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branches ::: the Immortal

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object:the Immortal
class:person
word class:noun
class:Names of God

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Collected_Fictions
Epigrams_from_Savitri
Heart_of_Matter
Labyrinths
Liber_157_-_The_Tao_Teh_King
Life_without_Death
Modern_Man_in_Search_of_a_Soul
Plotinus_-_Complete_Works_Vol_01
Process_and_Reality
Savitri
The_Divine_Comedy
The_Divine_Companion
The_Republic
The_Use_and_Abuse_of_History
The_Yoga_Sutras

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
04.05_-_The_Immortal_Nation
05.04_-_The_Immortal_Person
11.09_-_Towards_the_Immortal_Body
ENNEAD_04.07_-_Of_the_Immortality_of_the_Soul:_Polemic_Against_Materialism.
The_Immortal

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
00.03_-_Upanishadic_Symbolism
00.04_-_The_Beautiful_in_the_Upanishads
00.05_-_A_Vedic_Conception_of_the_Poet
0.00_-_INTRODUCTION
0.00_-_THE_GOSPEL_PREFACE
0.03_-_The_Threefold_Life
0.06_-_Letters_to_a_Young_Sadhak
0.09_-_Letters_to_a_Young_Teacher
01.01_-_The_Symbol_Dawn
01.02_-_The_Issue
01.03_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Souls_Release
01.04_-_The_Secret_Knowledge
01.05_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Spirits_Freedom_and_Greatness
0.11_-_Letters_to_a_Sadhak
0_1954-08-25_-_what_is_this_personality?_and_when_will_she_come?
0_1961-01-29
0_1961-05-12
0_1962-02-06
0_1962-12-15
0_1963-03-13
0_1964-11-21
0_1969-02-01
0_1972-04-08
02.01_-_Our_Ideal
02.01_-_The_World_War
02.02_-_The_Kingdom_of_Subtle_Matter
02.03_-_The_Glory_and_the_Fall_of_Life
02.03_-_The_Shakespearean_Word
02.04_-_The_Kingdoms_of_the_Little_Life
02.04_-_Two_Sonnets_of_Shakespeare
02.05_-_Robert_Graves
02.06_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Greater_Life
02.07_-_The_Descent_into_Night
02.08_-_The_World_of_Falsehood,_the_Mother_of_Evil_and_the_Sons_of_Darkness
02.11_-_Hymn_to_Darkness
02.11_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Greater_Mind
02.12_-_The_Heavens_of_the_Ideal
02.14_-_The_World-Soul
03.02_-_The_Adoration_of_the_Divine_Mother
03.03_-_Arjuna_or_the_Ideal_Disciple
03.03_-_The_House_of_the_Spirit_and_the_New_Creation
03.04_-_The_Body_Human
03.04_-_The_Vision_and_the_Boon
03.05_-_The_Spiritual_Genius_of_India
04.01_-_The_Birth_and_Childhood_of_the_Flame
04.01_-_The_Divine_Man
04.02_-_The_Growth_of_the_Flame
04.03_-_Consciousness_as_Energy
04.03_-_The_Call_to_the_Quest
04.04_-_A_Global_Humanity
04.05_-_The_Immortal_Nation
04.06_-_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Consciousness
04.07_-_Readings_in_Savitri
05.01_-_Man_and_the_Gods
05.02_-_Satyavan
05.03_-_Bypaths_of_Souls_Journey
05.04_-_The_Immortal_Person
05.05_-_In_Quest_of_Reality
05.05_-_Of_Some_Supreme_Mysteries
05.12_-_The_Soul_and_its_Journey
05.18_-_Man_to_be_Surpassed
06.01_-_The_Word_of_Fate
06.02_-_The_Way_of_Fate_and_the_Problem_of_Pain
07.03_-_The_Entry_into_the_Inner_Countries
07.05_-_The_Finding_of_the_Soul
09.02_-_The_Journey_in_Eternal_Night_and_the_Voice_of_the_Darkness
10.02_-_The_Gospel_of_Death_and_Vanity_of_the_Ideal
10.03_-_The_Debate_of_Love_and_Death
10.04_-_The_Dream_Twilight_of_the_Earthly_Real
1.00_-_The_way_of_what_is_to_come
10.11_-_Savitri
10.12_-_The_Divine_Grace_and_Love
1.01_-_Foreward
1.01_-_The_Human_Aspiration
1.02.2.2_-_Self-Realisation
1.02.3.2_-_Knowledge_and_Ignorance
1.02.4.1_-_The_Worlds_-_Surya
1.02.4.2_-_Action_and_the_Divine_Will
1.02.9_-_Conclusion_and_Summary
1.02_-_MAPS_OF_MEANING_-_THREE_LEVELS_OF_ANALYSIS
1.02_-_SADHANA_PADA
1.02_-_The_Doctrine_of_the_Mystics
10.37_-_The_Golden_Bridge
1.03_-_Bloodstream_Sermon
1.03_-_Hymns_of_Gritsamada
1.04_-_Homage_to_the_Twenty-one_Taras
1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP
1.05_-_Adam_Kadmon
1.05_-_Buddhism_and_Women
1.05_-_Hymns_of_Bharadwaja
1.05_-_Ritam
1.05_-_The_Destiny_of_the_Individual
1.06_-_Agni_and_the_Truth
1.06_-_Dhyana_and_Samadhi
1.06_-_Hymns_of_Parashara
1.06_-_The_Four_Powers_of_the_Mother
1.07_-_Jnana_Yoga
1.07_-_Note_on_the_word_Go
1.08_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda_-_The_Secret_of_the_Veda
1.09_-_Legend_of_Lakshmi
11.01_-_The_Eternal_Day__The_Souls_Choice_and_the_Supreme_Consummation
11.02_-_The_Golden_Life-line
11.06_-_The_Mounting_Fire
11.08_-_Body-Energy
11.09_-_Towards_the_Immortal_Body
1.10_-_Concentration_-_Its_Practice
1.10_-_Life_and_Death._The_Greater_Guardian_of_the_Threshold
1.10_-_The_Image_of_the_Oceans_and_the_Rivers
1.10_-_Theodicy_-_Nature_Makes_No_Mistakes
1.10_-_The_Secret_of_the_Veda
11.10_-_The_Test_of_Truth
1.11_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Problem
1.11_-_The_Seven_Rivers
1.11_-_The_Soul_or_the_Astral_Body
1.1.2_-_Commentary
1.12_-_The_Herds_of_the_Dawn
1.12_-_The_Significance_of_Sacrifice
1.13_-_And_Then?
1.13_-_BOOK_THE_THIRTEENTH
1.13_-_Gnostic_Symbols_of_the_Self
1.13_-_The_Kings_of_Rome_and_Alba
1.13_-_The_Spirit
1.14_-_The_Structure_and_Dynamics_of_the_Self
1.14_-_The_Victory_Over_Death
1.15_-_The_Transformed_Being
1.17_-_The_Seven-Headed_Thought,_Swar_and_the_Dashagwas
1.18_-_FAITH
1.18_-_Mind_and_Supermind
1.18_-_The_Human_Fathers
1.19_-_Equality
1.19_-_The_Victory_of_the_Fathers
12.01_-_The_Return_to_Earth
12.09_-_The_Story_of_Dr._Faustus_Retold
1.20_-_The_Hound_of_Heaven
1.21_-_Families_of_the_Daityas
1.21_-_Tabooed_Things
1.22__-_Dominion_over_different_provinces_of_creation_assigned_to_different_beings
1.25_-_The_Knot_of_Matter
1.29_-_Concerning_heaven_on_earth,_or_godlike_dispassion_and_perfection,_and_the_resurrection_of_the_soul_before_the_general_resurrection.
1.2_-_Katha_Upanishads
13.07_-_The_Inter-Zone
1.3.5.01_-_The_Law_of_the_Way
1.3_-_Mundaka_Upanishads
14.05_-_The_Golden_Rule
1.439
1.43_-_Dionysus
1.450_-_1.500_Talks
1.550_-_1.600_Talks
1.61_-_The_Myth_of_Balder
17.01_-_Hymn_to_Dawn
17.02_-_Hymn_to_the_Sun
17.04_-_Hymn_to_the_Purusha
17.07_-_Ode_to_Darkness
17.11_-_A_Prayer
1953-10-14
1954-08-25_-_Ananda_aspect_of_the_Mother_-_Changing_conditions_in_the_Ashram_-_Ascetic_discipline_-_Mothers_body
1955-07-06_-_The_psychic_and_the_central_being_or_jivatman_-_Unity_and_multiplicity_in_the_Divine_-_Having_experiences_and_the_ego_-_Mental,_vital_and_physical_exteriorisation_-_Imagination_has_a_formative_power_-_The_function_of_the_imagination
1961_01_28
1961_05_04_-_60
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Mound
1f.lovecraft_-_Till_A_the_Seas
1.fs_-_The_Division_Of_The_Earth
1.fs_-_The_Driver
1.fs_-_The_Eleusinian_Festival
1.fs_-_The_Fortune-Favored
1.fs_-_The_Ideal_And_The_Actual_Life
1.fs_-_The_Iliad
1.fs_-_The_Ring_Of_Polycrates_-_A_Ballad
1.jk_-_Hyperion._Book_III
1.jk_-_Lamia._Part_II
1.jk_-_Sonnet_-_As_From_The_Darkening_Gloom_A_Silver_Dove
1.jwvg_-_Anacreons_Grave
1.jwvg_-_The_Godlike
1.pbs_-_Adonais_-_An_elegy_on_the_Death_of_John_Keats
1.pbs_-_Epipsychidion_-_Passages_Of_The_Poem,_Or_Connected_Therewith
1.pbs_-_Homers_Hymn_To_The_Sun
1.pbs_-_Hymn_To_Mercury
1.pbs_-_On_Keats,_Who_Desired_That_On_His_Tomb_Should_Be_Inscribed--
1.pbs_-_Peter_Bell_The_Third
1.pbs_-_Prometheus_Unbound
1.pbs_-_The_Revolt_Of_Islam_-_Canto_I-XII
1.poe_-_Eureka_-_A_Prose_Poem
1.rt_-_(1)_Thou_hast_made_me_endless_(from_Gitanjali)
1.rt_-_Gitanjali
1.rt_-_Little_Flute
1.rt_-_Poems_On_Life
1.rwe_-_Woodnotes
1.wb_-_Trembling_I_sit_day_and_night
1.wby_-_A_Dramatic_Poem
1.wby_-_The_Poet_Pleads_With_The_Elemental_Powers
1.wby_-_The_Shadowy_Waters_-_The_Shadowy_Waters
1.wby_-_The_Wanderings_Of_Oisin_-_Book_I
1.wby_-_The_Wanderings_Of_Oisin_-_Book_III
1.whitman_-_Aboard_At_A_Ships_Helm
1.whitman_-_As_A_Strong_Bird_On_Pinious_Free
1.whitman_-_As_I_Sat_Alone_By_Blue_Ontarios_Shores
1.whitman_-_For_Him_I_Sing
1.whitman_-_The_Mystic_Trumpeter
1.ww_-_Book_Eleventh-_France_[concluded]
1.ww_-_Book_First_[Introduction-Childhood_and_School_Time]
1.ww_-_Book_Fourth_[Summer_Vacation]
1.ww_-_Dion_[See_Plutarch]
1.ww_-_The_Excursion-_IV-_Book_Third-_Despondency
1.ww_-_Those_Words_Were_Uttered_As_In_Pensive_Mood
2.01_-_Mandala_One
2.02_-_The_Ishavasyopanishad_with_a_commentary_in_English
2.03_-_Indra_and_the_Thought-Forces
2.03_-_Karmayogin__A_Commentary_on_the_Isha_Upanishad
2.03_-_THE_ENIGMA_OF_BOLOGNA
2.03_-_The_Supreme_Divine
2.04_-_Agni,_the_Illumined_Will
2.05_-_Apotheosis
2.11_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_The_Double_Aspect
2.12_-_The_Way_and_the_Bhakta
2.13_-_THE_MASTER_AT_THE_HOUSES_OF_BALARM_AND_GIRISH
2.15_-_The_Cosmic_Consciousness
2.16_-_The_Integral_Knowledge_and_the_Aim_of_Life;_Four_Theories_of_Existence
2.17_-_The_Progress_to_Knowledge_-_God,_Man_and_Nature
2.18_-_January_1939
2.2.03_-_The_Psychic_Being
2.20_-_The_Philosophy_of_Rebirth
2.21_-_The_Order_of_the_Worlds
2.21_-_Towards_the_Supreme_Secret
2.22_-_Rebirth_and_Other_Worlds;_Karma,_the_Soul_and_Immortality
2.2.4_-_Taittiriya_Upanishad
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
2.3.06_-_The_Mind
2_-_Other_Hymns_to_Agni
30.14_-_Rabindranath_and_Modernism
30.17_-_Rabindranath,_Traveller_of_the_Infinite
3.02_-_The_Psychology_of_Rebirth
3.04_-_LUNA
3.06_-_The_Delight_of_the_Divine
3.18_-_Of_Clairvoyance_and_the_Body_of_Light
3.2.02_-_The_Veda_and_the_Upanishads
3.2.03_-_To_the_Ganges
3.3.01_-_The_Superman
3.3.1_-_Agni,_the_Divine_Will-Force
34.10_-_Hymn_To_Earth
3.5.01_-_Aphorisms
3.6.01_-_Heraclitus
36.07_-_An_Introduction_To_The_Vedas
36.08_-_A_Commentary_on_the_First_Six_Suktas_of_Rigveda
37.01_-_Yama_-_Nachiketa_(Katha_Upanishad)
37.06_-_Indra_-_Virochana_and_Prajapati
3.7.1.01_-_Rebirth
3.7.1.02_-_The_Reincarnating_Soul
3_-_Commentaries_and_Annotated_Translations
4.03_-_The_Psychology_of_Self-Perfection
4.04_-_In_the_Total_Christ
4.1_-_Jnana
4.2.04_-_Epiphany
5.01_-_Proem
5.1.01.1_-_The_Book_of_the_Herald
5.1.01.2_-_The_Book_of_the_Statesman
5.1.01.4_-_The_Book_of_Partings
5.1.01.5_-_The_Book_of_Achilles
5.1.01.6_-_The_Book_of_the_Chieftains
5.1.01.8_-_The_Book_of_the_Gods
5.1.01.9_-_Book_IX
5_-_The_Phenomenology_of_the_Spirit_in_Fairytales
7.5.26_-_The_Golden_Light
7.5.29_-_The_Universal_Incarnation
7.5.52_-_The_Unseen_Infinite
7.6.13_-_The_End?
Aeneid
Book_1_-_The_Council_of_the_Gods
BOOK_I._-_Augustine_censures_the_pagans,_who_attributed_the_calamities_of_the_world,_and_especially_the_sack_of_Rome_by_the_Goths,_to_the_Christian_religion_and_its_prohibition_of_the_worship_of_the_gods
BOOK_II._--_PART_I._ANTHROPOGENESIS.
BOOK_II._--_PART_III._ADDENDA._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_II._--_PART_II._THE_ARCHAIC_SYMBOLISM_OF_THE_WORLD-RELIGIONS
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_I._--_PART_II._THE_EVOLUTION_OF_SYMBOLISM_IN_ITS_APPROXIMATE_ORDER
BOOK_IV._-_That_empire_was_given_to_Rome_not_by_the_gods,_but_by_the_One_True_God
BOOK_IX._-_Of_those_who_allege_a_distinction_among_demons,_some_being_good_and_others_evil
BOOK_VIII._-_Some_account_of_the_Socratic_and_Platonic_philosophy,_and_a_refutation_of_the_doctrine_of_Apuleius_that_the_demons_should_be_worshipped_as_mediators_between_gods_and_men
BOOK_VII._-_Of_the_select_gods_of_the_civil_theology,_and_that_eternal_life_is_not_obtained_by_worshipping_them
BOOK_VI._-_Of_Varros_threefold_division_of_theology,_and_of_the_inability_of_the_gods_to_contri_bute_anything_to_the_happiness_of_the_future_life
BOOK_XI._-_Augustine_passes_to_the_second_part_of_the_work,_in_which_the_origin,_progress,_and_destinies_of_the_earthly_and_heavenly_cities_are_discussed.Speculations_regarding_the_creation_of_the_world
BOOK_XIII._-_That_death_is_penal,_and_had_its_origin_in_Adam's_sin
BOOK_XII._-_Of_the_creation_of_angels_and_men,_and_of_the_origin_of_evil
BOOK_XIX._-_A_review_of_the_philosophical_opinions_regarding_the_Supreme_Good,_and_a_comparison_of_these_opinions_with_the_Christian_belief_regarding_happiness
BOOK_X._-_Porphyrys_doctrine_of_redemption
BOOK_XV._-_The_progress_of_the_earthly_and_heavenly_cities_traced_by_the_sacred_history
BOOK_XXII._-_Of_the_eternal_happiness_of_the_saints,_the_resurrection_of_the_body,_and_the_miracles_of_the_early_Church
BOOK_XXI._-_Of_the_eternal_punishment_of_the_wicked_in_hell,_and_of_the_various_objections_urged_against_it
BOOK_XX._-_Of_the_last_judgment,_and_the_declarations_regarding_it_in_the_Old_and_New_Testaments
COSA_-_BOOK_X
ENNEAD_01.01_-_The_Organism_and_the_Self.
ENNEAD_02.01_-_Of_the_Heaven.
ENNEAD_02.03_-_Whether_Astrology_is_of_any_Value.
ENNEAD_02.09_-_Against_the_Gnostics;_or,_That_the_Creator_and_the_World_are_Not_Evil.
ENNEAD_04.07_-_Of_the_Immortality_of_the_Soul:_Polemic_Against_Materialism.
Gorgias
Liber_46_-_The_Key_of_the_Mysteries
Meno
Phaedo
r1914_04_19
Sayings_of_Sri_Ramakrishna_(text)
Symposium_translated_by_B_Jowett
Tablets_of_Baha_u_llah_text
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Aleph
The_Book_of_Certitude_-_P1
The_Book_of_Certitude_-_P2
The_Divine_Names_Text_(Dionysis)
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
the_Eternal_Wisdom
The_Golden_Verses_of_Pythagoras
The_Hidden_Words_text
The_Immortal
The_Last_Question
The_Poems_of_Cold_Mountain
Timaeus

PRIMARY CLASS

Names_of_God
person
SIMILAR TITLES
the Immortal

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE

  “After death . . . there occurs what is called the ‘second death,’ which is the separation of the immortal part of the second or intermediate Duad from the lower portions of this Duad, which lower portions remain as the kama-rupa in the etheric or higher astral spheres which are intermediate between the devachanic and the earthly spheres. In time this kama-rupa gradually fades out in its turn, its life-atoms at such dissolution passing on to their various and unceasing peregrinations.

AGNI. ::: Fire; Fire of Sacrifice; the Fire-God; Flame of Divine Force; illumined will; Divine Will; Fire of human aspiration; flame of purification or transformation in the psychic being; psychic fire.
The psychic fire is the fire of aspiration, purification and Tapasya.
Without Agni the sacrificial flame cannot bum on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
Agni and colours ::: the principle of Fire can manifest all the colours and the pure white fire is that which contains in itself all the colours.


  Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.” *The Secret of the Veda

Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.” The Secret of the Veda

“Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifested as conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language, Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternal worlds, then manifest, ``born’’, building up in man the Truth and the Immortality.” The Secret of the Veda

Agni ::: Without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 15, Page: 379-80


akal. ::: the timeless; the immortal; the non-temporal

a lovely luminary characterized as “the immortal one, genius of fertilizing waters.” Offsetting

Amata-yana (Pali) Amata-yāna [from a not + mata dead, from the verbal root mṛ to die + yāna leading, going, vehicle, from the verbal root ya to go, proceed, advance] Immortal vehicle or way; equivalent to the Sanskrit amrita-yana, the immortal vehicle or individuality in contradistinction to the personal vehicle or ego (pachcheka-yana). It is, therefore, the immortal part of the human being, “a combination of the fifth, sixth, and seventh” principles — atman, buddhi, and manas (cf ML 114).

Ambrosia (Greek) [from ambrotos immortal from a not + mortos or brotos mortal; cf Sanskrit amṛta from a not + the verbal root mṛ to die; Latin immortalus from in not + mors death] In Classical myths variously the food, drink, or unguent of the gods or divine wisdom, connected with nectar; anything that confers or promotes immortality. Equivalent to the Sanskrit amrita and soma and the northern European mead. In a Chinese allegory, the flying Dragon drinks of ambrosia and falls to earth with his host. The laws of evolution entail a so-called curse or fall upon virtually all the hosts of monads frequently called angels, whereby they are cast down to the nether pole and undergo peregrinations in the realms of matter; in the case of many such “fallen angels,” this involves imbodiment or incarnation on earth. Man himself at a stage of his evolution experiences a similar “descent” and speeding-up, due to the impulses of the immortal urge within his breast to grow, progress, evolve, and become cognizant of larger reaches of truth. This is evident in the highly mystical Hebrew story of the forbidden Tree and in the various legends pertaining to soma in Hindu literature.

amrta (Amrita) ::: 1. immortality. ::: 2. the nectar of immortality, ambrosia, the food or drink of the gods; the immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy. ::: amrtam [nominative]

amrte loke aksite ::: [in the immortal inexhaustible world]. [RV 9.113.7]

And flame-wrapt outbursts of the immortal Word

::: "As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, — for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga

“As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body,—for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga

Aswapati ::: Sri Aurobindo: “Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her [Savitri’s] human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; …” (Author’s Note at the beginning of Savitri.)

Aswapati ::: Sri Aurobindo: “Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her [Savitri’s] human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; …” (From a letter of Sri Aurobindo to a disciple, listed now as the Author’s Note at the beginning of Savitri.)

aswapati ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her [Savitri"s] human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; . . . .” (From a letter written by Sri Aurobindo) Aswapati"s.

Atma-buddhi-manas (Sanskrit) Ātma-buddhi-manas [from ātman self + buddhi spiritual soul + manas mind] The reincarnating ego in conjunction with the monad. This trinity includes only the highest essence of manas — the higher manas. The combination of atma-buddhi-manas is sometimes mystically called the divine swallow or the uraeus of flame, when the speaker intends to convey the idea that spirit, the spiritual soul, and the intellect or higher manas are all united and therefore immortal and enduring for the cosmic manvantara. “The ‘Three-tongued flame’ that never dies is the immortal spiritual triad — the Atma-Buddhi and Manas — the fruition of the latter assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The ‘four wicks’ that go out and are extinguished, are the four lower principles, including the body.

At-one-ment: A term used in Christian science for the spiritual union with the Immortal Mind.

Buddhi-manas (Sanskrit) Buddhi-manas [from buddhi spiritual soul + manas intellect] The higher ego, the principle of essential self-consciousness, especially when considered as over-enlightened by the atman or self per se. Buddhi-manas is the karana-sarira (causal body), hence the immortal or spiritual self which passes intact from one incarnation to another. This higher self or ego is formed of the indissoluble union of buddhi, the sixth principle counting upwards, and the spiritual efflorescence of manas, the fifth principle. Buddhi-manas is the divine individual soul infilled with the light of the ray from the atman, and hence includes human intellect and egoic self-consciousness, in addition to all the spiritual faculties and powers inherent in the ray itself. See also ATMA-BUDDHI-MANAS

But by the same token, as Kant now shows in the third part on "Transcendental Dialectic", the forms of sensibility and understanding cannot be employed beyond experience in order to define the nature of such metaphysical entities as God, the immortal soul, and the World conceived as a totality. If the forms are valid in experience only because they are necessary conditions of experience, there is no way of judging their applicability to objects transcending experience. Thus Kant is driven to the denial of the possibility of a science of metaphysics. But though judgments of metaphysics are indemonstrable, they are not wholly useless. The "Ideas of Pure Reason" (Vernunft) have a "regulative use", in that they point to general objects which they cannot, however, constitute. Theoretical knowledge is limited to the realm of experience; and within this realm we cannot know "things-in-themselves", but only the way in which things appear under a priori forms of reason; we know things, in other words, as "phenomena."

Causal body: “This term denotes the vehicle of the spiritual ego in the higher mind of each individual. It is usually called the immortal soul, for it persists throughout the cycle [of reincarnations]. To it are attached the vehicles of the personality or personal ego, on the lower planes.” ( . A. Gaskell)

cosmic Will ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifested as conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language, Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternal worlds, then manifest, ``born"", building up in man the Truth and the Immortality.” *The Secret of the Veda

CPU Wars /C-P-U worz/ A 1979 large-format comic by Chas Andres chronicling the attempts of the brainwashed androids of IPM (Impossible to Program Machines) to conquer and destroy the peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered Computers). This rather transparent allegory featured many references to {ADVENT} and the immortal line "Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!" (uttered, of course, by an IPM stormtrooper). It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation on IBM company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratories (then, as now, one of the few islands of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. See {eat flaming death}. [{Jargon File}]

Elementaries The earth-bound disimbodied human souls of people who were evil or depraved when imbodied: the conscious or quasi-conscious astral souls of people who on earth refused all spiritual light, remained and died deeply immersed in the mire of matter, and from whose souls or intermediate, personal nature the immortal spirit has gradually separated. These may exist for centuries before completely dissolving. Blavatsky writes of the spiritual death leading to this condition: “When one falls into a love of self and love of the world, with its pleasures, losing the divine love of God and of the neighbor, he falls from life to death. The higher principles which constitute the essential elements of his humanity perish, and he lives only on the natural plane of his faculties. Physically he exists, spiritually he is dead. . . . This spiritual death results from disobedience of the laws of spiritual life, which is followed by the same penalty as the disobedience of the laws of natural life. But the spiritually dead have still their delights; they have their intellectual endowments and power, and intense activities. All the animal delights are theirs, and to multitudes of men and women these constitute the highest ideal of human happiness. The tireless pursuit of riches, of the amusements and entertainments of social life; the cultivation of graces of manner, of taste in dress, of social preferment, of scientific distinction, intoxicate and enrapture these dead-alive . . .” (IU 1:318).

Ficino, Marsilio: Of Florence (1433-99). Was the main representative of Platonism in Renaissance Italy. His doctrine combines NeoPlatonic metaphysics and Augustinian theologv with many new, original ideas. His major work, the Theologia Ptatonica (1482) presents a hierarchical system of the universe (God, Angelic Mind, Soul, Quality, Body) and a great number of arguments for the immortality of the soul. Man is considered as the center of the universe, and human life is interpreted as an internal ascent of the soul towards God. Through the Florentine Academy Ficino's Platonism exercised a large influence upon his contemporaries. His theory of "Platonic love" had vast repercussions in Italian, French and English literature throughout the sixteenth century. His excellent Latin translations of Plato (1484), Plotinus (1492), and other Greek philosophers provided the occidental world with new materials of the greatest importance and were widely used up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. -- P.O.K.

“For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law of the Truth, rtasya panthâh.” The Renaissance in India

Freemasonry: A world-wide philosophical fraternal institution. Its origins are lost in the immemorial past, although it is claimed to have been founded at the time of the building of Solomon’s Temple; its present organization dates from 1717, the establishment of the premier Grand Lodge of England. It teaches morality and basic religion by means of symbols, particularly those derived from the builder’s craft; its basic doctrines include belief in God, the Great Architect of the Universe, and belief in the immortality of the soul. A great deal of ancient and medieval occult lore, particularly of the Kabalah and of alchemy, has been retained by the Order in a more or less modified form. According to H. L. Haywood, in Supplement to Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (copyright, 1946, by the Masonic History Company), Vol. III, p. 1234, “A Masonic Lodge represents a body of workmen in which each member has a station or place corresponding to his task or function.” It is stated in the same volume (p. 1485) that “there is no occultism in Freemasonry, though the word is often used loosely in the Ritual, as a synonym for ‘arcane.’ The correct Masonic word is ‘esoteric.’”

guest ::: Sri Aurobindo: " When the Rishis speak of Indra or Agni or Soma in men, they are speaking of the god in his cosmic presence, power or function. This is evident from the very language when they speak of Agni as the immortal in mortals, the immortal Light in men, the inner Warrior, the Guest in human beings.” *Letters on Yoga

Guest ::: “ When the Rishis speak of Indra or Agni or Soma in men, they are speaking of the god in his cosmic presence, power or function. This is evident from the very language when they speak of Agni as the immortal in mortals, the immortal Light in men, the inner Warrior, the Guest in human beings.” Letters on Yoga

Hoddmimir’s Holt (Icelandic) [from hodd treasury + Mimir, Mimer a giant, the root of matter + holt grove] In Norse myths the sacred grove where is guarded the treasury that is being sought by the gods in matter during manifestation. In that grove Lif and Lifthrasir, the immortal principles in humanity, are secreted when the world has ended its lifetime and before it is reborn.

immortalist ::: n. --> One who holds the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

Immortality cannot come if there is attachment to the body ; for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come.

immortality ::: n. --> The quality or state of being immortal; exemption from death and annihilation; unending existance; as, the immortality of the soul.
Exemption from oblivion; perpetuity; as, the immortality of fame.


In a more relative sense the sutratman is the egoic pilgrim, the immortal individuality, or that thread of being which animates a person and passes through all the countless personalities which he uses during the course of his manvantara-long evolutionary progress. “In each of us that golden thread of continuous life — periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super-sensuous in Devachan — is from the beginning of our appearance upon this earth. It is the Sutratma, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal monadship, on which our earth lives or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads . . .” (SD 2:513).

Incantation [from Latin cantare to sin] Charm, mantra; the expert use of the power of unvocalized or vocalized sound in evolving occult forces of nature. Used in magic, especially of the ceremonial kind. The power of sound, akasic in character, is the “first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and the Immortals” (SD 1:464); one of the seven siddhis, mantrika-sakti.

Individuality [from Latin individuum undivided thing, unit] In philosophy, as well as in theosophy, used for inherent selfhood: monad, ego, atom. Used in theosophy for the higher ego in man as contrasted with the lower ego or personality — a distinction not made in ordinary parlance, where the two words may even be used in the opposite senses. The individuality is the immortal spiritual ego or monad; whereas the personality, or lower quaternary of the septenary human constitution, is the mortal human ego which goes to pieces at death.

In Kant: Whatever enters into the structure of actual experience. Thus, the categories are constitutive of knowledge of nature because they are necessary conditions of any experience or knowledge whatever. In contrast, the transcendent Ideas (God, the total Cosmos, and the immortal Soul) are not constitutive of anything, since they do not serve to define or compose real objects, and must be restricted to a regulative and speculative use. See Crit. of Pure Reason, Transc. Dialectic, Bk. II, ch. II, Sec. 8. -- O.F.K.

Inner man: In occult terminology, the immortal essence or higher ego of man.

In the Orphic teachings Demeter is not only the earth goddess, but is also Demeter-Kore the divine maid. This aspect is twofold: as Persephone the Virgin-Queen of the Dead; and as the mortal maid Semele, mother of the mystic savior Dionysos, and later enthroned as Semele-Thyone (Semele the Inspiried). As both maid and mother she is the immortal wife of Zeus, and is also called the mother of Zeus, as an Orphic verse declares: “The goddess who was Rhea, when she bore Zeus became Demeter.” In one of her aspects, Demeter is the one to whom, in the Orphic legend, is given the still beating heart of the murdered Zagreus-Dionysus.

In theosophical philosophy, the general or essential elixir is attained by the student-adept when he fills his whole being with the spiritual flow of substance and energy from the immortal center within himself. It is precisely this flow of the spirit which is the true elixir of immortality and the basis of all the marvelous powers within the person thus regenerated which enables him to transmute the base into the fine, evil into good, and to obtain self-conscious perpetuity during the manvantara. See also HETEROGENEITY AND HOMOGENEITY; PRIMEVAL MATTER

Jains, Jainas [from jina victorious] Followers of the jinas; one of the major Indian religions. Scholars place their origin in the 5th century BC, believing them to be the last direct representatives of the philosophical schools which then flourished. Jainism, however, became overshadowed with the rise of Buddhism, which it closely resembles; but came to the front when the Buddhist fervor waned in India. The first recorded Jain teacher is Vaddhamana (known as Mahavira, “the great hero”), a contemporary of Gautama Buddha; the Jains themselves state that there was a succession of teachers antedating him, and enumerate 24 Jinas or Tirthankaras. Jains deny the authority of the Vedas and do not believe in any personal supreme god. They have a complex religious philosophy which includes belief in the eternity of matter, the periodicity of the universe, and the immortality of human’s and animal’s minds. They are particularly known for avoiding harming any living thing.

  “Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent personalities — the illusive envelopes of the immortal monad-ego — twinkle and dance on the waves of Maya. They last and appear, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the running waters of life: the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the beams — symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos — alone surviving, re-merged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source” (SD 1:237).

Kama-manas in the human constitution is conditionally immortal or mortal: if the kama-manas aspires successfully upwards and makes intellectual and emotional union with the buddhi over-enlightening it, the immortality for the manvantara is relatively certain. If, however, the kama-manas is insufficiently illuminated to withstand successfully the attractions of the lower astral and material realms of feeling and thought, it is attracted downwards and becomes enchained in these lower realms, and immortality in this case is lost, for the time being at least.

Kama-Rupa(Sanskrit) ::: A compound word signifying "desire body." It is that part of man's inner constitution in whichdwell or inhere the various desires, affections, hates, loves -- in short, the various mental and psychicalenergies. After death it becomes the vehicle in the astral worlds of the higher principles of the man thatwas. But these higher principles are nevertheless scarcely conscious of the fact, because the rupture ofthe golden cord of life at the moment of the physical death plunges the cognizing personal entity into amerciful stupor of unconsciousness, in which stupor it remains a longer or shorter period depending uponits qualities of spirituality or materiality. The more spiritual the man was the longer the period ofmerciful unconsciousness lasts, and vice versa.After death, as has been frequently stated elsewhere, there occurs what is called the second death, whichis the separation of the immortal part of the second or intermediate duad from the lower portions of thisduad, which lower portions remain as the kama-rupa in the etheric or higher astral spheres which areintermediate between the devachanic and the earthly spheres. In time this kama-rupa gradually fades outin its turn, its life-atoms at such dissolution passing on to their various and unceasing peregrinations.It is this kama-rupa which legend and story in the various ancient world religions or philosophies speakof as the shade, and which it has been customary in the Occident to call the spook or ghost. It is, in short,all the mortal elements of the human soul that was. The kama-rupa is an exact astral duplicate, inappearance and mannerism, of the man who died; it is his eidolon or "image." (See also Second Death)

Karest (Egyptian) Karest. Mummy; Massey identifies it with Christ: “the author of the Christian name is the Mummy-Christ of Egypt, called the Karest, which was a type of the immortal spirit in man, the Christ within (as Paul has it), the divine offspring incarnated, the Logos, the Word of Truth, the Makheru of Egypt. It did not originate as a mere type! The preserved mummy was the dead body of any one that was Karest, or mummified, to be kept by the living; and, through constant repetition, this became a type of the resurrection from (not of!) the dead” (quoted BCW 188n). Blavatsky comments that this interpretation is too materialistic. (BCW 8: 197-200, 203)

known also as Chirangivah the Immortal.

Lararium (Latin) A shrine for holding the lares (images of the household gods) and similar relics in the houses of ancient Romans. The lares are described as those parts of the human constitution left behind by the immortal monad after death, these remnants being of different classes because belonging to different planes. The Latins grouped them under three general planes: manes, lares, and lemures. The lemures were virtually the kama-lokic shades or shells, and so likewise were the larvae; the lares were at once the ancestral images in a family or of a city, and at the same time more mystically the quasi-personalized astral forces hovering around and thus becoming tutelary influences — a Roman belief difficult to describe; whereas the manes corresponded more closely to excarnate human monads. See also LARVA

Madhav: “Zero does not stand for nothing. Zero does not signify emptiness, but has behind it the face of the immortal.” The Book of the Divine Mother

Manasa(s) (Sanskrit) Mānasa [from mānasa intelligent from manas mind] Adjective of manas; in theosophical literature, title for the Sons of Wisdom or manasaputras, those intellectual beings, spiritual pitris or dhyanis, who endowed humanity with manas or intelligence; hence, the immortal egos in man. See also AGNISHVATTAS; MANASAPUTRAS

Man as well as nature is called saptaparna (seven-leaved plant), symbolized by the triangle above the square. While the senary was applied to man in all ranges from the physical to the spiritual, when completed by the atman, thus making the septenary, the latter signified the entire range of the constitution, whether of man or nature, crowned by the immortal spirit.

Maruts ::: the Thought-Forces; the Life-Powers that support by their nervous and vital energies the action of the thought in the attempt of the mortal consciousness to grow or expand itself into the immortality of the Truth and Bliss; (to the uninstructed Aryan worshipper): powers of storm, wind and rain.

Materializations The taking on of an objective form or body by something of a subjective nature; used in modern spiritualism for appearances which the latter calls spirits of the dead. “Theosophists accept the phenomenon of ‘materialization’; but they reject the theory that it is produced by ‘Spirits,’ i.e., the immortal principles of the disembodied persons” (TG 209).

Mendelsohn, Moses: (1729-1786) A German Jewish popular philosopher, holding an admired position in German literature. He was the first to advocate the social emancipation of the Jews, to plead in Germany for the separation of the Church and the State and for freedom of belief and conscience. He is philosrohically best known for his adduced proofs of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of a personal God. Schriften z. Philos., Aesthetik u. Apologetik (ed. Brasch, 1880). -- H.H.

Monadic Ray The monad, that divine-spiritual-intellectual seed or originant of each evolving being, does not itself descend into the planes of matter, but shoots forth from itself a multitude of rays. Each such ray forms the essential nature of the complex evolving being to which it pertains, and hence the monad is the primal or ultimate source of all that being’s life and characteristic attributes, the immortal part of the being, whether that being be human, animal, vegetable, mineral, or what not. In man it is his essential self; it persists throughout all the evolutionary transformations in the life cycle and gathers around itself the life-atoms at each new incarnation of the reincarnating ego.

Monad: In Greek philosophy, the Unit; originally, the number One, later any individual or metaphysical unit. Numerology still uses the term monad for the number One. According to Giordano Bruno, a metaphysical unit, a microscopic embodiment of the divine essence which pervades and constitutes the universe. Leibniz identified the monads with the metaphysical individuals or souls. In occult terminology, the monad is an indivisible divine spiritual life-atom, the immortal part of man which lives on in successive reincarnations.

Orphic mysteries: The ancient Greek mystery cult which developed from the Dionysian mysteries (q.v.). The Orphics eliminated the orgiastic elements of the Dionysian rites, and invested their mysteries with a more sober and speculative character, emphasizing the immortality of the soul and the doctrine of reincarnation, the “Great Circle of Necessity.” They taught a symbolism in which, for instance, the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and they sought to influence their destiny after death by austerity and pure living.

Personality ::: Theosophists draw a clear and sharp distinction, not of essence but of quality, between personality andindividuality. Personality comes from the Latin word persona, which means a mask, through which theactor, the spiritual individuality, speaks. The personality is all the lower man: all the psychical and astraland physical impulses and thoughts and tendencies, and what not. It is the reflection in matter of theindividuality; but being a material thing it can lead us downwards, although it is in essence a reflection ofthe highest. Freeing ourselves from the domination of the person, the mask, the veil, through which theindividuality acts, then we show forth all the spiritual and so-called superhuman qualities; and this willhappen in the future, in the far distant aeons of the future, when every human being shall have become abuddha, a christ. Such is the destiny of the human race.In occultism the distinction between the personality and the immortal individuality is that drawn betweenthe lower quaternary or four lower principles of the human constitution and the three higher principles ofthe constitution or higher triad. The higher triad is the individuality; the personality is the lowerquaternary. The combination of these two into a unity during a lifetime on earth produces what we nowcall the human being. The personality comprises within its range all the characteristics and memories andimpulses and karmic attributes of one physical life; whereas the individuality is the aeonic ego,imperishable and deathless for the period of a solar manvantara. It is the individuality through its ray orhuman astral-vital monad which reincarnates time after time and thus clothes itself in one personalityafter another personality.

Pharisees ::: (Heb. perushim, lit. separatists; adj. pharisaic). The name given to a group or movement in early Judaism, the origin and nature of which is unclear. Many scholars identify them with the later sages and rabbis who taught the oral and written law; others see them as a complex of pietistic and zealous separatists, distinct from the proto-rabbis. According to Josephus, the Pharisees believed in the immortality of souls and resurrection of the dead, in a balance between predestination and free will, in angels as active divine agents and in authoritative oral law. In the early Christian materials, Pharisees are often depicted as leading opponents of Jesus/Joshua and his followers, and are often linked with “scribes” but distinguished from the Sadducees.

Primeval self-conscious humanity — not savage by any means, however much it may have needed spiritual guidance — was watched over and protected by divine instructors, and among the arts taught by these great beings, architecture had a prominent place: “No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third root race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion. . . . It is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of construction of the Grecian temples erected to the immortal gods; and the ten books of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short, who was an initiate, can only be studied esoterically. The Druidical circles, the Dolmens, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers and the 127 towns in Europe which were found ‘Cyclopean in origin’ by the French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those primarily taught by the ‘Sons of God,’ justly called ‘The Builders’ ” (SD 1:208-9n).

Pythagoreanism: The doctrines (philosophical, mathematical, moral, and religious) of Pythagoras (c. 572-497) and of his school which flourished until about the end of the 4th century B.C. The Pythagorean philosophy was a dualism which sharply distinguished thought and the senses, the soul and the body, the mathematical forms of things and their perceptible appearances. The Pythagoreans supposed that the substances of all things were numbers and that all phenomena were sensuous expressions of mathematical ratios. For them the whole universe was harmony. They made important contributions to mathematics, astronomv, and physics (acoustics) and were the first to formulate the elementary principles and methods of arithmetic and geometry as taught in the first books of Euclid. But the Pythagorean sect was not only a philosophical and mathematical school (cf. K. von Fritz, Pythagorean Politics in Southern Italy, 1941), but also a religious brotherhood and a fellowship for moral reformation. They believed in the immortality and transmigration (see Metempsychosis) of the soul which they defined as the harmony of the body. To restore harmony which was confused by the senses was the goal of their Ethics and Politics. The religious ideas were closely related to those of the Greek mysteries which sought by various rites and abstinences to purify and redeem the soul. The attempt to combine this mysticism with their mathematical philosophy, led the Pythagoreans to the development of an intricate and somewhat fantastic symbolism which collected correspondences between numbers and things and for example identified the antithesis of odd and even with that of form and matter, the number 1 with reason, 2 with the soul, etc. Through their ideas the Pythagoreans had considerable effect on the development of Plato's thought and on the theories of the later Neo-platonists.

Referring to the forming of mankind, the Stanzas of Dzyan say: “Who perfects the last body? Fish, Sin, and Soma.” Soma was in Hindustan also a name of the moon, and fish refers to a similar fact — fishes often being taken as symbols of the productive power of the lunar influence because of their great fecundity. Fish, Sin, and the moon conjointly are the three symbols of the immortal Being (SD 1:263). As these symbols, among other things, stand for Pisces, karma, and the mother of terrestrial life, it would seem that the pilgrimage of the human monad through the halls of experience, and the completing of its evolution thereby, is indicated.

Round: In theosophical terminology, the passage of the immortal part of man (monad) through the complete chain of planes of existence.

Saddharmapundarīkasutra. (T. Dam pa'i chos padma dkar po'i mdo; C. Miaofa lianhua jing/Fahua jing; J. Myohorengekyo/Hokekyo; K. Myobop yonhwa kyong/Pophwa kyong 妙法蓮華經/法華經). In Sanskrit, "Sutra of the White Lotus of the True Dharma," and known in English simply as the "Lotus Sutra"; perhaps the most influential of all MAHĀYĀNA sutras. The earliest portions of the text were probably composed as early as the first or second centuries of the Common Era; the text gained sufficient renown in India that a number of chapters were later interpolated into it. The sutra was translated into Chinese six times and three of those translations are extant. The earliest of those is that made by DHARMARAKsA, completed in 286. The most popular is that of KUMĀRAJĪVA in twenty-eight chapters, completed in 406. The sutra was translated into Tibetan in the early ninth century. Its first translation into a European language was that of EUGÈNE BURNOUF into French in 1852. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra is perhaps most famous for its parables, which present, in various versions, two of the sutra's most significant doctrines: skill-in-means (UPĀYA) and the immortality of the Buddha. In the parable of the burning house, a father lures his children from a conflagration by promising them three different carts, but when they emerge they find instead a single, magnificent cart. The three carts symbolize the sRĀVAKA vehicle, the PRATYEKABUDDHA vehicle, and the BODHISATTVA vehicle, while the one cart is the "one vehicle" (EKAYĀNA), the buddha vehicle (BUDDHAYĀNA). This parable indicates that the Buddha's previous teaching of three vehicles (TRIYĀNA) was a case of upāya, an "expedient device" or "skillful method" designed to attract persons of differing capacities to the dharma. In fact, there is only one vehicle, the vehicle whereby all beings proceed to buddhahood. In the parable of the conjured city, a group of weary travelers take rest in a magnificent city, only to be told later that it is a magical creation. This conjured city symbolizes the NIRVĀnA of the ARHAT; there is in fact no such nirvāna as a final goal in Buddhism, since all will eventually follow the bodhisattva's path to buddhahood. The apparently universalistic doctrine articulated by the sutra must be understood within the context of the sectarian polemics in which the sutra seems to have been written. The doctrine of upāya is intended in part to explain the apparent contradiction between the teachings that appear in earlier sutras and those of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. The former are relegated to the category of mere expedients, with those who fail to accept the consummate teaching of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra as the authentic word of the Buddha (BUDDHAVACANA) repeatedly excoriated by the text itself. In a device common in Mahāyāna sutras, the sutra itself describes both the myriad benefits that accrue to those who recite, copy, and revere the sutra, as well as the misfortune that will befall those who fail to do so. The immortality of the Buddha is portrayed in the parable of the physician, in which a father feigns death in order to induce his sons to commit to memory an antidote to poison. The apparent death of the father is compared to the Buddha's entry into nirvāna, something which he only pretended to do in order to inspire his followers. Elsewhere in the sutra, the Buddha reveals that he did not achieve enlightenment as the prince Siddhārtha who left his palace, but in fact had achieved enlightenment eons before; the well-known version of his departure from the palace and successful quest for enlightenment were merely a display meant to inspire the world. The immortality of the Buddha (and other buddhas) is also demonstrated when a great STuPA emerges from the earth. When the door to the funerary reliquary is opened, ashes and bones are not found, as would be expected, but instead the living buddha PRABHuTARATNA, who appears in his stupa whenever the Saddharmapundarīkasutra is taught. sĀKYAMUNI joins him on his seat, demonstrating another central Mahāyāna doctrine, the simultaneous existence of multiple buddhas. Other famous events described in the sutra include the miraculous transformation of a NĀGA princess into a buddha after she presents a gem to sākyamuni and the tale of a bodhisattva who immolates himself in tribute to a previous buddha. The sutra contains several chapters that function as self-contained texts; the most popular of these is the chapter devoted to the bodhisattva AVALOKITEsVARA, which details his ability to rescue the faithful from various dangers. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra was highly influential in East Asia, inspiring both a range of devotional practices as well as the creation of new Buddhist schools that had no Indian analogues. The devotional practices include those extolled by the sutra itself: receiving and keeping the sutra, reading it, memorizing and reciting it, copying it, and explicating it. In East Asia, there are numerous tales of the miraculous benefits of each of these practices. The practice of copying the sutra (or having it copied) was a particularly popular form of merit-making either for oneself or for departed family members. Also important, especially in China, was the practice of burning either a finger or one's entire body as an offering to the Buddha, emulating the self-immolation of the bodhisattva BHAIsAJYARĀJA in the twenty-third chapter (see SHESHEN). In the domain of doctrinal developments, the Saddharmapundarīkasutra was highly influential across East Asia, its doctrine of upāya providing the rationale for the systems of doctrinal taxonomies (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) that are pervasive in East Asian Buddhist schools. In China, the sutra was the central text of the TIANTAI ZONG, where it received detailed exegesis by a number of important figures. The school's founder, TIANTAI ZHIYI, divided the sutra into two equal parts. In the first fourteen chapters, which he called the "trace teaching" (C. jimen, J. SHAKUMON), sākyamuni appears as the historical buddha. In the remaining fourteen chapters, which Zhiyi called the "origin teaching" (C. benmen, J. HONMON), sākyamuni reveals his true nature as the primordial buddha who achieved enlightenment many eons ago. Zhiyi also drew on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra in elucidating two of his most famous doctrines: the three truths (SANDI, viz., emptiness, the provisional, and the mean) and the notion of YINIAN SANQIAN, or "the trichiliocosm in an instant of thought." In the TENDAISHu, the Japanese form of Tiantai, the sutra remained supremely important, providing the scriptural basis for the central doctrine of original enlightenment (HONGAKU) and the doctrine of "achieving buddhahood in this very body" (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU); in TAIMITSU, the tantric form of Tendai, sākyamuni Buddha was identified with MAHĀVAIROCANA. For the NICHIREN schools (and their offshoots, including SoKA GAKKAI), the Saddharmapundarīkasutra is not only its central text but is also considered to be the only valid Buddhist sutra for the degenerate age (J. mappo; see C. MOFA); the recitation of the sutra's title is the central practice in Nichiren (see NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo). See also SADĀPARIBHuTA.

Sadducees [from Greek saddoukaioi from Hebrew tsadoq supposed to be the founder of the sect, meaning just, righteous] Among Europeans, a skeptic or doubter; originally the party of the Jewish priestly aristocracy which arose in the 2nd century BC under the later Hasmoneans. The Sadducees have come to be regarded as primarily a political party opposed to the Pharisees, called by some the party of the Scribes, but later Jewish tradition following Josephus more accurately regarded them as a philosophico-religious school. The Sadducees, a sect of erudite philosophers, opposed a great deal of the commonly accepted beliefs of the majority of the Jews, who were actually nearly all Pharisees — as for instance, the immortality of the personal soul, and the actual resurrection of the physical body; yet they strongly upheld what they considered the genuine meaning, and therefore the true authority, of the Jewish scriptures. They likewise opposed no small number of doctrinal or religious innovations, some of them true, and some of them less true in nature, which had been accepted by the body of the Pharisees — virtually by the Jewish people. And the reason for their reluctance to accept these innovations, whether of doctrine or interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, seems to be that they preferred a highly philosophical and even perhaps mystical interpretation, which they said the Jewish scriptures contained, rather than the more popular versions accepted by the Hebrew people as a whole. One may say that what the Gnostics were to the body of the Christians in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Sadducees were to the body of the Jews or Pharisees. The Sadducees likewise claimed to be the scientists and genuine philosophers of the Hebrews; although it is apparently quite true that as time went on their attitude of opposition, and even of reluctance, often became, at least among individual Sadducees, an attitude of cynicism and even possibly of cynical disbelief.

Shamanism Generally regarded as spirit worship, commonly and often unjustly classed with the religions of primitive peoples referring particularly to the beliefs of wandering tribes in Siberia, Tartary, and Mongolia. Belief in a supreme being is a prominent feature but this supreme being must be propitiated through secondary powers, both beneficent and malevolent, by means of intermediaries — priests or shamans. Blavatsky had contacted several shamans and wrote concerning it: “What is now generally known of Shamanism is very little; and that has been perverted, like the rest of the non-Christian religions. It is called the ‘heathenism’ of Mongolia, and wholly without reason, for it is one of the oldest religions of India. It is spirit-worship, or belief in the immortality of the souls, and that the latter are still the same men they were on earth, though their bodies have lost their objective form, and man has exchanged his physical for a spiritual nature. In its present shape, it is an offshoot of primitive theurgy, and a practical blending of the visible with the invisible world.” “The true Shamanism . . . can no more be judged by its degenerated scions among the Shamans of Siberia, then the religion of Gautama-Buddha can be interpreted by the fetishism of some of his followers in Siam and Burmah. It is in the chief lamaseries of Mongolia and Thibet that it has taken refuge” (IU 2:615-6).

Shamen bujing wangzhe lun. (J. Shamon fukyoosharon; K. Samun pulgyong wangja non 沙門不敬王者論). In Chinese, "The sRAMAnA Does Not Pay Homage to the Ruler Treatise." In response to the anticlerical policy of the monarch Huanxuan (who reigned for less than three months as King of Chu in 404) LUSHAN HUIYUAN compiled this apologetical treatise in 404. It is preserved in the fifth roll of the HONGMING JI. The treatise is comprised of five sections. The first two sections, on householders and monks, detail the differences in their social status and way of life. The other three sections are concerned with more doctrinal and theoretical issues, which are presented in the form of a debate between imaginary opponents. In the third section, Huiyuan, as the "host," argues that monks, unlike householders including the worldly ruler, seek the "truth" and thus strive to free the "spirit" from the realm of worldly desires and emotions, or SAMSĀRA. In the fourth section, the opponent argues that there is no truth beyond that which has been revealed by the sages of the past. In the last section, Huiyuan replies that these sages are merely manifestations of the Buddha, or the immortal spirit. Although the immortal spirit "mutually resonates" (GANYING) with SAMSĀRA, it is not, Huiyuan explains, a worldly thing itself. The argument for the immortality of the spirit also appears in Zongbing's (375-443) Mingfo lun ("Treatise on Clarifying Buddhism)," the MOUZI LIHUO LUN, and various other treatises found in the Hongming ji.

Sometimes the uraeus is represented with a circle over its head, and again with the winged solar disk, a variant of the serpent and egg symbol met with in so many forms among ancient peoples. Egyptologists interpret the uraeus placed on either side of the winged solar disk as emblematic of the supremacy of the sun, of good over evil, or of Horus over Set; but also the uraeus is associated with the immortal human principles, for one of its identities in The Book of the Dead is the flame. In Aanroo or Aaru — one of the divisions of the underworld — the soul of the spirit is devoured after death by the uraeus (ch 99). Blavatsky in explaining this verse speaks of the uraeus as “the Serpent, Son of the earth (in another sense the primordial vital principles in the sun),” and says further that “the Astral body of the deceased or the ‘Elementary’ fades out and disappears in the ‘Son of the earth,’ limited time. The soul quits the fields of Aanroo and goes on earth under any shape it likes to assume” (SD 1:674n).

Spirit Cosmically, the homogeneous emanation from the universal cosmic monad; in man, the direct emanation of his spiritual monad, the immortal element in us which never was born and which retains through the mahamanvantara its own quality, essence, and characteristics. It sends its ray through the laya-centers of all the various sheaths of consciousness-substance, and is itself a ray of the all-spirit, and, again applied to man, is used specifically for the union of the higher part of manas with atma-buddhi.

Spirit ::: In the theosophical philosophy there is a distinct and important difference in the use of the words spiritand soul. The spirit is the immortal element in us, the deathless flame within us which dies never, whichnever was born and which retains throughout the entire maha-manvantara its own quality, essence, andlife, sending down into our own being and into our various planes certain of its rays or garments or soulswhich we are.The divine spirit of man is linked with the All, being in a highly mystical sense a ray of the All.A soul is an entity which is evolved by experiences; it is not a spirit because it is a vehicle of a spirit. Itmanifests in matter through and by being a substantial portion of the lower essence of the spirit.Touching another plane below it, or it may be above it, the point of union allowing ingress and egress tothe consciousness is a laya-center. The spirit manifests in seven vehicles, and each one of these vehiclesis a soul; and that particular point through which the spiritual influence passes in the soul is thelaya-center, the heart of the soul, or rather the summit thereof -- homogeneous soul-substance, if youlike.In a kosmical sense spirit should be applied only to that which belongs without qualifications to universalconsciousness and which is the homogeneous and unmixed emanation from the universal consciousness.In the case of man, the spirit within man is the flame of his deathless ego, the direct emanation of thespiritual monad within him, and of this ego the spiritual soul is the enclosing sheath or vehicle orgarment. Making an application more particularly and specifically to the human principles, when thehigher manas of man which is his real ego is indissolubly linked with buddhi, this, in fact, is the spiritualego or spirit of the individual human being's constitution. Its life term before the emanation is withdrawninto the divine monad is for the full period of a kosmic manvantara.

Spiritual Soul Buddhi; in man, typically the immortal individual monad. The first vehicle of the atmic monadic ray is the spiritual ego, a copy in miniature of the monad, individualized throughout manvantaric evolution. The second vehicle is the spiritual soul, the bearer, veil, or carrier of the spiritual ego.

Sri Aurobindo: "By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity.” *The Life Divine

suram) or Chirangivah the immortal; Ram Avatar

“Taken variously to mean a shark, a dolphin, etc.; as it is the vahan of Varuna, the Ocean God . . .” (SD 2:577). It appears on the banner of Kama, god of love, and is connected with the immortal egos (TG 162).

The arguments for immortality fall into four groups: Metaphysical arguments which attempt to deduce immortality from properties of the soul such as simplicity, independence of the body, its knowledge of eternal truth, etc. Valuational and moral arguments seek to derive the immortality of the soul from its supreme worth or as a presupposition of its moral nature. Empirical arguments which adduce as evidence of immortality, automatic writing, mediumship and other spiritualistic phenomena.

The general superiority of theology in this system over the admittedly distinct discipline of philosophy, makes it impossible for unaided reason to solve certain problems which Thomism claims are quite within the province of the latter, e.g., the omnipotence of God, the immortality of the soul. Indeed the Scotist position on this latter question has been thought by some critics to come quite close to the double standard of truth of Averroes, (q.v.) namely, that which is true in theology may be false in philosophy. The univocal assertion of being in God and creatures; the doctrine of universal prime matter (q.v.) in all created substances, even angels, though characteristically there are three kinds of prime matter); the plurality of forms in substances (e.g., two in man) giving successive generic and specific determinations of the substance; all indicate the opposition of Scotistic metaphysics to that of Thomism despite the large body of ideas the two systems have in common. The denial of real distinction between the soul and its faculties; the superiority of will over intellect, the attainment of perfect happiness through a will act of love; the denial of the absolute unchangeableness of the natural law in view of its dependence on the will of God, acts being good because God commanded them; indicate the further rejection of St. Thomas who holds the opposite on each of these questions. However the opposition is not merely for itself but that of a voluntarist against an intellectualist. This has caused many students to point out the affinity of Duns Scotus with Immanuel Kant. (q.v.) But unlike the great German philosopher who relies entirely upon the supremacy of moral consciousness, Duns Scotus makes a constant appeal to revelation and its order of truth as above all philosophy. In his own age, which followed immediately upon the great constructive synthesis of Saints Albert, Bonaventure, and Thomas, this lesser light was less a philosopher because he and his School were incapable of powerful synthesis and so gave themselves to analysis and controversy. The principal Scotists were Francis of Mayron (d. 1327) and Antonio Andrea (d. 1320); and later John of Basoles, John Dumbleton, Walter Burleigh, Alexander of Alexandria, Lychetus of Brescia and Nicholas de Orbellis. The complete works with a life of Duns Scotus were published in 1639 by Luke Wadding (Lyons) and reprinted by Vives in 1891. (Paris) -- C.A.H.

"The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.” The Secret of the Veda

“The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.” The Secret of the Veda

The greatest initiates and yogis since Sankaracharya’s time are reputed to have come from the ranks of the Advaita-Vedantists. “Yet the root philosophy of both Adwaita and Buddhist scholars is identical, and both have the same respect for animal life, for both believe that every creature on earth, however small and humble, ‘is an immortal portion of the immortal matter’ — for matter with them has quite another significance than it has with either Christian or materialist — and that every creature is subject to Karma” (SD 1:636; cf 2:637).

“The human constitution is a composite or compound, and may be figurated . . . as a stream of consciousness flowing forth from the deathless Center or Spiritual Monad, which last is at once the immortal Root of the human being and his Essential Self” (ET 384 3rd & rev ed). It corresponds to the spiritual self or jivatman.

The influence of Pietism and of Rousseau's gospel of Nature are apparent in the essentially Christian and democratic direction in which Kant develops this rigorous ethics. The reality of God and the immortality of souls -- concerning which no theoretical demonstration was possible -- emerge now as postulates of practical reason; God, to assure the moral governance of a world in which virtue is crowned with happiness, the "summum bonum"; immortality, so that the pursuit of moral perfection may continue beyond the empirical life of man. These postulates, together with moral freedom and popular rights, provide the basis for Kant's assertion of the primacy of practical reason.

The language of incantations or mantras is the element-language composed of sounds, numbers, and figures. He who knows how to blend the three will call forth the response from the regent-god of the specific element needed. For, in order to communicate with the gods, men must learn to address each one of them in the language of his element. Sound is “the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and the Immortals” (SD 1:464).

theodicy ::: n. --> A vindication of the justice of God in ordaining or permitting natural and moral evil.
That department of philosophy which treats of the being, perfections, and government of God, and the immortality of the soul.


The original from which the Hebrew Genesis was later compiled is lost. Yet even as the latter has reached us — first veiled, then probably remodeled by Ezra with shiftings that confuse the chronology — despite important words and clauses mistranslated by European scholars, its resemblance to the esoteric account is unmistakable. For Jehovah, who gave the human body and (physical) breath of life, is the hyparxis of Saturn and an earthly, not a celestial, hierarchy. The human mind and spirit are essentially emanations from the immortal spiritual monad coeval with the universe, and subsequent human evolutionary development was both from and aided by the elohim, a spiritual host. Adam and Eve, once mind appeared in them, enter the path of self-directed evolution, a reference to the second and third Eves mentioned above. The eating of the fruit of the tree is the awakening or lighting of mind in man. It shows Eve as consorting with spiritual, not demoniacal, forces and incidentally reconciles the two creation stories. Like the serpent, the tree is an ancient and universal symbol of sacred and esoteric knowledge. To eat of its fruit is to acquire the knowledge that only the gods possess, and the possession confers immortality under the law.

The origin, nature, and the continued existence or immortality of the soul is widely discussed in Jewish philosophy. As to origin, Saadia believes that each individual soul is created by God -- considering, of course, creation a continuous process -- and that it is of a fine spiritual substance. As to its faculties, he accepts the Aristotelian-Platonic division of the soul into three parts, namely, the appetitive, emotional, and cognitive. Ibn Daud thinks that the soul exists prior to the body potentially, i.e., that the angels endow the body with form; he further considers it a substance but says that it undergoes a process of development. The more it thinks the more perfect it becomes, and the thoughts are called acquired reason, it is this acquired reason, or being perfected which remains immortal. Maimonides does not discuss the origin of the soul, but deals more with its parts. To the three of Saadia he adds the imaginative and the conative. Gersonides' view resembles somewhat that of Ibn Daud, except that he does not speak of its origin and limits himself to the intellect. The intellect, says he, is only a capacity residing in the lower soul, and that capacity is gradually developed by the help of the Active Intellect into an acquired and ultimately into an active reason. All thinkers insist on immortality, but with Saadia and ha-Levi it seems that the entire soul survives, while the Aristotelians assert that only the intellect is immortal. Maimonides is not explicit on the subject, yet we may surmise that even the more liberal thinkers did not subscribe to Averroes' theory of unitas intellectus, and they believed that the immortal intellect is endowed with consciousness of personality. To this trend of connecting immortality with rational reflection Crescas took exception, and asserts that it is not pure thought which leads to survival, but that the soul is immortal because it is a spiritual being, and it is perfected by its love for God and the doing of good.

"There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and is not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind"s view of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul as the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has been extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by the thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like the life and its organs and their objects, but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet the Reality which all these strive to figure.” Essays on the Gita

“There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and is not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind’s view of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul as the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has been extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by the thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like the life and its organs and their objects, but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet the Reality which all these strive to figure.” Essays on the Gita

The right-hand path is sometimes known as amrita-yana (the immortal vehicle or path of immortality) or as dakshina-marga (right path), and those who practice the rules of conduct and manner of life enjoined upon those who follow the right-hand path are known as dakshinacharins and their course of life is known as dakshinachara. It is a path leading to an ever wider consciousness, and those whose feet are firmly planted thereon are known as Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. See also LEFT-HAND PATH

The second death takes place when the two highest human principles, atman and buddhi, free themselves from the fourfold entity, but such separation of the monad takes place only after it has assimilated all the higher intellectual and truly spiritual attributes which the manas principle has stored up during the last life on earth. The ego then is freed from all low attractions and enters into devachanic bliss for a period according to its richness in human spiritual qualities. After the monad in the second death has abandoned the lower part of manas joined to kama, there remains the shell or spook (kama-rupa) which under normal conditions immediately begins to disintegrate in kama-loka. Thus after the second death the immortal triad — atman, buddhi, and all the spiritual and intellectual aroma of the manas — is freed, and the reimbodying ego or higher manas enters the devachanic state, and sleeps blissfully there till beginning its new cycle of descent towards reincarnation.

The term may also refer to the “immortal vehicle” within each person, the individuality in contradistinction to the evanescent personality; that is, “the Spiritual Soul, or the Immortal monad — a combination of the fifth, sixth and seventh” principles (ML 114).

The term monad was adopted from Greek philosophy by Bruno, Leibniz, and others. According to Leibniz there can be but one ultimate cosmic reality or monad, the universe; but he recognizes an innumerable multiplicity of monads which pervade the universe, copies or reflections of the universal monad regarded as real except in their relation to the universal monad. He divides his derivative monads into three classes: rational souls; sentient but irrational monads; and material monads, or organic and inorganic bodies. As regards the material monads, while recognizing that corporeal matter is compound, and the attributes by which we perceive it unreal, unlike Berkeley, he does not deny its existence but regards it essentially as monadic. Thus his universe is an aggregate of individuals. The relations of these individuals to each other and to the universal is a supreme harmony, implying both individuality and coordination, thus reconciling the antinomy of bonds of law and freedom. The interrelations of various groups of monads is as a series of hierarchies. Theosophical usage is largely the same as that of Leibniz, as the focus or heart in any individual being, of all its divine, spiritual, and intellectual powers and attributes — the immortal part of its being. In The Secret Doctrine we find a triadic union of gods-monads-atoms, related to each other as spirit-soul-body (or more accurately spirit, spirit-soul, and spirit-soul-body). Monads and atoms are related to each other as the energic and the material side of manifestation, the atoms being the reflections, veils, or projections of and from the monads themselves.

The vital part of us normally exists after the dissolution of the body for some time and passes away into the vital piano where it remains til! the vital sheath dissolves. Afterwards it passes, if it is mentally evolved, in the mental sheath to some mental world and finally the psychic leaves its mental sheath also and goes to its place of rest. If the mental is strongly developed, then the mental part of us can remain ; so also can the vital, provided they are organised by and centred round the true psychic being — for they then share the immortality of the psychic. Otherwise the psychic draws mind and life into itself and enters into^an intematal quiescence.

::: "This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally, when we insist on the soul"s undying existence, what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial I'' of the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the demand is extravagant and cannot be conceded; theI"" of the moment can only merit survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else, greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that we are; but the I'' of this moment, theI"" of this life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless Spirit into the terms of Time.” The Life Divine

“This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally, when we insist on the soul’s undying existence, what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial I’’ of the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the demand is extravagant and cannot be conceded; theI’’ of the moment can only merit survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else, greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that we are; but the I’’ of this moment, theI’’ of this life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless Spirit into the terms of Time.” The Life Divine

  “This mystical symbol shows plainly that the Egyptians believed in reincarnation and the successive lives and existences of the Immortal entity. Being, however, an esoteric doctrine, revealed only during the mysteries by the priest-hierophants and the Kings-Initiates to the candidates, it was kept secret” (SD 2:552).

Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist.   Bibliography:   B. Geyer,   Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano,   Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody,   The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle,   Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter,   Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922).     --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B.   In logic, see Operationism.   In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations.   1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events.   2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance.   Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning).   Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class.   The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined.   In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations.   For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.)   For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation.   Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes.   Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion.   For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R.   The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .).   The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C.   G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M.   In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established.   Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset:     Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914;   El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935;   El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921;   España Invertebrada, 1922;   Kant, 1924;   La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925;   Espiritu de la Letra, 1927;   La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929;   Goethe desde Adentio, 1934;   Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939;   Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939;   El Libro de las Misiones, 1940;   Ideas y Creencias, 1940;     and others.   Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P

Three-tongued Flame The immortal spiritual triad, atma-buddhi-manas; the four wicks are the four lower principles (SD 1:237). Also called the three fires, which when reunited in nirvana become one. See also THREE FACES

Thus, the higher triad is what is occasionally called the immortal reimbodying ego or monad.

  “To become a Buddha one has to break through the bondage of sense and personality; to acquire a complete perception of the real self and learn not to separate it from all other selves; to learn by experience the utter unreality of all phenomena of the visible Kosmos foremost of all; to reach a complete detachment from all that is evanescent and finite, and live while yet on Earth in the immortal and the everlasting alone, in a supreme state of holiness” (TG 64-5).

Two-factor religion: A term coined by F. L. Parrish, to designate any religion in which all religious ideas and practices of faith are based on the assumption that the religious factor (q.v.) native to man and that native to non-human nature powers are different and mutually exclusive factors; the religions which assume that there are two impinging worlds—the human world of the here and hereafter, and the world of the immortals (gods, demons and spirits).

unborn ::: “By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity.” The Life Divine

Ushas (Sanskrit) Uṣas [from the verbal root uṣ to burn, warm by illumination or light] The dawn, daughter of heaven, identical with the Latin Aurora and the Greek Eos. First mentioned in the Vedas, “wherein her name is also Ahana and Dyotana ([both words meaning] the illuminator), and is a most poetical and fascinating image. She is the ever-faithful friend of men, of rich and poor, though she is believed to prefer the latter. She smiles upon and visits the dwelling of every living mortal. She is the immortal, ever-youthful virgin, the light of the poor, and the destroyer of darkness” (TG 356).

way, the upward ::: Sri Aurobindo: "For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law of the Truth, rtasya panthâh.” The Renaissance in India

Yana (Sanskrit) Yāna [from the verbal root yā to go] Path, road, vehicle; there are two recognized paths of action in nature, the pratyeka-yana (the path of each one for himself) and the amrita-yana (the immortal vehicle or path of immortality). There are also two schools of philosophy in India using this term: the Hinayana (the lesser, inferior, or defective vehicle) and the Mahayana (the greater or superior vehicle).

Yoga is in essence the union of the soul with the immortal being and consciousness and delight of the Divine effected through human nature with a result of development Into the

yoga ::: joining, union; the union of the soul with the immortal being and consciousness and delight of the Divine; a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent existence; [as opposed to Samkhya]: the concrete and synthetical realisation of truth in our experience; [a system of philosophy systematised by Patanjali, one of the six darsanas].

Yoga ::: Yoga is in essence the union of the soul with the immortal being and consciousness and delight of the Divine, effected through the human nature with a result of development into the divine nature of being, whatever that may be, so far as we can conceive it in mind and realise it in spiritual activity.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 587


Zagreus as Dionysos is known as the god of many names, most of which refer to his twofold character as the suffering mortal Zagreus, and the immortal or reborn god-man. Many titles also refer to him as the mystic savior. He is the All-potent, the Permanent, the Life-blood of the World, the majesty in the forest, in fruit, in the hum of the bee, in the flowing of the stream, etc., the earth in its changes — the list runs on indefinitely, and is strikingly similar to the passage in which Krishna, the Hindu avatara, instructs Arjuna how he shall know him completely: “I am the taste in water, the light in the sun and moon,” etc. (BG ch 7).



QUOTES [29 / 29 - 339 / 339]


KEYS (10k)

   23 Sri Aurobindo
   1 Upanishad
   1 Manly P. Hall (The Soul Image as the Immortal Friend March 24
   1 Manly P. Hall Lecture
   1 Ken Wilber
   1 Katha Upanishad
   1 Bribadaranyaka Upanishad

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   20 Sri Aurobindo
   11 Homer
   8 Ralph Waldo Emerson
   8 Hesiod
   6 Rabindranath Tagore
   4 John Green
   4 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   3 Poul Anderson
   3 Mehmet Murat ildan
   3 Mark Twain
   3 Laozi
   3 Fyodor Dostoevsky
   3 Alyson Noel
   2 William Shakespeare
   2 William Barclay
   2 Vladimir Nabokov
   2 Victor Hugo
   2 S Jae Jones
   2 Sherrilyn Kenyon
   2 Robert A Heinlein

1:O Word, cry out the immortal litany:
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child is born. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 11:1,
2:Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal's gradual birth mid mire and stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
3:It stirred in the lotus of her throat of song,
And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,
4:Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omnipotent hush, womb of the immortal Word. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem,
5:The gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - II,
6:Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes
The immortal calm of his tremendous gaze: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,
7:An errant ray from the immortal Mind
Accepted the earth's blindness and became
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,
8:We would like to see the world around us as beautiful as we know it could be, but this cannot be achieved until the soul world within us is as beautiful as it must be to transform the outer surface of things. ~ Manly P. Hall Lecture
9:Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, understands nothing else, that is the infinite. But where one sees something else, hears something else, understands something else, that is the finite. The infinite is the same as the immortal, the finite - the mortal. ~ Upanishad,
10:Take me from non-being to being, take me from death to immortality. The non-being, it is death; but the being is the immortal. From death take me to that which dies not, let me be that which is immortal. ~ Bribadaranyaka Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom
11:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
12:Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,
Our strength a parody of the Immortal's power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal's way
Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
13:I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,
Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,
14:The foolish follow after the desires that are outward and they fall into the snare of death that is wide open for them, but the wise man sets his mind on the immortal and the certain and longs not here below for uncertain and transient things. ~ Katha Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom
15:By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death;
   by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine 1.5-19,
16:8. O Fire, they have set thee here the Messenger, the Immortal in generation after generation, the Carrier of offerings, protector of man and the Godhead of his prayer. Gods alike and mortals sit with obeisance before the all-pervading Master of the peoples, the ever-wakeful Fire.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire,
17:The soul is the older brother of the personality. It is that which from a somewhat larger perspective is forever ministering without thought of itself, without selfishness, without ulterior motive. It is the true friend, therefore, because it is that which works forever for our good. ~ Manly P. Hall (The Soul Image as the Immortal Friend March 24, 1957)
18:The voices that an inner listening hears
Conveyed to him their prophet utterances,
And flame-wrapped outbursts of the immortal Word
And flashes of an occult revealing Light
Approached him from the unreachable Secrecy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,
19:In the realms of the immortal Supermind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
Is Nature and the common law of things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,
20:Afflicted by his harsh divinity,
   Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased
   The daily oblation of her unwept tears.
   All the fierce question of man's hours relived.
   The sacrifice of suffering and desire
   Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy
   Began again beneath the eternal Hand.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn,
21:As comes a goddess to a mortal's breast
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on earth's insensible frame.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Glory and the Fall of Life,
22:...the conception of a Truth-consciousness supramental and divine, the invocation of the gods as powers of the Truth to raise man out of the falsehoods of the mortal mind, the attainment in and by this Truth of an immortal state of perfect good and felicity and the inner sacrifice and offering of what one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means of the divine consummation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda, [68],
23:The Golden Light :::

Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean-song of Thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.

Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.

Thy golden Light came down into my feet,
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
24:The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 3:4,
25:THE TRUE STUDENT OF OCCULT SCIENCE
   The White Magician uses none of the powers of the animal world in his work, but rather seeks to transmute the poles of the beast within himself into higher and finer qualities. The White Magician labors entirely with the finer forces of the elemental planes. He is a builder--not a destroyer--and seeks to liberate rather than to dominate his fellow creatures. The White Magician has dedicated his soul to the immortal light, while the Black Magician has sold his for mortal glory. The Grimores of the Middle Ages are filled with chants and charms for the invoking of spirits. History is filled with stories of Black Magicians but the true student of occult science must have nothing to do with these things other than to protect himself against them. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Natural Occultism, 28,
26:Driven by her breath across life's tossing deep,
Through the thunder's roar and through the windless hush,
Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,
He carries her sealed orders in his breast.
Late will he know, opening the mystic script,
Whether to a blank port in the Unseen
He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover
A new mind and body in the city of God
And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house
And make the finite one with Infinity.
Across the salt waste of the endless years
Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,
The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,
A rumour around him and danger and a call.
Always he follows in her force's wake.
He sails through life and death and other life,
He travels on through waking and through sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:4,
27:To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical men- tality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.01,
28:In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is called 'the resurrection body ' and 'the glorified body.' The prophet Isaiah said, 'The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise' (Isa. 26:19). St. Paul called it 'the celestial body' or 'spiritual body ' (soma pneumatikon) (I Corinthians 15:40). In Sufism it is called 'the most sacred body ' (wujud al-aqdas) and 'supracelestial body ' (jism asli haqiqi). In Taoism, it is called 'the diamond body,' and those who have attained it are called 'the immortals' and 'the cloudwalkers.' In Tibetan Buddhism it is called 'the light body.' In Tantrism and some schools of yoga, it is called 'the vajra body,' 'the adamantine body,' and 'the divine body.' In Kriya yoga it is called 'the body of bliss.' In Vedanta it is called 'the superconductive body.' In Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, it is called 'the radiant body.' In the alchemical tradition, the Emerald Tablet calls it 'the Glory of the Whole Universe' and 'the golden body.' The alchemist Paracelsus called it 'the astral body.' In the Hermetic Corpus, it is called 'the immortal body ' (soma athanaton). In some mystery schools, it is called 'the solar body.' In Rosicrucianism, it is called 'the diamond body of the temple of God.' In ancient Egypt it was called 'the luminous body or being' (akh). In Old Persia it was called 'the indwelling divine potential' (fravashi or fravarti). In the Mithraic liturgy it was called 'the perfect body ' (soma teilion). In the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, it is called 'the divine body,' composed of supramental substance. In the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, it is called 'the ultrahuman'.
   ~ ?, http://herebedragons.weebly.com/homo-lumen.html,
29:To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?

Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.

Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.

Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things - for creation is out-bringing, expression by the Truth and Will - and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.

Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.

Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.

Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.

There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.

All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.

The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Doctrine of the Mystics,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:The simplest subjects are the immortal ones. ~ pierre-auguste-renoir, @wisdomtrove
2:Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove
3:Our task is to harvest from the mortal world fruits for the immortal. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove
4:If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove
5:At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove
6:The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove
7:To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal EyesOf Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into EternityEver expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove
8:I rest not from my great task! | To open the Eternal Worlds, | to open the immortal Eyes of Man | Inwards into the Worlds of Thought; | Into eternity, ever expanding | In the Bosom of God, | The Human Imagination ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove
9:The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who remains passive against the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self, he attains the Immortal Being; the true God is ever with him. ~ kabir, @wisdomtrove
10:Look within. Within you is the hidden God. Within you is the immortal soul. Within you is the inexhaustible spiritual treasure. Within you is the ocean of bliss. Look within for the happiness which you have sought in vain. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove
11:Look within. Within you is the hidden God. Within you is the immortal soul.  Within you is the inexhaustible spiritual treasure.  Within you is the ocean of bliss.  Look within for the happiness which you have sought in vain. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove
12:Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove
13:That intense faith in another world, that intense hatred for this world, that intense power of renunciation, that intense faith in God, that intense faith in the immortal soul, is in you. I challenge anyone to give it up. You cannot. You may try to impose upon me by becoming materialists, by talking materialism for a few months, but I know what you are; if I take you by the hand, back you come as good theists as ever were born. How can you change your nature? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
14:Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work." ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Typhoeus yanked out the immortal sinews, ~ Rick Riordan,
2:All pains the immortal spirit must endure, ~ Matthew Arnold,
3:The simplest subjects are the immortal ones. ~ Pierre Auguste Renoir,
4:In the immortal words of Mr. Burns.......eeeeexcellent. ~ Gemma Halliday,
5:Art is the expression of the immortal part of man. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski,
6:Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
7:It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance. ~ Sulari Gentill,
8:Our task is to harvest from the mortal world fruits for the immortal. ~ Rudolf Steiner,
9:I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...I drank what? ~ Val Kilmer,
10:Rejoice, that the immortal God is born, so that mortal men may live in eternity. ~ Jan Hus,
11:Cursed be the immortal that believed time was more precious than love. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,
12:It was built against the will of the immortal gods, and so it did not last for long. ~ Homer,
13:Art is our endless desire to turn the mortal things into the immortal things! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan,
14:In the immortal words of Radiohead, ‘go and tell the king that the sky is falling in. ~ Lucy Parker,
15:Life is a gift of the immortal Gods, but living well is the gift of philosophy. ~ Seneca the Younger,
16:Dovetailed (Immortal Essence #3) The Immortal Essence Series: The Omnibus Collection ~ RaShelle Workman,
17:In front of excellence, the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it. ~ Hesiod,
18:Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth ~ Homer,
19:Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth. ~ Homer,
20:...a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. ~ Robert A Heinlein,
21:Tis true, 'tis certain; man, though dead, retains Part of himself; the immortal mind remains. ~ Alexander Pope,
22:Woe is Merit, the immortal vampire with the never-gray hair and long legs and hot blond boyfriend. ~ Chloe Neill,
23:He should also have remembered the immortal words of Woody Allen: “The most expensive sex is free sex. ~ Dan Ariely,
24:Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. It's eternal goal is life. ~ Smiley Blanton,
25:Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time. ~ Karl Marx,
26:In the immortal words of Willie Stargell, trying to hit Koufax was like “trying to drink coffee with a fork. ~ Jane Leavy,
27:Being aware of awareness itself only consciousness can get you there to the truth of yourself the immortal inner being. ~ Rajneesh,
28:In the immortal words of Duke Vaughn, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow. ~ Matthew FitzSimmons,
29:I was the Immortal, the man who couldn’t be killed. A regular Jack Harkness, for those of you who watch BBC America. ~ Peter Clines,
30:If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal. ~ Frank Herbert,
31:Who can doubt, my dear Lucilius, that life is the gift of the immortal gods, but that living well1 is the gift of philosophy? ~ Seneca,
32:On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest. ~ Joseph Conrad,
33:At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. ~ Rabindranath Tagore,
34:The immortal parts of the late Droopy’s relict leaped through her cranium and described several somersaults in the air. She ~ Cao Xueqin,
35:The immortal photographers will be straightforward photographers, those who do not rely on tricks or special techniques. ~ Philippe Halsman,
36:In the immortal words of Roberto Duran, we are saying, 'No mas!' We will educate students and then promote them, not the reverse ~ Joel Klein,
37:There is no thought of death in your mind now, and yet death stands close beside you as you put on the immortal armor of a surpassing man. ~ Homer,
38:Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal’s gradual birth mid mire and stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,
39:True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible. ~ William Barclay,
40:The immortal gods, the deities will rise, they will fall but none will live beyond the wall. Prometheus, knows love & saves them all. ~ Truth Devour,
41:Turian Councilor: Ah yes, Reapers. The immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in dark space. We have dismissed that claim. ~ Drew Karpyshyn,
42:Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I ha' lost my reputation, I ha' lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial! ~ William Shakespeare,
43:A man is a god in ruins.When men are innocent,life shall be longer and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
44:The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple. ~ Victor Hugo,
45:Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. ~ William Shakespeare,
46:A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
47:Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
48:It stirred in the lotus of her throat of song,
And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,
49:All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. ~ Robert A Heinlein,
50:Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction. ~ Charles Baudelaire,
51:You might as well take the sun out of the sky as friendship from life: for the immortal gods have given us nothing better or more delightful. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
52:Love, who is most beautiful among the immortal gods, the melter of limbs, overwhelms in their hearts the intelligence and wise counsel of all gods and all men. ~ Hesiod,
53:To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take "the lid off life and let [you] look at the works. ~ Dashiell Hammett,
54:It's only the immortal thing that a man can be judged on, that bit of himself that he makes as he does the best he can with what fate handed out to him. ~ Elizabeth Goudge,
55:Death, the dire god, inflicted on her eyes
The immortal calm of his tremendous gaze: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,
56:We have strayed from the Immortal's ways And worship with a dull and senseless mind Idols, the workmanship of our own hands, And images and figures of dead men. ~ Justin Martyr,
57:Why do we tell our children to sit still all the time? Shouldn’t we be saying to them, in the immortal words of S Club: don’t stop movin’ to the funky funky beat! ~ Bryony Gordon,
58:....and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth. ~ Guy de Maupassant,
59:In the immortal words of Maya Angelou … people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will
never forget how you made them feel. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,
60:The plan was simple. Once on the Plain of Idavoll, we were going to follow the immortal strategy of Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh and “announce [our] presence with authority. ~ Kevin Hearne,
61:Silence, the nurse of the Almighty’s power,
The omnipotent hush, womb of the immortal Word. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem,
62:And let us pause to remember the immortal words of Dr. Seuss: ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. ~ Chris Grabenstein,
63:Education is not acquisition of burdensome information regarding objects and men. It is the awareness of the immortal spirit within,, which is the spring of joy, peace and courage. ~ Sai Baba,
64:The gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - II,
65:An errant ray from the immortal Mind
Accepted the earth’s blindness and became
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,
66:Nothing serves as a better reminder of that than the immortal words of my friend Scott Stratten, author of UnMarketing: “Don’t try to win over the haters; you’re not the jackass whisperer. ~ Bren Brown,
67:Hold love like a butterfly, with gentle preservation. Hold life like the reigns of a wild stallion, with fierce assertion. Encompass that, and you find the nectar of the immortal spirit. ~ Kellie Elmore,
68:As long as you wish to separate yourself from the immortal consciousness, you will suffer. You will experience the pain of the separation, the abridgment of infinite mind in finite form. ~ Frederick Lenz,
69:I am a big fan of vampires. I've always been obsessed with the genre, and the beautiful romanticism and erotic kind of nature of the immortal being, the undead who lives on human blood. ~ Alex O Loughlin,
70:No one likes the fellow who is all rogue, but we'll forgive him almost anything if there is warmth of human sympathy underneath his rogueries. The immortal types of comedy are just such men. ~ W C Fields,
71:Tell me just one thing. Why did you weep tears when you saw my son?” asked Suddhodana. “Because I will not live long enough to hear the immortal truth that Buddha will speak,” Asita said. ~ Deepak Chopra,
72:Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. ~ William Wordsworth,
73:I am telling you that the child will not out live the buildings. Do you understand that wheras women may touch the immortal by giving birth, men--great men-- must build monuments and seek fame? ~ Karen Essex,
74:You won't tell?"

"I'll add it to the box under my bed labeled 'The Secret Confession of the Immortal Pia'. Good Lord, girl, don't look so mortified. There's not actually a box. ~ Jessica Khoury,
75:In the immortal words of Loshain P'stane, 'If anyone reads this without permission, he will be most certainly and brutally slain. Or at the very least I'll chop off a finger or two. Or three. ~ Andrew Peterson,
76:Beware, Diomedês! Forbear, Diomedês! Do not try to put yourself on a level with the gods; that is too high for a man's ambition. The immortal gods are one race, men that walk upon the earth are another. ~ Homer,
77:The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament! ~ Gloria Steinem,
78:The soul is the immortal part of us. It recycles, over and over again from what I've seen, but it never dies. We're meant to strive beyond the physical world, not... not settle for it and only it... ~ Alyson Noel,
79:Death stripes away many things, especially when it arrives at a temperature hot enough to vaporize iron ... The immortal remains of Brother Watchtower watched the dragon flap away into the fog .... ~ Terry Pratchett,
80:I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time ~ Franz Boas,
81:Every moment of your lives you are exerting a tremendous influence, that will tell on the immortal interests of souls around you. Are you asleep, while your conduct is exerting such an influence? ~ Charles Grandison Finney,
82:The score of Pelleas and Melisande by Debussy, heralds that which will lift man from the earthly to the celestial, from the mortal to the immortal. Once again the ways of the artist and healer are merging. ~ Corinne Heline,
83:Be thou as the immortal are,   Who dwell beneath their God’s own wing A spirit of light, a living star,   A holy and a searchless thing: But oh! forget not those who mourn, Because thou canst no more return. ~ Alfred Tennyson,
84:I rest not from my great task! | To open the Eternal Worlds, | to open the immortal Eyes of Man | Inwards into the Worlds of Thought; | Into eternity, ever expanding | In the Bosom of God, | The Human Imagination ~ William Blake,
85:You look like a Greek God sent down by the immortal Zeus from Mount Olympus to taunt the rest of us inferior beings with your astonishing beauty, I said, which somehow in translation came out as "you look fine, why? ~ John Boyne,
86:Take me from non-being to being, take me from death to immortality. The non-being, it is death; but the being is the immortal. From death take me to that which dies not, let me be that which is immortal. ~ Bribadaranyaka Upanishad,
87:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
88:The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who remains passive against the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self, he attains the Immortal Being; the true God is ever with him. ~ Kabir,
89:The immortal silence is there always waiting for you and that spirit is deathless and courageous. Remember, many have trod the path that you are walking on and they succeeded. They were no better than you, no wiser. ~ Frederick Lenz,
90:The more I see of the ‘hounoured, famed, and great,’ the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within. ~ Karen Swallow Prior,
91:The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests. ~ Russell Kirk,
92:In the universal stillness of nature and the calmness of the senses the immortal spirit’s hidden faculty of cognition speaks an ineffable language and provides undeveloped concepts that can certainly be felt but not described. ~ Immanuel Kant,
93:Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,
Our strength a parody of the Immortal’s power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal’s way
Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,
94:We met a great many other interesting people, among them Lewis Carroll, author of the immortal "Alice"--but he was only interesting to look at, for he was the silliest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except "Uncle Remus. ~ Mark Twain,
95:I fought; I fought for the immortal soul the preachers had taught me to believe in. I do not know whether I ever believed in it—I had never seen God, and He had never spoken to me—but I fought for it anyway, and I fought for Alexander. ~ Amelia Atwater Rhodes,
96:But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental. ~ Stephen Spender,
97:Limping, attendants rushed up to support him,
Attendants made of gold who looked like real girls,
With a mind within, and a voice, and strength,
And knowledge of crafts from the immortal gods.
These busily moved to support their lord... ~ Homer,
98:Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest. ~ Margaret Fuller,
99:The foolish follow after the desires that are outward and they fall into the snare of death that is wide open for them, but the wise man sets his mind on the immortal and the certain and longs not here below for uncertain and transient things. ~ Katha Upanishad,
100:It is the custom of the immortal gods to grant temporary prosperity and a fairly long period of impunity to those whom they plan to punish for their crimes, so that they may feel it all the more keenly as a result of the change in their fortunes. ~ Julius Caesar,
101:I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,
Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,
102:Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys..." ~ Neil Gaiman,
103:The physical life of an individual person is limited, but the life of the masses united as an independent social-political organism is immortal. Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he acquire the immortal social-political life. ~ Kim Jong Il,
104:Yoga philosophy teaches that real man is not his body, but that the immortal I, of which each human being is conscious to some degree according to his mental evolution, is not the body but merely occupies and uses the body as an instrument. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
105:Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the
computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department
that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached
just saying: "Learn, guys. ~ Neil Gaiman,
106:My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you! ~ Frank Herbert,
107:Badness you can get easily, in quantity. The road is smooth and lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to do it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard. ~ Hesiod,
108:Ludwig’s enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here. ~ Magnus Flyte,
109:Tear forever the garland of Homer, and number the fathers
Of the immortal work, that through all time will survive!
Yet it has but one mother, and bears that mother's own feature,
'Tis thy features it bears,Nature,thy features eterne!

~ Friedrich Schiller, The Iliad
,
110:Cursing, Gwen resettled herself , and found that her friend was looking up at her with the exact same expression she'd once worn while watching a much younger and boisterously drunk Gwen fall down an incline seconds after uttering the immortal phrase, "Nothing can stop me now! ~ Foz Meadows,
111:Though the gates that stand between the mortal world and the immortal Realm of Chaos are now closed to me, still I would rather die having glimpsed eternity than never to have stirred from the cold furrow of mortal life. I embrace death without regret as I have embraced life without fear. ~ Unknown,
112:The Eucharist is source and pledge of blessedness and glory, not for the soul alone, but for the body also.... In the frail and perishable body that divine Host, which is the immortal body of Christ, implants a principle of resurrection, a seed of immortality, which one day must germinate ~ Pope Leo XIII,
113:...[W]hen death comes to a man, the mortal part of him dies, but the immortal part retires at the approach of death and escapes unharmed and indestructible... [I]t is as certain as anything can be... that soul is immortal and imperishable, and that our souls will really exist in the next world. ~ Socrates,
114:And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. ~ Matthew Arnold,
115:By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death;
   by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine 1.5-19,
116:The voices that an inner listening hears
Conveyed to him their prophet utterances,
And flame-wrapped outbursts of the immortal Word
And flashes of an occult revealing Light
Approached him from the unreachable Secrecy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul’s Release,
117:The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason. ~ Jacques Louis David,
118:The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself. ~ Max Stirner,
119:The purpose of life, therefore, is the realizing of that prophecy; the unveiling of the immortal man; the birth of the spiritual from the psychical, whereby we enter our divine inheritance and come to inhabit Eternity. This is, indeed, salvation, the purpose of all true religion, in all times. Patanjali ~ Pata jali,
120:Egotism is but the perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, when the clouds disperse. 4. ~ Pata jali,
121:The Alchemyst had discovered that the seats revolved and had been amusing himself by swinging back and forth. His chair squeaked with each turn.Finally Prometheus turned and glared at the immortal. "If you do that one more time, I'm going to feed you to the Lotan myself." "And I will help," Niten added. ~ Michael Scott,
122:Who and what was Ayesha, nay, what is Ayesha? An incarnate essence, a materialised spirit of Nature the unforeseeing, the lovely, the cruel and the immortal; ensouled alone, redeemable only by Humanity and its piteous sacrifice? Say you! I have done with speculations who depart to solve these mysteries. ~ H Rider Haggard,
123:As Dr. Zinchenko informed you, I’d like to say a few brief words. Here they are: ‘short,’ ‘memorandum,’ and ‘underpants.’ And let us pause to remember the immortal words of Dr. Seuss: ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.’ Children?… ~ Chris Grabenstein,
124:The Alchemyst had discovered that the seats revolved and had been amusing himself by swinging back and forth. His chair squeaked with each turn.Finally Prometheus turned and glared at the immortal. "If you do that one more time, I'm going to feed you to the Lotan myself."
"And I will help," Niten added. ~ Michael Scott,
125:Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness. ~ Annie Besant,
126:William eyed Tai Haruru with a certain apprehension. It struck him that in this country the men, as well as the landscape, ran to extremes. Samuel, now, was almost tedious in his insistence upon the fact of the immortal soul; Tai Haruru on the contrary seemed likely to harp unnecessarily upon its absence. ~ Elizabeth Goudge,
127:8. O Fire, they have set thee here the Messenger, the Immortal in generation after generation, the Carrier of offerings, protector of man and the Godhead of his prayer. Gods alike and mortals sit with obeisance before the all-pervading Master of the peoples, the ever-wakeful Fire.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire,
128:In the realms of the immortal Supermind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
Is Nature and the common law of thing ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,
129:Afflicted by his harsh divinity,
   Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased
   The daily oblation of her unwept tears.
   All the fierce question of man's hours relived.
   The sacrifice of suffering and desire
   Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy
   Began again beneath the eternal Hand.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn,
130:A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
131:Well, now,” Chiron said. “God—capital G, God. That’s a different matter altogether. We shan’t deal with the metaphysical.” “Metaphysical? But you were just talking about—” “Ah, gods, plural, as in, great beings that control the forces of nature and human endeavors: the immortal gods of Olympus. That’s a smaller matter. ~ Rick Riordan,
132:I'm very much drawn to these stories. This is a huge, great story [in Doctor Strange] about the possibility of living beyond everything, living beyond mortality, living beyond all the immortal confines, living beyond the planet as we know it. It's mind-blowingly no limits, and I think this is going to be something else. ~ Tilda Swinton,
133:Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton,
134:Aerial spirits, by great Jove design'd To be on earth the guardians of mankind: Invisible to mortal eyes they go, And mark our actions, good or bad, below: The immortal spies with watchful care preside, And thrice ten thousand round their charges glide: They can reward with glory or with gold, A power they by Divine permission hold. ~ Hesiod,
135:When, as President Joseph F. Smith said, we "catch a spark from the awakened memories of the immortal soul, "let us be quietly grateful. When of great truths we can say "I know," that powerful spiritual witness may also carry with it the sense of our having known before. With rediscovery, we are really saying "I know - again!" ~ Neal A Maxwell,
136:She wondered if the immortal's avoidance of life's ugliness was a matter of survival or bigotry. Lord Akeldama did so love to know all the gossip about the mundane world, but it was in the manner of a cat amusing himself among the butterflies without a need to interfere should their wings get torn off. They were only butterflies, after all. ~ Gail Carriger,
137:[...]and yet wasn't there something about [vampires] that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness -- what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? ~ Justin Cronin,
138:Many think that the mark of a great champion is the nature and margin of their victories and the peaks they scale and reach. That’s only part of it. The mark of the greatest of champions is how they react and respond to defeat. That is when they become enshrined in our hearts and minds – as they rise again and into the immortal pages of history. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru,
139:Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt,
140:The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience. ~ Vasily Grossman,
141:But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again. ~ Thomas Wolfe,
142:There are three layers to the universe. In the lower, Tai Ching, and the middle, Shan Ching, the hindrance of a physical bodily existence is required. Those who fail to live consistently in accord with the Tao reside here. In the upper, Yu Ching, there is only Tao: the bondage of form is broken, and the only thing existing is the exquisite energy dance of the immortal divine beings. ~ Laozi,
143:As comes a goddess to a mortal's breast
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on earth's insensible frame.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Glory and the Fall of Life,
144:The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible. ~ William Barclay,
145:Here Pushkin’s Endless Exile Has Begun
Here Pushkin's endless exile has begun,
And Lermontov's exile turned out fatal,
The mountain grass has a smell so sweet and gentle,
And only once I managed to discern,
By the lake under the dense shade of a chinara,
In the early evening and ferocious trice
The glare of insatiable dark eyes
Of the immortal lover of Tamara.
~ Anna Akhmatova,
146:What do the few existing mystics still do? -- They more or less mold the raw chaos of already existing religion. But only in an isolated, insignificant manner, through feeble attempts. Do it in a grand manner from all aspects with unified efforts, and let us awaken all religions from their graves, newly revivify and form the immortal ones through the omnipotence of art and science. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
147:In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is "pure thought," undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle's God is pure activity, undefiled with action. Let him who can, be comforted with this theology. One wonders sometimes whether this metaphysical eating of one's cake and keeping it is not Aristotle's subtle Way of saving himself from anti-Macedonian hemlock? ~ Will Durant,
148:...the conception of a Truth-consciousness supramental and divine, the invocation of the gods as powers of the Truth to raise man out of the falsehoods of the mortal mind, the attainment in and by this Truth of an immortal state of perfect good and felicity and the inner sacrifice and offering of what one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means of the divine consummation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda, [68],
149:Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side,” is now out! Quote: “Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury. ~ Margot Adler,
150:Nag Hammadi, On the Origin of the World, tells a variant of the same story:  … he boasted continually, saying to (the angels) … “I am God, and no other one exists except me.” But when he said these things, he sinned against all of the immortal ones … when Faith saw the impiety of the chief ruler, she was angry.… she said, “You err, Samael (i.e., “blind god”). An enlightened, immortal humanity [anthropos] exists before you!”3 ~ Elaine Pagels,
151:The advantage of mortality is clear to us, but not to them, and that is why those left behind suffer. They miss the company of their loved ones, but it is the feeling that the deceased no longer exist that hurts the most. This is the cost mortals must pay. Let me put it to you this way: Mortality is better than immortality, but only the immortal have the ability to see this, and there lies both the irony and the cost of human happiness. ~ Eva Pohler,
152:In every man there is a hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail, but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the captain. He also wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this "child in man" is the immortal creator within him. ~ Christian Morgenstern,
153:True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead. ~ Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov,
154:Your edict, King, was strong,
But all your strength is weakness itself against
The immortal unrecorded laws of God.
They are not merely now: they were, and shall be,
Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.

