre of the soul,
Ruled them at ease enthroned; with gifts of power
Widening the empyrean world on world.
And dropping down the fathom-line of thought
Into the future years, conceive what 'twere
To quit this world's necessitated deeps,
These strange librating bonds of birth and death;
And sweep into the still, free, sphere on high,
On faith and truth, our undeveloped wings,
Like to a vital wind, invisible,
Yet firmed and bounded in a beauteous form;
To give up life for being, and be gods:—
Such were the heights we aimed at, such the deeps
He reached and yet alive; for, sooth to say,
His soul was twin-lifed with a certain star;
When he died, the star also died.

Helen.
Note that.

Student.
Now, I beseech thee, be not as a stream
Which publisheth its shallows, but keeps all
Its deep things to itself. What mean'st thou, say?
That all things have a soul, an inner life,
I much believe, such things as trees and flowers,
Life not as ours like positive, less defined,
Still conscious, rivers, may be, mountains. stars:
That substance implies essence, essence life;
That what to us mere matter shows, may show
As mentally to others; and that men
Are shadows inwardly invert of gods;
So, at the fiery martyrdom of earth

386

When all heaven's starry sisterhood shall sigh
The blazing pyre to see, our souls will rise
With its spheral spirit, and there in it for ever,
Abide, all life's forms blessed and beautified.

Helen.
What if it were that life, commencing first
In kind atomic, step by step, through all
The countless grades vegetative, animal,
Of nature, should progress at last to man,
Possessed with all the intermediate powers
Of all the schooling spheres he had passed through, till
This mere noviciate of humanity,
Encumbered with the veil of flesh, expired;
The spirit shall take the plenar vows of truth,
And enter upon the sanctity of heaven?

Festus.
Our life is like the wizard's charmed ring;
Death's heads, and loathsome things fill up the ground,
But spirits wing about, and wait on us,
While yet the hour of enchantment is.
And while we keep within, we are safe, and can
Force them to do our bidding.

Student.
It is very true.

Helen.
Oh that mine eyes had virtues, such as those
Native to fairy fount in Sarnia's isle,
Rock-pinnacled by the foamy braid of the sea,
Of reach how perilous; whereby, oft, of yore,
'Neath summer moons, danced elf-dom, and its wave
Fresh, sweet, so gifted, that man's eye inlaved
Thereafter knew sense spiritual, and view
Of bodiless things; gift with the fairies now
Gone, possibly; but if not, how little it were
To risk all, this once gained!

Student.
Risk nothing, beauty;
But know that always properly prepared
By holy meditation and divine lore,
Souls, self-adapted knowledge to receive
Are, by the truth desired illumined; made
Fit to convene, converse with purer powers
Which do unseen surround us e'er, and gladden
In human good and exaltation; oft,
The face of heaven is not more clear to one,
Than to another, outwardly; but this,
By strong intention of his soul perceives,
Attracts, unites himself to essences,
And elemental spirits, of wider range,
And more beneficent nature; by whose aid,
Occasion, circumstance, futurity,
Impress on him their image, and impart
Their secrets to his soul; thus chance and lot
Are sacred things; thus dreams are verities.
The soul too, which, like mountain lakelet lifts

387

Its gaze to heaven alone, will, doubt not, learn
Glassed in its visionary profound, to read
Ere long, futurity's cloudy forms; or mark
Clear through time's crystalline egg, the chanceful play
Of spirits, and strange forecomingness of things.
Saidst not this friend of thine was even a bard
And wrote prophetic of time's afterworld?

Festus.
Ay, and time's present.

Student.
What of that he wrote?

Festus.
Some said, and lied, that he blasphemed, because
God's name he used, as spirits use it, barely;
Yet surely more sublime in nakedness
Statuelike, than in a whole tongue of dress.
Thou knowest, God! that to the full of worship
All things are worshipful; and thy great name,
In all its awful brevity, hath nought
Unholy breeding in it, but doth bless
Rather the tongue that utters it; for me,
I ask no higher office than to fling
My spirit at thy feet, and cry thy name,
God! through eternity. Who irreverence sees
In that name hath been wont to take it in vain.
Call all things by their names; hell call thou hell;
Archangel call archangel; and God, God.
Not less, for those who wilfully mislead,
Or err, the word is, lied; though it were writ
In honied dew, upon a lily leaf,
With quill of nightingale, like love-letters
From Oberon sent to the bright Titania,
Fairest of all the fays.

Helen.
Not such were all?

Festus.
No. Unlike those false brethren who of old
Sold their enlightener, and into duresse cast
The unfolder of high secrets, far and near,
All generous souls rejoiced in his, as one
Which holding in itself the sacred power
Thought to eternize, things divine achieves
With infinite ease; an earnest thus to all
Of gifts to come; as when young Jove, who now
Had but dethroned his sire, nor lots yet cast
With his titanic kin for the world's sway;
In earth's first blaze of conquest Maia met,
From out whose hallowed bosom lacteal life
He erst had drawn; she, bending close to his,
Her sad, but luminous brow, with thought oppressed
Of favour and dominion, him besought
What sometime he would grant her for long love,
And bounteousness of both her mothering breasts;
He, poor in all but in immortality;
Earth was not his as yet, but only heaven;

388

Touched her with hand deific, and her form,
Flashing with light, flew upwards as a star,
Insphered in air for ever. There she shines;
Not envious of the power, her earthly veins
Which filled with astral life; but laudful, blessed.
So too the high and bright souled sons of men
Loved him and praised. Yet praise nor fame he loved.
Men's praise an awe of one's own self so breeds
In us, we fear lest the heart, magician-like,
Show more than we can bear. The clouds which hide
The mental mountains rising nighest heaven,
Are full of finest lightning, and a breath
Can give those gathered shadows fearful life,
And launch their light in thunder o'er the world.
Yet was not all perfection, even finite;
But that at first defective most, he wholed,
By tyrant will, and toilful skill, use-born;
As the young merlin, when he first takes flight,
The uncredited wing whirrs aimless; this side, now,
Stoops dubiously, now that; his ways, his bourne,
Wists not, nor potencies; till, timely taught
By faulteous circlet and shrewd fall, just scope,
Firm trust in the unvacuous air, life's field
Henceforth to be, full-yeared, his total skies
Measuring in glance immense, with sternest plume
Strained steadily through one pauseless, pulseless flight,
He rounds; or, augur-like, from end to end,
Pages the parted firmament. So with him
Contemplative of work at last matured,
His eye's dark ball grew greater with delight,
And darker, as he viewed the things he had made;
Not planless, aimless not; deep based, high reared;
Not men nor monsters only outside the fane
Grinning and howling; but a holy group
Shown shrined within, before seraphic forms,
Embodied thoughts of worship, wisdom, love,
Joining their fire-tipped wings across the shrine
Where his heart's relics lay, and where were wrought
Upon men's minds immortal miracles.

Student.
Poems outline religions, nay than some
Better they are, and lovelier far than most.
The poet's pen, the true divining rod
Trembling towards feeling's inner founts, brings forth
To light, to use, the sources many and sweet
We have, of beauty and good in our own deep bosoms.
But what if it be true that all is God;
Worship, the passive sympathy of parts
Atomic with the mightier, active mass,
As might a foam drop worship the great sea

389

All deities mere abstractions of man's mind,
And ultimate moral laws impersonate?
I hold my revelation in myself,
Of the God within me, sacred and supreme.
And for the law moral, humane, believe
He truest is of men whose thoughts are highest,
Whose wishes noblest, purest, charitablest;
Whose acts embody most both wish and thought.
Ill deeds who doth, in such incarnates hell,
By his own will. In our own brain or heart,
The magic circle lies wherein we raise
Sprites, good or bad. With our own blood, it is,
We pour libation to forbidden powers;
Or satisfy with expurgative fires,
Fed from the fuel of unbounded grief,
The offended God within us. Life's great laws,
The world is based upon, inviolable,
By us, and to us holy, he who makes
Breaks never. This my creed, I hold he most
Believes, who only God believes; all else
Is superstition.

Festus.
More than this is true,
And more is needed. Freedom not alone
Is worthy of worship; souls most one with heaven
Less, maybe, glory in liberties than laws.

Student.
Man's mind is like the moon, whose crescent orb
Tops yonder hill; the vastier volume dark;
But 'tis not that which grows; the virginal light
At first but just enough to affirm its life,
With total and resistless ray, at last
Subdues the obscure sphere; so reason wins
From faith her shadowy world; and knowledge hoards
What ignorant belief hath lost for aye.
Relate his purpose summarily.

Festus.
Why thus.

Helen.
I have been quite waiting for an eloquent pause
In my instructors' speeches; gained at last.
So now then, I shall ask myself to sing,
And granting I agree to my request,
I think you ought to thank me.

Student.
But not now!

Helen.
Oh, yes, this instant.

Festus.
Aught thou lik'st of love.

Student.
Something about love; and it can't be wrong;
For love the sunny world supplies
With laughing lips and happy eyes.

Festus.
And 'twill be sooner over.

Student.
And so better.

390

Helen.

Like an island in a river,
Art thou my love to me;
And I journey by thee ever,
With a gentle ecstasie.
I arise to fall before thee;
I come to kiss thy feet;
To adorn thee and adore thee,
Mine only one, my sweet!

And thy love hath power upon me,
Like a dream upon a brain;
For the loveliness which won me,
With the love, too, doth remain:
And my life it beautifieth,
Though love be but a shade,
Known of only, ere it dieth,
By the darkness it hath made.

A most lugubrious end; I hope that song,
Tis thine, was not addressed to me.

Student.
Resume.
The king who ruled the demons, ruled the powers
Of air, ruled angels, was by woman ruled.

Festus.
All great lays, equals to the minds of men,
With the divine deal; have for end some good
Commensurate of the soul, some scheme of being
To illustrate; this, God's great world-drame to sum,
Prophetically. Mind, this world's, and soul, God's
The wise man here joins, orderly, all he can.
Mid lesser lays stand, as among village cots
Churches, these works high, holy, whose sanctity
Crowns them as gold cross minster dome, and shows,
As with that instonement of divinity,
The whole belongs to God. Joy 'tis to know
However state, or soul, in creed might err,
Mind's greatest works done e'er to God, as hand's;
So, hallowed shown, to him, man's loftiest thought,
And might's sublime humility. One bard
Shows God as he deals with kings and states, war-ruled;
One as inaugurating an empire's sway;
As with the first man this; this, as with heaven,
Earth, hell, and fires remedial; ours, one soul
Forechosen, man's ultimate, with whom all time,
Earth's universal race and life sphere end;
One soul, one statued mind, one naked heart,
Emblemed; creative and created mind
Shown allwhere interactive; this though yielding
In mediate trials, triumphing o'er the last
Temptation, testful; being, at one with God.
All points are central to the infinite.
Therefore it is that deity, which fills
The spheres unnumbered save by him who made
The space existent whole, one human heart,

391

With equal power and specialty inspires.
His aim being spiritual most, the bard would tell
How the soul stands with God, and the unseen
Realities round us all; our angel kin,
And spheres of heavenly life; the mind-made world,
Without, within; part, earthly: other bards
Man dressed in manners, customs, forms, and laws,
Time, place, appearance, countless accidents
Of peace or polity draw; to him these are not;
'Twas his to show, whate'er his doubts, sins, trials,
However earth-born pleasures soil man's soul;
What power soe'er he gain of evil, still,
That not alone till death time is, but heaven
Stands open day and night to spirit and man,
Ever; for all are of God's race, and have
In themselves good. The life-writ of a heart,
Whose firmest prop and highest intent, the hope
Proffered of serving God as poet-priest;
And the belief that he would not put back
Love-offerings, though brought to him by hands
Unclean and earthy even as fallen man's
Must be; and most the thankful manifest
Of his high power and goodness, in redeeming
And blessing souls that love him, spite of sin,
And their old worldly strain, these are the aims,
The doctrines, truths, and staple of the story.
What theme sublimer than all soul being saved?
Though it is not moral standards most, the bard
Is called to inculcate, such designs pertain
To other ministries, the law of life
His all-comprising province, yet he errs,
Who, faithful maybe to his higher end,
Unites not both in one symmetric plan,
Lofty and plain and pure as are the skies;
All forms resolving to one element.
Our world-man's life,—the model of all men, he
All in his fate involving, friends, loves, foes,
As draws the sun his children, circling round
Heaven's infinite, to his own eternal end,—
Being moralled wholewise, thus, and even in parts,
Which, though to careless eyes, like the winged stones,
Air-travelled, now on Saronian downs, convolved,
And in primæval mystery, still to eye
Trained worshipfully reveal a holy use,
And meaning of a temple reared to God;
While in all life's scenes and sections that is found
Which aiding thought of him, him whom the more
We obey and love, the nigher to are we drawn,
As by attraction spiritual, and growth
Of divine gravity, whereby the soul,

392

Though on things' outmost verge, elects to seek
Its central reason of being, all-where diffused,
Shows all that's good is deathless, as of God.
For the world tells us manifestly of him,
As of my soul, flesh; so our imperfectness
Proves his perfection; our atomic life,
His orbed totality of being. This told
For man's behoof in these and ultimate times,
The bard with eye foreviewing gifted, shows
Instructive, how God reconciles to himself
All being.

Student.
By purifying from ill all worlds?
I would not ask thy meaning, but that I know
Thy even lighter words have in them couched
Not rarely a double value; and much convince
Of secret sanctity, like a golden toy
Mid beauty's orbèd bosom; speak thy thought.

Festus.
Too oft have holiest bards defiant Ill
Successful shown 'gainst God. Ours, truelier taught
Holds not the Omnipotent self-doomed to succumb
'Neath evil and imperfection, sin, woe; serfs
By him so made for ends sealed in their birth.
But, as when artist, skilled in feats of fire,
The mother-city of an empire shows
How, though heart-sick for slaughtered sons, she still,
May gladden her in the peace their swords have wrought:—
The mimic comet at his signal soars
To invade the upper sphere; and streams of fire
Blood-dyed, shot east and west, speak war, until
Tumultuous founts of flame, erewhile immasked,
Flare triumph to the stars; then, with weird art,
He bids the skies shed showers of golden rain,
Of wealth pacific proof, or sheaves of light
Drop their bright grain; token that while the rich
Reap, e'en the poor may glean life's goods; or, roots,
Instant in air, a palm whose glittering cones
Seem culled by hand celestial, fruits of peace,
As peace of victory; street, spire and dome,
With fire-jets gleam, in lines of lengthening light,
Vibrant, by playful gusts chased; soothed in soul,
The night-thronged nations thunder their applause.
So he, heaven's war divine 'gainst falsest hell;
God's conquest o'er Ill's ravenous hosts; and grace,
And peace triumphant celebrates for man,
Now deathless, qualified for heaven by good.

Student.
And all begins and ends, thou sayest in heaven?

Helen.
So gracious the bard's plan.

Festus.
Yes, even as one
Who sacring first his touch with waters blessed,

393

Some stateliest minster entered, breast and brow
Glistening with holy dew, from aisle to aisle,
Here, overshot with raftered sunbeams, there
With gorgeous lights begloomed, strays reverent; all
Its spatial vastness, all its wonders notes;
Arches of aspiration and command;
Columns and carvèd curves which end, but seem
While ending blending with infinitude;
Shrines and miraculous treasures, relics heired
From tutelar saints, ascended now; views wrought
Immarmorate on the wall the angelic poise
Of souls, earth's last assize; or, floorwise traced,
Boundless, indevious as a law of God,
Her long degree of light, her beam in heaven,
Mid sistering spheres itinerant; knees the slab
Luminous with gold aërial and all dyes
Oriel or rose transfuse in jewelled squares,
And gems gigantic as of paradise,
Imaginary, immortal; nether crypt
Spectral, shrinks not to unnight; nor risen, abhors
On prayerful knee, to scale sin-loosening stair
Thrice sacred; or with penitent foot o'erpace,
Bequest of sterner faith, its mystic maze,
A knotted league in length; but, led, at last,
By many a winding step to the roof high spired,
Glimpses with thanks, the skies, and air unwalled,
Unincensed air, breathes gladliest; so, man's soul
Time-travelled, all its hallowed wanderings o'er,
In the infinite presence ends of deity,—
The bard shows.

Student.
Heaven's the birth of spirit; the world
Passing, preparative only in its kind.
We are but here the multiples of men,
Like seeds of thought and transient words of chance
Which, buried in the mind for days and nights,
Live to revive, and fructify in dreams
Of infinite power and import, the round world
We act in, shall itself but barely seem
To the soul a faltering reminiscence; seem
Like a base thought across a cloudless prayer,
Which ruffles it, not annuls; and lo! the great
Artist, whose pictures live, expunges earth,
And on his easel there dawns another heaven.

Helen.
These things to think of, life nobilitates.

Festus.
The sun, we may affirm, is dead and gone
For ever, and may swear he will rise no more;
The skies may put on mourning for their god,
And earth heap ashes on her head; but who
Shall keep the sun back, when he thinks to rise?
Where is the chain shall bind him, where the cell

394

Shall hold him? Hell he would burn down to embers;
And would lift up the world with a lever of light,
Out of his way; yet know ye 'twere thrice less
To do thrice this, than keep the soul from God.
O'er earth and cloud and sky and star and heaven,
With God it 'bides, uprisen as is a prayer.
O'erwearied with life's feints, and vain pursuits,
As some dim starlet, lost in maze of strange
Systems, retreats to heaven's securer depths,
Where luminary create hath never beamed,
So, indigent only of pure rest, the soul
Seals and secretes itself in deity.

Helen.
Hush!
Now lest we talk of nothing else all night,
I'll to my music. Sweet one, yes, I come.
Art thou not glad to see me? What a time
Since I have touched thine eloquent fingers, white
As eminent ripples upon an elfin sea
Of sound. Hast thou forgot me? mind! know'st not
My greeting? Ah! I love thee. Talk, you two,
Never heed me. I shall not you.

Student.
Agreed!

Helen.
By the sweet muse of music, I could swear
I do believe it smiles upon me. See it,
Full of unuttered melodies, like a bird,
Articulative of sweetest notes that seem
From each other separated as drops of dew
Concentual; beating time with artless wing
Strained heavenward, now,—now, slowly, groundwards sloped:
Rich in invisible treasures, like a bud
Of unborn sweets, and thick about the heart
With ripe and rosy beauty, full to trembling.
I love it like a sister. Hark! its tones;
They melt the soul within one, like a sword
Albeit sheathed, by lightning. Talk to me,
Lovely one; answer me thou beauty.

Student.
Hear her!

Helen.
What said ye, sing again? Your kindness well
Merits the raptures you are doomed to enjoy.

The rose is weeping for her love,
The nightingale;
And he is flying fast above,
To her he will not fail.
Already golden eve appears;
He wings his way along;
Ah! look, he comes to kiss her tears,
And soothe her with his song.

395

The moon in pearly light may steep
The still blue air;
The rose hath ceased to droop and weep,
For lo! her love is there.
He sings to her, and o'er the trees
She hears his sweet notes swim;
The world may weary; she but sees
Her love, and hears but him.

Festus.
So to the flower of perfect life the world,
Sings the eternal spirit; drinks its divine
Perfume, and comforts it with fluttering wings.

Student.
That roses weep is a botanic fact;
A zoologic truth that birds woo flowers.

Helen.
'Tween truth and fact, a world-wide difference lies;
Earth is a fact, but heaven, oh heaven, is truth:
That word reminds me I have news for thee,
Sir Student. Thou art invited to partake
With us truth's mysteries.

Festus.
The friend thou knowest,
Whom thou hast met with me aforetime, now,
Knowing thine ardent longing for the light
Of wisdom, and my sovereign beauty's, here
Hath tendered to procure us without pain
Probational, for proofs are only due
From spirits less far advanced, the privilege
Of ancient mysteries, practised heretofore,
Which likely linked together divers faiths.

Helen.
Wilt share with us this glory?

Student.
Gladly, I.
The more so as concerned with rites, thou knowst,
Less diverse in their origin, than the end
We have laboured to extend 'mong men, and mean
By earth enlightening inwardly to achieve.
Art thou initiate?

Helen.
Art thou perfect?

Student.
Scarce
An answer, that, fair lady of the light.

Festus.
Nay, then. To one wise, chosen, say, soul restored,
What rite, or rule, prerequisite can be?
Soul that hath once received, as some receive,
With fatal knowledge of futurity,
Faith full assured, that from time's crowned womb
Whatever comes is kingly, feels henceforth
All secondary knowledge pall. To me
Rule, rite sign, symbol, all have ceased to fruit.
Who knows the eternal secrets of the stars
Hath touched the quick of all faiths; knoweth all
Worth knowing; though true faith all known transcends.
And whoso lives not as the Master lived,

396

The great initiate here of life divine,
In the dry wilderness of self-denial
Beset, it may be, by wild passions, sins
Brute-like; by demons in the form of fame,
Power, beauty tempted, worship, wealth; in sooth
By aught that might the truth-fraught soul deflect,
In its serene procession towards God's throne,
To aims base, selfish; and who, trampling these,
Feels not God's sanction, nor the conscious worth
Of one long ministered to by angel hopes,
Winged with the spirit of comfort from high heaven,
Filling the craving mind with food celestial;
Greater or less than saint and spirit elect,
Hath most or nought of perfect manhood, tried
In God's all-cleansing fires. If nought, and he
Fails, falls he into fatal dark, the pit
Lit only by the light of serpents' eyes;
There, wandering desolately and self-condemned,
Till renovative times bid hope return.
But who so satisfied conquereth self, how blessed!
All that he once subdued who now enjoys.
Proud of his aid, but humble in himself,
Lion of God, he all attacks o'ercomes
Of fascinative fraud, or fiercest force;
A proffered throne to steal aside his soul
Into by paths of treachery, and bewray
The secret truth, supremely sweet, he spurns,
Whose crown is God, the perfector of soul.
All souls are born of God and of the faith—
Their mother faith wherein they are bred and nursed.
The king hath many a hundred handmaidens,
All sharers in his worship, of his love.
Others may thirst to know more. I all know
I wish to know. Who, pray, can teach me truths
More sure, choice, comforting than those are mine
Of graduated divinity; being's grand
Development upwards; and the world's humane
And everlasting judgment of itself,
As worthier God than nought; though earth-fouled, man,
Like some degraded god, debarred the mount
For a time by oath of Stygian waters, oath
Void since by wave and god both gone, he, sole
Survivor, exile of eternity, met
With heaven's all-pardoning welcome, met, at last.

Helen.
Chill not our souls with negatives.

Student.
Say, I come.
'Tis to be hoped, like man-gods, we'll survive.

Festus.
The spirit speaks of God in heaven's own tongue,
No mystery to those who love, but learned,
As is our mother-tongue from him, the parent,

397

By whom first fashioned, flesh and spirit, all forms
Of truth, and feelings of all kinds of beauty,—
Moral and natural, in our heart-clay stamped,
Burn with celestial pattern. It is in love,—
Earth midway sphered 'tween love and war, war's part
In poesie played, our bard hath most his work
Love's heart-book made, and made well nigh all grief;
For the heart its truest likeness leaves in love's
O'erwhelming sorrow, which burns up and buries,
Like to the eloquent impress left, nor lost,
In ashes, of Pompeian maiden's bosom:
With love divine such blent. Though thin, though fleet
Our thoughts of God as ghosts, our thoughts of men
As men, bold, yet the ideals personate,
The shadowy creatures youth dreams live in the world
Embodied, but invisible, save in mind's,
The mightier, lack not; names believed, beloved,
Of beauteous souls all saved, which stand, perchance,
Who knows? for the heart's desires made pure in heaven.

Student.
How is't the world so falls below our hopes?

Helen.
The world! 'tis a forged thing, and hath not got
God's die upon it; 'twill not pass in heaven.

Student.
I might believe thee and remain still proof
Against all soothsayers.

Festus.
Pray now, cease. Ye twain
Jar ever; even, as with two bickering swords,
Concurrence makes not harmony.

Student.
Nay, I yield.

Helen.
Oh I could stand and rend myself with rage
To think I am so weak, that all are so.
Mere minims in the music made from us,
While I would be a hand, to sweep from end
To end, from infinite even to infinite,
The world's great chord. The beautiful of old
Had but to show some god had been with them,
And their worst fault to their best deed was hallowed.
That was to live. Could we uproot the passed,
Which grows and throws o'er us its chilling shade,
Lengthening each hour, and darkening; or could we
Plant where we would the future, and make flourish,
'Twere to live, too. Enough, it seems, the present,
All weighed, to endure. The city of the passed
Is in ruins laid; its echo echoing walls
At a whisper, fall: the coming's not yet built,
Nor laid even its foundations; rather seems it,
Like the air-city, goodly and well-watered,
The dry wind dreams of on the sand, and dies
Wandering round it, and maundering; we, our homes
Imaginary, cool courted, with alcoves
And fountains dropping in the noonlight, there

398

Waiting us, madly eye, and rave, and perish;
Not seeing the desert present is our end.

Festus.
End darkest have the brightest natures oft.

Student.
Let us not speak so ominously; but while
We live, work out our natures. We can do
No wrong in them; they are divine, eterne.
I follow mine attraction, and obey
Nature as earth does, circling round her source
Of life and light, and keeping true in heaven
Her path, if perfect not in round. What is?

Festus.
True; no prognostics, or we close our night
Too sadly, and go sleep, and dream of deaths.

Student.
Dreams are mind-clouds, thought-forms, unshapen and high,
Or but God-shaped, like mountains, which contain
Much and rich matter, ofttimes not for us
But others' conscience, dreams being rudiments
Of the great state to come.

Helen.
But what's a dream
Of death? Is that all? Well, I too have had,
What all methinks have once at least, in life—
A vision of the region of the dead;
It was the land of shadows: yea, the land
Itself was but a shadow; and the race
Which seemed therein were voices, thoughts of forms,
And echoes of themselves. And there was nought
Of substance seemed, save one thing in the midst,
A great red sepulchre—a granite grave;
And at the bottom lay a skeleton,
From whose decaying jaws the shades were born;
Making its only sign of life, its dying
Continually. Some were bright, some dark.
Those that were bright went upwards, heavenly.
They which were dark grew darker, and remained.
A land of change, yet did the half things nothing
That I could see; but passèd stilly on,
Taking no note of other, mate or child;
For all had lost their love when they put off
The beauty of the body. And as I
Looked, I began to dream it was a dream;
The grave before me presently backed away,
And I rushed after it: when the earth quaked twice;
Opened and shut, like the eye of one, convulsed,
Then shut to with a shout. The grave was gone.
And in the stead there stood a gleed-like throne,
The ghostlings shook to see, and swooned; for there,
Strange shapes were standing, loaded with long chains,
The links whereof were fire, waiting the word
To bind and cast the shadows into hell;
For Death the second sat upon that throne,

399

Which set on fire the air not to be breathed.
And as he lifted up his arm to speak,
Fear preyed upon all souls, like fire on paper;
And mine among the rest, and I awoke.

Student.
By Hades 'twas most awful. But I too
Have dreamed strange things beyond the mind's clear grasp,
Beyond life's limits and the term of time,
And star-lamped palace of eternal night.
I dreamed time's system ended, like a day
Of celebrant victory rounded with a roar
Of jubilant thunder, which subsides at last
Into emphatic silence; and the soul
Which had outlived the great creative week,—
Those seven fair days the Pleiades of time,
Whereof if one be lost, 'tis lost in heaven,—
Was rising from the ashes of the sun,
Assured of its divineness, to enjoy
Birth upon birth of glory and delight;
When lo!—a skiff upon a sea of fire,
Wearily ploughing, crossed my vision's disk;
And straight it changed for ever and was nought.
And as I gazed upon the lucid void,
All things reframed themselves before mine eyes;
And looking up aloft I heard in heaven
Young fluent Time discoursing of the worlds,
With starry diagrams on night's black board,
Most learnedly to many a lovely Hour,
Who fain would have delayed to hear him out;
While wise Eternity sat by and smiled,
Waving them all away.

Festus.
And Time though now
Old, withered, bald, still prates of them as I
Have heard him, his young Hours, his lilied loves;
And still his mighty mother, in serene
Maturity of beauty, sits and smiles;
The infant dotard's inexperienced age
Sublimely pitying; for well she knows,
Though time and life are both of dual kind,
And men and things now sacred and profane,
Yet in the coming all shall holy be;
And the calm world reflect the One divine.
Peace is the end of all things, tearless Peace;
Who by the immoveable basis of God's throne,
Takes her perpetual stand; and, of herself
Prophetic, lengthens age by age her sceptre.
The world, like a lion disembruted, rid
With rose-wreathed reins, by a childling in some isle
Enchanted, shall be subject yet to love,
Earth's lord transforming all, he, unsuspect.

Student.
I shall be swift to read.

400

Festus.
Yes read and learn
A hearty thanksgiving for blessings here;
The proud prediction proved of life, to come;
Love, holiness, future bliss unlimited; learn
To view in nature deity all diffused.
Her study; and with earth's purest elements
Mingle thy being; sworn suitor for the smile
She pays all love with; nor, until thine eye,
Hallowed by sympathy with her in all shapes
Fleeting or fixed, and every changeful mood,
Conceive her spiritually, believe thou aught
Knowest, or canst; this conscious of, with heart
Loyal and reverent to the inmost soul,
And onemost cause of things, live blessed. For this,
The world hath said its say, for and against;
And after praise and blame cometh the truth.

Student.
And of all truth, the most we prize we learn
From poesie, faculty inborn, except
From God derived not.

Festus.
This condition add:
That as lauds attract the largesses of heaven,
As gifts God's bounties, purity his saints;
So genius inspiration; who most fame
To toil owes, his twin-brother. Even as when
In planning some steel-rutted road, long years
Dreamed of,—where now the fire-horse ramps, steam-breath'd,
Sweating red coal-drops on his panting path,—
The deep-eyed engineer his level lays
Inscrutable, and anon, the hills with men,
Brood of his brain swarm; black, unbottomed moss,
And willowy dale with mattock gleam and axe;
Or rock-hills, cleft as with a giant's club,
Groan loud; but stealthily, and reach on reach,
The mighty work, elongating itself,
Glides dragon-like, nor,—save in litheliest curves,
Flexed, gracile, as the lines meridian heaven
Hath clustered polewards,—swerves; till o'er the sea,
Victor by hill and chasm, broad stream and plain,
Cloud-plumed its iron-brow towers high, at last
With head works of all nations ranked; so here,
His primal plan for others' weal, our bard,
Made wise by grief's infallible instinct, knew
Must grow in gradual grandeur, till by toil
Inevitable of art complete, man's calm
Approof it conquer; and by conquering serve.
'Tis the soul's love-service manwards, and toward God,
Which hath alone his inbreath, and is rendered
To him from those he worthy makes to worship;
Who kneel at once to him, and at no shrine,
Save in the world's wide ear, do they confess them

401

Of faults all truths, through which, as the world follows,
He heareth and absolveth; for the bard
Speaks but what all feel variously within
The heart's heart; and the sin confessed, absolved,
Is done with, and for ever. Bards, to God,
The almighty poet of the world, confess;
And they to whom it is given with holy things
To deal thus and such privilege high partake,
Life individual with life's lord enjoy,
Uplifted o'er the vast and markless mass;
Yet not into a sphere of selfish thought,
But of innate and infinite commune
With all creation; for, as distance rules,
Behold the stars are suns, the sun a star;
So they who near God, boundless hold his love;
Who far off lie, misdoubt it almost nought.
And I who hold the clear and flawless faith,
Ancient and universal in the spheres,
Know earth was ta'en out of heaven's starry side,
And both blessed. Therefore am I joyful, here,
In the far to be our heirdom glitters.

Student.
Say,
Thy friend, was he much seen of the world?

Festus.
No, truly.
Too oft men look on all who live askance.
Were he a cold grey ghost, he might have honour.
Nor thought he of himself save as a ghost,
Who sees in night his day. For the true bard,
And genius those most haunts who loneliest are,
In life and in desire, crowds never; knows,
Nay, makes himself inevitably, ghostlike;
He lives from men apart; he wakes and walks
By nights, he puts himself into the world
Above him; and he is what but few see.
No peace, choice, chance is his of happier being,
Till his secret told, the occult hoard he show.
Yet seeks he none, save of his own dear blood;
Lets generations pass, till his like turns up;
Nor him, unless with reverence brave bespoke,
Thinks fit to infeoff, his heir: for knows he not
He only, to that old hid treasure, truth?
And the world wonders shortly how some one
Hath come so rich in soul. It little dreams
Of the poor ghost that made him. Each this spirit
Receives, transmits. But while inventive soul
The bearings and the workings of all things
Around, knows more than other; knows all ends
Of nature meet and fit; wit, wisdom, worth,
Goodness and greatness; to sublimity
Beauty approachful; and his purpose seems

402

But hesitantly to reach, he to himself
Lives in thought, secularly; as a planet world
Labouring slowly seemingly up the void,
But with infinite pace to immortal eyes, and knowing
Who means the bard's great functions, must not sole
Be as nature perfect, but in art perfect;
And himself measuring 'gainst pure mind, and high
Extolled above himself, will seek some theme
Where spiritual element most majestic shows,
All covering, not all constituting; thought
Enkindling, as in some conflagrant wood,
By lightning fired, or swept by hurricane's feet,
With whirlwinds winged, bough chafe bough, till all burn,
Like heaven's star-written prophesies: thus, conceive;—
Time, shattered shadow of eternity, cast
On the troubled world as the sun shows brokenly
Upon wavelets, time, but a second to the dead,
Had seen elapse unconscious many an age;
And the reek o' the world's great burning, o'er the skies
Trailed, was fast wearing into air away;
When a saint stood before the throne, and cried,
Blessèd be thou, Lord God of worlds that are,
Have been, and are to be! for infinite like
With thy creation, their destruction, wise,
Just, thou, in both,—Give me a world. God gives;
And the world was. How this new orb was made,
Show: where it shone; who ruled, abode therein,
Worshipped, and loved; their natures, duties, hopes;
Let it be pure, wise, holy, beautiful.
If elsewise not, so made by stress of heaven,
Kindly forced good; we have had enough of sin
And folly here to embrace even change of chains.
Show God as fatherlike, going thither mildly;
All blessing, cursing none; no need for those,
That he shall come in glory new to himself,
With light whereto the lightning's shall be shadow,
And the sun's, sadness; borne on a car self-teamed,
High wheeled, of burning worlds, within whose rims
Whole hells glow; and beneath whose course dry up
Like drops of dew, the starlets faint, of space.

Student.
It is a theme I want. What theme remains?

Festus.
One that shall start and struggle within thy breast
Like to a spirit, in its tomb at rising,
Rending the stones, and crying ‘Resurrection!’
What theme remains! Thyself, thy race, thy love,
All sanctified, the faithless, and the full
Of faith in God; thy race's destiny. Know
Every believer is God's miracle.
Blend all in one great holy work, which first,

403

A handful of eternal truth, shall men
A heartful, after, make; bid bury with them:
Fair hands shall turn, idolatrous, and bright eyes
Sprinkle their sparkles o'er it with their tears.
The young, gay, brave shall seek't with joy; the old
Still hearty in decline, whose happy life
Hath blossomed downwards like the purple bell-flower,
Closing the book shall utter lowly; death,
How little! 'tis life in God that's infinite.
Believe thou art inspired, and thou art.
Behold the bard. He is wont to make, unite,
Believe; the world to doubt and part and narrow.
That he believes he utters. What the world
Utters, it trusts not. Pray we, time may come,
When all who would raise men's minds may be God inspired
To utter truth, and feel like love for men.

Student.
One thing I'd know, thy friend's faith.

Festus.
Ah! I see.
Though cognizant of his temper, culture, taste,
We know not what a man is, till we know
What he believes; that known, all's well-nigh known.
Well, this is what his faith was, faith in God.
It was right enough to ask. Thou art as one
Who roaming haply lands remote, arrived
At some strange gated city, whose domes and spires
While yet far off have piqued his spirit to learn
Its fabulous passed, its legendary renown,
Its present life, its people's exploits, tasks, toils.
Their haunts of pleasure, halls of science, art,
By pencil fine or chisel glorified,
The abodes of learning, catacombs of wit
And seminaries of thought he paces; scans
Their courts of sacred justice; tribune, throne,
Senate; treads, pleased, the proud embattled keep
Of princely governance; and yet longs,—all these
Seen, seen!—to view God's children at their best;
And mark how high their flood of thought devout
Hath borne them up in their chief shrine of old,
By them prededicate to Divinity; mind
Made holy, needs, seeks deity most; so there,
Ingliding stilly, with the vespering sun,
Through curtained porch, the sanctuary within,
Welcomed by looks none but devout or kind,
He kneels; thanks heaven for hourly mercies; pleads
For a blessing upon those he loves, afar
Or near; and thus with brethren worshipping
One Father, feels, whate'er their social claims
Art-wise, or civil, on man's just sympathies
Fraternal, spiritual, men each other know
Through fellowship best in God. But what his creed

404

I scarce dare say, so simple and brief it seemed;
But as heaven high, as earth broad, it embraced
All souls of men.

Student.
Poets, I think, henceforth
Are the world's best teachers; mountainous minds, their heads
Are sunned, long ere the rest of earth. I would
Be one such.

Festus.
It is well. Burn to be great.
Each mountain stands inspired as touching heaven.
But pay not praise to loftiest things alone.
The plains are everlasting as the hills.
Revere God's order everywhere. And now,
Thou hast heard thus much from one not wont to give
Nor seek advice, remember whatsoe'er
Thou art as man, suffer the world; 'twas thus
God made; entreat it kindly, and forgive.
They who forgive most shall be most forgiven.
Dear Helen, I will tell thee what I love
Next to thee;—poesie.

Helen.
What! can there be
Aught even second to me in thy love?
Doth it not distance all things?

Festus.
Sooth to say,
I once loved many things; ere I met with thee,
My one blue break of beauty in the clouds,
Bending thyself to me as heaven to earth.
Even now 'tis variable, this love. To-night,
It is, as thou seest: to-morrow—

Helen.
Well?

Festus.
Oh, nothing.

Helen.
Mine, too, moonlike may seem to lessen or grow,
Because not visible all at once. But felt
Trulier by me in inmost consciousness,
It knows no night, nor morrow, like the sun.
Unchangeable even as space, it still shall be
When yon bright suns, in time's great hour-glass, what
But sands? are run out.

Festus.
Without woman, man's
But half man; and as idolators their gods
Heavenless, we deify first what we adore.

Student.
It is not idolatry life looks most for now.
There's work at hand, which, not achieved, I'd look
Simply on life as keeping me from God,
Stars, heaven, and angels' bosoms. I lay ill:
And the dark hot blood pulsed, plunging through and through me.
They bled me and I swooned; and as I seemed
To die, a soft sweet sadness seized my soul,
That made me feel all happy. But my heart

405

Would live, and rose and wrestled with the soul,
Twining around it as a snake an eagle,
Which stretched its wings and strained its strength in vain.
Mine eyes unclosed anon, and I looked up,
And saw the sweet blue twilight and one star,
One only star in heaven, I felt I had been
Quite near to, hoveringly; and then I wished
I had died and kept to it; but, my pulse revived,
Was glad I lived to love life once again.
And so our souls turn round upon themselves
Like orbs upon their axles; what was night
Is day; what day, night; God will guide us on;
Body and soul, through life and death.

Helen.
Our life
Is comely as a whole; nay, something more;
Like rich brown ringlets, with odd hairs all gold.
We women, have four seasons, like the year.
Our spring is in our lightsome girlish days,
When the heart within us laughs for simplest joy;
Ere yet we know what love is, or the ill
To be loved by those we love not. Summer is,
When loving and beloved, we double our life,
And seems short; from its very splendour seems
To pass the quickliest; crowned with flowers it flies.
Autumn, when some young thing with tiny hands,
Cheeks rosy and bright, and flossy tendrilled locks,
Is wantoning about us day and night.
And winter is, when these so loved, have perished,
If we ourselves depart not ere that time,
For the heart ices then. And the next spring
Is in another world, if such world be.
Some miss one season, some another. This
Shall have them early, and that late; and yet
The year wear round with all as best it may.
There is no rule for it; but in the main
It is as I have said.

Festus.
My life with thee
Is like a song; and the sweet music thou
Which doth accompany it.

Student.
Tell me, did thy friend
Write aught beside the work thou tellest of?

Festus.
Nothing.
Thereafter, like the burning peak he fell
Into himself, and was missing evermore.

Student.
If not a secret, pray, who was he?

Festus.
Who?
I say not, I.

Helen.
Guess!

Student.
Nay, it is passed all guess.

406

XXIV.

Soul's minor mysteries shown by light of faiths,
None wholly false, imperfect all; the true
No secrecies hath, no ritual. But not all
Who love truth, and are brave to seek, are free
To find. Who curiously, else unprepared,
Force themselves into her presence, earth not yet
Ripe for her glorious advent, perish; fruit
Untimely fallen. Death's harvest home begins.
Be the first fruits holy, let us hope, to God.
One of our fair ones dreadly quits life's field:
And he, the enthusiast friendliest, what of him?
Precipitate as a comet, when it dips
Below the undulant edge of the keen sea,
Smoothly serrate as Indian dag, or sword
Flame-waved, cherubic, in the ancient east,
Far-flashing by the gates of Eden, he ends.
How near is utterest failure to success!
Ambitious of all excellence, he, no more,
Save in his life-work, like the luminous shade
Sign, heavenward, of earth's progress 'mong the spheres
From the equinoctial towering high, at eve,
Lightens our orbital path. Ambition's ends
In view, its means being no more needed, love,
Nor friendship, but by ceasing, aid. The spirit
Of woe foretels, and lo! it comes to pass.

A Rocky Promontory, overhanging the Sea.
Festus alone. Afterwards Lucifer. Midnight. Moonlight.
Festus.
O starry harp of heaven, O poet's star!
To man, prophetic, since wild earth hath changed
Her astral aim, of worlds to will supreme
Attuned, and soul from death's numb hand redeemed
Godwards; once more, once more in thankful joy
Through midnight's mighty silence, the divine
Vibrations of thy world-strung chords I hear.
Theirs is the strength of ages. Infant time
Smote on them playful; and the eternal toy
Decks, still, heaven's aery halls. Thou, still, unchecked,
And changeless circlest round God's feet; to us
Of life triumphant sign o'er sleepful death
Eternal, and necessity colleagued
In pact resistless save to spirit inspired
Of love; whereto our most of joy and grief
We owe, soul-testing, sacred both. For here,
If fate, our sovran rule, in worlds to come,
Necessity shall be thrall to us divine;
We homaging her each separately; but oned
With God, collectively, her liege. So shown
Life's full communion with its lord, let joy
By his touch imparted, through thy starry strings

407

Harp of God's hand, thrill; he all creatural strains
Ruling and rectifying to his own ends.
Perchance, in after times, in some far sun,
Less conscious than our serpent-coiled orb,
Whose guilty heart, ghost-haunted, leaps with fear
At all faith's innocent spectres as they pass,
Eyeing, as now, yon sacred shape, the soul
With thy predictive legend pleased, shall view
All heaven rejoicing in perfection; all
Spheres worshipful of God; all liberty,
Love's law whereon the world's wide walls are built,
In harmonies based, become the law of life,
Which all intelligence, passion tamed, shall sue
To live consentient with, and mind supreme;
God's peace o'erarching nature's strife. But me
Bright harp! let gladden in looking on thee, more
In this, augurial, that as he of old
Legendary, who bare thee upon his breast,
By sweet extortion of thy starry strains,
The Hadean powers compelled his spouse to yield
One moment's glimpse of life regenerate; boon
Of gods, disastrous, and of dim record;
Man yet, in happier juncture, buried faith,
His spiritual bride, by pity of deity,
Shall show redeemed to life for aye. Could now
Mortal that bright feat emulate!

Lucifer.
Thou wouldst not
Fail, doubtless in intent. But destiny,
As here thou hast felt, hath heavy hands, and strong
Escapeless grasp. Well, he is sensitive
Who can from stars comfort, though cold extract,
And out of fables truth.

Festus.
Each soul his star
Of evil or good predominant hath; but me
All heavens betoken woe.

Lucifer.
Deeds before words!
I half suspect I know what thou wouldst say:
But saying will soothe full oft the soul sore tried.
Say on. I have time enough for others' dole,
Let be mine own.

Festus.
Bride of my heart, O woe!
One instant see I thee both quick and dead.
Oh mystery of most sad bereavement! This
It is, racks me to the core. The good, the wise,
Why snatched away, when prized, when needed, most?

Lucifer.
Calm and command thy soul.

Festus.
I will. Allured
By hope fraught promises thy words conveyed,
Of revelations of the light occult,
I, long, in kind reserve deemed fitlier hid,

408

We with our studious friend, at his request
Thrice urged, went forth to meet him, named by thee
Sun-seer, but whom the desolate end of all
Proved rather dread adept of darknesses.
It was the hour of stars. Spring's crescent sphere
Followed the vanishing footsteps of her lord,
For that she loved the light: 'twas eve, I said,
As thou wouldst have; I had marked the setting sun
Calling all kindred glories of the world,
All friendly royalties, earth, sea, and air,
To attest his end imperial, for that they
Must likewise learn to die, who came and stood
Round his orbed bier, death-hallowed; came too, there
Nature, as earth's high priestess fain to screen
The death-throes of titanic light, and drew
High o'er heaven's blood dyed altar, with the fires
Flushed of faith's evening sacrifice, a veil
Celestial, of all hues, rose, amber, pearl,
Lilac, and palest green;—like a faint thought, this,
A half reluctant memory interfused
With dreams, of earth in paradise;—far round
The impurpling sea-flood, fired with opaline gleams,
Heaved, as though pondering every wave; below
Our feet, rough ruddying crags; the horizon barred
With beams of blinding gold shot lancewise forth,
In permanent lightnings, levelled as to pierce
The dying sun-god; high o'erhead, the while,
Heaven's boundless, stainless blue, star-glinting, flecked
With crimson featherings shadowing off towards night,
Pure, peaceful, prayerful, all consoling. Fell
Now round us twilight swift, and as we sped
By wild rough windings through a holy land
Of solar cult primæval, solemnized
In prehistoric eld, the age of fire,
They, heart full of expectancy, and I
Faithless in aught that might to us conduce
Of wisdom, or of weal,—how fate confirms
All saddest premonitions! deep in thought,
Mute, save in whispered wordlets, or mere signs,
A hill we reached, by moonrise, on whose head
Hearselike, a sable grove nodded. We mount;
And midway the ascent, descend, and strike
A foot-road, forked like a divining rod,
One branch whereof we track, until it lead
To a stone of worship, sun devote, which us
Shrining within its shadow, struck to the heart,
A holy chill, while round its base, earth-tombs,
Crowd, waves immoveable of a sea of death.
Thee wait we long time here; and whiles, this rock,—
As maenhir once by Keltic spouse adored,

409

Babeless, who oft with lank and fawning breasts,
Fretted, at midnight cold, its bossy side;
Which rustic's eye now shuns, but most abhors
By ghostly twilight, deeming fiend transformed;—
This rock, thrice circling we, as type of ours,
Sun spiritual, supreme rock, hail, hand-linked.
Thence pressing on, breathless, a dell we near
Wherein secreted lay, below a tall
And rugged precipice, a glassy pool,
Like an enchanted mirror, in the breast
Hid of a dreadful wizard, of all speech
Disdeignful, ere he prove his threatened power;
And glowering nigh the foot of the imminent cliff
Opposed, a cave but late discoverable,
And save to us unknown. The arch-seer here
Receiving us, as we advanced, withdrew
Inwards; and as we left the outer world,
A blast premonitory caused the groves
Groan o'er our heads: in vain low thunder-peals
Ejaculated just warning. By command
We enter, hapless all, head bared and foot
Naked; and wade a purifying rill,
Which o'er its couch, pale alabaster, veined
With glittering purple glode. A strait anon,
Jagged and dark, dragged through, we enter crouched,
A high-pitched cave where dwelled of old, if sere
Tradition err not, and what wiselier shows?
The prediluvian giants of the land;
Vault upon vault outbranching; not unlike
The cave close bordering on the coasts of heaven,
Where, in the sub-celestial empire hid
The offended sun his head, till wooed by gods,
And sued by men prostrate, so feign the bards
And bonzes of Zipang—his staff of light
He seized, and reassumed his rolling throne:
Sceptre and staff of light that ere the stars
Were, out of depths chaotic in the hand
Of heaven's supreme the rocky scum of fire
Stirred, whence arose life's morning land divine;—
An underworld abysmal excavate
In masonry divine. His hands here smote
The arch-mage, and the thunder of his palms
Re-echoed palpably o'erhead. A gush
Of blinding lightnings showed us now the roof,
A glimmering void, spar-starred, where travelling lights,
Like planetary seats of social gods,
By craft titanic fulmined into shape,
Self-levered, fabrics of artistic fire,
Mysterious moved; through whose bright art we read
The awful wonders of that uneyed sphere.

410

Where, as though nature craved to represent,
In forms of time, eternal histories,
That she the scions of the wise might teach,
In one vast, visible lecture, all to come,
All passed, all present, here insculpt were seen
Wrought out from primal matter nebulous,
As in marmoreal epic, deed by deed,
The marvels of the Omnicausal hand,
And end of man triumphal. Here we viewed
The first essay of force to form in laws
The mountain playthings of the infant sun.
Here, wrought in stony flames, the age of fire;
The earth one vast volcano vomiting forth
Her gradual continents and seas of sand;
Islands extemporizing in a breath.
Grouped there the Preadamic races huge,
Of mastodon and mammoth doomed to swell
Some second chaos with their wreck sublime.
Enormous, and now fabulous, shapes of yore
Cross-peopling all the elements; wingèd bulls
Star-yoked, that led the morn an endless chase.
Sad gryphon eagle-sired and lion-born;
Unslumbering gold-ward, jealous of all gems;
And those commingled births whom Belus smote
Headless, and drowned in gore, his mission here;
Mild rokh, simorgh, wise sun-spirit; all these
In amiable converse shown, or strife,
In lifelike petrifactions crowd the walls.
The heavenly age, the age of paradise
Here glowed in gold-veined marbles; darkened sole
By angel treason and the fall of gods;
Wherewith unconscious earth too sympathized.
Here symbolled by the thousand-branched tree,
From whose broad boughs hung constellated gifts,
And every wish delicious of the heart;
The tree of life there deathless; but elsewhere
Withered too soon; and here, with meteor wave
Victorious, o'er the works of God and man
Surging, the all-obliterative flood.
And there, too, limned in adamantine lines,
The age of evil, when to angel hands,
To sceptered Sataël, and to Samaël crowned,
Chiefs of the original hierarchies of heaven
And their base compeers of the mountain oath,
Virtue and leave were given to deluge earth
With woes all natural, shadow and reverse
Of every good gift God had showered on man;
Now checked by pain, or nullified by fine
On every blessing. Swiftly malignant these,
Embittering every element with death,

411

Taught men the lust of war, beasts thirst of blood;
Gave reptile, insect, herb, venom; and poured
In earth's veins poisons mineral; 'neath the hills
The motive powers of earthquakes rooted; sowed
Death's seed explosive; angered air with storms.
These made the hollow columns of the sea
And lofty as the tower of glass that rose
Mid ocean, sudden, by the astounded bark
Of Partholoin straight-helmed for Ierne's isle;
Those watery pillars, death-black, that oft burst,
Swollen, nigh ship becalmed on sweltering seas,
Beneath the hot line; and, ere now, have quenched
The life-light in some fugitive skiff, escaped
Like truant cygnet from its parent sail,
Stealthy, on lawless quest; in marble here
Portrayed with industry malicious, these,
To man and angel, foes, the lightnings forged,
Which he who owneth all things, after seized,
Wrapped in authentic thunders, and by hands
Angelic, Usdom wracked, with the grim towns
In salt slime sleeping 'neath the sea of death;
Those, fell disease, contagious pest and plague;
These, guileful, taught the craft of sorceries,
Black magic and the dæmon-thralling spells;
The blood-draught necromantic, and the charms
Whereat the shadowy nations of the dead
Shudder, and flickering upwards to the light
Unfold the soul-sought secret, or convey
Foreboding fatal to the wretch death-doomed.
These in man's heart all evil passions sowed,
And woman's richer and more fertile mould;
Such snakelike envyings, wolf like jealousies,
As when, for love of fair Khalmanah, Cain
Him slew—since feared as Hades, god of death,
Whom Eva, unhappy mother of mankind,
Beauty of Æden, sinful though revered,
Bewept a hundred years; so long the dead,
While death was new to earth and life, were mourned;
These taught the sword to shape, and those the shield,
Bow, poleaxe, spear; these jewels for the fair,
Brightly seductive; women were their spoil
From the beginning; these, and their spurious brood
Gigantic, in whose ears apostate, preached
That patriarch who, accredited of God,
Ambassador to angels, was in heaven
Received, by death untouched, ere Noah as yet,
With his majestic consort, great Tidea,
Queen-mother of the nations,—deified
After as Vesta or Kybelé, all
Her offspring kings of earth tripartite,—sought

412

God-warned, the ark, with all their living train.
Instructed by our guide in all we viewed,
Though seen but darkling, and in briefest speech,
Out of the hall of elements slow we passed
Into the fane of life. Here graven the great
And holy war which raged 'twixt earth and heaven,
Betwixt the pious race and impious tribes,
And microcosmically still in man,
In craggy frieze glared round the orbed dome.
Here hundred-handed vices, titan sins,
And giant crimes, seek from the mountain-heart
Of heaven, the high-throned Thunderer to tear;
But he, with fiery hail, hurls all to hell;
Sulphureous remedies there to underlie,
Asbestine; purifying, blanching woes.
Aurmazd and Ahriman there, in balanced strife,
The doubtful sphere contest; and here, in stone
Prophetically white, the conquest glad
Of the beneficent power. Young Orus there,
His sire the sun, his mother mild the moon;
O sacred night-sun, soul of heaven, which through
The starry welkin wanderest, in divine
And radiant sorrow seeking for thy lord,
Him living ne'er thou wilt find; but lo! thy son
The evil godhead Typhon slays, and reigns
Wise, silent child of light. Here next, the god,
Incarnate ninefold, crushed with sole divine
To death, and strangled with resistless hand
The snake-god; holy fiction! The Asoors there,
In armied millions by the deities
Vanquished, draw off their whole malignant host,
Destined some day to perish, fiendish sprites;
But first the tale of their defeat bequeath
In scroll perpetual to these cliff-like walls.
Here, Izdubar's descent, love-led, to hell;
The ascent of Psyche, there, love-led, to heaven;
Insculpt exemplary; virtue's pilgrimage,
Self-guided through all earth, more arduous task.
Towards the opposing side our feet we turned.
Here the divine and human wrestled; there,
Where faith's bright orbit reason's intersects,
The human and angelic; there, in chair
Of starry state, sate the proud queen, condemned
The everlasting sacrifice to see
Of her pure daughter, like humanity
Waiting with outstretched arms to be redeemed
By some divine deliverer; there, with head
Hurled downwards from the topmost height of heaven,
The righteous but self-glorifying king
Who thought mere merit enough to earn a throne

413

In God's eternal kingdom; fatal fault!
Wherefore, as clutching at, with either hand
A world, but grasping nought, serene reproof
He gives to all immortal. Here, hosts terrene,
Celestial, and infernal, armed with faith,
Or infidel fury fought; these sworn to rase
In ruin, cities reared by hands divine,
Or for like ends; such even as holy Rome,
City of cities, earth's crownèd capital:
Or sacred Troy; fount, fig-tree, temple and all
Sites of that holiest legend, which began
By discord's apple with one all-conquering steed,
Huge, rampant, ends; or that gold builded erst,
On sceptre tridentine of Indian god,
Men's sins degraded into stone, and now
Debased to clay, but still no whit cognate
To common earth, but of time's earliest heaven,
One unadulterate section; those to defend
Their starry battlements; their walls inlaid
With purest virtues, and their streets and squares
Paved with celestial wisdom. Here the north,
Icy but strong; and there the burning south
Led by its passionate queen, contending stood
In fierce and fateful fray; death looking on,
Well pleased; he alway won, whoever lost.
Here nation after nation fought the world
For universal dominance, fought in vain;
One sole elect of creatures hath that gift.
Before all, at the end a female form
Gigantic kneeled, dread guardian of the sphere,
Now interceding for its life; but she,
The fatal sign once given, ordaining death,
Relentless tears the solid universe
Asunder: and on either side, behind,
The final field so feared of old to be
Between the mundane gods and giants fought,
Ere comes the reign of darkness, when with deaths
Commutual, all shall perish. We, our eyes
Edged on the growing blacknesses which now
Mute lightnings lit in mock of light, and now
Blind thunder groped round. Ever and anon,
What spectres seemed, flitted athwart the dark,
But dimly eyeable. Locked hand in hand,
Our fair heroic trembling 'tween her guards,
But firm in spirit as the patriot queen
In golden chains bound Romewards, so to grace
Her victor's triumph, each step doomed to move
Time's ruth, and wrong's eternal recompense;
We through a long laborious road, rock-arched,
Creep speechless, whence emerging in a cave

414

Like the green grot where Zeus in secret grew
To stripling godhood, hid from cruel time;
Or stalactital palace, subterrene
In Hellas, where the Nine kept secret court,
And crownless ruled o'er kingly servitors;
We meet with for the first time othersome
Ourselves beside, all silent; to the voice
Hearkening, of one, in face and form like him
Who first the name of wisdom's lover claimed;
Heard first of men, heaven's spheral harmonies;
At Metapontum wrote upon the moon;
And at Olympia bared the golden thigh,
In sign of solar lineage; proof supreme.
Listening we stood, charmed; reassured in faith,
Heartlightened, on we fared; and following close
The echoes of our guide's feet, in the heart
Of a dim dome we stood, of sightless bounds,
And named of immortality; nor far
Our haughty leader found, whose steps we had tracked,
Though deigning commune with us scarcely none,
High on an arch 'neath which a torrent foamed,
Red with its torch's glare, bloodlike. Beyond,
A mount of awe there loomed which seemed inspired
With palpitating light, that came and went
Wilderingly; and thither pointing, ‘lo! the end
Of our emprise;’ with these words cut our guide,
As with a sword, the silence; then, ‘who truth
Would win, as she awaits us, in yon shrine
Yearning the victor soul to satiate
With wisdom, and to crown with life divine,
Earthlife, and her embrace deific give,
Know that to arms untested, hearts untried,
She trusteth nought. Let not yon seething stream
One therefore who would gain such priceless prize
Affright; but let the wight content with less,
Smile colder, and, more conventional embrace,
Tread, after me, the arch.’ Here quailed she first,
Of the end too emulative, the mean untried,
Who finally,—but stay. Our student feere
Bolder than I, because incredulous, rid
Not solely of superstition, but mere faith,
As God would have, plunged with me in that tide
And struggled nigh to safety. Once, a prow,
More like a raft, adrift from upper bank,
Help promised falsely; till, at last, a rock
Grasping, this, loose at base betrayed his trust
And crushing, soon that death-flood hurried off
Into earth's caverned darkness, and the abyss
Reverberant always with its watery roar
And funeral wail perpetual; but to me

415

Now wading, floating now, safe transit vouched,
Though sickening to the sense; nor wist I this,
Till, scaped, and scantly, from the perilous arch
Which crumbled as she crossed, nor left retreat,
My love I met, who saw, and fainting told;
Told, shuddering, like the tree whose sense of sin,
Howbeit involuntary, the ages fail
To calm, as weighted yet with the pendent power.
I meanwhile shore who had reached heard, heard dismayed,
Thrice called his name aloud, which, to no end,
Unanswering silence sadly learned, thenceforth
Wasted, like time upon unquickened stars.
Scant leisure ours was for lament; for now,
Fiercer and far more urgent grew the mien
Of our mysterious leader, who aloof
Held him, and hailed as careless of our loss,
Or witless, for his countenance saw we not.
And now, all light snatched from us, hie we on,
We twain, I bearing up her slackening steps
Amid darknesses successive, each more deep
Than other, and far thunders whence we opined,
Day, egress nearer than they seemed; to us
A time of torture, but determined soon.
And now, the light from out that fane of fire
We seemed unskilled to escape from, and within
Whose slowly quivering bosom, half distent
By smothered splendour, like the sacred side
Of Athyr, when in travail of the sun,
Blew, flowerlike, open, and with arrowy glance
Showed us one only feat to consummate.
From out that lofty shrine of roseate glow,
And 'twixt the stops of stormy thunders now
Voices and harps and far, faint harmonies
We list ecstatic, as though deadliest fate
Would masque it, faëry wise. Here, each one's foot
Instinct with caution, easy seemed ascent
Nor either paused, until the brink we touch
Unseen till lighted on of a horrent chasm,
Sacred in use, defensive of the fane,
Forbidding access uninvited. There
But on the thither side, our sun-seer stood
Who gazed that orb nor blinked; for on his side
New risen upon the summer's narrow night,
Sheer through a mountain fissure shone the sun,
The fane within lightening. That rocky rift,—
Sheer as the ghastly vein, shale blue, earth's heart
Explosive once, through granate shot, league-long,
Now seas persistent have well breathed, and left
Hollow, as tube twixt isle and isle that swings
Echoing; clean, evident, as the iron gash

416

Helmwise, that 'compts on battle-fields for one,—
I, only bidden o'ervault, one comforting sign
To her, so left, expressed, clear; and clear death.
Enter, to me, he cried; and enter alone;
Soul that would learn truth's sum must learn it sole.
To her who had me companioned then a seat
In the immarbled rock assigning, he
In common silence, all, beside her stood,
Each thenceforth mute. I entering, solitary,
View first mid many an arched recess, star-circled
In order ranged, and from grade to grade of all
Perfection, each mysterious symbol truth
Hath hallowed, every teeming sign faith holds
In old and orient imagery, devote
To sacred use, with mightiest meanings lined,
Which wisdom worthful makes but to those wise,
Lords of best learning, creed-skilled; here conjoined
In secret state emblazoned, rayed with words
Divine, unutterable; each charm by turns
Opening in awful gradual, till achieved
The one sole truth which crowns all creeds and sums.
The thought of God is simple enough; it is man
Makes the world's mystery, who self-warned of powers
Unlimited but for sense, cloud-lifed, conceives
Beyond the impermanent skies the eternal soul
Of all existence transitory or fixed;
Perfect though infinite; knows through virtue truth,
And as an educable divinity schooled
Through Being's grand gradations loves the law,
Of all intelligent life, just, bettering soul,
Soul-freeing, joining whole with God; yet lives
Doubt's thrall and fool. This, one long instant, next
Prostrate within the sanctuary,—and still
My mind the effect sublime of joy retains,
Cleared, elevated, and sanctified by sight
Of all faith's passed perplexities, to one
Key yielding, in result the one same truth.
My spirit grew great with gladness, there, as might
Of old, some riverine god upon his side
Leaning complacent, on his long career
Reflective; foamy fall, still, sunny reach,
Shoal, and bend troublous, ere the bar which bounds
His wave from ocean's, he o'ersurge; so, I,
Shrining within the spirit all faiths, all creeds,
Knew at the last truth's oneness; full content
Of being and satisfaction with all life.
Thus gladdening to have reached that shrine of shrines,
Where light intelligible,—henceforth the sun's
But a shadow shown,—all life illumes, I kneel
In silent worship; and thence rising, saw

417

On the wrought altar-rock laid gleaming, midst
The fragrant death of flowers all hued, and where
Life, more than flower-life sensitive, ne'er was ta'en
A volume, vamped in ore of Auphir, vast,
On either side with solemn gems, that seemed
Of their own value thoughtful, outwardly
Embossed, which starred the points of some device
Symmetric, shield of God's own bard, or seal
Of wisdom's lord; within, on azure leaves,
Arrowy, constellate, luminous, like night's spheres,
Ranged linearly, at large the law divine,
Life's universal law, the tract of God,
Transcribed from skiey archives; in my mind
This fragmentary sum of truth being all.
Sole, simple, pure, the personal Infinite,
Of necessary essence, perfect, free,
All-present, good, is wise and just; life, love;
Not as space passive, powerless, nor as time
Subject of mere relation between deed
And doer; but of duration source and sum
And of all causes; founder of the skies;
Author of all the elements of the world;
Quickener of tides, of the heart's first beat; as sire
Of natural life, the life of bud, bulb, root;
Of act instinctive in all animate tribes
The kind instructor; in man's kinglier race
Teacher of social law; of sacred rites;
Of family sanctities, and the holy round
Of virtues our humanity attests
As unitive with the heavenly state, and proof
Of our derived divinity; guardian he
To us his kindred though remote, and yet
On the great stem regraftable; who man
With nature guides, exacting righteous fines
And satisfactions from the temporal due
When erring, to the eternal æquity shown
In just proportions verified by love.
Here, turning o'er these mighty leaves, I learned
His primal essence; cause, mean, end of all.
The circular path of worlds in beauty traced;
The total scope of things, viewed thus, heaven taught;
The fruitful round of seasons—as on earth
So in man's life—kind nature's loveliness
All witness made to love and love's deep laws,—
God-laws, not written only on stone, nor graven
Once on a time in granate; but for aye
And everywhere in all things that uphold
The uses and the harmonies of the world,
And the stability of the universe:—

418

In ocean's trenchèd waves, in earth's broad vales;
In air's wide wind-streams; in birth, growth, and death;
Bloom, fruitage, seed regenerative, decay,
The wholesome waste of storms, the torrent's wrack;
The brooklet's smiling prattle; in love, truth,
Divine fear, provident virtue, hope of peace;
In the heart's aspiration after God's
Just sanctity and approval; for the rule
Of righteousness, a rightlier balanced life
To come; and all the general good that aids:
Even evil, but a less degree of good
Made needful for progression. Separate soul
Struggling against the imperfect and default,
Back to the intelligent Light must needs advance,
By conquered ills to attain the good supreme.
While issuant thus from God's breast, spirit fares
Variously through schooling spheres, and many a turn
Calamitous, to death's nadir; its return,
All progress naturally, and intense delight,
And conscious pressure towards the infinite shows.
For evil, moral and natural, though the proofs
Of imperfection necessary to all
Created things, are, this, annulled by man's
Perfectibleness; by God's foredooming word
That; both concurrent; frames the crucial test
Each soul must pass; and stand thereby, or fall.
The fall hath fatal force, and in all spheres,
As though with gravity's irresistible spell,
Charms to deteriorate, and with low aims
For loftier, cheats the inquisitive spirit. But who
Can love's all saving faithfulness divine,
That hath not erred? nor separated the seeds
Of good and evil, painful task, nor felt
All evil hath temporal origin, and so ends;
But good, identical with God, endures
To all eternity, and subtends the base
Celestial of his universal life?
Thus all things from him, to him witness bear
Assentient, as their source, their good. There's not
An angel relegate to the outmost spheres,
But vaunts his birth divine; no creatural soul,
No animate form that foots the soil, or creeps,
Or ocean nether-tided wanders; nay,
There's not the tiniest lifelet flecks the air
With wing invisible, who through his sires
Preadamite ruled earth, but strange lineage boasts,
And high and azure blood; nor heaven itself
From his proud pedigree spares; but in his coat
Quarters the arms of God. Man only,—skilled
To anticipate the divine as virtue's meed

419

The ultimate scope of spirit and nature's end;
To know each holy element source and mean
Of spiritual refinement; God to trace
In ocean's rock commuting force, in earth's
Life flowing breast; in air's inspiring breath,
His spirit renovative; in natural fire
And flamy light of sun or star the strength
Annihilant of the whole; in gentlest heat
His recreant force; and in e'er during space
Boundless, of all save deity void, to acquire
Science supreme—in all things God;—so learns
To graduate in heaven's mysteries, and in earth's,
Creation's, holiest orgies as to see
In the great disseverance of the essential One
Sole mean of self-diffusion through freed soul,
And spiritual commune with deity here;
Whereby in all, the One confessing he
His secret of reunion apprehends,
Not to be reached save by adventurous spirit,
On arduous path, man's elevative fall,
Soul richening fine; punition covetable;
Heart clarified through troubles; and final rise
Of meditative perfection to the mind
Of joy deific; to the spirit elect
Made righteous, hallowed, glorified with God,
In essence one, in nature myriadfold.
From every massive page I turned, there came
The spirit of consolation. Ending thus
The book I closed; rejoiced, 'twas mine to know
The truth transformative of life, that God
The conscious Infinite wills by rendering soul
Wistful of his divinity, man to make
Free, blessed; and, striving towards perfection, crown,—
So loves he those that to him turn,—with life
Immortal, his congenerate gift. And now,
Words heard I, whispering me to call within
The beauteous brave who had dared so much and earned
As to her it seemed, albeit I knew, and feared
The attempt to achieve more. Opening, then, intent
Again to approach her I so loved, and seek
Some sign to assure her present entrance, lo!
The chasm which yawned betwixt us, and at first
Scarce pace-wide, now showed fathomless, and broad,
As 'tween two waves, mid sea, rood-wide is stretched
Their tempest cradling hollow, hurricane rocked.
Desperate, I called; but now behold the ground,
As though on rolling hinges nether-hidden,
Slode crabwise; and methought,—nay, could it be?
The temple against whose wall our leader leaned
Tottered, as though deliberant or to stand

420

Or fall. One moment more than sated sight.
For ah! a shriek I heard; and turning, viewed,
Slow sinking with the slab whereon she stood,
Down, irrecoverably down the abyss,
My loved one, like a sacrifice to night.
Glory and joy of life, creation's crown,
Now lost; already do I feel the weight
Of woes perspective. Therefore time's broad stream
Flows o'er thine end in silence: hides thy doom.
To heaven she raised her finger, and was gone.
Nor saw I, nor aught knew, distinctly, more.
Save that in springing upwards for mere life,
That vast substructure, all, meseemed, was blent
With earth's interior chaos, and I passed,
The mysteries now in mystery all inwombed,
For aye, and ne'er to be by me resought,—
Clear through the death-rift, into heavenly day;
For spirits are e'er born upwards, while in time,
As by Cæsarean birth. The orient sun,
Head of the house of heaven, the sire of days,
The manifestive light, the lord of joy,
Saluting prostrate, I beheld: and lo!
As when, in sight the axe, some wrongous wretch
Fear urged, confesseth, but one murtherous deed,
Still unsuspect, keeps back; and with a groan,
And grinding shudder, locks it in his breast;
Nor leaves his lips scarce room to vaunt of breath;
So earth that fatal fissure with a crash
Closing, beheld I hide her deathful deed;
While I, from shutting as from opening death,
Doubly escaped, seem scarce convinced of life.
Thou speakest not.

Lucifer.
I have nothing to observe.
The quest of knowledge is man's deadliest pride;
And me nor pride, nor death, surpriseth now.

Festus.
Twain of my best supports, as though the earth
Should miss twin elements, my heart hath lost.

Lucifer.
This spirit inquisitive which all things would learn,
Learns all things nothing may be.

Festus.
Ah! Let be!
Life's intransmissive secret now she knows,
Knows but too well.

Lucifer.
Go to. Have done with these,
Whose fates were doubtless fixed before all time;
Coæval with the atoms.

Festus.
Mystery, say,
Accounts for mystery. Meanwhile this to know
Of nature, God, man, truth, of all creeds core,
Outworths all gain beside, annuls all loss,

421

Pain, suffering; close as to God's feet we have been.
What men believe beside nought helps, nor harms;
Their primal faith this, Godwards. Thus it is
A great deliverance,—like mine own just passed,
Slipped through death's fingers, solemnizes life
Nay, sanctifies. One seems to hold the trust
More straight from God. No earthly mean we need,
No graduated conception of the gift,
To prove its worth, through fellow-creaturehood,
Or test our reasoning; soul, rehomed, restalled,
Renewed, confirms spontaneously its vows,
Ta'en first when scarce intelligible.

Lucifer.
And now,
Time threatens to forestall our course. Wilt do
A message for me?

Festus.
Aught I will that may
Ease and divert my mind.

Lucifer.
True, I had forgot.
Seek then the fair Elissa: and with her
From time to time confer; sometime 'twill need—
Upon thy coming ends, long hoped, which she
May sanction, perchance aid. Go; waste no words.
Improve thy welcome.

Festus.
I want something new.

Lucifer.
Hence! I assure thee pleasant company;
More so than thine; bright future, and—

Festus.
I go.

Guardian Angel.
Yes, go. But I unseen attend thee, yet
To warn 'gainst cruel sin; mayhap to save.
Not even he doth know that I am here.

Lucifer.
Thus to dissemble suits me: me reminds
Of whilome triumphs. Well wots the world ere now,
That I have starred it on an ampler stage.
Meantime I get impatient for the end.
I trust this fair one so to assume, that she
In spirit commanding may the man's excite
As fitmost for such eminence. Then,—at last,—

Festus.
Now though I do what I desire, or fail,
Each were not less an evil.

Lucifer.
Nature, friend,
Is given to man to conquer.

Festus.
But alas!
Not yet can we o'ercome our nature, here,
Would we.

Lucifer.
If therefore passion strike the heart
Let it have length of line and plenteous play;
The safety of superior principles
Lies in exhaustion of the lower ones
However vast or violent.

422

Festus.
Such a thought
Stands in the way of nothing; not even man.
But hesitancy is ominous.

Lucifer.
Men and angels
Obey the order of existence.

Festus.
Fate!
Who seeks thee everywhere, will find thee there.

XXV.

Our story binds us still for a while to earth,
And sea all agèd, gray at once with years,
And green with youth. Oft those unhappiest have
Their heart's desire in dreams; we dreaming that
Not seldom shall befal us. And when love
In creature worship merges, who can tell
What 'tis we love? Perchance incarnate evil.
For now the evillest one's designs take shape;
Through beauty to be impressed upon the soul
Tempted, that each in other rapt, and love
Of world-pomp, chosen his final gift, all power,
The end might swiftlier happen. Not the less,
One grain of holiest hope is sown, whence fields
Other than ours, by patience tilled, shall wave
With unimagined harvests.

