Christopher Pearse Cranch: Verses about Passion

FORGIVE — that thus the trumpet I have blown
You never sounded — never cared to hear.
The world, I know, can give no smile or tear
To those whose story it has never known.
But must the poet tune his lyre alone
To themes of passionate hope or love or fear, —
Or thoughts of loftier flight, yet shun the clear
Affection of two brothers' hearts at one?
If gallant sonneteers may sing the light
And radiant demoiselles of olden time —
If in their melodies they may not slight
The fleeting passion of their youthful prime,
The old true loves from boyhood ever bright
Are surely worth the tribute of a rhyme.

ALL loves have frailer roots than loves that start
From one ancestral blood. The friends we find
In youth pass on before us, or behind
Are dropped, or on diverging paths depart,
While branches from one trunk still own one heart,
And bud and bear from one maternal mind.
Sister and brother need no vows to bind
Their pre-ordained alliance, nor the art
Of lovers plotting through a thousand fears
Lest love, of passion born, should fade or change;
Nor dread the undermining drip of years;
Nor stand on forms that other souls estrange.
Such love is ours, and theirs who bear our name,
Born in the honored home from which we came.

O BOON and curse in one — this ceaseless need
Of looking still behind us and before!
Gift to the soul of eyes that cannot read
Life's open book of cabalistic lore; —
Eyes that discern a light and joy divine
Twinkling beyond the twilight clouds afar,
Yet know not if it be the countersign
Of moods and thoughts, or some eternal star.
What taunt of destiny still stimulates
Yet baffles all desire, or wise or fond,
To pierce the veil ne'er lifted by the fates
Between the life that ends and life beyond?
We sit before the doors of death, and dream
That when they ope to let our brothers in,
We catch, before they close, some flitting gleam
Of glory where their after-lives begin.
And with the light a transient burst of song
Comes from within the gates that shut again
Upon our dead. Then we, the proud, the strong,
Sit crushed and lonely in our wordless pain.
Weeping, we knock against the bars, and call,
'Speak — speak, O love, for we are left alone!'
We hear our voices echo against the wall,
And dream it is a spirit's answering tone.
'Come back, or answer us!'
In vain we cry.
Naught is so near as death, so far away
As life beyond. They only know who die:
And we who live can only guess and pray.
If 't were indeed a voice not born within —
Some sure authentic sign from unknown realms —
Some note that heart and reason both could win —
Some carol like yon oriole in the elms;
Though but a vague and broken music caught,
Heard in the darkness, and then heard no more —
Sinking in sudden silence — while in thought
We piece the strains outside the muffled door
That leads into the light and perfect joy
Of the full concert — then 't were bliss indeed
No present griefs could darken or destroy;
Somewhere life's mystery we should learn to read.
Somewhere we then might drop the ripened seed
Of life, to grow again beyond the sky —
Nor deem the human soul a withering weed
Born but to bloom a summer time and die.

As once I sat upon the shore
There came to me a fairy boat,
A bark I never saw before,
Whose coming I had failed to note,
Wrapped in my studies conning rules of life by rote.
The stern was fashioned like a heart;
The curving sides like Cupid's bow.
And from the mast, which like a dart
Was winged above and barbed below,
A pennon like an airy stream of blood did flow.
Upon the prow on either side
Was carved a snowy Paphian dove.
Between, reflected in the tide
An arching swan's neck rose above
The deck o'erspread with broidered tapestries of love.
Against the mast the idle sail
Flapped like a lace-edged valentine.
It seemed a canvas all too frail,
Should winds arouse the sleeping brine.
A toy the boat appeared, for sport in weather fine.
And so I stepped, in idle mood,
Aboard the bark — when suddenly
A breeze sprang up: and while I stood
Uncertain, thinking I was free
To make retreat, the vessel bore me out to sea.
Silent and swift away from land
It cut the waves. No pilot steered.
No voice of captain gave command.
Yet to and fro it tacked and veered.
All day it flew. At eve a distant land appeared.
An island in the restless seas,
With rosy cliffs, and gold and green
Of dappled fields, and tropic trees,
With trailing vines and flowers between,
Across the purple waves through amber skies was seen.
And music floating from afar
I heard, of voice and instrument
As the sun sank, and star by star
Throbbed in the living firmament;
And all kind fates seemed pledged to cheer me as I went.
Till in a deep and shadowy bay
The little argosy, self-furled,
Self-anchored, in the silence lay,
And landed me upon a world
By other stars and a moons endiamonded, impearled.
A region to my student's nooks
Unknown — where first I leaned to see
That love is never conned from books,
Nor passion taught by fantasy —
But in the living, beating heart alone can be.
For on that shore a maiden stood,
Who smiled with sympathetic glance,
And when I pressed her hand, and wooed,
Turned not her truthful eyes askance,
And proved my voyage was no idle sport of chance.
Ah, from this island if I veer
Into the seas of worldly strife,
Give me the bark that brought me here,
Where now the tried and faithful wife
Year after year renews the lover's lease of life.

