No More Learning

How the spirits in thine eyes
From their dilated orbits bound before
To meet the spectral Dread!

_Eve. _ I am afraid--
Ah, ah! the twilight bristles wild with shapes
Of intermittent motion, aspect vague
And mystic bearings, which o'ercreep the earth,
Keeping slow time with horrors in the blood.
How near they reach . . . and far! How grey they move--
Treading upon the darkness without feet,
And fluttering on the darkness without wings!
Some run like dogs, with noses to the ground;
Some keep one path, like sheep; some rock like trees;
Some glide like a fallen leaf, and some flow on
Copious as rivers.

_Adam. _ Some spring up like fire;
And some coil . . .

_Eve. _ Ah, ah! dost thou pause to say
Like what? --coil like the serpent, when he fell
From all the emerald splendour of his height
And writhed, and could not climb against the curse,
Not a ring's length. I am afraid--afraid--
I think it is God's will to make me afraid,--
Permitting THESE to haunt us in the place
Of his beloved angels--gone from us
Because we are not pure. Dear Pity of God,
That didst permit the angels to go home
And live no more with us who are not pure,
Save _us_ too from a loathly company--
Almost as loathly in our eyes, perhaps,
As _we_ are in the purest! Pity us--
Us too! nor shut us in the dark, away
From verity and from stability,
Or what we name such through the precedence
Of earth's adjusted uses,--leave us not
To doubt betwixt our senses and our souls,
Which are the more distraught and full of pain
And weak of apprehension!

_Adam. _ Courage, Sweet!
The mystic shapes ebb back from us, and drop
With slow concentric movement, each on each,--
Expressing wider spaces,--and collapsed
In lines more definite for imagery
And clearer for relation, till the throng
Of shapeless spectra merge into a few
Distinguishable phantasms vague and grand
Which sweep out and around us vastily
And hold us in a circle and a calm.

_Eve. _ Strange phantasms of pale shadow! there are twelve.
Thou who didst name all lives, hast names for these?

_Adam. _ Methinks this is the zodiac of the earth,
Which rounds us with a visionary dread,
Responding with twelve shadowy signs of earth,
In fantasque apposition and approach,
To those celestial, constellated twelve
Which palpitate adown the silent nights
Under the pressure of the hand of God
Stretched wide in benediction. At this hour,
Not a star pricketh the flat gloom of heaven:
But, girdling close our nether wilderness,
The zodiac-figures of the earth loom slow,--
Drawn out, as suiteth with the place and time,
In twelve colossal shades instead of stars,
Through which the ecliptic line of mystery
Strikes bleakly with an unrelenting scope,
Foreshowing life and death.

_Eve. _ By dream or sense,
Do we see this?

_Adam. _ Our spirits have climbed high
By reason of the passion of our grief,
And, from the top of sense, looked over sense
To the significance and heart of things
Rather than things themselves.

_Eve. _ And the dim twelve. . . .

_Adam. _ Are dim exponents of the creature-life
As earth contains it. Gaze on them, beloved!
By stricter apprehension of the sight,
Suggestions of the creatures shall assuage
The terror of the shadows,--what is known
Subduing the unknown and taming it
From all prodigious dread. That phantasm, there,
Presents a lion, albeit twenty times
As large as any lion--with a roar
Set soundless in his vibratory jaws,
And a strange horror stirring in his mane.
And, there, a pendulous shadow seems to weigh--
Good against ill, perchance; and there, a crab
Puts coldly out its gradual shadow-claws,
Like a slow blot that spreads,--till all the ground,
Crawled over by it, seems to crawl itself.
A bull stands horned here with gibbous glooms;
And a ram likewise: and a scorpion writhes
Its tail in ghastly slime and stings the dark.
This way a goat leaps with wild blank of beard;
And here, fantastic fishes duskly float,
Using the calm for waters, while their fins
Throb out quick rhythms along the shallow air.
While images more human----

_Eve. _ How he stands,
That phantasm of a man--who is not _thou_!
Two phantasms of two men!

_Adam. _ One that sustains,
And one that strives,--resuming, so, the ends
Of manhood's curse of labour. [B] Dost thou see
That phantasm of a woman?