Garden and Bower by the Sea.
Lucifer and Elissa. Afterwards Festus.
Lucifer.
Night comes, world jewelled, as my bride should be.
Start forth the stars in myriads, at the sign
Of light, divine usurper, as to wage
War with the lines of darkness; and the moon
Pale ghost of light, comes haunting the cold earth
After the sun's red sea-death, quietless.
Immortal night! I love thee. Thou and I
Are of one strain. Heaven's eldest issue, we.
He makes; we mar together all things; all
But our own selves. Let love not make thee cold
And tremble, or thou'lt chill me. That starry robe
Thou wearest, makes thee lovelier. Love me, night!
Catch me up to thee, mightiest one. To thee
Thee only, fatal power might I unveil
A plot so great, so just it must succeed,
Were success merit's predicate. The friend
Whose fate momentous most to man I treat,
Long launched with me on a tempestuous track
See, and still hotlier must I urge, that hurled
On passion's treacherous shoals, his barque may yet

423

Founder, o'erfraught as 'tis with human doom;
Doom, thou, O precreative night, who holdst
Within thy breast, the prime conceipt of things,
And their last outcome, mightst impart, wert thou
Oracular, as of old, as of old, kind.
Small help get I, elsewhere. But surely, here
Cometh mine earthly. I, in mine own toils
Seem to me tangled. Her high-natured soul
Takes seriously all. But to me no end,
In show, or earnest, save the end of all,
Remains. To that end all things be mere means.
Him for whose fall I care this beauteous dame
Shall duly dazzle; and, for I think not much
Of ultimate perseverance, with their fates
So blent, if the threads prove pliable enough,
This way or that, by suffering, or by sin,
Or patent power, sublimed in secresy,
The world's works running gently down, no check
Will likely mar the smooth decline I mean.
All things have so far answered the sage plans
Friends, some, alack! defunct of life and aim,
Long toiled, nor fruitlessly, to attain. At last
Earth shows in travail of an unborn king;
The imperial infant, he; and sooner now
Than he or any knows man's mightiest choice
Is being destined. See slowly, solemnly,
As riseth from the main the sacred moon,
Stately and still, she grows upon the night.
She sees me not. Ere yet she comes is time
To rectify my spirit to its just points
Above, around. How is it that now I thrill
More deeply 'neath her eye-glance than the gaze
Of spirit or angel? Can this negative
Eternal be subdued by things of time?
And paltriest affirmations of mere power,
If by him guided, bear the brunt of worlds?
As still, when set the sun, in summer's tide,
Earth feels, though faintly, his presence; and the night
Hath never total dark; but round her head
In starry silence, light invisible feels
Mysteriously his blind way; so, I now
Oppressed with what seems coming, as one doomed,
At day-dawn, which to all beside brings life:
To him death only. It is Elissa! Welcome!—

Elissa.
Is't not a lovely, nay, a heavenly eve?

Lucifer.
Thy presence only makes it so to me.
The moments thou art with me are like stars
Peering through my dark life.

Elissa.
Nay, speak not so,
Or I shall weep, and thou wilt turn away
From woman's tears: yet are they woman's wealth.

424

Lucifer.
Then keep thy treasures, lady! I would not have
The world, if prized at one sad tear of thine.
One tear of beauty can outweigh a world
Even of sin and sorrow, heavy as this;
But beauty cannot sin, and should not weep,
For she is mortal. Oh! let deathless things
Alone weep. Why should aught that dies be sad?

Elissa.
The noble mind is oft too generous,
And, by protecting, weakens lesser ones;
And tears must come of feeling, though they quench
As oft the light which love lit in the eye.

Lucifer.
I meant not to be mournful. Tell me, now,
How hast thou passed the hours since last we met?

Elissa.
I have stayed the livelong day within this bower;
It was here that thou didst promise me to come;
Watching from wanton morn to repentant eve,
The self-same roses ope and close; untired,
Listening the same birds first and latest songs.
And still thou camest not. To the mind which waits
Upon one hour, the others are but slaves.
The week hath but one day—the day one hour;
That hour of the heart—that lord of time.

Lucifer.
Sweet one! I raced with light, and passed the laggard
To meet thee—or, I mean I could have done—
Yea, have outsped the very dart of death—
So much I sought; and were I living light
From God, with leave to range the world, and choose
Another brow than his whereon to beam;
To mark what even an angel could but covet;
A something lovelier than heaven's loveliness;
To thee I straight would dart, unheeding all
The lives of other worlds, even those who name
Themselves thy kind; for oft my mind o'ersoars
The stars; and, pondering upon what may be
Of their chief lording natures, man's seems worst—
The darkest, meanest, which, through all these worlds,
Drags what is deathless, may be, down to dust.

Elissa.
Speak not so bitterly of human kind;
I know that thou dost love it. Hast not heard
Of those great spirits, who the greater grow
The better we are able them to prize?
Great minds can never cease; yet have they not
A separate estate of deathlessness:
The future is a remnant of their life:
Our time is part of theirs, not theirs of ours;
They know the thoughts of ages long before.
It is not the weak mind feels the great mind's might;

425

None but the great can test it. Feels the oak
Or reed the strong storm keenlier? Oh, unsay
What thou hast said of man; nor deem me wrong.
Mind cannot mind despise—it is itself.
Mind must love mind: the great and good are friends;
And he is but half great who is not good.
And, oh! humanity is the fairest flower
Blooming in earthly breasts; so sweet and pure,
That it might freshen even the fadeless wreaths
Twined round the golden harps of those in heaven.

Lucifer.
For thy sake I will love even man, or aught.
Spirit were I, and a mere mortal thou,
For thy sake I would even seek to die;
That, dead or living, I might still be with thee.
But no! I'll deem thee deathless—mind and make,
And worthier of some spirit's love than mine;
Yea, of the first born of God's sons, could he,
In that sweet shade thy beauty casts o'er all,
One moment lay and cool his burning soul;
Or might the ark of his wide flood-like woe
But rest upon that mount of peace and bliss,
Thy heart imbosomed in all beauteousness.
Nay, lady! shrink not. Thinkest thou I am he?

Elissa.
Thou art too noble, far. I oft have wished,
Ere I knew thee, I had some spirit's love;
But thou art more like what I sought than man:
And a forbidden quest, it seems; for thou
Hast more of awe than love about thee, like
The mystery of dreams which we can feel,
But cannot touch.

Lucifer.
Nay, think not so! It is wrong.
Come, let us sit in this thy favourite bower,
And I will hear thee sing. I love that voice,
Dipping more softly on the subject ear
Than that calm kiss the willow gives the wave;
A soft rich tone, a rainbow of sweet sounds,
Just spanning the soothed sense. Come, nay me not.

Elissa.
Do thou lead out some lay; I'll follow thine.

Lucifer.
Well, I agree. It will spare me much of shame
In coming after thee. My song is said
Of Lucifer the star. See, there he shines!

I am Lucifer, the star;
Oh! think on me,
As I lighten from afar
The heavens and thee;
In town, or tower,
Or this fair bower,
Oh! think on me;
Though a wandering star,
As the loveliest are,
I love but thee.

426

Lady! when I brightest beam,
Love, look on me;
I am not what I may seem
To the world or thee;
But fain would love
With thee above,
Where thou wilt be.
But if love be a dream,
As the world doth deem,
What is't to me?

Elissa.
Could we but deem the stars had hearts, and loved,
They would seem happier, holier, even than now;
And, ah! why not? they are so beautiful.
And love is part and union in itself
Of all that is in nature brilliant, pure;
Of all in feeling sacred and sublime.
Surely the stars are images of love:
The sunbeam and the starbeam doth bring love.
The sky, the sea, the rainbow, and the stream,
And dark blue hill, where all the loveliness
Of earth and heaven, in sweet ecstatic strife,
Seem mingling hues which might immortal be,
If length of life by height of beauty went:
All seem but made for love—love made for all:
We do become all heart with those we love:
It is nature's self—it is everywhere—it is here.

Lucifer.
To me there is but one place in the world,
And that where thou art; for where'er I be,
Thy love doth seek its way into my heart,
As will a bird into her secret nest:
Then sit and sing; sweet wing of beauty, sing.

Elissa.
Bright one! who dwellest in the happy skies,
Rejoicing in thy light as does the brave
In his keen flashing sword, and his strong arm's
Swift swoop, canst thou, from among the sons of men
Single out those who love thee as do I
Thee from thy fellow glories? If so, star,
Turn hither thy bright front; I love thee, friend.
Thou hast no deeds of darkness. All thou dost
Is to us light and beauty: yea, thou art
A globe all glory; thou who at the first
Didst answer to the angels which in heaven
Sang the bright birth of earth, and even now,
As star by star is born, dost sing the same
With countless hosts in infinite delight,
Be unto me a moment! Write thy bright
Light on my heart before the sun shall rise
And vanquish sight. Thou art the prophesy
Of light which he fulfils. Speak, shining star,

427

Drop from thy golden lips the truths of heaven.
First of all stars and favourite of the skies,
Apostle of the sun—thou upon whom
His mantle resteth—speak, prophetic beauty!
Speak, shining star out of the heights of heaven,
Beautiful being, speak to God for man!
Is it because of beauty thou wast chosen
To be the sign of sin? For surely sin
Must be surpassing lovely when for her
Men forfeit God's reward of deathless bliss,
And life divine; or, is it that such beauty,
Sometimes before the truth, and sometimes after,
As is a moral or a prophesy,
Is ever warning? Why wert thou accorded
To the great Evil? Is it because thou art
Of all the sun's bright servants nearest earth?
Star of the morning! unto us thou art
The présage of a day of power. Like thee
Let us rejoice in life, then, and proclaim
A glory coming greater than our own.
All ages are but stars to that which comes,
Sunlike. Oh! speak, star! Lift thou up thy voice
Out of yon radiant ranks, and I on earth,
As thou in heaven, will bless the Lord God ever.
Hear, Lucifer, thou star! I answer thee.

Oh! ask me not to look and love,
But bid me worship thee;
For thou art earthly things above,
As far as angels be:
Then whether in the eve or morn
Thou dost the maiden skies adorn,
Oh! let me worship thee!

I am but as this drop of dew;
Oh! let me worship thee!
Thy light, thy strength, is ever new,
Even as the angels' be:
And as this dewdrop, till it dies,
Bosoms the golden stars and skies,
Oh! let me worship thee!

But, dearest, why that dark look?

Lucifer.
Let it not
Cloud thine even with its shadow: but the ground
Of all great thoughts is sadness; and I mused
Upon passed happiness. Well—be it passed!
Did Lucifer, as I do, gaze on thee,
The flame of woe would flicker in his breast,
And straight die out—the brightness of thy beauty
Quenching it as the sun doth earthly fire.

Elissa.
Nay, look not on me so intensely sad.

428

Lucifer.
Forgive me: it was an agony of bliss.
I love thee, and am full of happiness.
My bosom bounds beneath thy smile as bounds
The sea's unto the moon, his mighty mistress;
Lying and looking up to her, and saying,
Lovely! lovely! lovely! lady of the heavens!
Oh! when the thoughts of other joyous days,
Perchance, if such may be, of happier times,
Are falling gently on the memory
Like autumn's leaves distained with dusky gold,
Yet softly as a snowflake; and the smile
Of kindliness, like thine, is beaming on me,
Oh! pardon, if I lose myself, nor know
Whether I be with heaven or thee.

Elissa.
Use not
Such ardent phrase, nor mix the claim of aught
On earth with thoughts more than with hopes of heaven.

Lucifer.
Hopes, lady! I have none.

Elissa.
Thou must have. All
Have hopes, however wretched they may be,
Or blessed. It is hope which lifts the lark so high,
Hope of a lighter air and bluer sky;
And the poor hack which drops down on the flints,
Upon whose eye the dust is settling, he
Hopes, but to die. No being exists, of hope
Of love, void.

Lucifer.
Yes, one is; the ancient Ill,
Dwelling and damned through all which is: that spirit
Whose heart is hate—who is the foe of God—
The foe of all.

Elissa.
How knowest thou such doth live?
If one there be, the spirit foe of man,
It is only that inferiors still must strive.
With God they cannot strive nor dare to deem.
What single star could in itself abide
The onset of the armies of the heavens?
How then all armies his, who all hath made?
And made in love? Oh, trust me, never fell
By love, a spirit or earthly or of heaven.
Rather by love they are regenerate; love,
Mind's happiest privilege, of all living things
The sole sufficing reason. A trinity
There seems of principles, which represent
And rule created life; the love of self,
Our fellows, and our God. In all there reigns
One common feeling; each maintains the other;
Compatible all—all needful; this to life,
To virtue, that, to bliss, all. All, together,
Source, end, perfection show of being create.
From these three principles cometh every deed,

429

Desire, will, reasoning, good or bad; to these
They all determine—sum and scheme: the three
In centre and in round one—wrap life's world
Sky-wise. Hail! air of love, whereby we live;
How sweet, how fragrant! Spirit, though unseen—
Void of gross sign—is scarce a simple essence,
Immortal, immaterial, though it be.
One only simple essence liveth—God,—
Creator, uncreate. The brutes beneath,
The angels high above us, with ourselves,
Are but compounded things of mind and form.
In all things animate is therefore cored
An elemental sameness of existence;
For God, being love, in love created all,
As he contains the whole, and penetrates.
Seraphs love God, and angels love the good:
We love each other; and these lower lives,
Which walk the earth in thousand diverse shapes,
In whose mean being see God's humility,
According to their reason, love us too;
The most intelligent affect us most.
Nay, man's chief wisdom's love—the love of God.
The new religion—final, perfect, pure—
Is that of mercy and love. Heaven's great command—
Our all-sufficing precept—is't not love?
Truly to love ourselves we must love God—
To love God we must all his creatures love—
To love his creatures, both ourselves and him.
Thus love is all that's wise, fair, good, and happy.

Lucifer.
How knowest thou God doth live? Why did he not,
With that same hand which scattered o'er the sky,
As this small dust I strew upon the wind,
Yon countless orbs, aye fixing each on him
Its flaming eye, which winks and blenches oft
Beneath his glance,—with the finger of that hand
Which spangled o'er infinity with suns,
And wrapped it round about him as a robe,
Why did he not write out his own great name
In spheres of fire, that heaven might alway tell
To every creature, God? If not, then why
Should I believe when I behold around me
Nought, scarce, save ill and woe?

Elissa.
God surely lives!
Without God all things are in tunnel darkness.
Let there be God, and all are sun—all God.
And to the just soul, in a future state,
Defect's dark mist, thick-spreading o'er this vale,
Shall dim the eye no more, nor bound survey;
And evil, now which boweth being down

430

As dew the grass, shall only fit all life
For fresher growth and for intenser day,
Where God shall dry all tears as the sun dew.

Lucifer.
O lady! I am wretched.

Elissa.
Say not so.
With thee I could not deem myself unhappy.
Hark to the sea! Like the near hum it sounds
Of a great city.

Lucifer.
Say, the city earth;
For such these orbs are in the realms of space.

Elissa.
I dreamed once that the night came down to me;
In figure, oh! too like thine own for truth,
And looked into me with his thousand eyes;
And that made me unhappy; but it passed;
And I half wished it back. Mind hath its earth
And heaven. The many petty common thoughts
Whereon we daily tread, as it were, make one,
And above which few look; the other is
That high and welkin-like infinity,—
The brighter, upper half of the mind's world,
Thick with great sun-like and constellate thoughts;
And in the night of mind, which is our sleep,
These thoughts shine out in dreams. Dreams double life;
They are the heart's bright shadow on life's flood;
And even the step from death to deathlessness,
From this earth's gross existence unto heaven,
Can scarce be more than from the harsh hot day,
To sleep's soft scenes, the moonlight of the mind.
The wave is never weary of the wind,
And in mountainous playfulness leaps to it always.
But mind, world-wearied, glooms itself in sleep,
Like a sweet smile, settling into proper sadness;
For sleep seems part of our immortality:
And why should anything that dies be sad?
Last night I dreamed I walked within a hall—
The concave of the world. Long shroud-like lights
Lit up its lift-like dome, and pale wide walls,
Horizon-like; and every one was there;
It was the house of death, and Death was there.
We could not see him, but he was a feeling:
We knew he was around us—heard us—eyed us;
But where wast thou? I never met thee once.
And all was still as nothingness; or as God,
Deep judging, when the thought of making first
Quickened and stirred within him; and he made
All heaven at one thought as at a glance.
Noise was there none; and yet there was a sound,
Which seemed to be half like silence, half like sound.
All crept about still as the cold wet worms,
Which slid among our feet, we could not 'scape from.

431

Round me were ruined fragments of dead gods—
Those shadows of the mystery of One—
And the red worms, too, flourished over these,
For marble is a shadow weighed with mind;
Each being, as men of old believed, who 'neath
A dim starlight of truth religious lived,
A moral night, contrast with ours,—distinct
In form, and place, and power, But oh! not all
The gathered gods of eld could shine like ours,
No more than all yon stars could make a sun.
I felt my spirit's spring gush out more clear,
Gazing on these: they beautified my mind,
As rocks and flowers reflected do a well.
Mind makes itself like that it lives amidst,
And on; and thus, among dreams, imaginings,
And scenes of awe, and purity, and power,
Grows sternly sweet and calm—all beautiful
With godlike coldness and unconsciousness
Of mortal passion, mental toil; until,
Like to the marble model of a god,
It doth assume a firm and dazzling form,
Scarcely less incorruptible than that
It emblems: and so grew, methought, my mind.
Matter hath many qualities; mind, one:
It is irresistible: pure power—pure god.
While wandering on I met what seemed myself:
Was it not strange that we should meet, and there?
But all is strange in dreaming, as in death,
And waking, as in life: nought is not strange.
Methought that I was happy, because dead.
All hurried to and fro; and many cried
To each other—Can I do thee any good?
But no one heeded: nothing could avail:
The world was one great grave. I looked, and saw
Time on his two great wings—one, night—one, day—
Fly moth-like, right into the flickering sun;
So that the sun went out, and they both perished.
And one gat up and spake—a holy man—
Exhorting them; but each and all cried out—
Go to!—it helps not—means not; we are dead.
Death spake no word methought, but me he made
Speak for him; and I dreamed that I was death;
Then, that Death only lived: all things were mixed;
Up and down shooting, like the brain's fierce dance
In a delirium, when we are apt to die.
‘Hell is my heir: what kin to me is heaven?
Bring out your hearts before me. Give your limbs
To whom ye list or love. My son, Decay,
Will take them: give them him. I want your hearts,
That I may take them up to God.’ There came

432

These words amongst us, but we knew not whence;
It was as if the air spake. And there rose
Out of the earth a giant thing, all earth;
His eye was earthy, and his arm was earthy;
He had no heart. He but said, I am Decay;
And as he spake, he crumbled into earth,
And there was nothing of him. But we all
Lifted our faces up at the word, God,
And spied a dark star high above in the midst
Of others, numberless as are the dead.
And all plucked out their hearts, and held them in
Their right hands. Many tried to pick out specks
And stains, but could not; each gave up his heart.
And something—all things—nothing—it was Death,
Said, as before, from air—Let us to God!
And straight we rose, leaving behind the raw
Worms and dead gods, all of us—soared and soared
Right upwards, till the star I told thee of,
Looked like a moon—the moon became a sun:
The sun—there came a hand between the sun and us,
And its five fingers made five nights in air.
God tore the crown from off the sun's broad brow,
And flung the flaming glory flat to hell.
And then I heard a long, cold, skeleton scream,
Like a trumpet whining through a catacomb,
Which made the sides of that great grave shake in.
I saw the world and vision of the dead
Dim itself off—and all was life. I woke,
And felt the high sun blazoning on my brow,
His own almighty mockery of woe,
And fierce and infinite laugh at things which cease.
Hell hath its light—and heaven; he burns with both,
And my dream broke, like life from the last limb—
Quivering; so loth I felt to let it go,
Just as I thought I had caught sight of heaven,
And seen my last of life's unhappiness.
It came to nought, as dreams of heaven on earth
Do always. Have I touched some spirit-chord,
Adroitless, jars within thy mind? For, see!
Like to a mountain battlemented with cloud,
Some gloomy thought,—what is't? o'erpents thy brow?

Lucifer.
It is only this; we are to part.

Elissa.
So soon!
Farewell, then, gentle stars! To-night, farewell!
For we all part at once. It is thus the bright
Visions and joy of youth break up—but they
For ever. When ye shine again I will
Be with ye; for I love ye next to him.
To all, adieu! When shall I see thee next?

Lucifer.
Lady, I know not.

433

Elissa.
Say!

Lucifer.
Never, perchance.

Elissa.
There is but one immortal in the world
Who need say—never!

Lucifer.
What if I were he?

Elissa.
But thou art not he; and thou shalt not say it.
There is not a thing so ill I would not save
Had I the power, from ill, and from itself.

Lucifer.
A thought inspired; it might have come from heaven.
Thou art the soul of kindness.

Elissa.
Who so speaks
The soul of kindness, speaks the mind of God;
For nature is all kind, and all he made.
Justice and power are attributes of God,
But love his essence. How then harmonize
Infinite love with creatures' endless woe?
If every creatural act be finite, all
God's infinite, then must his love at last
Win every spirit, and all hate subdue.
Can God's will fail for ever? But he wills,
And must, that all souls should be saved and blessed.
As man could never be more just than God,
Shall God, too, be less merciful than man?
The soul create imperfect therefore sins
Because imperfect; but by him redeemed,
As by an universal sacrifice,
Being is saved; and sin gone, suffering ends.
Then, finite nature, which can only know
Imperfect good, by purifying spheres
Of wisdom and progression, grace sustained,
Harmonious lives with the eternal heavens.
Oh! let us meet and talk of things like these,
Always. I love the thought of boundless good.
Stars rise and set, like beauteous, through all time,
With a sublime exactitude to meet
Each other's faces. Why not we, like them?

Lucifer.
I see no beauty—feel no love—all things
Are unlovely.

Elissa.
O earth! be deaf; and heaven
Shut thy blue eye. He doth blaspheme the world.
Dost not love me?

Lucifer.
Love thee? Ay! earth and heaven,
Together, could not make a love like mine!

Elissa.
When wilt thou come again? To-morrow?

Lucifer.
Well.
And then I cross yon sea ere I return;
For I have matters in another land.
Fear not.

Elissa.
When will our parting days be over?

434

Lucifer.
Oh! soon—soon! Think of me, love, on the waters!
Be happy! and, for me, I love few things more
Than at night to ride upon the broad-backed billow,
Seeing along and plunging on his precipitous path;
While the red moon is westering low away,
And the mad waves are fighting for the stars,
Or, say, their transient imagery, sea-sown,
Like men for—what they know not.

Elissa.
Scorner!

Lucifer.
Saint!

Elissa.
Much that is great hath earth; and but one sea,
To her as is her spirit; impulsive oft,
As the mad monarch passion to the heart,
Fathomless, overwhelming, which receives
The rivers of all feeling; in whose depths
Lie wrecked all nature's riches; God, O! sea!
Stainless, immaculable by death, by earth
Of grossliest burthened stream, unfiled; while all
Accepting, purifying, commuting; God
When first he made thee, moved upon thee then,
And left his impress there, the same even now,
As when thy last wave leapt from chaos.—Hark!
Nay, there is some one coming.

Festus
(entering).
It is I.
I said we should be sure to meet thee here:
For I have brought one who would speak with thee.

Lucifer.
Thanks! and where is he?

Festus.
Yonder. He would not
Come up so far as this.

Lucifer.
Who is it?

Festus.
I know not
Who he may be, or what; but I can guess.

Lucifer.
Remain a moment, love, till I return.

Elissa.
Nay—let me leave!

Lucifer.
Not yet: do not dislike him.
He is a friend, and more another time.

Festus.
I am sorry, lady, to have caused this parting.
I fear I am unwelcome.

Elissa.
We were parting.

Festus.
Then am I doubly sorry; for I know
It is the saddest and the sacredest
Moment of all with those who love.

Elissa.
He is coming!
So I forgive thee.

Lucifer.
I must leave thee, love:
I know not for how long: it rests with thee
If it seem long at all. Eternity
Might pass, and I not know it in thy love.

435

Elissa.
If to believe that I do love thee always
May make time fly the fleeter—

Lucifer.
I'll believe it—
Trust me. I leave this lady in thy charge,
Festus. Be kind—wait on her—may he, love?

Elissa.
Thou knowest. I receive him as thy friend,
Whenever he come.

Festus.
I ask no higher title
Than friend of the lovely and the generous.

Elissa.
Farewell!

Festus.
Lady! I will not forget my trust. (Apart)

The breeze which curls the lake's bright lip but lifts
A purer, deeper, water to the light;
The ruffling of the wild bird's wing but wakes
A warmer beauty and a downier depth.
That startled shrink, that faintest blossom-blush
Of constancy alarmed!—Love! if thou hast
One weapon in that shining armoury,
The quiver on thy shoulder, where thou keep'st
Each arrowy eye-beam feathered with a sigh;—
If from that bow, shaped so like beauty's lip,
Strung with its string of pearls, thou wilt twang forth
But one dart, fair into the mark I mean,—
Do it, and I will worship thee for ever:
Yea, I will give thee glory and a name
Known, sunlike, in all nations. Heart be still!

Lucifer.
This parting over—

Elissa.
Yes, this one—and then?

Lucifer.
Why, then another, may be.

Elissa.
No—no more.
I'll be unhappy if thou tell'st me so.

Lucifer.
Well, then—no more.

Elissa.
But when wilt thou come back?

Lucifer.
Almost before thou wishest. He will know.

Elissa.
I shall be always asking him.

Lucifer.
One word
Apart with thee ere yet thou leavest. Know,
I have with him a purpose thou mayst aid.
Conscious though careless of the future, he
Thou wot'st of, breathes premarked to mighty ends,
The heir of fate; and though to states unknown,
The destined head he lives of power mundane,
Than grandest monarch's more. His soul, as yet
Absorbed in love of wisdom, and his heart
In beauty's starry smile steeped, lack the lure
To climb ambition's heights, where yet his foot,
Outstepping all, is due. If thou, possessed
With aught of friendly impulse, to that end
Couldst wake into a glow the torpid gleeds

436

Which wait the inspiring breath, words, as may suit,
Of ardour or contempt—forms audible—
Thy fealty to mewards I hold firm,—
It will much advantage me, and mine own ends
Advance.

Elissa.
I doubt not, but in worthy purposes,
One might adventure more than words; and this
Towers on the mind more grandly, as the thought
Is contemplated.

Lucifer.
True. Perchance himself
Urged warily may to thine ears confide
The future, and success concert with thee.
Tempt him, and he might name thee queen of earth.
Yea, stamped by thine ascendant soul, commence
That bright career the world awaits.

Elissa.
And thou?
What part hast thou in this?

Lucifer.
A great one I,
Though not like his.

Elissa.
Ah, me! A second-best.

Lucifer.
Who doeth not great things with equal ease,
And small, doth but indifferently.

Elissa.
We all
Have met ere now.

Lucifer.
My fault it shall not be
That ye are strangers.

Elissa.
Say for me—farewell!

Lucifer.
Shine on, ye stars! and light her to her rest;
Scarce are ye worthy for her handmaidens.
Why, hell would laugh to learn I had been in love.
As rumour through some impish spy may blab,
And would be blind, as they oft are who laugh;
Not seeing their own folly, nor the flaw
Which stars their self-deceit. These twain I bring
Together as prime factors in my sum,
The evil most profound I can achieve—
Earth's sudden death. Yet, through the boundless mist
Of mockery I have played with, one bright peak,
Sharp, solid, peers into the upper light;
One thought of good, one seed of sacred truth,
One priceless pearl fallen from love's fairy lips,
Hath sunk into my soul. It irks me not,
Though, like the projective powder of adept,
Hell's base metallic mass it should transmute
Into one pure and perfect orb of gold,
The future is to be; and not as yet
Can I be balked. Eradicated good
Hath heretofore the aim been of my being.
Shall I not strive to root it out then, hence?
See which is stronger, that, or I? though helped

437

By all creation's wrong and wretchedness?
The war of good and evil narrowed here
To mine own spirit, it is time to force the strife.
All obstacles must be removed, the fates
Are fast maturing to their end, at once.
Thou seemest fixed in thought, as a star in space.
Hast thought of that, I whilom promised thee?

Festus.
Soon, then soon.
My mind is now intent on other aims.

Lucifer.
The world perhaps will hear of?

Festus.
Ay, anon.

Lucifer.
I have affairs in hell. Wilt go with me?

Festus.
Yes, in a month or two:—not just this minute.

Lucifer.
I shall be there and back again ere then.

Festus.
Meanwhile I can amuse myself; so, go!
But some time I would fain behold thy home,
And pass the gates of fire.

Lucifer.
Thou shalt, and soon.
My home is everywhere where spirit is.

Festus.
The strongest passion which I have is honour:
I would I had none: it is in my way.

Guardian Angel.
One moment, Festus; go! I follow.

Lucifer.
Gone?
All things are as I meant them. On the ridge
Of ruin, how we brave it; as though one,
Ambitious of a seat in heaven, above
The cloud-encumbered pathway of the wind,
Should sit the tremulous bridge all-hued, which spans
Air's stormy realms, fate scorned. To mark an eagle,
Batting the sunny ceiling of the world,
With his dark wings, one well might deem his heart
On heaven; but no! it is fixed on flesh and blood;
And soon his talons tell it. Let me think.

Guardian Angel.
Thy great decrees, O God of grace! be given
To humblest spirits to know: too blessed if they,
Thy holy secrets sharing, live, depute,
To work thy universal will, and ground
In thine intents the all-embracing heavens.
Empowered by thee to serve thine ends divine,
We learn the thoughts of others; and in this wise
Now know I thine, O Lucifer! thy schemes
'Gainst God's elect, by mortal, fatal sin
To ruin; but the words within thy spirit,
Let fall by her thou once wouldst sacrifice—
I, and her angel here together prayed—
Like the atomic seed of worlds, the heart
And nucleus of new nature shall betimes,
By will of God regenerate; and all aims
Of creatural evil frustrate, God's sole end

438

Of universal good o'erride all bounds;
And in his infinite satisfaction close
The world of life:—words which, truth-soul'd, have struck
To the main root of being; thoughts of good
Thou canst not now annihilate; hopes which bear,
Though silent, witness not to be suppressed
By time, like earth's immarbled sediments,
To age-compressing floods. Thou wilt not brook
To her, harm; even this can I foresee;
And thus thy first good deed, rebuking thought
Of ill in other, shall both her and him
Whom thou wouldst lure to ill, and loss of bliss,
Them and thee profit. Time, and God's high will
Shall all things else educe, as writ in heaven.
But he shall know my presence ere I go.
Spirit, I warn thee!

Lucifer.
What! celestial friend!
Meet we once more?

Guardian Angel.
At last, let mockery cease.

Lucifer.
Let mockery cease. I have—is this not true?
To be is something, to believe is more—
While owning him supreme, believed his good,
Yet bounded by mine evil?

Guardian Angel.
O, conceit
Most false, most fearful! How then shall he gain
The victories he hath promised to himself,
And all, in everlasting prophesies,
If he subdue not evil and transform
All ill to good? That were a victory vast,
And of none other hand achievable;
Worthy indeed of God.

Lucifer.
This sole I see;
All evil I must elaborate to the end,
Both in this mortal and myself. Meanwhile
Can I not, in his heart—bad, base return
True, for that late to me vouchsafed,—one thought
Evil, one wild desire, instil; of soul
Perilous, if ruinous not? 'Gainst both, in sooth,
Must I take arms; as the audacious main
Combats twin elements at once, the land
Lashing with breakers, while with clouded foam,
The neutral air intimidate, he invades.
But dare I meet the fate mysterious, now
Threatened, or promised is't? awaits me? Well;
It recks not. I can brave it to the last.

Guardian Angel.
My lips are sealed, mine eyes.

Lucifer.
Mine, too. Around
The cavèd heavens I grope, nor see escape;
This everlasting vault, these tombing skies.

439

XXVI.

Hearts, like moons,
Mature apace; and while one half the world
Is busy, and one half dreaming, Passion's path
Is miled of perilous ventures scarcely 'scaped
By sheer precipitancy, as ice unsafe
Oft rends not till we are sped. Pity the fair
Embodiment of thrice passionate love, by man
From his fiend friend won; the lure yet laid of power,
Ambition's highest to attract, learn, justly fails;
Nor less the false solution this would seek
Of selfish luxury, and a life unlawed
By relevance to the eternal, and its dues.
Thus wiled, lo! life's defeat we fame; with cups
Of air inebriate, or more substanced, drain
Deceived, the wine of our own death-feast; plot,
Ravenous of doom, self-ruin; but this withheld.
See wars of soul with soul that but half-won
Half lost on either side feints prove contrived,
By the bad spirit's means for his own worst ends:
Whom we know not when come; so dark we grow.

Mansion overlooking the Sea. Interior. A Drawing-room.
Festus and Elissa. Guardian Angel. Lucifer.
Festus.
Who says he loves and is not wretched, lies,
Or that love is madness, mad from his mother came.
It is the most reasonable thing in nature.
What can we do but love? It is our cup;
Our fine, our passion. In heaven's name, Elissa!
What was it made us love?

Elissa.
I know not, what?
I am not happy. I have wept all day.

Festus.
It was thine own fault. What wouldst thou have of me?
I tell thee we must—no: I cannot tell thee.
I cannot brook those tears. Thou knowest I love thee,
Worship thee; oh it's a world more than worship,
The cold obedience given to God. Elissa,
Turn towards me thy fair brow.

Elissa.
Nay, let me weep.

Festus.
Thou hadst no need, no call, no cause to have loved me.
One was, who well loved thee.

Elissa.
I could not help
His loving me; nor, woe is me! prevent
My loving thee. Alas! it is our fate.

Festus.
Then fate hath fee'd the passion for our end;
And we are sold to ruin.

Elissa.
Then we will die
Together; quit together body and life;
But while I live, none can I love but thee.

440

Look at me; heart and arms, I am thine own;
Have been, must be. Oh! I was happy once;
Ere I knew thee. And thou, why wast thou kind
To me, kind cruelly, or this had not been
Ever. But now, be cruel, if thou wilt.
Hate me, still I am thine; disown me, thine;
Desert me, no thou canst not. Look at me,
I am half blind with weeping, and mine eyes
Have scarce a tear left in them, for I yet
Dread how 'twill end. Thou wilt leave me, leave me, lone,
Loveless, forgot.

Festus.
Nay, if we are given to forge
Adventures, let it be so. Say, we part.
Say, we must part. Think that I come again.

Elissa.
Not be again with thee, nor thou with me!
It is too much. Let me go mad, or die.

Festus.
Live mine, Elissa; and I will ever love thee.

Elissa.
Wilt thou? Oh make me happy. Say it again.
I cannot know too often of my bliss.

Festus
(apart).
As shakes the continent 'neath the solid fall
Of mighty stream, lake-gorged, appalling air,
Thought wildering, so my heart by passion's force
Stunned, rests nor night nor day, but rocks with one
Ceaseless vibration. Does the very air
Whisper forbiddance to my will?

Guardian Angel.
O soul,
Be wise! The vast invisible witness all
Beholds.

Elissa.
But say, dost love me? wilt thou love me?

Festus.
Since I have known thee I have done nought else.
All hours not spent with thee are blanks between stars.
Love thee? I love thee madly. Thou hast drained,
Of all its love, mine heart. It will empty be
To aught after thee. Ay, now relume thine eyes,
Those eyes that might a moment win the glance
Of any seraph gazing not the throne.

Elissa.
No wonder thine. What! tears! 'Tis thy turn now.
Sad formulary with me of speechless grief!
One retributive tear is there. Nay, why?

Festus.
'Tis strange, 'tis startling, is the first hot tear
We have shed, may be for years; and which hath lain
Like a water-fairy in the eye's blue depths,
Spell-bound; death freed it not; pain, not; nor shame;
Nor penitence, nor much pity, nor despair;
What else but love could? For a fearful time
We can keep down the floodgates of the heart,
But somewhile we must draw them, or it will burst

441

Like sand, this brave embankment of the breast,
And drain itself to dry death. When pride thaws,
Look for floods. I have that in thought that sets
Between me and the world a bar, no power
Can loose.

Elissa.
What thought? Our time may soon be over.

Festus.
I cannot think of time; there is no time.
Time, time, I hate thee with the hate of hell
For aught that's good, but thou art infamous.
I will give thee half mine immortality
To keep back one for an hour. Leave me to-night,
And wither me to-morrow like a weed.

Elissa.
Where is he now?

Festus.
In Hades, hope!

Elissa.
What mean'st thou?
He wronged thee never. Say, when cometh he?

Festus.
To-night.

Elissa.
He comes to sever us like fate.
But shall he part us?

Festus.
Never. Let him part
The sun in twain first.

Elissa.
Now, would I, he came
Right speedily, for it frets me until freed
Frankly, from all allegiance.

Festus.
See him not,
He will re-lure thy spirit with vain deceits;
Or try. No, hence with me. Trust me. Away,
Ere he come.

Elissa.
I may not. It was ever thus;
I am born to make unhappy all around me.

Festus.
Of thy being wrong I will not hear; it is I;
I am the false usurper. And since one
Must be a sacrifice, be it me.

Elissa.
Thou swarest,
Even now to love me ever!

Festus.
Be it so.
I have sworn, and now and then I keep my oath;
I will not give thee up.

Elissa.
We have been too happy.
We might have known woe follows bliss as clos
As death, life.

Festus.
Ah! how cold thy hand is. Here,
Warm it upon my heart. Nay, let it be.
The hand that is on the heart is on the soul.
And it is thus some moments take the heart,
Life's wheel, and steer us through eternity.

Elissa.
Loose, now, my hand.

Festus.
Look beautiful on me then!
Speak to me. Keep my name upon thy lips,
Steeped in their roseate dew, lips sacred aye

442

To the word that shall be; and the unexpressed sweets
Of possible music; hither turn those eyes,
Within whose depths one streaming star, the soul's
Ascendant, radiant rules, that mine may share
Their dear translated light; that cheek, just tinged
As with the visible echo of a blush;
Pale as the sumptuous bosom'd rose, which, save
For its heart, might vie with snow; that crescent brow
Beaming with soul-light, oh, incline to mine.
Nay, do not weep. We never trust your tears.
Tears, even as spirits within a magic glass,
Upon practised witchery, wait on woman's will.

Elissa.
Wrong me not thus. The end of love is woe;
And of woe, death, and of death, death alone.
And there is no redemption for the heart.

Festus.
Love hath no end except itself. We only
Felt we loved, and were happy.

Elissa.
Ah, it was so.
Our sole misfortune is, we have been happy.
We never shall be happy here again.

Festus.
Nay, say not so. Let us be happy, now.
Happy? To fling aside thy wavy locks,
And feed upon thy white brow mine eyes; to look
Deep into thine, till mine I feel have drank
Full of that soft wet fire which floats in them;
Eyes I would never leave, yet when most near
Then, most astray, I; nay, but to glance, as one
Who hath eyed the inconceivable forms on high,—
Where midst upon the beauty of thy breast
Sits Love, like one between the cherubim;
To name thee, dream thee, but one moment mine
Delights me more than all that earth can lend
The good or bad, or heaven—

Elissa.
Oh name not heaven!
With thoughts so foolish and so wrong.

Festus.
What's wrong?
Shall my blood never bound 'neath beauty's touch,
Heart throb, nor eye thaw with hers when her tears
Drop quick and bright upon the glowing brow
Bowed at her feet, because, forsooth, it is wrong?
Let it be wrong, it is wrong, it is wretchedness,
I seek to suffer.

Elissa.
Nay, be calm. I never
So love thee as when calm. Even then, 'tis strange!
How dare we love each other as we do!

Festus.
Give me some wine; more wine. It pleasures me
One's blood to impurple with the pall-black wine
Of southern slopes, where years agone this grape
Clustered mayhap o'erhead, and my brow screened

443

With the strong dark shadows cast by lustier suns.
Good, now. It feeds my will. And I have plans,
Oh, plans! 'twould take a realm to execute.

Elissa.
Drink; but the vintage of a hundred years
Would never slake shame's memory, heed thou well,
Nor quench the thirst of folly.

Festus.
Fill again,
My beauty. Sing to me and make me glad.
Thy sweet words drop as softly upon the ear
As rose leaves on a well; and I could listen,
As though the immortal melodies of heaven
Were wrought into one word, that word a whisper,
That whisper all I would from all I love.

Elissa.
I am not happy; cannot sing. Thou lookest
Happy. Would I were!

Festus.
The sun's body, they say,
Is dark, hard, hollow; light but a floating fluid
Veiling him.

Elissa.
Ah! how truly like man's heart;
Most when, self-hid in passion's bright disguise,
Fraudful.

Festus.
Dost moralize? Oh, I'm with thee, there!

Servant,
entering.
A singer told to come is here.

Festus.
Wilt hear him?

Elissa.
Gladly, love. Bid him enter.

Festus.
What hast there?

Singer.
Oh, everything, I think.

Festus.
Well anything
Will serve, this once.

Singer.
The last new song?

Festus.
Begin.

Singer.
Oh! let not a lovely form
With feeling fill thine eye;
Oh! let not the bosom warm
At love-lorn lady's sigh;
For how false is the fairest breast;
How little worth, if true;
And who would wish possessed,
What all must scorn or rue?
Then pass by beauty with looks above;
Oh! seek never—share never—woman's love!

Oh! let not a planet-like eye
Imbeam its tale on thine;
In truth 'tis a lie—though a lie
Scarce less than truth divine.
And the light of its look on the young
Is wildfire with the soul;
Ye follow and follow it long,
But find nor good nor goal.
Then pass by beauty with looks above;
Oh! seek never—share never—woman's love!

Elissa.
Methinks I must have heard that voice before.

444

Festus.
And I, though I forget me where.

Elissa.
I, too.

Singer.
Oh! let not a wildering tongue
Weave bright webs o'er thine ear;
Nor thy spirit be said nor sung
To the air of smile or tear.
And say it hath melody far
More than the spheres of heaven,
Though to man and the morning star
They sang, Ye be forgiven!
Yet pass by beauty with looks above;
Oh! seek never—share never—woman's love!

Oh! let not a soft bosom pour
Itself in thine! It is vain.
Love cheateth the heart, oh! be sure,
Worse even than wine the brain.
Then snatch up thy soul from his snare,
Ere e'en from the goblet's brim,
Thy lip; for the wise declare,
There is none that can blind like him.
Then pass by beauty with looks above;
Oh! seek never—share never—woman's love!

Festus.
Come hither, I would look on thee. I have seen
Some one much like thee.

Elissa.
It was a brother, maybe?

Singer.
I have none, lady.

Festus.
Go; but leave your song.

Elissa.
Go not as yet. Even yon unfolding door
Hath cleared the sultry-passion'd air, which hangs
Heavy as with idolatrous incense. Wait.
There was a steadying coolness of the stars
Came with those footsteps. Stay!—Again, I prithee.

Festus.
Sing something burning, passionate, and sweet.
For oh! I am in the mood to realize
All deep and dear enjoyment. Trill away,
The lilt perchance may dovetail with the time.

Singer.
Thou art for happiness with me.
Love, love me as thou wilt!
I care not, so I live with thee,
For goodness or for guilt.
I leave repentance to the weak,
And to the good all gladness:
I only feel, that while I speak,
Reason to me seems madness.

This heart at once went wild for thee,
While yet thou wert not mine;
And now thine eye is law to me—
Law human and divine.
I leave despair to all who fail,
Who love and lose thee, sadness;
For what 'gainst beauty can avail,
Which, moon-like, maketh madness?
Is this sufficient?

445

Festus.
Ample, excellent.
His words perplex me not a little. But now
Bid him depart.

Elissa.
Let fate fulfil itself.

Servant.
Here, follow me.

Singer.
Soft, friend. Await me here,
While I assort my ditties, and concert
What on re-entry may be just.

Servant.
Art bidden
To reappear?

Singer.
Truth, I may be recalled.

Elissa.
How is't my heart misgives me so? How is't
I long, yet dread, to meet this regent once,
Now outcast, of my spirit? How break to him
That change which o'er the firmament of my life
Hath swept, and stormily even now, where once,
Calm homed. Alas for me! Thou knowst not, thou
Though dear, my troubles.

Festus.
Weeping again, my love?
Thou art by turns the proudest, humblest, creature
Earth owns. The least thing, now, dints thy soft heart;
Now, thou couldst face unblenched, a menacing world.
Oh, if to say I love laid all the sins
Of all the worlds on me I'd say it, still.

Elissa.
If love be blind, it must be by his tears:
For love and sorrow alway come together,
Love with his sister, Sorrow, by the hand.

Festus.
Nay, I will conquer thee again to smile,
To jet forth thy soul's radiance, once again,
Or lose my right to love thee. Let me kneel.
Come! I will have no other gods but thee;
To none but thee will I bow down and worship.
Thy bosom be mine altar, and thine eyes
Stars manifestive that lead me hourly on
To the shrine of thy divinity. Shine! Appear!
Oh cruel as the week-day gods of old
Wilt thou have human victims? Not content
With fire and water, kisses, tears, is't thou
Wilt have life's subtler element? must needs
On immortality feast? Here, take me, then;
I offer up myself, in sacrifice,
To thee.

Elissa.
Where will thy passionate folly end?
I love thee.

Festus.
I conjure thee, let me swear
By some sweet oath that shall to both be holy,
By arms which hold; by knees which worship thee;
By that dark eye, the dark divine of beauty,
Yet trembling o'er its lid all tears and light;
Glory, and eye of eyes which yet have shone;

446

By this lone heart which longeth for a mate;
By love's sweet will and sweeter way, by all
I love, by thyself, myself, let me, let me,
Let me,—but draw the lightnings from thine eye;
Kisses be my conductors; do not frown;
Nor look so temptingly angry. I was but trifling.
The cold, calm kiss which cometh as an alms
Not a necessity is not for me,
Whose bliss, whose woe, whose life, whose all is love.

Elissa.
We both wrong whom we love, love whom we wrong.

Festus.
But I am even as a dog that fondles o'er,
And licks the wound he dies of. Would I could
Create or suffer within myself enough
Of love to kill.

Elissa.
Thou lovest one whom, maybe,
Thou oughtst not to have loved.

Festus.
Love hath its own
Belief, own worship, own morality,
Own laws. It were better that all love were sin
Than that love were not. By-laws it must have,
Exceptions to earth's rules, and heaven's, not meaning
The good it doth, nor ill.

Elissa.
Oh, plead not thus;
It is wrong, it is unjust, unkind.

Festus.
It is.
But I am half mad and half dead with it.
I have loved thee till I can love nought beside.
My heart is drenched with love, as with a cloud
A sky aspiring hill. So much I have
Of lifefulness I seem to o'erlive myself.
I hate all things but thee; shun men like snakes;
Women, like pits. To me thou art all woman,
All life, all love, and more than all my kind.
I love thee more than I shall love and look for
Death, dare he take thee from me. But who dreams
Of death and thee together?

Elissa.
I dream so, not
Rarely; and know not but that now and again,
I would such dreams were verified. The best
Of all things are dreams realized.

Festus.
Ah me!
Dreams such as gods may dream thy soul possess
For aye i' the Hadean Eden, death; but here,
Me bless with love's divine reality.
So live we ever; thou in thyself, with me
Happy; and I of thee all wise, all blessed.
I have gone round the compass of all life
And can find nought worthy of thee. I but feel
That were I, as I ought to be, a god

447

I would sacrifice to thee the sun, in bright
And burning honour of thy love; proof sought
Of mine oblation's worthfulness; for know,
Miracles are not miracles with gods.

Elissa.
Dearer thou canst not be to me, unless
I die in telling how dear.

Festus.
Mine! be mine!
My soul is stung with thy beauty to the quick.
Oh but thou art too good or else too bad;
Be colder or be warmer.

Elissa.
Leave me.

Festus.
Well
It is most cruel, first to light the heart
With love completely, boundlessly; and then,
Moonlike, slowly to edge aside, and leave
One only little line of all so bright,
Once; teach and unteach; nay, to use more arts
Than would outdo the devil of his throne,
To make us ignorant of all we know;
To take the heart to pieces carefully;
For it is love alone can build the heart;
To root the tree up, 'neath whose shade we have lived,
And give us back a sliver. Let it die.

Guardian Angel.
Thus dares he brave fate's end. With her to reign
Forbid, he would drive dominion from his mind,
As drives the wind some day-besetting cloud
Though ne'er so grand and gorgeous, down the skies,
So he might soothe his heart with this new love
And rest in peace. False peace! not thus grants Heaven.
She only shares pride's seat, pride banned—whose soul
Turned prayerful Godwards, power can sanctify
By teaching rule to serve. Haste, heaven, the hour.

Elissa.
Hark, he is coming.

Festus.
Who is coming?

Elissa.
He
Thou knowst, I wait for.

Festus.
No! he cannot come;
For I have driven an oath into his heart,
And hanged a curse about his neck, might sink
The Prince of Air to the centre.

Elissa.
But thou saidst
He was to come, and at fixed time.

Festus.
I said so?
I'm, sure, bewildered. Time it is indeed
To do what most I am here to do.

Guardian Angel.
Beware!
Oh! I beseech thee. Nay, he hears me not,
More than 'mid foamy turmoil of a sea
Storm-lashed is heard the sigh of land-locked gale,
State-severed, hid in continents.

448

Festus.
All concurs.
With what malefic providence, will men say,
Success hath covenanted with wrong. The hour
Burns as it passes o'er me with a wing
Stifling of fire, till all's done; and we here
Enjoy perfection. Have, have, cries a voice,
As of a crowd within me. All one's life
Lies past the vast horizon there, unseen,
But must be sought and had. I would do aught
To throw this dark desire which wrestles with me.
It answers not to hold it at arm's length.
It must be hurled, dashed, trampled down, or see
It soars, and all subdues. O lady, hear!
Never did angel love his heaven, nor king
Crown, as I thee. As some fire-hearted star,
By beauteousness of sister sphere allured,
His ancient seat mid everlasting space,
And self-sufficing harmonies quits, to round
The idol orb, ceaseless, and to hers add
His pomp of light subservient, nor would leave
Such luminous vortex, but the unlidded eye
Burns to her always,—I for thee, most fair!
Mind's self rule, earth's forego; nor other end
Seek than thyself.

Elissa.
But to what end? The world
Is ripening with the plans thyself hast sown,
And waits its reaper. Would not earth contend?

Festus.
Let others notions fit them to our need.
I have effaced my nature in the hope
To conciliate love with fate. In vain! As might
One resolute to die, the shore sought, cry
To the wide embattled wave whose twin white arms,
And stretched out fingers, streamy with latent light,
All things before them conquering, at last, close,
Arched like the bow of death, resplendent, ‘Come,
Wreck me with thine embrace, it is my doom.’
So, to thy destinative hands, my brow
Now circling as a moveable aureole, I
My spirit reserveless trust.

Elissa.
See, now, the moon,
As one whose soul, sole conversant with heaven,
But by immortal memories saddened, still
Considers silently the excuseful mirth
Of wavelets in their twinkling play, and dance
Of even the eternal elements, which will take
Now, and once more their pleasure.

Festus.
Oh! far off!
That everlasting shimmering; 'tis indeed
Too notable; and anon—

Elissa.
Yon fountain's fall!

449

How sweetly it lulls the ear, and ringed in groves
Of fragrant fruitage, and by showers suspense
And permanent of the myrtle's pearly stars
Shocks not with love's own murmured words.

Festus.
Peace, peace!
I cannot grant tame audience, thou with me,
To outward nature.

Elissa.
Think then of thine own.
Nay, let me look then on the impassive hills,
Their swell unchangeful, stirless rise and fall;
The sea is all too mutable, and the moon.
I breathe now, 'neath this trellis.

Festus.
Breathe, and know
The might and truth of hearts is ne'er so shown
As in loving those we ought not, may be, love;
Or cannot have.

Elissa.
Let me not wrong thee, Festus.
Let me not think I have thought too well of thee;
And that to rebel 'gainst thee were heaven to obey.
What is't thou meditatest? Hast aught conceived
Would contrary God's ends? and edge aside
Thy path from duty and destiny?

Festus.
I am here
To act, not ask, nor answer; to myself
I am henceforth sole responsible.

Elissa.
Alas!
I do begin to fear thee.

Festus.
That were well.

Elissa.
Wouldst thou God's law and man's evade? Then know,
I cannot fly the world; more than defy
Earth's bodily gravity; still less wouldst thou deem
Soul to disconsecrate?

Festus.
Not a moment. Not
One spot thy shadow hallows. But these climes!
This plot of earth is all too mean, too tame,
Too moderate in its temperament; its range
Of act too average; nor enough profound
Its total rest. I love the pitiless sun;
Soil that reeks high with rankest fruitfulness;
Law such as lurks in storms; each day a day
Of history; and a sleep lawn-pillowed, now
'Neath moonlight, now in savage sun-blaze trapped;
Half down some steep ravine, safe hutted; lulled
By boom of waters, black with molten snows;
The passionate lands where women live to love,
And men 'twixt war and worship halve their days.

Elissa.
Is't thou sayst war?

Festus.
I prate not now of peace.
I reck not were the world all war, and thou

450

Queen of the south to head a hemisphere
Of foes against me challenging so the throne
Of a plight orb, I'd care not. Thee to bind
In bands of love triumphant, 'twere enough
For me the great tradition's sum and close.

Elissa.
What dreadful words are these! What change hast thou,
Change utter and unutterable, endured
In spirit, who once wert most humane of men
Not manwards sole, but towards all life. Be calm.
Truth, thou affrightest me.

Festus.
Oh, I am calm,
As husbandman when midst the harvest field
And the soft shadelets thrown by autumnal moons
From sheaf and shock, he eyes the upbuilded wealth,
Builded breast high, shake to his passing foot,
Anticipative of whitest wealth. Nay, see;
Calm as the heartiest circlet of a wheel
Whose visible movement's lost, to myself I seem
Still absolutely. Oh feel my pulse; I'm calm;
Breathless.

Elissa.
We trifle.

Festus.
Trifle then no more.
Let us away, away! Yon innocent moon
Sacred, sequestrate, virgin of the skies,
Us following with her patient power shall tend
Our homeward track nor leave us till we reach
With thy fair following, holiest peace.

Elissa.
I cannot.

Festus.
Oh say not so. Slay me at once, I die.
I look upon thy beauty, and forget,
As in a dream of drowning all things else.
Right, wrong, seem one, seem nothing. Thou art beauty;
That beauty everything. Speak not. It may be
I shall look on thee as looks the sun on earth,
Until like him I gaze myself away
From heaven. But if thou wouldst I look no longer,
Change then the action of thy loveliness,
Lest long same-seemingness should send me mad.
Blind me with kisses. I would ruin sight,
To give its virtue to those lips whereon
I would die now or ever live. Away!
For as wearied wanderer snow-blinded, sinks,
And swoons upon the swelling drift and dies;
So on that dazzling bosom would I lay
These famished lips, and end their wanderings there.
Come, let us balk the future of its end
Hoped for, forfeared by some. Oh! I'll be all
Thou ask'st for in the coming, placable, calm,
Most moderate, most amenable to right;
But know the present pressant! know, I still

451

Am earnest, still resolved; and shall I now
For scare of covetise, and the curt commands
Of law, whose thunderous negatives awe the world,
And pale the lips of weekly posturists,
Shall I cheat thee, bonny heart of mine, of this
Thy long expected spoil? No, minion, no!
But if meanwhile thy word hope certify
With promise of thyself;—what! not appeased?
Nay, rage not, dove of mine!—ferocious dove!

Elissa.
Be as thou wert. What will become of us?

Festus.
Be mine, be me, be aught but so far from me.
Let us from hence. The south expects our feet
With tremulous burnings. Winds await our flight,
Breathless, till hailed. My heart is numb with ire
Of love. I rage to be with thee where none
Can eye or awe us, of the incarnate world.
All nature waits our will, all skill of art.
Our sloop in moonshade hid, beyond yon crag,
Impatient, rocks from head to heel, to hear
One footstep crash the beach! For thy dear sake,
The world may go a begging for a king.
And say, we jilt our destiny, and so void
Their ends who would foreclose earth's leading life;
What ail we? length of rapturous days our own,
And respited humanity? It were something
Both earth and heaven, hell aidant, to defeat;
Defeat the stars 'gainst us concoursed.

Elissa.
Alas!
Alas! I dread thee now.

Festus.
Nay, fear not me.
Whither we wend, once there, while earth attends
The marvellous rumour, blessings not, nor banns
Shall lack, nor unspanned leisure; quashed all hopes
Of abnegated empire, what shall be
Ours, but love boundless, sateless?

Elissa.
Listen!

Festus.
No!
I list to no conditions, here nor now.
Give me thyself. Rise, come with me, with me!
Surely, some whirlwind waits to lackey us hence!

Guardian Angel.
Where art thou, Lucifer? Part them!

Lucifer.
Is't my part
To order, or hinder fate? As yet, let be.

Festus.
Far off, on the obscure disk of earth, is mine
Originally by sword-right of my sires,
Upon a mountain spur which dips its foot
Death-deep in the sea, a stern stronghold, that boasts,
In ruinous luxury, still sufficing state,
An exiled tyrant liberally to guest,
And all his wastrel court; high peaked, far back

452

Snows everduring blanch; below, thick woods
Lush leaved, broad fanned, fruit breedful, stretch; and there,
All night around the crowns of favourite palms,
Their winged and intricate reel, the fireflies,—sparks
Vivid, as 'twere of life's divinity, weave,
Mocking the star-maze; and in rapid act
Of light, self regulative, law heed nor need,
Being of surpassing nature; there, too, pour,
From their encoigning huts, leaf-roofed, when dews
And shadows thicken at mid-moon, for dance,
Feastful, hot-breath'd, the lithe and dusky array
Who call me master, adulative, and mouth
Maybe a common creed; but coyly, adore,
Some uncouth idolet to their glebe adstrict,
With whom I have whiles done battle; there, with me,
Most excellentest of things, be thou their pride,
Their providence, their supreme! Nay, linger not,
See, all the way is water. Moons but three
Shall waste their light upon our flamy wake,
Ere we are there: there rest in lavish peace
And pall-less pleasures. Oh it is not for me
Enough to have gazed and doted on thee until
Mine eye is dazzled, and brain dizzied. Thou
All worship must exhaust; it is not enough
That in long dreams my soul hath torrent-like,
Swept this majestic make; nor, that it now
Fails in the sight of heaven and thee, nay, falls
As a summer sunset, seawards, hot and tired
With the o'erlong day, that slowly degrades itself
Of absolute beauty to a noteless mass
Uncomeliest of all things—reck I. The cost,
The fine, I have summed, and yet have sworn to fill,
Sometime, mine arms with bliss.

Elissa.
Sit, Festus!

Lucifer.
Friends!
Did ye not know me? No! Then know me now.

Elissa.
It was he.

Festus.
Thou—

Lucifer.
Hush; thou art not to utter what
I am. Bethink thee: it was our covenant.

Guardian Angel.
Man from thyself saved although as 'gainst thy will,
Give thanks thou mayst for life snatched from remorse,
And sin's soul-blinding sophistries: and learn
How even by the hands of evil God worketh good,
Nor dream his fates can fail, or plans succeed
Without his part of the fortune.

Festus.
I, content,
Submit me to the award of God.

Guardian Angel.
Farewell.

453

Lucifer.
Thee, lady, said I, once, I again would see.

Elissa.
Thou didst, and I must thank thee. Waiting here
Thy visit, all uncharmed by the ripple of seas
On summer eve, moonlit, 'twere well I staid
To render back to thee my troth, or one,
Too daring thoughtless, would have borne me off
Whither I know not, might have smirched a name
Though meaning not, that shall be stainless still.
'Twas wrong, but I forgive. He hears me not.

Lucifer.
I hear. Thou knowest what once I was to thee
One who for love of one I loved, for thee,
Would have done or borne the sins of all the world;
Who did thy bidding at thy lightest look
And had it been to have snatched an angel's crown,
Off his bright brow, as he sate singing, throned,
I would have cut these heart strings that tie down
My spirit, and spite of thunder and sacrilege,
Had laid it at thy feet. I loved thee, lady.
I am one whose love was greater than the world's,
And might have vied with God's; a boundless ring
All pressing upon one point, that point thy heart.
And now, but should I call on my revenge;
It were at hand in armies. But thou art woman;
And I forget my purpose and my wrongs
In looking, and in loving.

Elissa.
Was it sin
To have loved once ignorantly?

Lucifer.
Oh, hear her heaven.
There is no blasphemy in love, but doubt;
No sin but to deceive.

Festus.
Then is she sinless.
Thy heart's embrace though close was snakelike cold.
And mine was warm, and more, was welcome.

Lucifer.
Patience;
Of thee I spake not, cared not, thought not, I.
Be sure, it was not from reverence for thee,
I saved ye, but for her sake and mine own.
I have excused so much there is little left
To make more words about; but, for the future,
I would almost vow, so variable it seems,
It were as well expect to entice a star
To perch upon one's finger, or the wind
To follow one like a dog, as think to fix
To aught a woman's heart. Answer me not.
Let me say what I have to say, and go.
Thou art all will and passion, that is thine
Excuse and condemnation.

Elissa.
While that will
Was turned towards thee, thou saw'st in it no harm.

454

Lucifer.
Oh I have heard what rather than have heard
I would have stopped mine ears with thunder; words
That have gone singing through my soul, as arrows
Through the air, their death-song.

Elissa.
Not from me expect
Defence, nor accusation. Both I scorn.

Lucifer.
Now, let us part, or I shall die of wrath.

Elissa.
Part then.

Lucifer.
Thank God it is for eternity.

Elissa.
I do. Away.

Lucifer.
Festus, I wait for thee.
I have fulfilled the word between us passed
So far as is permitted me. Look back!
There is little unaccomplished.

Festus.
One thing yet.

Lucifer.
And that mayhap anon. Wouldst rather power
To sow in millions or in units reap?

Festus.
Spirit, beyond compute, beyond compare,
Both I must have.

Lucifer.
So then, this womanish love,
Brain-feebling, heart unmanning sentiment,
Must be put by, which is to neither gain,
Honour, nor need nor meed. Enough of love.
True, it hath served a purpose with myself;
Although constrained the very end to avert
All forecast had led up to. Nor in this
Seemed I myself quite, but as urged by power
Unseen, resistless.

Festus.
Well, I will think of it.

Lucifer.
It is thought and done with. Soon, 'twill lead thee whither
Thou shalt behold more marvels than man e'er
Hath known; perceive earth spirit-wise, and know
All nature tributary.

Festus.
'Twere well; in time.

Lucifer.
Said I, in this strange deed, I to myself
Seemed not myself, quite? But though baffled here,
By what a good deed seems, one cipher less
In the great evil's boundless deficience,
It were base to flee the field, one chance yet left.
If in the lure of power, my next, he fail
Self-magnifying, he forfeits all.

Festus.
But now,—
And come! thou art not the first deceived in love;
Yet is not love so much love as a dream
Of madness, whence we wake, scared and astound
To find that what we have loved, must love, is not
That we had meant to love; and all we deemed
To be, proves nought;—from each, like guerdon reaped.

Lucifer.
Well, doubtless well.

Festus.
Perhaps I profit ed

455

Too much by thy good lessons.

Lucifer.
Lady, ere
I hence, grant yet one favour. Take this rose
Fresh from its parent stem; make much of it;
And as it fades, let all remembrance fade
Of him who gave.

Elissa.
I cast it down at once.
The eagle needs no omens who to all
Himself is ominous; and not with me
Shall memory, like a whirlpool 'neath a fall,
Whose watery resurrection scares the bold,
Revolve the mangled moments of the passed
In wearisome dissolution: no! at once—

Lucifer.
The furies hint it, let the fates advise.
Take heed. A nobler life may sometime cross
The path of spirit perplexed, intempested;
Inexorable; and like that—

Festus.
Go. I follow.

Lucifer.
Now therefore would I wager, and I might
The great archangel's trump to a dog-whistle
That whatsoever happens, worse ensues.

Festus.
Even the unwise may prophesy, now and then.
Forgive, love, him; and me forgive for all.

Elissa.
Yes, I forgive. What is there not and whom
That I forgive not? Let me be forgiven
By the Great Spirit in death as I, in life,
Pardon who would me wrong, if such soul live.
The love which giveth all, forgiveth aught.
And thou to me art more than earth or heaven.
They have but given me life, thou gavest love;
The lord of life, thou my life, love, and lord.
Take me again, my kindest, dearest, best.
Him who hath gone I never loved like thee.
Was in his eye a desolation, seemed
To prey upon all the light, whate'er, in mine.
But it is passed; and he with it. I think
I know, thou lovest me.

Festus.
And I think, as now,
For perfect love there should be but one god,
One worshipper.

Elissa.
We know the gods of old
Worshipped each other, equal deities.
For the poets surely spake the truth of gods
Who dare not speak but truth.

Festus.
O breathing beauty!
Bards seek ideally, dost believe the gods
Of old, toys, terrors, of an infant world?

Elissa.
If I do not believe, I scorn them not.
Nay, I could mourn for them and pray for them.
I can scorn nought a nation's honest heart
Hath held for ages holy: for the heart

456

Is alike holy in its strength and weakness.
All things to me are sacred that have been;
And though earth, like a stream, blood-streaked, which tells
A long and silent tale of wrongful death,
May mostly, blush her history, and her eyes
Hide, yet the passed is sacred; it is God's;
Not ours; let her, let us, do better, now.

Festus.
O re-inspired, retowered in spirit, arise;
Go mate thee with the stars; thou are not made
For mortal 'spousals. Tears all gone, all dread.
All dubiousness, beams forth thy soul again.
Lo! there are veins of diamonds in thine eyes,
Might furnish crowns for all the queens of earth.
Oh! I could sooner price the sun, than set
A value earth could pay, upon thy look.
Look! I would rather look upon thee one minute,
Than a whole day on Paradise;—such days
As are, and only, in heaven. But now I have seen
Fate's all compelling nod, and must away.
What wilt thou? Is there aught dost fear?

Elissa.
I dread
But too long separation; nothing else.

Festus.
Would I could more assure thee than by words.

Elissa.
When heaven and earth were first betrothed, they brake
The rainbow 'tween them as a ring, for each
A part, in token of their troth-plight, till
Their sacred bridals, when both fragments oned,
It shall conclude the eternal covenant.
But we, we need no signal, need we?

Festus.
None.
Here have I fixed my rest. It may be none
Shall compass all the ends he hopes, in gift
Of hands divine sole; but for the destiny,
Mightiest, which e'er awaited man, earth's crown,
I spurn it for thy sake; renounce.

Elissa.
For me?
I fear me, love of power is more than power
Of love were't tried.

Festus.
Till tried, 'twere well to trust.
But I have heard the call I must obey.
It hastens me away.

Elissa.
And am I nothing?
Who masters not his fate is weak indeed.

Festus.
What if by serving thee, I vanquish mine?

Guardian Angel.
Vain boast; thou canst not God resist, his eye
Foreseeing, preordains what comes to pass.

Festus.
We are the lords of our own destiny, we;
Our own fates, furies, graces. All the gods
Are we to ourselves because we love.

457

Elissa.
Nay, tremble.
Thou utterest treasonable truth against
The dead divinities.

Festus.
Who shall reconcile
Their powers, or 'venge their slighted worship.

Elissa.
God.
For the divine, though dimlier, being of old
As now, adored, what 'gainst our sense of God
Sins, chiefliest pride, heaven alway punisheth
With death or madness.

Festus.
Nay, convert me quite.
Thou art at heart, a pagan.

Elissa.
I am one
In whose free faith the truth, whate'er, is holy,
And what is good is sacred.

Festus.
I am too.

Elissa.
I cannot bid thee hence. Nay, sit. From thee
Parted, I feel as a tree might feel, half riven,
And my soul acheth to spring to,—as thus.

Festus.
Still must I loose these arms; and while heart-filled
With memories of sweet thefts, a thousand years
In Saturn, nor ten thousand in the sun
Approximative to bliss should rob me of,
My parting gift I know thou wilt not refuse
Nor would I proffer aught which emblemed less
Than life celestial and the light divine;
Expect me ere it wither; ere the scent
Sweet effluence of its perfectness of leaf
Hath fled its starry censer, look for me.
Let the death-destined perish. We shall live.

Elissa.
My life is one long loving thought of thee.
If any ask me what I do, I say
I love.

Festus.
All that? It is enough. Farewell!

Elissa.
And he is gone! and the world seems gone with him.
Shine on, ye heavens! why can ye not impart
Light to my heart? Have ye no feeling in ye?
Why are ye bright when I am so unhappy?
Yet would not I my woes untold, unthought,
Unseen o' the world, blind lightnings which still strike
With secret scathe and fiery, change for thrice
The joys of others, since they are love for thee.
Our very wretchedness grows dear to us,
When suffering for one we love. Sweet stars!
I cannot look upon this your loveliness
Without sadness; for ye are too beautiful
And beauty makes unhappy. So men say.
Ye stars, it is true. We read our fate in ye.
Bright through all ages, are ye not happy there?

458

With years, many as your light-rays, are ye not
Immortal? space pervading, oh ye must be,
Spirit-like infinite! O All-being God,
Who art in all things, and in whom all are,
And it is thus we most can worship thee,
When soul to soul, with one we love we are gods,
Let us believe that if thou gavest earth,
For our bodies, then the stars were for our souls,
For perfect beauty and unbounded love.
Let us believe they look upon us here,
As their inheritors, and save themselves,
For us, as we for thee, and thou for all.

XXVII.

Count not the ripples upon life's stream, our days;
Nor eddying errors as a change misdeem
Of current; mark thou wiselier, the main flow
Of ever Godward being. The hand supreme
Outreaching all, guides to a term unthought.
Contrition makes confession; penitence draws
Pardon. So, thoughts once sinfullest abjured,
Dawn shows of the true life. The downward node
Turned, begins reascent: for God, with whom
His holy angel's prayers prevail, ordains
The peccant spirit to view and visit hell:
That this, of punitive flames, invisible,
Assured, but all potential, thence to man
Might bring his gladmost tidings back, and prove,
How justest judgment trines at once with God's
Love, and the soul's amendment.

Rocks and Sands by the Sea-shore.
Festus and Guardian Angel.
Guardian Angel.
Here break for good the bonds of silence. Once
Again we may as erst sweet commune hold.
I have spoken already, and once more by God's will
Bid thee despair not, but with penitence hear
The counsels of the All-wise, and fate's decree.
The anguish of thy heart, thy tears, sighs, groans
Have reached God. Wouldst thou aught confess?

Festus.
O angel!
How dared I think to thwart God's thought? or 'scape
The law inevitable of destined doom?
I hate, I loathe, I curse, condemn myself
To righteous penance and heart-scourging fires
Of sharp remorse for aye.

Guardian Angel.
Thy better self

459

So bids, retributively just. Thou knowest
Wherein thou hast failed; in this one test, the crown
Of good's conflict with evil, thou art proven
Losel, and all thy heavenly guidance foiled;
Myself aggrieved, dishonoured. Now, as of old,
Triumphant towers the tempter. Urge no more
Mean exculpations one keen thought, truth-edged,
Of conscience scatters.

Festus.
Be it so, angel. I
Have sinned; erred wilfully; wronged right; succumbed
To a base temptation fiend-forged in my heart;
The inlight quenched, which every soul illumes,
God's witness in the spirit, and inmost seal,
Blurred o'er with passionate fire.

Guardian Angel.
Confession clears
The conscience; and it is well. Though but in mood
What's done thou canst not now undo; for thought
Is mind's act, but 'twixt thought and outward deed
As 'twixt heaven's polar stars, lies the whole world.

Festus.
How was't I failed? How came it sin's rank breath
The cool calm air of virtue dared defile?
Oh I have lost my starry seat in heaven;
Lost God's approving smile.

Guardian Angel.
Nay, God indeed,
Hath suffered this, hath led thee to the abyss
Of all deceptive nature, thee to show
Its ruinous depths, no hand save his alone
Can lift from. Thou hast sinned, sinned, open-eyed,
But in thought only and passion. Let such strange pass
Life carnal from life spiritual demark,
This henceforth thine.

Festus.
It shall be, heavenly one!
Let the passed life-state perish. Be it with me,
As when some soft and sleepy summer scene
Of nature, framed before us, we, with the view
Content, like passive, like indifferent, gaze
Listless; all secondary shades of things
Immingling, show confusedly; hill, vale, plain,
The rivulet's gentle curve, the tremulous slope
O' the wood, the unlevel outline of far hills,
Just dusking air, all blend in light diffuse
Indefinite;—suddenly, a masklike cloud,
Creeping mid-sky, the sun surprises; straight,
As 'twere God's staff, a light-shaft, sharp, severe
Strikes earth, and lo! the unmoralled mixture ends;
The face of things shows changed; shapes all transformed,
Dark things grow darker, brightlier glow things bright;
The o'ersmiling world's frail witchery, and her craft
Inequitable of tolerance, fails, collate

460

With that just spear-beam; so this knowledge, now
Inlanced into my soul by conscience, makes
Not only truth more amiable, but shows
Of good and ill the eternal severances.

Guardian Angel.
It is well. Be verified thy resolves! and graved
On thy soul's frontlets, that remembering how
Of old thou failedst, and yet wast not forsook,
Thou mayst be wise; recalling, too, how they
Who wisdom willed but for themselves, and mere
Preeminence in the world, friend, lover, both
Untimely, perished; thou alone, self-trained
Sagelier, albeit unwittingly, to ends
Happier and nobler, even to serve, preserved.
Yet boast not, nor presume. In souls, forgiven
Of God, his chosen anointed, he, and they
Regenerate, make one being, their spirits which live
And thrive are holiest miracles, while here
Made pure by conscience, penitence, love of good
And hate of ill, restoratives of soul,
Shall reap at last divine reception there,
Presume not yet, nor boast. Not yet thy lot
Exhausted; or for man's sake, or thine own.
God's will o'errules his own appointed fates.

Festus.
Was this my sin foreset?

Guardian Angel.
Original sin's
A figment of man's brain. Pure come we all,
Angels and men from God. And though by flesh
Soul-soiled, our own and others' faults; life's needs;
Its passions, vanities, selfishness; and numbed
By ebb of moral energies, the force
Essential,—as thy privileged eye hath proved,
To itself, among spirit-spheres instructive,—fined
By sense of truth, and reasonably convert
To God's demand of penitent betterment,
Self-sown in the spirit, detersive of all sin,
All carnal aims, or more, deterrent, yet
Shall win its ultimate heaven, and rest in God,
Whose throne is world-wide. God therefore, pray thou
Thy forerun thought of evil intent, frustrate
By mean so marvellous, be not actual sin
Against thy soul adjudged; but, cloudlet-like,
That steals through heaven, nor shadow leaves below,
The unfixed fault may pass dissoluble,
Nor thy closed page, dread angel of the pen!
Darken:—and I mine orisons adding, too,
Will both present in heaven.

Festus.
Be thou my soul's
Kind keeper. Pray for me. For me remains
One only course, the step towards heaven.

461

Guardian Angel.
It may
Be arduous, but 'tis life.

Festus.
Oh, yes! 'tis life.
All else unsafe, in this to act's to live.
As some belated cliff-climber,—his track
Homewards, tide-swept, at foot of columned crag
Reared with its fellow jambwise, like blind gates
Hadeän, to mask earth's inmost,—halted, eyes
Shudderingly, all round, the death-expectant sea;
The ascent, limb perilling; and, reflective, knows
One sole safe path, that, upwards;—to the feat
Girds him unanxious, and so climbing climbs
Now, by sheer slopes unpunctuate to the edge;
Now clinging to grim steeps,—the lichen gray
Scarce closelier; steeps that in the paling light
Smile treacherous welcome, even as death might smile,
Petting the plumes of some surprised soul;—now,
Coasting the chasm which laughs the sea-hawk's home,
And her brown broodlings, ragg'd with flickering down,
From human foot, till he, rock-swarmer, clutch
Breathless, the bleak, black top; all daylight spent,
Save one poor sack of gold the unthrifty sun,
Decamped, hath dropped by the tent-pegs of the sky;
And prostrate, wordless, but with welling eyes
Thanks heaven; so I, too, haunted by a god,
Like one of old, who gives my soul no rest,
Bear me, till I in him attain the sum
Of peace and safety.