COLD philosophers, so apt
With your formulas exacting,
In your problems so enwrapt,
And your theories distracting;
Webs of metaphysic doubt
On your wheels forever spinning,
Turning Nature inside out
From its end to its beginning;
Drawing forth from matter raw
Protoplasmic threads, to fashion
What Creation never saw —
Mind apart from faith or passion;
Faculties that know no wants
But a logical position —
Intellectual cormorants
Fed on facts of pure cognition; —
Like Arachne's is your task,
By Minerva's wisdom baffled.
Defter weavers we must ask;
Tissues less obscurely ravelled.
Larger vision you must find
Ere your evolution-plummets
Sound the abysses of the mind,
Or your measure reach its summits.
Not from matter crude and coarse
Comes this delicate creation.
Twinned with it a finer force
Rules it to its destination.
All beliefs, affections, deeds
Feed its depths as streams a river,
Every purpose holds the seeds
Of a fruit that grows forever.
Souls outsoar your schoolmen's wit,
In a loftier heaven wheeling.
Lights ideal o'er them flit.
Every thought is wing'd with feeling.
Conscience born of heavenly light
Mingles with their lofty yearning;
Phantasy and humor bright
Cheer their toilsome path of learning.
Poesy with dreamy eyes
Lures them into fairy splendor,
Music's magic harmonies
Thrill with touches deep and tender.
Love, that shapes their mental moods,
Offers now its warm oblations,
Now the heart's dark solitudes
Glow with solemn adorations.
Vain your biologic strife,
Your asserting, your denying;
Ygdrasil the Tree of Life
Flouts your narrow classifying.
Every living leaf and bud
On its mighty branches growing,
Palpitates with will and blood
Past primordial foreknowing.
Your dissecting-knives can show
Less than half these wondrous natures,
In these beating hearts there glow
Flames that scorch your nomenclatures, —
Lights that make your axioms fine
Fade like stars when day is breaking; —
Splendors, hopes, and powers divine,
New born with each day's awaking.
Raise your scientific lore,
Grant us larger definitions;
Souls are surely something more
Than mere bundles of cognitions.
Take the sum — the mighty whole —
Man, this sovereign Protean creature,
Follow the all-embracing soul,
If you can, through form and feature.
Whence it came in vain you guess,
Where it goes you cannot measure,
And its depths are fathomless;
And exhaustless flows its treasure.
And its essence holds the world
In abeyance and solution,
For the gods themselves are furled
In its mystic involution.

HAD I, instead of unsonorous words,
The skill that moves in rapturous melodies,
And modulations of entrancing chords
Through mystic mazes of all harmonies —
The bounding pulses of an overture
Whose grand orchestral movement might allure
The listener's soul through chaos and through night,
And seeming dissonance to concord and to light —
I might allow some harsh Titanic strains
To wrestle with Apollo and with Jove;
And let the war-cries on barbaric plains
Clash through the chords of wisdom and of love.
For still the harmonies should sing and soar
Above the discord and the battle's roar;
E'en as the evolving art and course of time,
Amid the wrecks in wild confusion hurled,
Move with impartial rhythm and cosmic rhyme
Along the eternal order of the world.

Then would I bid my lyric band express
In music the old earth's long toil and stress:
How the dumb iron centuries have foretold
The coming of the future age of gold:
How, ere the morning stars together sang,
Divine completeness out of chaos sprang
Through shapeless germs of lower forms that climb
By slow vast æons of a dateless time:
Till, through the impulse of the primal plan
They reach their flowering in the soul of man.

All swift-contending fugues — all wild escapes
Of passion — long-drawn wail and sudden blast —
Weird, winding serpent-chords, their writhing shapes
Shot through with arrowy melodies that fast
Pursue them, or that fall and lose themselves
In changing forms, as in some land of elves;
The shadows and the lights
Of joyous mornings, and of sorrowing nights —
Strange tones of crude half-truth — the good within
The mysteries of evil and of sin,
Should weave the prelude of a symphony
Whose music voiced the world's vast harmony;
And only to the ears
Of spirits listening from serener spheres
Of thought, the differing tones should blend and twine
Into the semblance of a work divine;
Where, not in strife but peace, should meet
What single were but incomplete.

I would unloose the soul beneath the wings
Of every instrument;
I would enlist the deep-complaining strings
Of doubt and discontent;
The low sad mutterings and entangled tunes
Of viols and bassoons; —
Shy horns with diffident tones —
The insolent trombones —
The reedy notes
From mellow throats
Of oboë and of clarionet —
Their pure and pastoral singing met
By clash of bacchanal cymbals, and a rout
Of tipsy satyrs dancing all about: —
Carols of love and hope checked by the blare
Of trumpet-cries of anger and despair: —
All differing mingling voices of the deep —
All startling blasts, all airs that lull to sleep;
The mountain cataract that whirls and spins
And bursts in spray asunder :—
Swift puttering rains of flutes and violins, —
The tymbal's muffled thunder:
Æolian breathings wild and soft,
Notes that sink or soar aloft —
Soar or sink with harp-strings pulsing under :—
Ravishing melodies that stream
Through chords entrancing as a dream
Out of a realm of wonder.

Or else, from off the full and large-leaved score
Into the willing instruments I'd pour
A noise of battle in the air unseen;
Of ghostly squadrons sending tremors strange
Of trouble and disastrous change
From beyond their cloudy screen;
Low rumbling thunders — drops of bloody rain —
Earthquake and storm — presentiment of pain —
Strange sobbings in the air
Hushed by degrees in fading semitones
And softened sighs and moans,
As when a mother by the cradle stills
At night her weeping child, ere morn peeps o'er the hills,
And all the world again is bright and fair.
While, with receding feet,
Far off is heard the beat
Of mournful marches of the muffled drums;
And nearer now and nearer,
Sweeter still and clearer,
The bird-like flute-notes leap into the air,
While the great human-heavenly music comes
Emerging from the dark with bursts of song
And hope and victory delayed too long.