I knew I must die, even without your decree:
I am only mortal. And if I must die
Now, before it is my time to die,
Surely this is no hardship: can anyone
Living, as I live, with evil all about me,
Think Death less than a friend? ~ Sophocles,
155:I wrote to Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I said: "Here is the sentence once written by the immortal Bobby Jones. I thought you might like to have it done in needlepoint and mounted in a suitable frame to hang over Little John's bed. It says, The rewards of golf - and of life, too, I expect - are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules." I never heard from Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I can only conclude that the letter went astray. ~ Alistair Cooke,
156:That intense faith in another world, that intense hatred for this world, that intense power of renunciation, that intense faith in God, that intense faith in the immortal soul, is in you. I challenge anyone to give it up. You cannot. You may try to impose upon me by becoming materialists, by talking materialism for a few months, but I know what you are; if I take you by the hand, back you come as good theists as ever were born. How can you change your nature? ~ Swami Vivekananda,
157:Brooding, simmering and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race had yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium? ~ Stephen Fry,
158:I have never been able to understand how men can feel affection for individuals who are intent on massacring them in a variety of unpleasant ways, but it is an undeniable fact that they can and do. Witness the immortal verse of Mr. Kipling: "So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'home in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man!" One can only accept this as another example of the peculiar emotional aberrations of the male sex. ~ Elizabeth Peters,
159:But he felt too confident in Catherine’s beautiful nature to be afraid of Ned. Catherine, who loved beauty, who was so much moved by it—witness her rapt face at The Immortal Hour—would never listen to blandishments from anyone with Ned’s nose. Besides, Ned was elderly. In spite of the fur rug up to his chin, Christopher had seen that all right. He was an elderly, puffy man. Elderliness and love! He grinned to himself. If only the elderly could see themselves…. ~ Elizabeth von Arnim,
160:Antiquity was often delighted to cast a halo of mythical glory around its illustrious names. The immortal works of this great philosopher seemed to entitle him to more than mortal honors. A legend into the authenticity of which we will abstain from inquiring, asserted that his mother, Perictione, a pure virgin, suffered an immaculate conception through the influence of Apollo. The god declared to Ariston, to whom she was about to be married, the parentage of the child. ~ John William Draper,
161:If we had nothing but pecuniary rewards and worldly honours to look to, our profession would not be one to be desired. But in its practice you will find it to be attended with peculiar privileges, second to none in intense interest and pure pleasures. It is our proud office to tend the fleshly tabernacle of the immortal spirit, and our path, rightly followed, will be guided by unfettered truth and love unfeigned. In the pursuit of this noble and holy calling I wish you all God-speed. ~ Joseph Lister,
162:I am the Headless Daimon with sight in my feet; I am the mighty one who possesses the immortal fire; I am the truth who hates the fact that unjust deeds are done in the world; I am the one who makes the lightning flash and the thunder roll; I am the one whose sweat falls upon the earth as rain so that life can begin; I am the one whose mouth burns completely; I am the one who begets and destroys; I am the Favour of the Aion; my name is a Heart Encircled by a Serpent; Come Forth and Follow. ~ Gordon White,
163:He looked upon the immortal sea with the awakened and groping perception of its heartless might; he saw it unchanged, black and foaming under the eternal scrutiny of the stars; he heard its impatient voice calling for him out of a pitiless vastness full of unrest, turmoil, and of terror. He looked afar upon it, and he saw an immensity tortured and blind, moaning and furious, that claimed all the days of his tenacious life, and, when life was over, would claim the worn-out body of its slave... ~ Joseph Conrad,
164:In that moment, Lisette loved that man.
Loud complaints erupted, accomplished by the usual slurs slung at the immortal black sheep.

Bastien shrugged them off as his gaze met hers.
Thank you, she told him telepatheically.
His lips tilted up the tiniest bit.
Unfortunately, Seth and David both picked up on the thought and turned back to her with matching frowns, gazes sharpening.

Merde.

"Why haven't you been around lately?" Seth queried.
~ Dianne Duvall,
165:A Coward
By hardihood to rise and fear to strike,
And fitly to rebuke his sins decrees,
That, hide from others with what care he please,
Night sha'n't be black enough nor earth so wide
That from himself himself can ever hide!
Hard fate indeed to feel at every breath
His burden of identity till death!
No moment's respite from the immortal load,
To think himself a serpent or a toad,
Or dream, with a divine, ecstatic glow,
He's long been dead and canonized a crow!
~ Ambrose Bierce,
166:For while we are enclosed in these confinements of the body, we perform as a kind of duty the heavy task of necessity; for the soul from heaven has been cast down from its dwelling on high and sunk, as it were, into the earth, a place just the opposite to godlike nature and eternity. But I believe that the immortal gods have sown souls in human bodies so there might exist beings to guard the world and after contemplating the order of heaven, might imitate it by their moderation and steadfastness in life. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
167:But a man's life breath cannot come back again-no raiders in force, no trading brings it back, once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.

Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet, that two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies...true, but the life that's left me will be long, the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. ~ Homer,
168:Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work." ~ Victor Hugo,
169:The immortal mind, superior to his fate, amid the outrage of external things, firm as the solid base of this great world, rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds! Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on! Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky! Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene, the unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck; and ever stronger as the storms advance, firm through the closing ruin holds is way, when nature calls him to the destin'd goal. ~ Mark Akenside,
170:author class:William Blake

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me. Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love: Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life! [1982.jpg] -- from The Complete Illuminated Books, by William Blake

~ I sit day and night
,
171:It's not about you, it's about the story. It's not about the folks who raise an eyebrow because you're not yet published or not yet J.K. Rowling. It's not about what that lady at church may think or, for that matter, the critics. It's not about the fact that you can't please everyone, and it's sure as heck not about the odds. In the immortal words of Gold Five, "Stay on target." You may or may not be the one who destroys the Death Star. But you're a hero if you get out of your own way, put it all on the line, and try. ~ Cynthia Leitich Smith,
172:To A Poet
There is a lovely noise about your name,
Above the shoutings of the city clear,
More than a moment's merriment, whose claim
Will greater grow with every mellowed year.
The people will not bear you down the street,
Dancing to the strong rhythm of your words,
The modern kings will throttle you to greet
The piping voice of artificial birds.
But the rare lonely spirits, even mine,
Who love the immortal music of all days,
Will see the glory of your trailing line,
The bedded beauty of your haunting lays.
~ Claude McKay,
173:It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things... ~ H P Lovecraft,
174:Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail
vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,
and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in
joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

~ Rabindranath Tagore, Little Flute
,
175:Summer Streams
ALL day long beneath the sun
Shining through the fields they run,
Singing in a cadence known
To the seraphs round the throne.
And the traveller drawing near
Through the meadow, halts to hear
Anthems of a natural joy
No disaster can destroy.
All night long from set of sun
Through the starry woods they run,
Singing through the purple dark
Songs to make a traveller hark.
All night long, when winds are low,
Underneath my window go
The immortal happy streams,
Making music through my dreams.
~ Bliss William Carman,
176:There is a certain period of the soul-culture when it begins to interfere with some of characters of typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring of the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its way out to heaven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel; and there is, in this indication of subduing the mortal by the immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range than that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul than of, the fair and ruddy countenance of David. ~ John Ruskin,
177:With what purpose did God make material beings and spiritual beings and men who are both? Each thing He made to serve Him, and to serve Him by being totally itself. But within this total ordering of everything towards God there is a division: for, under God, spiritual beings are an end in themselves, matter is not. The earth is made for man, whereas man is not similarly made for the angels but men and angels alike for God only: they can serve one another, but it is not the service of a means to an end, but reciprocal service of the children of one father: the immortal beings have no end but God Himself. ~ Frank Sheed,
178:Blest as the immortal gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee, all the while,
Softly speaks and sweetly smile.

'Twas this deprived my soul of rest,
And raised such tumults in my breast;
For, while I gazed, in transport tossed,
My breath was gone, my voice was lost;

My bosom glowed; the subtle flame
Ran quick through all my vital frame;
O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung;
My ears with hollow murmurs rung;

In dewy damps my limbs were chilled;
My blood with gentle horrors thrilled:
My feeble pulse forgot to play;
I fainted, sunk, and died away. ~ Sappho,
179:Krishna assures Arjuna that his basic nature is not subject to time and death; yet he reminds him that he cannot realize this truth if he cannot see beyond the dualities of life: pleasure and pain, success and failure, even heat and cold. The Gita does not teach a spirituality aimed at an enjoyable life in the hereafter, nor does it teach a way to enhance power in this life or the next. It teaches a basic detachment from pleasure and pain, as this chapter says more than once. Only in this way can an individual rise above the conditioning of life’s dualities and identify with the Atman, the immortal Self. Also, ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa,
180:Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill. [1884.jpg] -- from Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore

~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1) Thou hast made me endless (from Gitanjali)
,
181:I will not speak of him as if he were absent, he has not been and he will never be. These are not mere words of consolation. Only those of us who feel it truly and permanently in the depths of our souls can comprehend this. Physical life is ephemeral, it passes inexorably... This truth should be taught to every human being -- that the immortal values of the spirit are above physical life. What sense does life have without these values? What then is it to live? Those who understand this and generously sacrifice their physical life for the sake of good and justice -- how can they die? God is the supreme idea of goodness and justice. ~ Fidel Castro,
182:19For what can be  m known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature,  n have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, [7] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they  o became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 p Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23and  q exchanged the glory of  r the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. ~ Anonymous,
183:Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable? If not, go away. Simple as that. We don’t need to feel sorry for you. We don’t want to put up with your narcissism, and we don’t want to do your work. ~ Jordan Peterson,
184:Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable? If not, go away. Simple as that. We don’t need to feel sorry for you. We don’t want to put up with your narcissism, and we don’t want to do your work. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
185:Hell
R. B. VAUGHN speaks:
“After so many years of pursuing the ideal
I came home. But I had caught sight of it.
You see it sometimes in the blue-silver wake
Of island schooners, bound for Anegada, say.
And it takes other forms. I saw it flickering once
In torches by the railroad tracks in Medellín.
When I was very young I thought that love would come
And seize and take me south and I would see the rose;
And that all ambiguities we knew would merge
Like orchids on a word. Say this:
I sought the immortal word.”
So saying he went on
To join those who preceded him;
and there were those that followed.
~ Donald Justice,
186:The Rose Did Caper On Her Cheek
208
The Rose did caper on her cheek—
Her Bodice rose and fell—
Her pretty speech—like drunken men—
Did stagger pitiful—
Her fingers fumbled at her work—
Her needle would not go—
What ailed so smart a little Maid—
It puzzled me to know—
Till opposite—I spied a cheek
That bore another Rose—
Just opposite—Another speech
That like the Drunkard goes—
A Vest that like her Bodice, danced—
To the immortal tune—
Till those two troubled—little Clocks
Ticked softly into one.
~ Emily Dickinson,
187:Mist swirled and the Spartoi closed in on the defenseless Niten. Lightning fast, one lashed out at him, catching him a blow on the thigh, and he fell to the bridge with a grunt of pain. He lay flat on his back, looked up at the lizard-like creatures and realized that he was going to die. The immortal felt just the vaguest pang of regret: He had always wanted to die in his beloved Japan and he had made Aoife promise that if he fell in some foreign country or shadowrealm, she would bring his body back to Reigando in the southwest of his country. But Aoife was gone. He would never be able to fulfill his promise to rescue her. And he would never rest in his home soil. ~ Michael Scott,
188:Solitude is an interesting companion. It is both enemy and friend, comforter and tormentor. I spent a lot of time in Dun Cinzci's meat locker trying to decide which. Fortunately, when I tired of solitude, I had guilt to keep me company. Guilt is an even more interesting acquaintance than solitude, let me tell you. Solitude is a harsh but essentially benign attendant. Guilt, on the other hand, is a living, breathing creature, cruel and remorseless. It eats you from the inside out; devours what little hope you have left. It feeds on you, growing stronger with every accursed replayed memory, every useless recrimination." ~ Jennifer Fallon Cayal, The Immortal Prince ~ Jennifer Fallon,
189:Aboard at a ship's helm
A young steersman steering with care.

Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell - O a warning bell, rock'd by the waves.

O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her grey sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gaily and safe.

But O ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging. ~ Walt Whitman,
190:The Golden Light :::

Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean-song of Thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.

Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.

Thy golden Light came down into my feet,
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
191:In February
Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;
A poet's face asleep in this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn.
To all the miles and miles of unsprung wheat,
And to the Spring waiting beyond the portal,
And to the future of my own young art,
And, among all these things, to you, my sweet,
My friend, to your calm face and the immortal
Child tarrying all your life-time in your heart.
~ Alice Meynell,
192:The Cranes Of Ibicus
Here was a man who watched the river flow
Past the huge town, one gray November day.
Round him in narrow high-piled streets at play
The boys made merry as they saw him go,
Murmuring half-loud, with eyes upon the stream,
The immortal screed he held within his hand.
For he was walking in an April land
With Faust and Helen. Shadowy as a dream
Was the prose-world, the river and the town.
Wild joy possessed him; through enchanted skies
He saw the cranes of Ibycus swoop down.
He closed the page, he lifted up his eyes,
Lo--a black line of birds in wavering thread
Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!
~ Emma Lazarus,
193:Mould And Vase [greek Pottery Of Arezzo.]
HERE in the jealous hollow of the mould,
Faint, light-eluding, as templed in the breast
Of some rose-vaulted lotus, see the best
The artist had - the vision that unrolled
Its flying sequence till completion's hold
Caught the wild round and bade the dancers rest The mortal lip on the immortal pressed
One instant, ere the blindness and the cold.
And there the vase: immobile, exiled, tame,
The captives of fulfillment link their round,
Foot-heavy on the inelastic ground,
How different, yet how enviously the same!
Dishonoring the kinship that they claim,
As here the written word the inner sound.
~ Edith Wharton,
194:The hour which might have been yet might not be,
Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore
Yet whereof life was barren,—on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea?
Bondchild of all consummate joys set free,
It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before
The house of Love, hears through the echoing door
His hours elect in choral consonancy.

But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand
With eyes where burning memory lights love home?
Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned:—
'I am your child: O parents, ye have come! ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
195:The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man. ~ Otto Rank,
196: The Unseen Infinite
Arisen to voiceless unattainable peaks
I meet no end, for all is boundless He,
An absolute joy the wide-winged spirit seeks,
A Might, a Presence, an Eternity.

In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite.

The insensible midnight veils His trance of bliss,
A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.

In His ray that dazzles our vision everywhere,
Our half-closed eyes seek fragments of the One:
Only the eyes of Immortality dare
To look unblinded on that living Sun.

Yet are our souls the Immortal's selves within,
Comrades and powers and children of the Unseen.

~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Unseen Infinite
,
197:Hell had become, over the years, a wearisome speculation. Even its proselytizers have neglected it, abandoning the poor, but serviceable, human allusion which the ecclesiastic fires of the Holy Office once had in this world: a temporal torment, of course, but one that was not unworthy, within its terrestrial limitations, of being a metaphor for the immortal, for the perfect pain without destruction that the objects of divine wrath will forever endure. Whether or not this hypothesis is satisfactoy, an increasing lassitude in the propaganda of the institution is indisputable. (Do not be alarmed; I use propaganda here not in its commercial but rather in its Catholic genealogy: a congregation of cardinals.) ~ Jorge Luis Borges,
198:She covered her mouth while her promised one slipped back into the rock he now considered his eternal tomb.

Pallador took possession of the scarlet gem and returned it to its dark hiding place. Eena couldn’t move. She stood frozen, facing the wall of mirrors, staring at a pathetic image that mourned in endless repeated reflections. This would be her agonizing eternity if she agreed to stay in Tribanees. This would be her hell—seeing her beloved day after day after day, unable to feel his touch or know his physical affections. This was no blessing in tragedy. Cursed be the immortal that believed time was more precious than love. Her answer to Pallador’s offer was an irrefutable and definitive no. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,
199:Sonnet Lv: Stillborn Love
The hour which might have been yet might not be,
Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore
Yet whereof life was barren,—on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea?
Bondchild of all consummate joys set free,
It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before
The house of Love, hears through the echoing door
His hours elect in choral consonancy.
But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand
With eyes where burning memory lights love home?
Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned:—
“I am your child: O parents, ye have come!”
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
200:The immortal remains of Brother Watchtower watched the dragon flap away into the fog, and then looked down at the congealing puddle of stone, metal and miscellaneous trace elements that was all that remained of the secret headquarters. And of its occupants, he realized in the dispassionate way that is part of being dead. You go through your whole life and end up a smear swirling around like cream in a coffee cup. Whatever the gods’ games were, they played them in a damn mysterious way. He looked up at the hooded figure beside him. “We never intended this,” he said weakly. “Honestly. No offense. We just wanted what was due to us.” A skeletal hand patted him on the shoulder, not unkindly. And Death said, CONGRATULATIONS. ~ Terry Pratchett,
201:By taking sides against appearance and speaking about “perspective” in a newly arrogant tone, by granting their own bodies about as little credibility as they grant the visual evidence that says “the earth stands still,” and so, with seemingly good spirits, relinquishing their most secure possession (since what do people believe in more securely these days than their bodies?), who knows whether they are not basically trying to re-appropriate something that was once possessed even more securely, something from the old estate of a bygone faith, perhaps “the immortal soul” or perhaps “the old God,” in short, ideas that helped make life a bit better, which is to say stronger and more cheerful than “modern ideas” can do? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
202: The Universal Incarnation
There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,
A Bliss in the heart's crypt grown fiery white,
The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,
A Silence on the mountains of delight,
A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees;
A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth's pain;
A Witness dwells within our secrecies,
The incarnate Godhead in the body of man.

Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,
Our strength a parody of the Immortal's power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal's way
Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour.

Only on the heart's veiled door the word of flame
Is written, the secret and tremendous Name.

~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Universal Incarnation
,
203:Hymn
To the too-dear, to the too-beautiful,
who fills my heart with clarity,
to the angel, to the immortal idol,
All hail, in immortality!
She flows through my reality,
air, mixed with the salt sea-swell:
into my soul’s ecstasy,
pours the essence of the eternal;
Ever-fresh sachet, that scents
the dear corner’s atmospheric light,
hidden smoke, of the burning censer,
in the secret paths of night.
How, incorruptible love,
to express your endless verities?
Grain of musk, unseen, above,
in the depths of my infinities!
To the too-dear, to the too-beautiful,
who is my joy and sanity,
to the angel, to the immortal idol,
All hail in immortality!
~ Charles Baudelaire,
204:Mo Shang Sang
Driving a rainbow,
Riding crimson clouds,
I ascend the Nine Peaks to the Gates of Jade.
Crossing Heaven's River ,
Reaching Mount Kunlun ,
I meet the Western Goddess, pay my respects to the Sun.
Chisong's my companion,
With Xianmen I am friends
I learn to nurture my spirit with the Tao that transcends.
My food's the immortal's lingzhi ,
My drink's from fragrant springs,
My staff is made of laurel, and on my head an orchid ring.
No mortal affairs or troubles,
No limits to where I go,
As swift as the wind blows in the universe I travel.
Though the shadow has moved not,
A thousand miles I've passed
Ageless as the mountains but forgetting not the past.
~ Cao Cao,
205:author class:Sri Aurobindo

The Golden Light :::

Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean-song of Thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.

Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.

Thy golden Light came down into my feet,
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,
~ oem, - The Golden Light
,
206:The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 3:4,
207:In the convent, y'all,
I tend the gardens,
watch things grow,
pray for the immortal soul
of rock 'n' roll.

They call me
Sister Presley here,
The Reverend Mother
digs the way I move my hips
just like my brother.

Gregorian chant
drifts out across the herbs
Pascha nostrum immolatus est...
I wear a simple habit,
darkish hues,

a wimple with a novice-sewn
lace band, a rosary,
a chain of keys,
a pair of good and sturdy
blue suede shoes.

I think of it
as Graceland here,
a land of grace.
It puts my trademark slow lopsided smile
back on my face.

Lawdy.
I'm alive and well.
Long time since I walked
down Lonely Street
towards Heartbreak Hotel.

- Elvis's Twin Sister ~ Carol Ann Duffy,
208:Stars
Wild eyes—and faces ashen grey
That strain through lofty prison bars
To see the everlasting stars,
Then turn—to slumber as we may:
Even as we are, so are they,
And here is peace for all who know
The stars still follow where we go,
When heaven and earth have passed away.
Obedient to the Unknown Power,
From out the ruin of a world
A clustered galaxy is hurled
To glimmer through its steadfast hour:
The blazing sun of Shakespeare’s soul
Shattered to star-dust, fills again
With meteor-flights the immortal brain
That seeks a yet more splendid goal;
And still a voice—that now is ours—
Repeats for aye the unknown word
That thrilled the heart of beast and bird,
Ere man had learned to love the flowers.
~ Dowell O'Reilly,
209:Three Shadows
I LOOKED and saw your eyes
In the shadow of your hair,
As a traveller sees the stream
In the shadow of the wood;
And I said, “My faint heart sighs,
Ah me! to linger there,
To drink deep and to dream
In that sweet solitude.”
I looked and saw your heart
In the shadow of your eyes,
As a seeker sees the gold
In the shadow of the stream;
And I said, “Ah me! what art
Should win the immortal prize,
Whose want must make life cold
And Heaven a hollow dream?”
I looked and saw your love
In the shadow of your heart,
As a diver sees the pearl
In the shadow of the sea;
And I murmured, not above
My breath, but all apart,—
“Ah! you can love, true girl,
And is your love for me?”
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
210:You are empty,” I said, my throat working, “and cruel.” “Ah. Yes, now that is true. Would you like to know the greatest secret of fairykind?” When I didn’t answer he continued, “We prefer to pretend otherwise, but truly, we have never been the immortal ones. We may live long enough to see the world change, but we’re never the ones who changed it. When we finally reach the end, we are unloved and alone, and leave nothing behind, not even our name chiseled on a stone slab. And yet—mortals, through their works, their Craft, are remembered forever.” He turned us gracefully through the crowd without missing a step. “Oh, you cannot imagine the power your kind holds over us. How very much we envy you. There is more life in your littlest fingernail than in everyone in my court combined. ~ Margaret Rogerson,
211:MECH to Baal: Would you like some wine, Mr Baal? All take seats, Baal in the place of honour. Do you like crab? That’s a dead eel. PILLER to Mech: I’m very glad that the immortal poems of Mr Baal, which I had the honour of reading to you, have earned your approval. To Baal: You must publish your poetry. Mr Mech pays like a real patron of the arts. You’ll be able to leave your attic. MECH: I buy cinnamon wood. Whole forests of cinnamon float down the rivers of Brazil for my benefit. But I’ll also publish your poetry. EMILIE: You live in an attic? BAAL eating and drinking: 64 Klauckestrasse. MECH: I’m really too fat for poetry. But you’ve got the same-shaped head as a man in the Malayan Archipelago, who used to have himself driven to work with a whip. If he wasn’t grinding his teeth he couldn’t work. ~ Bertolt Brecht,
212:Driven by her breath across life's tossing deep,
Through the thunder's roar and through the windless hush,
Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,
He carries her sealed orders in his breast.
Late will he know, opening the mystic script,
Whether to a blank port in the Unseen
He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover
A new mind and body in the city of God
And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house
And make the finite one with Infinity.
Across the salt waste of the endless years
Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,
The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,
A rumour around him and danger and a call.
Always he follows in her force's wake.
He sails through life and death and other life,
He travels on through waking and through sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:4,
213:In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and precepts of life, we may be tempted to reverse the game, and to paint a picture of the founders of the Academy and the Lyceum as two frightened men standing in the self-same Cave, facing the wall, chained to their places in a catastrophic age, turning their back on the flame of Greece's heroic era, and throwing grotesque shadows which are to haunt mankind for a thousand years and more. ~ Arthur Koestler,
214:THE Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows
Have pulled the Immortal Rose;
And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,
The Polar Dragon slept,
His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:
When will he wake from sleep?
Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,
With your harmonious choir
Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,
That my old care may cease;
Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight
The nets of day and night.
Dim powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be
Like the pale cup of the sea,
When winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim
Above its cloudy rim;
But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow
Whither her footsteps go.

~ William Butler Yeats, The Poet Pleads With The Elemental Powers
,
215:THE TRUE STUDENT OF OCCULT SCIENCE
   The White Magician uses none of the powers of the animal world in his work, but rather seeks to transmute the poles of the beast within himself into higher and finer qualities. The White Magician labors entirely with the finer forces of the elemental planes. He is a builder--not a destroyer--and seeks to liberate rather than to dominate his fellow creatures. The White Magician has dedicated his soul to the immortal light, while the Black Magician has sold his for mortal glory. The Grimores of the Middle Ages are filled with chants and charms for the invoking of spirits. History is filled with stories of Black Magicians but the true student of occult science must have nothing to do with these things other than to protect himself against them. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Natural Occultism, 28,
216:The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol, “J’y suis, j’y reste”—“I am here, and here I shall remain.” People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, “What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?” and they answer, “We have everything. The mountains and the water.” This is their explanation, mountains and water. As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is. ~ Maria Semple,
217:The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement. The purity of love is regained in its intimate truth which, as I said, is that of death. Death and the instant of divine intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which are based on rational calculation. And death indicates the instant which, in so far as it is instantaneous, renounces the calculated quest for survival. The instant of the new individual being depended on the death of other beings. Had they not died there would have been no room for new ones. Reproduction and death condition the immortal renewal of life; they condition the instant which is always new. That is why we can only have a tragic view of the enchantment of life, but that is also why tragedy is the symbol of enchantment. ~ Georges Bataille,
218:The Times
The times are not degenerate. Man’s faith
Mounts higher than of old. No crumbling creed
Can take from the immortal soul the need
Of that supreme Creator, God. The wraith
Of dead beliefs we cherished in our youth
Fades but to let us welcome new-born Truth.
Man may not worship at the ancient shrine
Prone on his face, in self-accusing scorn.
That night is past. He hails a fairer morn,
And knows himself a something all divine;
No humble worm whose heritage is sin,
But, born of God, he feels the Christ within.
Not loud his prayers, as in the olden time,
But deep his reverence for that mighty force,
That occult working of the great all Source,
Which makes the present era so sublime.
Religion now means something high and broad,
And man stood never half so near to God.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
219:Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. ~ Bruce Sterling,
220:The Garden Refused
There is a garden made for our delight,
Where all the dreams we dare not dream come true.
I know it, but I do not know the way.
We slip and tumble in the doubtful night,
Where everything is difficult and new,
And clouds our breath has made obscure the day.
The blank unhappy towns, where sick men strive,
Still doing work that yet is never done;
The hymns to Gold that drown their desperate voice;
The weeds that grow where once corn stood alive,
The black injustice that puts out the sun:
These are our portion, since they are our choice.
Yet there the garden blows with rose on rose,
The sunny, shadow-dappled lawns are there;
There the immortal lilies, heavenly sweet.
O roses, that for us shall not unclose!
O lilies, that we shall not pluck or wear!
O dewy lawns untrodden by our feet!
~ Edith Nesbit,
221:To The Poet Cowper, On His Recovery From An
Indisposition
WRITTEN SOME TIME BACK.
Cowper, I thank my God that thou art healed.
Thine was the sorest malady of all,
And I am sad to think that it should light
Upon the worthy head; but thou art healed,
And thou art yet, we trust, the destined man,
Born to re-animate the lyre, whose chords
Have slumbered, and have idle lain so long;
To the immortal sounding of whose strings
Did Milton frame the stately-paced verse;
Among whose wires with lighter finger playing
Our elder bard, Spenser, a gentler name,
The lady Muses' dearest darling child,
Enticëd forth the deftest tunes yet heard
In hall or bower; taking the delicate ear
Of the brave Sidney, and the Maiden Queen.
Thou, then, take up the mighty epic strain,
Cowper, of England's bards the wisest and the best!
~ Charles Lamb,
222:Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has ever seen. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
223:Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys... ~ Neil Gaiman,
224:When social and market norms collide, trouble sets in. Take sex again. A guy takes a girl out for dinner and a movie, and he pays the bills. They go out again, and he pays the bills once more. They go out a third time, and he's still springing for the meal and the entertainment. At this point, he's hoping for at least a passionate kiss at the front door. His wallet is getting perilously thin, but worse is what's going on in his head: he's having trouble reconciling the social norm (courtship) with the market norm (money for sex). On the fourth date he casually mentions how much this romance is costing him. Now he's crossed the line. Violation! She calls him a beast and storms off. He should have known that one can't mix social and market norms—especially in this case—without implying that the lady is a tramp. He should also have remembered the immortal words of Woody Allen: “The most expensive sex is free sex. ~ Dan Ariely,
225:The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: "Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you will be happy! And if you don't..." Every morality, every religion, is based on this imperative; I call it the original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. In my mouth, this formula is changed into its opposite — the first example of my "revaluation of all values." An admirable human being, a "happy one," instinctively must perform certain actions and avoid other actions; he carries these impulses in his body, and they determine his
relations with the world and other human beings. In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness. A long life, many descendants — these are not the rewards of virtue: instead, virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among other things, to a long life, many descendants — in short, to Cornaro's virtue. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
226:I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never like this - quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago - the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,
227:There are moments when masses establish contact with their nation's spirit. These are the moments of providence. Masses then see their nation in its entire history, and feel its moments of glory, as well as those of defeat. Then they can clearly feel turbulent events in the future. That contact with the immortal and collective nation's spirit is feverish and trembling. When that happens, people cry. It is probably some kind of national mystery, which some criticize, because they don't know what it represents, and others struggle to define it, because they have never felt it.
If the Christian mystery, which tends to ecstasy, is contact between Man and God, through, "ascent from human to divine nature", then the national mystery is nothing more than man's contact, or contact of mass, with the spirit of its nation. Not intellectually, for it could be the case with any historian, but live, in their hearts. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu,
228:On My Wife's Birth-Day
'Tis Nancy's birth-day--raise your strains,
Ye nymphs of the Parnassian plains,
And sing with more than usual glee
To Nancy, who was born for me.
Tell the blythe Graces as they bound,
Luxuriant in the buxom round;
They're not more elegantly free,
Than Nancy, who was born for me.
Tell royal Venus, tho' she rove,
The queen of the immortal grove,
That she must share her golden fee
With Nancy, who was born for me.
Tell Pallas, tho' th'Athenian school,
And ev'ry trite pedantic fool,
On her to place the palm agree,
'Tis Nancy's, who was born for me.
Tell spotless Dian, tho' she range,
The regent of the up-land grange,
In chastity she yields to thee,
O Nancy, who was born for me.
Tell Cupid, Hymen, and tell Jove,
With all the pow'rs of life and love,
That I'd disdain to breathe or be,
If Nancy was not born for me.
~ Christopher Smart,
229:New College Gardens, Oxford
ON this old lawn, where lost hours pass
Across the shadows dark with dew,
Where autumn on the thick sweet grass
Has laid a weary leaf or two,
When the young morning, keenly sweet,
Breathes secrets to the silent air,
Happy is he whose lingering feet
May wander lonely there.
The enchantment of the dreaming limes,
The magic of the quiet hours,
Breathe unheard tales of other times
And other destinies than ours;
The feet that long ago walked here
Still, noiseless, walk beside our feet,
Poor ghosts, who found this garden dear,
And found the morning sweet!
Age weeps that it no more may hold
The heart-ache that youth clasps so close,
Pain finely shaped in pleasure's mould,
A thorn deep hidden in a rose.
Here is the immortal thorny rose
That may in no new garden grow-Its root is in the hearts of those
Who walked here long ago.
~ Edith Nesbit,
230:I say no wealth is worth my life! Not all they claim
was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches,
in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came-
not all the gold held fast in the Archer's rocky vaults,
in Phoebus Apollo's house on Pytho's sheer cliffs!
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man's life breath cannot come back again-
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies...
true, but the life that's left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. ~ Homer,
231:Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea? ~ Rupert Brooke,
232:Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea? ~ Rupert Brooke,
233:Hymn Xxviii: Love Divine! What Hast Thou Done!
Love divine! what hast thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!
The Father's co-eternal Son
Bore all my sins upon the tree;
The immortal God for me hath died!
My Lord, my Love is crucified.
Behold him, all ye that pass by,
The bleeding Prince of life and peace!
Come, see, ye worms, your Maker die,
And say, was ever grief like his?
Come, feel with me his blood applied:
My Lord, my Love is crucified.
Is crucified for me and you,
To bring us rebels back to God:
Believe, believe the record true,
Ye all are bought with Jesu's blood,
Pardon for all flows from his side;
My Lord, my Love is crucified.
Then let us sit beneath his cross,
And gladly catch the healing stream,
All things for him account but loss,
And give up all our hearts to him;
Of nothing think or speak beside,
'My Lord, my Love is crucified.'
~ Charles Wesley,
234:As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
Upsoars, and darts into the eastern light,
On pinions that nought moves but pure delight,
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love;
Where happy spirits, crown'd with circlets bright
Of starry beam, and gloriously bedight,
Taste the high joy none but the blest can prove.
There thou or joinest the immortal quire
In melodies that even heaven fair
Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire,
Of the omnipotent Father, cleav'st the air
On holy message sent -- What pleasure's higher?
Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?
'Lord Houghton gave this sonnet in the Aldine edition of 1876, with the date 1816. There is nothing to show to whose death the poet refers.'
~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ John Keats, Sonnet - As From The Darkening Gloom A Silver Dove
,
235:The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. ~ Joseph Conrad,
236:The Sun
Through the streets where at windows of old houses
the persian blinds hide secret luxuries,
when the cruel sun strikes with redoubled fury
on the roofs and fields, the meadows and city,
I go alone in my crazy sword-play
scenting a chance rhyme on every road-way,
stumbling on words and over the pavement
finding verses I often dreamed might be sent.
This nurturing father, anaemia’s foe
stirs, in the fields, the worm and the rose,
makes our cares evaporate into the blue,
fills the hives and our brains with honey-dew.
It is he who gives youth to the old man, the cripple,
makes them like young girls, happy and gentle,
and commands the crops to grow ripe in an hour
of the immortal heart, that so longs to flower.
When he shines on the town, a poet that sings,
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
~ Charles Baudelaire,
237:In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there. ~ Gloria Steinem,
238:...Man is a composite creature, his lower nature consisting of the fragments of the Titans and his higher nature the sacred, immortal flesh (life) of Bacchus. Therefore man is capable of either a Titanic (irrational) or a Bacchic (rational) existence. The Titans of Hesiod, who were twelve in number, are probably analogous to the celestial zodiac, whereas the Titans who murdered and dismembered Bacchus represent the zodiacal powers distorted by their involvement in the material world. Thus Bacchus represents the sun who is dismembered by the signs of the zodiac and from whose body the universe is formed. When the terrestrial forms were created from the various parts of his body the sense of wholeness was lost and the sense of separateness established. The heart of Bacchus, which was saved by Pallas, or Minerva, was lifted out of the four elements symbolized by his dismembered body and placed in the ether. The heart of Bacchus is the immortal center of the rational soul. ~ Manly P Hall, The Secret Teachings of all Ages,
239:I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them. ~ Gustave Flaubert,
240:I was astonished at her words, and said: 'Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?' And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;-think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,' she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal. ~ Plato,
241:demigod, chances are you’re making your way to camp with your satyr guide. Or maybe you’ve already arrived and are reading this with the hope that it’ll calm your nerves. I’d say there’s a fifty–fifty chance of that happening. But I’m getting off topic. (I do that. I have ADHD. Bet you know what that’s like.) What I’m supposed to do is explain the story behind this book. A few months ago, Chiron – he’s the immortal centaur who’s also our camp activities director – was called away to rescue two unclaimed demigods and their satyr guide. (The satyr had got himself into a sticky situation. It took him days to get his fur clean.) Anyway, Argus, our resident security guard and part-time chauffeur, drove Chiron on this mission because, well, can you imagine a centaur driving an SUV? (You can? Hmm. Maybe you’re a child of Hypnos and saw it in a dream.) Our camp director, Mr D (aka Dionysus, the god of wine), was MIA, so that left us demigods on our own. ‘Don’t destroy Half-Blood while we’re gone,’ was Chiron’s parting instruction. ~ Rick Riordan,
242:I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. [...] Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
243:Mr. Blotton, indeed—and the name will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime—Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man presumed the stone to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity of the inscription—inasmuch as he represented it to have been rudely carved by himself in an idle mood, and to display letters intended to bear neither more or less than the simple construction of—'BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK'; and that Mr. Stumps, being little in the habit of original composition, and more accustomed to be guided by the sound of words than by the strict rules of orthography, had omitted the concluding 'L' of his Christian name. ~ Charles Dickens,
244:What are you storing up there?" Virginia Dare yelled from the stairwell below. The immortal was outlined with a translucent green aura that lifted her fine black hair off her back and shoulders like a cloak.
"Just a few small alchemical experiments...," Dee began.
A thunderous explosion dropped the trio to their knees. Bits of plaster rained down from the ceiling and a heavy smell of sewage filled the stairwell.
"And one or two big ones," he added.
"We need to get out of here.The entire building is going to collapse," Dare said. She turned and continued down the stairs, Dee and Josh close on her heels.
Josh breathed deeply. "Am I smelling burning bread?" he asked, surprised.
Dare glanced back up at Dee. "I don't even want to know what that smell is coming from."
"No,you don't," the doctor agreed.
When they reachd the bottom of the stairs,Virginia flung herself against the double doors but bounced off them. They were padlocked, a thick chain woven through their handles.
"I'm sure that breaches a fire code," Dee murmured. ~ Michael Scott,
245:Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower's half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor. ~ Jules Verne,
246:Mr. Blotton, indeed — and the name will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime — Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man presumed the stone to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity of the inscription — inasmuch as he represented it to have been rudely carved by himself in an idle mood, and to display letters intended to bear neither more or less than the simple construction of— ‘BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK’; and that Mr. Stumps, being little in the habit of original composition, and more accustomed to be guided by the sound of words than by the strict rules of orthography, had omitted the concluding ‘L’ of his Christian name. ~ Charles Dickens,
247:To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical men- tality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.01,
248:You might say, “I know I am an immortal spirit,” or “I am tired of this mad world, and peace is all I want”—until the phone rings. Bad news: The stock market has collapsed; the deal may fall through; the car has been stolen; your mother-in-law has arrived; the trip is cancelled, the contract has been broken; your partner has left you; they demand more money; they say it’s your fault. Suddenly there is a surge of anger, of anxiety. A harshness comes into your voice; “I can’t take any more of this.” You accuse and blame, attack, defend, or justify yourself, and it’s all happening on autopilot. Something is obviously much more important to you now than the inner peace that a moment ago you said was all you wanted, and you’re not an immortal spirit anymore either. The deal, the money, the contract, the loss or threat of loss are more important. To whom? To the immortal spirit that you said you are? No, to me. The small me that seeks security or fulfillment in things that are transient and gets anxious or angry because it fails to find it. Well, at least now you know who you really think you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle,
249:Today I choose happiness. The circumstances of my life may go up and down, for the mortal world is changeable. The immortal world, however, is changeless, for there there is only love. I build my house on the rock of the immortal world. Today I choose only immortal thoughts. I extend my perception beyond what my senses perceive, to what my heart knows is true. I withdraw my belief that I need anyone or anything to be other than what they are, in order for me to be secure. I know that whenever fear expresses itself, love will ultimately prevail. Therefore I need not fear, nor cry, nor despair. To the extent to which I see what is truly true, I see only cause for happiness. Happiness is the choice I make today. It does not rest on my circumstances, but on my frame of mind. I surrender to God any emotional habits that lead me down the path of unhappiness, and pray for guidance in shifting my thoughts. In cultivating the habits of happiness, I attract the people and situations that match its frequency. I smile more often, give praise more often, give thanks more often, and am glad more often. For such is my choice today. ~ Marianne Williamson,
250:For Hindus, banyan trees are sacred. For Buddhists, bodhi trees; for the Arabs, certain date palms. To be stalwart in a ‘tree-like’ way was to approach goodness, according to Confucius. The Normans built chapels in the trunks of yew trees. Many other cultures attached religious significance to particular trees and groves and forests. Adonis was born of a tree. Daphne turned into one. George Washington confessed to cutting one down and the United States, as a result, was all but immaculately conceived. The tree is the symbol of the male organ and of the female body. The Hebrew kabbalah depicts Creation in the form of a tree. In Genesis, a tree holds the key to immortal life, and it is to the branches and fruit of an olive tree that God’s people are likened in both the Old and New Testaments. To celebrate the birth of Christ his followers place trees in their sitting rooms and palm fronds, a symbol of victory, commemorate his entering Jerusalem. A child noted by Freud had fantasies of wounding a tree that represented his mother. The immortal swagman of Australia sat beneath a coolabah tree. In hundreds of Australian towns the war dead are honoured by avenues of trees. ~ Don Watson,
251:As By Fire
Sometimes I feel so passionate a yearning
For spiritual perfection here below,
This vigorous frame, with healthful fervor burning,
Seems my determined foe,
So actively it makes a stern resistance,
So cruelly sometimes it wages war
Against a wholly spiritual existence
Which I am striving for.
It interrupts my soul's intense devotions;
Some hope it strangles, of divinest birth,
With a swift rush of violent emotions
Which link me to the earth.
It is as if two mortal foes contended
Within my bosom in a deadly strife,
One for the loftier aims for souls intended,
One for the earthly life.
And yet I know this very war within me,
Which brings out all my will-power and control,
This very conflict at the last shall win me
The loved and longed-for goal.
87
The very fire which seems sometimes so cruel
Is the white light that shows me my own strength.
A furnace, fed by the divinest fuel,
It may become at length.
Ah! when in the immortal ranks enlisted,
I sometimes wonder if we shall not find
That not by deeds, but by what we've resisted,
Our places are assigned.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
252:Offspring of Jove, Calliope, once more
To the bright Sun, thy hymn of music pour;
Whom to the child of star-clad Heaven and Earth
Euryphaessa, large-eyed nymph, brought forth;
Euryphaessa, the famed sister fair
Of great Hyperion, who to him did bear
A race of loveliest children; the young Morn,
Whose arms are like twin roses newly born,
The fair-haired Moon, and the immortal Sun,
Who borne by heavenly steeds his race doth run
Unconquerably, illuming the abodes
Of mortal Men and the eternal Gods.

Fiercely look forth his awe-inspiring eyes,
Beneath his golden helmet, whence arise
And are shot forth afar, clear beams of light;
His countenance, with radiant glory bright,
Beneath his graceful locks far shines around,
And the light vest with which his limbs are bound,
Of woof aethereal delicately twined,
Glows in the stream of the uplifting wind.
His rapid steeds soon bear him to the West;
Where their steep flight his hands divine arrest,
And the fleet car with yoke of gold, which he
Sends from bright Heaven beneath the shadowy sea.
Published by Mrs. Shelley, Poetical Works, 1839, 2nd edition; dated 1818.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Homers Hymn To The Sun
,
253:Homer's Hymn to the Sun

Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition; dated 1818.

Offspring of Jove, Calliope, once more
To the bright Sun, thy hymn of music pour;
Whom to the child of star-clad Heaven and Earth
Euryphaessa, large-eyed nymph, brought forth;
Euryphaessa, the famed sister fair
Of great Hyperion, who to him did bear
A race of loveliest children; the young Morn,
Whose arms are like twin roses newly born,
The fair-haired Moon, and the immortal Sun,
Who borne by heavenly steeds his race doth run
Unconquerably, illuming the abodes
Of mortal Men and the eternal Gods.

Fiercely look forth his awe-inspiring eyes,
Beneath his golden helmet, whence arise
And are shot forth afar, clear beams of light;
His countenance, with radiant glory bright,
Beneath his graceful locks far shines around,
And the light vest with which his limbs are bound,
Of woof aethereal delicately twined,
Glows in the stream of the uplifting wind.
His rapid steeds soon bear him to the West;
Where their steep flight his hands divine arrest,
And the fleet car with yoke of gold, which he
Sends from bright Heaven beneath the shadowy sea ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley,
254:...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?"
"I am myself. My body will not decay and die-"
"A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life."
"I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!"
"Who are you, then?"
"The Immortal One."
"Say your name."
"The King."
"Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!"
"You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist."
"You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
255: The End?
Is this the end of all that we have been,
And all we did or dreamed, -
A name unremembered and a form undone, -
Is this the end?
A body rotting under a slab of stone
Or turned to ash in fire,
A mind dissolved, lost its forgotten thoughts, -
Is this the end?
Our little hours that were and are no more,
Our passions once so high
Dying mocked by the still earth and calm sunshine, -
Is this the end?
Our yearnings for the human Godward climb
Passing to other hearts
Deceived, while sinks towards death and hell the world, -
Is this the end?
Fallen is the harp; shattered it lies and mute;
Is the unseen player dead?
Because the tree is felled where the bird sang,
Must the song too hush?
One in the mind who planned and willed and thought,
Worked to reshape earth's fate,
One in the heart who loved and yearned and hoped,
Does he too end?

644

Pondicherry, c. 1927 - 1947
The Immortal in the mortal is his Name;
An artist Godhead here
Ever remoulds himself in diviner shapes,
Unwilling to cease
Till all is done for which the stars were made,
Till the heart discovers God
And soul knows itself. And even then
There is no end.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The End?
,
256:Homer, in the second book of the Iliad says with fine enthusiasm, "Give me masturbation or give me death." Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, "To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion." In another place this experienced observer has said, "There are times when I prefer it to sodomy." Robinson Crusoe says, "I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art." Queen Elizabeth said, "It is the bulwark of virginity." Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, "A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush." The immortal Franklin has said, "Masturbation is the best policy." Michelangelo and all of the other old masters--"old masters," I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction--have used similar language. Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, "Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse." Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time--"None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise. ~ Mark Twain,
257:Back then I took up flying with the sense of coming to something I had been meant to do all my life. Many people who fly feel this way and I think it has more to do with some kind of treetop or clifftop gene than with any sense of unbounded freedom or metaphors of the soaring spirit. The way the earth below resolves. The way the landscape falls into place around the drainages, the capillaries and arteries of falling water: mountain slopes bunched and wrinkled, wringing themselves into the furrows of couloir and creek , draw and chasm, the low places defining the spurs and ridges and foothills the way creases define the planes of a face, lower down the canyon cuts, and then the swales and valleys of the lowest slopes, the sinuous rivers and the dry beds where water used to run seeming to hold the hills the waves of the high plains all together and not the other way around… but what I loved the most from the first training flight was the neatness, the sense of everything in its place. The farms in their squared sections, the quartering county roads oriented to the cardinal compass points, the round bales and scattered cattle and horses as perfect in their patterns as sprays of stars and holding the same ruddy sun on their flanks…the immortal stillness of a landscape painting. ~ Peter Heller,
258:Dolphins... Yeah, dolphins... A lot of people like dogs, cats, and - for some reason I've never been able to fathim - even snakes and toads. But dolphins? Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY loves bloody dolphins. Don't they? Goes way back, to the ancient Greeks, when shipwrecked sailors would wash up on beaches yammering out crazy stories of how they was staring down a watery grave, when out of nowhere, flipper shows up and pushes them safely back to the shore. Heartarming - and say what you will about aquatic mammal public relations, but that was one ispired move, because here we are two thousand years later and everybody still loves them bloody dolphins. What you don't hear are the other stories, the ones where flipper's watching poor Artemides doggy paddling away and inhaling the warm, salty waters of the Adriatic... and flipper things, "Yeah, sure I could save him, but sod that for a can of sardines" and instead of pushing Artemides back to shore, flipper pushes the poor sod out to sea... in the immortal words of Sir Johnny of the Cash, "Just to watch him die..." See, moral is, if you're gonna be a bastard, be like a dolphin - think big picture, protect your image and above all, leave no trace. Because in the bloodshot, bleary eyes of the world, once you're a bastard, you're always a bastard. ~ Simon Oliver,
259:Hebrews 4:12–16: For the Word that God speaks is alive and full of power—making it active, operative, energizing and effective; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit, and of joints and marrow [of the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and sifting and analyzing and judging the very thoughts and purposes of the heart. And not a creature exists that is concealed from His sight, but all things are open and exposed, naked and defenseless to the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do. Inasmuch then as we have a great High Priest Who has [already] ascended and passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession [of faith in Him], For we do not have a High Priest Who is unable to understand and sympathize and have a fellow feeling with our weaknesses and infirmities and liability to the assaults of temptation, but One Who has been tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sinning. Let us then fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace—the throne of God's unmerited favor [to us sinners]; that we may receive mercy [for our failures] and find grace to help in good time for every need—appropriate help and well-timed help, coming just when we need it. (AMP) ~ Beth Moore,
260:The hard things break. The soft things bend. The stubborn ones batter themselves against all that is immovable. The flexible adapt to what is before them. Of course, we are all hard and soft, stubborn and flexible, and so we all break until we learn to bend and are battered until we accept what is before us. This brings to mind the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, the stubborn, hard king who sought to ask the Immortal One the secret of life. He was told that there would be stones on his path to guide him. But in his urgency and pride, Gilgamesh was annoyed to find his path blocked, and so smashed the very stones that would help him. In his blindness of heart, he broke everything he needed to discover his way. With the same confusion, we too break what we need, push away those we love, and isolate ourselves when we need to be held most. There have been many times in my life when I have been too proud to ask for help or too afraid to ask to be held, and in the frenzy of my own isolation, like Gilgamesh, I have smashed the window I was trying to open, have split the bench I was trying to hammer, and have made matters worse by bruising the one I meant to be tender with. The live bough bends. The dead twig snaps. We are humbled to soften from our griefs, or else, in brittle time, become the next thing grieved. ~ Mark Nepo,
261:Family life, which is the Ashrama of the householder, can also take you in His direction, provided it is accepted as an asrama. Lived in this spirit, it helps man to progress towards Self-realization.

Nevertheless, if you hanker after anything such as name, fame or position, God will bestow it on you, but you will not feel satisfied.

The Kingdom of God is a whole, and unless you are admitted to the whole of it you cannot remain content. He grants you just a little, only to keep Your discontent alive, for without discontent there can be no progress. You, a scion of the Immortal, can never become reconciled to the realm of death, neither does God allow you to remain in it.

He Himself kindles the sense of want in you by granting you a small thing, only to whet your appetite for a greater one. This is His method by which He urges you on. The traveller on this path finds it difficult and feels troubled, but one who has eyes to see can clearly perceive that the pilgrim is advancing.

The distress that is experienced burns to ashes all pleasure derived from worldly things. This is what is called ‘tapasya’. What obstructs one on the spiritual path bears within itself seeds of future suffering. Yet the heartache, the anguish over the effects of these obstructions, are the beginning of an awakening to Consciousness. ~ Anandamayi Ma,
262:Rage.

Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles, of Peleus’ son, murderous, man-killer, fated to die, sing of the rage that cost the Achaeans so many good men and sent so many vital, hearty souls down to the dreary House of Death. And while you’re at it, Muse, sing of the rage of the gods themselves, so petulant and so powerful here on their new Olympos, and of the rage of the post-humans, dead and gone though they might be, and of the rage of those few true humans left, self-absorbed and useless though they have become. While you are singing, O Muse, sing also of the rage of those thoughtful, sentient, serious but not-so-close-to-human beings out there dreaming under the ice of Europa, dying in the sulfur ash of Io, and being born in the cold folds of Ganymede.

Oh, and sing of me, O Muse, poor born-against-his-will Hockenberry, dead Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., Hockenbush to his friends, to friends long since turned to dust on a world long since left behind. Sing of my rage, yes, of my rage, O Muse, small and insignificant though that rage might be when measured against the anger of the immortal gods, or when compared to the wrath of the god-killer Achilles.

On second though, O Muse, sing nothing of me. I know you. I have been bound and servant to you, O Muse, you incomparable bitch. And I do not trust you, O Muse. Not one little bit. ~ Dan Simmons,
263:Shaemus
We will go no more to Shaemus, at the Nip,
for sly innuendo and an Oporto Flip,
the rough but tender voice, the wide-mouthed grin,
the steady-unsteady hand that poured the gin:
memory, that flew back years to find a name,
found it, and fetched it up, still just the same;
the shaky footsteps, and then the shaky kidding:
you, the big business man, outbid, outbidding,
the mystery man, the man of deep affairs,
highbrow, and playboy, and friend of millionaires:
and you, the lovers, whose love was in your faces—
there you were, back once more—and still the traces!—
Yes, still the traces of that love he loved,
and re-examined, but as if unmoved;
the names fished up from time, or Singapore,
joined and repeated on his bar once more;
as if no let or hindrance were permitted;
as if both time and space could be outwitted;
endurance noted—in a protocol—
and then embalmed, of course, in alcohol.
And now himself, the immortal, lightly gone,
as if stepped out for a quick one—who had none.
And dead, his room inspected by his friends,
to find a will, adjust the odds and ends;
and there, the fifteen suits, the malacca cane,
the hats, and spats: in which he roved again,
far from the furnished room, the sacred bar,
141
immortal dandy, towards an immortal star.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,
264:Flower Of Aloe
HOW can I tell you how I love you, dear?
There is no music now the world is old;
The songs have all been sung, the tales all told
Broken the vows are all this many a year.
Had we but met when all the world was new,
When virgin blossoms decked untrodden fields,
I had plucked all the buds that summer yields
And woven a garland, worthy even of you.
Or had I sung when rhymes were yet unwed,
And crowned their marriage in the songs I made,
I had laid them down before you unafraid,
Meet offering to your grace and goodlihead.
But all the dreams are dreamed, and no new heat
Touches life's altars, all the scents are burnt,
The truths all taught and all the lessons learnt,
And no new stars lead kings to kiss Love's feet.
For now in this grey world, of youth bereft,
Love has no throne, no sceptre and no crown;
His groves are hushed, his altars are cast down,
And we who worship--we have nothing left.
And yet--your lips ! The God has built him there
An altar which has known nor flower nor flame:
There may we burn the incense to Love's name,
There the immortal virgin rose be fair.
So--since my lips have known but one desire,
And all my flowers of life are vowed to you-For us, at least, the old world has something new:
For me the altar--and for you the fire!
119
~ Edith Nesbit,
265:John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.' Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body....

Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. ~ Linda Hogan,
266:(You look the same.)

(I’m not using it yet.)

(Don’t you think a test run would be a good idea?)

She nodded. (Probably.)

Her eyelids closed as she concentrated on a mental image of the person she wished to impersonate. Her desire was to appear exactly as the immortal leader, Pallador. Calling on the powers of the dragon’s blood, she willed its enchantment alive. It was Ian’s astounded whisper that told her the charm was working.

“Whoa!”

Opening her eyes she fully expected to see Ian staring at the shining gems on the dragon’s blood. Instead, he was staring at her with a look that was more or less disgusted.

(That’s really you?) he asked, looking her up and down as though she had turned into some sort of lizard creature.

(Yes, why? What’s wrong with me?) Her gaze dropped to check for herself. All she observed was her tawny dress pulled in at the waist by Edgar’s hideous, glowing belt. She glanced at one arm and then the other, both sleeved in the same billowed silk. Her fingers flailed, still the same short, slender digits.

(Oh crud,) she breathed. (It’s not working.)

(Oh, it’s working alright,) Ian disagreed.

Eena glanced up to find him grinning with real amusement.

(You’re a dead ringer for the guy. Ghost robe, bug eyes, bony fingers, in need of a serious haircut. Exactly like him.)

(Really?)

(Really.)

(Cool,) she breathed and then added, (That’s not very nice how you described him.)

(It’s accurate.) ~ Richelle E Goodrich,
267:The Living Word has various dimensions in relation to power and will to power. The spoken word stands at the very bottom of the involuted scale, being the faint echo of the inaudible Word. All beings, from the Gods to mankind, possess a sound, an essential name, a key note. By discovering what it is, one acquires the power to decompose and recreate it. It is also a mantra of voluntary death and resurrection. In the current parlance: the individual, chromosomic, genetic code has been deciphered. The secret has been penetrated. The name to which we refer corresponds to the supratemporal being and has nothing to do with the intimate, family name, although sometimes a delicate synchronicity is produced within a turn of the wheel, a mysterious lucky occurrence filled with meaning, and this name may also be symbolic.

'You must discover your Beloved's real name if you are to bring her back to life. And yours, too. They are the names of the God and Goddess to whom they will give a face. 'Of the God within you', as the Hindu greeting says: Namaste. 'I greet the God within you'.

'The essential name cannot be chosen, it isn't arbitrary. It is filled with meaning of the root note. It is mantra, an eternal designation. It is inscribed in the Book of the Stars, on the Tree of Life, awaiting its actualisation. The initiate of our order is given his real name when he has successfully undergone the most difficult tests. Then it is inscribed in the genealogical tree of the family, in the immortal circle of the Hyperborean initiation. ~ Miguel Serrano,
268:For those who have walked through the fires of hell and rather than fall to its flames, have emerged battered, but victorious. In the immortal words of Ovid: Quin ninc quoque frigidus artus, dum loquor, horror habet, parsque est meminisse doloris- Even now while I tell it, cold horror envelops me and my pains return the minute I think of it. We can never escape the pain of our pasts, or the flashbacks that assault us when we dare to let our thoughts drift unattended, but we can choose to not let it ruin the future we, alone, can build for ourselves.
And for those who are currently trapped in a bad situation. May you find the resolute strength it takes to free yourself, and to finally see the beauty that lives inside you. You are resplendent, and you deserve respect and love. Don't let the minions of hatred or cruelty define you, or steal away your own humanity. When our compassion and ability to love and appreciate others go, then our bullies and oppressors have truly won, for it is not they who are harmed, but rather we who lose our souls and hearts to the same miserable bitterness that causes them to lash out against us. The cycle can be broken- it must be broken, even though the path is never easy or without cost. Yet victory is made sweeter when you know it came from within you, without violent retribution. The best revenge is to leave them mired in their hateful misery while you learn to bask in the warmth of self-esteem and happiness. Never forget that broken wings can and do heal in time, and that those scarred wings can carry the eagle to the top of the highest mountain. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,
269:In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is called 'the resurrection body ' and 'the glorified body.' The prophet Isaiah said, 'The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise' (Isa. 26:19). St. Paul called it 'the celestial body' or 'spiritual body ' (soma pneumatikon) (I Corinthians 15:40). In Sufism it is called 'the most sacred body ' (wujud al-aqdas) and 'supracelestial body ' (jism asli haqiqi). In Taoism, it is called 'the diamond body,' and those who have attained it are called 'the immortals' and 'the cloudwalkers.' In Tibetan Buddhism it is called 'the light body.' In Tantrism and some schools of yoga, it is called 'the vajra body,' 'the adamantine body,' and 'the divine body.' In Kriya yoga it is called 'the body of bliss.' In Vedanta it is called 'the superconductive body.' In Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, it is called 'the radiant body.' In the alchemical tradition, the Emerald Tablet calls it 'the Glory of the Whole Universe' and 'the golden body.' The alchemist Paracelsus called it 'the astral body.' In the Hermetic Corpus, it is called 'the immortal body ' (soma athanaton). In some mystery schools, it is called 'the solar body.' In Rosicrucianism, it is called 'the diamond body of the temple of God.' In ancient Egypt it was called 'the luminous body or being' (akh). In Old Persia it was called 'the indwelling divine potential' (fravashi or fravarti). In the Mithraic liturgy it was called 'the perfect body ' (soma teilion). In the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, it is called 'the divine body,' composed of supramental substance. In the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, it is called 'the ultrahuman'.
   ~ ?, http://herebedragons.weebly.com/homo-lumen.html,
270:The Immortal Part
When I meet the morning beam,
Or lay me down at night to dream,
I hear my bones within me say,
"Another night, another day.
"When shall this slough of sense be cast,
This dust of thoughts be laid at last,
The man of flesh and soul be slain
And the man of bone remain?
"This tongue that talks, these lungs that shout,
These thews that hustle us about,
This brain that fills the skull with schemes,
And its humming hive of dreams,-"These to-day are proud in power
And lord it in their little hour:
The immortal bones obey control
Of dying flesh and dying soul.
"'Tis long till eve and morn are gone:
Slow the endless night comes on,
And late to fulness grows the birth
That shall last as long as earth.
"Wanderers eastward, wanderers west,
Know you why you cannot rest?
'Tis that every mother's son
Travails with a skeleton.
"Lie down in the bed of dust;
Bear the fruit that bear you must;
Bring the eternal seed to light,
And morn is all the same as night.
"Rest you so from trouble sore,
Fear the heat o' the sun no more,
Nor the snowing winter wild,
Now you labour not with child.
77
"Empty vessel, garment cast,
We that wore you long shall last.
--Another night, another day."
So my bones within me say.
Therefore they shall do my will
To-day while I am master still,
And flesh and soul, now both are strong,
Shall hale the sullen slaves along,
Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone
The stedfast and enduring bone.
~ Alfred Edward Housman,
271:"Take the world!" Zeus exclaimed from his throne in the skies
To the children of man"take the world I now give;
It shall ever remain as your heirloom and prize,
So divide it as brothers, and happily live."

Then all who had hands sought their share to obtain,
The young and the aged made haste to appear;
The husbandman seized on the fruits of the plain,
The youth through the forest pursued the fleet deer.

The merchant took all that his warehouse could hold,
The abbot selected the last year's best wine,
The king barred the bridges,the highways controlled,
And said, "Now remember, the tithes shall be mine!"

But when the division long-settled had been,
The poet drew nigh from a far distant land;
But alas! not a remnant was now to be seen,
Each thing on the earth owned a master's command.

"Alas! shall then I, of thy sons the most true,
Shall I, 'mongst them all, be forgotten alone?"
Thus loudly he cried in his anguish, and threw
Himself in despair before Jupiter's throne.

"If thou in the region of dreams didst delay,
Complain not of me," the Immortal replied;
"When the world was apportioned, where then wert thou, pray?"
"I was," said the poet, "I wasby thy side!"

"Mine eye was then fixed on thy features so bright,
Mine ear was entranced by thy harmony's power;
Oh, pardon the spirit that, awed by thy light,
All things of the earth could forget in that hour!"

"What to do?" Zeus exclaimed,"for the world has been given;
The harvest, the market, the chase, are not free;
But if thou with me wilt abide in my heaven,
Whenever thou comest, 'twill be open to thee!"
~ Friedrich Schiller, The Division Of The Earth
,
272:Stop tormenting Derian.”

“Me?” Edgar gaped at her with a clearly fake look of innocence.

“Yes, you.”

“And what about you? When will you stop tormenting him?” Edgar moved past the young queen to approach the unmoving captain. He circled the man as though he were checking out a statue on display

“I’m not tormenting him; why would you say that?”

“You have the poor guy believing you actually intend to marry him.” Edgar stopped to fix the captain’s collar, raising it up high and stiff around his neck.

“I do intend to marry him.” Eena followed her immortal watchdog and folded down the captain’s collar, repositioning it as it had been.

“Oh please,” Edgar groaned. “You’ve had two opportunities to do so, and on both occasions you turned him down.” Edgar elevated the captain’s elbow—adjusting him like a mannequin—leaving it in an awkward position. “The council expressed a desire for you to marry, and you nearly hyperventilated over the mere suggestion. And just recently, due to his own paranoia, Derian all but begged you to marry him. Your refusal couldn’t have been more swift or more adamant.”

Eena returned the captain’s elbow to his side as she retorted, “I’m only seventeen, Edgar! I have no desire to marry anyone right now. But when I am ready, Derian will be my husband.”

Edgar took hold of the captain’s outreaching arm and shoved it forcefully down. “He will not.”

“He will so!” Eena raised the arm back to where it had been and warned her rival, “Don’t touch him again, Edgarmetheus!”

“Fine, fine,” the immortal ceded. Then with a smug grin he added, “If this had been Ian, you would never have let me touch him in the first place. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,
273:A pair of shots rang out from outside, near the front of the house, followed by shouting. A sudden flood of adrenaline doused my fatigue and political confusion.

Jean’s posture straightened, and he rose quickly. “That is Dominique, whose men were watching the transport. Something is amiss.”

Ya think? I ran for my bag and pulled out the staff.

Jean slipped a triangular-bladed dagger from beneath his tunic, wrenched open the door to the study, and strode out ahead of me. As always where the pirate was concerned, I trailed along, a step behind.

I edged around Jean in time to see his older half-brother and fellow pirate captain Dominique Youx dragging a stumbling, bleeding man into the front hallway from outside and shoving him to the floor. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Alex, followed by a chaser of disappointment that it wasn’t Alex, topped by a dollop of concern that our friend Ken Hachette had been shot.

Ken, a human NOPD detective who’d recently been clued in about the big bad world surrounding him, had missed all the recent events due to a family emergency that had taken him out of town.

Why would he be coming to Old Barataria alone via Jean Lafitte’s private transport unless Alex sent him? My adrenaline jump-started my heart to another race, this one fueled by worry. Something bad had happened; it was the only explanation.

Jean and Dominique exchanged a rapid-fire torrent of French that went way past my abilities to interpret. “He claims to be a friend to her,” Dominique finally spat out, and I could tell by the way he said her, much as one might say flesh-eating maggot, that he referred to me. He’d never liked me; he considered me a bad influence on his baby brother the immortal pirate. As if. ~ Suzanne Johnson,
274:Judgment Hour
“SPIRIT,” said God, “come up for Judgment now.”
The words seemed spoke in such familiar tone
As if the accents of a natural voice
Close to the heart as its own beating pulse.
“Come up,” it said, “for final judgment now
Before the absolute court of Me in Thee,
The court which hears no plea, allows no charge,
Abates no jot in estimating wrong,
Awards no punishment and grants no boon,
But weighs precise the actual quality
Of Spirit proven by the appointed tests,
And true decides if it recruit in Me
The Immortal Strength, or if the tempted one,
Too weak for toils eternal, sanely pass
To that which I am not, Oblivion.”
Then Thee reviewed with Me, O God, the course,—
What bodily appetites indulged or quelled;
What hates and harms repaid with hurts and scorns,
Or with forgetfulness or benefits;
The proper rest that merged to slothful ease,
Or was in pain enduringly ignored;
That laughing, wholesome impulse which, unchecked,
Became derision’s cruelty of glee;
The righteous anger rushing headlong on,
What did, when calmly visioned, piteous seem;
That pity for the Weak, which blamed alike
The unjust heedless and the heedful Strong;
The passionate heart’s excess in everything,
Its wild unsteadiness unto the Soul
Which yet persisted, sternly right, to chide
The insensate rebel part averse from Thee.
47
The Thee and Me, O God, revised it all
Clearly, relentlessly, and grave declared,—
“Thou didst not ever fail the Heart, O Soul,
Nor doth it fail thee now. Nay, We elect
No Lethe, no Oblivion, but the strife
Eternal, toward we know not what, save Good.”
Then some calm happiness known not before
Came to the Life whose Judgement hour was o’er.
~ Edward William Thomson,
275:Consider the death of the body in terms of God and His law. Your life, the life within you, encompasses everything within itself -- not only those whom you have lost but everything -- it includes God within itself. And if there is a God in your soul, then your soul is full, and there is no loss. And if there is a God, then there is love towards Him and towards people, towards those unfortunates who are in need of love.

If you believe that everything that has happened to us in our life has been for our own good, then that which happens to us in our death is also for our own good.

All of our misfortunes reveal to us the presence in us of the divine, of the immortal, of the self-sufficient which constitutes the foundation of our life. Death reveals to us fully our true Self. That which happens to man after his death we cannot and ought not to know. We could not live or do God's work if we knew it. If what awaits us after death were worse than what we meet with here on earth, we would prize this life even more than we do now, and there is no greater impediment to the fulfillment of God's will than concern for one's own life. If what awaits us after death were better than now, then we would scorn this life and make every effort to flee from it.

We do not know what awaits us after death, but we do know one thing without any doubt, namely, that the spiritual Being into which, according to Christian teachings, I have passed over is indissoluble, eternal, free and omnipotent because this Being is God. I shall go into that Source of Love from which I came and into that which I feel is Love. 'Into thine hands I commit my spirit.' That is all we can say, yet this too is something. For the person who believes in the existence of Him from whom he came and to Whom he is going, this is all there is, and nothing more is needed. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
276:I begin to sing of Demeter, the holy goddess with the beautiful hair.
And her daughter [Persephone] too. The one with the delicate ankles, whom Hadês[1]
seized. She was given away by Zeus, the loud-thunderer, the one who sees far and wide.
Demeter did not take part in this, she of the golden double-axe, she who glories in the harvest.
5 She [Persephone] was having a good time, along with the daughters of Okeanos, who wear their girdles slung low.
She was picking flowers: roses, crocus, and beautiful violets.
Up and down the soft meadow. Iris blossoms too she picked, and hyacinth.
And the narcissus, which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl
by Gaia [Earth]. All according to the plans of Zeus. She [Gaia] was doing a favor for the one who receives many guests [Hadês].
10 It [the narcissus] was a wondrous thing in its splendor. To look at it gives a sense of holy awe
to the immortal gods as well as mortal humans.
It has a hundred heads growing from the root up.
Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies up above.
And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea.
15 She [Persephone] was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands
to take hold of the pretty plaything.[2] And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her.
It happened on the Plain of Nysa. There it was that the Lord who receives many guests made his lunge.
He was riding on a chariot drawn by immortal horses. The son of Kronos. The one known by many names.
He seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot,
20 And drove away as she wept. She cried with a piercing voice,
calling upon her father [Zeus], the son of Kronos, the highest and the best.
But not one of the immortal ones, or of human mortals,
heard her voice. ~ Homer,
277:Blake’s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all, ‘body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses’; body has its place in imagination.

And the function of imagination was to look inward. In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake avowed his intention:

To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes

Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity.

Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge.

But what must be grasped about Blake’s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect.

Los is only a half of Blake’s picture of man’s inner states. The other half is the strange being called ‘the Spectre’:

Each man is in his spectre’s power

Until the arrival of that hour

When his humanity awakes

And casts his spectre into the lake...

The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness.

Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits, the identity. ‘Man is not of fixed or enduring form’ Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in ‘the Spectre’s power’ (and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of ‘fixed and enduring form’.

Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal. ~ Colin Wilson,
278:Dear Woman Who Gave Me Life:

The callous vexations and perturbations of this night have subsequently resolved
themselves to a state which precipitates me, Arturo Bandini, into a
brobdingnagian and gargantuan decision. I inform you of this in no uncertain
terms. Ergo, I now leave you and your ever charming daughter (my beloved sister
Mona) and seek the fabulous usufructs of my incipient career in profound
solitude. Which is to say, tonight I depart for the metropolis to the east — our
own Los Angeles, the city of angels. I entrust you to the benign generosity of your brother, Frank Scarpi, who is, as the phrase has it, a good family man
(sic!). I am penniless but I urge you in no uncertain terms to cease your
cerebral anxiety about my destiny, for truly it lies in the palm of the immortal gods. I have made the lamentable discovery over a period of years that living
with you and Mona is deleterious to the high and magnanimous purpose of Art, and I repeat to you in no uncertain terms that I am an artist, a creator beyond question. And, per se, the fumbling fulminations of cerebration and intellect find little fruition in the debauched, distorted hegemony that we poor mortals, for lack of a better and more concise terminology, call home. In no uncertain
terms I give you my love and blessing, and I swear to my sincerity, when I say
in no uncertain terms that I not only forgive you for what has ruefully
transpired this night, but for all other nights. Ergo, I assume in no uncertain terms that you will reciprocate in kindred fashion. May I say in conclusion that I have much to thank you for, O woman who breathed the breath of life into my
brain of destiny? Aye, it is, it is.

Signed.

Arturo Gabriel Bandini.

Suitcase in hand, I walked down to the depot. There was a ten-minute wait for
the midnight train for Los Angeles. I sat down and began to think about the new novel. ~ John Fante,
279:Gifts
'O World-God, give me Wealth!' the Egyptian cried.
His prayer was granted. High as heaven, behold
Palace and Pyramid; the brimming tide
Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold.
Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet,
World-circling traffic roared through mart and street,
His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined,
Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep.
Seek Pharaoh's race to-day and ye shall find
Rust and the moth, silence and dusty sleep.
'O World-God, give me beauty!' cried the Greek.
His prayer was granted. All the earth became
Plastic and vocal to his sense; each peak,
Each grove, each stream, quick with Promethean flame,
Peopled the world with imaged grace and light.
The lyre was his, and his the breathing might
Of the immortal marble, his the play
Of diamond-pointed thought and golden tongue.
Go seek the sun-shine race, ye find to-day
A broken column and a lute unstrung.
'O World-God, give me Power!' the Roman cried.
His prayer was granted. The vast world was chained
A captive to the chariot of his pride.
The blood of myriad provinces was drained
To feed that fierce, insatiable red heart.
Invulnerably bulwarked every part
With serried legions and with close-meshed Code,
Within, the burrowing worm had gnawed its home,
A roofless ruin stands where once abode
The imperial race of everlasting Rome.
'O Godhead, give me Truth!' the Hebrew cried.
His prayer was granted; he became the slave
Of the Idea, a pilgrim far and wide,
Cursed, hated, spurned, and scourged with none to save.
The Pharaohs knew him, and when Greece beheld,
His wisdom wore the hoary crown of Eld.
85
Beauty he hath forsworn, and wealth and power.
Seek him to-day, and find in every land.
No fire consumes him, neither floods devour;
Immortal through the lamp within his hand.
~ Emma Lazarus,
280:One Of The Redeemed
Saint Peter, standing at the Gate, beheld
A soul whose body Death had lately felled.
A pleasant soul as ever was, he seemed:
His step was joyous and his visage beamed.
'Good morning, Peter.' There was just a touch
Of foreign accent, but not overmuch.
The Saint bent gravely, like a stately tree,
And said: 'You have the advantage, sir, of me.'
'Renan of Paris,' said the immortal part
'A master of the literary art.
'I'm somewhat famous, too, I grieve to tell,
As controversialist and infidel.'
'That's of no consequence,' the Saint replied,
'Why, I myself my Master once denied.
'No one up here cares anything for that.
But is there nothing you were always at?
'It seems to me you were accused one day
Of _something_-what it was I can't just say.'
'Quite likely,' said the other; 'but I swear
My life was irreproachable and fair.'
Just then a soul appeared upon the wall,
Singing a hymn as loud as he could bawl.
About his head a golden halo gleamed,
As well befitted one of the redeemed.
A harp he bore and vigorously thumbed,
Strumming he sang, and, singing, ever strummed.
374
His countenance, suffused with holy pride,
Glowed like a pumpkin with a light inside.
'Ah! that's the chap,' said Peter, 'who declares:
'Renan's a rake and drunkard-smokes and swears.'
'Yes, that's the fellow-he's a preacher-came
From San Francisco. Mansfield was his name.'
'Do you believe him?' said Renan. 'Great Scott!
Believe? Believe the blackguard? Of course _not!
'Just walk right in and make yourself at home.
And if he pecks at you I'll cut his comb.
'He's only here because the Devil swore
He wouldn't have him, for the smile he wore.'
Resting his eyes one moment on that proof
Of saving grace, the Frenchman turned aloof,
And stepping down from cloud to cloud, said he:
'Thank you, monsieur,-I'll see if he'll have _me_.'
~ Ambrose Bierce,
281:Rosa Flammea
Beautiful demon, O veil those eyes of fire,
Cover your breasts that are whiter than milk, and ruddy
With dewy buds of the magical rose, your body,
Veil your lips from the shining of my desire!
As a rose growing up from hell you waver before me,
Shaking an odorous breath that is fire within;
The Lord Christ may not pardon me this sweet sin,
But the scent of the rose that is rooted in hell steals o'er me.
O Lord Christ, I am lost, I am lost, I am lost!
Her eyes are as stars in a pool and their spell is on me;
She lifts her unsearchable lids, chill fire is upon me,
It shudders through every vein, and my brain is tossed
As the leaves of a tree when the wind coils under and over;
She smiles, and I hear the heart beat in my side;
She lifts her hands, and I swirl in a clutching tide;
But shall my soul not burn in flame if I love her?
She shall veil those eyes, those lips, ah! that breast.
Demon seeking my soul, I do adjure thee,
In the name of him for whose tempted sake I endure thee,
Trouble my sight no more: lost soul, be at rest!
She smiles, and the air grows into a mist of spices,
Frankincense, cinnamon, labdanum, and myrrh
Rise in sweet smoke about the feet of her
Before whom the sweets of the world are as sacrifices.
Cinnamon, frankincense, labdanum, and myrrh
Smoke in the air, the fume of them closes round me;
Help, ere the waves of the flood of odours have drowned me,
Help, ere it be too late! There has no help come,
And I feel that the rose of the pit begins to blossom
Into the likeness of a lost soul on fire,
And the soul that was mine is emptied of all but desire
Of the rose of her lips and the rose of her bosom.
Ah! she smiles the great smile, the immortal shame:
Her mouth to my mouth, though hell be the price hereafter!...
I hear in the whirling winds her windy laughter,
And my soul for this shall whirl in the winds of flame.
~ Arthur Symons,
282:Arjuna, I will now enumerate the marks of the devotee I most dearly love. I love the one who
harbors no ill will toward any living being, who returns love for hatred, who is friendly and
compassionate toward all. I love the devotee who is beyond ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ unperturbed by pain and not elated by pleasure, who possesses firm faith, is forgiving, ever contented and ever meditating on Me.
“I love the peaceful devotee who is neither a source of agitation in the world nor agitated by the world. I love those who are free of fear, envy, and other annoyances that the world brings, who accept the knocks that come their way as blessings in disguise.
“I love those who do their worldly duties unconcerned and untroubled by life. I love those who expect absolutely nothing. Those who are pure both internally and externally are also very dear to Me. I love the devotees who are ready to be My instrument, meet any demands I make on them, and yet ask nothing of Me.
“I love those who do not rejoice or feel revulsion, who do not grieve, do not yearn for possessions, are not affected by the bad or good things that happen to and around them and yet are full of devotion to Me. They are dear to Me because they live in the Self (Atma), not in the commotion of the world.
“I love devotees whose attitudes are the same toward friend or foe, who are indifferent to honor or ignominy, heat or cold, praise or criticism—who not only control their talking but are silent within.
Also very dear to Me are those generally content with life and unattached to things of the world, even to home. I love those whose sole concern in life is to love Me. Indeed, these and all the others I mentioned are very, very dear to Me.
“Hold Me as your highest goal. Live your life in accordance with the immortal wisdom I have taught you here, and practice this wisdom with great faith and deep devotion. Surrender your mind and heart completely to Me. Then I will love you dearly, and you will go beyond death to immortality. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa,
283:We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right.
It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented.
Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness.
We had found salvation, and I was beat.
The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement.
The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there--if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown.
I felt so proud.
In truth it was probably luck, but I learned another valuable lesson that night: Listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind.
As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why.
First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block.
There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive.
Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you…” He continued, “The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search-and-rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation.”
We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you,” has gone down into Grylls family folklore. ~ Bear Grylls,
284:Arabesque
On a background of pale gold
I would trace with quaint design,
Penciled fine,
Brilliant-colored, Moorish scenes,
Mosques and crescents, pages, queens,
Line on line,
That the prose-world of to-day
Might the gorgeous Past's array
Once behold.
On the magic painted shield
Rich Granada's Vega green
Should be seen;
Crystal fountains, coolness flinging,
Hanging gardens' skyward springing
Emerald sheen;
Ruddy when the daylight falls,
Crowned Alhambra's beetling walls
Stand revealed;
Balconies that overbrow
Field and city, vale and stream.
In a dream
Lulled the drowsy landscape basks;
Mark the gleam
Silvery of each white-swathed peak!
Mountain-airs caress the cheek,
Fresh from the snow.
Here in Lindaraxa's bower
The immortal roses bloom;
In the room
Lion-guarded, marble-paven,
Still the fountain leaps to heaven.
But the doom
Of the banned and stricken race
Overshadows every place,
Every hour.
39
Where fair Lindaraxa dwelt
Flits the bat on velvet wings;
Mute the strings
Of the broken mandoline;
The Pavilion of the Queen
Widely flings
Vacant windows to the night;
Moonbeams kiss the floor with light
Where she knelt.
Through these halls that people stepped
Who through darkling centuries
Held the keys
Of all wisdom, truth, and art,
In a Paradise apart,
Lapped in ease,
Sagely pondering deathless themes,
While, befooled with monkish dreams,
Europe slept.
Where shall they be found today?
Yonder hill that frets the sky
'The last Sigh
Of the Moor' is named still.
There the ill-starred Boabdil
Bade good-by
To Granada and to Spain,
Where the Crescent ne'er again
Holdeth sway.
Vanished like the wind that blows,
Whither shall we seek their trace
On earth's face?
The gigantic wheel of fate,
Crushing all things soon or late,
Now a race,
Now a single life o'erruns,
Now a universe of suns,
Now a rose.
~ Emma Lazarus,
285:The Immortal Strain
“Late Midshipman John Travers (Chester),
aged 16 years. He was mortally wounded
early in the action, yet he remained alone in
a most exposed post awaiting orders, with
his gun's crew dead all round him.”
We told old stories one by one,
Brave tales of men who toyed with death,
Of wondrous deeds of valor done
In days of bold Elizabeth.
“Alas! our British stock,” said we,
“Is not now what it used to be.”
We read of Drake's great sailors, or
Of fighting men that Nelson led,
Who steered the walls of oak to war.
“These were our finest souls,” we said.
“Their fame is on the ocean writ,
Nor time, nor storm may cancel it.
“The mariners of England then
Were lords of battle and of breeze.
The were, indeed the wondrous men
Who won for us the shoreless seas,
Who took old Neptune's ruling brand
And set it in Britannia's hand.
“But now,” we sighed, “the blood is pale,
We're little people of the street,
And dare not front the shrilling gale.
The sons of England are effete,
Of shorter limb and smaller mould,
Mere pigmies by the men of old.”
Then came the vibrant bugle note.
None cowered at the high alarm,
The steady fleets were still afloat,
And England saw her soldiers arm,
131
And readily, with sober grace.
The close-set ranks swung into place.
On sea and shore they fought again,
And storied heroes came to life,
Once more were added to the slain.
Once more found glory in the strife;
Again her yeoman sons arose;
A wall 'tween Britain and her foes.
The eager lads, with laughing lips
And souls elate, where oceans roar,
Or planes the eagle's flight eclipse,
Give all for her, and come no more;
Or where death thunders down the sky
Beside their silent guns they lie;
This boy who, while the iron rains
With seething riot whip the flood,
Fights on, till in his heart remains
No single drop of English blood,
Avers the British strain sublime,
Outliving Death, outlasting Time!
~ Edward George Dyson,
286: Epiphany
Immortal, moveless, calm, alone, august,
A silence throned, to just and to unjust
One Lord of still unutterable love,
I saw Him, Shiva, like a brooding dove
Close-winged upon her nest. The outcasts came,
The sinners gathered to that quiet flame,
The demons by the other sterner gods
Rejected from their luminous abodes
Gathered around the Refuge of the lost
Soft-smiling on that wild and grisly host.

All who were refugeless, wretched, unloved,
The wicked and the good together moved
Naturally to Him, the shelterer sweet,
And found their heaven at their Master's feet.

The vision changed and in its place there stood
A Terror red as lightning or as blood.

His strong right hand a javelin advanced
And as He shook it, earthquake stumbling danced
Across the hemisphere, ruin and plague
Rained out of heaven, disasters swift and vague
Neighboured, a marching multitude of ills.

His foot strode forward to oppress the hills,
And at the vision of His burning eyes
The hearts of men grew faint with dread surmise
Of sin and punishment. Their cry was loud,
"O master of the stormwind and the cloud,
Spare, Rudra, spare! Show us that other form
Auspicious, not incarnate wrath and storm."
The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. Alone
Who towers above fear and plays with grief,
Defeat and death, inherits full relief
From blindness and beholds the single Form,
Love masking Terror, Peace supporting Storm.
279

280

Calcutta and Chandernagore, 1907 - 1910
The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.

He feels the joy of the immortal play;
He has the silence and the unflinching force,
He knows the oneness and the eternal course.

He too is Rudra and thunder and the Fire,
He Shiva and the white Light no shadows tire,
The Strength that rides abroad on Time's wide wings,
The Calm in the heart of all immortal things.

~ Sri Aurobindo, - Epiphany
,
287:Man is comprised of an organism, which is to say an organised form, and of vital forces, as well as a soul. The same may be said of a people. The national construction of a state, while taking account of all three elements, for various reasons of qualification and heredity can nevertheless be chiefly based upon a single one of these elements.

In my opinion, in the Fascist movement it is the state element that prevails, coinciding with organised force. What finds expression here is the shaping power of ancient Rome, that master of law and political organisation, the purest heirs to which are the Italians. National Socialism emphasises what is connected to vital forces: race, racial instinct, and the ethical and national element. The Romanian Legionary movement instead chiefly stresses what in a living organism corresponds to the soul: the spiritual and religious aspect.

This is the reason for the distinctive character of each national movement, although ultimately all three elements are taken into account, and none is overlooked. The specific character of our movement derives from our distant heritage. Already Herodotus called our forefathers “the immortal Dacians”. Our Geto-Thracian ancestors, even before Christianity, already had faith in the immortality and indestructibility of the soul – something which proves their spiritual drive. Roman colonisation introduced the Roman sense of organisation and form. Later centuries made our people miserable and divided; yet, just as a sick and beaten horse will still show traces of its nobility of stock, so too the Romanian people of yesterday and today reveals the latent features of its two-fold heritage.

It is this heritage that the Legionary movement seeks to awaken. It begins with the spirit: for the movement wishes to create a spiritually new man. Once we have met this goal as a “movement”, we must then awaken our second heritage – the politically shaping Roman power. The spirit and religion are thus our starting point; “constructive nationalism” is our point of arrival – almost a consequence. Joining these two points is the ascetic and at the same time heroic ethic of the Iron Guard. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu,
288:Aspiration
MY friend conceived the soul hereafter dwells
In any heaven the inmost heart desires,
The heart, which craves delight, at pain rebels,
And balks, or obeys the soul till life expires.
He deemed that all the eternal Force contrives
Is wrought to revigorate its own control,
And that its alchemy some strength derives
From every tested and unflagging soul.
He deemed a spirit which avails to guide
A human heart, gives proof of energy
To be received in That which never bides,
But ever toils for what can never be—
A perfect All—toward which the Eternal strives
To urge forever every atom’s range,
The Ideal, which never unto Form arrives,
Because new concept emanates from change.
He deemed the inmost heart is what aligns
Man’s aspiration, noble or impure,
And that immortal Tolerance assigns
Each soul what Aspiration would secure.
And if it choose what highest souls would rue—
Some endless round of mortal joys inane—
Such fate befits what souls could not subdue
The heart’s poor shrinking from the chrism of pain.
My friend reviewed, nigh death, how staunch the soul
18
Had waged in him a conflict, never done,
To rule the dual self that fought control,
Spirit and flesh inextricably one.
His passionless judgment pondered well the past,
Patient, relentless, ere he spoke sincere,—
“Through all the strife my soul prevailed at last,
It rules my inmost heart’s desire here;
“My Will craves not some paradise of zest
Where mortal joys eternally renew,
Nor blank nirvana, nor elysian rest,
Nor palaced pomp to bombast fancy true;
“It yearns no whit to swell some choiring strain
In endless amplitudes of useless praise;
It dares to aspire to share the immortal pain
Of toil in mouldering Form from phase to phase.
“To me, of old, such fate some terror bore,
But now great gladness in my spirit glows,
While death clings round me friendlier than before,
To loose the soul that mounts beyond repose.”
Yet, at the end, from seeming death he stirred
As one whose sleep is broke by sudden shine,
And whispered Christ, as if the soul had heard
Tidings of some exceeding sweet design.
~ Edward William Thomson,
289:The Praise Of Pindar In Imitation Of Horace His
Second Ode, Book 4
Pindarum quisquis studet oemulari, &c.
I.
Pindar is imitable by none;
The phoenix Pindar is a vast species alone.
Whoe'er but Daedalus with waxen wings could fly
And neither sink too low nor soar too high?
What could he who followed claim
But of vain boldness the unhappy fame,
And by his fall a sea to name?
Pindar's unnavigable song,
Like a swollen flood from some steep mountain, pours along;
The ocean meets with such a voice
From his enlarged mouth as drowns the ocean's noise.
II.
So Pindar does new words and figures roll
Down his impetuous dithyrambic tide,
Which in no channel deigns to abide,
Which neither banks nor dikes control.
Whether the immortal gods he sings
In a no less immortal strain,
Or the great acts of god-descended kings,
Who in his numbers still survive and reign,
Each rich embroidered line,
Which their triumphant brows around
By his sacred hand is bound,
Does all their starry diadems outshine.
III.
Whether at Pisa's race he please
To carve in polished verse the conquerors' images,
Whether the swift, the skillful, or the strong
Be crowned in his nimble, artful, vigorous song,
Whether some brave young man's untimely fate
In words worth dying for he celebrate,
66
Such mournful and such pleasing words
As joy to his mother's and his mistress' grief affords,
He bids him live and grow in fame;
Among the stars he sticks his name;
The grave can but the dross of him devour,
So small is death's, so great the poet's power.
Lo, how the obsequious wind and swelling air
The Theban swan does upwards bear
Into the walks of clouds, where he does play,
And with extended wings opens his liquid way,
Whilst, alas, my timorous Muse
Unambitious tracks pursues;
Does, with weak, unballast wings,
About the mossy brooks and springs,
About the trees' new-blossomed heads,
About the gardens' painted beds,
About the fields and flowery meads,
And all inferior beauteous things,
Like the laborious bee,
For little drops of honey flee,
And there with humble sweets contents her industry.
~ Abraham Cowley,
290:Matins
Gray earth, gray mist, gray sky:
Through vapors hurrying by,
Larger than wont, on high
Floats the horned, yellow moon.
Chill airs are faintly stirred,
And far away is heard,
Of some fresh-awakened bird,
The querulous, shrill tune.
The dark mist hides the face
Of the dim land: no trace
Of rock or river's place
In the thick air is drawn;
But dripping grass smells sweet,
And rustling branches meet,
And sounding water greet
The slow, sure, sacred dawn.
Past is the long black night,
With its keen lightnings white,
Thunder and floods: new light
The glimmering low east streaks.
The dense clouds part: between
Their jagged rents are seen
Pale reaches blue and green,
As the mirk curtain breaks.
Above the shadowy world,
Still more and more unfurled,
The gathered mists upcurled
Like phantoms melt and pass.
In clear-obscure revealed,
Brown wood, gray stream, dark field:
Fresh, healthy odors yield
Wet furrows, flowers, and grass.
The sudden, splendid gleam
Of one thin, golden beam
Shoots from the feathered rim
127
Of yon hill crowned with woods.
Down its embowered side,
As living waters slide,
So the great morning tide
Follows in sunny floods.
From bush and hedge and tree
Joy, unrestrained and free,
Breaks forth in melody,
Twitter and chirp and song:
Alive the festal air
With gauze-winged creatures fair,
That flicker everywhere,
Dart, poise, and flash along.
The shining mists are gone,
Slight films of gold swift-blown
Before the strong, bright sun
Or the deep-colored sky:
A world of life and glow
Sparkles and basks below,
Where the soft meads a-row,
Hoary with dew-fall, lie.
Does not the morn break thus,
Swift, bright, victorious,
With new skies cleared for us,
Over the soul storm-tost?
Her night was long and deep,
Strange visions vexed her sleep,
Strange sorrows bade her weep:
Her faith in dawn was lost.
No halt, no rest for her,
The immortal wanderer
From sphere to higher sphere,
Toward the pure source of day.
The new light shames her fears,
Her faithlessness, her tears,
As the new sun appears
To light her godlike way.
128
~ Emma Lazarus,
291:The Light In The Window Pane
A joy from my soul's departed,
A bliss from my heart is flown,
As weary, weary-hearted,
I wander alone - alone!
The night wind sadly sigheth
A withering, wild refrain,
And my heart within me dieth
For the light in the window pane.
The stars overhead are shining,
As brightly as e'er they shone,
As heartless - sad - repining,
I wander alone - alone!
A sudden flash comes streaming,
And flickers adown the lane,
But no more for me is gleaming
The light in the window pane.
The voices that pass are cheerful,
Men laugh as the night winds moan;
They cannot tell how fearful
'Tis to wander alone - alone!
For them, with each night's returning,
Life singeth its tenderest strain,
Where the beacon of love is burning The light in the window pane.
Oh, sorrow beyond all sorrows
To which human life is prone:
Without thee, through all the morrows,
To wander alone - alone!
Oh, dark, deserted dwelling!
Where Hope like a lamb was slain,
No voice from thy lone walls welling,
No light in thy window pane.
But memory, sainted angel!
Rolls back the sepulchral stone,
And sings like a sweet evangel:
155
'No - never, never alone!
True grief has its royal palace,
Each loss is a greater gain;
And Sorrow ne'er filled a chalice
That Joy did not wait to drain!
--'Man must be perfected
By suffering,' he said;
'And Death is but the stepping-stone, whereby
We mount towards the gate
Of heaven, soon or late.
Death is the penalty of life; we die,
Because we live; and life
Is but a constant strife
With the immortal Impulse that within
Our bodies seeks control The time-abiding Soul,
That wrestles with us - yet we fain would win.
And what? the victory
Would make us slaves; and we,
Who in our blindness struggle for the prize
Of this illusive state
Called Life, do but frustrate
The higher law - refusing to be wise.'
Rightly he knew, indeed,
Earth's brightest paths but lead
To the true wisdom of that perfect state,
Where Knowledge, heaven-born,
And Love's eternal morn,
Awaiteth those who would be truly great.
With what abiding trust
He rose from out the dust,
As Death's swift chariot passed him by the way;
No visionary dream
Was his - no trifling theme -
156
The Soul's great Mystery before him lay:
~ Charles Sangster,
292:Then Faust descends into the realm of the Mothers — the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up with him the spirit of Helena. But he is not ripe enough to unite this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where desire stirs in Faust, where he wishes to embrace the archetype of Helena with sensual passion. He is therefore thrust back. That is the fate of everyone who seeks to approach the Spiritual World harboring personal, egotistical feelings; he is repelled like Faust. He must first mature; must learn the real relationship between the three members of man's nature: the immortal spirit which goes on from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation; the body, commencing and ending its existence between birth and death, and the soul between the two of them. Body, soul and spirit — how they unite, how they mutually react — that is the lesson Faust must learn. The archetype of Helena, the immortal, the eternal, that passes from life to life, from one incarnation to the other, Faust has already tried to find, but was then immature. Now he is to become ripe so that he is worthy to truly penetrate into the spirit realm. For this purpose he had to learn that this immortality comes to man only when he can be re-embodied repeatedly within physical existence — have new lives extending from birth to death. Therefore must Goethe show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how the soul is placed between the immortal spirit and the body which exists only between birth and death. The second part of Faust shows us this.