Guardian Angel.
Mayst thou even attain!
Thus heart-wrung, thus soul-humbled, know God wills
Thou make of hell foreproof in conscience; view
The fate foredoomed for one who wilful sins;
And voluntary, visit with him who owns
And strives to extend, hell's stern domains. There, reigns
Nathless, thou wilt find, eternal equity,
And justest law; sin's graduate chastisement,
The harmonic bonds 'twixt fault and fine, and there,
Man's mind, disrupt from self-deceits shall show
Time's wasted faculties still used to ends
Emendative of soul. There, all God's ways,
To nature's reconciled, prove thou not more just
Than amiable; so, gladdening man and earth.

Festus.
I go. Adieu!

Guardian Angel.
When out of night leapt light,
Not weightier seemed the event than now from this,
The good, the glory. One fault 'twas wrought man's fall;
This act, the rise of angels; so o'erruled
To good, all evil beneath the hand of God.

Festus.
Be it mine to enjoy or suffer, as decreed.

462

XXVIII.

In such time
As it takes to turn a leaf, we are in heaven;
Making our way among the wheeling worlds,
Millions of suns, half infinite each, and space,
For ever shone into, for ever dark,
As deity to and by created mind;
Upborne by the companion spirit, who held,
As tempter, now, by God, enlightener, now
But servant ever, in grasp unloosenable, shows
The nature of the All in One; whence evil,
And its necessity, mediate in all life,
Betwixt its source and end; the angels' fall,
Originated, essentially, as man's,
And creature's perfectness how impossible
Until made one with God.

Infinite Space.
Festus and Lucifer.
Festus.
Why, earth is in the very midst of heaven!
And space, though void of things, feels full of God.
Hath space no limit?

Lucifer.
None to thee. Yet, if
Infinite, it would equal God; and that
To think of is most vain.

Festus.
And yet if not
Infinite how can God exist therein?

Lucifer.
I say not.

Festus.
No. So soon when placed beside
The infinite the poor immortal fails.

Lucifer.
It is God contains the infinite, not that God.
Space is God's space: eternity is his
Eternity; his, heaven. He only holds
Perfections, which are but the impossible
To other beings.

Festus.
We are things of time.

Lucifer.
With God time is not. Unto him all is
Present eternity. Worlds, beings, years,
With all their natures, powers, and events,
The range whereof when making he ordains,
Unfold themselves like flowers. He foresees
Not, but sees all at once. Time must not be
Contrasted with eternity: it is not
A second of the everlasting year.
Perfections, although infinite with God,
Are all identical; as much of him—
And holy is his mercy, merciful
His wisdom, wise his love, and kind his wrath—
As form, extension, parts, are requisites

463

Of matter. Spirit hath no parts. It is
One substance, whole and indivisible,
Whatever else. Souls see each other clear
At one glance, as two drops of rain in air
Might look into each other, had they life.
Death doth away disguise.

Festus.
Even here I feel
Among these mighty things, that, as I am,
I am akin to God;—that I am part
Of the use universal, and can grasp
Some portion of that reason within whose scope
The whole is ruled and founded;—that I have
A spirit nobler in its cause and end,
Lovelier in order, greater in its powers,
Than all these bright immensities—how swift!
And doth creation's tide for ever flow,
Nor ebb with like destruction? World on world
Are they for ever heaping up, and still
The mighty measure never full?

Lucifer.
To act
Is power's habit: always to create,
God's; which, thus ever causing worlds, to him
Nought cumbrous more than new down to a wing,
Aye multiplies at once my power and pain.
I have seen many frames of being pass.
This generation of the universe
Will soon be gathered to its grave. These worlds,
Which bear its sky-pall, soon will follow thine.
I, both. All things must die.

Festus.
What are ye orbs?
God's words—the scriptures of the skies? for words
With him cannot be passing, nor less vast,
Less real, nor less glorious than yourselves.
The world is God's great poem; and the worlds
The words it is writ in; and we souls, the thoughts.
Ye cannot die.

Lucifer.
Think not on death. Here all
Is life, light, beauty. Harp not so on death.

Festus.
I cannot help me, spirit! Chide no more.
As who dare gaze the sun, doth after see
Betwixt him and else, a dark sun in his eye;
So I, once having braved my burning doom,
See nought beside, or that in everything.
Hark! what is that I hear?

Lucifer.
An angel weeping.
Earth's guardian angel; she is always weeping.

Festus.
See where she flies spirit-lorn round the heavens,
Like a forefeel of madness about the brain.

464

Angel of Earth.
Stars, stars!
Stop your bright cars!
Stint your breath;
Repent ere worse;
Think of the death
Of the universe.
Fear doom, and fear
The fate of your kin-sphere.
As a corse in the tomb
Earth! thou art laid in doom.
The worm is at thy heart.
I see all things part:—
The bright air thicken,
Thunder-stricken;
Birds from the sky
Shower like leaves;
Streamlets stop,
Like ice on eaves.
The sun go blind;
Swoon the wind
On the high hill-top,
Swoon and die.
Earth rear off her cities
As a horse his rider;
And still with each death-strain,
Her heart-wound tear wider.
The dead rise;
Death dies.
Go, time, and sink
Thy great thoughts in the sea,
And quench thy red link.
Let him flutter to rest
On thy god-nursing breast,
Eternity;
Mother Eternity,
What is for me?

Festus.
Poor angel! ah, it is the good most suffer.
Look! like a cloud she hath wept herself away.
Yon central sphere supreme of spirit create,
Immediate seeming most to deity, draws
With irresistible force.

Lucifer.
Thereto we tend.

Festus.
What of this world we view, and all yon worlds?
If God made not the whole from nothing, how
Is he creator? Somewhat must exist
Else, with himself eternal, nor had all things
In him their origin.

Lucifer.
All being he makes
Of his own nature manifestive; each day
Is born a new creation; the infinite

465

Expands perpetually, new formed; all orbs
Have their revealed law; and every race
Of being hath had its judgment, or shall have.

Festus.
The infinite reach of dark and vacuous space!
Oh, let me rest, be it but a moment's pause,
Remember still my spirit toils in guise
Aërial, shadowy.

Lucifer.
Alight then on this orb,
Central of heaven's great system, and the seat
Recipient of the virtues of all stars.

Festus.
Are all these worlds then stocked with souls like man's,
Free, fallible, and sinful?

Lucifer.
Listen. Although
All things be perfect relatively, with God
All is imperfect absolutely. No room's
In his forecounsel for repentance; none
For acts emendative. Grow not in his hand
From fabulous chaos, stars; nor needs he learn,
By slow degrees, to separate elements
From jumbled contraries. The heavenly spheres
Show not as shapeless lumps on rumbling roads
Time scarce hath time to level ere lo! they end;
But bright and glib from the creative hour
Orb, orbit to each other apt, all life
Intelligent, admires; and knows the mind
Omniscient lacks not schooled experience' lore.
Him can events instruct who all events
Foreorders to their end? Nor yet with him
Who for his own good pleasure all hath made,
All life pervades, perpetuates and conducts,
Lieth necessity more than freedom. These
On spirit create, imperfect, only act.
As every living thing upon earth sustains,
Unconscious, weight enorme of aëry leagues,
Their inner life-power thus enabling them;
So by the force of freedom self-conceived,
The spatial pressure of necessity
Man bears with equal mind, as paired with fate,
And inwardly divine. So I with him.

Festus.
'Tis well in souls created room is found
For some self-bettering impulse. Spirits how else
So feeble, and so defectible, see restored?

Lucifer.
All creature minds like man's are fallible.
The seraph who in heaven highest stands,
May fall to ruin deepest. God is mind;
Pure, perfect, sinless; man imperfect, is,
Momently sinning. Evil then results
From imperfection. The idea of good
Is owned in imperfection's lowest form.

466

God would not, could not make aught wholly ill;
Nor aught not like to err. Man never was
Perfect nor pure, or so he would be even now.
Thy nature hath some excellencies; these,
By mean proclivities, oft, and wicked wiles
Thwarted, albeit in kind necessitate
As change in nature, or as shade to light.
No darkness hath the sun, no weakness God.
These only be the faulty attributes
Of secondary natures, planets, men.
God's are not attributes by creature mind
From his essential separable, or such
Not limitless, him would mix with that he hath made.
God is all God, as life is that which lives.
A mighty spirit am I; yet what to light
Is lightning? Lightning maybe one thing slays;
Light makes all live. Thy necessary ills
Bear then with grace. No positive estate
Is evil, or principle, wholly for its form
And measure due to defect, defect to good.
Good's the sole positive principle in the world.
It is only thus that what God makes, he loves,
And must. Ill's limited. None can form a scheme
For universal evil; not even I.

Festus.
Can imperfection from perfection come?
Can God make aught defective?

Lucifer.
How aught else?
But three proportions are there in all things;
The greater—equal—less. God could not make
A god above—nor equal—with—himself,
By nature and necessity the Highest.
So, if he make, it must be lesser minds,
Lower and less, from angels down to men,
Whose natures are imperfect, as his own
All perfect must be. These two states are not
Except as whole to its parts opposed; and evil's
Itself no ill, unless creation be.

Festus.
Is God the cause of evil?

Lucifer.
So far as evil
From imperfection comes, and the imperfect
From things he hath made, and these come from his will
To make, be it said, if reverently, he is.

Festus.
Then imperfection goes back past man's fall?

Lucifer.
Goes to the veriest verge of being create
And nature's rise.

Festus.
Speak.

Lucifer.
All was peace in heaven
When God to the assembled angels showed
His future ends towards man, not yet create.
Some, I and mine, his wisdom in that end

467

Misdoubt; and as we doubted, a dim film
Shadowy, o'erspread the spirit; and we felt
Dark, and first knew ourselves from God diverged,
Excentric to the universal soul;
First knew ill's relative existence; knew
Foreseeingly the strife which should pervade
Creation, then begun, which we were doomed
To wage for ever; its final cause, and how
To be transformed and righted and made ground
Of greater glory, knew not; of that end
Still dubious; our conclusive ignorance,
In common with creation, of the mode
And reason to that endwards being a curse,
Inevitable appearing save by death.
But how, immortal, die? Ere yet one act
Had faintest thought interpreted, o'er heaven
Fell down a volumed darkness, night of night,
Thick as a thousand palls, were earth the bier.
For God upon his throne had frowned. When fled
The blackness of that strangeness, lo! we stood,
Who erred, disjoined by line impalpable,
But ah! impassable, from all in heaven.
The seed of sin expanded, as thought swift,
As love light. Self in lieu of God remains
In all their souls who sin, self, deified.
Evil is multitudinous. God is one.
But though the sum of evil, in myself
Not whole or absolute ill, I; for to live
Is of itself a predicate divine;
Good of a high condition; and to be,
Proves mine existence drawn with all from God.

Festus.
How is't that mind create of freedom boasts,
Which, when most one with God, most knows itself
Constrained by law divine? Wert free at first?
Or won'st by force of sin, free solitude?
If thus, then is not freedom a defect?

Lucifer.
Thou soon shalt see of freedom and constraint
Enough to sate all questionings.

Festus.
It is well.
This endless, light-like journey hath wearied me.

Lucifer.
Rest thou. I watch by thee. I am no wearied.
He sleeps; he dreams. How far men see in dreams!
Or dream they see; do worlds of things; the heart
To its first hours of innocence reverts,
And nakedness and paradise, ere yet
Round it the world had wound its perishing garb;
While yet its God came down and spake with it.
Such, and so great are dreams. My might, my being,
To him is but a dream's. And could a state

468

To come fill up their dream-stretched minds, they might
Be gods. And may it not be so? Then man
Is worth my ruining. What doth he dream?
With all the sway his spirit now exerts
O'er time, space, thought, it is but a shadowy sway;
Light as a mountain shadow on a lake.
Mine is the mountain's self. A touch would shake
To nought whatever his soul now feels or acts;
But not a world-quake could touch aught of mine:
Thus much we differ. I will not envy man.
Power alone makes being bearable.
And yet this dream-power is mind-power—real:
All things are real: fiction cannot be.
A thought is real as the world—a dream
True as all God doth know—with whom all is true.
The deep dense sleep of half-dead exhaustedness!
Would I could feel it. Ah! he wakes at last.

Festus.
Oh! I have dreamed a dream so beautiful!
Methought I lay as it were here! and lo!
A spirit came and gave me wings of light,
Which thrice I waved delighted. Up we flew
Sheer through the shining air, far past the sun's
Broad blazing disk,—past where the great great snake
Binds in his bright coil half the host of heaven,—
Past thee, Orion! who, with arm uplift,
Like him the divine evil of the world,
Threatening the throne of God, dost ever stand
Sublimely impious; and thy mighty mace
Whirling on high, down from its glorious seat
Drops, crushed and shattered, many a shining world.
And so the brave and beautiful of old
Believed thou wast a giant made of worlds:
And they were right, if thus they bodied out
The immortal mind; for it hath starlike beauty,
And worldlike might; and is as high above
The things it scorns, and will make war with God,
Though he gave it earth and heaven, and arms to win
Them both; and, spite of lust and pride, to earn them.
And now thy soul informs yon hundred stars,
As mine my limbs—well, 'tis a noble end.
What now to thee be mortal maid or goddess?
Look! she who fled thee once, now loves and longs
To clasp thee to her cold and beamy breast.
Pine Moon! thou art as far below him now,
As once she was above thee, thou of the world-belt!
And she who had thee, and who knew thee god,
Died of her boast, and lies in her own dust.
And she who loved thee, the young blushing Morning,
Who caught thee in her arms, and bore thee off
Far o'er the lashing seas to a lonely isle,

469

Where she might pleasure longer and in secret—
That love undid thee, and it is so now:
Whether the beauty seek, or flee, or have,
'Tis a like ill—this beauty doubly mortal.
What though the Moon with madness slew thee there,
Let me believe it was within the arms
That loved thee even in the arms of death,
And that there snapped the lightning link of life.
Kill, but not conquer, man nor mind may gods.
Thou image of the Almighty error, man!
Banished and banned to heaven, by a weak world,
Which makes the minds it cannot master gods.
And thou, the first and greatest of half-gods,
Which they in olden time did star together
To an idolatrous immortality;
Who nationalized the skies, and gave all stars
Unto the spirits of the good and brave,
Forestalling heaven by ages—wondrous men!
And if—beguiled by wine, and the low wiles
Thou wouldst not creep to meet, and a drunken sleep,
Like to high noon in the midst of all his might,
Close by the brink of immortality—
The deep dominions of thy sea-sire, thou
Didst lose thy light by kings who hate the great,
Thou only hadst to stand up to the sun,
And gain again thine eyes. So the great king,
The world, the tyrant we elect, in vain
Puts out the eyes of mind: it looks to God,
And reaps its light again. Wherefore, revenge;
Out with the sword; the world will run before thee,
Orion! beited giant of the skies!
Thou with the treble strain of godhood in thee!
March! there is nought to hinder thee in heaven:—
Past that great sickle saved for one day's work,
When he who sowed shall reap creation's field;—
Past those bright diademed orbs which show to man
His crown to come;—up through the starry strings
Of that high harp close by the feet of God,
Which he, methought, took up and struck, till heaven,
In love's immortal madness, rang and reeled;
The stars fell on their faces; and, far off,
The wild world halted—shook his burning mane—
Then, like a fresh-blown trumpet blast, went on,
Or like a god gone mad. On, on we flew,
I and the spirit, far beyond all things
Of measure, motion, time and aught create:
Where the stars stood on the edge of the first nothing,
And looked each other in the face and fled,—
Past even the last long starless void, to God;
Whom straight I heard, methought, commanding thus:
Immortal! I am God. Hie back to earth,

470

And say to all, that God doth say—love God!

Lucifer.
God visits men adreaming: I, awake.

Festus.
And my dream changed to one of general doom.
Wilt hear it?

Lucifer.
Ay, say on! It is but a dream.

Festus.
God made all mind and motion cease; and lo!
The whole was death and peace. An endless time
Obtained, in which the power of all made failed.
God bade the worlds to judgment, and they came—
Pale, trembling, corpse-like. To the souls therein
Then spake the Maker: deathless spirits, rise!
And straight they thronged around the throne. His arm
The Almighty then uplift, and smote the worlds
Once, and they fell in fragments like to spray,
And vanished in their native void. He shook
The stars from heaven like raindrops from a bough;
Like tears they poured adown creation's face.
Spirit and space were all things. Matter, death,
And time, left nought, not even a wake to tell
Where once their track o'er being. God's own light,
Undarkened and unhindered by a sun,
Glowed forth alone in glory. And through all
A clear and tremulous sense of God prevailed,
Like to the blush of love upon the cheek,
Or the full feeling lightening through the eye,
Or the quick music in the chords of harps.
God judged all creatures unto bliss or woe,
According to their deeds, and faith, and his
Own will: and straight the saved upraised a voice
Which seemed to emulate eternity
In its triumphant overblessedness.
The lost leaped up and cursed God to his face;
A curse might make the sun turn cold to hear;
And thee, in all thy burning glory, tremble,
In front of all thy angels, like a chord.
Rage writhed each brow into a changeless scowl.
Madly they mocked at God, and dared his eye,
Safe in their curse of deathlessness. To hell
They hied like storms; and, cursing all things, each
Soul wrapped him in his shroud of fire for aye,
With one long loud howl which seemed to deafen heaven;—
And then I woke.

Lucifer.
A wild fantastic dream!
A mere mirage of mind! Come, let us leave:
We have seen enough of this world.

Festus.
Lift me up, then.
World upon world how they come rolling on!
Smooth moving, irresistible, breathing life,
Self perfect each in impulse, course and end.
But none I see so beauteous are as earth.

471

Lucifer.
Behold these spheres. These be heaven's golden harps,
By God strung, struck by angels; making now
Harmonious worlds, now worlds of harmony.

Festus.
Here, all-where God is; the universal soul,
All centering, circumscribing, quickening all
In his own essence infinite; soul of space;
Of all force life, and rational moving will.
In presence here of all these sovereign laws,
Which weave their spells around me, like the rays
Varied of stars, that thwart the vast inane,
And with God's attributes alligned, in us
Beget that sense of world-life which pervades
The boundless whole; I feel the effect supreme
And venerable of one well-ordered plan
Conceived from the beginning; know in truth,
Where law is, there is God; yet is not God
Law only; but peace and order and harmony,
Progressive purity and perfection; law,
Proof of self-limiting will, itself to expound
Towards mind create, whereby his spirit, defined,
Might interact with secondaries; nor these,
From contact with pure deity, fail for aye,
Or in the original void cease. Contract this
All natural life intelligently enjoys,
And builds on, for its world completive course.

Lucifer.
All true laws harmonize; in force and end;
Law being law to God, not less than man,
Inviolable. Earth crumbles and decays:
And with the all gulphing main wars ever; fire,
Air, each o'er other elements reigns, subdues
Disorganizes, transforms; the life meanwhile
Of governing nature being to straightly hold,
Or rectify that balance, each in turn
Aims severally to ruin.

Festus.
Earth, O earth!
There is so much to love that is purely earth.
Now I could wander all day in the wood,
Where nature, like a sibyl, writes the fate
Of all that live on her red forest leaves:
Aimless, save there to wander, and mine arms
Wind round their grey gaunt trunks; nor, idly quite
Their instincts blind but beauteous seek to guess;
And what things vegetal think of the light, the air
The frost disanimative, the nourishing brook,
And the rude robber storm, that steals their bloom,
Whiles, and whiles, sinking, moans o'er wintry earth,
Like a giant o'er some dead captive dame
Whom death had saved from madness and his love;
Could watch the clouds self shaping fanciful,
Embodied silences, their news yet impart

472

To each other impulsive, as from wind or sun;
Could tramp across the brown and springy moor,
And over the purple ling and never tire;
Could look upon the ripple of a river,
Or on a tree's long shadow down a hill
For a summer's day, wishing the sun would call
My conscious soul up, up to him as he draws
Dew from the earth: sweet earth, in every clime
Like lovely, in all times, all seasons, now
In tropic wilds, flower blazoned; now where hills
Their burning feet cool in the pearl paved wave;
Now, where in face of winter,—as a flower,
Sheds its superfluous leaflets to its feet,
Heart-touched by frost; or as some silly maid
Consulting to her cost, thin-bearded hag,
Enchantress deemed, with many an uncouth rite
And mercenary, her white weeds, piece by piece,
Yields, ere yet, mute, to lonely couch consigned,
And dream of spouse to be, who though far off
Perchance at sea, still, forced by witchwrought charm,
Shall surely his features visionary reveal
Ere dawn;—delusive spell! so there, like nude,
Stands nature, icily pure; and now where air
Aids life by temperate sweets, with heat nor cold
Stifling perfection: these things, in my mind,
Nor suns nor systems can drive out nor quell;
Nor universal system of all suns.

Lucifer.
Oh! earth and sun I have marked them both of late;
This ailing, failing that, whose genial loves
Men once so mouthed; they loathe each other's face,
By this time, trust me candidly, as each,
Seized of the secret of the other's life,
Though severally disposed, together clamped
By fate unloosenably, vain triumph steals
Of mutual hate. As some black-blooded chief,
Swift towards his sudden and unexpected end
Sickening, puts on in right of royalty
Strange robes of ceremony, to meet with Death;
Death, than he mightier; and to blind all nigh
Bids, openly, all his treasures be earthed with him;
Bar-gold and spoils unransomable of war;
Privily, the poisonous bond-quean,—round his feet
Ministrant, gliding like a sable ghost,
Whose slow still step he, easeless, eyes, askance,
Knowing full well she burns at heart to see
The last of him;—dooms to be hurled into his grave,
Living; and wept by all round, dies content,
In mute malignance, ignorant she o' the end,
So nigh, precipitate. Let them perish, both.

473

Behold the boundless prospect. Goodlier view
I know not: suns which rounding the infinite,
But slowly, as though reluctant to exhaust
The pleasing amplitude of space, themselves
Confess but disguised planets, and so complying
With life's perpetual progress, nearer aye
In its vast spiral to the all central soul,
Towards this the original seat of things return
Obedient; for all worlds are ware of God;
Nay, an orb by him arraigned, starts sensitive
To the touch divine, and feels his finger's force
In counsel or command: the same, it knows
Which holloweth out the bed the stream of time
Shall flow in, flow for aye. Shall mind do less?

Festus.
Dost ravage all these worlds?

Lucifer.
Ay all mine own.
Where spirit is, there evil; and the world
Is full of me, as ocean is of brine.

Festus.
God is all perfect; man imperfect. Thou?

Lucifer.
I am the imperfection of the whole;
The great negation of the universe:
The pitch profoundest of the fallible:
Myself the all of evil which exists;
The ocean heaped into a single surge.

Festus.
O God! why wouldst thou make the universe?

Lucifer.
Child! quench yon suns; strip death of its decay;
Men of their follies; hell of all its woe.
These if thou didst thou couldst not banish me.
I am the shadow whole creation casts
From God's own light. But lo! we are here; at hell.
Hark to the thunderous roaring of its fires!
Yet ere we further pass, pause; dost thou shrink?

Festus.
At nought; not I. Come on, fiend! follow me.

474

XXIX.

Traversed the void,
Hell's fires, unholy not, not hopeless, reached,
The initials even of good in the sad mock
Of mortal revelry mark; the quelling truth
That all life's sinful follies run to hell;
Lies, wrongs, debauches, murders, die not; live
In hell for ever; make, are hell; till just
Amendment expiate, and the soul's right will,
Set heavenward, lead those lost to happier end.
Perdition to the impenitent certain; yet,
Redemption as creation vast; all soul
Of every kind, angelical or humane,
Amenable sometime to God's saving truth,
And mercifullest forbearance, more than force
Convictive; by long suffering conquering all.
There, awed, the visitant spirit, in joy endowed
With heaven's self justifying message,—less
Man's soul to free from dread of pain eterne,
Than God's name from the injustice measureless
They to his rule, corrective, just, impute
Falsely who such affirm,—hell's end foretels.

Hell. Lucifer and Festus entering.
Lucifer.
Behold my world. Man's science counts it not
Upon the brightest sky. He never knows
How near it comes to him, but swathed in clouds
As though in plumed and palled state, it steals
Hearselike round the universe, and thieflike; aye
Rolling, returning not; robbing all worlds,
Of many an angel soul; its light hid deep
In its breast which burns with woe concentrate, woe
Superfluent, woe self generate and eterne.
Nor sun nor moon illume it; and to those
Who dwell in it, not live, the starry skies
Have told no time since first they entered there.
Worlds have been built and to their central base
Ruined, nay razed to the last atom; they
Of neither know nor care, unconscious save
To agony, nought knowing even of God,
But his omnipotence so to execute
Torture on those he hath in wrath endowed
With heaven's own immortality, as to make
Them feel what scathe the Almighty can inflict,
And the all feeble endure, nor—as they would—
Be annihilated. Be sure that this is hell.
The blood which hath embrued earth's breast since first
Men met in war may hope to be reformed, yet,
And reascend, each individual drop,
Its vein; the foam-bubble from sea, sun-drawn
Cloudwards, to scale the fall it fell down, erst;

475

Or seek its primal source in earth's hot heart;
But for the lost to rise towards heaven, regain,
Or hope it, ne'er can be.

Guardian Angel.
Who are the lost
For aye? But here thou shalt behold the truth.
How shall the mere immortal unredeemed,
Impenitent, with no sense of hating sin,
Know God the righteous Maker, Judge?

Lucifer.
Art here?

Guardian Angel.
Here am I, as elsewhere.

Festus.
Protect; instruct.

Guardian Angel.
Behold me, by heaven missioned, so to clear
From all illusion spiritual and wrong
Conceit, that tyrant sin as now would teach,
Or ignorantly misrule, that thou mayst both,
While in soul agonized by that thou seek'st
As just reward for wilful wrong, than thine
Worse only by the unfrustrate act of dread
Betrayal, now too self condemned, take good
To thyself; and so instructed here, the world
After, forewarn, as hopeless not; and God
Prove therefore just in this his judgment hall
Of hell.

Lucifer.
Believe me in mine own domain.

Festus.
Are all these angels then, or men, or both?
Or mortals of all worlds?

Lucifer.
Immortals all.

Festus.
Countless as meteorites that strew the breast
Of some quenched orb where yet they lie aglow,
Panting away their life-fires!

Lucifer.
Fallen through sin,
At various periods of eternity, all,
And not by one offence to one same doom,
And at one moment did they down from heaven,
Like to the rapid droppings of a shower;
No; each distinct as thunderpeals they fell.
Save those that fell with me. With me began
Sin even in heaven, with me but sin remains.
Once I alone was hell. Behold my fruits.

Festus.
What do yon fiends? Some 'mong them look like mortals
Whose hearts shine through their frames as living coals
Through ashes. These, a torture agonised
Express; those madness gone delirious; all
By excess of evil and woe, in clinging strife
Contort, like nested snakes, that fang each other
With wounds that wake to life, and struggling deaths
Ceaseless, requickened as if from mortal pangs.
Oh horror! let me hence.

476

Lucifer.
Nay, hear.

Festus.
I hear
A strain incongruous as a merry dirge,
Or sacramental bacchanal. Oh shame!

Guardian Angel.
Truly, for here is spiritual chaos; deeps
Wherein, distraught to their own first rudiments,
Souls must reseek their ends, refound themselves;
Each worsening other, deepening life's despair;
Till sin be from the spirit eliminate clean.

Festus.
O sad and pitiable ye souls of men,
Self-torturing without end; hell's alien fiends.

Lucifer.
Men are they not, but devils at their best.
And I would have thee mark them.

Festus.
I attend.

Lucifer.
Behold the cup of demons and their board;
Their fellowship, their triumph, their self hate,
Who so much loved themselves, their wretched joy.

Fiend.

Heap high the fires of hell; let woe not languish,
Heap up with everlasting flames, heap higher.
There, let the man-fiend, consummate in anguish,
Howl through the fathomless profound of fire.
To tempt and ruin those that once were solely
God's, and torment them, when with us they dwell,
This is our end, and their existence wholly
Hid in the doom no demon dares to tell,
But is shadowed in the harrowing eternity of hell.

Deeper than the bowl the drunkard drained so gladly;
Deadlier than the lie which scorched the liar's tongue;
Keener than the blade the murderer plied so madly,
Eats aye into the essence, the worm that all hath stung;
And for that they succumbed to the toils wherewith we bound them,
Their bread is burning brimstone, their drink is bubbling fire;
For they live upon the nature of the tortures that surround them;
And their life is in the death they shall never see expire,
Lo! it floweth from the fountains of the ever-seething ire.

Festus.
Nay, let me quit. Now know I what hell is.

Guardian Angel.
Be not deceived even here, by the show of things.
Lift up this veil of fire and look beneath.
Here is nought seen save justice, strict, supreme,
By all approvable; by the spirit which bears,
Inflicts, or views, remedial, fruiting good;
Unworthy not of God to doom, nor man
To endure. See midst this basement of all soul,
Antipodal to heaven, hate, envy, base
Desire, revenge, wrath, inhumanity, pride,
All crime engendering vice, by sense of sin,
Here forced inevitably upon the spirit,
Patience, and slow conviction of God's truth
And justice, gradually but surely change

477

To qualities substitute, that time by time
Mature, and fit the soul to seek a sphere
More congruous with its altered state; in fine
Passing to virtue's realm, and joy's. For know,
Evil is not an ultimate, even in hell,
Either as law of being, or state; but here
Elsewhere, allwhere, through Being's avoidless shade,
Probational, and convertible by our God
To luminous good, restorative of life.
See, now, how seeks this soul, in true remorse
Gradual, but unrelaxed, to amend; and there,
As when some mountain rivulet through black gorge
And jagged chasm, hurried, with thunderous plunge
Leaps suicidal, down; its bed,—thenceforth
Of agony, with the death-foam of its lips
Whitening, and rage regretful at its fall;—
So here, the atrocious spirit, self cursed with sin,
Writhes in his lengthening torments, till more calm
Conviction penitence teach, and peace to soul,
Of future ends considerate, bring.

Festus.
O heaven!
Can such things come to pass?

Guardian Angel.
They may, and do.

Festus.
What means yon fiendish chant, then?

Lucifer.
It means this;—
Sin with deep draughts of fiery venom fed,
Drains, to the latest dreg of murderous flame,
Its own consuming fate, self punitive; thus
Constructing its own death, its own defeat
Scheming with fatal skill, as I myself
The lord of evil, fear I am.

Festus.
But if God's
Good will gave all things being, then his hate,—
What is unholy he detests to death,
Cannot do less than, were it even the all,
Annihilate.

Guardian Angel.
What if evil, left to itself,
Corrupt itself away?

Lucifer.
When ends the world,
I end.

Guardian Angel.
A glorious hope. But God's intent
Unsearchable, as his will unbattleable,
O'errides, o'errules the all, child of his hand.
Hence, it means, too, when all's done, and at last,
Time's sun, declining down the eternal skies,
Leaves his last shining shadow upon the sea,
And in the boundless abyss entombs his beams;
When final evening folds the universe
Heavily round, then hell shall drain the dread
Cup of perdition to the last drop.

478

Lucifer.
Death
Is of all things thou thinkest, most like sleep.
The dead think otherwise. But wherefore thus?
What mean my words to thee?

Festus.
In sooth I know not.
I am constrained to hear them.

Lucifer.
They mean this;
Words, shapes, like easily are by spirits assumed.

Festus.
So, then, these palpable torments,—

Guardian Angel.
Whatsoe'er
Thou seest, see most thou err not. Burning racks
Conscience self-agonized bears, corrective griefs,
Fires of remorse refining, pains soul-wringing,
Whereby the spirit, of evil dispollute,
Conscious, its clarity reattains; and strained
Through many a mediate check, which fuller sense
Of others' rights and God's prerogative gives,
Steps upwards towards perfection, though still far,
Proofs fiery show of the inward struggles waged
In spirits immortal by rebellious will,
Proud once of self idolatry; now shame-burned
With hot humiliation 'neath God's eye,
Sightful of all things to their inmost core,
At forfeiture of noblest privileges,
By creature owned, once for the world's worst cheats,
Life's worthlessest impostures bartered; sin
And her false felonry. Contrarious, there
High o'er hell's reek and roar of clashing lies,
Which now obscure, now deafen, now all affright,
By truth's calm utterance gradually subdued,
Like foul things perishing simply of the light,
See virtue, wisdom, love, peace, righteousness,
Harmonious with themselves and her, up soar
Towards their all-central source, as satellites
Their light, their beauty, to renew; and showing
How pitiable the counterfeits men praised,
Make to the obdurate infidel hells of shame;
To betterward tending soul, an aim right high
To aspire to; and a standard of rise gained.

Festus.
That these poor souls, so self-distort, should e'er
By justice straightened, hope to again see God!

Guardian Angel.
Not unreturnless are the paths of hell,
More than inevitable: whence now the soul,
Sifted through outraged conscience' scapeless bars,
Given up to retribution just, weighed, proved,
May issue purified, and through cleansing rounds
Of nature, self-wise chastened, happiest life
Win; and the heart's ill lusts exorcised, seek
Sin-freed, and humble, acceptance of its God.

479

End only worthy, this, of God; who,—all
Things aptliest planned,—to finite reason gave
Virtue, as test of heavenliness, and hell
Reserved as his displeasure souls must feel
Who, erring wilfully, impenitent end
Their day on earth; his laws world-wise who scorn,
His provident control, his just commands,
They answerable, and his retributive rule.

Festus.
How changed in this heaven-justifying truth,
Show all things now! no sin of man, by man
Not duly expiable; all life to come,
And passed, like witness of his righteousness.
Hell terminable makes heaven an actual joy.

Guardian Angel.
Behold these nations of iniquitous soul,
Which, mixed in misery here, all orderless lie;
Who God forgat on earth, or wronged; false priests
Whose lips the prayers they made for peace, defiled;
Blessing ambition's bloody-bannered war;
The apostate hypocrites of every faith;
Death-ravening demagogues worshippers of the axe;
Murderous inquisitors of contending creeds;
Remorseless mobs who urged to death the pure,
The patriot, benefactor of his race;
Peoples, not less than tyrannous kings unjust,
See called on here to pay their righteous dues;
Nor less than soul of craftiest statesman, proud
Erst of iniquitous war for trivial end,
Heroes whose spirits adhere to forceful fight,
Still as a sword blood-rusted cleaves to its sheath;
Blasphemers; perjurers; stirrers up of strife;
Impure, the innocent ravishing with their eyes;
Torturers of humbler lives, idolaters;
Of sinners chief the impenitent, and those
Who in life were most severe on others' sins;
Ignoble souls, who quench in sensual ends
Reason's divine light, given as guide. Nor these,
Doomed justly, deem, through purgatorial pains.
Their way to upper spheres, pure and serene,
May lightlier win. Who have long time outraged man,
Have God to appease at last; and his great heart
Long suffering, oh unwearyable, aye beats
For justice, mercy crowned. So then let once,
Repentance, reason's first deflective step
From sin's dark ways, ascendant, mark the soul's
Path, and the atonement's virtually achieved.
The essential fires they burn in, patient fires
Which leprous soul unscurf from sin, contract
Grossly and wilfully, eat in time the curse
Would else consume them, and to childlike state

480

Of innocence, not ineligible, restore.
Here, all the guilty passions cleansed from self's
False pleadings, and the indulgence of the sense,
Show monstrous, shame judicial reason's eye.
Remorse, repentance, follows; all things thus
Work, worldlike round to their due end; and hell's orb
Hath its proper place in heaven as thine, and all.
For that earth-life not sufficeth to God's ends,
And man's immortal destinies, hell, here
As timely chastisement affirms, yon heaven,
As prize eternal; that a mildened doom,
A doubled bliss this; and, equivalent deemed
Of earth's iniquities and her virtues, shows
O infinite universe, thou hast no like to man,
The conscious breath of the world's deity,
No second favourite of our God's. Not hell,
Not sin, destroys the soul. Can falsest creed
The innocence unmake of sinless babe?
Can lewd idolaters who adore the world,
Gold, or as savages, the stars and heaven,
And elements of earth, obstruct, defraud
God of his worship true? None worship him,
But with, and in, his spirit; nought attains
His love, but that proceedeth from it first.
His praise is ever vastening in all worlds,
Through all the ages. Nought eternal is
But that's of God; all pain and woe, finite
Are, therefore. Can thief steal from heaven the soul?
Can liar make God to lie? Can poisoner drug
Soul's immortality? Great the sin, flesh-born,
But expiable by this, by that forgiven,
It may be, shall the dead slay e'er the living?
Shall God, all love, here, ages afterwards,
Reserving these misdeeds, himself, reverse?
And because man a moment sinned, all crime
Crown in unending scourgings for the wrong?
Shall such be justice called? 'Twere more than vengeance.
Said One, five hundred times, forgive! Shall God
Act by less perfect law than he bids men heed?
Yet such the deity men will fable; such
The hell whereto they doom themselves.

Festus.
No more!
Not I will so misjudge life's gracious lord.
As in earth's skies, whate'er the mutable day
Of rosy or lurid hue brings, high o'er all,
Beams at last heaven's eternal azure, firm
Unfathomable; so here and allwhere, see,
Rule wrath or justice whiles they may, the whole
In his ever-enduring mercy wrapped.

Guardian Angel.
How else

481

Could earth's and heaven's Creator glory find
In hell, or creature good, if God be just,
Or man a being salvable?

Festus.
See now,
Yon spirit whose brow seems calmer than the wont
Of most, as though suffused with trustful hope.
What doth he here?

Guardian Angel.
If, spirit, it grieve thee not,
And thou mayst speak, alleviate for the time
From woe, say why here; and when hope,—for hope
I judge, is thine,—may lead thee hence; that so
This man, by God permit, may on return
Earthwards, to his relate thy tale of truth.

Festus.
'Twill much content me. Say what brought thee hither?

Spirit.
God's angel was I once, ages agone;
But though doing good, not glorifying God
Who me empowered, he sent me here to fire
The proud spot from my heart.

Festus.
And when wilt thou
Do this, and own thou hast wronged God?

Spirit.
Even now,
I do repent me, and confess it here.
I do not beseech God now to let me be
What once I was; but might I only sit
A footstool for some other worthier far
Who owneth now my throne, I should be happy:
Happier than ever I was in my proud prayers,
That God would give me worlds on worlds to govern;
Happier than in receiving prayers and blessings
From prostrate priests of old and crowded fanes.
O God remember me, O save me!

Festus.
See!
I do believe there is an angel coming
This way, from heaven.

Spirit.
He comes to me, to me.

Angel.
Hail, sufferer; sinner now no more. God bids me
Bring thee on high. Thy throne is kept for thee;
And all the hosts of heaven are on the wing,
To welcome thee again.

Spirit.
I dare not come.
I am not worthy heaven.

Angel.
But God will make thee.

Festus.
Spirit, adieu! May we meet again in place
Better and happier time.

Spirit.
Glory to God!
Mortal, I go. Farewell. Say thou to all
On earth, Repent; be humble, and despair not.

Lucifer.
Here one may go, and there, one. Thousands come.

482

I have seen and have contemned. Sometimes I hear
Of ominous defections, such as, late,
Of Samiaza, Azazyel and the sires
To foreworld giants, Molech, Bel, and those
World moulding spirits depute, I named, who each
His rites idolatrous claimed, pretended gods,
The several nations once who ruled, but since,
Ill expiative, have here, and for long transferred
Their hopes to Hades; and—so angels feign,—
Commenced, conceptive of Saturnian times,
Their long return. I miss them not o'ermuch.
But think, when all are judged, what hosts of souls
Will then be mine at last; what wings of fire.
Hell is the wrath of God; his hate of sin.
God hates man's nature; be it said of his,
As of all beings.

Festus.
How hates he that he hath made?

Lucifer.
The infinite opposite of perfection
To imperfection leaves nor choice nor mean.
Thus the demeanour of thy world grieved God,
Till its destruction pleased him, and its name
Was struck out of the starry scroll; thus all
Creation worketh infinite grief in time.
When human nature is most perfect, then,
Its fall is nearest, as of ripest fruit.

Guardian Angel.
To hate is not to approve. All signs God hates
Of imperfection as unworthy of him
To mark, and as from him leading far away
Selfwards; but every proof of progress towards
Perfection, towards his own pure mind and ends,
He loves, aids, seals. Such ween God's hate and love.

Lucifer.
Thinkst thou as mortals think yet?

Festus.
This is not
As thou didst speak of hell, nor as I judged.

Guardian Angel.
Deem as thou seest: these hells eternal be
Only in endurance, not in pains applied
To the individual spirit, which, taught of God
Whose universal aim is to redeem
All he hath made, as part-wise of himself,
So long as good, or goodwards tending, learns
Its mountain of demerit, grain by grain
To wash away with penitent tears. But look!
Who hither cometh.

Lucifer.
It is the Son of God;
For He, in his humanity's also here,
All gracious being, against whose world-great throne
These now all strengthless, hopeless, godless, here,
Rose once in tide of war, and ebbed for ever,

483

These, in their fieriest abyss of woe,
Unbent, unbettered will again rush forth
In all the might of mad despair, to prove
Of thee, and of his love their hatred. Know
Salvation is the scorn of angels fallen.

Son of God.
I know it; it is divine humanity
Shall rescue all from ruin. The Father makes
And orders every instant what is best.

Festus.
This is God's truth. Hell feels a moment cool.

Son of God.
Hell is his justice; heaven is his love;
Earth his long suffering: nought create but shows
A quality of God; therefore come I
By him sent, these to announce as tempered; peace
To accord to strife, to give to justice mercy,
Even to long suffering longer; everywhere
God's justice shall to his humanity yield.
He hath made that lord of all things; of all worlds
And all the souls therein; yea world by world,
And soul by soul he hath all redeemed, or given
The means of their salvation; why not, then, Hell?

Festus.
Every spirit is to be redeemed.

Son of God.
Mortal, it hath: the best and worse need one
And same salvation. Final in his world
Nought is, but God; therefore these souls to be seen
And pitied much for their woes, for their evil more,
Need not, shall not, cannot be inhelled for aye.
For albeit on earth or here they have put God from them,
Disowned his prophets, mocked his angels, stormed
His threatenings back to him; yet God is such
He can still pity, suffer for them still
And save them. Heavenly father! mercy fears not
But by thy love hell can be saved from hell.
See, here be they which fell of old, through pride.
Created mind could ne'er the thought conceive
Of equalness with God, unless by first
Debasing the idea. They err who feign
The devil by vain ambition fell from heaven.
He in the God state first with all his hosts,
By fate inhered; by fate, as cloud to cloud
On the hill side succeeds, with all his host,
They darkened and declined and passed away.
Through pride in what they were they fell, and not
Ambition to be highest. These while yet
The dew lay of creation's morn; and now
Glistens the dew of evening o'er the world.
Mixed in one stormy ruin with the rest,
Lo! mortal those, who lost by mortal love
Their lot in the eternal.

Festus.
Save them, Lord!

484

Son of God.
Salvation is the will supreme of God,
And final cause of all things. But to some
He grants, as proof and earnest of the truth
Ere yet fate take the tangled skein of time,
And weave it into one surpassing web,
Fit for the glorious garment of our God,
Bliss precedent o'er all else: the angels' such;
While he the Maker, sole omniscient, knows
The boundless sum of being, and its end.
Fiends hear ye me; wash, bathe ye in truth's fount;
Your sins confess; your judgment justly earned;
Implunge in life's pure well, the spring of peace.
Revere God's righteousness; to his just will
Assentient, peace shall then your souls o'erflood.
I who am God's humanity, his all
Of mercy, his equity, subjecting law,
Bid ye immortal fallen, rise again:
There is a resurrection for the dead,
And for the second dead. And though ye died,
And fell, and fell again, and again died,
There's life to come, a rise for all, a life
For ever, a rise aye as the spring's i' the year.

A Fiend.
Son, thou, of God, what wilt with us? Is ours
Not hell enough, remorse, strife always, hate
Mutual of all? Why double with thy mild eyes?

Son of God.
Spirit I come to show thee how remorse
For God offended, violated law,
Iniquity done, may save thee.

Fiend.
How save fiends?

Son of God.
How any save, save by the spirit of truth,
And love, of him whose mercy so outdures
All things, it must at last all things persuade?
Repentant, God forgives thee, and the truth
Enlightening, the all-holy Spirit shall hallow
With sense of justly inflicted chastisement,
And of an equity, lenient more than law,
Wiser. Repent still; judgment is at hand;
But these means, times, for repentance given, o'erslurred,
Tremble; this hell is nought to that which comes.
Believest thou God can save thee?

Fiend.
I believe,
And I adore.

Son of God.
Faith sanctifies the soul,
See all ye fallen, even in the heart of woe.
Come to me; lo! faith hath but touched thy brow,
And thou art bright as morning is in heaven.

Spirit.
Angel of light, ye lost, am I again;
See, this is to be saved.

Lucifer.
I like it not.

485

Son of God.
Hear ye immortals, dead in evil and sin
Yet unrepented of, oh repent, and be
All angels.

Spirit.
Oh, repent. He comes to show
How penitence yet available all may save.

A Lost Soul.
I, too, who while on earth believed not God
Nor death's result; nor, partly by defect
Of nature, teaching, and self-will, heaven, nor hell,
Nor deathless spirit; who, faithless, trusted not
God's universal fatherhood, nor man's
Eternal sonship, nor that e'er the All-good
Still heaven indwelling self-incarnate came
To man, and 'bode in him; but myself believed,
And mine own fleshly being only;—I,
Repentant sore, that disbelief condemn,
And glory now in a worthier faith. Shall hope
Me visit here?

Son of God.
Though in hell's deepest hell,
Thy soul shall she salute, and God redeem.
Arise!

Soul.
Divine one! all the world of life
To thee is debtor; thy supreme command
Thou betterest by exampling; all forgiven.

Another Soul.
I, too, 'mid scenes of violence, sins of soul,
And crimes of head and hand, justly cut off,—
In fullest fruitage of iniquity,
My fellow men to save from basest wrongs,
Then plotting in my brain, by God all good,—
Repent me of my wickedness; and still
Acknowledging the mercy of the pains
So grievously imposed, so long endured,
Dare hope his pardon, who me power hath dealt
His justice to confess. Thou couldst not be
True to divinity, were not sin condemned,
Nor to humanity were it pardoned not;
Thou, Lord, whose faithfulness from heaven to earth
Reacheth, and hell's hot roots. Death on my soul
Darted. I died, red-handed in my guilt.
Through woeful ages hath my spirit burned
With expiative remorse, and longing sore
Sometime to serve those I upon earth had wronged;
Desire that God's divine compassionateness
Would grant me leave, for them to sacrifice
This self I am, this whole essential pang,
Nor elsewise seek I not release from woe.

Son of God.
Be of good heart, poor soul. Thou art not lost
Assure thyself, for aye. Time puts no term

486

To God's divinest attributes; to love
Compassion, mercy, truth; or time, and time's
Events would dominate his, the eternal mind.
Lo now these human with the angelic mixed
In process of purgation; angels these
Retributive, who by God ordained, their own
Misdeeds to expiate in judicial acts,
Self-punitive, while towards others penal, thus
The united betterment work out of both.
Mark, too, who 'twixt due penitence and remorse,
Contrition's upper stone and nethermost, grind
The spirit self-convict, self-condemned, as through
A mill of fire, to pure repentance; whence
Reframed, revivified, the heart again
Warms with new love towards God and man. Be sure,
Mortal, through all our God's intelligent world,
Through all its infinite multitudes of soul,
Its testing earths, its proof fraught spheres, its orbs
Of purifying progress, near or far,
Central, or clustering round some parent globe,
Not man alone aspires to himwards; not
Man only worships wholly. Spirits elect,
Through all mind's conscious orders, fraught with gifts
Of reason, and answerable for act and choice,
Made just, made holy, glorified, e'er seek
With him essential union. Nay, even here,
Through all hell's haunts of burning anguish, woe
Unslaked, for follies voidable once, closed now,
With seal judicial of the passed; regrets
Unstifleable, for secret sins, to the world
Since patent; for applauded lies life-long;
The wail of self-deception undeceived;
The gnawing curse of conscience tricked in vain;
The torturing memories of life's every grace,
Each innocent joy, each natural pleasure fouled,
Degraded, desecrated by sin; through all
The guilty spirit, still purifiable, keeps
Deep in its inmost essence consciousness
Of divine origin, nor misdoubts its own
Capacity of redemption. Change may be
That moment quickening in them, not in vain.
Though here be weepings of repentant tears,
Enough to quench hell's sinlit fires; though here
Be wailings like the moan of dying worlds,
Over impossible restitutions; wrongs
Ne'er to be righted, now: o'er virtue's last
Resolves for future amendment lost; not less
Believe the world's God's field of culture; sin's
Tares into ashes burned, more fertile making
Creation; and his heavenly garner helping
With time's more glorious harvestage to fill.

487

Festus.
O saviour spirit, first-born of deity, mould
And ideal of the mental world of man
And angels both, divine humanity, tell,
Man fallen his final doom, and angels lost;
Exceptions, or examples, these?

Son of God.
This know;
All things are intermediate; God, his name
For aye be praised and magnified; alone
Is first and last, creation circling midst.
The pre-existent life of spirit spheres,
Is that of preparation; on the earth's
Probation; after death, purgation. All
Begins, all ends, all mediates sole in God!
It is just that sin should suffer. It is unjust,
Alike to made and maker, to believe
The Eternal should a creatural soul invest
With deathlessness to suffer pain alone;
No possible betterment to the sufferer,
Resultant, proof 'twere of pure tyrant rule;
Birth but a penalty; and mortal life
One cruel and continuous curse of God.

Lucifer.
But here annihilation is their hope,
Who be not hopeless. How shall aught create
Sustain the onslaught of him, the Almighty God?
Or how, if hell be but his justice, bear
The wrath of the Omnipotent? Who despair,
And proud to suffer being, deem nought ends,
Live on, in untamed energy of ill.
If matter indestructible, why not mind?

Son of God.
Yea, who the depths of deity can conceive,
That only see its surface creature-wards?
Their punishment is partly to believe
Hell's pain perpetual; but it ends.

Lucifer.
Ends?

Son of God.
Ends.
Fires these Æonian, not eternal; thoughts
Distinguishable. Eternal's nought, save God.
In like sense, and the spirit with him made one.
As purgatory 'tis everlasting, this;
The fires eternal, not the punishment
On individual soul, or man's, or fiend's;
Age lasting and life lasting such alone.
For just so much as a man hath lived in sin,
In wilful wickedness or contempt of good;
Corrupt, corrupting others; unrepentant:
So much the spirit suffers for wrong of sense;
So much for worst offence he pays, soul-racked;
Who tempts or wrongs another mulcts himself
In misery he not reckons, nor conceives.

488

So long remorse, as with a burning rasp,
In venom steeped, shall bite his quivering heart;
Till, blanched and purified, sin's pantherine spots
Vanish in whiteness as the wool of lambs.
For the foundations of the intelligent world
Are laid in imperfection; and all soul
The purifying pain of fire divine
Must pass through, in its holy reascent,
To the supreme perfection of pure cause.
But 'gainst unending woe, the love of God
Towards every soul avails, all covering, aye.

Festus.
O thou who art the humanity of God,
Impersonate and our nature's type foreplanned
By the Eternal in himself, ere time,
Holy and kindly are thy words; wise, true;
Befitting one who like communion holds
With deity and with creature. In thy breast
The weakness of all worlds dwells; on thy brow
The glory of their Maker and thine. All life's
Most holiest sympathies, all mind's virtues meet
Heavenwards preponderating, in thee, and last,
Even in God's bosom centre. And thus love,
The heart's deep gulph-stream, that with warmer wave
Sun-gilded, soothes the abysses of our life,
And tempers, with its mild divinity,
The universal breath all part-wise breathe,
Its end celestial hasting with serene
Progress to compass, makes us transient feel
In loving God the soul reseeks its source;
Being to being answering, name to name.
While every evil passion, which man's soul
With flesh engendering, fostered while in life,
Becomes, in death, a living fiend to scourge
With patricidal and Briarean hand,
Its guilty parent, shrinking, shrieking, lost;
But vanquished, grows an angel pure, transformed,
Attracting to salvation in the heavens.

Son of God.
Oh vainly never from the contrite soul,
Stabbed with the golden dagger of remorse,
For sin, pours forth the penitential prayer.
The enlightened conscience quickened by blessed grief,
Man's self-condemning judgment torturing him,
Death were too cheap a pain, man's life a fine
Too trivial to appease God's proud revenge,
But that with reason faith ones; the less ill
Men do, less will they suffer; the more good
On earth men do to men, the more will God
Do unto them in heaven, for he repays
Always a hundred, ofttimes thousand-fold.

Guardian Angel.
Wherefore should all men purge the soul of sin

489

Conscience of criminal desire; self-love;
Concupiscence, ire, envy, hatred, sloth;
The mind, of all perturbing passion; heart,
Of all propensity not made clear to bear
Heaven's fullest, holiest light; whereof by love,
Divine and human, wisdom, charity,
Immortal mediators of the world and soul,
Man may become the blessed recipient;
And heaven be filled with spirit, as air with motes
Prismatic, the vivacious seed of worlds.

Spirit Redeemed.
Who knoweth this and sinneth, great his sin.

Spirit Saved.
But greater towards the sinner is God's love.

Son of God.
One grain of good whose sheafings shall at last
Choke out perdition, and with glorious death
All evil ruin, see mortal! here insown.

Lucifer.
It is not that I cannot credit truth
But that I rather fear as once of old,
God hath inspired false prophets with a lie,
To wreak me further wretchedness. But now
Stand thou—while this great reaper reaps his ear
Elsewhere; beside me. I will speak to mine;
Or they will sure believe him. Hell, O hell;
Powers of perdition, thrones of darkness, hear!
Wrath, ruin, torment hear ye me. It is I.
Thanks, fiends, I know ye hate me well, and may.
I tempted, ruined all. But wherefore, now,
So ominously supine? Earth's fate, and all
Her many-kingdomed tribes, now, know ye not,
Is oscillating in air? List, then, to me.
Be still, ye thunderblasts and hills of fire;
Hell doth out-din itself. Weak hearted slaves,
What are ye that I thus should toil for you?
Power I have proffered, kingdoms I've prepared.
Nothing is for ye, but your fiery fate.
Slaves, slaves, ye are too much at ease. Ye leave
Me single in evil's work of woe. I, sole,
Go forth to sow destruction. I, alone,
Reap ruin. But had ye been as I, ere now
The universe had been, doubt not, all hell;
And for a pit each fiend had had a world
To rule. But rise! To strive 'gainst God is life;
Evil to spread is more than joy, its shade
Dims all that yet may happen. Up, hell, and act!
Who knows but from its central chair we, good
May yet dis-seat; and, hurling, each his orb,
Scatter it in fine as sand? To reign is nought
Like to dethrone; each greater then than God;

490

Or, is it ye dream of peace—like theirs late lost—
Submiss, and pity, of power restorative?
And if dethrone we may not, that we can
We will, withdraw from spirits, even, one by one
The allegiance owed the Lord of life in heaven,
Or elsewhere; leave him lonely in the skies
Desert; and grieving on his liegeless throne:
While we o'er all the populous spheres hold rule,
And spite of right and good, ill deify.
With these, or those, new ranks of spirit sublime,
Succeed we may, nor fail one perfect soul.
If elsewise, us it irks not; for at last,
Time perfected, if ever, and all souls freed
As promised, from the tomb-like clay they boast,
Rise, ere the threshold of eternity, one
Crosseth, a deed of note I have in mind
May yet be achieved; whereof more news anon.
Methinks I see ye captives, suppliants, bound.
But will ye, fiends, give up your hopes of heaven
And entrance as young conquerors fresh from spoil,
And choice of thrones, won by your death-red hands,
For pitiful penitence, like yon angel there,
Garbed though in sheeny white, star-tiar'd, lyre armed?
Forbid it, all sin's pride, sin's prowess; all
Hell's pains we have borne, unblenched. Be it not. Meanwhile
Know ye, man's world's adjudged not long to endure.
And though time's orb so waneth, fields there are
Twain to be foughten as yet, with man, with God.
Be glad; be glad; earth's sons may soon be here;
And here, as earnest of my word, behold
This visitant earthling, standing by my side.
Speak to them, Festus.

Festus.
Nay, I dread them.

Lucifer.
Speak.
Great spirits he scarce is worthy to address ye,
In that I cannot say he is yet, like you—

Festus.
But I am here. What matters how? God's will,
And his who sets me here, for all suffice;
I, saved or lost. It is enough 'tis fate;
Fate that I come, fate that I quit; and though
Soul-racked to view such woe, yet mercy approves
The means remedial of God's righteousness,
And justice satisfied; for wrath which not
Ends, nor appeaseable is, is brute revenge,
Not divine equity. Souls, doubt I not,
Are, which be better, some, some worse than mine,
More illy qualified these than I to brook
Hell's restorative stripes and chastening storms,

491

Fiery; but though none less, and would 'twere so!
Yet have I never mocked the word of God,
Nor torn it into fuel for my scorn;
Nor doubted saving tremblingly, his being;
His love to man, his right to be adored;
Never have hated, never wronged my race,
Deluded nor rejoiced in their delusion;
Never have beckoned off the good from good;
Never have mocked nor scattered hopes; nor e'er
Have wasted hearts nor desolated hearths;
And if I have, once, twice, as who hath not,
Toyed with temptation, yet even he will say,
Who there stands, I have never yielded up
To his burning dalliance, this my soul. And though
God's everlasting hate were sin, sin's not
In the spirit of man, not even in yours eterne;
As I from lips divinely inspired have learned
Here, and now haste, confirmed of love, to impart
To man. Yet he's my friend, the evil one.
And why is wondrous; judge ye wherefore, too.
I have no malice, envy, nor revenge;
None of those petty passions which bad hearts
Scourge red into themselves, for passions are
Sufferings,—and which to nourish is his wont,
Wherein's his power; and save enjoying earth
Have nought done he could share in. But he came
From God he said, to give, and I believed,
Great spirits lie not, nor doubt.

Lucifer.
Hear! He says truth.
He knows not; nor is't his nor yours to know
The reason of all my doings. It is that unfeared,
Unforethought, tempts, betrays; and that I who bait,
Who teaze the world to do its will, most use.
Proceed we therefore to the future. Though
Racked with undying pain, all pain must end,
As born of life create, though life must cease.
Eternal nought is, nought can be; save God.
But how Creator's glory reconcile
With all creation's sin, save those his grace
Sustains perforce, in heaven, 'twere wise to leave
In his hands; since nor ye nor I can say.
As to this mortal, what I have done is all
Sanctioned of heaven, all I may do, to the end.
God, go on making; I will go on marring:
Go on believing man; I will go on tempting;
Saint, angel, cherub, seraph and archangel,
Good genius, guardian of the soul o' the world,
Go all on blessing! My being it is to curse.
Now back to earth to work out what remains
Of this man's fate, and wait his world's destruction.
What next may hap I reck not.

492

Festus.
Let us hence.

Lucifer.
Where now is he whose advent wheresoe'er
O'er evil triumphing, makes heavenly good
Persistent? Nought I fear save him, and him
Successful.

Festus.
There; see, many do believe.

Lucifer.
It likes me not. Though what seemed fated aye
A happier fate annuls, yet who shall hope
Fall such as mine redeemable? Away
The vain, impossible thought.

Festus.
Impossible not.
For hell remedial proves God's love. The world
Devoutly sworn to error deems the spirit
Create, tormented aye: but finite soul
Bears not, nor can, pain ever. Hell's itself
God's everlasting ordinance. Nought he does
But is with his own eternity impressed
And divine wisdom. Hell, therefore, the force
Corrective and ameliorative of ill
Done wilfully 'gainst conscience, reason, seems
Rightliest prepared for temporal wrongs; itself
Of terminable appliance to finite
Transgressor, as were just; and just God is:
Not punishing minor sins with major pains,
But penalty appropriating to offence
With nicest equity. Greater need in truth
Were that the base or ignorant soul should rise
Through grades of penitence and amendment, sought
Freely, and be made noble, wise and blessed
With final pardon of God, than slave in hell,
Through burning ages endlessly, to adjust
The balance sin on earth left wronged; for sin
To human soul inevitable, to God
Irreconcileable, and wherefore he hath made
His own hands answerable, shall yet become
The contrary of all things, and not be.

Lucifer.
This is to me a mystery. How can hell
Dwindle, betimes, thus; God being just?

Festus.
I see
Truly in this God's wisdom; yea, foresee
A time when creatural opposition ceased
All temporal misconception ended, soul
Though limited, so instructed, shall confess
God's justice and benevolence in all things.
All spirits then one with might divine, this hell
Shall in the fiery lake, of old ordained
Annihilative of all ill, cease for ever.
Orb of perdition, thou too shalt die out,
And thy red sheeted flames shall fail for aye.

493

Thy palpitating piles of ruin, hot
With ever active agony, and quick
With soul immortal, down whose midnight heights
The wrath of God, in cataracts of fire,
Precipitates itself unceasingly,
Shall rush into destruction as a steed
Rushes into the battle, there to die.
Thy quivering hills of black and bloody hue,
Death-breathing, shall collapse like lifeless lungs,
And end in air and ashes. Thou shalt be
Dashed from creation sparklike from a hand
Scarless; pass like a rollèd syllable
Of midnight thunder from the coming day.
The river of all life which flows through heaven,
Shall yet reach thee and overflood thy flames.
Thou shalt no more vex God, nor man, nor all
The seekings of the soul shall hunt thee out.
Thy day is sometime over. Be it soon;
And thou the lost world which the world hath lost.

XXX.

Thence earthward tending, first we make the sun;
Where, as at rest in light, a mediate point,
A bright effect original of God,
Enlightening all things, inly and externe,
'Twixt earth and heaven, our soul heroic now
The spirit beloved, progressive, earlier met
In satellite sphere, and kindred throne, imbue
With sense of being æonian. Only thus,
As we advance in life perfective, soul
Sums accurately the future forming force
Of failures passed; for failures are all faiths
Though each to educable man once good.
The spirit inquisitive of the long foregone
By natural barriers checked, at last all bounds
Of birth and death views vanish; eyes the dawn
Eternal of creation.

The Sun.—Festus, Angela, Lucifer, Ouriel, Guardian Angel, Luniel.
Festus.
Soul of the world, divine necessity,
Servant of God, and master of all things,
Here, in the orb of light's eternal noon,
First see I all things clear; from end to end
The divine cycle of the soul of man;
How spirit and soul, mind, life, flesh, feeling, mix,
Reciprocate as the elements; how too flow
The streams of feeling, passion's cataracts;

494

How rise, how sink, mine, mountain, this of pride
And that of covetousness. Such is, man to know.
The human universe and the divine, and fate
Central: know all must be fulfilled that is
Of nature; of sin and strife, peace, righteousness,
Change and destruction, ere the earth can take
New life, or man God's minister become.
All things are means for greater good. Thou, sun!
Art just a giant slave, a god in bonds;
The summit-flower of all created life
Is its unition with divinity,
In essence, yet existence separate.
If heaven and all its stars depend on earth,
Then may eternity upon time; but earth's
A crumb of heaven, and time an atom sole
Of eternity: neither pends on other; both
One essence being, emanant from God,
Whose flowings forth are aye and infinite.
One only truth hath consequence, God's truth
Inspirited in man. The world may act,
Believe, bless, curse it's way as best it lists;
Expend a vain life solemnizing points
Uncertain as the site of Paradise
Or Hades' area: one thing sure to us;
Whate'er we expect in time or place to be,
No future disappointment can be more
Than that we are now to ourselves. We make our hearts
Centres of all hopes, powers, rewards; nor deign
Scarcely to circumscribe our life, so vast
The thought of our own merit, remembering not
That, solely as its imaginary, exists;
This, only as intelligible, and not
Substantial; draw life therefore as we may
It fails to match the true invisible,—
Pure, as some virgin visionary's dream
Of sanctity, still consociable with love,
Or perfect faith's regenerative wave;—
Whereafter we contend. It is come to this.
One state of life with me hath passed away.
Aught henceforth that may matter be of doubt,
To me is indifferent, not of interest. I
That only love that's certain. Me no more
The spirits of the bright impalpable life
Shall throng round as the wind some mountain-top;
Nor watery lightfulness of ghostly eyes,
Belonging heavenly forms informed with light,
Impose their spell of record under pain.
The inspiration quits me; it is gone
Like a retreating army from the land
It twice hath wasted; the long gleaming mass

495

Snakelike, at last hath wound itself away,
And left me weak and wretched. None again
Of all the starry tribes of museful mien
Shall visit me; their leave revoked, henceforth,
Restricted to perfection, earth they quit.
True, albeit, I loved them more than life.
I felt myself made sacred by their touch;
But they are gone, and there is nought on earth
Left with their beauty comparable. It seems
I held me wholly assured; discrediting
Once and for aye all doubts. What doubts forsooth,
And all hell's hosts obscure, grief generative,
Should henceforth shake me? Fiery shadows, hence!
I have outbraved ye once: I scorn ye now.
Is't not enough that I to myself have sworn,
All things to acquit for one; truth's needled rays
For truth's one sphere; the mean for the supreme;
The dubitable power for that orb-throned?
I have, yet is not soul God's echo. Mind
And matter are proportioned in all worlds
The father they and mother of all things.
And earth hath favour over crowds of stars.
Earth let me then reseek. It suits not now
To plunge in pleasure, or to passion stoop,
The lion-honey of the heart which speaks,
And dwells in, life corrupted. Thirst no more
For lore, or joy, the heart distracts, nor meet
I' the brain with dizzying mixture, they. Be it mine
To hope not yet all things concluse; nor fate's
Broad arrow sped, but from its living bow
God's lips, defixed, may yet to sheaf return.
If suffering expiated offence, then they
Who have suffered most, have most maybe, atoned.
Earth-like, the heart must bide all change ere yet
The heaven-life form within it, and we feel
Midst all the world's delights, and life's desires
That chastity of heart which loves but God.

Lucifer.
Lo! I am one who waits not to be sought.
It is from this mighty orb, Time's solar brood,
How many or how far soe'er, are born;
And here, if chance or destiny hath bade
Converge our courses, it were doubtless well.

Festus.
Would I could well reply to word of thine.

Lucifer.
All mysteries once I warned thee thou shouldst ken,
Nor mazèd stand at aught: that promise now
I honour; and will show thee thou hast been
Thyself the all thou seest. Ere every birth,
The spirit, baptized into forgetfulness,
Sloughs off the oppressive consciousness of years,

496

Soul-saddening as with thunderstorms of thought.
But leave is mine and power devolved of God,
With reminiscence of Time's foresped tides,
Thy memory to endow; and from the passed
Evoke eternal pictures; for the world
Itself is but an outline manifold,
And surface of true essence. Underneath
That superficial veil is nought but God.

Festus.
Draw it and die.

Lucifer.
Not yet. It irks not me
That thou wouldst aye, from this to that extreme,
Hie with a footstep as of polar light,
All sequence mocking; urgent when the passed,
Then calling on the future. But this sun,
All life, hath its set service. Be it now
Mine own to show what hath been, and the soul,
Here doting on the merest chance of death,
Its prouder pre-existence, angel-mate
Of immortality, all time foregone.
Souls are not new created, hour by hour,
Like rain-drops; but immortal in the heavens
From form to form pass through eternity.
And now what seest thou?

Festus.
Surely, in yonder shape
I see approaching, purer, lovelier, her
Whose spirit enshrined in beauty's crescent star,
With bliss intense lit up my heart; my soul
Steeped in the pearly radiance of her smile;
But here of loftier and more grand aspect,
Nor now by inmost shadows saddened. Speak,
Transcendent spirit; and whom thou seekest say;
Or wherefore here.

Angela.
The life of all that's good
Is one perpetual progress. Every thought
That strengthens, purifies, exalts a mind,
Betters the soul so blessing.

Festus.
Spirit benign!
Such progress is perfection. It is the power
Of man's perfectibility gives earth
Capacity of heaven. And thou hast left
Yon orb celestial, for this throne of light,
Throne than all empires wider; but while thou
Art here of right and fitness, I of mere
Permission come, and momentary choice.

Angela.
To will and to permit with one whose will,
Creative even of all obstructive force,
Is irresistible, were nought but one.

Festus.
Thou, too, mine angel guardian!

Guardian Angel.
Wheresoe'er
Thou art am I, or far or nigh, to ward
From woe, to watch 'gainst evil, or to warn.

497

But let the fates proceed. Here all is safe;
Here, 'neath yon mighty ruler, like a god
Blessing his worshippers; for he is found
Most blessing who most serves in godly love.

Lucifer.
Yon servant-lord, chained doubtless to his throne;
Such empery be not mine?

Angela.
Nay, see, he comes.

Guardian Angel.
Lo! Ouriel, regent spirit of the sun.

Ouriel.
Were I sole servant of the universe,
As of one starry family, not then
Could I the pride admit thou feelest, fiend,
In ruling or in ruining one poor soul.
The glory of kingship is humility.
Hence knowing every star, for light is here
No more obstructive to angelic eye,
Than night to man's, I know all; and beside,
Hear angel-whispers in remotest heavens;
O'er all, God's will, how strange soe'er, embrace;
And blazon on my breast his holy law.
Whatever its requirements, here obeyed,
Do that ye came for hither. It is fate.
Fate is God's spoken law, and age by age
Concurrent with his written ripely fulfilled.

Guardian Angel.
A life, a moment, all is doomed of God;
The aged growth of empire and the fall
Ephemeral of a flower.

Angela.
That all are here,
Hosts of the blessèd know; and for what end
Thou, man! shalt learn; and with profound surprise
The volumed ages of the soul unseal,
Time's growth concentric reaping at one glance.

Festus.
Hold we, then, passed and future in ourselves?

Angela.
Truly. Thy future lightly once I limned,
Leave given, but just so far; and now thy passed,
In shadowy visions, rimmed or cored with light,
I call before thee as in painted clouds.

Festus.
Spirit of power, thy teaching wait we; all
Time's marvellous lore of eld thy tenderness
How amiable I know, attempering truth;
For as some primæval stream, earth-nourishing once,
Whose giant bed a continent here conceals,
Seas here obliterate, by no living land
Named, nor its tideway; but whose course, still graved
Hither as yond, in monumental marl,
'Neath isle, main, mainland lurks, my heart's first flow
Of love, though since, by worlds of life, and ebb
Of years immemorable, as seems, oppressed,
I yet retrace, and footsteps of the flood.

Angela.
Forget not; but remember too, how once

498

On earth the fatal mystery thou besought'st me,
Unconscious what that mystery then comprised,
To ope of thine own nature, while death's seal,
Inviolable upon our natal sphere,
Yet iced my lips; and now wouldst know it still?

Festus.
Spirit of beauty, who so late hast known
Death, man's penultimate fate;—O humbled Death!
Inevitable shadow, lackeying life;
Archer, who sinnest never from thy mark!
By God's grace conquered now,—speak on, nor cease.

Angela.
God, when he made the heavens precede the earth,
Made in them all celestial substances,
Angel and spirit and life-intelligence,
And soul, if deathless, pre-existent; all
With power of gradual perfectness enriched,
That by successive sense of spheral life,
Refined to common godhood, they might gain
Original bliss. To mortals of thine orb,
Ere now, though few and by full many an age
Sundered, hath he the world-wide wave of light,
From memory's fount revealed, that sage and seer,
And now thyself mightst learn therefrom to live,
By teaching truth from good, and good from truth,
The spiritual sunlife of the soul.

Festus.
The air thy breath doth hallow feels to me
Vital with light of truth.

Angela.
Truth's holy beam
Disperseth passion, as the moon full orbed
The clouds below her dissipates. Seek henceforth
The soul to purify from mortal love
By an immortal passion. Let no aim
Less than celestial fix thine eye; for soul,
Though pre-essential in a bygone sphere,
Or future form, shows still direct from God.

Guardian Angel.
God's providential fates towards earth and man
Have yet to be consummed; and these comprise
More than perchance thou knowest.

Ouriel.
One element
Subtracted from the universe, all is death.
All forms material fade; all signs, all modes,
All shapes. The shows of mightiest things shall pass;
And nothing but essential deity
Be and remain.

Lucifer.
The element I foresee
To be withdrawn, seems strangely akin to life;
And this to me pertains. The end is nigh.
God justifies my purpose, and permits
Herein my action. Life or death, what now
Matters, to me, or any? All are doomed.

499

Guardian Angel.
We, irrespective of each other's course,
Work, and one only knoweth how all ends.

Lucifer.
This know I, that I reck not of the passed.
And for this soul elect, I long have feared
To watch him was spilt time. One trial more!
But Lord! my spirit expands; I long to test
Nations at once; a generation; a race.

Guardian Angel.
So be it. The generation now to be swept
From life, in fleshly mould, by earth's dread doom,
The spirits of total man's terrestrial strain,
He added, whom I still tend on, God permits,
As he from first vouchsafed to approve to all,
And thee, divulsive of the world of life,
Its kind and end. Counsel divine I speak.
Those souls secure who prove by sovereign grace
God's will not to necessity thrall, but he,
Lord even of destiny, and source of fate.

Angela.
Here, 'mid this world-vast granary of light,
Where the sun's fruitful rays are harvested,
Sit we, and thy passed being's shadowy scenes
See, silent; listening to the tongue of time.

Festus.
Silent? Then these be mysteries?

Guardian Angel.
Holy, grand!

Lucifer.
They to their solar secrets; I to mine;
And mine intents; in number 'minishing,
In nature greatening. Ye will follow soon.

Guardian Angel.
Fear not, but I attend him all due times.

XXXI.

Earth regained,
And lone sea-shore where the great waves come in
Frothed like a horse put to his heart-burst speed,
Sobbing up-hill, note we, his ends frustrate,
How evil, who liar, accuser, tempter, known
Deceiver proven, his title of murderer to earn
Man's hater, God's most, works his victim's death,
Reckless of promised boons; ingrate! Fell deed;
By guardian powers of good to good o'erruled.
Struck thrice by loved one's death, give sorrow way,
What fleshly gods, or perishable, can yield
The heart consolement? Fly to solitude.
Only the desert can drink up love's tears.