So should my music fill its perfect round
With dewy sunrise, and with peace profound.

Ah, what are all the discords of all time
But stumbling steps of one persistent life
That struggles up through mists to heights sublime
Forefelt through all creation's lingering strife: —
The deathless motion of one undertone,
Whose deep vibrations thrill from God to God alone!

A CHORUS OF HUMAN SPIRITS IN THE MIST.

FAR in the shuddering spaces of the North
We live. We saw a Shape
Of terror rise and spread and issue forth;
And we would fain escape
The anger of his frown. We know him not,
Nor whether it be he
Who claims our homage, for the shadows blot
The sun we may not see.

We lift our prayers on heavy wings to one
Who dwells beyond the sun;
Whose lightnings are decrees of life or doom;
Whose laws are veiled in gloom.
Thick clouds and darkness are about thy throne
Where thou dost reign alone.
And we amid the mists and shadows grope,
With faint bewildered hope.
We fear thy awful judgments, and thy curse
Upon thy Universe.
For we are told it is a fearful thing,
O thou Almighty King,
To fall into thy hands. O spare the rod —
Thou art a jealous God!
O save us by the blood of him who died,
That sin might not divide
Our guilty souls from heaven and Christ and Thee.
And yet we dread to see
Thy face. How can the trembling fugitive
Behold thy face and live!

VOICE BEHIND THE MIST.

Fear not, for ye shall live if ye receive
The life divine, obedient to the law
Of truth and good. So shall there be no frown
Upon his face who wills the good of all.

CHOIR OF ANGELS IN THE DISTANCE.

God who made the tempest's wingèd terror
And the smile of morn,
Who art bringing truth from sin and error,
Love from hate and scorn;

Lo, thy presence glows through all thy creatures,
Passion-stained or fair;
Saint and sinner bear the selfsame features
Thy bright angels wear.

Human frailty all alike inherit,
Yet our souls are free.
Giver of all good, it is no merit
That we turn to thee.

Thou alone art pure in thy perfection.
We thy children shine
But as our soiled garments take reflection
From thy light divine.

Thou art reaching forth thine arms forever,
Struggling souls to free.
Leading man by every good endeavor
Back to heaven and thee!

CHORUS OF PLANETARY SPIRITS.

The presence that awed us and chilled us
Dissolves in the dews of the morning.
The darkness has vanished around us,
And shrunk to the shadows that color
The cloud flakes of gold and of purple:
So vanish the thoughts that obscured us,
The doubt and the dread of the evil
That stained the starred robe of Creation.
And we hear but one music pervading
The planets and suns that are shining —
The spirits that pine in the darkness
Or float in the joy of the morning.

SEMICHORUS I.

Have we wronged thee, O monarch of shadows?
Have we named thee the Demon of spirits?
We know that the good and the evil
Each mortal and angel inherits —
The evil and good that are twisted
As fibres of brass and of gold —
To the All-seeing Eye have a meaning
We know not — too vast to be told;
But the wise and the merciful Father,
Though they stray in the desert and wold,
Will lift up his lambs to his bosom,
And gather them into his fold.

SEMICHORUS II.

Yet the guilt and the crime that have triumphed,
Though shining in purple and gold,
Shall bring their own sure retribution,
As the prophets of ages have told.
For Justice is sure in the order
That rules through the heavens of old.

VOICE OF A PROPHET.

Aye, though no tyrant's stern decree enforce
The law, yet Justice still must hold its course;
Sure as the power that draws the falling stone,
Sure as the electric thrill from zone to zone,
The ocean's tides, the round of day and night,
The burning tropic sun, the winter's blight —
So follows, though long years have hid the seed,
The fatal fruitage of the evil deed.

VOICE OF A PHILOSOPHER.

Yet not, we must believe,
Like man's infirm opinion
And incomplete tribunals
God's larger judgments stand.
He sees the Past and Present;
He knows the strong temptations;
The nets where lie entangled
The creatures of his hand.

He knows the deep enigmas
No mortal mind has solved.
The armed and banded legions,
That bind earth's captives down,
Hold no divine commission
To pass the final sentence.
Heaven holds its perfect balance,
And smiles above their frown.

SONG OF HOPEFUL SPIRITS.

1.
Praise, praise ye the prophets, the sages
Who lived and who died for the ages;
The grand and magnificent dreamers;
The heroes, the mighty redeemers;
The martyrs, reformers and leaders;
The voices of mystical Vedas;
The bibles of races long shrouded
Who left us their wisdom unclouded;
The truth that is old as their mountains,
But fresh as the rills from their fountains.
2.
And praise ye the poets whose pages
Give solace and joy to the ages;
Who have seen in their marvellous trances
Of thought and of rhythmical fancies,
The manhood of Man in all errors;
The triumph of hope over terrors;
The great human heart ever pleading
Its kindred divine, though misleading,
Fate held it aloof from the heaven
That to spirits untempted was given.

CHORUS.

