Which swept through Heaven the alien name of woe,

Or whether the subtle glory broke Through my strong and shielding wings,

Bearing to my finite essence Incapacious of their presence, Infinite imaginings, None knoweth save the Throned who spoke;

But I, who, at creation, stood upright And heard the God-Breath move, Shaping the words that lightened, * Be there light,'

Nor trembled but with love, Now fell down shudderingly. My face upon the pavement whence I

had towered. As if in mine immortal overpowered By God's eternity. Zerah. Let me wait I—let me wait!— Ador. Nay, gaze not hackward through the gate. God fills our heaven with God's own solitude

Till all the pavements glow:
His Godhead being no more subdued
By itself, to glories low

Which seraphs can sustain,
What if thou, in gazing so,
Should behold but only one
Attribute, the veil undone—
And that to which we dare to press
Nearest, for its gentleness—

Ay, His love! How the deep ecstatic pain Thy being's strength would capture! Without language for the rapture, Without music strong to come And set the adoration free. For ever,' ever, wouldst thou be Amid the general chorus dumb,

God-stricken to seraphic agony!

Or, brother, what if on thine eyes In vision hare should rise The life-fount whence His hand did gather

With solitary force Our immortalities! Straightway how thine own would wither,

Falter like a human breath,

And shrink into a point like death,

By gazing on its source!

My words have imaged dread.
Meekly hast thou bent thine head.
And dropt thy wings in languishment
Overclouding foot and face;
As if God's throne were eminent

Before thee, in the place.
Yet not—not so,

0 loving spirit and meek, dost thou

fulfil

The Supreme Will,
Not for obeisance but obedience.
Give motion to thy wings. Depart from
hence.

The voice said * Go.'
Zerah. Beloved, I depart.
His will is as a spirit within my spirit,
A portion of the being I inherit.
His will is mine obedience. I resemble
A flame all undented though it trem-
ble;

I go and tremble. Love me, O be

loved I O thou, who stronger art, And standest ever near the Infinite, Pale with the light of Light! Love me, beloved! me, more newly made.

More feeble, more afraid; And let me hear with mine thy pinions moved,

As close and gentle as the loving are, That love being near, heaven may not

seem so far. Ador. I am near thee, and I love

thee.

Where I loveless, from thee gone. Love is round, beneath, above thee, God, the omnipresent One. Spread the wing, and lift the brow. Well-beloved, what fearest thou? Zerah. I fear, I fear— Ador. What fear?

Zerah. The fear of earth.

Ador. Of earth, the God-created and God-praised In the hour of birth? Where every night, the moon in light Doth lead the waters, silver-faced t Where every day, the sun doth lay A rapture to the heart of all

The leafy and reeded pastoral, As if the joyous shout which burst

From angel lips to see him first. Had left a silent echo in his ray 1

Zerah. Of earth—the God-createtl and God-curst, Where man is, and the thorn. Where sun and moon have borne No light to souls forlorn. Where Eden's tree of life no more uprears

Its spiral leaves and fruitage, but instead

The yew-tree bows its melancholy head,

And all the undergrasses kills and seres.

Ador. Of earth the weak, Made and unmade.

Where men that faint, do strive for

crowns that fade? Where, having won the profit which they

seek.

They lie beside the sceptre and the gold

With fleshless hands that cannot wield or hold,

And the stars, shine in their unwinking eyes?

Zerah. Of earth the bold:
Where the blind matter wrings

An awful potence out of impotence,

Bowing the spiritual things
To the things of sense.

Where the human will replies

With ay and no,

Because the human pulse is quick or slow.

Where Love succumbs to Change, With only his own memories, for revenge.

And the fearful mystery—

Ador. Called Death?

Zerah. Nay, death is fearful—but who saith 'To die,' is comprehensible. What's fearfuller, thou knowest well, Though the utterance be not for thee, Lest it blanch thy lips from glory— Ay! the cursed thing that moved A shadow of ill, long times ago. Across our heaven's own shining floor, And when it vanished, some who were On thrones of holy empire there, Did reign—w^re seen — were — never more.

Come nearer, O beloved I

Ador. I am near thee. Didst thou
bear thee
Ever to this earth?
Zerah. Before.

When thrilling from His hand along
Its lustrous path with spheric song.
The earth was deathless, sorrowless.
Unfearing, then, pure feet might
press

The grasses brightening with their
feet,

For God's own voice did mix its sound

In a solemn confluence oft With the rivers' flowing round And the life-tree's waving soft. Beautiful new earth, and strange! Ador. Hast thou seen it since—the change?