Garden and Bower by the Sea. Evening.
Elissa, Lucifer; afterwards Festus.
Elissa.
God, by whose elements holy and undefiled
I, too, clear-lifed as they, now stand, nor shrink

500

These primal powers to face unveiled, and mix
Aweless, with nature's grand integrities,
Of no sin conscious; how else dare I breathe
This air ætherial, vivid, which thy throne
Circling, to us from far descends, peace-winged;—
How tread this earth thy cloudy feet o'erpace,
Unwearyable;—this tameless, termless sea,
Heaven imaging,—like the eternal mind which made,
Embosoming in reflection all its works—
How, confident, bear to embrace,—I, hopeful e'er
'Neath thy strong guard to abide, could I not now
In vital contact with the infinite mind,
Through innocence, thee, pure Lord, seek? Hear!—and grant
That while with these and thee at one, the soul,—
Accepted, suffering with yon sun, baptized
To daily death, which yet from burying bath
Rises regenerate, and to awakening worlds
Shows as the light immortal,—may, itself
A morning ray shot forth, at eve, resumed
By the world-quickening spirit whose beams are life,
Eye, undisturbed, its end, and so with dread
No more than scathe, the mortal change endure
Which trains us towards perfection; and, in turn
Our atomie to the life celestial adds;
Our instant to the eternal. I, by dreams
Divining, and night's palpable visions, know
Joy unexpected and reunion blessed,
With strange premonishment of death, confuse
My soul as though were sought a sacrifice
Of one assured best of the offerer's love,
And dearest the demanding deity. Strange,
This struggle of free emotion and fixed faith.
Come, Festus, let me think, my love, on thee!
Why art thou thus away from me so long?
I have whispered it unto the southern wind,
And charged it with my love: why should it not
Carry that love to thee as air bears light?
And thou hast said I was all light to thee.
The stars grow brighter together, and for aye,
Loverlike, watch each other; and though apart,
Like us, they fill each other's eyes with love
And beauty: but mine only fill with tears.
Oh! life were nothing without love; and love
What without love's embrace? Haste, haste thee, love.

One taste of thy dewy lips, my love,
Would far more gladden me
Than a draught of the waters, in heaven above,
Of immortality.
Then oh come hither to me, my love!
Back to this bosom, dear;

501

It is burning for thee, though thy love be dead,
Widow-like on her lord's death-bier.

One touch of thy gentle hand, sweet feere!
One glance of thy glowing eye,
One pitying word, oh, one pardoning tear,
And I've nothing to do but to die;
But to die in the bliss of thy breast, my love,
Like a flower to the gods which is given;
That was happy in life, and is holy in death,
For it dies on an altar of heaven.

And be it that I should die, and whensoe'er,
My life, love, I bequeath to thee, that thine
Redoubling, I may alway live with thee.
Nay, but I feel I am dying; and dreams too true.
This sense of life-loss! From out the firmament
Of visible things, my life fast faints away
Into dim nothingness; nature's self my fate
Prefiguring in the mid-day moon I marked,
This noontide, stealing nightwards. And, as ghost
Caught tampering with the truth, and straight dismissed
By some austere exorcist, shuddering, turns
Its shadowy face to Hades, never more
With man to mix, nor earth's familiar scenes
Haunt, once so cherished; but bidden prepare for pains
Soul-bracing, while they rack, and richening fines,
Would yet life lavish in one exhaustive gaze
On things too dear; so I, forewarned this world
To quit, quit still reluctant; while as yet,
Like a morn-loitering masquer tracked and mocked
By the tell-tale light, who hopes, yet dreads his home,
I, all-while conscious of divine love lost
For human, blame my heart. Heart! thou that makest me
Live, 'tis thou killest. Let me but, ere I die
See him I love. He must know how I love him.
Festus! come to me. I do think I am dying:
I see him,—in brain-sight, him coming to me now;
Now he is thinking of me, loving me;
He sees me—flies to me half out of breath;
His hand is on my arm—he looks on me;
And puts my long locks backwards—God! thy ban
Lies upon waking dreams. To weep and sleep:
Dream—wake, and find one's only one hope false,
Is what we can brook, for we do endure it,
And bear with heaven still. Nigh one year ago,
I watched that large bright star, much where 'tis now:
Time hath not touched its everlasting lightning,
Nor dimmed the glorious glances of its eye;
Nor passion clouded it, nor any star
Eclipsed; it is the leader still of heaven.
And I who loved it then can love it now;

502

But am not what I was, in one degree.
Calm star! who was it named thee Lucifer,
From him who drew the third of heaven down with him?
Oh! it was but the tradition of thy beauty!
For if the sun hath one part, and the moon one,
Thou hast the third part of the host of heaven—
Which is its power—which power is but its beauty!

Lucifer.
It was no tradition, lady, but of truth!

Elissa.
I thought we parted last to meet no more.

Lucifer.
It was so, lady; but it is not so.

Elissa.
Am I to leave, or thou, then?

Lucifer.
Neither, yet.

Elissa.
And who art thou that I should fear and serve?

Lucifer.
I am the morning and the evening star,
The star thou lovedst; thy lover too; as once
I told thee incredulous; star and spirit I am;
A power, an ill which doth outbalance being.
Behold life's tyrant evil, peer of good;
The great infortune of the universe.
Am I not more than mortal in my form?
Millions of years have circled round my brow,
Like worlds upon their centres;—still I live;
And age but presses with a halo's weight.
This single arm hath dashed the light of heaven;
This one hand dragged the angels from their thrones:—
Am I not worthy to have loved thee, lady?
Thou mortal model of all heavenliness!
Yet all these spoils have I abandoned, cowered
My powers, my course becalmed, and stooped from the high
Destruction of the skies for thee, and him
Who loving thee is with thee lost, both lost.
Thou hast but served the purpose of the fiend;
Art but the gilded vessel of selfish sin
Whose poison hath drunken made a soul to death:
Thou, useless now. I come to bid thee die.

Elissa.
Wicked, impure, tormentor of the world,
I knew thee not. Yet doubt not thou it was
Who darkenedst for a moment with base aim
God to evade, and shun in this world, man,
Love's heart; with selfish end alone redeeming
Me from the evil, the death-fright. Take, nathless,
One human soul's forgiveness, such the sum
Of thanks I feel for heaven's great grace that thou
From the overflowings of love's cup mayst quench
Thy breast's broad burning desert, and fertilize
Aught may be in it, that boasts one root of good.

Lucifer.
It is doubtless sad to feel one day our last.

Elissa.
I knew, forewarned, I was dying. God is good.
The heavens grow darker as they purer grow,

503

And both, as we approach them; so near death,
The soul grows darker and diviner hourly.
Could I love less, I should be happier now.
But always 'tis to that mad extreme, death
Alone appears the fitting end to bliss
Like that my spirit presseth for.

Lucifer.
Thy death
Gentle shall be as e'er hath been thy life.
I'll hurt thee not, for once upon this breast,
Fell, like a snowflake on a fevered lip,
Thy love. Thy soul shall, dreamlike, pass from thee.
One instant, and thou wakest in heaven for aye.

Elissa.
Lost, sayst thou in one breath, and saved in heaven.

Lucifer.
Whatever my words, God's are true. With him
Good heavenly, heavenly bliss, eternal are
While all created things, if to these false,
Perish; perdition even perisheth.

Elissa.
Thee one good deed I owe for.

Lucifer.
With thy life
I now myself repay.

Elissa.
But that still leaves
Me debtor.

Lucifer.
No; to thee the deed was due.
Time's orbit turns recurvant. It may be,
A consciousness of restorative power
Ingrains and gladdens all life. Not aught is lost
For ever. All nature knows its end, not less
Than source divine; and I, by truth in me
Dimly refract, what may be from what must
Arguing, feel thou it is hast given me hopes
Of ultimate possibilities, scarce I dare
Breathe to myself in darkness.

Elissa.
Hast thou hopes?

Lucifer.
Like the first shower which cooled the burning plain,
Where Jove o'erthrew the giants, and high God,
Giving o'er dumb-struck volcans, leave to earth
To outspread her mantle green, the moss to nurse,
And dandle lichen, where he had e'er, till then,
Hailed rocks; thy words once wrought a blessing here;
And caused the indelible germ of good, howe'er
Minute, which cored in all create abides,
Spring forth to lightwards. Fruited it not in time?

Elissa.
Truly. Be all forgiven; as now to thee
I pardon grant for this ill boon of death;
If inescapeless.

Lucifer.
Fate hath nought more sure.

Elissa.
The world is heaving with the earthquake throes

504

Of some portentous birth, some form of power,
Whose orbèd head is to o'ertop all thrones.
Am I not bound to live till that I see
I have wrought for, longed for, prayed for?

Lucifer.
No! thou art bound
To die. I, too, see darkness, only at times,
As sacred night begins all things and ends.
But here, thine end's too clear, clear as the lines
Of fate, to palmist's eye, which cross the hand.

Elissa.
I ever thought thee to be more than mortal.
And since thus mighty, grant me, and thou mayst
This one, this only boon, as friend to friend;
Bring him I love, one moment ere I die;
Life, love, all his.

Lucifer.
And is't to him thou vowest
Thy nature's sweets? Nay, then, this queenly life
With love perfected, as yon gold gemmed vase,
By lustrous flowers encrowned, all fragrance, makes
An offering fit for shrines, a gift for gods,
'Tis time were sent for sanctuary, on high.
Thou judgest well. All but almighty I am,
And have strained my strength to its verge to satisfy
His heart who loved thee; gave I not up to him thee?
Reigns he not even at this sad moment there,
Or possibly may, and if he please, not else—
King of the sun, and monarch of the seven
Orbs that surround him, leaving earth alone,
For the present; earth is in good keeping yet?
I know he is hasting hither now; he comes;
But may not see thee living.

Elissa.
It is not thou
Who takest life; it is God's, whose I shall be;
And his, with God, whom here my heart deifies.
I glory in his power. He'll save me.

Lucifer.
Cease!
As a wind-flaw, darting from some rifted cloud,
Seizes upon a water-patch mid main,
And into white wrath worries it, so my mind
This petty controversy distracts. He comes,
I say, but never shalt thou view him, living.

Elissa.
But I will, will see him, and while I am alive.
hear him. He is come.

Lucifer.
The ends of things
Are urgent. Still, to this mortuary deed
Reluctant, fix I death's black seal. He's here!

Elissa.
I hear him; he is come; it is he; it is he!

Lucifer.
Die graciously, as ever thou hast lived;
Die, thou shalt never, look upon him again.

Elissa.
My love! haste, Festus! I am dying.

Lucifer.
Dead!

505

As ocean racing fast and fierce to reach
Some headland, ere the moon with maddening ray
Forestal him, and rebellious tides excite
To vain strife, nor of the innocent skiff that thwarts
His path, aught heeds, but with dispiteous foam
Wrecks deathful; I, made hasty by time's end
Impending, thus fill up fate's tragic form.
A word could kill her. See, she hath gone to heaven.

Festus.
Fiend! what is this? Elissa! She is not dead.

Lucifer.
She is. I bade her die, as I had reason.

Festus.
Now o'er the bosom of this death, I swear,
God's will and mine one moment harmonized,
I hate thee, I abhor thee, I abjure
Thee and thy works.

Lucifer.
Who seeks thee other, first?
I can't afford to quarrel; but for the nonce
I am gone.

Festus.
Away, fiend! Leave me. Mine Elissa!

Lucifer.
Meet me in city or in solitude,
By sea, or desert where pale marble shafts
Stud the hot sands, or, fallen, earth's generous springs
Imposthumously, forewaste,—enough! we meet.

Festus.
Thy bolts fall heavily on me, Lord! and fast.

Guardian Angel.
O steeds of passion, whirl not reason's car
From life's precipitous marge into the void
Of madness.

Festus.
Sole in life!—save as to one
I may not think of. Let me 'scape the world.
O weary, weary world, hide thou in heaven;
Search out some nebulous depth where thou mayst leave
Thy holy ashes; I some shore or isle
In ocean's spatial distance, seek, where plunged
In penitence, this my burning heart, like steel
In the wave retempered, may, by solitude
Concentrate, purified, thenceforth the new life
Of heaven inaugurate, hallow, and all fates
Again face, grace directing, to their end.

Guardian Angel.
By judgments such as these God calls to himself
The soul he loves. Do thou thy spirit serene,
Meanwhile, by holiest place and saintliest shrine,
Wherein and midst the memories to them due
Thy spirit may raise itself to thoughts divine,
Untamperable.

Festus.
Such comfort much I need,
Good angel! such restoratives. Bear with me.

506

XXXII.

God only can heal the bruised spirit, and yield
Peace. By the overthrown altar of a fane,
Foundation shattered, which from faith to faith
Translate, e'er consecrate still stands, we join
In mystic worship secretly. Let us trust
All, worship, form and offering grateful. Stone
Untooled; untouched, unless by nature's hand,
By man reared, solitary; mound, pyramid,
Tower, temple, obelisk, stony cirque, and spire
To one fact witness, that as sun and moon
Fill, with their light, space, so twin truths man's mind
Through time possess; God's onemostness, and our
Immortal life. To soul saved, time's no more
An opponent section of duration, summed
In separate column from the eternal. All's
Eternity, is concentric with our life.

A Ruined Temple, surrounded by Sands.
Festus and Lucifer.
Festus.
Here will I worship solely.

Lucifer.
It is a fane
Once sacred to the sun; since consecrate
To the Cross; deserted now.

Festus.
It matters not
That false god here may have truly been adored,
Nor true God falsely served, nor by what rites
Life-hating, or life-nourishing, or with sign
Simplest of corn, oil, wine; or fruit and flower.
The truly holy soul which hath once received
God's unattainable gift, the imparted sense
Of unitive life with him can hallow here
Whate'er the creed it holds; not less what, late,
Of theo-human being, before all time,
And all incarnate emanations, priest
Or prophet taught these stones, than in times long gone,
Of mediatorial light, heaven's orbèd god,
Sunning, though feebly, death's black void with ray
Too sadly numerable. For me, albeit
The general faith sufficeth, and although
The worshipping crowd I love, the gorgeous rite,
The genuflective wave, the common awe;
The scent of incense; hymns and harmonies
Of the sanctuary; yet knowing somewhat still
More amiable, the secret of the soul,
Commune alone with God, me, here behold
Seas, deserts crossed, to pour forth in this fane
Of old days, my soul's worship; and to God

507

Give witness of earth's eldest, youngest faith;
Known always to the wise, if by them hidden;
Ere all theophanies; destined all to outlast;
With heaven co-ordinate only; base of all
From the beginning, of all now sum and crown.
Each orb is to itself the heart of heaven;
And each belief, wherein man roots his hope,
And lives and dies, God's favourite. What if here,
Of yore, before this shrine, the sun's pure priest,
And all his prostrate worshippers, knew their god
Fire-bodied, but grossly; conqueror of the shades,
Of earth bright purifier; invoking thee,
O sun! as glory of air, and lord of light!
Fountain and fane of heaven's immortal fire;
Lord of the upper world and lower; judge
Strict, incorruptible; giving every land
Just wealth of light; due service from each soul
Exacting; showing all, high, low, like love;
King of the life to come, immortal; soul
Treating with purifying penalties;
Great wonder-worker; seer of all the skies;
The gates of whose house are the east and the west:
The ever-coming light, bright mystery;
Sense binding, mind attracting, passion taming;
Light born, light generating, light all life;
Whom God begat on light which first he loved,
Encircling in himself; but who in shades
Of primal night wast nursed; whom all time's hours
Attend; whose travel beneficent round the world
Makes one eternal triumph; unto whom
All earth is sacred;—Yes! O sun to thee
One vast and living garden of the Lord,
Watered by light streams, where the vine divine
Fruits, inexhaustible, for the wise; and where
Shepherd of worlds, and harmonist of heaven,
The music of whose golden lyre is light;
With pastures varied, thrives thy starry flock,
Numbered complete, in spiritual perfectness
Inviolable; in multitude of days
Deathless, as in thy years thou O nightslayer;
Whose car the elements draw; from whom all signs
And natural miracles joyously proceed;
Whose eloquent fire lights aye their starry heads
That, in celestial conclave with thee ruling,
Pour down, on darkness' crown, original light;
Whose gospels are the seasons, all thy twelve
In spheral order and a chain starlinked,
Through gods, kings, signs, gems, toils, tribes, messengers,
Heroes and peers, the universe uniting

508

To thee in love, thy being's boundless law;
Thy Maker's synonym; his symbol thou:—
Whose offspring are the ages, and whose years
Links of the everlasting chain of change
Thou bindst us with, progenitor of spheres;—
To whom time's azure serpent, starry scaled
And noiseless creeping, that its years now sloughs
In thy reviving brightness, and now lays
Its world-eggs in thine incubant rays, we hold
Hallowed, because of thee inspired with life;
Whose quickening touch all life, soulless or souled,
Draws up towards thee all generative; of pest
And death, dispeller; life elicitor;
World-navelled oracle, whose sensible beam
O'erpatent, oft the strongest eye blinds; oft
Godlike, death-darting, life reclaims through the aye
Revolving universe and evolving. This,
The faith of honest ignorance, yet with sense
Of thanks for good received, and things create
Misprising for their Maker, in a rude
Shallow belief which gladdened not the soul,
Raised not, sustained, nor inly enlightened, passed;
To a nobler creed transformed, that thenceforth hailed
In the material heavens but shadowy types
Of spiritual truths more solid; and in shapes
Of hero and saint, light's natural qualities,
Truth, power and purity moralled; in the sun
The source of all things through vast mysteries sought,
Their meaning and their end; from thee, O sun!
Child of the infinite firmament, conceived
A filial god, laborious for man's good;
Unwearyable on earth as in the skies;
Hero and victor of the universe; thou,
Who at thy birth didst slay sin's serpent brood;
And through the foul stalled stable of this world's life,
The sourceless, circular, river of thy love
Didst turn; redeem the soul of man thy friend
From death and hell; destroy the dragon fiend
With the seven deadly heads, devouring life;
Regain thy golden apples, paradise;
And, to complete the mystic cycle, rise
Well proven, and approved of God, to heaven:—
Of whose divine end emulous, we, too, tried
By choice of virtue over pleasurous vice,
Though now by passionate sins distraught, and now
Soul-soiled by waste subservience to mean aims,
From God estranged, yet longing to return,
And brighten again the spirit by strict contact
With heaven's original ray, might sometime find,
Having here lived beneficently 'mong men,

509

Merited acceptance. Not sufficing this,
Man's soul which speculatively had erst conceived
The light unlimited, whose most ancient sheen
Beamed forth man spiritual, angelic mind,
Intelligent life, life sentient, and, less pure,
Still from God emanant, matter, form and all
This universe in its oval orbit holds,—
The light intelligible conceived on earth
Incarnate; light, before whose orient ray
The gods all vanished like night's ghosts; light sole,
Sun spiritual; source not only of life and light
Worldly, but soul-regenerative; whom all
The lives of all the elements, lamb, fish, dove;
Earth all productive; life requickening air;
The purifying wave, perfective fire;
Whom all earth's faiths and creeds, rites, gods of old,
Foreshadowed personate as a child of man,
In precognition of eternal truth
Made deathless; whom and his, the world foretyped,
One all-comprising prophecy; the moon,
Virgin of heaven, who nightly bringeth forth
The light, thine own, O sun! in heaven to earth;
Morn's herald star, imbathing earth in dew,
And the sun leading into the desert sea,
To his eternal baptism, ere with light
He floods the world, and cleaves the breathing skies
With inspirative fire; earth, weeping set,
Sin-shamed, self-humbled, like the penitent one
Below his cross, the darkness of whose death
Eclipsed all day; these, and light's whole bright flock,
Before thy crucial exaltation fled,
But born of light, predestined yet to range
In bliss the spirit-pasturing skies; to quaff
Serene, the waters of the sun; and yet
Catch his vivific secret, as he beams
Resurgent, from the entombing wave; that grave
Thou, daily dying, dost, night by night, o'erpass
Into the invisible halls men dread; but whence,
O Hadëan god, death-hidden in dark and chill,
Eastering, again thou comest with joy;—foretyped,
All signs, all seasons, records but of thee,
And of thy deeds divine and dignities,
Soul-embleming: twin being, God with man,
Whose doubled nature indicates in heaven
Natural and spiritual; who holdst unmoved
The balance of the all-just One o'er the world,
Well weighing work and faith; with scorpion sting
Treating the carnal conscience self-condemned;
Who bendst the heavens before thee like a bow
And earth thine orbèd arrow shoot'st through air

510

Who from celestial fountains pourest floods
Of grace regenerative; who to thyself,
Produced by thee, earth's twin chief boons of life
Dost sanctify for sustenance and for joy,
Symbols of soul and body, that both be known
In him thou too but symbollest, God. But these,
Enthusiasts of a composite creed who sought
The impossible with too easy to imblend,
And difficulty soul-bracing scape, but failed
With speculative conceits to unreason faith,
Learned liberally at last the simpler truth
Whereby we recognize as one of heaven's
Star peers the sphere we dwell in, and yon sun
Know, too, as not above us; we are upon
The same proud level; by the same laws constrained;
Of the like roots compact. Who therefore knows
Soul-freed, all stars but steps in heaven's great scale,
Up to God's throne from time's last orb which eyes
The inner and the utter infinite round
To that highest deepest midmost site where heaven's
Star-music ends, for ever quelled in the sun's
Silence supreme; knows happily too, that through
All spheral forms, the centre searching soul,
Circling in bright expansive progress, fit
To match the march of angels in time's van,
By-passing all night's constellated chart
Where God hath set his burning seal the sun,
And all delights of merely intelligent life,
In spirit conquests self-purifying skilled,
Reseeks thee, lone and universal light,
Spiritual, divine, deific; even as at first
Creative, all conclusive; with dread hope
Persistent, individually, to acquire
Clear glory, and midst the all-involving heavens
Share preapportioned rule. Now dawns the day
When natural faiths and typical both outworn
Man's spirit sight by eyebright of the stars,
And rue celestial cleared, one deity sole,
One spirit throughout the globe shall name; one Power
Beyond all being; of all worlds sire and heir;
Sole Saviour of the world of life he hath made;
Whose breath from servile matter framed at first
The fading frostwork of created things.
Earth's tale is told in heaven; heaven's told in earth.
Since either 'gan, though thousand tribes have chosen
A thousand types, one sole true faith hath been,
The faith of all in God. Let earth, henceforth,
To its right creed re-oriented, the faith
Which, world-comprising, soul-sufficing, wise
Spirits are taught of rational light,—confess

511

Things all may symbols, each of other, be,
Nothing of God. To this joyed eye, the hour
Already, hawklike, preens its wing for flight,
When all shall be remassed in one great creed,
All spirit shall yet be rebegotten; all
Worship rededicate, time's degenerate lapse
Twice having fused the symbol with the truth;
All dark things brightened; all contrariants blent;
And truth and love, perradiating all life
Be the new poles of nature; earth, at last
Joining the great procession of the skies.
Now, therefore to the sole true God, in man,
In nature timely manifested, these walls
Shall echo praise, if never yet. Attend.
Bring me a morsel of the fire without.
For I a sacred offering unto God
Will make, as high priest of the world. He lacks not
At best hands, consecration, whom thou, Lord!
By choice hast hallowed; and these elements
I offer, thou hast holy made, by making.

Lucifer.
Lo, fire! I wait thee in the air.

Festus.
Withdraw.
Eternal, infinite Spirit, hear thou, heaven-throned,
While one, by thy divine salvation graced,
A servant of thy boundless law of love,
This temple redevotes to a purer end
Than they who built or who abandoned knew.
Thine Lord are all the elements, all the worlds;
The sun thy bounteous servant, and the moon
Thy servant's servant; the round rushing earth;
This lifeful air; these thousand wingèd winds:
Fire, heaven-kinned; continental clouds; the sea
Broad-breasted, trancèd lake; and rivers rich,
Arterial; sky-crowned, shadow-haunted hills,
Their woody tresses waving on the breeze,
Grateful, in sign of worship; all are thine.
Thine are the snow robed mountains girdling earth
As the white spirits God our Saviour's throne;
Thine the bright secrets central in all orbs,
And rudimental mysteries of sphere life,
Fire misted, nebulous. The sun starred night,
Day all prevailing, ever maiden morn,
Consummate eve, earth's varying seasons aye
Confess them thine, through the life gladdening world.
All art hath wrought from earth, or science lured
From truth, like flame out of the firecloud; all
Man's thought, man's toil, man's deeds, his best of thee
Inspired, of thee foreplanned all nature, are
Thine; thine the glory; all of thee conceived,
Things finite, infinite, to thee belong,

512

As mountains to a world, as worlds to heaven.
City high domed and pompous; populous town,
Toilful, and early hamlet; all that live
Or die: decay or flourish; change, or stand
Unchanged, before thy face, heaven's starry hosts
Thy ministry of light, for thee exist,
Or, at thy bidding, are not. Thine, all cause
Evil, or best, of every orb; all ends
Forebalanced, yet preponderate so towards good
As all events to adjust: thine Lord! all souls;
Thought, atom, world, the universe thine; thou yet
Thine eye, all hallowing, canst as easily turn
From comprehending the bright infinite,
To this crushed temple, where the wild flower decks
Its earthquake rifted walls, and birdlets build
In leafage of its columned capitals,
And to this crumbling heart I offer here,
As trust thine own eternity. Behold!
Accept, I pray thee Lord! this sacrifice;
These elemental offerings, simple, pure,—
A branch, a flowery turf, a burning coal,
A cup of water and an empty bowl,—
I, in man's name, make filially to thee,
Formless, save kneeling heart, save prostrate soul,
In token of thine all perfect monarchy
And world comprising mercy, of us confessed.
This air-filled bowl, of the world typical, thou
With thy good spirit replenishest, and the soul
Receptive of thy life conferring truth;
This, the symbolic element, whence, reborn,
Made pure, thy chosen are first regenerate
Out of men's mighty multitudes, yet all
As of one nature be redeemed; this coal,
From the earth torn flaming, which thy mercy, sin
Consuming, as of earth proclaims; and these
Pale flamelets, starwards tending, emblem just
Of spirit aspiring Godwards; this mere turf
As the earthy nature and abode we would
Subject to thee, here lying, though type obscure,
Yet representative of heaven's every star,
And world extended matter; all these in one
Sole, simple oblation proffered;—last, this branch,
High flourishing over all, let this, Lord! sign
Thine own eternal son Humanity
On earth though dying, immortalized in heaven,
Redemptive of all being; the golden branch—
Rootless in self, graffed only in deity,—
Of life's eternal tree, seer's, sibyl's, word
Inspired of old, full of dark central thought

513

And mystic truth, foretold should overspread
The spirit world, death's every wound, with its fruit
Healing:—all, offering, offerer, Lord! accept.
Nor these of natural birth as 'neath thine hand
Pure and munificent framed, hold thou to thee
Sole acceptable; but these, corn, olive, grape,
By sumptuous man manipulate into food,
Whereby we strengthen ourselves to endure for thee
This bodily life, and use as best we may,
Deign thou to look upon, and so sanctify
With thine all hallowing glance; for, taught by seer,
Priest, hierophant of old, thou, walking earth,
Shrinking thyself to shape create, calf, lamb
Or kid, with angels and god-messengers
Partaking, drinking wine and breaking bread,
So tokening man's divinity humane,
And thy divine humanity, we know
Didst, in all forms of being, the force convey
Of holiest goodness; thine essential life
Pervading all the elements of the world;
Thine actual all-presence in every heart,
Lift choicefully to thee. So now and here,
By usance of like signs communion whole
Of bodily powers and spiritual, God! with thee
Maker, regenerator, we ask:—ask, too,
This gift, Lord! that if men can nought but sin,
Forgive the creature crime,—fruit this of soul
Imperfect, but by thee create, which takes
From thee its whole capacity,—and bring back
To thy breast world-parent! who madest the whole,
And wilt remould all, purified, to thee.
Wherefore, in spirit of this kind faith, baptized,
Faith, world embracing, soul sufficing, faith,
Wherein the vortices of all variant creeds
As eddies in the sea are lost, let me,
Let both Lord! gladden within ourselves; thou, God!
Who joyest to view the living world, endowed
As with thine own vitality, although
Insentient of its mighty source, because
Reflective of thine attributes; but man
Most, as the living mirror, which conceives
From thy vivific beam the rational ray
Conscious, whereby we, cognizant of thee,
Light of thy light, our crowning glory gain;
Thou, thy chief joy. Exchanging therefore sense
Of life undying, and sureness of the truth,
Thine infinite unity, which doth underlie
The world's wide walls, the truth which, uttered, opes
All-where a paradise, to man colleagued
In brotherly worship of the invisible one,

514

Father of all immortal spirits, 'twixt whom
And him, love mutual mediateth alone;
We joy, as those of old, who, in mysteries
Initiate, ranked as gods. For now, of ours
Taught trueliest, and thou, sun, the innocent cause
Of faith's first error, from celestial things
Deposed, and made to man subservient, we,
Time's childish ignorance passed, and earth's vain lore
Symbolic, mythical, shadowy, put away
As holy ænigmas merely, do yet confess
That though word written, or sign, be born no more,
The spirit's revelation still proceeds,
Evolving all perfection; and that while
We bless thee, Saviour! knowing that whoso are
In thee are saved, man, nature one and twin
In God triune: we know too, fruit of love
Divine, soul perfecting, the infinite spirit
And antiformal, needs no word, nor lacks
Whereby to mark its union with the soul;
For, kindled like a sacrifice of old,
By heaven's spontaneous fire, the soul achieves,
In aspiration, being's highest end;
Save that accomplished in death's final cause,
With God reunion. Hope whereof, thou Lord!
Instilling into men's minds of eld as now,
Man's richest heritage, and, so, providing
'Gainst mortal things, that must and ought to be,
Thou, who dost all things rightly, all are best,
Joy, sorrow, suffering, power, since ruled by thee,
This heart which finally I to thee devote,
And here, this spirit enlightened with all love
Godwards, let cease from prayer, these lips from praise,
Save that which life shall offer pauselessly.
Be with me, Lord now, all-where and for aye.
Now go I forth again, refreshed, consoled,
Upon my time enduring pilgrimage.
Ho, Lucifer!

Lucifer.
I wait thee.

Festus.
Whither next?

Lucifer.
As thou wilt; apposite spots or opposite;
It is light translateth night; it is inspiration
Expounds experience; it is the west explains
The east; it is time unfolds eternity.

Festus.
Enough. It is time then that I homewards tend.

515

XXXIII.

As in our sky sometimes a vaporous mass
Low down, shows thunder threatening; while by winds
Of happier, if adverse wing fanned, high up,
Unutterably extolled, a cloud-stream clear,
Tinged as with ghostliest silver, spreads, opposed,
Its shadowy waveletage, bespeaking peace
Prospective, genial change; so here; o'er man's
And life's concerns, celestial influences
Shed their serene constraint. Calmed by excess
Of grief, by disillusion purified,
We picture back life's simpler, earlier joys,
Pleased; and contrasting with the sateless greed
Of knowledge, unbelief in love we had nigh
Ourselves discredited, faith in innocence
By passion spurned, self, magnified by eye
Invert, disloyalty to law once deemed
By us divine, it may be, all on earth
We count false, vain; our part is played; to live
We list not. 'Tis the new temptation's hour.
The last lure power is proffered; grasped at. All
Hangs on the last desire.

A Library and Balcony, overhanging a River. Summer Night in the North.
Festus, Guardian Angel, Lucifer.
Festus.
The last high upward slant of sun on the trees,
Like a dead soldier's sword upon his pall,
Seems to console earth for the glory gone.
Oh! I could weep to see the day die thus:
The deathbed of a day how beautiful.
Linger ye clouds one moment longer there;
Fan it to slumber with your golden wings,
Like pious prayers ye seem to soothe its end.
It will wake no more, till the all revealing day,
When like a drop of water greatened bright
Into a shadow, it shall show itself
With all its little tyrannous things and deeds,
Unhomed and clear. The day hath gone to God,
Straight, like an infant's spirit, or a mocked
And mourning messenger of grace to man.
Would it had taken me too upon its wing!
Mine end is nigh. Grant heaven, I die outright,
And slip the coil, without waiting it unwind!
Who, lying lonely upon a highmost hill,
In noon's imperious silence, nought about him
But the clear dark sky, like to God's hollowed hand
On earth's head laid, but expects some natural spirit
Should start out of the universal air;

516

And gathering round him all his cloudy robe,
As one in act to teach mysterious things,
Explain that he must die? that risen as high
As life can lift him up, as far above
The world as flesh can mount, o'er tyrant wind
And clouded lightning, and the rainbow round;
And gained a loftier, more mysterious beauty
Of feeling, something like a starry darkness
Seizing the soul, say he must die, and vanish?
Who hath not at such moments felt, as now
I feel, that to be happy we must die?
And here I rest above the world, and its ways;
The wind, opinion, and the rainbow, beauty,
And the thunder, superstition. I am free
Of all: save death, what want I to be happy?
Hell solves all doubts. Come to me, spirit of evil!

Lucifer.
Lo! I am here; and ever prompt when called.
Death's such a favourite now at court, it seems,
He hath but to ask and have. Teaze him not yet.
How speed thy general pleasures?

Festus.
Bravely. Joys
Are bubble-like; what makes them, bursts them, too.
And like the milky way, there, dim with stars,
The soul which numbers most, will shine the less.

Lucifer.
No matter; mind it not. That joys of earth
Should turn to ruin of spirits is somewhat hard.
What are these, love, hilarity, vanity,
These secondary orblets of man's life,
And satellites of youth's all glowing sphere,
But natural luxuries, few indeed can shun?
They have well nigh unimmortalized myself.

Festus.
Yet have they nought, base, impure, ruinous
Heart-harlots, wherewithal to sate the spirit
Which doth enamour immortality.
It may be, as to love, the feeling still
Is adamantine though the splendid thing
Whereon it writes its record, is of all
Frailest; and though earth, lovely mother, shows
To all the same blind kindness, beautiful
To see, she loves her children with, to me
Her beauty she in vain unbosometh.
It lists me not to live; for things may be
Corrupted into beauty; and even love,
Where all the passions blend, as hues in white,
Tires at the last as day would, if all day,
And no night. It may be, forgive me, God!
I am getting too forlorn to live, too waste;
Aught that I can, or do love, shoots by me,
Like a train upon an iron road. And yet
I need not now reproach mine arm nor aim.

517

For I have winged each pleasure as it flew,
How swift or high soever in its flight.
We cannot live alone. The heart must have
A prop without, or it will fall and break.
But nature's common joys are common cheats.
As he who sails southwards, beholds, each night,
New constellations rise, all clear, and fair;
So, o'er the waters of the world, as we
Reach the mid zone of life, or go beyond,
Beauty and bounty still beset our course;
New beauties wait upon us everywhere;
New lights enlighten, and new worlds attract.
But I have seen and I have done with all.
Friendship hath passed me like a ship at sea;
And I have seen no more of it. A friend
I had with whom, in youthhood. I was wont
To learn, think, laugh, weep, strive, and love, together;
For we were always rivals in all things;
Together up high springy hills, to trace
A runnel to its birthplace—to pursue
A river—to search, haunt old ruined towers,
And muse in them—to scale the cloud-clad hills,
While thunders murmured in our very ear;
To leap the lair of the live cataract,
And pray its foaming pardon for the insult;
To dare the broken tree-bridge across the stream;
To crouch behind the broad white waterfall,
Tongue of the glen, like to a hidden thought—
Dazzled, and deafened, yet the more delighted;
To reach the rock which makes the fall and pool;
There to feel safe or not to care if not;
To fling the free foot over our native hills,
Which seemed to breathe the bracing breeze we loved
The more it lifted up our loosened locks,
That nought might be between us and the heavens;
Or, hand in hand, leap, laughing, with closed eyes,
In Trent's death-loving deeps; yet was he kind
Ever to us; and bare us buoyant up,
And followed our young strokes, and cheered us on—
As quick we dashed, in reckless rivalry,
To reach, perchance, some long green floating flag—
Just when the sun's hot lip first touched the stream,
Reddening to be so kissed; and we rejoiced,
As breasting it on we went over depth and death,
Strong in the naked strife of elements,
Toying with danger in as little fear
As with a maiden's ringlets. And oft, at night
Bewildered and bewitched by favourite stars,
We would breathe ourselves amid unfooted snows;
For there is poetry where aught is pure;

518

Or over the still dark heath, leap along, like harts,
Through the broad moonlight; for we felt where'er
We leapt the golden gorse, or lowly ling,
We could not be from home.—That friend is gone,
There's the whole universe before our souls.
Where shall we meet next? Shall we meet again?
Oh! might it be in some far happy world,
That I may light upon his lonely soul,
Hard by some broad blue stream, where high the hills,
Wood-bearded, sweep to its brink—musing, as wont,
With love-like sadness, upon sacred things;
For much in youth we loved and mused on them.
To say what ought to be to human wills,
And measure morals sternly; to explore
The bearings of men's duties and desires;
To note the nature and the laws of mind;
To balance good with evil; and compare
The nature and necessity of each;
To long to see the ends and end of things;
Or if no end there be, the endless, then,
As suns look into space; these were our joys—
Our hopes—our meditations—our attempts.
One thing he missed 'twas faith in man; he loved
Knowledge to please and greaten himself, not men.
Yes, he is gone, and what remains but woe?
And if I have enjoyed more love than others,
Love's but superior suffering, and is more
Than balanced by the loss of one we love.
And love, itself, hath passed. One fond fair girl
Remains, who loves me still. But is it love
I feel? or but pure kindness? Let fate prove.
How shall I find another like my last?
Even as I had for her relinquished all,
Herself, that more than all, to me was lost;
And Death cast down the tower of my intent.
Though thou and he o'erthrew, yet heaven, I know,
Her soul received; and the Eternal beauty
Embayed within its arms the mortal fair.
The golden and the gorgeous loveliness,
A sunset beauty! Ah! I saw it set.
My heart, alas! set with it. I have drained
Life of all love, as doth an iron rod
The heavens of lightning; I have done with it;
And all its waking woes, and dreamed-of joys.
No more shall beauty star the air I live in;
And no more will I wake at dead of night,
And hearken to the roaring of the wind,
As though it came to carry one away—
Claiming for sin. Fear lost, I am lost for ever.
To earn the world's delights by equal sins,

519

Seems the great aim of life—the aim succeeds.
Here it is madness, and perdition there.
And but for thee I might have now been happy!

Lucifer.
Why charge, why wrong me thus? When first I knew thee,
I deemed it thine ambition to be damned.
Thine every thought, almost, had gone from good,
As far as finite is from infinite;
And then thou wast as near to me as now.
Thou hadst declined in worship, and in wish
To please thy God; nor wouldst thou e'er repent.
What more need I, to justify attempt?
Have I shrunk back from granting aught I promised?
Thy love of knowledge—is that satisfied?

Festus.
It is. Yet knowledge is a doubtful boon—
Root of all good, and fruit of all that's bad.
I have talked with elements, here unknown, of worlds;
Learned the majestic language of the sons
Of light, and heaven's angelic kin; and taught
By spheres impetuous hearted, mountain maned,
And wisest stars which speak themselves in signs
Too sacred to be explicable here,
The bright articulations of their spheres,
Have summed the mysteries of all worlds with earth's,
And found in all one same and master truth.
And now what better am I? Nearer God?
When the void finds a voice, mine answer know.

Lucifer.
What better or what worse thou canst not tell.
For good and evil, wherein differ they?
Accrue not both from the same parent force,
As ripeness and decay? Light, light alone,
Of hues how contrary soe'er is cause
Common and one.

Festus.
Distracter of God's truth!
Shall not God's word, all separative, suffice?

Lucifer.
Thou canst not have lacked joys.

Festus.
We seek them oft
Among our own delusions, follies, pains;
Joys half accursed my soul hath writhed 'mong oft,
Like to some day-lifed creature in the heart
Of a rose, to him death odorous from excess.

Lucifer.
Hath not care perished from thy heart, as, flung
From the apostle's hand, the viper?

Festus.
Just like that:
All care shall cease in fire.

Lucifer.
Infatuate, cease.

Festus.
Were act mind's mate, man had a firm hold now
On the immortal future; but we turn

520

From either skiey end, star-garlanded,
Teeming with light, and from the spirit truths
Which crown all thought, to gauds and lures of life
All-formed, and beauty's eyes inspired with tears,
Or fired with mirth conclusive; and so lose
Count of those heavenly spheres we meant at first
To reckon unto the last atomic light.
But how shall these, the joys and cares of earth,
And life's vain schemes, appear to the great soul,
Which hath no friend, no equal save the world,
When all these constellated systems known
To the keen ken of science, space's depths,
And the whole mighty heavens that bind our reach,
Hang like a pale speck doubtful to the eye,
In unimagined distance? Is it thus
Ordered of God lest man's weak powers should fail,
And the round wall of madness pound us in?
Eternity! thou holdest in thine own hand
The casket of all secrets, death the key.
And now what seem I even unto myself?
Life's impulse ceased, we live on being's rebound;
As some vain wind, which having wasted life
In rounding mountains and their shadowy woods
Made lyrelike vocal, dies at last at sea
The sun sole witness, where deep-brooding spreads
The uttermost circumference of a calm;
So the soul struggling through life's death-clouds, ends
In the serene eternal.

Lucifer.
It may be,
No life is waste in the great worker's hand:
The gem too poor to polish in itself,
We grind to brighten others. Courage, friend!
Hast thou not had thine every quest?

Festus.
Save one.

Lucifer.
Why not then rest at last, and life enjoy?

Festus.
How can I rest while aught remains not tried?

Lucifer.
Not tried? I proffer now the power thou long'st for.

Festus.
I have beheld my name writ in the book
Of life eterne; wherefore then tempt'st thou me?
What were a seat among the sons of kings
To him whose seat is with the sons of God?

Lucifer.
Fate's scheme must be fulfilled. Salvation though
Promised, is not achieved; and if achieved
Is still not life accomplished. Never known
To being create may fate's most holy law,
Till the day dawn of all fulfilments, be.

Festus.
When God once speaks, his word for ever stands.

521

Still let me well consider.

Lucifer.
Justly weigh
All things. I have need to ponder even as thou.
Say he casts back mine offer. Still is due,
By thought or deed, the unknotting of the tale,
Some day. Accepts? Still well; the peace he harps on,
Be his, though not for long would earth's endure,
Without; and for within, I'll look to that.
Meanwhile, as on some stern and strifeful day,
An age smote hot into an hour, that sends
Kings crownless begging, or an empire hurls
To popular deperdition, and its lord,
Rude dominator of nations, to his doom,
Comes night with limpening dews; and drives the crowd
Home, self-distraught with pale and panic fears,
Lest law lift up her ghastly head as stunned,
Not slain, or power imperial drown the roar
Of brute success, with muffled tramp of troops,
Stealthy, retributive; so be it mine, time due,
To enfeeble his spirit's triumphant temperament
With nature's sick forebodings, vain and vague
And vacillating emotions, which undo
All reason hath yet pronounced most stable. I hear!
Say but the word, and thou shalt press a throne
But less than mine, scarce less than heaven's; before
Whose feet earth's puny potentates may sue
For choice of slavedoms, and be all satisfied.

Festus.
The paltry pittance of a world like this
Were not a bribe for me, nor all its crowns
Crushed into one tiara, but that thus,
By supersession of all earthly sway,
Autocrasie divine were mine; and man,
Knowing the power of truth and faith, might see
Fate, highest of all laws, and recognize
In mine direct complicity with heaven:
My will, my fate, God's fate.

Lucifer.
So let it be.

Festus.
I have had enough of the infinities:
I am moderate now. I will have the throne of earth.

Lucifer.
Thou shalt. Yet mind!—with that the world must end.

Festus.
I can survive.

Lucifer.
Nay, die with it must thou.

Festus.
Why should I die? I am egg-full of life:
Earth's in her first young crescent quarter, yet.
I dare not, cannot credit it shall die.
I will not have it, then.

Lucifer.
It matters not;
I know thou never wilt have ease at heart,
Until thou hast thy soul's whole, full desire;

522

Whenever that may happen, all is done.
Once again therefore search the scroll of life;
Mark what is done, what undone. Lo! in love,
Already twice hath judgment passed upon thee.
Say hath not evil wrought its own revenge,
And death the only guerdon thou hast gained?
Let then mere self-life cease. The heart's career
Is ended. With the world thy part is now.
The depths of feeling, passion, pleasure, woe,
The mysteries and dread delights of spirit,
All, thou hast sounded. Now behoves to live
The worldlife of the future—last the same
One instant or for ever. Bury love.
The steedlike world stands ready. Mount for life.

Festus.
Well, then—be it now! I live but for myself—
The whole world but for me. Friends, loves, and all
I sought, abandon me. It is time to die.
I am yet young; yet have I been deserted,
And wronged, by those whom most I have loved and served.
Sun, moon, and stars! may they all fall on me,
When next I trust another—man or woman.
Earth rivals hell too often, at the best.
All hearts are stronger for the being hollow.
And that was why mine was no match for theirs.
The pith is out of it now.—Lord of the world—
It will not directly perish?

Lucifer.
Not perhaps.
Thou wilt have all fame, while thou livest, now.

Festus.
I care not; fame is folly: for it is, sure,
Far more to be well known of God than man.
With all my sins I think I feel I am God's.

Lucifer.
Farewell, then, for a time.

Festus.
I am alone.
Alone? He clings around me like the clouds
Upon a hill. When will the clouds roll off?
When will sun visit me? O thou great God!
In whose right hand the elements are atoms;
In whose eye, light and darkness but a wink;
Who, in thine anger, like a blast of cold,
Dost make the mountains shake like chattering teeth;
Have mercy! pity me! for it is thou
Who hast fixed me to this test. Wilt thou not save?
Forgive me, Father! but I long to die;
I long to live to thee, a pure, free mind.
Take again, God! and thou, fair earth, the form
And spirit which, at first, ye lent to me.
Such as they were, I have used them. Let them part.
I weary of this world; and like the dove,
Urged o'er life's barren flood, sweep, tired, back

523

To thee who sent'st me forth. Bear with me, God!
I am not worthy of thy wrath, nor love!—
Oh! that the things which have been were not now
In memory's resurrection! But the past
Bears in her arms the present and the future:
And what can perish while perdition is?
From the hot, angry, crowding courts of doubt
Within the breast, it is sweet to escape, and soothe
The soul in looking upon natural beauty.
Oh! earth, like man her son, is half divine.
There is not a leaf within this quiet spot,
But which I seem to know; should miss, if gone.
I could run over its features, hour by hour,
The quaintly figured beds—the various flowers—
The mazy paths all cunningly converged—
The black yew hedge, like a beleaguering host,
Round some fair garden province—here and there,
The cloudlike laurel clumps sleep, soft and fast,
Pillowed by their own shadows—and beyond,
The ripe and ruddy fruitage—the sharp firs'
Fringe, like an eyelash, on the faint blue west—
The grey old church, its age-peeled pinnacles,
And tufted top, whence, now, the white owl wheels;
The oaks, which spread their broad arms in the blast,
And bid storms come, and welcome; there they stand
To whom a summer passes like a smile:
And the proud peacock towers himself there, and screams,
Ruffling the imperial purples of his neck;
O'er all, the shadowy groves which crest the hills,
And with descending clouds equality claim
Of gloom; whisper with winds nought else knows nigh,
And bow to angels as they wing by them;
The lonely, bowery, woodland view before—
And, making all more beautiful, thou, sweet moon,
Leading slow pomp, as triumphing o'er heaven!
High riding in thy loveless, deathless brightness,
And in thy cold, unconquerable beauty,
As though there were nothing worthy in the world
Even to lie below thee, face to God.
And Night, in her own name, and God's again,
Hath dipped the earth in dew;—and there she lies,
Even like a heart all trembling with delight,
Till passion murder power to speak—so mute.
Young maiden moon! just looming into light—
I would that aspect never might be changed;
Nor that fine form, so spirit-like, be spoiled
With fuller light. Oh! keep that brilliant shape,
Keep the delicious honour of thy youth,
Sweet sister of the sun, more beauteous thou
Than he sublime. Shine on, nor dread decay.

524

It may take meaner things: but thy bright look,
Smiling away an immortality,
Assures it us—nay, it seems, half, to give.
Earth may decease. God will not part with thee,
Fair ark of light, and every blessedness!
Yes, earth, this earth, may foul the face of life,
Like some swart mole on beauty's breast—or dead
Stiff, mangled reptile some clear well—while thou,
Like to a diamond on a dead man's hand,
Shalt shine, aye brilliant, on creation's corse;
Whence God shall pluck thee to his breast, or bid
Beam mid his lightning locks. What are earth's joys
To watching thee, tending thy bright flock over
Yon fields celestial? Mother, and maid of light!
That, like a god, redeems the world to heaven—
Making us one with thee, and with the sun,
And with the stars in glory—lovely moon!
I am immortal as thyself; and we
Shall look upon each other yet in heaven
Often—but never, never more on earth.
Am I to die so soon? This death!—the thought
Comes on my heart as through a burning glass.
I cannot bend mine eyes to earth, but thence
It riseth, spectrelike, to mock—nor towards
The west, where sunset is, whose long bright pomp
Makes men in love with change—but there it lowers
Eve's last still lingering, darkening cloud; and on
The escutcheon of the morn, it is there—it is there!
But fears will steal upon the bravest mind,
Like the white moon upon the crimson west.
I have attractions for all miseries:
And every course of thought, within my heart
Leaves a new layer of woe. But it must end.
It will all be one, hereafter. Let it be;
My bosom, like the grave, holds all quenched passions.
It is not that I have not found what I sought—
But, that the world—tush! I shall see it die.
I hate, and shall outlive the hypocrite.
Stealthily, slowly, like the polar sun,
Who peeps by fits above the air-walled world—
The heavenly fief he knows and feels his own,
My heart o'erlooks the paradise of life
Which it hath lost, in cold, reluctant joy.
I live and see all beauteous things about me,
But feel no nature prompting from within
To meet and profit by them. I am like
That fabled forest of the Alp Pennine,
Which leafless lives; whereto the spring's bright showers,
Summer's heat breathless, autumn's fruitful juice,
Nothing avail;—nor winter's killing cold.

525

Yet have I done, said, thought, in time now passed,
What, rather than remember, I would die,
Or do again. It is the thinking on't,
And the repentance, maddens. I have thought
Upon such things so long and grievously,
My lips have grown like to a cliff-chafed sea,
Pale with a tidal passion: and my soul,
Once high and bright and self-sustained as heaven,
Unsettled now for life or death, feels like
The gray gull balanced on her bowlike wings,
Between two black waves seeking where to dive.
Long we live thinking nothing of our fate;
For in the morn of life we mark it not—
It falls behind: but as our day goes down
We catch it lengthening with a giant's stride,
And ushering us unto the feet of night.
Dark thoughts, like spots upon the sun, revolve
In troops for days together round my soul,
Disfiguring and dimming. Death! O death!
The past, the present, and the future, like
The dog three-headed, by the gates of woe
Sitting, seem ready to devour me each.
I dare not look on them. I dare not think.
The very best deeds I have ever done
Seem worthy reprobation, have to be
Repented of. But have I done aught good?
Oh that my soul were calmer! Grant me, God!
Thy peace; that added, I can smile and die.
Thy spirit only is reality:
All things beside are folly, falsehood, shame.

Guardian Angel.
Elect of spirits, of sinners God forgiven,
Soul of my watching, not in all things thou
Hast pleased God, nor responded to my care;
But lone and comfortless nor I, nor heaven
Would have thee.

Festus.
Well I know I both have grieved.
But not thou knowest all things. 'Tween my soul
And God are secrets not consigned to thee.
Until I have assurance from his word,
Which maybe I shall never have in life,
I dare not deem me safe, nor sealed in bliss.

Guardian Angel.
More, then, than this beseems me not to say.
One lives who loves thee still, by thee estranged.
Give pure fidelity due meed.

Festus.
Her soul
Walks but with God.

Guardian Angel.
Nay, she forgets not thee.
But as when by morning moonlight, while round dews

526

Bead still the impleachèd paths, some thoughtful nun,
Whose very life would wither 'neath a name
Of secular cast, culls, with cold paly hand,
Buds delicatest, that these the shrine may deck
Of patron saint who hallows from his niche
The bosky pleasance, and at his marble feet
Breathe forth their premier odours; bent to joy
The just on high, she guileless thinks, with gifts
Of earth least gross, most savouring innocence;
And posing reverently the offering, lo!
She kneels! Heaven's hosts thrill stilly; and while heard
The heart-breathed prayer, transcending reason, in doubt,
God's watchful eye watch. He, saint, votary, shrine,
Oblation marks: and, all seen, each in kind
Pure, not reproves; but, pleased with patiently,
Smiles, inostensive:—so, this soul who yields
Her life-flower to memorial love, and lives
Elsewise in active virtue, known to heaven
May, though beclouded seemingly, abide
In secret sunshine all her days, and bear
A strengthening weight of blessing, not alone
For herself, but others, hope.

Festus.
I hope. Thy words
Too kind are to deceive. Yet still I would
I knew my destiny. I may hope, not love.

Guardian Angel.
But love's more mild reflection, such as that
Tempered with love divine was always hers,
She feels, thy saintly Clara, and with thee
Fate sharing, such as life hath still to give,
Might yet communicate. This is the love
The heavens approve; this sole.

Festus.
I doubt it not.
We may be reconciled;—united, never.
The end we aim at, her more sensitive soul,
Filled with the love of lowliest loneliness,
Will suit not, I foresee.

Guardian Angel.
To her thou owest
Essayed reunion; and if there it end,
Her pure thought will thine own refine; perchance,
May sanctify the sacrifice both make.

Festus.
Thou sayst what ought to be. Be it mine to make
Meet reparation.

Guardian Angel.
Prosper.

Festus.
Thanks!

Guardian Angel.
Farewell.

527

XXXIV.

First love recalled
Not yet reanimate, joy and grief disguised
Each as the other, neither gains, perplexed,
His way. Even they who play round wisdom's knee
Miss sometimes worthiest ends. Knowing no mean,
Ambition's high demands too close encroach
On nature's pious privileges. Not less
True tenderness rejoices to conceive
The happy evangel, world-vast, of God's love;
His alliance with all life create and how
Heaven's mercy ends sin's mystery, as made clear
To the great gathering of the spheres, round God
Convoked; and thanks with holiest warnings blends.
O grace forgiving, how in heaven divine,
How sweet on earth love reconciled; how dear
Virtue in both; though trode down or ignored,
Still precious, goldlike, as in southern isle,
Vastest of isles, to Asian continent
Rich counterpoise, o'er mount and vale and plain
Tribes senseless, salvage, tramped the o'ertreasured earth
For ages, nor its charm, nor value knew.

Colonnade and Lawn.
Festus and Clara.
Festus.
Henceforth this spot be sacred; here, where first
I shrined thee, flower of beauty, in my heart.
None holier to the tribes of earth; not thou,
Divine Elborz, now cold and crowned with snow,
Since rested on thy brow the ark; but once
Peak paradisal whereupon God's sons
Of saintliest lineage helped the harps of heaven,
And joined each eve, ere rest the angelic hymn:—
Earth's first communion with the immortal blessed.
Not holier thou, though meanest mound on earth,
Nigh Moslem city of the moon, where, first,
After long severance for their death-fraught sin,
And world wide wanderings lonely, from afar,
Our great original mother him espied,
Tall as the crownèd palm, though bowed with woe,
Whom her soul clave to; one whole age had passed;
Nought more divine than demons had she seen,
More human than the ape; when her hot tears,
And his repentant groans drew down from heaven

528

Permission for their dear reunion there;
The mount of recognition; hallowed, thence,
To after ages, by that blessed embrace,
Obliterative of woe. Come, come; oh come!
As in arctic climes Spring, wandering through the air,
His long lost consort earth, all frozen at heart
Finds 'tranced 'neath wicked winter's deathly spell,
Stretched corselike; he full soon by gentle embrace,
Warm breath, and sedulous skill calls back to life
His star-browed bride; she wakes; her stiffened limbs
Requickening, stirs; casts off the sheeted snows;
Trees, jocund with the loosening life-sap, freed
Through all their veinlets, don their greenery; birds
Their voice refound, in song each other greet;
And, like some hoary grandsire's wrinkled front,
Ridgy with life-long cares, touched suddenly
By infant's playful finger—ocean's face,
Dimpled by gambolling gust, lights up, and breaks
Into a running smile, and laughs for leagues;—
Heaven and all-pitying nature o'er the glad
Reunion weep their joy; so, found by me,
Sweet solace of my soul, I long to make
To thee atonement. Reconciled to thee,
All parenthetic passions sacrificed,
The world shall slip off easy from our hands,
And we not miss her. Long! how long I wait!

I wait for thee, even as the weary west
Waits for the evening star,
With whom the eternal promises of rest
And glory are.
I wait, as waits a storm-cloud in the sky,
The bow divine of peace,
Which bids the thunders and the lightnings lie
Down, and fear cease.
I long to meet thee, as earth longs to view
Icebound, spring's golden flowers;
Thy beauty soothes my spirit, as the dew
Day's burning hours.
As heaven's own light upon some sainted shrine
Where mouldering relics be,
Thou shinest in upon this heart of mine,
Sacred to thee.
And as a line erased some trace still bears
Of words therein first writ,
Which neither pen can hide, nor penitent tears
As 'twas refit;
It matters not what other powers around
Here graved their conquering name;
Below all depth thy love will still be found
Truth's secret fame.

Known to ourselves, we only share with heaven
The secret yet by me ineffable.
Lo! now I see thee coming, come, at last.

529

Clara.
At thy desire I come, though hard to me.
We have lived separate lives, unlike, unsought
Each by the other. Wherefore meet we now?

Festus.
Thee seeking in thy sacred solitude,
I told thee I had somewhat to impart,
Somewhat to ask; if asking were not vain,
Which springs despondingly from dubious heart.

Clara.
Time was it was not thus. But others came
Whose tyrant beauty and more soaring souls
Thee dazzled, me eclipsed. Already years
Have passed since first we were, what now we are,
Strangers.

Festus.
I do confess to my reproach
A friend too well forgotten, and thine image
By time's colleaguèd forces with the world's,
Effaced half from this monumental breast;
And as the effigy of a saint, insculpt
On alabastrine tomb some unroofed shrine,
Faithless fiduciary, hath bared to moon
And winds star-iced, wastes plenteously away,
Thinned pitifully by the upper elements;
Compassionate woods their leafy tresses strew
Winterly, o'er it perishing, and bemoan
In gusty suspiration; so of thee,
My thought memorial, while impaired, had joined
Well nigh for aye life's lengthening dusk; and now,
Let but the passed be buried, where it lies
In mine awed memory hidden, like to a blade
Sore rusted, in its sheath, no more to flash
In the grey air upon the eyes of men,
And all the future is our own. One's own
Resistless weakness 'tis which overcomes,
More than another's strength. Oh! I confess,
Oft hath this heart allured by glittering rites
And sacred titles, and celestial names,
Offered at others' altars, and decreed
Wildly, profanely, negligence of thine.
True, I have worshipped idols and forsworn
The loving faith I owed to thee alone;
Canst thou forgive? reconsecrate the heart,
Rededicate the temple? Do not all
Beliefs how far soever from God's truth,
Circle around the same in mode prescribed,
As round heaven's secret and all-central sun,
The constellated skies? And shall then love
Lack like justification, or in vain
Plead the necessity of liberty?—
For truly I was destined for this end,
And in myself believed the most at first.
For mortal knowledge, which is error, dies,

530

And spiritual truth alone outlasts
All nature; love insensibly with heaven
Here blending, thither wending, thence derived.

Clara.
Wert thou as I such need had never been;
But we had lived serene and sinless here,
Aimless, save loving God and bettering man.
Nay, let it be so still, with thee, I pray.
As in a round wide view from some tall hill,
Central and isolate, it happeneth oft,
The furthest things on all sides eyeable
Are village temples tapering to the skies,
Be such, too, the horizon of the soul;
And every ultimate object, unto heaven
Calmly aspiring, indicate its end,
And sanctify the limits of our life.
For as in gentlest exhalations earth
Breathes forth the glistening steams which, high in air,
Glow, sunlipped, into clouds of rosy gold,
Or seek again her breast in fruitful dew;
So of our aspirations and desires,
Might we endow life's skiey calm, they all
Made retributive blessings, and a clime
Of love create about us bright and boon;
An everlasting spring of holy good,
And venerable beauty. But, alas!
Men breathe forth passions which fall back in blights,
And stormy desolations, that defile
The sky-born streams, and flood life's fields with woe.

Festus.
The evil in our nature we can act
Alway and utter; but the inner good
Hath inexpressive boundlessness. Earthlike,
Each carries with him his own atmosphere,
Or pure or foul, where'er we orbitate.
Who knows himself in spirit, all things knows;
As in nature even the atom and the all
Commune and know each other; and as the slant
Invisible axis of the earth too fine
For fairy to find footing tiptoe, bears
All superincumbent continents and seas,
Mountains and air realms. Knowing thus, that once,
My own heart like a wizard's magic book,
Studded with spells despotic to call up
Sprite, spectre, and familiar fiend, must needs
Assoilzied be from every fiery sign
And fateful cipher, ere made safe for aye;
Thee as a priestess pure of old seek I,
That thou mightst hold to me the holy branch,
Dipped in soul-cleansing wave, the branch of peace:
That peace thou lovest so well and both desire;
And from thee ask absolvement of passed sin.

531

For as when the sun's light in some high-domed fane
On golden altar gleaming, finds itself
In face of something holier, more divine;
So on thy sacred soul heaven's truths, confirmed,
Beam in subservient blessings.

Clara.
If thou meanest
That thou dost hope forgiveness, it is given;
Thine hath it been ere asked for; always thine.

Festus.
Bright soul be blessèd. Take again thy name
Unto thee; sign of reunited love.

Clara.
Name which because it hath lingered on thy lips,
In love's pure tones full oft, always to me
Is sacred. None shall name me so but thou,
Thou only. When thou changest, that shall change.

Festus.
Breathe not to me of change; albeit I lived
On earth, till like some desert builded fane,
Though based on astral laws, she ceased from sight,
Wasted by winds, worn down by elements,
Smoothed level under time's insatiate sands;
Oh, I should change no more. Henceforth to me
Be thou, thou art, the type of holiest things;
The symbol and fulfilment of all good;
Truth's promises and prophesies inspired,
Bound in one saintly volume love-illumed;
A book of benedictions sealed to me;
A second covenant; oh, a spirit-bride,
A new alliance, sanctified of heaven.
This fallible heart, enchanted long, distraught
By charms of luxury, sense, art, knowledge now
To truth's allegiance, and to thine returns.

Clara.
'Twas not for pleasure, power, or knowledge I
First loved thee; no! but for thyself, thy soul;
And now I seek not these, I dare not have.
As some great glacier from its icy breast,
Expelling aught of baser nature, seeks,
By this mysterious means, to purify
Its visible essence; so the saintly soul,
Out of its high and bright vitality,
Rejects, in silent scorn, those worldly taints
And aims extraneous, which itself debar
From inmost commune, and most high with heaven;
Why, then, thy spirit degrade with greed of power,
Thankless, unblessed, as I have heard? To me
This were forbiddance. Aught that clogs the soul,
Or clouds its aspirations, I abhor.
Be it not therefore that though one in heart,
We are in spirit twain.

Festus.
Nay, speak not thus.
All things are full of presage; winds and streams
And cloud-shapes, which in heaven's inverted bowl

532

Forecast our future. The presage of some vast
And world-wide revolution, nigh at hand,
In a sonorous whisper broods o'er earth.

Clara.
True, I have heard it. Would it were untrue!
Hearts may be sad at parting, but at meeting
They should spring light as birds upon the spray.

Festus.
As stars the sea, thy thoughts light up my mind.
Heaven's son am I, and am by heaven made free
From all low laws and lesser fealties.
This is the age that men are destined evil;
But say not fate doth not fulfil itself.
What if my cause before men seem askant,
Yet is it straight as light in the eye of heaven.
To God I am no mystery. Well he knows
All motives; and my objects I avow
Each night to him, who each morn sanctions them.
It is not the world which makes me great. It is I
Greaten the nations.

Clara.
I foresee the end,
In utter and inevitable woe.

Festus.
True to my purpose, what if I be false
To others, and their objects, it is nothing;
Mine good, I'll hold it great and holy still.
Have I not seen this among coming things
For what seems ages? Knew I not the fate
Out of all others? That star-studded crown,
Which hangs as though a hand out of the air
Held it before mine eyes, where'er I wend?
Rather let earth and truth and all things fail,
Than I fulfilling fate. Let these bring forth,
Whose unbethought of duty it is to serve,
Not reign, crown, robe and sceptre, the bright signs
And constellations of dominion. World!
Go, toss thy head and shake thy shoulders, like
A horse unharnessed. Wars cease. Never more
Shalt thou, blood-blotted brand, allure men on,
To practice of thy fascinating sin;
Nor crimson cloud-bath of the evening sun,
The dreams of sleeping city or hamlet, dye
With visionary death. Remains for thee
Nothing, O earth! but penitence and peace;
All strife composed. Wilt share with me this throne?

Clara.
The only throne I hope for is a throne
Which neither policy can found, nor power;
Which never war can overthrow, nor blood
Befoul, nor treachery undermine, nor kin
Succeed to or thrust off; a throne upon
The right hand of the Humblest. Praise him, earth.

Festus.
I am at peace with all men save myself.
My rule is safe; nay, warranted of fate.

533

Clara.
Thousands of enemies must be thine even now.
No mortal man is safe; and least of all,
A mortal foe. The terror of a tyrant
Knows no distinction. If he does not fear,
He hates; and if he does not hate, he scorns;
And scorn and hate and fear are all with him,
And alike deadly; he, therefore, insecure;
For man by man, each slays him in his mind.
But this is not the future I, in heart,
Have dared so long to dream of. Even although
Thy will should vaunt immortal dominance,
To me it brings scant pleasure. I had hoped
New love to welcome like the morning air,
Which wakes the buds in roseland; and that still,
If like twin hands around the face of life,
Thou hadst a wider scope and bolder course,
Our end and object were yet one and same,
To note the hours, and years fulfil of love.
But now, since I this mighty rumour heard,
My thoughts, though many, are all sad, and cast
In one mould, tearlike. I behold them come,
The long, long train of states depute and powers,
Leading earth's empire after them. And now
Thy glory my soul's lord is like the sky;
Nothing is to be seen beyond it. Minds
Of lesser space may sparkle in it starlike,
But thine embraceth and outstretcheth all.
Nothing can wrong nor ruffle it, nor endanger
More than a wild bird's wandering wing, the air.

Festus.
Faithful and dreadful like a lioness,
There spake the bride of empire.

Clara.
Nay, I see
Thy triumph, and abjure it. Would I might
For thee disclaim it, even as for myself.
It is meat forbidden unto my fasting soul,
Unclean, accursèd. Thou canst not enjoy
World-service and heaven's favour.

Festus.
Both be mine.

Clara.
Choose thou between thy destiny and me.
How great soe'er things being or done of man,
To be, to do, is less than to believe:
For to believe God is to know him love.
As on some hill at day dawn we see born
Of maiden light the sun, head of all worlds,
Who hour by hour exalts his own place; Truth
Instructing us the while it is earth beneath
Which rolls away; he, lord of time, in his
Eternal zenith throned, climbs not nor stoops;
So they, in spirit knowledge wisest, know,
As more and more the soul is purified,

534

It is their own fleshly ignorance from them rolled,
Which opens them to heaven, and to God's light,
Unvarying and supreme, due ingress gives.
It is we who change towards him, not he towards us;
As therefore to the sun, nor east nor west,
Nor day nor night is, but all timeless noon;
So from the lord of life unbounded beams
One everlasting effluence which is love.
To gain this; to prepare for this, is all.

Festus.
Sweetest and dearest, kindest, best of beings!
Truth I have both to realize and impart;
And would, while yet time serves, thy spirit enrich.

Clara.
This vaunted future I mistrust, nor know I
How 'tis of God secured. I fear to share.

Festus.
But though foredoomed to lose thy late-gained love,
Fate I must follow. Said I not my soul
Had taken up its freedom, and assumed
The birthright of creation?

Clara.
Truly so.

Festus.
And that holding in itself the omnitude
Of being, God endowed, it doth become
World representative?

Clara.
Well, be it thus.

Festus.
Thus versant with an absolute life, the spirit
Makes towards its end and great reward, in peace,
O'erpassing all earth's lesser joys.

Clara.
Say on!
I would not have thy soul abase itself
By one thought about me.

Festus.
Nay, speak not so.
But love's career is over in my heart.
A vaster sphere expands before me. Power
And knowledge I can give thee for thy love,
But scarce repay in kind.

Clara.
I hear thy words.
The fragrance of the flower of life is fled;—
Still let it linger where thou laidst it, here!

Festus.
It is I who suffer. Suffer therefore me,
While I am with thee. The sole love I feel
That might have, that hath, blessed me—but what eye
Can see the circuit of an orb at once?
The orb of life, alas! is on the wane.
And much must yet be said, much yet be done.
All things have premonition of their end;
And mighty states exhausted of old faith,
Have sought extremest unction of the new,
Which can alone regenerate. Nations now
Stand sponsors for the right divine of man,
To every blessing earth can give, or heaven.

535

The earth-flower closeth, even now its leaves.
Death's dews are falling. We are verging nigh
On sundown of time's universal day;
And these be life's last vespers. It remains,
As promised by the all-granting power, to change
The essential for the real, and to translate
The virtual into practice. All that truth,
Mining her way through policy profound,
Secretes from masses skilless to commute
Force into power; all that the holy bond
Of man's most high fraternity secures,
Is mine, unthought of by the obsequious world,
Unfeared, unprized. One right exists, one sole,
Whereto man's regal race, all times conceived,
Yields sacred loyalty, the right of doom
Divine, the destiny imposed of God.
God now elects a nation, now a man,
A child, maybe, a dagger, or a dream,
To work his will, and sanctify his means.
That mean, that man am I: the seal of time,
And closure of the canon of all kings.
It is the imperial soul alone can make
The sacrifice supreme. And as in spring,
By Nanking, courtly seat of T'sin's high lord,
What time the winds harmoniously inclined,
Tinkling the white pagoda's gilded bells,
Meet music make to heaven propitiable;
He priest imperial, sovereign labourer, sole
With royal rights and sacerdotal crowned,
Who year by year on the rebirth of things,
Driving his furrow deep in earth both soil
And toil doth sanctify, and with the hand
That curbs a hundred kinglings, grain of life
Insows; the steps of that bright tower then scales
In solemn solitude; and upon its peak,
Struggles alone with heaven; prostrate in prayer,
Heart scourged, and with confession expiates thrice
Those sins the sun saw in his golden rounds;
Then of the stars inquisitive, by wise
And perfect intuition of the heavens,
And social signs, and seasons of the spheres,
The horoscope of nations, and of all
His diligent lands he learns; and so descends
Vicarious, bringing with him prosperous days;
So seek I, who have sown so long the seed
Of peace, on man's broad field, the peace of God;—
Such may he grant! The sacrifice be mine!

Clara.
I wonder; yet my soul its balance keeps;
Not prizing, not approving all I hear:
More marvelling how thou knowest of these truths;
And how the end of all things blends with thine.

536

Festus.
God's thoughts are as a firmament of stars,
Fixed suns; the heavenly truths which he inspires
Or we by nature know of him, the all
Revealed, all-hidden, eternal show to us,
Innumerable, vast: man's loftiest thoughts,
Even on his own destinies, as one soul,
Or volumed into nations, or as all,
Mind's momentary meteors, which, flashed through
Life's hemisphere illume it, whose counterpart
Is death, heaven, what? with but decadent light,
Gleam, yet are truly perfect each, each true;
Eternal those, these temporal, not the less
Whose union constitutes the universe.
As when some mighty Mage, intent to know
Life's coming secrets, 'gainst the reticent skies
Wagers his skill, and notes how from the breast
Of tempting virgin by her side who holds
The golden cluster; or his marital hand
Who heads the mourning triad, leap they forth,
The instantaneous starlets: or, from his blade
Galactic, trenchant, waved to save from death
By spatial passion, his belovèd fair
With starlets girdled, whence full many an orb,
In meteoric nights autumnal, fills
In falling half the firmament with light;
And thus from fixed and transient spheres combined,
Draws astral fate destructive, or of war,
Or death, deliverance, love, nay, what he would;
So I, although in lowliest wise, forebent
To know, from God's fixed truths, and natural thoughts,
Which, like heaven's evanescent spherelets, light
Together, man's high brain, my destined end
Deduce, and future of the universe.
And weighing all these things, the sum I find
As fortunate; for at man's, the native's birth,
The star of love, peace, power benefic ruled.
In mid-life all the houses of the heavens,
Law, science, power, faith, health, wealth, dearth, death,
He suffered, well or ill; and when at last
Dying betwixt time's trembling lights ere yet
His eyes lost sight, he hailed the eternal dawn;
Hailed prophetwise the ascendant sun, arch-priest
Of nature in whose law of wisest love
He had walked as faithful votary; saw approach
His head to shrive him and his soul release
Mid blessings humbly conquered, he foreknew
His future rich with joys won, unconceived.
So the same star which led him into life,
His spirit restores all kindly to the heavens;
And earth's vast horoscope is verified.

537

Wherefore let us rejoice together; each
Congratulating on destiny divine
The other; and the world.

Clara.
How sayest thou, then,
Destroyed? Mysterious judgment, as when God,
With ruinous fire from heaven, hurls down the fane
Wherein his faithful worship; or salutes
With death this holier temple of the soul,
Sudden and swift,—no time for penitence,
Nor prayer.

Festus.
Arraign not I, God's deep decrees.
I cannot tell thee all I know nor dare;
For wisdom seals the lips which wonder opes.
The dread initiation into light
Saddens the soul it hallows and expands.
But thou because thou knowest much of truth—

Clara.
What is it thou wilt tell me?

Festus.
I have seen
What ne'er again may be, nor e'er till now hath been.

Clara.
Where didst thou see—and what?

Festus.
In space. He took me there,
Of whom I oft have told thee. Midst in air
Was God. I'll tell thee that he told the spheres;
For the great family of the universe
Round him were gathered as a fire: but we
Held back; and saving God, none did us see;
Though round his throne in sunny halo rolls
A ceaseless, countless throng of sainted souls.

Clara.
Say on, love! Let me hear.