The creeds of the past that have bound us,
With visions of terror around us
Like dungeons of stone that have crumbled,
Beneath us lie shattered and humbled.
The tyranny mitred and crested,
Flattered and crowned and detested;
The blindness that trod upon Science;
The bigotry Ignorance cherished;
The armed and the sainted alliance
Of conscience and hate — they have perished,
Have melted like mists in the splendor
Of life and of beauty supernal —
Of love ever watchful and tender,
Of law ever one and eternal.

SONG OF A WISE SPIRIT.

The light of central suns o'erflows
The unknown bounds of time and space.
The shadows are but passing shows
And clouds upon Creation's face.
From out the chaos and the slime,
From out the whirling winds of fire,
From years of ignorance and crime,
From centuries of wild desire,
The shaping laws of truth and love
Shall lift the savage from the clod;
Shall till the field and grid the grove
With homes of man and domes of God.
And Love and Science, side by side,
With starry lamps of heavenly flame,
Shall light the darkness far and wide;
The wandering outcast shall reclaim;
Shall bury in forgotten graves
Blind Superstition's tyrant brood;
Shall break the fetters of the slaves;
Shall bind the world in brotherhood;
Shall huff all despots from the throne,
And lift the saviors of the race;
And law and liberty alone
From sea to sea the lands embrace.

HYMN OF A DEVOUT SPIRIT.

The time shall come when men no more
Shall deem the sin that taints the earth
A demon-spell — a monstrous birth —
A curse forever to endure; —

Shall see that from one common root
Must spring the better and the worse;
And seek to cure, before they curse,
The tree that drops its wormy fruit.

For God must love, though man should hate
The vine whose mildew blights its grapes;
Shall he not clothe with fairer shapes
The lives deformed by earthly fate?

O praise him not that on a throne
Of glory unapproached he sits,
For deem a slavish fear befits
The child a father calls his own.

But praise him that in every thrill
Of life his breath is in our lungs,
And moves our hearts and tunes our tongues,
Howe'er rebellious to his will.

Praise him that all alike drink in
A portion of the life divine,
A light whose struggling soul-beams shine
Through all the blinding mists of sin.

For sooner shall the embracing day,
The air that folds us in its arms,
The morning sun that cheers and warms,
Held back their service, and decay,

Ere God, who wraps the Universe
With love, shall let the souls he made
Fall from his omnipresent aid
O'ershadowed by a human curse.

SONG OF AN EVOLUTIONIST.

1.
All in its turn is good
And suited to its time;
Fire-mist and cosmic flood,
Ice, rock, and ocean slime;
Savage and Druid stern,
Faith typed in legends wild.
The mills of God still turn;
Order is Discord's child.
Ever from worse to better
Breaks Nature through her fetter —
The spirit through the letter.
One vast divine endeavor,
One purpose still pursued —
Upward and onward ever —
All in its turn is good.

2.
Up from the centre striving
Through countless change on change,
Through shapes uncouth and strange —
The weakest doomed to perish —
The strongest still surviving;
Purpose divine in all.
Whether they rise or fall
Pledged to maintain and cherish
Types higher still and higher,
To struggle and aspire.
One vast divine endeavor
Upward and onward ever —
Through fish and bird and beast —
Power that hath never ceased —
Through darkness and through light —
Through ape and troglodyte,
Till best with best unite;
Through melancholy wastes
Of unknown time and space —
A power that never hastes,
And never slackens pace
Until the human face,
Until the human form
Beautiful, and swift and warm,
Awaits the crowning hour,
And blooms — a spirit-flower —
Upward and onward ever
One primal plan pursued.
All in its turn is good.

SONG OF AN OLD POET.

I sang of Eden and Creation's morn;
Of fiend and angel, triumph and despair.
I caught the world's old music in the air —
The strains that from a people's creed were born.

I soared with seraphs, walked with lords of doom;
Basked in the sun and groped in utter dark.
I lit the olden legends with a spark
Whose radiance but revealed eternal gloom.

I stood enveloped in a cloud o'ercharged
With thunder; and the blind mad bolts that flew
Were heaven's decrees. They spared alone the few
Whose hearts by grace supernal were enlarged.

Upon imagination's star-lit wings
I flew beyond the steadfast earth's supports,
And stood within Jehovah's shining courts,
And heard what seemed the murmur of the springs,

The streams of living and eternal youth.
Was it a dream? Hath God another Word
Than that between the Cherubim we heard
When Israel served the Lord with zeal and truth?

Are those but earthborn shadows that we saw
Thronging the spaces of the heavens and hells?
Is there a newer prophet-voice that tells
The trumpet-tidings of a grander law?

The lurid words above the fatal door —
The door itself — the circles of despair
Are fast dissolving in serener air.
They were but dreams. They can return no more.

No more the vengeance of a demon-god;
No more the lost souls whirling in black drifts
Of endless pain. The wind of morning lifts
The fog where once our groping footsteps trod.

I looked, and lo! the Abyss was all ablaze
With light of heaven, and not abysmal fire;
And fain would tune to other chords my lyre;
And fain would sing the alternate nights and days —

The days and nights that are the wings of Time;
The love that melts away the eternal chains;
The judgments only of remedial pains;
The hidden innocence in guilt and crime.

