University of Virginia Library

ACT II.

Proscenium.—The Gates which lead to the Paradise of Cœlis.
Cœlis, Messenger.
MESSENGER.
I bear the words of Voragine.

CŒLIS.
Begin:
Erewhile his words were still the battle's din.

MESSENGER.
The vulgar cry for liberty is lulled;
Bright is the sword again that blood had dulled:
As though it flashed the miracle of peace,
'Tis only lifted now and murmurs cease.

CŒLIS.
In terror sown, the seeds of hate
Take easy root and germinate:
So, for our foes a better time is near,
And their revenge it is our turn to bear.

MESSENGER.
Their homes laid out in desert, who shall know
A seed-time where but weeds henceforward grow?
The earth is charred; priests, chieftains, all have fled
Into the burning forests and are dead.

CŒLIS.
Nature herself not spared! yet ere the year
Will she revolt and her new weapon wear:
On the burnt soil will man again appear.

MESSENGER.
Who looks so far?

CŒLIS.
Not Voragine, 'tis clear.

MESSENGER.
But many a day beyond his morrow
Is safe; at glorious spring-time, which is near,
The chief returns;—

CŒLIS.
With him our reign of Sorrow.

CŒLIS,
alone.
Can Nature sanction this, even war espouse
Wasting the scanty moments she allows,
Lest the religion to her trust reposed
Be to our precious leisure here disclosed?
The seer may vainly seek for holy soil
Whose sod the wily sorcerer turns over,
Though but to bare a serpent's coil
Or some more warlike creed discover.
But faith suffices with the sword's defence,
And sets aside the cruel evidence
Death's face affords, a warning all believe
And sicken at; unwilling to receive.
Thus must the disaffected soul resume,
In its resolve eternally to live,
Some war of vain desires whose creed shall vanquish doom.
I, too, will struggle through all hope, though none
The immortal life, since life first was, hath won.

Scene I.

—The Paradise of Cœlis.
Cœlis, alone.
CŒLIS.
‘Summer and winter changing hands
The green leaves hang mid red and yellow;
The fruits are over-ripe and mellow;
Cracked to the core their germ expands
And hope is heir to nature's sway,
Though now embowelled in decay.
Even while they vanish, Nature drapes
In her autumnal pride their lovely shapes.
Beyond the forest's brink pale clouds
Float o'er the foliage to take up its blaze,
While the sun glittering through the woods
Steeps their last beauty in his slumbering rays.
But he that set the stamp of death on man
At the fate-haunted tree still guards the portal
To thwart my soul that would escape the ban
And upon earth recover days immortal.
Nature's High Fast begins: life's latter stage
Glows in the ruddiness of age;
Then, as the pomp of dying holds the scene
In slow procession, proud that it has been,
All drops; the wondrous death its heritage.
So we approach the end; o'er sodden leaves
The naked boughs stretch forth their dripping eaves,
Sapless and dark; their potent virtue spent
Whose leaf-dome was the world's green firmament.
The skies are humbled in their grey attire,
And from the tree of life the fruit is gone;
The flowers no more put forth their meek desire:
All things, one with another; yet alone!

Scene II.

—The Forest.
Volupsa, alone.
VOLUPSA.

Cœlis, Volupsa.

Volupsa knows the wanderer's haunt and strays
By paths wherein she feels his heart has spoken;
And though the spell to her remain unbroken,
Not less the depth of silence may betoken
A love that but its voice delays.
No match was she, pure, simple-hearted maid,
For one whose soul must soar and cannot wade:
So when they meet, she only thinks how high
The hawk ascends through its blue hunting fields
In search of prey it finds not in the sky,
But in the hedges where the sparrow builds.
Then would she hold him in the gaze
She lifts to heaven when she prays,
And say, O Cœlis! wander here no more!
Magic arts you disavow,
Yet at false shrines you surely bow,
And spirits of the unknown world adore;
Agents of ill who would our souls decoy;
Who dark, alchemic arts employ,
And false to seeming true transmute,
Beyond the reach of reason to refute.

CŒLIS.
Is life, then, dear one, such a pleasant travel
That what is next 'twere best not to unravel,
But shut our senses lest they knowledge find
Of marvels in advance and wonders left behind?
Our fathers so let slip their will and died.