Now can Goethe compress all that Faust has achieved since the time of premonitory striving, the time when he despaired of science and turned away from it, till he gained his highest degree of spiritual perception. This he does in the chorus mysticus which, by its name alone, indicates that it contains something very deep. Here, in this chorus, is to be condensed in few words — paradigmatically — that which offers the key to all the world mysteries: how everything temporal is only a symbolism for the eternal. What the physical eye can see is only a symbol for the spiritual, the immortal of which Goethe has shown that he, when entering into this spiritual realm, even gains the knowledge of reincarnation. He will finally show man's entrance into the spiritual kingdom coincides with the knowledge that what was premonition and hope in the physical is truth in the spiritual; what was aspiration in the physical becomes attainment in the spiritual world. ~ Rudolf Steiner,
293:The Birth Of Man
A Legend of the Talmud.
I.
When angels visit earth, the messengers
Of God's decree, they come as lightning, wind:
Before the throne, they all are living fire.
There stand four rows of angels-to the right
The hosts of Michael, Gabriel's to the left,
Before, the troop of Ariel, and behind,
The ranks of Raphael; all, with one accord,
Chanting the glory of the Everlasting.
Upon the high and holy throne there rests,
Invisible, the Majesty of God.
About his brows the crown of mystery
Whereon the sacred letters are engraved
Of the unutterable Name. He grasps
A sceptre of keen fire; the universe
Is compassed in His glance; at His right hand
Life stands, and at His left hand standeth Death.
II.
Lo, the divine idea of making man
Had spread abroad among the heavenly hosts;
And all at once before the immortal throne
Pressed troops of angels and of seraphim,
With minds opposed, and contradicting cries:
'Fulfill, great Father, thine exalted thought!
Create and give unto the earth her king!'
'Cease, cease, Almighty God! create no more!'
And suddenly upon the heavenly sphere
Deep silence fell; before the immortal throne
The angel Mercy knelt, and thus he spoke:
'Fulfill, great Father, thine exalted thought!
Create the likeness of thyself on earth.
In this new creature I will breathe the spirit
Of a divine compassion; he shall be
239
Thy fairest image in the universe.'
But to his words the angel Peace replied,
With heavy sobs: 'My spirit was outspread,
Oh God, on thy creation, and all things
Were sweetly bound in gracious harmony.
But man, this strange new being, everywhere
Shall bring confusion, trouble, discord, war.'
'Avenger of injustice and of crime,'
Exclaimed the angel Justice, 'he shall be
Subject to me, and peace shall bloom again.
Create, oh Lord, create!' 'Father of truth,'
Implored with tears the angel Truth, 'Thou bring'st
Upon the earth the father of all lies!'
And over the celestial faces gloomed
A cloud of grief, and stillness deep prevailed.
Then from the midst of that abyss of light
Whence sprang the eternal throne, these words rang forth:
'Be comforted, my daughter! Thee I send
To be companion unto man on earth.'
And all the angels cried, lamenting loud:
'Thou robbest heaven of her fairest gem.
Truth! seal of all thy thoughts, Almighty God,
The richest jewel that adorns thy crown.'
From the abyss of glory rang the voice:
'From heaven to earth, from earth once more to heaven,
Shall Truth, with constant interchange, alight
And soar again, an everlasting link
Between the world and sky.'
And man was born.
~ Emma Lazarus,
294:L'Aube Spirituelle (Spiritual Dawn)
Quand chez les débauchés l'aube blanche et vermeille
Entre en société de l'Idéal rongeur,
Par l'opération d'un mystère vengeur
Dans la brute assoupie un ange se réveille.
Des Cieux Spirituels l'inaccessible azur,
Pour l'homme terrassé qui rêve encore et souffre,
S'ouvre et s'enfonce avec l'attirance du gouffre.
Ainsi, chère Déesse, Etre lucide et pur,
Sur les débris fumeux des stupides orgies
Ton souvenir plus clair, plus rose, plus charmant,
À mes yeux agrandis voltige incessamment.
Le soleil a noirci la flamme des bougies;
Ainsi, toujours vainqueur, ton fantôme est pareil,
Ame resplendissante, à l'immortel soleil!
Spiritual Dawn
When debauchees are roused by the white, rosy dawn,
Escorted by the Ideal which gnaws at their hearts
Through the action of a mysterious, vengeful law,
In the somnolent brute an Angel awakens.
The inaccessible blue of Spiritual Heavens,
For the man thrown to earth who suffers and still dreams,
Opens and yawns with the lure of the abyss.
Thus, dear Goddess, Being, lucid and pure,
Over the smoking ruins of stupid orgies,
Your memory, clearer, more rosy, more charming,
Hovers incessantly before my widened eyes.
The sunlight has darkened the flame of the candles;
Thus, ever triumphant, resplendent soul!
Your phantom is like the immortal sun!
263
— Translated by William Aggeler
Spiritual Dawn
When in the company of the Ideal
(That gnawing tooth) Dawn enters, white and pink,
The rooms of rakes — each sated beast can feel
An Angel waking through the fumes of drink.
For downcast Man, who dreams and suffers still,
The azure of the mystic heaven above,
With gulf-like vertigo, attracts his will.
So, Goddess, lucid Being of pure love,
Over the smoking wreck of feasts and scandals,
Your phantom, rosy and enchanting, flies
And still returns to my dilated eyes.
The sun has blackened out the flame of candles.
So your victorious phantom seems as one,
O blazing spirit, with the deathless Sun!
— Translated by Roy Campbell
L'Aube spirituelle
when to the drunkard's room the flushing East
comes with her comrade sharply-clawed, the Dream,
she wakens, by a dark avenging scheme,
an angel in the dull besotted beast.
deep vaults of inaccessible azure there,
before the dreamer sick with many a phasm,
open, abysmal as a beckoning chasm.
thus, deity, all pure clear light and air,
over the stupid orgy's reeking track
— brighter and lovelier yet, thine image flies
in fluttering rays before my widening eyes.
the sun has turned the candles' flame to black;
264
even so, victorious always, thou art one
— resplendent spirit! — with the eternal sun!
— Translated by Lewis Piaget Shanks
~ Charles Baudelaire,
295:done to show that this is not so (which is not to say that there are no points of difference between Thomistic and Aristotelian metaphysics). The dominant form of neo-Platonism in medieval Christian thought was Augustinianism. It is little wonder that the Platonic tradition should have seemed agreeable to the early Church Fathers, for it is not difficult to map Christian beliefs and practices into central elements of neo-Platonism. Most fundamentally, just as the Christian distinguishes between the physical cosmos and the eternal kingdom of God, so Plato and his followers distinguish between the material world and the timeless and unchanging realm of immaterial forms. Similarly, Christians commonly distinguish between body and soul and look forward to life after death in which the blessed will enjoy forever the sight of God; while Platonists contrast the mortal frame and the immortal mind that will ascend to eternal vision of the forms. Supreme among these forms is that of the One whose principal aspects are those of truth, beauty and goodness; a trinity-in-unity ready-made to assist Christians struggling with the idea that God is three persons in one divinity. The lesser Platonic forms, including those corresponding to natures experienced in the empirical world, became the ideas out of which God created the world. Even Christian mysticism found its rational warrant in the idea that the most noble experiences consist in inexpressible encounters with transcendental realities. Aristotle came into his own as a philosopher through his rejection of the fundamental tenets of Platonism and through his provision of a more naturalistic and less dualistic worldview. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the enthusiasm for Aristotelianism shown by Aquinas and by his teachers Peter of Ireland and Albert the Great was viewed with suspicion by the Augustinian masters of the thirteenth century. Even so, it is a serious mistake, still perpetrated today, to represent Aristotle as if he were some sort of scientific materialist. In one of the classics of analytical philosophy, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, Peter Strawson explains his subtitle by distinguishing between two types of philosophy, writing that ‘descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, [while] revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure’.7 He goes on to point out that few if any actual metaphysicians have been wholly of one or other sort, but that broadly speaking Leibniz and Berkeley are revisionary while Aristotle and Kant are descriptive. In these terms Aquinas’s thought and thomist metaphysics are fundamentally ‘descriptive’, notwithstanding that they are at odds with the materialism and scientism which some contemporary philosophers proclaim as enlightened common sense. The words of G.K. Chesterton quoted at the outset of this chapter ~ John Haldane,
296:Worthy the majesty of these great finds?
Or who in words so strong that he can frame
The fit laudations for deserts of him
Who left us heritors of such vast prizes,
By his own breast discovered and sought out?-
There shall be none, methinks, of mortal stock.
For if must needs be named for him the name
Demanded by the now known majesty
Of these high matters, then a god was he,-
Hear me, illustrious Memmius- a god;
Who first and chief found out that plan of life
Which now is called philosophy, and who
By cunning craft, out of such mighty waves,
Out of such mighty darkness, moored life
In havens so serene, in light so clear.
Compare those old discoveries divine
Of others: lo, according to the tale,
Ceres established for mortality
The grain, and Bacchus juice of vine-born grape,
Though life might yet without these things abide,
Even as report saith now some peoples live.
But man's well-being was impossible
Without a breast all free. Wherefore the more
That man doth justly seem to us a god,
From whom sweet solaces of life, afar
Distributed o'er populous domains,
Now soothe the minds of men. But if thou thinkest
Labours of Hercules excel the same,
Much farther from true reasoning thou farest.
For what could hurt us now that mighty maw
Of Nemeaean Lion, or what the Boar
Who bristled in Arcadia? Or, again,
O what could Cretan Bull, or Hydra, pest
Of Lerna, fenced with vipers venomous?
Or what the triple-breasted power of her
The three-fold Geryon

The sojourners in the Stymphalian fens
So dreadfully offend us, or the Steeds
Of Thracian Diomedes breathing fire
From out their nostrils off along the zones
Bistonian and Ismarian? And the Snake,
The dread fierce gazer, guardian of the golden
And gleaming apples of the Hesperides,
Coiled round the tree-trunk with tremendous bulk,
O what, again, could he inflict on us
Along the Atlantic shore and wastes of sea?-
Where neither one of us approacheth nigh
Nor no barbarian ventures. And the rest
Of all those monsters slain, even if alive,
Unconquered still, what injury could they do?
None, as I guess. For so the glutted earth
Swarms even now with savage beasts, even now
Is filled with anxious terrors through the woods
And mighty mountains and the forest deeps-
Quarters 'tis ours in general to avoid.
But lest the breast be purged, what conflicts then,
What perils, must bosom, in our own despite!
O then how great and keen the cares of lust
That split the man distraught! How great the fears!
And lo, the pride, grim greed, and wantonness-
How great the slaughters in their train! and lo,
Debaucheries and every breed of sloth!
Therefore that man who subjugated these,
And from the mind expelled, by words indeed,
Not arms, O shall it not be seemly him
To dignify by ranking with the gods?-
And all the more since he was wont to give,
Concerning the immortal gods themselves,
Many pronouncements with a tongue divine,
And to unfold by his pronouncements all
The nature of the world.


author class:Lucretius
~ can build with puissant breast a song, Proem
,
297:An Autumn Garden
My tent stands in a garden
Of aster and golden-rod,
Tilled by the rain and the sunshine,
And sown by the hand of God, An old New England pasture
Abandoned to peace and time,
And by the magic of beauty
Reclaimed to the sublime.
About it are golden woodlands
Of tulip and hickory;
On the open ridge behind it
You may mount to a glimpse of sea, The far-off, blue, Homeric
Rim of the world's great shield,
A border of boundless glamor
For the soul's familiar field.
In purple and gray-wrought lichen
The boulders lie in the sun;
Along its grassy footpath,
The white-tailed rabbits run.
The crickets work and chirrup
Through the still afternoon;
And the owl calls at twilight
Under the frosty moon.
The odorous wild grape clambers
Over the tumbling wall,
And through the autumnal quiet
The chestnuts open and fall.
Sharing time's freshness and fragrance,
Part of the earth's great soul,
Here man's spirit may ripen
To wisdom serene and whole.
Shall we not grow with the asters? Never reluctant nor sad,
Not counting the cost of being,
43
Living to dare and be glad.
Shall we not lift with the crickets
A chorus of ready cheer,
Braving the frost of oblivion,
Quick to be happy here?
The deep red cones of the sumach
And the woodbine's crimson sprays
Have bannered the common roadside
For the pageant of passing days.
These are the oracles Nature
Fills with her holy breath,
Giving them glory of color,
Transcending the shadow of death.
Here in the sifted sunlight
A spirit seems to brood
On the beauty and worth of being,
In tranquil, instinctive mood;
And the heart, athrob with gladness
Such as the wise earth knows,
Wells with a full thanksgiving
For the gifts that life bestows:
For the ancient and virile nurture
Of the teeming primordial ground,
For the splendid gospel of color,
The rapt revelations of sound;
For the morning-blue above us
And the rusted gold of the fern,
For the chickadee's call to valor
Bidding the faint-heart turn;
For fire and running water,
Snowfall and summer rain;
For sunsets and quiet meadows,
The fruit and the standing grain;
For the solemn hour of moonrise
Over the crest of trees,
When the mellow lights are kindled
In the lamps of the centuries.
44
For those who wrought aforetime,
Led by the mystic strain
To strive for the larger freedom,
And live for the greater gain;
For plenty and peace and playtime,
The homely goods of earth,
And for rare immaterial treasures
Accounted of little worth;
For art and learning and friendship,
Where beneficent truth is supreme,
Those everlasting cities
Built on the hills of dream;
For all things growing and goodly
That foster this life, and breed
The immortal flower of wisdom
Out of the mortal seed.
But most of all for the spirit
That can not rest nor bide
In stale and sterile convenience,
Nor safety proven and tried,
But still inspired and driven,
Must seek what better may be,
And up from the loveliest garden
Must climb for a glimpse of sea.
~ Bliss William Carman,
298:Amazing.” Anders glanced around with a start. He found Lucian leaning against the door frame, eyeing him with amusement. “What?” he asked, sitting up straight. “How everything can change so swiftly,” Lucian said dryly, moving into the kitchen. Anders watched him get a glass out of the cupboard before asking mildly, “And what is it you think is changing?” “Three days ago when you first realized you couldn’t read her and that she might possibly be your life mate, you weren’t happy,” Lucian said. He filled the glass with water, took a drink, and then continued, “You didn’t like the idea of anyone stealing so much of your attention, of having something to lose, of becoming a mother hen like me, or of being led around by your dick. Now you want to follow that presently very evident dick upstairs and claim Valerie by any means necessary.” Anders glanced down to note that not only did he still have an erection, but it was very evident in his boxers. Grabbing one of the couch pillows, he dragged it over his lap and muttered, “You caught all that from reading my thoughts, did you?” “Clear as glass,” Lucian said. “Right.” Anders said and grimaced at the knowledge that Lucian had read his less than complimentary thoughts about his worry for Leigh and being led around by his dick. Raising an eyebrow, he asked, “Do I owe you an apology?” “Nope. I can hardly complain when I was eavesdropping on your thoughts.” He took another drink of his water. As Lucian lowered the glass, he swallowed, and added, “But I’d go softly with Valerie. I wouldn’t want you to rush things and blow it.” “Thanks for the advice,” Anders said dryly. “I’m serious,” Lucian said softly. Anders stilled. As a rule, Lucian could be counted on to growl, grunt, or bark. His voice only got that soft, solemn sound on very rare occasions. When it did, you were smart to listen. Anders nodded. “I’m listening.” “She just experienced a nightmarish two weeks at the hands of what she thinks is a vampire. One of our kind,” he pointed out. “Ten days and nights in the flesh and three in fever-driven nightmares.” “But we aren’t vampires,” Anders pointed out. “We’re immortals.” “Semantics,” Lucian said with a shrug. “It won’t make any difference to her whether we are the mythological cursed and soulless beast Stoker wrote about, or scientifically evolved mortals turned nearly immortal by bio-engineered nanos that were introduced into our blood before the fall of Atlantis.” “Scientifically evolved mortals who need more blood than the human body can produce to power those nanos,” Anders added wearily. Lucian nodded. “We have fangs, we don’t age, we are hard to kill and we need blood to survive. To her and many others, we are vampires.” “We drink bagged blood to survive now,” Anders argued. “The immortal who kidnapped and held Valerie and the other women is a rogue.” “True,” Lucian agreed. “Unfortunately, Valerie’s first encounter with our kind was via that rogue. She, understandably, is not going to be very receptive to the possibility that there are good guys among our kind. She needs to get to know and trust us, you especially, before you reveal too much.” Anders nodded, seeing the wisdom in what he said. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “By don’t reveal too much, you aren’t including—” “No,” Lucian said, rare amusement curving his lips. “Bed her all you want, just keep your mouth shut while you do. At least until you think she can handle it. Otherwise,” he warned, “you could lose the chance of a lifetime. ~ Lynsay Sands,
299:By Still Waters
MY tent stands in a garden
Of aster and goldenrod,
Tilled by the rain and the sunshine,
And sown by the hand of God, —
An old New England pasture
Abandoned to peace and time,
And by the magic of beauty
Reclaimed to the sublime.
About it are golden woodlands
Of tulip and hickory;
On the open ridge behind it
You may mount to a glimpse of sea, —
The far-off, blue, Homeric
Rim of the world's great shield,
A border of boundless glamor
For the soul's familiar field.
In purple and gray-wrought lichen
The boulders lie in the sun;
Along its grassy footpath
The white-tailed rabbits run.
The crickets work and chirrup
Through the still afternoon;
And the owl calls from the hillside
Under the frosty moon.
The odorous wild grape clambers
Over the tumbling wall,
And through the autumnal quiet
The chestnuts open and fall.
Sharing time's freshness and fragrance,
Part of the earth's great soul,
Here man's spirit may ripen
To wisdom serene and whole.
70
Shall we not grow with the asters —
Never reluctant nor sad,
Not counting the cost of being,
Living to dare and be glad?
Shall we not lift with the crickets
A chorus of ready cheer,
Braving the frost of oblivion,
Quick to be happy here?
Is my will as sweet as the wild grape,
Spreading delight on the air
For the passer-by's enchantment,
Subtle and unaware?
Have I as brave a spirit,
Sprung from the self-same mould,
As this weed from its own contentment
Lifting its shaft of gold?
The deep red cones of the sumach
And the woodbine's crimson's sprays
Have bannered the common roadside
For the pageant of passing days.
These are the oracles Nature
Fills with her holy breath,
Giving them glory of color,
Transcending the shadow of death.
Here in the sifted sunlight
A spirit seems to brood
On the beauty and worth of being,
In tranquil, instinctive mood;
And the heart, filled full of gladness
Such as the wise earth knows,
Wells with a full thanksgiving
For the gifts that life bestows:
For the ancient and virile nurture
71
Of the teeming primordial ground,
For the splendid gospel of color,
The rapt revelations of sound;
For the morning-blue above us
And the rusted gold of the fern,
For the chickadee's call to valor
Bidding the faint-heart turn;
For fire and running water,
Snowfall and summer rain;
For sunsets and quiet meadows,
The fruit and the standing grain;
For the solemn hour of moonrise
Over the crest of trees,
When the mellow lights are kindled
In the lamps of the centuries;
For those who wrought aforetime,
Led by the mystic strain
To strive for the larger freedom,
And live for the greater gain;
For plenty and peace and playtime,
The homely goods of earth,
And for rare immaterial treasures
Accounted of little worth;
For art and learning and friendship,
Where beneficent truth is supreme, —
Those everlasting cities
Built on the hills of dream;
For all things growing and goodly
That foster this life, and breed
The immortal flower of wisdom
Out of the mortal seed.
But most of all for the spirit
That cannot rest nor bide
In stale and sterile convenience,
72
Nor safely proven and tried,
But still inspired and driven,
Must seek what better may be,
And up from the loveliest garden
Must climb for a glimpse of sea.
~ Bliss William Carman,
300:Hymn to Mercury : Continued

11.
...
Seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat,
He in his sacred crib deposited
The hollow lyre, and from the cavern sweet
Rushed with great leaps up to the mountain's head,
Revolving in his mind some subtle feat
Of thievish craft, such as a swindler might
Devise in the lone season of dun night.

12.
Lo! the great Sun under the ocean's bed has
Driven steeds and chariot—the child meanwhile strode
O'er the Pierian mountains clothed in shadows,
Where the immortal oxen of the God
Are pastured in the flowering unmown meadows,
And safely stalled in a remote abode.—
The archer Argicide, elate and proud,
Drove fifty from the herd, lowing aloud.

13.
He drove them wandering o'er the sandy way,
But, being ever mindful of his craft,
Backward and forward drove he them astray,
So that the tracks which seemed before, were aft;
His sandals then he threw to the ocean spray,
And for each foot he wrought a kind of raft
Of tamarisk, and tamarisk-like sprigs,
And bound them in a lump with withy twigs.

14.
And on his feet he tied these sandals light,
The trail of whose wide leaves might not betray
His track; and then, a self-sufficing wight,
Like a man hastening on some distant way,
He from Pieria's mountain bent his flight;
But an old man perceived the infant pass
Down green Onchestus heaped like beds with grass.

15.
The old man stood dressing his sunny vine:
'Halloo! old fellow with the crooked shoulder!
You grub those stumps? before they will bear wine
Methinks even you must grow a little older:
Attend, I pray, to this advice of mine,
As you would 'scape what might appal a bolder—
Seeing, see not—and hearing, hear not—and—
If you have understanding—understand.'

16.
So saying, Hermes roused the oxen vast;
O'er shadowy mountain and resounding dell,
And flower-paven plains, great Hermes passed;
Till the black night divine, which favouring fell
Around his steps, grew gray, and morning fast
Wakened the world to work, and from her cell
Sea-strewn, the Pallantean Moon sublime
Into her watch-tower just began to climb.

17.
Now to Alpheus he had driven all
The broad-foreheaded oxen of the Sun;
They came unwearied to the lofty stall
And to the water-troughs which ever run
Through the fresh fields—and when with rushgrass tall,
Lotus and all sweet herbage, every one
Had pastured been, the great God made them move
Towards the stall in a collected drove.

18.
A mighty pile of wood the God then heaped,
And having soon conceived the mystery
Of fire, from two smooth laurel branches stripped
The bark, and rubbed them in his palms;—on high
Suddenly forth the burning vapour leaped
And the divine child saw delightedly.—
Mercury first found out for human weal
Tinder-box, matches, fire-irons, flint and steel.

19.
And fine dry logs and roots innumerous
He gathered in a delve upon the ground—
And kindled them—and instantaneous
The strength of the fierce flame was breathed around:
And whilst the might of glorious Vulcan thus
Wrapped the great pile with glare and roaring sound,
Hermes dragged forth two heifers, lowing loud,
Close to the fire—such might was in the God.

20.
And on the earth upon their backs he threw
The panting beasts, and rolled them o'er and o'er,
And bored their lives out. Without more ado
He cut up fat and flesh, and down before
The fire, on spits of wood he placed the two,
Toasting their flesh and ribs, and all the gore
Pursed in the bowels; and while this was done
He stretched their hides over a craggy stone. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley,
301: To the Ganges
Hearken, Ganges, hearken, thou that sweepest golden to the sea,
Hearken, Mother, to my voice.

From the feet of Hari with thy waters pure thou leapest free,
Waters colder-pure than ice.

On Himaloy's grandiose summits upright in his cirque of stones
Shiva sits in breathless air,
Where the outcast seeks his refuge, where the demon army moans,
Ganges erring through his hair.

Down the snowwhite mountains speeding, the immortal peaks and cold,
Crowd thy waves untouched by man.

From Gungotry through the valleys next their icy tops were rolled,
Bursting through Shivadry ran.
Poems from Manuscripts

257

In Benares' stainless city by defilement undefiled
Ghauts and temples lightly touched
With thy fingers as thou ranst, laughed low in pureness like a child
To his mother's bosom clutched.

Where the steps of Rama wandered, where the feet of Krishna came,
There thou flowest, there thy hand
Clasps us, Bhagirathie, Jahnavie or Gunga, and thy name
Holier makes the Aryans' land.

But thou leavest Aryavurtha, but thou leapest to the seas
In thy hundred mighty streams;
Nor in the unquiet Ocean vast thy grandiose journeyings cease,
Mother, say thy children's dreams.

Down thou plungest through the Ocean, far beneath its oozy bed
In Patala's leaden gloom
Moaning o'er her children's pain our mother, Ganges of the dead,
Leads our wandering spirits home.

Mighty with the mighty still thou dwelledst, goddess high and pure;
Iron Bhshma was thy son,
Who against ten thousand rushing chariots could in war endure;
Many heroes fled from one.

Devavrath the mighty, Bhshma with his oath of iron power,
Smilingly who gave up full
Joy of human life and empire, that his father's wish might flower
And his father's son might rule.

Who were these that thronged thereafter? wherefore came these puny hearts
Apter for the cringing slave,
Wrangling, selfish, weak and treacherous, vendors of their nobler parts,
Sorry food for pyre and grave?

258

Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909

O but these are men of mind not yet with Europe's brutal mood alloyed,
Poets singing in their chains,
Preachers teaching manly slavery, speakers thundering in the void.

Motley wear these men of brains!
Well it is for hound and watchdog fawning at a master's feet,
Cringing, of the whip afraid!
Well it is for linnet caged to make with song his slavery sweet.

Man for other ends was made.

Man the arrogant, the splendid, man the mighty wise and strong,
Born to rule the peopled earth,
Shall he bear the alien's insult, shall he brook the tyrant's wrong
Like a thing of meaner birth?
Sreepoor in the east of Chand and Kedar, bright with Mogul blood,
And the Kings of Aracan
And the Atlantic pirates helped that hue, - its ruined glory flood
Krtinasha's waters wan.

Buried are our cities; fallen the apexed dome, the Indian arch;
In Chitore the jackals crowd:
Krishna's Dwarca sleeps for ever, o'er its ruined bastions march
All the Oceans thundering loud.

Still, yet still the fire of Kali on her ancient altar burns
Smouldering under smoky pall,
And the deep heart of her peoples to their Mighty Mother turns,
Listening for her Titan call.

Yet Pratapaditya's great fierce spirit shall in might awake
In Jessore he loved and made,
Sitaram the good and mighty for his well-loved people's sake
Leave the stillness and the shade.
Poems from Manuscripts

259

And Bengal the wide and ancient where the Senas swayed of old
Up to far Benares pure,
She shall lead the Aryan peoples to the mighty doom foretold
And her glory shall endure.

By her heart of quick emotion, by her brain of living fire,
By her vibrant speech and great,
She shall lead them, they shall see their destiny in her warm desire
Opening all the doors of Fate.

By the shores of Brahmaputra or where Ganges nears the sea,
Even now a flame is born
Which shall kindle all the South to brilliance and the North shall be
Lighted up as with the morn.

And once more this Aryavurtha fit for heavenly feet to tread,
Free and holy, bold and wise,
Shall lift up her face before the world and she whom men thought dead,
Into strength immortal rise.

Not in icy lone Gungotry nor by Kashi's holy fanes,
Mother, hast thou power to save
Only, nor dost thou grow old near Sagar, nor our vileness stains,
Ganges, thy celestial wave.

Dukkhineswar, Dukkhineswar, wonderful predestined pile,
Tell it to our sons unborn,
Where the night was brooding darkest and the curse was on the soil
Heaviest, God revealed the morn.
260

Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
~ Sri Aurobindo, - To the Ganges
,
302:To The Immortal Memory And Friendship Of That
Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary And Sir H. Morison
The Turn
Brave infant of Saguntum, clear
Thy coming forth in that great year,
When the prodigious Hannibal did crown
His rage, with razing your immortal town.
Thou looking then about
Ere thou wert half got out,
Wise child, didst hastily return,
And mad'st thy mother's womb thine urn.
How summed a circle didst thou leave mankind
Of deepest lore, could we the centre find!
The Counter-Turn
Did wiser nature draw thee back
From out the horror of that sack,
Where shame, faith, honour, and regard of right,
Lay trampled on?-the deeds of death and night
Urged, hurried forth, and hurled
Upon th' affrighted world?
Sword, fire, and famine, with fell fury met,
And all on utmost ruin set:
As, could they but life's miseries foresee,
No doubt all infants would return like thee.
The Stand
For what is life, if measured by the space,
Not by the act?
137
Or maskèd man, if valued by his face,
Above his fact?
Here's one outlived his peers
And told forth fourscore years:
He vexèd time, and busied the whole state,
Troubled both foes and friends,
But ever to no ends:
What did this stirrer but die late?
How well at twenty had he fall'n or stood!
For three of his four score, he did no good.
The Turn
He entered well, by virtuous parts,
Got up and thrived with honest arts:
He purchased friends, and fame, and honours then,
And had his noble name advanced with men;
But, weary of that flight,
He stooped in all men's sight
To sordid flatteries, acts of strife,
And sunk in that dead sea of life
So deep, as he did then death's waters sup,
But that the cork of title buoyed him up.
The Counter-Turn
Alas, but Morison fell young;He never fell, thou fall'st, my tongue.
He stood, a soldier to the last right end,
A perfect patriot and a noble friend,
But most a virtuous son.
All offices were done
By him, so ample, full, and round
In weight, in measure, number, sound,
As, though his age imperfect might appear,
His life was of humanity the sphere.
138
The Stand
Go now, and tell out days summed up with fears,
And make them years;
Produce thy mass of miseries on the stage
To swell thine age;
Repeat of things a throng,
To show thou hast been long,
Not lived; for life doth her great actions spell,
By what was done and wrought
In season, and so brought
To light: her measures are, how well
Each syllab'e answered, and was formed how fair;
These make the lines of life, and that's her air.
The Turn
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make men better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.
The Counter-Turn
Call, noble Lucius, then for wine,
And let thy looks with gladness shine:
139
Accept this garland, plant it on thy head,
And think, nay, know, thy Morison's not dead.
He leaped the present age,
Possest with holy rage,
To see that bright eternal day,
Of which we priests and poets say
Such truths as we expect for happy men,
And there he lives with memory: and Ben
The Stand
Jonson, who sung this of him ere he went
Himself to rest,
Or taste a part of that full joy he meant
To have expressed
In this bright asterism:
Where it were friendship's schism,
(Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry)
To separate these twiLights, the Dioscuri,
And keep the one half from his Harry.
But fate doth so alternate the design,
Whilst that in heaven, this light on earth must shine.
The Turn
And shine as you exalted are,
Two names of friendship, but one star,
Of hearts the union. And those not by chance
Made, or indentured, or leased out t' advance
The profits for a time.
No pleasures vain did chime
Of rhymes, or riots at your feasts,
Orgies of drink, or feigned protests;
But simple love of greatness and of good
That knits brave minds and manners, more than blood.
140
The Counter-Turn
This made you first to know the why
You liked, then after to apply
That liking; and approach so one the t'other,
Till either grew a portion of the other;
Each stylèd by his end,
The copy of his friend.
You lived to be the great surnames
And titles by which all made claims
Unto the virtue: nothing perfect done,
But as a Cary or a Morison.
The Stand
And such a force the fair example had,
As they that saw
The good and durst not practise it, were glad
That such a law
Was left yet to mankind;
Where they might read and find
Friendship in deed was written, not in words.
And with the heart, not pen,
Of two so early men,
Whose lives her rolls were, and records,
Who, ere the first down bloomèd on the chin
Had sow'd these fruits, and got the harvest in.
~ Ben Jonson,
303:To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius
Cary and Sir Henry Morison.
I.
THE TURN.
Brave infant of Saguntum, clear
Thy coming forth in that great year,
When the prodigious Hannibal did crown
His cage, with razing your immortal town.
Thou, looking then about,
Ere thou wert half got out,
Wise child, didst hastily return,
And mad'st thy mother's womb thine urn.
How summed a circle didst thou leave mankind
Of deepest lore, could we the centre find!
THE COUNTER-TURN.
Did wiser nature draw thee back,
From out the horror of that sack,
Where shame, faith, honour, and regard of right,
Lay trampled on? the deeds of death and night,
Urged, hurried forth, and hurled
Upon th' affrighted world;
Sword, fire, and famine, with fell fury met,
And all on utmost ruin set;
As, could they but life's miseries foresee,
No doubt all infants would return like thee.
THE STAND.
For what is life, if measured by the space
Not by the act?
Or masked man, if valued by his face,
Above his fact?
Here's one outlived his peers,
70
And told forth fourscore years;
He vexed time, and busied the whole state;
Troubled both foes and friends;
But ever to no ends:
What did this stirrer but die late?
How well at twenty had he fallen or stood!
For three of his fourscore he did no good.
II.
THE TURN
He entered well, by virtuous parts,
Got up, and thrived with honest arts;
He purchased friends, and fame, and honours then,
And had his noble name advanced with men:
But weary of that flight,
He stooped in all men's sight
To sordid flatteries, acts of strife,
And sunk in that dead sea of life,
So deep, as he did then death's waters sup,
But that the cork of title buoyed him up.
THE COUNTER-TURN
Alas! but Morison fell young:
He never fell,--thou fall'st, my tongue.
He stood a soldier to the last right end,
A perfect patriot, and a noble friend;
But most, a virtuous son.
All offices were done
By him, so ample, full, and round,
In weight, in measure, number, sound,
As, though his age imperfect might appear,
His life was of humanity the sphere.
THE STAND
Go now, and tell out days summed up with fears,
And make them years;
Produce thy mass of miseries on the stage,
To swell thine age;
71
Repeat of things a throng,
To show thou hast been long,
Not lived: for life doth her great actions spell.
By what was done and wrought
In season, and so brought
To light: her measures are, how well
Each syllabe answered, and was formed, how fair;
These make the lines of life, and that's her air!
III.
THE TURN
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make men better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear:
A lily of a day,
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant, and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures, life may perfect be.
THE COUNTER-TURN
Call, noble Lucius, then for wine,
And let thy looks with gladness shine:
Accept this garland, plant it on thy head
And think, nay know, thy Morison's not dead
He leaped the present age,
Possessed with holy rage
To see that bright eternal day;
Of which we priests and poets say,
Such truths, as we expect for happy men:
And there he lives with memory and Ben.
THE STAND
Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went,
Himself to rest,
Or taste a part of that full joy he meant
72
To have expressed,
In this bright Asterism!
Where it were friendship's schism,
Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry,
To separate these twiLights, the Dioscouri;
And keep the one half from his Harry,
But fate doth so alternate the design
Whilst that in heaven, this light on earth must shine.
IV.
THE TURN
And shine as you exalted are;
Two names of friendship, but one star:
Of hearts the union, and those not by chance
Made, or indenture, or leased out t'advance
The profits for a time.
No pleasures vain did chime,
Of rhymes, or riots, at your feasts,
Orgies of drink, or feigned protests:
But simple love of greatness and of good,
That knits brave minds and manners more than blood.
THE COUNTER-TURN
This made you first to know the why
You liked, then after, to apply
That liking; and approach so one the t'other,
Till either grew a portion of the other:
Each styled by his end,
The copy of his friend.
You lived to be the great sir-names,
And titles, by which all made claims
Unto the virtue; nothing perfect done,
But as a Cary, or a Morison.
THE STAND
And such a force the fair example had,
As they that saw
73
The good, and durst not practise it, were glad
That such a law
Was left yet to mankind;
Where they might read and find
Friendship, indeed, was written not in words;
And with the heart, not pen,
Of two so early men,
Whose lines her rolls were, and records;
Who, ere the first down bloomed upon the chin,
Had sowed these fruits, and got the harvest in.
~ Ben Jonson,
304:To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?

Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.

Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.

Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things - for creation is out-bringing, expression by the Truth and Will - and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.

Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.

Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.

Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.

There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.

All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.

The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Doctrine of the Mystics,
305:Forever fair, forever calm and bright,
Life flies on plumage, zephyr-light,
For those who on the Olympian hill rejoice
Moons wane, and races wither to the tomb,
And 'mid the universal ruin, bloom
The rosy days of GodsWith man, the choice,
Timid and anxious, hesitates between
The sense's pleasure and the soul's content;
While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,
The beams of both are blent.

Seekest thou on earth the life of gods to share,
Safe in the realm of death?beware
To pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye;
Content thyself with gazing on their glow
Short are the joys possession can bestow,
And in possession sweet desire will die.
'Twas not the ninefold chain of waves that bound
Thy daughter, Ceres, to the Stygian river
She plucked the fruit of the unholy ground,
And sowas hell's forever!
The weavers of the webthe fatesbut sway
The matter and the things of clay;
Safe from change that time to matter gives,
Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray
With gods a god, amidst the fields of day,
The form, the archetype [39], serenely lives.
Would'st thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?
Cast from thee, earth, the bitter and the real,
High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring
Into the realm of the ideal!

Here, bathed, perfection, in thy purest ray,
Free from the clogs and taints of clay,
Hovers divine the archetypal man!
Dim as those phantom ghosts of life that gleam
And wander voiceless by the Stygian stream,
Fair as it stands in fields Elysian,
Ere down to flesh the immortal doth descend:
If doubtful ever in the actual life
Each contesthere a victory crowns the end
Of every nobler strife.

Not from the strife itself to set thee free,
But more to nervedoth victory
Wave her rich garland from the ideal clime.
Whate'er thy wish, the earth has no repose
Life still must drag thee onward as it flows,
Whirling thee down the dancing surge of time.
But when the courage sinks beneath the dull
Sense of its narrow limitson the soul,
Bright from the hill-tops of the beautiful,
Bursts the attained goal!

If worth thy while the glory and the strife
Which fire the lists of actual life
The ardent rush to fortune or to fame,
In the hot field where strength and valor are,
And rolls the whirling thunder of the car,
And the world, breathless, eyes the glorious game
Then dare and strivethe prize can but belong
To him whose valor o'er his tribe prevails;
In life the victory only crowns the strong
He who is feeble fails.

But life, whose source, by crags around it piled,
Chafed while confined, foams fierce and wild,
Glides soft and smooth when once its streams expand,
When its waves, glassing in their silver play,
Aurora blent with Hesper's milder ray,
Gain the still beautifulthat shadow-land!
Here, contest grows but interchange of love,
All curb is but the bondage of the grace;
Gone is each foe,peace folds her wings above
Her native dwelling-place.

When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light,
With the dull matter to unite
The kindling genius, some great sculptor glows;
Behold him straining, every nerve intent
Behold how, o'er the subject element,
The stately thought its march laborious goes!
For never, save to toil untiring, spoke
The unwilling truth from her mysterious well
The statue only to the chisel's stroke
Wakes from its marble cell.

But onward to the sphere of beautygo
Onward, O child of art! and, lo!
Out of the matter which thy pains control
The statue springs!not as with labor wrung
From the hard block, but as from nothing sprung
Airy and lightthe offspring of the soul!
The pangs, the cares, the weary toils it cost
Leave not a trace when once the work is done
The Artist's human frailty merged and lost
In art's great victory won! [40]

If human sin confronts the rigid law
Of perfect truth and virtue [41], awe
Seizes and saddens thee to see how far
Beyond thy reach, perfection;if we test
By the ideal of the good, the best,
How mean our efforts and our actions are!
This space between the ideal of man's soul
And man's achievement, who hath ever past?
An ocean spreads between us and that goal,
Where anchor ne'er was cast!

But fly the boundary of the senseslive
The ideal life free thought can give;
And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill
Of the soul's impotent despair be gone!
And with divinity thou sharest the throne,
Let but divinity become thy will!
Scorn not the lawpermit its iron band
The sense (it cannot chain the soul) to thrall.
Let man no more the will of Jove withstand [42],
And Jove the bolt lets fall!

If, in the woes of actual human life
If thou could'st see the serpent strife
Which the Greek art has made divine in stone
Could'st see the writhing limbs, the livid cheek,
Note every pang, and hearken every shriek,
Of some despairing lost Laocoon,
The human nature would thyself subdue
To share the human woe before thine eye
Thy cheek would pale, and all thy soul be true
To man's great sympathy.

But in the ideal realm, aloof and far,
Where the calm art's pure dwellers are,
Lo, the Laocoon writhes, but does not groan.
Here, no sharp grief the high emotion knows
Here, suffering's self is made divine, and shows
The brave resolve of the firm soul alone:
Here, lovely as the rainbow on the dew
Of the spent thunder-cloud, to art is given,
Gleaming through grief's dark veil, the peaceful blue
Of the sweet moral heaven.

So, in the glorious parable, behold
How, bowed to mortal bonds, of old
Life's dreary path divine Alcides trod:
The hydra and the lion were his prey,
And to restore the friend he loved to-day,
He went undaunted to the black-browed god;
And all the torments and the labors sore
Wroth Juno sentthe meek majestic one,
With patient spirit and unquailing, bore,
Until the course was run

Until the god cast down his garb of clay,
And rent in hallowing flame away
The mortal part from the divineto soar
To the empyreal air! Behold him spring
Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing,
And the dull matter that confined before
Sinks downward, downward, downward as a dream!
Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul,
And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream,
Fills for a god the bowl!

~ Friedrich Schiller, The Ideal And The Actual Life
,
306:Ode For The Keats Centenary
The Muse is stern unto her favoured sons,
Giving to some the keys of all the joy
Of the green earth, but holding even that joy
Back from their life;
Bidding them feed on hope,
A plant of bitter growth,
Deep-rooted in the past;
Truth, 'tis a doubtful art
To make Hope sweeten
Time as it flows;
For no man knows
Until the very last,
Whether it be a sovereign herb that he has eaten,
Or his own heart.
O stern, implacable Muse,
Giving to Keats so richly dowered,
Only the thought that he should be
Among the English poets after death;
Letting him fade with that expectancy,
All powerless to unfold the future!
What boots it that our age has snatched him free
From thy too harsh embrace,
Has given his fame the certainty
Of comradeship with Shakespeare's?
He lies alone
Beneath the frown of the old Roman stone
And the cold Roman violets;
And not our wildest incantation
Of his most sacred lines,
Nor all the praise that sets
Towards his pale grave,
Like oceans towards the moon,
Will move the Shadow with the pensive brow
To break his dream,
And give unto him now
One word! -When the young master reasoned
75
That our puissant England
Reared her great poets by neglect,
Trampling them down in the by-paths of Life
And fostering them with glory after death,
Did any flame of triumph from his own fame
Fall swift upon his mind; the glow
Cast back upon the bleak and aching air
Blown around his days -- ?
Happily so!
But he, whose soul was mighty as the soul
Of Milton, who held the vision of the world
As an irradiant orb self-filled with light,
Who schooled his heart with passionate control
To compass knowledge, to unravel the dense
Web of this tangled life, he would weigh slight
As thistledown blown from his most fairy fancy
That pale self-glory, against the mystery,
The wonder of the various world, the power
Of "seeing great things in loneliness."
Where bloodroot in the clearing dwells
Along the edge of snow;
Where, trembling all their trailing bells,
The sensitive twinflowers blow;
Where, searching through the ferny breaks,
The moose-fawns find the springs;
Where the loon laughs and diving takes
Her young beneath her wings;
Where flash the fields of arctic moss
With myriad golden light;
Where no dream-shadows ever cross
The lidless eyes of night;
Where, cleaving a mountain storm, the proud
Eagles, the clear sky won,
Mount the thin air between the loud
Slow thunder and the sun;
Where, to the high tarn tranced and still
No eye has ever seen,
Comes the first star its flame to chill
76
In the cool deeps of green; -Spirit of Keats, unfurl thy wings,
Far from the toil and press,
Teach us by these pure-hearted things,
Beauty in loneliness.
Where, in the realm of thought, dwell those
Who oft in pain and penury
Work in the void,
Searching the infinite dark between the stars,
The infinite little of the atom,
Gathering the tears and terrors of this life,
Distilling them to a medicine for the soul;
(And hated for their thought
Die for it calmly;
For not their fears,
Nor the cold scorn of men,
Fright them who hold to truth:)
They brood alone in the intense serene
Air of their passion,
Until on some chill dawn
Breaks the immortal form foreshadowed in their dream,
And the distracted world and men
Are no more what they were.
Spirit of Keats, unfurl thy deathless wings,
Far from the wayward toil, the vain excess,
Teach us by such soul-haunting things
Beauty in loneliness.
The minds of men grow numb, their vision narrows,
The clogs of Empire and the dust of ages,
The lust of power that fogs the fairest pages,
Of the romance that eager life would write,
These war on Beauty with their spears and arrows.
But still is Beauty and of constant power;
Even in the whirl of Time's most sordid hour,
Banished from the great highways,
Afflighted by the tramp of insolent feet,
She hangs her garlands in the by-ways;
Lissome and sweet
Bending her head to hearken and learn
Melody shadowed with melody,
77
Softer than shadow of sea-fern,
In the green-shadowed sea:
Then, nourished by quietude,
And if the world's mood
Change, she may return
Even lovelier than before. -The white reflection in the mountain lake
Falls from the white stream
Silent in the high distance;
The mirrored mountains guard
The profile of the goddess of the height,
Floating in water with a curve of crystal light;
When the air, envious of the loveliness,
Rushes downward to surprise,
Confusion plays in the contact,
The picture is overdrawn
With ardent ripples,
But when the breeze, warned of intrusion,
Draws breathless upward in flight,
The vision reassembles in tranquillity,
Reforming with a gesture of delight,
Reborn with the rebirth of calm.
Spirit of Keats, lend us thy voice,
Breaking like surge in some enchanted cave
On a dream-sea-coast,
To summon Beauty to her desolate world.
For Beauty has taken refuge from our life
That grew too loud and wounding;
Beauty withdraws beyond the bitter strife,
Beauty is gone, (Oh where?)
To dwell within a precinct of pure air
Where moments turn to months of solitude;
To live on roots of fern and tips of fern,
On tender berries flushed with the earth's blood.
Beauty shall stain her feet with moss
And dye her cheek with deep nut-juices,
Laving her hands in the pure sluices
Where rainbows are dissolved.
Beauty shall view herself in pools of amber sheen
Dappled with peacock-tints from the green screen
78
That mingles liquid light with liquid shadow.
Beauty shall breathe the fairy hush
With the chill orchids in their cells of shade,
And hear the invocation of the thrush
That calls the stars into their heaven,
And after even
Beauty shall take the night into her soul.
When the thrill voice goes crying through the wood,
(Oh, Beauty, Beauty!)
Troubling the solitude
With echoes from the lonely world,
Beauty will tremble like a cloistered thing
That hears temptation in the outlands singing,
Will steel her dedicated heart and breathe
Into her inner ear to firm her vow: -"Let me restore the soul that ye have marred.
O mortals, cry no more on Beauty,
Leave me alone, lone mortals,
Until my shaken soul comes to its own,
Lone mortals, leave me alone!"
(Oh Beauty, Beauty, Beauty!)
All the dim wood is silent as a dream
That dreams of silence.
~ Duncan Campbell Scott,
307:Thus in altemate uproar and sad peace,
Amazed were those Titans utterly.
O leave them, Muse! O leave them to their woes;
For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire:
A solitary sorrow best befits
Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.
Leave them, O Muse! for thou anon wilt find
Many a fallen old Divinity
Wandering in vain about bewildered shores.
Meantime touch piously the Delphic harp,
And not a wind of heaven but will breathe
In aid soft warble from the Dorian flute;
For lo! 'tis for the Father of all verse.
Flush everything that hath a vermeil hue,
Let the rose glow intense and warm the air,
And let the clouds of even and of morn
Float in voluptuous fleeces o'er the hills;
Let the red wine within the goblet boil,
Cold as a bubbling well; let faint-lipp'd shells,
On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn
Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid
Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris'd.
Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades,
Rejoice, O Delos, with thine olives green,
And poplars, and lawn-shading palms, and beech,
In which the Zephyr breathes the loudest song,
And hazels thick, dark-stemm'd beneath the shade:
Apollo is once more the golden theme!
Where was he, when the Giant of the sun
Stood bright, amid the sorrow of his peers?
Together had he left his mother fair
And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower,
And in the morning twilight wandered forth
Beside the osiers of a rivulet,
Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.
The nightingale had ceas'd, and a few stars
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush
Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave,
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.
He listen'd, and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
Thus with half-shut suffused eyes he stood,
While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by
With solemn step an awful Goddess came,
And there was purport in her looks for him,
Which he with eager guess began to read
Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said:
"How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?
Or hath that antique mien and robed form
Mov'd in these vales invisible till now?
Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er
The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone
In cool mid-forest. Surely I have traced
The rustle of those ample skirts about
These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers
Lift up their heads, as still the whisper pass'd.
Goddess! I have beheld those eyes before,
And their eternal calm, and all that face,
Or I have dream'd."-"Yes," said the supreme shape,
"Thou hast dream'd of me; and awaking up
Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side,
Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast
Unwearied ear of the whole universe
Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth
Of such new tuneful wonder. Is't not strange
That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth,
What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad
When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs
To one who in this lonely isle hath been
The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life,
From the young day when first thy infant hand
Pluck'd witless the weak flowers, till thine arm
Could bend that bow heroic to all times.
Show thy heart's secret to an ancient Power
Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones
For prophecies of thee, and for the sake
Of loveliness new born."-Apollo then,
With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes,
Thus answer'd, while his white melodious throat
Throbb'd with the syllables.-"Mnemosyne!
Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how;
Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest?
Why should I strive to show what from thy lips
Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark,
And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes:
I strive to search wherefore I am so sad,
Until a melancholy numbs my limbs;
And then upon the grass I sit, and moan,
Like one who once had wings.-O why should I
Feel curs'd and thwarted, when the liegeless air
Yields to my step aspirant? why should I
Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet?
Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing:
Are there not other regions than this isle?
What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun!
And the most patient brilliance of the moon!
And stars by thousands! Point me out the way
To any one particular beauteous star,
And I will flit into it with my lyre,
And make its silvery splendor pant with bliss.
I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power?
Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity
Makes this alarum in the elements,
While I here idle listen on the shores
In fearless yet in aching ignorance?
O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp,
That waileth every morn and eventide,
Tell me why thus I rave about these groves!
Mute thou remainest-Mute! yet I can read
A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal."-Thus the God,
While his enkindled eyes, with level glance
Beneath his white soft temples, steadfast kept
Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne.
Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush
All the immortal fairness of his limbs;
Most like the struggle at the gate of death;
Or liker still to one who should take leave
Of pale immortal death, and with a pang
As hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse
Die into life: so young Apollo anguish'd:
His very hair, his golden tresses famed,
Kept undulation round his eager neck.
During the pain Mnemosyne upheld
Her arms as one who prophesied. At length
Apollo shriek'd;-and lo! from all his limbs
Celestial * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(last lines): 'Leigh Hunt says of this part of the fragment, "It strikes us that there is something too effeminate and human in the way in which Apollo receives the exaltation which his wisdom is giving him. He weeps and wonders somewhat too fondly; but his powers gather nobly on him as he proceeds." I confess that I should be disposed to rank all these symptoms of convulsion and hysteria in the same category as the fainting of lovers which Keats so frequently represented, -- a kind of thing which his astonishing powers of progress would infallibly have' outgrown had he lived a year or two longer."'
~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ John Keats, Hyperion. Book III
,
308:The Many Mansioned House
THERE looms, upon the enormous round
Where nations come and nations go,
A many-mansioned house, whose bound
Ranges so wide that none may know
Its temperate lands of corn and vine,
Its solitudes of Arctic gloom,
Its wealth of forest, plain, and mine,
Its jungle world of tropic bloom.
Yet so its architects devise
That still its boundary walls extend,
And still its guardian forts arise,
And still its builders see no end
Of plan, or labor, or the call
By which the Master of their Fate
Urges to lay the advancing wall
Of Law beyond the farthest gate.
The mortar oft is red with blood
Of men within and men without,
For hate’s incessant storm and flood
Rage round each uttermost redoubt,
And bullets sing, and shrieks are loud,
And bordering voices curse the hour
That sees the builders onward crowd,
True to the Master Mind, whose power
Impels them build by plumb and line
To give the blood-stained wall increase
And forward push the huge design
Within whose mansions dwelleth peace.
The Master Mind is in no place,
83
It hath no settled rank nor name,
Its mood, as moulded by the race,
Shifts often, yet remains the same
To meditate what millions think,
And shape the deed to fit their thought,
Now raising high who seemed to sink,
Now flinging down their choice as naught.
It lauds what sons obey its calls
When time has come for hands to smite,
And when the hour to cease befalls
It chastens them it did requite;
Yet still so chooses that the change
From war to peace and peace to war
Confirms the mansions in their range,
And builds the far-built wall more far.
Within the many mansions dwell
Nations diverse of tongue and blood,—
Races whose primal anthems tell
How Ganges grew a sacred flood,
Tribes long fore-fathered when the birds
Of Egypt saw Osiris pass,
They that were ancient when the herds
Of Abraham cropped Chaldean grass,
People whose shepherd-priesthoods saw
The might of Nineveh begin,
And folk whose slaves baked mud and straw
Mid Babylon’s revelling fume of sin;
Blacks that have served in every age
Since first the yoke of Ham they wore,
Yellows who set the printed page
Ere Homer sang from shore to shore,
84
Swart Browns whose glittering kreeses held
In dread the far-isled Asian seas,
Fierce Reds who waged from primal eld
Their stealthy warfare of the trees;
Men of the jaguar-haunted swamp
Whose mountain masters dwelt in pride
Of golden-citied Aztec pomp
Ages ere Montezuma died;
Builders whose blood was in the hands
That propped the circled Druid stones,
And Odin-fathered men, whose bands
Storming all winds, laid warrior bones
Round all the Roman mid-world sea,
And held the Cæsars’ might in scorn,
And kept the Viking liberty
That fairer freedom might be born.
The wall defendeth all alike,
The Master Mind on all ordains:—
Within my bound no sword shall strike,
Nor fetter bind, save law arraigns;
No prisoner here shall feel the rack,
No infant be to slavery born,
The wage shall labor’s sweat not lack,
Nor skill of just reward be shorn.
The king and hind alike shall stand
Within the peril of my law,
And though it change at time’s demand
Shall every change be held in awe.
Here every voice may freely speak
Wisdom or folly as it choose,
And though the strong must lead the weak,
The weak may yet the strong refuse;
Thus shall no change be wrought before
The wise who seek a better way
85
Can win, to share their vision, more
Than praise the wise who wish delay,—
That so the Master Mind be strong
Through every drift of time and change,
To fashion either right or wrong
At will, within the mansions’ range.
Of what is wrong and what is right
The Master Mind doth ceaseless hear,
Listens intent to counselling might,
Pity or fury, hope or fear,
Sways to the evil, yet repents,
Sways to the good, yet half denies,
Follows revenge, but quick relents,
And makes its wondering foes allies;
In memory sees its frenzied hours,
And holds those fury-fits in scorn;
In gentlest aspiration towers,
Or grovels as of faith forlorn,
Yet never, never loses quite
The thought, the hope, the glory-dream,
That beacon of supernal light,
The shining, holy Grail-like beam,
The Ideal—in which alone it dares
Advance the circuit of the wall—
The faith that yet shall happy shares
Of circumstance be won for all,—
This is the vision of its law,
This is the Asgard of its dream—
That what the world yet never saw
Of justice shall arise supreme.
86
The Master Mind proclaims as free
Alike, all creeds that men may name,
All worships they devise to be
Their help in hope, or ease in shame;
In Buddha, Mahmoud, Moses, Christ,
Outspokenly may any trust,
Or he whom no belief enticed
May hold the soul a dream of dust,
Yet all alike be free to teach,
And all alike be free to shun,
Because the law of freeman’s speech
Impartial guardeth every one;
If but all rites of blood be banned,
Then may each life select its God,
And every congregation stand
Past dread of persecution’s rod,—
Lo now! Is thus not Jesus set
Transcendent o’er the broad domain—
The gentle Christ whose anguished sweat
Bled for a world-wide mercy’s reign?
Yet in many Mansions flaunt,
As if they deem their place secure,
Legion, whose Christ-defying vaunt
How long, O Lord, dost Thou endure!
Belshazzar’s Feast is multiplied,
Mammon holds fabulous parade,
Thousands of Minotaurs divide
The procurers’ tribute of the maid,
Circe enchants her votary swine,
Moloch, though veiled his fire, consumes,
87
And all the man-made Gods assign
Their victims self-elected dooms.
In large, the suffering and the sin
(Full well the Master Mind doth know),
From luxury and want begin,
And through unequal portions flow.
This ancient wrong doth worst defeat
The immortal yearning of His plea
To save the little, wandering feet,—
“Suffer the children come to me”;
Wherefore, on streets that Mammon makes
165
The Master Mind bends ruthless eye,
Yet calm withholds the blow that breaks,
And leaves that stroke to by and by,
Since faithful memory, backward cast,
Beholds how much hath freedom won,
And lest a pomp-destroying blast
Might shrivel many a guiltless one,
And since it knows that freedom’s plan
To build secure alone is skilled,
And that firm-grounded gain for man
Is only by what man hath willed.—
Hence waits the Master Mind, in trust
That yet the hour shall Mammon rue,
Since, as the mansions grow, so must
Freedom upraise The Christ anew.
But whether He prevail at last,
88
Or whether all shall pass away,
Even as Rome’s great Empire passed
When wrought the purpose of its day,
Still must the builders heed the call
By which the Master of all Fate
Ordains they lay the advancing wall
Of peace beyond the farthest gate.
And, oh! the Master Mind may well
In pride of gentleness rejoice
That in the Mansions none may quell
The lilt of any nation’s voice;
But every race may sing their joy,
May hymn their pride, their glories boast
To listeners glad without alloy—
The primal, wall-extending host,
The founding, freedom-loving race
Whose generous-visioning mind doth see
No worth in holding foremost place,
Save in an Empire of the Free.
~ Edward William Thomson,
309:White Nocturne
The first soft snowflakes hovering down the night,
From one white cloud that hurries beneath the stars,Whispering over the black unfrozen pool,
Silently falling on withered leaves,
Eddying slowly among bare boughs of trees,The music you are to me is as ghostly as these,
Softly falling, softly passing,
Wandering slowly on dreamless air ...
The first soft snowflakes slanting down this night
Melt on the lifted palms of your hands,
Or in the fragrant darkness of your hair ...
One of them finds your lip, and you quietly laugh,
A laught that means to say
'This was the kiss you gave me yesterday,
Or the ghost of it- ah yes, the ghost of it ...
For the ghost of it is all we have to-day ...'
The first slow snowflakes pass
Leaving a sprinkled whiteness on leaves and grass,
The cloud whirls ghostlike against the cold bright stars,
Over the long black boughs that seem to reach
Forlornly after it,
And now it is gone, and suddenly we seem
To walk in silence where before we walked in speech ...
But the silence itself is exquisite,
Like a pause in music, ghostly with overtones,
And, silent, we seem to hear
The echoes of words we spoke and heard last year.
Clearly our footsteps sound on the moistened stones,
Clearly the lamplit hill-street gleams before us,
And silently we climb,
Climbing our tragic destiny together,
From lamp to lamp up the bright street of time.
II
You sit beneath the lamp and talk to me,
With dark hair somehow turned to fire,
Your white hands lie in your lap, or touch your lips,
And your talk, like music, weaving intricately,
Plays upon me. It is a magic of white
334
Touching and changing all familiar things;
It flows in the windy night,
It quietly opens secret doors, it sings,
It returns upon itself, repeats, denies,
Or takes sweet pleasure in silence. And all the while
You sit beneath the lamp, and smile,
Or turn away your eyes.
We remember, you seem to say,Choosing strange words to say it, in another way,How slowly and how inevitably we change,
How what was then familiar now grows strange ...
White valleys fall between us,
Your words become a wind, and heavily blow,
We seem to be crying across a chasm of snow,
Trying to hear the half-remembered words,
Trying to guess what we no longer know.
Yes, life changes, we are never the same ...
Your eyes grow dark with a tiny flame,
You say the words, and wait,
And a sudden terror seizes me, for I fear
That you have divined the things that I have forgotten,
Things that still shine before you white and clear.
Yes, it is strange ... You sigh, your talk flows on,
You touch your hair with your hands, and sigh,
And suddenly then it seems to me that this word,
This word so quietly said, was a terrible cry ...
And I am confused, I desire to touch your hand,
But again white chasms open, the night flows chill,
And something freezes within me, and I am still.
III
The snowflakes tick the frosted windowpane,
The night is mad with the senseless dance of flakes,
The coal fire sinks and shakes;
And I wait by the window, and look along the street,
To where in the snow, beneath a lamp,
A man and a woman stand:
He is leaning close to her face, he takes her hand,
He pleads with her, she tries to turn away ...
What is it he leans to say?
What is the savage music he plays upon her?
What chords profound with memories?
335
He takes her in his arms, and she is his,
She lifts her face in the sombre light,
And together, slowly, they walk away
Whirled about by the mad dance of snow;
Down the white silent street from lamp to lamp they go,
Into the immortal night.
Where have they gone? Where will the white streets lead them?
To what tempestuous or ignoble end?
To what faint peace, or dazzling pain?
The snowflakes whirl and madden my brain,
They whirl in patterns before my eyes ...
And I see them at last in a small and sombre room,
In the yellow lamplight I see them rise;
She smiles, and lifts white hands to touch her hair:
And he waits wearily in the eternal chair.
IV
I would like to touch this snow with the wind of a dream,
With a sudden warmth of music, and turn it all
To petals of roses ... Why is it that I recall
Your two pale hands holding a bowl of roses,
Wide open like lotos flowers, floating in water?
I would like to touch this snow with the wind of a dream;
To hold the world in my hands and let it fall.
We have walked among the hills immortally white,
Golden by noon and blue by night.
I would like to touch this snow with the wind of a dream:
And hear you singing again by a starlight wall ...
You talk to me- what is it that you are saying?
April ... April ... the soft sun falls between,
The deep white chasm, the gorge of the frozen river,
Flashes with white and green;
And we are walking there by the blue river,
By the blue river scaled with golden fire,
Our feet move pace for pace through the tall grasses,
And the earth is light with desire.
Youth ... youth ... so sing we for a space ...
And darkness comes over your face,
A great cloud crosses the golden sky,
Wind shakes the leaves, you fall in the grass and cry;
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Crying silently, hiding your face with your hands.
Youth ... youth ... so sing we for a space,
And you are crying, I know,
Because this day, this youth, this beauty, must go,
Go down into the dust.
The golden river is dark with a sudden gust,
The green of the willows is ruffled grey,
A great cloud crosses the sky,
Wind shakes the leaves, you fall in the grass and cry.
Youth ... April ... we clamour to them to stay,
And a shadow is on us, for we know that love must die.
And rising, then, we see white peaks in the distance ...
White peaks ... quiet ... peace ... eternity.
VI
Do you remember, you who smiled at me,
Under this lamp, here in this world of snow,
Do you remember, long ago ...
What was I going to tell you? What was my dream to be?
It does not matter; for all we need to say
To strike our hearts to a bitter-chorded music
Is 'do you remember ... on a certain day ...'
And all the years fall down from us like leaves,
And all this sinister world is blown away.
Take my hand and dream of youth once more,
Take my arm, and let us walk
On the wet flagstones gleaming yellow with lamps,
And along the sea-furled shore;
Or up a certain flight of marble stairs,
Resting our hands on the green-veined balustrade,
And into a room where a low-toned waltz is played,
And women rise from gilded chairs.
Ah, this has been a golden day,You lean and say,A day like music of strange rich involutions,
Swift and profound and huddled and sweet ...
The wind of it blows even into this room,
There is a hint of forests in this rich gloom ...
You smile, your eyes intensely darken at mine,
I feel the music about us heavily beat,
Waver and vanish and shine.
One white rose with a golden heart-
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Held in the cup of your handTo-day, I muse, all things will find solution,
The universe is simple to understand.
Take my arm, and let us drift
Like leaves when the wind is driven; for the day soon ends.
It is strange how such a day, with such a music,
And one white rose, will make friends more than friends.
VII
White hours like snow, white hours like eternal snow ...
Long white streets jewelled with lights ...
Our steps are muffled and silent, we scarcely know
How swiftly we cross the nights.
I would like to touch this snow with the fire of a dream,
With the mouth of a dream. And turn it all
To petals of roses ... I would like to touch you, too,
And change you into the chord of music I knew.
Can you not change?... Run back again to April?
Laugh out at me from among young lilac leaves?...
Play with your jewels, and sing!
Feeling the earth beneath you float with spring!...
You talk in an even tone, I answer you;
And all about us seems to say
Peace ... peace ... the hills and streets are cold.
You are growing cold.
VIII
Yes, we have changed, slowly and silently changed;
We are the hungry ghosts of the selves we knew;
We sit on each other's tombs and stare at death,
We are not lovely, we scarcely believe it true,And only then with a pang that is almost a cry,That once, long ago, we were the I and the you
Who shivered in music under an April sky.
White night of snow, and a thousand nights like this;
Snow on our lips like the ghost of a kiss;
And a thousand nights in a hollow second of time
We will return again,
Silently, or with trivial speech, to climb
From lamp to lamp up the white street of pain.
Yet, is it better, you say,
Painfully turning your darkened eyes away,
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To lend our souls to a quieter music at last,Remembering, when we will,
The sudden and gorgeous clashings of the past?...
Snow falls about us, the hills immortally white
Wait far off in the undisturbing night.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,
310:At The Gate
THE monastery towers, as pure and fair
As virgin vows, reached up white hands to Heaven;
The walls, to guard the hidden heart of prayer,
Were strong as sin, and white as sin forgiven;
And there came holy men, by world's woe driven;
And all about the gold-green meadows lay
Flower-decked, like children dear that keep May-holiday.
'Here,' said the Abbot, 'let us spend our days,
Days sweetened by the lilies of pure prayer,
Hung with white garlands of the rose of praise;
And, lest the World should enter with her snare-Enter and laugh and take us unaware
With her red rose, her purple and her gold-Choose we a stranger's hand the porter's keys to hold.'
They chose a beggar from the world outside
To keep their worldward door for them, and he,
Filled with a humble and adoring pride,
Built up a wall of proud humility
Between the monastery's sanctity
And the poor, foolish, humble folk who came
To ask for love and care, in the dear Saviour's name.
For when the poor crept to the guarded gate
To ask for succour, when the tired asked rest,
When weary souls, bereft and desolate,
Craved comfort, when the murmur of the oppressed
Surged round the grove where prayer had made her nest,
The porter bade such take their griefs away,
And at some other door their bane and burden lay.
'For this,' he said, 'is the white house of prayer,
Where day and night the holy voices rise
Through the chill trouble of our earthly air,
And enter at the gate of Paradise.
Trample no more our flower-fields in such wise,
Nor crave the alms of our deep-laden bough;
The prayers of holy men are alms enough, I trow.'
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So, seeing that no sick or sorrowing folk
Came ever to be healed or comforted,
The Abbot to his brothers gladly spoke:
'God has accepted our poor prayers,' he said;
'Over our land His answering smile is spread.
He has put forth His strong and loving hand,
And sorrow and sin and pain have ceased in all the land.
'So make we yet more rich our hymns of praise,
Warm we our prayers against our happy heart.
Since God hath taken the gift of all our days
To make a spell that bids all wrong depart,
Has turned our praise to balm for the world's smart,
Fulfilled of prayer and praise be every hour,
For God transfigures praise, and transmutes prayer, to power.'
So went the years. The flowers blossomed now
Untrampled by the dusty, weary feet;
Unbroken hung the green and golden bough,
For none came now to ask for fruit or meat,
For ghostly food, or common bread to eat;
And dreaming, praying, the monks were satisfied,
Till, God remembering him, the beggar-porter died.
When they had covered up the foolish head,
And on the foolish loving heart heaped clay,
'Which of us, brothers, now,' the Abbot said,
'Will face the world, to keep the world away?'
But all their hearts were hard with prayer, and 'Nay,'
They cried, 'ah, bid us not our prayers to leave;
Ah, father, not to-day, for this is Easter Eve'.
And, while they murmured, to their midst there came
A beggar saying, 'Brothers, peace, be still!
I am your Brother, in our Father's name,
And I will be your porter, if ye will,
Guarding your gate with what I have of skill'.
So all they welcomed him and closed the door,
And gat them gladly back unto their prayers once more.
But, lo! no sooner did the prayer arise,
68
A golden flame athwart the chancel dim,
Then came the porter crying, 'Haste, arise!
A sick old man waits you to tend on him;
And many wait--a knight whose wound gapes grim,
A red-stained man, with red sins to confess,
A mother pale, who brings her child for you to bless'.
The brothers hastened to the gate, and there
With unaccustomed hand and voice they tried
To ease the body's pain, the spirit's care;
But ere the task was done, the porter cried:
'Behold, the Lord sets your gate open wide,
For here be starving folk who must be fed,
And little ones that cry for love and daily bread!'
And, with each slow-foot hour, came ever a throng
Of piteous wanderers, sinful folk and sad,
And still the brothers ministered, but long
The day seemed, with no prayer to make them glad;
No holy, meditative joys they had,
No moment's brooding-place could poor prayer find,
Mid all those heart to heal and all those wounds to bind.
And when the crowded, sunlit day at last
Left the field lonely with its trampled flowers,
Into the chapel's peace the brothers passed
To quell the memory of those hurrying hours.
'Our holy time,' they said, 'once more is ours!
Come, let us pay our debt of prayer and praise,
Forgetting in God's light the darkness of man's ways!'
But, ere their voices reached the first psalm's end,
They heard a new, strange rustling round their house;
Then came the porter: 'Here comes many a friend,
Pushing aside your budding orchard boughs;
Come, brothers, justify your holy vows.
Here be God's patient, poor, four-footed things
Seek healing at God's well, whence loving-kindness springs.'
Then cried the Abbot in a vexed amaze,
'Our brethren we must aid, if 'tis God's will;
But the wild creatures of the forest ways
69
Himself God heals with His Almighty skill.
And charity is good, and love--but still
God shall not look in vain for the white prayers
We send on silver feet to climb the starry stairs;
'For, of all worthy things, prayer has most worth,
It rises like sweet incense up to heaven,
And from God's hand falls back upon the earth,
Being of heavenly bread the accepted leaven.
Through prayer is virtue saved and sin forgiven;
In prayer the impulse and the force are found
That bring in purple and gold the fruitful seasons round.
'For prayer comes down from heaven in the sun
That giveth life and joy to all things made;
Prayer falls in rain to make broad rivers run
And quickens the seeds in earth's brown bosom laid;
By prayer the red-hung branch is earthward weighed,
By prayer the barn grows full, and full the fold,
For by man's prayer God works his wonders manifold.'
The porter seemed to bow to the reproof;
But when the echo of the night's last prayer
Died in the mystery of the vaulted roof,
A whispered memory in the hallowed air,
The Abbot turned to find him standing there.
'Brother,' he said, 'I have healed the woodland things
And they go happy and whole--blessing Love's ministerings,
'And, having healed them, I shall crave your leave
To leave you--for to-night I journey far.
But I have kept your gate this Easter Eve,
And now your house to heaven shines like a star
To show the Angels where God's children are;
And in this day your house has served God more
Than in the praise and prayer of all its years before.
'Yet I must leave you, though I fain would stay,
For there are other gates I go to keep
Of houses round whose walls, long day by day,
Shut out of hope and love, poor sinners weep-Barred folds that keep out God's poor wandering sheep--
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I must teach these that gates where God comes in
Must not be shut at all to pain, or want, or sin.
'The voice of prayer is very soft and weak,
And sorrow and sin have voices very strong;
Prayer is not heard in heaven when those twain speak,
The voice of prayer faints in the voice of wrong
By the just man endured--oh, Lord, how long?-If ye would have your prayers in heaven be heard,
Look that wrong clamour not with too intense a word.
'But when true love is shed on want and sin,
Their cry is changed, and grows to such a voice
As clamours sweetly at heaven to be let in-Such sound as makes the saints in heaven rejoice;
Pure gold of prayer, purged of the vain alloys
Of idleness--that is the sound most dear
Of all the earthly sounds God leans from heaven to hear.
'Oh, brother, I must leave thee, and for me
The work is heavy, and the burden great.
Thine be this charge I lay upon thee: See
That never again stands barred thy abbey gate;
Look that God's poor be not left desolate;
Ah me! that chidden my shepherds needs must be
When my poor wandering sheep have so great need of me.
'Brother, forgive thy Brother if he chide,
Thy Brother loves thee--and has loved--for see
The nails are in my hands, and in my side
The spear-wound; and the thorns weigh heavily
Upon my brow--brother, I died for thee-For thee, and for my sheep that are astray,
And rose to live for thee, and them, on Easter Day!'
'My Master and my Lord!' the Abbot cried.
But, where that face had been, shone the new day;
Only on the marble by the Abbot's side,
Where those dear feet had stood, a lily lay-A lily white for the white Easter Day.
He sought the gate--no sorrow clamoured there-And, not till then, he dared to sink his soul in prayer.
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And from that day himself he kept the gate
Wide open; and the poor from far and wide,
The weary, and wicked, and disconsolate,
Came there for succour and were not denied;
The sick were healed, the repentant sanctified;
And from their hearts rises more prayer and praise
Than ever the abbey knew in all its prayer-filled days.
And there the Heavenly vision comes no more,
Only, each Easter now, a lily sweet
Lies white and dewy on the chancel floor
Where once had stood the beloved wounded feet;
And the old Abbot feels the nearing beat
Of wings that bring him leave at last to go
And meet his Master, where the immortal lilies grow.
~ Edith Nesbit,
311:All Is Vanity
How vain is Life! which rightly we compare
To flying Posts, that haste away;
To Plants, that fade with the declining Day;
To Clouds, that sail amidst the yielding Air;
Till by Extention into that they flow,
Or, scatt'ring on the World below,
Are lost and gone, ere we can say they were;
To Autumn-leaves, which every Wind can chace;
To rising Bubbles, on the Waters Face;
To fleeting Dreams, that will not stay,
Nor in th' abused Fancy dance,
When the returning Rays of Light,
Resuming their alternate Right,
Break on th' ill-order'd Scene on the fantastick Trance:
As weak is Man, whilst Tenant to the Earth;
As frail and as uncertain all his Ways,
From the first moment of his weeping Birth,
Down to the last and best of his few restless Days;
When to the Land of Darkness he retires
From disappointed Hopes, and frustrated Desires;
Reaping no other Fruit of all his Pain
Bestow'd whilst in the vale of Tears below,
But this unhappy Truth, at last to know,
That Vanity's our Lot, and all Mankind is Vain.
II
If past the hazard of his tendrest Years,
Neither in thoughtless Sleep opprest,
Nor poison'd with a tainted Breast,
Loos'd from the infant Bands and female Cares,
A studious Boy, advanc'd beyond his Age,
Wastes the dim Lamp, and turns the restless Page;
For some lov'd Book prevents the rising Day,
And on it, stoln aside, bestows the Hours of Play;
Him the observing Master do's design
For search of darkned Truths and Mysteries Divine;
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Bids him with unremitted Labour trace
The Rise of Empires, and their various Fates,
The several Tyrants o'er the several States,
To Babel's lofty Towers, and warlike Nimrod's Race;
Bids him in Paradice the Bank survey,
Where Man, new-moulded from the temper'd Clay,
(Till fir'd with Breath Divine) a helpless Figure lay:
Could he be led thus far--What were the Boast,
What the Reward of all the Toil it cost,
What from that Land of ever-blooming Spring,
For our Instruction could he bring,
Unless, that having Humane Nature found
Unseparated from its Parent Ground,
(Howe'er we vaunt our Elevated Birth)
The Epicure in soft Array,
The lothsome Beggar, that before
His rude unhospitable Door,
Unpity'd but by Brutes, a broken Carcass lay,
Were both alike deriv'd from the same common Earth?
But ere the Child can to these Heights attain,
Ere he can in the Learned Sphere arise;
A guilding Star, attracting to the Skies,
A fever, seizing the o'er labour'd Brain,
Sends him, perhaps, to Death's concealing Shade;
Where, in the Marble Tomb now silent laid,
He better do's that useful Doctrine show,
(Which all the sad Assistants ought to know,
Who round the Grave his short continuance mourn)
That first from Dust we came, and must to Dust return.
III
A bolder Youth, grown capable of Arms,
Bellona courts with her prevailing Charms;
Bids th' inchanting Trumpet sound,
Loud as Triumph, soft as Love,
Striking now the Poles above,
Then descending from the Skies,
Soften every falling Note;
As the harmonious Lark that sings and flies,
When near the Earth, contracts her narrow Throat,
And warbles on the Ground:
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Shews the proud Steed, impatient of the Check,
'Gainst the loudest Terrors Proof,
Pawing the Valley with his steeled Hoof,
With Lightning arm'd his Eyes, with Thunder cloth'd his Neck;
Who on the th' advanced Foe, (the Signal giv'n)
Flies, like a rushing Storm by mighty Whirlwinds driv'n;
Lays open the Records of Fame,
No glorious Deed omits, no Man of mighty Name;
Their Stratagems, their Tempers she'll repeat,
From Alexander's, (truly stil'd the GREAT)
From Cæsar's on the World's Imperial Seat,
To Turenne's Conduct, and to Conde's Heat.
'Tis done! and now th' ambitious Youth disdains
The safe, but harder Labours of the Gown,
The softer pleasures of the Courtly Town,
The once lov'd rural Sports, and Chaces on the Plains;
Does with the Soldier's Life the Garb assume,
The gold Embroid'ries, and the graceful Plume;
Walks haughty in a Coat of Scarlet Die,
A Colour well contriv'd to cheat the Eye,
Where richer Blood, alas! may undistinguisht lye.
And oh! too near that wretched Fate attends;
Hear it ye Parents, all ye weeping Friends!
Thou fonder Maid! won by these gaudy Charms,
(The destin'd Prize of his Victorious Arms)
Now fainting Dye upon the mournful Sound,
That speaks his hasty Death, and paints the fatal Wound!
Trail all your Pikes, dispirit every Drum,
March in a slow Procession from afar,
Ye silent, ye dejected Men of War!
Be still the Hautboys, and the Flute be dumb!
Display no more, in vain, the lofty Banner;
For see! where on the Bier before ye lies
The pale, the fall'n, th' untimely Sacrifice
To your mistaken Shrine, to your false Idol Honour!
IV
As Vain is Beauty, and as short her Power;
Tho' in its proud, and transitory Sway,
The coldest Hearts and wisest Heads obey
That gay fantastick Tyrant of an Hour.
39
On Beauty's Charms, (altho' a Father's Right,
Tho' grave Seleucus! to thy Royal Side
By holy Vows fair Stratonice be ty'd)
With anxious Joy, with dangerous Delight,
Too often gazes thy unwary Son,
Till past all Hopes, expiring and undone,
A speaking Pulse the secret Cause impart;
The only time, when the Physician's Art
Could ease that lab'ring Grief, or heal a Lover's Smart.
See Great Antonius now impatient stand,
Expecting, with mistaken Pride,
On Cydnus crowded Shore, on Cydnus fatal Strand,
A Queen, at his Tribunal to be try'd,
A Queen that arm'd in Beauty, shall deride
His feeble Rage, and his whole Fate command:
O'er the still Waves her burnisht Galley moves,
Row'd by the Graces, whilst officious Loves
To silken Cords their busie Hands apply,
Or gathering all the gentle Gales that fly,
To their fair Mistress with these Spoils repair,
And from their purple Wings disperse the balmy Air.
Hov'ring Perfumes ascend in od'rous Clouds,
Curl o'er the Barque, and play among the Shrouds;
Whilst gently dashing every Silver Oar,
Guided by the Rules of Art,
With tuneful Instruments design'd
To soften, and subdue the stubborn Mind,
A strangely pleasing and harmonious Part
In equal Measures bore.
Like a new Venus on her native Sea,
In midst of the transporting Scene,
(Which Pen or Pencil imitates in vain)
On a resplendent and conspicuous Bed,
With all the Pride of Persia loosely spread,
The lovely Syrene lay.
Which but discern'd from the yet distant Shore,
Th' amazed Emperor could hate no more;
No more a baffled Vengeance could pursue;
But yielding still, still as she nearer drew,
When Cleopatra anchor'd in the Bay,
Where every Charm cou'd all its Force display,
Like his own Statue stood, and gaz'd the World away.
40
Where ends alas! this Pageantry and State;
Where end the Triumphs of this conqu'ring Face,
Envy'd of Roman Wives, and all the Female Race?
Oh swift Vicissitude of Beauty's Fate!
Now in her Tomb withdrawn from publick Sight,
From near Captivity and Shame,
The vanquish'd, the abandon'd Dame
Proffers the Arm, that held another's Right,
To the destructive Snake's more just Embrace,
And courts deforming Death, to mend his Leaden Pace.
But Wit shall last (the vaunting Poet cries)
Th' immortal Streams that from Parnassus flow,
Shall make his never-fading Lawrels grow,
Above this mouldring Earth to flourish in the Skies:
'And when his Body falls in Funeral Fire,
When late revolving Ages shall consume
The very Pillars, that support his Tomb,
'His name shall live, and his best Part aspire.
Deluded Wretch! grasping at future Praise,
Now planting, with mistaken Care,
Round thy enchanted Palace in the Air,
A Grove, which in thy Fancy time shall raise,
A Grove of soaring Palms, and everlasting Bays;
Could'st Thou alas! to such Reknown arrive,
As thy Imagination wou'd contrive;
Should numerous Cities, in a vain contest,
Struggle for thy famous Birth;
Should the sole Monarch of the conquer'd Earth,
His wreathed Head upon thy Volume rest;
Like Maro, could'st thou justly claim,
Amongst th' inspired tuneful Race,
The highest Room, the undisputed Place;
And after near Two Thousand Years of Fame,
Have thy proud Work to a new People shown;
Th' unequal'd Poems made their own,
In such a Dress, in such a perfect Stile
As on his Labours Dryden now bestows,
As now from Dryden's just Improvement flows,
In every polish'd Verse throughout the British Isle;
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What Benefit alas! would to thee grow?
What Sense of Pleasure wou'dst thou know?
What swelling Joy? what Pride? what Glory have,
When in the Darkness of the abject Grave,
Insensible, and Stupid laid below,
No Atom of thy Heap, no Dust wou'd move,
For all the airy Breath that form'd thy Praise above?
VI
True, says the Man to Luxury inclin'd;
Without the Study of uncertain Art,
Without much Labour of the Mind,
Meer uninstructed Nature will impart,
That Life too swiftly flies, and leaves all good behind.
Sieze then, my Friends, (he cries) the present Hour;
The Pleasure which to that belongs,
The Feasts, th' o'erflowing Bowls, the Mirth, the Songs,
The Orange-Bloom, that with such Sweetness blows,
Anacreon's celebrated Rose,
The Hyacinth, with every beauteous Flower,
Which just this happy Moment shall disclose,
Are out of Fortune's reach, and all within our Power.
Such costly Garments let our Slaves prepare,
As for the gay Demetrius were design'd;
Where a new Sun of radiant Diamonds shin'd,
Where the enamel'd Earth, and scarce-discerned Air,
With a transparent Sea were seen,
A Sea composed of the Em'rald's Green,
And with a golden Shore encompass'd round;
Where every Orient Shell, of wondrous shape was found.
The whole Creation on his Shoulders hung,
The whole Creation with his Wish comply'd,
Did swiftly, for each Appetite provide,
And fed them all when Young.
No less, th' Assyrian Prince enjoy'd,
Of Bliss too soon depriv'd, but never cloy'd,
Whose Counsel let us still pursue,
Whose Monument, did this Inscription shew
To every Passenger, that trod the way,
Where, with a slighting Hand, and scornful Smile
The proud Effigies, on th' instructive Pile,
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A great Example lay.
I, here Entomb'd, did mighty Kingdoms sway,
Two Cities rais'd in one prodigious Day:
Thou wand'ring Traveller, no longer gaze,
No longer dwell upon this useless Place;
Go Feed, and Drink, in Sports consume thy Life;
For All that else we gain's not worth a Moment's Strife.
Thus! talks the Fool, whom no Restraint can bound,
When now the Glass has gone a frequent round;
When soaring Fancy lightly swims,
Fancy, that keeps above, and dances o'er the Brims;
Whilst weighty Reason sinks, and in the bottom's drown'd;
Adds to his Own, an artificial Fire,
Doubling ev'ry hot Desire,
Till th' auxiliary Spirits, in a Flame,
The Stomach's Magazine defy,
That standing Pool, that helpless Moisture nigh,
Thro' every Vital part impetuous fly,
And quite consume the Frame;
When to the Under-world despis'd he goes,
A pamper'd Carcase on the Worms bestows,
Who rioting on the unusual Chear,
As good a Life enjoy, as he could boast of here.
VII
But hold my Muse! thy farther Flight restrain,
Exhaust not thy declining Force,
Nor in a long, pursu'd, and breathless Course,
Attempt, with slacken'd speed, to run
Through ev'ry Vanity beneath the Sun,
Lest thy o'erweary'd Reader, should complain,
That of all Vanities beside,
Which thine, or his Experience e'er have try'd,
Thou art, too tedious Muse, most frivolous and vain;
Yet, tell the Man, of an aspiring Thought,
Of an ambitious, restless Mind,
That can no Ease, no Satisfaction find,
Till neighb'ring States are to Subjection brought,
Till Universal Awe, enslav'd Mankind is taught;
That, should he lead an Army to the Field,
For whose still necessary Use,
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Th' extended Earth cou'd not enough produce,
Nor Rivers to their Thirst a full Contentment yield;
Yet, must their dark Reverse of Fate
Roll round, within that Course of Years,
Within the short, the swift, and fleeting Date
Prescrib'd by Xerxes, when his falling Tears
Bewail'd those Numbers, which his Sword employ'd,
And false, Hyena-like, lamented and destroy'd.
Tell Him, that does some stately Building raise,
A Windsor or Versailles erect,
And thorough all Posterity expect,
With its unshaken Base, a firm unshaken Praise;
Tell Him, Judea's Temple is no more,
Upon whose Splendour, Thousands heretofore
Spent the astonish'd Hours, forgetful to Adore:
Tell him, into the Earth agen is hurl'd,
That most stupendious Wonder of the World,
Justly presiding o'er the boasted Seven,
By humane Art and Industry design'd,
This! the rich Draught of the Immortal Mind,
The Architect of Heaven.
Remember then, to fix thy Aim on High,
Project, and build on t'other side the Sky,
For, after all thy vain Expence below,
Thou canst no Fame, no lasting Pleasure know;
No Good, that shall not thy Embraces fly;
Or thou from that be in a Moment caught,
Thy Spirit to new Claims, new Int'rests brought,
Whilst unconcern'd thy secret Ashes lye,
Or stray about the Globe, O Man ordain'd to Dye!
~ Anne Kingsmill Finch,
312:Into The Silent Land
I.
'Oh for a pen of light, a tongue of fire,
That every word might burn in living flame
Upon the age's brow, and leave one name
Engraven on the future! One desire
Fills every nook and cranny of my heart;
One hope-one sorrow-one beloved aim!
She whose pure life was of my life a part,
As light is of the day, could she inspire
My unmelodious muse, or tune the lyre
To diapasons worthy of the theme,
How would her joy put on its robes of light,
And nestle in my bosom once again,
As when life, like an Oriental dream,
Fanned by Arabian airs, glode down the stream
To music whose remembrance is a pain.
The foot of time might trample on my strain,
But could not quench its essence. There was might,
And majesty, and greatness in the love
She blest me with-a blessing without stain,
And that was earthly; since her spirit-sight
Looked through the veil, and learned love's true delight,
Which sainted ministrants alone can prove
Who taste the waters of eternal love:
I pause to think how wonderful has grown
The love that was to me so wondrous here!
Chained as I am to this terrestrial sphere,
Groping my way through darkness, and alone,
Like a blind eaglet soaring towards the sun,
How would her full experience lift and cheer
The heart that never feels its duty done,
And with a girdle of pure light enzone
My flowery world of thought, and make it all her own.'
Thus mused the Minstrel, for his heart was sad.
Death had bereaved him of his bride, while youth,
And looming years of future trust and truth,
60
Knit them together, till their souls were clad
With joy ineffable. Love's great High Priest
Sacrificed in their hearts to Him that doeth
All things well; and such rare, perpetual feast
Of love and truth no mortals ever had,
To keep their memories green, their lives serene and glad,
He sat again within the quiet room,
Where Death had snapped one golden thread of life,
And the pale hand of Sickness, sorrow-rife,
Robbed the plump cheek of childhood of its bloom;
Where she, another Philomena, moved
Like a fond Charity-the coming wife
Ordained to crown his being: And he loved.
The future rose before him, joy and gloom;
For where the sunlight shone, there waved the sable plume.
And yet he failed not, for the coming pain;
The coming bliss would counterbalance all.
The sight prophetic that perceived the pall,
Looked far beyond for the celestial gain.
They do not truly love who cannot yield
The mortal up at the Immortal's call,
Or fail to triumph for the soul that's sealed.
His mind was strung to one harmonious strain:
To give when God should ask, and not resign in vain.
Love was to him life's chiefest victory;
He knew no greater, and he sought no less.
Like a green isle surrounded by the sea
That gives it health and vigour, so was he
The centre of love's sphere of perfectness;
He breathed its heavenly atmosphere; the key
That opened every chamber in love's court
Was in his hand; love's mystery was his sport,
He knelt within love's fane and worshipped thereBut not alone, for one was by his side
Whose love refined his being, filled the air
Of life's irradiated sky with light,
As the sun floods the heavens with a tide
Of renovating freshness, as the night
61
Is mellowed by the ample moon.
And hoping for the recompense
That would be theirs in life's approaching noon,
They built on hope's high eminence
Their airy palaces, whose magnificence
Surpassed the dreams that fancy drew,
So fair the promised land that lay within their view.
And here they lived; just within reach of heaven.
They could put forth their hands and touch the skies
That brooded o'er the walls of chrysolite,
The airy minarets, and golden domes
Of their new home, by Love, the Maker, given,
Steeped in his brightest dyes.
All nature opened up her ponderous tomes,
Whereby they had new knowledge and new sight,
Learned greater truths, and saw the paths of light,
Mosaic-paven, which to Duty led.
And there were secrets written overhead,
In burning hieroglyphs of thought,
From which they gleaned such lessons as are taught
Only to those whom heaven, in graciousness,
Lifts in her arms with a divine caress.
Earth, like a joyous maiden whose pure soul
Is filled with sudden ecstacy, became
A fruitful Eden; and the golden bowl
That held their elixir of life was filled
To overflowing with the rarest draught
Ever by gods or men in rapture quaffed;
Till from the altar of their hearts love's flame
Passed through the veins of the world, and thrilled
The soul of the rejoicing universe,
Which became theirs, and like true neophytes
They drained the sweet nepenthe, and love's rites
Wiped from their hearts all trace of the primeval curse.
The happy months rolled on; each wedded day
A bridal; and each calm and holy eve
Strewed with rare blessings all the sunny way
Through which they passed, with so divine a joy
That in his brain would meditation weave
62
Love's roses into garlands of sweet song,
To deck the brow of his devoted wife.
In this their El Dorado, no alloy
Mixed with the coinage of their wedded life;
The workmen in the mint an honest throng.
No wonder, then, that with go fine a bliss
Informing every fibre of his brain,
His thoughts begat impressions such as this;
Linking their lives together with a chain
Of melody as rare as some divine refrain:
Like dew to the thirsty flower,
Like sweets to the hungry bee,
Is love's divinest dower,
Its tenderness and power,
To thee, dear Wife! to thee.
Like light to the darkened spirit,
Like oil to the turbid sea,
Like truthful words to merit,
Are the blessings I inherit
With thee, dear Wife! with thee.
Afar in the distant ages,
Soul-ransomed, and spirit-free,
I'll read all being's pages,
Unread by mortal sages,
With thee, dear Wife! with thee.
None but the happy heart could carol thus;
A feather stolen from Devotion's wing,
To keep as a memento of the time
When earth met heaven, in life's duteous
And prayerful journey towards the shadowy clime;
Ere they descended from their height sublime,
Where at Love's well-filled table, banqueting,
They sat, and watched the first glad year,
Earthlike, revolving round the sun
Of their true life. Within that sphere
Was the new Eden. One by one
63
The precious moments dropped like golden sands,
And formed the solid hours. No perilous strands
Delayed life's blissful current, as it sped
Through flowery realms with blue skies overhead,
To songs and laughter musically sweet,
As if all sorrow had forever fled;
And idylls, sung with cheerful tone,
Haunted the calm, enchanted zone
That hemmed them in,
Where, like a stately queen,
Sate Peace, beatified, serene,
The guardian, heaven-sent, of this their fair demesne:
--LOVE'S ANNIVERSARY.
Like a bold, adventurous swain,
Just a year ago to-day,
I launched my bark on a radiant main,
And Hymen led the way:
'Breakers ahead!' he cried,
As he sought to overwhelm
My daring craft in the shrieking tide,
But Love, like a pilot bold and tried,
Sat, watchful, at the helm.
And we passed the treacherous shoals,
Where many a hope lay dead,
And splendid wrecks were piled, like the ghouls
Of joys forever fled.
Once safely over these,
We sped by a fairy realm,
Across the bluest and calmest seas
That were ever kissed by a truant breeze,
With Love still at the helm.
We sailed by sweet, odorous isles,
Where the flowers and trees were one;
Through lakes that vied with the golden smiles
Of heaven's unclouded sun:
Still speeds our merry bark,
64
Threading life's peaceful realm,
And 'tis ever morn with our marriage-lark,
For the Pilot-Love of our safety-ark
Stands, watchful, at the helm.
II.
A beautiful land is the Land of Dreams,
Green hills and valleys, and deep lagoons,
Swift-rushing torrents and gentle streams,
Glassing a myriad silver moons;
Mirror-like lakelets with lovely isles,
And verdurous headlands looking down
On the Neread shapes, whose smiles
Were worth the price of a peaceful crown.
We clutch at the silvery bars
Flung from the motionless stars,
And climb far into space,
Defying the race
Who ride in aerial cars.
We take up the harp of the mind,
And finger its delicate strings;
The notes, soft and light
As a moonbeam's flight,
Departing on viewless wings.
Afar in some fanciful bower,
Some region of exquisite calm,
Where the starlight falls in a gleaming shower,
We sink to repose
On our couch of rose,
Inhaling no mortal balm.
The worlds are no longer unknown,
We pass through the uttermost sky,
Our eyelids are kissed
By a gentle mist,
And we feel the tone
Of a calmer zone,
As if heaven were wondrous nigh.
65
A fanciful land is the Land of Dreams,
Where earth and heaven are clasping hands;
No heaven-no earth,
But one wide, new birth,
Where Beauty and Goodness, and human worth,
Make earth of heaven and heaven of earth;
And angels are walking on golden strands.
And the pearly gates of the universe
Of mind and fancy, opening
To the touch of the dainty finger-tips
Of elegant Peris with rose-bud lips,
Delicate, weird-like sounds are born
From the amber depths of odorous morn,
And spirits of beauty and light rehearse
Such strains as the young immortals sing,
When the souls of the blest
Are borne to their rest,
On luminous pinions of light serene
To the fragrant bowers of evergreen;
O'er the rosy plains, where the dying hours
Are changed by a spell to celestial flowers,
Where the skies have a hue no name can express,
For the tone of their passionate loveliness
Surpasseth all human imagining.
Such was their beautiful Dream of Life;
Each stern reality softened down;
Earth seemed to have ended her age of Strife,
And Harmony reigned, her olive crown
Besting on the Parian brow
Of the fair victor, like the gleam
Of the silvery moon on waves that flow
Thoughtfully down the summer stream.
Such was their earnest Dream of Life!
Was it some angel, with jealous eye,
Seeing such love beneath the sky
As never yet in world or star,
Or spheral height, that reached so far
'Twas never beheld by mortal sight,
Or elsewhere, save in highest heaven,
66
Was duly earned, or truly given,
That leagued with the usurper, Death,
To quench the light that shone so bright
That in all the earth there was not a breath
So foul as to change their day to night?
Alone! alone! Oh, word of fearful tone!
Well might the moon withhold her light,
The stars withdraw from human sight,
When Love was overthrown.
The Minstrel's heart how changed!
Love's principalities,
O'er which he reigned supreme,
Usurped by earth's realities;
The realm through which he ranged
Become a vanished dream!
And yet he sung, as sings
The dying swan that droops its wings
And drifts along the stream:
--THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW PANE.
A joy from my soul's departed,
A bliss from my heart is flown,
As weary, weary-hearted,
I wander alone-alone!
The night wind sadly sigheth
A withering, wild refrain,
And my heart within me dieth
For the light in the window pane.
The stars overhead are shining,
As brightly as e'er they shone,
As heartless-sad-repining,
I wander alone-alone!
A sudden flash comes streaming,
And flickers adown the lane,
But no more for me is gleaming
The light in the window pane.
67
The voices that pass are cheerful,
Men laugh as the night winds moan;
They cannot tell how fearful
'Tis to wander alone-alone!
For them, with each night's returning,
Life singeth its tenderest strain,
Where the beacon of love is burningThe light in the window pane.
Oh, sorrow beyond all sorrows
To which human life is prone:
Without thee, through all the morrows,
To wander alone-alone!
Oh, dark, deserted dwelling!
Where Hope like a lamb was slain,
No voice from thy lone walls welling,
No light in thy window pane.
But memory, sainted angel!
Rolls back the sepulchral stone,
And sings like a sweet evangel:
'No-never, never alone!
True grief has its royal palace,
Each loss is a greater gain;
And Sorrow ne'er filled a chalice
That Joy did not wait to drain!
--'Man must be perfected
By suffering,' he said;
'And Death is but the stepping-stone, whereby
We mount towards the gate
Of heaven, soon or late.
Death is the penalty of life; we die,
Because we live; and life
Is but a constant strife
With the immortal Impulse that within
Our bodies seeks controlThe time-abiding Soul,
68
That wrestles with us-yet we fain would win.
And what? the victory
Would make us slaves; and we,
Who in our blindness struggle for the prize
Of this illusive state
Called Life, do but frustrate
The higher law-refusing to be wise.'
Rightly he knew, indeed,
Earth's brightest paths but lead
To the true wisdom of that perfect state,
Where Knowledge, heaven-born,
And Love's eternal morn,
Awaiteth those who would be truly great.
With what abiding trust
He rose from out the dust,
As Death's swift chariot passed him by the way;
No visionary dream
Was his-no trifling themeThe Soul's great Mystery before him lay:
--THE SOUL.
All my mind has sat in state,
Pond'ring on the deathless Soul:
What must be the Perfect Whole,
When the atom is so great!
God! I fall in spirit down,
Low as Persian to the sun;
All my senses, one by one,
In the stream of Thought must drown.
On the tide of mystery,
Like a waif, I'm seaward borne,
Ever looking for the morn
That will yet interpret Thee,
69
Opening my blinded eyes,
That have strove to look within,
'Whelmed in clouds of doubt and sin,
Sinking where I dared to rise:
Could I trace one Spirit's flight,
Track it to its final goal,
Know that 'Spirit' meant 'the Soul,'
I must perish in the light.
All in vain I search, and cry:
'What, O Soul, and whence art thou?'
Lower than the earth I bow,
Stricken with the grave reply:
'Wouldst thou ope what God has sealedSealed in mercy here below?
What is best for man to know,
Shall most surely be revealed!'
Deep on deep of mystery!
Ask the sage, he knows no more
Of the soul's unspoken lore
Than the child upon his knee!
Cannot tell me whence the thought
That is passing through my mind!
Where the mystic soul is shrined,
Wherewith all my life is fraught?
Knows not how the brain conceives
Images almost divine;
Cannot work my mental mine,
Cannot bind my golden sheaves.
Is he wiser, then, than I,
Seeing he can read the stars?
I have rode in fancy's oars
Leagues beyond his farthest sky!
Some old Rabbi, dreaming o'er
The sweet legends of his race,
70
Ask him for some certain trace
Of the far, eternal shore.
No. The Talmud page is dark,
Though it burn with quenchless fire,
And the insight must pierce higher,
That would find the vital spark.
O, my Soul! be firm and wait,
Hoping with the zealous few,
Till the Shekinah of the True
Lead thee through the Golden Gate.
~ Charles Sangster,
313:Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke,
High as the Saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke;
The immortal desire of Immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.

I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,
And never a song sang Niamh, and over my finger-tips
Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,
And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.

Were we days long or hours long in riding, when, rolled in a grisly peace,
An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?
And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed fleece
Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke.

And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge; the sea's edge barren and grey,
Grey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.

Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak,
A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay,
Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk,
Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way.

And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,
And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.

And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men;
The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds,
And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,
The breathing came from those bodies, long warless, grown whiter than curds.

The wood was so Spacious above them, that He who has stars for His flocks
Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from His dew-cumbered skies;
So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their locks,
Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.

And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,
Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow-place wide;
And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft star-flame,
Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.

Golden the nails of his bird-clawS, flung loosely along the dim ground;
In one was a branch soft-shining with bells more many than sighs
In midst of an old man's bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around
Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.

And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; no, not since the world began,
In realms where the handsome were many, nor in glamours by demons flung,
Have faces alive with such beauty been known to the salt eye of man,
Yet weary with passions that faded when the sevenfold seas were young.

And I gazed on the bell-branch, sleep's forebear, far sung by the Sennachies.
I saw how those slumbererS, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep,
Of wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the wandering seas,
Laid hands on the bell-branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.

Snatching the horn of Niamh, I blew a long lingering note.
Came sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like the stirring of flies.
He, shaking the fold of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat,
Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.

I cried, 'Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!
And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,
That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;
Your questioner, Oisin, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands.'

Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their dreams;
His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;
Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping a sound in faint streams
Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame.

Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth,
The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone
Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the whole of my mirth,
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low;
And the pearl-pale Niamh lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast;
And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years 'gan flow;
Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.

And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot
How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when the fallen on fallen lie rolled;
How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron's plot,
And the name of the demon whose hammer made Conchubar's sword-blade of old.

And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot
That the spear-shaft is made out of ashwood, the shield out of osier and hide;
How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spearhead's burning spot;
How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.

But in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust with their throngs,
Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales;
Came by me the kings of the Red Branch, with roaring of laughter and songs,
Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing the tempest with sails.

Came Blanid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk,
Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry,
Dark Balor, as old as a forest, car-borne, his mighty head sunk
Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death making eye.

And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams,
And Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone.
So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of dreams,
In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.

At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold;
When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness they love going by;
When a glow-worm was green on a grass-leaf, lured from his lair in the mould;
Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh.

So watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell,
Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air,
A starling like them that forgathered 'neath a moon waking white as a shell
When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sceolan, Lomair.

I awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran,
Thrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep
That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man,
And that I would leave the Immortals, their dimness, their dews dropping sleep.

O, had you seen beautiful Niamh grow white as the waters are white,
Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:
But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight
Of twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept.

I died, 'O Niamh! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day,
I must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young
In the Fenians' dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,
Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan's slanderous tongue!

'Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle,
Remembering its long-oared companions, sails turning to threadbare rags;
No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile,
But to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags.'

Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought,
Watched her those seamless faces from the valley's glimmering girth;
As she murmured, 'O wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-branch is naught,
For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.

'Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do,
And softly come to your Niamh over the tops of the tide;
But weep for your Niamh, O Oisin, weep; for if only your shoe
Brush lightly as haymouse earth's pebbles, you will come no more to my side.

'O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?'
I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan:
'I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto breast
We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone

'In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.
Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon who sleeps on her nest,
Nor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea's vague drum?
O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?'

The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark,
Where ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark:
In a reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling' ground.

And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and grey,
Grey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away',
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

And the winds made the sands on the sea's edge turning and turning go,
As my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak,
I rode away on the surges, where, high aS the saddle-bow,
Fled foam underneath me, and round me, a wandering and milky smoke.

Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret; nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.

Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown.

If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing the sand and the shells,
Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells,
I would leave no saint's head on his body from Rachlin to Bera of ships.

Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and woodwork made,
Your bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the rath,
And a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade,

Or weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet;
While in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious, their chieftains stood,
Awaiting in patience the straw-death, croziered one, caught in your net:
Went the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring of wind in a wood.

And before I went by them so huge and so speedy with eyes so bright,
Came after the hard gaze of youth, or an old man lifted his head:
And I rode and I rode, and I cried out, 'The Fenians hunt wolves in the night,
So sleep thee by daytime.' A voice cried, 'The Fenians a long time are dead.'

A whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh of his face as dried grass,
And in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad as a child without milk-
And the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how men sorrow and pass,
And their hound, and their horse, and their love, and their eyes that glimmer like silk.

And wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, 'In old age they ceased';
And my tears were larger than berries, and I murmured, 'Where white clouds lie spread
On Crevroe or broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast
On the floors of the gods.' He cried, 'No, the gods a long time are dead.'

And lonely and longing for Niamh, I shivered and turned me about,
The heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart;
I turned and rode to the westward, and followed the sea's old shout
Till I saw where Maeve lies sleeping till starlight and midnight part.

And there at the foot of the mountain, two carried a sack full of sand,
They bore it with staggering and sweating, but fell with their burden at length.
Leaning down from the gem-studded saddle, I flung it five yards with my hand,
With a sob for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenians' old strength.

The rest you have heard of, O croziered man; how, when divided the girth,
I fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly;
And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose, and walked on the earth,
A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle on his beard never dry'.

How the men of the sand-sack showed me a church with its belfry in air;
Sorry place, where for swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes the crozier gleams;
What place have Caoilte and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair?
Speak, you too are old with your memories, an old man surrounded with dreams.

S. Patrick. Where the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones is their place;
Where the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide Hell,
Watching the blessed ones move far off, and the smile on God's face,
Between them a gateway of brass, and the howl of the angels who fell.

Oisin. Put the staff in my hands; for I go to the Fenians, O cleric, to chaunt
The war-songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds with their Breath,
Innumerable, singing, exultant; the clay underneath them shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them in death.

And demons afraid in their darkness; deep horror of eyes and of wings,
Afraid, their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep;
Hearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings,
Hearing Hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep.

We will tear out the flaming stones, and batter the gateway of brass
And enter, and none sayeth 'No' when there enters the strongly armed guest;
Make clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young grass;
Then feast, making converse of wars, and of old wounds, and turn to our rest.

S. Patrick. On the flaming stones, without refuge, the limbs of the Fenians are lost;
None war on the masters of Hell, who could break up the world in their rage;
But kneel and wear out the flags and pray for your soul that is lost
Through the demon love of its youth and its godless and passionate age.

Oisin. Ah me! to be Shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain,
Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear;
All emptied of purple hours as a beggar's cloak in the rain,
As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir.

It were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.

~ William Butler Yeats, The Wanderings Of Oisin - Book III
,
314:Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
IsLove, forgive us!cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermits fast:
That is a doubtful tale from faery land,
Hard for the non-elect to understand.
Had Lycius livd to hand his story down,
He might have given the moral a fresh frown,
Or clenchd it quite: but too short was their bliss
To breed distrust and hate, that make the soft voice hiss.
Besides, there, nightly, with terrific glare,
Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair,
Hoverd and buzzd his wings, with fearful roar,
Above the lintel of their chamber door,
And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor.