The sunlight on the illumined tracts of earth
Sprang from the darkness, pale and undiscerned.
And the great creeds the world hath slowly learned
Are truths evolved from forms of ruder birth.

The tides of life, divine and human, swell
And flood the desert shore, the stagnant pool.
And sage and poet know, where God hath rule
There is no cloud in heaven — no doom in hell.

FULL CHORUS OF THE PLANETARY SPIRITS.

1.
Hear ye, O brothers, the voices around that are swelling in chorus?
Nearer and sweeter they rise and fall through the nebulous light:
Voices of sages and prophets — while under our footsteps and o'er us
Roll in their orbits the worlds whose circles we tracked through the night.

2.
Melting away in the morning, we follow their pathways no longer,
Knowing the hand that has guided will bear them forever along;
Bear them forever, and shape them to destinies fairer and stronger
Than when the joyous archangels hailed their creation with song.

3.
Not with a light that is waning — not with the curse of a dooming,
They shall accomplish their cycles through ages of fire and of cloud:
Ever from their chaos to order unfolding, progressing, and blooming,
Till with the wisdom and beauty of ages on ages endowed.

4.
Out of the regions of discord, out of the kingdoms of evil,
God in the races to come shall abolish the reign of despair.
Who shall confront his decrees with the phantoms of demon and devil?
Who shall unhallow the joy of his light and the health of his air?

5.
Lo! on the day-star itself there are spots that, coming and going,
Send through the spaces mysterious thrillings like omens of blight.
And the great planets afar are convulsed, as when winter comes blowing
Over the shuddering oceans and islands of tropical light.

6.
Shadows are shadows; and all that is made is illumined and shaded, —
Bound by the laws of its being — heaven and earth in its breath.
He who hath made us will lift us, though stained and deformed and degraded —
Lift us and love us, though drowned in the surges of darkness and death.

Daybreak.

CHORUS OF PLANETARY SPIRITS.

YE interstellar spaces, serene and still and clear.
Above, below, around!
Ye gray unmeasured breadths of ether, — sphere on sphere!
We listen, but no sound
Rings from your depths profound.

But ever along and all across the morning bars
Fast-flashing meteors run —
The trailing wrecks of fierce and fiery-bearded stars,
Scattered and lost and won
Back to their parent sun.

Through rifts of bronzing clouds the tides of morning glow
And swell and mount apace.
We watch and wait if haply we at last may know
Some record we may trace
Upon the orbs of space.

Above, below, around we track our planets' flight;
Their paths and destinies
Are intertwined with ours. Remote or near, their light
Or darkness to our eyes
A mystic picture lies.

FIRST SPIRIT.

Close to the morn a small and sparkling star-world dances,
Bathed in the flaming mist;
Flashing and quivering like a million moving lances
Of gold and amethyst
By slanting sunrise kissed.

A fairy realm of rapid and unimpeded sprites,
That fly and leap and dart;
All fierce and tropic fervors, all swift and warm delights
Bound and flash and start
In every fiery heart.

SECOND SPIRIT.

Deep in the dawn floats up a star of dewy fire —
So pure it seems new-born;
As though the soul of morn
Were pulsing through its heart in dim, divine desire
Of poesy and love; — the star of morn and eve —
Whose crystal sphere is shining
With joys beyond divining —
Passion that never tortures, and hopes that ne'er deceive.

THIRD SPIRIT.

There swims the pale, green Earth, half drowned and thunder-rifted,
Steeped in a sea of rain. Above the watery waste
Of God's primeval flood, all other land effaced —
One peak alone uplifted.
The baffled lightnings play around its crags and chasms;
So far away they flash, I hear no thunder-spasms.
But now the scowling clouds are drifting from its spaces,
And leave it to the wind and coming day's embraces.

FOURTH SPIRIT.

Beyond, a planet rolls with darkly lurid sides,
Flooded and seamed and stained by drenching Stygian tides;
Deep gorges, up whose black and slimy slopes there peep
All monstrous Saurian growths that run or fly or creep;
And, in and out the holes and caverns clogged with mud,
Crawl through their giant ferns to suck each other's blood.
I see them battling there in fog and oozy water,
Symbols of savage lust, deformity, and slaughter.

FIFTH SPIRIT.

I see an orb above that spins with rapid motion,
Vaster and raster growing —
Belted with sulphurous clouds; and through the rents an ocean
Boiling and plunging up on a crust of fiery shore.
And now I hear far off the elemental roar,
And the red fire-winds blowing:
A low, dull, steady moan a million miles away,
Of whirling hurricanes that rage all night, all day.
No life of man or beast, were life engendered there,
Could bide those flaming winds, that white metallic glare.

SIXTH SPIRIT.

But yonder, studded round with lamps of moonlight tender,
And arched from pole to pole with rings of rainbow splendor,
A world rolls far apart; as though in haughty scorning
Of all the alien light of his diminished morning.

SEVENTH AND EIGHTH SPIRITS.

Cold, cold and dark — and farther still
We dimly see the icy spheres
Like spectre worlds, who yet fulfil,
Through slow dull centuries of years,
Their circuit round the distant sun who winds them at his will.

CHORUS.

Round and round one central orb
The wheeling planets move,
And some reflect and some absorb
The floods of light and love.