_Eve. _ I have seen;
But look off to those small humanities[C]
Which draw me tenderly across my fear,--
Lesser and fainter than my womanhood,
Or yet thy manhood--with strange innocence
Set in the misty lines of head and hand.
They lean together! I would gaze on them
Longer and longer, till my watching eyes,
As the stars do in watching anything,
Should light them forward from their outline vague
To clear configuration.

[_Two Spirits, of Organic and Inorganic Nature, arise from the
ground. _

But what Shapes
Rise up between us in the open space,
And thrust me into horror, back from hope!

_Adam. _ Colossal Shapes--twin sovran images,
With a disconsolate, blank majesty
Set in their wondrous faces! with no look,
And yet an aspect--a significance
Of individual life and passionate ends,
Which overcomes us gazing.
O bleak sound,
O shadow of sound, O phantasm of thin sound!
How it comes, wheeling as the pale moth wheels,
Wheeling and wheeling in continuous wail
Around the cyclic zodiac, and gains force,
And gathers, settling coldly like a moth,
On the wan faces of these images
We see before us,--whereby modified,
It draws a straight line of articulate song
From out that spiral faintness of lament,
And, by one voice, expresses many griefs.

_First Spirit. _
I am the spirit of the harmless earth.
God spake me softly out among the stars,
As softly as a blessing of much worth;
And then his smile did follow unawares,
That all things fashioned so for use and duty
Might shine anointed with his chrism of beauty--
Yet I wail!
I drave on with the worlds exultingly,
Obliquely down the Godlight's gradual fall;
Individual aspect and complexity
Of gyratory orb and interval
Lost in the fluent motion of delight
Toward the high ends of Being beyond sight--
Yet I wail!

_Second Spirit. _
I am the spirit of the harmless beasts,
Of flying things, and creeping things, and swimming;
Of all the lives, erst set at silent feasts,
That found the love-kiss on the goblet brimming,
And tasted in each drop within the measure
The sweetest pleasure of their Lord's good pleasure--
Yet I wail!
What a full hum of life around his lips
Bore witness to the fulness of creation!
How all the grand words were full-laden ships
Each sailing onward from enunciation
To separate existence,--and each bearing
The creature's power of joying, hoping, fearing!
Yet I wail!

_Eve. _ They wail, beloved! they speak of glory and God,
And they wail--wail. That burden of the song
Drops from it like its fruit, and heavily falls
Into the lap of silence.

_Adam. _ Hark, again!

_First Spirit. _
I was so beautiful, so beautiful,
My joy stood up within me bold to add
A word to God's,--and, when His work was full,
To "very good" responded "very glad! "
Filtered through roses did the light enclose me,
And bunches of the grape swam blue across me--
Yet I wail!

_Second Spirit. _
I bounded with my panthers: I rejoiced
In my young tumbling lions rolled together:
My stag, the river at his fetlocks, poised
Then dipped his antlers through the golden weather
In the same ripple which the alligator
Left, in his joyous troubling of the water--
Yet I wail!

_First Spirit. _
O my deep waters, cataract and flood,
What wordless triumph did your voices render
O mountain-summits, where the angels stood
And shook from head and wing thick dews of splendour!
How, with a holy quiet, did your Earthy
Accept that Heavenly, knowing ye were worthy!
Yet I wail!

_Second Spirit. _
O my wild wood-dogs, with your listening eyes!
My horses--my ground-eagles, for swift fleeing!
My birds, with viewless wings of harmonies,
My calm cold fishes of a silver being,
How happy were ye, living and possessing,
O fair half-souls capacious of full blessing!
Yet I wail!

_First Spirit. _
I wail, I wail! Now hear my charge to-day,
Thou man, thou woman, marked as the misdoers
By God's sword at your backs! I lent my clay
To make your bodies, which had grown more flowers:
And now, in change for what I lent, ye give me
The thorn to vex, the tempest-fare to cleave me--
And I wail!

_Second Spirit. _
I wail, I wail! Behold ye that I fasten
My sorrow's fang upon your souls dishonoured?
Accursed transgressors! down the steep ye hasten,--
Your crown's weight on the world, to drag it downward
Unto your ruin. Lo! my lions, scenting
The blood of wars, roar hoarse and unrelenting--
And I wail!

_First Spirit. _
I wail, I wail! Do you hear that I wail?
I had no part in your transgression--none.
My roses on the bough did bud not pale,
My rivers did not loiter in the sun;
_I_ was obedient. Wherefore in my centre
Do I thrill at this curse of death and winter? --
Do I wail?