For all this came a ruin: side by side
They were enthroned, in the even tide,
Upon a couch, near to a curtaining
Whose airy texture, from a golden string,
Floated into the room, and let appear
Unveild the summer heaven, blue and clear,
Betwixt two marble shafts:there they reposed,
Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed,
Saving a tythe which love still open kept,
That they might see each other while they almost slept;
When from the slope side of a suburb hill,
Deafening the swallows twitter, came a thrill
Of trumpetsLycius startedthe sounds fled,
But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.
For the first time, since first he harbourd in
That purple-lined palace of sweet sin,
His spirit passd beyond its golden bourn
Into the noisy world almost forsworn.
The lady, ever watchful, penetrant,
Saw this with pain, so arguing a want
Of something more, more than her empery
Of joys; and she began to moan and sigh
Because he mused beyond her, knowing well
That but a moments thought is passions passing bell.
Why do you sigh, fair creature? whisperd he:
Why do you think? returnd she tenderly:
You have deserted me;where am I now?
Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow:
No, no, you have dismissd me; and I go
From your breast houseless: ay, it must be so.
He answerd, bending to her open eyes,
Where he was mirrord small in paradise,
My silver planet, both of eve and morn!
Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
While I am striving how to fill my heart
With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
Ay, a sweet kissyou see your mighty woes.
My thoughts! shall I unveil them? Listen then!
What mortal hath a prize, that other men
May be confounded and abashd withal,
But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,
And triumph, as in thee I should rejoice
Amid the hoarse alarm of Corinths voice.
Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar,
While through the thronged streets your bridal car
Wheels round its dazzling spokes.The ladys cheek
Trembled; she nothing said, but, pale and meek,
Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain
Of sorrows at his words; at last with pain
Beseeching him, the while his hand she wrung,
To change his purpose. He thereat was stung,
Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim
Her wild and timid nature to his aim:
Besides, for all his love, in self despite,
Against his better self, he took delight
Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new.
His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous as twas possible
In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell.
Fine was the mitigated fury, like
Apollos presence when in act to strike
The serpentHa, the serpent! certes, she
Was none. She burnt, she lovd the tyranny,
And, all subdued, consented to the hour
When to the bridal he should lead his paramour.
Whispering in midnight silence, said the youth,
Sure some sweet name thou hast, though, by my truth,
I have not askd it, ever thinking thee
Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny,
As still I do. Hast any mortal name,
Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?
Or friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth,
To share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth?
I have no friends, said Lamia, no, not one;
My presence in wide Corinth hardly known:
My parents bones are in their dusty urns
Sepulchred, where no kindled incense burns,
Seeing all their luckless race are dead, save me,
And I neglect the holy rite for thee.
Even as you list invite your many guests;
But if, as now it seems, your vision rests
With any pleasure on me, do not bid
Old Apolloniusfrom him keep me hid.
Lycius, perplexd at words so blind and blank,
Made close inquiry; from whose touch she shrank,
Feigning a sleep; and he to the dull shade
Of deep sleep in a moment was betrayd.

It was the custom then to bring away
The bride from home at blushing shut of day,
Veild, in a chariot, heralded along
By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage song,
With other pageants: but this fair unknown
Had not a friend. So being left alone,
(Lycius was gone to summon all his kin)
And knowing surely she could never win
His foolish heart from its mad pompousness,
She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress
The misery in fit magnificence.
She did so, but tis doubtful how and whence
Came, and who were her subtle servitors.
About the halls, and to and from the doors,
There was a noise of wings, till in short space
The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade
Of palm and plantain, met from either side,
High in the midst, in honour of the bride:
Two palms and then two plantains, and so on,
From either side their stems branchd one to one
All down the aisled place; and beneath all
There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall.
So canopied, lay an untasted feast
Teeming with odours. Lamia, regal drest,
Silently paced about, and as she went,
In pale contented sort of discontent,
Missiond her viewless servants to enrich
The fretted splendour of each nook and niche.
Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first,
Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst
Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees,
And with the larger wove in small intricacies.
Approving all, she faded at self-will,
And shut the chamber up, close, hushd and still,
Complete and ready for the revels rude,
When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude.

The day appeard, and all the gossip rout.
O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout
The silent-blessing fate, warm cloisterd hours,
And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
The herd approachd; each guest, with busy brain,
Arriving at the portal, gazd amain,
And enterd marveling: for they knew the street,
Rememberd it from childhood all complete
Without a gap, yet neer before had seen
That royal porch, that high-built fair demesne;
So in they hurried all, mazd, curious and keen:
Save one, who lookd thereon with eye severe,
And with calm-planted steps walkd in austere;
Twas Apollonius: something too he laughd,
As though some knotty problem, that had daft
His patient thought, had now begun to thaw,
And solve and melt:twas just as he foresaw.

He met within the murmurous vestibule
His young disciple. Tis no common rule,
Lycius, said he, for uninvited guest
To force himself upon you, and infest
With an unbidden presence the bright throng
Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong,
And you forgive me. Lycius blushd, and led
The old man through the inner doors broad-spread;
With reconciling words and courteous mien
Turning into sweet milk the sophists spleen.

Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room,
Filld with pervading brilliance and perfume:
Before each lucid pannel fuming stood
A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood,
Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
Whose slender feet wide-swervd upon the soft
Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke
From fifty censers their light voyage took
To the high roof, still mimickd as they rose
Along the mirrord walls by twin-clouds odorous.
Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats insphered,
High as the level of a mans breast reard
On libbards paws, upheld the heavy gold
Of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told
Of Ceres horn, and, in huge vessels, wine
Came from the gloomy tun with merry shine.
Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood,
Each shrining in the midst the image of a God.

When in an antichamber every guest
Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure pressd,
By ministring slaves, upon his hands and feet,
And fragrant oils with ceremony meet
Pourd on his hair, they all movd to the feast
In white robes, and themselves in order placed
Around the silken couches, wondering
Whence all this mighty cost and blaze of wealth could spring.

Soft went the music the soft air along,
While fluent Greek a voweld undersong
Kept up among the guests discoursing low
At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow;
But when the happy vintage touchd their brains,
Louder they talk, and louder come the strains
Of powerful instruments:the gorgeous dyes,
The space, the splendour of the draperies,
The roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer,
Beautiful slaves, and Lamias self, appear,
Now, when the wine has done its rosy deed,
And every soul from human trammels freed,
No more so strange; for merry wine, sweet wine,
Will make Elysian shades not too fair, too divine.
Soon was God Bacchus at meridian height;
Flushd were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright:
Garlands of every green, and every scent
From vales deflowerd, or forest-trees branch rent,
In baskets of bright osierd gold were brought
High as the handles heapd, to suit the thought
Of every guest; that each, as he did please,
Might fancy-fit his brows, silk-pillowd at his ease.

What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adders tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angels wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-persond Lamia melt into a shade.

By her glad Lycius sitting, in chief place,
Scarce saw in all the room another face,
Till, checking his love trance, a cup he took
Full brimmd, and opposite sent forth a look
Cross the broad table, to beseech a glance
From his old teachers wrinkled countenance,
And pledge him. The bald-head philosopher
Had fixd his eye, without a twinkle or stir
Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride,
Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride.
Lycius then pressd her hand, with devout touch,
As pale it lay upon the rosy couch:
Twas icy, and the cold ran through his veins;
Then sudden it grew hot, and all the pains
Of an unnatural heat shot to his heart.
Lamia, what means this? Wherefore dost thou start?
Knowst thou that man? Poor Lamia answerd not.
He gazd into her eyes, and not a jot
Ownd they the lovelorn piteous appeal:
More, more he gazd: his human senses reel:
Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs;
There was no recognition in those orbs.
Lamia! he criedand no soft-toned reply.
The many heard, and the loud revelry
Grew hush; the stately music no more breathes;
The myrtle sickend in a thousand wreaths.
By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased;
A deadly silence step by step increased,
Until it seemd a horrid presence there,
And not a man but felt the terror in his hair.
Lamia! he shriekd; and nothing but the shriek
With its sad echo did the silence break.
Begone, foul dream! he cried, gazing again
In the brides face, where now no azure vein
Wanderd on fair-spaced temples; no soft bloom
Misted the cheek; no passion to illume
The deep-recessed vision:all was blight;
Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white.
Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!
Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban
Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images
Here represent their shadowy presences,
May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn
Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn,
In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright
Of conscience, for their long offended might,
For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries,
Unlawful magic, and enticing lies.
Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch!
Mark how, possessd, his lashless eyelids stretch
Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see!
My sweet bride withers at their potency.
Fool! said the sophist, in an under-tone
Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan
From Lycius answerd, as heart-struck and lost,
He sank supine beside the aching ghost.
Fool! Fool! repeated he, while his eyes still
Relented not, nor movd; from every ill
Of life have I preservd thee to this day,
And shall I see thee made a serpents prey?
Then Lamia breathd death breath; the sophists eye,
Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,
Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well
As her weak hand could any meaning tell,
Motiond him to be silent; vainly so,
He lookd and lookd again a level--No!
A Serpent! echoed he; no sooner said,
Than with a frightful scream she vanished:
And Lycius arms were empty of delight,
As were his limbs of life, from that same night.
On the high couch he lay!his friends came round--
Supported himno pulse, or breath they found,
And, in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound.
(line 50): Keats adopted here, in the manuscript, a pointing notice before: he placed the note of interrogation at the end of this line, a semi-colon at the end of line 51, and a full-stop at the end of line 54. The pointing of the text is from the first edition.

(lines 124-6): Leigh Hunt notes - "This is the very quintessence of the romantic."

(line 140): Rejected reading, "wainscoated" for "marbled plain."

(line 239): In the Autobiography of Haydon, as edited by the late Mr. Tom Taylor, we read at page 354 of Volume 1 (edition of 1853) that Keats and Lamb, at one of the meetings at Haydon's house, agreed that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours." This meeting was what Haydon calls "the immortal dinner" of the 28th of December 1817; so that the idea appears to have persisted in Keats's mind.

Last line: The following extract is appended in Keats's edition as a note to the last line of Lamia:--
"Philostratus, in his fourth book 'de Vita Apollonii', hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who, by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus' gold, descried by Homer, no substance but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece." ~ John Keats, Lamia. Part II
,
315:I
WHEN the pine tosses its cones
To the song of its waterfall tones,
Who speeds to the woodland walks?
To birds and trees who talks?
Csar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side,
Not hook nor line hath he;
He stands in the meadows wide,
Nor gun nor scythe to see.
Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.
In the wood he travels glad,
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.
Knowledge this man prizes best
Seems fantastic to the rest:
Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,
Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds,
Boughs on which the wild bees settle,
Tints that spot the violet's petal,
Why Nature loves the number five,
And why the star-form she repeats:
Lover of all things alive,
Wonderer at all he meets,
Wonderer chiefly at himself,
Who can tell him what he is?
Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities?

2
And such I knew, a forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year,
Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,
A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart;
It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks,
In damp fields known to bird and fox.
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.
It seemed as if the breezes brought him,
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him;
As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in far fields, the orchis grew.
Many haps fall in the field
Seldom seen by wishful eyes,
But all her shows did Nature yield,
To please and win this pilgrim wise.
He saw the partridge drum in the woods;
He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him;
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
Was shown to this philosopher,
And at his bidding seemed to come.

3
In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;
He trod the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linna hang its twin-born heads,
And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame'through the northern bowers.
He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century.

Low lies the plant to whose creation went
Sweet influence from every element;
Whose living towers the years conspired to build,
Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild.
Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,
He roamed, content alike with man and beast.
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roved at will the boundless shade.
The timid it concerns to ask their way,
And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray,
To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road
By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.

4
'T was one of the charmd days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.
The musing peasant, lowly great,
Beside the forest water sate;
The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown
Composed the network of his throne;
The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,
Was burnished to a floor of glass,
Painted with shadows green and proud
Of the tree and of the cloud.
He was the heart of all the scene;
On him the sun looked more serene;
To hill and cloud his face was known,
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy
The public child of earth and sky.
'You ask,' he said,'what guide
Me through trackless thickets led,
Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide.
I found the water's bed.
The watercourses were my guide;
I travelled grateful by their side,
Or through their channel dry;
They led me through the thicket damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp,
Through beds of granite cut my road,
And their resistless friendship showed.
The falling waters led me,
The foodful waters fed me,
And brought me to the lowest land

Unerring to the ocean sand.
The moss upon the forest bark
Was pole-star when the night was dark;
The purple berries in the wood
Supplied me necessary food;
For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
'T will be time enough to die;
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.'

II
As sunbeams stream through liberal space
And nothing jostle or displace,
So waved the pine-tree through my thought
And fanned the dreams it never brought.
'Whether is better, the gift or the donor?
Come to me,'
Quoth the pine-tree,
'I am the giver of honor.

My garden is the cloven rock,
And my manure the snow;
And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,
In summer's scorching glow.
He is great who can live by me:
The rough and bearded forester
Is better than the lord;
God fills the scrip and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.
The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be;
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry, and one the living tree.
Who liveth by the ragged pine
Foundeth a heroic line;
Who liveth in the palace hall
Waneth fast and spendeth all.
He goes to my savage haunts,
With his chariot and his care;
My twilight realm he disenchants,
And finds his prison there.
'What prizes the town and the tower?
Only what the pine-tree yields;
Sinew that subdued the fields;
The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods
Chants his hymn to hills and floods,
Whom the city's poisoning spleen
Made not pale, or fat, or lean;
Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,
Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,
In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth,
In whose feet the lion rusheth,
Iron arms, and iron mould,
That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.
I give my rafters to his boat,
My billets to his boiler's throat,
And I will swim the ancient sea
To float my child to victory,
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem
Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.
Whoso walks in solitude
And inhabiteth the wood,
Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass,
From these companions, power and grace.
Clean shall he be, without, within,
From the old adhering sin,
All ill dissolving in the light
Of his triumphant piercing sight:
Not vain, sour, nor frivolous;
Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous;
Grave, chaste, contented, though retired,
And of all other men desired.
On him the light of star and moon
Shall fall with purer radiance down;
All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;
The mounting sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones, his helpers be;
He shall meet the speeding year,
Without wailing, without fear;
He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;
He shall be happy whilst he wooes,
Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse.
But if with gold she bind her hair,
And deck her breast with diamond,
Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,
Though thou lie alone on the ground.
' Heed the old oracles,
Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.
Hearken! Hearken!
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.
Aloft, abroad, the pan swells;
O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?
O wise man! hear'st thou the least part?
'T is the chronicle of art.
To the open ear it sings
Sweet the genesis of things,
Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old flood's subsiding slime,
Of chemic matter, force and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm:
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.
O, listen to the undersong,
The ever old, the ever young;
And, far within those cadent pauses,
The chorus of the ancient Causes!
Delights the dreadful Destiny
To fling his voice into the tree,
And shock thy weak ear with a note
Breathed from the everlasting throat.
In music he repeats the pang
Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang.
O mortal! thy ears are stones;
These echoes are laden with tones
Which only the pure can hear;
Thou canst not catch what they recite
Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right,
Of man to come, of human life,
Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife.'
Once again the pine-tree sung:
' Speak not thy speech my boughs among:
Put off thy years, wash in the breeze;
My hours are peaceful centuries.
Talk no more with feeble tongue;
No more the fool of space and time,
Come weave with mine a nobler rhyme.
Only thy Americans
Can read thy line, can meet thy glance,
But the runes that I rehearse
Understands the universe;
The least breath my boughs which tossed
Brings again the Pentecost;
To every soul resounding clear
In a voice of solemn cheer,
"Am I not thine? Are not these thine?"
And they reply, "Forever mine!"
My branches speak Italian,
English, German, Basque, Castilian,
Mountain speech to Highlanders,
Ocean tongues to islanders,
To Fin and Lap and swart Malay,
To each his bosom-secret say.
'Come learn with me the fatal song
Which knits the world in music strong,
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid,
The land reflected in the flood,
Body with shadow still pursued.
For Nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
The wood is wiser far than thou;
The wood and wave each other know
Not unrelated, unaffied,
But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect Nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty Heart.
But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,
Whence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed,
Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded?
Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded?
Who thee divorced, deceived and left?
Thee of thy faith who hath bereft,
And torn the ensigns from thy brow,
And sunk the immortal eye so low?
Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender,
Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender
For royal man;they thee confess
An exile from the wilderness,
The hills where health with health agrees,
And the wise soul expels disease.
Hark! in thy ear I will tell the sign
By which thy hurt thou may'st divine.
'When thou shalt climb the mountain cliff,
Or see the wide shore from thy skiff,
To thee the horizon shall express
But emptiness on emptiness;
There lives no man of Nature's worth
In the circle of the earth;
And to thine eye the vast skies fall,
Dire and satirical,
On clucking hens and prating fools,
On thieves, on drudges and on dolls.
And thou shalt say to the Most High,
"Godhead! all this astronomy,
And fate and practice and invention,
Strong art and beautiful pretension,
This radiant pomp of sun and star,
Throes that were, and worlds that are,
Behold! were in vain and in vain;
It cannot be,I will look again.
Surely now will the curtain rise,
And earth's fit tenant me surprise;
But the curtain doth not rise,
And Nature has miscarried wholly
Into failure, into folly."
'Alas! thine is the bankruptcy,
Blessed Nature so to see.
Come, lay thee in my soothing shade,
And heal the hurts which sin has made.
I see thee in the crowd alone;
I will be thy companion.
Quit thy friends as the dead in doom,
And build to them a final tomb;
Let the starred shade that nightly falls
Still celebrate their funerals,
And the bell of beetle and of bee
Knell their melodious memory.
Behind thee leave thy merchandise,
Thy churches and thy charities;
And leave thy peacock wit behind;
Enough for thee the primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind:
Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns,
Gives all to them who all renounce.
The rain comes when the wind calls;
The river knows the way to the sea;
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity;
The sea tosses and foams to find
Its way up to the cloud and wind;
The shadow sits close to the flying ball;
The date fails not on the palm-tree tall;
And thou,go burn thy wormy pages,
Shalt outsee seers, and outwit sages.
Oft didst thou thread the woods in vain
To find what bird had piped the strain:
Seek not, and the little eremite
Flies gayly forth and sings in sight.
'Hearken once more!
I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant time behoves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse, and sound, and light was none;
And God said, "Throb!" and there was motion
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,
But forever doth escape,
Like wave or flame, into new forms
Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms.
I, that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine,
Pouring of his power the wine
To every age, to every race;.
Unto every race and age
He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each, and unto all,
Maker and original.
The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are and think.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the next a special nature;
The third adds heat's indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light which eats the dark;
Into the fifth himself he flings,
And conscious Law is King of kings.
As the bee through the garden ranges,
From world to world the godhead changes;
As the sheep go feeding in the waste,
From form to form He maketh haste;
This vault which glows immense with light
Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What reeks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity?
Alike to him the better, the worse,
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky.
Than all it holds more deep, more high.'
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodnotes
,
316:The Emigrants: Book I
Scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of
Brighthelmstone in Sussex. Time, a Morning in November, 1792.
Slow in the Wintry Morn, the struggling light
Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves;
Their foaming tops, as they approach the shore
And the broad surf that never ceasing breaks
On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams
Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives
To this cold northern Isle, its shorten'd day.
Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy!
How many murmur at oblivious night
For leaving them so soon; for bearing thus
Their fancied bliss (the only bliss they taste!) ,
On her black wings away! - Changing the dreams
That sooth'd their sorrows, for calamities
(And every day brings its own sad proportion)
For doubts, diseases, abject dread of Death,
And faithless friends, and fame and fortune lost;
Fancied or real wants; and wounded pride,
That views the day star, but to curse his beams.
Yet He, whose Spirit into being call'd
This wond'rous World of Waters; He who bids
The wild wind lift them till they dash the clouds,
And speaks to them in thunder; or whose breath,
Low murmuring, o'er the gently heaving tides,
When the fair Moon, in summer night serene,
Irradiates with long trembling lines of light
Their undulating surface; that great Power,
Who, governing the Planets, also knows
If but a Sea-Mew falls, whose nest is hid
In these incumbent cliffs; He surely means
To us, his reasoning Creatures, whom He bids
Acknowledge and revere his awful hand,
Nothing but good: Yet Man, misguided Man,
Mars the fair work that he was bid enjoy,
And makes himself the evil he deplores.
How often, when my weary soul recoils
154
From proud oppression, and from legal crimes
(For such are in this Land, where the vain boast
Of equal Law is mockery, while the cost
Of seeking for redress is sure to plunge
Th' already injur'd to more certain ruin
And the wretch starves, before his Counsel pleads)
How often do I half abjure Society,
And sigh for some lone Cottage, deep embower'd
In the green woods, that these steep chalky Hills
Guard from the strong South West; where round their base
The Beach wide flourishes, and the light Ash
With slender leaf half hides the thymy turf! There do I wish to hide me; well content
If on the short grass, strewn with fairy flowers,
I might repose thus shelter'd; or when Eve
In Orient crimson lingers in the west,
Gain the high mound, and mark these waves remote
(Lucid tho' distant) , blushing with the rays
Of the far-flaming Orb, that sinks beneath them;
For I have thought, that I should then behold
The beauteous works of God, unspoil'd by Man
And less affected then, by human woes
I witness'd not; might better learn to bear
Those that injustice, and duplicity
And faithlessness and folly, fix on me:
For never yet could I derive relief,
When my swol'n heart was bursting with its sorrows,
From the sad thought, that others like myself
Live but to swell affliction's countless tribes!
- Tranquil seclusion I have vainly sought;
Peace, who delights solitary shade,
No more will spread for me her downy wings,
But, like the fabled Danaïds- or the wretch,
Who ceaseless, up the steep acclivity,
Was doom'd to heave the still rebounding rock,
Onward I labour; as the baffled wave,
Which yon rough beach repulses, that returns
With the next breath of wind, to fail again.Ah! Mourner- cease these wailings: cease and learn,
That not the Cot sequester'd, where the briar
And wood-bine wild, embrace the mossy thatch,
(Scarce seen amid the forest gloom obscure!)
155
Or more substantial farm, well fenced and warm,
Where the full barn, and cattle fodder'd round
Speak rustic plenty; nor the statelier dome
By dark firs shaded, or the aspiring pine,
Close by the village Church (with care conceal'd
By verdant foliage, lest the poor man's grave
Should mar the smiling prospect of his Lord) ,
Where offices well rang'd, or dove-cote stock'd,
Declare manorial residence; not these
Or any of the buildings, new and trim
With windows circling towards the restless Sea,
Which ranged in rows, now terminate my walk,
Can shut out for an hour the spectre Care,
That from the dawn of reason, follows still
Unhappy Mortals, 'till the friendly grave
(Our sole secure asylum) 'ends the chace 1.'
Behold, in witness of this mournful truth,
A group approach me, whose dejected looks,
Sad Heralds of distress! proclaim them Men
Banish'd for ever and for conscience sake
From their distracted Country, whence the name
Of Freedom misapplied, and much abus'd
By lawless Anarchy, has driven them far
To wander; with the prejudice they learn'd
From Bigotry (the Tut'ress of the blind) ,
Thro' the wide World unshelter'd; their sole hope,
That German spoilers, thro' that pleasant land
May carry wide the desolating scourge
Of War and Vengeance; yet unhappy Men,
Whate'er your errors, I lament your fate:
And, as disconsolate and sad ye hang
Upon the barrier of the rock, and seem
To murmur your despondence, waiting long
Some fortunate reverse that never comes;
Methinks in each expressive face, I see
Discriminated anguish; there droops one,
Who in a moping cloister long consum'd
This life inactive, to obtain a better,
And thought that meagre abstinence, to wake
From his hard pallet with the midnight bell,
To live on eleemosynary bread,
And to renounce God's works, would please that God.
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And now the poor pale wretch receives, amaz'd,
The pity, strangers give to his distress,
Because these Strangers are, by his dark creed,
Condemn'd as Heretics- and with sick heart
Regrets 2 his pious prison, and his beads.Another, of more haughty port, declines
The aid he needs not; while in mute despair
His high indignant thoughts go back to France,
Dwelling on all he lost- the Gothic dome,
That vied with splendid palaces 3; the beds
Of silk and down, the silver chalices,
Vestments with gold enwrought for blazing altars;
Where, amid clouds of incense, he held forth
To kneeling crowds the imaginary bones
Of Saints suppos'd, in pearl and gold enchas'd,
And still with more than living Monarchs' pomp
Surrounded; was believ'd by mumbling bigots
To hold the keys of Heaven, and to admit
Whom he thought good to share it- Now alas!
He, to whose daring soul and high ambition
The World seem'd circumscrib'd; who, wont to dream,
Of Fleuri, Richelieu, Alberoni, men
Who trod on Empire, and whose politics
Were not beyond the grasp of his vast mind,
Is, in a Land once hostile, still prophan'd
By disbelief, and rites un-orthodox,
The object of compassion- At his side,
Lighter of heart than these, but heavier far
Than he was wont, another victim comes,
An Abbé- who with less contracted brow
Still smiles and flatters, and still talks of Hope;
Which, sanguine as he is, he does not feel,
And so he cheats the sad and weighty pressure
Of evils present; - - Still, as Men misled
By early prejudice (so hard to break) ,
I mourn your sorrows; for I too have known
Involuntary exile; and while yet
England had charms for me, have felt how sad
It is to look across the dim cold sea,
That melancholy rolls its refluent tides
Between us and the dear regretted land
We call our own- as now ye pensive wait
157
On this bleak morning, gazing on the waves
That seem to leave your shore; from whence the wind
Is loaded to your ears, with the deep groans
Of martyr'd Saints and suffering Royalty,
While to your eyes the avenging power of Heaven
Appears in aweful anger to prepare
The storm of vengeance, fraught with plagues and death.
Even he of milder heart, who was indeed
The simple shepherd in a rustic scene,
And, 'mid the vine-clad hills of Languedoc,
Taught to the bare-foot peasant, whose hard hands
Produc'd 4 the nectar he could seldom taste,
Submission to the Lord for whom he toil'd;
He, or his brethren, who to Neustria's sons
Enforc'd religious patience, when, at times,
On their indignant hearts Power's iron hand
Too strongly struck; eliciting some sparks
Of the bold spirit of their native North;
Even these Parochial Priests, these humbled men;
Whose lowly undistinguish'd cottages
Witness'd a life of purest piety,
While the meek tenants were, perhaps, unknown
Each to the haughty Lord of his domain,
Who mark'd them not; the Noble scorning still
The poor and pious Priest, as with slow pace
He glided thro' the dim arch'd avenue
Which to the Castle led; hoping to cheer
The last sad hour of some laborious life
That hasten'd to its close- even such a Man
Becomes an exile; staying not to try
By temperate zeal to check his madd'ning flock,
Who, at the novel sound of Liberty
(Ah! most intoxicating sound to slaves!) ,
Start into licence- Lo! dejected now,
The wandering Pastor mourns, with bleeding heart,
His erring people, weeps and prays for them,
And trembles for the account that he must give
To Heaven for souls entrusted to his care.Where the cliff, hollow'd by the wintry storm,
Affords a seat with matted sea-weed strewn,
A softer form reclines; around her run,
On the rough shingles, or the chalky bourn,
158
Her gay unconscious children, soon amus'd;
Who pick the fretted stone, or glossy shell,
Or crimson plant marine: or they contrive
The fairy vessel, with its ribband sail
And gilded paper pennant: in the pool,
Left by the salt wave on the yielding sands,
They launch the mimic navy- Happy age!
Unmindful of the miseries of Man! Alas! too long a victim to distress,
Their Mother, lost in melancholy thought,
Lull'd for a moment by the murmurs low
Of sullen billows, wearied by the task
Of having here, with swol'n and aching eyes
Fix'd on the grey horizon, since the dawn
Solicitously watch'd the weekly sail
From her dear native land, now yields awhile
To kind forgetfulness, while Fancy brings,
In waking dreams, that native land again!
Versailles appears- its painted galleries,
And rooms of regal splendour, rich with gold,
Where, by long mirrors multiply'd, the crowd
Paid willing homage- and, united there,
Beauty gave charms to empire- Ah! too soon
From the gay visionary pageant rous'd,
See the sad mourner start! - and, drooping, look
With tearful eyes and heaving bosom round
On drear reality- where dark'ning waves,
Urg'd by the rising wind, unheeded foam
Near her cold rugged seat:- To call her thence
A fellow-sufferer comes: dejection deep
Checks, but conceals not quite, the martial air,
And that high consciousness of noble blood,
Which he has learn'd from infancy to think
Exalts him o'er the race of common men:
Nurs'd in the velvet lap of luxury,
And fed by adulation- could he learn,
That worth alone is true Nobility?
And that the peasant who, 'amid 5 the sons
'Of Reason, Valour, Liberty, and Virtue,
'Displays distinguish'd merit, is a Noble
'Of Nature's own creation! '- If even here,
If in this land of highly vaunted Freedom,
159
Even Britons controvert the unwelcome truth,
Can it be relish'd by the sons of France?
Men, who derive their boasted ancestry
From the fierce leaders of religious wars,
The first in Chivalry's emblazon'd page;
Who reckon Gueslin, Bayard, or De Foix,
Among their brave Progenitors? Their eyes,
Accustom'd to regard the splendid trophies
Of Heraldry (that with fantastic hand
Mingles, like images in feverish dreams,
'Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,'
With painted puns, and visionary shapes ;) ,
See not the simple dignity of Virtue,
But hold all base, whom honours such as these
Exalt not from the crowd 6 - As one, who long
Has dwelt amid the artificial scenes
Of populous City, deems that splendid shows,
The Theatre, and pageant pomp of Courts,
Are only worth regard; forgets all taste
For Nature's genuine beauty; in the lapse
Of gushing waters hears no soothing sound,
Nor listens with delight to sighing winds,
That, on their fragrant pinions, waft the notes
Of birds rejoicing in the trangled copse;
Nor gazes pleas'd on Ocean's silver breast,
While lightly o'er it sails the summer clouds
Reflected in the wave, that, hardly heard,
Flows on the yellow sands: so to his mind,
That long has liv'd where Despotism hides
His features harsh, beneath the diadem
Of worldly grandeur, abject Slavery seems,
If by that power impos'd, slavery no more:
For luxury wreathes with silk the iron bonds,
And hides the ugly rivets with her flowers,
Till the degenerate triflers, while they love
The glitter of the chains, forget their weight.
But more the Men, whose ill acquir'd wealth
Was wrung from plunder'd myriads, by the means
Too often legaliz'd by power abus'd,
Feel all the horrors of the fatal change,
When their ephemeral greatness, marr'd at once
(As a vain toy that Fortune's childish hand
160
Equally joy'd to fashion or to crush) ,
Leaves them expos'd to universal scorn
For having nothing else; not even the claim
To honour, which respect for Heroes past
Allows to ancient titles; Men, like these,
Sink even beneath the level, whence base arts
Alone had rais'd them; - unlamented sink,
And know that they deserve the woes they feel.
Poor wand'ring wretches! whosoe'er ye are,
That hopeless, houseless, friendless, travel wide
O'er these bleak russet downs; where, dimly seen,
The solitary Shepherd shiv'ring tends
His dun discolour'd flock (Shepherd, unlike
Him, whom in song the Poet's fancy crowns
With garlands, and his crook with vi'lets binds):
Poor vagrant wretches! outcasts of the world!
Whom no abode receives, no parish owns;
Roving, like Nature's commoners, the land
That boasts such general plenty: if the sight
Of wide-extended misery softens yours
Awhile, suspend your murmurs! - here behold
The strange vicissitudes of fate- while thus
The exil'd Nobles, from their country driven,
Whose richest luxuries were their's, must feel
More poignant anguish, than the lowest poor,
Who, born to indigence, have learn'd to brave
Rigid Adversity's depressing breath! Ah! rather Fortune's worthless favourites!
Who feed on England's vitals- Pensioners
Of base corruption, who, in quick ascent
To opulence unmerited, become
Giddy with pride, and as ye rise, forgetting
The dust ye lately left, with scorn look down
On those beneath ye (tho' your equals once
In fortune, and in worth superior still,
They view the eminence, on which ye stand,
With wonder, not with envy; for they know
The means, by which ye reach'd it, have been such
As, in all honest eyes, degrade ye far
Beneath the poor dependent, whose sad heart
Reluctant pleads for what your pride denies):
Ye venal, worthless hirelings of a Court!
161
Ye pamper'd Parasites! whom Britons pay
For forging fetters for them; rather here
Study a lesson that concerns ye much;
And, trembling, learn, that if oppress'd too long,
The raging multitude, to madness stung,
Will turn on their oppressors; and, no more
By sounding titles and parading forms
Bound like tame victims, will redress themselves!
Then swept away by the resistless torrent,
Not only all your pomp may disappear,
But, in the tempest lost, fair Order sink
Her decent head, and lawless Anarchy
O'erturn celestial Freedom's radiant throne; As now in Gallia; where Confusion, born
Of party rage and selfish love of rule,
Sully the noblest cause that ever warm'd
The heart of Patriot Virtue 8 - There arise
The infernal passions; Vengeance, seeking blood,
And Avarice; and Envy's harpy fangs
Pollute the immortal shrine of Liberty,
Dismay her votaries, and disgrace her name.
Respect is due to principle; and they,
Who suffer for their conscience, have a claim,
Whate'er that principle may be, to praise.
These ill-starr'd Exiles then, who, bound by ties,
To them the bonds of honour; who resign'd
Their country to preserve them, and now seek
In England an asylum- well deserve
To find that (every prejudice forgot,
Which pride and ignorance teaches) , we for them
Feel as our brethren; and that English hearts,
Of just compassion ever own the sway,
As truly as our element, the deep,
Obeys the mild dominion of the MoonThis they have found; and may they find it still!
Thus may'st thou, Britain, triumph! - May thy foes,
By Reason's gen'rous potency subdued,
Learn, that the God thou worshippest, delights
In acts of pure humanity! - May thine
Be still such bloodless laurels! nobler far
Than those acquir'd at Cressy or Poictiers,
Or of more recent growth, those well bestow'd
162
On him who stood on Calpe's blazing height
Amid the thunder of a warring world,
Illustrious rather from the crowds he sav'd
From flood and fire, than from the ranks who fell
Beneath his valour! - Actions such as these,
Like incense rising to the Throne of Heaven,
Far better justify the pride, that swells
In British bosoms, than the deafening roar
Of Victory from a thousand brazen throats,
That tell with what success wide-wasting War
Has by our brave Compatriots thinned the world.
~ Charlotte Smith,
317:The Kalevala - Rune Xix
ILMARINEN'S WOOING.
ILMARINEN, hero-blacksmith,
The eternal metal-worker,
Hastens forward to the court-room
Of the hostess of Pohyola,
Of the master of the Northland,
Hastens through the open portals
Into Louhi's home and presence.
Servants come with silver pitchers,
Filled with Northland's richest brewing;
Honey-drink is brought and offered
To the blacksmith of Wainola,
Ilmarinen thus replying:
'I shall not in all my life-time
Taste the drink that thou hast brought me,
Till I see the Maid of Beauty,
Fairy Maiden of the Rainbow;
I will drink with her in gladness,
For whose hand I journey hither.'
Spake the hostess of Pohyola:
'Trouble does the one selected
Give to him that wooes and watches;
Not yet are her feet in sandals,
Thine affianced is not ready.
Only canst thou woo my daughter,
Only canst thou win the maiden,
When thou hast by aid of magic
Plowed the serpent-field of Hisi,
Plowed the field of hissing vipers,
Touching neither beam nor handles.
Once this field was plowed by Piru,
Lempo furrowed it with horses,
With a plowshare made of copper,
With a beam of flaming iron;
Never since has any hero
Brought this field to cultivation.'
Ilmarinen of Wainola
172
Straightway hastens to the chamber
Of the Maiden of the Rainbow,
Speaks these words in hesitation:
'Thou of Night and Dawn the daughter,
Tell me, dost thou not remember
When for thee I forged the Sampo,
Hammered thee the lid in colors?
Thou didst swear by oath the strougest,
By the forge and by the anvil,
By the tongs and by the hammer,
In the ears of the Almighty,
And before omniscient Ukko,
Thou wouldst follow me hereafter,
Be my bride, my life-companion,
Be my honored wife forever.
Now thy mother is exacting,
Will not give to me her daughter,
Till by means of magic only,
I have plowed the field of serpents,
Plowed the hissing soil of Hisi.'
The affianced Bride of Beauty
Gives this answer to the suitor:
'O, thou blacksmith, Ilmarinen,
The eternal wonder-forger,
Forge thyself a golden plowshare,
Forge the beam of shining silver,
And of copper forge the handles;
Then with ease, by aid of magic,
Thou canst plow the field of serpents,
Plow the hissing soil of Hisi.'
Ilmarinen, welcome suitor,
Straightway builds a forge and smithy,
Places gold within the furnace,
In the forge he lays the silver,
Forges then a golden plowshare,
Forges, too, a beam of silver,
Forges handles out of copper,
Forges boots and gloves of iron,
Forges him a mail of metal,
For his limbs a safe protection,
Safe protection for his body.
Then a horse of fire selecting,
173
Harnesses the flaming stallion,
Goes to plow the field of serpents,
Plow the viper-lands of Hisi.
In the field were countless vipers,
Serpents there of every species,
Crawling, writhing, hissing, stinging,
Harmless all against the hero,
Thus he stills the snakes of Lempo:
'Vipers, ye by God created,
Neither best nor worst of creatures,
Ye whose wisdom comes from Ukko,
And whose venom comes from Hisi,
Ukko is your greater Master,
By His will your heads are lifted;
Get ye hence before my plowing,
Writ-he ye through the grass and stubble,
Crawl ye to the nearest thicket,
Keep your heads beneath the heather,
Hunt our holes to Mana's kingdom
If your poison-heads be lifted,
Then will mighty Ukko smite them
'With his iron-pointed arrows,
With the lightning of his anger.'
Thus the blacksmith, Ilmarinen,
Safely plows the field of serpents,
Lifts the vipers in his plowing,
Buries them beneath the furrow,
Harmless all against his magic.
When the task had been completed,
Ilmarinen, quick returning,
Thus addressed Pohyola's hostess:
'I have plowed the field of Hisi,
Plowed the field of hissing serpents,
Stilled and banished all the vipers;
Give me, ancient dame, thy daughter,
Fairest maiden of the Northland.
Spake the hostess of Pohyola:
'Shall not grant to thee my daughter,
Shall not give my lovely virgin,
Till Tuoni's bear is muzzled,
Till Manala's wolf is conquered,
In the forests of the Death-land,
174
In the boundaries of Mana.
Hundreds have been sent to hunt him,
So one yet has been successful,
All have perished in Manala.'
Thereupon young Ilmarinen
To the maiden's chamber hastens,
Thus addresses his affianced:
'Still another test demanded,
I must go to Tuonela,
Bridle there the bear of Mana,
Bring him from the Death-land forests,
From Tuoni's grove and empire!
This advice the maiden gives him:
'O thou artist, Ilmarinen,
The eternal metal-worker,
Forge of steel a magic bridle,
On a rock beneath the water,
In the foaming triple currents;
Make the straps of steel and copper,
Bridle then the bear of Mana,
Lead him from Tuoni's forests.'
Then the blacksmith, Ilmarinen,
Forged of steel a magic bridle,
On a rock beneath the water,
In the foam of triple currents;
Made the straps of steel and copper,
Straightway went the bear to muzzle,
In the forests of the Death-land,
Spake these words in supplication:
'Terhenetar, ether-maiden,
Daughter of the fog and snow-flake,
Sift the fog and let it settle
O'er the bills and lowland thickets,
Where the wild-bear feeds and lingers,
That he may not see my coming,
May not hear my stealthy footsteps!'
Terhenetar hears his praying,
Makes the fog and snow-flake settle
On the coverts of the wild-beasts;
Thus the bear he safely bridles,
Fetters him in chains of magic,
In the forests of Tuoni,
175
In the blue groves of Manala.
When this task had been completed,
Ilmarinen, quick returning,
Thus addressed the ancient Louhi:
'Give me, worthy dame, thy daughter,
Give me now my bride affianced,
I have brought the bear of Mana
From Tuoni's fields and forests.'
Spake the hostess of Pohyola
To the blacksmith, Ilmarinen:
'I will only give my daughter,
Give to thee the Maid of Beauty,
When the monster-pike thou catchest
In the river of Tuoni,
In Manala's fatal waters,
Using neither hooks, nor fish-nets,
Neither boat, nor fishing-tackle;
Hundreds have been sent to catch him,
No one yet has been successful,
All have perished in Manala.'
Much disheartened, Ilmarinen
Hastened to the maiden's chamber,
Thus addressed the rainbow-maiden:
'Now a third test is demanded,
Much more difficult than ever;
I must catch the pike of Mana,
In the river of Tuoni,
And without my fishing-tackle,
Hard the third test of the hero!
This advice the maiden gives him:
'O thou hero, Ilmarinen,
Never, never be discouraged:
In thy furnace, forge an eagle,
From the fire of ancient magic;
He will catch the pike of Mana,
Catch the monster-fish in safety,
From the death-stream of Tuoni,
From Manala's fatal waters.'
Then the suitor, Ilmarinen,
The eternal artist-forgeman,
In the furnace forged an eagle
From the fire of ancient wisdom;
176
For this giant bird of magic
Forged he talons out of iron,
And his beak of steel and copper;
Seats himself upon the eagle,
On his back between the wing-bones,
Thus addresses he his creature,
Gives the bird of fire, this order:
'Mighty eagle, bird of beauty,
Fly thou whither I direct thee,
To Tuoni's coal-black river,
To the blue deeps of the Death-stream,
Seize the mighty fish of Mana,
Catch for me this water-monster.'
Swiftly flies the magic eagle,
Giant-bird of worth and wonder,
To the river of Tuoni,
There to catch the pike of Mana;
One wing brushes on the waters,
While the other sweeps the heavens;
In the ocean dips his talons,
Whets his beak on mountain-ledges.
Safely landing, Ilmarinen,
The immortal artist-forger,
Hunts the monster of the Death-stream,
While the eagle hunts and fishes
In the waters of Manala.
From the river rose a monster,
Grasped the blacksmith, Ilmarinen,
Tried to drag him to his sea-cave;
Quick the eagle pounced upon him,
With his metal-beak he seized him,
Wrenched his head, and rent his body,
Hurled him back upon the bottom
Of the deep and fatal river,
Freed his master, Ilmarinen.
Then arose the pike of Mana,
Came the water-dog in silence,
Of the pikes was not the largest,
Nor belonged he to the smallest;
Tongue the length of double hatchets,
Teeth as long as fen-rake handles,
Mouth as broad as triple streamlets,
177
Back as wide as seven sea-boats,
Tried to snap the magic blacksmith,
Tried to swallow Ilmarinen.
Swiftly swoops the mighty eagle,
Of the birds was not the largest,
Nor belonged he to the smallest;
Mouth as wide as seven streamlets,
Tongue as long as seven javelins,
Like five crooked scythes his talons;
Swoops upon the pike of Mana.
Quick the giant fish endangered,
Darts and flounders in the river,
Dragging down the mighty eagle,
Lashing up the very bottom
To the surface of the river;
When the mighty bird uprising
Leaves the wounded pike in water,
Soars aloft on worsted pinions
To his home in upper ether;
Soars awhile, and sails, and circles,
Circles o'er the reddened waters,
Swoops again on lightning-pinions,
Strikes with mighty force his talons
Into the shoulder of his victim;
Strikes the second of his talons
On the flinty mountain-ledges,
On the rocks with iron hardened;
From the cliffs rebound his talons,
Slip the flinty rocks o'erhanging,
And the monster-pike resisting
Dives again beneath the surface
To the bottom of the river,
From the talons of the eagle;
Deep, the wounds upon the body
Of the monster of Tuoni.
Still a third time soars the eagle,
Soars, and sails, and quickly circles,
Swoops again upon the monster,
Fire out-shooting from his pinoins,
Both his eyeballs flashing lightning;
With his beak of steel and copper
Grasps again the pike of Mana
178
Firmly planted are his talons
In the rocks and in his victim,
Drags the monster from the river,
Lifts the pike above the waters,
From Tuoni's coal-black river,
From the blue-back of Manala.
Thus the third time does the eagle
Bring success from former failures;
Thus at last the eagle catches
Mana's pike, the worst of fishes,
Swiftest swimmer of the waters,
From the river of Tuoni;
None could see Manala's river,
For the myriad of fish-scales;
Hardly could one see through ether,
For the feathers of the eagle,
Relicts of the mighty contest.
Then the bird of copper talons
Took the pike, with scales of silver,
To the pine-tree's topmost branches,
To the fir-tree plumed with needles,
Tore the monster-fish in pieces,
Ate the body of his victim,
Left the head for Ilmarinen.
Spake the blacksmith to the eagle:
'O thou bird of evil nature,
What thy thought and what thy motive?
Thou hast eaten what I needed,
Evidence of my successes;
Thoughtless eagle, witless instinct,
Thus to mar the spoils of conquest!'
But the bird of metal talons
Hastened onward, soaring upward,
Rising higher into ether,
Rising, flying, soaring, sailing,
To the borders of the long-clouds,
Made the vault of ether tremble,
Split apart the dome of heaven,
Broke the colored bow of Ukko,
Tore the Moon-horns from their sockets,
Disappeared beyond the Sun-land,
To the home of the triumphant.
179
Then the blacksmith, Ilmarinen,
Took the pike-head to the hostess
Of the ever-dismal Northland,
Thus addressed the ancient Louhi:
'Let this head forever serve thee
As a guest-bench for thy dwelling,
Evidence of hero-triumphs;
I have caught the pike of Mana,
I have done as thou demandest,
Three my victories in Death-land,
Three the tests of magic heroes;
Wilt thou give me now thy daughter,
Give to me the Maid of Beauty?'
Spake the hostess of Pohyola:
'Badly is the test accomplished,
Thou has torn the pike in pieces,
From his neck the head is severed,
Of his body thou hast eaten,
Brought to me this worthless relic!
These the words of Ilmarinen:
'When the victory is greatest,
Do we suffer greatest losses!
From the river of Tuoni,
From the kingdom of Manala,
I have brought to thee this trophy,
Thus the third task is completed.
Tell me is the maiden ready,
Wilt thou give the bride affianced?
Spake the hostess of Pohyola:
'I will give to thee my daughter,
Will prepare my snow-white virgin,
For the suitor, Ilmarinen;
Thou hast won the Maid of Beauty,
Bride is she of thine hereafter,
Fit companion of thy fireside,
Help and joy of all thy lifetime.'
On the floor a child was sitting,
And the babe this tale related.
'There appeared within this dwelling,
Came a bird within the castle,
From the East came flying hither,
From the East, a monstrous eagle,
180
One wing touched the vault of heaven,
While the other swept the ocean;
With his tail upon the waters,
Reached his beak beyond the cloudlets,
Looked about, and eager watching,
Flew around, and sailing, soaring,
Flew away to hero-castle,
Knocked three times with beak of copper
On the castle-roof of iron;
But the eagle could not enter.
'Then the eagle, looking round him,
Flew again, and sailed, and circled,
Flew then to the mothers' castle,
Loudly rapped with heavy knocking
On the mothers' roof of copper;
But the eagle could not enter.
'Then the eagle, looking round him,
Flew a third time, sailing, soaring,
Flew then to the virgins' castle,
Knocked again with beak of copper,
On the virgins' roof of linen,
Easy for him there to enter;
Flew upon the castle-chimney,
Quick descending to the chamber,
Pulled the clapboards from the studding,
Tore the linen from the rafters,
Perched upon the chamber-window,
Near the walls of many colors,
On the cross-bars gaily-feathered,
Looked upon the curly-beaded,
Looked upon their golden ringlets,
Looked upon the snow-white virgins,
On the purest of the maidens,
On the fairest of the daughters,
On the maid with pearly necklace,
On the maiden wreathed in flowers;
Perched awhile, and looked, admiring,
Swooped upon the Maid of Beauty,
On the purest of the virgins,
On the whitest, on the fairest,
On the stateliest and grandest,
Swooped upon the rainbow-daughter
181
Of the dismal Sariola;
Grasped her in his mighty talons,
Bore away the Maid of Beauty,
Maid of fairest form and feature,
Maid adorned with pearly necklace,
Decked in feathers iridescent,
Fragrant flowers upon her bosom,
Scarlet band around her forehead,
Golden rings upon her fingers,
Fairest maiden of the Northland.'
Spake the hostess of Pohyola,
When the babe his tale had ended:
'Tell me bow, my child beloved,
Thou hast learned about the maiden,
Hast obtained the information,
How her flaxen ringlets nestled,
How the maiden's silver glistened,
How the virgin's gold was lauded.
Shone the silver Sun upon thee,
Did the moonbeams bring this knowledge?'
From the floor the child made answer:
'Thus I gained the information,
Moles of good-luck led me hither,
To the home, of the distinguished,
To the guest-room of the maiden,
Good-name bore her worthy father,
He that sailed the magic vessel;
Better-name enjoyed the mother,
She that baked the bread of barley,
She that kneaded wheaten biscuits,
Fed her many guests in Northland.
'Thus the information reached me,
Thus the distant stranger heard it,
Heard the virgin had arisen:
Once I walked within the court-yard,
Stepping near the virgin's chamber,
At an early hour of morning,
Ere the Sun had broken slumber
Whirling rose the soot in cloudlets,
Blackened wreaths of smoke came rising
From the chamber of the maiden,
From thy daughter's lofty chimney;
182
There the maid was busy grinding,
Moved the handles of the millstone
Making voices like the cuckoo,
Like the ducks the side-holes sounded,
And the sifter like the goldfinch,
Like the sea-pearls sang the grindstones.
'Then a second time I wandered
To the border of the meadow
In the forest was the maiden
Rocking on a fragrant hillock,
Dyeing red in iron vessels,
And in copper kettles, yellow.
'Then a third time did I wander
To the lovely maiden's window;
There I saw thy daughter weaving,
Heard the flying of her shuttle,
Heard the beating of her loom-lathe,
Heard the rattling of her treddles,
Heard the whirring of her yarn-reel.'
Spake the hostess of Pohyola:
'Now alas! beloved daughter,
I have often taught this lesson:
'Do not sing among the pine-trees,
Do not call adown the valleys,
Do not hang thy head in walking,
Do not bare thine arms, nor shoulders,
Keep the secrets of thy bosom,
Hide thy beauty and thy power.'
'This I told thee in the autumn,
Taught thee in the summer season,
Sang thee in the budding spring-time,
Sang thee when the snows were falling:
'Let us build a place for hiding,
Let us build the smallest windows,
Where may weave my fairest daughter,
Where my maid may ply her shuttle,
Where my joy may work unnoticed
By the heroes of the Northland,
By the suitors of Wainola.''
From the floor the child made answer,
Fourteen days the young child numbered;
'Easy 'tis to hide a war-horse
183
In the Northland fields and stables;
Hard indeed to hide a maiden,
Having lovely form and features!
Build of stone a distant castle
In the middle of the ocean,
Keep within thy lovely maiden,
Train thou there thy winsome daughter,
Not long hidden canst thou keep her.
Maidens will not grow and flourish,
Kept apart from men and heroes,
Will not live without their suitors,
Will not thrive without their wooers;
Thou canst never hide a maiden,
Neither on the land nor water.'
Now the ancient Wainamoinen,
Head down-bent and heavy-hearted,
Wanders to his native country,
To Wainola's peaceful meadows,
To the plains of Kalevala,
Chanting as he journeys homeward:
'I have passed the age for wooing,
Woe is me, rejected suitor,
Woe is me, a witless minstrel,
That I did not woo and marry,
When my face was young and winsome,
When my hand was warm and welcome!
Youth dethrones my age and station,
Wealth is nothing, wisdom worthless,
When a hero goes a-wooing
With a poor but younger brother.
Fatal error that a hero
Does not wed in early manhood,
In his youth does not be master
Of a worthy wife and household.'
Thus the ancient Wainamoinen
Sends the edict to his people:
'Old men must not go a-wooing,
Must not swim the sea of anger,
Must not row upon a wager,
Must not run a race for glory,
With the younger sons of Northland.'
184
~ Elias Lönnrot,
318:Senlin: His Futile Preoccupations
I am a house, says Senlin, locked and darkened,
Sealed from the sun with wall and door and blind.
Summon me loudly, and you'll hear slow footsteps
Ring far and faint in the galleries of my mind.
You'll hear soft steps on an old and dusty stairway;
Peer darkly through some corner of a pane,
You'll see me with a faint light coming slowly,
Pausing above some gallery of the brain . . .
I am a city . . . In the blue light of evening
Wind wanders among my streets and makes them fair;
I am a room of rock . . . a maiden dances
Lifting her hands, tossing her golden hair.
She combs her hair, the room of rock is darkened,
She extends herself in me, and I am sleep.
It is my pride that starlight is above me;
I dream amid waves of air, my walls are deep.
I am a door . . . before me roils the darkness,
Behind me ring clear waves of sound and light.
Stand in the shadowy street outside, and listen-The crying of violins assails the night . . .
My walls are deep, but the cries of music pierce them;
They shake with the sound of drums . . . yet it is strange
That I should know so little what means this music,
Hearing it always within me change and change.
Knock on the door,--and you shall have an answer.
Open the heavy walls to set me free,
And blow a horn to call me into the sunlight,-And startled, then, what a strange thing you will see!
Nuns, murderers, and drunkards, saints and sinners,
Lover and dancing girl and sage and clown
Will laugh upon you, and you will find me nowhere.
I am a room, a house, a street, a town.
127
It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!-The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.
There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea . . .
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me . . .
It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
Should I not pause in the light to remember God?
Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,
He is immense and lonely as a cloud.
I will dedicate this moment before my mirror
To him alone, and for him I will comb my hair.
Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!
I will think of you as I descend the stair.
Vine leaves tap my window,
The snail-track shines on the stones,
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree
Repeating two clear tones.
128
It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence,
Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep.
The walls are about me still as in the evening,
I am the same, and the same name still I keep.
The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion,
The stars pale silently in a coral sky.
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,
Unconcerned, I tie my tie.
There are horses neighing on far-off hills
Tossing their long white manes,
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk,
Their shoulders black with rains . . .
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And surprise my soul once more;
The blue air rushes above my ceiling,
There are suns beneath my floor . . .
. . . It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where,
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.
There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven,
And a god among the stars; and I will go
Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know . . .
Vine-leaves tap at the window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
I walk to my work, says Senlin, along a street
Superbly hung in space.
I lift these mortal stones, and with my trowel
I tap them into place.
But is god, perhaps, a giant who ties his tie
Grimacing before a colossal glass of sky?
129
These stones are heavy, these stones decay,
These stones are wet with rain,
I build them into a wall today,
Tomorrow they fall again.
Does god arise from a chaos of starless sleep,
Rise from the dark and stretch his arms and yawn;
And drowsily look from the window at his garden;
And rejoice at the dewdrop sparkeling on his lawn?
Does he remember, suddenly, with amazement,
The yesterday he left in sleep,--his name,-Or the glittering street superbly hung in wind
Along which, in the dusk, he slowly came?
I devise new patterns for laying stones
And build a stronger wall.
One drop of rain astonishes me
And I let my trowel fall.
The flashing of leaves delights my eyes,
Blue air delights my face;
I will dedicate this stone to god
And tap it into its place.
That woman--did she try to attract my attention?
Is it true I saw her smile and nod?
She turned her head and smiled . . . was it for me?
It is better to think of work or god.
The clouds pile coldly above the houses
Slow wind revolves the leaves:
It begins to rain, and the first long drops
Are slantingly blown from eaves.
But it is true she tried to attract my attention!
She pressed a rose to her chin and smiled.
Her hand was white by the richness of her hair,
Her eyes were those of a child.
It is true she looked at me as if she liked me.
And turned away, afraid to look too long!
130
She watched me out of the corners of her eyes;
And, tapping time with fingers, hummed a song.
. . . Nevertheless, I will think of work,
With a trowel in my hands;
Or the vague god who blows like clouds
Above these dripping lands . . .
But . . . is it sure she tried to attract my attention?
She leaned her elbow in a peculiar way
There in the crowded room . . . she touched my hand . . .
She must have known, and yet,--she let it stay.
Music of flesh! Music of root and sod!
Leaf touching leaf in the rain!
Impalpable clouds of red ascend,
Red clouds blow over my brain.
Did she await from me some sign of acceptance?
I smoothed my hair with a faltering hand.
I started a feeble smile, but the smile was frozen:
Perhaps, I thought, I misunderstood.
Is it to be conceived that I could attract her-This dull and futile flesh attract such fire?
I,--with a trowel's dullness in hand and brain!-Take on some godlike aspect, rouse desire?
Incredible! . . . delicious! . . . I will wear
A brighter color of tie, arranged with care,
I will delight in god as I comb my hair.
And the conquests of my bolder past return
Like strains of music, some lost tune
Recalled from youth and a happier time.
I take my sweetheart's arm in the dusk once more;
One more we climb
Up the forbidden stairway,
Under the flickering light, along the railing:
I catch her hand in the dark, we laugh once more,
I hear the rustle of silk, and follow swiftly,
And softly at last we close the door.
Yes, it is true that woman tried to attract me:
131
It is true she came out of time for me,
Came from the swirling and savage forest of earth,
The cruel eternity of the sea.
She parted the leaves of waves and rose from silence
Shining with secrets she did not know.
Music of dust! Music of web and web!
And I, bewildered, let her go.
I light my pipe. The flame is yellow,
Edged underneath with blue.
These thoughts are truer of god, perhaps,
Than thoughts of god are true.
It is noontime, Senlin says, and a street piano
Strikes sharply against the sunshine a harsh chord,
And the universe is suddenly agitated,
And pain to my heart goes glittering like a sword.
Do I imagine it? The dust is shaken,
The sunlight quivers, the brittle oak-leaves tremble.
The world, disturbed, conceals its agitation;
And I, too, will dissemble.
Yet it is sorrow has found my heart,
Sorrow for beauty, sorrow for death;
And pain twirls slowly among the trees.
The street-piano revolves its glittering music,
The sharp notes flash and dazzle and turn,
Memory's knives are in this sunlit silence,
They ripple and lazily burn.
The star on which my shadow falls is frightened,-It does not move; my trowel taps a stone,
The sweet note wavers amid derisive music;
And I, in horror of sunlight, stand alone.
Do not recall my weakness, savage music!
Let the knives rest!
Impersonal, harsh, the music revolves and glitters,
And the notes like poniards pierce my breast.
And I remember the shadows of webs on stones,
132
And the sound or rain on withered grass,
And a sorrowful face that looked without illusions
At its image in the glass.
Do not recall my childhood, pitiless music!
The green blades flicker and gleam,
The red bee bends the clover, deeply humming;
In the blue sea above me lazily stream
Cloud upon thin-brown cloud, revolving, scattering;
The mulberry tree rakes heaven and drops its fruit;
Amazing sunlight sings in the opened vault
On dust and bones, and I am mute.
It is noon; the bells let fall soft flowers of sound.
They turn on the air, they shrink in the flare of noon.
It is night; and I lie alone, and watch through the window
The terrible ice-white emptiness of the moon.
Small bells, far off, spill jewels of sound like rain,
A long wind hurries them whirled and far,
A cloud creeps over the moon, my bed is darkened,
I hold my breath and watch a star.
Do not disturb my memories, heartless music!
I stand once more by a vine-dark moonlit wall,
The sound of my footsteps dies in a void of moonlight,
And I watch white jasmine fall.
Is it my heart that falls? Does earth itself
Drift, a white petal, down the sky?
One bell-note goes to the stars in the blue-white silence,
Solitary and mournful, a somnolent cry.
Death himself in the rain . . . death himself . . .
Death in the savage sunlight . . . skeletal death . . .
I hear the clack of his feet,
Clearly on stones, softly in dust;
He hurries among the trees
Whirling the leaves, tossing he hands from waves.
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat.
Death himself in the grass, death himself,
133
Gyrating invisibly in the sun,
Scatters the grass-blades, whips the wind,
Tears at boughs with malignant laughter:
On the long echoing air I hear him run.
Death himself in the dusk, gathering lilacs,
Breaking a white-fleshed bough,
Strewing purple on a cobwebbed lawn,
Dancing, dancing,
The long red sun-rays glancing
On flailing arms, skipping with hideous knees
Cavorting grotesque ecstasies:
I do not see him, but I see the lilacs fall,
I hear the scrape of knuckles against the wall,
The leaves are tossed and tremble where he plunges among them,
And I hear the sound of his breath,
Sharp and whistling, the rythm of death.
It is evening: the lights on a long street balance and sway.
In the purple ether they swing and silently sing,
The street is a gossamer swung in space,
And death himself in the wind comes dancing along it,
And the lights, like raindrops, tremble and swing.
Hurry, spider, and spread your glistening web,
For death approaches!
Hurry, rose, and open your heart to the bee,
For death approaches!
Maiden, let down your hair for the hands of your lover,
Comb it with moonlight and wreathe it with leaves,
For death approaches!
Death, huge in the star; small in the sand-grain;
Death himself in the rain,
Drawing the rain about him like a garment of jewels:
I hear the sound of his feet
On the stairs of the wind, in the sun,
In the forests of the sea . . .
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat!
It is noontime, Senlin says. The sky is brilliant
134
Above a green and dreaming hill.
I lay my trowel down. The pool is cloudless,
The grass, the wall, the peach-tree, all are still.
It appears to me that I am one with these:
A hill, upon whose back are a wall and trees.
It is noontime: all seems still
Upon this green and flowering hill.
Yet suddenly out of nowhere in the sky,
A cloud comes whirling, and flings
A lazily coiled vortex of shade on the hill.
It crosses the hill, and a bird in the peach-tree sings.
Amazing! Is there a change?
The hill seems somehow strange.
It is noontime. And in the tree
The leaves are delicately disturbed
Where the bird descends invisibly.
It is noontime. And in the pool
The sky is blue and cool.
Yet suddenly out of nowhere,
Something flings itself at the hill,
Tears with claws at the earth,
Lunges and hisses and softly recoils,
Crashing against the green.
The peach-tree braces itself, the pool is frightened,
The grass-blades quiver, the bird is still;
The wall silently struggles against the sunlight;
A terror stiffens the hill.
The trees turn rigidly, to face
Something that circles with slow pace:
The blue pool seems to shrink
From something that slides above its brink.
What struggle is this, ferocious and still-What war in sunlight on this hill?
What is it creeping to dart
Like a knife-blade at my heart?
It is noontime, Senlin says, and all is tranquil:
The brilliant sky burns over a greenbright earth.
The peach-tree dreams in the sun, the wall is contented.
135
A bird in the peach-leaves, moving from sun to shadow,
Phrases again his unremembering mirth,
His lazily beautiful, foolish, mechanical mirth.
The pale blue gloom of evening comes
Among the phantom forests and walls
With a mournful and rythmic sound of drums.
My heart is disturbed with a sound of myriad throbbing,
Persuasive and sinister, near and far:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the thrum of the evening star.
My work is uncompleted; and yet I hurry,-Hearing the whispered pulsing of those drums,-To enter the luminous walls and woods of night.
It is the eternal mistress of the world
Who shakes these drums for my delight.
Listen! the drums of the leaves, the drums of the dust,
The delicious quivering of this air!
I will leave my work unfinished, and I will go
With ringing and certain step through the laughter of chaos
To the one small room in the void I know.
Yesterday it was there,-Will I find it tonight once more when I climb the stair?
The drums of the street beat swift and soft:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the throb of the bridal star.
It weaves deliciously in my brain
A tyrannous melody of her:
Hands in sunlight, threads of rain
Against a weeping face that fades,
Snow on a blackened window-pane;
Fire, in a dusk of hair entangled;
Flesh, more delicate than fruit;
And a voice that searches quivering nerves
For a string to mute.
My life is uncompleted: and yet I hurry
Among the tinkling forests and walls of evening
136
To a certain fragrant room.
Who is it that dances there, to a beating of drums,
While stars on a grey sea bud and bloom?
She stands at the top of the stair,
With the lamplight on her hair.
I will walk through the snarling of streams of space
And climb the long steps carved from wind
And rise once more towards her face.
Listen! the drums of the drowsy trees
Beating our nuptial ecstasies!
Music spins from the heart of silence
And twirls me softly upon the air:
It takes my hand and whispers to me:
It draws the web of the moonlight down.
There are hands, it says, as cool as snow,
The hands of the Venus of the sea;
There are waves of sound in a mermaid-cave;-Come--then--come with me!
The flesh of the sea-rose new and cool,
The wavering image of her who comes
At dusk by a blue sea-pool.
Whispers upon the haunted air-Whisper of foam-white arm and thigh;
And a shower of delicate lights blown down
Fro the laughing sky! . . .
Music spins from a far-off room.
Do you remember,--it seems to say,-The mouth that smiled, beneath your mouth,
And kissed you . . . yesterday?
It is your own flesh waits for you.
Come! you are incomplete! . . .
The drums of the universe once more
Morosely beat.
It is the harlot of the world
Who clashes the leaves like ghostly drums
And disturbs the solitude of my heart
As evening comes!
I leave my work once more and walk
Along a street that sways in the wind.
137
I leave these stones, and walk once more
Along infinity's shore.
I climb the golden-laddered stair;
Among the stars in the void I climb:
I ascend the golden-laddered hair
Of the harlot-queen of time:
She laughs from a window in the sky,
Her white arms downward reach to me!
We are the universe that spins
In a dim ethereal sea.
It is evening, Senlin says, and in the evening
The throbbing of drums has languidly died away.
Forest and sea are still. We breathe in silence
And strive to say the things flesh cannot say.
The soulless wind falls slowly about the earth
And finds no rest.
The lover stares at the setting star,--the wakeful lover
Who finds no peace on his lover's breast.
The snare of desire that bound us in is broken;
Softly, in sorrow, we draw apart, and see,
Far off, the beauty we thought our flesh had captured,-The star we longed to be but could not be.
Come back! We will laugh once more at the words we said!
We say them slowly again, but the words are dead.
Come back beloved! . . . The blue void falls between,
We cry to each other: alone; unknown; unseen.
We are the grains of sand that run and rustle
In the dry wind,
We are the grains of sand who thought ourselves
Immortal.
You touch my hand, time bears you away,-An alien star for whom I have no word.
What are the meaningless things you say?
I answer you, but am not heard.
It is evening, Senlin says;
And a dream in ruin falls.
Once more we turn in pain, bewildered,
138
Among our finite walls:
The walls we built ourselves with patient hands;
For the god who sealed a question in our flesh.
10
It is moonlight. Alone in the silence
I ascend my stairs once more,
While waves, remote in a pale blue starlight,
Crash on a white sand shore.
It is moonlight. The garden is silent.
I stand in my room alone.
Across my wall, from the far-off moon,
A rain of fire is thrown . . .
There are houses hanging above the stars,
And stars hung under a sea:
And a wind from the long blue vault of time
Waves my curtain for me . . .
I wait in the dark once more,
Swung between space and space:
Before my mirror I lift my hands
And face my remembered face.
Is it I who stand in a question here,
Asking to know my name? . . .
It is I, yet I know not whither I go,
Nor why, nor whence I came.
It is I, who awoke at dawn
And arose and descended the stair,
Conceiving a god in the eye of the sun,-In a woman's hands and hair.
It is I whose flesh is gray with the stones
I builded into a wall:
With a mournful melody in my brain
Of a tune I cannot recall . . .
There are roses to kiss: and mouths to kiss;
And the sharp-pained shadow of death.
I remember a rain-drop on my cheek,--
139
A wind like a fragrant breath . . .
And the star I laugh on tilts through heaven;
And the heavens are dark and steep . . .
I will forget these things once more
In the silence of sleep.
~ Conrad Potter Aiken,
319:

Book IX



Meanwhile moved by their unseen spirits, led by the immortal
Phalanxes, who of our hopes and our fears are the reins and the drivers,
Minds they use as if steam and our bodies like power-driven engines,
Leading our lives towards the goal that the gods have prepared for our striving,
Men upon earth fulfilled their harsh ephemeral labour.
But in the Troad the armies clashed on the plain of the Xanthus.
Swift from their ships the Argives marched,more swiftly through Xanthus
Driving their chariots the Trojans came and Penthesilea
Led and Anchises son and Deiphobus the Priamid hero.
Now ere the armies met, ere their spears were nearer, Apollo
Sent a thought for his bale to the heart of Zethus the Hellene.
He to Achilles car drew close and cried to the hero:
Didst thou not promise a boon to me, son of Peleus and Thetis,
Then when I guarded thy life-breath in Memnons battle from Hades?
Therefore I claim the proudest of boons, one worthy a Hellene.
Here in the front I will fight against dangerous Penthesilea.
Thou on our left make war with the beauty and cunning of Paris.
But from his heart dismayed Achilles made answer to Zethus:
What hast thou said, O Zethus, betrayed by some Power that is hostile?
Art thou then hired by the gods for the bale and the slaughter of Hellas?
Zethus answered him, Alone art thou mighty, Achilles, in Phthia?
Tyrant art thou of this fight and keepst for thee all of its glory
We are but wheels of thy chariot, reins of thy courser, Achilles.
What though dire be thy lust, yet here thou canst gather not glory,
Only thy shame and the Greeks, if a girl must be matched with Achilles!
Zethus, evil thy word and from death are the wings of its folly.
Even a god might hesitate fronting the formidable virgin.
Many the shafts that, borne in her chariot, thirst for the blood-draught.
Pages ride in her car behind and hand to her swiftly
Death in the rapid spears and she hurls them and drives and she stays not.
Forty wind-footed men of the mountains race with her chariot
Shielded and armed and bring back the spears from their hearts whom she slaughters.
So like the lightning she moves incessantly flashing and slaying,
Not like mens warring her fight who battle for glory and plunder.
Never she pauses to pluck back her point nor to strip off the armour.
Only to slay she cares and only the legions to shatter.
Come thou not near to her wheels; preserve thy life for thy father.
Pity Arithoas heart who shall wait in vain for her children.
Wroth at Pelides scorn made answer Zethus the Hellene,
Give me my boon I have chosen and thou fight far from my battle
Lest it be said that Achilles was near and therefore she perished.
Cycnus and I []1 will strike down the terror of Argos.
Moved the mighty Achilles answered him, Zethus and Cycnus,
Granted your will; I am bound by my truth, as are you now by Hades.
So he spoke and cried to his steeds, who the wings of the southwind
Racing outvied to the left where from Xanthus galloping swiftly
Came in a mass the Ilian chariots loud towards the Hellenes.
Phoces was with him and Echemus drove and Drus and Thretaon,
They were like rays of the sun, but nighest him, close to his shadow
Ascanus, Phrinix son, who fought ever near to his war-car.
And from the Trojan battle gleaming in arms like the sungod
Paris beheld that dangerous spear and he cried to the heroes:
See now where death on the Trojans comes in the speed of that war-car.
Warriors, fight not [.] Achilles
But where you see him guiding his spear or turning his coursers,
Menace his days and shield the Trojan life that he threatens.
Fighting together hide with your spear-rain his head from the heavens.
Zeus perhaps shall, blinded, forget to cover the hero.
So as he spoke, the armies neared and they clashed in the mellay.
Who first shed the blood [.] that fell in that combat
Thick with the fall of the mighty, last of the battles of Troya?
Helenus first, King Priams son, smote down in that battle
Phoces, Amarus son, who fought in the front of Pelides.
He by the point twixt his brows surprised left the spear he had lifted;
Down he clanged from his car with his armour sounding upon him.
Echemus wroth let drive at Helenus, grieved for his comrade.
Him he missed but Ahites slew who was Helenus henchman.
Helenus wroth in his turn at Echemus aimed and his spear-point
Bit through the shield and quivering paused,by Ananke arrested.
Back avoiding death the Hellene shrank from the forefront.
Nor had Achilles mingled yet his strength with the fighters.
But like a falconer on a hillock lone in his war-car
Shouting his dreadful cry in the pause ere the shock he had lingered
Wheeling slowly his gaze for the choice of a prey or a victim
For with his host was his heart [.] behind Zethus
Herding in shepherded [.]
Ill at ease was his heart [..] or lying
Slain on the Trojan [..] Ares.
Forward [..] towards the Trojans
[.] helmet.
Helenus [] his shield from the death-blow.
But oer his [] Apollo extended.
And from the left and the right the heroes of Ilion gathered.
Dyus and Polites came and Eumachus threatened Achilles.
Paris fatal shafts sang joyously now from the bowstring.
Fast from the Hellene [..]
Ares iron [..]
Neighing [..] of the war-cries.
Nor could the Trojan fighters break through the wall of their foemen,
Nor could the mighty Pelides slay in his war-rage the Trojans.
Ever he fought surrounded or drew back compelled to his legions;
For to each spear of his strength full twenty hissed round his helmet,
Rang on his shield, attempted his cuirass or leaped at his coursers
Or at Automedon ran like living things in their blood-thirst.
Galled the deathless steeds high-neighing pawed in their anger;
Wrathful Achilles wheeled and threatened seeking a victim.
So might a fire on the high-piled altar of sacrifice blazing
Seek for its tongues an offering fit for the gods, but tis answered
Only by spitting rain that a dense cloud sends out of heaven.
Sibilant hiss the drops on the glowing wood and the altar.
Chill a darkness oerhangs and its brief and envious spirits
Rail at the glorious flame desiring an end of its brilliance.
Meanwhile behind by the ranks of the fighters sheltered from Hades
Paris loosed his lethal shafts at the head of the Hellene.
Then upon Helenus wrath from the gods who are noble descended,
Seized on the tongue of the prophet and framed their thoughts in his accents,
Thoughts by men rejected who follow the beast in their reason,
Only advantage seek, and honour and pride are forgotten:
Paris, not thus shalt thou slay Achilles but only thy glory.
Hast thou no heed that the women should mock in the streets of our city
Thee and thy bow and thy numbers, hearing this shame of the Trojans?
Dost thou not fear the gods and their harms? Not so do they combat
Who have the awe of their deeds and follow the way of the mighty.
Paris the Priamid answered his brother: Helenus, wherefore
Care should I have for fame, or the gods and their punishments, heeding
Breath of men when they praise or condemn me? Victory I ask for,
Joy for my living heart, not a dream and a breath for my ashes.
Work I desire and the wish of my heart and the fruit of my labour.
Nay, let my fame be crushed into mire for the ages to spit at,
But let my country live and her foes be slain on her beaches.
So he spoke and fitted another shaft to the bowstring.
Always they fought and were locked in a fierce unyielding combat.
But on the Hellene right stood the brothers stark in their courage
Waiting the Eoan horsehooves that checked at the difficult crossing
Late arrived through field and through pasture. Zethus exultant
Watched their advent stern and encouraged the legions behind him.
Now is the hour of your highest fame, O ye sons of the Hellenes.
These are the iron squadrons, these are the world-famed fighters.
Here is a swifter than Memnon, here is a greater than Hector.
Who would fight with the war-wearied Trojans, the Lycian remnants,
When there are men in the world like these? O Phthians, we conquer
Asias best today. And you, O my brothers, with courage
Reap all the good I have won for our lives this morn from Achilles.
Glad let our fame go before us to our mother Arithoa waiting
Lonely in Phthia, desiring death or the eyes of her children.
Soon will our sails pursue their herald Fame, with our glory
Bellying out and the winds. They shall bear oer the murmurs of Ocean
Heaped up Ilions wealth and the golden bricks of King Priam
And for the halls of our fathers a famous and noble adornment
Severed the beautiful head of the virgin Penthesilea.
So he cried and the Hellenes shouted, a savage rumour,
Proud of their victories past and incredulous grown of disaster.
Now from the Xanthus dripping-wheeled came the Eoan war-cars
Rolling thunder-voiced with the tramp of the runners behind them,
Dust like a flag and dire with the battle-cry, full on the Hellenes.
They to the mid-plain arrived where the might of the Hellene brothers
Waited their coming. Zethus first with his cry of the cascade
Hurrying-footed, headlong that leaps far down to the valley:
Curb, but curb thy advance, O Amazon Penthesilea!
These are not Gnossus ranks and these are not levies from Sparta.
Hellas spears await thee here and the Myrmidon fighters.
But like the northwind high and clear answered Penthesilea,
High like the northwind racing and whistling over the icefields,
Death at its side and snow for its breath in the pitiless winter:
Who art thou biddest to pause the horsehooves of Penthesilea?
Hellene, thou in thy strength who standest forth from thy shielders,
Turn yet, save thy life; for I deem that thou art not Achilles.
Zethus the Hellene I am and Cycnus and Pindus, my brothers,
Stand at my either side, and thou passest no farther, Bellona.
Lioness, turn thou back, for thou canst not here be a hunter.
Zethus and Cycnus and Pindus, little you loved then your mother
Who in this field that is wide must needs all three perish together
Piled on one altar of death by the spear-shafts of Penthesilea.
Empty for ever your halls shall be, childless the age of your father.
High she rose to the spear-cast, poised like a thunderbolt lifted,
Forward swung to the blow and loosed it hissing and ruthless
Straight at the Hellene shield, and it tore through the bronze and groaning
Butted and pushed through the cuirass and split the breast of the hero.
Round in his car he spun, then putting his hands out before him,
Even as a diver who leaps from the shed of the bath to the current,
Launched out so headlong, struggled, sideward collapsed, then was quiet,
Dead on Trojan earth. But dismay and grief on his brothers
Yet alive now seized, then rage came blinding the eyeballs.
Blindly they hurled, yet attained, for Athene guided the spear-shafts;
Death like a forest beast yet played with the might of the virgin.
One on her shield and one on her cuirass rang, but rejected
Fell back like reeds that are thrown at a boulder by boys on the seashore.
She unmoved replied; her shafts in their angry succession
Hardly endured delay between. Like trees the brothers,
Felled, to each side sank prone. So lifeless these strong ones of Hellas
Lay on their couch of the hostile soil reunited in slumber
As in their childhood they lay in Hellas watched by their mother,
Three of them side by side and she dreamed for her darlings their future.
But on the ranks of the Hellenes fear and amazement descended,
Messengers they from Zeus to discourage the pride and the blood-lust.
Back many yards their foremost recoiled in a god-given terror,
As from a snake a traveller scorned for a bough by the wayside,
But it arises puffing its hood and hisses its hatred.
Forward the henchmen ran and plucked back the spears from the corpses;
Onward the Eoan thousands rolled oer the ground that was conquered
Trampling the fallen men into earth with the wheels of their war-cars.
But in her speed like the sea or the stormwind Penthesilea
Drove towards the ranks of the foe and her spear-shafts hastened before her,
Messengers whistling shrilly to Death; he came like a wolfhound
Called by his masters voice and silently fell on the quarry.
Hyrtamus fell, Admetus was wounded, Charmidas slaughtered;
Cirrhes died, though he faced not the blow while he hastened to shelter.
Itylus, bright and beautiful, went down to night and to Hades.
Back, ever back the Hellenes recoiled from the shock of the Virgin,
Slain by her prowess fierce, alarmed by the might of her helpers.
For at her right Surabdas threatened and iron Surenas,
And at her left hill-shouldered Pharatus slaughtered the Hellenes.
Then in the ranks of the Greeks a shouting arose and the leaders
Cried to their hosts and recalled their unstained fame and their valour
Never so lightly conquered before in the onsets of Ares
And of Achilles they spoke and King Peleus waiting in Phthia,
Listening for Troy oerthrown not his hosts overcome by a woman.
And from the right and the left came heroes mighty to succour.
Chiefs of the Dolopes Ar and Aglauron came mid the foremost,
Hillus fair as a drifting moon but fierce as the winter;
Pryas came the Thessalian and Sebes whom Pharsalus honoured,
Victors in countless fights who had stood against Memnon and Hector.
But though their hands were mighty, though fierce their obdurate natures,
Mightier strengths they met and a sterner brood of the war-god.
Light from the hand of the Virgin the spear ran laughing at Sebes,
Crashed through his helmet and left him supine on the pastures of Troya;
Ar to Surabdas fell and the blood-spirting head of Aglauron
Dropped like a fruit from a branch by its weight to the discus of Sambus;
Iron Surenas mace-head shattered the beauty of Hillus;
Pryas by Pharatus slain lay still and had rest from the war-cry.
Back, ever back reeled the Hellene host with the Virgin pursuing.
Storm-shod the Amazon fought and she slew like a god unresisted.
None now dared to confront her burning eyes; the boldest
Shuddered back from her spear and the cry of her tore at their heart-strings.
Fear, the daughter of Zeus, had gripped at the hearts of the Hellenes.
So as their heroes yielded before her, Penthesilea
Lifted with victory cried to her henchman, Aurus of Ellae,
Who had the foot of the wind and its breath that scants not for running,
Hasten, hasten, Aurus; race to the right where unwarring
Valarus leads his host; bid him close with the strength of the Hellenes.
Soon will they scatter like chaff on the threshing-floor blown to the beaches.
But when he sees their flight by Sumalus shepherded seaward,
Swift let him turn like the wind in its paths and follow me, pouring
All in a victor flood on the Myrmidon left and Achilles.
Then shall no Hellene again dare embark in ships for the Troad.
Cursed shall its beaches be to their sons and their sons and for ever.
So she spoke and Aurus ran by the chariots protected.
Then had all Hellas perished indeed on the beaches of Troas,
But from the Argives right where she battled Pallas Athene
Saw and was wroth and she missioned her thought to Automedon speeding.
Splendid it came and found him out mid the hiss of the spear-shafts
Guiding, endangered, Achilles steeds in the thick of the battle.
Shaped like a woman clad in armour and fleeing from battle,
Helmed with the Hellene crest it knocked at the gates of his spirit
Shaking the heros heart with the vision that came to his eyeballs;
Silent he stared aghast and turned his ear to the war-din.
Dost thou not hear to our right, Achilles, these voices of Ares?
High is the sound of Eoan battle, a womans war-cry
Rings in my ears, but faint and sparse come the shouts of our nation.
Far behind is their call and nearer the ships and the beaches.
Great Pelides heard and groaned in the caves of his spirit:
It is the doom that I feared and the fatal madness of Zethus;
Slain are the men of my nation or routed by Penthesilea.
Drive, Automedon, drive, lest shame and defeat upon Hellas
Fasten their seal and her heroes flee from the strength of a woman.
And to the steeds divine Automedon called and they hearkened,
Rose as if seeking their old accustomed paths in the heavens,
Then through the ranks that parted they galloped as gallops the dust-cloud
When the cyclone is abroad and the high trees snap by the wayside,
And from the press of the Hellenes into the plain of the Xanthus
Thundering, neighing came with the war-car borne like a dead leaf
Chased by the blast. Then Athene opened the eyes of Achilles,
Eyes that in all of us sleep, yet can see the near and the distant,
Eyes that the gods in their pity have sealed from the giant confusion,
Sealed from the bale and the grief. He saw like one high on a summit
Near him the Eoans holding the plain and out in the distance
Breaking the Hellene strengths. Like a dream in the night he regarded
High-crested Sumalus fight, Somaranes swift in the onset,
Bull-shouldered Taurons blows and the hero Artavoruxes.
But in the centre fiercest the cry and the death and the fleeing.
There were his chieftains ever reforming vainly resistance,
Even in defeat these were Hellenes and fit to be hosts of Achilles,
But like a doom on them thundered the war-car of Penthesilea,
Pharatus smote and Surabdas and Sambus and iron Surenas.
Down the leaders fell and the armies reeled towards the Ocean.
Wroth he cried to his coursers and fiercely they heard and they hastened;
Swift like a wind oer the grasses galloped the car of Achilles.
Echemus followed, Ascanus drove and Drus and Thretaon:
Phoces alone in the dust of the Troad lay there and moved not.
Yet brought not all of them help to their brothers oppressed in the combat:
For from the forefront forth on the knot of the swift-speeding war-cars
High an Eoan chariot came drawn fast by its coursers
Bearing a mighty chieftain, Valarus son of Supaures.
Fire-footed thundered past him the hooves of the heavenly coursers,
Nor to his challenging shout nor his spear the warlike Pelides
Answered at all, but made haste like a flood to the throng and the mellay.
But twixt the chariots behind and their leader the mighty Eoan
Drove his dark-maned steeds and stood like a cliff to their onset.
Great is your haste, O ye Kings of the Greeks! Abide yet and converse.
Scatheless your leader has fled from me borne by the hooves of his coursers;
Ye, abide! For we meet from far lands on this soil of the Trojans.
All of us meet from afar, but not all shall return to their hearthsides.
Valarus stays you, O Greeks, and this is the point of his greeting.
So as he spoke he launched out his spear as a cloud hurls its storm-flash;
Nor from that fatal hand parted vainly the pitiless envoy,
But of its blood-thirst had right. Riven through and through with the death-stroke
Drus fell prone and tore with dying fingers the grasses.
Sobbing his soul fled out to the night and the chill and the silence.
They like leaves that are suddenly stayed by the fall of a wind-gust
Ceased from their headlong speed. And Echemus poising his spear-shaft:
Sharp are thy greetings, chieftain Eoan. Message for message
Echemus son of Ates, one of the mighty in Hellas,
Thus returns. Let Ares judge twixt the Greek and the Eastern.
Fast sped the spear but Valarus held forth his shield and re butted
Shouting the deadly point that could pierce not his iron refusal.
Echemus, surely thy vaunt has reached me, but unfelt is thy spear-point.
Weak are mens arms, it seems, in Hellas; a boy there Ares
Aims with reeds not spears at pastoral cheeses not iron.
Judge now my strength. Two spears from him ran at the hearts of his foemen.
Crouching Thretaon heard the keen death over him whistle;
Ascanus hurt in the shoulder cried out and paused from his war-lust.
Echemus hurled now again and hurled with him stalwart Thretaon.
Strong Thretaon missed, but Echemus point at the helmet
Bit and fastened as fastens a hound on the ear of the wild-boar
Wroth with the cry and the hunt that gores the pack and his hunters.
Valarus frowning tugged at the heavy steel; yet his right hand
Smote at Echemus. Him he missed but valiant Thretaon
Sat back dead in his seat and the chariot wild with its coursers
Snorting and galloping bore his corpse oer the plains to the Hellenes.
But while yet Valarus strove with the shaft, obscured and encumbered,
Ascanus sprang down swift from his car and armed with his sword-point
Clove the Eoans neck as the lightning springs at an oak-trunk
Seized in the stride of the storm and severs that might with its sharpness.
Slain the hero fell; his mighty limbs the spirit
Mightier released to the gods and it rose to the heavens of the noble.
Ascanus gathered the spear-shafts; loud was his shout as exulting
Back he leaped to the car triumphant oer death and its menace.
Lie there, Valarus, king of the East, with imperial Troya.
Six rich feet of her soil she gives thee for couch of the nuptials.
Rest then! talk not again on the way with the heroes of Hellas.
So delivered they hastened glad to the ranks of their brothers.
After them rolled the Eoan war-cars, Arithon leading,
Loud with the clamour of hooves and the far-rolling gust of the war-cry;
Wroth at their chieftains fall they moved to the help of their nation
Now by the unearthly horses neared and the might of Achilles.
Then from the Hellenes who heard the noise and the cry of their coming,
Lifted eyes dismayed, but saw the familiar war-car,
Saw the heaven-born steeds and the helm unconquered in battle,
Cry was of other hopefulness. Loud as the outbursting thunder
Rises oer lower sounds of the storm, oer the din of the battle
Rose the Hellene shout and rose the name of Achilles.

  Here and below some words have been lost as a result of damage to the manuscript.Ed.