The rolling globe of molten stones,
The spinning watery waste,
The forests whirled through tropic zones
By circling moons embraced —

We watch their element strife;
We wait, that we may see
Some record of their inner life,
Where all is mystery.

A pause. The Spirits approach the Earth. The Sun rises over the Continent of Asia.

SECOND SPIRIT.

Look, brothers, look! The quivering sunrise tinges
Our nearest orb of Earth. The forest fringes
Redden with joy; and all about the sun,
That gilds the boundless east, the cloud-banks dun
Flame into gold; and with a crimson kiss
Wake the green world to beauty and to bliss.
See how she glows with sweet responsive smile!
Hark, how the waves of air lap round her!
As though she were some green, embowered isle,
And the fond ocean had just found her,
In Time's primeval morn of unrecorded calms
Hidden away with all her lilies and her palms;
And flattering at her feet, had smoothed his angry mane,
And moving round her kissed her o'er and o'er again.

THIRD SPIRIT.

And now, behold, our wings are rapid as our thought;
And nearer yet have brought
Our feet, until we hover above the Asian lands
Beyond the desert sands.
There, girt about by mountain peaks that cleave the skies,
A blooming valley lies:
A pathway, sloping down from visionary heights
Through shades and dappled lights,
Lost in a garden widerness of tropic trees
And flowers and birds and bees.
Far off I smell the rose, the amaranth, the spice,
The breath of Paradise.
Far off I hear the singing through hidden groves and vales
Of Eden's nightingales;
And, sliding down through pines and moss and rocky walls,
The murmuring waterfalls.
And lo, two radiant forms that seem akin to us,
Walk, calm and beauteous,
Crowed with the light of thought and mutual love, whose blisses
Are sealed with rapturous kisses.
Ah, beautiful green Earth! ah, happy, happy pair!
Can there be aught so fair,
O brothers, in yon vast unpeopled worlds afar,
As these bright beings are!

CHORUS OF SPIRITS.

The stars in the heavens are singing
Response to the wonderful story;
Joy, joy to the race that is springing
To cover the earth with its glory!

The race that enfolds in its bosom
A birthright divine and immortal;
As the fruit is enwrapped in the blossom,
As the garden is hid by the portal!

DISTAINT VOICES.

(A change to a minor key.)

Sin and weakness, misery and pain,
Cloud their sunlit birth;
And the sons of Heaven alone remain
Gods unmixed with earth.

Light and darkness are the twins of fate;
Undivided they,
Through all realms that bear a mortal date,
Hold alternate sway.

Through the universe the lords of life
Never at peace can be.
Good and evil in a ceaseless strife
Fight for victory.

THIRD SPIRIT.

I hear in the spaces below
A discord of voices that flow
In muttering tones through the air.
But where are they hidden — where?
There are trailings of gloom through the spaces,
And far-darting cones that eclipse
The splendor of planets whose faces
Are dimmed by their darkening traces,
And frozen by alien lips;
And the dream of a swift-coming change
Foretokens a destiny strange.

And what is yon Shadow that creeps
On the marge of her crystalline deeps?
On the field and the river and grove,
On the borders of hope and of rest;
On the Eden of wedlock and love;
On the labor contentment hath blessed?
That crawls like a serpent of mist
Through the vales and the gardens of peace,
With a blight upon all it hath kissed,
And a shade that shall never decrease?
That maddens the wings of desire,
And saddens the ardors of joy —
Winged like a phantom of fire —
Armed like a fiend to destroy!

SECOND SPIRIT.

Before me there flitted a vision —
A vision of dawn and Creation,
Of faith and of doubt and division,
Of mystical fruit and temptation:
A garden of lilies and roses,
Ah, sweeter than dreams ever fashioned;
Hopes in whose splendor reposes
A love that was pure and impassioned.
But alas for the sons and the daughters
Of man, in the morning of nations!
Alas for their rivers of waters!
Alas for their fruitless oblations!
The curse and the blight and the sentence
Have fallen too swift for repentance.
I see it, I feel it — O brother!
It shadows one half of their garden.
O Earth! O improvident Mother!
Where left'st thou thy angel, thy warden?
Is it theirs, or the guilt of another?
Must they die without hope of a pardon?
What is it they suffer, O brother,
In the red, rosy light of their garden?

THE SPIRITS.

Ye Angels — ye heavenly Powers
Whose wisdom is higher than ours —
From the blight, from the terror defend them —
Help, help! In their Eden befriend them.

THE ANGEL RAPHAEL.
Beyond the imagined limits of such space
As ye can guess, I passed, yet heard your cry.
For ye are brother spirits. And I come,
Swifter than light, to shield you from the dread
Of earth-born shadows, and the ghostly folds
Of seeming evil curtaining round your worlds.
Yet can I bring no amulet to guard
One peaceful breast from sorrow; for yourselves
Are girt about, as I, by that divine,
Exhaustless Love, whose pledge your souls contain.

THE SPIRITS.

Ah, not for ourselves — but our brothers
We plead, in their dawn overglooming,
For the death is not theirs, but anothers.
Help, help! from the doom that is coming;

For they stand all alone and unguided;
No Past with its lesson upholds them;
Their life from their race is divided;
A childhood unconscious enfolds them.

Is it sin — is it death that has shrouded
Their souls, or a taint in their nature?
Is there hope for a future unclouded?
Tell — tell us — angelical teacher!

RAPHAEL.