_Second Spirit. _
I wail, I wail! I wail in the assault
Of undeserved perdition, sorely wounded!
My nightingale sang sweet without a fault,
My gentle leopards innocently bounded.
_We_ were obedient. What is this convulses
Our blameless life with pangs and fever pulses?
And I wail!

_Eve. _ I choose God's thunder and His angels' swords
To die by, Adam, rather than such words.
Let us pass out and flee.

_Adam. _ We cannot flee.
This zodiac of the creatures' cruelty
Curls round us, like a river cold and drear,
And shuts us in, constraining us to hear.

_First Spirit. _
I feel your steps, O wandering sinners, strike
A sense of death to me, and undug graves!
The heart of earth, once calm, is trembling like
The ragged foam along the ocean-waves:
The restless earthquakes rock against each other;
The elements moan 'round me--"Mother, mother"--
And I wail!

_Second Spirit. _
Your melancholy looks do pierce me through;
Corruption swathes the paleness of your beauty.
Why have ye done this thing? What did we do
That we should fall from bliss as ye from duty?
Wild shriek the hawks, in waiting for their jesses,
Fierce howl the wolves along the wildernesses--
And I wail!

_Adam. _ To thee, the Spirit of the harmless earth,
To thee, the Spirit of earth's harmless lives,
Inferior creatures but still innocent,
Be salutation from a guilty mouth
Yet worthy of some audience and respect
From you who are not guilty. If we have sinned,
God hath rebuked us, who is over us
To give rebuke or death, and if ye wail
Because of any suffering from our sin,
Ye who are under and not over us,
Be satisfied with God, if not with us,
And pass out from our presence in such peace
As we have left you, to enjoy revenge
Such as the heavens have made you. Verily,
There must be strife between us, large as sin.

_Eve. _ No strife, mine Adam! Let us not stand high
Upon the wrong we did to reach disdain,
Who rather should be humbler evermore
Since self-made sadder. Adam! shall I speak--
I who spake once to such a bitter end--
Shall I speak humbly now who once was proud?
I, schooled by sin to more humility
Than thou hast, O mine Adam, O my king--
_My_ king, if not the world's?

_Adam. _ Speak as thou wilt.

_Eve. _ Thus, then--my hand in thine--
. . . Sweet, dreadful Spirits!
I pray you humbly in the name of God,
Not to say of these tears, which are impure--
Grant me such pardoning grace as can go forth
From clean volitions toward a spotted will,
From the wronged to the wronger, this and no more!
I do not ask more. I am 'ware, indeed,
That absolute pardon is impossible
From you to me, by reason of my sin,--
And that I cannot evermore, as once,
With worthy acceptation of pure joy,
Behold the trances of the holy hills
Beneath the leaning stars, or watch the vales
Dew-pallid with their morning ecstasy,--
Or hear the winds make pastoral peace between
Two grassy uplands,--and the river-wells
Work out their bubbling mysteries underground,--
And all the birds sing, till for joy of song
They lift their trembling wings as if to heave
The too-much weight of music from their heart
And float it up the aether. I am 'ware
That these things I can no more apprehend
With a pure organ into a full delight,--
The sense of beauty and of melody
Being no more aided in me by the sense
Of personal adjustment to those heights
Of what I see well-formed or hear well-tuned,
But rather coupled darkly and made ashamed
By my percipiency of sin and fall
In melancholy of humiliant thoughts.
But, oh! fair, dreadful Spirits--albeit this
Your accusation must confront my soul,
And your pathetic utterance and full gaze
Must evermore subdue me,--be content!
Conquer me gently--as if pitying me,
Not to say loving! let my tears fall thick
As watering dews of Eden, unreproached;
And when your tongues reprove me, make me smooth,
Not ruffled--smooth and still with your reproof,
And peradventure better while more sad!
For look to it, sweet Spirits, look well to it,
It will not be amiss in you who kept
The law of your own righteousness, and keep
The right of your own griefs to mourn themselves,--
To pity me twice fallen, from that, and this,
From joy of place, and also right of wail,
"I wail" being not for me--only "I sin. "
Look to it, O sweet Spirits!
For was I not,
At that last sunset seen in Paradise,
When all the westering clouds flashed out in throngs
Of sudden angel-faces, face by face,
All hushed and solemn, as a thought of God
Held them suspended,--was I not, that hour,
The lady of the world, princess of life,
Mistress of feast and favour? Could I touch
A rose with my white hand, but it became
Redder at once? Could I walk leisurely
Along our swarded garden, but the grass
Tracked me with greenness? Could I stand aside
A moment underneath a cornel-tree,
But all the leaves did tremble as alive
With songs of fifty birds who were made glad
Because I stood there? Could I turn to look
With these twain eyes of mine, now weeping fast,
Now good for only weeping,--upon man,
Angel, or beast, or bird, but each rejoiced
Because I looked on him? Alas, alas!
And is not this much woe, to cry "alas! "
Speaking of joy? And is not this more shame,
To have made the woe myself, from all that joy?
To have stretched my hand, and plucked it from the tree,
And chosen it for fruit? Nay, is not this
Still most despair,--to have halved that bitter fruit,
And ruined, so, the sweetest friend I have,
Turning the GREATEST to mine enemy?