***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 9 - Book IX
,
320:Jubilate Agno: Fragment B, Part 1
Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his
keepers.
Let Shedeur rejoice with Pyrausta, who dwelleth in a medium of fire, which God
hath adapted for him.
Let Shelumiel rejoice with Olor, who is of a goodly savour, and the very look of
him harmonizes the mind.
Let Jael rejoice with the Plover, who whistles for his live, and foils the marksmen
and their guns.
Let Raguel rejoice with the Cock of Portugal -- God send good Angels to the allies
of England!
Let Hobab rejoice with Necydalus, who is the Greek of a Grub.
Let Zurishaddai with the Polish Cock rejoice -- The Lord restore peace to Europe.
Let Zuar rejoice with the Guinea Hen -- The Lord add to his mercies in the WEST!
Let Chesed rejoice with Strepsiceros, whose weapons are the ornaments of his
peace.
Let Hagar rejoice with Gnesion, who is the right sort of eagle, and towers the
highest.
Let Libni rejoice with the Redshank, who migrates not but is translated to the
upper regions.
Let Nahshon rejoice with the Seabreese, the Lord give the sailors of his Spirit.
Let Helon rejoice with the Woodpecker -- the Lord encourage the propagation of
trees!
Let Amos rejoice with the Coote -- prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.
Let Ephah rejoice with Buprestis, the Lord endue us with temperance and
40
humanity, till every cow have her mate!
Let Sarah rejoice with the Redwing, whose harvest is in the frost and snow.
Let Rebekah rejoice with Iynx, who holds his head on one side to deceive the
adversary.
Let Shuah rejoice with Boa, which is the vocal serpent.
Let Ehud rejoice with Onocrotalus, whose braying is for the glory of God, because
he makes the best musick in his power.
Let Shamgar rejoice with Otis, who looks about him for the glory of God, and
sees the horizon compleat at once.
Let Bohan rejoice with the Scythian Stag -- he is beef and breeches against want
and nakedness.
Let Achsah rejoice with the Pigeon who is an antidote to malignity and will carry
a letter.
Let Tohu rejoice with the Grouse -- the Lord further the cultivating of heaths and
the peopling of deserts.
Let Hillel rejoice with Ammodytes, whose colour is deceitful and he plots against
the pilgrim's feet.
Let Eli rejoice with Leucon -- he is an honest fellow, which is a rarity.
Let Jemuel rejoice with Charadrius, who is from the HEIGHT and the sight of him
is good for the jaundice.
Let Pharaoh rejoice with Anataria, whom God permits to prey upon the ducks to
check their increase.
Let Lotan rejoice with Sauterelle. Blessed be the name of the Lord from the Lotetree to the Palm.
Let Dishon rejoice with the Landrail, God give his grace to the society for
preserving the game.
Let Hushim rejoice with the King's Fisher, who is of royal beauty, tho' plebeian
41
size.
Let Machir rejoice with Convolvulus, from him to the ring of Saturn, which is the
girth of Job; to the signet of God -- from Job and his daughters BLESSED BE
JESUS.
Let Atad bless with Eleos, the nightly Memorialist
ελεησον
κυριε .
Let Jamim rejoice with the Bittern -- blessed be the name of Jesus for Denver
Sluice, Ruston, and the draining of the fens.
Let Ohad rejoice with Byturos who eateth the vine and is a minister of
temperance.
Let Zohar rejoice with Cychramus who cometh with the quails on a particular
affair.
Let Serah, the daughter of Asher, rejoice with Ceyx, who maketh his cabin in the
Halcyon's hold.
Let Magdiel rejoice with Ascarides, which is the life of the bowels -- the worm
hath a part in our frame.
Let Becher rejoice with Oscen who terrifies the wicked, as trumpet and alarm the
coward.
Let Shaul rejoice with Circos, who hath clumsy legs, but he can wheel it the
better with his wings. -Let Hamul rejoice with the Crystal, who is pure and translucent.
Let Ziphion rejoice with the Tit-Lark who is a groundling, but he raises the spirits.
Let Mibzar rejoice with the Cadess, as is their number, so are their names,
blessed be the Lord Jesus for them all.
Let Jubal rejoice with Cascilia, the woman and the slow-worm praise the name of
the Lord.
42
Let Arodi rejoice with the Royston Crow, there is a society of them at
Trumpington and Cambridge.
Let Areli rejoice with the Criel, who is a dwarf that towereth above others.
Let Phuvah rejoice with Platycerotes, whose weapons of defence keep them
innocent.
Let Shimron rejoice with the Kite, who is of more value than many sparrows.
Let Sered rejoice with the Wittal -- a silly bird is wise unto his own preservation.
Let Elon rejoice with Attelabus, who is the Locust without wings.
Let Jahleel rejoice with the Woodcock, who liveth upon suction and is pure from
his diet.
Let Shuni rejoice with the Gull, who is happy in not being good for food.
Let Ezbon rejoice with Musimon, who is from the ram and she-goat.
Let Barkos rejoice with the Black Eagle, which is the least of his species and the
best-natured.
Let Bedan rejoice with Ossifrage -- the bird of prey and the man of prayer.
Let Naomi rejoice with Pseudosphece who is between a wasp and a hornet.
Let Ruth rejoice with the Tumbler -- it is a pleasant thing to feed him and be
thankful.
Let Ram rejoice with the Fieldfare, who is a good gift from God in the season of
scarcity.
Let Manoah rejoice with Cerastes, who is a Dragon with horns.
Let Talmai rejoice with Alcedo, who makes a cradle for it's young, which is rock'd
by the winds.
Let Bukki rejoice with the Buzzard, who is clever, with the reputation of a silly
fellow.
43
Let Michal rejoice with Leucocruta who is a mixture of beauty and magnanimity.
Let Abiah rejoice with Morphnus who is a bird of passage to the Heavens.
Let Hur rejoice with the Water-wag-tail, who is a neighbour, and loves to be
looked at.
Let Dodo rejoice with the purple Worm, who is cloathed sumptuously, tho he
fares meanly.
Let Ahio rejoice with the Merlin who is a cousin german of the hawk.
Let Joram rejoice with the Water-Rail, who takes his delight in the river.
Let Chileab rejoice with Ophion who is clean made, less than an hart, and a
Sardinian.
Let Shephatiah rejoice with the little Owl, which is the wingged Cat.
Let Ithream rejoice with the great Owl, who understandeth that which he
professes.
Let Abigail rejoice with Lethophagus -- God be gracious to the widows indeed.
Let Anathoth bless with Saurix, who is a bird of melancholy.
Let Shammua rejoice with the Vultur who is strength and fierceness.
Let Shobab rejoice with Evech who is of the goat kind which is meditation and
pleasantry.
Let Ittai the Gittite rejoice with the Gerfalcon amicus certus in re incertâ cernitur.
Let Ibhar rejoice with the Pochard -- a child born in prosperity is the chiefest
blessing of peace.
Let Elishua rejoice with Cantharis -- God send bread and milk to the children.
Let Chimham bless with Drepanis who is a passenger from the sea to heaven.
Let Toi rejoice with Percnopteros which haunteth the sugar-fens.
44
Let Nepheg rejoice with Cenchris which is the spotted serpent.
Let Japhia rejoice with Buteo who hath three testicles.
Let Gibeon rejoice with the Puttock, who will shift for himself to the last
extremity.
Let Elishama rejoice with Mylæcos Ισχετε
χειρα
μυλαιον
αλιτριδες .
ευδετε
μακρα .
Let Elimelech rejoice with the Horn-Owl who is of gravity and amongst my friends
in the tower.
Let Eliada rejoice with the Gier-eagle who is swift and of great penetration.
Let Eliphalet rejoice with Erodius who is God's good creature, which is sufficient
for him.
Let Jonathan, David's nephew, rejoice with Oripelargus who is noble by his
ascent.
Let Sheva rejoice with the Hobby, who is the service of the great.
Let Ahimaaz rejoice with the Silver-Worm who is a living mineral.
Let Shobi rejoice with the Kastrel -- blessed be the name JESUS in falconry and
in the MALL
Let Elkanah rejoice with Cymindis -- the Lord illuminate us against the powers of
darkness.
Let Ziba rejoice with Glottis whose tongue is wreathed in his throat.
Let Micah rejoice with the spotted Spider, who counterfeits death to effect his
purposes.
Let Rizpah rejoice with the Eyed Moth who is beautiful in corruption.
45
Let Naharai, Joab's armour-bearer rejoice with Rock who is a bird of stupendous
magnitude.
Let Abiezer, the Anethothite, rejoice with Phrynos who is the scaled frog.
Let Nachon rejoice with Parcas who is a serpent more innocent than others.
Let Lapidoth with Percnos -- the Lord is the builder of the wall of CHINA -REJOICE.
Let Ahinoam rejoice with Prester -- The seed of the woman hath bruised the
serpents head.
Let Phurah rejoice with Penelopes, the servant of Gideon with the fowl of the
brook.
Let Jether, the son of Gideon, rejoice with Ecchetae which are musical
grashoppers.
Let Hushai rejoice with the Ospray who is able to parry the eagle.
Let Eglah rejoice with Phalaris who is a pleasant object upon the water.
Let Haggith rejoice with the white Weasel who devoureth the honey and it's
maker.
Let Abital rejoice with Ptyas who is arrayed in green and gold.
Let Maacah rejoice with Dryophyte who was blessed of the Lord in the valley.
Let Zabud Solomon's friend rejoice with Oryx who is a frolicksome mountaineer.
Let Adoniram the receiver general of the excise rejoice with Hypnale the sleepy
adder.
Let Pedahel rejoice with Pityocampa who eateth his house in the pine.
Let Ibzam rejoice with the Brandling -- the Lord further the building of bridges
and making rivers navigable.
Let Gilead rejoice with Gentle -- the Lord make me a fisher of men.
46
Let Zelophehad rejoice with Ascalabotes who casteth not his coat till a new one is
prepared for him.
Let Mahlah rejoice with Pellos who is a tall bird and stately.
Let Tirzah rejoice with Tylus which is the Cheeslip and food for the chicken.
Let Hoglah rejoice with Leontophonos who will kill the lion, if he is eaten.
Let Milcah rejoice with the Horned Beetle who will strike a man in the face.
Let Noah rejoice with Hibris who is from a wild boar and a tame sow.
Let Abdon rejoice with the Glede who is very voracious and may not himself be
eaten.
Let Zuph rejoice with Dipsas, whose bite causeth thirst.
Let Schechem of Manasseh rejoice with the Green Worm whose livery is of the
field.
Let Gera rejoice with the Night Hawk -- blessed are those who watch when
others sleep.
Let Anath rejoice with Rauca who inhabiteth the root of the oak.
Let Cherub rejoice with the Cherub who is a bird and a blessed Angel.
***
For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the
glory of the name of the Lord.
For I bless God whose name is Jealous -- and there is a zeal to deliver us from
everlasting burnings.
For my existimation is good even amongst the slanderers and my memory shall
arise for a sweet savour unto the Lord.
For I bless the PRINCE of PEACE and pray that all the guns may be nail'd up,
save such are for the rejoicing days.
47
For I have abstained from the blood of the grape and that even at the Lord's
table.
For I have glorified God in GREEK and LATIN, the consecrated languages spoken
by the Lord on earth.
For I meditate the peace of Europe amongst family bickerings and domestic jars.
For the HOST is in the WEST -- the Lord make us thankful unto salvation.
For I preach the very GOSPEL of CHRIST without comment and with this weapon
shall I slay envy.
For I bless God in the rising generation, which is on my side.
For I have translated in the charity, which makes things better and I shall be
translated myself at the last.
For he that walked upon the sea, hath prepared the floods with the Gospel of
peace.
For the merciful man is merciful to his beast, and to the trees that give them
shelter.
For he hath turned the shadow of death into the morning,the Lord is his name.
For I am come home again, but there is nobody to kill the calf or to pay the
musick.
For the hour of my felicity, like the womb of Sarah, shall come at the latter end.
For I shou'd have avail'd myself of waggery, had not malice been multitudinous.
For there are still serpents that can speak -- God bless my head, my heart and
my heel.
For I bless God that I am of the same seed as Ehud, Mutius Scævola, and Colonel
Draper.
For the word of God is a sword on my side -- no matter what other weapon a
stick or a straw.
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For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord, and he hath marked me
for his own.
For I bless God for the Postmaster general and all conveyancers of letters under
his care especially Allen and Shelvock.
For my grounds in New Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats and
maynes of Staindrop Moor.
For the praise of God can give to a mute fish the notes of a nightingale.
For I have seen the White Raven and Thomas Hall of Willingham and am my self
a greater curiosity than both.
For I look up to heaven which is my prospect to escape envy by surmounting it.
For if Pharaoh had known Joseph, he woud have blessed God and me for the
illumination of the people.
For I pray God to bless improvements in gardening till London be a city of palmtrees.
For I pray to give his grace to the poor of England, that Charity be not offended
and that benevolence may increase.
For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for
pearls.
For there is a blessing from the STONE of JESUS which is founded upon hell to
the precious jewell on the right hand of God.
For the nightly Visitor is at the window of the impenitent, while I sing a psalm of
my own composing.
For there is a note added to the scale, which the Lord hath made fuller, stronger
and more glorious.
For I offer my goat as he browses the vine, bless the Lord from chambering and
drunkeness.
For there is a traveling for the glory of God without going to Italy or France.
49
For I bless the children of Asher for the evil I did them and the good I might have
received at their hands.
For I rejoice like a worm in the rain in him that cherishes and from him that
tramples.
For I am ready for the trumpet and alarm to fight, to die and to rise again.
For the banish'd of the Lord shall come about again, for so he hath prepared for
them.
For sincerity is a jewel which is pure and transparent, eternal and inestimable.
For my hands and my feet are perfect as the sublimity of Naphtali and the felicity
of Asher.
For the names and number of animals are as the name and number of the stars.
-For I pray the Lord Jesus to translate my MAGNIFICAT into verse and represent
it.
For I bless the Lord Jesus from the bottom of Royston Cave to the top of King's
Chapel.
For I am a little fellow, which is intitled to the great mess by the benevolence of
God my father.
For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her
infirmities.
For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her
age.
For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her
poverty.
For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I had the grace to obey the voice of
Christ in my conscience.
For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I was willing to run all hazards for
50
the sake of the name of the Lord.
For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I was willing to be called a fool for
the sake of Christ.
For I lent my flocks and my herds and my lands at once unto the Lord.
For nature is more various than observation tho' observers be innumerable.
For Agricola is Γηουργος .
For I pray God to bless POLLY in the blessing of Naomi and assign her to the
house of DAVID.
For I am in charity with the French who are my foes and Moabites because of the
Moabitish woman.
For my Angel is always ready at a pinch to help me out and to keep me up.
For CHRISTOPHER must slay the Dragon with a PHEON's head.
For they have seperated me and my bosom, whereas the right comes by setting
us together.
For silly fellow! silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor my
family.
For he that scorneth the scorner hath condescended to my low estate.
For Abiah is the father of Joab and Joab of all Romans and English Men.
For they pass by me in their tour, and the good Samaritan is not yet come. -For I bless God in the behalf of TRINITY COLLEGE in CAMBRIDGE and the society
of PURPLES in LONDON. -For I have a nephew CHRISTOPHER to whom I implore the grace of God.
For I pray God bless the CAM -- Mr HIGGS and Mr and Mrs WASHBOURNE as the
drops of the dew.
For I pray God bless the king of Sardinia and make him an instrument of his
51
peace.
For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom I take occasion to
bless Almighty God.
For I pray God for the professors of the University of Cambridge to attend and to
amend.
For the Fatherless Children and widows are never deserted of the Lord.
For I pray God be gracious to the house of Stuart and consider their afflictions.
For I pray God be gracious to the seed of Virgil to Mr GOODMAN SMITH of King's
and Joseph STUD.
For I give God the glory that I am a son of ABRAHAM a PRINCE of the house of
my fathers.
For my brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks
that pass away.
For I bless God for my retreat at CANBURY, as it was the place of the nativity of
my children.
For I pray God to give them the food which I cannot earn for them any otherwise
than by prayer.
For I pray God bless the Chinese which are of ABRAHAM and the Gospel grew
with them at the first.
For I bless God in the honey of the sugar-cane and the milk of the cocoa.
For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the
world.
For I bless God in the strength of my loins and for the voice which he hath made
sonorous.
For tis no more a merit to provide for oneself, but to quit all for the sake of the
Lord.
For there is no invention but the gift of God, and no grace like the grace of
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gratitude.
For grey hairs are honourable and tell every one of them to the glory of God.
For I bless the Lord Jesus for the memory of GAY, POPE and SWIFT.
For all good words are from GOD, and all others are cant.
For I am enabled by my ascent and the Lord haith raised me above my Peers.
For I pray God bless my lord CLARENDON and his seed for ever.
For there is silver in my mines and I bless God that it is rather there then in my
coffers.
For I blessed God in St James's Park till I routed all the company.
For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchman smites
me with his staff.
For I am the seed of the WELCH WOMAN and speak the truth from my heart.
For they lay wagers touching my life. -- God be gracious to the winners.
For the piety of Rizpah is imitable in the Lord -- wherefore I pray for the dead.
For the Lord is my ROCK and I am the bearer of his CROSS.
For I am like a frog in the brambles, but the Lord hath put his whole armour
upon me.
For I was a Viper-catcher in my youth and the Lord delivered me from his
venom.
For I rejoice that I attribute to God, what others vainly ascribe to feeble man.
For I am ready to die for his sake -- who lay down his life for all mankind.
For the son of JOSHUA shall prevail against the servant of Gideon -- Good men
have their betters,
For my seed shall worship the Lord JESUS as numerous and musical as the
53
grashoppers of Paradise.
For I pray God to turn the council of Ahitophel into foolishness.
For the learning of the Lord increases daily, as the sun is an improving angel.
For I pray God for a reformation amonst the women and the restoration of the
veil.
For beauty is better to look upon than to meddle with and tis good for a man not
to know a woman.
For the Lord Jesus made him a nosegay and blessed it and he blessed the
inhabitants of flowers.
For a faithful friend is the medicine of life, but a neighbour in the Lord is better
than he.
For I stood up betimes in behalf of LIBERTY, PROPERTY and NO EXCISE.
For they began with grubbing up my trees and now they have excluded the
planter.
For I am the Lord's builder and free and accepted MASON in CHRIST JESUS.
For I bless God in all gums and balsams and every thing that ministers relief to
the sick.
For the Sun's at work to make me a garment and the Moon is at work for my
wife.
For tall and stately are against me, but humiliation on humiliation is on my side.
For I have a providential acquaintance with men who bear the names of animals.
For I bless God to Mr Lion Mr Cock Mr Cat Mr Talbot Mr Hart Mrs Fysh Mr Grub,
and Miss Lamb.
For they throw my horns in my face and reptiles make themselves wings against
me.
For I bless God for the immortal soul of Mr Pigg of DOWNHAM in NORFOLK.
54
For I fast this day even the 31st of August N.S. to prepare for the SABBATH of
the Lord.
For the bite of an Adder is cured by its greese and the malice of my enemies by
their stupidity.
For I bless God in SHIPBOURNE FAIRLAWN the meadows the brooks and the
hills.
For th adversary hath exasperated the very birds against me, but the Lord
sustain'd me.
For I bless God for my Newcastle friends the voice of the raven and heart of the
oak.
For I bless God for every feather from the wren in the sedge to the CHERUBS and
their MATES.
~ Christopher Smart,
321:The Botanic Garden (Part Vi)
THE LOVES OF THE PLANTS.
CANTO II.
Again the Goddess strikes the golden lyre,
And tunes to wilder notes the warbling wire;
With soft suspended step Attention moves,
And Silence hovers o'er the listening groves;
Orb within orb the charmed audience throng,
And the green vault reverberates the song.
'Breathe soft, ye Gales!' the fair CARLINA cries,
Bear on broad wings your Votress to the skies.
How sweetly mutable yon orient hues,
As Morn's fair hand her opening roses strews;
How bright, when Iris blending many a ray
Binds in embroider'd wreath the brow of Day;
Soft, when the pendant Moon with lustres pale
O'er heaven's blue arch unfurls her milky veil;
While from the north long threads of silver light
Dart on swift shuttles o'er the tissued night!
'Breathe soft, ye Zephyrs! hear my fervent sighs,
Bear on broad wings your Votress to the skies!'-Plume over plume in long divergent lines
On whale-bone ribs the fair Mechanic joins;
Inlays with eider down the silken strings,
And weaves in wide expanse Dædalian wings;
Round her bold sons the waving pennons binds,
And walks with angel-step upon the winds.
So on the shoreless air the intrepid Gaul
Launch'd the vast concave of his buoyant ball.Journeying on high, the silken castle glides
Bright as a meteor through the azure tides;
O'er towns and towers and temples wins its way,
Or mounts sublime, and gilds the vault of day.
Silent with upturn'd eyes unbreathing crowds
Pursue the floating wonder to the clouds;
And, flush'd with transport or benumb'd with fear,
Watch, as it rises, the diminish'd sphere.
-Now less and less!-and now a speck is seen!-
41
And now the fleeting rack obtrudes between!With bended knees, raised arms, and suppliant brow
To every shrine with mingled cries they vow.'Save Him, ye Saints! who o'er the good preside;
'Bear Him, ye Winds! ye Stars benignant! guide.'
-The calm Philosopher in ether fails,
Views broader stars, and breathes in purer gales;
Sees, like a map, in many a waving line
Round Earth's blue plains her lucid waters mine;
Sees at his feet the forky lightnings glow,
And hears innocuous thunders roar below.
--Rife, great MONGOLFIER! urge thy venturous flight
High o'er the Moon's pale ice-reflected light;
High o'er the pearly Star, whose beamy horn.
Hangs in the east, gay harbinger of morn;
Leave the red eye of Mars on rapid wing;
Jove's silver guards, and Saturn's dusky ring;
Leave the fair beams, which, issuing from afar;
Play with new lustres round the Georgian star;
Shun with strong oars the Sun's attractive throne,
The sparkling zodiack, and the milky zone;
Where headlong Comets with increasing force
Through other systems bend their blazing course.For thee Cassiope her chair withdraws,
For thee the Bear retracts his shaggy paws;
High o'er the North thy golden orb shall roll,
And blaze eternal round the wondering pole.
So Argo, rising from the southern main,
Lights with new stars the blue etherial plain;
With favoring beams the mariner protects,
And the bold course, which first it steer'd, directs.
Inventress of the Woof, fair LINA flings
The flying shuttle through the dancing strings;
Inlays the broider'd weft with flowery dyes,
Quick beat the reeds, the pedals fall and rise;
Slow from the beam the lengths of warp unwind,
And dance and nod the massy weights behind.Taught by her labours, from the fertile soil
Immortal Isis clothed the banks of Nile;
And fair ARACHNE with her rival loom
Found undeserved a melancholy doom.-
42
Five
Sister-nymphs with dewy fingers twine
The beamy flax, and stretch the fibre-line;
Quick eddying threads from rapid spindles reel,
Or whirl with beaten foot the dizzy wheel.
-Charm'd round the busy Fair
five
shepherds press,
Praise the nice texture of their snowy dress,
Admire the Artists, and the art approve,
And tell with honey'd words the tale of love.
So now, where Derwent rolls his dusky floods
Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods,
The Nymph, GOSSYPIA, treads the velvet sod,
And warms with rosy smiles the watery God;
His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns,
And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns;
With playful charms her hoary lover wins,
And wields his trident,-while the Monarch spins.
-First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull
From leathery pods the vegetable wool;
With wiry teeth
revolving cards
release
The tanged knots, and smooth the ravell'd fleece;
Next moves the
iron-band
with fingers fine,
Combs the wide card, and forms the eternal line;
Slow, with soft lips, the
whirling Can
acquires
The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires;
With quicken'd pace
successive rollers
move,
And these retain, and those extend the
rove
Then fly the spoles, the rapid axles glow;And slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below.
PAPYRA, throned upon the banks of Nile,
43
Spread her smooth leaf, and waved her silver style.
-The storied pyramid, the laurel'd bust,
The trophy'd arch had crumbled into dust;
The sacred symbol, and the epic song,
(Unknown the character, forgot the tongue,)
With each unconquer'd chief, or fainted maid,
Sunk undistinguish'd in Oblivion's shade.
Sad o'er the scatter'd ruins Genius sigh'd,
And infant Arts but learn'd to lisp and died.
Till to astonish'd realms PAPYRA taught
To paint in mystic colours Sound and Thought.
With Wisdom's voice to print the page sublime,
And mark in adamant the steps of Time.
-Three favour'd youths her soft attention share,
The fond disciples of the studious Fair,
Hear her sweet voice, the golden process prove;
Gaze, as they learn; and, as they listen, love.
The first
from Alpha to Omega joins
The letter'd tribes along the level lines;
Weighs with nice ear the vowel, liquid, surd,
And breaks in syllables the volant word.
Then forms
the next
upon the marshal'd plain
In deepening ranks his dexterous cypher-train;
And counts, as wheel the decimating bands,
The dews of Ægypt, or Arabia's sands,
And then
the third
on four concordant lines
Prints the lone crotchet, and the quaver joins;
Marks the gay trill, the solemn pause inscribes,
And parts with bars the undulating tribes.
Pleased round her cane-wove throne, the applauding crowd
Clap'd their rude hands, their swarthy foreheads bow'd;
With loud acclaim 'a present God!' they cry'd,
'A present God!' rebellowing shores reply'dThen peal'd at intervals with mingled swell
The echoing harp, shrill clarion, horn, and shell;
While Bards ecstatic, bending o'er the lyre,
44
Struck deeper chords, and wing'd the song with fire.
Then mark'd Astronomers with keener eyes
The Moon's refulgent journey through the skies;
Watch'd the swift Comets urge their blazing cars,
And weigh'd the Sun with his revolving Stars.
High raised the Chemists their Hermetic wands,
(And changing forms obey'd their waving hands,)
Her treasur'd gold from Earth's deep chambers tore,
Or fused and harden'd her chalybeate ore.
All with bent knee from fair PAPYRA claim
Wove by her hands the wreath of deathless fame.
-Exulting Genius crown'd his darling child,
The young Arts clasp'd her knees, and Virtue smiled.
So now DELANY forms her mimic bowers,
Her paper foliage, and her silken flowers;
Her virgin train the tender scissars ply,
Vein the green leaf, the purple petal dye:
Round wiry stems the flaxen tendril bends,
Moss creeps below, and waxen fruit impends.
Cold Winter views amid his realms of snow
DELANY'S vegetable statues blow;
Smooths his stern brow, delays his hoary wing,
And eyes with wonder all the blooms of spring.
The gentle LAPSANA, NYMPHÆA fair,
And bright CALENDULA with golden hair,
Watch with nice eye the Earth's diurnal way,
Marking her solar and sidereal day,
Her slow nutation, and her varying clime,
And trace with mimic art the march of Time;
Round his light foot a magic chain they fling,
And count the quick vibrations of his wing.First in its brazen cell reluctant roll'd
Bends the dark spring in many a steely fold;
On spiral brass is stretch'd the wiry thong,
Tooth urges tooth, and wheel drives wheel along;
In diamond-eyes the polish'd axles flow,
Smooth slides the hand, the ballance pants below.
Round the white circlet in relievo bold
A Serpent twines his scaly length in gold;
And brightly pencil'd on the enamel'd sphere
Live the fair trophies of the passing year.
-Here
45
Time's
huge fingers grasp his giant-mace,
And dash proud Superstition from her base,
Rend her strong towers and gorgeous fanes, and shed
The crumbling fragments round her guilty head.
There the gay
Hours
, whom wreaths of roses deck,
Lead their young trains amid the cumberous wreck;
And, slowly purpling o'er the mighty waste,
Plant the fair growths of Science and of Taste.
While each light
Moment
, as it dances by
With feathery foot and pleasure-twinkling eye,
Feeds from its baby-hand, with many a kiss,
The callow nestlings of domestic Bliss.
As yon gay clouds, which canopy the skies,
Change their thin forms, and lose their lucid dyes;
So the soft bloom of Beauty's vernal charms
Fades in our eyes, and withers in our arms.
-Bright as the silvery plume, or pearly shell,
The snow-white rose, or lily's virgin bell,
The fair HELLEBORAS attractive shone,
Warm'd every Sage, and every Shepherd won.Round the gay sisters press the
enamour'd bands
And seek with soft solicitude their hands.
-Ere while how chang'd!-in dim suffusion lies
The glance divine, that lighten'd in their eyes;
Cold are those lips, where smiles seductive hung,
And the weak accents linger on their tongue;
Each roseat feature fades to livid green,-Disgust with face averted shuts the scene.
So from his gorgeous throne, which awed the world,
The mighty Monarch of the east was hurl'd,
To dwell with brutes beneath the midnight storm,
By Heaven's just vengeance changed in mind and form.
-Prone to the earth He bends his brow superb,
Crops the young floret and the bladed herb;
Lolls his red tongue, and from the reedy side
46
Of slow Euphrates laps the muddy tide.
Long eagle-plumes his arching neck invest,
Steal round his arms, and clasp his sharpen'd breast;
Dark brinded hairs in bristling ranks, behind,
Rise o'er his back, and rustle in the wind,
Clothe his lank sides, his shrivel'd limbs surround,
And human hands with talons print the ground.
Silent in shining troops the Courtier-throng
Pursue their monarch as he crawls along;
E'en Beauty pleads in vain with smiles and tears,
Nor Flattery's self can pierce his pendant ears.
Two
Sister-Nymphs to Ganges' flowery brink
Bend their light steps, the lucid water drink,
Wind through the dewy rice, and nodding canes,
(As
eight
black Eunuchs guard the sacred plains),
With playful malice watch the scaly brood,
And shower the inebriate berries on the flood.Stay in your crystal chambers, silver tribes!
Turn your bright eyes, and shun the dangerous bribes;
The tramel'd net with less destruction sweeps
Your curling shallows, and your azure deeps;
With less deceit, the gilded fly beneath,
Lurks the fell hook unseen,-to taste is death!-Dim your slow eyes, and dull your pearly coat,
Drunk on the waves your languid forms shall float,
On useless fins in giddy circles play,
And Herons and Otters seize you for their prey.So, when the Saint from Padua's graceless land
In silent anguish sought the barren strand,
High on the shatter'd beech sublime He stood,
Still'd with his waving arm the babbling flood;
'To Man's dull ear,' He cry'd, 'I call in vain,
'Hear me, ye scaly tenants of the main!'Misshapen Seals approach in circling flocks,
In dusky mail the Tortoise climbs the rocks,
Torpedoes, Sharks, Rays, Porpus, Dolphins, pour
Their twinkling squadrons round the glittering shore;
47
With tangled fins, behind, huge Phocæ glide,
And Whales and Grampi swell the distant tide.
Then kneel'd the hoary Seer, to heaven address'd
His fiery eyes, and smote his sounding breast;
'Bless ye the Lord!' with thundering voice he cry'd,
'Bless ye the Lord!' the bending shores reply'd;
The winds and waters caught the sacred word,
And mingling echoes shouted 'Bless the Lord!'
The listening shoals the quick contagion feel,
Pant on the floods, inebriate with their zeal,
Ope their wide jaws, and bow their slimy heads,
And dash with frantic fins their foamy beds.
Sopha'd on silk, amid her charm-built towers,
Her meads of asphodel, and amaranth bowers,
Where Sleep and Silence guard the soft abodes,
In sullen apathy PAPAVER nods.
Faint o'er her couch in scintillating streams
Pass the thin forms of Fancy and of Dreams;
Froze by inchantment on the velvet ground
Fair youths and beauteous ladies glitter round;
On crystal pedestals they seem to sigh,
Bend the meek knee, and lift the imploring eye.
-And now the Sorceress bares her shrivel'd hand,
And circles thrice in air her ebon wand;
Flush'd with new life descending statues talk,
The pliant marble softening as they walk;
With deeper sobs reviving lovers breathe,
Fair bosoms rise, and soft hearts pant beneath;
With warmer lips relenting damsels speak,
And kindling blushes tinge the Parian cheek;
To viewless lutes aërial voices sing,
And hovering Loves are heard on rustling wing.
-She waves her wand again!-fresh horrors seize
Their stiffening limbs, their vital currents freeze;
By each cold nymph her marble lover lies,
And iron slumbers seal their glassy eyes.
So with his dread Caduceus HERMES led
From the dark regions of the imprison'd dead,
Or drove in silent shoals the lingering train
To Night's dull shore, and PLUTO'S dreary reign
So with her waving pencil CREWE commands
The realms of Taste, and Fancy's fairy lands;
48
Calls up with magic voice the shapes, that sleep
In earth's dark bosom, or unfathom'd deep;
That shrined in air on viewless wings aspire,
Or blazing bathe in elemental fire.
As with nice touch her plaistic hand she moves,
Rise the fine forms of Beauties, Graces, Loves;
Kneel to the fair Inchantress, smile or sigh,
And fade or flourish, as she turns her eye.
Fair CISTA, rival of the rosy dawn,
Call'd her light choir, and trod the dewy lawn;
Hail'd with rude melody the new-born May,
As cradled yet in April's lap she lay.
I.
'Born in yon blaze of orient sky,
'Sweet MAY! thy radiant form unfold;
'Unclose thy blue voluptuous eye,
'And wave thy shadowy locks of gold.
II.
'For Thee the fragrant zephyrs blow,
'For Thee descends the sunny shower;
'The rills in softer murmurs slow,
'And brighter blossoms gem the bower.
III.
'Light Graces dress'd in flowery wreaths
'And tiptoe Joys their hands combine;
'And Love his sweet contagion breathes,
'And laughing dances round thy shrine.
IV.
'Warm with new life the glittering throngs
'On quivering fin and rustling wing
'Delighted join their votive songs,
'And hail thee, GODDESS OF THE SPRING.'
O'er the green brinks of Severn's oozy bed,
49
In changeful rings, her sprightly troop She led;
PAN tripp'd before, where Eudness shades the mead,
And blew with glowing lip his sevenfold reed;
Emerging Naiads swell'd the jocund strain,
And aped with mimic step the dancing train.'I faint, I fall!'at noon
the Beauty cried,
'Weep o'er my tomb, ye Nymphs!'-and sunk and died.
-Thus, when white Winter o'er the shivering clime
Drives the still snow, or showers the silver rime;
As the lone shepherd o'er the dazzling rocks
Prints his steep step, and guides his vagrant flocks;
Views the green holly veil'd in network nice,
Her vermil clusters twinkling in the ice;
Admires the lucid vales, and slumbering floods,
Fantastic cataracts, and crystal woods,
Transparent towns, with seas of milk between,
And eyes with transport the refulgent scene:If breaks the sunshine o'er the spangled trees,
Or flits on tepid wing the western breeze,
In liquid dews descends the transient glare,
And all the glittering pageant melts in air.
Where Andes hides his cloud-wreath'd crest in snow,
And roots his base on burning sands below;
Cinchona, fairest of Peruvian maids
To Health's bright Goddess in the breezy glades
On Quito's temperate plain an altar rear'd,
Trill'd the loud hymn, the solemn prayer preferr'd:
Each balmy bud she cull'd, and honey'd flower,
And hung with fragrant wreaths the sacred bower;
Each pearly sea she search'd, and sparkling mine,
And piled their treasures on the gorgeous shrine;
Her suppliant voice for sickening Loxa raised,
Sweet breath'd the gale, and bright the censor blazed.
-'Divine HYGEIA! on thy votaries bend
Thy angel-looks, oh, hear us, and defend!
While streaming o'er the night with baleful glare
The star of Autumn rays his misty hair;
Fierce from his fens the Giant AGUE springs,
And wrapp'd in fogs descends on vampire wings;
'Before, with shuddering limbs cold Tremor reels,
50
And Fever's burning nostril dogs his heels;
Loud claps the grinning Fiend his iron hands,
Stamps with his marble feet, and shouts along the lands;
Withers the damask cheek, unnerves the strong,
And drives with scorpion-lash the shrieking throng.
Oh, Goddess! on thy kneeling votaries bend
Thy angel-looks, oh, hear us, and defend!'
-HYGEIA, leaning from the blest abodes,
The crystal mansions of the immortal gods,
Saw the sad Nymph uplift her dewy eyes,
Spread her white arms, and breathe her fervid sighs;
Call'd to her fair associates, Youth, and Joy,
And shot all-radiant through the glittering sky;
Loose waved behind her golden train of hair,
Her sapphire mantle swam diffus'd in air.O'er the grey matted moss, and pansied sod,
With step sublime the glowing Goddess trod,
Gilt with her beamy eye the conscious shade,
And with her smile celestial bless'd the maid.
'Come to my arms,' with seraph voice she cries,
'Thy vows are heard, benignant Nymph! arise;
Where yon aspiring trunks fantastic wreath
Their mingled roots, and drink the rill beneath,
Yield to the biting axe thy sacred wood,
And strew the bitter foliage on the flood.'
In silent homage bow'd the blushing maid,Five
youths athletic hasten to her aid,
O'er the scar'd hills re-echoing strokes resound,
And headlong forests thunder on the ground.
Round the dark roots, rent bark, and shatter'd boughs,
From ocherous beds the swelling fountain flows;
With streams austere its winding margin laves,
And pours from vale to vale its dusky waves.
-As the pale squadrons, bending o'er the brink,
View with a sigh their alter'd forms, and drink;
Slow-ebbing life with refluent crimson breaks
O'er their wan lips, and paints their haggard cheeks;
Through each fine nerve rekindling transports dart,
Light the quick eye, and swell the exulting heart.
-Thus ISRAEL's heaven-taught chief o'er trackless lands
51
Led to the sultry rock his murmuring bands.
Bright o'er his brows the forky radiance blazed,
And high in air the rod divine He raised.Wide yawns the cliff!-amid the thirsty throng
Rush the redundant waves, and shine along;
With gourds and shells and helmets press the bands,
Ope their parch'd lips, and spread their eager hands,
Snatch their pale infants to the exuberant shower,
Kneel on the shatter'd rock, and bless the Almighty Power.
Bolster'd with down, amid a thousand wants,
Pale Dropsy rears his bloated form, and pants;
'Quench me, ye cool pellucid rills!' he cries,
Wets his parch'd tongue, and rolls his hollow eyes.
So bends tormented TANTALUS to drink,
While from his lips the refluent waters shrink;
Again the rising stream his bosom laves,
And Thirst consumes him 'mid circumfluent waves.
-Divine HYGEIA, from the bending sky
Descending, listens to his piercing cry;
Assumes bright DIGITALIS' dress and air,
Her ruby cheek, white neck, and raven hair;
Four
youths protect her from the circling throng,
And like the Nymph the Goddess steps along.-O'er Him She waves her serpent-wreathed wand,
Cheers with her voice, and raises with her hand,
Warms with rekindling bloom his visage wan,
And charms the shapeless monster into man.
So when Contagion with mephitic breath
And withered Famine urged the work of death;
Marseilles' good Bishop, London's generous Mayor,
With food and faith, with medicine and with prayer,
Raised the weak head and stayed the parting sigh,
Or with new life relumed the swimming eye.-And now, PHILANTHROPY! thy rays divine
Dart round the globe from Zembla to the Line;
O'er each dark prison plays the cheering light,
Like northern lustres o'er the vault of night.From realm to realm, with cross or crescent crown'd,
Where'er Mankind and Misery are found,
O'er burning sands, deep waves, or wilds of snow,
52
Thy HOWARD journeying seeks the house of woe.
Down many a winding step to dungeons dank,
Where anguish wails aloud, and fetters clank;
To caves bestrew'd with many a mouldering bone,
And cells, whose echoes only learn to groan;
Where no kind bars a whispering friend disclose,
No sunbeam enters, and no zephyr blows,
HE treads, inemulous of fame or wealth,
Profuse of toil, and prodigal of health;
With soft assuasive eloquence expands
Power's rigid heart, and opes his clenching hands;
Leads stern-ey'd Justice to the dark domains,
If not to fever, to relax the chains;
Or guides awaken'd Mercy through the gloom,
And shews the prison, sister to the tomb!Gives to her babes the self-devoted wife,
To her fond husband liberty and life!-The Spirits of the Good, who bend from high
Wide o'er these earthly scenes their partial eye,
When first, array'd in VIRTUE'S purest robe,
They saw her HOWARD traversing the globe;
Saw round his brows her sun-like Glory blaze
In arrowy circles of unwearied rays;
Mistook a Mortal for an Angel-Guest,
And ask'd what Seraph-foot the earth imprest.
-Onward he moves!-Disease and Death retire,
And murmuring Demons hate him, and admire.'
Here paused the Goddess,-on HYGEIA'S shrine
Obsequious Gnomes repose the lyre divine;
Descending Sylphs relax the trembling strings,
And catch the rain-drops on their shadowy wings.
-And now her vase a modest Naiad fills
With liquid crystal from her pebbly rills;
Piles the dry cedar round her silver urn,
(Bright climbs the blaze, the crackling faggots burn),
Culls the green herb of China's envy'd bowers,
In gaudy cups the steamy treasure pours;
And, sweetly-smiling, on her bended knee
Presents the fragrant quintessence of Tea.
~ Erasmus Darwin,
322:I.
I weep for Adonais -he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

II.
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.

III.
O, weep for Adonais -he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend; -oh, dream not that the amorous Deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

IV.
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania! -He died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite
Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light.

V.
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time
In which suns perished; others more sublime,
Struck by the envious wrath of man or god,
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;
And some yet live, treading the thorny road
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.

VI.
But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished -
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew;
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies -the storm is overpast.

VII.
To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal. -Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.

VIII.
He will awake no more, oh, never more! -
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law
Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.

IX.
O, weep for Adonais! -The quick Dreams,
The passion-winged Ministers of thought,
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The love which was its music, wander not, -
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.

X.
And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries,
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

XI.
One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;
Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;
Another in her wilful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.

XII.
Another Splendour on his mouth alit,
That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath
With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips;
And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath
Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips,
It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.

XIII.
And others came Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; -the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

XIV.
All he had loved, and moulded into thought,
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aereal eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

XV.
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away
Into a shadow of all sounds: -a drear
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.

XVI.
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown,
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
Thou, Adonais: wan they stand and sere
Amid the faint companions of their youth,
With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth.

XVII.
Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,
As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

XVIII.
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Season's bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

XIX.
Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

XX.
The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender,
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning? -the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.

XXI.
Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean
Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

XXII.
He will awake no more, oh, never more!
"Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core,
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs."
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song
Had held in holy silence, cried: "Arise!"
Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.

XXIII.
She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs
Our of the East, and follows wild and drear
The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.

XXIV.
Our of her secret Paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her aery tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,
Rent the soft Form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.

XXV.
In the death-chamber for a moment Death,
Shamed by the presence of that living Might,
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
Revisited those lips, and Life's pale light
Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.
"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress
Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.

XXVI.
"'Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,
With food of saddest memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!

XXVII.
"O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
Defenceless as thou wert, oh, where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.

XXVIII.
"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead;
The vultures to the conqueror's banner true
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion; -how they fled,
When, like Apollo, from his golden bow
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
And smiled! -The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.

XXIX.
"The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again;
So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night."

XXX.
Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Irene sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.

XXXI.
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.

XXXII.
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift -
A Love in desolation masked; -a Power
Girt round with weakness; -it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow; -even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

XXXIII.
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.

XXXIV.
All stood aloof, and at his partial moan
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own,
As in the accents of an unknown land
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
The Stranger's mien, and murmured: "Who art thou?"
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
Which was like Cain's or Christ's -oh! that it should be so!

XXXV.
What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one,
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.

XXXVI.
Our Adonais has drunk poison -oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape, the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.

XXXVII.
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow:
Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee;
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt -as now.

XXXVIII.
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites that scream below;
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now -
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.

XXXIX.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -
He hath awakened from the dream of life -
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. -We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

XL.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

XLI.
He lives, he wakes -'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. -Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

XLII.
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

XLIII.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heavens' light.

XLIV.
The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

XLV.
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, -his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.

XLVI.
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry,
"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of Song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!"

XLVII.
Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,
Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.

XLVIII.
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought
That ages, empires, and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend, -they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

XLIX.
Go thou to Rome, -at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness
Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;

L.
And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.

LI.
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

LII.
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. -Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! -Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

LIII.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is passed from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, -the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

LIV.
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

LV.
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

Adonais was composed at Pisa during the early days of June, 1821, and printed, with the author's name, at Pisa, 'with the types of Didot,'by July 13, 1821. Part of the impression was sent to the brothers Ollier for sale in London. An exact reprint of this Pisa edition (a few typographical errors only being corrected) was issued in 1829 by Gee & Bridges, Cambridge, at the instance of Arthur Hallan and Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton). The poem was included in Galignani's edition of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Paris, 1829, and by Mrs. Shelley in the Poetical Works of 1839.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais - An elegy on the Death of John Keats
,
323:Resignation Pt 2
But what in either sex, beyond
All parts, our glory crowns?
'In ruffling seasons to be calm,
And smile, when fortune frowns.'
Heaven's choice is safer than our own;
Of ages past inquire,
What the most formidable fate?
'To have our own desire.'
If, in your wrath, the worst of foes
You wish extremely ill;
Expose him to the thunder's stroke,
Or that of his own will.
What numbers, rushing down the steep
Of inclination strong,
Have perish'd in their ardent wish!
Wish ardent, ever wrong!
'Tis resignation's full reverse,
Most wrong, as it implies
Error most fatal in our choice,
Detachment from the skies.
By closing with the skies, we make
Omnipotence our own;
That done, how formidable ill's
Whole army is o'erthrown!
No longer impotent, and frail,
Ourselves above we rise:
We scarce believe ourselves below!
We trespass on the skies!
The Lord, the soul, and source of all,
Whilst man enjoys his ease,
Is executing human will,
In earth, and air, and seas;
70
Beyond us, what can angels boast?
Archangels what require?
Whate'er below, above, is done,
Is done as-we desire.
What glory this for man so mean,
Whose life is but a span!
This is meridian majesty!
This, the sublime of man!
Beyond the boast of pagan song
My sacred subject shines!
And for a foil the lustre takes
Of Rome's exalted lines.
'All, that the sun surveys, subdued,
But Cato's mighty mind.'
How grand! most true; yet far beneath
The soul of the resign'd:
To more than kingdoms, more than worlds,
To passion that gives law;
Its matchless empire could have kept
Great Cato's pride in awe;
That fatal pride, whose cruel point
Transfix'd his noble breast;
Far nobler! if his fate sustain'd
And left to heaven the rest;
Then he the palm had borne away,
At distance Caesar thrown;
Put him off cheaply with the world,
And made the skies his own.
What cannot resignation do?
It wonders can perform;
That powerful charm, 'Thy will be done,'
Can lay the loudest storm.
Come, resignation! then, from fields,
71
Where, mounted on the wing,
A wing of flame, blest martyrs' souls
Ascended to their king.
Who is it calls thee? one whose need
Transcends the common size;
Who stands in front against a foe
To which no equal rise:
In front he stands, the brink he treads
Of an eternal state;
How dreadful his appointed post!
How strongly arm'd by fate:
His threatening foe! what shadows deep
O'erwhelm his gloomy brow!
His dart tremendous! -at fourscore
My sole asylum, thou!
Haste, then, O resignation! haste,
'Tis thine to reconcile
My foe, and me; at thy approach
My foe begins to smile:
O! for that summit of my wish,
Whilst here I draw my breath,
That promise of eternal life,
A glorious smile in death:
What sight, heaven's azure arch beneath,
Has most of heaven to boast?
The man resign'd; at once serene,
And giving up the ghost.
At death's arrival they shall smile,
Who, not in life o'er gay,
Serious and frequent thought send out
To meet him on his way:
My gay coevals! (such there are)
If happiness is dear;
Approaching death's alarming day
72
Discreetly let us fear:
The fear of death is truly wise,
Till wisdom can rise higher;
And, arm'd with pious fortitude,
Death dreaded once, desire:
Grand climacteric vanities
The vainest will despise;
Shock'd, when beneath the snow of age
Man immaturely dies:
But am not I myself the man?
No need abroad to roam
In quest of faults to be chastis'd;
What cause to blush at home?
In life's decline, when men relapse
Into the sports of youth,
The second child out-fools the first,
And tempts the lash of truth;
Shall a mere truant from the grave
With rival boys engage?
His trembling voice attempt to sing,
And ape the poet's rage?
Here, madam! let me visit one,
My fault who, partly, shares,
And tell myself, by telling him,
What more becomes our years;
And if your breast with prudent zeal
For resignation glows,
You will not disapprove a just
Resentment at its foes.
In youth, Voltaire! our foibles plead
For some indulgence due;
When heads are white, their thoughts and aims
Should change their colour too:
73
How are you cheated by your wit!
Old age is bound to pay,
By nature's law, a mind discreet,
For joys it takes away;
A mighty change is wrought by years,
Reversing human lot;
In age 'tis honour to lie hid,
'Tis praise to be forgot;
The wise, as flowers, which spread at noon,
And all their charms expose,
When evening damps and shades descend,
Their evolutions close.
What though your muse has nobly soar'd,
Is that our truth sublime?
Ours, hoary friend! is to prefer
Eternity to time:
Why close a life so justly fam'd
With such bold trash as this? (54)
This for renown? yes, such as makes
Obscurity a bliss:
Your trash, with mine, at open war,
Is obstinately bent,(55)
Like wits below, to sow your tares
Of gloom and discontent:
With so much sunshine at command,
Why light with darkness mix?
Why dash with pain our pleasure?
Your Helicon with Styx?
Your works in our divided minds
Repugnant passions raise,
Confound us with a double stroke,
We shudder whilst we praise;
A curious web, as finely wrought
As genius can inspire,
74
From a black bag of poison spun,
With horror we admire.
Mean as it is, if this is read
With a disdainful air,
I can't forgive so great a foe
To my dear friend Voltaire:
Early I knew him, early prais'd,
And long to praise him late;
His genius greatly I admire,
Nor would deplore his fate;
A fate how much to be deplor'd!
At which our nature starts;
Forbear to fall on your own sword.
To perish by your parts:
'But great your name'-To feed on air,
Were then immortals born?
Nothing is great, of which more great,
More glorious is the scorn.
Can fame your carcass from the worm
Which gnaws us in the grave,
Or soul from that which never dies,
Applauding Europe save?
But fame you lose; good sense alone
Your idol, praise, can claim;
When wild wit murders happiness,
It puts to death our fame!
Nor boast your genius, talents bright;
E'en dunces will despise,
If in your western beams is miss'd
A genius for the skies;
Your taste too fails; what most excels
True taste must relish most!
And what, to rival palms above,
Can proudest laurels boast?
75
Sound heads salvation's helmet seek,(56)
Resplendent are its rays,
Let that suffice; it needs no plume,
Of sublunary praise.
May this enable couch'd Voltaire
To see that-'All is right,'(57)
His eye, by flash of wit struck blind,
Restoring to its sight;
If so, all's well: who much have err'd,
That much have been forgiven;
I speak with joy, with joy he'll hear,
'Voltaires are, now, in heaven.'
Nay, such philanthropy divine,
So boundless in degree,
Its marvellous of love extends
(Stoops most profound!) to me:
Let others cruel stars arraign,
Or dwell on their distress;
But let my page, for mercies pour'd,
A grateful heart express:
Walking, the present God was seen,
Of old, in Eden fair;
The God as present, by plain steps
Of providential care,
I behold passing through my life;
His awful voice I hear;
And, conscious of my nakedness,
Would hide myself for fear:
But where the trees, or where the clouds,
Can cover from his sight?
Naked the centre to that eye,
To which the sun is night.
As yonder glittering lamps on high
76
Through night illumin'd roll;
My thoughts of him, by whom they shine,
Chase darkness from my soul;
My soul, which reads his hand as clear
In my minute affairs,
As in his ample manuscript
Of sun, and moon, and stars;
And knows him not more bent aright
To wield that vast machine,
Than to correct one erring thought
In my small world within;
A world, that shall survive the fall
Of all his wonders here;
Survive, when suns ten thousand drop,
And leave a darken'd sphere.
Yon matter gross, how bright it shines!
For time how great his care!
Sure spirit and eternity
Far richer glories share;
Let those our hearts impress, on those
Our contemplation dwell;
On those my thoughts how justly thrown,
By what I now shall tell:
When backward with attentive mind
Life's labyrinth I trace,
I find him far myself beyond
Propitious to my peace:
Through all the crooked paths I trod,
My folly he pursued;
My heart astray to quick return
Importunately woo'd;
Due resignation home to press
On my capricious will,
How many rescues did I meet,
77
Beneath the mask of ill!
How many foes in ambush laid
Beneath my soul's desire!
The deepest penitents are made
By what we most admire.
Have I not sometimes (real good
So little mortals know!)
Mounting the summit of my wish,
Profoundly plung'd in woe?
I rarely plann'd, but cause I found
My plan's defeat to bless:
Oft I lamented an event;
It turn'd to my success.
By sharpen'd appetite to give
To good intense delight,
Through dark and deep perplexities
He led me to the right.
And is not this the gloomy path,
Which you are treading now?
The path most gloomy leads to light,
When our proud passions bow:
When labouring under fancied ill,
My spirits to sustain,
He kindly cur'd with sovereign draughts
Of unimagin'd pain.
Pain'd sense from fancied tyranny
Alone can set us free;
A thousand miseries we feel,
Till sunk in misery.
Cloy'd with a glut of all we wish,
Our wish we relish less;
Success, a sort of suicide,
Is ruin'd by success:
78
Sometimes he led me near to death,
And, pointing to the grave,
Bid terror whisper kind advice;
And taught the tomb to save:
To raise my thoughts beyond where worlds
As spangles o'er us shine,
One day he gave, and bid the next
My soul's delight resign.
We to ourselves, but through the means
Of mirrors, are unknown;
In this my fate can you descry
No features of your own?
And if you can, let that excuse
These self-recording lines;
A record, modesty forbids,
Or to small bound confines:
In grief why deep ingulf'd? You see
You suffer nothing rare;
Uncommon grief for common fate!
That wisdom cannot bear.
When streams flow backward to their source,
And humbled flames descend,
And mountains wing'd shall fly aloft,
Then human sorrows end;
But human prudence too must cease,
When sorrows domineer,
When fortitude has lost its fire,
And freezes into fear:
The pang most poignant of my life
Now heightens my delight;
I see a fair creation rise
From chaos, and old night:
From what seem'd horror, and despair,
The richest harvest rose;
79
And gave me in the nod divine
An absolute repose.
Of all the plunders of mankind,
More gross, or frequent, none,
Than in their grief and joy misplac'd,
Eternally are shown.
But whither points all this parade?
It says, that near you lies
A book, perhaps yet unperus'd,
Which you should greatly prize:
Of self-perusal, science rare!
Few know the mighty gain;
Learn'd prelates, self-unread, may read
Their Bibles o'er in vain:
Self-knowledge, which from heaven itself
(So sages tell us) came,
What is it, but a daughter fair
Of my maternal theme?
Unletter'd and untravel'd men
An oracle might find,
Would they consult their own contents,
The Delphos of the mind.
Enter your bosom; there you'll meet
A revelation new,
A revelation personal;
Which none can read but you.
There will you clearly read reveal'd
In your enlighten'd thought,
By mercies manifold, through life,
To fresh remembrance brought,
A mighty Being! and in him
A complicated friend,
A father, brother, spouse; no dread
Of death, divorce, or end:
80
Who such a matchless friend embrace,
And lodge him in their heart,
Full well, from agonies exempt,
With other friends may part:
As when o'erloaded branches bear
Large clusters big with wine,
We scarce regret one falling leaf
From the luxuriant vine.
My short advice to you may sound
Obscure or somewhat odd,
Though 'tis the best that man can give,'E'en be content with God.'
Through love he gave you the deceas'd,
Through greater took him hence;
This reason fully could evince,
Though murmur'd at by sense.
This friend, far past the kindest kind,
Is past the greatest great;
His greatness let me touch in points
Not foreign to your state;
His eye, this instant, reads your heart;
A truth less obvious hear;
This instant its most secret thoughts
Are sounding in his ear:
Dispute you this? O! stand in awe,
And cease your sorrow; know,
That tears now trickling down, he saw
Ten thousand years ago;
And twice ten thousand hence, if you
Your temper reconcile
To reason's bound, will he behold
Your prudence with a smile;
A smile, which through eternity
81
Diffuses so bright rays,
The dimmest deifies e'en guilt,
If guilt, at last, obeys:
Your guilt (for guilt it is to mourn
When such a sovereign reigns) ,
Your guilt diminish; peace pursue;
How glorious peace in pains!
Here, then, your sorrows cease; if not,
Think how unhappy they,
Who guilt increase by streaming tears,
Which guilt should wash away;
Of tears that gush profuse restrain;
Whence burst those dismal sighs?
They from the throbbing breast of one
(Strange truth!) most happy rise;
Not angels (hear it, and exult!)
Enjoy a larger share
Than is indulg'd to you, and yours,
Of God's impartial care;
Anxious for each, as if on each
His care for all was thrown;
For all his care as absolute,
As all had been but one.
And is he then so near! so kind! How little then, and great,
That riddle, man! O! let me gaze
At wonders in his fate;
His fate, who yesterday did crawl
A worm from darkness deep,
And shall, with brother worms, beneath
A turf, to-morrow sleep;
How mean! -And yet, if well obey'd
His mighty Master's call,
The whole creation for mean man
82
Is deem'd a boon too small:
Too small the whole creation deem'd
For emmets in the dust!
Account amazing! yet most true;
My song is bold, yet just:
Man born for infinite, in whom
Nor period can destroy
The power, in exquisite extremes,
To suffer, or enjoy;
Give him earth's empire (if no more)
He's beggar'd, and undone!
Imprison'd in unbounded space!
Benighted by the sun!
For what the sun's meridian blaze
To the most feeble ray
Which glimmers from the distant dawn
Of uncreated day?
'Tis not the poet's rapture feign'd
Swells here the vain to please;
The mind most sober kindles most
At truths sublime as these;
They warm e'en me.-I dare not say,
Divine ambition strove
Not to bless only, but confound,
Nay, fright us with its love;
And yet so frightful what, or kind,
As that the rending rock,
The darken'd sun, and rising dead,
So formidable spoke?
And are we darker than that sun?
Than rocks more hard, and blind?
We are; -if not to such a God
In agonies resigned.
83
Yes, e'en in agonies forbear
To doubt almighty love;
Whate'er endears eternity,
Is mercy from above;
What most imbitters time, that most
Eternity endears,
And thus, by plunging in distress,
Exalts us to the spheres;
Joy's fountain head! where bliss o'er bliss,
O'er wonders wonders rise,
And an Omnipotence prepares
Its banquet for the wise:
Ambrosial banquet! rich in wines
Nectareous to the soul!
What transports sparkle from the stream,
As angels fill the bowl!
Fountain profuse of every bliss!
Good-will immense prevails;
Man's line can't fathom its profound
An angel's plummet fails.
Thy love and might, by what they know,
Who judge, nor dream of more;
They ask a drop, how deep the sea!
One sand, how wide the shore!
Of thy exuberant good-will,
Offended Deity!
The thousandth part who comprehends,
A deity is he.
How yonder ample azure field
With radiant worlds is sown!
How tubes astonish us with those
More deep in ether thrown!
And those beyond of brighter worlds
Why not a million more? -
84
In lieu of answer, let us all
Fall prostrate, and adore.
Since thou art infinite in power,
Nor thy indulgence less;
Since man, quite impotent and blind,
Oft drops into distress;
Say, what is resignation? 'T is
Man's weakness understood;
And wisdom grasping, with a hand
Far stronger, every good.
Let rash repiners stand appall'd,
In thee who dare not trust;
Whose abject souls, like demons dark,
Are murmuring in the dust;
For man to murmur, or repine
At what by thee is done,
No less absurd, than to complain
Of darkness in the sun.
Who would not, with a heart at ease,
Bright eye, unclouded brow,
Wisdom and goodness at the helm,
The roughest ocean plough?
What, though I'm swallow'd in the deep?
Though mountains o'er me roar?
Jehovah reigns! as Jonah safe,
I'm landed, and adore:
Thy will is welcome, let it wear
Its most tremendous form;
Roar, waves; rage, winds! I know that thou
Canst save me by a storm.
From the immortal spirits born,
To thee, their fountain, flow,
If wise; as curl'd around to theirs
Meandering streams below:
85
Not less compell'd by reason's call,
To thee our souls aspire,
Than to thy skies, by nature's law,
High mounts material fire;
To thee aspiring they exult,
I feel my spirits rise,
I feel myself thy son, and pant
For patrimonial skies;
Since ardent thirst of future good,
And generous sense of past,
To thee man's prudence strongly ties,
And binds affection fast;
Since great thy love, and great our want,
And men the wisest blind,
And bliss our aim; pronounce us all
Distracted, or resigned;
Resign'd through duty, interest, shame;
Deep shame! dare I complain,
When (wondrous truth!) in heaven itself
Joy ow'd its birth to pain?
And pain for me! for me was drain'd
Gall's overflowing bowl;
And shall one dropp to murmur bold
Provoke my guilty soul?
If pardon'd this, what cause, what crime
Can indignation raise?
The sun was lighted up to shine,
And man was born to praise;
And when to praise the man shall cease,
Or sun to strike the view;
A cloud dishonors both; but man's
The blacker of the two:
For oh! ingratitude how black!
86
With most profound amaze
At love, which man belov'd o'erlooks,
Astonish'd angels gaze.
Praise cheers, and warms, like generous wine;
Praise, more divine than prayer;
Prayer points our ready path to heaven;
Praise is already there.
Let plausive resignation rise,
And banish all complaint;
All virtues thronging into one,
It finishes the saint;
Makes the man bless'd, as man can be;
Life's labours renders light;
Darts beams through fate's incumbent gloom,
And lights our sun by night;
'T is nature's brightest ornament,
The richest gift of grace,
Rival of angels, and supreme
Proprietor of peace;
Nay, peace beyond, no small degree
Of rapture 't will impart;
Know, madam! when your heart's in heaven,
'All heaven is in your heart.'
But who to heaven their hearts can raise?
Denied divine support,
All virtue dies; support divine
The wise with ardour court:
When prayer partakes the seraph's fire,
'T is mounted on his wing,
Bursts thro' heaven's crystal gates, and
Sure audience of its king:
The labouring soul from sore distress
That bless'd expedient frees;
I see you far advanc'd in peace;
87
I see you on your knees:
How on that posture has the beam
Divine for ever shone!
An humble heart, God's other seat! (58)
The rival of his throne:
And stoops Omnipotence so low!
And condescends to dwell,
Eternity's inhabitant,
Well pleas'd, in such a cell?
Such honour how shall we repay?
How treat our guest divine?
The sacrifice supreme be slain!
Let self-will die: resign.
Thus far, at large, on our disease;
Now let the cause be shown,
Whence rises, and will ever rise,
The dismal human groan:
What our sole fountain of distress?
Strong passion for this scene;
That trifles make important, things
Of mighty moment mean:
When earth's dark maxims poison shed
On our polluted souls,
Our hearts and interests fly as far
Asunder, as the poles.
Like princes in a cottage nurs'd,
Unknown their royal race,
With abject aims, and sordid joys,
Our grandeur we disgrace;
O! for an Archimedes new,
Of moral powers possess'd,
The world to move, and quite expel
That traitor from the breast.
88
No small advantage may be reap'd
From thought whence we descend;
From weighing well, and prizing weigh'd
Our origin, and end:
From far above the glorious sun
To this dim scene we came:
And may, if wise, for ever bask
In great Jehovah's beam:
Let that bright beam on reason rous'd
In awful lustre rise,
Earth's giant ills are dwarf'd at once,
And all disquiet dies.
Earth's glories too their splendour lose,
Those phantoms charm no more;
Empire's a feather for a fool,
And Indian mines are poor:
Then levell'd quite, whilst yet alive,
The monarch and his slave;
Not wait enlighten'd minds to learn
That lesson from the grave:
A George the Third would then be low
As Lewis in renown,
Could he not boast of glory more
Than sparkles from a crown.
When human glory rises high
As human glory can;
When, though the king is truly great,
Still greater is the man;
The man is dead, where virtue fails;
And though the monarch proud
In grandeur shines, his gorgeous robe
Is but a gaudy shroud.
Wisdom! where art thou? None on earth,
Though grasping wealth, fame, power,
89
But what, O death! through thy approach,
Is wiser every hour;
Approach how swift, how unconfin'd!
Worms feast on viands rare,
Those little epicures have kings
To grace their bill of fare:
From kings what resignation due
To that almighty will,
Which thrones bestows, and, when they fail,
Can throne them higher still!
Who truly great? The good and brave,
The masters of a mind
The will divine to do resolv'd,
To suffer it resign'd.
Madam! if that may give it weight,
The trifle you receive
Is dated from a solemn scene,
The border of the grave;
Where strongly strikes the trembling soul
Eternity's dread power,
As bursting on it through the thin
Partition of an hour;
Hear this, Voltaire! but this, from me,
Runs hazard of your frown;
However, spare it; ere you die,
Such thoughts will be your own.
In mercy to yourself forbear
My notions to chastise,
Lest unawares the gay Voltaire
Should blame Voltaire the wise:
Fame's trumpet rattling in your ear,
Now, makes us disagree;
When a far louder trumpet sounds,
Voltaire will close with me:
90
How shocking is that modesty,
Which keeps some honest men
From urging what their hearts suggest,
When brav'd by folly's pen.
Assaulting truths, of which in all
Is sown the sacred seed!
Our constitution's orthodox,
And closes with our creed:
What then are they, whose proud conceits
Superior wisdom boast?
Wretches, who fight their own belief,
And labour to be lost!
Though vice by no superior joys
Her heroes keeps in pay;
Through pure disinterested love
Of ruin they obey!
Strict their devotion to the wrong,
Though tempted by no prize;
Hard their commandments, and their creed
A magazine of lies
From fancy's forge: gay fancy smiles
At reason plain, and cool;
Fancy, whose curious trade it is
To make the finest fool.
Voltaire! long life's the greatest curse
That mortals can receive,
When they imagine the chief end
Of living is to live;
Quite thoughtless of their day of death,
That birthday of their sorrow!
Knowing, it may be distant far,
Nor crush them till-to-morrow.
These are cold, northern thoughts, conceiv'd
91
Beneath an humble cot;
Not mine, your genius, or your state,
No castle is my lot:(59)
But soon, quite level shall we lie;
And, what pride most bemoans,
Our parts, in rank so distant now,
As level as our bones;
Hear you that sound? Alarming sound!
Prepare to meet your fate!
One, who writes finis to our works,
Is knocking at the gate;
Far other works will soon be weigh'd;
Far other judges sit;
Far other crowns be lost or won,
Than fire ambitious wit:
Their wit far brightest will be prov'd,
Who sunk it in good sense;
And veneration most profound
Of dread omnipotence.
'Tis that alone unlocks the gate
Of blest eternity;
O! mayst thou never, never lose
That more than golden key! (60)
Whate'er may seem too rough excuse,
Your good I have at heart:
Since from my soul I wish you well;
As yet we must not part:
Shall you, and I, in love with life,
Life's future schemes contrive,
The world in wonder not unjust,
That we are still alive?
What have we left? How mean in man
A shadow's shade to crave!
When life, so vain! is vainer still,
92
'Tis time to take your leave:
Happier, than happiest life, is death,
Who, falling in the field
Of conflict with his rebel will,
Writes vici, on his shield;
So falling man, immortal heir
Of an eternal prize;
Undaunted at the gloomy grave,
Descends into the skies.
O! how disorder'd our machine,
When contradictions mix!
When nature strikes no less than twelve,
And folly points at six!
To mend the moments of your heart,
How great is my delight
Gently to wind your morals up,
And set your hand aright!
That hand, which spread your wisdom wide
To poison distant lands:
Repent, recant; the tainted age
Your antidote demands;
To Satan dreadfully resign'd,
Whole herds rush down the steep
Of folly, by lewd wits possess'd,
And perish in the deep.
Men's praise your vanity pursues;
'Tis well, pursue it still;
But let it be of men deceas'd,
And you'll resign the will;
And how superior they to those
At whose applause you aim;
How very far superior they
In number, and in name!
93
~ Edward Young,
324:Of The Four Humours In Mans Constitution.
The former four now ending their discourse,
Ceasing to vaunt their good, or threat their force.
Lo other four step up, crave leave to show
The native qualityes that from them flow:
But first they wisely shew'd their high descent,
Each eldest daughter to each Element.
Choler was own'd by fire, and Blood by air,
Earth knew her black swarth child, water her fair:
All having made obeysance to each Mother,
Had leave to speak, succeeding one the other:
But 'mongst themselves they were at variance,
Which of the four should have predominance.
Choler first hotly claim'd right by her mother,
Who had precedency of all the other:
But Sanguine did disdain what she requir'd,
Pleading her self was most of all desir'd.
Proud Melancholy more envious then the rest,
The second, third or last could not digest.
She was the silentest of all the four,
Her wisdom spake not much, but thought the more
Mild Flegme did not contest for chiefest place,
Only she crav'd to have a vacant space.
Well, thus they parle and chide; but to be brief,
Or will they, nill they, Choler will be chief.
They seing her impetuosity
At present yielded to necessity.
Choler.
To shew my high descent and pedegree,
Your selves would judge but vain prolixity;
It is acknowledged from whence I came,
It shall suffice to shew you what I am,
My self and mother one, as you shall see,
But shee in greater, I in less degree.
We both once Masculines, the world doth know,
Now Feminines awhile, for love we owe
Unto your Sisterhood, which makes us render
Our noble selves in a less noble gender.
Though under Fire we comprehend all heat,
Yet man for Choler is the proper seat:
67
I in his heart erect my regal throne,
Where Monarch like I play and sway alone.
Yet many times unto my great disgrace
One of your selves are my Compeers in place,
Where if your rule prove once predominant,
The man proves boyish, sottish, ignorant:
But if you yield subservience unto me,
I make a man, a man in th'high'st degree:
Be he a souldier, I more fence his heart
Then iron Corslet 'gainst a sword or dart.
What makes him face his foe without appal,
To storm a breach, or scale a city wall,
In dangers to account himself more sure
Then timerous Hares whom Castles do immure?
Have you not heard of worthyes, Demi-Gods?
Twixt them and others what is't makes the odds
But valour? whence comes that? from none of you,
Nay milksops at such brunts you look but blew.
Here's sister ruddy, worth the other two,
Who much will talk, but little dares she do,
Unless to Court and claw, to dice and drink,
And there she will out-bid us all, I think,
She loves a fiddle better then a drum,
A Chamber well, in field she dares not come,
She'l ride a horse as bravely as the best,
And break a staff, provided 'be in jest;
But shuns to look on wounds, & blood that's spilt,
She loves her sword only because its gilt.
Then here's our sad black Sister, worse then you.
She'l neither say she will, nor will she doe;
But peevish Malecontent, musing sits,
And by misprissions like to loose her witts:
If great perswasions cause her meet her foe,
In her dull resolution she's so slow,
To march her pace to some is greater pain
Then by a quick encounter to be slain.
But be she beaten, she'l not run away,
She'l first advise if't be not best to stay.
Now let's give cold white sister flegme her right,
So loving unto all she scorns to fight:
If any threaten her, she'l in a trice
Convert from water to congealed ice:
68
Her teeth will chatter, dead and wan's her face,
And 'fore she be assaulted, quits the place.
She dares not challeng, if I speak amiss,
Nor hath she wit or heat to blush at this.
Here's three of you all see now what you are,
Then yield to me preheminence in war.
Again who fits for learning, science, arts?
Who rarifies the intellectual parts:
From whence fine spirits flow and witty notions:
But tis not from our dull, slow sisters motions:
Nor sister sanguine, from thy moderate heat,
Poor spirits the Liver breeds, which is thy seat.
What comes from thence, my heat refines the same
And through the arteries sends it o're the frame:
The vital spirits they're call'd, and well they may
For when they fail, man turns unto his clay.
The animal I claim as well as these,
The nerves, should I not warm, soon would they freeze
But flegme her self is now provok'd at this
She thinks I never shot so far amiss.
The brain she challengeth, the head's her seat;
But know'ts a foolish brain that wanteth heat.
My absence proves it plain, her wit then flyes
Out at her nose, or melteth at her eyes.
Oh who would miss this influence of thine
To be distill'd, a drop on every Line?
Alas, thou hast no Spirits; thy Company
Will feed a dropsy, or a Tympany,
The Palsy, Gout, or Cramp, or some such dolour:
Thou wast not made, for Souldier or for Scholar;
Of greazy paunch, and bloated cheeks go vaunt,
But a good head from these are dissonant.
But Melancholy, wouldst have this glory thine,
Thou sayst thy wits are staid, subtil and fine;
'Tis true, when I am Midwife to thy birth
Thy self's as dull, as is thy mother Earth:
Thou canst not claim the liver, head nor heart
Yet hast the Seat assign'd, a goodly part
The sinke of all us three, the hateful Spleen
Of that black Region, nature made thee Queen;
Where pain and sore obstruction thou dost work,
Where envy, malice, thy Companions lurk.
69
If once thou'rt great, what follows thereupon
But bodies wasting, and destruction?
So base thou art, that baser cannot be,
Th'excrement adustion of me.
But I am weary to dilate your shame,
Nor is't my pleasure thus to blur your name,
Only to raise my honour to the Skies,
As objects best appear by contraries.
But Arms, and Arts I claim, and higher things,
The princely qualities befitting Kings,
Whose profound heads I line with policies,
They'r held for Oracles, they are so wise,
Their wrathful looks are death their words are laws
Their Courage it foe, friend, and Subject awes;
But one of you, would make a worthy King
Like our sixth Henry (that same virtuous thing)
That when a Varlet struck him o're the side,
Forsooth you are to blame, he grave reply'd.
Take Choler from a Prince, what is he more
Then a dead Lion, by Beasts triumph'd o're.
Again you know, how I act every part
By th'influence, I still send from the heart:
It's nor your Muscles, nerves, nor this nor that
Do's ought without my lively heat, that's flat:
Nay th'stomack magazine to all the rest
Without my boyling heat cannot digest:
And yet to make my greatness, still more great
What differences, the Sex? but only heat.
And one thing more, to close up my narration
Of all that lives, I cause the propagation.
I have been sparings what I might have said
I love no boasting, that's but Childrens trade.
To what you now shall say I will attend,
And to your weakness gently condescend.
Blood.
Good Sisters, give me leave, as is my place
To vent my grief, and wipe off my disgrace:
Your selves may plead your wrongs are no whit less
Your patience more then mine, I must confess
Did ever sober tongue such language speak,
Or honesty such tyes unfriendly break?
Dost know thy self so well us so amiss?
70
Is't arrogance or folly causeth this?
Ile only shew the wrong thou'st done to me,
Then let my sisters right their injury.
To pay with railings is not mine intent,
But to evince the truth by Argument:
I will analyse this thy proud relation
So full of boasting and prevarication,
Thy foolish incongruityes Ile show,
So walk thee till thou'rt cold, then let thee go.
There is no Souldier but thy self (thou sayest,)
No valour upon Earth, but what thou hast
Thy silly provocations I despise,
And leave't to all to judge, where valour lies
No pattern, nor no pattron will I bring
But David, Judah's most heroick King,
Whose glorious deeds in Arms the world can tell,
A rosie cheek Musitian thou know'st well;
He knew well how to handle Sword and Harp,
And how to strike full sweet, as well as sharp,
Thou laugh'st at me for loving merriment,
And scorn'st all Knightly sports at Turnament.
Thou sayst I love my Sword, because it's gilt,
But know, I love the Blade, more then the Hill,
Yet do abhor such temerarious deeds,
As thy unbridled, barbarous Choler breeds:
Thy rudeness counts good manners vanity,
And real Complements base flattery.
For drink, which of us twain like it the best,
Ile go no further then thy nose for test:
Thy other scoffs, not worthy of reply
Shall vanish as of no validity:
Of thy black Calumnies this is but part,
But now Ile shew what souldier thou art.
And though thou'st us'd me with opprobrious spight
My ingenuity must give thee right.
Thy choler is but rage when tis most pure,
But usefull when a mixture can endure;
As with thy mother fire, so tis with thee,
The best of all the four when they agree:
But let her leave the rest, then I presume
Both them and all things else she would consume.
VVhilst us for thine associates thou tak'st,
71
A Souldier most compleat in all points mak'st:
But when thou scorn'st to take the help we lend,
Thou art a Fury or infernal Fiend.
Witness the execrable deeds thou'st done,
Nor sparing Sex nor Age, nor Sire nor Son;
To satisfie thy pride and cruelty,
Thou oft hast broke bounds of Humanity,
Nay should I tell, thou would'st count me no blab,
How often for the lye, thou'st given the stab.
To take the wall's a sin of so high rate,
That nought but death the same may expiate,
To cross thy will, a challenge doth deserve
So shed'st that blood, thou'rt bounden to preserve
Wilt thou this valour, Courage, Manhood call:
No, know 'tis pride most diabolibal.
If murthers be thy glory, tis no less,
Ile not envy thy feats, nor happiness:
But if in fitting time and place 'gainst foes
For countreys good thy life thou dar'st expose,
Be dangers n'er so high, and courage great,
Ile praise that prowess, fury, Choler, heat:
But such thou never art when all alone,
Yet such when we all four are joyn'd in one.
And when such thou art, even such are we,
The friendly Coadjutors still of thee.
Nextly the Spirits thou dost wholly claim,
Which nat'ral, vital, animal we name:
To play Philosopher I have no list,
Nor yet Physitian, nor Anatomist,
For acting these, l have no will nor Art,
Yet shall with Equity, give thee thy part
For natural, thou dost not much contest;
For there is none (thou sayst) if some not best;
That there are some, and best, I dare averre
Of greatest use, if reason do not erre:
What is there living, which do'nt first derive
His Life now Animal, from vegetive:
If thou giv'st life, I give the nourishment,
Thine without mine, is not, 'tis evident:
But I without thy help, can give a growth
As plants trees, and small Embryon know'th
And if vital Spirits, do flow from thee
72
I am as sure, the natural, from me:
Be thine the nobler, which I grant, yet mine
Shall justly claim priority of thine.
I am the fountain which thy Cistern fills
Through warm blew Conduits of my venial rills:
What hath the heart, but what's sent from the liver
If thou'rt the taker, I must be the giver.
Then never boast of what thou dost receive:
For of such glory I shall thee bereave.
But why the heart should be usurp'd by thee,
I must confess seems something strange to me:
The spirits through thy heat made perfect are,
But the Materials none of thine, that's clear:
Their wondrous mixture is of blood and air,
The first my self, second my mother fair.
But Ile not force retorts, nor do thee wrong,
Thy fi'ry yellow froth is mixt among,
Challeng not all, 'cause part we do allow;
Thou know'st I've there to do as well as thou:
But thou wilt say I deal unequally,
Their lives the irascible faculty,
Which without all dispute, is Cholers own;
Besides the vehement heat, only there known
Can be imputed, unto none but Fire
Which is thy self, thy Mother and thy Sire
That this is true, I easily can assent
If still you take along my Aliment;
And let me be your partner which is due,
So shall I give the dignity to you:
Again, Stomacks Concoction thou dost claim,
But by what right, nor do'st, nor canst thou name
Unless as heat, it be thy faculty,
And so thou challengest her property.
The help she needs, the loving liver lends,
Who th'benefit o'th' whole ever intends
To meddle further I shall be but shent,
Th'rest to our Sisters is more pertinent;
Your slanders thus refuted takes no place,
Nor what you've said, doth argue my disgrace,
Now through your leaves, some little time I'l spend
My worth in humble manner to commend
This, hot, moist nutritive humour of mine
73
When 'tis untaint, pure, and most genuine
Shall chiefly take the place, as is my due
Without the least indignity to you.
Of all your qualities I do partake,
And what you single are, the whole I make
Your hot, moist, cold, dry natures are but four,
I moderately am all, what need I more;
As thus, if hot then dry, if moist, then cold,
If this you cann't disprove, then all I hold
My virtues hid, I've let you dimly see
My sweet Complection proves the verity.
This Scarlet die's a badge of what's within
One touch thereof, so beautifies the skin:
Nay, could I be, from all your tangs but pure
Mans life to boundless Time might still endure.
But here one thrusts her heat, wher'ts not requir'd
So suddenly, the body all is fired,
And of the calme sweet temper quite bereft,
Which makes the Mansion, by the Soul soon left.
So Melancholy seizes on a man,
With her unchearful visage, swarth and wan,
The body dryes, the mind sublime doth smother,
And turns him to the womb of's earthy mother:
And flegm likewise can shew her cruel art,
With cold distempers to pain every part:
The lungs she rots, the body wears away,
As if she'd leave no flesh to turn to clay,
Her languishing diseases, though not quick
At length demolishes the Faberick,
All to prevent, this curious care I take,
In th'last concoction segregation make
Of all the perverse humours from mine own,
The bitter choler most malignant known
I turn into his Cell close by my side
The Melancholy to the Spleen t'abide:
Likewise the whey, some use I in the veins,
The overplus I send unto the reins:
But yet for all my toil, my care and skill,
Its doom'd by an irrevocable will
That my intents should meet with interruption,
That mortal man might turn to his corruption.
I might here shew the nobleness of mind
74
Of such as to the sanguine are inclin'd,
They're liberal, pleasant, kind and courteous,
And like the Liver all benignious.
For arts and sciences they are the fittest;
And maugre Choler still they are the wittiest:
With an ingenious working Phantasie,
A most voluminous large Memory,
And nothing wanting but Solidity.
But why alas, thus tedious should I be,
Thousand examples you may daily see.
If time I have transgrest, and been too long,
Yet could not be more brief without much wrong;
I've scarce wip'd off the spots proud choler cast,
Such venome lies in words, though but a blast:
No braggs i've us'd, to you I dare appeal,
If modesty my worth do not conceal.
I've us'd no bittererss nor taxt your name,
As I to you, to me do ye the same.
Melancholy.
He that with two Assailants hath to do,
Had need be armed well and active too.
Especially when friendship is pretended,
That blow's most deadly where it is intended.
Though choler rage and rail, I'le not do so,
The tongue's no weapon to assault a foe:
But sith we fight with words, we might be kind
To spare our selves and beat the whistling wind,
Fair rosie sister, so might'st thou scape free;
I'le flatter for a time as thou didst me:
But when the first offender I have laid,
Thy soothing girds shall fully be repaid.
But Choler be thou cool'd or chaf'd, I'le venter,
And in contentions lists now justly enter.
What mov'd thee thus to vilifie my name,
Not past all reason, but in truth all shame:
Thy fiery spirit shall bear away this prize,
To play such furious pranks I am too wise:
If in a Souldier rashness be so precious,
Know in a General tis most pernicious.
Nature doth teach to shield the head from harm,
The blow that's aim'd thereat is latcht by th'arm.
When in Batalia my foes I face
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I then command proud Choler stand thy place,
To use thy sword, thy courage and thy art
There to defend my self, thy better part.
This wariness count not for cowardize,
He is not truly valiant that's not wise.
It's no less glory to defend a town,
Then by assault to gain one not our own;
And if Marcellus bold be call'd Romes sword,
Wise Fabius is her buckler all accord:
And if thy hast my slowness should not temper,
'Twere but a mad irregular distemper;
Enough of that by our sisters heretofore,
Ile come to that which wounds me somewhat more
Of learning, policy thou wouldst bereave me,
But's not thine ignorance shall thus deceive me:
What greater Clark or Politician lives,
Then he whose brain a touch my humour gives?
What is too hot my coldness doth abate,
What's diffluent I do consolidate.
If I be partial judg'd or thought to erre,
The melancholy snake shall it aver,
Whose cold dry head more subtilty doth yield,
Then all the huge beasts of the fertile field.
Again thou dost confine me to the spleen,
As of that only part I were the Queen,
Let me as well make thy precincts the Gall,
So prison thee within that bladder small:
Reduce the man to's principles, then see
If I have not more part then all you three:
What is within, without, of theirs or thine,
Yet time and age shall soon declare it mine.
When death doth seize the man your stock is lost,
When you poor bankrupts prove then have I most.
You'l say here none shall e're disturb my right,
You high born from that lump then take your flight.
Then who's mans friend, when life & all forsakes?
His Mother mine, him to her womb retakes:
Thus he is ours, his portion is the grave,
But while he lives, I'le shew what part I have:
And first the firm dry bones I justly claim,
The strong foundation of the stately frame:
Likewise the usefull Slpeen, though not the best,
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Yet is a bowel call'd well as the rest:
The Liver, Stomack, owe their thanks of right,
The first it drains, of th'last quicks appetite.
Laughter (thô thou say malice) flows from hence,
These two in one cannot have residence.
But thou most grosly dost mistake to think
The Spleen for all you three was made a sink,
Of all the rest thou'st nothing there to do,
But if thou hast, that malice is from you.
Again you often touch my swarthy hue,
That black is black, and I am black tis true;
But yet more comely far I dare avow,
Then is thy torrid nose or brazen brow.
But that which shews how high your spight is bent
Is charging me to be thy excrement:
Thy loathsome imputation I defie,
So plain a slander needeth no reply.
When by thy heat thou'st bak'd thy self to crust,
And so art call'd black Choler or adust,
Thou witless think'st that I am thy excretion,
So mean thou art in Art as in discretion:
But by your leave I'le let your greatness see
What Officer thou art to us all three,
The Kitchin Drudge, the cleanser of the sinks
That casts out all that man e're eats or drinks:
If any doubt the truth whence this should come,
Shew them thy passage to th'Duodenum;
Thy biting quality still irritates,
Till filth and thee nature exonerates:
If there thou'rt stopt, to th'Liver thou turn'st in,
And thence with jaundies saffrons all the skin.
No further time Ile spend in confutation,
I trust I've clear'd your slanderous imputation.
I now speak unto all, no more to one,
Pray hear, admire and learn instruction.
My virtues yours surpass without compare,
The first my constancy that jewel rare:
Choler's too rash this golden gift to hold,
And Sanguine is more fickle manifold,
Here, there her restless thoughts do ever fly,
Constant in nothing but unconstancy.
And what Flegme is, we know, like to her mother,
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Unstable is the one, and so the other;
With me is noble patience also found,
Impatient Choler loveth not the sound,
What sanguine is, she doth not heed nor care,
Now up, now down, transported like the Air:
Flegme's patient because her nature's tame;
But I, by virtue do acquire the same.
My Temperance, Chastity is eminent,
But these with you, are seldome resident;
Now could I stain my ruddy Sisters face
With deeper red, to shew you her dsgrace,
But rather I with silence vaile her shame
Then cause her blush, while I relate the same.
Nor are ye free from this inormity,
Although she bear the greatest obloquie,
My prudence, judgement, I might now reveal
But wisdom 'tis my wisdome to conceal.
Unto diseases not inclin'd as you,
Nor cold, nor hot, Ague nor Plurisie,
Nor Cough, nor Quinsey, nor the burning Feaver,
I rarely feel to act his fierce endeavour;
My sickness in conceit chiefly doth lye,
What I imagine that's my malady.
Chymeraes strange are in my phantasy,
And things that never were, nor shall I see
I love not talk, Reason lies not in length,
Nor multitude of words argues our strength;
I've done pray sister Flegme proceed in Course,
We shall expect much sound, but little force.
Flegme.
Patient I am, patient i'd need to be,
To bear with the injurious taunts of three,
Though wit I want, and anger I have less,
Enough of both, my wrongs now to express
I've not forgot, how bitter Choler spake
Nor how her gaul on me she causeless brake;
Nor wonder 'twas for hatred there's not small,
Where opposition is Diametrical.
To what is Truth I freely will assent,
Although my Name do suffer detriment,
What's slanderous repell, doubtful dispute,
And when I've nothing left to say be mute.
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Valour I want, no Souldier am 'tis true,
I'le leave that manly Property to you;
I love no thundring guns, nor bloody wars,
My polish'd Skin was not ordain'd for Skarrs:
But though the pitched field I've ever fled,
At home the Conquerours have conquered.
Nay, I could tell you what's more true then meet,
That Kings have laid their Scepters at my feet;
When Sister sanguine paints my Ivory face:
The Monarchs bend and sue, but for my grace
My lilly white when joyned with her red,
Princes hath slav'd, and Captains captived,
Country with Country, Greece with Asia fights
Sixty nine Princes, all stout Hero Knights.
Under Troys walls ten years will wear away,
Rather then loose one beauteous Helena.
But 'twere as vain, to prove this truth of mine
As at noon day, to tell the Sun doth shine.
Next difference that 'twixt us twain doth lye
Who doth possess the brain, or thou or I?
Shame forc'd the say, the matter that was mine,
But the Spirits by which it acts are thine:
Thou speakest Truth, and I can say no less,
Thy heat doth much, I candidly confess;
Yet without ostentation I may say,
I do as much for thee another way:
And though I grant, thou art my helper here,
No debtor I because it's paid else where.
With all your flourishes, now Sisters three
Who is't that dare, or can, compare with me,
My excellencies are so great, so many,
I am confounded; fore I speak of any:
The brain's the noblest member all allow,
Its form and Scituation will avow,
Its Ventricles, Membranes and wondrous net,
Galen, Hippocrates drive to a set;
That Divine Ofspring the immortal Soul
Though it in all, and every part be whole,
Within this stately place of eminence,
Doth doubtless keep its mighty residence.
And surely, the Soul sensitive here lives,
Which life and motion to each creature gives,
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The Conjugation of the parts, to th'braine
Doth shew, hence flow the pow'rs which they retain
Within this high Built Cittadel, doth lye
The Reason, fancy, and the memory;
The faculty of speech doth here abide,
The Spirits animal, from hence do slide:
The five most noble Senses here do dwell;
Of three it's hard to say, which doth excell.
This point now to discuss, 'longs not to me,
I'le touch the sight, great'st wonder of the three;
The optick Nerve, Coats, humours all are mine,
The watry, glassie, and the Chrystaline;
O mixture strange! O colour colourless,
Thy perfect temperament who can express:
He was no fool who thought the soul lay there,
Whence her affections passions speak so clear.
O good, O bad, O true, O traiterous eyes
What wonderments within your Balls there lyes,
Of all the Senses sight shall be the Queen;
Yet some may wish, O had mine eyes ne're seen.
Mine, likewise is the marrow, of the back,
Which runs through all the Spondles of the rack,
It is the substitute o'th royal brain,
All Nerves, except seven pair, to it retain.
And the strong Ligaments from hence arise,
Which joynt to joynt, the intire body tyes.
Some other parts there issue from the Brain,
Whose worth and use to tell, I must refrain:
Some curious learned Crooke, may these reveal
But modesty, hath charg'd me to conceal
Here's my Epitome of excellence:
For what's the Brains is mine by Consequence.
A foolish brain (quoth Choler) wanting heat
But a mad one say I, where 'tis too great,
Phrensie's worse then folly, one would more glad
With a tame fool converse then with a mad;
For learning then my brain is not the fittest,
Nor will I yield that Choler is the wittiest.
Thy judgement is unsafe, thy fancy little,
For memory the sand is not more brittle;
Again, none's fit for Kingly state but thou,
If Tyrants be the best, I le it allow:
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But if love be as requisite as fear,
Then thou and I must make a mixture here.
Well to be brief, I hope now Cholers laid,
And I'le pass by what Sister sanguine said.
To Melancholy I le make no reply,
The worst she said was instability,
And too much talk, both which I here confess
A warning good, hereafter I'le say less.
Let's now be friends; its time our spight were spent,
Lest we too late this rashness do repent,
Such premises will force a sad conclusion,
Unless we agree, all falls into confusion.
Let Sangine with her hot hand Choler hold,
To take her moist my moisture will be bold:
My cold, cold melancholy hand shall clasp;
Her dry, dry Cholers other hand shall grasp.
Two hot, two moist, two cold, two dry here be,
A golden Ring, the Posey VNITY.
Nor jarrs nor scoffs, let none hereafter see,
But all admire our perfect Amity
Nor be discern'd, here's water, earth, air, fire,
But here a compact body, whole intire.
This loving counsel pleas'd them all so well
That flegm was judg'd for kindness to excell.
~ Anne Bradstreet,
325:The Botanic Garden( Part I)
The Economy Of Vegetation
Canto I
STAY YOUR RUDE STEPS! whose throbbing breasts infold
The legion-fiends of Glory, or of Gold!
Stay! whose false lips seductive simpers part,
While Cunning nestles in the harlot-heart!For you no Dryads dress the roseate bower,
For you no Nymphs their sparkling vases pour;
Unmark'd by you, light Graces swim the green,
And hovering Cupids aim their shafts, unseen.
'But THOU! whose mind the well-attemper'd ray
Of Taste and Virtue lights with purer day;
Whose finer sense each soft vibration owns
With sweet responsive sympathy of tones;
So the fair flower expands it's lucid form
To meet the sun, and shuts it to the storm;For thee my borders nurse the fragrant wreath,
My fountains murmur, and my zephyrs breathe;
Slow slides the painted snail, the gilded fly
Smooths his fine down, to charm thy curious eye;
On twinkling fins my pearly nations play,
Or win with sinuous train their trackless way;
My plumy pairs in gay embroidery dress'd
Form with ingenious bill the pensile nest,
To Love's sweet notes attune the listening dell,
And Echo sounds her soft symphonious shell.
'And, if with Thee some hapless Maid should stray,
Disasterous Love companion of her way,
Oh, lead her timid steps to yonder glade,
Whose arching cliffs depending alders shade;
There, as meek Evening wakes her temperate breeze,
And moon-beams glimmer through the trembling trees,
The rills, that gurgle round, shall soothe her ear,
The weeping rocks shall number tear for tear;
There as sad Philomel, alike forlorn,
Sings to the Night from her accustomed thorn;
While at sweet intervals each falling note
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Sighs in the gale, and whispers round the grot;
The sister-woe shall calm her aching breast,
And softer slumbers steal her cares to rest.'Winds of the North! restrain your icy gales,
Nor chill the bosom of these happy vales!
Hence in dark heaps, ye gathering Clouds, revolve!
Disperse, ye Lightnings! and, ye Mists, dissolve!
-Hither, emerging from yon orient skies,
BOTANIC GODDESS! bend thy radiant eyes;
O'er these soft scenes assume thy gentle reign,
Pomona, Ceres, Flora in thy train;
O'er the still dawn thy placid smile effuse,
And with thy silver sandals print the dews;
In noon's bright blaze thy vermil vest unfold,
And wave thy emerald banner star'd with gold.'
Thus spoke the GENIUS, as He stept along,
And bade these lawns to Peace and Truth belong;
Down the steep slopes He led with modest skill
The willing pathway, and the truant rill,
Stretch'd o'er the marshy vale yon willowy mound,
Where shines the lake amid the tufted ground,
Raised the young woodland, smooth'd the wavy green,
And gave to Beauty all the quiet scene.She comes!-the GODDESS!-through the whispering air,
Bright as the morn, descends her blushing car;
Each circling wheel a wreath of flowers intwines,
And gem'd with flowers the silken harness shines;
The golden bits with flowery studs are deck'd,
And knots of flowers the crimson reins connect.And now on earth the silver axle rings,
And the shell sinks upon its slender springs;
Light from her airy seat the Goddess bounds,
And steps celestial press the pansied grounds.
Fair Spring advancing calls her feather'd quire,
And tunes to softer notes her laughing lyre;
Bids her gay hours on purple pinions move,
And arms her Zephyrs with the shafts of Love,
Pleased GNOMES, ascending from their earthy beds,
Play round her graceful footsteps, as she treads;
Gay SYLPHS attendant beat the fragrant air
On winnowing wings, and waft her golden hair;
Blue NYMPHS emerging leave their sparkling streams,
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And FIERY FORMS alight from orient beams;
Musk'd in the rose's lap fresh dews they shed,
Or breathe celestial lustres round her head.
First the fine Forms her dulcet voice requires,
Which bathe or bask in elemental fires;
From each bright gem of Day's refulgent car,
From the pale sphere of every twinkling star,
From each nice pore of ocean, earth, and air,
With eye of flame the sparkling hosts repair,
Mix their gay hues, in changeful circles play,
Like motes, that tenant the meridian ray.So the clear Lens collects with magic power
The countless glories of the midnight hour;
Stars after stars with quivering lustre fall,
And twinkling glide along the whiten'd wall.Pleased, as they pass, she counts the glittering bands,
And stills their murmur with her waving hands;
Each listening tribe with fond expectance burns,
And now to these, and now to those, she turns.
I. 'NYMPHS OF PRIMEVAL FIRE! YOUR vestal train
Hung with gold-tresses o'er the vast inane,
Pierced with your silver shafts the throne of Night,
And charm'd young Nature's opening eyes with light;
When LOVE DIVINE, with brooding wings unfurl'd,
Call'd from the rude abyss the living world.
'-LET THERE BE LIGHT!' proclaim'd the ALMIGHTY LORD,
Astonish'd Chaos heard the potent word;Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns;
Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first;
Bend, as they journey with projectile force,
In bright ellipses their reluctant course;
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,
And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.
-Onward they move amid their bright abode,
Space without bound, THE BOSOM OF THEIR GOD!
II. 'ETHEREAL POWERS! YOU chase the shooting stars,
Or yoke the vollied lightenings to your cars,
Cling round the aërial bow with prisms bright,
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And pleased untwist the sevenfold threads of light;
Eve's silken couch with gorgeous tints adorn,
And fire the arrowy throne of rising Morn.
-OR, plum'd with flame, in gay battalion's spring
To brighter regions borne on broader wing;
Where lighter gases, circumfused on high,
Form the vast concave of exterior sky;
With airy lens the scatter'd rays assault,
And bend the twilight round the dusky vault;
Ride, with broad eye and scintillating hair,
The rapid Fire-ball through the midnight air;
Dart from the North on pale electric streams,
Fringing Night's sable robe with transient beams.
-OR rein the Planets in their swift careers,
Gilding with borrow'd light their twinkling spheres;
Alarm with comet-blaze the sapphire plain,
The wan stars glimmering through its silver train;
Gem the bright Zodiac, stud the glowing pole,
Or give the Sun's phlogistic orb to roll.
III. NYMPHS! YOUR fine forms with steps impassive mock
Earth's vaulted roofs of adamantine rock;
Round her still centre tread the burning soil,
And watch the billowy Lavas, as they boil;
Where, in basaltic caves imprison'd deep,
Reluctant fires in dread suspension sleep;
Or sphere on sphere in widening waves expand,
And glad with genial warmth the incumbent land.
So when the Mother-bird selects their food
With curious bill, and feeds her callow brood;
Warmth from her tender heart eternal springs,
And pleased she clasps them with extended wings.
'YOU from deep cauldrons and unmeasured caves
Blow flaming airs, or pour vitrescent waves;
O'er shining oceans ray volcanic light,
Or hurl innocuous embers to the night.While with loud shouts to Etna Heccla calls,
And Andes answers from his beacon'd walls;
Sea-wilder'd crews the mountain-stars admire,
And Beauty beams amid tremendous fire.
'Thus when of old, as mystic bards presume,
Huge CYCLOPS dwelt in Etna's rocky womb,
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On thundering anvils rung their loud alarms,
And leagued with VULCAN forged immortal arms;
Descending VENUS sought the dark abode,
And sooth'd the labours of the grisly God.While frowning Loves the threatening falchion wield,
And tittering Graces peep behind the shield,
With jointed mail their fairy limbs o'erwhelm,
Or nod with pausing step the plumed helm;
With radiant eye She view'd the boiling ore,
Heard undismay'd the breathing bellows roar,
Admired their sinewy arms, and shoulders bare,
And ponderous hammers lifted high in air,
With smiles celestial bless'd their dazzled sight,
And Beauty blazed amid infernal night.
IV. 'EFFULGENT MAIDS! YOU round deciduous day,
Tressed with soft beams, your glittering bands array;
On Earth's cold bosom, as the Sun retires,
Confine with folds of air the lingering fires;
O'er Eve's pale forms diffuse phosphoric light,
And deck with lambent flames the shrine of Night.
So, warm'd and kindled by meridian skies,
And view'd in darkness with dilated eyes,
BOLOGNA'S chalks with faint ignition blaze,
BECCARI'S shells emit prismatic rays.
So to the sacred Sun in MEMNON's fane,
Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain;
-Touch'd by his orient beam, responsive rings
The living lyre, and vibrates all it's strings;
Accordant ailes the tender tones prolong,
And holy echoes swell the adoring song.
'YOU with light Gas the lamps nocturnal feed,
Which dance and glimmer o'er the marshy mead;
Shine round Calendula at twilight hours,
And tip with silver all her saffron flowers;
Warm on her mossy couch the radiant Worm,
Guard from cold dews her love-illumin'd form,
From leaf to leaf conduct the virgin light,
Star of the earth, and diamond of the night.
You bid in air the tropic Beetle burn,
And fill with golden flame his winged urn;
Or gild the surge with insect-sparks, that swarm
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Round the bright oar, the kindling prow alarm;
Or arm in waves, electric in his ire,
The dread Gymnotus with ethereal fire.Onward his course with waving tail he helms,
And mimic lightenings scare the watery realms,
So, when with bristling plumes the Bird of JOVE
Vindictive leaves the argent fields above,
Borne on broad wings the guilty world he awes,
And grasps the lightening in his shining claws.
V. 1. 'NYMPHS! Your soft smiles uncultur'd man subdued,
And charm'd the Savage from his native wood;
You, while amazed his hurrying Hords retire
From the fell havoc of devouring FIRE,
Taught, the first Art! with piny rods to raise
By quick attrition the domestic blaze,
Fan with soft breath, with kindling leaves provide,
And lift the dread Destroyer on his side.
So, with bright wreath of serpent-tresses crown'd,
Severe in beauty, young MEDUSA frown'd;
Erewhile subdued, round WISDOM'S Aegis roll'd
Hiss'd the dread snakes, and flam'd in burnish'd gold;
Flash'd on her brandish'd arm the immortal shield,
And Terror lighten'd o'er the dazzled field.
2. NYMPHS! YOU disjoin, unite, condense, expand,
And give new wonders to the Chemist's hand;
On tepid clouds of rising steam aspire,
Or fix in sulphur all it's solid fire;
With boundless spring elastic airs unfold,
Or fill the fine vacuities of gold;
With sudden flash vitrescent sparks reveal,
By fierce collision from the flint and steel;
Or mark with shining letter KUNKEL's name
In the pale Phosphor's self-consuming flame.
So the chaste heart of some enchanted Maid
Shines with insidious light, by Love betray'd;
Round her pale bosom plays the young Desire,
And slow she wastes by self-consuming fire.
3. 'YOU taught mysterious BACON to explore
Metallic veins, and part the dross from ore;
With sylvan coal in whirling mills combine
The crystal'd nitre, and the sulphurous mine;
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Through wiry nets the black diffusion strain,
And close an airy ocean in a grain.Pent in dark chambers of cylindric brass
Slumbers in grim repose the sooty mass;
Lit by the brilliant spark, from grain to grain
Runs the quick fire along the kindling train;
On the pain'd ear-drum bursts the sudden crash,
Starts the red flame, and Death pursues the flash.Fear's feeble hand directs the fiery darts,
And Strength and Courage yield to chemic arts;
Guilt with pale brow the mimic thunder owns,
And Tyrants tremble on their blood-stain'd thrones.
VI. NYMPHS! You erewhile on simmering cauldrons play'd,
And call'd delighted SAVERY to your aid;
Bade round the youth explosive STEAM aspire
In gathering clouds, and wing'd the wave with fire;
Bade with cold streams the quick expansion stop,
And sunk the immense of vapour to a drop.Press'd by the ponderous air the Piston falls
Resistless, sliding through it's iron walls;
Quick moves the balanced beam, of giant-birth,
Wields his large limbs, and nodding shakes the earth.
'The Giant-Power from earth's remotest caves
Lifts with strong arm her dark reluctant waves;
Each cavern'd rock, and hidden den explores,
Drags her dark coals, and digs her shining ores.Next, in close cells of ribbed oak confined,
Gale after gale, He crowds the struggling wind;
The imprison'd storms through brazen nostrils roar,
Fan the white flame, and fuse the sparkling ore.
Here high in air the rising stream He pours
To clay-built cisterns, or to lead-lined towers;
Fresh through a thousand pipes the wave distils,
And thirsty cities drink the exuberant rills.There the vast mill-stone with inebriate whirl
On trembling floors his forceful fingers twirl.
Whose flinty teeth the golden harvests grind,
Feast without blood! and nourish human-kind.
'Now his hard hands on Mona's rifted crest,
Bosom'd in rock, her azure ores arrest;
With iron lips his rapid rollers seize
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The lengthening bars, in thin expansion squeeze;
Descending screws with ponderous fly-wheels wound
The tawny plates, the new medallions round;
Hard dyes of steel the cupreous circles cramp,
And with quick fall his massy hammers stamp.
The Harp, the Lily and the Lion join,
And GEORGE and BRITAIN guard the sterling coin.
'Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER'D STEAM! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
-Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.
'So mighty HERCULES o'er many a clime
Waved his vast mace in Virtue's cause sublime,
Unmeasured strength with early art combined,
Awed, served, protected, and amazed mankind.First two dread Snakes at JUNO'S vengeful nod
Climb'd round the cradle of the sleeping God;
Waked by the shrilling hiss, and rustling sound,
And shrieks of fair attendants trembling round,
Their gasping throats with clenching hands he holds;
And Death untwists their convoluted folds.
Next in red torrents from her sevenfold heads
Fell HYDRA'S blood on Lerna's lake he sheds;
Grasps ACHELOUS with resistless force,
And drags the roaring River to his course;
Binds with loud bellowing and with hideous yell
The monster Bull, and threefold Dog of Hell.
'Then, where Nemea's howling forests wave,
He drives the Lion to his dusky cave;
Seized by the throat the growling fiend disarms,
And tears his gaping jaws with sinewy arms;
Lifts proud ANTEUS from his mother-plains,
And with strong grasp the struggling Giant strains;
Back falls his fainting head, and clammy hair,
Writhe his weak limbs, and flits his life in air;By steps reverted o'er the blood-dropp'd fen
He tracks huge CACUS to his murderous den;
Where breathing flames through brazen lips he fled,
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And shakes the rock-roof'd cavern o'er his head.
'Last with wide arms the solid earth He tears,
Piles rock on rock, on mountain mountain rears;
Heaves up huge ABYLA on Afric's sand,
Crowns with high CALPÈ Europe's saliant strand,
Crests with opposing towers the splendid scene,
And pours from urns immense the sea between.-Loud o'er her whirling flood Charybdis roars,
Affrighted Scylla bellows round his shores,
Vesuvio groans through all his echoing caves,
And Etna thunders o'er the insurgent waves.
VII. 1. NYMPHS! YOUR fine hands ethereal floods amass
From the warm cushion, and the whirling glass;
Beard the bright cylinder with golden wire,
And circumfuse the gravitating fire.
Cold from each point cerulean lustres gleam,
Or shoot in air the scintillating stream.
So, borne on brazen talons, watch'd of old
The sleepless dragon o'er his fruits of gold;
Bright beam'd his scales, his eye-balls blazed with ire,
And his wide nostrils breath'd inchanted fire.
'YOU bid gold-leaves, in crystal lantherns held,
Approach attracted, and recede repel'd;
While paper-nymphs instinct with motion rife,
And dancing fauns the admiring Sage surprize.
OR, if on wax some fearless Beauty stand,
And touch the sparkling rod with graceful hand;
Through her fine limbs the mimic lightnings dart,
And flames innocuous eddy round her heart;
O'er her fair brow the kindling lustres glare,
Blue rays diverging from her bristling hair;
While some fond Youth the kiss ethereal sips.
And soft fires issue from their meeting lips.
So round the virgin Saint in silver streams
The holy Halo shoots it's arrowy beams.
'YOU crowd in coated jars the denser fire,
Pierce the thin glass, and fuse the blazing wire;
Or dart the red flash through the circling band
Of youths and timorous damsels, hand in hand.
-Starts the quick Ether through the fibre-trains
Of dancing arteries, and of tingling veins,
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Goads each fine nerve, with new sensation thrill'd,
Bends the reluctant limbs with power unwill'd;
Palsy's cold hands the fierce concussion own,
And Life clings trembling on her tottering throne.So from dark clouds the playful lightning springs,
Rives the firm oak, or prints the Fairy-rings.
2. NYMPHS! on that day YE shed from lucid eyes.
Celestial tears, and breathed ethereal sighs!
When RICHMAN rear'd, by fearless haste betrayed,
The wiry rod in Nieva's fatal shade;Clouds o'er the Sage, with fringed skirts succeed,
Flash follows flash, the warning corks recede;
Near and more near He ey'd with fond amaze
The silver streams, and watch'd the saphire blaze;
Then burst the steel, the dart electric sped,
And the bold Sage lay number'd with the dead!NYMPHS! on that day YE shed from lucid eyes
Celestial tears, and breathed ethereal sighs!
3. 'YOU led your FRANKLIN to your glazed retreats,
Your air-built castles, and your silken seats;
Bade his bold arm invade the lowering sky,
And seize the tiptoe lightnings, ere they fly;
O'er the young Sage your mystic mantle spread,
And wreath'd the crown electric round his head.Thus when on wanton wing intrepid LOVE
Snatch'd the raised lightning from the arm of JOVE;
Quick o'er his knee the triple bolt He bent,
The cluster'd darts and forky arrows rent,
Snapp'd with illumin'd hands each flaming shaft,
His tingling fingers shook, and stamp'd, and laugh'd;
Bright o'er the floor the scatter'd fragments blaz'd,
And Gods retreating trembled as they gaz'd;
The immortal Sire, indulgent to his child,
Bow'd his ambrosial locks, and Heaven relenting smiled.
VIII. 'When Air's pure essence joins the vital flood,
And with phosphoric Acid dyes the blood,
YOUR VIRGIN TRAINS the transient HEAT dispart,
And lead the soft combustion round the heart;
Life's holy lamp with fires successive feed,
From the crown'd forehead to the prostrate weed,
From Earth's proud realms to all that swim or sweep
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The yielding ether or tumultuous deep.
You swell the bulb beneath the heaving lawn,
Brood the live seed, unfold the bursting spawn;
Nurse with soft lap, and warm with fragrant breath
The embryon panting in the arms of Death;
Youth's vivid eye with living light adorn,
And fire the rising blush of Beauty's golden morn.
'Thus when the Egg of Night, on Chaos hurl'd,
Burst, and disclosed the cradle of the world;
First from the gaping shell refulgent sprung
IMMORTAL LOVE, his bow celestial strung;O'er the wide waste his gaudy wings unfold,
Beam his soft smiles, and wave his curls of gold;With silver darts He pierced the kindling frame,
And lit with torch divine the ever-living flame.'
IX. The GODDESS paused, admired with conscious pride
The effulgent legions marshal'd by her side,
Forms sphered in fire with trembling light array'd,
Ens without weight, and substance without shade;
And, while tumultuous joy her bosom warms,
Waves her white hand, and calls her hosts to arms,
'Unite, ILLUSTRIOUS NYMPHS! your radiant powers,
Call from their long repose the VERNAL HOURS.
Wake with soft touch, with rosy hands unbind
The struggling pinions of the WESTERN WIND;
Chafe his wan cheeks, his ruffled plumes repair,
And wring the rain-drops from his tangled hair.
Blaze round each frosted rill, or stagnant wave,
And charm the NAIAD from her silent cave;
Where, shrined in ice, like NIOBE she mourns,
And clasps with hoary arms her empty urns.
Call your bright myriads, trooping from afar,
With beamy helms, and glittering shafts of war;
In phalanx firm the FIEND OF FROST assail,
Break his white towers, and pierce his crystal mail;
To Zembla's moon-bright coasts the Tyrant bear,
And chain him howling to the Northern Bear.
'So when enormous GRAMPUS, issuing forth
From the pale regions of the icy North;
Waves his broad tail, and opes his ribbed mouth,
And seeks on winnowing fin the breezy South;
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From towns deserted rush the breathless hosts,
Swarm round the hills, and darken all the coasts;
Boats follow boats along the shouting tides,
And spears and javelins pierce his blubbery sides;
Now the bold Sailor, raised on pointed toe,
Whirls the wing'd harpoon on the slimy foe;
Quick sinks the monster in his oozy bed,
The blood-stain'd surges circling o'er his head,
Steers to the frozen pole his wonted track,
And bears the iron tempest on his back.
X. 'On wings of flame, ETHEREAL VIRGINS! sweep
O'er Earth's fair bosom, and complacent deep;
Where dwell my vegetative realms benumb'd,
In buds imprison'd, or in bulbs intomb'd,
Pervade, PELLUCID FORMS! their cold retreat,
Ray from bright urns your viewless floods of
heat
From earth's deep wastes
electric
torrents pour,
Or shed from heaven the scintillating shower;
Pierce the dull root, relax its fibre-trains,
Thaw the thick blood, which lingers in its veins;
Melt with warm breath the fragrant gums, that bind
The expanding foliage in its scaly rind;
And as in air the laughing leaflets play,
And turn their shining bosoms to the ray,
NYMPHS! with sweet smile each opening glower invite,
And on its damask eyelids pour the
light
'So shall my pines, Canadian wilds that shade,
Where no bold step has pierc'd the tangled glade,
High-towering palms, that part the Southern flood
With shadowy isles and continents of wood,
Oaks, whose broad antlers crest Britannia's plain,
Or bear her thunders o'er the conquer'd main,
Shout, as you pass, inhale the genial skies,
And bask and brighten in your beamy eyes;
Bow their white heads, admire the changing clime,
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Shake from their candied trunks the tinkling rime;
With bursting buds their wrinkled barks adorn,
And wed the timorous floret to her thorn;
Deep strike their roots, their lengthening tops revive,
And all my world of foliage wave, alive.
'Thus with Hermetic art the ADEPT combines
The royal acid with cobaltic mines;
Marks with quick pen, in lines unseen portrayed,
The blushing mead, green dell, and dusky glade;
Shades with pellucid clouds the tintless field,
And all the future Group exists conceal'd;
Till waked by fire the dawning tablet glows,
Green springs the herb, the purple floret blows,
Hills vales and woods in bright succession rise,
And all the living landscape charms his eyes.
XI. 'With crest of gold should sultry SIRIUS glare,
And with his kindling tresses scorch the air;
With points of flame the shafts of Summer arm,
And burn the beauties he designs to warm;-So erst when JOVE his oath extorted mourn'd,
And clad in glory to the Fair return'd;
While Loves at forky bolts their torches light,
And resting lightnings gild the car of Night;
His blazing form the dazzled Maid admir'd,
Met with fond lips, and in his arms expir'd;NYMPHS! on light pinion lead your banner'd hosts
High o'er the cliffs of ORKNEY'S gulphy coasts;
Leave on your left the red volcanic light,
Which HECCLA lifts amid the dusky night;
Mark on the right the DOFRINE'S snow-capt brow,
Where whirling MAELSTROME roars and foams below;
Watch with unmoving eye, where CEPHEUS bends
His triple crown, his scepter'd hand extends;
Where studs CASSIOPE with stars unknown
Her golden chair, and gems her sapphire zone;
Where with vast convolution DRACO holds
The ecliptic axis in his scaly folds,
O'er half the skies his neck enormous rears,
And with immense meanders parts the BEARS;
Onward, the kindred BEARS with footstep rude
Dance round the Pole, pursuing and pursued.
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'There in her azure coif and starry stole,
Grey TWILIGHT sits, and rules the slumbering Pole;
Bends the pale moon-beams round the sparkling coast,
And strews with livid hands eternal frost.
There, NYMPHS! alight, array your dazzling powers,
With sudden march alarm the torpid Hours;
On ice-built isles expand a thousand sails,
Hinge the strong helms, and catch the frozen gales;
The winged rocks to feverish climates guide,
Where fainting Zephyrs pant upon the tide;
Pass, where to CEUTA CALPE'S thunder roars,
And answering echoes shake the kindred shores;
Pass, where with palmy plumes CANARY smiles,
And in her silver girdle binds her isles;
Onward, where NIGER'S dusky Naiad laves
A thousand kingdoms with prolific waves,
Or leads o'er golden sands her threefold train
In steamy channels to the fervid main,
While swarthy nations croud the sultry coast,
Drink the fresh breeze, and hail the floating Frost,
NYMPHS! veil'd in mist, the melting treasures steer,
And cool with arctic snows the tropic year.
So from the burning Line by Monsoons driven
Clouds sail in squadrons o'er the darken'd heaven;
Wide wastes of sand the gelid gales pervade,
And ocean cools beneath the moving shade.
XII. Should SOLSTICE, stalking through the sickening bowers,
Suck the warm dew-drops, lap the falling showers;
Kneel with parch'd lip, and bending from it's brink
From dripping palm the scanty river drink;
NYMPHS! o'er the soil ten thousand points erect,
And high in air the electric flame collect.
Soon shall dark mists with self-attraction shroud
The blazing day, and sail in wilds of cloud;
Each silvery Flower the streams aerial quaff,
Bow her sweet head, and infant Harvest laugh.
'Thus when ELIJA mark'd from Carmel's brow
In bright expanse the briny flood below;
Roll'd his red eyes amid the scorching air,
Smote his firm breast, and breathed his ardent prayer;
High in the midst a massy altar stood,
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And slaughter'd offerings press'd the piles of wood;
While ISRAEL'S chiefs the sacred hill surround,
And famish'd armies crowd the dusty ground;
While proud Idolatry was leagued with dearth,
And wither'd famine swept the desert earth.'OH, MIGHTY LORD! thy woe-worn servant hear,
'Who calls thy name in agony of prayer;
'Thy fanes dishonour'd, and thy prophets slain,
'Lo! I alone survive of all thy train!'Oh send from heaven thy sacred fire,-and pour
'O'er the parch'd land the salutary shower,'So shall thy Priest thy erring flock recal,'And speak in thunder, 'THOU ART LORD OF ALL.'He cried, and kneeling on the mountain-sands,
Stretch'd high in air his supplicating hands.
-Descending flames the dusky shrine illume;
Fire the wet wood, the sacred bull consume;
Wing'd from the sea the gathering mists arise,
And floating waters darken all the skies;
The King with shifted reins his chariot bends,
And wide o'er earth the airy flood descends;
With mingling cries dispersing hosts applaud,
And shouting nations own THE LIVING GOD.'
The GODDESS ceased,-the exulting tribes obey,
Start from the soil, and win their airy way;
The vaulted skies with streams of transient rays
Shine, as they pass, and earth and ocean blaze.
So from fierce wars when lawless Monarch's cease,
Or Liberty returns with laurel'd Peace;
Bright fly the sparks, the colour'd lustres burn,
Flash follows f
Blue serpents sweep along the dusky air,
Imp'd by long trains of scintillating hair;
Red rockets rise, loud cracks are heard on high,
And showers of stars rush headlong from the sky,
Burst, as in silver lines they hiss along,
And the quick flash unfolds the gazing throng.
~ Erasmus Darwin,
326:The Botanic Garden( Part Ii)
The Economy Of Vegetation
Canto II
AND NOW THE GODDESS with attention sweet
Turns to the GNOMES, that circle round her feet;
Orb within orb approach the marshal'd trains,
And pigmy legions darken all the plains;
Thrice shout with silver tones the applauding bands,
Bow, ere She speaks, and clap their fairy hands.
So the tall grass, when noon-tide zephyr blows,
Bends it's green blades in undulating rows;
Wide o'er the fields the billowy tumult spreads,
And rustling harvests bow their golden heads.
I. 'GNOMES! YOUR bright forms, presiding at her birth,
Clung in fond squadrons round the new-born EARTH;
When high in ether, with explosion dire,
From the deep craters of his realms of fire,
The whirling Sun this ponderous planet hurl'd,
And gave the astonish'd void another world.
When from it's vaporous air, condensed by cold,
Descending torrents into oceans roll'd;
And fierce attraction with relentless force
Bent the reluctant wanderer to it's course.
'Where yet the Bull with diamond-eye adorns
The Spring's fair forehead, and with golden horns;
Where yet the Lion climbs the ethereal plain,
And shakes the Summer from his radiant mane;
Where Libra lifts her airy arm, and weighs,
Poised in her silver ballance, nights and days;
With paler lustres where Aquarius burns,
And showers the still snow from his hoary urns;
YOUR ardent troops pursued the flying sphere,
Circling the starry girdle of the year;
While sweet vicissitudes of day and clime
Mark'd the new annals of enascent Time.
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II. 'You trod with printless step Earth's tender globe,
While Ocean wrap'd it in his azure robe;
Beneath his waves her hardening strata spread,
Raised her PRIMEVAL ISLANDS from his bed,
Stretch'd her wide lawns, and sunk her winding dells,
And deck'd her shores with corals, pearls, and shells.
'O'er those blest isles no ice-crown'd mountains tower'd,
No lightnings darted, and no tempests lower'd;
Soft fell the vesper-drops, condensed below,
Or bent in air the rain-refracted bow;
Sweet breathed the zephyrs, just perceiv'd and lost;
And brineless billows only kiss'd the coast;
Round the bright zodiac danced the vernal hours,
And Peace, the Cherub, dwelt in mortal bowers!
'So young DIONE, nursed beneath the waves,
And rock'd by Nereids in their coral caves,
Charm'd the blue sisterhood with playful wiles,
Lisp'd her sweet tones, and tried her tender smiles.
Then, on her beryl throne by Triton's borne,
Bright rose the Goddess like the Star of morn;
When with soft fires the milky dawn He leads,
And wakes to life and love the laughing meads;With rosy fingers, as uncurl'd they hung
Round her fair brow, her golden locks she wrung;
O'er the smooth surge on silver sandals flood,
And look'd enchantment on the dazzled flood.The bright drops, rolling from her lifted arms,
In slow meanders wander o'er her charms,
Seek round her snowy neck their lucid track,
Pearl her white shoulders, gem her ivory back,
Round her fine waist and swelling bosom swim,
And star with glittering brine each crystal limb.-The immortal form enamour'd Nature hail'd,
And Beauty blazed to heaven and earth, unvail'd.
III. 'You! who then, kindling after many an age,
Saw with new fires the first VOLCANO rage,
O'er smouldering heaps of livid sulphur swell
At Earth's firm centre, and distend her shell,
Saw at each opening cleft the furnace glow,
And seas rush headlong on the gulphs below.-
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GNOMES! how you shriek'd! when through the troubled air
Roar'd the fierce din of elemental war;
When rose the continents, and sunk the main,
And Earth's huge sphere exploding burst in twain.GNOMES! how you gazed! when from her wounded side
Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide,
Rose on swift wheels the MOON'S refulgent car,
Circling the solar orb; a sister-star,
Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss'd,
And roll'd round Earth her airless realms of frost.
'GNOMES! how you trembled! with the dreadful force
When Earth recoiling stagger'd from her course;
When, as her Line in slower circles spun,
And her shock'd axis nodded from the sun,
With dreadful march the accumulated main
Swept her vast wrecks of mountain, vale, and plain;
And, while new tides their shouting floods unite,
And hail their Queen, fair Regent of the night;
Chain'd to one centre whirl'd the kindred spheres,
And mark'd with lunar cycles solar years.
IV. 'GNOMES! you then bade dissolving SHELLS distil
From the loose summits of each shatter'd hill,
To each fine pore and dark interstice flow,
And fill with liquid chalk the mass below.
Whence sparry forms in dusky caverns gleam
With borrow'd light, and twice refract the beam;
While in white beds congealing rocks beneath
Court the nice chissel, and desire to breathe.'Hence wearied HERCULES in marble rears
His languid limbs, and rests a thousand years;
Still, as he leans, shall young ANTINOUS please
With careless grace, and unaffected ease;
Onward with loftier step APOLLO spring,
And launch the unerring arrow from the string;
In Beauty's bashful form, the veil unfurl'd,
Ideal VENUS win the gazing world.
Hence on ROUBILIAC'S tomb shall Fame sublime
Wave her triumphant wings, and conquer Time;
Long with soft touch shall DAMER'S chissel charm,
With grace delight us, and with beauty warm;
FOSTER'S fine form shall hearts unborn engage,
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And MELBOURN's smile enchant another age.
V. GNOMES! you then taught transuding dews to pass
Through time-fall'n woods, and root-inwove morass
Age after age; and with filtration fine
Dispart, from earths and sulphurs, the saline.
1. 'HENCE with diffusive SALT old Ocean steeps
His emerald shallows, and his sapphire deeps.
Oft in wide lakes, around their warmer brim
In hollow pyramids the crystals swim;
Or, fused by earth-born fires, in cubic blocks
Shoot their white forms, and harden into rocks.
'Thus, cavern'd round in CRACOW'S mighty mines,
With crystal walls a gorgeous city shines;
Scoop'd in the briny rock long streets extend
Their hoary course, and glittering domes ascend;
Down the bright steeps, emerging into day,
Impetuous fountains burst their headlong way,
O'er milk-white vales in ivory channels spread,
And wondering seek their subterraneous bed.
Form'd in pellucid salt with chissel nice,
The pale lamp glimmering through the sculptured ice,
With wild reverted eyes fair LOTTA stands,
And spreads to Heaven, in vain, her glassy hands;
Cold dews condense upon her pearly breast,
And the big tear rolls lucid down her vest.
Far gleaming o'er the town transparent fanes
Rear their white towers, and wave their golden vanes;
Long lines of lustres pour their trembling rays,
And the bright vault returns the mingled blaze.
2. 'HENCE orient NITRE owes it's sparkling birth,
And with prismatic crystals gems the earth,
O'er tottering domes in filmy foliage crawls,
Or frosts with branching plumes the mouldering walls.
As woos Azotic Gas the virgin Air,
And veils in crimson clouds the yielding Fair,
Indignant Fire the treacherous courtship flies,
Waves his light wing, and mingles with the skies.
'So Beauty's GODDESS, warm with new desire,
Left, on her silver wheels, the GOD of Fire;
Her faithless charms to fiercer MARS resign'd,
Met with fond lips, with wanton arms intwin'd.
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-Indignant VULCAN eyed the parting Fair,
And watch'd with jealous step the guilty pair;
O'er his broad neck a wiry net he flung,
Quick as he strode, the tinkling meshes rung;
Fine as the spider's flimsy thread He wove
The immortal toil to lime illicit love;
Steel were the knots, and steel the twisted thong,
Ring link'd in ring, indissolubly strong;
On viewless hooks along the fretted roof
He hung, unseen, the inextricable woof.-Quick start the springs, the webs pellucid spread,
And lock the embracing Lovers on their bed;
Fierce with loud taunts vindictive VULCAN springs,
Tries all the bolts, and tightens all the strings,
Shakes with incessant shouts the bright abodes,
Claps his rude hands, and calls the festive Gods.-With spreading palms the alarmed Goddess tries
To veil her beauties from celestial eyes,
Writhes her fair limbs, the slender ringlets strains,
And bids her Loves untie the obdurate chains;
Soft swells her panting bosom, as she turns,
And her flush'd cheek with brighter blushes burns.
Majestic grief the Queen of Heaven avows,
And chaste Minerva hides her helmed brows;
Attendant Nymphs with bashful eyes askance
Steal of intangled MARS a transient glance;
Surrounding Gods the circling nectar quaff,
Gaze on the Fair, and envy as they laugh.
3. 'HENCE dusky IRON sleeps in dark abodes,
And ferny foliage nestles in the nodes;
Till with wide lungs the panting bellows blow,
And waked by fire the glittering torrents flow;
-Quick whirls the wheel, the ponderous hammer falls,
Loud anvils ring amid the trembling walls,
Strokes follow strokes, the sparkling ingot shines,
Flows the red slag, the lengthening bar refines;
Cold waves, immersed, the glowing mass congeal,
And turn to adamant the hissing Steel.
'Last MICHELL'S hands with touch of potent charm
The polish'd rods with powers magnetic arm;
With points directed to the polar stars
In one long line extend the temper'd bars;
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Then thrice and thrice with steady eye he guides,
And o'er the adhesive train the magnet slides;
The obedient Steel with living instinct moves,
And veers for ever to the pole it loves.
'Hail, adamantine STEEL! magnetic Lord!
King of the prow, the plowshare, and the sword!
True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady helm amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but Thee.By thee the plowshare rends the matted plain,
Inhumes in level rows the living grain;
Intrusive forests quit the cultured ground,
And Ceres laughs with golden fillets crown'd.O'er restless realms when scowling Discord flings
Her snakes, and loud the din of battle rings;
Expiring Strength, and vanquish'd Courage feel
Thy arm resistless, adamantine STEEL!
4. 'HENCE in fine streams diffusive ACIDS flow,
Or wing'd with fire o'er Earth's fair bosom blow;
Transmute to glittering Flints her chalky lands,
Or sink on Ocean's bed in countless Sands.
Hence silvery Selenite her chrystal moulds,
And soft Asbestus smooths his silky folds;
His cubic forms phosphoric Fluor prints,
Or rays in spheres his amethystine tints.
Soft cobweb clouds transparent Onyx spreads,
And playful Agates weave their colour'd threads;
Gay pictured Mochoes glow with landscape-dyes,
And changeful Opals roll their lucid eyes;
Blue lambent light around the Sapphire plays,
Bright Rubies blush, and living Diamonds blaze.
'Thus, for attractive earth, inconstant JOVE
Mask'd in new shapes forsook his realms above.First her sweet eyes his Eagle-form beguiles,
And HEBE feeds him with ambrosial smiles;
Next the chang'd God a Cygnet's down assumes,
And playful LEDA smooths his glossy plumes;
Then glides a silver Serpent, treacherous guest!
And fair OLYMPIA folds him in her breast;
Now lows a milk-white Bull on Afric's strand,
And crops with dancing head the daisy'd land.-
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With rosy wreathes EUROPA'S hand adorns
His fringed forehead, and his pearly horns;
Light on his back the sportive Damsel bounds,
And pleased he moves along the flowery grounds;
Bears with slow step his beauteous prize aloof,
Dips in the lucid flood his ivory hoof;
Then wets his velvet knees, and wading laves
His silky sides amid the dimpling waves.
While her fond train with beckoning hands deplore,
Strain their blue eyes, and shriek along the shore;
Beneath her robe she draws her snowy feet,
And, half-reclining on her ermine seat,
Round his raised neck her radiant arms she throws,
And rests her fair cheek on his curled brows;
Her yellow tresses wave on wanton gales,
And high in air her azure mantle sails.
-Onward He moves, applauding Cupids guide,
And skim on shooting wing the shining tide;
Emerging Triton's leave their coral caves,
Sound their loud conchs, and smooth the circling waves,
Surround the timorous Beauty, as she swims,
And gaze enamour'd on her silver limbs.
-Now Europe's shadowy shores with loud acclaim
Hail the fair fugitive, and shout her name;
Soft echoes warble, whispering forests nod,
And conscious Nature owns the present God.
-Changed from the Bull, the rapturous God assumes
Immortal youth, with glow celestial blooms,
With lenient words her virgin fears disarms,
And clasps the yielding Beauty in his arms;
Whence Kings and Heroes own illustrious birth,
Guards of mankind, and demigods on earth.
VI. 'GNOMES! as you pass'd beneath the labouring soil,
The guards and guides of Nature's chemic toil,
YOU saw, deep-sepulchred in dusky realms,
Which Earth's rock-ribbed ponderous vault o'erwhelms,
With self-born fires the mass fermenting glow,
And flame-wing'd sulphurs quit the earths below.
1. 'HENCE ductile CLAYS in wide expansion spread,
Soft as the Cygnet's down, their snow-white bed;
With yielding flakes successive forms reveal,
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And change obedient to the whirling wheel.
-First CHINA'S sons, with early art elate,
Form'd the gay tea-pot, and the pictured plate;
Saw with illumin'd brow and dazzled eyes
In the red stove vitrescent colours rise;
Speck'd her tall beakers with enamel'd stars,
Her monster-josses, and gigantic jars;
Smear'd her huge dragons with metallic hues,
With golden purples, and cobaltic blues;
Bade on wide hills her porcelain castles glare,
And glazed Pagodas tremble in the air.
'ETRURIA! next beneath thy magic hands
Glides the quick wheel, the plaistic clay expands,
Nerved with fine touch, thy fingers (as it turns)
Mark the nice bounds of vases, ewers, and urns;
Round each fair form in lines immortal trace
Uncopied Beauty, and ideal Grace.
'GNOMES! as you now dissect with hammers fine
The granite-rock, the nodul'd flint calcine;
Grind with strong arm, the circling chertz betwixt,
Your pure Ka-o-lins and Pe-tun-tses mixt;
O'er each red saggars burning cave preside,
The keen-eyed Fire-Nymphs blazing by your side;
And pleased on WEDGWOOD ray your partial smile,
A new Etruria decks Britannia's isle.Charm'd by your touch, the flint liquescent pours
Through finer sieves, and falls in whiter showers;
Charm'd by your touch, the kneaded clay refines,
The biscuit hardens, the enamel shines;
Each nicer mould a softer feature drinks,
The bold Cameo speaks, the soft Intaglio thinks.
'To call the pearly drops from Pity's eye,
Or stay Despair's disanimating sigh,
Whether, O Friend of art! the gem you mould
Rich with new taste, with antient virtue bold;
Form the poor fetter'd SLAVE on bended knee
From Britain's sons imploring to be free;
Or with fair HOPE the brightening scenes improve,
And cheer the dreary wastes at Sydney-cove;
Or bid Mortality rejoice and mourn
O'er the fine forms on PORTLAND'S mystic urn.'
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Here
by fall'n columns and disjoin'd arcades,
On mouldering stones, beneath deciduous shades,
Sits HUMANKIND in hieroglyphic state,
Serious, and pondering on their changeful state;
While with inverted torch, and swimming eyes,
Sinks the fair shade of MORTAL LIFE, and dies.
There
the pale GHOST through Death's wide portal bends
His timid feet, the dusky steep descends;
With smiles assuasive LOVE DIVINE invites,
Guides on broad wing, with torch uplifted lights;
IMMORTAL LIFE, her hand extending, courts
The lingering form, his tottering step supports;
Leads on to Pluto's realms the dreary way,
And gives him trembling to Elysian day.
Beneath
in sacred robes the PRIESTESS dress'd,
The coif close-hooded, and the fluttering vest,
With pointing finger guides the initiate youth,
Unweaves the many-colour'd veil of Truth,
Drives the profane from Mystery's bolted door,
And Silence guards the Eleusinian lore.'Whether, O Friend of Art! your gems derive
Fine forms from Greece, and fabled Gods revive;
Or bid from modern life the Portrait breathe,
And bind round Honour's brow the laurel wreath;
Buoyant shall sail, with Fame's historic page,
Each fair medallion o'er the wrecks of age;
Nor Time shall mar; nor steel, nor fire, nor rust
Touch the hard polish of the immortal bust.
2. 'HENCE sable COAL his massy couch extends,
And stars of gold the sparkling Pyrite blends;
Hence dull-eyed Naphtha pours his pitchy streams,
And Jet uncolour'd drinks the solar beams,
Bright Amber shines on his electric throne,
And adds ethereal lustres to his own.
-Led by the phosphor-light, with daring tread
Immortal FRANKLIN sought the fiery bed;
Where, nursed in night, incumbent Tempest shrouds
103
The seeds of Thunder in circumfluent clouds,
Besieged with iron points his airy cell,
And pierced the monster slumbering in the shell.
'So, born on sounding pinions to the WEST,
When Tyrant-Power had built his eagle nest;
While from his eyry shriek'd the famish'd brood,
Clenched their sharp claws, and champ'd their beaks for blood,
Immortal FRANKLIN watch'd the callow crew,
And stabb'd the struggling Vampires, ere they flew.
-The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran,
Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man;
Her heroes slain awhile COLUMBIA mourn'd,
And crown'd with laurels LIBERTY return'd.
'The Warrior, LIBERTY, with bending sails
Helm'd his bold course to fair HIBERNIA'S vales;Firm as he steps, along the shouting lands,
Lo! Truth and Virtue range their radiant bands;
Sad Superstition wails her empire torn,
Art plies his oar, and Commerce pours her horn.
'Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA'S plains
Inglorious slept, unconscious of his chains;
Round his large limbs were wound a thousand strings
By the weak hands of Confessors and Kings;
O'er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound,
And steely rivets lock'd him to the ground;
While stern Bastile with iron cage inthralls
His folded limbs, and hems in marble walls.
-Touch'd by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed
The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed;
Starts up from earth, above the admiring throng
Lifts his Colossal form, and towers along;
High o'er his foes his hundred arms He rears,
Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears;
Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rolls
Like Heaven's own thunder round the echoing poles;
Gives to the winds his banner broad unfurl'd,
And gathers in its shade the living world!
VII. 'GNOMES! YOU then taught volcanic airs to force
Through bubbling Lavas their resistless course,
O'er the broad walls of rifted Granite climb,
And pierce the rent roof of incumbent Lime,
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Round sparry caves metallic lustres fling,
And bear phlogiston on their tepid wing.
'HENCE glows, refulgent Tin! thy chrystal grains,
And tawny Copper shoots her azure veins;
Zinc lines his fretted vault with sable ore,
And dull Galena tessellates the floor;
On vermil beds in Idria's mighty caves
The living Silver rolls its ponderous waves;
With gay refractions bright Platina shines,
And studs with squander'd stars his dusky mines;
Long threads of netted gold, and silvery darts,
Inlay the Lazuli, and pierce the Quartz;-Whence roof'd with silver beam'd PERU, of old,
And hapless MEXICO was paved with gold.
'Heavens! on my sight what sanguine colours blaze!
Spain's deathless shame! the crimes of modern days!
When Avarice, shrouded in Religion's robe,
Sail'd to the West, and slaughter'd half the globe;
While Superstition, stalking by his side,
Mock'd the loud groans, and lap'd the bloody tide;
For sacred truths announced her frenzied dreams,
And turn'd to night the sun's meridian beams.Hear, oh, BRITANNIA! potent Queen of isles,
On whom fair Art, and meek Religion smiles,
Now AFRIC'S coasts thy craftier sons invade
With murder, rapine, theft,-and call it Trade!
-The SLAVE, in chains, on supplicating knee,
Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee;
With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress'd,
'ARE WE NOT BRETHREN?' sorrow choaks the rest;-AIR! bear to heaven upon thy azure flood
Their innocent cries!-EARTH! cover not their blood!
VIII. 'When Heaven's dread justice smites in crimes o'ergrown
The blood-nursed Tyrant on his purple throne,
GNOMES! YOUR bold forms unnumber'd arms outstretch,
And urge the vengeance o'er the guilty wretch.Thus when CAMBYSES led his barbarous hosts
From Persia's rocks to Egypt's trembling coasts,
Defiled each hallowed fane, and sacred wood,
And, drunk with fury, swell'd the Nile with blood;
Waved his proud banner o'er the Theban states,
105
And pour'd destruction through her hundred gates;
In dread divisions march'd the marshal'd bands,
And swarming armies blacken'd all the lands,
By Memphis these to ETHIOP'S sultry plains,
And those to HAMMON'S sand-incircled fanes.Slow as they pass'd, the indignant temples frown'd,
Low curses muttering from the vaulted ground;
Long ailes of Cypress waved their deepen'd glooms,
And quivering spectres grinn'd amid the tombs;
Prophetic whispers breathed from S
And MEMNON'S lyre with hollow murmurs rung;
Burst from each pyramid expiring groans,
And darker shadows stretch'd their lengthen'd cones.Day after day their deathful rout They steer,
Lust in the van, and rapine in the rear.
'GNOMES! as they march'd, You hid the gathered fruits,
The bladed grass, sweet grains, and mealy roots;
Scared the tired quails, that journey'd o'er their heads,
Retain'd the locusts in their earthy beds;
Bade on your sands no night-born dews distil,
Stay'd with vindictive hands the scanty rill.Loud o'er the camp the Fiend of Famine shrieks,
Calls all her brood, and champs her hundred beaks;
O'er ten square leagues her pennons broad expand,
And twilight swims upon the shuddering sand;
Perch'd on her crest the Griffin Discord clings,
And Giant Murder rides between her wings;
Blood from each clotted hair, and horny quill,
And showers of tears in blended streams distil;
High-poised in air her spiry neck she bends,
Rolls her keen eye, her Dragon-claws extends,
Darts from above, and tears at each fell swoop
With iron fangs the decimated troop.
'Now o'er their head the whizzing whirlwinds breathe,
And the live desert pants, and heaves beneath;
Tinged by the crimson sun, vast columns rise
Of eddying sands, and war amid the skies,
In red arcades the billowy plain surround,
And stalking turrets dance upon the ground.
-Long ranks in vain their shining blades extend,
To Demon-Gods their knees unhallow'd bend,
Wheel in wide circle, form in hollow square,
106
And now they front, and now they fly the war,
Pierce the deaf tempest with lamenting cries,
Press their parch'd lips, and close their blood-shot eyes.
-GNOMES! o'er the waste YOU led your myriad powers,
Climb'd on the whirls, and aim'd the flinty showers!Onward resistless rolls the infuriate surge,
Clouds follow clouds, and mountains mountains urge;
Wave over wave the driving desert swims,
Bursts o'er their heads, inhumes their struggling limbs;
Man mounts on man, on camels camels rush,
Hosts march o'er hosts, and nations nations crush,Wheeling in air the winged islands fall,
And one great earthy Ocean covers all!Then ceased the storm,-NIGHT bow'd his Ethiop brow
To earth, and listen'd to the groans below,Grim HORROR shook,-awhile the living hill
Heaved with convulsive throes,-and all was still!
IX. 'GNOMES! whose fine forms, impassive as the air,
Shrink with soft sympathy for human care;
Who glide unseen, on printless slippers borne,
Beneath the waving grass, and nodding corn;
Or lay your tiny limbs, when noon-tide warms,
Where shadowy cowslips stretch their golden arms,So mark'd on orreries in lucid signs,
Star'd with bright points the mimic zodiac shines;
Borne on fine wires amid the pictured skies
With ivory orbs the planets set and rise;
Round the dwarf earth the pearly moon is roll'd,
And the sun twinkling whirls his rays of gold.Call your bright myriads, march your mailed hosts,
With spears and helmets glittering round the coasts;
Thick as the hairs, which rear the Lion's mane,
Or fringe the Boar, that bays the hunter-train;
Watch, where proud Surges break their treacherous mounds,
And sweep resistless o'er the cultured grounds;
Such as erewhile, impell'd o'er Belgia's plain,
Roll'd her rich ruins to the insatiate main;
With piles and piers the ruffian waves engage,
And bid indignant Ocean stay his rage.
'Where, girt with clouds, the rifted mountain yawns,
And chills with length of shade the gelid lawns,
107
Climb the rude steeps, the granite-cliffs surround,
Pierce with steel points, with wooden wedges wound;
Break into clays the soft volcanic slaggs,
Or melt with acid airs the marble craggs;
Crown the green summits with adventurous flocks,
And charm with novel flowers the wondering rocks.
-So when proud Rome the Afric Warrior braved,
And high on Alps his crimson banner waved;
While rocks on rocks their beetling brows oppose
With piny forests, and unfathomed snows;
Onward he march'd, to Latium's velvet ground
With fires and acids burst the obdurate bound,
Wide o'er her weeping vales destruction hurl'd,
And shook the rising empire of the world.
X. 'Go, gentle GNOMES! resume your vernal toil,
Seek my chill tribes, which sleep beneath the soil;
On grey-moss banks, green meads, or furrow'd lands
Spread the dark mould, white lime, and crumbling sands;
Each bursting bud with healthier juices feed,
Emerging scion, or awaken'd seed.
So, in descending streams, the silver Chyle
Streaks with white clouds the golden floods of bile;
Through each nice valve the mingling currents glide,
Join their fine rills, and swell the sanguine tide;
Each countless cell, and viewless fibre seek,
Nerve the strong arm, and tinge the blushing cheek.
'Oh, watch, where bosom'd in the teeming earth,
Green swells the germ, impatient for its birth;
Guard from rapacious worms its tender shoots,
And drive the mining beetle from its roots;
With ceaseless efforts rend the obdurate clay,
And give my vegetable babes to day!
-Thus when an Angel-form, in light array'd,
Like HOWARD pierced the prison's noisome shade;
Where chain'd to earth, with eyes to heaven upturn'd,
The kneeling Saint in holy anguish mourn'd;Ray'd from his lucid vest, and halo'd brow
O'er the dark roof celestial lustres glow,
'PETER, arise!' with cheering voice He calls,
And sounds seraphic echo round the walls;
Locks, bolts, and chains his potent touch obey,
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And pleased he leads the dazzled Sage to day.
XI. 'YOU! whose fine fingers fill the organic cells,
With virgin earth, of woods and bones and shells;
Mould with retractile glue their spongy beds,
And stretch and strengthen all their fibre-threads.Late when the mass obeys its changeful doom,
And sinks to earth, its cradle and its tomb,
GNOMES! with nice eye the slow solution watch,
With fostering hand the parting atoms catch,
Join in new forms, combine with life and sense,
And guide and guard the transmigrating Ens.
'So when on Lebanon's sequester'd hight
The fair ADONIS left the realms of light,
Bow'd his bright locks, and, fated from his birth
To change eternal, mingled with the earth;With darker horror shook the conscious wood,
Groan'd the sad gales, and rivers blush'd with blood;
On cypress-boughs the Loves their quivers hung,
Their arrows scatter'd, and their bows unstrung;
And BEAUTY'S GODDESS, bending o'er his bier,
Breathed the soft sigh, and pour'd the tender tear.Admiring PROSERPINE through dusky glades
Led the fair phantom to Elysian shades,
Clad with new form, with finer sense combined,
And lit with purer flame the ethereal mind.
-Erewhile, emerging from infernal night,
The bright Assurgent rises into light,
Leaves the drear chambers of the insatiate tomb,
And shines and charms with renovated bloom.While wondering Loves the bursting grave surround,
And edge with meeting wings the yawning ground,
Stretch their fair necks, and leaning o'er the brink
View the pale regions of the dead, and shrink;
Long with broad eyes ecstatic BEAUTY stands,
Heaves her white bosom, spreads her waxen hands;
Then with loud shriek the panting Youth alarms,
'My Life! my Love!' and springs into his arms.'
The GODDESS ceased,-the delegated throng
O'er the wide plains delighted rush along;
In dusky squadrons, and in shining groups,
Hosts follow hosts, and troops succeed to troops;
109
Scarce bears the bending grass the moving freight,
And nodding florets bow beneath their weight.
So when light clouds on airy pinions sail,
Flit the soft shadows o'er the waving vale;
Shade follows shade, as laughing Zephyrs drive,
And all the chequer'd landscape seems alive.
~ Erasmus Darwin,
327:BY MICHING MALLECHO, Esq.