Festus.
A sound, then, first
I heard as of a pent-up flood just burst:
It was the rush of God's world-winnowing wing;
Which bowed the orbs as flowers are bowed by breath of spring.
And then a voice I heard, a voice sublime—
To which the hoarded thunders of all time
Pealing earth's death-knell shall a whisper be—
Saying these words—Where will ye worship me?
Ay, where shall be your Maker's holy place?
The heaven of heavens is poor before his face.
How shall ye mete my temple, ye who die?
Look! can ye span your God's infinity?
Hear, mighty universe, thy Creator's voice!
Let all thy myriad, myriad worlds rejoice!
Lo! I, your Maker, do amid ye come,
To choose my worship and to name my home.
This heard each sphere; and all throughout the sky
Came crowding round. Our earth was rolling by,
When God said to it—Rest! And fast it stood.
With voice like winds through some wide olden wood,

538

Thus spake the One again: Behold, O earth!
Thy parent, God! it is I who gave thee birth.
With all my love I did thee once endow;
With all my mercy—and thou hast them now.
But hear my words! thou never lovedst me well,
Nor fearedst my wrath: dreadst thou no longer hell?
Dream'st thou that guilt shall alway mock those fires?
That deathless death which hell for aye expires?
Should all creation its rebellion raise,
I speak, and this broad universe doth blaze—
Pass like a dew-drop 'neath mine angry rays—
Blaze like the fat in sacrificial flame:
And that burned offering, when I come to claim,
Its scorching, quenchless mass, all I will pour
Upon thy naked soul:—canst thou endure?
He spake; and, as the fear-fraught words flew past,
Earth fluttered like a dead leaf in their blast.
Am not I God? Answer me! Hope not thou,
Impenitent, to ward my righteous blow.
Yet, come again! my proffered mercy hear!
Rejoice and sing! sweet music in thine ear,
And peace I speak: seek but to be forgiven:
Repent! and thou shalt meet thy God in heaven.
Go! cleanse thy brow from blood, thy heart from crime,
And on thy Saviour call while yet is time!
Now to this universe of pride and sin
I speak, ere yet I call mine angels in.
Draw nigh, ye worlds!—and, lo! their light did seem
Before his eye paled to a pearl's dull beam.
Attend! said God—o'er all he lifts his hand;
Where will ye set my tent? where shall my temple stand?
And all were dumb. Distracting silence spread
Throughout that host as each were stricken dead.
I made ye. I endowed ye. Ye are mine.
Then trembled out each orb: thine, God! for ever thine!
All that ye have, within myself have I;
God, am complete; full inexhaustibly.
I dwell within myself, and ye in me,
Not in yourselves; I have infinity.
The everything in all things is my throne;
Your might is my might, and your wealth mine own:
'Tis by my power and sufferance that ye shine:
I live in light, and all your light is mine.
Be dark! said God. Night was. Each glowing sphere
Dulled. Night seemed everything and everywhere;
Save that in utter space a feeble flare
Told that the pits of hell were sunken there.
Shuddered in fear the universe the while,
Till God again embraced it with a smile.
Divine delight responsive spread through space;

539

Till like a serious smile, whose gradual grace
Expands its soul-born sunshine o'er the face,
Lo, all things made were glad. Come now and hear,
Ye worlds! said God, the truth I thus make clear:
My words are mercy, wherefore should ye fear?
And straight, obedient to his sacred will,
One great concentrate globe they crowd to fill;
Systems and suns pour forth their glowing urns;
Full in the face of God the glory burns.
Hearken, thou host! thy trembling hope to raise,
I to all being thus make plain my ways:
God, the creator, bade creation rise,
And matter came in void like clouds in skies;
Lifeless and cold it spread throughout all space,
And darkness dwelled and frowned upon its face:
Chaos I bade depart this work of mine,
And straight the mighty elements disjoin.
Then light I lit; then order I ordained,
And put the dance of atoms to an end.
Matter I brake, and scattered into globes,
And clad ye each in green and growing robes:
Your sizes, places, forms, I fixed with laws,
And wrought the link between effect and cause.
Your spheres I framed; your stations, motions, planned;
These compass fingers all your orbits spanned.
Then formed I lives for each, which might inherit
Will, reason, form, and power—not deathless spirit.
Then I made spirits, things of heavenly worth,
Deathless, divine. Round these from every earth,
I gathered forms and features fit for love,
Trust, pleasure, power, and all I could approve.
One universal nature spread through space,
Free, faulty, human, born for better place.
To every spirit I disclosed my name,
My love, my might, and whence all being came:
To deathless souls I righteously decreed
Accountability for thought, word, deed.
Then every orb complete, along the sky,
In glory, beauty, order, harmony,
I launched. Souls, worlds did every thing possess
Which could a mortal and immortal bless.
To all the hope of happier state was given—
For all I keep one common boundless heaven.
Ye all have freedom, and ye all do sin,
For ye are creatures: but ye all may win
Life everlasting—everlasting joy,
If ye do but the love of sin destroy:
This only is offence; for sin ye must
Not by my will; but weakness dwells with dust.
Unless ye have sinned ye cannot enter heaven.

540

How shall a sinless creature be forgiven?
And by forgiveness only can ye claim
Hope in my mercy, trust upon my name.
I knew that ye would all to sin be given;
But I, even God, have paid your price to heaven:
And if ye will not journey on that way—
The truth—the life—what do ye merit? say!
Death is the gate of life, and sin, of bliss:
Mark the dread truth! but mourn your deeds amiss.
Cast off your guilt! abandon folly's path!
Turn to the Lord your God ere hell his wrath!
Turn from your madness, wicked ones, and live!
Take, take the bliss which God alone can give.
God, the Creator, me all beings own;
God, the Redeemer, I will still be known;
God, too, the Judge—the each—the three—the one.
Again the Everlasting cried—Repent!
To bless or curse I am omnipotent.
And what art thou created being? Round
That world of worlds his arm the Almighty wound;
The bright immensity he raised, and pressed,
All trembling, like a babe, unto his breast.
There, in the Father's bosom rose again,
Of filial love, the universal strain;
Strong and exultant—blissful, pure, sublime,
It rolled, and thrilled, and swelled, in notes unknown to time.
Think ye that I, who thus do ye maintain;
Thus alway cherish ye, or all were vain;
Ye all would drop into your native void,
If by my hand ye were not held and buoyed:
Think ye that I cannot uphold in heaven,
In righteous state, the souls I have forgiven?
Be this a weightier task? with God, 'tis one
To guide a sunbeam or create a sun;
To rule ten thousand thousand worlds, or none.
Art thou not with thy Lord, O host of heaven?
Answered all spirits, Yea,—then first forgiven;
The primal covenant, Lord! thou mad'st with us
Is sealed and sanctified and fulfilled thus.
Go, worlds! said God, but learn, ere ye depart,
My favoured temple is an humble heart:
Therein to dwell I leave my loftiest skies—
There shall my holy of all holies rise!
He spake; and swiftly reverent to his will,
Sprang each bright orb on high its sphere to fill.
Glory to God! they chanted as they soared,
Father Almighty! be thou all-adored.
Thou art the glory—we, thine universe,
Serve but abroad thy lustre to disperse

541

Unsearchable, and yet to all made known!
The world at once thy kingdom and thy throne;
Pity us, God! nor chase us quite away
Before thy wrath, as night before the day.
In thee, our God, we live; from thee we came;
The feeble sparks of thine eternal flame.
Thy breath from nothing filled us all at first,
And could again as soon the bubble burst.
In thee, like motes in the sunbeam, do we move;
Glow in thy light, and gladden in thy love.
Earth only, like a spot upon the sun,
Sullen remained in that grand union
Of joy, praise, harmony. Word spake she none.

Clara.
Earth only had been chidden.

Festus.
Not alone.
High o'er all height, God gat upon his throne.
Downwards he bent: and, like a meteor ball
From Cepheus' hand we see, green burning fall,
God, as in pity, through the extense of space,
Again to run its e'er contracting race,
Bowled the all favoured but the ingrate sphere,
Which rushed like ruin down its dark career.
And high the air's blue billows rolled and swelled
On many an island world mine eye beheld.

Clara.
And where and what is he, this mighty friend,
Who to thee, human, thus his might doth lend?
Who bore thee harmless, as thou sayst, through space,
And brought thee front before thy Maker's face?

Festus.
I know not where he is. It is but at times
That he is with me; but he aye sublimes
His visits thus, by lending me his might
O'er things more bright than day, more deep than night;
And he obeys me—whether good or ill
His or my object, he obeys me still.

Clara.
O Festus! I conjure thee to beware
Lest thus the evil one thy soul ensnare.

Festus.
What! may not a free spirit have preferred
A mortal to his heart—as thou thy bird
Lovest, because it singeth of the sky,
Although it is as far below thy soul
As I 'neath an archangel's majesty?
God will protect the atom as the whole.

Clara.
Him, then, I pray: the spirit full must share
The truths it feels with God himself in prayer.
So guide us, God! in all our works and ways,
That heart may feel, hand act, mouth show thy praise;
That when they meet, who love, and when they part,
Each may be high in hope, and pure in heart:
That they who have seen, and they who have but heard
Of thy great deeds, may both obey thy word!

542

Festus.
Unto the wise belongs the sphere of light,
And to the spirit world-compelling might.
Yon sun, now setting in the golden main,
Shall count me his ere next he rise again.
One farewell round I long to make above,
As now with thee this leavetaking of love;
Once more to circle round the central skies,
And sound the silent infinite, where rise
Creation's outflows, and the new-born light
Smiles babe-like on the lap of ancient nursing night.
Would that the earth had nothing fair to lure,
Nor being more to answer or endure!
But I foresee, foresuffer. Bound to earth,
Wrecked in the deeps of heaven, in death's expiring birth!

Clara.
Is all then over? I ask not what hath come
Of those who once were thine, but fear, nor speak.
Fate brooks not to be questioned in the light.
But shall we part? Is this ordained or not!
Or is the earth-star struggling still with death?

Festus.
Being of beauty, whose yet unfilled arms
Form an incarnate Eden, and whose eyes
The angel watchers o'er it—mine exiled,
And gazing on thee gainless—smile no more.
For if life's feelings flow not now as erst,
It is not that they are vanished like a stream,
Sun dwindled or earth drained, but that their face
Is frozen 'neath the world's wide winter. No!
The liquid lightning of thine eye no more,
Nor flowery light which blooms upon thy cheek,
Nor delicate perfection of pure form,
A breathing revelation incarnate—
Illumes for me the dusk of life. Night reigns.
My heart's poles now are fixed like earth's in heaven,
Shining in solid silence to the moon,
Starry and icy silence; and all ceased
Their torrid oscillances. Once it rolled
In tropic splendour. Now experience treads
Deep in the snow of blossoms. Maid of love!
Were thy heart now free as a zoneless nymph,
And on life's race of rapture mad to start,
Like her of old, ere dropped the golden pome,
'Twere vain to me; immoveable is mine;
Still as a statue studying stony tome.
Unite we may not. In this fatal life
There is no real union. All things here
Seem of monadic nature; and with God,
All oneness and sole allness lives alone.
Still even in this—time's age penultimate—
And in my heart's exhausted mine, I feel—
But I for ever have forsworn it—both

543

The magic might of beauty, and the fierce
Deliciousness of love. Yes! I must be
In soul, in sacrifice alone. Thoughts once
My masters, now in bonds retributive round
My soul's invisible centre titan-like
Hold I; and 'scaped from thrall to dominance feel
As liberated god of old who heaven's
Unbounded calm is eyeing as he returns,
Rejoicing the eternals to rejoin.
I hold life's feast, death's fast indifferent.
There is divorce between my heart and me;
And I have neither bride nor brethren—I;
But I achieve my end—the end of all.
From this is no appeal to death nor fate,
Nor the just Gods; herein are all at one.
Love me not therefore now; but when with me
The great cessation happens; when the poles
Are icing, and this tyrant of life's realm
Totters to execution, and well-earned
Ruin—attend me; whether in the flesh
Or in the spirit be with me; and, mark:
One birdlike thought through death's wide void shall fly
Right to thy bosom home, the thought of thee.
Cherish it there as mine, and royally
In its snow palace. It will bear the gaze
Of all the star souls and the spirit stars
Which will the living land of light indwell.
I feel earth slacken in rotation. Time
Lays down his weary length, as though the work
Wherefore he had his hire were finished. Go!
Now there is nothing left for us on earth
Save separation.

Clara.
Still I love thee, still.
Hast thou no further word?

Festus.
No, death alone
Is that I live for, ever in mine eye;
Death, white-robed doorkeeper of heaven, whose sword
Soul from the spirit severeth. For one,
In wisdom reinstated, and brought back
Into the sovereign presence, the golden soul
Which sees things as they are, nor as they are,
Only, but as through eternity they shall be
Known, justifiable, is thenceforth still;
As he who in the mystic caldron bathed
Immortal grew, but dumb. Henceforth am I
Death-mute; for all things else with me consent.

Clara.
But this is not the end.

Festus.
Go! I have said it.
I am henceforth alone. My thought of thee
Above all passionate fire-peaks, and above

544

The sacred snowline of my heart where soul
And spirit in extatic stillness join,
Bides in perpetual purity. Farewell.

XXXV.

Our first, our last, by heavenly fates impelled;
We again meet; warned by the Spirit progressive, learn,
Not man's design, mere compromise of good
With ill, nor ill's, infeasible most, approves
Celestial polity. Reason's plea, here shown
Of gravity less than virtue's; virtue's, there,
Convictive less than reason's. What the twain,
Unversant in fate's ultimate laws, reject,
Grace gratulative enjoins. Not separate life,
But oned, perfection's source.

An Oratory. Daybreak.
Clara and Angela.
Clara.
I have erred, not sinned. My soul in faith assured,
Feels conscious of acceptance, and of prayer,
Night long companion of the stars, fulfilled.
Relief and surety come on day's broad wing.
My spirit, fountainlike, of the present full,
O'erflowing with the future, life hath all
I ever asked. God shriven then, be it mine
What once I failed in to amend; to undo
The wrong and do the right. Thee thank I, Lord!
For this repose of spirit, this sense of peace
By thine approof made holy. Hear I not,—
Fanning the calm of morn with sensible beat,
The musical movement of an angel's wing,
Vibrant with spheral airs? Nay, on my heart
I feel the hint of a bodiless hand, as rose
Wind-ruffled, might some pitying finger feel
Its leaflets smoothening. Sweetened by seraph's breath,
And scent of saintly garments seems the air.
Speak, spirit! for sure I am, one circleth me
In narrowing ring, and swiftening folds, as erst
Rounded the worshipping priest, of primal faith,
His arrowy rock, sun-sainted. Voice thyself,
Angel!

Angela.
The spirit of her, thine earliest friend
Am I.

Clara.
Thy best-belovèd, say.

545

Angela.
Best loved. I
Thy trials, tears and sighs have numbered all
Since the sad day thou followedst to the tomb
The form once dearest to thy sisterly heart.
Deem not thyself uncared by me, when first
A desolate heart embodied, with pale arms
Outstretched to the pitiless world, and stern quatrain
Of elements, thou well nigh met'st fate half-way;
Nor think I have never marked thy course through life,
Most like a weeping and dishevelled cloud
Trailing its forlorn honours o'er the sea
Rude, reckless, unsympathetic, till it reach
Time's western gates which, passed, ope but one way;—
Nor eyed thee from woe's waves soul-whelming, seize
The pearl of spiritual content which yet
Thine angel brow shall light, as it hath earned
The approving love of saints in heaven who watch
O'er two estranged hearts, in whose union earth
Her summing good awaits. His spirit who still
Loves thee, thou yet shalt bless; and, ere the end,
Thine hallowing, will I guide unto his breast,
God guiding me. For he himself foreknown
Knoweth, called, chosen, but oh! not sanctified
Not perfected, nor of saints celestial peer
While yet one selfish thought otherwards dims
The soul presumptuous, or with one wish, not
For their good aimed, disturbs. To thee is given
The glory of teaching this, to me the grace
Of bidding thee so act. When he thou lovest,
Urged by thy gracious influence, graffed in him,
Lives consonant with his destiny, so conceives
Of life's great ends that duties show as soul's
Best privileges, obedience stands transformed
To triumph, then the end indeed draws nigh.
Till penitent of all sin and sanctified,
Even spirit elect pleaseth not wholly God:
Nor itself gladdens in him with that whole joy
The perfected conceive who walk through life
Heart-crowned, with the aureole of divinity
Their reborn nature glorifying.

Clara.
Be this
And all things as God would.

Angela.
Ye both have erred.
Missioned for this cause prompt from heaven I come
To show ye this. Thou shrankest to share with him
His exaltation in the house of life,
Miraculous, unconceived lest secular cares
Thy way from peace and still humility warp,
Mistrusting destiny;—nor he his heart
Would lovewards ope, lest the magnificent end

546

World-rule, of God determined, in his hands
Waver, or wane, or e'er his thoughts quit. Heaven
Otherwise orders. Thou to him shalt reach,
With God's design the fruit of perfectness
Pure grace; calm, holy, generative of peace
And vital wisdom; not on truth's domain
Deviating by chance, nor on strict virtue's grounds
Trespassing, as by stealth; but in thy course
Upheld by holiest patience, shalt with all
Divine conditions congruous live, as earth
Moves with the moving future of the stars,
Fateful and fair as they: even here, in heaven,
Quickened with life eterne, the saved, reborn
Of God the Spirit, are spirits themselves divine
Whose will the worlds await. Hence, seek thy fate.
This union is decreed in heaven—and blessed.

Clara.
I yield. Albeit aye erring, let me not
Urge pardon for defectible nature;—that
Is God's decree, too; but with purest gold
Obedience, haste to o'erlay God's mercy-seat,
The hour of life he grants us here.

Angela.
It is well.
This hoped I from the first. Know, in yon orb
Where first,—this quit,—I, greatened in soul by death
Rejoiced, thy loved one now, mine erst, to meet,
And point his spirit hopeful of heaven, to truth;—
Orb, which then lit to rest the sun, but now
Him ushereth, as thou seest, this morn to toil
Celestial, and the glory of active life,
I thy felicitous fate presaged, than mine
Happier,—as seemed to eye of being which yet
Earth's echoes thrilled; fate now fulfilled. Lo, there!
See where yon wanton sun, not yet ripe aged,
But, feigning infancy, with Morn's fair hours
Sent to arouse him, toys, and bids them bind
Their grossest gauzes round him; lo! he stirs,
And suddenly every golden swathe that ringed
His mummied limbs falls off; his wakeners scud
Far, far, rose blushed; he triumphs innocently;
And smiling gives to eternity the day
He had promised ere he slept. Accept, so thou,
Life's renovative season, and be content
With all good compassable.

Clara.
Be it as heaven wills.

547

XXXVI.

Perfection gained,
True love his life renews, now sanctified.—
Our world-seer counts humanity's gains, how earth's
Best aims by the associate wise the' elect
Of universal manhood leagued to instal
God's peace, the peace of earth, show. 'Neath one head
One moral empire seems secured, whose laws
Tend proveably but to human weal, not power
Selfish, nor private ends. What forces now
Life's game? It may be fate. The all-tested soul,
Whose aim to most serve men proves best to rule,
His doomful choice here makes; war, life prolonged
To the fore-flood fathers' years, with personal powers
Like theirs who,—lords Preadamite, kinged the world,
Incarnate forces of the universe,
At option, or pure peace, nature's last boon,
Death instant, his; he this, for man's good, claims;
Unwitting that that hour the day of God
Destined, earth's doom-day dawns. Time closes in.

Garden and Grove by the Sea Mountains near.
Festus and Clara.
Festus.
Day of all days, bright daughter of the sun,
From midnight hailed by rushing star-clouds, glad
With their auxiliar light to perfect here
My loved one's happy birth-hour; day of days,
When first, fair bride, thy life-path crossing mine,
This transept of existence traced, God now
To himself hath hallowed, our united life;—
Day which now gives me thee;—and thou, night's queen,
In heavenly lowliness sublime, and meek
With the sun's imputed radiance, like a soul
Holy in God, aye brightening with the light
Reflected from the Invisible; earth, albeit
Now with thee waned, while nightly in thy lost light
Death's daily gain stands forth, and conquest waste
Of eternity over time; earth calls on you,
Ye sacred lights, God's ministry in heaven,
Each other eyeing, to bewail with her
As I, these hours, so sadly, deadly sweet,
Stopped in mid flight, which, else, might well be deemed
Intransitive, immortal; hours, ah! too soon,
For me, to cease, like the olden Paradise
Earth's glory, flowery initial of time's tome.
Thee, too, invoke I, of all fateful powers
The complemental force, true one, thrice tried;
This reverence, this my worship is to own
Thy truthful steadfastness; and, separate life
When each can yield help meet the other, a false

548

And inconclusive end. How only blessed
Men's aims when steadied by celestials' hands!

Clara.
My heart intuitive spake the truth, meseemed
The severance once thou threatenedst could not prove
Final. God's equity forbade.

Festus.
Enough;
Our guardian angels greeting soon agreed.

Clara.
And, bidden of heaven, our destined union fruits
In ominous bliss.

Festus.
Most dear, most honoured bride,
Thou sayest. Hast heart to view earth's death-throes? Mark
Her end, with thine like timed? For as, while now
The westering sun, high on yon Alpine height,
Snow shouldered, like a maid for whiteness praised
Of neck or brow, blushing, in sweet defeat
Of admiration, comelier,—his farewell glow
Incarnadines, an instant,—let the moon
Orient, shed down her silver shafted rays,
As though in negligent rivalry to contest
The palm of perfect beauty, man's rapt eye,
Meanwhile, by the coalition unconceived
Of natural lights, droops, awed; so, on thy head
Heaven's claims and earth's, mine too, in right of death,
One moment dreadly mingle.

Clara.
For all fates
To be prepared, I seek. Thou hast to me
The world oped and expounded: its needs, claims
On God; its fore-reached purpose in his mind;
Its compassed ends and failures. I, too, thee
May have served; and the All-blesser's wise intents;
By proof of heart obedience, and the gain
Of following truth rather than leading men.

Festus.
So kind and providently instructive all
His counsels. Here, too, past the worth of worlds,
As though we owned the merits of angels, God
A season of satisfaction, ere all cease,
And rest hath given, to note the mighty march
And grieve its closure mind hath made; the schemes
Of social life just perfected, now for aye
Disharmonized by their imminent end; its gains
For toil material, and o'er powers matured
By happy use, which, sovereign servants, aid
Man's magistery o'er nature; this in strength
Faith's match, unbasing mountains, bridging seas,
States binding to serve peace and freedom; this
Starring anew the night with pit-born light,
Secrete from primal matter's nebulous flame;
This, third of powers imponderable, which earth
Bridle in her orbit, gravitative, or this

549

Attractive; this our knowledge o'er the gods
Swiftening and time's poor possible; this which guides
By mineral instinct, through the deep, tall ships
Sail winged; or this not life, but life-like, heat,
Source of inanimate motion and innate,
Caught from God's breast;—all nourishing powers with man
Leagued, want and death—earth's evillest ills—to slay;
And now, long time victorious.

Clara.
So advanced,
Completion would the curse not blessing seem
Whereto creation tends, were not God's love,
Making this world's fulfilment that world's base,
Better than all we hope. Earth's end how else
Conceive, or justify by law divine
Not less than natural which, in things made, makes
Perfect, fore-state to fall? If life him owe
For breath, for more, death; access limitless
To ampler being, God's plenitude. So, earth
Ended, all holds that's well; faultless the fair;
Potent the pure; the great and good, joy-souled,
Each other helping, serve the many with love.

Festus.
Who loves thee, Lord, lives like thee; is, does, good.

Clara.
Man surely grows more godlike daily, nearing
His final future. Thee sublimed in soul
And with life's aims uplift to loftier ends
Time's lapse hath found.

Festus.
Time, too, to good men given
By work devout, unselfish, sage, to raise,—
As lands by hidden force their beach upheave
To levels unforethought,—man's social mass
To purer life, more reasonable, more just,
More parallel with God's plan. Behold! the bounds
Of every separate science, known, and all
In one consummed; all modes of state-rule made
Like operative of good; all liberties
Coincident with authority; every faith
Grounded on heavenly influences, and made
Their compensating errors so to adjust
As truth's success to ensure. O'er all, peace, most
Approximative of earth to heaven, and love
Brotherly, thirst for others' good, not blood,
Now urging nations, more content me yields
Than earth's full orbèd realm, my doom. The world
One grand equality now kings. Slave, no more,
Nor lord,—their common nature regnant—breathes;
Rich drone, nor beggar clammed. Sin, vice and wrong,
Hate, misery, lawlessness, contempt of kind,
Self-worship, ignorance, fraud, impiety, all
Life's fellest plagues, impurity, of thought

550

Or word, or deed, fled hellwards, the chief wise
Revering nature, teach hope: the holy chosen
Pray, interceding for their fellows, God.
Earth's great ones plight to amity, states no more
Ravening for war's dread flesh-feast, seethed in blood
From lust of soil or pride of power, but yearning
Solely for liberty self-earned, or secured
For others, knowledge, mental and bodily health,
And increment of the good God's function, fill
Pacific, each their just and natural bounds
Lakelike. Towards this all times have wrought; and now
Whoso man's worldlife notes, his qualities metes,
His faculties; sums the vast designs or boon
Even now benevolent hearts cherish, and brains
Restless to enlighten souls, and the flesh free
From servile toils, needs sordid, that to quests
More pure, more grand, the world's day may be leased
Largelier, and aims best worthy life, of heaven
Anticipative,—wots well no ampler lists,
No fairer scope could God have given, than earth
As now, state-chequered, with all patterns graced
Each excellentest, of faith, rights civil, grades
Of culture, social, mental; cunning craft,
Refining art; nor deftlier planned to aid,
By gradual concentration of good gained,
The just expansion, just, though slowly achieved,
Of man's supreme capacities, which, sphered
Integral, all, we know shall cease. Nor less,
Author and perfecter of man's wondrous life!
Mark we herein thy wisdom which brooked not
Men should grow wise too fast, nor blessed too soon,
Thy bounty in withholding; of sage restraints
Lavish; in mere deficiency the grace,
Most manifest, of perfectible power; that all
Grounded in good and ill, made sage through choice,
By pure contrition proved, may seek in thee
Sole, their divinity, and attain. So fit,
So perfect, seems his training, both in kind
And instance, of our race, that while we, here,
This calm concentrate life, large yet intense,
Consuming, near our culminant destiny,
The last necessities of his state o'ercome,
Man—like an exiled prince, who through all time
Burns to regain his natal throne—hath proven
By peril, self-abnegation, sacrifice
By labour, learning, largesse, earnest rich
Of kingly intents, the integrity of heart
By birthright his, that purity, that faith
In faith, and charity to his kind, the wise
Know needful to reunion with their God.

551

For, as of old, truth's substitute, in shows
Mimetic of the moral sphere, through rocks
Dragged naked, bounding breathless out of flames;
Walled in the lone grey death cell midst the moor,
A death regenerative of spiritual life,—
Waiting by nodding rock triumphant proof
Of ghostly call, or innocence; by beasts
Or men, more brute, with sword and brand and snare
Driven desperately, till the delusive goal
Raught, lo! the deep and hidden well, whence risen
And throughly purified, his holy peers
Elect, joined, their austerely splendid life
Partaking and companioning; signs but these
Of the soul's struggles, toils, victories, and its blessed
Acceptance with the power which, granting life,
Tests meetly all responsible spirits; thenceforth
Him delegate of God, behoved to abide
In ever ripening certitude,—and truth's
Grave mysteries, here, all lore beside outworth,—
The advent of the Eternal, and the e'er
Renewable triumph of truth's light. So, now,
Self-chosen example of humanity, here,
The initiate of philosophy, while freed
From physical contest, perilous feat and fear
Of elements embattled,—tests once meet
For times of ignorance,—versed in every art
That life adorns or consecrates; in law
Ennobling, science which sustains, in ties
Social and sympathies; in relations pure
Alike with kind and kindred; skilled in lore
Profoundest, man hath heired from ages passed;
A doer of good deeds; strong to endure
The stings of slander, torts of strength or fraud;
Perfect in faith's just ordinances; in all
The duties of humanity, must, perforce,
More even than erst, clearly approve himself
Truth's champion, virtue's friend. But, who aspires
His nature to consummate, to partake
Strict and entire communion with the source
Sublime of soul; resolved, though lone, to tread
The heavenward path of wisdom,—quits, content,—
Life's labyrinthine round; earth's charmful lures;
Time's fraudulent vanities; abhorrent, shuns
Man's meaner passions; paltry pleasures, cares
Carnal or covetous; wily ambition's schemes,
Rank ostentation's toys; the solid world
Held but a shadow, every idol form
And mode of worship waived, trusts schemes no more
Of faith widespread, wise seeming once, but, now
Gone like a molten glacier, that of old,

552

While yet the youthful sun his waxing beam
Shot on our shivering orb ice armoured, aye
His burning glance fate-fraught and fascinative,
By dale and hill followed, till, o'er the brink
Precipitous of the abysmal main, it fell
In a dry cataract shimmering on the beach,
No more to rise; but, henceforth, spirit sole
In spirit adoring, he, the enfranchised heart,
Trampling on death, and more, the fear of death,
Shall equal angels here: the soothly wise,
Separate to righteousness, self-reverent, sworn
Earth's peace to endeavour aye in spite's despite;
Their nature hallowed by their aims; inspired
With God's truth, knowing all things as in God,
So from him emanant, and, as proveably
Purposed by him, good;—evil ignoring save
As cloudlet which the calm briefwhile obscures
Of perfect being: one substance, all divine,
Eternal, indivisible, vital; these
With him, all life, unite, as altar fires
Assimilate with the heavens.

Clara.
Should never man
Near, more than now, perfection; and the best,
Sinners by nature, if by grace sinless, clothed
In righteousness divine, as mount with snows
Eternal, while within red rabid fires
Smoulder, although perhaps subdued, still joys
Are there to some not world-known. Let us boast
In secret, of our thrones, like kings disguised,
And as, in eastern spousals, bride and lord
Crown each the other, kingly obeisance, so,
Humiliate with the excess of grace God given,
Praise we his merciful pleasure in pardoning sins
Of loved ones, greater than their power to offend.

Festus.
Thy soul let revel in its own innocence
Even as in snow the snow-pure ermine.

Clara.
Heaven
Is in our inmost spirit as in the eye
Yon imaged infinites.

Festus.
All plans forespent,
Pleas present, purposes of future life,
To him surrendered who gives all; the passed
Errors abjured; mine heart I have molten in tears
As kings their gods erewhile in gold to pay
Some covetous conqueror; but to my soul God
Content with nought but all, hath all at last
Remitted and forgiven. It is faith removes
This mountain of our sins, and in the sea,
Tearful, of penitence casts. As by art's stress,
Granite and steel flow free as oil, so 'neath

553

God's awful love man's conscience stilly thaws,
Whate'er its self-shaped purpose losing: here
Withdrawn, self-banished, I the ascendant sign
Wait of earth's demolition; knowing still
With God one preappointed end yet holds,
One high design yet unfulfilled. This, soon,
The assembled chosen of nations, of our race
Chiefest in worth and wisdom, shall make known
Returning from all lands, their vast consent,
In sage and solemn secrecy achieved,
With doom divine, recorded in the roll
Of foreordaining fate, and thine own spell
Predictive of pacific power.

Clara.
Our God
Is happily lord of peace and union. Strife
Divisive nought agrees with love and heaven.

Festus.
But unity hath shades, modes manifold.
Many are the ways God shows us we may serve
Man, and his own good cause. These even the toils
And trappings of the fight by virtue waged
In man's behoof 'gainst ill; the dust, shouts, sweat
Of struggling swarms attract; and these, a spot
Contemplative, where memory may recal
The simple sweets of early love, the heart's
Wild honey, gathered in green glades man's eye
Seems even to startle; which, like the wrestler's oil
In grappling with the world or ghostly foes,
May loosen the adversary's grip.

Clara.
Need were
Our deeds, motives to scan, and their results
Carefully, prayerfully; every daily sum
Of duty verify by its holy rule
In God's celestial key wherein, more fixed,
More true than nature's fleet forms, all acts, means
And ends contingent, through each factor traced,
Thought, feeling, interest, ignorance, circumstance
And temperament stand solved; of our moral sense
And soul's vitality sole test, prime rules,—
That each one's acts and purposes comport
With others' good not less than ours.

Festus.
It is this—
Life's universal law, the code divine
Graved in all hearts wild, cultured, though unwrit,
Justly to live and temperately; in peace
And charity with the world; content with fate;
To law obedient human and divine,
And to the lord of law; to all that breathe
Kind; sociable with mankind; honouring all
Life's pure relationships; to worship God
Sincerely, and to do men good; abet

554

Virtue, the right, always 'gainst vice, wrong, ill;
Truth aye to speak,—for to speak truth's to talk
In God's own tongue, truth middle term 'twixt earth
And heaven! to labour honestly, and rest
Holily, cheerfully, for he who made
All things, both rest and toil hath hallowed;—us
Ones with the one supreme in will, and rounds
With good the common nature of all life;
Which of and in him born, him serves and loves
With open trustfulness. Whate'er the end,—
On this sure base,—that God's wide equity
Commensurable with mercy, and than all law
Juster, all tabulated claims o'erriding
Bidden or forbidden, and which by principles
Precept supplants or modifies,—rest we; safe
That even as he himself immutable
In essence, but reflecting outward lives,
As ocean clouds, shows towards created soul
Reciprocal eternally;—as we love
Loving; condemning as we err; to all
Revering him, resembling, boon; so man
To deity linked, by life immortal, feels
In his inmost being when, heartwrung, he forespeaks
Heaven's judgment on iniquitous deed; when wroth
At treachery's triumph; or, when uttering truth
Spiritual, inspired,—all states external lost
Like star-dust from a seraph's wing in flight
Upwards, conscious identity with God.
Such union now earth's best reality; time's
Most chief, most choice delight; the soul at peace;
Life's rolling round, to him submiss, the Spirit
Divine, of loftier ends once meant for man
Reminded, deigns to regulate. As when,
In class, the pensive tutor,—his high heart
Ambitious as a bow upstretched to outshoot
All rival boughs, on vast designs intent
Inly of human weal, truth proven, or law
Harmonic, 'tween creator and create,—
By timid monitor summoned, shuts away,
Sighing, his sacred theories, and proceeds
To lowlier needs in earnest; bent to inform
His docile pupils how our sphere the sun
Spins round, and in what posture, blandly, at once
The mimic globe—by puerile guilt awryed
From its right incline, restores, minutely just,
To ciphers graved on the arc meridian, brazen,
Steadfast, all circling; our true attitude
Toward heaven thus shown;—so God, by prayer invoked
Stooping to instruct the sons of men, corrects
To his eternal and immoveable law

555

Soul, from its due position sin-wrenched;—he,
So much less prone to punish than to teach
Pleased, pleased to expound and rectify, nor time
On passed mischance waste, he himself for us
Gives as best lesson; and our poor fallen orb
Bids walk again, head skyward; man's main end,
Whate'er his first deflection, being to make
Now, best amends we may; to know, be, do
The most we can, of good; for that we know
And do, we in truth are; and thus bettered, live;
His joy and ours combined. For, when God first
Launched on its infinite course this sphere of man,
This mixed humanity,—through good and ill
Contestful, whirled—as earth through gloom and sheen—
Zoned it with laws, with broad degrees of right
Humane swathed, and with binding lengths of love
Divine, convergent, crossed, he midst all powers
Of fate the intelligible orb enthroned;
Housed it with angels; him, their common source
Beneficent, of light, life, godship round
In graduated freedom ranged, and bade
To all the bliss thought creatural could conceive,
And live, aspire. We, thus encouraged, taught
All vital wisdom profitable to man
In thought, word, deed and love to him, our being's
Fitness and joy most high; taught here to know
The virtues are heaven's elements, as air,
Fire, water, earth, the world's; and that the soul,
Simple and inseparable, conformed by their
Pure quality to his heavenly substance, lives
Thence, trans-essentiate, secretly in God,
As a star in day;—find, too, as by access
Of finite to the infinite, nature's end.

Clara.
How rich in teachings is God's word!

Festus.
O soul
Of saintly light, wherever truth be voiced,
God's word know, as his law in all that's right.
Wherever soul acts righteously, intends
Truth's triumph, or man's weal, with mutual joy
There creature and Creator meet; not less
On crag or desert sand, than temple floor
Of porphyry polished, or tall columned courts
With moonwhite marble impaved and night-black slabs.
Where heart thou findst pure, holy, unselfish life,
Love brotherly, matched and crowned with love of God,
Seek there his people, his chosen; hear there his word
With all perfections teeming. Who now lodge
The living saving truth, nor famishing soul
Gorge on gross shadows, and the unfoodful chaff
Of ceremonies artistic,—servile form

556

Of words, nor tinkled time of worship, need,
Nor dome spire-peaked, sky peering. Life's best part
In voiceless converse and serene commune
With heaven's soul-sanctifying spirit, who gives
To every age fit inspiration, passed,
They in their own hearts hold realm, shrine and God,
Him in themselves adoring. The soul's war,
Its struggle not yet to admit the Almighty force,
Though round it and above; the heart's revolt
Ended and pardoned; dread, despair, doubt, quelled,
God to his saints reveals himself as peace,
Parent of bliss. Such, glorified, have sped
From deathful nature and her fettering sins,
By divine impulse into life eterne.
There, errless, they abide. Nor hold such lot,
Though of pontifical function void towards man,
Irreverend; for, by none else shareable,
Save their victorious spirits who, fined in fires
Of trial and of soul conflict, running bright
Pure, ductile to God's hand as virgin ore,
Original innocence have regained; these sole,
To God sealed, true felicity know; whose breasts
By rational light illumed; and filled with plans
Worthiest of man, angelic purposes,
Beam, inly sensible of divinity; thence,
Such serious rapture radiating, as felt
Once, maketh happy aye. Yes, these are they
Who in purity of heart, in humbleness
Of spirit, faith-fraught, in holiness of life,
In sin condemned, repented of, abjured,
In will quiescent as the wave Christ's feet
Trode tranquil; who, their being yielding up,
To him who asks, as a sigh to one beloved,
Are wholly God's. Let whoso hath these signs
Congenital with the spirit's birth, rejoice.
For him time renovates the sphere; redates
Earth from its primal order; trebly bright
Shine sun and moon; the sweet stars shape themselves
Into all oracular asterisms; the clouds
Space-born, like thoughts of mind, mount at his spell
Compulsory, to forespeak things coming; air,
God's fan, wafts Eden; and the large, live world
Throbs palpably beneath his hand; his heart
Is as an ark twin cherubs, prayer and praise,
Fend with life-sacring wings.

Clara.
Less worship, more
Virtue, the same in all faiths, and their sum
Earth needs; a godly race self given to God,
Who of his mind partaking, in his will,
By boundless acquiescence, co-operate;

557

Lovers of natural life and cherishers,
Though more of spiritual existence, still;
Pacific; holding each man sacred guest
In common with himself, of one great host;
Yielding to him their nature, he, who all
Defect o'erfills, to them, his righteousness;
These in the mirror of God's mind his will
Reading, shall satisfy, perfective; his
Whose thoughts are high as mountains, deep as seas;
Who in either hand beginning holds and end
Of things; pours forth creation, or withdraws,
Like him of yore whose lordly lay led back
The rivers gladdening, refluent, to their source;
Regeneration's sacred cycle; his
Whose eye guides nature; goalless yet.

Festus.
How long?
Nature is full of God; but he abounds
Immeasurably o'er all. His monarch will
All law he hath himself ordained, o'errides.
Elsewise, defined and calculable, we
Sum up, and him deny. Oh, more than all
More infinitely, is he who all hath made!
It is not enough that in all mine eye beholds
I trace him, in all life that buds, breathes, blooms,
I feel him in my heart; in mine, death-freed,
The spirit, I hail, eternal and divine.
Even evil tells of God to the pure soul
And thoughtful, as divinely endured.

Clara.
To know
Prayer radius-like unites the soul with God,
All central, all surrounding; shuts the world
Out of the heart; and sets frail being to face
Eternal virtue, rapture gives; but prayer
Preferred, is oft more, prayer fulfilled, means, end.
Lo, mine now granted in my joy and thine.
Think, too, how patient God, how wise man's friend;
Triumph deferring till, full faith assured,
Our ill-timed importunities brooked awhile—
The world to its forefated end approach.

Festus.
Man entered on a higher course, the scheme
Of things seems in these later, kindlier days,
Nobilitated. No slaughterous tools of war,
By false-souled priests ill-blessed, by reckless scribes
Lauded, tear men to quivering fragments, now;
Nor sword, death's reaping-hook for human corn;
Nor cannon's syllogism confutes the right
In bloodiest controversy. One round belief,
One universal and simple faith in God,
Stablished o'er earth, from slavish ignorance freed
And tyrant superstition, one most just

558

Perfect and catholic polity, makes mankind
Though late, an unity; shows man purified,
Man elevated, man peaceful, man made wise;
Worthy God's rule; but rule, by his will, on me
Devolved. And me, the world's vast littleness
Mocking no more, I look not for that prize
Vouchsafed me with vain ambition, nor with pride
Hail, but a toilful privilege deem to serve
In duty spiritual my brotherly race;
Judge it the righteous fine I pay for wish
Presumptuous granted. Earth's conclusive hour
Hath clicked its gentle alarm; and all too late
'Twere to recall what, if regretful, I
Have caused, the doom of earth. I have seen ere now
A penitent people, prostrate, bid remorse
Trample their hearts as in a winepress; seen
Nations when galled with the insults of years
And wrongs of generations sacrificed
To the few's selfish class-pride, at last roused
Wroth, and their ire incendiary demark
Through all the land; here by burned cities; there
By beaconed palaces, fuming night with scent
Of cedarn roofs—the tapestried handiwork
Of queens long since anointed, long embalmed,
Palling the flaunting flames; sudden, the bold,
With sense of wrong irreparable, and dread
Of retribution, chill;—for soon revenge
At conscience' feet confesseth,—and in vain
Time's slowly purpling fruit would fain await
Repentant, remediless; so I, my soul
To thoughts tumultuous yielding once, too prompt
To impound the future, would, but can, defer
No longer, time's last end. The final word,
Raze earth to its foundations, hath gone forth.
Hungers the inevitable to be fulfilled,
As gods of the orient, uncomputed years,
Yearn for their avatars. This end foreknown,
The secret thought—as torrent subterrene
Wrenched by distorting strata from the light,
Falls inly thundering on earth's heart, my soul
Fills with unnatural tumult, for man's sake
Not ours, though blent inextricably. And as,
While storms rend air, on high reigns spatial calm,
Where spheres their ancient tracks of light re-rolling,
Salute in saintly silence, storm and star
Like just intent accomplishing,—so thy life,
Pure, peaceful as the path ætherial trode
By her now regnant in mid heaven, and mine,
Long time by doubt and passion tempested,
In common with the world, reach one same end.

559

Clara.
When, know we not, nor would I know. But all time
Seems now a boon unreckonable; most fit
Therefore for godliest spirit to rouse the hearts
Of thoughtless nations to life's imminent close;
And as of old the arch-druid, golden knifed,
From his altar crag now lonely amid the moor,
Doled forth to awestruck tribes by brands, God's fire,
Their willowy bowers or rockhewn nests, in brows
Of cliffs, scooped like the sand swallow's, to warm,
Hearths sanctify, and life forefend from bale;
Do thou, man's thronèd minister, send round
Thy flame-winged words warning the world of doom;
Blessing with hope of heaven: that all in heart
May home them and hold holy.

Festus.
The world's rich
In warnings; and advice creeps ofttimes round
To find one, goal and starting-point. Already
A thousand tongues I have caused to monish men,
Incredulous, to this day, of things to be;
Nor by one hour would I, for selfish ends,
Time's scheme foreclose. The soul made perfect here,
By him who in secret works, and openly,
Patent in nature's every fact while yet
In operation latent, helps by means
Thrice sifted, heaven, to sow with both hands brimmed,
The liberal truth, nor faint; to scatter hope
And reap belief; my guerdon sole, as yet,
To bask me in thy rare retreats, content!
Where, stripped of mere conventional values, life
And time are, by deliberate conscience, priced
At their just worth, the good that may be wrought
In them and through them for mankind, by mind
Actful, not o'er solicitous; where the mock
Empire which custom sways, the painted forts
Unreason mans 'gainst truth, delude no more;
Where eyes o'ertaxed with the world's tinsel glare,
The luminous rottenness of sacred shams;
The microscopic grandeurs flattery feigns
Eye-fawning, her own pettiness to hide;
The foil of false repute; the sickly flash
Of pale and pasty wit tricked from the crown
Of ignorance worn by puniest judgling;—add,
Where ears, distraught by their gong-beaten lies,
Who betwixt obscurity and ignominy
Courted, embrace both,—gluttons of contempt;
By full-fed pity's after-dinner groans
O'er lean men's nuncheons; the paper trumpet's blare
Blown, till it bursts, of charity; by the oaths
Obscene, of gentle doctrine gone stark mad!

560

And babble of opinion's shallowing stream
All down its daily kennels,—may each, in still
And wholesome shade, rest;—while even here, to view
The eye-brine trickling down to the treacled lips
Of adulation fined, greed hoped; to hear
The bruit of nations questing after dreams,
And dream-names, sworn to capture liberty;
Might make one wretchless smile. Have I not seen
An ignorant people serve the living God;
And self-dubbed sapients, grovelling at the graves
Of certain dead rogues, ycleped philosophers,
Call their foul faith religion?

Clara.
Rate not now
'Neath their just worth faith nor philosophy;
The soul's instructor this, that sage moderatress,
Apt in one faultless breviary, to imblend
All faiths heaven's angels might use here with us,
We there with them.

Festus.
Know I not, here and there,
An amiable mild-mannered seer whose vast
Inheritance of the skies escheats to dust,
By voluntary defeasance, atom-wise,
Stake out his lines of being, necessity
Reason, the absolute, negative,—what not?
Measure himself 'gainst God? Assume to be
God? and survey the universe of things
With some dissatisfaction as a feat
Scarce worthy of him, nor comparable at all
To that he meant it should be when—his soul
Diffused, meanwhile, in death through space—he next
Should wake to conscious deity?

Clara.
Nay, let be.
Such bitterness savours not perfection. Sneer
Nor sarcasm peace befit, nor spirit affied
To charity's friend, content.

Festus.
Thee firm I know
On mercy's side, by kindliest nature bound
The punitive ire stern justice vaunts to assuage,
Though lashing but with tonguèd scourge, and scorn
Of foes presumptuous, even if weak. As when
Heaven's lesser bale, through many a stellar house
In militant triumph riding, till by law
Gods even must vail to, stalled, his fiery team
Reins stationary, and, chafed at forced recoil,
One bloodshot feverous glance on the luckless lands
Thralled to the sign he fires, thrown, backening turns;
Stamps in the nations fury and civil strife
Disastrous; causing the social elements
Clash; or, through ruinous insurrection, seek
Self sundering, raw contracts, less just; if now,

561

Beauty's mild orb, that fair benignant, beam
Conjunctively disposed, on the dread scene
Time groans withal, her stern swain's human realm
Compassionating, his brow, frown writhen, she smooths
While yet far, with boon-asking eye; and now,
Neared timidly the starry pest her charms
Dazzle, toys guileful with the death-strung nerve
Of his bow sky-arched; his angriest bolts steel-beaked
Lulls womanishly; with strange delicious touch
Sleeking their storm-packed plumes; each battailous fate
To stress competitive softens, to wordy wars,
Or emulous bent; thus tempering every plague
She fails to avert, or, midst her piteous breasts,
Paler than moonlit lilies, hides;—the world
Breathes bold, nor wots the secret treaty of light
Sealed in heaven's chancellerie;—so thou, sweet bride
Predominating by mere humanity, sweep'st
All bitterness from my heart.

Clara.
Such grace, mayhap
Thou deemest weakness still; and much misdoubts
My mind the emprise thou vowest me to.

Festus.
Be brave!
Thy weakness brings forth strength, as the young slight moon
The year's main tides. Nor I have strength, nor thou
Aught to endure or do but comes from him,
Tasker and lesson. Joy be it meanwhile, to me
Whose loftiest hope is lowliest even to stand
'Mong devotees of good; a vital voice
With the great whole in unison; to feel
How, raised by God's good mercy above the clash
Of narrow creedlets, jarring systems, sects
Sick of unnatural piety, overlaid
With truths so twisted as show well nigh false;
One soul from faiths complex and frivolous freed,
Grace-moved, more worthily truth to construe, may,
Through simplest trust in God and neighbour man,
Learning a wiser, teach a happier way.
Rather than all these spurious sanctities,
Give me the loneliest desert where man's free soul
Towers naked in God's eye, and, as a temple
Empty, but full of awe, let me all shrines
By art debased, for heaven's uncolumned fane,
And truth's unritualled service, quit; a faith
Faith fills with visits of angel deities;
A pastoral rite, a patriarchal creed;
A filial worship of the all-fatherly God;
A covenant binding with the Eternal,—this
Of truth communicative; this bold to embrace

562

The vital Infinite. The soul which wins
Rest in the alone divine, once purified
From all ills gotten of contact with the world,
Its hollow shows and rank impostures, dread
Of wrongs impossible to impute to God,
Yet sure his justice, as all his attributes—
Will boundlessly affect intelligent life,
Lives rebegotten, a personal verity,
By him in view of his complete design
The whole, conceived; and so thereto akin,
And unto God, name greater than all writ,
All wit, can teach, that he who made, and told
The broad affinity, seals and sanctifies.

Clara.
Shows there no peril lest ghostly pride should snare
Our spirits somewhile in parleying, pondering, even
These ends, so vast, of God? To touch on, seems
So oft, in view defective, to comprise.
God grant us humble hearts and lowly thoughts.

Festus.
Love I not, too, humility, these thy plains
Of soul, rich in the roots of fruitful things?
None but the great in mind, the true in heart,
The just in life, the perfect, seek thy peace,
Thy pastures, where the consoling spirit oft
Walks beatific; sanctifies the breast
Which suffers sovereignly, and, all kind, confirms
The soul that lists not other's gifts, nor need,
Each to himself sufficing; but its own,
Loyal, asserts to vindicate God's rights,
And, boasting nought its own, all claims as God's.
God is my friend, and nature. Sun and sea
Are my next neighbours. Yon great main and I
In turn expatiate o'er the same sands; wake
By each other's bed; or by the sad moon trined,
Her silvery kiss of pure and equal love
Receive; joint boon and bond. Oft in his sleep,
And in this neap of time, I overhear
The ubiquitous winds weird secrets interchange
With the elements of the future; he alone,
To those exalted mysteries unbid; oft
From morn's slow opening eye to eve's, sun-drooped,
Track his broad dial's hands of ebb and flood;
Now, like a favourite thought, recurrent, dart
Into his bosom; now, like falcon poised,
Mantling his wings, strained stirless in mid air,
Float, with the sea-sway swaying; upon his heart's
Large and deliberate beat, rocked. Earth, for me,
Sometimes, I dream, forgetful of fate's plan,
A niche hides, ivy fingered, dank with dew,

563

Close by her side, where, when the gay day ends,
Her world-worn brood she lulls; with sweets alone
Of sleep unsurfeited. The moss-branched woods,
Traversed by sloping lanes of evening light,
Greet, whispering to themselves, my wonted foot;
And you, gaunt hills, that stand with broad brows bared
As in perpetual consciousness of God
With us, and inward audience of the heavens;
And pass me along nightly with solemn touch;
In the austere comity of mountains me
Accept, your reverent comrade, like endowed
With reticent virtue; ye, who but seem to lack
Organic utterance; quick with sacred thought;
And through the eye's still commune not unskilled
To impart, prompted by dumb immensity,
Majestic meditations. Among your forms
Unmoved, the spirit consentient with that power
Working miraculous in all round, grows apt
And proper to the Eternal. We believe
In silence, looking on the face of things
Which have returned through changeless years his gaze
Who in time's fluctuating effects,—absorbed
Mid their surroundings, iceberglike,—joys not;
But in his own pure mountainous purposes,
Fixed as the ever sedent fates, the orb
Which dominate. Drawn thus, and in right accord
Towards the divine, we walk, like paced with God,
Leaning on him, and, conscious of the vast
Circumference of his arm, advance; no more
Maker with made, nor just law with blind force
Or act of chance misblending; but sustained
By his impartible strength, and by the smile
Cheered, which all spirit turned Godward doth illume,
We tread down each day's shadow, and so step
Clean o'er the soiling world.

Clara.
The world nathless
We too much love, for those imperial tasks
And kinglier ends the soul is destined to,
By him who calls us not to trifle but reign.

Festus.
It is manworld only, this petty universe
Deformed by sin and selfhood, to the sense
Breeds vileness, and repugnance of pure thought.
God's outer sphere is faultless. Be it man's
To accord the soul-world with the world-soul, God.
When from each heart youth's grand illusions perish,
Mean wits deem so much wisdom earned; conceits
Exploded counting virtual truths, not knowing
The multitude here of sectional sciences
Accomplished ignorance. Truth can be but one;

564

Of all, the essence sole and simple.

Clara.
See!
The blue of heaven o'ercast. Each natural change
Seem I to dread, sad forenote of the end.
A rising gust o'erawes me. Vain alarms
Doubtless, but erewhile to be verified.

Festus.
Life's shadow, death, hastes to enshroud the world.

Clara.
You skiey mourners that, like mine own sad thoughts,
Can scarce yourselves sustain, too prompt to tears,
Let me at least weep with ye. Nature, here
Ends her divine descent. Henceforth it is God
Claims all things, and reclaims. And can it be,
That all this vast and visible scheme of things,
Set in light's golden frame, no more shall eye
View? Mountain; streamlet swiftening to the deep;
Sward, flower besprent; wind-haunted forest; plain
Fruit-laden; all gone? Shall nevermore that peak
With stern uplifted finger threatful, check
The outgoing storm, and bring it to his feet,
Effusive? Nor yon grim glacier where it creeps
Wrinkled and rigid, as snake half frozen, e'er burst,
At streamy touch of the all-transfiguring sun,
Its icy enchantment, nor its patient hope
Yet gain, of all its race this only, balked?
Shall no to-morrow be? Shall the fair moon,
Her starry stations nightly accomplishing,
Threading in wavy orbit every sign,
Wax ne'er again; like us, safe housed within
The mansions of the immutable?

Festus.
All souls,
One grand, one worldwide trial passed, shall glide
Into eternity as the awakening earth
Rounds towards the day re-risen. Our Lord, even now,
With knowledge fills of passed things and to come
The spirit by him forechosen; and as in cave
Caucasian, priest hereditary, tribe-led
At old year's end, thrice pacing the emerald walls
Those mystic offerings, none but he may, makes;
From off the central altar, rock-squared, lifts
The chalice golden chased, with drowsiest juice
Of bearded grain creaming, and from its hue,
Clear or beclouded; troublous or stirless state;
And savour sweet or acrid, to those round
Of time's forth-issuing seasons much divines,
Peace, life and plenty, dearth or death or war;—
So me hath God installed from time's full cup
At eve of earth's great year, to announce to man

565

Grief gone, pain passed, the day of general joy
And,—war, the world's worst curse rehomed in hell,—
The age of peace perennial.

Clara.
Earth, as though
In forefeast of delight, and dimly limned
Grandeurs to come, looks wistful of a change
Brightening, dawnlike, man's mind, new-moralled.

Festus.
Dream
Of perfectness too soon alas! to cease.
But better thus than as of old, when earth
Despairing lay, war-gored, by ignorance base
Blinded, and crushed by weight of despot crowns,
Piled on her panting bosom. Await thine hour,
Hopefully, earth. Peace, victress peace draws nigh.
The secret longings of the wise, deep based
On perfectness, fast ripening, leave joy's heart
Beggared of blessings not all heavenly. And now
Thrill with the audible advent of their fate,
Fate predetermined good, all lands; his boon
Last, loftiest, best, who all founds.

Clara.
Ere the worlds,
Light was: ere light night ever-being, pierced
After by sun-stars; and world, light, and night
Spring up and cease, while God's word but matures.

Festus.
Grinding the road of doom on worldlike wheels,
Time's coming coursers, day and night, I hear
Whirling the car of destiny. It comes.
The clouded dust of ages marks its track;
Now, lost in depths of space; a moment, mobbed
By noisy nations; now again, it hurls
All hindrance from its path. The gates of force,
The bars of hate and prejudice, in vain
Oppose. It thunders to my feet. Time's lord,
The sun, long sunk, that sober legacy
Of light he left the hour spent, too, night warns us
Hence.

Clara.
And I feel, with all these failing flowers,
Consentful. Nature hath to all things given
Her silent signal. Earth her thought-racked brow,
Racked to provide for all she is doomed to bear,
Pillows at God's feet; and to his diligent guard,
Her slumbering spirit commends.

Festus.
We ours to him,
Like confident, as not cherished less, less watched,
At day's dawn, sun crowned noon, or eve. Me leaving
Somewhile, go, sacred consort of my soul;
This coring deepliest in thine heart; that they
Who love, know God, to his their wills conform
As mists to mountains, and, like one long trained

566

In loyal suit to nature, who forehears
In clouds the ripple of rills, as yet aërial
Which shall make glad the meads; who views in stars
The adoring awe their light shall sometime win
In eyes of unborn ages; so souls foregraced
By like gifts to conceive all scope of good
Heaven prophesies fulfilled, not only God
Indwell, but here participant of the joy
He in them feels, shall, dying, ever live!

Clara.
May we so live we dread not here to die.
So die, we dread not afterward to live!

Festus.
Now heaven be thanked, man's end henceforth can man
Calmly construe, note hopefully; and, seen,
Exist, at least, not miserably; our God,
By dread experience, known, of Hadëan realms,
No more, as falseliest once to impious thought,
Unjustest of all beings; indeed most just.
Yes, now I can behold the world nor breathe
The life-long sigh that I or any live;
That souls whose sins minute hell's fiery light
Taxed to make legible even in God's broad eye,
Should, cursing and accursed, their Maker's shame,
Live, deathless, inameliorable. Thank God!
God's realm hath no such scandal; boundless space
Hides no such horrible blot on nature's end;
A figment, which, if true, God were not God,
Man, man, nor fiend their enemy. As one
Who at ebb of tide, by treacherous underdraught
Sucked seawards, stealthily, tossed here, tossed there,
In death-play of the brutal surge, ere yet,
At turn, hurled landwards scornfully, wave on wave,
Each strenuously intending doom,—the foam,
Wide-spreading as his watery winding-sheet,
Eyes round him; and beyond, the infinite
Upper and lower, sees, of main and sky,
All pitilessly conclusive of his end;
And knows the elements oathed against him; knows
Nought with him, God except, and hope; at last,
Battling no more with breakers, even for breath,
Feels, as his feet insensitive drop, the sand,—
Friend unsuspect, unconscious, unbeheld,—
And with his heart's last life-beat, lifts again
His head from burying billows,—lifts, and lives;
As one who toiling up the burning slope,
High pitched, of cone vulcanic, soon to outpour,
Dread prelibation of earth's end, red floods
Fuellous, of lava, in God's cup of wrath
Slow brimming, till the ebullient dross, league-high,
Shoots up, hell spilling;—scorched by sun-fires; parched

567

By fumes sulphureous from above, by heat
Subterrene stifled; now, by stony showers,
Gleed-hot, imperilled, now by hissing streams
Of seething ore,—swoons, falls: but, once restored,
And, wistfulness returned, the healing ice
Loosed from his feverous forehead, as from crag
In spring, fall winter's snows,—conceives, towards God,
The rebegetter of his future, thanks
Such, and so vast, as might a nation feel,
From famine saved, or pest; so I, from sense
Of hell, mistaught by merciless ages passed,
Reproachful against God, the infinite love,
As scourging soul with self-perpetuate woe,
Firefloods eruptive of wrath endless, freed;
And knowing all things spiritual bettering aye,
Perfecting, growing worthier of God's thought,
Ever, by even disciplinary pains,
Can look now on the world if not with joy,
With trust of ultimate peace; so much hath search
Of truth, faith lowly but firm, and meditative
Perfection, profited me, as this to know;
That not till freed from soul-seductive cares
The longing for mere knowledge, greed of power,
Luxury, the world, and all its nothings, lures
To lead astray, I have lived to spurn or shun,
Can soul, by such disoriented, recur
To union with the Onemost spirit; nor e'er
Till all men's broken faiths remassed in one,
God's unity end, and man's vast brotherhood
Spread peaceful o'er the earth shall all partake
Faith's universal headship; war thenceforth,
Sacred or sæcular, ceased for aye. For know,
While leonine tribes, which, desert-shrined, deem God
One sole: and while the art-loving races seized
With sense of deity through all things diffused,
And conscious of more complicated life,
Trace him, through nature's myriad-sided whole,
Trine-wise, or manifold, simple faith at last
Names the All-one; shows earth's all various creeds,
True in time's partial views each, in the eterne
One verity, same and whole. This truth to me
Blessed, who have visited all earth's holiest shrines,
And by alien ritual undeterred, have joined
My spirit in worship at all sacred feasts
Saying, God be hallowed here as allwhere, only;
Soul of the world! Source of all good, and end,
Teach us true worshippers to be,
Spirit in spirit, Lord! of thee;
Our soul's just judge, lover and lord of truth.
Men's piety reverencing in all earth's creeds,

568

In every sanctuary, his praise with prayer,
Parents of peace, I have found. To all who him
Love truly, and spiritually adore, he grants
Like favour, like delight. Nor needs for this,
So perfect commune, one revealing word
Soulwards, the spirit of God divinely dumb.
But as when, long winter passed, his fibrous veins
Stiff and contract with stormy cold, some oak,
Hallowed by patriot legend, and with birth
Of world-feared realm coëval, feels, one morn,
His tender leaflets buddening in the breeze,
And loosening in the light; hears himself breathe,
With self-felicitant murmur; waves his boughs
Towards every casual wing in welcome; laughs
To know himself alive; his gay, old heart,
Tingling 'neath spring's regenerative touch,
Swells with the sense already of worshipping praise
He through his shade shall reap from beasts and men,
Stretched grateful, at his huge roots, there to enjoy
Life's natural sacrament of rest; while round
His leafy tent prowl summer heats, in vain
Ravening; so, I, faith's festive light refound,
Live fourfold, and in this my soul, beyond
All world-force, feeling the' elements of heaven
Struggle for loftier and more perfect life,
Like-natured with the infinite, joy with joy
Speechless, as earth, when she God's smile returns.

Clara.
But even if all mysterious rites thou hast learned,
The spirit's probation, and just progress; still,
Till pride of knowledge in the humility ends
Of wisdom; and all proud desires of power
In righteous service manwards, and to God,
Thou hast learned nought, and lived in vain.

Festus.
I am one
Contented with his call, who knows the world
Progresses just as heretofore, by wrongs
Much, and by rights a little; who, possessed
By absolutest indifference to the run
Of fortune's and the world's blind turmoil, waits
His destined task, as mariner late storm-tossed,
By his beached boat stretched, swarthening in the sun,
Lists the quick creeping flood. I seem to have passed
All world-life, all desire. My blood fulfils
Its orbit as the stars their round in heaven
With a cool constancy even I admire.
What would my monitress? For the soul to have passed
Passion and doubt, twin helps, twin foes, and trust
Illimitably in God, who builds his heaven

569

On love, the life-link between himself and man;
And our immortal know the interior arc
Of his more vast eternal, seems true life,
Nor all unworthy of high intelligence;—
Which life attained the aspiring spirit shall find
Unselfish virtue's meed; the rational joy
And satisfaction just, to us accruing,
Of spiritual holiness which to us outsprings
Direct and radius-like from God's own heart,
Eternal therefore; and the gracious boon
Of infinite amendment fixed by God
On all free spirit though peccant, surely at last
Amenable, as imperfect, narrow, dark,
To suasions of the infinite perfect light;
Thence penitent and progressive; yes, to know
Him, the' universal being, in time deployed
Through forms innumerable, the all lifeful stars,
Globules that float through his galactic veins,
And yon spherebounding sea, the shimmering fringe
Of his broad skirts world-spangled, spread o'er space;
One self-evolving essence which all things
O'errules and underlies; the source eterne
Of all conceptive nature; to mere life
Life elemental, with the permanent flow
Of streams, and virtual immortality
Of mountains; to earth's annual growth the sense
Adding of animate instinct; but in man
Self-knowledge of the whole, its parts, plan, end,
Its author, and his own, whose advent here
Flesh hallows; in whose consciousness of sin,
And the ill, the imperfect, the inadequate
Attempts we make to realize truth and good,
Our finite thwarts the Infinite; and makes
The natural cross both suffer; but whose death,
When soul that's bound on earth is loosed in heaven,
Shows us the reascendant god, is life
Eternal, life celestial, life divine.

Clara.
May such be ours!

Festus.
Oh, may it! To me thy life
Redeems a long sad passed, and fills with sense
Of joy unutterable the brief to come.
As a fountain which from Andëan heights art-led
Into palatial gardens, massed with flowers,
Though far beguiled and long repressed, jets up
At last columnar, seeming so to express
Its own and nature's innocent glee; nor can,
Though of all rills simplest, secretest, conceal
Pre-eminency of source, but, 'gainst its will,
Itself encrowns with soft and scintillant snows

570

Of night-starred silence vindicative, and coy,
And colourless perfection of pure life,
Such as earth owns, heaven neighbouring; thus too, thou
To me, sweet, come, reanimatest the world
Howbeit not of thine element, and the soul
With recollection of celestial things
Serenest, only impartible from on high.

XXXVII.

Not on one plane indeviable, the soul
Makes way, but moonlike waveringly as though
Not to advance for a time content; the while
Urged by interior fate to compass heaven
Pauseless; the spirit's instruction still proceeds;
And God's original end itself fulfil.
Soul commune solitary with God; faith, prayer
Strengthen the spirit meekly sustained by sense
Of travail, for the world's weal fate to endure
And rule. God, through his angel, tidings blessed
To man sends of acceptance sealed; his choice
Pacific ratified. Yet welcome though,
The heaven imputed charge, now imminent, weights
The aspiring soul with prescient grief, if heaven's
Free testimony make glad, and man's assent
General, but unproclaimed to power God-vouched
With calm fill now inalienable for aye.

A lonely Lodge among the Snowy Mountains.
Festus alone; afterwards Guardian Angel.
Festus.
I feel as if I could devour the days
Till the time came when I shall gain mine end;
God shall have made me ruler, and all worlds
Signed the sublime recognizance. Till then,
Even as a boat lies rocking on the beach,
Waiting the one white wave to float it free,
Wait I the great event;—too great it seems.
Yet, Lord! thou knowest the power I seek for sought
For man's good and thy glory, and its desire
By thee inspired. As I use it use thou me.
Thou hast said that such I shall enjoy, and then,
My mission and thine ends accomplished, here,
I seek a world where souls begin again,
Or life take up from where death broke it at.
Like disproportion there 'tween will and power
As here, may not be. If not, I shall be happy.
I feel no bounds. I cannot think but thought

571

On thought springs up, illimitably, around,
As a great forest sows itself; but here
There is nor ground nor light enough to live.
Sealike, I would be everywhere at once;
And, sensible of the natural competence
To outspread my spirit o'er all the endless world,
Would act at all points. Bound to one, I feel,
So poor mere place is, with ubiquity weighed,
As well nigh nowhere. Sense, flesh, feeling, fail
Before the imperious mind's feet as the dust
She treads, windlike lifts up and leaves behind.
How mind will act with body glorified
And spiritualized, and senses fined,
And pointed brilliantwise, we know not. Here,
Even, it may be wrong in us to deem
The senses degradations, otherwise
Than as fine steps, whereby the queenly soul
Comes down from her bright throne to view the mass
She hath dominion over, and the things
Of her inheritance; and reascends,
With an indignant fiery purity,
Not to be touched, her seat. The visible world,
Whereby God maketh nature known to us,
Is not derogatory unto himself,
As the pure Spirit Infinite. A world
Is but, perhaps, a sense of God's whereby
He may explain his nature, and receive
Fit pleasure. But the hour is hard at hand,
When time's gray wing shall winnow all away,
Heavens, stars, earth's atoms: when Creator mind
And mind create shall know each other; worlds,
Bodies put off, and man his Maker meet
Where all, who through the universe do well,
Embrace their hearts' desire; what things they will
And whom remember; live, too, where they list;
And with the beings they love best, and God,
Inherit and inhabit boundless bliss.
Hear me, all-favouring God! my latest prayer;
Thou unto whom all nations of the world
Lift up their hearts, like grass-blades to the sun;
Who all things hast, save need of aught; who hast given me
Earth and her all; give from thy garner stored
With good, some sign Lord now in proof to earth
My prayers are with thee; that they rend the clouds,
And, rising through the sightless dark of space,
Reach to thy central throne. Oh! let me feel,
What was my constant dream in my young years,
And is in all my better moments now,—
My hope, my faith, my nature's sum and end,
Oneness with thee and heaven. Lord! make me sure

572

My soul already is in unison
With the triumphant. Ah! I surely hear
The voices of the spirits of the saints,
And witnesses to the redeeming truth;
Not, as of old, in scanty scattered strains,
Breathed from the caves of earth and cells of cities,—
Nor as the voice of martyr choked with fire,—
But in one solemn hymn of joy as when
From the bright walls of the heavenly city they
Looked on the war of hell, host upon host,
Foiled by God's single sword before their gates
Of perfect pearl;—nearer and nearer now!
This is the sign, O God! which thou hast given,
And I will praise thee through eternity.

Saints from Heaven.

Call all who love thee, Lord! to thee,
Thou knowest how they long
To leave these broken lays, and aid
In heaven's unceasing song;
How they long, Lord! to go to thee,
And hail thee with their eyes,—
Thee in thy blessedness, and all
The nations of the skies;

All who have loved thee and done well,
Of every age, creed, clime;
The host of saved ones from the ends
And all the worlds of time:
The wise in matter and in mind,
The soldier, sage, and priest,
King, prophet, hero, saint, and bard,
The greatest soul and least;

The old and young and very babe,
The maiden and the youth,
All re-born angels of one age—
The age of heaven and truth;
The rich, the poor, the good, the bad,
Redeemed alike from sin;
Lord! close the book of time, and let
Eternity begin.

Festus.
Will ye away, ye blessed? To God I then
Commend ye, and my soul with yours; and midst
The light ye live, in, oh! mind ye of the days
Sunless, and starless nights, myriads on earth
Pass without faith's one ray, and pray for those
Who in the world's dark womb bound, know not yet,
Through indifference, ignorance, or disbelief,
Their sire, God. Lord of all earth, all worlds, all heavens,
Lift up to thine my spirit; let me so share
The comfort of thy love, that while ordained
To my great task, no more misgivings, fears,
Nor mortal doubts, the soul chill, thou by thy love
Hast hallowed, and so made like molten gold

573

The mould that holds it precious; or for thine
Own ends, if such thou suffer, may they pass
Quickly and traceless, perish; all thoughts of earth
All deathpangs too o'ercome, may I with thy chosen,
Seraphs and saints, and all-possessing souls,
Which minister through the universe, to thee,
Enthroned in spirit's intensest bliss, succeed
To heaven for ever.

Guardian Angel.
Hear, mortal, and believe.
The soul once saved shall never cease from bliss.
She doth not sin. The deeds which look like sin,
The flesh and the false world, are all to her
Hallowed and glorified. The world is changed.
She hath a resurrection unto God,
While in the flesh, before the final one,
And is with God. Her state shall never fail.
Even the molten granite which hath split
Mountains, and lieth now like curdled blood
In marble veins, shall flow again when comes
The heat which is to end all; when the air
Is as a ravening fire, and what at first
Produced, at last consumeth; but the soul
Redeemed is dear to God as his own throne,
And shall no sooner perish. Hearken, man!
Will thou distrust God?

Festus.
God I ne'er distrust.

Guardian Angel.
Perchance his dooms perplex thee; thou wouldst know
Why this, why that, were ta'en. If that, by charm
Of world-lore and all mysteries abstruse,
Art's secular sanctities and accomplishments,
Would have divert thy heart, thy life absorbed
As fain she would, to her own ends: if this,
Of sway ambitious, had foreurged the arm
Of empire, ere among men's minds the need
And good of universal peace became
Compeer, in thine, of conscience purified
And life sublimed and hallowed; had life's friend,
Though cordial and sincere, infected thine
With his soul's selfish purports, love of power,
Wealth, knowledge, state and rule for any good
Narrower than all thy kind's; the stars had stopped
Their sacred march. All fates are in God's hand;
And whether by their own presumption, pride,
Passion or ignorance, this or that one cease,
Perish, man knows not, angel knows not. All
Know it is just. Doubt thou on doubt no more.
Prepare then for the power and lot most high
Whereto the Lord hath called thee. He hath heard
The prayers thou hast now besought him with, heart-strained,

574

And bids me tell thee, shrink not, doubt not. He
Will comfort and uphold thee at the end.

Festus.
Thou art mine angel guard! I recognize,
In every holy feature of thy face,
The instigated thoughts of heaven which oft
In my world wanderings blessed me; in thy touch,
The virtuous resolution; in thy voice,
The warning and foreknowledge unexplained,
Not unesteemed, prompting to do or shun;
And in thy smile joy total and supreme.

Guardian Angel.
But death's eternal secret all must hear.

Festus.
I fear, I fear this miracle of death
Is something terrible.

Guardian Angel.
Where faith were not
In God's all-moulding hand, such fear were well.
As when aërial voyager—in car
Strung pensile 'neath some huge and gaseous globe,
That but by loftier levity attains
Life's limit, upwards eyes the Infinite,
Formless and vast as deity; then, while through
His mind, himself a wind-steered atom—pass
Inexplicable thoughts and doubts sublime,
And troublous forecast of his travel's end,
Pores, wistful, downwards on the sea of clouds,
Peaked far below his feet in billowy hills,
Sea over sea, whose vaporous baptism he
Must plunge through, ere he sets where fortune lists,
Or tyrant gusts decree; so 'twixt all truth
And death, the uncertain soul, sustained alone
By its own insubstantive powers, less free
Than mutable, sees no safety in its course,
Nor fixèd goal afar. But, soul-assured,
Rests on the rock-foundations of God's word;
Nor brooks the awful liberty to doubt.

Festus.
My soul feels firmer; fitter for the end,
Too soon, come when it will. But while life lasts
This holy mystery of incertitude,
Lawed of God, doubtless, to some good, rules all.
As when from some broad bluff where rival winds,
Hold haughty revelry, by night we see
The lurid lights of a huge city lie
Below, like an abyss of fallen stars,
Marked dully from those heavenly ones, and feel
The storm and stress of transit, though subdued,
And as with deadened thunder, still the ear,
More than day's roar and the tempestuous tides
Of social strife; so, calling back our years,
We note where youth's bright aspirations soar
O'er life's dim actions; how, too, as we age,

575

Life's recollections more than present deeds
Or hopes, mind's courts judicial crowd; while there,
Still, by her balance, sits everlasting doubt
Poising and pondering all things. But to God,
Go angel, and declare that I repent
Of all misdeeds; that but for his own grace
I should repent of my whole life; that on
That grace, which now hath sanctified the whole,
I trust for all the rest of it, and then
For ever; that I am prepared to act
And suffer as he bids, and in all things
To do his will rejoicing.

Guardian Angel.
It is done.

Festus.
Oh! I repent me of a thousand sins,
In number as the breaths which I have breathed.
Am I forgiven?