_Adam. _ I will not hear thee speak so. Hearken, Spirits!
Our God, who is the enemy of none
But only of their sin, hath set your hope
And my hope, in a promise, on this Head.
Show reverence, then, and never bruise her more
With unpermitted and extreme reproach,--
Lest, passionate in anguish, she fling down
Beneath your trampling feet, God's gift to us
Of sovranty by reason and freewill,
Sinning against the province of the Soul
To rule the soulless. Reverence her estate,
And pass out from her presence with no words!

_Eve. _ O dearest Heart, have patience with my heart!
O Spirits, have patience, 'stead of reverence,
And let me speak, for, not being innocent,
It little doth become me to be proud.
And I am prescient by the very hope
And promise set upon me, that henceforth
Only my gentleness shall make me great,
My humbleness exalt me. Awful Spirits,
Be witness that I stand in your reproof
But one sun's length off from my happiness--
Happy, as I have said, to look around,
Clear to look up! --And now! I need not speak--
Ye see me what I am; ye scorn me so,
Because ye see me what I have made myself
From God's best making! Alas,--peace forgone,
Love wronged, and virtue forfeit, and tears wept
Upon all, vainly! Alas, me! alas,
Who have undone myself, from all that best,
Fairest and sweetest, to this wretchedest
Saddest and most defiled--cast out, cast down--
What word metes absolute loss? let absolute loss
Suffice you for revenge. For _I_, who lived
Beneath the wings of angels yesterday,
Wander to-day beneath the roofless world:
_I_, reigning the earth's empress yesterday,
Put off from me, to-day, your hate with prayers:
_I_, yesterday, who answered the Lord God,
Composed and glad as singing-birds the sun,
Might shriek now from our dismal desert, "God,"
And hear him make reply, "What is thy need,
Thou whom I cursed to-day? "

_Adam. _ Eve!

_Eve. _ _I_, at last,
Who yesterday was helpmate and delight
Unto mine Adam, am to-day the grief
And curse-mete for him. And, so, pity us,
Ye gentle Spirits, and pardon him and me,
And let some tender peace, made of our pain,
Grow up betwixt us, as a tree might grow,
With boughs on both sides! In the shade of which,
When presently ye shall behold us dead,--
For the poor sake of our humility,
Breathe out your pardon on our breathless lips,
And drop your twilight dews against our brows,
And stroking with mild airs our harmless hands
Left empty of all fruit, perceive your love
Distilling through your pity over us,
And suffer it, self-reconciled, to pass!

_LUCIFER rises in the circle. _

_Lucifer. _ Who talks here of a complement of grief?
Of expiation wrought by loss and fall?
Of hate subduable to pity? Eve?
Take counsel from thy counsellor the snake,
And boast no more in grief, nor hope from pain,
My docile Eve! I teach you to despond
Who taught you disobedience. Look around:--
Earth spirits and phantasms hear you talk unmoved,
As if ye were red clay again and talked!
What are your words to them--your grief to them--
Your deaths, indeed, to them? Did the hand pause,
For _their_ sake, in the plucking of the fruit,
That they should pause for _you_, in hating you?
Or will your grief or death, as did your sin,
Bring change upon their final doom? Behold,
Your grief is but your sin in the rebound,
And cannot expiate for it.

_Adam. _ That is true.

