GILES FLETCHER.

Ador. O Seraph, pause no more!

Beside this gate of heaven we stand alone.

Zerah. Of heaven!

Ador. Our brother hosts are gone —

Zerah. Are gone before.

Ador. And the golden harps the angels bore

To help the songs of their desire,

Still burning from their hands of fire,

Lie without touch or tone

Upon the glass-sea shore.

Zerah. Silent upon the glass-sea shore!

Ador. There the Shadow from the throne

Formless with infinity

Hovers o'er the crystal sea

Awfuller than light derived,

And red with those primeval heats

Whereby all life has lived.

Zerah. Our visible God, our heavenly seats!

Ador. Beneath us sinks the pomp angelical,

Cherub and seraph, powers and virtues, all,—

The roar of whose descent has died

To a still sound, as thunder into rain.

Immeasurable space spreads magnified

With that thick life, along the plane

The worlds slid out on. What a fall

And eddy of wings innumerous, crossed

By trailing curls that have not lost

The glitter of the God-smile shed

On every prostrate angel's head!

What gleaming up of hands that fling

Their homage in retorted rays,

From high instinct of worshipping,

And habitude of praise!

Zerah. Rapidly they drop below us:

Pointed palm and wing and hair

Indistinguishable show us

Only pulses in the air

Throbbing with a fiery beat,

As if a new creation heard

Some divine and plastic word,

And trembling at its new-found being,

Awakened at our feet.

Ador. Zerah, do not wait for seeing!

HIS voice, his, that thrills us so

As we our harpstrings, uttered Go,

Behold the Holy in his woe!

And all are gone, save thee and —

Zerah. Thee!

Ador. I stood the nearest to the throne

In hierarchical degree,

What time the Voice said Go!

And whether I was moved alone

By the storm-pathos of the tone

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!— let me wait!—

Ador. Nay, gaze not backward 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,

Shouldst behold but only one

Attribute, the veil undone —

Even 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 bare 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,

O 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 undefiled though it tremble;

I go and tremble. Love me, O beloved!

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.

Were 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?

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?

Zerah. Of earth — the God-created 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 time ago,

Across our heaven's own shining floor,

And when it vanished, some who were

On thrones of holy empire there,

Did reign — were seen — were — never more.

Come nearer, O beloved!

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 band,

Without a smile in heaven.

Ador. Then thou wast 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

All 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, where 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 eclipse

And radiance, with contrasted wrath and love,

As God had called thee to a seraph's 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 ban,

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 has ta'en

From out the dust, with its humanity

Mournful and weak yet innocent around it,

And bade 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!

O 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 down-lay

Your sweet secureness 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?

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.