Guardian Angel.
Child of God, thou art.
It is God prompts, inspires, and answers prayer;
Not sin, nor yet repentance, which avails:
And none can truly worship but who have
The earnest of their glory from on high,
God's nature in them. It is the love of God
The extatic sense of oneness with all things,
And special worship towards himself that thrills
Through life's self-conscious chord, vibrant in him,
Harmonious with the universe, which makes
Our sole fit claim to being immortal; that
Wanting nor willing, the world cannot worship.
And whether the lip speak, or in inspired
Silence, we clasp our hearts as a shut book
Of song unsung, the silence and the speech
Is each his; and as coming from and going
To him, is worthy of him and his love.
Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to truth;
The expiration of the thing inspired.
Above the battling rock-storm of this world
Lies heaven's great calm, through which as through a bell,
Tolleth the tongue of God eternally,
Calling to worship. Whoso hears that tongue
Worships. The spirit enters with the sound,
Preaching the one and universal word,
The God word, which is spirit, life, and light;
The written word to one race, the unwrit
Revealment to the thousand peopled world.
The ear which hears is preattuned in heaven,
The eye which sees prevision hath ere birth.
But the just future shall to many give,
Gifts which the partial present doles to few;
To all the glory of obeying God.

Festus.
The knowledge of God is the wisdom of man—

576

This is the end of being, wisdom; this
Of wisdom, action; and of action, rest;
And of rest, bliss; that by experience sage
Of good and ill, the diametric powers
Which thwart the world, the thrice-born might discern,
With the undeflected spirit pure from heaven,
That he who makes, unbuilding, saves the whole;
In wisdom's holy spirit all renewed.
To know this, is to read the runes of old,
Wrought in the time-outlasting rock; to see
Unblinded in the heart of light; to feel
Keen through the soul, the same essential strain,
Which vivifies the clear and fire-eyed stars,
Still harping their serene and silvery spell
In the perpetual presence of the skies,
And of the world-cored calm, where silence sits
In secret light all hidden; this to know—
Brings down the fiery unction from on high,
Chrism spiritual of heaven's eternal sun,
Which hallows and ordains the regnant soul;
Transmutes the splendid fluid of the frame
Into a fountain of divine delight,
And renovative nature;—shows us earth,
One with the great galactic line of life
Which parts the hemispheral palm of heaven;
This with all spheres of being makes concord
As at the first creation, in that peace,
Earth's hope, heaven's joy, the choice of the elect,
Life's grace, God's blessing. And as time's vesper hymn
The starry matins of eternity
Precedes, and dawn of being in the new heavens,
To know this, is to know we shall depart
Into the storm-surrounding calm on high,
The sacred cirque, the all-central infinite,
Of that self-blessedness wherein abides
Our God, all kind, all loving, all beloved;—
To feel life one great ritual, and its laws,
Writ in the vital rubric of the blood,
Flow in obedience, and flow out command,
In sealike circulation; and be here
Accepted as a gift by him who gives
An empire as an alms, nor counts it aught,
So long as all his creatures joy in him,
The great Rejoicer of the universe,
Whom all the boundless spheres of being bless.

Angel.
I go. Thy God is with thee. We shall meet
Ere long, no more to part.

Festus.
Hear, angel-guard!
Hie thee to heaven, and say in man's behalf,
Perfect as creatural limits will let be,

577

All aptnesses of heaven and earth complete,
All being's best aims accomplished, God's and man's,
Truth, union, peace, society's triple crown
Secured, 'twere well, ere fall befal, earth cease.
I have chosen; and all the ambitious hopes of life,
Proud schemes of power prolonged; huge length of days;
And all that secret wisdom toiled to achieve
One hour shall wreck.

Guardian Angel.
It is best for all. Farewell!

Festus.
It is sweet to feel we are encircled here
By breath of angels as the stars by heaven;
And the soul's own relations, all divine,
As kind as even those of blood;—and thus,
While friends and kin, like Saturn's double rings,
Cheer us along our orbit, we may feel
We are not lone in life, but that earth's part
Of heaven and all things. Left now lonely here,
Like a gray gaunt menhir by the all-wasting sea,
The solitude impersonate, nature's ebb
Surviewing, let me my life o'erlook. I see,
Not inconspicuous, hence:—an islet fair
Fertile; with waste spots; washed by death's wide main,
All streams of life emotional gulphing; skyed
By boundless thought; and, albeit sunned by faith,
And heavenly love, sin-clouded; passion swept
As though the nest of storms; ribbed through by chains
Of mountain acts; immoveable shackles these;
No subtlest sophist can dislink; no priest
Pretentious loose; no angel bid fall off.
Acts are for ever. Thoughts, like dreamclouds, come
Unbidden, and go: nay, oft 'neath reason's ray
Evaporate, cease, unknown to the heart or God.
But deeds die not; though trodden below the ground
They seed for ever. Yet the coming clears;
The chaos of uncertainties, the storm-fires
Of thought-search, feeling, I have passed through, henceforth
By force of fate foregone, though scarcely now,
Shadows to me, of truth, life sure—no more
Vex; nor, dragged captive, groan I, where'er doubt
Skims in his fugitive tents, pitched here, pitched there;
But the well-built walls of castled certainty
Me, voluntary, detain, faith's guest, faith's friend
Undauntable—dreadless of all siege; nor awed
Of the twinned strife, waged ere the birth of things,
Of freedom against fate, mere liberty,
The inferior marking; spirit more high, the stress
Of virtue's laws, and reason's despotry;
Until through every range is reached the soul
In whose great essence fate with freedom ones.
Called by his sovereign mandate thus to reign

578

In earth and death beyond, my spirit, as air
No arrow wounds, passive to every hest
The All-sire sends forth, abides. Are God's ways now
Less marvellous than of old, with men? Lacks one
Due witness in his own considerate heart,
Of impulse, guidance, warning, sway divine?
All things controlling to concerted ends
Material or of mind? Through what dim paths,
Unconscious seemingly of all approach
Truthwards, I have trode; how secret wisdom's ways;
And through what mazy discipline at last,
In thought's free centre summed and ended, I
Soul perfected am come. How things despised
Once ignorantly, have since in life's complete,
But graduated evolvement, gained just power,
True trust and dignity. How the spirit, cleared
From every doubt,—the black o'erbelted clouds
Of mystery rounding the orbed world, is now
To faith, pure simple life, and conscious joy
Of being with deity concentrate, returned.
See love and knowledge, superficial tests,
Though once deemed satisfying, now proved but means
Soul perfective for heavenlier ends. Command,
Life's crowning proof I feel, if or towards self,
Or man's good bent. And this now nerves me, I
Obedient though reluctant, armed for fight,
By faithful love, wisdom divine, and meek
Philosophy, whose broad and rational fan,
All doctrine winnowing, windlike leaves truth sole,
The vital seed of science; with such food
Celestial, the sense quickening that nought bars
Man's conscience from commune divine, and heaven's
Own inspiration; she, life's guard and guide,
From creeds opposed like verities draws; annuls
All rancour; mediatizes the proud points
Of old and worldwide worships, and declares,
As every faith begins and ends in God,
The virtual spirit of all, love; earth-life, rite
Initiative to life divine. Man's heart,
So bettered in its aims shall yet with all
In heaven beat tunably. Pursuits, desires,
Affections, passions which once specious made
Existence and experience seeming sage,
Paled 'fore death's breathless stride shall cease, and leave
Rapt union only with the eternal mind
And concourse with its ends. For, once approved
The illusoriness of things, the barrenness
Of knowledge, and occupation; the unworth
Life's solid-seeming bubble infilms, the cares,
The needs which here disfigure time, the wrongs

579

Society most in virtue's name enacts,
Maugre the prime decrees staunch conscience owns
Heaven sown, innate; man spiritually framed
Upon the scale of gods, with broods of stars
Coæval, vast in years, perfectible even
To the mid point where mixed humanity blends
With pure divinity and parental, views,
In God's unbounded and immediate being,
All secondary existence reunite;
By beauty of purity drawn; by holiness
Of thought and godliest love of love supreme;
All hopes amassed, all ends concentrate there.
To know the truth of God, by none without
His special love known; in accord to act
With sanctified intelligences that rule,
Each, as the finger of God, a world; to feel
Heart and mind one, with all we rule or serve;
Mind, everywhere like-motived, passioned; ours
Toned all to endure, but hopeful of things best,
As ultimately and only bound to be;
To know each new conception gained of God's
All blessing nature, proof of commune pure
With deity, and of his divine embrace;
Makes the round good I have longed for, and by grace
God, now, such capabilities perfected, grants.
Come then, the end at once. Nay, wherefore not?
Content with recognition just from spirits
Of orders highest, selectest round me,—even
As when Jove's prosperous star, upclimbing slow
Behind some hill-based city, obscured at first
By urban exhalations, and confused
With earthlier luminaries, draws soon, serene
Towards the upper rooms of space, and the bays bridging,
And flat wide wastes of wet and weedy sand;
With beamy path, shows plainly planetwise,
Through grandeur of patience, and the ascent to heights
More and more pure continually, by hosts
Fraternal, in bright conclave welcomed, there
With them heaven's arch to tread, and the rare blue air
Respire, of immortality, let my soul,
By fate and faith empowered all eminence here
To o'erpass; misjudgment's fog cleared, and rank mists
Of slander: passion's cloud-scud, and all fires
Fatuous or vaporous, ignorant praise ill rates
As lights perennial, henceforth of this high end
Assured, and state celestial, life's last aim
And holiest duty, God to obey, fulfil.
The world's precipitate opposition changed
To tolerant acquiescence, man's whole strength
May still need marshalling 'gainst destruction's ranks

580

Should these contest the world-realm yet, or those
Their Lord's disposal of time's ultimate gifts
Defy, and power's supreme arrangements. Hence
I live but in the future; earth in me
Breathes only, and in my choice; choice, heaven-approved.
Too long perhaps withdrawn, too glad to escape
Once the o'ermastering world, my solitude,
Myself, it is now for me to quit, and life's
Opposing interests, influences, contemned,
Work out for all a freer, worthier fate.
As one on coast half cave, half crag, but caught
By tempest, savage breast-room finds, and peace,
In the sudden silence of a rocky rift,
Nought visible thence but storm of foam-flakes floating
Before its mouth like wild words, from white lips
Wrung reckless, desperate tossed; save roar of sea
Nought heard, and his own, his hurried breathing;—awed
By the sensible stillness round him of all else,
And vague unreasoning fears lest thunders thrice
Reverberant smote, should casually unloose
The natural vault-work o'er his head, and make
Safer to face, without, the hurricane drift
Rock shivering, than abide in that grim cell
Its calm, so deathful possibly; tides the while
Mounting, night falling, his now dread retreat
By lightning searched, he at last from his niche burst forth,
Braves resolute, all; so I, long periods passed,
Of dolorous exile and seclusion, seek
Through the tempestuous clash of human wills,
And general hate, save of the good and wise,
Mightier than others, or themselves deem, earth's,
Mine own, and man's convergent destinies.

581

XXXVIII.

Union of God with nature man their son
Hymns; and heaven thanking for all earthly good
Perfected in humanity, with his bride,
Sibylline, he,—as prophet bards of old
Their morn and noontide service,—chants, alterne,
Earth's evensong, earth's vespers; night at hand.
Hope of the wise and good through time, the world
Shown bettered, but by virtue's noblest plans
Thought out of genius, and through patient aid
Of brethren, saintliest lovers of their kind,
So patent made, the holy and sage at last
For their best aims and worthiest deeds dare hope
God's sanction. Still, let nature grieve, as wont:
Man, woman, angel, weep earth's coming end;
End that so chosen shall show earth's final race
Still parted; these self-ranged to serve God's will;
These, contrary, their own ends; fate still, by death
Not,—as ill deemed—unalterable. God just,
God kind, accepts, all penitence, at all times.

Garden Terrace, by the Sea; Cliff and Wood near: Town in distance.
Festus and Clara.
Festus.
O days of heaven and earth, when all things seem
Perfection, issuant from some central soul
Whose life all love, all happiness, transfused
Through being we share, and in humane degree
Enjoy, nay more enhance; for man's delight
In virtue and holy thought redounds to God's.
And as heaven's calm immense, intense, the wind
Ceaselessly operative pervades, and so
Faintly to us, God's mode of being conveys
And action spiritual, we too the more
By deed of mind we range the world, and rise
To thought serene celestial, and devote
Our spirits to inmost commune with his works;
In him our source confessed, our base in them;
Knowing the duties, destinies of souls;
Self-charged their wellbeing to promote, and train
The immortal up towards deity, so far
Do we God's work, and bear the stamp divine
Of perfectness, progression. To perceive
Our oneness with the universe, and feel
The joyous mystery which each special life
Binds to the conscious infinite immasked
In its own creations, brings the intuitive soul
Such fine delight as simple gods of old
Pleased cheaply, felt, who budged unseen the streets

582

Of cities dedicate; and beside some shrine
Hearkening their names invoked, and scenting myrrh
Or nard, bewrayed their presence with a smile,
Men took for playful lightnings, such as cast
From Pallas' filial hand gleam wide,—but home
Returned, find every prayer they had prayed fulfilled.
The soul self satisfied of being which knows
The absolute spirit and infinite; on whose head
Their holy hands the ages have imposed,
Teeming with sevenfold boons; who through himself
Feels flow the vital and invisible force
Which to its will compels all, but through all
Makes harmony of its most tyrannous laws,
Subjection grateful; even in wild extremes,
Beauty inevitable; and,—though for a time
Ill, like some arrogant cloud that blurs the sun,
Through the wide welkin riot, at last good
Predominant o'er all evil, in man's heart
Mixed, as corruption serves to engender life
For better ends, he, like flower sweets to the sun
Light erst instilled, drawn Godwards, in whom souls
Forelive first as in cause pretemporal, rests
From toilful apprehension of the whole,
In spirit sabbatic; and the heavens and earth,
And various nature's sympathetic life
Each in their generations, hails divine.
Somewhat to feel in common with all life
Human, instinctive, vegetive, to trace
One vital force through life leaf light; the vast
Of nature's powers and products, or her fair
And delicate outgrowths; river, mountain, main,
Forest or floweret, gives the spirit access
To God a thousand ways; and so secures
His favourable acceptance as we make
Mention within our minds of all his good.
On wild and heathery turf to bask, or cool
Green sod of meads, or bloomy lawn where rose,
Laurel and lily cluster, loam-born scents
With flowery incense mingling; to recline
Dreamy and passive to all influences
Cloudlet and sun thrill through the sensitive breast,
By rivulets elm o'erarched, and lulling lapse
Of rippling wavelets glittering, and the oft
Redimpled eddy slowly concurrent; stretched
'Neath blos'my trees, gaze through their silvery snow,
On air's blue heights inviolable; to scale
Perilously some sheer browed cliff, that day's
Salvation thenceforth ne'er forgot, or cling,
Only not vanquished by the vindictive blast,
Prone to the craggy nape of giant peak,

583

Whence the rapt eye may crowd into its ball
A visioned kingdom; forth to steal at eve,
Grave tryst to keep with tutelar stars, and trace
Their prosperous walk through night; or mark them rise,
Till, with their fair reflection midst the lake,
They meet in tremulous joy; cave-hidden to watch
The moonlit cataract, sheeted like a ghost,
Muttering in awful monotone its one
Intelligible word of life; to list
Far off, the torrent's inarticulate roar
Blend with the storm-wind through the wood, till both
In those inaudible harmonies silence copes,
Die; to contest the strength of confluent streams;
The rushing rain to face, heaven's holy rite
Of sprinkling, oft to priest at nature's shrine
Serving, prelustrant; to imbreast the gale
Healthful, reanimative, the breath divine
Of the great world spirit, that where he will,
Blowing with aery baptism reimpregns
With new life principles man's sacred frame;
Desert and savage shore to roam, all thought
Feeling, strung tense by soleness, and the sense
Of high equality with aught create;
Star-like, to haunt wastes spatial, where alone
Mid clear aired wilds the sunfires purify
And founts rock smitten of God, the spirit sincere,
Insensible of limits, may grow to feel
Like broad simplicity; and learn to love
Of very lonesomeness the elements,
Our kingly kin tetrarchal, as the powers
That start all shapes, and close; uniting thus
Things sensible and things animate in one realm,
Our own heart's royalty;—thus aye to live
Part absolute of the world's essential cause,
Free, arbitrary; creative of all truth
Conviction, mental impress; in oneself
Enjoyer of the universe, co-mate
With nature's eldest dignities, self ordained,
Self consecrate, enthroned, is to regain
Our birthright from us filched by the false world,
Irreverent, mean; our heart to re-immerse
In being's primal font; our covenant faith
With nature reaffirm, and so accept
Absolvence by the eternal spirit from life's
Vain toils and deadening trivialities; renew
Our soul's first sacrament, and take in God
With mindful extasie to ourselves, and sense
Of the world-bosoming deity, who all
By reason made, in love sustains, and, just
In judgment, all will bless; 'tis to conceive

584

By force of vital sympathies the whole;
And be, and act through all; it is to feel
Our spirits collateral flow with time's broad flood,
Even as our heart's blood coursing aye, like pulsed
With earth's unhesitant streams; 'tis to possess
Souls self adjusted to the whole round of things,
The central life, the infinite. Man alone,
Conscious alike of nature and of God,
Brings both into communion; sanctifies
With sympathy the naked elements;
And—like the mediator he is, inspires,
Appreciative of all his blessings here,
That joy in God God's works enkindle in him.
When thus by wisdom's clearsight he first views,
With eye grown practised to the infinite,
Whether on mount, mid desert, or withdrawn
In chambered loneliness and studious calm,
Those inner spheres wherein dwell goodness, truth;
Peace, love, the inborn sense of God; and knows
That God subsists in virtue and holiness,
As in material forms the essential force
Impalpable, yet there,—which underlies
The common properties of things; 'neath all
Defect perfection; soul-spheres these that rule,
And mould this volatile world whose shows, that hour
Lift themselves lightly off mistlike, we find
Instamped through being's universal self,
Proof of our prime conception there; and here,
To such as love humanity, divine
Adoption; and, life's loftiest end to come,
A spirit regenerate, glorified, in full
Concord with God and nature. Such delights
Of sun, sea, hill, and bleak and windbleached wastes,
And silence superhuman of the skies,
Are in wise solitude as the drumming world
Knows not nor dreams of. Enter therefore thou
Into thyself, and be at one with God.
Thus being, we trueliest live. To will what's just;
To love what's pure; to seek man's peace as God's;
And aid his worthier aims; to feed on truths
Soul-liberating, supreme; our daily choice
Being such to assimilate, and to all commend
As gracious, saving, best, makes us in part
Celestial, and in ours inhearts the faith
Of everlasting being. Prophetic man
Who can foreset the stars their stations; winds
Weigh; and his own mind's virtues deify,
A larger, freer, happier, holier life
Shall lead than all the painful pietism
Of peddling sects could compass. God's great dower

585

To the accepted spirit of life eterne,
Seems in excess no more when those he loves
He with the fulness of perfection crowns,
The gift of his own nature; through the soul's
System so working that it is he who us
Capacitates to enjoy, and is himself
The enjoyment he confers; feast, host, guest, grace
And blessing; teaching that, with us, to strive
For heaven is heaven; to love God is to be,
Ourselves, divine. For as yon space spanning bow,
The miracle of a moment, which adorns
And seems all things to comprehend, earth, sea
And firmament made its debtors, proud to pay
Their subsidy of admiring joy, its end
Achieved, God's truth to certify, in the skies'
Boundless and formless unity disappears;
So, arched an instant on the eternal disk
Of life divine, man's soul,—embracing here
This world-frame in itself, each, but for heaven,
Baseless, incredible,—ceasing gradual, grows
With its object one; this death-conditioned life,
These vari-coloured pomps of transient time,
These elements of existence dropped, whose end
Is as was their beginning; and assumed
In plenitude of deity, and the immense
Seclusion of his essence, reattains
Identity with being still ours, once all.

Clara.
How deeply doubly dear are beauties seen
Never enough, but now untimely lost.

Festus.
It is this o'erglooms, o'erwhelms me. Life's best aims,
Seclusion's studious joys, conceptive mind,
Peopling the void with many a voice and shape
Of truth impersonate, heeding not alone
This day-wave on whose feathering ridge we ride,
But the wild world of billows bound to break
Yet on time's patient shore; home's daily dues;
The converse spoken or writ of a choice friend;
Words winnowed well of sages of the light,
Garnered in books, the elect of ages, crowned
By man's depurate judgment, have so long
Consoled me, so long made, still to me make,
With the delightful talk of one I love,
Society, and in rich exchange supplied,
For the tumultuous trifling of the times,
And their puffed out inanities, a retreat
Complacent, where the soul, of wisdom's charms
Fired, may the shades of kingly sages guest,
Earth's silver-shielded band of minds immortal,
The livelong day,—listing them sadly enlarge

586

On virtue and the good most high of life;
The passionless perfection of our race;
On being and becoming,—the eterne
Entangled in the temporal,—reason, truth
Essential, and divine fate;—or, though fixed,
Where fancy, palmer-wise, at will, may roam
The faëry fields of fiction and romance,
Alive with princely knights, queens, giants, churls;
Enchantresses steel castled, whose wan smiles
Win realms, but too soon, at a breath, dissolved:—
Or isles of song Elysian, trode by muse
Rose crowned, new ditties lilting day by day;—
That I, thus privileged, dare not deem me all
Unblessed, nor my Lord chide for good desired,
Withholden; rather, even as now, on life
Passed, calmly ruminant, on the unmeasured tracts
Of world-lore reaped; and death deriding truths,
Heaven-planted in man's soul, wrung by brave hand
Guided of angels, from the stifling clutch
Of unveracious faiths, 'tween God and man
Intrusive, but amended, sanctioned now
By the hallowing spirit, his disentangling hand
All life's knots smoothening, recognize; nay, him
More heartfully revere, who the free boon
Of everlasting union, sharing here
With whom he would, in arbitrary delight,
All lesser gifts discards, with one more grand
His favourites to consumm.

Clara.
Hours such as these
To me, time's worthiest seem; yes, when we die,
Memory will bless those moments most in life
We passed in worship, drinking in the breath
Of the Great Spirit, who with his presence fills
Impalpably, the whole; but of whom the wise
Only aware, a life co-apt, within
His definite governance, live. Oh, I have felt
At such times as my heart had wings; nay, what
Lacked, that we took not flight at once, for heaven?

Festus.
To know all these, life's purest, loftiest joys,
Commensurate even with mind, death-doomed; to feel
Earth hourly fail, might sadden us,—gloried not
Faith more in God's decree than man's desire.

Clara.
Yon sun, whose sea-set here, to happier globes
Bodes light-birth; yon faint crescent, in the sky
Airily hovering, like to a spirit scarce 'scaped
From death-pyres still aglow; yon snow-piled peaks
Clouds pearly o'erfilm; all things invite, as though
On his own one day—paled half of sanctity,
Of joy half—God had smiled; to round with thought
Divine and meditative, on him who made.

587

Than that, nought fitter, nor more blessed, though earth
And we at the next breath, ceased. Having all we would,
Even as in heaven, free commune, Lord! with thee,
To whom all life instinctive, tree and flower,
Breathe, thankful for their being, praise; and hill,
River and grove, and high towered town, remote
Their universal hymn attune, let us
Our gratulant souls unite with nature's; we
As some their life-loved union, ours with God,
Thus, praiseful consecrating.

Festus.
What need? As when
Midst summer's still noon we, cliff-chaired, view earth,
And sea, land-locked, lost in each other's arms,
Union ineffable; so of perfected souls,
One with the natural deity they adore;
God hears the unworded worship. Think on him.

Clara.
Nature is free-tongued. All things need their word.
Yon clouds, these flowerets which perfume our feet,
In masses golden and azure and all hues,
In splendour with each other vieing, to me,
Day's dewy footsteps nightwards seem to grace
With notes of venerant praise. Blend we with theirs,
While those yet poise their delicate pinions, these
Their incense freelier pour, earth's vesper hymn!

Festus.
Nay then, me fellow celebrant with thyself
Hold, priestess: for, nor shrine high roofed, with arch
Marmoreal, nor orbicular dome, need we;
Nor interpleading choir our spirits to guide
Godwards; between the immaculate heavens and us
No form its shadow casts. Soul-worship pure
Leaps at one infinite bound from prostrate hearts
Into God's bosom, where transmute it bides,
And with the eternal ones. Not these alone;
All things, O God, by thee made, are to thee
Holy, and with true praisefulness inspired;
Nature and all her powers, thy servitors,
Our friends and fellow-worshippers: and man,
Arch-priest of earth, most bounden thee to adore.
Thou, O great sun, whose life eliciting ray
But shadoweth forth his greater grace, who showers
On spiritual and natural world alike
His inexhaustless good: sun-kindler, him,
Sun-quencher, praise thou and adore, who thee
Fixed in full heaven his mighty miniature;
Him, infinite centre, unseen, from whose force
Original, radiate all things, and to whom,
Inly illumining every soul of life,
Parental, they relapse; even as thy beams,
Though world-soiled thine all brightening breast regain.

588

Sun, magnify thy maker!

Clara.
Moon, whose gleam
Reflective, types the God-light, wherewith shines
Man's soul, lead thou, through each sabbatic change
That errant essence to One invariable;
And, as some pilgrim maid, from shrine to shrine
Circling, insatiate of all sanctities,
Her resolute soul to expand with fullest faith,
And holiest memories; teach us, light of night,
By thy superb procession through yon skies,
Mansioned with many a world of bliss, to enlarge
Our spirits with love of God, nor know of wane,
Save in the world's attraction; so best serving
Our Lord and thine.

Festus.
Twin spheres, perpetual rest
This showing, pauseless motion that, between
Whose fires, for purifying, the storied day,
The night, earth's star tipped shadow pass, and space,
World spangled, 'neath whose sensible folds, his garb,
The formless spirit within we trace; your Lord
Attest, the eternal reason of the whole;
Hidden in himself, self manifestive cause;
Former of forms; who, source and sum of life
Bade being be; and, from his boundless deeps
Of reason, drew law primitive and supreme.
Ye orbs, self moved, which, rounding with our own,
The infinite within, without, yourselves
Find nought but God, oh, shout aloud your proofs,
All heavens may hear; and even the nebulous star,
Of pale, irresolute sheen, with fearful joy
Vibrant, conclude God is, our Lord, our Sire;
Not chaos, chance, nor matter; law inert,
Unconscious; nor yourselves, contingent, weak,
Who might have been, as now, or not have been.
Chance hurled him prostrate in the dusk when asked
The crucial question; chaos cowled his head
In twice redoubled darkness, witting nought;
Mute matter heard not; no! it was mind most skilled
All made by one omnific word; all named
His children; laid on every head his hand,
Whose radiant impress shows there still; and dowered
With natural life, second to nought save soul.
Wherefore, bright worlds, your parent spirit exalt;
Leap 'mid your solar dance; with awful mirth
Joy in yourselves and gladden in your God.
He through your space spread tome, of light and peace,
And fates more blessed than these, of rights divine
And heavenly royalties, his starry rede
To man predictive speaks, whose words are worlds.

Clara.
Stars restful, who, day's dazzling veil withdrawn,

589

Heaven's sanctuary illume, your laws, powers, spheres,
Graduate, each gift of the variousness he sole
Holds in perfective fulness, reason of thanks
Past numbering, him, through all life mundane, adore
Harmoniously. Time's tawdry pageants pass.
States, empires come—pause, vanish. O'er yon hills,
Your globèd fires, in dread-fraught sameliness
Of time and place, rise punctual. Shall stars show
More than their founder, faithful?

Festus.
Hear, all orbs,
Moveless, or who, persistent in extremes,
Course fast and far the firmament, and, ours quit,
Warm ye full oft by alien hearths; while proud
Of chaste and chartered liberties, your sire,
Source, force and end of every law by him
To creatures limited, he by all bonds unbound,
Above law, praise the Lawgiver; who poured ye forth
As from an urn of life; flooding with light
All space, but gave space, light, life, bound and scope;
Order divine, connate with heaven; and form,
First of all laws, whereby the immensurable,
To finite fitted, fills the organic whole:
Mirror material of substantive mind;
For nothing finite, nought conceivable
By us, can of itself be, more than God,
Beyond thought, to aught else existence owe.
Effect pretemporal of eternal cause,
Heaven in thy highest reach, thy starriest depth,
Thy bosom's inmost infinite, sanctify,
With thy voluminous silence him all wise;
Who, holding all perfections absolute
And necessary, as all conclusions time,
As space orbs, as earth nature's countless germs,
The great progressive power which prompts with life
Their self-renewing functions, and unseals
The flowing forces of this sensible sphere—
Aye tabernacleth in thee.

Clara.
And thou, O earth,
Who movest in music, like a harper's hand,
White among gleamy chords, thine elements,
Stringed fourfold, laud him with all sounds of joy;
With joy august and dread, great mother world,
Whose veins within, the fire Promethean stolen
Truly of heaven, and him, who planned the plains
Ætherial, streams from unbeginning time
To time unending; cease not, earth, his praise,
Who in himself imbreasts both thee and heaven.

Festus.
O heart of fire, which, central, towards our feet
Throbbest, through rock girders zone wide, and huge halls
Where stalactital mountains hang, and whence

590

Are fed the deep gorged volcanoes that erst scarred
With channelled flame-floods and hot torrent ore,
Earth's soft face, healing now; material shape
First looming, which, uncurbed and uncompressed,
Swept'st o'er the naked void, a burning mist;
Till, stiffened gradual, the constituent mass,
Once reek-like, severing into self-poised spheres,
In gravity rejoiced, space circling; him
Greet as liege loyal Master, who, of old,
On the high mount of world enlightening law—
For law is love defined—toward those who brake
So soon the tabled stones of blessing, tamed down,
And tempered into intolerable blaze,
The eye glance of his wrath; fire, praise thou God;
Earliest of worldly rudiments, and last;
Voracious even of death, though bodiless,
Though soulless. Retributive cause, him praise.

Clara.
Grey ocean, folding in thine arms our earth
Still shrinking tremulous from the booming shock
Of thy foam-crested legions, laud the arm
Which, forceful, hallowed thine abysmal bed.
All not thine own, with other thronèd thieves—
Thou must yield up. What justice bids restore
In thy store count not. Neither quite despair.
The prayers of purity and of penitent sin
Like favourites be of God. He, righteous, reads,
As through a tear in nature's eye, thy deeps
Reluctant; and just restitution claims
From thee, from all, before acceptance. Night
And morn, thy voice, or tolling to repose
I hear, or whispering out of sleep. To earth's
Tongue, and all elements, join then, Ocean, thine;
Him equitable, only unsearchable, name.

Festus.
Tides, that with tranquil transport woo the shore,
Or vehement rapture roused by passionate airs,
Clash, cymbalwise, your white hands. He is God
Who fashioned you, evoked you from the void
Impalpable of vapour, and with force
Mobile, as with resistless will endowed.
Spell over in every wave his words of love,
When first he taught you whence ye were; and when,
Wearied with vast librations to and fro,
And sparklings infinite, twinkling time away,
Your deep breasts heave with long and dreamy swell,
Let his dread name, untongued, initiate sleep,
And hallow all your calm.

Clara.
Him, ebb and flood,
Now heaped in billowy darkness, now ungloomed
By streamy globelets of liquescent flame,

591

Like light chaotic struggling for free life,
Worship in all your width; who bade ye flow
From fountains elemental, and condensed,
In the cool concave of his spacious hand,
The world air limitless, wherein he breathed
All being into being. Laud your God.

Festus.
Winds, tireless wayfarers of air, like aged
With the beginning, his all fatherly lips
Bless, that from dull vacuity woke ye, now
Laden with death tempestuous, but with wafts
Oftener of his world vivifying breath,
Who matter into movement touching, gave ye
To rove the earth as spirits space: his name
In secret sigh as lovers wont, therewith
All elements divinizing; and while ye sweep
Earth in bland waves aërial, gales health-rise,
The white wheat winnowing for high granaries,
A life-whole benediction breathe. What less
Can creature its Creator give? What more?
Him whirlwinds, hurricanes, wild winged storms, confess,
Earthquakes, and powers pernicious; that the breast
Of this fair orb have rent aforetime; nor
This sole; but once disrupting into space
Our midmost planet, shot, diffuse through void,
A shower of falling worlds; just judgment;—praise
Destructive him, him recreative, who yet
Those shattered world-shards shall restore, conglobed
In innocent unity, and to happier life
Their intercursive tenants. Meteors, him,
And lightnings, laud with thunders thousandfold,
Who do his bidden hests, and justify
God's dealings, when beneath high bannered tent,
The feastful conqueror, thunder riven, down drops
Before his guests astound; or, on his throne,
Struck by a falling star, loosed from God's hand,
The tyrant, curse incarnate, suddenly ends
In face of all the land he had outraged. Him,
Agents of wrath and angels of his ire,
Laud, who, too, slays with uncompassionate bolt
Shepherd and sheep blameless alike, in shade
Of weathering crag, death dreamed not of, nor ill;
Praise him, nathless, that man's whole race may know
Submiss, prepared, the incomprehensible One;
Who in himself all motives, means, and ends,
Compriseth, first and final cause of things.
Nor by necessity he, nor dubious choice
Of specious good, acts; but the best wills, does,
As absolute viewed, now, relative or eterne.

Clara.
Snow, with thy voiceless tongue, from either pole

592

To zenith, preach in godliest silence God;
Who ice and frost, thy sterner brethren, armed
With glassy key to lock earth's lifewarm veins;
Praise him reanimative. Thy glistening down,
Thy blossoming starlets, thy crystalline flowers,
White as the wing of angel waved in heaven
Only, shed thankful. God exalts the pure.
On peaks sky peering, and earth's orbèd brow
Upturned as in God's arms, thy Lord adore.

Festus.
Night's dazzling dancers, tall-speared, which invade
Air northward, with explosive rays, the stars'
Pale armies routing breathless, and sure morn
Confounding with false outbursts; ominous once
Of imminent battle strife, fear's restless ears
Deafening with clash imaginary of arms;
With all your fiery tongues, lambent of heaven,
Peal forth to God your resonant thanks, that ye,
Mere militant maskers known, men now your play
With curious questings mark, and cheerful awe;
For knowledge hath undreaded ye; no more
Prefigurative of war. Haste, days of peace,
Humanity's perfection, peace; our path
Convergent with divinity, there; oh, haste.
Man shall be one in spirit as God is one.
Our God is Lord of peace.

Clara.
Breathe, glittering bow,
All hued, ere burst, as though from beauty o'ertense,
Thy brief, bright life throughout, one solemn thought;
God's oath, how thankworthy; the passed passed by;
Which, sparing earth, thee special witness hight,
Man's heart to reassure 'gainst ruining storms;
While far beyond, bides aye the intent divine
Of precreative love. Him, bow of heaven,
God's holy oath made visible here, adore.

Festus.
Laud him ye cloudlets snow-bosomed, which morn
Or eve serve, golden robed; or, rich in rain,
Blend tearful blessings with the reviling blast;
Praise ye, whose life expends itself in good,
The source surceaseless of all blessings. Hymn
Your God, while hurrying on wing-footed winds,
His messages of mercy to scorched lands
Dreaming of violet wreaths, dew soaked, to cool
Their sun seared breasts, and widening deserts strew
With riot of rank greenery; or, when slow
Beneath the moon, ye swoon away utterly,
Earth breathing lightlier then; each blade and bloom
Bedropped with fragrant moist; cheer ye; your life
Culmines in death; for, from your birth-hour, known

593

Of no man, midst the black Atlantic, wroth
At ancient bans ignored, which betwixt old
And young world barred alliance, now with coils
The voiceable lightnings dart through, perfected,
Till life's last moment, God your whole career
Sums in his eye's broad purpose. What, round heaven,
Hath seemlier honour? Praise him for your end.

Clara.
Storm breasting cliffs, whose feet, earth stained, the deep
Laveth, as with the humility of a god;
Oh! of that steadfast strength make much, your Lord
Hath sunken you in and grounded you, as signs
Of his unshaken truth, against whose face
The spray of years from time's unnumbered tides,
Dashes in vain. Rocks, glory in your host;
Earth framer he who hath kinged you with his name,
And ta'en your own; whose guests are ye for life;
And then, make room.

Festus.
Ye too, who sit serene,
Firstborn of earth and ancients of the snow;
Time's youthmates; mountains, solemn as God's thoughts
Pondering the chain of being, life with life
Linked in connatural lineage round to him;
Praise ye his favouring hand, who in earth's murk breast
Moulded your giant forms; who, age by age,
Tried ye with flood, and tested ye with fire;
Proved ye with darkness; racked ye patiently,
As schooling for perfection; and at last,
Crowned and consummate in all mysteries,
Led into sacred light, the outmost court
Of God's invisible temple, whose dome is life,
Whose sanctuary the soul; him, aye at rise
And set of sun, when comeliest ye appear,
In fiery albs arrayed and burning snows,
To adore fail not; for he in your most pure
Beauty delights; and to his heavenly eye,
Whose loveliness shows boundless as his love,
All beauteousness is holy. Laud ye him,
Whose mystic name heaven, secret and sublime,
Hath yet to you assured. Him praise, too, plains,
Teeming with succulent life, glebe, glade, and lea,
With homeliest blossoms blushing now, with fruit,
Boughed soon delicious; or solemnized with corn;
Confess who blessed you with the privilege man
To banquet: man, earth's king.

Clara.
Coy valleys, lisp
Well pleased, your thanks, that God's attempering hand
Hath smoothed ye meet for happiest ends, and made
Shadows substantial of the calm which broods,
Welkin-like, o'er those upper deeps of soul

594

Vain worldling sounds not, nor pride's keel profanes.
Gush into song, shy nooks; dells fall and swell,
With every deep pulsation of earth's heart,
Into melodious praise, even as joy's eye
Melts in the measureless relief of tears.
Him whose ordaining hand your solitudes
Hath given to peace, adore: who heaved the hills,
Your dales too delved as deep.

Festus.
Vine mantled knolls,
Whence 'stils the grape blood choicest juice that charms
God's tabled round, the earth; him, palm plumed vales,
Where glow all fruits of tropic fame; and fields
That temperate taste, the palate's luxe, rules; him,
Hot wilds of herbage sparse; all healing roots,
And wholesome poisons; spice and incense; all
For our sustenance and delight which fructify,
Or flourish bosky; laurel, myrtle, and bay;
Oil-olive, guide to wisdom, pledge of peace;
Gum, balm, acacia's sinless branch, and myrrh;
Pour forth your sweet breath'd thanks, till starry earth,
Still fair, still dear, still in her matron prime,
With thickening odours cloud her sacred path,
Like a swung censer through the templed skies.

Clara.
Bloom bedded pleasances, where leisured taste
Luxuriates, as in recollected dreams
Of life prenatal in God's garden; him,
How fair, the beautifier of all worlds,
Worship; and all ye plants, well nurtured, praise;
Who quickened you from dark and obdurate seed;
Suppled with balmy showers your growthful roots;
Gave daily dews; tapered your shapely stems
In his fine fingers; with free foliage clad,
Pendent and plenteous; starred your heads with flowers,
Crosswise or radiate; praise him with meek pride.
It was his considerate touch your bosoms bathed
With heaven's translucent hues; your heart-buds dyed
In sunsets paradisal; steeped your leaves,
One moment, in ætherial scents; and streaked
With veinlets velvet lined, your nectarous cups;
None less, none else. O virgin lily, queen
Of flowers, immaculate, vaunt, with all thy kin
Most delicate, vaunt, not less than forest oaken,
Or cedarn, fane-famed, ebon, sandal, rose;
Settim, God's ark, or gopher, man's, his hand;
Nor shadowy pine copse, soundless as the void.

Festus.
Fair fountains, rainbow haunted, art hath voiced
Through marble lips, and 'mid palatial courts
Bade whisper God's great name; you that, like strings
Of liquid silver, ripple 'neath nature's touch,
In lifeful melody; and, through daisied banks,

595

By your own sweet song solaced, seek your end
In joy unlessenable: and you, tameless springs,
Froth flecked, that seawards gash the plashy moor;
Or rush, rock maddened, adown deep jagged ravines,
Chant, murmurous him; him, rill and runnel praise.

Clara.
Praise him, ye rivers, vastening as ye roll
From ice cleft or turfed slope to where the main
Lurks watchful, with your waters soft and sweet,
To slake his lips salt parched, and tribute seize
In kind of his liege loves; and you, from heights
Flush with the eagle's eyrie, plunging, death
Scorning as life, for are not ye immortal?
And you, from chasmy and glacial wilds, death-white,
Or pine clad gore, leaping, cloud shrouded; praise
His name who on your first precipitous steps,
And pretty stumbling falls smiled stealthily;
Your infant course mapped; fed with milky mists;
And, guiding to good ends the waywardest course,
Those swift, still feet subservient made to bear
Treasures of sap to meadland, swathed in sward,
Or leagues of grain, heart strengthening; all the sun,
Of annual growth, or root perennial, helps
Mature, with you, praise him for.

Festus.
Seas, land ringed,
Primæval ocean's relics, and ye fresh
And lucid lakelets, where the stark fisher, man,
First floated his rough raft, and the mud hut
He, beaverlike, had builded, fortified;
Or where, hard by, the cave-born savage left
His liberal bones to mell with those he had gnawn;
Rejoice, and bless your Maker, that in your breast
Lie glassed now cities and castled palaces,
Wood nested cots, rich mansions, gold topped fanes,
And seats of science; while o'er your faces skim
Barks self impelled, art's noblest, manliest feat.
God, necessary in essence, in will free,
Because illimitable, and free to free
From general law his special will and ours,
Power self determinative, through all his works
In apt proportions acts to ends well planned;
Rules rudest nature by dynamic law,
Spatially operative; his own designs
Oft modifying by like wise; empowers
Organic being with instinct; but to mind
Leaves liberty of motive; and himself
Conceals, to allow to man and angel scope
Accountable. Let all life praise its Lord
Therefore; of beasts, if tamed, as God's claimed once,
Ours now, whose inoffensive natures he,
Most amiable, as ensamples chose of his

596

All suffering deity; laud him, end and head
Of sacrifice; if wild, his prescience praise,
Which would not mean should nobler strains restrict.
Dwellers in ocean's wave roofed halls, who range,
Constant, from shoal to deep, from deep to shoal;
Him worship, heavenly husbandman, who drives
Yearly his star-plough o'er the brine, and seeds
Its furrows with your innumerous hosts of life.
Cloud haunters, ocean now, the skies anon
Enthralling, greet him gratefully who gave
Your strength despotic, and powers of threefold use;
Wave cradled, riding winds, land tripping; hail
Your Maker irresponsible, who all being
Founded, not found made, and so justified.

Clara.
And you, bright song birds, whose felicitous lives
In flight, thought-swift, and music sweet as love,
Heart-harmony, elapse; song, even and morn,
Concerted, trill, grateful to him who grants
Your innocent souls earth's luxuries, and in life
Here, something like the liberties of heaven.

Festus.
Your kind with force, choice honoured, and so allied
By nature's lord to the world's conscious sense
And rational energy, him, ye serpent seed,
Skin sloughing, witness annual of new birth;
Him, too, ye insect tribes, thrice-lived, who joy
In natural resurrection, and fulfil
The cycle of being, glorified with wings;
Of luminous bodies, ye; or, honeyed swarms,
In politic craft pre-eminent, and sage use
Of toil divisional with constructive skill,
Praise; praise ye gay broods, dawn-born, night-slain, air
With filmy winglet fanning; nor yet grieve. Death,
Impatient not for you alone, secures
In his dark couch, after life's giddying reel,
A sequel undisturbed. Ye animate motes,
Uneyeable, whose curt existence we
Laugh into nought at every breath; yet deem
Your Maker bounteous. Life, how scant soever,
Seems good, as loaned of God, whose arm all space
Outspans, whose eye all mirrors.

Clara.
Him, then, hymn,
O universal nature, passive power
Of deity, which, with the minutest thing
Subsistent, owest thyself totally to God;
The whole embracing in thy boundless breast;
Our world-sire praise; while yet immortal man,
The intelligible light, silent, within,
Shall clearlier hear than though each atom spake;

597

Or every cloudlet thundered, Worship God.

Festus.
Him worship, all of human blood who roam,
Tribal, in wilds; for breath, food, freedom, praise;
Ye more, who, fixèd, live the life refined
Of cities, amid societies of the wise;
Graced with all science, learning, interchange
Of luxuries, profitable to all, and wealth
Art's delicate toil, or lowliest labour, earns:
For polity based on manly rights; for life
Social, by moral law, with usance kind,
Confederate, ruled; for nature's comely boons;
For virtue's bonds majestic; mind's delights;
The affections of the heart; the joys of sense;
Man's common usefulness to man, whereby
The general good conceived of thee, and blessed
In that conception, issues: for the gift
Those fitnesses to trace in all thy works,
Which, proved the intent, glads and sublimes man's soul,
Conclusive of resemblant powers; and deeds
Like, but how little like! Him bless for power
To separate truth from error, right from wrong;
For love of knowledge; art's purifying grace;
For cultured mind; for means material thralled
In thousand shapes by inventive wit; and now
Forces of progress, aids to man's high race,
And holy future; succourers of the world;
Aye working through part ends its end complete,
Through beauty, good, truth; order realized,
Expressed or thought, its way back to God's breast;
Seat both of law and liberty, needful each
For mere creation; he o'er both supreme.
Praise him, all bounteous, for the intelligence
Inquisitive, which from every being would wrest
The reason of its existence, nor, tongue-stilled,
Slacks but in gaze of thee, before whose face
Bow angel essences, in number more
Than night's invisible stars, wherewith, commixed,
The forces of the universe stand; him praise
Who is praised of all. Praise him for power to praise.

Clara.
Ye continents many-peopled, and all isles,
Children of earth and ocean; and thou, chief,
Who hast the birthright and the blessing; swell
With jubilant joy, the song to him supreme,
Father and friend of life; who man's crude needs
Mildens with heavenly sanctions, by seer's voice
Or prophet's; justice names his assessor;
Gives nations the reward of well-doing, peace,
While evildoers themselves accurse by war;
Presumptuous states by races checks, and stress
Of personal interaction; now lays bare

598

To scoffing ages popular policy;
Now scheming power's recondite cunning; heeds
Indignant, empires wrongs reciprocate,
Just rights upheld complacent; to all doles
Such excellencies as wisdom warrants. Nought
Lacks he true 'compt of, who, with all that think,
Most intimate secretly, cons both, and weighs
Men's individual deeds; which, though we feign
Transient to hold and trivial, by him glimpsed
Prove not phænomenal merely, but imply
Eternal bearings; and here rooted, there
Fruit freely; if to our contentment, well;
If elsewise, still reproachless he, whose end,
In all creating, was to diffuse himself
Through life in uncontaminate good; to all
As present, and to those he loves most nigh.
Him, in the heights of his divinity, praise,
The depths of his humanity; the breadth
Of being; him redemptive who assumed
Into his perfect nature ours, complete
Deficiency; who set in manhood, rose
In deity, praise; all lands, lips, nations, hail
His laudable name; till, passed from world to world,
Their shining feet it reach, who, glorious, tread,
Starpaved and straight, the streets of Paradise.
Him, workers of the world, world-wielder him,
Blessed in activity, blesser of repose,
Praise ceaseless, who with alternative rest
And action, nature's self-perpetuate scheme
Poises; contracting or expanding force
The ages hoard, the hours distribute; him
Who, coupling life with motion, builds on rest
Eternal heaven. Who labour's law revere,
The sweat of honest toil, deeming a dew
Grateful to God, more than that beads the rose,
Laud, manful, him, ye who gaunt want, fell foe
To life and knowledge, battling daily, yet
Wot well where'er on earth be faith and truth,
Aim holy or aspiration, there is God;
That all who do their best of hand or mind,
Do well; and thought devout may every task,
Not of itself unholy, hallow. Him
Unchangeable himself, but of all change
Impressive; self-necessitating cause;
Ye truth searchers exalt, whose trust to know
All verity as in heaven, he, sovereign soul
Of being, divines, and turns to simplest faith;
Who, more than all, is; whom apparent things,
Fruit transient of eternal root unseen,
Conspire to honour, from life's primal cell,

599

To heaven's immeasurable arch, and hosts
Contiguous of all being; which both worlds
Exterior and intrinsic, link in powers
Reactive; and God indwelling in the world
Evince; but God, most just; who towards us acts
As he would have us act towards all and him;
Exacting from perfection perfect deed,
Granting the imperfect, grace; his equity such,
Who loves the spirit longsuffering like himself;
But his own binds in normal righteousness
To manwards, and assumes the splendid coil,
Wherewith, attaching nature to himself,
True freedom means obedience to high law,—
Our spirits he liberates and exalts. Him praise,
In whose divine perception all things made,
Move congruous, designate for final good;
Happy because all holy; in his love
Boundless; in virtue sumless; who for us
Made truth compensate nature, and with light
Kinned and companioned her; the soul's guide that,
This, body's; him let man praise, who, empowered
With high capacities to administer here,
Creation's uses and our own, yet dares,
Humbly, the stores his Lord for him amassed
In times bygone, adjust; and the vague force
Nature inbred at birth, condenses, fines;
The code of life interprets; and, inspired
Conform with reason, faculty supreme,
Divine, and to both common, truth revealed,
As march the ages on, makes more humane,
And so more worthy God.

Clara.
Him, deeplier taught
In holiest mysteries, blessed o'er all in soul,
Simple or sage, ye of celestial strain,
Yet earth-born, laud, who caused ye, finite, know
Him infinite; and his nature imaging
In your conditional essence, be to him
Through mediate kinship of his Son, your whole
Existence one sole glorifying act.
Though like a permanent star-cloud mid the void,
Insoluble, the cross, still shadowing shame
With honour, earth's hate thwarted by God's love,
Proclaim it, man redeemed, as e'er thy first
Of blessings. Thanks for all things, but for this,
Thanks threefold!

Festus.
Oh! it were a blessèd thing
Faith such as thine to have held unfaltering; ne'er
To have fainted, failed, waned, wavered. 'Tis as when
In Alp-land, on some white and fanglike crag,
Keen, cruel as Time's tooth, earth's blanched extreme,

600

Trophy of this world's desolateness, I've seen
A splintered cross, memorial frail, upreared
By perilous piety, once, and since, of aught
Save vulturous levity of wing, untopped;
By snows path-hating, blurred; by gelid rains
Glazed; streaming, now, with long and icy tears;
Now tempest-rapt from vision; now, to the eye
Restored by curative lightnings; by the sun's
First rays saluted, by his last; there, still,
Ever, with arms outstretched, obtesting all
The elements, even as though sphere-kinned, it stands,
Dumb, but compelling God, and the white world
Adjuring, to behold, that scorching shine,
Storm, nor all mutable seasons can defeat
Its changeless cheer; itself so frail, yet sign
Of that's eternal; so, 'gainst time's assaults,
'Gainst nature's banded powers, thy faith thou hold'st
Inalterable, triumphant.

Clara.
Yea, I hold.

Festus.
God grant thee this to enjoy, and to the end!
Mine always such I dare not say; but now,
Lord of our life! of this sure, more than aught,
Let us, while praising thee for all, most praise
For thy regenerant spirit which hallowing life,
Ones it with thine; whereby we dread not death,
The house the sun must pass through, and the sign
Which us initiates into heaven; but know
Death means reunion with the deathless; range
With our translated elders; consciousness
Enlarged of the eternal spirit unmarred
By bodily needments; life at one with God;
And faith's huge promises,—our souls assume
The future, and we covenant here for heaven,—
Confirmed by fate. Here, and for ever, him
All souls, praise. Praise him, lovers of his law
Unwrit, word unrevealed, but to yourselves;
Not for those faculties only with all life
Ye own instinctive, but each mental gift
Enlightened conscience sways; for conscience' self;
For those affections not the world, not man,
Not country, friendship, love exhausts, nor blood,
While just devotion burns in us towards him;
For those high powers, conceptions, hopes, which fill
Or thrill our breasts; which prophets e'er have preached,
Or nature hints we share, the unboundedness
Of time, existence, will; the ennobling sense
Of duteousness towards men, of debt to God;
For reason, whose undimmed outlook o'er the world,
Is balanced by right insight into ourselves;
For a life whitening through probation, here;

601

For deep convictions of a loftier lot,
An ampler scope of spirit, a draught of bliss
Endless, to be, nearer the fount; praise him
Who godly care spares not, nor stores, that we,
Saved from our niggard selves, and unto him
Assimilate, may, through good deeds faith inspired;
Just estimate of divine love towards all made;
Life venerable and pure; the calm supreme
And clear of sacred souls, the quietude
Intense and infinite, gain of holy thoughts;
Such as he loves and lives in.

Clara.
Laud ye God,
Saviour and instigator of all good;
Yet not the less impenetrable! who ill
O'errules to good; both mingles; ends and means
Metes; sparing now, as space were something scant;
Now lavish of waste worlds; atomic force
Economizing here; there solar powers
Permitting perish. What then? That sun hath long
Compassed its end; this atom a world's head
May yet be. Him, ye just in soul, adore,
Who, latent deity, gives place to all,
And takes away; whose holy attributes,
Essential as his being, ray and rule
From him, through all his rational works; the source
Of every virtuous tie the world of soul
Acknowledgeth, as from wisdom's sacred breast
Spontaneous sprung; whereby God laws himself
In natural rectitude, with all create;
He who all made, himself to manifest;
And to intelligent creatures gave to know,
Possess, communicate, his love and truth;
His righteousness to emulate; to share
His holiness; his beatitude enjoy;
And, in his wisdom skilled, in his intents
Proved, and heart purified, for others' weal
Most labouring, taught to crown with moral good
The vast divine of things.

Festus.
But though the mass
Be holy, yet the first-fruits God most loves.
Praise, therefore, him, ye sons of light, and bless
The communable deity, who, albeit,
Perpetual passion suffering at men's hands,
Hoards not from those he loves divinity; him,
Participants of his kingly state, whose wills
With his conjoined, subregnant rule, the same,
Though in narrower round, as his; praise him supreme,
Who loves the praises he in hymns inspires,
Or, wordlessly, imbreathes. Let all forechosen;
Ambitious only of more humility;

602

Exalted but to serve; who, while in time,
Bide truelier in the eternal state, which rests
To each world proper, pillared upon the passed
And future in the soul, praise him; ye, most,
Whose privilege is to please God perfectly;
Earth this wise tolerated; whereto ye lend,
Like fire from faith's accepted offering,
The savour of salvation; whose heart's hope
That all souls might be saved, by him inspired,
Transfigured into fate, reads sure in heaven.
All ways are byeways but the way of God,
So broad, not thought a road. And man's wise heart
Which wide relations with the infallible holds,
Though flawed by error; with all excellence,
Moral and rational; with God immanent
In all things, yet transcendent over all,
Knows him sire, saviour, sanctifier of soul;
Who in their principles cores all ends; combines
Results forestablished with acts freely willed;
Through body clarifies the spirit of man;
And virtue made obligatory, but ruled,
For its validity, rise and close in him.

Clara.
Him praise, ye generations of the passed,
Whose unrenown seems holier than all fame;
All final history in her epitaphs
Of nations notes; him, who the adopted soul
Fills, by sin's absolution, with rich foretaste
Of evil's abolition; the world stamped
With total good. Praise him, ye sceptred saints,
With God, like-minded, glorying in his will,
Impeccable, who muse celestial things;
Whose sins are washed away in seas of love;
Who, liberate from all law, sit judging law;
Whose passion for perfection sated, ye,
Rapt into deity, with your Lord enjoy
Life unitive, life eternal, life divine;
Who revel in futurity, and inhale
The gust of inspiration at his lips;
Of all worlds owner, author of all fates.

Festus.
Who knoweth God the sum of science owns.
The heavens record his handiwork; the earth
Worships his footsteps; life his breath repeats;
The soul his image; everlasting space,
The harmonies of his nature echoing, round
Reflects his vast extension; the great whole
His boundless being, and his infinite mind.

Clara.
Midst, but apart from all, he substance gives
And choice, distinct from others and himself;
Yet himself makes the beauty and the bliss
Of his intelligent universe; its aim,

603

Its orderly source, its endless end; whose rule,
Let justice among equals reign,—is love.
For he with us not varying, harsh or bland,
As our vain 'haviour bids, but in himself
All kind, sufficing, fixed; unroughed by wrath,
By bribeful prayers unsmoothed; towards all his works
Piteous, yea, sentient of faith's faintest sigh,
In all his sweetness, is by none save soul
Saved, apprehensible.

Festus.
Lord, be it for me
With earth's triumphal hymn these lays to blend,
Worthy but of thy blessing that they flow
From gifts thou gavest, reconsecrate to thee;
Whereby in thy dear love thou madest it mine
To interpret nature's elements, and with her
In all her holy tongues commune; to live
In presence of our peers, the powers of heaven,
Sun, moon, and skies star-crowded; clouds, winds, tides;
Born of yon far blue infinite; but all
Predestined to soul service; mine to scan
In greatest minds' great thoughts earth's passed; betimes
Fatal, foreshape the future; mine to know,
In moral might towards thee deific drawn
All spirits in order blessed; mine, henceforth, aye
To extol thee merciful as mighty; thee,
Ours, and all being's, end and author, God.
All things in thee subsistent, thou alone
In thyself art; all eyeing at one glance;
All minding in one thought; in one sole act,
Creating, comprehending, judging all.
Unalterable as silence, thy decrees
Are boundless and for ever. Thy delight
Is in the holy of heaven, and in the heart
Responsive to thy counsels. Even as space,
All things embosoming, is thy mercifulness.
Thy love is life; and they who find thee here,
Find perfectness and peace; eternal gifts;
Peace in themselves, and perfectness in thee.

Clara.
Hallowed and comforted the soul, elate
By pure prostration at God's feet, the world
Meets but scant welcome from us; we half hoped
To have lost what soon we lose for aye and all.

Festus.
I seek no selfish gladness, though to me
High thoughts are life, and life immortal more
Only in conception as divine than this,
Our perishable, in act; yet would not I
Forestall apart from thee those paths, those plans
We have hope to perfect in eternity.
To search together truth space-wide; to soar
In spirit unitedly through all the immense

604

Thus, of celestial thought gives joy sublime,
I know to both. As when by sunset's hues
Invited, some fair falcon, whose broad eye
Mirrors the welkin, through air's shadowy blue
Wheeling with wing unwavering, every plume
Stretched tense, mid sky serenely balanced, calls
Forth from her eyrie, crown of sea-faced crag,
His mightier mate; these twain each other now
In unconceived ellipse, curve following curve,
Redoubled rainbowlike, outsweep; thrice o'er
Snatch from ambition's touch the zenith; mock
With playful fall the expectant earth; now, thwart,
In arbitrary and intercircling flights,
Their mutual orbits, emulous; this below
Echoing the other's cry on high, till heaven
Closes, by hint of stars, the rapt contest.

Clara.
How near earth's end!

Festus.
Earth's future soon is told.
Nigher each hour, the incredible becomes
What sole can be; the key that all unlocks.
For now not only our life's exterior charms,
Earth's beauties perish, but mind's most treasured joys,
Brain-realms pictorial of creative thought,
Fairer than Eden, were that garden all
Fiction entranced, e'er dreamed. Song, art, romance,
Farewell! Hope is, we enjoy not only, there,
The future, but the passed made clear, sublimed,
Perfect. Perchance in life to come a glimpse
May ope, God good, to memory's inward eye
From all imperfect aims, impure views, purged
Of divine fable. If not, be it as God will;
But as when the moon at her full round arrived
Of beauty, uprising, level, from the main,
Late turbulent, smiles to behold the loyal waves'
Awe, and their hush low whispered hear as she
Venerable by birth, though young, just state assumes,
And splendid presidency; these, too, like pleased
With her exact observance of all times,
And the well-lawed conformity to things
Earthly, of things celestial and serene,
As mutually assurant, yield her back,
Considerate, smile for smile; so I,—so thou,
Souls like authentic, each the other's breast
Let fill with pure content.

Clara.
As far as such,
Amassed of all defects, avail.

Festus.
There's one
Defect we have each outlived. We part no more.

605

XXXIX.

Much of the passed is prophecy; and now,
All done, ambition earns his wage, earth's throne,
Throne than all empires wider: proof and prize
Indisputable of peace. A social change
Being wrought, with that like vast in nature's prime,
When the elements less gross than air, condensed
Into mountainous levels, broad footholds made themselves
Of nations,—figuring forth the fateful mind
Pacific, all controlling, war, and worse,
Could worse be, in life's penultimate age. What war
World wide and through all time had failed to achieve,
Sage peace with sensitive hand unseen, wins. Love,
Of mortal things last, nestles within the heart.
Ambition ruined by success; doubt's last
Attack, see, crushed; for though to the edge of hell
Despair bring one self-blindfold, yet turns not
Ours, heaven affianced, false to God, who tries
All spirits; and this, from its own ruin at last,
Like a flag storm-torn, fluttering from its staff,
Evanishing, saves. Earth's elements discohere.

A Gathering of Kings and Peoples.
Festus throned; Lucifer, and Clara.
Festus.
Princes and Peoples! Powers once of earth!
It suits not that I point to ye the path
I trode to reach this sole supreme domain—
This mountain of all mortal might. Enough,
That I am monarch of the world—the world.
Let all acknowledge loyally my laws,
And love me as I them love. It will be best.
No rise against me can stand. I rule of God;
And am God's sceptre here. Think not the world
Is greater than my might—less than my love—
Or that it stretcheth further than mine arm.
Kings! ye are kings no longer. Cast your crowns
Here—for my footstool. Every power is mine.
Nobles! be first in honour. Ye, too, lose
Your place, in place: retrieve yourselves in good.
Peoples! be mighty in obedience.
Let each one labour for the common weal.
Be every man a people in his mind.
Kings—nobles—nations! love me and obey.
I need no aid—no arms. Burn books—break swords!
The world shall rest, and moss itself with peace.

Kings.
Tyrant, we love thee not; and we as one
Man will resist thee.

Festus.
Well I know it. Mark!

606

Ye are all nations, I a single soul.
Yet shall this new world order outlast all.
Behold in me the doomsman of your race.
Will, reason, passions, all shall serve and aid,
Yea your most secret qualities and powers.
Not by the mandate of the mass as wont,
In times gone by for aye, to mark the elect
Of popular will; not by sublime descent
From conquering kings, sit I here; but of God
Called, and of wise men's wisdom, and the force
Supreme of reason, and law of serving love
Intituled and acknowledged, name me lord.

Nobles.
Reason rebels against thee, and condemns
Tyrant and slave alike; exalting this,
Deposing that, adjusting all; as yet
Hope we and mean to do with thee and these.

Festus.
And seek ye to gainstand the faith in God?
O blindest rulers! will ye never learn
Your proper region and due dominance?
Whatever ye rule I rule over you.
All unobstructed power is sanctified.
Divine rule is a tyranny of good.
Mine shall be like it. Tyrant! Well; I am.
I glory in the title; reverence
Myself, for that it is accorded me.
What is above this soul of mine but heaven?

Peoples.
The opposite of rule divine is best
For man. Power gives temptation, which in turn
Sets aside honour, social duty, law,
And right; creates abuse, and abuse strife,
Confusion, retribution, bloodshed, sin.
Though for a season cloud and meteor, sign
Of transient action midst eternal calm,
Usurp the heights of air, yet soon the stars
Their peaceful reign resume; and now at last,
Since earth hath wiser waxed, the people theirs.
Therefore descend thou and make room for us;
Or else thy powers submit to perfect proof,
And our approval, ratified by all.

Lucifer.
These are the proud divisors of times passed,
Brought forward to futurity: the seed
Of souls which live to sow dissension; souls
Who would suspend upon a cable's strand,
A continent of cavil. Go, good friends.
A mightier contest than ye dream, and like
To task all craft acuminous, waits ye yet.
While hangs the world together, these lack not.

Festus.
Nations! behold the day of gladness, long
Craved by all righteous souls, the day of peace,
The feast-day of the Eternal. Sun, main, sky,

607

Beaming each one with God's reflected love,
Their vast content, united, smile. And now
When in these times, earth's latest days, the sea,
His ancient sites revindicate, reigns supreme
O'er all time's storied states, and powers renowned
Of antique policy, heirless empires, cleansed
By God's liege element from the blood of wars,
Sacred and most iniquitous, at the shrines
Poured, of false gods, to this terrene upheaved
Freshliest, and counter-shadowy, where young earth
Unannalled, undefiled, demands as dower
The mighty and immaculate future; now
When heaven round other star than sung of old
Rolls peaceful; star of conquered death, the lyre's
Bright paramount; when, with swift and easy shock,—
As toiling traveller from his shoulder shifts
Towards the day's end, his burthen,—earth shakes off
Her overpoise of old beliefs and stale
Traditions; and with slope celestial trimmed
To happier influences,—still find we things,
Conform to reason most, by the mass most spurned;—
Sad leaven of our original self-defect.

Peoples.
This newest order of things us suits not.

Festus.
Nay,
Ask not how long 'twill last. Meanwhile, enjoy;
Reap all the harvest peace and power can give
Freedom and nature perfected. Let all
Good plans benevolence longs to realize,
Not yet accomplished be achieved. For what
Beside, were boundless power, and peace assured,
One only polity, one sole faith?

Peoples.
We trow not.
We, more than half, throw back the whole thou'dst give;
Want not thy boons, nor thee; would say farewell.

Lucifer.
Their honey smacks of rue, or I mistake.

Festus.
Man's conscience is an angel or a fiend,
According to his deeds. What have I done?
I was the youngest born of destiny,
The favourite of fate, and fortune's heir;
My word for once was law and prophecy.
Speak, spirit! have I forfeited my star?

Lucifer.
Storms give to dust a privilege to rise,
And fly in all men's faces—even kings'!

Peoples.
Monarch, thou rulest nought. We will thee not.

Festus.
What if a million molehills were to league
Their meannesses together, with due pomp,
And to some mountain say,—In the name of God!
Whither dost thou aspire? Does any deem
That great imperial creature would descend

608

From those sublimest solitudes of air,
Where it had dwelt in snowy sanctity,
For ages, ere the mud-made world below
Was more than half conceived, to parley there
At its own footstool, and lay down its crown,
And elemental commune with the skies,
Because its height was so intolerable,
And its supremacy termed tyranny?
Why look ye all amort? Is doomsday come?
Stand forth, and speak, sole servant of my throne!
If aught thou hast to settle and explain—
Or straightway send these nations to their homes.

Peoples.
Our home is where we rule and are content.

Lucifer.
Ye mighty once—ye many weak, give ear!
I and my god—for god he sure must be,
In human form, who sitteth there enthroned—
For readier rule, and for the good of all,
Have cast again the dynasties of earth
According to the courses of the air:—
Therefore, from east, and west, and north, and south,
Four kings ministrant element-like shall bend
Before his feet. Hearken, thou unkinged crowd!
Ye have not sought the good of those ye governed.
The people only for the people care.
Ye seem to have thought earth but a ball for kings
To play with: rolling the royal bauble, empire,
Now east—now west. Your hour and power is past.
Ye are the very vainest of mankind,
As loftiest things weigh lightest. Ye are gone!
Nations, away with them! Nor do ye boast!
Ye find that power means not good, not bliss.
But ye would wed delusion:—now, ye know her.
And she is yours for life—and death—and judgment.
There is no power, nor majesty, save his:
His is the kingdom of the world and glory.
His throne is founded centre-deep by heaven;
And the whole earth doth bless him, and approve
With proud assent, one-minded. As the sun
Fresh risen from hallowing waters which his touch
In turn reconsecrates, by slow ascent,
Persistent, but inevitable, assumes
The zenith, and in judgment throned, his seat,
As standard of all height, gives earth, gives heaven,
To each the same scale, this, your liege, for you
For all, lays down one perfect, level, law,—
His will; and he, at will, will turn the world
As light turns earth round. Greet your lord, and go!

Festus.
All silent! Do they understand?

Lucifer.
Why, yes,
They hold thy gain their loss; that's all.

609

Festus.
O men!
O brethren! deathless mortals, hear me once!—
Listen, ye nations! would ye learn how stands
Your great accompt with those, earth's choice, who me
Have chosen, attend, while I times passed unfold,
Time present, times to come. Men all are born
To serve or rule; no harm, if they who rule
Most, the most serve. To this end I, self-vowed,
Elect of heaven, casting in mind how best
I could man benefit; and soul-grieved to know
Of doubts that in one's fellows' hearts and ours
Dare wretchedly God's being ignore, oft mouthed
By mock philosophy, I, self-sworn to seek
All truth through nature, region none of life,
Inner or outer spared; while through all forms
Material, through the world's broad elements,
All science, graduating, have traced; and joyed,
My way, through fires sphere-cored, the hearth of things
And the atlantëan axis of the world,
Where played time's brood, archaic, fought; air's heights,
And all the undescribed circumference,
Where earth's thick breath thins off to blankest space,
Scaled; ocean's stormy baptistery, world-walled,
Sounded, and trode the high exhilarant snows,
Sparkling like star-dust; while all form extreme
Of socialty, rude, polished, tested, I
One sense of law, in all, one law of right
Finding, one sanctity of blood, proof sure
To man of like rise, end; and while in all
These elements of conclusion joyed to trace
All-where, the god-print of one bounteous hand
Omnific, predisposant: nor, less proof,
Marking of power than love; to view o'er all
Spread the wide wing of God propitiable,
Answerer of prayer, inspirer; in all need
The Lord of provident goodness, by pure hearts
Neared only, and spirit imbued with love of God
And man; a spirit which, sinning, seeks through faith
And penitence, re-access to him the One
Invariable, whose wordless name, as taught
By him, all orders of existence serves
To fraternize, all worlds, all souls unites;
Nor, labouring to this end, though pleased to see
Science, in all her walks, keep step with faith,
Each purifying the other, can soul content,
Through nature's sensible rudiments to have passed
Fruitless, unless in heart, grace-taught; but aye
Wretched to view faith's vast divergences,
One only true 'mong men, to me it came,
As duty and end inspired, to seek in all

610

The essential verity which, to each germane,
All linking, permeated. This hoped, through all
Soul-culture of the passed, and sacred creeds,
Initiative on earth of life divine,
From earliest days,—whose ruinous relics still
Astound, not, sole, through many a faith extinct,
I pilgrim-wise have toiled, but many a fane
Now silent, solitary, save by the sun
Uneyed, unvisited, save by the elements,
With patient foot have trodden; in rock-slabbed tomb,
For the living built as though to expiate sins
Titanic; cell sepulchral midst the moor
For penitence reared or rites regenerative
Of aspirant soul; in stony ark on hill
Piled giant-wise, have knelt, heart-racked, to wring
From those dumb rocks their secret, petrified
Long years since, what their stone of fate, hard by,
And intersecting circles of good and ill,
Mutation, destiny, life, imported; chair
Piacular, scooped from cliff wherein to outwatch
The moon, or trace some fateful birth star end
Its skiey arc, oft rapturous pressed; in these,
Fanes roofless, wandering, stretched o'er heathy downs,
And pillared crags ranged rudely ring-wise, rough,
Shapeless, or shaped like clouds, men's first essay
To circumscribe the infinite, and one spot
Make holier than the rest where God is all;
Have bowed me 'neath the mystic moon, and prayed
Before the altar, hoary, meteoric, once
Encrowned with fire the flood quenched; and these quit
For Parian shafted shrines, shrines such as born
To mount Pentelic, parent of white fanes,
Commemorate in earth's choicest lore, to light,
To wisdom, sacred, to heaven's Lord; or such,
Columnar as illume the broadening sands
Round Tchelminar or Balbeck, to the sun,
Hallowed of old; and thence to those cross-based
Which cloudward towered, or domed, here consecrate
The principle of divine self-sacrifice,
Passing, have in them all, all found, at core,
Identic;—heart prostrate with hand uplift,
Professed man's creed eternal;—God is God;
Nought else; the Infinite, the Eternal, one;
All provident nature is his prophet; man
His son from him first issuant back returns
To him by virtue, and moral light; his law
Is pure and righteous; in its practice, peace
Wisdom, salvation are. He, God, is love;
But just both when he punishes and forgives.

611

Him fear, obey, love, worship. Of all faiths
The essence thus in mine own spirit summed
In fanes both old and new, I, with all rites,
The world-presiding deity, dared to adore,
And knew such service acceptable;—nor less
That God's name ye might know as Love, not Fear;
That hope and not despair might rule your souls
Conceptive of the future life; that war
Earth's vastest curse might cease, and peace the path
Prepare of justice, know, my task hath been,
By secret rites and sacred, many a year,—
As might a river subterrene through caves
Abysmal, issue sunwards seek—to gain
Such light of truth as, lightening soul, might all
Advantage in the scale of being; with sense
Of wisest justice competent to reframe
On base right equitable man's social life;
With saving trust in God, the infinite mind,
Simplest of faiths and the sole true; with arms
Of purest piety in prayer's fervent fires
Wrought indestructible, so to encrown man's soul
That nought of good, save angelhood, scarce remains
For men to attain, that, well nigh reached; and helped
By sagest souls who, operating unseen
As nature's forces, in one law supreme
Have wrought of faith and life, and all good ends
Knotting in one, in me have all success
Crowned; and all this for you.

Peoples.
Thee, king of earth,
We want not, nor await we thy projects.
War when we would, and when war-wearied, peace;
Fair conquest and fair risk we rather love
Than peace enforced, forced union.

Festus.
Ye who speak
Are not the whole.

Peoples.
We are most.

Festus.
Alas for man!
No hope. This grand reunion lasts no more
Than my day. Seer, sage, saint, have wrought in vain.
Thought's pettiest differences are cherished more
Than truth's most vast congruities. In vain
It seems, to have oped the way to truth, and peace,
And reason's sacred cabinet, wherein all
Earth's wise might make their conclave, and the world
Rule bodily, spiritually; in vain to have passed
Through pains and perils without end, to earn
For man the attainable results he spurns;
Peace universal, one pure simple faith,
Through lifts of soul, successive, whence its view
Widened and purified can clearlier hold

612

Manhood's test, virtue; and for all inspired
With love their kind to enlighten, and with proof
Perfective of each soul to serve its race
By loving God, and well-doing.

Peoples.
Be it so.
Good will we not by these means to such end.

Others.
We, king, we homage thee. In thee content,
We hail the great designs of God fulfilled.
Thee for no other end than man to serve,
Enlighten, free in mind, he here hath placed.
Thee for our joy, our perfectness we take,
Our seal of earth's companionship with heaven;
Our hope and our accomplished proof of good.
His laws the only miracles being knows,
And these because from nothingness his will
Evoked them; matter powerless, lawless; time,
Extent, life, mind, the infinite whole his own
Blessed spirit diffused through space, and made all good.