Zerah. Nay, or wherefore should I fear

To look upon it now?
I have beheld the ruined things
Only in depicturings
Of angels from an earthly mission,—
Strong one, even upon thy brow.
When, with task completed, given
Back to us in that transition,
I have beheld thee silent stand,
Abstracted in the seraph hand,

Without a smile in heaven.
Ador. Then thou wert not one of

those

Whom the loving Father chose
In visionary pomp to sweep
O'er Judaea's grassy places,
O'er the shepherds and the sheep,
Though thou art so tender ?—

dimming
Al l the stars except one star,
With their brighter kinder faces.
And using heaven's own tune in

hymning,

While deep response from earth's own mountains ran, 'Peace upon earth—goodwill to man.' Zerah. "Glory to God!" — I said Amen afar. And those who from that earthly mission are, Within mine ears have told That the seven everlasting Spirits did hold

With such a sweet and prodigal constraint,

The meaning yet the mystery of the song,

What time they sang it, on their natures strong;

That, gazing down on earth's dark steadfastness,

And speaking the new peace in promises, The love and pity made their voices faint Into the low and tender music, keeping The place in heaven, of what on earth is weeping,

Ador. Peace upon earth! Come down to it.

Zerah. Ah me!

I hear thereof uncomprehendingly. Peace where the tempest—whero the

sighing is— And worship of the idol, 'stead of His?

Ador. Yea, peace, where He is.

Zerah. He! Say it again.

Ador. Where He is.

Zerah. Can it be

That earth retains a tree
Whose leaves, like Eden foliage, can be
swayed

By the breathing of His voice, nor
shrink and fade?
Ador. There is a tree !—it hath no
leaf nor root;
Upon it hangs a curse for all its fruit:
Its shadow on His head is laid.
For He, the crowned Son,
Has left his crown and throne,
Walks earth in Adam's clay,
Eve's snake to bruise and slay—
Zerah. Walks earth in clay?
Ador. And walking in the clay which
He created,
He through it shall touch death.
What do I utter? what, conceive? Did
breath

Of demon howl it in a blasphemy?
Or was it mine own voice, informed,
dilated

By the seven confluent Spirits?—Speak—

answer me! Who said man's victim was his deity?

Zerah. Beloved, beloved, the word came forth from thee. Thine eyes are rolling a tempestuous

light

Above, below, around, As putting thunder-questions without cloud,

Reverberate without sound, To universal nature's depth and height. The tremor of an inexpressive thought Too self-amazed to shape itself aloud, O'erruns the awful curving of thy lips: And while thine hands are stretched above

As newly they had caught Some lightning from the Throne—or showed the Lord

Some retributive sword— Thy brows do alternate with wild eclipsr And radiance—with contrasted wrath and love— As God had called thee to a seraph's i part,

With a man's quailing heart.
Ador. O heart—O heart of man!
O ta'en from human clay,
To be no seraph's but Jehovah's
own!

Made holy in the taking,
And yet unseparate
From death's perpetual han.
And human feelings sad and passionate!
Still subject to the treacherous forsaking
Of other hearts, and its own steadfast
pain.

O heart of man—of God! which God

hath ta'en From out the dust, with its humanity Mournful and weak yet innocent around

it,

And hade its many pulses beating lie
Beside that incommunicable stir
Of Deity wherewith He interwound it.
O man! and is thy nature so defiled,
That all that holy Heart's devout law-
keeping,

And low pathetic beat in deserts wild,
And gushings pitiful of tender weeping
For traitors who consigned it to such
woe—

That all could cleanse thee not—without the flow

Of blood—the life-blood—His — and

streaming so? O earth the thundercleft, windshaken!

where

The louder voice of "blood and blood" doth rise—

Hast thou an altar for this sacrifice?
O heaven—O vacant throne!

0 crowned hierarchies, that wear your

crown

When His is put away! Are ye unshamed, that ye cannot dim Your alien brightness to be liker Him,— Assume a human passion—and downlay

Your sweet secnreness for congenial fears—

And teach your cloudless ever-burning eyes

The mystery of His tears? Zerah. I am strong, I am strong! Were I never to see my heaven again,

I would wheel to earth like the tempest

rain

Which sweeps there with an exultant sound

To lose its life as it reaches the ground.
I am strong, I am strong!
Away from mine inward vision swim
The shining seats of my heavenly
birth—

I see but His, I see but Him—
The Maker's steps on His cruel earth.
Will the bitter herbs of earth grow
sweet

To me, as trodden by His feet?
Will the vexed, accurst humanity,
As worn by Him, begin to be
A blessed, yea, a sacred thing.
For love, and awe, and ministering 1

I am strong, I am strong!
By our angel ken shall we survey
His loving smile through his woeful
clay?