Is it a party in a parlour,
Crammed just as they on earth were crammed,
Some sipping punchsome sipping tea;
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent, and alldamned!
Peter Bell, by W. Wordsworth.

Ophelia.What means this, my lord?
Hamlet.Marry, this is Miching Mallecho; it means mischief. ~Shakespeare.

PROLOGUE
Peter Bells, one, two and three,
O'er the wide world wandering be.
First, the antenatal Peter,
Wrapped in weeds of the same metre,
The so-long-predestined raiment
Clothed in which to walk his way meant
The second Peter; whose ambition
Is to link the proposition,
As the mean of two extremes
(This was learned from Aldric's themes)
Shielding from the guilt of schism
The orthodoxal syllogism;
The First Peterhe who was
Like the shadow in the glass
Of the second, yet unripe,
His substantial antitype.
Then came Peter Bell the Second,
Who henceforward must be reckoned
The body of a double soul,
And that portion of the whole
Without which the rest would seem
Ends of a disjointed dream.
And the Third is he who has
O'er the grave been forced to pass
To the other side, which is,
Go and try else,just like this.
Peter Bell the First was Peter
Smugger, milder, softer, neater,
Like the soul before it is
Born from that world into this.
The next Peter Bell was he,
Predevote, like you and me,
To good or evil as may come;
His was the severer doom,
For he was an evil Cotter,
And a polygamic Potter.
And the last is Peter Bell,
Damned since our first parents fell,
Damned eternally to Hell
Surely he deserves it well!
PART THE FIRST
DEATH
And Peter Bell, when he had been
With fresh-imported Hell-fire warmed,
Grew seriousfrom his dress and mien
'Twas very plainly to be seen
Peter was quite reformed.
His eyes turned up, his mouth turned down;
His accent caught a nasal twang;
He oiled his hair; there might be heard
The grace of God in every word
Which Peter said or sang.
But Peter now grew old, and had
An ill no doctor could unravel;
His torments almost drove him mad;
Some said it was a fever bad
Some swore it was the gravel.
His holy friends then came about,
And with long preaching and persuasion
Convinced the patient that, without
The smallest shadow of a doubt,
He was predestined to damnation.
They said'Thy name is Peter Bell;
Thy skin is of a brimstone hue;
Alive or deaday, sick or well
The one God made to rhyme with hell;
The other, I think, rhymes with you.'
Then Peter set up such a yell!
The nurse, who with some water gruel
Was climbing up the stairs, as well
As her old legs could climb themfell,
And broke them boththe fall was cruel.
The Parson from the casement lept
Into the lake of Windermere
And many an eelthough no adept
In God's right reason for itkept
Gnawing his kidneys half a year.
And all the rest rushed through the door,
And tumbled over one another,
And broke their skulls.Upon the floor
Meanwhile sat Peter Bell, and swore,
And cursed his father and his mother;
And raved of God, and sin, and death,
Blaspheming like an infidel;
And said, that with his clenchd teeth
He'd seize the earth from underneath,
And drag it with him down to hell.
As he was speaking came a spasm,
And wrenched his gnashing teeth asunder;
Like one who sees a strange phantasm
He lay,there was a silent chasm
Between his upper jaw and under.
And yellow death lay on his face;
And a fixed smile that was not human
Told, as I understand the case,
That he was gone to the wrong place:
I heard all this from the old woman.
Then there came down from Langdale Pike
A cloud, with lightning, wind and hail;
It swept over the mountains like
An ocean,and I heard it strike
The woods and crags of Grasmere vale.
And I saw the black storm come
Nearer, minute after minute;
Its thunder made the cataracts dumb;
With hiss, and clash, and hollow hum,
It neared as if the Devil was in it.
The Devil was in it:he had bought
Peter for half-a-crown; and when
The storm which bore him vanished, nought
That in the house that storm had caught
Was ever seen again.
The gaping neighbours came next day
They found all vanished from the shore:
The Bible, whence he used to pray,
Half scorched under a hen-coop lay;
Smashed glassand nothing more!
PART THE SECOND
THE DEVIL
The Devil, I safely can aver,
Has neither hoof, nor tail, nor sting;
Nor is he, as some sages swear,
A spirit, neither here nor there,
In nothingyet in everything.
He iswhat we are; for sometimes
The Devil is a gentleman;
At others a bard bartering rhymes
For sack; a statesman spinning crimes;
A swindler, living as he can;
A thief, who cometh in the night,
With whole boots and net pantaloons,
Like some one whom it were not right
To mention;or the luckless wight
From whom he steals nine silver spoons.
But in this case he did appear
Like a slop-merchant from Wapping,
And with smug face, and eye severe,
On every side did perk and peer
Till he saw Peter dead or napping.
He had on an upper Benjamin
(For he was of the driving schism)
In the which he wrapped his skin
From the storm he travelled in,
For fear of rheumatism.
He called the ghost out of the corse;
It was exceedingly like Peter,
Only its voice was hollow and hoarse
It had a queerish look of course
Its dress too was a little neater.
The Devil knew not his name and lot;
Peter knew not that he was Bell:
Each had an upper stream of thought,
Which made all seem as it was not;
Fitting itself to all things well.
Peter thought he had parents dear,
Brothers, sisters, cousins, cronies,
In the fens of Lincolnshire;
He perhaps had found them there
Had he gone and boldly shown his
Solemn phiz in his own village;
Where he thought oft when a boy
He'd clomb the orchard walls to pillage
The produce of his neighbour's tillage,
With marvellous pride and joy.
And the Devil thought he had,
'Mid the misery and confusion
Of an unjust war, just made
A fortune by the gainful trade
Of giving soldiers rations bad
The world is full of strange delusion
That he had a mansion planned
In a square like Grosvenor Square,
That he was aping fashion, and
That he now came to Westmoreland
To see what was romantic there.
And all this, though quite ideal,
Ready at a breath to vanish,
Was a state not more unreal
Than the peace he could not feel,
Or the care he could not banish.
After a little conversation,
The Devil told Peter, if he chose,
He'd bring him to the world of fashion
By giving him a situation
In his own serviceand new clothes.
And Peter bowed, quite pleased and proud,
And after waiting some few days
For a new liverydirty yellow
Turned up with blackthe wretched fellow
Was bowled to Hell in the Devil's chaise.
PART THE THIRD
HELL
Hell is a city much like London
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.
There is a Castles, and a Canning,
A Cobbett, and a Castlereagh;
All sorts of caitiff corpses planning
All sorts of cozening for trepanning
Corpses less corrupt than they.
There is a -, who has lost
His wits, or sold them, none knows which;
He walks about a double ghost,
And though as thin as Fraud almost
Ever grows more grim and rich.
There is a Chancery Court; a King;
A manufacturing mob; a set
Of thieves who by themselves are sent
Similar thieves to represent;
An army; and a public debt.
Which last is a scheme of paper money,
And meansbeing interpreted
'Bees, keep your waxgive us the honey,
And we will plant, while skies are sunny,
Flowers, which in winter serve instead.'
There is a great talk of revolution
And a great chance of despotism
German soldierscampsconfusion
Tumultslotteriesragedelusion
Ginsuicideand methodism;
Taxes too, on wine and bread,
And meat, and beer, and tea, and cheese,
From which those patriots pure are fed,
Who gorge before they reel to bed
The tenfold essence of all these.
There are mincing women, mewing,
(Like cats, who amant miser,)
Of their own virtue, and pursuing
Their gentler sisters to that ruin,
Without whichwhat were chastity?
Lawyersjudgesold hobnobbers
Are therebailiffschancellors
Bishopsgreat and little robbers
Rhymesterspamphleteersstock-jobbers
Men of glory in the wars,
Things whose trade is, over ladies
To lean, and flirt, and stare, and simper,
Till all that is divine in woman
Grows cruel, courteous, smooth, inhuman,
Crucified 'twixt a smile and whimper.
Thrusting, toiling, wailing, moiling,
Frowning, preachingsuch a riot!
Each with never-ceasing labour,
Whilst he thinks he cheats his neighbour,
Cheating his own heart of quiet.
And all these meet at levees;
Dinners convivial and political;
Suppers of epic poets;teas,
Where small talk dies in agonies;
Breakfasts professional and critical;
Lunches and snacks so aldermanic
That one would furnish forth ten dinners,
Where reigns a Cretan-tongud panic,
Lest news Russ, Dutch, or Alemannic
Should make some losers, and some winners;
At conversazioniballs
Conventiclesand drawing-rooms
Courts of lawcommitteescalls
Of a morningclubsbook-stalls
Churchesmasqueradesand tombs.
And this is Helland in this smother
All are damnable and damned;
Each one damning, damns the other
They are damned by one another,
By none other are they damned.
'Tis a lie to say, 'God damns!'
Where was Heaven's Attorney General
When they first gave out such flams?
Let there be an end of shams,
They are mines of poisonous mineral.
Statesmen damn themselves to be
Cursed; and lawyers damn their souls
To the auction of a fee;
Churchmen damn themselves to see
God's sweet love in burning coals.
The rich are damned, beyond all cure,
To taunt, and starve, and trample on
The weak and wretched; and the poor
Damn their broken hearts to endure
Stripe on stripe, with groan on groan.
Sometimes the poor are damned indeed
To take,not means for being blessed,
But Cobbett's snuff, revenge; that weed
From which the worms that it doth feed
Squeeze less than they before possessed.
And some few, like we know who,
Damnedbut God alone knows why
To believe their minds are given
To make this ugly Hell a Heaven;
In which faith they live and die.
Thus, as in a town, plague-stricken,
Each man be he sound or no
Must indifferently sicken;
As when day begins to thicken,
None knows a pigeon from a crow,
So good and bad, sane and mad,
The oppressor and the oppressed;
Those who weep to see what others
Smile to inflict upon their brothers;
Lovers, haters, worst and best;
All are damnedthey breathe an air,
Thick, infected, joy-dispelling:
Each pursues what seems most fair,
Mining like moles, through mind, and there
Scoop palace-caverns vast, where Care
In thrond state is ever dwelling.
PART THE FOURTH
SIN
Lo, Peter in Hell's Grosvenor Square,
A footman in the Devil's service!
And the misjudging world would swear
That every man in service there
To virtue would prefer vice.
But Peter, though now damned, was not
What Peter was before damnation.
Men oftentimes prepare a lot
Which ere it finds them, is not what
Suits with their genuine station.
All things that Peter saw and felt
Had a peculiar aspect to him;
And when they came within the belt
Of his own nature, seemed to melt,
Like cloud to cloud, into him.
And so the outward world uniting
To that within him, he became
Considerably uninviting
To those who, meditation slighting,
Were moulded in a different frame.
And he scorned them, and they scorned him;
And he scorned all they did; and they
Did all that men of their own trim
Are wont to do to please their whim,
Drinking, lying, swearing, play.
Such were his fellow-servants; thus
His virtue, like our own, was built
Too much on that indignant fuss
Hypocrite Pride stirs up in us
To bully one another's guilt.
He had a mind which was somehow
At once circumference and centre
Of all he might or feel or know;
Nothing went ever out, although
Something did ever enter.
He had as much imagination
As a pint-pot;he never could
Fancy another situation,
From which to dart his contemplation,
Than that wherein he stood.
Yet his was individual mind,
And new created all he saw
In a new manner, and refined
Those new creations, and combined
Them, by a master-spirit's law.
Thusthough unimaginative
An apprehension clear, intense,
Of his mind's work, had made alive
The things it wrought on; I believe
Wakening a sort of thought in sense.
But from the first 'twas Peter's drift
To be a kind of moral eunuch,
He touched the hem of Nature's shift,
Felt faintand never dared uplift
The closest, all-concealing tunic.
She laughed the while, with an arch smile,
And kissed him with a sister's kiss,
And said'My best Diogenes,
I love you wellbut, if you please,
Tempt not again my deepest bliss.
''Tis you are coldfor I, not coy,
Yield love for love, frank, warm, and true;
And Burns, a Scottish peasant boy
His errors prove itknew my joy
More, learnd friend, than you.
'Bocca bacciata non perde ventura,
Anzi rinnuova come fa la luna:
So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a
Male prude, like you, from what you now endure, a
Low-tide in soul, like a stagnant laguna.'
Then Peter rubbed his eyes severe,
And smoothed his spacious forehead down
With his broad palm;'twixt love and fear,
He looked, as he no doubt felt, queer,
And in his dream sate down.
The Devil was no uncommon creature;
A leaden-witted thiefjust huddled
Out of the dross and scum of nature;
A toad-like lump of limb and feature,
With mind, and heart, and fancy muddled.
He was that heavy, dull, cold thing,
The spirit of evil well may be:
A drone too base to have a sting;
Who gluts, and grimes his lazy wing,
And calls lust, luxury.
Now he was quite the kind of wight
Round whom collect, at a fixed aera,
Venison, turtle, hock, and claret,
Good cheerand those who come to share it
And best East Indian madeira!
It was his fancy to invite
Men of science, wit, and learning,
Who came to lend each other light;
He proudly thought that his gold's might
Had set those spirits burning.
And men of learning, science, wit,
Considered him as you and I
Think of some rotten tree, and sit
Lounging and dining under it,
Exposed to the wide sky.
And all the while, with loose fat smile,
The willing wretch sat winking there,
Believing 'twas his power that made
That jovial sceneand that all paid
Homage to his unnoticed chair.
Though to be sure this place was Hell;
He was the Deviland all they
What though the claret circled well,
And wit, like ocean, rose and fell?
Were damned eternally.
PART THE FIFTH
GRACE
Among the guests who often stayed
Till the Devil's petits-soupers,
A man there came, fair as a maid,
And Peter noted what he said,
Standing behind his master's chair.
He was a mighty poetand
A subtle-souled psychologist;
All things he seemed to understand,
Of old or newof sea or land
But his own mindwhich was a mist.
This was a man who might have turned
Hell into Heavenand so in gladness
A Heaven unto himself have earned;
But he in shadows undiscerned
Trusted,and damned himself to madness.
He spoke of poetry, and how
'Divine it wasa lighta love
A spirit which like wind doth blow
As it listeth, to and fro;
A dew rained down from God above;
'A power which comes and goes like dream,
And which none can ever trace
Heaven's light on earthTruth's brightest beam.'
And when he ceased there lay the gleam
Of those words upon his face.
Now Peter, when he heard such talk,
Would, heedless of a broken pate,
Stand like a man asleep, or balk
Some wishing guest of knife or fork,
Or drop and break his master's plate.
At night he oft would start and wake
Like a lover, and began
In a wild measure songs to make
On moor, and glen, and rocky lake,
And on the heart of man
And on the universal sky
And the wide earth's bosom green,
And the sweet, strange mystery
Of what beyond these things may lie,
And yet remain unseen.
For in his thought he visited
The spots in which, ere dead and damned,
He his wayward life had led;
Yet knew not whence the thoughts were fed
Which thus his fancy crammed.
And these obscure remembrances
Stirred such harmony in Peter,
That, whensoever he should please,
He could speak of rocks and trees
In poetic metre.
For though it was without a sense
Of memory, yet he remembered well
Many a ditch and quick-set fence;
Of lakes he had intelligence,
He knew something of heath and fell.
He had also dim recollections
Of pedlars tramping on their rounds;
Milk-pans and pails; and odd collections
Of saws, and proverbs; and reflections
Old parsons make in burying-grounds.
But Peter's verse was clear, and came
Announcing from the frozen hearth
Of a cold age, that none might tame
The soul of that diviner flame
It augured to the Earth:
Like gentle rains, on the dry plains,
Making that green which late was gray,
Or like the sudden moon, that stains
Some gloomy chamber's window-panes
With a broad light like day.
For language was in Peter's hand
Like clay while he was yet a potter;
And he made songs for all the land,
Sweet both to feel and understand,
As pipkins late to mountain Cotter.
And Mr. -, the bookseller,
Gave twenty pounds for some;then scorning
A footman's yellow coat to wear,
Peter, too proud of heart, I fear,
Instantly gave the Devil warning.
Whereat the Devil took offence,
And swore in his soul a great oath then,
'That for his damned impertinence
He'd bring him to a proper sense
Of what was due to gentlemen!'
PART THE SIXTH
DAMNATION
'O that mine enemy had written
A book!'cried Job:a fearful curse,
If to the Arab, as the Briton,
'Twas galling to be critic-bitten:
The Devil to Peter wished no worse.
When Peter's next new book found vent,
The Devil to all the first Reviews
A copy of it slyly sent,
With five-pound note as compliment,
And this short notice'Pray abuse.'
Then seriatim, month and quarter,
Appeared such mad tirades.One said
'Peter seduced Mrs. Foy's daughter,
Then drowned the mother in Ullswater,
The last thing as he went to bed.'
Another'Let him shave his head!
Where's Dr. Willis?Or is he joking?
What does the rascal mean or hope,
No longer imitating Pope,
In that barbarian Shakespeare poking?'
One more, 'Is incest not enough?
And must there be adultery too?
Grace after meat? Miscreant and Liar!
Thief! Blackguard! Scoundrel! Fool! Hell-fire
Is twenty times too good for you.
'By that last book of yours we think
You've double damned yourself to scorn;
We warned you whilst yet on the brink
You stood. From your black name will shrink
The babe that is unborn.'
All these Reviews the Devil made
Up in a parcel, which he had
Safely to Peter's house conveyed.
For carriage, tenpence Peter paid
Untied themread themwent half mad.
'What!' cried he, 'this is my reward
For nights of thought, and days of toil?
Do poets, but to be abhorred
By men of whom they never heard,
Consume their spirits' oil?
'What have I done to them?and who
Is Mrs. Foy? 'Tis very cruel
To speak of me and Betty so!
Adultery! God defend me! Oh!
I've half a mind to fight a duel.
'Or,' cried he, a grave look collecting,
'Is it my genius, like the moon,
Sets those who stand her face inspecting,
That face within their brain reflecting,
Like a crazed bell-chime, out of tune?'
For Peter did not know the town,
But thought, as country readers do,
For half a guinea or a crown,
He bought oblivion or renown
From God's own voice in a review.
All Peter did on this occasion
Was, writing some sad stuff in prose.
It is a dangerous invasion
When poets criticize; their station
Is to delight, not pose.
The Devil then sent to Leipsic fair
For Born's translation of Kant's book;
A world of words, tail foremost, where
Rightwrongfalsetrueand fouland fair
As in a lottery-wheel are shook.
Five thousand crammed octavo pages
Of German psychologics,he
Who his furor verborum assuages
Thereon, deserves just seven months' wages
More than will e'er be due to me.
I looked on them nine several days,
And then I saw that they were bad;
A friend, too, spoke in their dispraise,
He never read them;with amaze
I found Sir William Drummond had.
When the book came, the Devil sent
It to P. Verbovale, Esquire,
With a brief note of compliment,
By that night's Carlisle mail. It went,
And set his soul on fire.
Fire, which ex luce praebens fumum,
Made him beyond the bottom see
Of truth's clear wellwhen I and you, Ma'am,
Go, as we shall do, subter humum,
We may know more than he.
Now Peter ran to seed in soul
Into a walking paradox;
For he was neither part nor whole,
Nor good, nor badnor knave nor fool;
Among the woods and rocks
Furious he rode, where late he ran,
Lashing and spurring his tame hobby;
Turned to a formal puritan,
A solemn and unsexual man,
He half believed White Obi.
This steed in vision he would ride,
High trotting over nine-inch bridges,
With Flibbertigibbet, imp of pride,
Mocking and mowing by his side
A mad-brained goblin for a guide
Over corn-fields, gates, and hedges.
After these ghastly rides, he came
Home to his heart, and found from thence
Much stolen of its accustomed flame;
His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and lame
Of their intelligence.
To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;
He was no Whig, he was no Tory;
No Deist and no Christian he;
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.
One single point in his belief
From his organization sprung,
The heart-enrooted faith, the chief
Ear in his doctrines' blighted sheaf,
That 'Happiness is wrong';
So thought Calvin and Dominic;
So think their fierce successors, who
Even now would neither stint nor stick
Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might 'do their do.'
His morals thus were undermined:
The old Peterthe hard, old Potter
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter.
In the death hues of agony
Lambently flashing from a fish,
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow's rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish.
So in his Country's dying face
He lookedand, lovely as she lay,
Seeking in vain his last embrace,
Wailing her own abandoned case,
With hardened sneer he turned away:
And coolly to his own soul said;
'Do you not think that we might make
A poem on her when she's dead:
Or, noa thought is in my head
Her shroud for a new sheet I'll take:
'My wife wants one.Let who will bury
This mangled corpse! And I and you,
My dearest Soul, will then make merry,
As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,'
'Ayand at last desert me too.'
And so his Soul would not be gay,
But moaned within him; like a fawn
Moaning within a cave, it lay
Wounded and wasting, day by day,
Till all its life of life was gone.
As troubled skies stain waters clear,
The storm in Peter's heart and mind
Now made his verses dark and queer:
They were the ghosts of what they were,
Shaking dim grave-clothes in the wind.
For he now raved enormous folly,
Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves,
'Twould make George Colman melancholy
To have heard him, like a male Molly,
Chanting those stupid staves.
Yet the Reviews, who heaped abuse
On Peter while he wrote for freedom,
So soon as in his song they spy
The folly which soothes tyranny,
Praise him, for those who feed 'em.
'He was a man, too great to scan;
A planet lost in truth's keen rays:
His virtue, awful and prodigious;
He was the most sublime, religious,
Pure-minded Poet of these days.'
As soon as he read that, cried Peter,
'Eureka! I have found the way
To make a better thing of metre
Than e'er was made by living creature
Up to this blessd day.'
Then Peter wrote odes to the Devil;
In one of which he meekly said:
'May Carnage and Slaughter,
Thy niece and thy daughter,
May Rapine and Famine,
Thy gorge ever cramming,
Glut thee with living and dead!
  'May Death and Damnation,
And Consternation,
Flit up from Hell with pure intent!
Slash them at Manchester,
Glasgow, Leeds, and Chester;
Drench all with blood from Avon to Trent.
'Let thy body-guard yeomen
Hew down babes and women,
And laugh with bold triumph till Heaven be rent!
When Moloch in Jewry
Munched children with fury,
It was thou, Devil, dining with pure intent.'
PART THE SEVENTH
DOUBLE DAMNATION
The Devil now knew his proper cue.
Soon as he read the ode, he drove
To his friend Lord MacMurderchouse's,
A man of interest in both houses,
And said:'For money or for love,
'Pray find some cure or sinecure;
To feed from the superfluous taxes
A friend of oursa poetfewer
Have fluttered tamer to the lure
Than he.' His lordship stands and racks his
Stupid brains, while one might count
As many beads as he had boroughs,
At length replies; from his mean front,
Like one who rubs out an account,
Smoothing away the unmeaning furrows:
'It happens fortunately, dear Sir,
I can. I hope I need require
No pledge from you, that he will stir
In our affairs;like Oliver,
That he'll be worthy of his hire.'
These words exchanged, the news sent off
To Peter, home the Devil hied,
Took to his bed; he had no cough,
No doctor,meat and drink enough,
Yet that same night he died.
The Devil's corpse was leaded down;
His decent heirs enjoyed his pelf,
Mourning-coaches, many a one,
Followed his hearse along the town:
Where was the Devil himself?
When Peter heard of his promotion,
His eyes grew like two stars for bliss:
There was a bow of sleek devotion
Engendering in his back; each motion
Seemed a Lord's shoe to kiss.
He hired a house, bought plate, and made
A genteel drive up to his door,
With sifted gravel neatly laid,
As if defying all who said,
Peter was ever poor.
But a disease soon struck into
The very life and soul of Peter
He walked aboutslepthad the hue
Of health upon his cheeksand few
Dug betternone a heartier eater.
And yet a strange and horrid curse
Clung upon Peter, night and day;
Month after month the thing grew worse,
And deadlier than in this my verse
I can find strength to say.
Peter was dullhe was at first
Dulloh, so dullso very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed
Still with this dulness was he cursed
Dullbeyond all conceptiondull.
No one could read his booksno mortal,
But a few natural friends, would hear him;
The parson came not near his portal;
His state was like that of the immortal
Described by Swiftno man could bear him.
His sister, wife, and children yawned,
With a long, slow, and drear ennui,
All human patience far beyond;
Their hopes of Heaven each would have pawned,
Anywhere else to be.
But in his verse, and in his prose,
The essence of his dulness was
Concentred and compressed so close,
'Twould have made Guatimozin doze
On his red gridiron of brass.
A printer's boy, folding those pages,
Fell slumbrously upon one side;
Like those famed Seven who slept three ages.
To wakeful frenzy's vigil-rages,
As opiates, were the same applied.
Even the Reviewers who were hired
To do the work of his reviewing,
With adamantine nerves, grew tired;
Gaping and torpid they retired,
To dream of what they should be doing.
And worse and worse, the drowsy curse
Yawned in him, till it grew a pest
A wide contagious atmosphere,
Creeping like cold through all things near;
A power to infect and to infest.
His servant-maids and dogs grew dull;
His kitten, late a sportive elf;
The woods and lakes, so beautiful,
Of dim stupidity were full,
All grew dull as Peter's self.
The earth under his feetthe springs,
Which lived within it a quick life,
The air, the winds of many wings,
That fan it with new murmurings,
Were dead to their harmonious strife.
The birds and beasts within the wood,
The insects, and each creeping thing,
Were now a silent multitude;
Love's work was left unwroughtno brood
Near Peter's house took wing.
And every neighbouring cottager
Stupidly yawned upon the other:
No jackass brayed; no little cur
Cocked up his ears;no man would stir
To save a dying mother.
Yet all from that charmed district went
But some half-idiot and half-knave,
Who rather than pay any rent,
Would live with marvellous content,
Over his father's grave.
No bailiff dared within that space,
For fear of the dull charm, to enter;
A man would bear upon his face,
For fifteen months in any case,
The yawn of such a venture.
Seven miles abovebelowaround
This pest of dulness holds its sway;
A ghastly life without a sound;
To Peter's soul the spell is bound
How should it ever pass away?
'Composed at Florence, October 1819, and forwarded to Hunt (Nov. 2) to be published by C. & J. Ollier without the author's name; ultimately printed by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of the Poetical Works, 1839. A skit by John Hamilton Reynolds, Peter Bell, A Lyrical Ballad, had already appeared (April, 1819), a few days before the publication of Wordsworth's Peter Bell, A Tale. These productions were reviewed in Leigh Hunt's Examiner (April 26, May 3, 1819); and to the entertainment derived from his perusal of Hunt's criticisms the composition of Shelley's Peter Bell the Third is chiefly owing.' ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peter Bell The Third
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328:Orpheus
ORPHEUS.
LAUGHTER and dance, and sounds of harp and lyre,
Piping of flutes, singing of festal songs,
Ribbons of flame from flaunting torches, dulled
By the broad summer sunshine, these had filled
Since the high noon the pillared vestibules,
The peristyles and porches, in the house
Of the bride's father. Maidens, garlanded
With rose and myrtle dedicate to Love,
Adorned with chaplets fresh the bride, and veiled
The shining head and wistful, girlish face,
Ineffable sweetness of divided lips,
Large light of clear, gray eyes, low, lucid brows,
White as a cloud, beneath pale, clustering gold.
When sunless skies uncertain twilight cast,
That makes a friend's face as an alien's strange,
Investing with a foreign mystery
The dear green fields about our very home.
Then waiting stood the gilded chariot
Before the porch, and from the vine-wreathed door,
Issued the white-veiled bride, while jocund youths
And mænads followed her with dance and song.
She came with double glory; for her lord,
Son of Apollo and Calliope,
Towered beside her, beautiful in limb
And feature, as though formed to magic strains,
Like the Bœotian city, that arose
In airy structures to Amphion's lute.
The light serene shone from his brow and eyes,
Of one whose lofty thoughts keep consonance
With the celestial music of the spheres.
His smile was fluent, and his speech outsang
The cadences of soft-stringed instruments.
He to the chariot led Eurydice,
And these twain, mounting with their paranymph,
Drove onward through the dusky twilit fields,
Preceded by the nymphs and singing youths,
And boys diffusing light and odors warm,
With flaming brands of aromatic woods,
138
And matrons bearing symbols of the life
Of careful wives, the distaff and the sieve;
And followed by the echoes of their songs,
The fragrance crushed from moist and trodden grass,
The blessing of the ever-present gods,
Whom they invoked with earnest hymns and prayer.
From Orpheus' portico, festooned with vines,
Issued a flood of rare, ambrosial light,
As though Olympian portals stood ajar,
And Hymen, radiant by his torch's flame,
Mystic with saffron vest and purple, stood
With hands munificent to greet and bless.
Ripe fruits were poured upon the married pair
Alighting, and the chariot wheels were burnt,
A token that the bride returned no more
Unto her father's house. With step resolved,
She crossed the threshold soft with flowers, secure
That his heroic soul who guided her,
Was potent and alert to grace her life,
With noble outlines and ideal hues,
Uplifting it to equal height with his.
EPITHALAMIUM. TO ZEUS.
Because thou art enthroned beyond our reach,
Behind the brightest and the farthest star,
And silence is as eloquent as speech,
To thee who knowest us for what we are,
We bring thee naught save brief and simple prayer,
Strong in its naked, frank sincerity.
Send sacred joys of marriage to this pair,
With fertile increase and prosperity.
Three nymphs had met beneath an oak that cast
Cool, dappled shadow on the glowing grass,
And liquid gleam of the translucent brook.
The air was musical with frolic sounds
Of feminine voices, and of laughter blithe.
Patines of sunshine fell like mottled gold
On the rose-white of bright bare limbs and neck,
On flowing, snowy mantles, and again
With sudden splendor on the gloriole
Of warm, rich hair. The fairest nymph reclined
Beneath the tree, and leaned her yellow head,
With its crisp, clustering rings, against the trunk,
139
And dipped her pure feet in the colorless brook,
Stirring the ripples into circles wide,
With cool, delicious plashings in the stream.
Her young companions lay upon the grass,
With indolent eyes half closed, and parted lips
Half-smiling, in the languor of the noon.
But suddenly these twain, arising, cried,
Startled and sharply, 'Lo, Eurydice,
Behold!' and she, uplifting frightened eyes,
Saw a strange shepherd watching with bold glance.
Veiling their faces with their mantles light,
Her sisters fled swift-footed, with shrill cries,
Adown the meadow, but her wet feet clung
To the dry grasses and the earthy soil.
'Eurydice, I love thee! fear me not,
For I am Aristæus, with gray groves
Of hoary olives, and innumerous flocks,
And precious swarms of yellow-vested bees.'
But she with sudden strength eluding him,
Sprang o'er the flowery turf, with back-blown hair,
And wing-like garments, shortened breath, and face
Kindled with shame and terror. In her flight
She ran through fatal flowers and tangled weeds,
And thick rank grass beside a stagnant pool,
When, with a keen and breathless cry of pain,
Abrupt she fell amidst the tall, green reeds.
Then Aristæus reached her, as a snake
Crept back in sinuous lines amidst the slime.
Desire was changed to pity, when he saw
The wounded dryad in her agony
Strive vainly to escape, repelling him
With feeble arms. 'Forgive me, nymph,' he cried;
' I will not touch, save with most reverent hands,
Thy sacred form. But let me bear thee hence,
And soothe thy bruise with healing herbs. 'Too late,
Leave me,' she sighed, 'and lead thou Orpheus here,
That I may see him ere the daylight fails.'
He left her pale with suffering, —earth seemed strange
Unto her eyes, who knew she looked her last
On level-stretching meadows, hazy hills,
And all the light and color of the sky.
Brief as a dream she saw her happy life,
140
Her father's face, her mother's blessed eyes,
The hero who, unheralded, appeared,
And all was changed,— all things put forth a voice,
As in the season of the singing birds.
She looked around revived, and saw again
The lapsing river and abiding sky.
Across the sunny fields came Aristæus,
With Orpheus following,— and after these,
Sad nymphs and heroes grave with sympathy.
Quite calm she lay, and almost wished to die
Before they reached her, if the throbbing pain
Of limb and heart could only thus be stilled.
But Orpheus hastened to her side, and mourned,
'Eurydice, Eurydice! Remain, —
For there is no delight of speech nor song
Among the dead. Will the gods jest with me,
And call this life, which must forevermore
Be but a void, a hunger, a desire,
A stretching out of empty hands to grasp
What earth nor sea nor heaven will restore?
Is this the life that I conceived and sang,
Rich with all noble opportunities
And beautiful realities?' But she:
'Brave Orpheus, search thou not the eternal gods,
Surely they love us dearer than we know.
Do thou refrain, for yet I hold my faith.
When I am gone, thou still wilt have thy lyre;
Love it and cherish,— it is Fate's best gift,
And with death's clearer vision, I can see
That in all ages men will be upraised
Nearer to gods through this than through aught else.
My death may but inspire a larger note,
A passionate cadence to thy strain, which else
Were not quite human, and thus incomplete.
And with this thought I am content to die.
Cease not to sing to me when I am gone;
Thy voice will reach me in the farthest spheres,
Or wake me out of silence. Now begin,
That I may float on those celestial waves
Into the darkness, as I oft have longed.'
ORPHEUS.
Once in a wild, bright vision, came to me
141
Beautiful music, luminous as morn,
An effluence of light and rapture born,
With eyes as full of splendor as the sea;
Dazzling as youth, with pinions frail as air,
Yet potent to uplift and soar as prayer.
Again I see her, cypress in her wreath,
Sad with all grave and tender mysteries;
Tears in her unimaginable eyes,
That look their first with wondering awe on Death.
Never again, in all the after years,
Will her lips laugh with utter mirthfulness;
Nor the strange longing in her eyes grow less,
Nor any time dispel their mist of tears.
Yea, with new numbers she completes her strain,
A song unsung before by gods or men;
But she hath lost, ah! lost for evermore,
The ringing note of joy ineffable,
The high assurance proud, that all is well,
The glad refrain that pealed from shore to shore.
O lyre, thou hast done with joyous things,
Triumphant ecstasies, exultant song;
Of subtle pain, keen anguish, hopeless wrong,
I fashion now another of thy strings,
And strike thee with a strong hand passionate,
Into a fuller music, adequate
Unto a soul that seeks insatiably,
With fond, illusive hope and faith divine;
For through all ages will my soul seek thine,
Eurydice, my lost Eurydice!
What solace to lament with empty hands
And smitten heart, above a mound of earth,
Vivid with mockery of perpetual flowers,
O'er one small urn that holds beneath its lid,
With overmeasure, all the flameless dust
And soulless ashes of our love? Yet this
Was Orpheus' life, to mourn beside the grave,
From his stringed lyre compelling wild response
And thrilling intonation of his grief,
That made the hearts of gnarled and knotty oaks
Ache as with human sympathy, and rived
The adamantine centre of the rock,
And lured the forest beasts, and hushed the birds,
142
Mavis and lark, while with wide, awful wings,
The eagle shadowed his exalted brow.
'Surely,' he cried, 'the senseless dust hears not,
More than the burnt brand hears old natural sounds
Innumerable rustle of young leaves.
It cannot be that only these remain,
The ashes of her glittering limbs, warm flesh,
And blessed hair,— my love had more than these
Where is the vital soul, that was to me
An inspiration and an influence?
The gods are not unstable like rash man,
Aimlessly to create and discreate,
With cruel and capricious fantasy,
For thus the immaculate skies would be a lie;
Eurydice is but withdrawn from me,
And disembodied, while mine eyesight blinds,
My senses are a hindrance, and obstruct
The accurate perception of my soul.
When mine own spirit, nightly disenthralled,
Soars to the land of dreams, whose boundaries,
By day, loom infinitely far and vague,
And yet, at night, become our very home,—
There still I see thee with the same bright form,
The same auroral eyes that made for me
Perpetual morning; and I stretch mine arms
Hungering after thee, and, calling, wake
Unto the vapid glare of languid dawn.
Yet all these things address my very soul,
Telling it that thou art not dead; for death
Is but the incarnation of man's fears;
Gods do not recognize it. If thou art
(As I have faith) in the known universe,
Yea, though it be in the extremest land,
Beyond the sunset, with its shining isles,
I will go forth and seek thee, nor will cease
To mourn thee and desire, till I have found.'
Thus Orpheus fared across the full-fed streams
Of Hebrus and of Strymon, and beyond
The purple outlines and aerial crags,
Snow-glittering of Scardus, Rhodope,
And grand Orbelus; through fair, fertile fields
Of Thessaly with increase of ripe corn,
143
Through Attica, Bœotia and Eubœa,
And southward to the royal-citied state,
Beautiful Corinth, throned upon the base
Of green Acrocorinthus, whose soft slope
Was dedicate with temples to the gods,
And towering over all the sacred shrine
Of Aphrodite. Upward from the town
The mountain rose defensive, where the walls
Of Corinth ended, and beyond the gates,
The radiant plain of the Corinthian Gulf
Stretched infinitely. Orpheus rested here,
Till he bethought him to ascend the mount,
With offerings at Aphrodite's shrine—
Not sanguine victims, but fresh myrtle wreath
And faultless rose—to sue the oracle
For help and guidance.
All the town was still,
The bright red band of sunrise lit the sky
Above the dark blue gulf, and Orpheus heard
A hundred birds saluting, from the brake,
Aurora, and cool rush of waterfalls.
Made murmurous music, while Athené breathed
The vigor of the morning in his soul.
Up the steep mountain side he passed, beyond
The silver growth of olives, and the belt
Of pines, to where the foam-white temple stood,
Smitten at once by all the beams of morn.
He saw the double peak, rose-white with snow
And early sunshine, of Parnassus cleave
The northern sky, and sacred Helicon
Erect its head, crowned with the Muses' grove,
The Bay of Crissa and Corinthian Gulf,
Below flashed restless, and a path of gold
Divided with clear, tremulous light the waves.
From the large beauty of the morn, he went
Into the holy limits of the shrine,
With warm air heavy with the odorous rose.
ORPHEUS.
I put into my prayer to thee, O mother,
The tumult and the passion of the ocean,
The unflecked purity of winnowed foam-wreaths;
To thee who sprang from these, the incarnation
144
Of all the huge sea holds of grace or splendor,
With its own light between thine amorous eyelids.
For I, in thy most sacred cause a pilgrim,
Have wandered tireless, from Thrace to Corinth,
'Midst foreign scenes and alien men and women.
And at my right hand Grief incessant follows,
And at my left walks Memory with the semblance
Of lost Eurydice's ethereal beauty.
Infatuate I gaze, until the vision
Thrills me to madness, and I start and tremble,
Remembering also Grief is my companion.
Onward through spacious fields, by copious waters,
Through purple growth of amaranth and crocus,
And past the marble beauty of great cities,
We three have journeyed,— strangers saw me reckless,
And knew at once that I had walked with sorrow,
And that the gods had chosen me their victim.
Are all my carols useless, worse than useless?
Shall my long pilgrimage, thus unrewarded,
End at the blank, insuperable ocean?
Hast thou no wise compassion, goddess, mother?
In all the measureless years' unfathomed chances,
Is the dear past to be repeated never?
O supreme mother! crowned with blessed poppy
As well as myrtle,— bring her here, or compass
My soul with death, that elsewhere I may seek her.
He ceased, and through the temple spread a mist
Ambrosial, and above the shrine a star
Serenely brightened, and a heavenly voice
Made sweet response: ' Love guides himself thy course
To the last sea-girt rock. No worthy soul
May ever truly seek, and fail to find.'
Still southward Orpheus journeyed, till he reached
Cape Tænarus, the last bleak point of Greece,
Desolate o'er an infinite waste of waves,
While sunset lit the western sea and sky
With yellow floods of warm, diffusive light,
Kindling his serious face and earnest eyes,
And glittering on his lyre. Long time he stood,
And gazed upon the trouble of the waves,
Expectant of a word, a sign— and still
No answer made the wild, indifferent sea.
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Impetuous, he smote his quivering lyre
To reckless and sonorous melody,
Vibrating o'er the watery turbulence.
Then far below its western bath, the sun
Dipped and was gone, and all the sea was gray.
Still through the air rang those imploring notes,
Unutterably plaintive— till there came
From out the ocean cave of Tænarus
The shining forms of Oceanides,
With myriad faces raised supremely fair,
And myriad arms that beckoned as he sang.
Behold! a stir amidst the frothing brine,
As though upheaved by powers submarine,
In implicate confusion, wave on wave,
Then rose with windy manes and fiery eyes,
Proudly careering, the immortal steeds,
Bearing, within the shell-shaped car, the god
Of august aspect and imperial port,
With such profusion of ambrosial locks
As curl around the very front of Zeus.
He with benign regard the minstrel viewed,
Then whirling thrice his massy trident, struck
The scarpéd promontory with its fork.
And Orpheus felt the solid basis yield,
And heard the hollow rumbling, as when earth
Rocks to her centre, and high hills spit flame.
And lo! he stood before a sulphurous throne,
Set in an open space, wherefrom there streamed
Four rivers stagnant, black. Here Ades reigned,
His very presence unto mortal sense
Oppressive as low thunder in the air.
The triple-headed guardian of his realm
Crouched at his feet, and in the dismal murk,
The hideous Harpies hovered o'er his head.
The serpent-haired Eumenides stood near,
Brow-bound with sanguine fillets, and the Fates
Wielded the distaff, spindle, and sharp shears.
The air was dense with noisome influence,
And shadowy apparitions seemed to float
Athwart the dusk. But on the infernal throne
Conspicuous in beauty, by her lord,
Persephone was seated. Wonderment
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Looked from her eyes, in seeing him, no god,
Who came before his time among the dead,
Unarmed with spear or shield, a glistening lyre
Nigh slipping from the loose grasp of his hands.
'Who comes unsummoned to my realm?' began
The baleful godhead in discordant tones,
Widely reverberant; and the low, clear voice
Of Orpheus answered: 'One who would remain,
If but the impotent body could be free
To follow the desires of the soul,—
Orpheus, an unskilled singer.' 'Birth and death
Are preordained for thee, presumptuous man.
What narrow space of time the Fates accord,
'Twould best become thee to bear worthily,
With dignity, and leave the rest to them,
The end as the beginning.' 'Plead for me,
O beautiful Persephone, — behold!
Eurydice was snatched with violent hand
From out mine eager arms, and I have sought
Her image o'er the peopled earth in vain.'
Then she: 'I may not summon her, nor hope
To swerve the haughty purpose of my lord.
With influence of thy familiar voice,
If thou canst touch her spirit, she is thine.'
But Ades: 'Who recalls the dead by prayer?
They whose calm souls are once possessed by death,
Find such a solid joy in grasping firm,
After life's phantasms, this reality,
That wisdom, grief, nor love persuadeth them
Their liberated spirits to confine
With fleshly limitations. Nathless sing,—
And prove life's glittering evanescence vain,
Outweighed by death's sublime security.'
ORPHEUS.
I render thanks, eternal gods, that ye
Empower myself to call Eurydice.
Man only can fulfill his own desire;
And if I fail, the sorrow rests with me.
Ye give what we deserve; I pray alone
Ne'er to be cursed with what I have not won.
And to whom else would I intrust my lyre,
This supreme invocation to intone?
147
But in myself I feel the love, the power,
The lyric inspiration, while the flower
Of all my life brings forth its proper fruit,
In this my loftiest, most godlike hour.
If I could make ye feel the agony
Of the strong man, O gods, condemned to see
The light fail from dear eyes, the white lips mute,
The elusive soul take flight eternally
To where we cannot follow it nor find,
With the most subtle searchings of the mind,
With the most passionate longings of the soul,
Deaf, unresponsive as the empty wind;
Then would your pity as your power be,
'Twould crown us all with immortality,
And grace us with completeness, make us whole,
Worthy to be the peers of deity.
For we are mighty now to slay and bless,
Yea, gifted with strange strength of steadfastness,
To conquer bodiless and viewless foes
Within ourselves, yet in our helplessness,
As children, in the presence of this Death,
Whom nor revolt nor patience conquereth,
Implacable, with grim mouth fastened close,
That with no hope our anguish answereth.
Resound with wildest utterance, O my lyre;
Let each note be a living flame of fire,
To reach her, to burn through her, to compel,
Strong with the infinite strength of my desire.
I am no god, yet Fate, Eurydice,
A goddess for my slave hath given me,—
Immortal Music, pure, ineffable;
And I send her, my handmaid, after thee.
If all wherein I put my faith as sure,
Be not delusions vain which death will cure;
If the sublime reliance of the soul
On her own powers be no empty lure,
Whereat the high gods laugh in bitter scorn;
If what I have achieved and what forborne,
Will lead me nearer to a worthy goal,
If all life's promises be not forsworn,—
Eurydice, appear! Before mine eyes,
O gods, I see a formless essence rise,
148
That moulds itself unto the music's beat,
Appareled in the glory of the skies.
Now, while I ring a more celestial tone,
The spirit more divinely bright hath grown,
To larger modulations, strains complete,
The white limbs from the shapeless mist are won,
As from the bosom of a summer cloud,
Wherewith a goddess would her semblance shroud.
Is this mine own creation? Is it truth,
That with warm life I have blank air endowed?
The soft cloud parts asunder,— yea, 'tis she!
Once more the face that was my star I see,
Crowned with the beauty of immortal youth,
Eurydice, my lost Eurydice!
Silent beside his silent, fallen lyre,
The singer stood, and clasped her in his arms,
Gazing upon this pale, fair face as one
Whose heart's supreme desire is satisfied.
'Is not this hour the hour I have foreseen,
Through all obstructions and infirmities
Of my mortality, and is it not
More glorious in fruition than I dreamed!
Yea, I have dreamed it all, eternal gods,
Even as now have pressed her to my heart
With the same clinging effort to retain,
And seen this breathing form, these lucent eyes
Vivid as now, instinct with life and love.
Yet have I waked to chill discouragement,
To vacant disappointment, and the sense
Of aching, unassuaged desire. O speak,
For in my dreams I never hear thy voice,
Save veiled and indistinct, a mockery
Of the old limpid music. Speak to me:
Thy flesh is warm, thy heart beats close to mine,
Thine upturned face is wet with human tears;
O speak to me,— lest I should wake again
To barren fields and empty skies of Thrace.'
Then in low, natural tones, Eurydice:
'Thy voice hath reached me in the farthest spheres,
And waked me out of silence.' 'Follow me,—
It is thyself,— if I must wake from this,
'Twill be to death or madness. Follow me,
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From darkness palpable, to earth, to light
Of ample skies, and freshness of blown grass
And rolling waters.' 'Hold!' the jarring voice
Of Ades interposed: ''Tis excellent
The attribute we gave thee, to convert
To such a weapon as may overcome
The old hereditary foes of man,
Sleep, death, corruption, and necessity.
But to reveal thyself the peer of gods,
Not only through inspired ecstasy,
But through a continent persistency,
This never was accomplished by thy race,
And thou must yet be tried. This soul is thine,
For thou hast won her from the jaws of Hell;
Yea, she may follow thee as free as light,—
Lead thou the way and charm the hostile fiends.
Look forward ever; if thine eyes revert
But once to gaze on her, to reassure
Unworthy fears, or sate a mean desire,
Thou art not mate for us. She will dissolve
To empty air —never to be recalled.
ORPHEUS.
Back to the vital earth, O follow me,
Regained Eurydice.
To rippling well-heads and to sunlit plains,
Greened by soft wash of rains.
See orchards rosy with prolific bloom,
And vineyards' purple gloom.
Lulled by the languid flow of lilied streams,
There will I sing my dreams.
Behold! I chant a hymn of adoration,
Triumphant exultation,
For I can see, in all the universe,
No error and no curse.
The gods have naught withheld, in power and sway,
From him who will obey
Their own divine and everlasting laws.
Above the world's applause,
As vigorous as morning, he can rise,
Wrest the desired prize
From the clenched hands of Nemesis and Fate.
With victory elate,
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I chant unmitigated prayer and praise
To gods who part our ways,
Seeing 'midst clamorous change incredible,
That all is ordered well.
In more harmonious strains, O lyre, express
My twice-born happiness;
Yea, utter and translate with larger sense
My rich experience,
That makes complete life's solemn threnody
Joy unalloyed and free,
Grief unexampled, victory at last,
When strife is overpast.
Through pathways hedged with horrors still they fared
Invulnerable. Darkness stayed them not,
Nor yet more dreadful light, revealing oft
The hideous fiends who rose on every side,
Huge shapes of ill, to gaze upon the twain.
A Greek, who, fleeing, smote a vibrant lyre,
That chimed to carols more divinely quired
Than those that fill with ravishment a grove,
Misty with moonlight, where the plain brown bird
Makes midnight vocal. Closely following him,
A woman with grave aspect, parted lips,
Upraising, in enthralléd ecstasy,
Large eyes serene, fulfilled with holier light
For having pierced beyond the boundaries
Of time and of mortality. The day
Shone through the murk at last, and filled their path
With dusky sunbeams; and far-stretching fields
Of soft, delicious green, and crystal skies,
Encouraged them; all perils past save one.
But a black, stagnant river crawled along,
Spanned by no bridge, and ferried by no sail,
With muddy tide between the day and them.
And Orpheus with enamored eyes passed on,
And saw not how the loathsome waters crept,
Nor how his magic song enchanted them
To solid substance; but he missed at once
The footsteps light that had inspired his lay.
Impetuous he turned to reassure
His fearful soul, and sate his hungry eyes;
But as he turned, the inspiration fled,
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His lips refused to frame the fruitless words,
His eyes beheld,—O gods! Eurydice
Removed already far away from him,
By all the wide-expanded space, between
Our loftiest dream and our unworthy deed.
She gazed with no reproachful glance nor tears,
And Orpheus felt himself beneath her, fall,
Momently down from empyreal heights,
And lo! he stood within the fields of Thrace,
On earth familiar, 'neath familiar skies,
And heard a voice float through the shining air,
From unimaginable distances,
Faint as a dream, — 'Farewell, farewell, farewell.'
'Woe! woe! what lamentations may express
The fullness of my new calamity!
I, overbearing, who presumed to reach
The lordly and severe stability
Of the immortals, — whom may I invoke?
To whom may man appeal when he hath failed
Unto himself? What god will interpose
To thwart invincible necessity?
Lost, lost forever! I stood elevate,
For one brief moment dreaming I had won
The skill and power of true divinity.
Gods! with what lofty and superb disdain
Ye must look down on mine unworthy haste,—
Ye, who with grandeur of sublime repose,
And majesty of patience, still abide
Invariable through eternity!
Alas! my mighty visions were to me
Auspicious omens, and they fed my heart
With vigor and encouragement; but now,
This was no dream; for Hope, full-flushed and fair,
Born, like the freshness of auroral dew,
From unseen air, and traceless vanishing,
Consorts not with this mighty goddess, Truth,
With solemn and unfathomable eyes,
For Truth is one with Death and Destiny.
With what a depth of meaning didst thou turn,
For the last time, to me, Eurydice,
A glory 'midst the darkness, with that glance
Of infinite compassion, hands outstretched,
152
As if to save the from mine own defect.
With what humiliation and despair
I saw thee rising unattainably!—
The vault, the stream accursed had disappeared;
I was in Thrace uplooking to the sky.
O, to what harmonies I might have wed
The blessed tidings which all men await!
Now I can only make my song express
A distant echo, a suggestion vague,
Of the serene contentment of thy voice.
Sing this, my lyre, that all who hark to thee
With an attentive and a gentle ear,
May hear the promise, faint and yet assured,
Recall the grace and the deliciousness
Of immortality, and strive anew
Towards the ideal unattained by me,
Yet still accessible to stronger souls.'
Thus Orpheus, when the first wild burst of woe
Had passed; no need to seek her now;
No need to wander o'er the peopled earth.
Was he in truth a victim of the gods,
Or rather with a fairer fortune blest
Than happier men, selected for a fate
Divinely tragical, that he might know
The fullness of a life's experience,
And find expression adequate for all,
Simple as wisdom, and as dignified
As silence? From his kind he lived apart,
As one who cherishes a grief, nor seeks
Forgetfulness nor comfort; elevate
To glittering eminence by destiny,
And lonely through the privacy of woe
Beyond the reaches of man's sympathy.
Where lucid Hebrus bathes its golden sands,
He sat discoursing gracious harmonies,
Amidst the morning fields, when on his ears
Sounded with horrid dissonance the clang
Of smitten cymbals and the throb of drums.
But still the revelers remained unseen,
Till, rounding suddenly a neighboring hill,
The whole mad troop came dancing into sight.
First marched a jovial bacchanal, who bore
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A crystal vessel, decked with branching vine,
Then youth and nymphs with ivy chapleted,
In purfled raiment of hues delicate,
With mitres, thyrsi, cymbals, drums and flutes,
Some balancing upon their graceful heads,
Regal with crisp-curled gold, their burdens light
Of baskets heaped with figs and dusky grapes.
And 'midst them all the sacrificial goat,
Adorned with berries. Thus the festal throng,
With wanton gestures, and with antic bounds,
And wild embracings, mad with wine, approached,
With peals of laughter, echoing faintly back
From jocund hill to hill, and lusty shouts
Of 'Bacché, Bacché!'
SONG.
With wassail all the night,
Celestial Bacchus, we have worshipped thee!
With riotous revel and with festal wine.
Still on the hills in early morning light,
With frolic dances and brisk jollity,
Our hymns of praise are thine.
For we have seen thee, god!
The fawn-skin slipping from thy shoulder bare,
Thy gestures lithe and loose, thine eyes that shine,
Thy rosy hands that waved a clustered rod
Of uncrushed grapes, and thine ambrosial hair,
Dripping with myrrh and wine.
Thou art not strict, severe,
Like loftier gods and ruthless goddesses,
Implacable like Pallas, Zeus, or Truth;
But to humanity akin and near,
Eager for folly, and the luxuries
Of lustful health and youth.
This crystal-vialed balm,
Divinely brewed, soothing as Lethe's streams,
Is the most generous gift of Deity,
Informing us with soft oblivion calm
Of Death and Fate, with joys beyond the dreams
Of grave sobriety.
Come, let us drink again.
Resound, O timbrels, and thou bird-voiced flute;
Thyrsus and pipes make shrill and dear acclaim,
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To Bacchus, who impurples hill and plain
With vineyards bursting with increase of fruit,
Subtle as liquid flame.
Œoë! quaff and sing!
Who drinks no more, offends the deity
Of Bacchus! lo on Hebrus' grassy brink,
A minstrel sits, with gold lute glistening,
Marring our rites with stern solemnity,
Who doth not chant nor drink.
Ho! Orpheus, laugh again,
From mirthful heart, and join our happy throng;
Cease to lament with unappeased desire.
We bring a cordial for all grief and pain.
Add to the choral strain thy siren song,
And thine enchanted lyre.
For Fate hath answered thee
With cold derision; Death respondeth not.
Here is a god who soothes tire soul and sense
With sweet nepenthe,—thy Eurydice
Thou wilt not lure to earthly grove nor grot
With suasive eloquence.
Here, nymphs no whit less fair
Are waiting thee, with warm, caressing arms
And loving eyes, lips fit for gods to kiss,
And rosy shoulders, dimpling white and bare,—
Pliant and graceful, with innumerous Charms,
To sate thy heart with bliss.
ORPHEUS.
Hence, thou ignoble throng!
Dare ye profane the splendid purity,
The high nobility of morn, with rites
Lewd and disgusting, and delirious song,
Completing in dear sunshine, shamelessly,
Rude orgies of wild nights?
BACCHANTES.
Ha! he insults the god,
With his presumptuous and impious scorn.
Avenge, O bacchanals, the cause divine;
Compel him with the sacred cup and rod,
To quaff his salutation to the morn,
In frothing, Massic wine!
ORPHEUS.
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Mad bacchanals, begone!
I honor all the gods and Nemesis.
They favor not such frantic revelry,
But blameless lives, and deeds most like their own,
The service of a patient heart submiss,
And staunch integrity.
Behold the morning hills,
Sky-kissed Libethra, delicate as air;
The fragile grasses gray with wreaths of dew.
Hark to the tumbling of the mountain rills
To Eos and Athene your first prayer
And sacrifice are due.
BACCHANTES.
With shameless blasphemy,
He dares proscribe, O god, thy rank and fame.
Enough! enough! he hath despised us long,
Bewailing his beloved Eurydice.
O nymphs, avenge yourselves in Liber's name,
Slay him 'midst dance and song.
Your deadly javelins fling
With flinty missiles at the singer proud,
Who deems himself an equal of the gods,
Because he hath the skill to pipe and sing,
With facile fluency of speech endowed.
Smite him with spears and rods.
ORPHEUS.
Ring forth, my lyre, again,—
With magic harmonies my doom avert,
In tones as plaintive and as rich as life.
BACCHANTES.
Our stones and javelins we have hurled in vain;
His lyre enchants them, he remains unhurt,
'Midst all the wrath and strife.
Toss the loud tambourine,
Its tight-drawn skin with noisy fingers smite;
Clash ye the cymbals, sing with fatal art;
Cast ye his sundered limbs the stream within,—
They irritate us, soft and bare and white;
Rend them, O nymphs, apart.
ORPHEUS.
Sweet Death, deliver me
Out of the reach of envy, lust, and hate;
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Enfold me in thy large-embracing arms.
BACCHANTES.
Ah! will he now invoke Eurydice,
Madly resisting his allotted fate
With vile, unhallowed charms?
So with a clamorous swell
Of drums and timbrels, we o'erpower the breath
Of dulcet and persuasive melody.
ORPHEUS.
The maniacs conquer! O my lyre, farewell!
Approach, thou beautiful and welcome Death,
With lost Eurydice.
~ Emma Lazarus,
329:Jubilate Agno: Fragment B, Part 2
LET PETER rejoice with the MOON FISH who keeps up the life in the waters by
night.
Let Andrew rejoice with the Whale, who is array'd in beauteous blue and is a
combination of bulk and activity.
Let James rejoice with the Skuttle-Fish, who foils his foe by the effusion of his
ink.
Let John rejoice with Nautilus who spreads his sail and plies his oar, and the Lord
is his pilot.
Let Philip rejoice with Boca, which is a fish that can speak.
Let Bartholomew rejoice with the Eel, who is pure in proportion to where he is
found and how he is used.
Let Thomas rejoice with the Sword-Fish, whose aim is perpetual and strength
insuperable.
Let Matthew rejoice with Uranoscopus, whose eyes are lifted up to God.
Let James the less, rejoice with the Haddock, who brought the piece of money for
the Lord and Peter.
Let Jude bless with the Bream, who is of melancholy from his depth and serenity.
Let Simon rejoice with the Sprat, who is pure and innumerable.
Let Matthias rejoice with the Flying-Fish, who has a part with the birds, and is
sublimity in his conceit.
Let Stephen rejoice with Remora -- The Lord remove all obstacles to his glory.
Let Paul rejoice with the Scale, who is pleasant and faithful!, like God's good
ENGLISHMAN.
Let Agrippa, which is Agricola, rejoice with Elops, who is a choice fish.
56
Let Joseph rejoice with the Turbut, whose capture makes the poor fisher-man
sing.
Let Mary rejoice with the Maid -- blessed be the name of the immaculate
CONCEPTION.
Let John, the Baptist, rejoice with the Salmon -- blessed be the name of the Lord
Jesus for infant Baptism.
Let Mark rejoice with the Mullet, who is John Dore, God be gracious to him and
his family.
Let Barnabus rejoice with the Herring -- God be gracious to the Lord's fishery.
Let Cleopas rejoice with the Mackerel, who cometh in a shoal after a leader.
Let Abiud of the Lord's line rejoice with Murex, who is good and of a precious
tincture.
Let Eliakim rejoice with the Shad, who is contemned in his abundance.
Let Azor rejoice with the Flounder, who is both of the sea and of the river,
Let Sadoc rejoice with the Bleak, who playeth upon the surface in the Sun.
Let Achim rejoice with the Miller's Thumb, who is a delicious morsel for the water
fowl.
Let Eliud rejoice with Cinaedus, who is a fish yellow all over.
Let Eleazar rejoice with the Grampus, who is a pompous spouter.
Let Matthan rejoice with the Shark, who is supported by multitudes of small
value.
Let Jacob rejoice with the Gold Fish, who is an eye-trap.
Let Jairus rejoice with the Silver Fish, who is bright and lively.
Let Lazarus rejoice with Torpedo, who chills the life of the assailant through his
staff.
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Let Mary Magdalen rejoice with the Place, whose goodness and purity are of the
Lord's making.
Let Simon the leper rejoice with the Eel-pout, who is a rarity on account of his
subtlety.
Let Alpheus rejoice with the Whiting, whom God hath bless'd in multitudes, and
his days are as the days of PURIM.
Let Onesimus rejoice with the Cod -- blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus for a
miraculous draught of men.
Let Joses rejoice with the Sturgeon, who saw his maker in the body and obtained
grace.
Let Theophilus rejoice with the Folio, who hath teeth, like the teeth of a saw.
Let Bartimeus rejoice with the Quaviver -- God be gracious to the eyes of him,
who prayeth for the blind.
Let CHRISTOPHER, who is Simon of Cyrene, rejoice with the Rough -- God be
gracious to the CAM and to DAVID CAM and his seed for ever.
Let Timeus rejoice with the Ling -- God keep the English Sailors clear of French
bribery.
Let Salome rejoice with the Mermaid, who hath the countenance and a portion of
human reason.
Let Zacharias rejoice with the Gudgeon, who improves in his growth till he is
mistaken.
Let Campanus rejoice with the Lobster -- God be gracious to all the CAMPBELLs
especially John.
Let Martha rejoice with the Skallop -- the Lord revive the exercise and excellence
of the Needle.
Let Mary rejoice with the Carp -- the ponds of Fairlawn and the garden bless for
the master.
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Let Zebedee rejoice with the Tench -- God accept the good son for his parents
also.
Let Joseph of Arimathea rejoice with the Barbel -- a good coffin and a tombstone without grudging!
Let Elizabeth rejoice with the Crab -- it is good, at times, to go back.
Let Simeon rejoice with the Oyster, who hath the life without locomotion.
Let Jona rejoice with the Wilk -- Wilks, Wilkie, and Wilkinson bless the name of
the Lord Jesus.
Let Nicodemus rejoice with the Muscle, for so he hath provided for the poor.
Let Gamaliel rejoice with the Cockle -- I will rejoice in the remembrance of
mercy.
Let Agabus rejoice with the Smelt -- The Lord make me serviceable to the
HOWARDS.
Let Rhoda rejoice with the Sea-Cat, who is pleasantry and purity.
Let Elmodam rejoice with the Chubb, who is wary of the bait and thrives in his
circumspection.
Let Jorim rejoice with the Roach -- God bless my throat and keep me from things
stranggled.
Let Addi rejoice with the Dace -- It is good to angle with meditation.
Let Luke rejoice with the Trout -- Blessed be Jesus in Aa, in Dee and in Isis.
Let Cosam rejoice with the Perch, who is a little tyrant, because he is not liable to
that, which he inflicts.
Let Levi rejoice with the Pike -- God be merciful to all dumb creatures in respect
of pain.
Let Melchi rejoice with the Char, who cheweth the cud.
Let Joanna rejoice with the Anchovy -- I beheld and lo! 'a great multitude!
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Let Neri rejoice with the Keeling Fish, who is also called the Stock Fish.
Let Janna rejoice with the Pilchard -- the Lord restore the seed of Abishai.
Let Esli rejoice with the Soal, who is flat and spackles for the increase of motion.
Let Nagge rejoice with the Perriwinkle -- 'for the rain it raineth every day.'
Let Anna rejoice with the Porpus, who is a joyous fish and of good omen.
Let Phanuel rejoice with the Shrimp, which is the childrens fishery.
Let Chuza rejoice with the Sea-Bear, who is full of sagacity and prank.
Let Susanna rejoice with the Lamprey, who is an eel with a title.
Let Candace rejoice with the Craw-fish -- How hath the Christian minister
renowned the Queen.
Let The Eunuch rejoice with the Thorn-Back -- It is good to be discovered reading
the BIBLE.
Let Simon the Pharisee rejoice with the Grigg -- the Lord bring up Issachar and
Dan.
Let Simon the converted Sorcerer rejoice with the Dab quoth Daniel.
Let Joanna, of the Lord's line, rejoice with the Minnow, who is multiplied against
the oppressor.
Let Jonas rejoice with the Sea-Devil, who hath a good name from his Maker.
Let Alexander rejoice with the Tunny -- the worse the time the better the
eternity.
Let Rufus rejoice with the Needle-fish, who is very good in his element.
Let Matthat rejoice with the Trumpet-fish -- God revive the blowing of the
TRUMPETS.
Let Mary, the mother of James, rejoice with the Sea-Mouse -- it is good to be at
60
peace.
Let Prochorus rejoice with Epodes, who is a kind of fish with Ovid who is at peace
in the Lord.
Let Timotheus rejoice with the Dolphin, who is of benevolence.
Let Nicanor rejoice with the Skeat -- Blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus in
fish and in the Shewbread, which ought to be continually on the altar, now more
than ever, and the want of it is the Abomination of Desolation spoken of by
Daniel.
Let Timon rejoice with Crusion -- The Shew-Bread in the first place is gratitude to
God to shew who is bread, whence it is, and that there is enough and to spare.
Let Parmenas rejoice with the Mixon -- Secondly it is to prevent the last
extremity, for it is lawful that rejected hunger may take it.
Let Dorcas rejoice with Dracunculus -- blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus in
the Grotto.
Let Tychicus rejoice with Scolopendra, who quits himself of the hook by voiding
his intrails.
Let Trophimus rejoice with the Sea-Horse, who shoud have been to Tychicus the
father of Yorkshiremen.
Let Tryphena rejoice with Fluta -- Saturday is the Sabbath for the mouth of God
hath spoken it.
Let Tryphosa rejoice with Acarne -- With such preparation the Lord's Jubile is
better kept.
Let Simon the Tanner rejoice with Alausa -- Five days are sufficient for the
purposes of husbandry.
Let Simeon Niger rejoice with the Loach -- The blacks are the seed of Cain.
Let Lucius rejoice with Corias -- Some of Cain's seed was preserved in the loins
of Ham at the flood.
Let Manaen rejoice with Donax. My DEGREE is good even here, in the Lord I have
61
a better.
Let Sergius Paulus rejoice with Dentex -- Blessed be the name Jesus for my
teeth.
Let Silas rejoice with the Cabot -- the philosophy of the times ev'n now is vain
deceit.
Let Barsabas rejoice with Cammarus -- Newton is ignorant for if a man consult
not the WORD how should he understand the WORK? -Let Lydia rejoice with Attilus -- Blessed be the name of him which eat the fish
and honey comb.
Let Jason rejoice with Alopecias, who is subtlety without offence.
Let Dionysius rejoice with Alabes who is peculiar to the Nile.
Let Damaris rejoice with Anthias -- The fountain of the Nile is known to the
Eastern people who drink it.
Let Apollos rejoice with Astacus, but St Paul is the Agent for England.
Let Justus rejoice with Crispus in a Salmon-Trout -- the Lord look on the soul of
Richard Atwood.
Let Crispus rejoice with Leviathan -- God be gracious to the soul of HOBBES, who
was no atheist, but a servant of Christ, and died in the Lord -- I wronged him
God forgive me.
Let Aquila rejoice with Beemoth who is Enoch no fish but a stupendous creeping
Thing.
Let Priscilla rejoice with Cythera. As earth increases by Beemoth so the sea
likewise enlarges.
Let Tyrannus rejoice with Cephalus who hath a great head.
Let Gaius rejoice with the Water-Tortoise -- Paul and Tychicus were in England
with Agricola my father.
Let Aristarchus rejoice with Cynoglossus -- The Lord was at Glastonbury in the
62
body and blessed the thorn.
Let Alexander rejoice with the Sea-Urchin -- The Lord was at Bristol and blessed
the waters there.
Let Sopater rejoice with Elacate -- The waters of Bath were blessed by St
Matthias.
Let Secundus rejoice with Echeneis who is the sea-lamprey.
Let Eutychus rejoice with Cnide -- Fish and honeycomb are blessed to eat after a
recovery. -Let Mnason rejoice with Vulvula a sort of fish -- Good words are of God, the cant
from the Devil.
Let Claudius Lysias rejoice with Coracinus who is black and peculiar to Nile.
Let Bernice rejoice with Corophium which is a kind of crab.
Let Phebe rejoice with Echinometra who is a beautiful shellfish red and green.
Let Epenetus rejoice with Erythrinus who is red with a white belly.
Let Andronicus rejoice with Esox, the Lax, a great fish of the Rhine.
Let Junia rejoice with the Faber-Fish -- Broil'd fish and honeycomb may be taken
for the sacrament.
Let Amplias rejoice with Garus, who is a kind of Lobster.
Let Urbane rejoice with Glanis, who is a crafty fish who bites away the bait and
saves himself.
Let Stachys rejoice with Glauciscus, who is good for Women's milk.
Let Apelles rejoice with Glaucus -- behold the seed of the brave and ingenious
how they are saved!
Let Aristobulus rejoice with Glycymerides who is pure and sweet.
Let Herodion rejoice with Holothuria which are prickly fishes.
63
Let Narcissus rejoice with Hordeia -- I will magnify the Lord who multiplied the
fish.
Let Persis rejoice with Liparis -- I will magnify the Lord who multiplied the barley
loaves.
Let Rufus rejoice with Icthyocolla of whose skin a water-glue is made.
Let Asyncritus rejoice with Labrus who is a voracious fish.
Let Phlegon rejoice with the Sea-Lizard -- Bless Jesus THOMAS BOWLBY and all
the seed of Reuben.
Let Hermas rejoice with Lamyrus who is of things creeping in the sea.
Let Patrobas rejoice with Lepas, all shells are precious.
Let Hermes rejoice with Lepus, who is a venomous fish.
Let Philologus rejoice with Ligarius -- shells are all parries to the adversary.
Let Julia rejoice with the Sleeve-Fish -- Blessed be Jesus for all the TAYLERS.
Let Nereus rejoice with the Calamary -- God give success to our fleets.
Let Olympas rejoice with the Sea-Lantern, which glows upon the waters.
Let Sosipater rejoice with Cornuta. There are fish for the Sea-Night-Birds that
glow at bottom.
Let Lucius rejoice with the Cackrel Fish. God be gracious to JMs FLETCHER who
has my tackling.
Let Tertius rejoice with Maia which is a kind of crab.
Let Erastus rejoice with Melandry which is the largest Tunny.
Let Quartus rejoice with Mena. God be gracious to the immortal soul of poor
Carte, who was barbarously and cowardly murder'd -- the Lord prevent the
dealers in clandestine death.
64
Let Sosthenes rejoice with the Winkle -- all shells like the parts of the body are
good kept for those parts.
Let Chloe rejoice with the Limpin -- There is a way to the terrestrial Paradise
upon the knees.
Let Carpus rejoice with the Frog-Fish -- A man cannot die upon his knees.
Let Stephanas rejoice with Mormyra who is a fish of divers colours.
Let Fortunatus rejoice with the Burret -- it is good to be born when things are
crossed.
Let Lois rejoice with the Angel-Fish -- There is a fish that swims in the fluid
Empyrean.
Let Achaicus rejoice with the Fat-Back -- The Lord invites his fishers to the WEST
INDIES.
Let Sylvanus rejoice with the Black-Fish -- Oliver Cromwell himself was the
murderer in the Mask.
Let Titus rejoice with Mys -- O Tite siquid ego adjuero curamve levasso!
Let Euodias rejoice with Myrcus -- There is a perfumed fish I will offer him for a
sweet savour to the Lord.
Let Syntyche rejoice with Myax -- There are shells in the earth which were left by
the FLOOD.
Let Clement rejoice with Ophidion -- There are shells again in earth at sympathy
with those in sea.
Let Epaphroditus rejoice with Opthalmias -- The Lord increase the Cambridge
collection of fossils.
Let Epaphras rejoice with Orphus -- God be gracious to the immortal soul of Dr
Woodward.
Let Justus rejoice with Pagrus -- God be gracious to the immortal soul of Dr
Middleton.
65
Let Nymphas rejoice with Fagurus -- God bless Charles Mason and all Trinity
College.
Let Archippus rejoice with Nerita whose shell swimmeth.
Let Eunice rejoice with Oculata who is of the Lizard kind.
Let Onesephorus rejoice with Orca, who is a great fish.
Let Eubulus rejoice with Ostrum the scarlet -- God be gracious to Gordon and
Groat.
Let Pudens rejoice with Polypus -- The Lord restore my virgin!
Let Linus rejoice with Ozsena who is a kind of Polype -- God be gracious to Lyne
and Anguish.
Let Claudia rejoice with Pascer -- the purest creatures minister to wantoness by
unthankfulness.
Let Artemas rejoice with Pastinaca who is a fish with a sting.
Let Zenas rejoice with Pecten -- The Lord obliterate the laws of man!
Let Philemon rejoice with Pelagia -- The laws and judgement are impudence and
blindness.
Let Apphia rejoice with Pelamis -- The Lord Jesus is man's judgement.
Let Demetrius rejoice with Peloris, who is greatest of Shell-Fishes.
Let Antipas rejoice with Pentadactylus -- A papist hath no sentiment God bless
CHURCHILL.
***
FOR I pray the Lord JESUS that cured the LUNATICK to be merciful to all my
brethren and sisters in these houses.
For they work me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument,
because I am more unguarded than others.
66
For the blessing of God hath been on my epistles, which I have written for the
benefit of others.
For I bless God that the CHURCH of ENGLAND is one of the SEVEN ev'n the
candlestick of the Lord.
For the ENGLISH TONGUE shall be the language of the WEST.
For I pray Almighty CHRIST to bless the MAGDALEN HOUSE and to forward a
National purification.
For I have the blessing of God in the three POINTS of manhood, of the pen, of
the sword, and of chivalry.
For I am inquisitive in the Lord, and defend the philosophy of the scripture
against vain deceit.
For the nets come down from the eyes of the Lord to fish up men to their
salvation.
For I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another.
For I bless the Lord JESUS in the innumerables, and for ever and ever.
For I am redoubted, and redoubtable in the Lord, as is THOMAS BECKET my
father.
For I have had the grace to GO BACK, which is my blessing unto prosperity.
For I paid for my seat in St PAUL's, when I was six years old, and took
possession against the evil day.
For I am descended from the steward of the island -- blessed be the name of the
Lord Jesus king of England.
For the poor gentleman is the first object of the Lord's charity and he is the most
pitied who hath lost the most.
For I am in twelve HARDSHIPS, but he that was born of a virgin shall deliver me
out of all.
For I am safe, as to my head, from the female dancer and her admirers.
67
For I pray for CHICHISTER to give the glory to God, and to keep the adversary at
bay.
For I am making to the shore day by day, the Lord Jesus take me.
For I bless the Lord JESUS upon RAMSGATE PIER -- the Lord forward the building
of harbours.
For I bless the Lord JESUS for his very seed, which is in my body.
For I pray for R and his family, I pray for Mr Becher, and I bean for the Lord
JESUS.
For I pray to God for Nore, for the Trinity house, for all light-houses, beacons and
buoys.
For I bless God that I am not in a dungeon, but am allowed the light of the Sun.
For I pray God for the PYGMIES against their feathered adversaries, as a deed of
charity.
For I pray God for all those, who have defiled themselves in matters
inconvenient.
For I pray God be gracious to CORNELIUS MATTHEWS name and connection.
For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour -- -for they said, he is
besides himself.
For I pray God for the introduction of new creatures into this island.
For I pray God for the ostriches of Salisbury Plain, the beavers of the Medway
and silver fish of Thames.
For Charity is cold in the multitude of possessions, and the rich are covetous of
their crumbs.
For I pray to be accepted as a dog without offence, which is best of all.
For I wish to God and desire towards the most High, which is my policy.
68
For the tides are the life of God in the ocean, and he sends his angel to trouble
the great DEEP.
For he hath fixed the earth upon arches and pillars, and the flames of hell flow
under it.
For the grosser the particles the nearer to the sink, and the nearer to purity, the
quicker the gravitation.
For MATTER is the dust of the Earth, every atom of which is the life.
For MOTION is as the quantity of life direct, and that which hath not motion, is
resistance.
For Resistance is not of GOD, but he -- hath built his works upon it.
For the Centripetal and Centrifugal forces are GOD SUSTAINING and DIRECTING.
For Elasticity is the temper of matter to recover its place with vehemence.
For Attraction is the earning of parts, which have a similitude in the life.
For the Life of God is in the Loadstone, and there is a magnet, which pointeth
due EAST.
For the Glory of God is always in the East, but cannot be seen for the cloud of the
crucifixion.
For due East is the way to Paradise, which man knoweth not by reason of his fall.
For the Longitude is (nevertheless) attainable by steering angularly
notwithstanding.
For Eternity is a creature and is built upon Eternity ¥ê¥á¥ó¥á¥â¥ï¥ë¥ç ¥å¥g¥é
¥ó¥ç ¥ä¥é¥á¥â¥ï¥ë¥ç .
For Fire is a mixed nature of body and spirit, and the body is fed by that which
hath not life.
For Fire is exasperated by the Adversary, who is Death, unto the detriment of
69
man.
For an happy Conjecture is a miraculous cast by the Lord Jesus.
For a bad Conjecture is a draught of stud and mud.
For there is a Fire which is blandishing, and which is of God direct.
For Fire is a substance and distinct, and purifyeth ev'n in hell.
For the Shears is the first of the mechanical powers, and to be used on the
knees.
For if Adam had used this instrument right, he would not have fallen.
For the power of the Shears Is direct as the life.
For the power of the WEDGE is direct as it's altitude by communication of
Almighty God.
For the Skrew, Axle and Wheel, Pulleys, the Lever and Inclined Plane are known
in the Schools.
For the Centre is not known but by the application of the members to matter.
For I have shown the Vis Inerti©¡ to be false, and such is all nonsense.
For the Centre is the hold of the Spirit upon the matter in hand.
For FRICTION is inevitable because the Universe is FULL of God's works.
For the PERPETUAL MOTION is in all the works of Almighty GOD.
For it is not so in the engines of man, which are made of dead materials, neither
indeed can be.
For the Moment of bodies, as it is used, is a false term -- bless God ye Speakers
on the Fifth of November.
For Time and Weight are by their several estimates.
For I bless GOD in the discovery of the LONGITUDE direct by the means of
70
GLADWICK.
For the motion of the PENDULUM is the longest in that it parries resistance.
For the WEDDING GARMENTS of all men are prepared in the SUN against the day
of acceptation.
For the Wedding Garments of all women are prepared in the MOON against the
day of their purification.
For CHASTITY is the key of knowledge as in Esdras, Sr Isaac Newton and now,
God be praised, in me.
For Newton nevertheless is more of error than of the truth, but I am of the
WORD of GOD.
For WATER, is not of solid constituents, but is dissolved from precious stones
above.
For the life remains in its dissolvent state, and that in great power.
For WATER is condensed by the Lord's FROST, tho' not by the FLORENTINE
experiment.
For GLADWICK is a substance growing on hills in the East, candied by the sun,
and of diverse colours.
For it is neither stone nor metal but a new creature, soft to the ax, but hard to
the hammer.
For it answers sundry uses, but particularly it supplies the place of Glass.
For it giveth a benign light without the fragility, malignity or mischief of Glass.
For it attracteth all the colours of the GREAT BOW which is fixed in the EAST.
For the FOUNTAINS and SPRINGS are the life of the waters working up to God.
For they are in SYMPATHY with the waters above the Heavens, which are solid.
For the Fountains, springs and rivers are all of them from the sea, whose water is
filtrated and purified by the earth.
71
For there is Water above the visible surface in a spiritualizing state, which cannot
be seen but by application of a CAPILLARY TUBE.
For the ASCENT of VAPOURS is the return of thanksgiving from all humid bodies.
For the RAIN WATER kept in a reservoir at any altitude, suppose of a thousand
feet, will make a fountain from a spout of ten feet of the same height.
For it will ascend in a stream two thirds of the way and afterwards prank itself
into ten thousand agreeable forms.
For the SEA is a seventh of the Earth -- the spirit of the Lord by Esdras.
For MERCURY is affected by the AIR because it is of a similar subtlety.
For the rising in the BAROMETER is not effected by pressure but by sympathy.
For it cannot be seperated from the creature with which it is intimately and
eternally connected.
For where it is stinted of air there it will adhere together and stretch on the
reverse.
For it works by ballancing according to the hold of the spirit.
For QUICK-SILVER is spiritual and so is the AIR to all intents and purposes.
For the AIR-PUMP weakens and dispirits but cannot wholly exhaust.
For SUCKTION is the withdrawing of the life, but life will follow as fast as it can.
For there is infinite provision to keep up the life in all the parts of Creation.
For the AIR is contaminated by curses and evil language.
For poysonous creatures catch some of it and retain it or ere it goes to the
adversary.
For IRELAND was without these creatures, till of late, because of the simplicity of
the people.
72
For the AIR. is purified by prayer which is made aloud and with all our might.
For loud prayer is good for weak lungs and for a vitiated throat.
For SOUND is propagated in the spirit and in all directions.
For the VOICE of a figure compleat in all its parts.
For a man speaks HIMSELF from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet.
For a LION roars HIMSELF compleat from head to tail.
For all these things are seen in the spirit which makes the beauty of prayer.
For all whispers and unmusical sounds in general are of the Adversary.
For 'I will hiss saith the Lord' is God's denunciation of death.
For applause or the clapping of the hands is the natural action of a man on the
descent of the glory of God.
For EARTH which is an intelligence hath a voice and a propensity to speak in all
her parts.
For ECHO is the soul of the voice exerting itself in hollow places.
For ECHO cannot act but when she can parry the adversary.
For ECHO is greatest in Churches and where she can assist in prayer.
For a good voice hath its Echo with it and it is attainable by much supplication.
For the FOICE is from the body and the spirit -- and is a a body and a spirit.
For the prayers of good men are therefore visible to second-sighted persons.
For HARPSICHORDS are best strung with gold wire.
For HARPS and VIOLS are best strung with Indian weed.
For the GERMAN FLUTE is an indirect -- the common flute good, bless the Lord
Jesus BENJIMIN HALLET.
73
For the feast of TRUMPETS should be kept up, that being the most direct and
acceptable of all instruments.
For the TRUMPET of God is a blessed intelligence and so are all the instruments
in HEAVEN.
For GOD the father Almighty plays upon the HARP of stupendous magnitude and
melody.
For innumerable Angels fly out at every touch and his tune is a work of creation.
For at that time malignity ceases and the devils themselves are at peace.
For this time is perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.
For the ¨¡olian harp is improveable into regularity.
For when it is so improved it will be known to be the SHAWM.
For it woud be better if the LITURGY were musically performed.
For the strings of the SHAWM were upon a cylinder which turned to the wind.
For this was spiritual musick altogether, as the wind is a spirit.
For there is nothing but it may be played upon in delight.
For the flames of fire may lie blown thro musical pipes.
For it is so higher up in the vast empyrean.
For is so real as that which is spiritual.
For an IGNIS FATUUS is either the fool's conceit or a blast from the adversary.
For SHELL-FIRE or ELECTRICAL is the quick air when it is caught.
For GLASS is worked in the fire till it partakes of its nature.
For the electrical fire is easily obtain'd by the working of glass.
74
For all spirits are of fire and the air is a very benign one.
For the MAN in VACUO is a flat conceit of preposterous folly.
For the breath of our nostrils is an electrical spirit.
For an electrical spirit may be exasperated into a malignant fire.
For it is good to quicken in paralytic cases being the life applied unto death,
For the method of philosophizing is in a posture of Adoration.
For the School-Doctrine of Thunder and Lightning is a Diabolical Hypothesis.
For it is taking the nitre from the lower regions and directing it against the
Infinite of Heights.
For THUNDER is the voice of God direct in verse and musick.
For LIGHTNING is a glance of the glory of God.
For the Brimstone that is found at the times of thunder and lightning is worked
up by the Adversary.
For the voice is always for infinite good which he strives to impede.
For the Devil can work coals into shapes to afflict the minds of those that will not
pray.
For the coffin and the cradle and the purse are all against a man.
For the coffin is for the dead and death came by disobedience.
For the cradle is for weakness and the child of man was originally strong from the
womb.
For the purse is for money and money is dead matter with the stamp of human
vanity.
For the adversary frequently sends these particular images out of the fire to
those whom they concern.
75
For the coffin is for me because I have nothing to do with it.
For the cradle is for me because the old Dragon attacked me in it and overcame
in Christ.
For the purse is for me because I have neither money nor human friends.
For LIGHT is propagated at all distances in an instant because it is actuated by
the divine conception.
For the Satellites of the planet prove nothing in this matter but the glory of
Almighty God.
For the SHADE is of death and from the adversary.
For Solomon said vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities all is vanity.
For Jesus says verity of verities, verity of verities all is verity.
For Solomon said THOU FOOL in malice from his own vanity.
For the Lord reviled not all in hardship and temptation unutterable.
For Fire hath this property that it reduces a thing till finally it is not.
For all the filth wicked of men shall be done away by fire in Eternity.
For the furnace itself shall come up at the last according to Abraham's vision.
For the Convex Heaven of shall work about on that great event.
For the ANTARTICK POLE is not yet but shall answer in the Consummation.
For the devil hath most power in winter, because darkness prevails.
For the Longing of Women is the operation of the Devil upon their conceptions.
For the marking of their children is from the same cause both of which are to be
parried by prayer.
For the laws of King James the first against Witchcraft were wise, had it been of
man to make laws.
76
For there are witches and wizards even now who are spoken to by their familiars.
For the visitation of their familiars is prevented by the Lord's incarnation.
For to conceive with intense diligence against one's neighbour is a branch of
witchcraft.
For to use pollution, exact and cross things and at the same time to think against
a man is the crime direct.
For prayer with musick is good for persons so exacted upon.
For before the NATIVITY is the dead of the winter and after it the quick.
For the sin against the HOLY GHOST is INGRATITUDE.
For stuff'd guts make no musick; strain them strong and you shall have sweet
melody.
For the SHADOW is of death, which is the Devil, who can make false and faint
images of the works of Almighty God.
For every man beareth death about him ever since the transgression of Adam,
but in perfect light there is no shadow.
For all Wrath is Fire, which the adversary blows upon and exasperates.
For SHADOW is a fair Word from God, which is not returnable till the furnace
comes up.
For the ECLIPSE is of the adversary -- blessed be the name of Jesus for Whisson
of Trinity.
For the shadow is his and the penumbra is his and his the perplexity of the the
phenomenon.
For the eclipses happen at times when the light is defective.
For the more the light is defective, the more the powers of darkness prevail.
77
For deficiencies happen by the luminaries crossing one another.
For the SUN is an intelligence and an angel of the human form.
For the MOON is an intelligence and an angel in shape like a woman.
For they are together in the spirit every night like man and wife.
For Justice is infinitely beneath Mercy in nature and office.
For the Devil himself may be just in accusation and punishment.
For HELL is without eternity from the presence of Almighty God.
For Volcanos and burning mountains are where the adversary hath most power.
For the angel GRATITUDE is my wife -- God bring me to her or her to me.
For the propagation of light is quick as the divine Conception.
For FROST is damp and unwholsome air candied to fall to the best advantage.
For I am the Lord's News-Writer -- the scribe-evangelist -- Widow Mitchel, Gun
and Grange bless the Lord Jesus.
For Adversity above all other is to be deserted of the grace of God.
For in the divine Idea this Eternity is compleat and the Word is a making many
more.
For there is a forlorn hope ev'n for impenitent sinners because the furnace itself
must be the crown of Eternity.
For my hope is beyond Eternity in the bosom of God my saviour.
For by the grace of God I am the Reviver of ADORATION amongst ENGLISH-MEN.
For being desert-ed is to have desert in the sight of God and intitles one to the
Lord's merit.
For things that are not in the sight of men are thro' God of infinite concern.
78
For envious men have exceeding subtlety quippe qui in -- videant.
For avaricious men are exceeding subtle like the soul seperated from the body.
For their attention is on a sinking object which perishes.
For they can go beyond the children of light in matters of their own misery.
For Snow is the dew candied and cherishes.
For TIMES and SEASONS are the Lord's -- Man is no CHRONOLOGER.
For there is a CIRCULATION of the SAP in all vegetables.
For SOOT is the dross of Fire.
For the CLAPPING of the hands is naught unless it be to the glory of God.
For God will descend in visible glory when men begin to applaud him.
For all STAGE-Playing is Hypocrisy and the Devil is the master of their revels.
For the INNATATION of corpuscles is solved by the Gold-beater's hammer -- God
be gracious to Christopher Peacock and to all my God-Children.
For the PRECESSION of the Equinoxes is improving nature -- something being
gained every where for the glory of God perpetually.
For the souls of the departed are embodied in clouds and purged by the Sun.
For the LONGITUDE may be discovered by attending the motions of the Sun.
Way 2d.
For you must consider the Sun as dodging, which he does to parry observation.
For he must be taken with an Astrolabe, and considered respecting the point he
left.
For you must do this upon your knees and that will secure your point.
For I bless God that I dwell within the sound of Success, and that it is well with
79
ENGLAND this blessed day. NATIVITY of our LORD N.S. 1759.
~ Christopher Smart,
330:TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF HOMER.