Festus.
Knowledge re-oned now with belief, while men
Deem diversely of lesser ends, God's law
Moral and natural, through man's mean evolved,
Or demonstrate, him shows like kind and wise.
The world hath but just now full use attained
And seisin of its happiest privilege;
For as one who unremembering somewhat seeks
He hath never truly lost, and at last knows
Haply in his hand or bosom, so the world,
God seeking, finds but in those inner heavens,
That peaceful and perfectible nature, man
Long missed, but, recollective, in his breast
Divinely implaced perceives; and now, of self
Recognizant, by true means, ends true achieves.

Lucifer.
Be it! If peace content not mighty man,
What can? For as the people cannot rule
Themselves, so neither may a crowd of kings.
And hence hath been the evil of the world;
Now ceased for ever. War will be no more.
His is the sway of social sovereign peace.
His tyranny is love and good to all.
His is the vice-royed, vouchsafed, reign of God.

Festus.
What wouldst thou angel-guard? for I feel thee near.

Guardian Angel.
Mortal, the end draws nigh. Prepare! For thus
God justifies his ways and manifests
His equitable forecounsel, told in heaven.

Lucifer.
Depart ye nations!

Festus.
Hark! thou fiend, dost hear?

Lucifer.
Ay! it is the death groan of the sons of men—
Thy subjects—King!

613

Festus.
Why hadst thou this so soon?
O men! O brethren! turn your souls to God.

Lucifer.
Why wish the world's conversion? Presently
God will fulfil the thousands known from first,
Whose apex soul alone is lacking, thine.
It is God who brings it all about—not I.

Festus.
I am not ready—and—it shall not be!

Lucifer.
I cannot help it, monarch! and—it is!
Hast not had time for good?

Festus.
One day—perchance.

Lucifer.
Then hold that day as an eternity.

Festus.
All around me die. The earth is one great death-bed.

Lucifer.
Time's tide is nearly out, and sick folk die.

Clara.
Oh! save me, Festus! I have fled to thee,
Through all the countless nations of yon dead—
For well I knew it was thou who sattest there,
To die with thee, if that thou art not death:
And if thou wert, I would not shrink from thee.
I am thine own, own Clara!

Festus.
Thou art safe!
Here in the holy chancel of my heart—
The heavenly end of this our fleshly fane,
I hold thee to communion. Rest thee safe.

Clara.
Men thought I was an angel, as I passed;
And caught up at my feet—but I 'scaped all.
I knew I should die by thee: the soul that loves
Soul-wise alone gives forth true oracles.

Festus.
Then there is faith among these mortals yet.
Thy beauty cometh first, and goeth last—
Willow-like. Welcome!

Clara.
Oh! I am so happy!

Festus.
I speak of thee as of the dead;—the dead
Are alway faithful.

Clara.
I will stay with thee—
Though angels beckon—may I? Let me, love!
I dare not—cannot, take mine eyes from thee,
For fear of looking on the dead. Dear Festus!
I think of thee as when I loved thee first;
For all time since, even as the ebbing sea
Falls in its rise, and loses in its gain,
My heart ne'er passed that hour. It soothes me now.

Festus.
Well, too, I mind me of that day; a day
Fragrant from first to last with sunny flowers;
Of cloudless light, of cloudless love; it passed:
Eve came; the dewy night stole forth, dim-veiled;
Arcturus, heavenly oxherd, bowed his knee
Star-cusped, upon the hill, as though with all
His worlds he worshipped God; his conquering head
Bowed 'neath the orb-gemmed crown, hollow with heaven,

614

God o'er him holds as one who had striven with God,
And gained the day o'er deity. Oh! no more!
Shall we not mind us of that day in heaven?
Thou art the only one hast answered me,
Love to love—life to life.

Clara.
Oh! I am dying!
The heavens are pressing down upon me. God
My father seeks the spirit of his child.

Festus.
Go, golden lily, bloom thou on the breast
Of everlasting sanctity.

Clara.
Farewell!
Give me one kiss—the kiss of life and death—
The only taste of earth I will take to heaven.
Here! let me die, die in it!

Festus.
Last and best!
Now am I one again. Oh! memory runs
To madness, like a river to the sea.
These long illustrious tresses, gold of gold,
Yea, very gold of very gold, which here
Insult all thought of limit; to my touch
Dearer than were the sceptre of the sun,
Wave me no more bright welcome; and these lips,
Whose animated silence sweetlier told
Than talk of other angel, move no more
In silence or in sound; these bright brown eyes,
Still as extinguished stars, no more reflect
The virtues of the heavens. Man's world of old,
Began with woman, mother of all life;
And, after countless ages, now, with thee,
Bride of my soul, death's youngest daughter, ends.
Our union is, and hath been, most in mind,
That perfect, yea, that hallowed; and I end,
As I began, sole as the sun in heaven.
Happy as heaven have I, love, been with thee!
Thine innocent heart hath passed through a pure life,
Like a white dove, wing-sunned through the blue sky.
A better heart God never saved in heaven.
She died as all the good die—blessing—hoping.
There are some hearts aloe-like, flower once, and die
And hers was of them.—Thrall art thou and free:
Free of immortal life though bound of death.
Not the emotional surface of the sea,
Whose form from things without is ta'en, but more
The deep essential quiet of its bed,
Thy soul resembled in the pure profound.
Thy love to me was as the morning dew,
Earth's liquid jewellery, wrought of air,
Young nature's christening; whose every bead,
Round as the globular genesis of things,
And bright as heaven's own gems in diamond set,

615

Emblemed its pure perfection o'er this heart;
Now sun parched, thunder scorched; yet stricken thus,
Feeling myself each hour, each pulse-beat drawn,
More mightily drawn, to join and glory in
All being's everlasting sense of God.
I see the universe made clear with light,
Holy with spirit, pure with deity;
Man the dear son of God to God returned,
And earth's renascent nature throned in heaven.
The voice of ages, syllabled in suns,
Pronounces God's unceasing benison
Upon his bright creation. Time is touched
On all hands by the Eternal: and the world
Is bounded, rounded, ended but by heaven.
Therefore the soul, in death resilient, looks,
Backwards to whence its impulse came, to God;
And all things lovely and divine that here
It loved in spirit, are too, with it conjoined,
And mingled with the future of the stars,
And blissful occupation of all space.
As, pending time, the passed and future cause
Chief reasons, and the present but a point,
So in eternity all's presentness.
Hence therefore from me now all thoughts of earth;
Be they as in a lake of lightning quenched;
In lone annihilation lie entombed;
And memory's pall be buried with the bier.
There lies my soul's sole love: and lo! all life,—
In such time as the pale self-flattering moon,
Who loves to see her likeness in all lakes,
Hath ta'en from her first starlike peep above
The hill, to free wholly her silvery breast,
Her upper and her lower limbs of light,
From dark, detentive earth, and, spurned all ties,
Of all attractions 'sdeignful, southening, soars
Calm, but unpiteous, heavenward,—life hath ceased;
And silence reads the dead world's burial tale.
And death sits quivering, there, and watering
His great gaunt jaw at me. When must I die?

Lucifer.
Say! dost thou feel to be mortal or immortal?

Festus.
Away!—and let me die alone.

Lucifer.
I go:—
And I will come again: but spare thee, now,
One hour, to think—

Festus.
On all things. God, my God!
One hour to sum a life's iniquities!—
One hour to fit me for eternity—
To make me up for judgment and for God!—
Only one hour to curse thee! Nay, for that,
There may be endless hours. God! I despair,—

616

And I am dying. Let me hold my breath!
I know not if I e'er may draw another.
I feel death blowing hard at the lamp of life.
My heart feels filling like a sinking boat;
It will soon be down—down. What will 'come of me?
It is as I always wished it;—I shall die
In darkness, and in silence, and alone.
Even my last wish is petted. God! I thank thee;
It is the earnest of thy coming—what?
Forgiveness? Let it be so: for I know not
What I have done to merit endless pain.
Is pleasure crime? Forbid it, God of bliss!
Who spurn at this world's pleasures, lie to God;
And show they are not worthy of the next.
What are thy joys we know not—nor can we
Come near thee in thy power, nor truth nor justice;
The nearest point wherein we come towards thee,
Is loving—making love—and being happy.
Thou wilt not chronicle our sandlike sins;
For sin is small, and mean, and barren. Good,
Only, is great, and generous, and fruitful.
Number the mountains, not the sands, O God!
God will not look as we do on our deeds;
Nor yet as others. If he more condemn,
Shall he not more approve? A few fair deeds
Bedeck my life, like gilded cherubs on
A tomb, beneath which lies dust, decay, and darkness.
But each is better than the other thinks.
Thank God! man is not to be judged by man;—
Or, man by man the world would damn itself.
What do I see? It is the dead. They rise
In clouds! and clouds come sweeping from all sides,
Upwards to God: and now they all are gone—
Gone, in a moment, to eternity.
But there is something near me.

Spirit.
It is I.

Festus.
Go on! I follow, when it is my time.
Not perfect yet the complement of heaven.
There is no shadow on the face of life:
It is the noon of fate. Why may not I die?
Methinks I shall have yet to slay myself.
I am calm now. Can this be the same heart
Which slept when sleep it did from dizziness,
And pure rapidity of passion, like
The centre circlet of the whirlpool's wheel?
The earth is breaking up; all things are thawing.
River and mountain melt into their atoms;
A little time, and atoms will be all.
The sea boils; and the mountains rise and sink
Like marble bubbles, bursting into death.

617

O thou Hereafter! on whose shore I stand—
Waiting each toppling moment to engulf me—
What am I? Say, thou Present!—say, thou Past!
Ye three wise children of Eternity!
A life?—a death?—and an immortal?—all?
Is this the threefold mystery of man?
The lower, darker Trinity of earth?
It is vain to ask. Nought answers me—not God.
The air grows thick and dark. The sky comes down.
The sun draws round him streaky clouds, like God
Gleaning up wrath. Hope hath leapt off my heart,
Like a false sibyl, fear-smote, from her seat,
And overturned it. I am bound to die.
Why wait, then, here, as an o'erfreighted cloud,
Abandoned by its lightlier winged convoy,
Lags, in some shadowy hollow of the hills,
Scapeless, till death, how dilatory! dissolve.
God! why wilt thou not save? The great round world
Hath wasted to a column beneath my feet.
I will hurl me off it, then; and search the depth
Of space, in this one infinite plunge! Farewell!
To earth, and heaven and God! Doom! spread thy lap;
I come—I come. But no! may God forbear,
To judge the tempted purpose of my heart!
Me hath he stablished here, and he will save;
And I can smile destruction in the face.
Let his strong hand compress the marble world,
And wring the starry fire-blood from its heart;
Still on this earth-core I rejoice in God;
I know him and believe in him as Love,
And this divinest truth he hath inspired,
Mercy to man is justice to himself.
To have held the truth is something, maybe. Yes!
As when in time's remote, even life's gay youth,
Adventurous, tramping upland tracts, towards eve,
Following the sun from rise to rise we spring,
And clearing just this eminence now, now that,
Stretch quick our stride, and hold him yet in heaven,
Nor let depart till certain quite he has marked
As cognizant witness, how we have toiled to keep
His golden company, so one sole truth
God in the soul, attested, glorified,
Pursued through life, I feel, hold still at last
Supreme, consolatory. It lights me here;
And will, till nature's night. But now compute
Thy deeds unwise, thy wasted times and means,
Disservice of the pure, the true, and judge
Thyself condemnable, if in part alone;
Judge justly, judge impartially. But how?
Like to the mighty leaves of light, shook off

618

Autumnal from the tree of time, which strew
In stormy incandescence the sun's heart,
My thoughts, confusedly burning, waste away
This world-enlightener. Soul, what hast thou done?
Hast brought forth a new God, or all the heavens
Stripped of their shining shams and shown the true?
Earth's spiritual idols hurled to hell?
Behold them, ghosts of gods, the evanishing reek
Of lights extinguished. I have seen them all
Huddled in Hades; lives that live no more,
Fast fading into sheer nonentity.
Hast thou, with all things granted to thy wish,
Wrought out thy sovereign end, to warm the world
To worship, love, pure life, thy solar will?
Thy heaven-wide mark, thine universal aim?
Alas! how futile action weighed 'gainst thought!
What mountainlike conceptions swell the mind!
What monumental molehills we achieve!
O grief, O woe, that I so much have thought
Of self; of God so little. Yet to know
Him, holy, gracious, giver of all good,
Forgiver of all evil, were surely enough
To sate the insatiable. In him we rest,
Our spiritual universe, in him
Move, as the self-revolving orbs in heaven.
And O! thou strange mysterious universe,
Eternal, unconceived, star-studded heaven,
Who art in God, and God in thee; and we
Of both, and in both, sovereign slaves of law,
Founded we know not or by whom, or how;
Canst thou not aid us to conceive ourselves,
Atoms of thine entirety, double-natured,
But powerless separate, seeing only this;
Matter, if indestructible, always was,
And aye must be; mind, too, if force defined;
And though immortal both, yet vital only
And individual, when by laws combined?
What then? Are unintelligent laws alone
The rulers of the universe, and God
A metaphysic fiction; am I God;
As bud, tree rudimental? As a seal's
Reverse impression, signifying yet
One only meaning, spelling one same word?
As part material, objective to God?
As immaterial, subjective with him?
As thus, of both symbolic, in myself,
An abstract of the infinite, the whole?
No difference 'tween the all and God, but this,
Active and passive deity! O man!
O sacred nature, all divine! In vain

619

We seek more light than that we see by. Nought
Explaineth death but death, nor life but life;
Whether perpetuate in more brilliant spheres,
Or fined and heightened simply into heaven;
Communion with the spirit of infinite life,
All present reason, and eternal right,
Hailed by each natural mind as God, the good,
The wise, the holy, the all-blessing. Hence,
God is to man both God unknown and known.
The known we love; but the unknown, although
We name it non-existent, still we fear;
And fearing everything, fear nothing most.
As 'mid sky-crowning halo, the wan moon,
Like an enchantress in her charmèd ring,
By recusant dæmons scared, her wheel of light
Widens, to fend her from wind-striding storms,
Threatful of death, in vain; she knows all; sees
The coming cloud which blots her out of heaven;
So, too, my soul, affrayed, but firm, foreknows
The fatal end of all things. Yet, why fear?
Great nature is my mother and my friend;
When God comes down from heaven he dwells with her.
Hers is the house of mourning and of mirth;
Feasting and fasting go on side by side;
The song of bridals and the dirge of death,
And wail of birth, are aye beneath her roof.
She brings her children to their father's knee.
These he rebukes, rewards those; judges all.
To all he shows their union with himself,
And those he loves best, takes, from time to time,
Back to his heavenly hall. Thus, now we know,
As 'tween the sun and earth light's spectral bond
Proves both like-essenced, concrete of one force
Reduplicate, parental; so we find
The elemental thoughts of God and man
One; the same self-constituent truths are ours.
Ours is his justice, his our love, though based
On grander and more sure foundations; heaven
We share in doing good and willing well;
In blessing, bettering, pardoning others here,
His universal throne.

Guardian Angel.
Go, reign with him.

Festus.
My confessor art thou, O God, alone.
Soon all the shows of nature shall depart,
And nought not one with deity, goodness, love,
Peace, righteousness, and divine humanity,
Yea, nought but the eternal be for aye.
He his hand opened and the world was born.
He shuts it, and the essential nothingness
Embodied, dies its everlasting death,

620

The infinite conclusion of all things.
Open thine arms, O death! thou fine of woe,
And warranty of bliss! I feel the last
Red mountainous remnant of the earth give way.
The stars are rushing upwards to the light;
My limbs are light, and liberty is mine.
The spirit's infinite purity consumes
The sullied soul. Eternal destiny
Opens its bright abyss. I am God's!

God.
Man, die!

XL.

The skies, the skies reclaim us. Earth dissolved,
God's will prevails now sole. As when o'er vast
And shoreward flats at murkiest noon of night,
No single element, not high heaven, not earth,
Not sea is visible; one wide searching wind,
Sign solitary of life, blows; blows; so sweeps
Through death's unsubstanced state, God's vital thought.
He, as he will, builds, rebuilds; but to all
Create, most just, the soul-world opes, that time
Foreclosed, unthought of men, as by some huge
Judgment self-wrought of nature, each spirit might make
Of evil or good, preponderant choice. Behold
The war all souls must wage; war justified
By God, forefixed; for good fought; war divine;
War spiritual; war heavenly:—and because
The good forgive the evil, all justice done,
God too forgives the good; and hope weds joy.
After inferior nature is subdued
The all-evil see confined. Earth's elements
Conglobe themselves from chaos, purified.

The Skies.
Deity, Angels, Angel of Earth, Luniel, Guardian Angel, Festus, Lucifer.
God.
The age of matter consummates itself.
All things that are shall end, save that is mine.
As with one world so shall it be with all;
For all false, human, fallible, as towards
Creator creature must be, while defect
Of separate life their being vitiates, are.
Prepare ye not the less for all at last,
Grade upon grade of glory, sons of God!

Angels.
Lord! we thy souls ministrant but to effect
Thy loveable will in all things, live.

Angel of Earth.
One sphere
Yon prophet of perdition, who saw not

621

In it destroyed, his own discomfiture,
Space lacks already; and life the great retreat
Begins.

Angels.
Thy hand regenerative, we wait
Author of all, its place to fill in heaven.

Angel of Earth.
Earth's annals are accomplished, and her tale
Told in the eternal archives, closed for good.
Behold the ruinous rudiments of a star,
Once mine; nor let repose in death; but since,
Tortured and torn by hands malevolent. See!
Hath any seen discerption like to this
Titanic, of an orb's once radiant limbs?

Angels.
Despair not thou, the nucleate heart still is,
Doubtless: and, purified, may yet revive.

Luniel.
Meanst thou yon mass unsphered, suspense 'tween heaven's
Calm upward, and these detrimental deeps,
Down dragging, all destructive, part without
Mine orbit, part within; was that once earth?
I see no feature, like.

Angel of Earth.
Ah, yes! not quite
Void, yet, of nature's cardinal shapes, each hour
Tending to wonted settlements, waiting still
The word compulsory, quickening, to reform;
Or, to disperse, permissive, earth it was.

Luniel.
Seems something wanting to perfection. Lacks
Force, may be for inception of new worlds;
Lacks will; perchance mislike feels deity towards
That mould of being.

Angel of Earth.
I go. Earth! man, farewell.

Luniel.
One moment, angel, fold thy wing. Stay yet
Thy star-flight; and,—if gained God's leave, while thus
Colleagued, we parle, we, hosts ubiquitous, soon
Eradiated, to part, on quests divine,
From this spot, God's now presence central makes
To the whole unlimited,—say, we all would know
Who circling with the whirlwind of our wings
Yon rude compost, the earth, have, curious, marked,—
What mean these grouped below us; that side, fiend,
And man, this? this triumphant, that abject?
What, too, yon guardian spirit, hovering near?
Why silent all in God? To most it bodes
Mystery; nor me can these, consociate here,
But for the hour, from spheres far off, inform
Touching events strange, vast, late happed in heaven.
Speak, friendliest spirit; for, when thine orb, dispersed
In fiery fragments, lessening more and more
By self-resolvent forces from all claim
Cohæsive, robbed my memory of a form

622

I once so dearly loved, tears so mine eyes
Drowned, grief my heart so panged, I fled; yes, far
Space-winging, fled that world-wrack. But now say
Ere yet, sweet angel-ward of earth, thou joinest
Again, thy charge, say, heard not I resound
Late on these aëry shores, the shock of war?
For view I might not, since the sun's bright ball
Rayless, upon his ebon throne, the void,
Between me and this dread combat intervened?

Angel of Earth.
War, Luniel? Yes! I there. Not I could quit
Even earth's ashes: nor was't for me to shrink
From sharing all her woe. Nor only this
Knew I, but all predestined in the passed;
The hostile forces, good and evil, each
Head in man's spirit contentious, wisely framed
For advance perpetual, conflict consecrate
By virtue's laws whose powers preponderant tend
Through nature, Godwards; if to ill devote
Wrenched therefore culpably 'gainst God's end,—and all
To that grand crisis pertinent, whose just
Effect, as earth with heaven reharmonized,
Foretold, we have yet to see. Meanwhile, be sure
'Twas a fair foughten fight, this field of fields.

Luniel.
Rehearse, dear spirit, this contest, for the sense
Intense of joy in extreme action makes
Wish one had there been.

Angel of Earth.
War unmatched in time;
Holiest of wars, and best, the war of good
'Gainst evil.

Phanuel.
O amiablest of angels, say
As thou beheldst, it may be, sharedst the strife,
Its varying course.

Angel of Earth.
Slight part in this was mine,
O angel of salvation! but to encheer
The heaven-prized spirits with hope and holy strength.
Nor is it I can tell ye best. Behold!
Couched 'neath yon cloudy precipice, the soul
War-proven, who watch keeps o'er the conquered fiend,
Heaven's late antagonist, and earth's; he, best,
He, or the fiend, how fared the fight, can say.
For need I show that in yon prostrate shape,
Lies evil o'erthrown, its doom from God's just lips
Here waiting; not with weak reproach, nor shame
Boisterous, nor mock contempt; but as evil sage,
Not wholly execrable, nor yet to be
Deemed desperate infinitely; but aptest sense
His of necessitate being, and consciousness
While gaining all his limited ends, of ends
Wider opposed, his mastering; we, not he,

623

Unless through blind and fluttering instinct, him
Knowing by alchemy of force divine,
God's sole will, yet transformable.

Luniel.
Draw nigh,
Mortal. And, if I err not, we, ere now,
Have met, traversed and seen together much.
Much joy I, that such good conceived hath borne
In thee, though late enough, fair fruit. And now
Wouldst me repay for favours passed, or these
Spirits of amity please; and if of deeds
Glorious at once and good, thou lovest to tell
Not less than aid,—speak on! that we, informed,
With all benevolent souls, that joy which crowns
And sums celestial life may share whene'er,
And in what spheres soever, through all space
Good prospers, good in all because of God.

Guardian Angel.
Approach, my Festus, spirit beloved, nor fear
Trespass again of evil, nor dread escape
From God's unmeasured grasp. This conflict passed,
Know all ye angels, earth's, with time, with life
Coördinate, and the victory God's, of good.

Festus.
O heavenly angels, denizens of state
Celestial, pardon ye, if words of mine,
Conceptions human failing to translate,
Fall shorter miserably of minds divine;
But that ye part, made wise in order due
Of all things, hear, bright spirits this tale in few:
And may the all present, but invisible One,
Inspire me to declare what sole is true!
Ere yet, and this ye wot of, earth attained
Her supreme end, man's race,—so gracious grown
Their instinct of perfection to be gained
In all things, had, in outward life, so won
Comfort refined, and moderate plenty, ease,
Free faith, and learning's temperate luxuries,
That, in self-flattery, they would whisper, none
Of souls create, or kinds to be, unknown,
In social law, weal, polity, might proceed
Further; scarce 'scaped they angels to become,
In charity and all knowledge. Underneath
This outward life of mind was spirit-death,
Wide spread, not tainting all. Heaven saw the need,—
Here, prophecy and pagan foresight one,—
Of a great purifying strife, the doom
Self-wrought, of woe or bliss, from good or ill
Practised by fallible souls but free, wherein
God's aims they might adopt, or side with sin:
And conscience so with fate, one end fulfil.
Earth's final scenes avails not now to unroll;

624

Her agony was o'er, and death's, mine own,
For we had died together: and my soul,
Freed from life's bonds, God's universal throne
Touched instant, and the immaterial whole
Henceforth intuitive grasped; and knowing, knew
Some all composing purgatorial strife,
Conclusive of all contests passed through life,
Some vast impending struggle foredoomed and due.
Such conflict God permitting for his ends
To be deferred till earth had ceased, outburned,
The bliss of his elect from first decerned,
Secured, that souls all else might prove themselves his friends
Or foes, self-judged; and ere these hellwards turned,
Those heavenwards, each their principles foreshow
To all their fellow spirits on high, below;
And if to wisdom's godlier life inclined,
Or ignorance dark and selfish lusts their mind.
I had passed then through death's cloud; my spirit dilate;
Like to a flower which suddenly expands
Seemed with all force fraught fourfold, and the fate
Of life-worlds trembling in my single hands.
I looked around; and though earth's sphere no more
Loomed 'neath my feet as memory sought, nor wore
The masque impenetrable she wont before,
Yet to my spiritual sense seemed all as when
First conscious, nature knew I, matter, men.
Save that the elements midst transition seemed
Somewhat; incongruous; bent to interchange;
Not friends, not foes, but each to other strange,
Unfixed, unfinished, as things had but dreamed
Their passed life over again; with many a gap
Of orderly sequence blanked; faults still, mayhap,
Of unrecognizant mind; to be disesteemed.
Thus, then the prospect stood; an obscure plain
Showed spread far out before the face of heaven,
Where solitude, if generable, once given
To life, might have presumed an endless reign,—
When, suddenly, on either hand, arose
And marvellously, as though compact of air,
Ere the whole eye were of the fact made 'ware,
A world in arms, though mixed, instinctive foes.
Souls, these, humane, which filled earth's every land,
When death's stern angel, at a sign, life's scroll,
Stretched 'tween his hands, did ruthlessly uproll;—
Not numbered 'mongst the chosen, but free to prove
By virtuous tests, amenable to love,
Who, foes of God, would fall, or, friends, would stand:
Sufficing thus to vindicate the end
God in creating free doth aye perpend;—

625

That good should master ill; heaven's hoped for life
Mere death outworth; God's peace, all creatural strife.
For every soul, unwittingly in the passed
Self-quit or self-condemned,—no proofless plea
Of faith in carnal gods, no unbased trust
To magical words or symbols in the eye
'Vailing, of God the Father, kind as just
Towards all his children, he uplifting none
At cost of others; asking not of one
More than his strength or light could owe; this last
Of all earth's human generations, he
Mildliest of all, as cut off timelessly,
Would treat. His ways how holy, and how fair!
Quick as by passion's step, that vast array,—
By trumpets silver or brazen, which each one told
Inly, beneath what pennons to repair,
That either side their visible tongues unrolled,
Divided, sought its side and took its way.
Soon, distant hills gleamed with long ranks of foes,
Illimitable, as sunset lines which bar
Eve's skies, or sphere broad belted, as for war,
Eager to outlap or with the opponent close:
Each gorged horizon tremulous with the crowds,
O'er plain and mount self-urged like armied clouds.
On either side, two eminences I viewed,
Tall, ominous, like twin monsters on the plain,
Fallen brooding. Each vast mound, of arms was reared
Carnal and spiritual mingled; bright appeared
Those, with a sickly polish which by use
Wears off; by use, a dazzling hue these gain,
Intensitive, that of dulness dares accuse
The glareful lightnings earth midst all her path
Fronts: and 'tween these the ghostly multitude
By brotherly love commoved, or scorn, which hath
With hell fell concert, each, his arms to choose,
Passed and repassed. Whiles marked I, unconcerned,
The gathering tempest rolling down the hills,
And storm of men their hurricane way that burned
Before them; and though, time now passed, averse
From war, and deeming it earth's crowning curse,
Her worst and least defensible of all ills,
Yet now it sacred seemed; and, strange fatality!
Who should be vanquished, or who victor, while
My course and choice awaiting to decide,
Borne in, it seemed, upon me as a tide
O'erwrothed, that all the blood-feuds which defile
Earth's annals, were but mocks of this reality,
Their end, their antitype; yet, so secure
My trust in good passed all things framed to endure,
No fear my heart from steadiest state might lure;

626

Nor mote I marvel more what should create
Such mighty armaments, should thus draw forth
Those, as of southern fire-gloom born, with hate
Hot, these, as storms of splendour from the north
Issuant, in long keen lines o'er half the earth,
When I beheld in these commilitant bands
Men of all faiths, all tongues, all strains, all lands,
All names; on that side all co-variants massed
Votaries of error, falsehood, mystery, each
Leagued 'gainst the faith on this, earth's first, earth's last;
Held by the wise of every age and speech;
Which saints sing, angels celebrate and teach,
God's unity, and his love; man's deathless soul
Judged with just mercy; so that he, the whole,
Who made, made pure, will ultimately ally
With him. Not long stood dallying with suspense.
I, who had ‘whither,’ alway paired with ‘whence,’
While pondering on man's end, as source, like high;—
When, hark! from form invisible, but close by,
An angel voice—

Guardian Angel.
'Twas I, dear Festus, I,
Thy soul-ward!

Festus.
Thou!—cried, ‘Arm, for thy defence;
The idolaters, thy foes, and truth's, appear;
And all the hosts of evildom, since life
Began, revived to wage earth's deadliest strife.’
And, in a moment, ere the anxious eye
Could glance around, a shadowy hand was near;
Dight me in armour; gave a glittering brand
Which, lurid as the flash tempestuous heaven
Hurls to sea, queller of cloud-sundering levin,—
Shook forth its permanent lightnings in mine hand;
Soul-trenchant; wrought of star-steel which endures,—
Even as of old the mystic meteor sword,
By nomad Scythian idolwise adored,—
No sheath; its ingrained fire all cloak combures
Disdainful; gave this spiky shield; this spear,
Floweret of fight, of war's keen crop bright ear:
Then, vanished visibly. I wordless stand,
Waiting the approach of some one to dispel
The mist of doubt upon my spirit that fell.
While thus I stood expectant, from on high
Yon angel came,—oh! can I ever tell
His guardian love?—and touching thrice mine eye,
With force endowed it prism-wise, whereby
All motives to themselves men justify
As stimulating their acts, it could disblend,
Even to their innate elements which the soul,
With either host, according to their end
Coördinated, and lawed to sin's control,

627

Or virtue's. Thus apprised, I straightways view,
Who served false gods, if but with piety, drew
Toward us; who homaged even the sole and true,
As hypocrites, sought the enemy; and so knew,
God just, self-doomed all. There, with those, I eyed
All selfish passions, envy, avarice, hate,
Impiety and impurity close allied,
Sloth, wrath, intemperance, cruelty and false pride,
Within the enemy's breast self-generate,
Each several vice the bad have deified
Corrupting inwardly; each contagious side
To his neighbour's heart infecting. Here, elate,
The pure determining reasons when I saw,
The love of God, of mercy, virtue's law,
Truth, wisdom and their friends impersonate,
Though fewer than the foe, of loftier state,
I, as by rational gravitation, sped
Swift towards the array of light, and made mine own
The cause they served. No sooner joined, than head
Stood I, meseemed, o'er all, leave asked of none,
Nor of sway wishful: for no longer fired
With love of place pre-eminent as desired
Erstwhile, nathless these ends my seekers sought
Prizing, ends virtue sanctioned, wisdom loved,
To save from error's doom, give heaven its aught,
Predestined; capture in pure mercy; win
The soul self-blinded to the effects of sin
Godwards; ends worthy of him, by him approved;
And truth's friends:—all resistlessly concurred
My soul to attract. Their foemen, rebels vile
Showed, who his rule spurned, scorned his power and word;
Strove aye his works to depreciate, defile;
Colleagued to impair the just; to impugn the true;
To blacken every fault thought had but blurred:—
To vaunt their arms could all the Gods subdue,
Or chase them out of heaven,—an atheist crew,
And disbeliefful host,—and their seats give
To creatural born pretenders, fortune, chance;
Developed force, wed atoms with the expanse;
To mere material powers that be, not live;
All godliest truths ignored;—such, these who fought—
So learned I, from the spiritual inview given
Mine eye,—for falsehood, and, for God, would nought.
And now, nor time for more served; for, self-massed,
With treacherous speed, and ranked, their lines as driven
By inward tempests, on, the foe came fast;
From every eye-ball rage and malice gleamed;
Like burning floods along the plain they passed.
High on their ensigns strange devices beamed
Forbidden, of blackest magic scrolled in light

628

Of vicious glamour; spells of murderous might;
And weapons weird, with mottoes base bedight,
Such as around the lips of Circe's bowl,
Or on siren's tongues suffice to slay the soul;
Here, as though stolen from the heraldry of hell,
On many a shield, ‘eternal death,’ imblazed;
Here, the illumined lie, ‘no God!’ we gazed,
Imbannered. Still no terror us befell.
But as when earth's forceful orb, ancient of night,
Rolling serene on her foresmoothened way,
Some dimly insultant shower of meteor light
Breasts listless, undeflect; so our array
Dense, but with crush of splendours, all their charge
Hurled on us, each receives, contemns at large;
So certain seem we of our ultimate day.
But not too wisely this, nor then. Still on,
On sweeping still, with shouts and cursings dire,
Their brows as brass, their squadrons swift as storm
When arrowy lightnings nature's face deform;
Before them darkness, and behind them fire,
They, hosted, rushed; and as a sea its banks
Strikes foaming, thundering, smote our faithful ranks.
Then closed the armies. Cloud 'gainst cloud when thrown
By adverse winds, first straggles into thin strife
From different levels, till, storm-crushed in one,
Darkness 'mid darkness wedged, with horrors rife,
The gloomy concave no distinction shows;
So blended in one vast intricate fray,
These, bellowing, called destruction on their foes,
And with a terrible onset nought could stay,
Left havoc scarcely room his arm to play.
From our own hearts unspoken prayers arose;
And praise of God who the beginnings knows
Of all things from the end; and to defeat
Ever subjects, at first, the cause he hath chose.
Reeled earth beneath the madness of the shock;
The mountains smoked; the hills broke from their seat;
Their banks streams leaped; groans burst from hardest rock;
The seas convulsed against their barriers beat;
The sun, like one who, fear-struck, drops his hands,
Withdraws his beams, and all astonied stands,
Rayless; re-waked, lifts her red torch the moon,
Lest all should yet be lost in total night.
The trembling stars, unchecked by fervid noon,
Rush from their bowers, with censers burning bright;
Even hell was moved, and weltering where he lay,
A howl of joy sent forth commingled with dismay.
Scarce was a pause bethought of, either side,
And fiercelier e'er the war waxed, for betide
What might of conflict or conquest, ere long

629

The sun; all saw, must set;—incentive strong
With us to fight so as to win, who light
Even as God's shadow love; to them, too, night
Who worship as the friend of fraud. Now, 'mong
The traitor ranks whose leaders we had guessed
Nowise, nor knew what griefs their manifest
Of war set forth,—a chief had late appeared,
Of towering stature, and of visage fell,
Who in his hand a dreadful weapon reared
Macelike, entwined with serpents, seed of hell;
While round his neck a burnished shield its blaze
Far o'er the war-field flashed with blinding rays.
Quailed all the faithful 'neath the impending might
Of this impersonate awe; a withering spell
Bode in his eyes that struck with deathly blight
Men's souls; scarce 'scaping one, a fatal daze
Who on those wide-scanning orbs but paused to gaze.
As when, through sheaf-piled fields, a ball of fire,
Elanced from cloud electric, speeds its way,
Scorching and wasting with unwavering ire,
Each feeble obstacle nought but surer prey;
So, through ranks prostrated, the eye might trace
His devastations by a trenchèd tract
Of souls slain seemingly; and still his pace,
Precipitate as a lava cataract,
Death-fraught, he urged; now, as he nearlier drew,
Amazed, I gazed; for well that form I knew;
And, hailing, would have stayed; in vain; for aye
The desolation round him graver grew.
His step, his mien alas! I could but know,
His ominous air; and from his eye's deep glow,
Pulsant, requickening like to ember fanned
By the owlet's wing, all sequent things in hand
My soul conceives, undeeded, done, foreplanned.
‘Hold, spirit;’ I cried; grant all thy doomed array
One moment's truce, and these just proffers weigh.
God willeth not the death ye seek this day;
But that ye live. Submit yourselves to heaven,
Quit evil, and all sin's false pretence eschew;
Repent, believe, be good and be forgiven.
'Tis God's will.’ ‘Art thou,’ quoth the fiend, ‘the man
I stood by, late?’ ‘I am,’ I said. ‘And can
These souls, think'st thou, who live beyond the grave,
Freed from death's law, who now destruction brave,
To other will subject them than their own?
Speak, all ye hosts!’ ‘We serve ourselves alone’;
Broke in low thunders from those lurid lines,
Shadowy. ‘Accept thy answer, nor again
Obstruct,’ the demon said, ‘with projects vain,
Our course.’—Grieved, scarce surprised, retain

630

All ours, perseverant, one sublime consent,
One fixed resolve; through all our columns shines
On every face the firm but sweet intent
To prove, by love's resistless argument
God kind as just; and how sin's worst endeavour
Being finite, must at last fail all to outbrave
His boundless goodness which, perforce, for ever
Endures; not he more prone to love than save
The souls he hath made. This too we let them hear
By herald's lips; and vowed to persevere
While life remained. Like hardly obstinate, they,
Motive and end impugned, word sent to say
No God they knew; nor, if they won their way
O'er us, should we great nature's mysteries
Traduce, and live. Forewarned by taunts like these
We nerve ourselves once more to war, and strain
Our strength to o'erthrow the mountainous juggleries
They forge against us. Strange and monstrous shows
Of all imaginary ills, portents,
Such only as inventive madness knows,
Forbye their own, of hideous armaments
O'erhead in air; seemed even to join the fray
The elements bodily; and whilst fieriest rain
And winds sulphureous storms contrariant threw
'Gainst our firm-footed forces, earth and main
By turns retaliating dismay, now drew
Hither, the fight, now thither. Fixed retain
Both hosts the intent, as yet, the day to gain.
As when some ocean-flood to circumvent
An island obstacle, its strifeful tides,
Though to collide at last doomed, first, divides,
This polewards, linewards that, while each intent
On its own course, half with its rival's blent,
Conscious not yet of check, nor rise nor fall
Brooks, till at last, one turbulent level all
In vast libration holds;—so we this war
And strenuous æquipoise of discontent
Wage, doubt-crowned, nor, who victors know thus far.
We most had suffered; ours, most wounded, showed.
Yet still meseemed we had gained the ground where stood
Their streamy standards first; and gained for good.
But as when athwart some broad far-stretching beach
The seaward wind ascendant, hour by hour,
With huge and inexhaustible greed of death,
Sweep sand-clouds suicidal, mad to reach
The invasive waves white plumed who at every breath
A land born levy engulph, insatiate;—so
Like endless, fruitless like, this strife of power
With power, to feud eternal threats to grow;
As though even fate prevaricated. Again

631

From point to point the rebel chieftains flew
And, passing, on us faithful, looks oft threw
Of proud contempt, to mark the swathes of slain;
So seemed our vanquished to their treacherous view.
In splendid mien and lofty port they shone,
Dazzling the eye; and as from out the mass,
They sudden broke, and then were lost anon,
Like stars they showed, when tempests break and pass
In quivering fragments of dark clouds away,
Casting around a brief but baleful ray.
The faithful checked, a moment, now resumed
Hotlier the fight; and though the rebel arms
Bright bannered, far and wide, the field illumed,
In guise triumphant, brooked no base alarms.
No foot now flinched; no hand now failed; no heart
Grew faint, of those who filled, still firm, our throng,
Of sacred ranks; each soul, inspired, his part
Heaven-named, performed, in zeal and reason strong;
For reason strengthened every hand that fought
That day for faith. How tense the strain was ours
One moment proved extatic, when, faith-brought;
Truth, virtue, 'like their cause, their ends, their powers,
Our camp seek; stay; and midst our vaunt-guard bide;
In panoply of proof, with hosts allied,
Givers of victory; choosers they of all
Whose choice is life eternal; by our ranks
Hailed rapturously, and their pure aid with thanks;
Maids of immortal sanctity, we forestal
Their triumph; and regard half-deified;—
Invincible, they at least. By our content,
So audibly voiced, the foe at last alarmed,
And at such access of high powers, so armed,
To madness wrought, and upon nought less bent
Than us to at once annihilate, formed behind
Each wing, fresh myriads massed; and passion-blind
Our lines unmoved assail; till, flagging they,
We, our main strength reserved, renew the affray:
Impatient, dreadless, on the enemy rush,
And 'neath our might, in turn, their legions crush.
As when 'neath spring's bright sun, clouds broken fly
Before the impulsive wind, and, through the sky
Routed, as by rejoicing gusts of light,
Pass, shamed and dulled, so these their fated flight,
Beneath our swift assaults, speed sullenly.
Exultant we pursue our conquests; yield
They seem to do on all sides; everywhere
We spread our terror; overrun the field;
Surrender some; some clamour to be led
'Gainst their late friends;—too weary we, instead,
These guard for later discipline;—but the snare

632

We are in, mark not; for, as a rock-foiled wave,
Instinct with treachery, scoops an envious grave
For the pursuing surge; so us, our foe
Had into straits enticed we could not know
Aforewhile. Sudden spread around our feet
Quicksands, where hollower hills redoubled cheat
With hope of fugitive rest. And some, no few,
By deftest witchery dazed and drawn, pursue
A high-road broad, which brings their camp in view,
Rich in all luxuries, tent and provant there,
Tempting repose, refreshment. ‘O beware!’
Our angel cried, o'er watchful in the sky,
‘'Tis all illusion, 'tis a visible lie.
Retreat, reframe yourselves.’ Ashamed in time,
They 'scape the torments of remembered crime,
And seek circuitously their peers and friends;
When lo! their backs scarce turned, the enchantment ends
As suddenly. But the enemy boastful now
Of least success, thought even to countervail
Our vantage late, by aids that could not fail,
Suborned of all the powers unjust below;
Sin, superstition, passion, vice, hate, pain;
He called, and hell's delusions thronged the inane:
Phantoms and fiendish spectres, such as glow
Preposterous, on the horizon long and low,
Where lies, cloud-stifled, on his golden bed
The tyrant sun; shapes, that from foot to head,
Distort themselves fanatically, and change
Their misconceived proportions every breath
They draw, ere throes of self-dissolving death
Scatter o'er space their writhing limbs. So strange
And to distract our spirits, these shapes appear,
Foul, threatening, that on high assailed by fear,
Below by force, we might less mightily ply
Our arms, this wise enfeebled;—arm nor eye
Quailed, or to phalanxed host, or imminent sky.
Not impious force, not ghastliest wizardry,
Prevailed. The tempest of enchantment passed,
Calm, we resumed our freer, safer ground;
Defend, and for reward brief respite found.
‘Hear, fellow-warriors,’ soon I cried, ‘not long
Behoves us to recruit our strength with rest.
'Tis action, and its sole end, fair conquest,
Heaven of our arms demands; 'twere like them wrong,
To stand not ever and instantly on guard.’
Assent all eagerly. Thus, not unprepared
The enemy find us; but still bent to wage
What war they might, who fought because we spared,
In mean, sparse, unsustained attacks they cast
Their failing strategy 'gainst us; till, at last,

633

Not daring longer openly to engage
Our conquering standards, they for parle applied;
But parley served not; for we, loyal, pressed
Now keenly on, and all their wiles defied;
More traitorous than we knew them yet untried.
As vulture trapped our enemy found too late,
Strife nor submission freed from fore-fixed fate,
Of them unthought; of us, yet unconfessed.
Anon, our faithful pause; for now the foe
Desperate, turned 'gainst each other, nor expressed
One plan, but for their Head hate sole possessed;
Whose errors grossest ignorance seemed to show
And whose misfeats all ills to premonstrate;—
Less seriously concerned our force to wreck
They, than their own league;—crazed! More potent check,
No more sufficing punishment could know,
'Twas plain, the adversary. Blow now 'gainst blow
Answering no more from ours, war lulled. While thus
In separate commonalties resolved, and while
By open conflict or by scarce hidden guile,
Each thwarting other, gradually they wound
Their battle from off this world-contested ground,
As though some likelier schemes to rediscuss.
Their leader, prompt to prove his weight in war,
To every foe, or open or envious,
In face of all his gleamy squadrons round,
Stood, as in summer's dawn the morning star
Is wont, in the young orient to protect
Night's astral troops, retreating nigh and far
Into heaven's fastnesses, ere o'ermastering light
All rout; and seems, while any shadows are,
With his sole tutelar spear, day's whole effect
To outworth; such craft of bravery in sight
Of our chafed legions, haughtily dared deploy
Their chief, who would our hopes, God's ends, destroy.
Yet seize we not the moment to embroil
Our arms afresh; but pause from battailous toil.
For now day dimmed, though long seemed dark delayed;
And hills, themselves but shadowy, shadows made.
Now, set the sun; but who of all forecast
That sunset he beheld was nature's last?
Man's little day, foreweighted on the beam
Of God's eternal poise, time's day supreme,
Closed now for aye on that ætherial field;
And all to night primæval looked to yield;
That strife of strengths supernal, once of old,
Time's twilight, and the god-war, seer foretold;
That contest so to conquest near, as deemed,
Our hosts, thus ended, worse than doubtful seemed,
In pardonable distrust; and some forebode,

634

The world's passed, they should see no day of God:
Not reckoning how all being our God can bend
To his vast aim, nor whither all things tend.
Now 'mongst the opposing powers strange factions showed,
And 'gainst their chief in mutinous hatred glowed.
Plot plot supplanted: each malign device
This one a feint proposing, that, a snare,
Foiled by his craft they sought to sacrifice;
He, pondering all, all deems unworth his care.
Till, galled at bruited failure of his plans,
The cause of good to ruin, God's and man's,
As boasted of in hell, and hatched first there,
Swells ultimately within the demon's breast
Lust for one more, one crucial, last contest.
His scheme imparted, animates the rest.
'Tis fixed; the friendly powers of darkness aid
Their columns thickening 'neath night's fraudful shade.
Yet not such secret guile was theirs to vaunt,
But Virtue,—who an eminence hard by
Had conquered, whence she might unseen descry
All hostile evildom,—she, aye vigilant,
Forewarned us; nay, presentient, had divined
From ominous silence what dumb fiend stood nigh;
And thence what proximate peril to first defy.
As therefore, when, times passed, to obey man's mind,
The electric harpstrings humming in the wind,
With latent lightning charged, strange news of birth
Imperial, peace, war, or loved patriot's death,
In viewless miracle flashed o'er half the earth,
By land, by sea, while one could hold his breath,
So through our serried squares the tidings passed,
Presignalled by the rise of time-fixed star,—
From the pure power—‘The foe prepares a last
Assault. Be equal all, anear, afar;
Nor doubt the event, God's champions as ye are.’
And soon, in full extent of all their host,
On us they advance, wide-horned; as rock-bound coast,
Curved crescent-wise, shuts in some helpless bay;
Though cheered by wavelets bright which know nathless
A spell to check their enemies' forwardness;—
So we the impending foe abide, and pray.
With a shock they burst upon us, as a cloud,
Rampant in air, hail-fraught, no mean that knows
'Tween the still step of its aerial snows
From this to that horizon, and the breach
Of all heaven's laws by abruptest thunder-speech
In burning bolts articulated, they blast
Our ranks, not foreadvised for nought. Allowed
Scarce time our files again to form, such blows
Dealt they, as might to all subjection teach,

635

Save their born masters. We, our foes irate,
Instinctive foes, by birth these, those by fate,
By reason more, but all as foes self-classed,
Fight leniently; nor strive to exterminate,
So much as to chastise and teach. Vain care!
Roused by one wide tempestuous thunder-blast,
Wild brief of all the discordry of war,
They bore down on us, with the sickening sweep
Of an eclipse's wing, which, shadowy, chilled
To its fiery heart, the sphere, and the storm stilled
Of foregone strife; down on us, in the deep
The murk, unmorrowing, darkness, as it seemed;
Cleared all mid spatial checks; closed for the fray;
Singled every soul his man, as who should say
Each spirit hath sworn its separate sheaf to reap
From that stupendous tilth, fate's harvest field,
Where all the vanquished, to perdition sealed,
Sank down, to horrible ruin unrepealed
Unmatched; or so they opined. Not one but dreamed
Of worsting us by truculent rage, or sheer
O'erbearingness; nor knew their doom how near.
Through all their vast platoons, as lightning ploughs
Black storm-clouds, pierce we; all our forces rouse
In flying raids their wings clip, and attack,
Lighter, their masses dense and dazed; drive back
To where their main reserves, not yet too late
For one grand stroke, in ignorance stand of fate.
We pause. They form; charge; but not all the weight
Their force disorderly could accumulate,
Nor vehement fury gave them, our array
Indented permanently. At this, abashed,
As one who by sheer selfwill hath lost his way,
Our rebels round them glared with dumb dismay,
Like to a storm whose last faint lightnings flashed
Soundless, ere yet it ceased, mid heaven's blithe vault,
In impotent vapourings. We, meanwhile, who rest,
With one sole resolute purpose prepossessed,
Such thankful tears shed, each on other's breast,
As one life hazarding 'gainst some grim assault
Of the elements, and still extant, sternly glad
Despite the escape from judgment lately had,
To know his vital virtue not at fault,
Nor all his lifelong training at last vain,
Who feels that not to have lost is all to gain;
Now, like elate, from rank to rank we tossed,—
As waves the columned shadow of the sun,
From this to that spray-crested, ever lost
In rearward depths, fresh framed in front,—the smile
Self-luminous of success, so dearly won,
So scarcely, that disdainful of all wile,

636

All force, presumptuous, I at length began
To accredit fate with faith's too facile plan,
And dream all might to one sole duel bend
This battlefield of good and evil man.
How act? ‘Stand forth, fell foe; man's, God's,’ I cried,
‘Who dost to both all ill, dost more intend.
Thy præpotence dread not I; but fortified
Built up and towered in spirit by strength divine,
I wait to seal this woe, thine end or mine,
With mine all these!’ As glides a cloud from far,
Lone scout of tempests, towards some paly star,
Pale, not appalled, in silence one may feel
Perfusive even to fainting, ere it rend
Its heart in fiery thunders, so reveal
Our foe storm-massed 'gainst us, their mighty head,
Towards me advancing on slow foot;—but ere
That occultation, crowds on either hand
Between us rush, and each to his command
Deliberately returned, reform instead
Their front, their lines redress. Fell now from heaven,
As I the event sought of this strife in prayer,
These words, space-sundering; ‘To nought made is given
This war to end, but to God sole. Persever
Ye righteous souls. Ye win, if late, win ever.’
Heart warm with joy I heard. To us who know
We no defection have to mourn, to show,—
With growth of disciplined forces everywhere,
No breast but glows recuperative, no arm
But touched one moment by the sacred charm
Of that soul-medicine, he, within his tent
The great Physician, gives to all who will;
To us, of strength vouchsafed proud, ardent, still,
As warriors of the light to fight 'gainst ill,
Scarce other plan than this seemed left, untried,
God's mind, diffused abroad in us, our guide,
The enemy now to charge in chief; and while
Their force by ours outmastering, force and guile
Alike crushed, bind, in love's constraining bands;
For in our camp was store of griefless chains
Unloosenable, which nought, not pride withstands,
Of golden patience wrought and purest pains,—
Nor slay, but relegate solely to God's hands.
This vow by each partook, and ministered
Mutually, as though by comforting wine and bread,
Refreshed, each heaven-devote battalion stands;
One moment pray we silently; then form;
Then forward, by one impulse, like a storm.
But oh! a storm of tenderness and fear
For them, not of them, even as streams o'erbear,
But not uproot, the sedgy crop they hold;

637

Thus irresistibly we outsweep, enfold,
Thus, peace-inspired, we war; pass hope; each hand
Mightier than aught known evil might gainstand,
Evil, cloud-lifed. Boots not to tell how last
O'erthrown, cowed, conquered, 'neath our yoke they passed,
Nor how, heaven therefor thanked, we testified
Our boundless joy. But as the earth-conquering tide,—
Who many a green and purple braid, at large,
Twist gorgeously in trebly tincted strand,
Like desert sanctuary's symbolic band,
Casts careless on the shore's wide shining marge;
With giant globelets gemmed of rainbow foam,
Seed of the sea, whence beauty first was born;—
A mass ingarlanded of jewelled weeds;
His prostrate foe thus decked in divine scorn
Of strength, strength sterner had o'erborne;—so we
All honours quartering with the enemy,
Nor longer counting possible strife to come,
Our vanquished load with spoil of generous deeds;
Drive, jubilant, all our glittering triumph home,
With song, and loud conclaim of victory.
Thus warred, thus win we. Time shall sink in night
But never shall from memory pass the sight
Transcendant, when the foe their sign first gave
Of full submission. Like the smile of light,
The silent lightning of the moonlipped wave,
Which, lengthening gradual, parts now, now extends;
Beams from far points at once, there central breaks;
Here from the midst its flight extremeward takes;
Then, sudden ceased; revives; revives, nor ever ends;—
Gleamed forth the inexhaustible joy, now ours
Through all our dazzling lines. There are, meanwhile,
With our changed adversaries, no longer powers
Of ill, who fain with fate would reconcile
Their late discomfited chief. He, too, in mien
By sudden sorcery changed, both hosts between,
On wing malefic hung, as, poised o'er sands,
Shadowy, a black and jagged cloud will lie,
Monstrous and solitary. Too fierce to fly
But, braving doom, with uplift impious hands
Clenched, clubbed with threats, he glowered upon the sky,
The great infortune of the universe;
All winding, man and God, in one unuttered curse.
‘O thou All-good!’ I cried, ‘to yon dark power,
Malevolent, in the air, betwixt thy throne
And us, our cause arraigning in thine own,
Be thy miraculous might, conversive, shown,
And all thy mercy usward, this dread hour;
Or show us how our foe to annihilate.’
Presumptuous, thus, impatient, if I prayed

638

Yet not unacceptably all, as fate
To the world reveals. For lo! all life create,
As warrior's breast of arrowy bolt relieved
Flesh racking,—groaned with joy, as down he fell,—
God's passive hand withdrawn, without whose aid
Things nathless evil, were all of force bereaved,—
With thunderous shock, reverberant even in hell,
The spirit, disrealmed, of ill; there stirless laid.
All being seemed now aswound, and smitten as dumb.
Grew a presage in every breast of some
Solemn and saintly act of God to come.
As when, at eve, some cloud, which long hath lain
The oppression of the heavens, and of a realm
The terror,—fled,—redeemed from nameless fear,
Anarchal, of earth-quakings, and the train
Of ills conflagrant, which by larcenous wile
By chance, by lightning, oft whole states o'erwhelm;—
Make glad the citizens, seeing, slow, appear
In air, a pearly calm, as though of sphere
Happier than theirs; the young moon's maiden smile
Lands, sullen late, lights up; the tranquil main
Rests to its roots;—so we, war gone, heaven's peace,
Coheir of bliss, and all their vast release,
Welcome. The day of God, to us the day
Of joy, to theirs destined of dire dismay,
Dawned o'er our heads; the sun of justice, sphere
Of righteousness, no setting more to fear,
Beamed manwards; and his seat assumed for aye.
All now the end of ends knew nigh; and lo!
Each eye intent on heaven's aspect, there shone
Instant, on light's enlargening horizon,
As crystalled by the spirit which round us blew
Perfect, in symmetry divine to view
A long slim cloudlet, like to a golden bow
Knapped just i' the midst; its loose and listless chord
Tangled about it. Thus showed God the Lord
That fight was finished; good's great victory won;
Earth's war of spiritual light and darkness done;
The strife of ages closed. Then all the sun
Helped us to note our foemen's piteous state,
And know thereby our victory half achieved
Onely, while charity failed to renovate
With hope those fallen; with faith those sin-deceived;
With trust in God those erst who misbelieved.
These humbled now, submissive, silent, gave
Ruth first its power to amend, grace, hope to save;
Us, spirit to help that ardent multitude
'Gainst ours so lately arrayed, but whom we viewed
Now, burying out of sight, in one deep grave,
Their carnal arms, ashamed. Disharnessed, nude

639

They watched their banners burn. Then first we saw,
Glancing on our own arms, each arm a law
Of God, each weapon a virtue; shield and glaive
A truth divine, strong to subdue or save;
Wrought of God's hand, God's art! without a flaw;
Forged in heaven's fire; impenetrable, alike,
This, faith to guard; by reason, that, to strike.
While myriads thus their arms laid down, subdued
By kindness, patience, grace, love, mansuetude;
All human excellences and God's combined;
And while truth, wisdom, virtue all things viewed
Approvingly, and holped one mighty mind
From all to mould, some few start out, of kind
Indomitable, and for meet punishment,
Conform to holy reason's just intent,
And his, divine, reserved,—who from the age
Initial of the world, life's every stage
Hath loved to advance and sought to ameliorate.
We, these things knowing, and with the great effect
Secured, well pleased, thanks first to God direct;—
Which done, in every wound we pour the balm
Of heavenly all-heal; every conscience calm
With mercy's anodyne; strengthen every mind
With just belief of strife man's vital need
By one all wise, who good and ill so twined
With freedom, that his fate man rules,—decreed
Until to nature's war heaven's peace succeed;
And God's pure truth triumphant prove the intent
He, world-wise providence, from the first hath planned,
That good, 'gainst ill, in free arbitrement
Of spirit, fair fought, should final conqueror stand;
Reason, faith serving, sin and self command;
And bale and bliss, life's vast contrariant whole,
One cause confess, one universal soul.
Now all earth's old distinctions ceased; sea, land
Lapsing into their primal essence grew
Ætherial, and the wind, world-warning, threw—
As wretched seer who some state-ruinous ill
Foretelling, helps his woeful weird fulfil,
The popular mind distraught by such sad skill,—
Into each dying gust, as breathed of fate,
Force, our mixed tribes once more to segregate;
Soul winnowing far from soul. These banned,—the word
Compellant, sternly mild, in fatherly tone
Said, as by one who willed to amend their state,
Not utterly ruined nor all reprobate,
Who favoured error, sin, the imperfect,—heard
Wistful: not ignorant how to reatone
With God the spirit, and knowing so concurred
In their just doom; knew, all the long career

640

Of pains abstersive, pains heaven's nether sphere
Opes aye to all, ere filled the soul's great year
Before them; knew their kind remedial end
Necessitated; and went. As one by one
Like rags of darkness from night's mantle riven,
Eve's tempest slackened, clouds, the face of heaven
Long shadowingly deform, loath to be gone;
But all at last mass up the horizon,
So they: their chief in bonds, once seeming friend,
Prey of my falchion, spoil now of this spear,
Out-taken; he, still reserved for judgment here:—
God's will so said. Meanwhile we, warned, attend
A further sign; and instantly 'twas given;
A fire-voice; gathering gradual out of heaven,
Sense hallowing, mind transfiguring, round us came;
A voice; as when within some homely shrine
Our God comes down in answer to his name
Invoked, and with a wordlessness divine
Holds converse inmostly; and us, who had striven
Through this soul conflict, calling, straight we know,—
As lived things dead, touched, erst, by prophet's rod,
In us the spirit regenerant's deathless glow;
A fire, that all with purifying zest
Before it, burned; consuming, midst our breast
Nature's whole evil; and this fire was God.
I, then:—‘As reeflet, long from parent shore
Orphaned, that save at hollowest ebb of all
Year-tides, peers not the savage surges o'er,
Nor airs her pearl and coral, childish store,
I' the golden light; nor ever,—while befal
Others, such less joys oft,—rejoins, by chance
Her kindred lands; gift compensative none
Desiring for life-long suppression more
Than this, eternized to her,—the sun's glance;
So, from time's deeps emergent, and the flood
Refluous, of life and death, my soul, in thine,
O God! sole spirit of universal good,
Oned with all blessed, the unnumbered multitude;
Immortal, mystic, militant, and divine,
Would in thine eye-light bask, thy governance.’
No after sound nor sign. The renovate sphere
Good thus world victor, evil o'erthrown,—us, here
Biding God's ends, see, angels! Dost not fear
Fiend! late my foe, fate's future, deadlier pass?

Lucifer.
Have not I triumphed o'er the world that was?

God.
Prince of the powers of air, thy doom is nigh.
The prison and place of spirits shall be for thee
As for all these guilt 'complices thine, thou hast wronged
For a time one proper mansion: they in pain
Emendative: thou, evil!

641

Lucifer.
And what if I
Heart-hardened, still endure? While lasts the world,
Thou mayst restrain, confine; not make to cease.

God.
Him lead ye angels into Hades, there
To await my will while the world's sabbath lasts.
These souls elect, self purified, fore-called
Who die not, nor, who through my favour, lose
Unconscious, by death's intermediate sleep,
Nor expiative amercement, joy in me,
Who, righteous souls of all earth's epochs passed,
All faiths, all grades of mind, here from the tomb
First-born, the truth, in heaven once gospelled, prove;
That faith should conquer misbelief, the good
All ill subject, virtue all sin; and these
Led by one sampling soul, forechosen of love,
First fruits of life celestial which their breast
Fills,—shall the earth, now renovated, indwell.

Angels.
Be it Lord as thou dost will, with us, with all.

God.
Angel of earth, and thou bright Phanuel, sole
In the infinite presence, visible of thyself,
And you, ye astral souls, who, latewhile, here,
Earth's end, as rise, saw, and this unfixed mean
Of seeming chaos; who still animate, guide,
Or train the orblets to your genial care
Consigned, and in your charge as in my love
Happy, know, all, if, sumless times now gone
Earth's mountainous frame to upbuild, from central base,
To airiest battlement once I willed, 'twas not
Necessity clogged my hands, nor forced compute
Of infinite atomies; no, my power as choice
Untrammelled, see, angel of starry earth,
My special promise once in heaven's records
Enrolled, shall be fulfilled. While time beholds
Orbs vaster, scattered into particles, dim
The surface of eternity's flood, conjoin
The casual meteor, or for ages drift
Through space extenuate, to minutest motes
Dissolved, even lucent dust, and radiant mist,
Prime manifest of the invisible essence, thine,
Regathering all its elements shall again
Brighten the vital air, fierily refined.
Lo! earth shall live again and, with her sons,
Have resurrection to a brighter being;
And wakening like a bride, or like a morning,
With a long blush of love, to a new life,
Another race of souls shall rule in her,
Creatures all loving, beautiful and holy;
Such,—see them!—as, evil quelled, and justice wrought,
Have vanquished bound and trampled under foot
Their souls' defect, by self-set tendence towards

642

The absolute good; whom death holds therefore not
In more than freshening slumber, and who, prime
Resurgents of all life, haste now to live.

Luniel.
Heard'st thou the word?

Angel of Earth.
The word I heard, Earth, be!
And earth meseemed in echoing, learned to live.

Phanuel.
So swift the omnific word, scarce syllabled, lo!
The perfect orb, in shape as erst, but made
Purer, ætherial, instantly restored,
As these glad eyes but now behold, to form,
And purified, by God's sole actful word.

Angel of Earth.
Be glad with me, ye angels! Earth from sleep
Regenerative, awakening, all her powers
Her beauties, spring spontaneous; gum and pine
Entwine their shadows; lily and violet blend
Odours; and myrtle and bay on morning gales
Eve's perfumes, stored with starry jasmin, musk,
And rose in amicable exchange, shall strew.

Guardian Angel.
See paradise her growth of nectarous flowers
Revives, to crown the eternal season's hours!
Away, ill; pain, away! Creation, burst
Into one orderly hymn of joy; all life
Sing, voluntary, his love, who willed to make
From evil all good, as all from nothing, first;
Henceforth with changeless boons and beauties rife
For his own glory, and for his creatures' sake;
Of him so loved, all his with rational hope
Endowed that they might trace in nature's scope
Presage of perfectness all lives should take.
No fire, no sea; all elements to one form
Final, of universal use, and plan,
Reverting; air invulnerable of storm;
Earth, pure, transpicuous, shadowless; and man
Apt for commune with God, as he began.

Angels.
The world begins and ends with paradise,
The garden and the city of the blessed;
Begins with paradise and ends with heaven.

Angel of Earth.
Thee, thank we, Lord! all powers of spiritual light,
Concerned thy counsels to partake, and spread
Wideliest we may allwhere the holy ends
Of thy benevolence. Most, earth's warden, I.

God.
Go, angel! guide her as erewhile through heaven.

Luniel.
Sometime my half-gloomed sphere, again may live.

Angel of Earth.
On! on! my world again!
Again we fly
Through heaven's blue plain,

643

As thought through the eye;
Ye angels keep your heaven.
I earth. For that with God
I have striven;
And have prevailed,
I come once more;
I come to thee, earth!
Like a ship to shore.

XLI.

Millennial earth, transfigured to a star,
The rebegotten world, see, born again;
Good, universal order, peace and joy.
Fruits of the new creation, all the heirs
Holy, of light, share; sweet command in these,
In those, obedience sweeter still. All art
Sublimed, all science hallowed, to best ends,
Life worldly made life heavenly by God's law
Pervasive, spiritual ill, pain bodily, cease.
Are gloriously disproven all godless doubts,
Earth's caverned prophesies, of oracular reek
Voiced, not divine breath, of mere fleshlihood.
Virtues incorporate spiritual-wise, with heaven
Linked, their original nature show and end.
Life lower now with more intelligence dowered,
Docile, unharmful, gladdens in fates humane.

Earth Millennial.
Archangel, Angel of Earth, Luniel, Angels, Saints, Angela, Festus, and Clara.
Angel of Earth.
God and the world one Holy family;
The houses of the heavens and earth allied;
That was the prophecy, and this the proof;
Love the beginning of the great return.

Luniel.
I had a happy vision yesternight.
Methought I saw the gathering of all tribes
Of men returning out of dateless death,
Unto the Holy land, the land of life.

Saints.
We saw it likewise; we, yea, all of us,
And heard the angels sing: far up mid heaven
Their blessèd words resounded, of our thoughts
The pure celestial echoes; this their hymn.

They come from the ends of the earth,
White with its aged snows;
From the bounding breast of the tropic tide,
Where the day-beam ever glows;
From the east where first they dwelt,
From the north, and the south, and the west,
Where the sun puts on his robe of light,
And lays down his crown to rest.

644

Out of every land they come;
Where the palm triumphant grows,
Where the vine overshadows the roofs and the hills,
And the gold orbed orange glows:
Where the olive and fig-tree thrive,
And the rich pomegranates red,
Where the citron blooms, and the apple of ill
Bows down its fragrant head.

From the lands where the gems are born;
Opal and emerald bright;
From shores where the ruddy corals grow,
And pearls with their mellow light;
Where silver and gold are dug,
And the diamond rivers roll,
And the marble white as the still moonlight
Is quarried, and jetty coal;—

They come—with a gladdening shout;
They come—with a tear of joy;
Father and daughter, youth and maid,
Mother and blooming boy.
A thousand dwellings they leave,
Dwellings—but not a home;
To them there is none but the sacred soil,
And the land whereto they come.

And the Temple again shall be built,
And filled as it was of yore;
And the burden be lift from the heart of the world,
And the nations all adore;
Prayers to the throne of heaven
Morning and eve shall rise,
And unto and not of the Lamb
Shall be the sacrifice.

Angel of Earth.
As isles, disjoined by superficial deeps,
Yet rooted stand in unity with worlds;
So with the interior continent of heaven,
Earth and its own.

Saints.
Now know we the whole world
The land of heavenly commerce, where both kinds
Of men and angels mix with mutual gain;
With knowledge, and with wisdom, and with joy
Flowing; the final festival of time.

Archangel.
Angels, God's gracious ministry, doubt ye not,
In many a sphere,—by laws of light and weight
With yours commutual bound, as ye to them,
Spiritual, by sense of right and truth, by proof,
By love of Deity, and by bonds to both
Common of virtue and piety, interchange
With chosen intelligences and spirits of power,
Thrones and all heavenly excellences, who scale
The star-stair of perfection's tower, glad news
Of orbs, even yours, regenerate. Every globe

645

A mansion of the spirit, world-blessing souls
Mingle at large with men. Know, who would prove
Divinity by deeds works miracles; who
By words, speaks mysteries mixed with clearest truths.
All revelation is a mystery, here.

Angel of Earth.
The ultimate mysteries faith shall celebrate,
Perfective, of the holy spirit, are God's;
Whose manifold salvation all imbounds,
Sinner and saint, one world completing plan.

Saints.
O holy Angel, warden of the world,
Who guidedst its first footsteps o'er the path,
Untried of newest space, well trodden now,
Which round the sun it circleth; and thou, too,
Serenest of all angels, fairest, first,
Of those here culled, the flower of heaven's bright hosts,
Who knowest the heart of truth, and well may'st smile
At legends of the birth of sun and stars,
The atomic ancestries of elements,
And infantile antiquity of time,—
We in this sphere rejoice that with ye we
The truth possess and glory in. Do thou
Speak then, who canst, bright angel guide of earth,
If leisure thine, whose long experience tends
Far past the immediate parentage of time,
Into eternal æons, what to us
The Godblessed words may prove of living light.
Instruct us in the wisdom of the heavens,
At once the gate and goal of the true life
The empyrean shadows, so that we,
Like self obedient elements, which contain
Their total laws and partial liberties,
The reign of God may honour in all spheres,
And act therewith concordantly, as here.

Angel of Earth.
As when one wise in Nature's ways of old,
Gazing through optic lens, heaven's spatial plains,
Perceived that what to naked eye black blanks
Unfathomable, and lonesome adits seemed
From universe to universe, were in truth
Crowded with suns; so, too, created mind,
Scanning the depths of Deity, must confess,
When by his will enlightened, that what shows
As mere inexplicable judgment, fate,
Imposed by arbitrary ruler, first,
Proves, rightly known of good and glory full,
As firmamental fields with orbs of life.
For infinitely various are the ways
Wherein God conquers evil; at one time
Slowly eradicating, line by line,

646

Its fatal features, and again, by one
Annihilative word, destroying it.
The sphere I mourned as mine, to ruin doomed,
God hath restored to being; and newly dowered
With life, and holy soul, transformed, it beams
Self-shining. And, recipient of all bliss
Unmerited, unmeasured, she the like
Imparts to all who in her hallowed light,
Gladden. Thereto, I now; God bidden to tend.

Luniel.
The issue of all ages is at hand.

Angel of Earth.
Heaven's ways are always cyclical; its events,
All orbital, its æras; and albeit
The sin of man, Promethean, never cease,
Nor the avenging vulture's beak, blood-wet;
Yet is the arrow always on the wing,
Which seeks the heart of vengeance, seeks and slays.
So from the first divine forgiveness clasps,
To her all quickening bosom, all which live;
Calls all by name, and naming, halloweth them.

Saints.
Thus, by God's goodness, goodness comes to us
Out of his boundless plenitude; and man,
The shadowy semblance of the vast divine,
Like a dark sphere absorbed into the sun,
As in presecular time emergent thence,
His constellated seat assumes in heaven,
A deathless incarnation of the light.
And this despite of evil, sin, and pain,
That every faculty be perfected,
And all affection purified in man;
Love being love of good, hate, hate of ill;
Divinest hate, unanimous with love.
Wherefore to those who realize God's will,
And with the same their own assimilate,
Water in water flowing, air in air,
Passive as silence, active as the light,
Receiving and dispensing, moments fall
Like silver raindrops stippled in the ground,
Whose resurrection is in grain of gold.
But with the generation of the world,
Who their back turned upon the sun to toy
With their own shadows, meanly pleased to mark
Their selfgrowth, not considering that the more
These things extend themselves, the nearer they
To their extinction;—not thus. Night comes on;
And lo! the whole flock in the fold of death.

Angel of Earth.
Ends and beginnings mingle at the last;
All ultimates are foreordained; these days,
And those far times, when yon fair flowering orb,

647

Lily-like, beamed out of time's shadowy tide;
And spread its bright and continental leaves,
Fragrant with sunny incense, to the heavens.
But his infallible eye, beneath whose beam
Essence becomes appearance, every day
Doomsday, an inner circlet of pure time,
Concentric with eternity, and part
Of the same all inclusive octave here,
The darkness from the light shall sejugate;
The visible veil of the invisible.
And the times near when all shall be complete;
The golden seed from ripe fulfilment fall;
Eternal mind immortal utterance make;
The many-coloured arch a circle be;
Earth's orb elect her crescent horns conjoin
With light perpetual, total, vital light;
And, the mixed past made pure and holy, cause
The present paradise, the future heaven.

Saints.
Man's being is an everlasting birth;
We are ourselves the elements of heaven.
And as the eye is sacred to the sun,
So be the soul to God. It is sweet to point
To prophecies fulfilled, when spells of good.
To us extinct all ill, all sin, all woe;
The world seems wreathed from end to end with joy,
And garlanded with glory, as the hall
Of some great populous palace at a feast.
Our nature we relume, too, as the sun,
From the bright burning atmosphere he breathes,
The starry spirits of his frame renews,
And revels in his glory without end.
So we in that divinity rejoice,
Wherein all spiritual essence is and acts,
Authentic because free.

Angels.
Praise therefore heaven.

Saints.
To thee, God, maker, ruler, saviour, judge!
The Infinite, the Universal One,
Whose righteousnesses are as numberless
As creature sins; who giver art of life;
Who sawest from the first that all was good,
Which thou didst make, and seal'dst it with thy love,
Thy boundless benediction on the world;
To thee be honour, glory, prayer and praise,
And full-orbed worship from all worlds, all heavens.
May every being bless thee in return
As thou dost bless it; every age and orb
Utter to thee the praise thou dost inspire.
Let man, Lord! praise thee most, as all redeemed,
As many in the saints, as one in thee.
Oh may perpetual pleasure, peace, and joy,

648

And spiritual light inform all souls;
And grace and mercy in bliss thousandfold
Enwrap the world of life. May all who dwell
On open earth, or in the hid abyss,
Howe'er they sin or suffer, in the end,
Receive, as beings born at first of thee,
The mercy that is mightier than all ill.
May all souls love each other in all worlds,
And all conditions of existence: even
As now these lower lives that dwell with man
In amity, rejoicing in the care
Of their superior, and in useful peace,
Upon the common earth, no more distained
With mutual slaughter—no more doomed to groan
At sight of woe, and cruelty, and crime.
Lo! all things now rejoicing in the life
Thou art to each and givest, live to thee;
And knowing other's nature and their own
Live in serene delight, content with good,
Yet earnest for the last and best degree.
Their hands are full of kindness, and their tongues
Are full of blessings, and their hearts of good.
All things are happy here. May kindness, truth,
Wisdom, and knowledge, liberty and power,
Virtue and holiness, o'erspread all orbs
As this star now; the world be bliss and love;
And heaven alone be all things; till at last
The music from all souls redeemed shall rise,
Like a perpetual fountain of pure sound,
Upspringing, sparkling in the silvery blue;
From round creation to thy feet, O God!

Festus.
One's fellow conquerors recognized in peace,
How calm, how sweet this life! from passion pure,
From natural evils freed. The storm of time
The world hath wept through, and the whirl of life
Once mine, shows like an agonizèd dream
Hung in the halls of memory, bannerwise;
Proof-sign of victory passed. Speak, angel-bride,
Being of bliss and beauty, seems not this
The peace serene thy spirit longed for once?

Clara.
It is. How doubly dear all sacred thing
Show to the soul elect salvation here
Hath hallowed; and how blessed the high employ,
God's wisdom teaching to millennial man,
And learning love divine.

Festus.
Doubt's tempest-age
Soothed into silent and profound belief;
The soul's ambitious and ill-ordered quests
Chastened to aspirations; all desires,
Calm as the regular breathings of the breast.

649

What joy to worship, in our heart recrowned,
The exiled sovereign of earth's youth, long lost,
Our old paternal faith!—What joy to feel,
Though life-deforming passions come and go,
Stormlike, and cloudlike, high o'er all, the spirit
Stands, in impassive purity and peace,
Identical with heaven. See, soul of light,
Thy kindred angel!