Yon earth, which claimed your closer vigilance,
And seems so near to you in time and space,
Is far away. Your present is its past.
To spirits, worlds and æons are condensed
Into a moment's feeling or a thought.
While ye were singing as ye watched those orbs,
They grew and grew from incandescent globes
Girdled with thunder, wreathed with sulphurous steam —
Or from the slime where rude gigantic forms
Of crocodile or bat plunged through the dense
And flowerless wilds of cane, or flapped like dreams
Of darkness through the foul mephitic air.
These shapes gave way to forests, rocks, and seas,
And shapely forms of beast and bird and man —
The last result of wonder-working Time —
Man — the tall crowning flower and fruit of all —
And the vast complex tissues he hath wrought
Of life and laws and government and arts.
All this ye knew not; tranced in choral song,
Your music was the oblivion of all time.

THE SPIRITS.

Have we not seen the approaching doom of Earth?

RAPHAEL.

The vision ye have had of joy and doom
Flashing and glooming o'er two little lives,
Is truth half-typed in legend, such as fed
The people of the ancient days, distilled
From crude primordial growths of time, when sin
Saw the fierce flaming sword of conscience shake
Its terror through the groves of Paradise,
Grasped by Jehovah's red right hand in wrath.

THE SPIRITS.

Was it a dream? We saw that red right hand.

RAPHAEL.

The events and thoughts that passed in olden time
Dawn on your senses with the beams of light
That left long, long ago those distant worlds,
And flash from out the past like present truths.
It was a poet's dream ye saw. It held
A truth. 'Tis yours to unfold the mythic form,
And guess the meaning of the ancient tale.

THE SPIRITS.

We mark thy words; we know that thou art wise
And good; and yet we hover in a mist
Of doubt. Help us! Our sight is weak and dim.

RAPHAEL.

Know then that men and Angels can conceive
Through symbols only, the eternal truths.
Through all creation streams this dual ray —
The marriage of the spirit with the form —
The correspondence of the universe
With souls through sense; and that the deepest thought
And firmest faith are nurtured and sustained
By the great visible universe of time
And space — the alphabet whose mystic forms
Present all inner lessons to the soul —
And thus the unseen by the seen is known.
Yea, even the blank and sterile voids that span
The dead unpalpitating space 'twixt star
And star, shall speak, as light hath spoken once.

And hark! Even now the unfathomable deeps
Begin to stir. I hear a far off sound
Of shuddering wings, beyond the hurrying clouds,
Beyond the stars — now nearer, nearer still!

DISTANT VOICES.

(Confusedly, in a minor key.)

Behind us shines the Light of lights.
We are the Shadows, we the nights,
That blot the pure expanse of time.
And yet we weave the destined rhyme
Of creatures with the Increate —
Of God and man, free will and fate;
The warp and woof of heavens and hells;
The noiseless round of death and birth;
The eternal protoplasmic spells
Binding the sons of God to earth; —
The ceaseless web of mystery
That has been, and shall ever be.

THE SPIRITS.

Far off we seem to hear a chorus strange,
Rising and falling through the gathering gloom.
And now the congregated clouds appear
To take the semblance of a Shape, that bends
This way — as when a whirling ocean-spout
Drinks, as it moves along, the light of heaven.

RAPHAEL.

Spirit — if Spirit or Presence
Thou art, or the gloom of a symbol —
Approach, if thou canst, to interpret
Thy name and thy work and thy essence.

( A pause. )

Behold, the Shadow spreads and towers apace,
Like a dense cloud that rolls along the sea
Landward, then shrouds the winding shore, the fields,
The network of rite gray autumnal woods,
And the low cottage roofs of upland farms;
What seemed a vapor with a ragged fringe
Changes to wings, that sweep from north to south.
And round about the mass whose cloudy dome
Should be a head, I see the lambent flames
Of distant lightnings play. And now a voice
Of winds and waves and crumbling thunder tones
Commingled, muttering unintelligible things,
Approaches us. The air grows strangely chill
And nebulous. Daylight hath backward stepped.
The morning sun is blotted with eclipse.

CHORUS OF THE SPIRITS.

Like the pale stricken leaves of the Autumn
When Winter swoops downward to whirl them
Afar from the nooks of the woodlands,
And up through the clouds of the twilight,
We shudder! We hear a wind roaring
And booming below in the darkness;
A voice whose low thunder is mingled
With waves of the sibilant ocean.
The clouds that were pearly and golden
Are steeped in a blackening crimson.
The spell of a magical presence
Is nearing us out of the darkness.
What is it? No shape we distinguish —
No voice — but a sound that is muffled,
Muffled and stifled in thunder.
We are troubled. Oh, help us, strong Angel!
A Form gathers out of the darkness,
Awful and dim and abysmal!

RAPHAEL.

Fear not the gloomy Phantasm. Speak to him.
If he will answer, ye may learn of him
What human books of dead theology
Have seldom taught, or poets, though they sang
Of Eden and the primal curse of man.

THE SPIRITS.

Spirit, or phantom — darkening earth and sky,
And creeping through the soul in grim despair —
What art thou? Speak! whose shadow darkens thus
The eye of morn?

SATAN.

I am not what I seem.

THE SPIRITS.

Art thou that fallen Angel who seduced
From their allegiance the bright hosts of heaven
And men, and reignest now the lord of doom?