I.
Sing, Muse, the son of Maia and of Jove,
The Herald-child, king of Arcadia
And all its pastoral hills, whom in sweet love
Having been interwoven, modest May
Bore Heavens dread Supreme. An antique grove
Shadowed the cavern where the lovers lay
In the deep night, unseen by Gods or Men,
And white-armed Juno slumbered sweetly then.

II.
Now, when the joy of Jove had its fulfilling,
And Heavens tenth moon chronicled her relief,
She gave to light a babe all babes excelling,
A schemer subtle beyond all belief;
A shepherd of thin dreams, a cow-stealing,
A night-watching, and door-waylaying thief,
Who mongst the Gods was soon about to thieve,
And other glorious actions to achieve.

III.
The babe was born at the first peep of day;
He began playing on the lyre at noon,
And the same evening did he steal away
Apollos herds;the fourth day of the moon
On which him bore the venerable May,
From her immortal limbs he leaped full soon,
Nor long could in the sacred cradle keep,
But out to seek Apollos herds would creep.

IV.
Out of the lofty cavern wandering
He found a tortoise, and cried out--'A treasure!'
(For Mercury first made the tortoise sing)
The beast before the portal at his leisure
The flowery herbage was depasturing,
Moving his feet in a deliberate measure
Over the turf. Joves profitable son
Eying him laughed, and laughing thus begun:--

V.
A useful godsend are you to me now,
King of the dance, companion of the feast,
Lovely in all your nature! Welcome, you
Excellent plaything! Where, sweet mountain-beast,
Got you that speckled shell? Thus much I know,
You must come home with me and be my guest;
You will give joy to me, and I will do
All that is in my power to honour you.

VI.
Better to be at home than out of door,
So come with me; and though it has been said
That you alive defend from magic power,
I know you will sing sweetly when youre dead.
Thus having spoken, the quaint infant bore,
Lifting it from the grass on which it fed
And grasping it in his delighted hold,
His treasured prize into the cavern old.

VII.
Then scooping with a chisel of gray steel,
He bored the life and soul out of the beast.--
Not swifter a swift thought of woe or weal
Darts through the tumult of a human breast
Which thronging cares annoynot swifter wheel
The flashes of its torture and unrest
Out of the dizzy eyesthan Maias son
All that he did devise hath featly done.

VIII.
...
And through the tortoises hard stony skin
At proper distances small holes he made,
And fastened the cut stems of reeds within,
And with a piece of leather overlaid
The open space and fixed the cubits in,
Fitting the bridge to both, and stretched oer all
Symphonious cords of sheep-gut rhythmical.

IX.
When he had wrought the lovely instrument,
He tried the chords, and made division meet,
Preluding with the plectrum, and there went
Up from beneath his hand a tumult sweet
Of mighty sounds, and from his lips he sent
A strain of unpremeditated wit
Joyous and wild and wanton--such you may
Hear among revellers on a holiday.

X.
He sung how Jove and May of the bright sandal
Dallied in love not quite legitimate;
And his own birth, still scoffing at the scandal,
And naming his own name, did celebrate;
His mothers cave and servant maids he planned all
In plastic verse, her household stuff and state,
Perennial pot, trippet, and brazen pan,--
But singing, he conceived another plan.

XI.
...
Seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat,
He in his sacred crib deposited
The hollow lyre, and from the cavern sweet
Rushed with great leaps up to the mountains head,
Revolving in his mind some subtle feat
Of thievish craft, such as a swindler might
Devise in the lone season of dun night.

XII.
Lo! the great Sun under the oceans bed has
Driven steeds and chariot--the child meanwhile strode
Oer the Pierian mountains clothed in shadows,
Where the immortal oxen of the God
Are pastured in the flowering unmown meadows,
And safely stalled in a remote abode.--
The archer Argicide, elate and proud,
Drove fifty from the herd, lowing aloud.

XIII.
He drove them wandering oer the sandy way,
But, being ever mindful of his craft,
Backward and forward drove he them astray,
So that the tracks which seemed before, were aft;
His sandals then he threw to the ocean spray,
And for each foot he wrought a kind of raft
Of tamarisk, and tamarisk-like sprigs,
And bound them in a lump with withy twigs.

XIV.
And on his feet he tied these sandals light,
The trail of whose wide leaves might not betray
His track; and then, a self-sufficing wight,
Like a man hastening on some distant way,
He from Pierias mountain bent his flight;
But an old man perceived the infant pass
Down green Onchestus heaped like beds with grass.

XV.
The old man stood dressing his sunny vine:
Halloo! old fellow with the crooked shoulder!
You grub those stumps? before they will bear wine
Methinks even you must grow a little older:
Attend, I pray, to this advice of mine,
As you would scape what might appal a bolder--
Seeing, see not--and hearing, hear not--and--
If you have understanding--understand.

XVI.
So saying, Hermes roused the oxen vast;
Oer shadowy mountain and resounding dell,
And flower-paven plains, great Hermes passed;
Till the black night divine, which favouring fell
Around his steps, grew gray, and morning fast
Wakened the world to work, and from her cell
Sea-strewn, the Pallantean Moon sublime
Into her watch-tower just began to climb.

XVII.
Now to Alpheus he had driven all
The broad-foreheaded oxen of the Sun;
They came unwearied to the lofty stall
And to the water-troughs which ever run
Through the fresh fields--and when with rushgrass tall,
Lotus and all sweet herbage, every one
Had pastured been, the great God made them move
Towards the stall in a collected drove.

XVIII.
A mighty pile of wood the God then heaped,
And having soon conceived the mystery
Of fire, from two smooth laurel branches stripped
The bark, and rubbed them in his palms;--on high
Suddenly forth the burning vapour leaped
And the divine child saw delightedly.--
Mercury first found out for human weal
Tinder-box, matches, fire-irons, flint and steel.

XIX.
And fine dry logs and roots innumerous
He gathered in a delve upon the ground--
And kindled themand instantaneous
The strength of the fierce flame was breathed around:
And whilst the might of glorious Vulcan thus
Wrapped the great pile with glare and roaring sound,
Hermes dragged forth two heifers, lowing loud,
Close to the firesuch might was in the God.

XX.
And on the earth upon their backs he threw
The panting beasts, and rolled them oer and oer,
And bored their lives out. Without more ado
He cut up fat and flesh, and down before
The fire, on spits of wood he placed the two,
Toasting their flesh and ribs, and all the gore
Pursed in the bowels; and while this was done
He stretched their hides over a craggy stone.

XXI.
We mortals let an ox grow old, and then
Cut it up after long consideration,--
But joyous-minded Hermes from the glen
Drew the fat spoils to the more open station
Of a flat smooth space, and portioned them; and when
He had by lot assigned to each a ration
Of the twelve Gods, his mind became aware
Of all the joys which in religion are.

XXII.
For the sweet savour of the roasted meat
Tempted him though immortal. Natheless
He checked his haughty will and did not eat,
Though what it cost him words can scarce express,
And every wish to put such morsels sweet
Down his most sacred throat, he did repress;
But soon within the lofty portalled stall
He placed the fat and flesh and bones and all.

XXIII.
And every trace of the fresh butchery
And cooking, the God soon made disappear,
As if it all had vanished through the sky;
He burned the hoofs and horns and head and hair,--
The insatiate fire devoured them hungrily;--
And when he saw that everything was clear,
He quenched the coal, and trampled the black dust,
And in the stream his bloody sandals tossed.

XXIV.
All night he worked in the serene moonshine--
But when the light of day was spread abroad
He sought his natal mountain-peaks divine.
On his long wandering, neither Man nor God
Had met him, since he killed Apollos kine,
Nor house-dog had barked at him on his road;
Now he obliquely through the keyhole passed,
Like a thin mist, or an autumnal blast.

XXV.
Right through the temple of the spacious cave
He went with soft light feetas if his tread
Fell not on earth; no sound their falling gave;
Then to his cradle he crept quick, and spread
The swaddling-clothes about him; and the knave
Lay playing with the covering of the bed
With his left hand about his knees--the right
Held his beloved tortoise-lyre tight.

XXVI.
There he lay innocent as a new-born child,
As gossips say; but though he was a God,
The Goddess, his fair mother, unbeguiled,
Knew all that he had done being abroad:
Whence come you, and from what adventure wild,
You cunning rogue, and where have you abode
All the long night, clothed in your impudence?
What have you done since you departed hence?

XXVII.
Apollo soon will pass within this gate
And bind your tender body in a chain
Inextricably tight, and fast as fate,
Unless you can delude the God again,
Even when within his arms--ah, runagate!
A pretty torment both for Gods and Men
Your father made when he made you!--Dear mother,
Replied sly Hermes, wherefore scold and bother?

XXVIII.
As if I were like other babes as old,
And understood nothing of what is what;
And cared at all to hear my mother scold.
I in my subtle brain a scheme have got,
Which whilst the sacred stars round Heaven are rolled
Will profit you and me--nor shall our lot
Be as you counsel, without gifts or food,
To spend our lives in this obscure abode.

XXIX.
But we will leave this shadow-peopled cave
And live among the Gods, and pass each day
In high communion, sharing what they have
Of profuse wealth and unexhausted prey;
And from the portion which my father gave
To Phoebus, I will snatch my share away,
Which if my father will not--natheless I,
Who am the king of robbers, can but try.

XXX.
And, if Latonas son should find me out,
Ill countermine him by a deeper plan;
Ill pierce the Pythian temple-walls, though stout,
And sack the fane of everything I can--
Caldrons and tripods of great worth no doubt,
Each golden cup and polished brazen pan, 235
All the wrought tapestries and garments gay.--
So they together talked;--meanwhile the Day

XXXI.
Aethereal born arose out of the flood
Of flowing Ocean, bearing light to men.
Apollo passed toward the sacred wood,
Which from the inmost depths of its green glen
Echoes the voice of Neptune,--and there stood
On the same spot in green Onchestus then
That same old animal, the vine-dresser,
Who was employed hedging his vineyard there.

XXXII.
Latonas glorious Son began:--I pray
Tell, ancient hedger of Onchestus green,
Whether a drove of kine has passed this way,
All heifers with crooked horns? for they have been
Stolen from the herd in high Pieria,
Where a black bull was fed apart, between
Two woody mountains in a neighbouring glen,
And four fierce dogs watched there, unanimous as men.

XXXIII.
And what is strange, the author of this theft
Has stolen the fatted heifers every one,
But the four dogs and the black bull are left:--
Stolen they were last night at set of sun,
Of their soft beds and their sweet food bereft.--
Now tell me, man born ere the world begun,
Have you seen any one pass with the cows?--
To whom the man of overhanging brows:

XXXIV.
My friend, it would require no common skill
Justly to speak of everything I see:
On various purposes of good or ill
Many pass by my vineyard,--and to me
Tis difficult to know the invisible
Thoughts, which in all those many minds may be:--
Thus much alone I certainly can say,
I tilled these vines till the decline of day,

XXXV.
And then I thought I saw, but dare not speak
With certainty of such a wondrous thing,
A child, who could not have been born a week,
Those fair-horned cattle closely following,
And in his hand he held a polished stick:
And, as on purpose, he walked wavering
From one side to the other of the road,
And with his face opposed the steps he trod.

XXXVI.
Apollo hearing this, passed quickly on--
No winged omen could have shown more clear
That the deceiver was his fathers son.
So the God wraps a purple atmosphere
Around his shoulders, and like fire is gone
To famous Pylos, seeking his kine there,
And found their track and his, yet hardly cold,
And criedWhat wonder do mine eyes behold!

XXXVII.
Here are the footsteps of the horned herd
Turned back towards their fields of asphodel;--
But THESE are not the tracks of beast or bird,
Gray wolf, or bear, or lion of the dell,
Or maned Centaur--sand was never stirred
By man or woman thus! Inexplicable!
Who with unwearied feet could eer impress
The sand with such enormous vestiges?

XXXVIII.
That was most strange--but this is stranger still!
Thus having said, Phoebus impetuously
Sought high Cyllenes forest-cinctured hill,
And the deep cavern where dark shadows lie,
And where the ambrosial nymph with happy will
Bore the Saturnians love-child, Mercury--
And a delightful odour from the dew
Of the hill pastures, at his coming, flew.

XXXIX.
And Phoebus stooped under the craggy roof
Arched over the dark cavern:--Maias child
Perceived that he came angry, far aloof,
About the cows of which he had been beguiled;
And over him the fine and fragrant woof
Of his ambrosial swaddling-clothes he piled--
As among fire-brands lies a burning spark
Covered, beneath the ashes cold and dark.

XL.
There, like an infant who had sucked his fill
And now was newly washed and put to bed,
Awake, but courting sleep with weary will,
And gathered in a lump, hands, feet, and head,
He lay, and his beloved tortoise still
He grasped and held under his shoulder-blade.
Phoebus the lovely mountain-goddess knew,
Not less her subtle, swindling baby, who

XLI.
Lay swathed in his sly wiles. Round every crook
Of the ample cavern, for his kine, Apollo
Looked sharp; and when he saw them not, he took
The glittering key, and opened three great hollow
Recesses in the rock--where many a nook
Was filled with the sweet food immortals swallow,
And mighty heaps of silver and of gold
Were piled within--a wonder to behold!

XLII.
And white and silver robes, all overwrought
With cunning workmanship of tracery sweet--
Except among the Gods there can be nought
In the wide world to be compared with it.
Latonas offspring, after having sought
His herds in every corner, thus did greet
Great Hermes:--Little cradled rogue, declare
Of my illustrious heifers, where they are!

XLIII.
Speak quickly! or a quarrel between us
Must rise, and the event will be, that I
Shall hurl you into dismal Tartarus,
In fiery gloom to dwell eternally;
Nor shall your father nor your mother loose
The bars of that black dungeonutterly
You shall be cast out from the light of day,
To rule the ghosts of men, unblessed as they.

XLIV.
To whom thus Hermes slily answered:--Son
Of great Latona, what a speech is this!
Why come you here to ask me what is done
With the wild oxen which it seems you miss?
I have not seen them, nor from any one
Have heard a word of the whole business;
If you should promise an immense reward,
I could not tell more than you now have heard.

XLV.
An ox-stealer should be both tall and strong,
And I am but a little new-born thing,
Who, yet at least, can think of nothing wrong:--
My business is to suck, and sleep, and fling
The cradle-clothes about me all day long,--
Or half asleep, hear my sweet mother sing,
And to be washed in water clean and warm,
And hushed and kissed and kept secure from harm.

XLVI.
O, let not eer this quarrel be averred!
The astounded Gods would laugh at you, if eer
You should allege a story so absurd
As that a new-born infant forth could fare
Out of his home after a savage herd.
I was born yesterday--my small feet are
Too tender for the roads so hard and rough:--
And if you think that this is not enough,

XLVII.
I swear a great oath, by my fathers head,
That I stole not your cows, and that I know
Of no one else, who might, or could, or did.--
Whatever things cows are, I do not know,
For I have only heard the name.--This said
He winked as fast as could be, and his brow
Was wrinkled, and a whistle loud gave he,
Like one who hears some strange absurdity.

XLVIII.
Apollo gently smiled and said:--Ay, ay,--
You cunning little rascal, you will bore
Many a rich mans house, and your array
Of thieves will lay their siege before his door,
Silent as night, in night; and many a day
In the wild glens rough shepherds will deplore
That you or yours, having an appetite,
Met with their cattle, comrade of the night!

XLIX.
And this among the Gods shall be your gift,
To be considered as the lord of those
Who swindle, house-break, sheep-steal, and shop-lift;--
But now if you would not your last sleep doze;
Crawl out!--Thus saying, Phoebus did uplift
The subtle infant in his swaddling clothes,
And in his arms, according to his wont,
A scheme devised the illustrious Argiphont.

L.
...
...
And sneezed and shuddered--Phoebus on the grass
Him threw, and whilst all that he had designed
He did perform--eager although to pass,
Apollo darted from his mighty mind
Towards the subtle babe the following scoff:--
Do not imagine this will get you off,

LI.
You little swaddled child of Jove and May!
And seized him:--By this omen I shall trace
My noble herds, and you shall lead the way.--
Cyllenian Hermes from the grassy place,
Like one in earnest haste to get away,
Rose, and with hands lifted towards his face
Round both his ears up from his shoulders drew
His swaddling clothes, andWhat mean you to do

LII.
With me, you unkind God?--said Mercury:
Is it about these cows you tease me so?
I wish the race of cows were perished!--I
Stole not your cows--I do not even know
What things cows are. Alas! I well may sigh
That since I came into this world of woe,
I should have ever heard the name of one--
But I appeal to the Saturnians throne.

LIII.
Thus Phoebus and the vagrant Mercury
Talked without coming to an explanation,
With adverse purpose. As for Phoebus, he
Sought not revenge, but only information,
And Hermes tried with lies and roguery
To cheat Apollo.--But when no evasion
Served--for the cunning one his match had found--
He paced on first over the sandy ground.

LIV.
...
He of the Silver Bow the child of Jove
Followed behind, till to their heavenly Sire
Came both his children, beautiful as Love,
And from his equal balance did require
A judgement in the cause wherein they strove.
Oer odorous Olympus and its snows
A murmuring tumult as they came arose,--

LV.
And from the folded depths of the great Hill,
While Hermes and Apollo reverent stood
Before Joves throne, the indestructible
Immortals rushed in mighty multitude;
And whilst their seats in order due they fill,
The lofty Thunderer in a careless mood
To Phoebus said:Whence drive you this sweet prey,
This herald-baby, born but yesterday?--

LVI.
A most important subject, trifler, this
To lay before the Gods!--Nay, Father, nay,
When you have understood the business,
Say not that I alone am fond of prey.
I found this little boy in a recess
Under Cyllenes mountains far away--
A manifest and most apparent thief,
A scandalmonger beyond all belief.

LVII.
I never saw his like either in Heaven
Or upon earth for knavery or craft:--
Out of the field my cattle yester-even,
By the low shore on which the loud sea laughed,
He right down to the river-ford had driven;
And mere astonishment would make you daft
To see the double kind of footsteps strange
He has impressed wherever he did range.

LVIII.
The cattles track on the black dust, full well
Is evident, as if they went towards
The place from which they came--that asphodel
Meadow, in which I feed my many herds,--
HIS steps were most incomprehensible--
I know not how I can describe in words
Those trackshe could have gone along the sands
Neither upon his feet nor on his hands;--

LIX.
He must have had some other stranger mode
Of moving on: those vestiges immense,
Far as I traced them on the sandy road,
Seemed like the trail of oak-toppings:--but thence
No mark nor track denoting where they trod
The hard ground gave:but, working at his fence,
A mortal hedger saw him as he passed
To Pylos, with the cows, in fiery haste.

LX.
I found that in the dark he quietly
Had sacrificed some cows, and before light
Had thrown the ashes all dispersedly
About the roadthen, still as gloomy night,
Had crept into his cradle, either eye
Rubbing, and cogitating some new sleight.
No eagle could have seen him as he lay
Hid in his cavern from the peering day.

LXI.
I taxed him with the fact, when he averred
Most solemnly that he did neither see
Nor even had in any manner heard
Of my lost cows, whatever things cows be;
Nor could he tell, though offered a reward,
Not even who could tell of them to me.
So speaking, Phoebus sate; and Hermes then
Addressed the Supreme Lord of Gods and Men:--

LXII.
Great Father, you know clearly beforehand
That all which I shall say to you is sooth;
I am a most veracious person, and
Totally unacquainted with untruth.
At sunrise Phoebus came, but with no band
Of Gods to bear him witness, in great wrath,
To my abode, seeking his heifers there,
And saying that I must show him where they are,

LXIII.
Or he would hurl me down the dark abyss.
I know that every Apollonian limb
Is clothed with speed and might and manliness,
As a green bank with flowersbut unlike him
I was born yesterday, and you may guess
He well knew this when he indulged the whim
Of bullying a poor little new-born thing
That slept, and never thought of cow-driving.

LXIV.
Am I like a strong fellow who steals kine?
Believe me, dearest Father--such you are--
This driving of the herds is none of mine;
Across my threshold did I wander neer,
So may I thrive! I reverence the divine
Sun and the Gods, and I love you, and care
Even for this hard accuser--who must know
I am as innocent as they or you.

LXV.
I swear by these most gloriously-wrought portals
(It is, you will allow, an oath of might)
Through which the multitude of the Immortals
Pass and repass forever, day and night,
Devising schemes for the affairs of mortals--
I am guiltless; and I will requite,
Although mine enemy be great and strong,
His cruel threat--do thou defend the young!

LXVI.
So speaking, the Cyllenian Argiphont
Winked, as if now his adversary was fitted:
And Jupiter, according to his wont,
Laughed heartily to hear the subtle-witted
Infant give such a plausible account,
And every word a lie. But he remitted
Judgement at presentand his exhortation
Was, to compose the affair by arbitration.

LXVII.
And they by mighty Jupiter were bidden
To go forth with a single purpose both,
Neither the other chiding nor yet chidden:
And Mercury with innocence and truth
To lead the way, and show where he had hidden
The mighty heifers.--Hermes, nothing loth,
Obeyed the Aegis-bearers willfor he
Is able to persuade all easily.

LXVIII.
These lovely children of Heavens highest Lord
Hastened to Pylos and the pastures wide
And lofty stalls by the Alphean ford,
Where wealth in the mute night is multiplied
With silent growth. Whilst Hermes drove the herd
Out of the stony cavern, Phoebus spied
The hides of those the little babe had slain,
Stretched on the precipice above the plain.

LXIX.
How was it possible, then Phoebus said,
That you, a little child, born yesterday,
A thing on mothers milk and kisses fed,
Could two prodigious heifers ever flay?
Even I myself may well hereafter dread
Your prowess, offspring of Cyllenian May,
When you grow strong and tall.--He spoke, and bound
Stiff withy bands the infants wrists around.

LXX.
He might as well have bound the oxen wild;
The withy bands, though starkly interknit,
Fell at the feet of the immortal child,
Loosened by some device of his quick wit.
Phoebus perceived himself again beguiled,
And staredwhile Hermes sought some hole or pit,
Looking askance and winking fast as thought,
Where he might hide himself and not be caught.

LXXI.
Sudden he changed his plan, and with strange skill
Subdued the strong Latonian, by the might
Of winning music, to his mightier will;
His left hand held the lyre, and in his right
The plectrum struck the chordsunconquerable
Up from beneath his hand in circling flight
The gathering music roseand sweet as Love
The penetrating notes did live and move

LXXII.
Within the heart of great Apollo--he
Listened with all his soul, and laughed for pleasure.
Close to his side stood harping fearlessly
The unabashed boy; and to the measure
Of the sweet lyre, there followed loud and free
His joyous voice; for he unlocked the treasure
Of his deep song, illustrating the birth
Of the bright Gods, and the dark desert Earth:

LXXIII.
And how to the Immortals every one
A portion was assigned of all that is;
But chief Mnemosyne did Maias son
Clothe in the light of his loud melodies;--
And, as each God was born or had begun,
He in their order due and fit degrees
Sung of his birth and beingand did move
Apollo to unutterable love.

LXXIV.
These words were winged with his swift delight:
You heifer-stealing schemer, well do you
Deserve that fifty oxen should requite
Such minstrelsies as I have heard even now.
Comrade of feasts, little contriving wight,
One of your secrets I would gladly know,
Whether the glorious power you now show forth
Was folded up within you at your birth,

LXXV.
Or whether mortal taught or God inspired
The power of unpremeditated song?
Many divinest sounds have I admired,
The Olympian Gods and mortal men among;
But such a strain of wondrous, strange, untired,
And soul-awakening music, sweet and strong,
Yet did I never hear except from thee,
Offspring of May, impostor Mercury!

LXXVI.
What Muse, what skill, what unimagined use,
What exercise of subtlest art, has given
Thy songs such power?--for those who hear may choose
From three, the choicest of the gifts of Heaven,
Delight, and love, and sleep,--sweet sleep, whose dews
Are sweeter than the balmy tears of even:--
And I, who speak this praise, am that Apollo
Whom the Olympian Muses ever follow:

LXXVII.
And their delight is dance, and the blithe noise
Of song and overflowing poesy;
And sweet, even as desire, the liquid voice
Of pipes, that fills the clear air thrillingly;
But never did my inmost soul rejoice
In this dear work of youthful revelry
As now. I wonder at thee, son of Jove;
Thy harpings and thy song are soft as love.

LXXVIII.
Now since thou hast, although so very small,
Science of arts so glorious, thus I swear,--
And let this cornel javelin, keen and tall,
Witness between us what I promise here,--
That I will lead thee to the Olympian Hall,
Honoured and mighty, with thy mother dear,
And many glorious gifts in joy will give thee,
And even at the end will neer deceive thee.

LXXIX.
To whom thus Mercury with prudent speech:--
Wisely hast thou inquired of my skill:
I envy thee no thing I know to teach
Even this day:for both in word and will
I would be gentle with thee; thou canst reach
All things in thy wise spirit, and thy sill
Is highest in Heaven among the sons of Jove,
Who loves thee in the fulness of his love.

LXXX.
The Counsellor Supreme has given to thee
Divinest gifts, out of the amplitude
Of his profuse exhaustless treasury;
By thee, tis said, the depths are understood
Of his far voice; by thee the mystery
Of all oracular fates,and the dread mood
Of the diviner is breathed up; even I--
A childperceive thy might and majesty.

LXXXI.
Thou canst seek out and compass all that wit
Can find or teach;--yet since thou wilt, come take
The lyre--be mine the glory giving it--
Strike the sweet chords, and sing aloud, and wake
Thy joyous pleasure out of many a fit
Of tranced sound--and with fleet fingers make
Thy liquid-voiced comrade talk with thee,--
It can talk measured music eloquently.

LXXXII.
Then bear it boldly to the revel loud,
Love-wakening dance, or feast of solemn state,
A joy by night or day--for those endowed
With art and wisdom who interrogate
It teaches, babbling in delightful mood
All things which make the spirit most elate,
Soothing the mind with sweet familiar play,
Chasing the heavy shadows of dismay.

LXXXIII.
To those who are unskilled in its sweet tongue,
Though they should question most impetuously
Its hidden soul, it gossips something wrong--
Some senseless and impertinent reply.
But thou who art as wise as thou art strong
Canst compass all that thou desirest. I
Present thee with this music-flowing shell,
Knowing thou canst interrogate it well.

LXXXIV.
And let us two henceforth together feed,
On this green mountain-slope and pastoral plain,
The herds in litigation -- they will breed
Quickly enough to recompense our pain,
If to the bulls and cows we take good heed;--
And thou, though somewhat over fond of gain,
Grudge me not half the profit.Having spoke,
The shell he proffered, and Apollo took;

LXXXV.
And gave him in return the glittering lash,
Installing him as herdsman;--from the look
Of Mercury then laughed a joyous flash.
And then Apollo with the plectrum strook
The chords, and from beneath his hands a crash
Of mighty sounds rushed up, whose music shook
The soul with sweetness, and like an adept
His sweeter voice a just accordance kept.

LXXXVI.
The herd went wandering oer the divine mead,
Whilst these most beautiful Sons of Jupiter
Won their swift way up to the snowy head
Of white Olympus, with the joyous lyre
Soothing their journey; and their father dread
Gathered them both into familiar
Affection sweet,and then, and now, and ever,
Hermes must love Him of the Golden Quiver,

LXXXVII.
To whom he gave the lyre that sweetly sounded,
Which skilfully he held and played thereon.
He piped the while, and far and wide rebounded
The echo of his pipings; every one
Of the Olympians sat with joy astounded;
While he conceived another piece of fun,
One of his old trickswhich the God of Day
Perceiving, said:I fear thee, Son of May;--

LXXXVIII.
I fear thee and thy sly chameleon spirit,
Lest thou should steal my lyre and crooked bow;
This glory and power thou dost from Jove inherit,
To teach all craft upon the earth below;
Thieves love and worship theeit is thy merit
To make all mortal business ebb and flow
By roguery:now, Hermes, if you dare
By sacred Styx a mighty oath to swear

LXXXIX.
That you will never rob me, you will do
A thing extremely pleasing to my heart.
Then Mercury swore by the Stygian dew,
That he would never steal his bow or dart,
Or lay his hands on what to him was due,
Or ever would employ his powerful art
Against his Pythian fane. Then Phoebus swore
There was no God or Man whom he loved more.

XC.
And I will give thee as a good-will token,
The beautiful wand of wealth and happiness;
A perfect three-leaved rod of gold unbroken,
Whose magic will thy footsteps ever bless;
And whatsoever by Joves voice is spoken
Of earthly or divine from its recess,
It, like a loving soul, to thee will speak,
And more than this, do thou forbear to seek.

XCI.
For, dearest child, the divinations high
Which thou requirest, tis unlawful ever
That thou, or any other deity
Should understandand vain were the endeavour;
For they are hidden in Joves mind, and I,
In trust of them, have sworn that I would never
Betray the counsels of Joves inmost will
To any Godthe oath was terrible.

XCII.
Then, golden-wanded brother, ask me not
To speak the fates by Jupiter designed;
But be it mine to tell their various lot
To the unnumbered tribes of human-kind.
Let good to these, and ill to those be wrought
As I dispensebut he who comes consigned
By voice and wings of perfect augury
To my great shrine, shall find avail in me.

XCIII.
Him will I not deceive, but will assist;
But he who comes relying on such birds
As chatter vainly, who would strain and twist
The purpose of the Gods with idle words,
And deems their knowledge light, he shall have missed
His roadwhilst I among my other hoards
His gifts deposit. Yet, O son of May,
I have another wondrous thing to say.

XCIV.
There are three Fates, three virgin Sisters, who
Rejoicing in their wind-outspeeding wings,
Their heads with flour snowed over white and new,
Sit in a vale round which Parnassus flings
Its circling skirtsfrom these I have learned true
Vaticinations of remotest things.
My father cared not. Whilst they search out dooms,
They sit apart and feed on honeycombs.

XCV.
They, having eaten the fresh honey, grow
Drunk with divine enthusiasm, and utter
With earnest willingness the truth they know;
But if deprived of that sweet food, they mutter
All plausible delusions;--these to you
I give;--if you inquire, they will not stutter;
Delight your own soul with them:--any man
You would instruct may profit if he can.

XCVI.
Take these and the fierce oxen, Maias child--
Oer many a horse and toil-enduring mule,
Oer jagged-jawed lions, and the wild
White-tusked boars, oer all, by field or pool,
Of cattle which the mighty Mother mild
Nourishes in her bosom, thou shalt rule--
Thou dost alone the veil from death uplift--
Thou givest notyet this is a great gift.

XCVII.
Thus King Apollo loved the child of May
In truth, and Jove covered their love with joy.
Hermes with Gods and Men even from that day
Mingled, and wrought the latter much annoy,
And little profit, going far astray
Through the dun night. Farewell, delightful Boy,
Of Jove and Maia sprung,never by me,
Nor thou, nor other songs, shall unremembered be
Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824. This alone of the Translations is included in the Harvard manuscript book. Fragments of the drafts of this and the other Hymns of Homer exist among the Boscombe manuscripts (Forman).
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hymn To Mercury
,
331:A Dramatic Poem

The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast,
with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea
on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar
coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a
series of steps hehind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves
overhead. When the play opens there are four persons upon the
deck. Aibric stands by the tiller. Forgael sleeps upon the raised
portion of the deck towards the front of the stage. Two Sailors
are standing near to the mast, on which a harp is hanging.

First Sailor. Has he not led us into these waste seas
  For long enough?

Second Sailor.  Aye, long and long enough.

First Sailor. We have not come upon a shore or ship
  These dozen weeks.

Second Sailor.  And I had thought to make
  A good round Sum upon this cruise, and turn
  For I am getting on in lifeto something
  That has less ups and downs than robbery.

First Sailor. I am so tired of being bachelor
  I could give all my heart to that Red Moll
  That had but the one eye.

Second Sailor.    Can no bewitchment
  Transform these rascal billows into women
  That I may drown myself?

First Sailor.     Better steer home,
  Whether he will or no; and better still
  To take him while he sleeps and carry him
  And drop him from the gunnel.

Second Sailor.       I dare not do it.
  Weret not that there is magic in his harp,
  I would be of your mind; but when he plays it
  Strange creatures flutter up before ones eyes,
  Or cry about ones ears.

First Sailor.     Nothing to fear.

Second Sailor. Do you remember when we sank that
     galley
  At the full moon?

First Sailor.  He played all through the night.

Second Sailor. Until the moon had set; and when I looked
  Where the dead drifted, I could see a bird
  Like a grey gull upon the breast of each.
  While I was looking they rose hurriedly,
  And after circling with strange cries awhile
  Flew westward; and many a time since then
  Ive heard a rustling overhead in the wind.

First Sailor. I saw them on that night as well as you.
  But when I had eaten and drunk myself asleep
  My courage came again.

Second Sailor.    But thats not all.
  The other night, while he was playing it,
  A beautiful young man and girl came up
  In a white breaking wave; they had the look
  Of those that are alive for ever and ever.

First Sailor. I saw them, too, one night. Forgael was
     playing,
  And they were listening ther& beyond the sail.
  He could not see them, but I held out my hands
  To grasp the woman.

Second Sailor.  You have dared to touch her?

First Sailor. O she was but a shadow, and slipped from
  me.

Second Sailor. But were you not afraid?

First Sailor.          Why should I fear?

Second Sailor. Twas Aengus and Edain, the wandering
     lovers,
  To whom all lovers pray.

First Sailor.     But what of that?
  A shadow does not carry sword or spear.

Second Sailor. My mother told me that there is not one
  Of the Ever-living half so dangerous
  As that wild Aengus. Long before her day
  He carried Edain off from a kings house,
  And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone
  And in a tower of glass, and from that day
  Has hated every man thats not in love,
  And has been dangerous to him.

First Sailor.          I have heard
  He does not hate seafarers as he hates
  Peaceable men that shut the wind away,
  And keep to the one weary marriage-bed.

Second Sailor. I think that he has Forgael in his net,
  And drags him through the sea,

First Sailor        Well, net or none,
  Id drown him while we have the chance to do it.

Second Sailor. Its certain Id sleep easier o nights
  If he were dead; but who will be our captain,
  Judge of the stars, and find a course for us?

First Sailor. Ive thought of that. We must have Aibric
     with us,
  For he can judge the stars as well as Forgael.

                 [Going towards Aibric.]

  Become our captain, Aibric. I am resolved
  To make an end of Forgael while he sleeps.
  Theres not a man but will be glad of it
  When it is over, nor one to grumble at us.

Aibric. You have taken pay and made your bargain for it.

First Sailor. What good is there in this hard way of
     living,
  Unless we drain more flagons in a year
  And kiss more lips than lasting peaceable men
  In their long lives? Will you be of our troop
  And take the captains share of everything
  And bring us into populous seas again?

Aibric. Be of your troop! Aibric be one of you
  And Forgael in the other scale! kill Forgael,
  And he my master from my childhood up!
  If you will draw that sword out of its scabbard
  Ill give my answer.

First Sailor.  You have awakened him.

                 [To Second Sailor.]

  Wed better go, for we have lost this chance.

                 [They go out.]

Forgael. Have the birds passed us? I could hear your
     voice,
  But there were others.

Aibric.        I have seen nothing pass.

Forgael. Youre certain of it? I never wake from sleep
  But that I am afraid they may have passed,
  For theyre my only pilots. If I lost them
  Straying too far into the north or south,
  Id never come upon the happiness
  That has been promised me. I have not seen them
  These many days; and yet there must be many
  Dying at every moment in the world,
  And flying towards their peace.

Aibric.          Put by these thoughts,
  And listen to me for a while. The sailors
  Are plotting for your death.

Forgael.          Have I not given
  More riches than they ever hoped to find?
  And now they will not follow, while I seek
  The only riches that have hit my fancy.

Aibric. What riches can you find in this waste sea
  Where no ship sails, where nothing thats alive
  Has ever come but those man-headed birds,
  Knowing it for the worlds end?

Forgael.           Where the world ends
  The mind is made unchanging, for it finds
  Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,
  The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,
  The roots of the world.

Aibric.        Shadows before now
  Have driven travellers mad for their own sport.

Forgael. Do you, too, doubt me? Have you joined their
     plot?

Aibric. No, no, do not say that. You know right well
  That I will never lift a hand against you.

Forgael. Why should you be more faithful than the rest,
  Being as doubtful?

Aibric.     I have called you master
  Too many years to lift a hand against you.

Forgael. Maybe it is but natural to doubt me.
  Youve never known, Id lay a wager on it,
  A melancholy that a cup of wine,
  A lucky battle, or a womans kiss
  Could not amend.

Aibric.     I have good spirits enough.

Forgael. If you will give me all your mind awhile
  All, all, the very bottom of the bowl
  Ill show you that I am made differently,
  That nothing can amend it but these waters,
  Where I am rid of lifethe events of the world
  What do you call it?that old promise-breaker,
  The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,
  You will have all you have wished for when you have
     earned
  Land for your children or money in a pot.-
  And when we have it we are no happier,
  Because of that old draught under the door,
  Or creaky shoes. And at the end of all
  How are we better off than Seaghan the fool,
  That never did a hands turn? Aibric! Aibric!
  We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living
  Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
  And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh,
  And find their laughter sweeter to the taste
  For that brief sighing.

Aibric.       If you had loved some woman

Forgael. You say that also? You have heard the voices,
  For that is what they sayall, all the shadows
  Aengus and Edain, those passionate wanderers,
  And all the others; but it must be love
  As they have known it. Now the secrets out;
  For it is love that I am seeking for,
  But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
  That is not in the world.

Aibric.        And yet the world
  Has beautiful women to please every man.

Forgael. But he that gets their love after the fashion
  Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope
  And bodily tenderness, and finds that even
  The bed of love, that in the imagination
  Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,
  Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting,
  And as soon finished.

Aibric.      All that ever loved
  Have loved that waythere is no other way.

Forgael. Yet never have two lovers kissed but they
  believed there was some other near at hand,
  And almost wept because they could not find it.

Aibric. When they have twenty years; in middle life
  They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth,
  And let the dream go by.

Forgael.          Its not a dream,
  But the reality that makes our passion
  As a lamp shadownono lamp, the sun.
  What the worlds million lips are thirsting for
  Must be substantial somewhere.

Aibric.          I have heard the Druids
  Mutter such things as they awake from trance.
  It may be that the Ever-living know it
  No mortal can.

Forgael.  Yes; if they give us help.

Aibric. They are besotting you as they besot
  The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows
  That he has been all night upon the hills,
  Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host
  With the Ever-living.

Forgael.      What if he speak the truth,
  And for a dozen hours have been a part
  Of that more powerful life?

Aibric,          His wife knows better.
  Has she not seen him lying like a log,
  Or fumbling in a dream about the house?
  And if she hear him mutter of wild riders,
  She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing
  That set him to the fancy.

Forgael.        All would be well
  Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
  And get into their world that to the sense
  Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
  Among substantial things; for it is dreams
  That lift us to the flowing, changing world
  That the heart longs for. What is love itself,
  Even though it be the lightest of light love,
  But dreams that hurry from beyond the world
  To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
  Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer,
  Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,
  Not in its image on the mirror!

Aibric.            While
  Were in the body thats impossible.

Forgael. And yet I cannot think theyre leading me
  To death; for they that promised to me love
  As those that can outlive the moon have known it,
  Had the worlds total life gathered up, it seemed,
  Into their shining limbsIve had great teachers.
  Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave
  Youd never doubt that it was life they promised
  Had you looked on them face to face as I did,
  With so red lips, and running on such feet,
  And having such wide-open, shining eyes.

Aibric. Its certain they are leading you to death.
  None but the dead, or those that never lived,
  Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael!
  They have made you follow the man-headed birds,
  And you have told me that their journey lies
  Towards the country of the dead.

Forgael.            What matter
  If I am going to my death?for there,
  Or somewhere, I shall find the love they have
     promised.
  That much is certain. I shall find a woman.
  One of the Ever-living, as I think
  One of the Laughing Peopleand she and I
  Shall light upon a place in the worlds core,
  Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,
  Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,
  Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysclite;
  And there, in juggleries of sight and sense,
  Become one movement, energy, delight,
  Until the overburthened moon is dead.

                 [A number of Sailors entcr hurriedly.]

First Sailor. Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice!
  And we are almost on her!

Second Sailor.     We had not known
  But for the ambergris and sandalwood.

First Sailor. NO; but opoponax and cinnamon.

Forgael [taking the tiller from Aibric]. The Ever-living have
  kept my bargain for me,
  And paid you on the nail.

Aibric.        Take up that rope
  To make her fast while we are plundering her.

First Sailor. There is a king and queen upon her deck,
  And where there is one woman therell be others.
Aibric. Speak lower, or theyll hear.

First Sailor.            They cannot hear;
  They are too busy with each other. Look!
  He has stooped down and kissed her on the lips.

Second Sailor. When she finds out we have better men
     aboard
  She may not be too sorry in the end.

First Sailor. She will be like a wild cat; for these queens
  Care more about the kegs of silver and gold
  And the high fame that come to them in marriage,
  Than a strong body and a ready hand.

Second Sailor. Theres nobody is natural but a robber,
  And that is why the world totters about
  Upon its bandy legs.

Aibric.        Run at them now,
  And overpower the crew while yet asleep!

                 [The Sailors go out.]

[Voices and thc clashing of swords are heard from the
  other ship, which cannot be seen because of the sail.]

A Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am slain!

Another Voice. Wake all below!

Another Voice.  Why have you broken our sleep?

First Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am
     slain!

Forgael [who has remained at the tiller]. There! there they
  come! Gull, gannet, or diver,
  But with a mans head, or a fair womans,
  They hover over the masthead awhile
  To wait their Fiends; but when their friends have
     come
  Theyll fly upon that secret way of theirs.
  Oneand onea couplefive together;
  And I will hear them talking in a minute.
  Yes, voices! but I do not catch the words.
  Now I can hear. Theres one of them that says,
  How light we are, now we are changed to birds!
  Another answers, Maybe we shall find
  Our hearts desire now that we are so light.
  And then one asks another how he died,
  And says, A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.-
  And now they all wheel suddenly and fly
  To the other side, and higher in the air.
  And now a laggard with a womans head
  Comes crying, I have run upon the sword.
  I have fled to my beloved in the air,
  In the waste of the high air, that we may wander
  Among the windy meadows of the dawn.
  But why are they still waiting? why are they
  Circling and circling over the masthead?
  What power that is more mighty than desire
  To hurry to their hidden happiness
  Withholds them now? Have the Ever-living Ones
  A meaning in that circling overhead?
  But whats the meaning? [He cries out.] Why do you
     linger there?
  Why linger? Run to your desire,
  Are you not happy winged bodies now?

                 [His voice sinks again.]

  Being too busy in the air and the high air,
  They cannot hear my voice; but whats the meaning?

        [The Sailors have returned. Dectora is with them.]

Forgael [turning and seeing her]. Why are you standing
  with your eyes upon me?
  You are not the worlds core. O no, no, no!
  That cannot be the meaning of the birds.
  You are not its core. My teeth are in the world,
  But have not bitten yet.

Dectora.       I am a queen,
  And ask for satisfaction upon these
  Who have slain my husband and laid hands upon me.

     [Breaking loose from the Sailors who are holding her.]

  Let go my hands!

Forgael.     Why do you cast a shadow?
  Where do you come from? Who brought you to this
     place?
  They would not send me one that casts a shadow.

Dectora. Would that the storm that overthrew my ships,
  And drowned the treasures of nine conquered nations,
  And blew me hither to my lasting sorrow,
  Had drowned me also. But, being yet alive,
  I ask a fitting punishment for all
  That raised their hands against him.

Forgael.               There are some
  That weigh and measure all in these waste seas
  They that have all the wisdom thats in life,
  And all that prophesying images
  Made of dim gold rave out in secret tombs;
  They have it that the plans of kings and queens
  But laughter and tearslaughter, laughter, and tears;
  That every man should carry his own soul
  Upon his shoulders.

Dectora.     Youve nothing but wild words,
  And I would know if you will give me vengeance.

Forgael. When she finds out I will not let her go
  When she knows that.

Dectora. What is it that you are muttering
  That youll not let me go? I am a queen.

Forgael. Although you are more beautiful than any,
  I almost long that it were possible;
  But if I were to put you on that ship,
  With sailors that were sworn to do your will,
  And you had spread a sail for home, a wind
  Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge
  It had washed among the stars and put them out,
  And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine,
  Until you stood before me on the deck
  As now.

Dectora.  Does wandering in these desolate seas
  And listening to the cry of wind and wave
  Bring madness?

Forgael.  Queen, I am not mad.

Dectora.              Yet say
  That unimaginable storms of wind and wave
  Would rise against me.

Forgael.       No, I am not mad
  If it be not that hearing messages
  From lasting watchers, that outlive the moon,
  At the most quiet midnight is to be stricken.

Dectora. And did those watchers bid you take me
  captive?

Forgael.  Both you and I are taken in the net.
  It was their hands that plucked the winds awake
  And blew you hither; and their mouths have
     promised
  I shall have love in their immortal fashion;
  And for this end they gave me my old harp
  That is more mighty than the sun and moon,
  Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars,
  That none might take you from me.

Dectora [first trembling back from the mast where the harp is,
  and then laughing]. For a moment
  Your raving of a message and a harp
  More mighty than the stars half troubled me,
  But all thats raving. Who is there can compel
  The daughter and the granddaughter of kings
  To be his bedfellow?

Forgael.     Until your lips
  Have called me their beloved, Ill not kiss them.

Dectora. My husband and miy king died at my feet,
  And yet you talk of love.

Forgael.        The movement of time
  Is shaken in these seas, and what one does
  One moment has no might upon the moment
  That follows after.

Dectora.     I understand you now.
  You have a Druid craft of wicked sound
  Wrung from the cold women of the sea
  A magic that can call a demon up,
  Until my body give you kiss for kiss.

Forgael. Your soul shall give the kiss.

Dectora.            I am not afraid,
  While theres a rope to run into a noose
  Or wave to drown. But I have done with words,
  And I would have you look into my face
  And know that it is fearless.

Forgael.          Do what you will,
  For neither I nor you can break a mesh
  Of the great golden net that is about us.

Dectora. Theres nothing in the world thats worth a
  fear.

[She passes Forgael and stands for a moment looking into
his face.]

  I have good reason for that thought.

[She runs suddenly on to the raiscd part of the poop.]

  And now
  I can put fear away as a queen should.

[She mounts on to the hulwark and turns towards
Forgael.]

  Fool, fool! Although you have looked into my face
  You do not see my purpose. I shall have gone
  Before a hand can touch me.

Forgael [folding his arms].   My hands are still;
  The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will,
  You cannot leap out of the golden net.

First Sailor. No need to drown, for, if you will pardon
     us
  And measure out a course and bring us home,
  Well put this man to death.

Dectora.          I promise it.

First Sailor. There is none to take his side.

Aibric.          I am on his side,
  Ill strike a blow for him to give him time
  To cast his dreams away.

[Aibric goes in front of Forgael with drawn sword. For-
gael takes the harp.]

First Sailor.       No otherll do it.

[The Sailors throw Aibric on one side. He falls and lies
upon the deck. They lift their swords to strike Forgael,
who is about to play the harp. The stage begins to
darken. The Sailors hesitate in fear.]

Second Sailor. He has put a sudden darkness over the
  moon.

Dectora. Nine swords with handles of rhinoceros horn
  To him that strikes him first!

First Sailor.       I will strike him first.

[He goes close up to Forgael with his sword lifted.]

[Shrinking back.] He has caught the crescent moon out
  of the sky,
  And carries it between us.

Second Sailor.       Holy fire
  To burn us to the marrow if we strike.

Dectora. Ill give a golden galley full of fruit,
  That has the heady flavour of new wine,
  To him that wounds him to the death.

First Sailor.          Ill do it.
  For all his spells will vanish when he dies,
  Having their life in him.

Second Sailor.    Though it be the moon
  That he is holding up between us there,
  I will strike at him.

The Others.      And I! And I! And I!

               [Forgael plays the harp.]

First Sailor [falling into a dream suddenly. But you were
  saying there is somebody
  Upon that other ship we are to wake.
  You did not know what brought him to his end,
  But it was sudden.

Second Sailor.  You are in the right;
  I had forgotten that we must go wake him.

Dectora. He has flung a Druid spell upon the air,
  And set you dreaming.

Second Sailor.    How can we have a wake
  When we have neither brown nor yellow ale?

First Sailor. I saw a flagon of brown ale aboard her.

Third Sailor. How can we raise the keen that do not
     know
  What name to call him by?

First Sailor.      Come to his ship.
  His name will come into our thoughts in a minute.
  I know that he died a thousand years ago,
  And has not yet been waked.

Second Sailor [beginning to keen]. Ohone! O! O! O!
  The yew-bough has been broken into two,
  And all the birds are scattered.

All the Sailors. O! O! O! O!

               [They go out keening.]

Dectora. Protect me now, gods that my people swear by.

[Aibric has risen from the deck where he had fallen. He
has begun looking for his sword as if in a dream.]

Aibric. Where is my sword that fell out of my hand
  When I first heard the news? Ah, there it is!

[He goes dreamily towards the sword, but Dectora runs at
it and takes it up before he can reach it.]

Aibric [sleepily]. Queen, give it me.

Dectora.          No, I have need of it.

Aibric. Why do you need a sword? But you may keep it.
  Now that hes dead I have no need of it,
  For everything is gone.

A Sailor [calling from the other ship]. Come hither, Aibric,
  And tell me who it is that we are waking.

Aibric [half to Dectora, half to himself]. What name had
  that dead king? Arthur of Britain?
  No, nonot Arthur. I remember now.
  It was golden-armed Iollan, and he died
  Broken-hearted, having lost his queen
  Through wicked spells. That is not all the tale,
  For he was killed. O! O! O! O! O! O!
  For golden-armed Iollan has been killed.

                      [He goes out.]
[While he has been speaking, and through part of what
follows, one hears the wailing of the Sailors from the
other ship. Dectora stands with the sword lifted in
front of Forgael.]

Dectora. I will end all your magic on the instant.

[Her voice hecomes dreamy, and she lowers the sword
slowly, and finally lets it fall. She spreads out her hair.
She takes off her crown and lays it upon the deck.]

  This sword is to lie beside him in the grave.
  It was in all his battles. I will spread my hair,
  And wring my hands, and wail him bitterly,
  For I have heard that he was proud and laughing,
  Blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet,
  And that he died a thousand years ago.
  O; O! O! O!

          [Forgael changes the tune.]

  But no, that is not it.
  They killed him at my feet. O! O! O! O!
  For golden-armed Iollan that I loved-
  But what is it that made me say I loved him?
  It was that harper put it in my thoughts,
  But it is true. Why did they run upon him,
  And beat the golden helmet with their swords?

Forgael. Do you not know me, lady? I am he
  That you are weeping for.

Dectora.       No, for he is dead.
  O! O! O! O! for golden-armed Iollan.

Forgael. It was so given out, but I will prove
  That the grave-diggers in a dreamy frenzy
  Have buried nothing but my golden arms.
  Listen to that low-laughing string of the moon
  And you will recollect my face and voice,
  For you have listened to me playing it
  These thousand years.

[He starts up, listening to the birds. The harp slips from
his hands, and remains leaning against the bulwarks
behind him.]

  What are the birds at there?
  Why are they all a-flutter of a sudden?
  What are you calling out above the mast?
  If railing and reproach and mockery
  Because I have awakened her to love
  By magic strings, Ill make this answer to it:
  Being driven on by voices and by dreams
  That were clear messages from the Ever-living,
  I have done right. What could I but obey?
  And yet you make a clamour of reproach.

Dcctora [laughing]. Why, its a wonder out of reckoning
  That I should keen him from the full of the moon
  To the horn, and he be hale and hearty.

Forgael. How have I wronged her now that she is merry?
  But no, no, no! your cry is not against me.
  You know the counsels of the Ever-living,
  And all that tossing of your wings is joy,
  And all that murmurings but a marriage-song;
  But if it be reproach, I answer this:
  There is not one among you that made love
  by any other means. You call it passion,
  Consideration, generosity;
  But it was all deceit, and flattery
  To win a woman in her own despite,
  For love is war, and there is hatred in it;
  And if you say that she came willingly

Dectora. Why do you turn away and hide your face,
  That I would look upon for ever?

Forgael.            My grief!

Dectora. Have I not loved you for a thousand years?

Forgael. I never have been golden-armed Iollan.

Vectora. I do not understand. I know your face
  Better than my own hands.

Forgael.          I have deceived you
  Out of all reckoning.

Tectora.          Is it not tme
  That you were born a thousand years ago,
  In islands where the children of Aengus wind
  In happy dances under a windy moon,
  And that youll bring me there?

Forgael.          I have deceived you;
  I have deceived you utterly.

Dectora.          How can that be?
  Is it that though your eyes are full of love
  Some other woman has a claim on you,
  And Ive but half!

Forgael.     O no!

Dectora.          And if there is,
  If there be half a hundred more, what matter?
  Ill never give another thought to it;
  No, no, nor half a thought; but do not speak.
  Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
  Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
  And that is why their lovers are afraid
  To tell them a plain story.

Forgael.          Thats not the story;
  But I have done so great a wrong against you,
  There is no measure that it would not burst.
  I will confess it all.

Dectora.       What do I care,
  Now that my body has begun to dream,
  And you have grown to be a burning sod
  In the imagination and intellect?
  If something thats most fabulous were true
  If you had taken me by magic spells,
  And killed a lover or husband at my feet
  I would not let you speak, for I would know
  That it was yesterday and not to-day
  I loved him; I would cover up my ears,
  As I am doing now. [A pause.] Why do you weep?

Forgael. I weep because Ive nothing for your eyes
  But desolate waters and a battered ship.

Dectora. O why do you not lift your eyes to mine?

Forgael. I weepI weep because bare nights above,
  And not a roof of ivory and gold.

Dectora. I would grow jealous of the ivory roof,
  And strike the golden pillars with my hands.
  I would that there was nothing in the world
  But my belovedthat night and day had perished,
  And all that is and all that is to be,
  All that is not the meeting of our lips.

Forgael. You turn away. Why do you turn away?
  Am I to fear the waves, or is the moon
  My enemy?

Dectora.  I looked upon the moon,
  Longing to knead and pull it into shape
  That I might lay it on your head as a crown.
  But now it is your thoughts that wander away,
  For you are looking at the sea. Do you not know
  How great a wrong it is to let ones thought
  Wander a moment when one is in love?

[He has moved away. She follows him. He is looking out
over the sea, shading his eyes.]

  Why are you looking at the sea?

Forgael.            Look there!

Dectora. What is there but a troop of ash-grey birds
  That fly into the west?

Forgael.       But listen, listen!

Dectora. What is there but the crying of the birds?

Forgael. If youll but listen closely to that crying
  Youll hear them calling out to one another
  With human voices

Dectora.     O, I can hear them now.
  What are they? Unto what country do they fly?

Forgael. To unimaginable happiness.
  They have been circling over our heads in the air,
  But now that they have taken to the road
  We have to follow, for they are our pilots;
  And though theyre but the colour of grey ash,
  Theyre crying out, could you but hear their words,
  There is a country at the end of the world
  Where no childs born but to outlive the moon.

[The Sailors comc in with Aibric. They are in great
excitement.]

First Sailor. The hold is full of treasure.

Second Sailor.         Full to the hatches.

First Sailor. Treasure on treasure.

Third Sailor.          Boxes of precious spice.

First Sailor. Ivory images with amethyst eyes.

Third Sailor. Dragons with eyes of ruby.

First Sailor.            The whole ship
  Flashes as if it were a net of herrings.

Third Sailor. Lets home; Id give some rubies to a
  woman.

Second Sailor. Theres somebody Id give the amethyst
  eyes to.

Aibric [silencing thcm with agesture]. We would return to
  our own country, Forgael,
  For we have found a treasure thats so great
  Imagination cannot reckon it.
  And having lit upon this woman there,
  What more have you to look for on the seas?

Forgael. I cannotI am going on to the end.
  As for this woman, I think she is coming with me.

Aibric. The Ever-living have made you mad; but no,
  It was this woman in her womans vengeance
  That drove you to it, and I fool enough
  To fancy that shed bring you home again.
  Twas you that egged him to it, for you know
  That he is being driven to his death.

Dectora. That is not true, for he has promised me
  An unimaginable happiness.

Aibric. And if that happiness be more than dreams,
  More than the froth, the feather, the dust-whirl,
  The crazy nothing that I think it is,
  It shall be in the country of the dead,
  If there be such a country.

Dectora.            No, not there,
  But in some island where the life of the world
  Leaps upward, as if all the streams o the world
  Had run into one fountain.

Aibric.          Speak to him.
  He knows that he is taking you to death;
  Speakhe will not deny it.

Dectora.          Is that true?

Forgael. I do not know for certain, but I know.
  That I have the best of pilots.

Aibric.        Shadows, illusions,
  That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing Ones,
  The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind,
  Or called before his eyes.

Dectora.          O carry me
  To some sure country, some familiar place.
  Have we not everything that life can give
  In having one another?

Forgael.       How could I rest
  If I refused the messengers and pilots
  With all those sights and all that crying out?

Dectora. But I will cover up your eyes and ear?,
  That you may never hear the cry of the birds,
  Or look upon them.

Forgael.     Were they but lowlier
  Id do your will, but they are too hightoo high.

Dectora. Being too high, their heady prophecies
  But harry us with hopes that come to nothing,
  Because we are not proud, imperishable,
  Alone and winged.

Forgael.     Our love shall be like theirs
  When we have put their changeless image on.

Dectora. I am a woman, I die at every breath.

Aibric. Let the birds scatter, for the tree is broken,
  And theres no help in words. [To the Sailors.]

  To the other ship,
  And I will follow you and cut the rope
  When I have said farewell to this man here,
  For neither I nor any living man
  Will look upon his face again.

                 [The Sailors go out.]

Forgael [to Dectora], Go with him,
  For he will shelter you and bring you home.

Aibric [taking Forgaels hand]. Ill do it for his sake.

Dectora. No. Take this sword
  And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.

Aibric [half falling into the keen]. The yew-bough has been
  broken into two,
  And all the birds are scatteredO! O! O!
  Farewell! farewell! [He goes out.]

Dectora. The sword is in the rope
  The ropes in twoit falls into the sea,
  It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,
  Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,
  You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts
     away,
  And I am left alone with my beloved,
  Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.
  We are alone for ever, and I laugh,
  Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.
  The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I
  Shall be alone for ever. We twothis crown
  I half remember. It has been in my dreams.
  Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.
  O flower of the branch, 0 bird among the leaves,
  O silver fish that my two hands have taken
  Out of the running stream, O morning star
  Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn
  Upon the misty border of the wood,
  Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,
  For we will gaze upon this world no longer.

Forgael [gathering Dectoras hair about him]. Beloved, hav-
  ing dragged the net about us,
  And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;
  And that old harp awakens of itself
  To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,
  That have had dreams for father, live in us.
  
~ William Butler Yeats, The Shadowy Waters - The Shadowy Waters
,
332:First Sailor. Has he not led us into these waste seas
  For long enough?

Second Sailor.  Aye, long and long enough.

First Sailor. We have not come upon a shore or ship
  These dozen weeks.

Second Sailor.  And I had thought to make
  A good round Sum upon this cruise, and turn -
  For I am getting on in life - to something
  That has less ups and downs than robbery.

First Sailor. I am so tired of being bachelor
  I could give all my heart to that Red Moll
  That had but the one eye.

Second Sailor.    Can no bewitchment
  Transform these rascal billows into women
  That I may drown myself?

First Sailor.     Better steer home,
  Whether he will or no; and better still
  To take him while he sleeps and carry him
  And drop him from the gunnel.

Second Sailor.       I dare not do it.
  Were't not that there is magic in his harp,
  I would be of your mind; but when he plays it
  Strange creatures flutter up before one's eyes,
  Or cry about one's ears.

First Sailor.     Nothing to fear.

Second Sailor. Do you remember when we sank that
     galley
  At the full moon?

First Sailor.  He played all through the night.

Second Sailor. Until the moon had set; and when I looked
  Where the dead drifted, I could see a bird
  Like a grey gull upon the breast of each.
  While I was looking they rose hurriedly,
  And after circling with strange cries awhile
  Flew westward; and many a time since then
  I've heard a rustling overhead in the wind.

First Sailor. I saw them on that night as well as you.
  But when I had eaten and drunk myself asleep
  My courage came again.

Second Sailor.    But that's not all.
  The other night, while he was playing it,
  A beautiful young man and girl came up
  In a white breaking wave; they had the look
  Of those that are alive for ever and ever.

First Sailor. I saw them, too, one night. Forgael was
     playing,
  And they were listening there& beyond the sail.
  He could not see them, but I held out my hands
  To grasp the woman.

Second Sailor.  You have dared to touch her?

First Sailor. O she was but a shadow, and slipped from
  me.

Second Sailor. But were you not afraid?

First Sailor.          Why should I fear?

Second Sailor. "Twas Aengus and Edain, the wandering
     lovers,
  To whom all lovers pray.

First Sailor.     But what of that?
  A shadow does not carry sword or spear.

Second Sailor. My mother told me that there is not one
  Of the Ever-living half so dangerous
  As that wild Aengus. Long before her day
  He carried Edain off from a king's house,
  And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone
  And in a tower of glass, and from that day
  Has hated every man that's not in love,
  And has been dangerous to him.

First Sailor.          I have heard
  He does not hate seafarers as he hates
  Peaceable men that shut the wind away,
  And keep to the one weary marriage-bed.

Second Sailor. I think that he has Forgael in his net,
  And drags him through the sea,

First Sailor        Well, net or none,
  I'd drown him while we have the chance to do it.

Second Sailor. It's certain I'd sleep easier o' nights
  If he were dead; but who will be our captain,
  Judge of the stars, and find a course for us?

First Sailor. I've thought of that. We must have Aibric
     with us,
  For he can judge the stars as well as Forgael.

                 [Going towards Aibric.]

  Become our captain, Aibric. I am resolved
  To make an end of Forgael while he sleeps.
  There's not a man but will be glad of it
  When it is over, nor one to grumble at us.

Aibric. You have taken pay and made your bargain for it.

First Sailor. What good is there in this hard way of
     living,
  Unless we drain more flagons in a year
  And kiss more lips than lasting peaceable men
  In their long lives? Will you be of our troop
  And take the captain's share of everything
  And bring us into populous seas again?

Aibric. Be of your troop! Aibric be one of you
  And Forgael in the other scale! kill Forgael,
  And he my master from my childhood up!
  If you will draw that sword out of its scabbard
  I'll give my answer.

First Sailor.  You have awakened him.

                 [To Second Sailor.]

  We'd better go, for we have lost this chance.

                 [They go out.]

Forgael. Have the birds passed us? I could hear your
     voice,
  But there were others.

Aibric.        I have seen nothing pass.

Forgael. You're certain of it? I never wake from sleep
  But that I am afraid they may have passed,
  For they're my only pilots. If I lost them
  Straying too far into the north or south,
  I'd never come upon the happiness
  That has been promised me. I have not seen them
  These many days; and yet there must be many
  Dying at every moment in the world,
  And flying towards their peace.

Aibric.          Put by these thoughts,
  And listen to me for a while. The sailors
  Are plotting for your death.

Forgael.          Have I not given
  More riches than they ever hoped to find?
  And now they will not follow, while I seek
  The only riches that have hit my fancy.

Aibric. What riches can you find in this waste sea
  Where no ship sails, where nothing that's alive
  Has ever come but those man-headed birds,
  Knowing it for the world's end?

Forgael.           Where the world ends
  The mind is made unchanging, for it finds
  Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,
  The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,
  The roots of the world.

Aibric.        Shadows before now
  Have driven travellers mad for their own sport.

Forgael. Do you, too, doubt me? Have you joined their
     plot?

Aibric. No, no, do not say that. You know right well
  That I will never lift a hand against you.

Forgael. Why should you be more faithful than the rest,
  Being as doubtful?

Aibric.     I have called you master
  Too many years to lift a hand against you.

Forgael. Maybe it is but natural to doubt me.
  You've never known, I'd lay a wager on it,
  A melancholy that a cup of wine,
  A lucky battle, or a woman's kiss
  Could not amend.

Aibric.     I have good spirits enough.

Forgael. If you will give me all your mind awhile -
  All, all, the very bottom of the bowl -
  I'll show you that I am made differently,
  That nothing can amend it but these waters,
  Where I am rid of life - the events of the world -
  What do you call it? - that old promise-breaker,
  The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,
  "You will have all you have wished for when you have
     earned
  Land for your children or money in a pot.-
  And when we have it we are no happier,
  Because of that old draught under the door,
  Or creaky shoes. And at the end of all
  How are we better off than Seaghan the fool,
  That never did a hand's turn? Aibric! Aibric!
  We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living
  Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
  And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh,
  And find their laughter sweeter to the taste
  For that brief sighing.

Aibric.       If you had loved some woman -

Forgael. You say that also? You have heard the voices,
  For that is what they say - all, all the shadows -
  Aengus and Edain, those passionate wanderers,
  And all the others; but it must be love
  As they have known it. Now the secret's out;
  For it is love that I am seeking for,
  But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
  That is not in the world.

Aibric.        And yet the world
  Has beautiful women to please every man.

Forgael. But he that gets their love after the fashion
  "Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope
  And bodily tenderness, and finds that even
  The bed of love, that in the imagination
  Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,
  Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting,
  And as soon finished.

Aibric.      All that ever loved
  Have loved that way - there is no other way.

Forgael. Yet never have two lovers kissed but they
  believed there was some other near at hand,
  And almost wept because they could not find it.

Aibric. When they have twenty years; in middle life
  They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth,
  And let the dream go by.

Forgael.          It's not a dream,
  But the reality that makes our passion
  As a lamp shadow - no - no lamp, the sun.
  What the world's million lips are thirsting for
  Must be substantial somewhere.

Aibric.          I have heard the Druids
  Mutter such things as they awake from trance.
  It may be that the Ever-living know it -
  No mortal can.

Forgael.  Yes; if they give us help.

Aibric. They are besotting you as they besot
  The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows
  That he has been all night upon the hills,
  Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host
  With the Ever-living.

Forgael.      What if he speak the truth,
  And for a dozen hours have been a part
  Of that more powerful life?

Aibric,          His wife knows better.
  Has she not seen him lying like a log,
  Or fumbling in a dream about the house?
  And if she hear him mutter of wild riders,
  She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing
  That set him to the fancy.

Forgael.        All would be well
  Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
  And get into their world that to the sense
  Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
  Among substantial things; for it is dreams
  That lift us to the flowing, changing world
  That the heart longs for. What is love itself,
  Even though it be the lightest of light love,
  But dreams that hurry from beyond the world
  To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
  Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer,
  Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,
  Not in its image on the mirror!

Aibric.            While
  We're in the body that's impossible.

Forgael. And yet I cannot think they're leading me
  To death; for they that promised to me love
  As those that can outlive the moon have known it, '
  Had the world's total life gathered up, it seemed,
  Into their shining limbs - I've had great teachers.
  Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave -
  You'd never doubt that it was life they promised
  Had you looked on them face to face as I did,
  With so red lips, and running on such feet,
  And having such wide-open, shining eyes.

Aibric. It's certain they are leading you to death.
  None but the dead, or those that never lived,
  Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael!
  They have made you follow the man-headed birds,
  And you have told me that their journey lies
  Towards the country of the dead.

Forgael.            What matter
  If I am going to my death? - for there,
  Or somewhere, I shall find the love they have
     promised.
  That much is certain. I shall find a woman.
  One of the Ever-living, as I think -
  One of the Laughing People - and she and I
  Shall light upon a place in the world's core,
  Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,
  Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,
  Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysclite;
  And there, in juggleries of sight and sense,
  Become one movement, energy, delight,
  Until the overburthened moon is dead.

                 [A number of Sailors enter hurriedly.]

First Sailor. Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice!
  And we are almost on her!

Second Sailor.     We had not known
  But for the ambergris and sandalwood.

First Sailor. NO; but opoponax and cinnamon.

Forgael [taking the tiller from Aibric]. The Ever-living have
  kept my bargain for me,
  And paid you on the nail.

Aibric        Take up that rope
  To make her fast while we are plundering her.

First Sailor. There is a king and queen upon her deck,
  And where there is one woman there'll be others.
Aibric. Speak lower, or they'll hear.

First Sailor.            They cannot hear;
  They are too busy with each other. Look!
  He has stooped down and kissed her on the lips.

Second Sailor. When she finds out we have better men
     aboard
  She may not be too sorry in the end.

First Sailor. She will be like a wild cat; for these queens
  Care more about the kegs of silver and gold
  And the high fame that come to them in marriage,
  Than a strong body and a ready hand.

Second Sailor. There's nobody is natural but a robber,
  And that is why the world totters about
  Upon its bandy legs.

Aibric.        Run at them now,
  And overpower the crew while yet asleep!

                 [The Sailors go out.]

[Voices and the clashing of swords are heard from the
  other ship, which cannot be seen because of the sail.]

A Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am slain!

Another Voice. Wake all below!

Another Voice.  Why have you broken our sleep?

First Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am
     slain!

Forgael [who has remained at the tiller]. There! there they
  come! Gull, gannet, or diver,
  But with a man's head, or a fair woman's,
  They hover over the masthead awhile
  To wait their Fiends; but when their friends have
     come
  They'll fly upon that secret way of theirs.
  One - and one - a couple - five together;
  And I will hear them talking in a minute.
  Yes, voices! but I do not catch the words.
  Now I can hear. There's one of them that says,
  "How light we are, now we are changed to birds!'
  Another answers, "Maybe we shall find
  Our heart's desire now that we are so light.'
  And then one asks another how he died,
  And says, "A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.-
  And now they all wheel suddenly and fly
  To the other side, and higher in the air.
  And now a laggard with a woman's head
  Comes crying, "I have run upon the sword.
  I have fled to my beloved in the air,
  In the waste of the high air, that we may wander
  Among the windy meadows of the dawn.'
  But why are they still waiting? why are they
  Circling and circling over the masthead?
  What power that is more mighty than desire
  To hurry to their hidden happiness
  Withholds them now? Have the Ever-living Ones
  A meaning in that circling overhead?
  But what's the meaning? [He cries out.] Why do you
     linger there?
  Why linger? Run to your desire,
  Are you not happy winged bodies now?

                 [His voice sinks again.]

  Being too busy in the air and the high air,
  They cannot hear my voice; but what's the meaning?

        [The Sailors have returned. Dectora is with them.]

Forgael [turning and seeing her]. Why are you standing
  with your eyes upon me?
  You are not the world's core. O no, no, no!
  That cannot be the meaning of the birds.
  You are not its core. My teeth are in the world,
  But have not bitten yet.

Dectora.       I am a queen,
  And ask for satisfaction upon these
  Who have slain my husband and laid hands upon me.

     [Breaking loose from the Sailors who are holding her.]

  Let go my hands!

Forgael.     Why do you cast a shadow?
  Where do you come from? Who brought you to this
     place?
  They would not send me one that casts a shadow.

Dectora. Would that the storm that overthrew my ships,
  And drowned the treasures of nine conquered nations,
  And blew me hither to my lasting sorrow,
  Had drowned me also. But, being yet alive,
  I ask a fitting punishment for all
  That raised their hands against him.

Forgael.               There are some
  That weigh and measure all in these waste seas -
  They that have all the wisdom that's in life,
  And all that prophesying images
  Made of dim gold rave out in secret tombs;
  They have it that the plans of kings and queens
  But laughter and tears - laughter, laughter, and tears;
  That every man should carry his own soul
  Upon his shoulders.

Dectora.     You've nothing but wild words,
  And I would know if you will give me vengeance.

Forgael. When she finds out I will not let her go -
  When she knows that.

Dectora. What is it that you are muttering -
  That you'll not let me go? I am a queen.

Forgael. Although you are more beautiful than any,
  I almost long that it were possible;
  But if I were to put you on that ship,
  With sailors that were sworn to do your will,
  And you had spread a sail for home, a wind
  Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge
  It had washed among the stars and put them out,
  And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine,
  Until you stood before me on the deck -
  As now.

Dectora.  Does wandering in these desolate seas
  And listening to the cry of wind and wave
  Bring madness?

Forgael.  Queen, I am not mad.

Dectora.              Yet say
  That unimaginable storms of wind and wave
  Would rise against me.

Forgael.       No, I am not mad -
  If it be not that hearing messages
  From lasting watchers, that outlive the moon,
  At the most quiet midnight is to be stricken.

Dectora. And did those watchers bid you take me
  captive?

Forgael.  Both you and I are taken in the net.
  It was their hands that plucked the winds awake
  And blew you hither; and their mouths have
     promised
  I shall have love in their immortal fashion;
  And for this end they gave me my old harp
  That is more mighty than the sun and moon,
  Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars,
  That none might take you from me.

Dectora [first trembling back from the mast where the harp is,
  and then laughing]. For a moment
  Your raving of a message and a harp
  More mighty than the stars half troubled me,
  But all that's raving. Who is there can compel
  The daughter and the granddaughter of kings
  To be his bedfellow?

Forgael.     Until your lips
  Have called me their beloved, I'll not kiss them.

Dectora. My husband and my king died at my feet,
  And yet you talk of love.

Forgael.        The movement of time
  Is shaken in these seas, and what one does
  One moment has no might upon the moment
  That follows after.

Dectora.     I understand you now.
  You have a Druid craft of wicked sound
  Wrung from the cold women of the sea -
  A magic that can call a demon up,
  Until my body give you kiss for kiss.

Forgael. Your soul shall give the kiss.

Dectora.            I am not afraid,
  While there's a rope to run into a noose
  Or wave to drown. But I have done with words,
  And I would have you look into my face
  And know that it is fearless.

Forgael.          Do what you will,
  For neither I nor you can break a mesh
  Of the great golden net that is about us.

Dectora. There's nothing in the world that's worth a
  fear.

[She passes Forgael and stands for a moment looking into
his face.]

  I have good reason for that thought.

[She runs suddenly on to the raised part of the poop.]

  And now
  I can put fear away as a queen should.

[She mounts on to the hulwark and turns towards
Forgael.]

  Fool, fool! Although you have looked into my face
  You do not see my purpose. I shall have gone
  Before a hand can touch me.

Forgael [folding his arms].   My hands are still;
  The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will,
  You cannot leap out of the golden net.

First Sailor. No need to drown, for, if you will pardon
     us
  And measure out a course and bring us home,
  We'll put this man to death.

Dectora.          I promise it.

First Sailor. There is none to take his side.

Aibric.          I am on his side,
  I'll strike a blow for him to give him time
  To cast his dreams away.

[Aibric goes in front of Forgael with drawn sword. For-
gael takes the harp.]

First Sailor.       No other'll do it.

[The Sailors throw Aibric on one side. He falls and lies
upon the deck. They lift their swords to strike Forgael,
who is about to play the harp. The stage begins to
darken. The Sailors hesitate in fear.]

Second Sailor. He has put a sudden darkness over the
  moon.

Dectora. Nine swords with handles of rhinoceros horn
  To him that strikes him first!

First Sailor.       I will strike him first.

[He goes close up to Forgael with his sword lifted.]

[Shrinking back.] He has caught the crescent moon out
  of the sky,
  And carries it between us.

Second Sailor.       Holy fire
  To burn us to the marrow if we strike.

Dectora. I'll give a golden galley full of fruit,
  That has the heady flavour of new wine,
  To him that wounds him to the death.

First Sailor.          I'll do it.
  For all his spells will vanish when he dies,
  Having their life in him.

Second Sailor.    Though it be the moon
  That he is holding up between us there,
  I will strike at him.

The Others.      And I! And I! And I!

               [Forgael plays the harp.]

First Sailor [falling into a dream suddenly. But you were
  saying there is somebody
  Upon that other ship we are to wake.
  You did not know what brought him to his end,
  But it was sudden.

Second Sailor.  You are in the right;
  I had forgotten that we must go wake him.

Dectora. He has flung a Druid spell upon the air,
  And set you dreaming.

Second Sailor.    How can we have a wake
  When we have neither brown nor yellow ale?

First Sailor. I saw a flagon of brown ale aboard her.

Third Sailor. How can we raise the keen that do not
     know
  What name to call him by?

First Sailor.      Come to his ship.
  His name will come into our thoughts in a minute.
  I know that he died a thousand years ago,
  And has not yet been waked.

Second Sailor[beginning to keen]. Ohone! O! O! O!
  The yew-bough has been broken into two,
  And all the birds are scattered.

All the Sailors. O! O! O! O!

               [They go out keening.]

Dectora. Protect me now, gods that my people swear by.

[Aibric has risen from the deck where he had fallen. He
has begun looking for his sword as if in a dream.]

Aibric. Where is my sword that fell out of my hand
  When I first heard the news? Ah, there it is!

[He goes dreamily towards the sword, but Dectora runs at
it and takes it up before he can reach it.]

Aibric [sleepily]. Queen, give it me.

Dectora.         No, I have need of it.

Aibric. Why do you need a sword? But you may keep it.
  Now that he's dead I have no need of it,
  For everything is gone.

A Sailor [calling from the other ship]. Come hither, Aibric,
  And tell me who it is that we are waking.

Aibric [half to Dectora, half to himself]. What name had
  that dead king? Arthur of Britain?
  No, no - not Arthur. I remember now.
  It was golden-armed Iollan, and he died
  Broken-hearted, having lost his queen
  Through wicked spells. That is not all the tale,
  For he was killed. O! O! O! O! O! O!
  For golden-armed Iollan has been killed.

                      [He goes out.]
[While he has been speaking, and through part of what
follows, one hears the wailing of the Sailors from the
other ship. Dectora stands with the sword lifted in
front of Forgael.]

Dectora. I will end all your magic on the instant.

[Her voice becomes dreamy, and she lowers the sword
slowly, and finally lets it fall. She spreads out her hair.
She takes off her crown and lays it upon the deck.]

  This sword is to lie beside him in the grave.
  It was in all his battles. I will spread my hair,
  And wring my hands, and wail him bitterly,
  For I have heard that he was proud and laughing,
  Blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet,
  And that he died a thousand years ago.
  O; O! O! O!

          [Forgael changes the tune.]

  But no, that is not it.
  They killed him at my feet. O! O! O! O!
  For golden-armed Iollan that I loved-
  But what is it that made me say I loved him?
  It was that harper put it in my thoughts,
  But it is true. Why did they run upon him,
  And beat the golden helmet with their swords?

Forgael. Do you not know me, lady? I am he
  That you are weeping for.

Dectora.       No, for he is dead.
  O! O! O! O! for golden-armed Iollan.

Forgael. It was so given out, but I will prove
  That the grave-diggers in a dreamy frenzy
  Have buried nothing but my golden arms.
  Listen to that low-laughing string of the moon
  And you will recollect my face and voice,
  For you have listened to me playing it
  These thousand years.

[He starts up, listening to the birds. The harp slips from
his hands, and remains leaning against the bulwarks
behind him.]

  What are the birds at there?
  Why are they all a-flutter of a sudden?
  What are you calling out above the mast?
  If railing and reproach and mockery
  Because I have awakened her to love
  By magic strings, I'll make this answer to it:
  Being driven on by voices and by dreams
  That were clear messages from the Ever-living,
  I have done right. What could I but obey?
  And yet you make a clamour of reproach.

Dectora [laughing]. Why, it's a wonder out of reckoning
  That I should keen him from the full of the moon
  To the horn, and he be hale and hearty.

Forgael. How have I wronged her now that she is merry?
  But no, no, no! your cry is not against me.
  You know the counsels of the Ever-living,
  And all that tossing of your wings is joy,
  And all that murmuring's but a marriage-song;
  But if it be reproach, I answer this:
  There is not one among you that made love
  by any other means. You call it passion,
  Consideration, generosity;
  But it was all deceit, and flattery
  To win a woman in her own despite,
  For love is war, and there is hatred in it;
  And if you say that she came willingly -

Dectora. Why do you turn away and hide your face,
  That I would look upon for ever?

Forgael.            My grief!

Dectora. Have I not loved you for a thousand years?

Forgael. I never have been golden-armed Iollan.

Vectora. I do not understand. I know your face
  Better than my own hands.

Forgael.          I have deceived you
  Out of all reckoning.

Tectora.          Is it not time
  That you were born a thousand years ago,
  In islands where the children of Aengus wind
  In happy dances under a windy moon,
  And that you'll bring me there?

Forgael.          I have deceived you;
  I have deceived you utterly.

Dectora.          How can that be?
  Is it that though your eyes are full of love
  Some other woman has a claim on you,
  And I've but half!

Forgael.     O no!