_Lucifer. _ Ay, that is true. The clay-king testifies
To the snake's counsel,--hear him! --very true.

_Earth Spirits. _ I wail, I wail!

_Lucifer. _ And certes, _that_ is true.
Ye wail, ye all wail. Peradventure I
Could wail among you. O thou universe,
That holdest sin and woe,--more room for wail!

_Distant Starry Voice. _ Ah, ah, Heosphoros! Heosphoros!

_Adam. _ Mark Lucifer! He changes awfully.

_Eve. _ It seems as if he looked from grief to God
And could not see him. Wretched Lucifer!

_Adam. _ How he stands--yet an angel!

_Earth Spirits. _ We all wail!

_Lucifer (after a pause). _ Dost thou remember, Adam, when the curse
Took us in Eden? On a mountain-peak
Half-sheathed in primal woods and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine at that hour,
A lion couched, part raised upon his paws,
With his calm massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world, right suddenly
He sprang up rampant and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes, and roared so fierce,
(Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear)
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast keen echoes crumbling down the vales
Precipitately,--that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
Of savage and of sorrowful complaint
Which trailed along the gorges. Then, at once,
He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height
Into the dusk of pines.

_Adam. _ It might have been.
I heard the curse alone.

_Earth Spirits. _ I wail, I wail!

_Lucifer. _ That lion is the type of what I am.
And as he fixed thee with his full-faced hate,
And roared, O Adam, comprehending doom,
So, gazing on the face of the Unseen,
I cry out here between the Heavens and Earth
My conscience of this sin, this woe, this wrath,
Which damn me to this depth.

_Earth Spirits. _ I wail, I wail!

_Eve. _ I wail--O God!

_Lucifer. _ I scorn you that ye wail,
Who use your petty griefs for pedestals
To stand on, beckoning pity from without,
And deal in pathos of antithesis
Of what ye _were_ forsooth, and what ye are;--
I scorn you like an angel! Yet, one cry
I, too, would drive up like a column erect,
Marble to marble, from my heart to heaven,
A monument of anguish to transpierce
And overtop your vapoury complaints
Expressed from feeble woes.

_Earth Spirits. _ I wail, I wail!

_Lucifer. _ For, O ye heavens, ye are my witnesses,
That _I_, struck out from nature in a blot,
The outcast and the mildew of things good,
The leper of angels, the excepted dust
Under the common rain of daily gifts,--
I the snake, I the tempter, I the cursed,--
To whom the highest and the lowest alike
Say, Go from us--we have no need of thee,--
Was made by God like others. Good and fair,
He did create me! --ask him, if not fair!
Ask, if I caught not fair and silverly
His blessing for chief angels on my head
Until it grew there, a crown crystallized!
Ask, if he never called me by my name,
_Lucifer_--kindly said as "Gabriel"--
_Lucifer_--soft as "Michael! " while serene
I, standing in the glory of the lamps,
Answered "my Father," innocent of shame
And of the sense of thunder. Ha! ye think,
White angels in your niches,--I repent,
And would tread down my own offences back
To service at the footstool? _that's_ read wrong!
I cry as the beast did, that I may cry--
Expansive, not appealing! Fallen so deep,
Against the sides of this prodigious pit
I cry--cry--dashing out the hands of wail
On each side, to meet anguish everywhere,
And to attest it in the ecstasy
And exaltation of a woe sustained
Because provoked and chosen.
Pass along
Your wilderness, vain mortals! Puny griefs
In transitory shapes, be henceforth dwarfed
To your own conscience, by the dread extremes
Of what I am and have been. If ye have fallen,
It is but a step's fall,--the whole ground beneath
Strewn woolly soft with promise! if ye have sinned,
Your prayers tread high as angels! if ye have grieved,
Ye are too mortal to be pitiable,
The power to die disproves the right to grieve.
Go to! ye call this ruin? I half-scorn
The ill I did you! Were ye wronged by me,
Hated and tempted and undone of me,--
Still, what's your hurt to mine of doing hurt,
Of hating, tempting, and so ruining?
This sword's _hilt_ is the sharpest, and cuts through
The hand that wields it.
Go! I curse you all.
Hate one another--feebly--as ye can!
I would not certes cut you short in hate,
Far be it from me! hate on as ye can!
I breathe into your faces, spirits of earth,
As wintry blast may breathe on wintry leaves
And lifting up their brownness show beneath
The branches bare. Beseech you, spirits, give
To Eve who beggarly entreats your love
For her and Adam when they shall be dead,
An answer rather fitting to the sin
Than to the sorrow--as the heavens, I trow,
For justice' sake gave theirs.
I curse you both,
Adam and Eve. Say grace as after meat,
After my curses! May your tears fall hot
On all the hissing scorns o' the creatures here,--
And yet rejoice! Increase and multiply,
Ye in your generations, in all plagues,
Corruptions, melancholies, poverties,
And hideous forms of life and fears of death,--
The thought of death being always imminent,
Immoveable and dreadful in your life,
And deafly and dumbly insignificant
Of any hope beyond,--as death itself,
Whichever of you lieth dead the first,
Shall seem to the survivor--yet rejoice!
My curse catch at you strongly, body and soul,
And HE find no redemption--nor the wing
Of seraph move your way; and yet rejoice!
Rejoice,--because ye have not, set in you,
This hate which shall pursue you--this fire-hate
Which glares without, because it burns within--
Which kills from ashes--this potential hate,
Wherein I, angel, in antagonism
To God and his reflex beatitudes,
Moan ever, in the central universe,
With the great woe of striving against Love--
And gasp for space amid the Infinite,
And toss for rest amid the Desertness,
Self-orphaned by my will, and self-elect
To kingship of resistant agony
Toward the Good round me--hating good and love,
And willing to hate good and to hate love,
And willing to will on so evermore,
Scorning the past and damning the to-come--
Go and rejoice! I curse you.