VOLUPSA.
What we resign to heaven, is sanctified.

CŒLIS.
When you speak thus all doubtful things seem true;
They take your beauty and resemble you;
Then is my boasted will of poor account.

VOLUPSA.
Into the airless void it strives to mount:
Here is it unrestrained; this pleasant throne,
Older than many kingdoms, is your own:
Suffices not a power so great? But more,—
In seats of learning where the youth dispute
None could your subtle arguments confute.
But there are wonders fruitless to explore.
What can the meaning be of secret lore
But that all things remote are hidden,
And to the scrutiny of all forbidden?

CŒLIS.
It is not man invents desire,
And what he craves he seeks, though vainly he aspire.
Somewhere is knowledge; did we only toil
At thought, as meaner labourers at the soil,
Then might we our lost strength renew,
And even the hidden wilderness subdue,
Feeding its fallow to its fullest greed
With our primeval germ, as with prolific seed.
Then should we touch the orbs divine
That in far darkness, unconceived of, shine.

VOLUPSA.
It never was so save in metaphor
Wherein your mind is rich and mine is poor:
Not truly touch them, Cœlis?

CŒLIS.
With our soul;
Which is of earth and heaven the one epitome:
A mirror that reflects the whole;
And loving eyes in it may all things see.
Ah! could you feel how there the vista brightens,
And reach with me the calm which ever heightens!

VOLUPSA.
Cœlis, I tremble; if such thoughts have worth
Like us will they enjoy a second birth
When all that we are let to wish will be
Of us a part, like things we daily see.
Our souls are like the butterfly that lives
On what the kind Creator gives;
It must not seek the flowery heaven before
Its wings are like an angel's. When we soar
Be it alone our Maker to adore!

Scene III.

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


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

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

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

CŒLIS.
What art thou, Spirit?

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

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

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

CŒLIS.
O Psyche! 'tis not thus!

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


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

Scene IV.

—The Castle of Cœlis.
Cœlis, alone.

‘Then life, forgetful of its former stages,
Breaks ever forth anew in endless time;
Now resting mid the waste of ages,
Now jubilant in Nature's paths sublime!
Again hath gaped the cavern of thy jaw,
O tongue that launched first knowledge from the tree;
And issues thence the all-enduring law
That life and death in turn must ever be!’
So the Soul-seeker heard the revelation,
That what is loveliest of creation
Springs only from a world's decay;
That all returns again to clay!
‘Shall not the heavens,’ he asks, ‘escape?’
He looks above and sees the Serpent's shape
Where constellations fill those plains of lustre;
But denser seem the timid stars to cluster
And ask of him their secret meaning,
While on the hidden power like infants leaning.
With hope, exalting once, that now debases,
Late through the midnight hours he paces
His armour-haunted corridor,
And there finds rest not any more.
The moonlight through the window glances
On jointed mail and shivered lances,
Kindling the ruby panes, though 'neath the sheen
The Serpent-shield shines ever-green,
Paling the past. There as he lay
Upon his bed his will dissolved away,
And in its place so soft a whisper crept
He took it to his spirit as he slept.
Nigh to his breast the Serpent seemed
To breathe into him all he dreamed,
A fulsome whisper that dissembled,
But pure, unchallenged truth resembled:
His conscious being, weak and fevered,
Like a stray memory from its soul dissevered.
So, prostrate was he, when the Snake once more
His spirit to the tree of knowledge bore.

Kausis, Cœlis.
KAUSIS.
‘Where, Worm! is the will that its lot would deny?
Where, Worm! is the will that its lord would defy?
Thou hast crawled from the earth in my daylight to die!
Thy people, thy kindred, my worship have spurned;
As I tread upon thee, at my tread who hast turned,
This arm, this one arm of a far-ruling fate,
Shall crush them and thee in the coil of its hate.’

Scene V.

—The Hall of Voragine.
Volupsa, Cœlis.

‘I haste to you, Volupsa; let me hear
Your voice in its dear, human melody!
Give mine ears shelter; save mine eyes the glare
Of hideous visions whence to you I fly.
To the enchanted haunts I go no more;
Let me through you my ill-timed life explore.’
So Cœlis speaks; Volupsa says:
‘What ails you? Strangely sounds your speech;
Though it be kind, its wilderment effrays
The love I bear you, to its inmost reach.’