SATAN.

I am not what I seem to finite minds; —
No fallen Angel — for I never fell,
Though priest and poet feign me exiled and doomed;
But ever was and ever shall be thus —
Nor worse nor better than the Eternal planned.
I am the Retribution, not the Curse.
I am the shadow and reverse of God;
The type of mixed and interrupted good;
The clod of sense without whose earthly base
You spirit-flowers can never grow and bloom.

THE SPIRITS.

We dread to ask — what need have we of thee?

SATAN.

I am that stern necessity of fate —
Creation's temperament — the mass and mould
Of circumstance, through which eternal law
Works in its own mysterious way its will.

THE SPIRITS.

Art thou not Evil — Sin abstract and pure?

SATAN.

There were no shadows till the worlds were made;
No evil and no sin till finite souls,
Imperfect thence, conditioned in free-will,
Took form, projected by eternal law
Through co-existent realms of time and space.

THE SPIRITS.

Thy words are dark. We dimly catch their sense.

SATAN.

Naught evil, though it were the Prince of evil,
Hath being in itself. For God alone
Existeth in Himself, and Good, which lives
As sunshine lives, born of the Parent Sun.
I am the finite shadow of that Sun,
Opposite, not opposing, only seen
Upon the nether side.

THE SPIRITS.

Art happy then?

SATAN.

Nor happy I nor wretched. I but do
My work, as finite fate and law prescribe.

THE SPIRITS.

Didst thou not tempt the woman and the man
Of Eden, and beguile them to their doom?

SATAN.

No personal will am I, no influence bad
Or good. I symbolize the wild and deep
And unregenerated wastes of life,
Dark with transmitted tendencies of race
And blind mischance; all crude mistakes of will —
Proclivity unbalanced by due weight
Of favoring circumstance; all passion blown
By wandering winds; all surplusage of force
Piled up for use, but slipping from its base
Of law and order; all undisciplined
And ignorant mutiny against the wise
Restraint of rules by centuries old indorsed,
And proved the best so long it needs no proof; —
All quality o'erstrained until it cracks —
Yet but a surface crack; the Eternal Eye
Sees underneath the soul's sphere, as above,
And knows the deep foundations of the world
Will not be jarred or loosened by the stress
Of sun and wind and rain upon the crust
Of upper soil. Nay, let the earthquake split
The mountains into steep and splintered chasms —
Down deeper than the shock the adamant
Of ages stands, symbol no less divine
Of the eternal Law than heaven above.

THE SPIRITS.

Shall we then doubt the sacred books — the faith
That Satan was of old the foe of God?

SATAN.

Nations have planned their demons as they planned
Their gods. Say, rather, God and Satan mixed, —
A hybrid of perplexed theology, —
Stood at the centre of the universe;
Ormuzd and Ahriman, in ceaseless war —
A double spirit through whose nerves and veins
Throbbed the vast pulses of his feverish moods
Of blight and benediction. Did the Jew
Or Pagan, save the few of finer mould,
Own an unchanging God, or one self-willed,
Who, like themselves, was moved to wrath, revenge
And jealousy, to petty strifes and bars
Of sect and clan — the reflex of their thought?

THE SPIRITS.

What if it were revealed to holy men,
By faith, that God had formed a spirit vast
Who fell, rebelled, tempted the race to death?
Whether a foe who rode upon the wind,
Or one within, leagued with some sweet, strong drift
Of natural desire, tainted yet sweet?

SATAN.

Alas, did ever human eyes transcend
And pierce beyond the hemisphere of tints
That overarched their thought and hope, yet seemed
A heaven of truth? As man is so his God.
So too his spirit of evil. Evil fixed
He saw, eternal and abstract, whose tree
Thrust down its grappling tap-roots in the heart,
And poisoned where it grew; its blighting shade
By no sweet wandering winds of heaven caressed,
No raindrops from the pitiless clouds. No birds
Of song and summer in its branches built
Their little nests of love. No hermit sought
The shivering rustle of its chilly shade.
Accursed of God it stood — accursed and drear
It stood apart — a thing by God and man
Hated or pitied as a pestilence
O'er-passing cure. So hate not me. For I
Am but the picture mortal eyes behold
Shadowing the dread results of broken laws
Designed by eternal wisdom for the good
Of man, though typed as Darkness, Pain, and Fire.

THE SPIRITS.

Must not the eternal Justice punish man
And spirits — now and in the great To-Be?
What sinner can escape his burning wrath?

SATAN.

The soul of man is man's own heaven or hell.
God's love and justice will no curse on men
Or spirits, who condemn themselves, and hide
Their faces in the murky fogs of sense
And lawless passion, and the hate and feud
Born of all dense inwoven ignorance.
Man loves or fears the shadow of himself.
God shines behind him. Let him turn and see.
[Vanishes slowly.]

THE SPIRITS.

Yet stay — speak, speak once more! Tell us what fate
Awaits the human race — now on this earth
Teeming with life — and in the great Hereafter!

RAPHAEL.

The phantom-lips are dumb: nor could they answer.
The book of fate is known to One alone.

THE SPIRITS.

And thou — thou, sovereign Angel, knowest not?

RAPHAEL.

He alone knows whose being contains the all.
Cease questioning. Have faith. Love reigns supreme.