I am swift, I am strong— The love is bearing me along.

Ador. One love is bearing us along.

PART THE SECOND.

Mid air, above Ju,lma. Ador and Z**rah are a little apart from the visibly Angelic Hosts.

Ador. Beloved! dost thou see ?—
Zerttk. Thee,—thee.

Thy burning eyes already are
Grown wild and mourntul as a star
Whose occupation is for aye
To look upon the place of clay
Whereon thou lookest now!
The crown is fainting on thy brow
To the likeness of a cloud—
The forehead's self a little bowed
From its aspect high and holy,
As it would in meekness meet

. Some seraphic melancholy,

Thy very wings that lately flung
An outline clear, do flicker here.
And wear to each a shadow hung

Dropped across thy feet.
In these strange contrasting glooms
Stagnant with the scent of tombs,
Seraph tares, O my brother,

* Show awfully to one another.

Ador. Dost thou see f

Zerah. Even so—I see

Our empyreal company;

Alone the memory of their bright ness

Left in them, as in thee: The circle upon circle, tier on tier— Piling earth's hemisphere With heavenly inriniteness l Above us and around. Straining the blue horizon like a bow: Their songful lips divorced from all sound;

A darkness gliding down their silvery glances,—

Bowing their steadfast solemn countenances.,

As if they heard God speak, and could not glow.

Ador. Look downward! dost thou see *

Zerah. And wouldst thou press this

vision on my words r Doth not earth speak enough Of change and of undoing, Without a seraph's witness' Oceans

rough

With tempest, pastoral swards Displaced by fiery deserts, mountains ruing

The bolt fallen yesterday, That shake their piney heads, as who would say 'We are too beautiful for our decav'

Shall seraphs speak of these things? Let alone

Earth, to her earthly moan.
Voice of all things. Is there no moan

but hers?
Ador. Hear est thou the attestation
Of the roused Universe,
Like a desert lion shaking
Dews of silence from its mane?
With an irrcpressive passion

Uprising at once,
Rising up and forsaking
Its solemn state in the circle of suns
To attest the pain
Of Him who stands ^O patience sweet!)
In his own hand-prints of creation,

With human feet?
Voice of all things. Is there no moan

but ours? * Zerah. Forms, Spaces, Motions wide,

O meek, insensate things, O congregated matters! who inherit Instead of vital powers. Impulsions, God-supplied; Instead of influent spirit, A clear informing beauty— Instead of creature-duty, Submission calm as rest! Lights, without feet or wings, In golden courses sliding! Glooms, stagnantly subsiding. Whose lustrous heart away was prest Into the argent stars! Ye crystal, firmamental bars. That hold the skyey waters free From tide or tempest's ecstasy! Airs universal! thunders lorn, That wait your lightnings in cloudcave

Hewn out by the winds! O brave And subtle Elements! the Holy Hath charged me by your voice with folly.* Enough, the mystic arrow leaves its wound.

Return ye to your silences inborn,
Or to your inarticulated sound!
Ador. Zerah,

Zerah. Wilt thou rebuke? God hath rebuked me, brother.—I am weak.

Ador. Zerah, my brother £erah Ucould I speak Of thee, 'twould be of love to thee.

Zerah, Thy look

Is flxed on earth, as mine upon tby face!
Where shall I seek Him ?—

I have thrown
One look upon earth—but one—
Over the blue mountain-lines.
Over the forests of palms and pines;
Over the harvest-lands golden;
Over the valleys that fold in
The gardens and vines—

He is not there!
All these are unwortby
His footsteps to bear;

Before which, bowing down I would fain quench the stars of my crown

In the dark of the earthy
Where shall I seek Him?

No reply?

Hath language left tby lips, to place

Its vocal in thine eye?
Ador, Ador! are we come
To a double portent, that
Dumb matter grows articulate

And songful spirits dumb?
Ador, Ador!
Ador. I constrain

The passion of my silence. None
Of those places gazed upon
Are gloomy enow to fit His pain.
Unto Him whose forming word
Gave to Nature flower and sward.
She hath given back again.
For the myrtle, the thorn;
For the sylvan calm, the human scorn.
Still, still, reluctant Seraph, gaze beneath!

There is a city

Zerah. Temple and tower,

Palace and purple would droop like a flower,

(Or a cloud at our breath)
If He neared in His state
The outermost gate.
Ador. Ah me, not so

In the state of a King, did the victim go!
And Thou who hangest mute of speech
'Twixt heaven and earth, with fore-
head yet

Stained by the bloody sweat .

God! man! Thou hast foregone thy throne in each!