CŒLIS.
What ails me, ask not! would you hear it
And suffer in this peril too?
Though I told all I yet must bear it;
'Tis not for one so loved to share it;
My trying lot falls not on you.
What ails me? Not the body's ill:
It is a malison in serpent shape,
That never mortal shall escape,
Entwines itself about my strangled will.

VOLUPSA.
O Cœlis!

CŒLIS.
Call me by the name no more;—
Call me the Last Laocoon!
The Serpent's eyes on me have shone
As glared they on the priest of yore.

VOLUPSA.
Cœlis! can I not calm you?

CŒLIS.
I am calm!
But soothe me with your dimpling cheek;
Let your soft eyes in light my soul embalm,
That through them I may see the things I seek.

VOLUPSA.
Yes, I will smile.

CŒLIS.
Such smile avert;
It draws not soul to soul in love's desire:
Your lips seem with a snake begirt!
The flame of love is clear; I see but smouldering fire.

VOLUPSA.
Cœlis, be calm, be strong! Repeat
To me the ills you suffer; often
When nothing else a grief can soften,
Fond souls in unison may meet.

CŒLIS.
Shall I relate how one who drank
At nectar-springs, 'neath the foamed poison sank?
And what a gulph now underlies
The heaven where hope ere it has blossomed dies!
Yet sought I not the awful one,
Whose words, whose aspect froze my blood to stone!

VOLUPSA.
Yet rest awhile.

CŒLIS.
Rest comes:
This hurried soul it soothes, this pain benumbs.

VOLUPSA.
How so?

CŒLIS.
You do not hear the music throbbing;
It brings me peace; the rage abates:
You cannot hear the fitful sobbing
That on the burst of rapture waits.
No soul so modulates its mortal voice!
The fall, the rise, the all-resistless swell
That holds emotion's wondrous argument,
Sways hidden nature with its conquering spell:
Absent is word, is thought, is doubt, is choice,
All heavenward lost in this divine consent!
As in a tranquil sleep we choose
Our dreams from things whereon we love to muse,
I call on her who o'er the forest hovers;
It is her voice that to my senses cleaving,
I hear from holy depths upheaving
A music she alone to me discovers.

VOLUPSA.
What voice? what can this rapture mean?

CŒLIS.
The voice of Psyche, Nature's only queen!
It is not human; o'er the wintry rime
It floats into the summer-time;
It lifts me to the place afar
Where the pure hope-blossoms are.
It is a voice that love-attuned pursues me;
That, when I question, bursts into a song.
Why doth it not to you belong
Who with your gentle love suffuse me?
Then through the mirror of your mind
Might I the never-ending prospect find.

VOLUPSA.
Cœlis! I am so wretched!

CŒLIS.
You elude
This search for life; only my miseries
In you, as in a second mirror, rise;
On them, again, within your soul I brood.

VOLUPSA.
I leave you, Cœlis.

CŒLIS.
Stay!

VOLUPSA.
But not to hear
More than a woman's heart can bear?

Scene VI.

—The Chamber of Volupsa.
Volupsa, alone.

Cœlis, in the true mirror of her eyes
Sees but the nimbus-cloud that on him lies.
There with no steady look can he survey
The love she suffers: her perturbèd mind
Can have no peace, no shelter find,
And never more to him its wealth display.
She in the storm of love is overtaken;
An ever-trembling aspen, tempest-shaken!
He loves her, but he deems her mortal still,
Or would she take no heed of pain,
But rise, upborne on his aspiring will
That cannot of itself all love attain.
How, calm-eyed, could she with her smiles reveal
To him the prospect of an endless weal?
How could she, when his lips so tremble,
Feign that her heart was light and gay;
Her inmost sympathy dissemble;
In merry tones shut out his soul's dismay?
The cloud that is upon his face
Falls o'er her eyes: can she his pains control?
O could one look of joy his dreams displace,
Then might he pierce the vista of her soul!
Yet comes a moment that allays
Her pangs, she sings to God, and singing to Him, prays.