Part I.

CHORUS OF WORLD-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 the planets’ flight.
Their paths and destinies
Are intertwined with ours. Remote or near, their light
Or darkness on 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 shivered lances
Of gold and amethyst
By bursts of moonlight 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 there floats a star of dewy fire,
So pure it seems new-born,
As though the soul of morn
Were pulsing through its heart in deep 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 a pale green world, half drowned and thunder-rifted,
Steeped in a sea of rain. 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.

See where yon 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 vaster 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 the flaming winds and 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 elemental strife,
We wait, that we may see
Some record of their inner life,
Where all is mystery.

Their future, like their voiceless past,
Is but a clouded gleam,
Our hope with fear is overcast,
Our prophecy a dream.

                      A Pause. The Sun rises.

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 around 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 wilderness 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 water-falls,
And lo! two radiant forms that seem akin to us
Walk calm and beauteous,
Crowned 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 your vast and fiery worlds afar,
As these bright beings are?

(A Pause.)

SECOND SPIRIT.

But 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,
And armed like a fiend to destroy?

THIRD 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 I
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 the 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 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, for our brothers
We plead, in their dawn overglooming!
For the death is not ours, but another’s.
Help! Help! from the doom that is coming.

RAPHAEL.

To spirits time and space may be condensed
Into a throb of feeling, or a thought.
While ye were singing, as ye watched your worlds,
They budded into life, from fiery 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,—
And the vast complex tissues he hath wrought,
Of life and laws and governments 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 growth!! 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. The earth,
That seems so near, is many myriad leagues
Away. ‘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,
This marriage of the spirit with the form,—
The correspondence of the universe
With souls through sense,—the incessant undertone
Of melody and chord through all the worlds;—
The life of man reflecting life divine;
Yea, even the blank and sterile voids that span
The dead unpalpitating space twixt star
And star, shall speak, as light hath spoken once.
Hark! even now the unfathomable shades
Of fate begin to stir. I hear a sound
Of shuddering wings, beyond the hurrying clouds,
Beyond the stars,—yet nearer, nearer still!

DISTANT VOICES confusedly.

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 protoplastic spells
That bind the sons of God to earth;—
The ceaseless web of mystery
That has been and shall ever be.

RAPHAEL.

Far off I 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.

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 net-work of the 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 flame
Of distant lightnings play. And now a voice
Of broken thunder-tones, and winds and waves
Commingled, muttering unintelligible things,
Approaches us. The air grows strangely chill
And nebulous. Daylight hath backward stepped,
And blotted with eclipse the morning sun.

CHORUS OF THE WORLD-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 whispering 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;
The shadows are hopeless and voiceless.
We are troubled. O help us, strong Angel I
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
Some truths your books of dead theology
Have never taught, nor poets, though they sang
Of Eden and the primal curse of man.

THE SPIRITS.

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 tempst 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
And tendency 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 play
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 Devil as they planned
Their gods. Say rather, God and Satan mixed,
A hybrid of diseased theology,
Stood at the centre of the universe,
Ormazd 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, flesh-veiled,
Who like themselves was moved to wrath, revenge,
And jealousy, to petty strifes and bars
Of sect and clan,—the echo 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, in league with some sweet drift
Of natural desire, tainted yet sweet.

SATAN.

Alas! did ever human eyes o’ertop
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 rain-drops from the pitying 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’erpassing 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, or in the great To-Be?
What sinner can escape His burning wrath?

SATAN.

His name is Love. He wills 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.