[_LUCIFER vanishes. _

_Earth Spirits. _
And we scorn you! there's no pardon
Which can lean to you aright.
When your bodies take the guerdon
Of the death-curse in our sight,
Then the bee that hummeth lowest shall transcend you:
Then ye shall not move an eyelid
Though the stars look down your eyes;
And the earth which ye defiled
Shall expose you to the skies,--
"Lo! these kings of ours, who sought to comprehend you. "

_First Spirit. _
And the elements shall boldly
All your dust to dust constrain.
Unresistedly and coldly
I will smite you with my rain.
From the slowest of my frosts is no receding.

_Second Spirit. _
And my little worm, appointed
To assume a royal part,
He shall reign, crowned and anointed,
O'er the noble human heart.
Give him counsel against losing of that Eden!

_Adam. _ Do ye scorn us? Back your scorn
Toward your faces grey and lorn,
As the wind drives back the rain,
Thus I drive with passion-strife,
I who stand beneath God's sun,
Made like God, and, though undone,
Not unmade for love and life.
Lo! ye utter threats in vain.
By my free will that chose sin,
By mine agony within
Round the passage of the fire,
By the pinings which disclose
That my native soul is higher
Than what it chose,
We are yet too high, O Spirits, for your disdain!

_Eve. _ Nay, beloved! If these be low,
We confront them from no height.
We have stooped down to their level
By infecting them with evil,
And their scorn that meets our blow Scathes aright.
Amen. Let it be so.

_Earth Spirits. _
We shall triumph--triumph greatly
When ye lie beneath the sward.
There, our lily shall grow stately
Though ye answer not a word,
And her fragrance shall be scornful of your silence:
While your throne ascending calmly
We, in heirdom of your soul,
Flash the river, lift the palm-tree,
The dilated ocean roll,
By the thoughts that throbbed within you, round the islands.

Alp and torrent shall inherit
Your significance of will,
And the grandeur of your spirit
Shall our broad savannahs fill;
In our winds, your exultations shall be springing!
Even your parlance which inveigles,
By our rudeness shall be won.
Hearts poetic in our eagles
Shall beat up against the sun
And strike downward in articulate clear singing.

Your bold speeches our Behemoth
With his thunderous jaw shall wield.
Your high fancies shall our Mammoth
Breathe sublimely up the shield
Of Saint Michael at God's throne, who waits to speed him:
Till the heavens' smooth-grooved thunder
Spinning back, shall leave them clear,
And the angels, smiling wonder,
With dropt looks from sphere to sphere,
Shall cry "Ho, ye heirs of Adam! ye exceed him. "

_Adam. _ Root out thine eyes, Sweet, from the dreary ground!
Beloved, we may be overcome by God,
But not by these.