Angela.
Yes. This joy is mine,
To quit betimes the grandeurs of the sun,
His continents of light and sea-like springs
Of radiance, here to wander by their side
Beloved on earth as mine; and ye are they
I loved most. Most of all it gladdeneth me
In hallowed commune thus to help expand
The spirit capacious of extremest truth,
With ends beneficent; so that kindly act
Keep pace with godly thought.

Festus.
God's universe,
A boundless field for ever-active good,
To soul so bent, unfolds. While, world by world,—
Through all successive spheres, the aspiring spirit,
Death born, yet reascendent, till it come,
Through many a cradling starlet, to the orb
Whence its predestined rise shall end all proof,
Restore the wanderer to the way, and blend
Life momentary with the eternal state,
The everlasting order of all days,—
Wisdom her many-chambered dome reveals,
Her graduated heaven.

Clara.
Content with this,
One altar in her thousand-shrinèd fane,
Earth's simpler souls their rites of truth and love
Like faithfully fulfil with those enthroned
Who look down on the empyrean. Here
All knowledge sanctified, all mind enlarged,
All faculties reformed, how perfect seems
To eyes illumed with truth's interior light,
Self-opening, flowerlike, those most gracious trials
Our souls once suffered; sufferings now enjoyed.

Angela.
What lengths we reach of spiritual light;
What breadths now compass of celestial views;
What heights faith's visionary eye commands;
What depths we fathom of divinity;
Let him tell, who can count the motes of air,
Stars, and the rays of stars, or God's good deeds.

Festus.
Alas! what mean conceptions once were man's
Of God; his essence, nature, ends. In vain
Men thought to magnify the Infinite,
Who merely magnified their own small thought,

650

And made it monstrous. Not in vain for such
May we thy pity ask, thy pardon, Lord;
For us, the joy to feel, the gift to prove
Love, power, and wisdom omnicausal thine,
Which from the fount divine of being flow.
With hatred and revenge are base effects,
And passions, to mean natures only known;
Not to be charged to God, nor named with him.
Passions are proofs of imperfection. Thou
Only hast all perfections, God! who art
Eternal reason quickening boundless laws;
The laws of love, life, light, wherein be based
The world's sublime foundations.

Angela.
Oh, how vast
The glories of the future, once mismatched
'Gainst earth-life merely, and all its littleness.

Clara.
Were happiness alone our being's aim,
We, over nature reigning and mere soul,
Pure intellect, and all whom, led by them
Our better lot is here to raise, refine,
Enlighten, free from inner mental bonds,
Oh, glorious rule! it might indeed seem well
For good of others and our own delight,
This natural dispensation and divine,
This first degree of heaven should aye perdure.

Angela.
True; earth is all one Eden. Pity 'twere,
That it should ever end.

Saint.
I say not so;
Although I have a thousand plans in hand,
Some interwoven with the farthest stars—
Each one of which might ask a year of years
To perfect.

Clara.
Be it; our Maker knoweth best
What thought or deed may best belong to time,
Or to eternity.

Saint.
All prophecy
Hath said the earth shall cease, and that right soon.

Festus.
It is like enough. Beauty's akin to death.

Angel.
Behold, our sister graces of the skies,
Faith, Hope, and Love, descend! Methinks of late
Ye chiefly dwell on earth.

Love.
Where lives and reigns
The divine humanity, there are we ever seen,
Successive, as the seasons to the sun.

Saints.
Well are ye known and welcome in all worlds.
Wherever lofty thought or godly deed
Is lodged or compassed, there your blessings rest.

Hope.
How sweet, how sacred now, this earth of man's,
The prelude of a yet sublimer bliss!—

651

I marked it from the first, while yet it lay
Lightless and stirless; ere the forming fire
Was kindled in its bosom, or the land
Lift its volcanic breastwork up from sea.
The deluge and idolatries of men
I viewed, though shuddering, and with faltering eye,
E'en to the incarnation of heaven's Truth,
And dawn of earth's best faith; that faith which fled
An infant, waxed anon a giant; peeped,
A star, and grew a heaven-fulfilling sun;
Which was an outcast, and became, ere long,
A dweller in all palaces; which hid
Its head in dens of deserts, and sat throned,
After, in richest temples high as hills:
Which, poured out painfully in mortal blood,
Rose an immortal spirit; as a slave
Was sold for gold and prostrated to power;—
And now that lowly bondmaid is a queen;
And lo! she is beloved in earth and heaven;
And lieth in the bosom of her Lord,
The bride of the all-worshipped, one with God.

Love.
We, even of divinest origin,
In infinite progression view all worlds;
And we are happy.

Faith.
The dead sleep as yet;
But their day cometh, and the bonds of death
Already slacken around the living soul;
The mortal sleep of ages, which began
When time sank down into his slumberous west,
Thins even now o'er the reviving eyes,
Gathering their heaven-lent light, no more to wane
In woe or age: never be quenched in tears,
Like a star in the sea. It is as I ever knew;
My life is to receive and to believe
The word and words of God.

Love.
I who am Love,
And Grace, and Charity, rejoice with you,
Whither ye wend I with ye; whether here,
Or on the utmost rim of Light's broad reign,
The least and last of stars which even seems
To tremble at its insignificance,
In presence of Infinity; where yet
No angel's wing hath waved, nor foot of fiend
Left its hot imprint;—still, in all do we
Find fit delight and honour, as now here.
Now earth and heaven hold commune, day and night;
There's not a wind but bears upon its wing
The messages of God; and not a star
But knows the bliss of earth.

Festus.
The earth hath God

652

Remade, and all its elements refined,
Fit for sublimer being. Flesh hath passed
Its fiery baptism, and come forth clear
As crystal gold: all that of vile or mean
Pertained to it hath perished atomless.
The kindred ties of family and race,
Intensified into identity, now,
Earth, like a diamond, basks in her own free light,
Unfed, unaided, unrequiring aught.
All now is purity, and power, and peace.
The first-born of creation, they who hail
Archangels as their brethren, mountainlike
Reign o'er the plains of men, converting all;
Reaping the fields of immortality,
Each one his sheaf, for him the harvest-Lord;
To whom belongs earth's whole estate and life,
And every world's.

Angel.
And he shall garner all.
The awful tribes which have in Hades dwelt,
Passed count of time, await their rising. God's
Great day, the sabbath of the world's long week,
Is at high noon; and Christ hath yet to come,
To judge and save the living and the dead.

Clara.
The shadows of eternity o'ercast
Already time's bright towers. The heavens shall come
Down like a cloud upon the hill, and sweep
Their spirit over earth, and the whole face
And form of things shall be dissolved and changed.
Nothing shall be but essence, perfect, pure,
And void of every attribute but God's.
This even is too gross for that to come,
The holy have the earth, and heaven is theirs.

Festus.
Nor pain, nor toil of mind or frame, nor doubt
Nor discontent, nor enmity to God,
Disturb the steady joy the spirit feels;
Nor element can torture, nor time tire;
Nor sea nor mountain make or bar or fear;
Sickness and woe and death are things gone by;
Destroyed with the destruction of the world:—
Shadows of things which have been, never more
To waste the world's bright hours, nor grate the heart
Of mighty man; now fit for thrones and wings;
Ruler of worlds, main minister of heaven,
Inheritor of all the prophecies
Of God, fore-uttered through the tongues of time,
Ages of ages. Evil is no more.

Archangel.
And does earth satisfy thee now?

Festus.
As earth.
There is a brighter, loftier life for man
Even yet, the very union with God.

653

Archangel.
God works by means. Between the two extremes
Of earth and heaven there lies a mediate state,—
A pause between the lightning lapse of life
And following thunders of eternity;—
Between eternity and time a lapse,
To soul unconscious, though agelasting, where
Spirit is tempered to its final fate;
Within or between worlds, repose or bliss
Divested, man shall mix with deity,
And the eternal and immortal make
One being. As in earth's first paradise
God's spirit walked with man, and commune made
With him, so in the second, after death,
Man's spirit walks with God in an elect
Existence, and a vigil of the great,
The holy day which is to break in heaven.
Thither Truth's prophet went, in the dread hour
That hell by earth on heaven revenged itself,
With one soul penitent 'companied;—nor long
Remained, but while enough to cheer earth's troop
Of foremost disobedients, heads of Sin's
Long line, who soul enlightened firm received
With time-outwearing hope that yet in God
They should partake the fulness of his love.
And with him rose then, in prophetic proof
Of immortality, many a deathless ghost,
Triumphant o'er that blind revenge which wrought
Hell! thy destruction—thy salvation, earth!

Festus.
That such will be, the just well know; and all
Earth's great events and changes tend thereto;
Its fiery dissolution in the passed,
And supernatural rebirth which now
The chosen and the world-redeemed partake.

Archangel.
And this shall last, till like the setting sun
Deserting earth, he shall retire to heaven,
With all his captive victors in his train,
Triumphant, and translated evermore
Into the hierarchal skies. Wilt see,
While yet time is, earth's shadowy world within—
The living death she hearts, and, augur-like,
Explore the ominous bowels of the sphere?
As one great life it is pervadeth all
That bud, breathe, beam, so in the spirit world,
Of God, his will through countless ministries
Confided potently, works publicly;
And I, the liberating angel, marked
From supramundane time, act to this end.
To me are given the secrets of the centre,
The keys of earth, to lock and to unlock,

654

Coffer-like. I it was who seized and bound,
At his behest who wills and it is done,
Even on their thrones, the mighty thou wilt see.

Festus.
Angel of heaven! I would view these things.

Archangel.
Nor these alone, but other wonders yet.
The valley Death's dark pinions brooded o'er,
A life-offending night, unvisited
By sun or star, where but the fatuous fire
Of man's weak judgment, wandered till God's hand
Laid o'er the black abyss a bridge of life,
And married earth to heaven's mainland thou'lt see,
Death's grave; and over him, that monument
Of light, enlightening earth. The gods and fiends
Of old, and all the fictions of man's heart,
Imagined of the future passed for aye,
Thou shalt inspect. Behold this mountain! We
Must pass through it; for under lie the gates
Of the invisible regions whereunto
We tend, for a brief season.

Festus.
On then!

Archangel.
Bare
Thy marble breast, O mountain, to its depths!
An angel and a man divine demand
A way through these foundations.

Festus.
And the rocks
Open like mists before thee.

Archangel.
Follow me!

XLII.

The soul-state, intermediate 'twixt earth's life
And the world future, unconceived till seen,
We search with curious awe; mark dormant death;
Nor, joyless, evil accost, by heaven restrained;
From bonds æonian loosened, ere the end:
View, visionary, the circle of false gods,
Refractions of the sole and infinite One,
Conceptions imperfect of deity, held
Of old, by ignorant and idolatrous man,
Yet honest, who his best faculties adored
Unwittingly, his mere passions:—ruined, chained,
Worshipless, all bear witness to one true,
All-free, all-necessary, all holy God.
Error's unreal immortality, see
Extinguished by God's verity: hear the word
Divine, by all obeyed.

Hades.
Archangel, Festus, Death, Lucifer.
Festus.
Almighty God! sustain me. This is death:—
And this—I knew not, angel, he was here—

655

Is Lucifer, the fallen; and like a bolt
Of thunder forged in intramundane air,
Self-buried within the centre. Not in hell;
Where every spirit's work, by fire is tried;
For there is fierce exaction of just dues,
Stern course of forfaults compurgate; remorse,
Flame-toothed, with bite unflickering, find I him;
But here, God-bounden in rest.

Archangel.
O Lucifer!
Wake from thy sea-like sleep, time's calm so long,
Long and unfathomable hath ceased. Arise
In peace or wrath, rouse from thine age-long trance,
And see; earth's representative, and heaven's,
Stand by thee. Closed, death's intermediate state,
Heaven's breath blows freely round us as the air
Vital of all futurity.

Lucifer.
Heaven's just doom
Respect thou, angel; nor thou, mortal, erst
Vassal, last victor, vaunt thou this, nor blame
Fate's word, for that, forespoken.

Festus.
I blame no more
The part thou took'st once in my mortal life;
It is gone; nor spurn thee for delusions dead.
The blood man's strife once spilled is sunk in earth,
Run into rivers, seas; dried up in air;
Air, water, earth themselves, all elements, gone,
With the sin itself; even sin being expiate now
By sufferance of just doom; good done to soul
Wronged; and first innocence rightly sought of God.
As therefore came by freedom sin, by sin
Knowledge, and last by knowledge wished return
Godwards, what good hath come of all I bear
Alone at heart; and if we have both, time passed,
Offended God, let me, though in nature not
To forget—forgive what each man once hath felt,
The devil's all-burning grip upon his heart.
Thee view I with compassion; half with hope.

Lucifer.
Mortal! I bow to thee, and would to the least
And lowest of all the spirits that God hath made;
Being in ill his worser, but that the curse
I am accursed with of impenitency,
Outlasts the elements—outlives all time.

Festus.
All curses cease with time; all ill, all woe.
Blessings star forth for ever; but a curse
Is like a cloud—it passeth.

Lucifer.
It is a cloud
Enshrouds creation. Good and ill perchance
Have one end.

Archangel.
Mark the uncertain wit he words.
Twice-shot contrariwise his thought-woof seems

656

Itself to thwart reversive; not of truth
Takes he yet hand-fast; nought of right conceives
Indeviable; and yet, once more, 'tis writ,
With miscreant strife, even faithless in himself,
His final fate he tempts, well-earned, so far
As finite spirit can deem; nathless, strange change
In him once wrought, like strange to come may augur.

Lucifer.
Angel and mortal, hear! who else save God
Can fathom nature? who unveil, he sole,
Except, who clothed? Me needs not here defend,
Mine office preappointed; nor yet tell
What thoughts if vacillant, still perchance not vain
Wholly, have filled my soul since thus. Dread thou
The executant of God's vengeance, for by him
Yon angel, only not almighty, there!
As with a chain of mountains, I was bound,
And hurled into this unformed nebulous life;
Stripped of all might when mightiest, struck down
While triumphing the loftiest,—enslaved,
When most a monarch o'er both earth and hell,
And made a shadow among shadows here.
It recks not. Let the impenetrable soul
Be ground as through a mill; know only I
In action or inaction equal woe;
Suffering, doing, being, one extreme.
Pass on! we meet again.

Festus.
And when we do,
May God forgive, as I!

Archangel.
Mayhap thou wilt yet
Know me as minister of his mercy.

Lucifer.
I!
I look for mercy? never! Least, when now
Plotting the sum of evil.

Archangel.
Behold there Death!
Throned on his tomb—entombèd in his throne;
Just as he ceased he rests for aye; his scythe,
Still wet out of its bloody swathe, one hand
Tottering sustains: the other strikes the cold
Drops from his bony brow; his mouldy breath
Tainteth all air.

Festus.
I dread him now no more,
Nor hate. He is a vanquished enemy.

Archangel.
Listen! he speaks.

Death.
To you, ye sons of God,
My latest words I utter. Unto him
Who ever lives, and hath for aye destroyed
Me and my reign, give ye this crown usurped,
And lay it at his feet; and this dulled dart
Which was my sceptre. To the conqueror
Belong these trophies. All the progeny

657

Of time will soon cease. Lo! the end's at hand.

Archangel.
Thus shall it be, O Death! and thus it is.
But hear, O Death! and thou, great Fiend; the will
Of the Eternal Life, the all-present Good
Is that I free ye both. Thou Death, depart;
Seek other sphere, where poised with life minute
Thou mayst existence match, and wait God's will,
Largening or lessening. Rise thou, hell's lord. Behold!
Even while I speak, so mighty shows his word,
Those chains though mountain-ribbed, and fit to bind
The tide to the sea's bed, like clotted snow,
Fall from thy feet. Up, then, and do thy will,
Whate'er it be, and wheresoever. Go!

Lucifer.
Let us away, O Death!

Death.
Let us away!
My realm I leave behind me.

Lucifer.
I mine seek.

Festus.
Lo! they are gone. Earth's breath is purified.
The air feels lighter, I breathe easier since.
Who now these giant shades of awe which fill
The midst, the present of the place? And whose
Yon throne inane whose perilous void bespeaks
A central terror which, unseen, more awes
Than others' presence?

Archangel.
Heaven to them thereby
Their state subordinate shows; the doom of pride.
These are the mighty nothings man of old
Made; unrealities dread by whom he swore,
Prayed to, and sacrificed; brother falsehoods all;
Men like himself, imagination changed
To gods; for good deeds these, and those for bad:
Or, angels who aspiring to be gods,
Made themselves, deathless nothings; lords of death,
And fire, and judgment; lords of time and war;
Beauty, and strength, and light; and the long roll
Of creatural powers and passions deified.
Abstractions made by men, by God preserved—
Preserved as shadows thus to realize,
Before all devotees, their nothingness;
Who gave their names to stars which still roam round
The skies, all worshipless, even from climes
Where their own altars once topped every hill.
Attend, their reign is over. These their last
Oracular utterances alone are true.

Zeus.
O God supreme, sole, all the gods to thee
Restore their stolen titles. Thou alone
Hast true right to the names of deity.
First Cause, and imperceptible, unseen;
If apprehended, only by pure soul;
Source of all life, transcendent and eterne;

658

Source of all measure, motion, time, and change;
Who makest, movest, rulest all; thyself
Impassible, immoveable, unmade;
The one great Spirit of the universe.
Who the world made of heaven and earth, as man
Of mind and body. Father of all life,
Whose living spirit animates the whole;
Governs and guides to ends both blessed and wise;
Gave mind its active power; to nature gives
Eternal pregnancy, perpetual birth;
And reasonable order, aye renewed;
The light of heaven, the parent of the world;
Who art eternally, and causest things
To be, which heretofore have never been;
The sovereign will, the intellect, the soul,
The perfect good, the perfect fair, the All;
One, immaterial, who by one sole act
Dost all things comprehend; and bliss supreme
Enjoyest, by knowing perfectly thyself.
Among the worlds how many are thy names!
For as the sun in divers tongues hath names
As many, yet to all men is but one,
So thou, however named, art God the sole.
Creator and adorner of the heavens;
Ruler most high of gods, and sire of man;
First, best and greatest of all beings, last;
Kind conqueror of all foes; of all create
The infinite reason, the substantive cause;
The forces of all life, impersonate.
Thou knowest and foreknowest all at once;
Thou givest good and evil to all souls.
Thine arm sweeps over sea and land; thine eye
Pierceth all elements, to the Hadëan shades,
Where thou art throned, too, as in upper skies;
Thy throne coequal with the universe.
The proud thou dost rebuke with death; with life
Immortal dost reward the just and true.
All who have served or loved thee thou dost love,
And worship givest of all men in the heavens.
With souls beneficent, innocent, and pure
Thou dost the largest and the loveliest stars
For aye consociate. All belong to thee,
And those who love thee; heaven and all its worlds.

Apollo.
Soul of the toilful sun, who dost unite
Creator and created; light of God,
And God of light; of human and immortal
Spirit, sole physician; victor thou of sin,
That hell-born serpent, thee, we gods adore;
The sovereign truth, who neither canst deceive
Nor be deceived; let earth and heaven their crown
Offer at the altar of thy fatherly knee.

659

Osiris.
Lord of the threefold region, life and death,
And everlasting being; king of gods;
Builder and benefactor of all worlds;
Who cast earth's rock foundation, and with hills
Walled it about, and moated with the sea;
Thou, sitting in the shining house of life,
Movest with thy foot the everlasting wheel
Of nature, and man's members mould'st divine;
Breathest in them their soul, and takest back;
Life-issuing as the sun imparteth light;
Glad re-awakener of the soul in heaven.
Eternal, all-beneficent, Lord of truth;
King of obedient natures; for thy will,
Perforce or favour, all create obey.
Distributor of destinies; lord beloved
Of spirits in the land of joy divine,
The land of purity, and light, and peace.
So should earth be, oracular truth once said,
And thus it is. Lord of stability,
For heavenly things alone endure for aye.
Eternal vivifier of all heavens!
Before thy face the impure cannot abide.
The crowned slave mocks thee; and like hills of sand,
Crumbling beneath the ruin of thy tread,
Earth's mountains tremble, and her high places fall.
Thy name is higher than the highest heaven;
Thy glory firmer than the firmament.
Ruler of spirits; of heaven's superior spheres;
The earthly, and the nether world of hell;
Beginningless and endless, the one cause,
Great, unimpersonable; whose attributes
Are beings, and whose thoughts creations; thou,
From whose mouth wordlike the round world is born.
Sovran of souls, and reëstablisher,
Who plantest the divine life in man's mind;
Who weighest man's actions in his heart, ere yet
They bud in speech, or fruit in deed of hand.
The birth and breath of prophecy; of time
Maker; of all, eternal head and end.
The Lord of Hades, dwelling in the tomb;
Death henceforth clean and sanctified to man;
Who with just sceptre rulest righteous souls.
Joy of the just on earth, the blessed in heaven;
Treating all evil with thy sacred scourge;
Lord of the visible and invisible life;
Being of beings; causer of causes; God.

Aurmazd.
Illimitable essence, unconceived;
One Spirit infinite: from all thy works
Dissimilar, great dispenser of all good;
Best of all best, and wisest of all wise;

660

Father of justice and of equity;
Perfect, who knowest all things from thyself.
The Lord of nature; not to be bribed by gifts
Nor mocked by false prayers. Teacher sole of truth,
To those high souls whose wisdom is their joy,
Their everlasting strength, their inner heaven;
Coheritors, and spirit peers of power,
These, who by intuition half-divine
Of the interior light, the light conceive;
And, knowing God, all knowledge know of him;
Ruler of earth and guardian, king of heaven;
Who made this world, that heaven; gave life to all;
And from the radiant fingers of his sun
Streams indiscriminate blessings upon men;
Children of earth and death, but planned to live
In an immortal future, pure from ill;
Earth's mountain evils smoothed off; the whole orb
Crystalline made; themselves all shadowless.
He, with unerring prescience, perfect power,
Unchanging kindness acts, and wisest love;
Who is the life of heaven; the threefold one;
Uniting deity and humanity,
Self-circled in the eternity divine;
Drives evil's monster dæmon from the earth,
From human souls sin's shadow, and o'er all
Life sheds resplendent purity and bliss.

Allah.
No god but God is. He is his own prophet.
God, self-sufficient, Lord of the great throne,
Higher than heaven, and wider than the earth;
Vaster and more profound than the abyss;
Whose is the kingdom of the universe.
Who comprehendeth all things; made the sun
Star earth with flowers, and with his golden sword
Reap, like a labourer in the fields of light,
One everlasting harvest round the world;
He made the moon succeedent; he ordained
Darkness and light; he causeth life and death.
The heavens and earth stand firm at thy command;
And all that is between them and beneath.
High, gracious, mighty, worthy of all praise
Art thou in this life, Lord! and life to come.
Bounteous and wise, thou lovest the merciful;
The holy, the forgiver thou of sin,
The accepter of repentance; faithful, just;
Giver of peace, victorious; excellent
Are all thy names, thy ways; eternal Power!
Thou knowest all things hidden and divulged.
Beside thee there is no God, thou art one.
Although within the world, the world without;
Who was ere time or space was; and now is,

661

And will be though they both should cease for aye.
Nigher to every being than its life,
Too mighty still to live in aught create;
Too holy to conform to things of time;
Too perfect in all excellence to change.
All angels he hath made, all heavens, all orbs;
Maintains and metes their natures, motives, ends,
Accordant with his mighty will: foreknows
All knowable things, and comprehends all known.
He knows the number of the drops of dew,
Spring's every leaflet, autumn's every seed,
And sums the quivered shafts of every sun.
The movement of all thought within man's brain;
The stir of every feeling in his heart;
The rise of every longing in his soul;
Sin's sooty trail and virtue's radiant track,
Traced in the inmost spirit, shows unto him
Clear as the course of comets in the sky.
He knoweth his own secrets, and conceals
From the united gaze of all create,
His infinite aim, his purpose absolute.
Neither to be resisted nor reversed
Is his decree, delayed nor dallied with;
For at the fated moment all's fulfilled.
Without all quality, pure essence, he
Ears hath not, but hears all things; eyes hath not,
But all things sees; nor distance is, nor dark
To his divine cognition. To his touch
All innermost substances are palpable;
The hearts of all things patent to his glance.
Wise in his ways and just in his decrees,
Nothing hath being but by him produced;
And though permitted evil, to him sole
Pertains the right of knowing why it is,
For God must not be questioned. He alone
Hath all right, privilege, and prerogative.
The world exists but by his sufferance.
All things belong to him; and into all,
Brought out of mere privation into light,
He entereth as possessor, maker, lord.
Not from necessity aught created he;
Nor that to him were need of lower life;
Nor shadow of vantage from the universe;
But from his lovingkindness, grace, and will
He breathed a vital blessing over space,
Quickened the void infinitude with light,
And filled the heavens with angels, earth with men.
Who love him, worship him, obey him, he
From his beneficent nature well rewards;
Not from their merit; nor tie absolute

662

Existent 'twixt well-doing and reward,
For merit man hath none, but all is grace;
Nor can God under obligation lie
To aught created, principle, or power.
Man all receives from, nothing gives to God,
But that he hath received; the gift to praise,
The grace to thank; the glory to adore.

Archangel.
But that his name, to sanction war's foul force
Invoked, gloomed earth's tale, Allah were not here.
False gods have had ere now true worshippers,
Who honoured names they wrongly deified;
The true God false adorers, who him shamed,
If aught could, they deceitful knee'd, in base
And bloody service, so misdeemed; or whose
Nature more horrible than their own they judged.
But now man's universal heart made pure
By penitence and penance, every fine
Paid to the utmost mite, all worship proves
The faith that's most humane is most divine,
Dearest to God and worthiest his approof.
Imperfect apprehension he not blames
Of things above man's intellectual grasp,
For thought less answerable than for act.
Of conduct most he judgeth, good or bad.
Who lives not equal to his highest sense
Of truth and good; whose acts, judged by himself
Wrong, conscience damns; doth, so far, wilful sin;
His nature knowingly degrades; and God,
Thereby offended, justly dooms such soul
To punishment proportionate; fine being then,
And righteously, commensurate with offence;
Or finite causes infinite, and outweighs;
Law earthly more divine than heavenly, proves,
And man more just, more merciful than God;
Which is not nor can be, as thou mayest yet
Know ere we quit this inward world of shades.

Festus.
Oblivion's own; like unrecorded dreams,
Ænigmas uninterpretable, these,
The worshipped perish; the adorers live.

Zeus.
Before the Christian cross and Moslem mosque
My marble fanes have fallen, and my shrines
Shrunk like a withered hand, ages ago.
But now all signs and sacred domes for gods
To dwell in are extinct. The world is all
One temple of the truth.

Brahm.
The ages feigned,
That made time groan to think how old he was,
And deities in millions, are no more.
Ageless eternity, and God the sole,

663

The royalty of heaven, is at hand.
Maker, destroyer, saviour! By all sense
Incomprehensible; all things above,
True being, cause of all; how, what, unknown.
One universal mind pervading all;
Dwelling in ocean, penetrating earth,
Touching the heaven, enclosing all the stars;
Inhabiting the universe, and through it
Passing like wind. All souls, all gods or men,
Shall fail in thee, as air, a phial holds,
Rejoineth infinite space, the crystal cell
Once broken which confined it. Yea, as streams
To ocean flowing, cease therein, all name
Losing, all form, so freed from life's sad yoke,
Created spirit once emanant from God,
Shall recombine with deity, and enjoy
In heaven's original bliss its primal power.

Budh.
All things that are shall nothing be at last,
Save what's resolvable in deity;
Yea, the whole world of old before thy face
Fading, stormlike beneath the sun, shall pass,
Absorbed in Godhood as some islet cloud
Melts midmost in the slowly darkening day.

Festus.
Great be the misconceptions even of gods.

Budh.
Giver, receiver, master of all life;
The primal, final, universal soul;
Pure deity absorbed in ultimate rest;
Who knowest the number of all souls, all stars;
Lord of the everduring dome of heaven,
The region of perfection, home of bliss,
Who dwell'st alone in the unseen, too pure
For death-doomed eye; the Lord who contemplates
With eyes of love the myriad-nationed world;
Lord of all being, ruling from on high,
Heaven, earth, and man, the sacred trine of life!
Great sea of spirit, fountain of all forms,
Issuer of all the laws of life which rule
Both unintelligent orbs and mightiest minds
In the well-ordered world, transcript divine
Of thought eternal in thy boundless breast;
Let us to thee give all our titles, thine
Of right, thine only. Let us, gods of earth,
Thee worship, God of heaven, as shadows sun;
Thee, self-existent, universal Lord,
Unchangeable, and independent; all
Embracing; by thee planted all the worlds
Expand like flowers on life's eternal stem;
Impenetrable, pure; judge of all spheres;
Author and worker of all laws which rule,
Material, mental, moral,—all the worlds;

664

Father and founder of all souls, all stars,
Creator, blesser, hallower of all life;
Whose will necessity, whose word is fate;
Whose providence inexorable law;
Who to the infinite nature thou hast made,
Givest lavish maintenance; while in thyself
Wealth inexhaustible still overabounds;
Treasures of mercies unconceived. Who, yet,
To premonition of the humblest soul
Inspired by thee to ask what thou hast willed,
Attentive, grant'st thy saints their least request,
Were it an orb of light. All holy, hear;
We praise thee, we adore thee, God of gods!

Odin.
All-father, permeating the world, all things
Sustaining, who end'st strife, and holy peace
Ordain'st, which lasts for aye; the omniscient, one,
And undeceivable, thee all gods adore.

Festus.
And all the lesser shades which move like moons,
Half darkened by the greater—half illumed—
Are priests and prophets of the mightier ones?

Archangel.
They are;—and further round than eye can mark,
The myriads of adorers of each god,
Confused and prostrate, as their souls awake
To the objects insubstantial of their prayers.
Behold! they kneel to those they hailed on earth
As makers—as omnipotent—eterne—
And cry for help, for comfort; none have they
To give to others or themselves; these high
Divinities, which, like shadowy pyramids,
Show form of strength, but of reality nought.
Gods of a mightier kind and nobler strain,
These truly—yea, but half false; and though now
Doomed, as the partial copies, so, untrue
Of the one universal, worthier yet
Man's trustful prayers and lauds, than those thou seest
Far off, round yon horizon of death's hall,
Monstrous, uncouth, fear-gendered, barbarous;
Such as were Rimac, who by Lima once
Sat, aboriginal oracle, imaged huge;
Till, smote by Christian mace, the immarbled lie
Rejoined chaotic formlessnesses: strewn
In grim and grinning fragments round its base:—
Or where in Kirauëa's lava-land
And island hills ablaze, fierce Pelé, thought
Goddess of fire, mid burning billows basked,
And music of the clashing hills of flame;
Or trode, triumphant, the tempestuous glow;
Such too the gory gods of western climes,

665

Who yearly claimed their feast of blood. The false,
The base, the brutish deities give way,
And all their sacred follies in their train,
Before the earthquake truth, engulphing all.
Woe to the false gods, woe! to prophet, priest,
And worshipper, all woe!

Festus.
Hark! round the earth
Each soul hath found a tongue and uttereth woe.
Lo! from their thrones the man-made gods descend,
And rend their robes and trample on their crowns,
And hurl away their sceptres. Woe to all
The gods and idols of the heart of man!
Their sun is set for ever in the night
Which was ere light was. Surely it is more
To be true man or woman than false god,
And falser prophet. God alone, the true,
The God of heaven, and all, shall be confessed
And worshipped.

Archangel.
Worshipped, witnessed, too,
By all: the faithful and the faithless—saint
And sinner. See, like clouds, the gods disperse,
Into their preoriginal nothingness.
And now the woe of those misguided, blind
To the demoniac madness of their creeds,
Shall be transformed to joy; they who adored
Their dreamlike deities, merely incompetent,
Shall, by God's grace, essential cause of all
Prior to all self-manifestive power,
Wisdom, or word, or act, reason, or will,
Their errors see transfigured into truth.
Listen, ye souls of men; all worship cease
Of what is false and fleeting; to your minds
Self-believed, always free, but bounded aye,
Fitted, or more or less; but now to truth
Transferred your lost allegiance shall receive
Just warrant of its right, perpetual peace,
Conscience of truth, bliss indestructible.
One only true God can be, has been, is.
False gods there never have been, nor false suns;
Save the abnormal shadows which betimes
Leap into life around him, and to man's
Weak sense owe all existence. So of these,
Parheliacal gods which mocked men's minds,
And, lighting them to darkness, left them there.
False gods have never been; nor false truths; forms
Partial and finite of the Infinite one
Who made all, all disposeth; who of all,
Hebrew and heathen, worldling and elect
Is worshipped, once as objects prayerwards served,
While of necessity falling short of truth,

666

To upraise, through all earth's times and climes, man's soul.
And one the Spirit of Evil, Dis, Lucifer,
Typhon, Misophanes, Satan, Aherman,
Hades, what name soe'er priest pleaseth best,
In nature still and destiny, one and same,
Creation's imperfections personate.
And Evil vitalised and as being conceived!
False gods there never have been; but of God
False names, false notions numberless. Behold
In these the transient types of one eterne;
Each several aspect deified, of Truth;
The obeliskal One, the primal three;
The powers divine and cardinal of heaven.
Yet prayer, preferred with a pure heart, to Baal,
As neither heard nor answered could it be
By non-existent dæmon, might, by him,
Who sits enthroned in unthought purity,
The lord and lover of the world, be ta'en,
And righteously fulfilled; so angels deem.
But in the depths of man's own nature, see,
As in a lake, reflected, hills, skies, clouds,
His heaven, his hell, and all his creature gods,
Inverted, and distorted, and obscured:
All which must vanish ere the truth divine
In glory supervene. Idolatry
Worshipped God meanly, as though knowable
Through generative energies and powers;
Not as man's great regenerative Lord.
For life was of the Angels, as was law:
But love in place of law, as final judge,
In lieu of life, heaven's immortality
Christ taught, hence what in false faiths energies,
Were deemed are symbols only in the true.
God's omnipresence seems not sensuous;
Unless he be in us we are not in him.
Signify all things; nothing represents.
And therefore were the chosen race alone,
To whom the godly secret was confined,
Lapsing from faith, rebuked and charged with sin.
The general world, unconscious pietists
Of falsest creeds and errors, God allowed
To live on, unreproved, till came the time
When all the mysteries of heaven and earth
Were put in evolution; are but now
Fulfilling.

Festus.
Lo! the nations of the dead,
Which do outnumber all earth's races, rise;
And high in sumless myriads over head
Sweep past us in a cloud, as it were the skirts
Of the Eternal passing.

667

A Voice.
Souls, arise
To deathless life!

Archangel.
It is God speaks. Let us hence.
The general judgment is in hand,—God's hand.
The souls of those whom God loves circle us.
For thee, thy lot thou knowest. As a seed
Buried in earth doth multiply itself
Full fifty fold, so will thy nature when
Changed, it lifts head in the air divine of heaven.

Festus.
Out of the depths of earth and the world's womb
Thine unborn angels seek thee, God, all love;
Now is thine hour for which all hours were made,
All life created, all things else ordained;
Be it the hour of mercy, Lord! to all,
Now reap the righteous, righteous but in thee
Any, their guerdon. Evil to repay
With good was Christ's command, and earth with heaven
Is thus the great example of his word.
Do thou Lord be with us. In thee we live;
Our treasure, trust, and triumph is in thee,
God's pure humanity; whence salvation comes
To the countless all thou dost redeem. Betrothed
To heaven was earth upon her natal day.
The ages sweep around me with their wings
Like angered eagles cheated of their prey.
Reach forth your arms ye angels. See them come.
I hear the orderly torrent of their wings
Hitherward streaming. Lo! the glowing skies
Are rushing to receive us. Oh! rejoice
All ye that are immortal, and whate'er
Hath been predestined to eternal end.
The day determined ere all time was, dawns.

668

XLIII.

Ill, now released,
Reckless of late discomfiture, as head
Of human strife 'gainst heaven, God's ends world-wide,
Inapt to appreciate, as his woeful fiends
He erst had promised, makes, an angel tells
To earth's dear saints, and how, one last and worst,
Attempt to o'erthwart God's just design. But as when
Some red volcano, scattering burning death,
The aggregated ire of ages lifts
Off earth's heart, saved from sphere-disruptive woes,
So, evil's ultimate force, hell's following, tends,
In way unthought, unreckoned by itself,
To goodward, vanquished by almighty good.

Paradisal Earth.
Angels and Saints—An Angel descending; Festus.
Saint.
Whence art thou?

Angel.
I? from heaven, and thither tend;—
One moment here to bid all souls prepare.
Our Lord, the prince of peace eternal, comes
With his victorious hosts, to judge the world.

Saint.
What victory hath our Liberator now gained?

Angel.
One final, over death and hell. Shout, earth!
Thy freedom is accomplished, and thy foes
Brought down to endless ruin.

Saint.
Angel, speak!
We burn to learn the tidings of this war,
Whereof thou tellest and doubtless wast a part.

Angel.
Hot from the fight I come. This lightning blade
Hath holpen well to thin the infernal rout,
Which back hath fled to hell, howling like winds.
But let me, at your will, ye peaceful saints,
Relate what happed to us, from first. The hour
Was come in God-home when the Son of Man,
Bowing his head before the Omnipotent,
Who doubled every blessing infinite
Wherewith he had enriched his only One
From first, rose from his glorious throne, and stepped
Into his sun-bright car, calling aloud
His angels to attend him while he went
To judge the earth, as foreordained of old;
That heaven and earth might view the majesty
And mercy of the God of all. We came,
Selectest spirits, countless; crowded bright
As the great stream of stars which flows through heaven,
Fast by the foot of God, each wave a world;
Eager to eye this act of glory long

669

Talked of in bliss, and now to be achieved.
Forth from the starry towers, and world-wide walls,
Of heaven, we set in high and silent joy,
And journeyed half our way through space, when lo!
A sight which checked the foremost flaming ranks,
That halted frontwise, working doubt at first,
But triumph after. Shielded and drawn up close,
Behind a broken and decaying world,
From whence the light had vanished like the light
Out of a death-shrunk eye, sat Lucifer—
Midst in the power of darkness, and the hosts
Of hell, enthroned sublime; and all were still
As ambushed silence round the foe of God.
But oh! how changed from him we knew in heaven,
Whose brightness nothing made might match nor mar;
Who rose and it was morn; who stretched his wing,
Or stepped, from star to star; so changed he showed
Most like a shadowy meteor, through whose guise
The stars dim glint—woe-wasted, pined with pain.
And by his side there sate or shrank a shape
We angels knew not, but the Son of God
Knew him, and called him Death; whom when he saw,
Arousing, after, out of sleep intense,
That unrealmed tyrant drew his mortal dart,
And drave it through himself,—a shade, shade-quelled.
Then to that chief of mischief and his fiends,
Who, thick as burning stones that from the throat
Of mount eruptive foul the benighted sky,
Shot up triumphant into air, as they
Beheld our ranks move on, thus spake our Lord,—
Now wrathfully, but sternly pitying:
Hell's wretched remnant! wherefore crouch ye here?
Is it to sue destruction, or to bar
My passage? If it be, in both ye err.
And will ye trust yourselves again to war
With me, God-missioned? Have I not overcome
Ye separately both? Speak, brutal Death?
Fit follower and fellow to all woes,—
Wherefore this instantaneous haste from hell,
And both from Hadëan bondage, thus again
So soon to compass mightiest wickedness,
And tempt extremest wrath? Speak, head of hell!
To him thus Lucifer: Paternal Son!
Prince of the face of God, first-born of heaven,
Head of all angels, truth-fulfilling Lord,
Thy power I defy not; but in peace
I war with fate. My life is to destroy.
Evil hath more activity, if good
More strength: and one must wear the other out.
The more august the sin, so much the more

670

Is my necessity. Yon earth hath been
The battle plain of heaven and hell. From God,
Who knoweth all things, and from thee to whom
Like knowledge he imparts, 'twere vain to hide
My purpose, which for a thousand years, the years
Of bondage, hath grown in me and lived on,
Toad-like within a rock—vital where all
Beside was death—to seize the nascent souls
Of men as they rerose from death to life,
And sweep them off in midst of all these hosts
Assembled for that cause here as thou seest,
To hell;—the universal race of man.
But if ordained that not on them, but thee
And thine, old hate shall satisfy itself,
Approach no nearer: for we live by death;—
Or turn the tide of fate, thou sole who canst!
Ceasing thereat, his host upraised a shout
Which shook the stars revibrant. Then to him
Our Lord spake tolerantly: It is well God rules.
Lo! to what base extremes infernal pride
Can push a princely spirit once in heaven.
Thee we will not destroy now, for thine hour
Hath yet to come—when least thou thinkest it.
God's wrath thou hast endured in punishment,
Not yet his power. Away! I warn ye hence,
Ere wrath ride forth again. To him the Fiend
Answered: God rules not us the unordered damned,
Nor recks of hell. For ages past belief,
Unless by those who like ourselves denied
Thine own eternity—by creature mind,
However lofty, hardly compassed—we
Our pain have borne without remorse, or sign
Of pity from our Maker. Shall we now
Believe, while thus confronting him again,
He means us better? Never worse than now.
Therefore I say to ye, On! mightiest fiends,
On! Let us reap companions for our woes,
Or earn annihilation! As when of old,
By bard, or soothsayer—but in vain—averred,
The swiftening shadow of some baleful god,
Himself impalpable, swept through air, and lo!
A high towered city tottered to its foot,
Rock-arched; or many breasted fleet, lay strewn,
Straggling, like leaflets torn from out a book,
Upon the tide intempested; so bent
To involve all soul in ruin, flew the fiend
Towards his marked prey. At the mere word, to bar
His way depute, whose ways are over all
His works, hell's fiery phalanx instant rushed.
A million spears blazed forth their challenge bright,

671

As of as many tongues. Serene our ranks
Stood like the stars o'er thunder. God the Son
Sate in his orbèd car, and breathed on them;
And they were rolled up like the desert sands
Before the burning wind,—throne wrecked on throne,
All ruined and fordone. Pursue! he cried,
Nor let them near the earth I go to judge.
And we pursued, as many as he chose,
And chased from sphere to sphere that wretched wreck
Of falsest fiends:—and I, it seems, am first
Of all my victor brethren, to declare
The triumph passed and coming; and your hearts
With tidings cheer of him to whom be due
Lauds for his so efficient breath.

Saint.
Behold
Another warrior angel from on high,
Like angels, singly always or in hosts.

Angel.
It is the most dread Azrael, unto whom,
Exterminative, Death's sword is given as boon.

Saint.
What sayst thou heavenly one?

Azrael.
To the extreme bound
Of light's domain we chased the flying foe,
Who on the confines of the lower air
Once rallied at their leader's stern command,
Whom more they fear, or seem to fear, than God.
They halted, formed, and faced us. I and mine
As on we came in order, full career,
Exalted by success, hoped ardently
One more convincing contest: but in spite
Of future woe, or the tempestuous threats
Of the great fiend who marshalled them, each eyed
His neighbour pale; their trembling shook all air;
And each one lift his arm, but no one struck.
Awhile in deadthroelike suspense they stood;
Or like the irresolution of the sea
At turn of tide;—then, wheeled, and fled amain;
And in one mass immense broke down from heaven,
Cliff-like; there, let them lie. Such fate have fiends;
Such self-accumulate loss, such home, such hell.

Festus.
And saw'st thou hell, the abode of fiends?

Azrael.
We saw;
Nor unsurprised; for round the mountain walls
Chasmy, that prop hell's nebulous domelet, dun
And dim as a star quenched, that regropes its way
To chaos, and to nothing, gleamed in light
Untarnishable these just words; God is love;
Corrective, perfective: hope, spirits never
To quit, save by due penitence, and consent
With law divine: thence hope; thence liberty;
Thence heaven. Be these yours now and ever. Hope!

672

So angels fallen may yet to upper spheres
Gradually evade, or elsewise as fate rules;
But there now, flouting fate, the recreant rests
Of that huge host, once world-compact, astound
At their own ruinous failure; forceless now
Their caitiff force for ever, as 'twould seem,
Self-blamed, all troubled, each other chiding, groan.
And we returned, hoping to meet, as charge
To all was given, the Lord our glory here.

XLIV.

Man's final doom conceive: the award to all
Earth's tribes of souls by spirits elect, their chiefs
Saintly, themselves through purifying rule
Of chastening spheres, to proximate perfectness
Long trained; all rational hosts, by boundless love,
Brought round to service reasonable and just,
Of life's beneficent lord. A million minds
Fixed momently on him, and countless more,
In rest, act, sin or strife, all seen at once,
Show but as one to God, all man one soul.
Blessed, when in spiritual sacrament as now
All creature being, by God invited, taste
His infinite essence, who all life within,
Soul with soul pure communes. We glimpse the close;
And swiftlier than an angel's wings outpace
Time's plodding feet, things ripen unto their end.

The Judgment of Earth.
Son of Man, Archangel, Angels and Saints.
Archangel.
Let all the dead rejoice; their Saviour comes
With clouds of angels circled like a sun
Belted with light, and brighter than all light.
Lo, he descends and seats him on his throne;
Alighting like a new made sun in heaven.
The world awaits thee Lord! Rise, souls of men,
Buried beneath all ages from the first;
Numbered, unnumbered, rise ye; death, no more,
Hath power upon ye than the ravening sea
Upon the stars of heaven. Ye elements
Give back your stolen dead. He claimeth them
Whose they both were and are and e'er shall be.

Angel of Earth.
See! to wipe from his word
The dust of years,
He comes, he comes, the Lord,
Man-god, reappears;
To bless and to save
From death and the grave;
To redeem and deliver,
For ever and ever.

673

Son of Man.
I come to repay sin with holiness;
And death with immortality; man's soul
With God's spirit; yea, all evil with all good.
Ye angels, ye elect, who with God's love
Informed, shall rule with me o'er life, assume
Your seats of judgment. Judge ye all in love,
The love which God the all-father hath to you.

Saints.
First-born of deity, judge ye, saidst thou. Be
Our Judge, Lord! Teach us others how to judge.

Son of Man.
Our father, heaven's supreme, the all-perfect one
Hath me, the Son, born of humanity, filled
With the spirit divine, and so of mercy and grace.
Thus judge ye, God in you all judging; soul
By soul before ye brought to cleansing pains
Of self reproach consigned for all offence
Conscious 'gainst God and man, ye so shall train
By precept and example 'like divine,
As shall all lowlier nature raise to sense
Worthier of being, as pure and true to God,
And fruitful sole of good; from sphere to sphere,
Of every virtue, thus refined, and raised,
Ye saints of choice with all ye rule, and serve,
One vast equality so attained of bliss,
With me shall enter heaven.

Saints.
Be it where God will;
But now we render back to thee the love
Which is thine own, none else is worthy thee.
Who shall commemorate all thy chosen names
Friend, servant, brother, joint-heir, owner, lord,
Priest, advocate, physician, teacher, guide:
Prime essence, virtue of all excellence?

Son of Man.
Whate'er the sign, the emblem, chartered law,
Treaty or covenant, man in ages passed
Hath boasted, of the spirit that should redeem
From sin and ignorance, idols many and foul,
His spirit to purify and lead to enjoy
Visions of peace triumphant, glory and power;
Know all are symbols only of truth; and know
To creature thought, God in his wholeness seems
Inestimable; and these conceived him best
Partwise, as acting through main energies,
Sevenfold, or trebly substanced, increate
Aspects of being; but illusory; those,
With more or less of majesty, as a cloud
Sun-gilded, of the storm's tempestuous breath,
Shows nobler than the minimous gust man's lips
Force on air frore; so, more than all things God;
All spirit, all substance, manifest or concealed.

674

God know ye one pure spirit, and self-outrayed
In infinite forms, instinct with deity, each
Which time by time, to its central source returns
Its end, its reason sole; intelligences,
Angels all, sons of God, to him, of all
Created, spirit and matter, sire and sum;
For as in man's breath congealed, cross, starlet, flower
Sphere crystalline, form, so into life all being,
Harmonious and symmetric, God imbreathes.
Behold, this day I dwell with ye on earth,
Time doling for the accomplishment of things,
Judicial, curative, rewardful; lawed
Even to the last. The next shall be in heaven,
Where ye shall meet the all-father, and remain
In the eternal presence; the all in one,
The sole true being of the universe.

Saints.
Dear Lord, our sire and saviour, for thy gifts,
The world were poor in thanks, though every soul
Should nought but breathe them; every blade of grass,
Yea every atomie of the earth and air
Thanks utter like to dew. Thy ways are plain
Only in thine own light. And this great day,
By one unfolded with thy spirit replete,
Unveils all nature's laws and miracles
All to thee all as one. Thy judgment all
Wise mercy, Lord of love, the world's no more
Illegible; all is bright as new-born star.
All men have sinned; but not a single soul
Less than the countless all can satisfy
The ultimate triumph which to us belongs
Who in mortality strove, and won; or failed
As these, the unnumbered, till death after. See!

Son of Man.
The book of life is opened. Heaven begins.

675

XLV.

'Twas held of old by some heresiarch sage,
Whose nobler name time bruits not overmuch,
That evil and good, twin powers, as light and dark,
Were destined to contest with varying mean,
The world while e'er it lasts; but in the sum
Of things, the final conquest is the Lord's.
Reject not all the fable. In this believe:
The grand intent of being, and its main stress,
Is towards its best, the all-perfect. Rest in God!
Heaven, highest and all enfolding, fills at last
Its infinite bounds: reward of love divine,
Salvation, not alone of this soul, view,
Whose steps we have tracked through time, nor total man's
Only, but of all spirits. Our God, in fine,
Drawing his thousand-folded veil of light,
Shows to the world, the astound and jubilant world,
As that from first forefixed and justified,
The universe cleansed of evil; hell for aye
Abolished; the holy happy; all create
Redeemed; themselves all bliss; all love, their God.

Heaven.
The Deity, Angels, Saints, Spirits Elect, Festus, Lucifer, The Restored Angels.
The Recording Angel.
All souls of men are judged save one, earth's chosen,
And last of God's elect.

Son of God.
He, too from first
'Mong spirits predestined saved, though to the last
Tried, longest disciplined, see ye entering! Come
Immortal, I have saved thy soul to heaven.
Come hither. All hearts bare themselves to me
As clouds unbind their bosoms to the sun.
Wealthy was thine in gifts of good; and, grant
Its guilt most lay in lavished time and thought
On uneternal ends, unuseful truth,
Knowledge, mind-power, and worldly sway, thy tests,
Let pass, for one whose life 'twas all to serve;
Let light outweigh the darkness.

Saints.
Saints rejoice!

Elect Spirits.
Welcome, free spirit, long lost, long hoped to heaven,
Where pure perfection reigns, the world of gods.

Saints.
Angel of all the covenants, law and love,
Pattern of manhood, with whose kind conformed
Each variously imperfect souls of men
Are made and constituted, we thank thee now
For this full harvest.

Festus.
Could I, Lord, pour my soul out

676

In thanks, even as a river rolling ever
It were too scant for that I owe thee.

Son of God.
Nay,
Immortal life were long enough, as life
On earth, or as a moment is, to show
Thy love of good, thy thanks to him who saves.
One heart-throb sometimes earneth heaven, one tear.

Festus.
Maker of worlds and souls, let all thee thank
Who have lived, and deathless witness of thy grace,
Me too; thee, holy one, who hast chosen me
From old eternity, while yet I lay
Hid like a thought in thee unuttered, God;
Creator, saviour, judge; sun of the soul,
Whose day is now all noon, eternal noon;
Who makest of the universe, one heaven;
We praise thee, heaven doth praise thee; praise thyself.

Lucifer.
Is not this man mine?

God.
Evil! hear thou my words.
In the beginning, ere I bade things be;
Or, finite filling with the infinite,
Ere ever I begat the worlds on space;
I knew of him, and saved him in my Son,
My first-born, God's humanity preconceived,
Who now hath judged, for with the Spirit divine
Fraught, heaven's humanity impersonate, he,
Feels yet the frailties of things made, and them
Like feelingly can judge. What deity chose
To make, divine humanity therefore saves:
For I abide not sin, and in my Son,
The spirit of pure humanity deified,
There is no sin; not that he takes away:
It is destroyed for ever, and made nothing.
Spirit of evil, this mortal loved me;
With all his doubts he never doubted God;
But from doubt gathered truth, as snow from clouds,
The most and whitest from those darkest. Such,
His aim was, such his trust to gain for good.
With many a shortcoming, his most strong desire
Was to do good among men; to show life's end
In knowing, loving God, and making known,
His boundless grace; him vindicating from charge
Of partial choice, mind prejudiciable; wrath
Unjust of endless reprobation aimed
'Gainst sinners unpermitted to repent.
And for that peace he chose for man, albeit
Power he himself and life lost; for that good
He chose 'gainst ill, and evil forgave by ill,
Most wronged, and myriads with him, see all here.

Lucifer.
Now know I who for certain are the elect,
The sons of God, predestined all to bliss.

677

I leave thee, Festus. Here, thou wilt be happy,
To be in heaven is God to love for ever,
And him thou must love, here. Here thou wilt find
All thou canst love and ought'st; for souls reborn
Of deity, made and moulded over again
Into his sunlike emblems, multiply
His might and love; the saved are suns, not earths;
And with original glory shine of God;
While I keep on, aye deepening in my darkness,
With not one hope-gleam cross the gloom of being.

Son of God.
Father, I pray to thee again one prayer,
One only, it is my latest.

God.
It is heard.

Festus.
Let us part, spirit. It may be in the coming,
That as some sun extinguished once, may yet,
In the ends of heaven restituent, shine again
Light-crowned; so we all, sometime worth God's making,
May yet be worth forgiving, taking back
Into his bosom pure again; and so blessed
To all eternity with the increase of truth,
And spirit of just obedience, that all mind
Shall one be, in fine, with him who is one in all.

Lucifer.
It may be then I shall cease to be. Farewell.
Forgive me in that I tempted thee.

Festus.
I am glad.

God.
Stay, spirit; it suits not the eternal laws
Of good, that things create be all unmade,
Nor yet that ill be immortal. In all space
Is joy and glory, and the gladdening stars,
Exultant in the sacrifice of sin,
And creatural defect unfilled by faith,
Leap forth as though to welcome earth to heaven;
Leap forth and die. All nature disappears.
Shadows are passed away, through all is light.
Man is as high above temptation now,
And where by grace he alway shall remain,
As ever sun o'er sea; and sin is burned
In hell to ashes, with the dust of death.
The worlds themselves are but as dreams within
Their souls who lived in them; and thou art null,
And thy vocation useless, gone with them.
Therefore shall heaven rejoice in thee again,
And the lost tribes of angels, who in thee
Wedded themselves to woe, first, and who dwell
Around the dizzying centres of all worlds,
Blessed with the blessedest be again; for thus
Salvation to the lost accrues, far passed
Thine ultimate thought, but wholly in scope of mine.
Draw nigh, ye angels, who, long time, with hope
Inspired of heavenly pardon, and with will

678

Of betterment, and of penitence moved, have striven
My grace to attract, and bring your spirits again
To the orderly progress of all good, approach.
Lo! ye are all restored, rebought, rebrought
To heaven, by him who cast ye forth, your God.
Your ransom, also boundless, hath been paid;
The pure humanity of the all-being God
Can let nought suffer woe for aye; not those
Who most have wronged him, and the souls he loves.
For his murderers Christ on earth forgiveness asked;
And that he would I will. The sage of Auz,
Unjustly accused; the sage of Athens, doomed
Iniquitously, plead pardon; nor shall man
Be juster nor more merciful than his God.
The fount love fills from is too deep for mere
Creation to exhaust, draw he, draw ye,
Angels, eternally. Your primal fall,
All nature's, is an everlasting lapse,
A bottomless descent till stayed by grace:
Which grace is mine. The issuant universe
Returns but to its source as dewdrops seek
Exhaled by sun, cloud-massed, their parent sea.
God's gifts are aye of increase. For this cause
Receive ye tenfold of all gifts and powers.
And thou who camest to heaven one soul to claim,
Remain possessed by all. The sons of bliss
Shall welcome thee again and all thy hosts;
Of whom thou first in glory as in woe
Last, most, in bright as darkness late, shalt shine.
Take, Lucifer, thy place. This day redeemed
Art thou to archangelic state. Bright child
Of morning, once again thou beamest fair,
O'er all the starry armaments of light.

Lucifer.
The highest and the humblest I of all
The beings whom thou hast made, eternal Lord!

God.
Thus art thou vanquished, adversary of good,
And thus restored. Death slain, sin quelled, all ill
Convert, no foe left, conquest is no more.
And you, ye saints, rejoice! that reign of old
Foretold, millennial, ceased, love all, the truth
Shall dwell in, and fulfill, all spirit create,
Hallow and quicken, that longed for reign with heaven's
Identical, of humanity pure, alone
Subsidiary to God's, must disappear.
The spirit of just humanity divinized,
No more distinct from deity yields at once
To him its mediate being; and by the loss
Of separateness all gaining, man with God
Unites, as even in firmamental light,
One, universal, vanisheth every star;

679

So creatures all in deity; all create
Intelligence circled in the boundless wheel;
All ends in the initial centre crowned.
Lo! death and hell have passed away; the extremes
Of space no longer blurred with the foul reek
Of spheres sin-tormented; heaven pure and calm,
Cored in God's infinite unity, see the whole.

Angels.
Oh marvellous mercy, God e'er blessing all.

Saints.
Behold they come, the legions of the lost,
Transformed already by the bare behest
Of God our Maker, to the purest form
Of seraph lustre.

God.
These have but fulfilled
The faults of imperfection, nor without
Evil, so named of man, can things create,
Act of themselves, or interact. Not theirs
Perfection; worse and better rounds all life,
Seeking or shunning, all intelligent act.
All elements of life act downwards; this
Destructive, sole, aspires; so mind create
Self 'stranged from God, through death, death first and last,
To him returns; through ill all good consummed.
Be all received.

The Restored Angels.
But thine be all the praise
And ours submissive thanks; thine, who so mad'st
The universe that its good and ill alike
Praise thee, the Soul supreme.

Saints.
O say ye risen
From life unblessed, how came the end we see?

The Restored Angels.
Protecting souls, how, hear. Ye doubtless marked
From these rejoicing heights where never war's
Dark storm-cloud blots the blue serene of day
Eternal, hell's late feud. When evil had done
Its worst, and we 'gainst God's divinest power
Had fought and failed in ruin of the kind ends
Thou, Lord! hadst planned for man; and seeing how vile
How vast our wreck; how hopeless showed ill's strife
'Gainst good divine; and minding us of meed
Like boundless, wisdom-promised to all soul
Fixed on self betterment penitently, there rose
On us a twilight dawn of reason, eclipsed
Long, woefully, but e'er brightening, till we viewed
In heaven's true light, gradual, our wretched deeds
Soul torturing now, and all the unholy frauds,
We had, self-blinded, mocked our sight with; saw
Unworthy of rational virtues, so endowed
As we, with means of growth in excellence; powers
Incapable not to range with these on high,
Who, through good, rule; one sole step ta'en, and held.

680

That step we took, and resolutely confessed,
Repentant in ourselves of all the passed,
The evil we had done and meant. The wail
Thou heard'st, Lord, piteous judge! and over all
Came peace; then, God most blessed us and forgave:
Oh! he hath triumphed over all the world,
In mercy, over earth, and death, and hell.

God.
For that my grace is greater than the world,
My essence vaster than the universe;
All recreated life exalted now
To union with its Maker; all may see
Their being's divine foundations in myself;
And know that though on all the fine I fixed
Of finitude; upon all the soul's results;
Woes self-begotten; self-conceived deserts,
And misconstructions of the Merciful One;
When come the end of all, which none but I
Know nor can know, it is mine,—the whole, made pure
By perfect annihilance of ill, to enfold
In mine own infinite being, and in all
The life of love imbreathe, the life of God.
Evil, to soul create, means opposite
Of what to her in outward guise shows good,
In act or thought: thus death to all which live;
Corruption and decay. But in my sight
Evil nor was nor is. I made the world,
Called it by mine own name and named it good;
The infinite whole as circumscribed in me.
All things I made to be good, and good is bliss.
Free choice to prove and need of grace, needs not
Fireflames eternal, feigned by zeal o'erstrained
In God's behalf. Free-will most perfect, pure,
Hath still a limit, my will; which all ellipse
Of thought create outcircles; if with mine
Co-apt, infinite virtually; opposed,
Fate's indefeasible right revives. So deem,
Hate against me—what else is sin?—eterne,
In conscious spirit, its author I, must mean
Such being were best not being, and so in God,
Defectible judgment, folly in wisdom. Far
From nature's mind glorying in reason, fly
Such base unhallowed thoughts! The worlds I made
That I in them might joy, and they in me.
Life I have made enjoyment. Should I make
The sense of all but boundless being, woe?
Though fails the imperfect left to itself to weigh
Perfection's warnings, or the fateful proofs
Of its incompetency itself to rule,
And thus by ill corrupt, wrong willing, sin,
Suffering in time-state righteous penalties

681

Proportioned to sin's voluntary offence,
Yet justice increate yields final grace,
From him who founded all, of all defect,
All perfect source, sole answerable Cause.
Now, too, that heaven is all, know, no such thing
As absolute evil exists, nor could exist,
Ever. In him who wronged, 'twas better, choice
To have of good and ill with life than not;
Though after justly fined for wrongful choice;
Better it was for him who suffered ill,
To enjoy life than not be; regard, too, had,
To the heavenly recompense, that for innocence,
For tested virtue this. Now, evil gone
Out of the world that was, like one dark wave
Merged in a sea of light, grace all sustains.
Apart from natural causes and the range
Of requisite freedom, evil is not. Free mind,
Free within certain bounds, imperfect, fails
In due conception, justly inadequate,
Of my divine intents,—to creatures known
As fate, doom, destiny, so good and ill
War spiritual wage which lasts while time lasts. Here
Good, losing nought, is made divine, and ill
Sloughing its selfish personalty becomes,
Transfigured in ascent, the all redeemed,
Commensurate with soul kind; and mind finite,
Distinct from, yet with deity perfused,
The whole is peace; divisive nature ends.
Truth only unitive, marks the spirit's path;
An endless radius from a boundless point
Of pure perfection. All created mind,
Whate'er its power, how far soe'er it fly
This parent point, hath limit to its force;
And, active thought its essence, must revolve
Around some central spirit.

Angels.
God!

God.
Henceforth
All thought of the now hallowed world of life,
Tends to communion with the infinite One;
Communion vital, virtual and divine;
Wherein is bliss supreme.

The Holy Spirit.
O sacred Son
Of deity, God's humanity, joy with me.
The tears of nature's birth, time's death-pangs passed,
And justice glorified in all love made,
I, Wisdom, parent of all souls, rejoice,
With thee, as thou with me, next to God's throne.
Sole king and conqueror of the spirit world
Who by thine infinite sacrifice, and in time's
Severance from divinity, didst conclude

682

In ample verge, the universe of soul;—
Thy throne, the crown of heaven, thy crown thy name,
Thy name the ever blessèd Lord of life;
Bliss-giver thou, who art the bliss of all,
Be thy soul satiate with this victory.

Son of God.
All hallowing deity, all parent power,
Of God prime effluence, it is for thee I fought
Time's universal war; that all by thee
Soul-sanctified might in spirit through thee return
To their all central source; for thee I gain
This heavenly victory; for thyself this peace
Celestial, recreative.

The Holy Spirit.
Lo! I have seen
The mountain of creation, all whose sands
Were starworlds, called eternal by made mind,
Rays finite of the all central infinite,
Like to a night-born islet, mid the main,
Sink in the abyss of being, as it rose.

Angel of Earth.
Be glad, O world of worlds. Rejoice, all life,
And mourn no more. Death, evil, suffering cease.

Ouriel.
Lift up your starry voices, all ye spheres,
Let all creation from its inmost heart,
Sound forth one song of ceaseless, boundless praise!

Festus.
How joys the soul redeemed, joys, as when first,
On the horizon of God's awful eye,
Some world he hath willed into existence beams,
And gladdens in his glance, whose look is love!

Luniel.
What infinite wonders we have witnessed here;
And now the greatest this, of all most blessed:—
Triumphant, all embracing good, the whole
Concordant, one made with the One supreme:
For as in things material, force all rules,
In matters spiritual, weakness wins; as once
Of old, on the angel visioned plain, thou sawest,
Wrestler with God, and prince; so, once again,
It is God's humanity prevails o'er God.

Festus.
Unsearchable are God's ways, God's works.

Angel.
But not
Dubious when shown. In this most luminous life,
Shined through by deity, and wherein the worlds,
God's vast and palpable thoughts transpicuous range,
The outcome, child, behold of all good deeds,
Though profitless misdeemed on earth; all aims
Which faultless in themselves failed; hopes well based,
Frustrate, not fruitless in the eternal plan;
Not futile; but to the soul advantageous.
Here roots of duty set in natural mould
Of heart-love, social virtues, freely bloom;

683

And fragrant, though, below, they ofttimes showed
Blighted, and irresponsive to just hope.
These are the flowers that now unwithering wreathe
The immortal brows of saints, and shed far round
Perfume of holy hilarity. And as marked
On earth, through some dark cloud-cleft, travelling swift,
The light-shaft downward shot from the sun's broad eye,
Illumed successive mount, spire, city or sea;
So points God's finger, brightening all the dark
Of being, fate's favourite secrets, one by one
To spirits benign, of reason sanctified,
And to saints prepared, permitted, truths profound,
In wisdom's breast hid; all the problems dark
And intricate, of existence solved; we, taught
Thus, by Omniscience.

Angel.
Here, too, in the soul
All tendencies of good, all rarest powers
And faculties of spirit, made holy, pure,
Potent to imbue receptive mind with sense
Of beauty spiritualized and sanctified,
Have full fruition, scope unlimited; end
Boundless; all plans prolific of the weal
Of worlds, and sanctioned by God's sign of good,
Their harvest through the appointed ages reap.

Guardian Angel.
That sinners be made holy, sin itself
By righteousness condoned, and vital bliss
Out of deadliest suffering wrought,—though to finite mind
From God divergent,—strange, astounds not soul
United with divinity; for what
More contrary can show than heaven thus full
Of boundless being, all glorified with bliss,
And the black void whence all things, at his word,
Leapt into life, and starred the skies with light?
That flame should heavenward rise, or waters fall,
Or ice evolve heat, mind no more confounds,
Than that who, fallible, stood, should sometime fail.
Why that who fell, should rise? All evil but gives
Just scope for God's more grand benevolence,
Who forms all natures, and at will transforms,
Happy in making happy, O Spirit elect
Of heaven and earth, and using to best ends
This life-world and its universal powers.
Thus, too, with the angels once estranged, at last,
Atoning by obedience just to God,
Oh doubly blessed and trebly worshipped name!
Of all in heaven or earth, or under earth,
Self-exiled, penitent, from affairs mundane,
For selfish rule, inexpiable else;
For cruel, reckless deed, or impious thought;
Misconstrued love, and means of grace thrust back;

684

They, their asbestine expurgation passed,
Exalted by progression infinite,
Through conduct, aspiration, and intent,
Thrice recreate, see now rise; and round God's throne,
Where o'er the infinite and immaculate skies,
Yon rainbow bends its everlasting beams;
Not drops of water, but translucent spheres
Quick with eternal life, wherein abide
The spirits of time all glorified, they, translate,
Bright guardians e'er shall stand; like dear to God
Both man and angel kind; and so, in the end,
Unnumbered times, duration unbethought,
When passed, our God, his name be ever blessed
By all, and hallowed, reigning mediately
In all the worlds of space, in all the powers
Of spirit aggrandized, holy, happy made,
Shall the whole infinite animate and bless
Where'er soul lives, wherever stretch his skies.

Festus.
So great his mercies are, so vast his love,
So infinite is his wisdom, all things seem
Possible, be they only good and kind.
All kind affections ripening here in heaven,
A thousand fold beneath God's smile, and blessed
Of all, all blessing, perfect life attained,
Nature expands into divinity.

Guardian Angel.
Hither with me.

Festus.
But where are those I love?
The dear religions of my heart, all true,
All perfect, all consoling while they ruled?

Guardian Angel.
Yon happy troop.

Festus.
Ah, blessed ones, come to me.
Are ye all here too with me?

Angels.
All.

Festus.
It is heaven.

Angel.
All spirits in heaven one holy company make,
Self-ruled and penetrate with divinity.

Guardian Angel.
Heaven,
God's special seat, was with him from the first,
And must be e'er; but this thou seest, the soul's
Guerdon, creation's crown, was last of things
Made, and is ever largening. Through divine
Beneficence, its foundations bright were laid
In reason's holiest verities, in mind's
Acts absolutest of good; from selfhood strained;
In nature's excellences made pure; in life's
World-winning charities hallowed, and the chords
Sentient, of sympathy, through every sphere,
Spiritual and animate stretched, the vital worlds
Of virtue, and light intelligible; lines these
Of God's design demonstrant, so adapt

685

To duty's parallels of choice, and act
Responsible; so commensurate each degree
Of just obedience there to bliss here, earned
Celestially, that not to see the fair
Congruities of the eternal world with time's
Conditions, where'er placed, were nor to know,
Nor be. As in heaven this central infinite,
The vast concerted laws of general being,
Do in God's ear, hallowed and harmonized,
Blend spiritually, and that peace express
Created mind can neither sum nor sound,
So on man's soul and natures like to his,
Of good and ill mixed, not infallible, falls
The calm most sweet, of orderly judgment born,
They share, who enter heaven; those first who come
By grace divine forechosen, from all law free,
Vouched for of God, who, careful, guides the paths
Of saints on earth with this hand, as with that,
The worlds; and these through training laws who passed
All tests, triumphant, tests, the touch of God,
Whereby he proves the virtue of souls, but passed
Their powers tries none, nay always far within;
So, in all temptations justified; and this
One backward glance makes clear, think thou on thine;
For, here, man's course, whate'er refining spheres
He pass through, shows with strictest relevance
To the passed, no error possible, every age
Brightening till soul, all verifying time,
All grades of being accomplished, all desires,
All aspirations crowned, each with the One
In absolute union rests.

Festus.
All see I now;
And heaven within the spirit, the whole divine.
Before God's all felicitating love
All earth love pales; how pure so e'er or dear,
And worship, sense of immanent deity,
Labouring within the spirit to burst forth
Into supreme expression of all truth,
Circles the soul as with a glory cloud.

Angels.
All praise, all love, all worship Lord be thine!

Festus.
Who can survey the world's vast ways and woes,
He hath passed through, times extinct; all orbs like earth,
The sun-born seed and increment of light;
Founded in strata deep and dim of stars;
Beyond those skies, the camp of light, where gleams
The bannered sun, God's oriflamme; beyond
Each sun-star space knows, beaming out his life
Godwards, in glorious gratitude of light;
Passed all time's mutable opposites, act and rest;

686

The mighty sequences of light and night;
Systems, scarce form deforms, so pure, so nigh
To the unconditionate sphere, this dome divine
The infinite bound which circles being finite,
And absolute centre of mere cause; nor feel
Soul worship, humbliest, unitive with him,
Maker of good, destroyer of all ill,
Saviour of all perfectible essence, God,
The highest bliss of being, being knows?
Wherefore let us him ceaselessly adore;
Active or meditative, as wisdom wills;
Praise him, ye chosen of the earth and skies,
Ye visible raylets of the invisible light;
Blend with the universal heaven, your hymns;
Immortal leaflets of love's holy flower,
Breathe forth your perfume of eternal praise.

Angel.
Come, let us join our souls unto the song
Of glory, which the saved all sing, to God.

The Saved.
Father of goodness,
Son of love,
Spirit of comfort,
Be with us!
God who hast made us,
God who hast saved,
God who hast judged us,
Thee we praise.
Heaven our spirits,
Hallow our hearts;
Let us have God-light
Endlessly,
Ours is the wide world,
Heaven on heaven;
What have we done, Lord,
Worthy this?
Oh! we have loved thee;
That alone
Maketh our glory,
Duty, meed.
Oh! we have loved thee!
Love we will
Ever, and every
Soul of us.
God of the saved,
God of the tried,
God of the lost ones,
Be with all!
Let us be near thee
Ever and aye;
Oh! let us love thee
Infinite!

Festus.
So, soul and song, begin and end in heaven,
Your birthplace and your everlasting home.

Angels.
In heaven extolled are now all souls of earth,

687

And each particular essence at thy word,
O God! rejoins the pure and pious skies.
All government, sway, and empire is at last
United here, the kingdom sole of heaven,
Meant from the first for universal rule.
In boundless bliss all creatural power is now
Essentially and evermore absorbed.
Henceforth the only offspring of the word
Of all sustaining grace, shall teach the souls,
Victors through God, eternal virtue's truth;
Adding celestial might to every thought
Hallowed by thee, by thee all thought inspired.
The gods are one God and all power is his.
High over all and deep in all dost thou
Ever rule one thing by another; still
On all thy throne is based, and round all thou
Stretchest the line unlimited of heaven.
Divine and holy is thine every work,
Eternal only as ordained by thee,
Unknown but to thyself, who dost remain
Steadfast in love though heaven and earth rebel.
All sway is thine, Lord! heaven and earth are one
In universal glory: world by world
Night renders up to thee the fruit of light,
Sown in her bosom, reaped and ripened here;
Unutterably happy to approach
Perfection in the Infinite, how far,
How high soever, still to thee allied.
All blessing God; who with thy boundless love
Dost deify the heavens and make the soul
Of man expand with immortality,
Now we with him in fourfold joy rejoice,
And all the heavenly hierarchies of light,
Ineffable, adore thy grace supreme.
All sanctifying Lord of love and might,
Let whole creation testify to thee,
As vice to virtue, darkness to the light,
Hell thus to heaven, and man to deity!—
Glory to thee our God, who all to prove,
Of earth the law, of heaven the grace above,
Dost make the great I am, the all I love.

Son of God.
All-father! all thou hast made is saved. The whole,
As being deified is in thee, the all-one.

The Holy Spirit.
God all in all, the all-perfect, heaven's complete.
Time there hath been when only God was all:
And it shall be again. The hour is named,
When angel, saint, man, every spirit create,
Though more or less imperfect, tested, tried,

688

Made pure, and unbelievably uplift
Above their present state—drawn up to God,
Like dew into the air—shall be all heaven;
And all souls shall be in God, and shall be God,
And nothing but God, be.

Son of God.
Let all be God's.
And us within his essence whence we came,
Born, and proceeding, oned and samed, return.

God.
World without end, and I am God alone;
The Aye, the Infinite, the Whole, the One.
I only was—nor matter else, nor mind,
The self-contained Perfection unconfined.
I only am—in might and mercy one;
I live in all things and am closed in none.
I only shall be—when the worlds have done,
My boundless being will be but begun.

THE END.