_Eve. _ By God, perhaps, in these.

_Adam. _ I think, not so. Had God foredoomed despair
He had not spoken hope. He may destroy
Certes, but not deceive.

_Eve. _ Behold this rose!
I plucked it in our bower of Paradise
This morning as I went forth, and my heart
Has beat against its petals all the day.
I thought it would be always red and full
As when I plucked it. _Is_ it? --ye may see!
I cast it down to you that ye may see,
All of you! --count the petals lost of it,
And note the colours fainted! ye may see!
And I am as it is, who yesterday
Grew in the same place. O ye spirits of earth,
I almost, from my miserable heart,
Could here upbraid you for your cruel heart,
Which will not let me, down the slope of death,
Draw any of your pity after me,
Or lie still in the quiet of your looks,
As my flower, there, in mine.

[_A bleak wind, quickened with indistinct Human Voices, spins around the
Earth-zodiac, filling the circle with its presence; and then, wailing
off into the East, carries the rose away with it. EVE falls upon her
face. ADAM stands erect. _

_Adam. _ So, verily,
The last departs.

_Eve. _ So Memory follows Hope,
And Life both. Love said to me, "Do not die,"
And I replied, "O Love, I will not die.
I exiled and I will not orphan Love. "
But now it is no choice of mine to die:
My heart throbs from me.

_Adam. _ Call it straightway back!
Death's consummation crowns completed life,
Or comes too early. Hope being set on thee
For others, if for others then for thee,--
For thee and me.

[_The wind revolves from the East, and round again to the East, perfumed
by the Eden rose, and full of Voices which sweep out into articulation
as they pass. _

Let thy soul shake its leaves
To feel the mystic wind--hark!

_Eve. _ I hear life.

_Infant Voices passing in the wind. _
O we live, O we live--
And this life that we receive
Is a warm thing and a new,
Which we softly bud into
From the heart and from the brain,--
Something strange that overmuch is
Of the sound and of the sight,
Flowing round in trickling touches,
With a sorrow and delight,--
Yet is it all in vain?
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.

_Youthful Voices passing. _
O we live, O we live--
And this life that we achieve
Is a loud thing and a bold
Which with pulses manifold
Strikes the heart out full and fain--
Active doer, noble liver,
Strong to struggle, sure to conquer,
Though the vessel's prow will quiver
At the lifting of the anchor:
Yet do we strive in vain?

_Infant Voices passing. _
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.

_Poet Voices passing. _
O we live, O we live--
And this life that we conceive
Is a clear thing and a fair,
Which we set in crystal air
That its beauty may be plain!
With a breathing and a flooding
Of the heaven-life on the whole,
While we hear the forests budding
To the music of the soul--
Yet is it tuned in vain?

_Infant Voices passing. _
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.

_Philosophic Voices passing. _
O we live, O we live--
And this life that we perceive
Is a great thing and a grave
Which for others' use we have,
Duty-laden to remain.
We are helpers, fellow-creatures,
Of the right against the wrong;
We are earnest-hearted teachers
Of the truth which maketh strong--
Yet do we teach in vain?

_Infant Voices passing. _
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.

_Revel Voices passing. _
O we live, O we live--
And this life that we reprieve
Is a low thing and a light,
Which is jested out of sight
And made worthy of disdain!
Strike with bold electric laughter
The high tops of things divine--
Turn thy head, my brother, after,
Lest thy tears fall in my wine!
For is all laughed in vain?

_Infant Voices passing. _
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.

_Eve. _ I hear a sound of life--of life like ours--
Of laughter and of wailing, of grave speech,
Of little plaintive voices innocent,
Of life in separate courses flowing out
Like our four rivers to some outward main.
I hear life--life!

_Adam. _ And, so, thy cheeks have snatched
Scarlet to paleness, and thine eyes drink fast
Of glory from full cups, and thy moist lips
Seem trembling, both of them, with earnest doubts
Whether to utter words or only smile.

_Eve. _ Shall I be mother of the coming life?
Hear the steep generations, how they fall
Adown the visionary stairs of Time
Like supernatural thunders--far, yet near,--
Sowing their fiery echoes through the hills.
Am I a cloud to these--mother to these?

_Earth Spirits. _ And bringer of the curse upon all these.

[_EVE sinks down again. _

_Poet Voices passing.