Dectora.          And if there is,
  If there be half a hundred more, what matter?
  I'll never give another thought to it;
  No, no, nor half a thought; but do not speak.
  Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
  Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
  And that is why their lovers are afraid
  To tell them a plain story.

Forgael.          That's not the story;
  But I have done so great a wrong against you,
  There is no measure that it would not burst.
  I will confess it all.

Dectora.       What do I care,
  Now that my body has begun to dream,
  And you have grown to be a burning sod
  In the imagination and intellect?
  If something that's most fabulous were true -
  If you had taken me by magic spells,
  And killed a lover or husband at my feet -
  I would not let you speak, for I would know
  That it was yesterday and not to-day
  I loved him; I would cover up my ears,
  As I am doing now. [A pause.] Why do you weep?

Forgael. I weep because I've nothing for your eyes
  But desolate waters and a battered ship.

Dectora. O why do you not lift your eyes to mine?

Forgael. I weep - I weep because bare night's above,
  And not a roof of ivory and gold.

Dectora. I would grow jealous of the ivory roof,
  And strike the golden pillars with my hands.
  I would that there was nothing in the world
  But my beloved - that night and day had perished,
  And all that is and all that is to be,
  All that is not the meeting of our lips.

Forgael. You turn away. Why do you turn away?
  Am I to fear the waves, or is the moon
  My enemy?

Dectora.  I looked upon the moon,
  Longing to knead and pull it into shape
  That I might lay it on your head as a crown.
  But now it is your thoughts that wander away,
  For you are looking at the sea. Do you not know
  How great a wrong it is to let one's thought
  Wander a moment when one is in love?

[He has moved away. She follows him. He is looking out
over the sea, shading his eyes.]

  Why are you looking at the sea?

Forgael.            Look there!

Dectora. What is there but a troop of ash-grey birds
  That fly into the west?

Forgael.       But listen, listen!

Dectora. What is there but the crying of the birds?

Forgael. If you'll but listen closely to that crying
  You'll hear them calling out to one another
  With human voices

Dectora.     O, I can hear them now.
  What are they? Unto what country do they fly?

Forgael. To unimaginable happiness.
  They have been circling over our heads in the air,
  But now that they have taken to the road
  We have to follow, for they are our pilots;
  And though they're but the colour of grey ash,
  They're crying out, could you but hear their words,
  "There is a country at the end of the world
  Where no child's born but to outlive the moon.'

[The Sailors come in with Aibric. They are in great
excitement.]

First Sailor. The hold is full of treasure.

Second Sailor.         Full to the hatches.

First Sailor. Treasure on treasure.

Third Sailor.          Boxes of precious spice.

First Sailor. Ivory images with amethyst eyes.

Third Sailor. Dragons with eyes of ruby.

First Sailor.            The whole ship
  Flashes as if it were a net of herrings.

Third Sailor. Let's home; I'd give some rubies to a
  woman.

Second Sailor. There's somebody I'd give the amethyst
  eyes to.

Aibric [silencing them with agesture]. We would return to
  our own country, Forgael,
  For we have found a treasure that's so great
  Imagination cannot reckon it.
  And having lit upon this woman there,
  What more have you to look for on the seas?

Forgael. I cannot - I am going on to the end.
  As for this woman, I think she is coming with me.

Aibric. The Ever-living have made you mad; but no,
  It was this woman in her woman's vengeance
  That drove you to it, and I fool enough
  To fancy that she'd bring you home again.
  'Twas you that egged him to it, for you know
  That he is being driven to his death.

Dectora. That is not true, for he has promised me
  An unimaginable happiness.

Aibric. And if that happiness be more than dreams,
  More than the froth, the feather, the dust-whirl,
  The crazy nothing that I think it is,
  It shall be in the country of the dead,
  If there be such a country.

Dectora.            No, not there,
  But in some island where the life of the world
  Leaps upward, as if all the streams o' the world
  Had run into one fountain.

Aibric.          Speak to him.
  He knows that he is taking you to death;
  Speak - he will not deny it.

Dectora.          Is that true?

Forgael. I do not know for certain, but I know.
  That I have the best of pilots.

Aibric.        Shadows, illusions,
  That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing Ones,
  The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind,
  Or called before his eyes.

Dectora.          O carry me
  To some sure country, some familia'r place.
  Have we not everything that life can give
  In having one another?

Forgael.       How could I rest
  If I refused the messengers and pilots
  With all those sights and all that crying out?

Dectora. But I will cover up your eyes and ear?,
  That you may never hear the cry of the birds,
  Or look upon them.

Forgael.     Were they but lowlier
  I'd do your will, but they are too high - too high.

Dectora. Being too high, their heady prophecies
  But harry us with hopes that come to nothing,
  Because we are not proud, imperishable,
  Alone and winged.

Forgael.     Our love shall be like theirs
  When we have put their changeless image on.

Dectora. I am a woman, I die at every breath.

Aibric. Let the birds scatter, for the tree is broken,
  And there's no help in words. [To the Sailors.]

  To the other ship,
  And I will follow you and cut the rope
  When I have said farewell to this man here,
  For neither I nor any living man
  Will look upon his face again.

                 [The Sailors go out.]

Forgael [to Dectora], Go with him,
  For he will shelter you and bring you home.

Aibric [taking Forgael's hand]. I'll do it for his sake.

Dectora. No. Take this sword
  And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.

Aibric [half falling into the keen]. The yew-bough has been
  broken into two,
  And all the birds are scattered - O! O! O!
  Farewell! farewell! [He goes out.]

Dectora. The sword is in the rope -
  The rope's in two - it falls into the sea,
  It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,
  Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,
  You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts
     away,
  And I am left alone with my beloved,
  Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.
  We are alone for ever, and I laugh,
  Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.
  The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I
  Shall be alone for ever. We two - this crown -
  I half remember. It has been in my dreams.
  Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.
  O flower of the branch, 0 bird among the leaves,
  O silver fish that my two hands have taken
  Out of the running stream, O morning star
  Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn
  Upon the misty border of the wood,
  Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,
  For we will gaze upon this world no longer.

Forgael [gathering Dectora's hair about him]. Beloved, hav-
  ing dragged the net about us,
  And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;
  And that old harp awakens of itself
  To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,
  That have had dreams for father, live in us.
The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast,
with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea
on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar
coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a
series of steps behind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves
overhead. When the play opens there are four persons upon the
deck. Aibric stands by the tiller. Forgael sleeps upon the raised
portion of the deck towards the front of the stage. Two Sailors
are standing near to the mast, on which a harp is hanging.
~ William Butler Yeats, A Dramatic Poem
,
333:Rose Mary
Of her two fights with the Beryl-stone
Lost the first, but the second won.
PART I
“MARY mine that art Mary's Rose
Come in to me from the garden-close.
The sun sinks fast with the rising dew,
And we marked not how the faint moon grew;
But the hidden stars are calling you.
“Tall Rose Mary, come to my side,
And read the stars if you'd be a bride.
In hours whose need was not your own,
While you were a young maid yet ungrown
You've read the stars in the Beryl-stone.
“Daughter, once more I bid you read;
But now let it be for your own need:
Because to-morrow, at break of day,
To Holy Cross he rides on his way,
Your knight Sir James of Heronhaye.
“Ere he wed you, flower of mine,
For a heavy shrift he seeks the shrine.
Now hark to my words and do not fear;
Ill news next I have for your ear;
But be you strong, and our help is here.
“On his road, as the rumour's rife,
An ambush waits to take his life.
He needs will go, and will go alone;
Where the peril lurks may not be known;
But in this glass all things are shown.”
Pale Rose Mary sank to the floor:—
“The night will come if the day is o'er!”
“Nay, heaven takes counsel, star with star,
And help shall reach your heart from afar:
A bride you'll be, as a maid you are.”
The lady unbound her jewelled zone
And drew from her robe the Beryl-stone.
Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere,—
World of our world, the sun's compeer,
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That bears and buries the toiling year.
With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn
Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon:
Freaked it was as the bubble's ball,
Rainbow-hued through a misty pall
Like the middle light of the waterfall.
Shadows dwelt in its teeming girth
Of the known and unknown things of earth;
The cloud above and the wave around,—
The central fire at the sphere's heart bound,
Like doomsday prisoned underground.
A thousand years it lay in the sea
With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly;
Deep it lay 'mid the coiled sea-wrack,
But the ocean-spirits found the track:
A soul was lost to win it back.
The lady upheld the wondrous thing:—
“Ill fare”(she said) “with a fiend's-faring:
But Moslem blood poured forth like wine
Can hallow Hell, 'neath the Sacred Sign;
And my lord brought this from Palestine.
“Spirits who fear the Blessed Rood
Drove forth the accursed multitude
That heathen worship housed herein,—
Never again such home to win,
Save only by a Christian's sin.
“All last night at an altar fair
I burnt strange fires and strove with prayer;
Till the flame paled to the red sunrise,
All rites I then did solemnize;
And the spell lacks nothing but your eyes.”
Low spake maiden Rose Mary:—
“O mother mine, if I should not see!”
“Nay, daughter, cover your face no more,
But bend love's heart to the hidden lore,
And you shall see now as heretofore.”
Paler yet were the pale cheeks grown
As the grey eyes sought the Beryl-stone:
Then over her mother's lap leaned she,
And stretched her thrilled throat passionately,
And sighed from her soul, and said, “I see.”
Even as she spoke, they two were 'ware
220
Of music-notes that fell through the air;
A chiming shower of strange device,
Drop echoing drop, once, twice, and thrice,
As rain may fall in Paradise.
An instant come, in an instant gone,
No time there was to think thereon.
The mother held the sphere on her knee:—
“Lean this way and speak low to me,
And take no note but of what you see.”
“I see a man with a besom grey
That sweeps the flying dust away.”
“Ay, that comes first in the mystic sphere;
But now that the way is swept and clear,
Heed well what next you look on there.”
“Stretched aloft and adown I see
Two roads that part in waste-country:
The glen lies deep and the ridge stands tall;
What's great below is above seen small,
And the hill-side is the valley-wall.”
“Stream-bank, daughter, or moor and moss,
Both roads will take to Holy Cross.
The hills are a weary waste to wage;
But what of the valley-road's presage?
That way must tend his pilgrimage.”
“As 'twere the turning leaves of a book,
The road runs past me as I look;
Or it is even as though mine eye
Should watch calm waters filled with sky
While lights and clouds and wings went by.”
“In every covert seek a spear;
They'll scarce lie close till he draws near.”
“The stream has spread to a river now;
The stiff blue sedge is deep in the slough,
But the banks are bare of shrub or bough.’
“Is there any roof that near at hand
Might shelter yield to a hidden band?”
“On the further bank I see but one,
And a herdsman now in the sinking sun
Unyokes his team at the threshold-stone.”
“Keep heedful watch by the water's edge,—
Some boat might lurk 'neath the shadowed sedge.”
“One slid but now 'twixt the winding shores,
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But a peasant woman bent to the oars
And only a young child steered its course.
“Mother, something flashed to my sight!—
Nay, it is but the lapwing's flight.—
What glints there like a lance that flees?—
Nay, the flags are stirred in the breeze,
And the water's bright through the dart-rushes.
“Ah! vainly I search from side to side:—
Woe's me! and where do the foemen hide?
Woe's me! and perchance I pass them by,
And under the new dawn's blood-red sky
Even where I gaze the dead shall lie.”
Said the mother: “For dear love's sake,
Speak more low, lest the spell should break.”
Said the daughter: “By love's control,
My eyes, my words, are strained to the goal;
But oh! the voice that cries in my soul!”
“Hush, sweet, hush! be calm and behold.”
“I see two floodgates broken and old:
The grasses wave o'er the ruined weir,
But the bridge still leads to the breakwater;
And—mother, mother, O mother dear!”
The damsel clung to her mother's knee,
And dared not let the shriek go free;
Low she crouched by the lady's chair,
And shrank blindfold in her fallen hair,
And whispering said, “The spears are there!”
The lady stooped aghast from her place,
And cleared the locks from her daughter's face.
“More's to see, and she swoons, alas!
Look, look again, ere the moment pass!
One shadow comes but once to the glass.
“See you there what you saw but now?”
“I see eight men 'neath the willow bough.
All over the weir a wild growth's spread:
Ah me! it will hide a living head
As well as the water hides the dead.
“They lie by the broken water-gate
As men who have a while to wait.
The chief's high lance has a blazoned scroll,—
He seems some lord of tithe and toll
With seven squires to his bannerole.
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“The little pennon quakes in the air,
I cannot trace the blazon there:—
Ah! now I can see the field of blue,
The spurs and the merlins two and two;—
It is the Warden of Holycleugh!”
“God be thanked for the thing we know!
You have named your good knight's mortal foe.
Last Shrovetide in the tourney-game
He sought his life by treasonous shame;
And this way now doth he seek the same.
“So, fair lord, such a thing you are!
But we too watch till the morning star.
Well, June is kind and the moon is clear:
Saint Judas send you a merry cheer
For the night you lie in Warisweir!
“Now, sweet daughter, but one more sight,
And you may lie soft and sleep to-night.
We know in the vale what perils be:
Now look once more in the glass, and see
If over the hills the road lies free.”
Rose Mary pressed to her mother's cheek,
And almost smiled but did not speak;
Then turned again to the saving spell,
With eyes to search and with lips to tell
The heart of things invisible.
“Again the shape with the besom grey
Comes back to sweep the clouds away.
Again I stand where the roads divide;
But now all's near on the steep hillside,
And a thread far down is the rivertide.”
“Ay, child, your road is o'er moor and moss,
Past Holycleugh to Holy Cross.
Our hunters lurk in the valley's wake,
As they knew which way the chase would take:
Yet search the hills for your true love's sake.”
“Swift and swifter the waste runs by,
And nought I see but the heath and the sky;
No brake is there that could hide a spear,
And the gaps to a horseman's sight lie clear;
Still past it goes, and there's nought to fear.”
“Fear no trap that you cannot see,—
They'd not lurk yet too warily.
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Below by the weir they lie in sight,
And take no heed how they pass the night
Till close they crouch with the morning light.”
“The road shifts ever and brings in view
Now first the heights of Holycleugh:
Dark they stand o'er the vale below,
And hide that heaven which yet shall show
The thing their master's heart doth know.
“Where the road looks to the castle steep,
There are seven hill-clefts wide and deep:
Six mine eyes can search as they list,
But the seventh hollow is brimmed with mist:
If aught were there, it might not be wist.”
“Small hope, my girl, for a helm to hide
In mists that cling to a wild moorside:
Soon they melt with the wind and sun,
And scarce would wait such deeds to be done
God send their snares be the worst to shun.”
“Still the road winds ever anew
As it hastens on towards Holycleugh;
And ever the great walls loom more near,
Till the castle-shadow, steep and sheer,
Drifts like a cloud, and the sky is clear.”
“Enough, my daughter,” the mother said,
And took to her breast the bending head;
“Rest, poor head, with my heart below,
While love still lulls you as long ago:
For all is learnt that we need to know.
“Long the miles and many the hours
From the castle-height to the abbey-towers;
But here the journey has no more dread;
Too thick with life is the whole road spread
For murder's trembling foot to tread.”
She gazed on the Beryl-stone full fain
Ere she wrapped it close in her robe again:
The flickering shades were dusk and dun
And the lights throbbed faint in unison
Like a high heart when a race is run.
As the globe slid to its silken gloom,
Once more a music rained through the room;
Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray,
And sobbed like tears at the heart of May,
224
And died as laughter dies away.
The lady held her breath for a space,
And then she looked in her daughter's face:
But wan Rose Mary had never heard;
Deep asleep like a sheltered bird
She lay with the long spell minister'd.
“Ah! and yet I must leave you, dear,
For what you have seen your knight must hear.
Within four days, by the help of God,
He comes back safe to his heart's abode:
Be sure he shall shun the valley-road.”
Rose Mary sank with a broken moan,
And lay in the chair and slept alone,
Weary, lifeless, heavy as lead:
Long it was ere she raised her head
And rose up all discomforted.
She searched her brain for a vanished thing,
And clasped her brows, remembering;
Then knelt and lifted her eyes in awe,
And sighed with a long sigh sweet to draw:—
“Thank God, thank God, thank God I saw!”
The lady had left her as she lay,
To seek the Knight of Heronhaye.
But first she clomb by a secret stair,
And knelt at a carven altar fair,
And laid the precious Beryl there.
Its girth was graved with a mystic rune
In a tongue long dead 'neath sun and moon:
A priest of the Holy Sepulchre
Read that writing and did not err;
And her lord had told its sense to her.
She breathed the words in an undertone:—
“None sees here but the pure alone.”
“And oh!” she said, “what rose may be
In Mary's bower more pure to see
Than my own sweet maiden Rose Mary?”
BERYL-SONG
We whose home is the Beryl,
Fire-spirits of dread desire,
225
Who entered in
By a secret sin,
'Gainst whom all powers that strive with ours are sterile,—
We cry, Woe to thee, mother!
What hast thou taught her, the girl thy daughter,
That she and none other
Should this dark morrow to her deadly sorrow imperil?
What were her eyes
But the fiend's own spies,
O mother,
And shall We not fee her, our proper prophet and seër?
Go to her, mother,
Even thou, yea thou and none other,
Thou, from the Beryl:
Her fee must thou take her,
Her fee that We send, and make her,
Even in this hour, her sin's unsheltered avower.
Whose steed did neigh,
Riderless, bridleless,
At her gate before it was day?
Lo! where doth hover
The soul of her lover?
She sealed his doom, she, she was the sworn approver,—
Whose eyes were so wondrous wise,
Yet blind, ah! blind to his peril!
For stole not We in
Through a love-linked sin,
'Gainst whom all powers at war with ours are sterile,—
Fire-spirits of dread desire,
We whose home is the Beryl?
PART II
“PALE Rose Mary, what shall be done
With a rose that Mary weeps upon?”
“Mother, let it fall from the tree,
And never walk where the strewn leaves be
Till winds have passed and the path is free.”
“Sad Rose Mary, what shall be done
With a cankered flower beneath the sun?”
“Mother, let it wait for the night;
226
Be sure its shame shall be out of sight
Ere the moon pale or the east grow light.”
“Lost Rose Mary, what shall be done
With a heart that is but a broken one?”
“Mother, let it lie where it must;
The blood was drained with the bitter thrust,
And dust is all that sinks in the dust.”
“Poor Rose Mary, what shall I do,—
I, your mother, that lovèd you?”
“O my mother, and is love gone?
Then seek you another love anon:
Who cares what shame shall lean upon?”
Low drooped trembling Rose Mary,
Then up as though in a dream stood she.
“Come, my heart, it is time to go;
This is the hour that has whispered low
When thy pulse quailed in the nights we know.
“Yet O my heart, thy shame has a mate
Who will not leave thee desolate.
Shame for shame, yea and sin for sin:
Yet peace at length may our poor souls win
If love for love be found therein.
“O thou who seek'st our shrift to-day,”
She cried, “O James of Heronhaye—
Thy sin and mine was for love alone;
And oh! in the sight of God 'tis known
How the heart has since made heavy moan.
“Three days yet!” she said to her heart;
“But then he comes, and we will not part.
God, God be thanked that I still could see!
Oh! he shall come back assuredly,
But where, alas! must he seek for me?
“O my heart, what road shall we roam
Till my wedding-music fetch me home?
For love's shut from us and bides afar,
And scorn leans over the bitter bar
And knows us now for the thing we are.”
Tall she stood with a cheek flushed high
And a gaze to burn the heart-strings by.
'Twas the lightning-flash o'er sky and plain
Ere labouring thunders heave the chain
From the floodgates of the drowning rain.
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The mother looked on the daughter still
As on a hurt thing that's yet to kill.
Then wildly at length the pent tears came;
The love swelled high with the swollen shame,
And their hearts' tempest burst on them.
Closely locked, they clung without speech,
And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
In stormy bowers of the night's mid-noon.
They swayed together, shuddering sore,
Till the mother's heart could bear no more.
'Twas death to feel her own breast shake
Even to the very throb and ache
Of the burdened heart she still must break.
All her sobs ceased suddenly,
And she sat straight up but scarce could see.
“O daughter, where should my speech begin?
Your heart held fast its secret sin:
How think you, child, that I read therein?”
“Ah me! but I thought not how it came
When your words showed that you knew my shame:
And now that you call me still your own,
I half forget you have ever known.
Did you read my heart in the Beryl-stone?”
The lady answered her mournfully:—
“The Beryl-stone has no voice for me:
But when you charged its power to show
The truth which none but the pure may know,
Did naught speak once of a coming woe?”
Her hand was close to her daughter's heart,
And it felt the life-blood's sudden start:
A quick deep breath did the damsel draw,
Like the struck fawn in the oakenshaw:
“O mother,” she cried, “but still I saw!”
“O child, my child, why held you apart
From my great love your hidden heart?
Said I not that all sin must chase
From the spell's sphere the spirits of grace,
And yield their rule to the evil race?
“Ah! would to God I had clearly told
How strong those powers, accurst of old:
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Their heart is the ruined house of lies;
O girl, they can seal the sinful eyes,
Or show the truth by contraries!”
The daughter sat as cold as a stone,
And spoke no word but gazed alone,
Nor moved, though her mother strove a space
To clasp her round in a close embrace,
Because she dared not see her face.
“Oh!” at last did the mother cry,
“Be sure, as he loved you, so will I!
Ah! still and dumb is the bride, I trow;
But cold and stark as the winter snow
Is the bridegroom's heart, laid dead below!
“Daughter, daughter, remember you
That cloud in the hills by Holycleugh?
'Twas a Hell-screen hiding truth away:
There, not i' the vale, the ambush lay,
And thence was the dead borne home to-day.”
Deep the flood and heavy the shock
When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
To the prisoned tide of doom set free
In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.
Once she sprang as the heifer springs
With the wolf's teeth at its red heart-strings.
First 'twas fire in her breast and brain,
And then scarce hers but the whole world's pain,
As she gave one shriek and sank again.
In the hair dark-waved the face lay white
As the moon lies in the lap of night;
And as night through which no moon may dart
Lies on a pool in the woods apart,
So lay the swoon on the weary heart.
The lady felt for the bosom's stir,
And wildly kissed and called on her;
Then turned away with a quick footfall,
And slid the secret door in the wall,
And clomb the strait stair's interval.
There above in the altar-cell
A little fountain rose and fell:
She set a flask to the water's flow,
And, backward hurrying, sprinkled now
229
The still cold breast and the pallid brow.
Scarce cheek that warmed or breath on the air,
Yet something told that life was there.
“Ah! not with the heart the body dies!”
The lady moaned in a bitter wise;
Then wrung her hands and hid her eyes.
“Alas! and how may I meet again
In the same poor eyes the selfsame pain?
What help can I seek, such grief to guide?
Ah! one alone might avail,” she cried—
“The priest who prays at the dead man's side.”
The lady arose, and sped down all
The winding stairs to the castle-hall.
Long-known valley and wood and stream,
As the loopholes passed, naught else did seem
Than the torn threads of a broken dream.
The hall was full of the castle-folk;
The women wept, but the men scarce spoke.
As the lady crossed the rush-strewn floor,
The throng fell backward, murmuring sore,
And pressed outside round the open door.
A stranger shadow hung on the hall
Than the dark pomp of a funeral.
'Mid common sights that were there alway,
As 'twere a chance of the passing day,
On the ingle-bench the dead man lay.
A priest who passed by Holycleugh
The tidings brought when the day was new.
He guided them who had fetched the dead;
And since that hour, unwearièd,
He knelt in prayer at the low bier's head.
Word had gone to his own domain
That in evil wise the knight was slain:
Soon the spears must gather apace
And the hunt be hard on the hunters' trace;
But all things yet lay still for a space.
As the lady's hurried step drew near,
The kneeling priest looked up to her.
“Father, death is a grievous thing;
But oh! the woe has a sharper sting
That craves by me your ministering.
“Alas for the child that should have wed
230
This noble knight here lying dead!
Dead in hope, with all blessed boon
Of love thus rent from her heart ere noon,
I left her laid in a heavy swoon.
“O haste to the open bower-chamber
That's topmost as you mount the stair:
Seek her, father, ere yet she wake;
Your words, not mine, be the first to slake
This poor heart's fire, for Christ's sweet sake!
“God speed!” she said as the priest passed through,
“And I ere long will be with you.”
Then low on the hearth her knees sank prone;
She signed all folk from the threshold-stone,
And gazed in the dead man's face alone.
The fight for life found record yet
In the clenched lips and the teeth hard-set;
The wrath from the bent brow was not gone,
And stark in the eyes the hate still shone
Of that they last had looked upon.
The blazoned coat was rent on his breast
Where the golden field was goodliest;
But the shivered sword, close-gripped, could tell
That the blood shed round him where he fell
Was not all his in the distant dell.
The lady recked of the corpse no whit,
But saw the soul and spoke to it:
A light there was in her steadfast eyes,—
The fire of mortal tears and sighs
That pity and love immortalize.
“By thy death have I learnt to-day
Thy deed, O James of Heronhaye!
Great wrong thou hast done to me and mine;
And haply God hath wrought for a sign
By our blind deed this doom of thine.
“Thy shrift, alas! thou wast not to win;
But may death shrive thy soul herein!
Full well do I know thy love should be
Even yet—had life but stayed with thee—
Our honour's strong security.”
She stooped, and said with a sob's low stir,—
“Peace be thine,—but what peace for her?”
But ere to the brow her lips were press'd,
231
She marked, half-hid in the riven vest,
A packet close to the dead man's breast.
'Neath surcoat pierced and broken mail
It lay on the blood-stained bosom pale.
The clot hung round it, dull and dense,
And a faintness seized her mortal sense
As she reached her hand and drew it thence.
'Twas steeped in the heart's flood welling high
From the heart it there had rested by:
'Twas glued to a broidered fragment gay,—
A shred by spear-thrust rent away
From the heron-wings of Heronhaye.
She gazed on the thing with piteous eyne:—
“Alas, poor child, some pledge of thine!
Ah me! in this troth the hearts were twain,
And one hath ebbed to this crimson stain,
And when shall the other throb again?”
She opened the packet heedfully;
The blood was stiff, and it scarce might be.
She found but a folded paper there,
And round it, twined with tenderest care,
A long bright tress of golden hair.
Even as she looked, she saw again
That dark-haired face in its swoon of pain:
It seemed a snake with a golden sheath
Crept near, as a slow flame flickereth,
And stung her daughter's heart to death.
She loosed the tress, but her hand did shake
As though indeed she had touched a snake;
And next she undid the paper's fold,
But that too trembled in her hold,
And the sense scarce grasped the tale it told.
“My heart's sweet lord,” ('twas thus she read,)
“At length our love is garlanded.
At Holy Cross, within eight days' space,
I seek my shrift; and the time and place
Shall fit thee too for thy soul's good grace.
“From Holycleugh on the seventh day
My brother rides, and bides away:
And long or e'er he is back, mine own,
Afar where the face of fear's unknown
We shall be safe with our love alone.
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“Ere yet at the shrine my knees I bow,
I shear one tress for our holy vow.
As round these words these threads I wind,
So, eight days hence, shall our loves be twined,
Says my lord's poor lady, JOCELIND.”
She read it twice, with a brain in thrall,
And then its echo told her all.
O'er brows low-fall'n her hands she drew:—
“O God!” she said, as her hands fell too,—
“The Warden's sister of Holycleugh!”
She rose upright with a long low moan,
And stared in the dead man's face new-known.
Had it lived indeed? She scarce could tell:
'Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,—
A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.
She lifted the lock of gleaming hair
And smote the lips and left it there.
“Here's gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
O thou dead body and damnèd soul!”
She turned, sore dazed, for a voice was near,
And she knew that some one called to her.
On many a column fair and tall
A high court ran round the castle-hall;
And thence it was that the priest did call.
“I sought your child where you bade me go,
And in rooms around and rooms below;
But where, alas! may the maiden be?
Fear nought,—we shall find her speedily,—
But come, come hither, and seek with me.”
She reached the stair like a lifelorn thing,
But hastened upward murmuring,
“Yea, Death's is a face that's fell to see;
But bitterer pang Life hoards for thee,
Thou broken heart of Rose Mary!”
BERYL-SONG
We whose throne is the Beryl,
Dire-gifted spirits of fire,
Who for a twin
233
Leash Sorrow to Sin,
Who on no flower refrain to lour with peril,—
We cry,—O desolate daughter!
Thou and thy mother share newer shame with each other
Than last night's slaughter.
Awake and tremble, for our curses assemble!
What more, that thou know'st not yet,—
That life nor death shall forget?
No help from Heaven,—thy woes heart-riven are sterile!
O once a maiden,
With yet worse sorrow can any morrow be laden?
It waits for thee,
It looms, it must be,
O lost among women,—
It comes and thou canst not flee.
Amen to the omen,
Says the voice of the Beryl.
Thou sleep'st? Awake,—
What dar'st thou yet for his sake,
Who each for other did God's own Future imperil?
Dost dare to live
`Mid the pangs each hour must give?
Nay, rather die,—
With him thy lover 'neath Hell's cloud-cover to fly,—
Hopeless, yet not apart,
Cling heart to heart,
And beat through the nether storm-eddying winds together?
Shall this be so?
There thou shalt meet him, but mayst thou greet him? ah no !
He loves, but thee he hoped nevermore to see,—
He sighed as he died,
But with never a thought for thee.
Alone!
Alone, for ever alone,—
Whose eyes were such wondrous spies for the fate foreshown!
Lo! have not We leashed the twin
Of endless Sorrow to Sin,—
Who on no flower refrain to lour with peril,—
Dire-gifted spirits of fire,
We whose throne is the Beryl?
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PART III
A SWOON that breaks is the whelming wave
When help comes late but still can save.
With all blind throes is the instant rife,—
Hurtling clangour and clouds at strife,—
The breath of death, but the kiss of life.
The night lay deep on Rose Mary's heart,
For her swoon was death's kind counterpart:
The dawn broke dim on Rose Mary's soul,—
No hill-crown's heavenly aureole,
But a wild gleam on a shaken shoal.
Her senses gasped in the sudden air,
And she looked around, but none was there.
She felt the slackening frost distil
Through her blood the last ooze dull and chill:
Her lids were dry and her lips were still.
Her tears had flooded her heart again;
As after a long day's bitter rain,
At dusk when the wet flower-cups shrink,
The drops run in from the beaded brink,
And all the close-shut petals drink.
Again her sighs on her heart were rolled;
As the wind that long has swept the wold,—
Whose moan was made with the moaning sea,—
Beats out its breath in the last torn tree,
And sinks at length in lethargy.
She knew she had waded bosom-deep
Along death's bank in the sedge of sleep:
All else was lost to her clouded mind;
Nor, looking back, could she see defin'd
O'er the dim dumb waste what lay behind.
Slowly fades the sun from the wall
Till day lies dead on the sun-dial:
And now in Rose Mary's lifted eye
'Twas shadow alone that made reply
To the set face of the soul's dark sky.
Yet still through her soul there wandered past
Dread phantoms borne on a wailing blast,—
Death and sorrow and sin and shame;
And, murmured still, to her lips there came
Her mother's and her lover's name.
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How to ask, and what thing to know?
She might not stay and she dared not go.
From fires unseen these smoke-clouds curled;
But where did the hidden curse lie furled?
And how to seek through the weary world?
With toiling breath she rose from the floor
And dragged her steps to an open door:
'Twas the secret panel standing wide,
As the lady's hand had let it bide
In hastening back to her daughter's side.
She passed, but reeled with a dizzy brain
And smote the door which closed again.
She stood within by the darkling stair,
But her feet might mount more freely there,—
'Twas the open light most blinded her.
Within her mind no wonder grew
At the secret path she never knew:
All ways alike were strange to her now,—
One field bare-ridged from the spirit's plough,
One thicket black with the cypress-bough.
Once she thought that she heard her name;
And she paused, but knew not whence it came.
Down the shadowed stair a faint ray fell
That guided the weary footsteps well
Till it led her up to the altar-cell.
No change there was on Rose Mary's face
As she leaned in the portal's narrow space:
Still she stood by the pillar's stem,
Hand and bosom and garment's hem,
As the soul stands by at the requiem.
The altar-cell was a dome low-lit,
And a veil hung in the midst of it:
At the pole-points of its circling girth
Four symbols stood of the world's first birth,—
Air and water and fire and earth.
To the north, a fountain glittered free;
To the south, there glowed a red fruit-tree;
To the east, a lamp flamed high and fair;
To the west, a crystal casket rare
Held fast a cloud of the fields of air.
The painted walls were a mystic show
Of time's ebb-tide and overflow;
236
His hoards long-locked and conquering key,
His service-fires that in heaven be,
And earth-wheels whirled perpetually.
Rose Mary gazed from the open door
As on idle things she cared not for,—
The fleeting shapes of an empty tale;
Then stepped with a heedless visage pale,
And lifted aside the altar-veil.
The altar stood from its curved recess
In a coiling serpent's life-likeness:
Even such a serpent evermore
Lies deep asleep at the world's dark core
Till the last Voice shake the sea and shore.
From the altar-cloth a book rose spread
And tapers burned at the altar-head;
And there in the altar-midst alone,
'Twixt wings of a sculptured beast unknown,
Rose Mary saw the Beryl-stone.
Firm it sat 'twixt the hollowed wings,
As an orb sits in the hand of kings:
And lo! for that Foe whose curse far-flown
Had bound her life with a burning zone,
Rose Mary knew the Beryl-stone.
Dread is the meteor's blazing sphere
When the poles throb to its blind career;
But not with a light more grim and ghast
Thereby is the future doom forecast,
Than now this sight brought back the past.
The hours and minutes seemed to whirr
In a clanging swarm that deafened her;
They stung her heart to a writhing flame,
And marshalled past in its glare they came,—
Death and sorrow and sin and shame.
Round the Beryl's sphere she saw them pass
And mock her eyes from the fated glass:
One by one in a fiery train
The dead hours seemed to wax and wane,
And burned till all was known again.
From the drained heart's fount there rose no cry,
There sprang no tears, for the source was dry.
Held in the hand of some heavy law,
Her eyes she might not once withdraw,
237
Nor shrink away from the thing she saw.
Even as she gazed, through all her blood
The flame was quenched in a coming flood:
Out of the depth of the hollow gloom
On her soul's bare sands she felt it boom,—
The measured tide of a sea of doom.
Three steps she took through the altar-gate,
And her neck reared and her arms grew straight:
The sinews clenched like a serpent's throe,
And the face was white in the dark hair's flow,
As her hate beheld what lay below.
Dumb she stood in her malisons,—
A silver statue tressed with bronze:
As the fabled head by Perseus mown,
It seemed in sooth that her gaze alone
Had turned the carven shapes to stone.
O'er the altar-sides on either hand
There hung a dinted helm and brand:
By strength thereof, 'neath the Sacred Sign,
That bitter gift o'er the salt sea-brine
Her father brought from Palestine.
Rose Mary moved with a stern accord
And reached her hand to her father's sword;
Nor did she stir her gaze one whit
From the thing whereon her brows were knit;
But gazing still, she spoke to it.
“O ye, three times accurst,” she said,
“By whom this stone is tenanted!
Lo! here ye came by a strong sin's might;
Yet a sinner's hand that's weak to smite
Shall send you hence ere the day be night.
“This hour a clear voice bade me know
My hand shall work your overthrow:
Another thing in mine ear it spake,—
With the broken spell my life shall break.
I thank Thee, God, for the dear death's sake!
“And he Thy heavenly minister
Who swayed erewhile this spell-bound sphere,—
My parting soul let him haste to greet,
And none but he be guide for my feet
To where Thy rest is made complete.”
Then deep she breathed, with a tender moan:—
238
“My love, my lord, my only one!
Even as I held the cursed clue,
When thee, through me, these foul ones slew,—
By mine own deed shall they slay me too!
“Even while they speed to Hell, my love,
Two hearts shall meet in Heaven above.
Our shrift thou sought'st, but might'st not bring:
And oh! for me 'tis a blessed thing
To work hereby our ransoming.
“One were our hearts in joy and pain,
And our souls e'en now grow one again.
And O my love, if our souls are three,
O thine and mine shall the third soul be,—
One threefold love eternally.”
Her eyes were soft as she spoke apart,
And the lips smiled to the broken heart:
But the glance was dark and the forehead scored
With the bitter frown of hate restored,
As her two hands swung the heavy sword.
Three steps back from her Foe she trod:—
“Love, for thy sake! In Thy Name, O God!”
In the fair white hands small strength was shown;
Yet the blade flashed high and the edge fell prone,
And she cleft the heart of the Beryl-stone.
What living flesh in the thunder-cloud
Hath sat and felt heaven cry aloud?
Or known how the levin's pulse may beat?
Or wrapped the hour when the whirlwinds meet
About its breast for a winding-sheet?
Who hath crouched at the world's deep heart
While the earthquake rends its loins apart?
Or walked far under the seething main
While overhead the heavens ordain
The tempest-towers of the hurricane?
Who hath seen or what ear hath heard
The secret things unregister'd
Of the place where all is past and done,
And tears and laughter sound as one
In Hell's unhallowed unison?
Nay, is it writ how the fiends despair
In earth and water and fire and air?
Even so no mortal tongue may tell
239
How to the clang of the sword that fell
The echoes shook the altar-cell.
When all was still on the air again
The Beryl-stone lay cleft in twain;
The veil was rent from the riven dome;
And every wind that's winged to roam
Might have the ruined place for home.
The fountain no more glittered free;
The fruit hung dead on the leafless tree;
The flame of the lamp had ceased to flare;
And the crystal casket shattered there
Was emptied now of its cloud of air.
And lo! on the ground Rose Mary lay,
With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
With a cold breast like the earth till Spring,
With such a smile as the June days bring
When the year grows warm with harvesting.
The death she had won might leave no trace
On the soft sweet form and gentle face:
In a gracious sleep she seemed to lie;
And over her head her hand on high
Held fast the sword she triumphed by.
'Twas then a clear voice said in the room:—
“Behold the end of the heavy doom.
O come,—for thy bitter love's sake blest;
By a sweet path now thou journeyest,
And I will lead thee to thy rest.
“Me thy sin by Heaven's sore ban
Did chase erewhile from the talisman:
But to my heart, as a conquered home,
In glory of strength thy footsteps come
Who hast thus cast forth my foes therefrom.
“Already thy heart remembereth
No more his name thou sought'st in death:
For under all deeps, all heights above,—
So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,—
Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.
“Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer
To blessed Mary's rose-bower:
Warmed and lit is thy place afar
With guerdon-fires of the sweet Love-star
Where hearts of steadfast lovers are:—
240
“Though naught for the poor corpse lying here
Remain to-day but the cold white bier,
But burial-chaunt and bended knee,
But sighs and tears that heaviest be,
But rent rose-flower and rosemary.”
BERYL-SONG
We, cast forth from the Beryl,
Gyre-circling spirits of fire,
Whose pangs begin
With God's grace to sin,
For whose spent powers the immortal hours are sterile,—
Woe! must We behold this mother
Find grace in her dead child's face, and doubt of none other
But that perfect pardon, alas! hath assured her guerdon?
Woe! must We behold this daughter,
Made clean from the soil of sin wherewith We had fraught her,
Shake off a man's blood like water?
Write up her story
On the Gate of Heaven's glory,
Whom there We behold so fair in shining apparel,
And beneath her the ruin
Of our own undoing!
Alas, the Beryl!
We had for a foeman
But one weak woman;
In one day's strife,
Her hope fell dead from her life;
And yet no iron,
Her soul to environ,
Could this manslayer, this false soothsayer imperil!
Lo, where she bows
In the Holy House!
Who now shall dissever her soul from its joy for ever
While every ditty
Of love and plentiful pity
Fills the White City,
And the floor of Heaven to her feet for ever is given?
Hark, a voice cries “Flee!”
Woe! woe! what shelter have We,
241
Whose pangs begin
With God's grace to sin,
For whose spent powers the immortal hours are sterile,
Gyre-circling spirits of fire,
We, cast forth from the Beryl?
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
334:

Book IV: The Book of Partings



Eagerly, spurred by Ares swift in their souls to the war-cry,
All now pressed to their homes for the food of their strength in the battle.
Ilion turned her thoughts in a proud expectancy seaward
Waiting to hear the sounds that she loved and the cry of the mellay.
Now to their citadel Priams sons returned with their father,
Now from the gates Talthybius issued grey in his chariot;
But in the halls of Anchises Aeneas not doffing his breastpiece
Hastily ate of the corn of his country, cakes of the millet
Doubled with wild-deers flesh, from the quiet hands of Cresa.
She, as he ate, with her calm eyes watching him smiled on her husband:
Ever thou hastest to battle, O warrior, ever thou fightest
Far in the front of the ranks and thou seekest out Locrian Ajax,
Turnest thy ear to the roar for the dangerous shout of Tydides;
There, once heard, leaving all thou drivest, O stark in thy courage.
Yet am I blest among women who tremble not, left in thy mansion,
Quiet at old Anchises feet when I see thee in vision
Sole with the shafts hissing round thee and say to my quivering spirit,
Now he is striking at Ajax, now he has met Diomedes.
Such are the mighty twain who are ever near to protect thee,
Phoebus, the Thunderers son, and thy mother, gold Aphrodite;
Such are the Fates that demand thee, O destined head of the future.
But though my thoughts for their own are not troubled, always, Aeneas,
Sore is my heart with pity for other Ilian women
Who in this battle are losing their children and well-loved husbands,
Brothers too dear, for the eyes that are wet, for the hearts that are silent.
Will not this war then end that thunders for ever round Troya?
But to Cresa the hero answered, the son of Anchises:
Surely the gods protect, yet is Death too always mighty.
Most in his shadowy envy he strikes at the brave and the lovely,
Grudging works to abridge their days and to widow the sunlight.
Most, disappointed, he rages against the beloved of Heaven;
Striking their lives through their hearts he mows down their loves and their pleasures.
Truly thou sayst, thou needst not to fear for my life in the battle;
Ever for thine I fear lest he find thee out in his anger,
Missing my head in the fight, when he comes here crossed in his godhead.
Yet shall Phoebus protect and my mother, gold Aphrodite.
But to Aeneas answered the tranquil lips of Cresa:
So may it be that I go before thee, seeing, Aeneas,
Over my dying eyes thy lips bend down for the parting.
Blissfullest end is this for a woman here mid earths sorrows;
Afterwards there we hope that the hands shall join which were parted.
So she spoke, not knowing the gods: but Aeneas departing
Clasped his fathers knees, the ancient mighty Anchises.
Bless me, my father; I go to the battle. Strong with thy blessing
Even today may I hurl down Ajax, slay Diomedes,
And on the morrow gaze on the empty beaches of Troas.
Troubled and joyless, nought replying to warlike Aeneas
Long Anchises sat unmoving, silent, sombre,
Gazing into his soul with eyes that were closed to the sunlight.
Prosper, Aeneas, slowly he answered him, son of a goddess,
Prosper, Aeneas; and if for Troy some doom is preparing,
Suffer always the will of the gods with a piety constant.
Only they will what Necessity fashions compelled by the Silence.
Labour and war she has given to man as the law of his transience.
Work; she shall give thee the crown of thy deeds or their ending appointed,
Whether glorious thou pass or in silent shadows forgotten.
But what thy mother commands perform ever, loading thy vessels.
Who can know what the gods have hid with the mist of our hopings?
Then from the house of his fathers Aeneas rapidly striding
Came to the city echoing now with the wheels of the chariots,
Clanging with arms and astream with the warlike tramp of her thousands.
Fast through the press he strode and men turning knew Aeneas,
Greatened in heart and went on with loftier thoughts towards battle.
He through the noise and the crowd to Antenors high-built mansion
Striding came, and he turned to its courts and the bronze of its threshold
Trod which had suffered the feet of so many princes departed.
But as he crossed its brazen square from the hall there came running,
Leaping up light to his feet and laughing with sudden pleasure,
Eurus the youngest son of Polydamas. Clasping the fatal
War-hardened hand with a palm that was smooth as a maidens or infants,
Well art thou come, Aeneas, he said, and good fortune has sent thee!
Now I shall go to the field; thou wilt speak with my grandsire Antenor
And he shall hear thee though chid by his heart reluctant. Rejoicing
I shall go forth in thy car or warring by Penthesilea,
Famous, give to her grasp the spear that shall smite down Achilles.
Smiling answered Aeneas, Surely will, Eurus, thy prowess
Carry thee far to the front; thou shalt fight with Epeus and slay him.
Who shall say that this hand was not chosen to pierce Menelaus?
But for a while with the ball should it rather strive, O hero,
Till in the play and the wrestle its softness is trained for the smiting.
Eagerly Eurus answered, But they have told me, Aeneas,
This is the last of our fights; for today will Penthesilea
Meet Achilles in battle and slay him ending the Argives.
Then shall I never have mixed in this war that is famous for ever.
What shall I say when my hairs are white like the aged Antenors?
Men will ask, And what were thy deeds in the warfare Titanic?
Whom didst thou slay of the Argives, son of Polydamas, venging
Bravely thy father? Then must I say, I lurked in the city.
I was too young and only ascending the Ilian ramparts
Saw the return or the flight, but never the deed and the triumph.
Friend, if you take me not forth, I shall die of grief ere the sunset.
Plucking the hand of Aeneas he drew him into the mansion
Vast; and over the floor of the spacious hall they hastened
Laughing, the gracious child and the mighty hero and statesman,
Flower of a present stock and the burdened star of the future.
Meanwhile girt by his sons and the sons of his sons in his chamber
Cried to the remnants left of his blood the aged Antenor.
Hearken you who are sprung from my loins and children, their offspring!
None shall again go forth to the fight who is kin to Antenor.
Weighed with my curse he shall go and the spear-points athirst of the Argives
Meet him wroth; he shall die in his sin and his name be forgotten.
Oft have I sent forth my blood to be spilled in vain in the battle
Fighting for Troy and her greatness earned by my toil and my fathers.
Now all the debt has been paid; she rejects us driven by the immortals.
Much do we owe to the mother who bore us, much to our country;
But at the last our life is ours and the gods and the futures.
Gather the gold of my house and our kin, O ye sons of Antenor.
Warned by a voice in my soul I will go forth tonight from this city
Fleeing the doom and bearing my treasures; the ships shall receive them
Gathered, new-keeled by my care and the gods, in the narrow Propontis.
Over Gods waters guided, treading the rage of Poseidon,
Bellying out with their sails let them cleave to the untravelled distance
Oceans crests and resign to their Fates the doomed and the evil.
So Antenor spoke and his children heard him in silence;
Awed by his voice and the dread of his curse they obeyed, though in sorrow.
Halamus only replied to his father: Dire are the white hairs
Reverend, loved, of a father, dreadful his curse to his children.
Yet in my heart there is one who cries, tis the voice of my country,
She for whose sake I would be in Tartarus tortured for ever.
Pardon me then, if thou wilt; if the gods can, then let them pardon.
For I will sleep in the dust of Troy embracing her ashes,
There where Polydamas sleeps and the many comrades I cherished.
So let me go to the darkness remembered or wholly forgotten,
Yet having fought for my country, true in my fall to my nation.
Then in his aged wrath to Halamus answered Antenor:
Go then and perish doomed with the doomed and the hated of heaven;
Nor shall the gods forgive thee dying nor shall thy father.
Out from the chamber Halamus strode with grief in his bosom
Wrestling with wrath and he went to his doom nor looked back at his dear ones.
Crossing the hall the son of Antenor and son of Anchises
Met in the paths of their fates where they knotted and crossed for the parting,
One with the curse of the gods and his sire fast wending to Hades,
Fortunate, blessed the other; yet equal their minds were and virtues.
Cypris son to the Antenorid: Thee I have sought and thy brothers,
Bough of Antenor; sore is our need today of thy counsels,
Endless our want of their arms that are strong and their hearts that recoil not
Meeting myriads stark with the spear in unequal battle.
Halamus answered him: I will go forth to the palace of Priam,
There where Troy yet lives and far from the halls of my fathers;
There will I speak, not here. For my kin they repose in the mansion
Sitting unarmed in their halls while their brothers fall in the battle.
Eurus eagerly answered the hero: Me rather, therefore,
Take to the fight with you; I will make war on the Greeks for my uncles;
One for all I will fill their place in the shock with the foemen.
But from his chamber-door Antenor heard and rebuked him:
Scamp of my heart, thou torment! in to thy chamber and rest there,
Bound with cords lest thou cease, thou flutter-brain, scourged into quiet;
So shall thy lust of the fight be healed and our mansion grow tranquil.
Chid by the old man Eurus slunk from the hall discontented,
Yet with a dubious smile like a moonbeam lighting his beauty.
But to Antenor the Dardanid born from the white Aphrodite:
Late the Antenorids learn to flinch from the spears of the Argives,
Even this boy of their blood has Polydamas heart and his valour.
Nor should a life that was honoured and noble be stained in its ending.
Nay, then, the mood of a child would shame a grey-headed wisdom,
If for the fault of the people virtue and Troy were forgotten.
For, though the people hear us not, yet are we bound to our nation:
Over the people the gods are; over a man is his country;
This is the deity first adored by the hearths of the noble.
For by our nations will we are ruled in the home and the battle
And for our nations weal we offer our lives and our childrens.
Not by their own wills led nor their passions men rise to their manhood,
Selfishly seeking their good, but the gods and the States and the fathers.
Wroth Antenor replied to the warlike son of Anchises:
Great is the soul in thee housed and stern is thy will, O Aeneas;
Onward it moves undismayed to its goal though a city be ruined.
They too guide thee who deepest see of the ageless immortals,
One with her heart and one in his spirit, Cypris and Phoebus.
Yet might a man not knowing this think as he watched thee, Aeneas,
Spurring Priams race to its fall he endangers this city,
Hoping to build a throne out of ruins sole in the Troad.
I too have gods who warn me and lead, Athene and Hera.
Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret.
Coldly Aeneas made answer, stirred into wrath by the taunting:
High wert thou always, nurtured in wisdom, ancient Antenor.
Walk then favoured and led, yet watch lest passion and evil
Feign auguster names and mimic the gait of the deathless.
And with a smile on his lips but wrath in his bosom answered,
Wisest of men but with wisdom of mortals, aged Antenor:
Led or misled we are mortals and walk by a light that is given;
Most they err who deem themselves most from error excluded.
Nor shalt thou hear in this battle the shout of the men of my lineage
Holding the Greeks as once and driving back Fate from their country.
His alone will be heard for a space while the stern gods are patient
Even now who went forth a victim self-offered to Hades,
Last whom their wills have plucked from the fated house of Antenor.
They now with wrath in their bosoms sundered for ever and parted.
Forth from the halls of Antenor Aeneas rapidly striding
Passed once more through the city hurrying now with its car-wheels,
Filled with a mightier rumour of war and the march of its thousands,
Till at Troys upward curve he found the Antenorid crestward
Mounting the steep incline that climbed to the palace of Priam
White in her proud and armed citadel. Silent, ascending
Hardly their feet had attempted the hill when behind them they hearkened
Sweet-tongued a call and the patter and hurry of light-running sandals,
Turning they beheld with a flush on his cheeks and a light on his lashes
Challenging mutely and pleading the boyish beauty of Eurus.
Racer to mischief, said Halamus, couldst thou not sit in thy chamber?
Surely cords and the rod await thee, Eurus, returning.
Answered with laughter the child, I have broken through ranks of the fighters,
Dived under chariot-wheels to arrive here and I return not.
I too for counsel of battle have come to the palace of Priam.
Burdened with thought they mounted slowly the road of their fathers
Breasting the Ilian hill where Laomedons mansion was seated,
They from the crest down-gazing saw their countrys housetops
Under their feet and heard the murmur of Troya below them.
But in the palace of Priam coming and going of house-thralls
Filled all the corridors; smoke from the kitchens curled in its plenty
Rich with savour and breathed from the labouring lungs of Hephaestus.
Far in the halls and the chambers voices travelled and clustered,
Anklets jangling ran and sang back from doorway to doorway
Mocking with music of speed and its laughters the haste of the happy,
Sound came of arms, there was tread of the great, there were murmurs of women,
Voices glad of the doomed in Laomedons marvellous mansion.
Six were the halls of its splendour, a hundred and one were its chambers
Lifted on high upon columns that soared like the thoughts of its dwellers,
Thoughts that transcended the earth though they sank down at last into ashes;
So had Apollo dreamed to his lyre; and its tops were a grandeur
Domed, as if seeking to roof mens lives with a hint of the heavens;
Marble his columns rose and with marble his roofs were appointed,
Conquered wealth of the world in its largeness suffered, supporting
Purities of marble, glories of gold. Nor only of matter
Blazed there the brutal pomps, but images mystic or mighty
Crowded ceiling and wall, a work that the gods even admire
Hardly believing that forms like these were imagined by mortals
Here upon earth where sight is a blur and the soul lives encumbered.
Scrolls that remembered in gems the thoughts austere of the ancients
Bordered the lines of the stone and the forms of serpent and Naiad
Ran in relief on those walls of pride in the palace of Priam
Mingled with Dryads who tempted and fled and Satyrs who followed,
Sports of the nymphs in the sea and the woods and their meetings with mortals,
Sessions and battles of Trojan demigods, deaths that were famous,
Wars and loves of men and the deeds of the golden immortals.
Pillars sculptured with gods and with giants soared up from bases
Lion-carved or were seated on bulls and bore into grandeur
Amply those halls where they soared, or in lordliness slenderly fashioned,
Dressed in flowers and reeds like virgins standing on Ida,
Guarded the screens of stone and divided alcove and chamber.
Ivory carved and broidered robes and the riches of Indus
Cherished in sandalwood triumphed and teemed in the palace of Priam;
Doors that were carven and fragrant sheltered the joys of its princes.
Here in a chamber of luminous privacy Paris was arming.
Near him moved Helen, a whiteness divine, and intent on her labour
Fastened his cuirass, bound the greaves and settled the hauberk
Thrilling his limbs with her touch that was heaven to the yearning of mortals.
She with her hands of delight caressing the senseless metal
Pressed her lips to his brilliant armour; she bowed down, she whispered:
Cuirass, allowed by the gods, protect the beauty of Paris;
Keep for me that for which country was lost and my child and my brothers.
Yearning she bent to his feet, to the sandal-strings of her lover;
Then as she gazed up, changed grew her mood; for the Daemon within her
Rose that had banded Greece and was burning Troy into ashes.
Slowly a smile that was perfect and perilous over her beauty
Dawned like the sunlight on Paradise; strangely she looked on her lover.
So might a goddess have gazed as she played with the love of a mortal
Passing an hour on the earth ere she rose up white to Olympus.
So art thou winner, Paris, yet and thy spirit ascendant
Leads this Troy where thou wilt, O thou mighty one veiled in thy beauty.
First in the dance and the revel, first in the joy of the mellay,
Who would not leave for thy sake and repent it not country and homestead?
Winning thou reignest still over Troy, over Fate, over Helen.
Always so canst thou win? Has Death no claim on thy beauty,
Fate no scourge for thy sins? How the years have passed by in a glory,
Years of this heaven of the gods, O ravisher, since from my hearthstone
Seizing thou borest me compelled to thy ships and my joy on the waters.
Troy is enringed with the spears, her children fall and her glories,
Mighty souls of heroes have gone down prone to the darkness;
Thou and I abide! the mothers wail for our pleasure.
Wilt thou then keep me for ever, O son of Priam, in Troya?
Fate was my mother, they say, and Zeus for this hour begot me.
Art thou a god too, O hero, disguised in this robe of the mortal,
Brilliant, careless of death and of sin as if sure of thy rapture?
What then if Fate today were to lay her hands on thee, Paris?
Calmly he looked on the face of which Greece was enamoured, the body
For whose desire great Troy was a sacrifice, tranquil regarded
Lovely and dire on the lips he loved that smile of a goddess,
Saw the daughter of Zeus in the woman, yet was not shaken.
Temptress of Argos, he answered, thou snare for the world to be seized in,
Thou then hopst to escape! But the gods could not take thee, O Helen,
How then thy will that to mine is a captive, or how, though with battle,
He who has lost thee, unhappy, the Spartan, bright Menelaus?
All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing.
Thou on this earth art mine since I claimed thee beheld, not speaking,
But with thy lids that fell thou veiledst thy heart of compliance.
Then in whatever beyond I shall know how to take thee, O Helen,
Even as here upon earth I knew, in heaven as in Sparta;
I on Elysian fields will enjoy thee as now in the Troad.
Silent a moment she lingered like one who is lured by a music
Rapturous, heard by himself alone and his lover in heaven,
Then in her beauty compelling she rose up divine among women.
Yes, it is good, she cried, what the gods do and actions of mortals;
Good is this play of the world; it is good, the joy and the torture.
Praised be the hour of the gods when I wedded bright Menelaus!
Praised, more praised the keels that severed the seas towards Helen
Churning the senseless waves that knew not the bliss of their burden!
Praised to the end the hour when I passed through the doors of my husband
Laughing with joy in my heart for the arms that bore and enchained me!
Never can Death undo what life has done for us, Paris.
Nor, whatsoever betide, can the hour be unlived of our rapture.
This too is good that nations should meet in the shock of the battle,
Heroes be slain and a theme be made for the songs of the poets,
Songs that shall thrill with the name of Helen, the beauty of Paris.
Well is this also that empires should fall for the eyes of a woman;
Well that for Helen Hector ended, Memnon was slaughtered,
Strong Sarpedon fell and Troilus ceased in his boyhood.
Troy for Helen burning, her glory, her empire, her riches,
This is the sign of the gods and the type of things that are mortal.
Thou who art kin to the masters of heaven, unconstrained like thy kindred
High on this ancient stage of the Troad with gods for spectators
Play till the end thy part, O thou wondrous and beautiful actor:
Fight and slay the Greeks, my countrymen; victor returning
Take for reward of the play, thy delight of Argive Helen.
Force from my bosom a hint of the joy denied to the death-claimed,
Rob in the kiss of my lips a pang from the raptures of heaven.
Clasping him wholly her arms of desire were a girdle of madness,
Cestus divine of the dread Aphrodite. He with her kisses
Flushed like the gods with unearthly wine and rejoiced in his ruin.
Thus while they conversed now in this hour that was near to their parting
Last upon earth, a fleet-footed slavegirl came to the chamber:
Paris, thy father and mother desire thee; there in the strangers
Outer hall Aeneas and Halamus wait for thy coming.
So with the Argive he wended to Priams ample chamber
Far in Laomedons house where Troy looked upwards to Ida.
Priam and Hecuba there, the ancient grey-haired rulers,
Waiting him sat in their chairs of ivory calm in their greatness;
Hid in her robes at their feet lay Cassandra crouched from her visions.
Since, O my father, said Paris, thy thoughts have been with me, thy blessing
Surely shall help me today in my strife with the strength of Achilles.
Surely the gods shall obey in the end the might of our spirits,
Pallas and Hera, flame-sandalled Artemis, Zeus and Apollo.
Ever serve the immortal brightnesses man when he stands up
Firm with his will uplifted a steadfast flame towards the heavens,
Ares works in his heart and Hephaestus burns in his labour.
Priam replied to his son: Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals,
Knowing all vain, yet we strive; for our nature seizing us always
Drives like the flock that is herded and urged towards shambles or pasture.
So have the high gods fashioned these tools of their action and pleasure;
Failure and grief are their engines no less than the might of the victor;
They in the blow descend and resist in the sobs of the smitten.
Such are their goads that I too must walk in the paths that are common,
Even I who know must send for thee, moved by Cassandra.
Speak, O my child, since Apollo has willed it, once, and be silent.
But in her raiment hidden Cassandra answered her father:
No, for my heart has changed since I cried for him, vexed by Apollo.
Why should I speak? For who will believe me in Troy? who believed me
Ever in Troy or the world? Event and disaster approve me
Only, my comrades, not men in their thoughts, not my brothers and kinsmen.
All by their hopes are gladly deceived and grow wroth with the warner,
Half-blind prophets of hope entertained by the gods in the mortal!
Wiser blind, if nothing they saw or only the darkness.
I too once hoped when Apollo pursued me with love in his temple.
Round me already there gleamed the ray of the vision prophetic,
Thrill of that rapture I felt and the joy of the god in his seeing
Nor did I know that the knowledge of mortals is bound unto blindness.
Either only they walk mid the coloured dreams of the senses
Treading the greenness of earth and deeming the touch of things real,
Or if they see, by the curse of the gods their sight into falsehood
Easily turns and leads them more stumbling astray than the sightless.
So are we either blind in a darkness or dazzled by seeing.
Thus have the gods protected their purpose and baffled the sages;
Over the face of the Truth their shield of gold is extended.
But I deemed otherwise, urged by the Dreadful One, he who sits always
Veiled in us fighting the gods whom he uses. I cried to Apollo,
Give me thy vision sheer, not such as thou givst to thy prophets,
Troubled though luminous; clear be the vision and ruthless to error,
Far-darting god who art veiled by the sun and by death thou art shielded.
Then I shall know that thou lovest. He gave, alarmed and reluctant,
Driven by Fate and his heart; but I mocked him, I broke from my promise,
Courage fatal helping my heart to its ruin with laughter.
Always now I remember his face that grew tranquil and ruthless,
Hear the voice divine and implacable: Since thou deceivest
Even the gods and thou hast not feared to lie to Apollo,
Speak shalt thou henceforth only truth, but none shall believe thee:
Scorned in thy words, rejected yet more for their bitter fulfilment,
Scourged by the gods thou must speak though thy sick heart yearns to be silent.
For in this play thou hast dared to play with the masters of heaven,
Girl, it is thou who hast lost; thy voice is mine and thy bosom.
Since then all I foreknow; therefore anguish is mine for my portion:
Since then all whom I love must perish slain by my loving.
Even of that I denied him, violent force shall bereave me
Grasped mid the flames of my city and shouts of her merciless victors.
But to Cassandra answered gently the voice of her brother:
Sister of mine, afflicted and seized by the dreadful Apollo,
All whose eyes can pierce that curtain, gaze into dimness;
This they have glimpsed and that they imagine deceived by their natures
Seeing the forms in their hearts of dreadful things and of joyous;
As in the darkness our eyes are deceived by shadows uncertain,
Such is their sight who rend the veil that the dire gods have woven.
Busy our hearts are weaving thoughts and images always:
After their kind they see what here we call truth. So thy nature
Tender and loving, plagued by this war and its fears for thy loved ones,
Sees calamity everywhere; when the event like the vision
Seems, as in every war the beloved must fall and the cherished,
Then the heart cries, It has happened as all shall happen I mourn for.
All that was bright it misses and only seizes on sorrow.
Dear, on the brightness look and if thou must prophesy, tell us
Rather of great Pelides slain by my spear in the onset.
But with a voice of grief the sister answered her brother:
Yes, he shall fall and his slayer too perish and Troy with his slayer.
But in his spirit rejoicing Paris answered Cassandra:
Let but this word come true; for the rest, the gods shall avert it.
Look once more, O Cassandra, and comfort the heart of thy mother,
See, O seer, my safe return with the spoils of Achilles.
And with a voice of grief the sister answered her brother:
Thou shalt return for thy hour while Troy yet stands in the sunshine.
But in his spirit exultant Paris seizing the omen:
Hearst thou, my father, my mother? She who still prophesied evil
Now perceives of our night this dawning. Yet is it grievous,
Since through a heart that we love must be pierced the heart of Achilles.
Fate, with this evil satisfied, turn in the end from Troya.
Bless me, my father, and thou, O Hecuba, mother long-patient,
Still forgive that thy children have fallen for Helen and Paris.
Tenderly yearning his mother drew him towards her and murmured:
All for thy hyacinth curls was forgiven even from childhood
And for thy sunlit looks, O wonder of charm, O Paris.
Paris, my son, though Troy must fall, thy mother forgives thee,
Blessing the gods who have lent thee to me for a while in their sunshine.
Theirs are fate and result, but ours is the joy of our children;
Even the griefs are dear that come from their hands while they love us.
Fight and slay Achilles, the murderer dire of thy brothers;
Venging Hector return, my son, to the clasp of thy mother.
But in his calm august to Paris Priam the monarch:
Victor so mightst thou come, so gladden the heart of thy mother.
Then to the aged father of Paris Helen the Argive
Bright and immortal and sad like a star that grows near to the dawning
And on its pale companions looks who now fade from its vision:
Me too pardon and love, my parents, even Helen,
Cause of all bane and all death; but I came from the gods for this ruin
Born as a torch for the burning of empires, cursed with this beauty.
Nor have I known a fathers embrace, a mothers caresses,
But to the distant gods I was born and nursed as an alien
Here by earth from fear, not affection, compelled by the thunders.
Two are her monstrous births, from the Furies and from the immortals;
Either touching mortality suffers and bears not the contact.
I have been both, a monster of doom and a portent of beauty.
Slowly Priam the monarch answered to Argive Helen:
That which thou art the gods have made thee; thou couldst not be other:
That which thou didst, the gods have done; thou couldst not prevent them.
Who here shall blame or whom shall he pardon? Should not my people
Rail at me murmuring, Priam has lost what his fathers had gathered;
Cursed is this king by heaven and cursed who are born as his subjects?
Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working.
Each of us bears his punishment, fruit of a seed thats forgotten;
Each of us curses his neighbour protecting his heart with illusions:
Therefore like children we blame each other and hate and are angry.
Take, my child, the joy of the sunshine won by thy beauty.
I who lodge on this earth as an alien bound by the body,
Wearing my sorrow even as I wear the imperial purple,
Praise yet the gods for my days that have seen thee at last in my ending.
Fitly Troy may cease having gazed on thy beauty, O Helen.
He became silent, he ceased from words. But Paris and Helen
Lightly went and gladly; pursuing their footsteps the mother,
Mother once of Troilus, mother once of Hector,
Stood at the door with her death in her eyes, nor returned from her yearning,
But as one after a vanishing sunbeam gazes in prison,
Gazed down the corridors after him, long who had passed from her vision.
Then in the silent chamber Cassandra seized by Apollo
Staggered erect and tossing her snow-white arms of affliction
Cried to the heavens in her pain; for the fierce god tortured her bosom:
Woe is me, woe for the guile and the bitter gift of Apollo!
Woe, thrice woe, for my birth in Troy and the lineage of Teucer!
So do you deal, O gods, with those who have served you and laboured,
Those who have borne for your sake the evil burden of greatness.
Blessed is he who holds mattock in hand or who bends oer the furrow
Taking no thought for the good of mankind, with no yearnings for knowledge.
Woe unto me for my wisdom which none shall value nor hearken!
Woe unto thee, O King, for thy strength which shall not deliver!
Better the eye that is sealed, more blest is the spirit thats feeble.
Vainly your hopes with iron Necessity struggle, O mortals.
Virtue shall lie in her pangs, for the gods have need of her torture;
Sin shall be scourged, though her deeds were compelled by the gods in their anger.
None shall avail in the end, the coward shall die and the hero.
Troy shall fall in her sin and her virtues shall not protect her;
Argos shall grow by her crimes till the gods shall destroy her for ever.
Now have I fruit of thy love, O Loxias, dreadful Apollo.
Woe is me, woe for the flame that approaches the house of my fathers!
Woe is me, woe for the hand of Ajax laid on my tresses!
Woe, thrice woe to him who shall ravish and him who shall cherish!
Woe for the ships that shall bound too swift oer the azure Aegean!
Woe for thy splendid shambles of hell, O Argive Mycenae!
Woe for the evil spouse and the house accursd of Atreus!
So with her voice of the swan she clanged out doom on the peoples,
Over the palace of Priam and over the armd nation
Marching resolved to the war in the pride of its centuries conquered,
Centuries slain by a single day of the anger of heaven.
Dim to the thoughts like a vision of Hades the luminous chamber
Grew; in his ivory chair King Priam sat like a shadow
Throned mid the ghosts of departed kings and forgotten empires.
But in his valiance careless and bli the the Priamid hastened
Seeking the pillared megaron wide where Deiphobus armoured
Waited his coming forth with the warlike chiefs of the Trojans.
Now as he passed by the halls of the women, the chambers that harboured
Daughters and wives of King Priam and wives of his sons and their playmates,
Niches of joy that were peopled with murmurs and sweet-tongued laughters,
Troubled like trees with their birds in a morning of sun and of shadow
Where in some garden of kings one walks with his heart in the sunshine,
Out from her door where she stood for him waiting Polyxena started,
Seized his hand and looked in his face and spoke to her brother.
Then not even the brilliant strength of Paris availed him;
Joyless he turned his face from her eyes of beauty and sorrow.
So it is come, the hour that I feared, and thou goest, O Paris,
Armed with the strength of Fate to strike at my heart in the battle;
For he is doomed and thou and I, a victim to Hades.
This thou preferrest and neither thy father could move nor thy mother
Burning with Troy in their palace, nor could thy country persuade thee,
Nor dost thou care for thy sisters happiness pierced by thy arrows.
Will she remember it all, my sister Helen, in Argos
Passing tranquil days with her husband, bright Menelaus,
Holding her child on her knees? But we shall lie joyless in Hades.
Paris replied: O sister Polyxena, blame me not wholly.
We by the gods are ensnared; for the pitiless white Aphrodite
Doing her will with us both compels this. Helpless our hearts are
And when she drives perforce must love, for death or for gladness:
Weighed in unequal scales she deals them to one or another.
Happy who holding his love can go down into bottomless Hades.
But to her brother replied in her anguish the daughter of Priam:
Evilly deal with my days the immortals happy in heaven;
Yes, I accuse the gods and I curse them who heed not our sorrow.
This they have done with me, forcing my heart to the love of a foeman,
One whose terrible hands have been stained with the blood of my brothers.
This now they do, they have taken the two whom I love beyond heaven,
Brother and husband, and drive to the fight to be slain by each other.
Nay, go thou forth; for thou canst not help it, nor I, nor can Helen.
Since I must die as a pageant to satisfy Zeus and his daughter,
Since now my heart must be borne as a victim bleeding to please them,
So let it be, let me deck myself and be bright for the altar.
Into her chamber she turned with her great eyes blind, unregarding;
He for a moment stood, then passed to the megaron slowly;
Dim was the light in his eyes and clouded his glorious beauty.
Meanwhile armed in the palace of Priam Penthesilea.
Near her her captains silent and mighty stood, from the Orient
Distant clouds of war, Surabdas and iron Surenas,
Pharatus planned like the hills, Somaranes, Valarus, Tauron,
High-crested Sumalus, Arithon, Sambus and Artavoruxes.
There too the princes of Phrygian Troya gathered for counsel
And with them Eurus came, Polydamas son, who most dearly
Loved was of all the Trojan boys by the glorious virgin.
She from her arming stayed to caress his curls and to chide him:
Eurus, forgotten of grace, dost thou gad like a stray in the city
Eager to mix with the armoured men and the chariots gliding?
High on the roofs wouldst thou watch the swaying speck that is battle?
Better to aim with the dart or seek with thy kind the palaestra;
So wilt thou sooner be part of this greatness rather than straining
Yearn from afar to the distance that veils the deeds of the mighty.
But with an anxious lure in his smile on her Eurus answered:
Not that remoteness to see have I come to the palace of Priam
Leaving the house of my fathers, but for the spear and the breastpiece.
Hast thou not promised me long I shall fight in thy car with Achilles?
Doubtful he eyed her, a lions cub at play in his beauty,
And mid the heroes who heard him laughter arose for a moment,
Yet with a sympathy stirred; they remembered the days of their childhood,
Thought of Troy still mighty, life in its rose-touched dawning
When they had longed for the clash of the fight and the burden of armour.
Glad, with the pride of the lioness watching her cub in the desert,
Couchant she lies with her paws before her and joys in his gambols,
Over the prey as he frisks and is careless, answered the virgin:
Younger than thou in my nation have mounted the steed and the war-car.
Eurus, arm; from under my shield thou shalt gaze at the Phthian,
Reaching my shafts for the cast from the rim of my car in the battle
Handle perhaps the spear that shall smite down the Phthian Achilles.
What sayst thou, Halamus? Were not such prowess a perfect beginning
Worthy Polydamas son and the warlike house of Antenor?
Halamus started and smiting his hand on the grief of his bosom,
Sombre replied and threatened with Fate the high-hearted virgin.
Virgin armipotent, wherefore mockst thou thy friend, though unwitting?
Nay, for the world will know at the end and my death cannot hide it,
Slain by a fathers curse we fight who are kin to Antenor.
Take not the boy in thy car, lest the Furies, Penthesilea,
Aim through the shield and the shielder to wreak the curse of the grandsire.
They will not turn nor repent for thy strength nor his delicate beauty.
Swiftly to Halamus answered the high-crested might of the virgin:
Curses leave lightly the lips when the soul of a man is in anger
Even as blessings easily crowd round the head that is cherished.
Yet have I never seen that a curse has sharpened a spear-point;
Never Death drew back from the doomed by the power of a blessing.
Valour and skill and chance are Fate and the gods and the Furies.
Give me the boy; a hero shall come back formed from the onset.
Do as thou wilt, replied Halamus; Fate shall guard or shall end him.
Then to the boy delighted and smiling-eyed and exultant
Cried with her voice like the call of heavens bugles waking the heroes,
Blown by the lips of gold-haired Valkyries, Penthesilea.
Go, find the spear, gird the sword, don the cuirass, child of the mighty.
Armed when thou standst on the plain of the Xanthus, field of thy fathers,
See that thou fight on this day like the comrade of Penthesilea.
Bud of a hero, gaze unalarmed in the eyes of Achilles.
Light as a hound released he ran to the hall of the armour
Where were the shields of the mighty, the arms of the mansion of Teucer;
There from the house-thralls he wrung the greaves and the cuirass and helmet
Troilus wore, the wonderful boy who, ere ripened his prowess,
Conquered the Greeks and drove to the ships and fought with Achilles.
These on his boyish limbs he donned and ran back exulting
Bearing spears and a sword and rejoiced in the clank on his armour.
Meanwhile Deiphobus, head of the mellay, moved by Aeneas
Opened the doors of their warlike debate to the strength of the virgin:
Well do I hope that our courage outwearying every opponent
Triumph shall lift to her ancient seat on the Pergaman turrets;
Clouds from Zeus come and pass; his sunshine eternal survives them.
Yet we are few in the fight and armoured nations besiege us.
Surging on Troy today a numberless foe well-captained
Hardly pushed back in shock after shock with the Myrmidon numbers
Swelled returns; they fight with a hope that broken refashion
Helpful skies and a man now leads them who conquers and slaughters,
One of the sons of the gods and armed by the gods for the struggle.
We unhelped save by Ares stern and the mystic Apollo
And but as mortals striving with stubborn mortal courage,
Hated and scorned and alone in the world, by the nations rejected,
Fight with the gods and mankind and Achilles and numbers against us
Keeping our country from death in this bitter hour of her fortunes.
Therefore have prudence and hardihood severed contending our counsels
Whether far out to fight on the seaward plain with the Argives
Or behind Xanthus the river impetuous friendly to Troya.
This my brother approves and the son of Antenor advises,
Prudent masters of war who prepare by defence their aggression.
But for myself from rashness I seek a more far-seeing wisdom,
Not behind vain defences choosing a tardy destruction,
Rather as Zeus with his spear of the lightning and chariot of tempest
Scatters and chases the heavy mass of the clouds through the heavens,
So would I hunt the Greeks through the plains to their lair by the Ocean,
Straight at the throat of my foeman so would I leap in the battle.
Swiftly to smite at the foe is prudence for armies outnumbered.
Then to the Dardanid answered the high-crested Penthesilea:
There where I find my foe I will fight him, whether by Xanthus
Or at the fosse of the ships where they crouch behind bulwarks for shelter,
Or if they dare by Scamander the higher marching on Troya.
Sternly approved her the Trojan, So should they fight who would triumph
Meeting the foe ere he move in his will to the clash of encounter.
But with his careless laughter the brilliant Priamid Paris:
Joy of the battle, joy of the tempest, joy of the gamble
Mated are in thy blood, O virgin, daughter of Ares.
Thou like the deathless wouldst have us combat, us who are human?
Come, let the gods do their will with us, Ares let lead and his daughter!
Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker.
Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals.
Highly to Paris the virgin armipotent Penthesilea,
Paris and Halamus, shafts of the war-god, fear not for Troya.
Not as a vaunt do I speak it, you gods who stern-thoughted watch us,
But in my vision of strength and the soul that is seated within me,
Not while I live and war shall the host of the Myrmidon fighters
Forcing the currents lave, as once they were wont, in Scamander
Vaunting their victor car-wheels red with the blood of the vanquished.
Then when I lie by some war-god slain on the fields of the Troad,
Fight again if you will behind high-banked fast-flowing Xanthus.
Halamus answered her, Never so by my will would I battle
Flinging Troy as a stake on the doubtful diceboard of Ares.
But you have willed it and so let it be; yet hearken my counsel.
Massed in the fight let us aim the storm of our spears at one greatness,
Mighty Pelides head who gives victory still to the Argives.
Easy the Greeks to destroy lay Achilles once slain on the Troad,
But if the Peleid lives the fire shall yet finish with Troya.
Join then Orestes speed to the stubborn might of Aeneas,
Paris fatal shafts and the missiles of Penthesilea.
Others meanwhile, a puissant screen of our bravest and strongest,
Fighting shall hold back Pylos and Argolis, Crete and the Locrian.
Thou, Deiphobus, front the bronze-clad stern Diomedes,
I with Polydamas spear will dare to restrain and discourage
Ajax feet though they yearn for pursuit and are hungry for swiftness.
Knot of retreat behind let some strong experienced captain
Stand with our younger levies guarding the fords of the Xanthus,
Fortify the wavering line and dawn as fresh strength on the wearied.
Then if the fierce gods prevail we shall perish not driven like cattle
Over the plains, but draw back sternly and slowly to Troya.
Answered the Priamid, Wise is thy counsel, branch of Antenor.
Chaff are the southern Achaians, only the hardihood Hellene,
Only the savage speed of the Locrian rescues their legions.
Marshal we so this field. Stand, Halamus, covering Xanthus,
Helping our need when the foe press hard on the Ilian fighters.
Paris, my brother, thou with our masses aid the Eoan.
I with Aeneas single spear am enough for the Argive.
Gladlier Halamus cried would I fight in the front with the Locrian!
This too let be as you will; for one is the glory and service
Fighting in front or guarding behind the fate of our country.
So in their thoughts they ordered battle. Meanwhile Eurus
Gleaming returned and the room grew glad with the light of his armour.
Glad were its conscious walls of that vision of boyhood and valour;
Gods of the household sighed and smiled at his courage and beauty,
They who had seen so many pass over their floors and return not
Hasting to battle, the fair and the mighty, the curled and the grizzled,
All of them treading one path like the conscious masks of one pageant
Winding past through the glare of a light to the shadows beyond them.
But on her captains proudly smiling Penthesilea
Seized him and cried aloud, her wild and warlike nature
Moved by the mothers heart that the woman loses not ever.
Who then shall fear for the fate of Troy when such are her children?
Verily, Eurus, yearning has seized me to meet thee in battle
Rather than Locrian Ajax, rather than Phthian Achilles.
There acquiring a deathless fame I would make thee my captive,
Greedy and glad who feel as a lioness eyeing her booty.
Nay, I can never leave thee behind, my delicate Trojan,
But, when this war ends, will bear thee away to the hills of my country
And, as a robber might, with my captive glad and unwilling
Bring thee a perfect gift to my sisters Ditis and Anna.
Eurus, there in my land thou shalt look on such hills as thy vision
Gazed not on yet, with their craggy tops besieging Cronion,
Sheeted in virgin white and chilling his feet with their vastness.
Thou shalt rejoice in our wooded peaks and our fruit-bearing valleys,
Lakes of Elysium dreaming and wide and rivers of wonder.
All day long thou shalt glide between mystic woodlands in silence
Broken only by call of the birds and the plashing of waters.
There shalt thou see, O Eurus, the childhood of Penthesilea.
Thou shalt repose in my fathers house and walk in the gardens
Green where I played at the ball with my sisters, Ditis and Anna.
Musing she ceased, but if any god had touched her with prescience
Bidding her think for the last time now of the haunts of her childhood,
Gaze in her soul with a parting love at the thought of her sisters
And of the lovely and distant land where she played through her summers,
Brief was the touch; for she changed at once and only of triumph
Dreamed and only yearned in her heart for the shock of Achilles.
So they passed from the halls of Priam fated and lofty,
Halls where the air seemed sobbing yet with the cry of Cassandra;
Clad in their brilliant armour, bright in their beauty and courage,
Sons of the passing demigods, they to their latest battle
Down the ancestral hill of the Pergamans moved to the gateway.
Loud with an endless march, with a tireless gliding to meet them,
All Troy streamed from her streets and her palaces armed for the combat.
Then to the voice of Deiphobus clanging high oer the rumour
Wide the portals swung that shall close on a blood-red evening,
Slow, foreboding, reluctant, and through the yawn of the gateway
Drove with a cry her steeds the virgin Penthesilea
Calling aloud, O steeds of my east, we drive to Achilles.
Bli the in the car behind her Eurus scouted around him
Scared with his eyes lest Antenor his grandsire should rise in the gateway,
Hardly believing his fate that led him safe through the portals.
After her trampled and crashed the ranks of her orient fighters.
Paris next with his hosts came brilliant, gold on his armour,
Gold on his helm; a mighty bow hung slack on his shoulder,
Propped oer his arm a spear, as he drove his car through the gateway.
Next Deiphobus drove and the hero strong Aeneas,
Leading their numbers on. Behind them Dus and Polites,
Helenus, Priams son, Thrasymachus, grizzled Aretes,
Came like the tempest his father, Adamas, son of the Northwind
Orus old in the fight and Eumachus, kin to Aeneas,
Who was Cresas brother and richest of men in the Troad
After Antenor only and Priam, Ilions monarch.
Halamus drove and Arintheus led on his Lycian levies.
Who were the last to speed out of Troya of all those legions
Doomed to the sword? for never again from the ancient city
Foot would march or chariots crash in their pride to the Xanthus.
Aetor the old and Tryas the conqueror known by the Oxus.
They in the portals met and their ancient eyes on each other
Looked amazed, admiring on age the harness of battle.
They in the turreted head of the gateway halted and conversed.
Twenty years have passed, O Tryas, chief of the Trojans,
Since in the battle thy car was seen and the arm of thy prowess
Age has wronged. Why now to the crowded ways of the battle
Move once more thy body infirm and thy eyes that are faded?
And to Antenors brother the Teucrian, Thou too, O Aetor,
Old and weary hast sat in thy halls and desisted from battle.
Now in Troys portals I meet thee driving forth to the mellay.
Aetor answered, Which then is better, to wretchedly perish
Crushed by the stones of my falling house or slain like a victim
Dragged through the blood of my kin on the sacred hearth of my fathers,
Or in the battle to cease mid the war-cry and hymn of the chariots
Knowing that Troy yet stands in her pride though doomed in her morrows?
So have the young men willed and the old like thee who age not,
Old are thy limbs, but thy heart is still young and hot for the war-din.
Tryas replied, To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection.
So have I come here to offer this shoulder Laomedon leaned on,
Arms that have fought by the Oxus and conquered the Orients heroes
Famous in Priams wars, and a heart that is faithful to Troya.
These I will offer to death on his splendid altar of battle,
Tri bute from Ilion. If she must fall, I shall see not her ending.
Aetor replied to Tryas, Then let us perish together,
Joined by the love of our race who in life were divided in counsel.
All things embrace in death and the strife and the hatred are ended.
Silent together they drove for the last time through Ilions portals
Out with the rest to the fight towards the sea and the spears of the Argives.
Only once, as they drove, they gazed back silent on Troya
Lifting her marble pride in the golden joy of the morning.
So through the ripening morn the army, crossing Scamander,
Filling the heavens with the dust and the war-cry, marched on the Argives.
Far in front Troys plain spread wide to the echoing Ocean.
***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 4 - The Book of Partings
,
335: Book VIII: The Book of the Gods

So on the earth the seed that was sown of the centuries ripened;
Europe and Asia, met on their borders, clashed in the Troad.
All over earth men wept and bled and laboured, world-wide
Sowing Fate with their deeds and had other fruit than they hoped for,
Out of desires and their passionate griefs and fleeting enjoyments
Weaving a tapestry fit for the gods to admire, who in silence
Joy, by the cloud and the sunbeam veiled, and men know not their movers.
They in the glens of Olympus, they by the waters of Ida
Or in their temples worshipped in vain or with heart-strings of mortals
Sated their vast desire and enjoying the world and each other
Sported free and unscourged; for the earth was their prey and their playground.
But from his luminous deep domain, from his estate of azure
Zeus looked forth; he beheld the earth in its flowering greenness
Spread like an emerald dream that the eyes have enthroned in the sunlight,
Heard the symphonies old of the ocean recalling the ages
Lost and dead from its marches salt and unharvested furrows,
Felt in the pregnant hour the unborn hearts of the future.
Troubled kingdoms of men he beheld, the hind in the furrow,
Lords of the glebe and the serf subdued to the yoke of his fortunes,
Slavegirls tending the fire and herdsmen driving the cattle,
Artisans labouring long for a little hire in mens cities,
Labour long and the meagre reward for a toil that is priceless.
Kings in their seats august or marching swift with their armies
Founded ruthlessly brittle empires. Merchant and toiler
Patiently heaped up our transient wealth like the ants in their hillock.
And to preserve it all, to protect this dust that must perish,
Hurting the eternal soul and maiming heaven for some metal
Judges condemned their brothers to chains and to death and to torment,
Criminals scourgers of crime, for so are these ant-heaps founded,
Punishing sin by a worse affront to our crucified natures.
All the uncertainty, all the mistaking, all the delusion
Naked were to his gaze; in the moonlit orchards there wandered
Lovers dreaming of love that endurestill the moment of treason;
Helped by the anxious joy of their kindred supported their anguish
Women with travail racked for the child who shall rack them with sorrow.
Hopes that were confident, fates that sprang dire from the seed of a moment,
Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacrifice wasted,
These he beheld with a heart unshaken; to each side he studied
Seas of confused attempt and the strife and the din and the crying.
All things he pierced in us gazing down with his eyelids immortal,
Lids on which sleep dare not settle, the Father of men on his creatures;
Nor by the cloud and the mist was obscured which baffles our eyeballs,
But he distinguished our source and saw to the end of our labour.
He in the animal racked knew the god that is slowly delivered;
Therefore his heart rejoiced. Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture.
Might not our human gaze on the smoke of a furnace, the burning
Red, intolerable, anguish of ore that is fused in the hell-heat,
Shrink and yearn for coolness and peace and condemn all the labour?
Rather look to the purity coming, the steel in its beauty,
Rather rejoice with the master who stands in his gladness accepting
Heat of the glorious god and the fruitful pain of the iron.
Last the eternal gaze was fixed on Troy and the armies
Marching swift to the shock. It beheld the might of Achilles
Helmed and armed, knew all the craft in the brain of Odysseus,
Saw Deiphobus stern in his car and the fates of Aeneas,
Greece of her heroes empty, Troy enringed by her slayers,
Paris a setting star and the beauty of Penthesilea.
These things he saw delighted; the heart that contains all our ages
Blessed our toil and grew full of its fruits, as the Artist eternal
Watched his vehement drama staged twixt the sea and the mountains,
Phrased in the clamour and glitter of arms and closed by the firebrand,
Act itself out in blood and in passions fierce on the Troad.
Yet as a father his children, who sits in the peace of his study
Hearing the noise of his brood and pleased with their play and their quarrels,
So he beheld our mortal race. Then, turned from the armies,
Into his mind he gazed where Time is reflected and, conscient,
Knew the iron knot of our human fates in their warfare.
Calm he arose and left our earth for his limitless kingdoms.
Far from this lower blue and high in the death-scorning spaces
Lifted oer mortal mind where Time and Space are but figures
Lightly imagined by Thought divine in her luminous stillness,
Zeus has his palace high and there he has stabled his war-car.
Thence he descends to our mortal realms; where the heights of our mountains
Meet with the divine air, he touches and enters our regions.
Now he ascended back to his natural realms and their rapture,
There where all life is bliss and each feeling an ecstasy mastered.
Thence his eagle Thought with its flashing pinions extended
Winged through the world to the gods, and they came at the call, they ascended
Up from their play and their calm and their works through the infinite azure.
Some from our mortal domains in grove or by far-flowing river
Cool from the winds of the earth or quivering with perishable fragrance
Came, or our laughter they bore and the song of the sea in their paces.
Some from the heavens above us arrived, our vital dominions
Whence we draw breath; for there all things have life, the stone like the ilex,
Clay of those realms like the children of men and the brood of the giants.
There Enceladus groans oppressed and draws strength from his anguish
Under a living Aetna and flames that have joy of his entrails.
Fiercely he groans and rejoices expecting the end of his foemen
Hastened by every pang and counts long Time by his writhings.
There in the champaigns unending battle the gods and the giants,
There in eternal groves the lovers have pleasure for ever,
There are the faery climes and there are the wonderful pastures.
Some from a marvellous Paradise hundred-realmed in its musings,
Million-ecstasied, climbed like flames that in silence aspire
Windless, erect in a motionless dream, yet ascending for ever.
All grew aware of the will divine and were drawn to the Father.
Grandiose, calm in her gait, imperious, awing the regions,
Hera came in her pride, the spouse of Zeus and his sister.
As at her birth from the foam of the spaces white Aphrodite
Rose in the cloud of her golden hair like the moon in its halo.
Aegis-bearing Athene, shielded and helmeted, answered
Rushing the call and the heavens thrilled with the joy of her footsteps
Dumbly repeating her name, as insulted and trampled by beauty
Thrill might the soul of a lover and cry out the name of its tyrant.
Others there were as mighty; for Artemis, archeress ancient,
Came on her sandals lightning-tasselled. Up the vast incline
Shaking the world with the force of his advent thundered Poseidon;
Space grew full of his stride and his cry. Immortal Apollo
Shone and his silver clang was heard with alarm in our kingdoms.
Ares impetuous eyes looked forth from a cloud-drift of splendour;
Themis steps appeared and Ananke, the mystic Erinnys;
Nor was Hephaestus flaming strength from his father divided.
Even the ancient Dis to arrive dim-featured, eternal,
Seemed; but his rays are the shades and his voice is the call of the silence.
Into the courts divine they crowded, radiant, burning,
Perfect in utter grace and light. The joy of their spirits
Calls to eternal Time and the glories of Space are his answer:
Thence were these bright worlds born and persist by the throb of their heart-beats.
Not in the forms that mortals have seen when assisted they scatter
Mists of this earthly dust from their eyes in their moments of greatness
Shone those unaging Powers; nor as in our centuries radiant
Mortal-seeming bodies they wore when they mixed with our nations.
Then the long youth of the world had not faded still out of our natures,
Flowers and the sunlight were felt and the earth was glad like a mother.
Then for a human delight they were masked in this denser vesture
Earth desires for her bliss, thin veils, for the god through them glimmered.
Quick were mens days with the throng of the brilliant presences near them:
Gods from the wood and the valley, gods from the obvious wayside,
Gods on the secret hills leaped out from their light on the mortal.
Oft in the haunt and the grove they met with our kind and their touches
Seized and subjected our clay to the greatness of passions supernal,
Grasping the earthly virgin and forcing heaven on this death-dust.
Glorifying human beauty Apollo roamed in our regions
Clymene when he pursued or yearned in vain for Marpessa;
Glorifying earth with a human-seeming face of the beauty
Brought from her heavenly climes Aphrodite mixed with Anchises.
Glimpsed in the wilds were the Satyrs, seen in the woodlands the Graces,
Dryad and Naiad in river and forest, Oreads haunting
Glens and the mountain-glades where they played with the manes of our lions
Glimmered on death-claimed eyes; for the gods then were near us and clasped us,
Heaven leaned down in love with our clay and yearned to its transience.
But we have coarsened in heart and in mood; we have turned in our natures
Nearer our poorer kindred; leaned to the ant and the ferret.
Sight we have darkened with sense and power we have stifled with labour,
Likened in mood to the things we gaze at and are in our vestures:
Therefore we toil unhelped; we are left to our weakness and blindness.
Not in those veils now they rose to their skies, but like loose-fitting mantles
Dropped in the vestibules huge of their vigorous realms that besiege us
All that reminded of earth; then clothed with raiment of swiftness
Straight they went quivering up in a glory like fire or the storm-blast.
Even those natural vestures of puissance they leave when they enter
Minds more subtle fields and agree with its limitless regions
Peopled by creatures of bliss and forms more true than earths shadows,
Mind that pure from this density, throned in her splendours immortal
Looks up at Light and suffers bliss from ineffable kingdoms
Where beyond Mind and its rays is the gleam of a glory supernal:
There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered.
They with bodies impalpable here to our touch and our seeing,
But for a higher delight, to a brighter sense, with more sweetness
Palpable there and visible, thrilled with a lordlier joyance,
Came to the courts of Zeus and his heavens sang to their footsteps.
Harmonies flowed through the blissful coils of the kingdoms of rapture.
Then by his mighty equals surrounded the Thunderer regnant
Veiled his thought in sound that was heard in their souls as they listened.
Veiled are the high gods always lest there should dawn on the mortal
Light too great from the skies and men to their destiny clear-eyed
Walk unsustained like the gods; then Night and Dawn were defeated
And of their masks the deities robbed would be slaves to their subjects.
Children of Immortality, gods who are joyous for ever,
Rapture is ours and eternity measures our lives by his aeons.
For we desireless toil who have joy in the fall as the triumph,
Knowledge eternal possessing we work for an end that is destined
Long already beyond by the Will of which Time is the courser.
Therefore death cannot alter our lives nor pain our enjoyment.
But in the world of mortals twilight is lord of its creatures.
Nothing they perfectly see, but all things seek and imagine,
Out of the clod who have come and would climb from their mire to our heavens.
Yet are the heavenly seats not easy even for the chosen:
Rough and remote is that path; that ascent is too hard for the death-bound.
Hard are Gods terms and few can meet them of men who are mortal.
Mind resists; their breath is a clog; by their tools they are hampered,
Blindly mistaking the throb of their mortal desires for our guidance.
How shall they win in their earth to our skies who are clay and a life-wind,
But that their hearts we invade? Our shocks on their lives come incessant,
Ease discourage and penetrate coarseness; sternness celestial
Forces their souls towards the skies and their bodies by anguish are sifted.
We in the mortal wake an immortal strength by our tortures
And by the flame of our lightnings choose out the vessels of godhead.
This is the nature of earth that to blows she responds and by scourgings
Travails excited; pain is the bed of her blossoms of pleasure.
Earth that was wakened by pain to life and by hunger to thinking
Left to her joys rests inert and content with her gains and her station.
But for the unbearable whips of the gods back soon to her matter
She would go glad and the goal would be missed and the aeons be wasted.
But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud.
This by pain we prevent; we compel his feet to the journey.
But in their minds to impression made subject, by forms of things captured
Blind is the thought and presumptuous the hope and they swerve from our goading;
Blinded are human hearts by desire and fear and possession,
Darkened is knowledge on earth by hope the helper of mortals.
Now too from earth and her children voices of anger and weeping
Beat at our thrones; tis the grief and the wrath of fate-stricken creatures,
Mortals struggling with destiny, hearts that are slaves to their sorrow.
We unmoved by the cry will fulfil our unvarying purpose.
Troy shall fall at last and the ancient ages shall perish.
You who are lovers of Ilion turn from the moans of her people,
Chase from your hearts their prayers, blow back from your nostrils the incense.
Let not one nation resist by its glory the good of the ages.
Twilight thickens over man and he moves to his winter of darkness.
Troy that displaced with her force and her arms the luminous ancients,
Sinks in her turn by the ruder strength of the half-savage Achaians.
They to the Hellene shall yield and the Hellene fall by the Roman.
Rome too shall not endure, but by strengths ill-shaped shall be broken,
Nations formed in the ice and mist, confused and crude-hearted.
So shall the darker and ruder always prevail oer the brilliant
Till in its turn to a ruder and darker it falls and is shattered.
So shall mankind make speed to destroy what twas mighty creating.
Ever since knowledge failed and the ancient ecstasy slackened,
Light has been helper to death and darkness increases the victor.
So shall it last till the fallen ages return to their greatness.
For if the twilight be helped not, night oer the world cannot darken;
Night forbidden how shall a greater dawn be effected?
Gods of the light who know and resist that the doomed may have succour,
Always then shall desire and passion strive with Ananke?
Conquer the cry of your heart-strings that man too may conquer his sorrow,
Stilled in his yearnings. Cease, O ye gods, from the joy of rebellion.
Open the eye of the soul, admit the voice of the Silence.
So in the courts of Heaven august the Thunderer puissant
Spoke to his sons in their souls and they heard him, mighty in silence.
Then to her brother divine the white-armed passionless Hera:
Zeus, we remember; thy sons forget, Apollo and Ares.
Hera, queen of the heavens, they forget not, but choose to be mindless.
This is the greatness of gods that they know and can put back the knowledge;
Doing the work they have chosen they turn not for fruit nor for failure,
Griefless they walk to their goal and strain not their eyes towards the ending.
Light that they have they can lose with a smile, not as souls in the darkness
Clutch at every beam and mistake their one ray for all splendour.
All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us,
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning.
There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour.
Great Cronion ceased and high in the heavenly silence
Rose in their midst the voice of the loud impetuous Ares
Sounding far in the luminous fields of his soul as with thunder.
Father, we know and we have not forgotten. This is our godhead,
Still to strive and never to yield to the evil that conquers.
I will not dwell with the Greeks nor aid them save forced by Ananke
And because lives of the great and the blood of the strong are my portion.
This too thou knowest, our nature enjoys in mankind its fulfilment.
War is my nature and greatness and hardness, the necks of the vanquished;
Force is my soul and strength is my bosom; I shout in the battle
Breaking cities like toys and the nations are playthings of Ares:
Hither and thither I shove them and throw down or range on my table.
Constancy most I love, nobility, virtue and courage;
Fugitive hearts I abhor and the nature fickle as sea-foam.
Now if the ancient spirit of Titan battle is over,
Tros fights no more on the earth, nor now Heracles tramples and struggles,
Bane of the hydra or slaying the Centaurs oer Pelion driven,
Now if the earth no more must be shaken by Titan horsehooves,
Since to a pettier framework all things are fitted consenting,
Yet will I dwell not in Greece nor favour the nurslings of Pallas.
I will await the sons of my loins and the teats of the she-wolf,
Consuls browed like the cliffs and plebeians stern of the wolf-brood,
Senates of kings and armies of granite that grow by disaster;
Such be the nation august that is fit for the favour of Ares!
They shall fulfil me and honour my mother, imperial Hera.
Then with an iron march they shall move to their world-wide dominion,
Through the long centuries rule and at last because earth is impatient,
Slowly with haughtiness perish compelled by mortalitys transience
Leaving a Roman memory stamped on the ages of weakness.
But to his son far-sounding the Father high of the Immortals:
So let it be since such is the will in thee, mightiest Ares;
Thou shalt till sunset prevail, O war-god, fighting for Troya.
So he decreed and the soul of the Warrior sternly consented.
He from his seats arose and down on the summits of Ida
Flaming through Space in his cloud in a headlong glory descended,
Prone like a thunderbolt flaming down from the hand of the Father.
Thence in his chariot drawn by living fire and by swiftness,
Thundered down to earths plains the mighty impetuous Ares.
Far where Deiphobus stern was labouring stark and outnumbered
Smiting the Achaian myriads back on the right of the carnage,
Over the hosts in his car he stood and darkened the Argives.
But in the courts divine the Thunderer spoke to his children:
Ares resisting a present Fate for the hope of the future,
Gods, has gone forth from us. Choose thou thy paths, O my daughter,
More than thy brother assailed by the night that darkens oer creatures.
Choose the silence in heaven or choose the struggle mid mortals,
Golden joy of the worlds, O thou roseate white Aphrodite.
Then with her starry eyes and bosom of bliss from the immortals
Glowing and rosy-limbed cried the wonderful white Aphrodite,
Drawing her fingers like flowers through the flowing gold of her tresses,
Calm, discontented, her perfect mouth like a rose of resistance
Chidingly budded gainst Fate, a charm to their senses enamoured.
Well do I know thou hast given my world to Hera and Pallas.
What though my temples shall stand in Paphos and island Cythera
And though the Greek be a priest for my thoughts and a lyre for my singing,
Beauty pursuing and light through the figures of grace and of rhythm,
Forms shall he mould for mens eyes that the earth has forgotten and mourns for,
Mould even the workings of Pallas to commune with Paphias sweetness,
Mould Hephaestus craft in the gaze of the gold Aphrodite,
Only my form he pursues that I wear for a mortal enchantment,
He to whom now thou givest the world, the Ionian, the Hellene,
But for my might is unfit which Babylon worshipped and Sidon
Palely received from the past in images faint of the gladness
Once that was known by the children of men when the thrill of their members
Was but the immortal joy of the spirit overflowing their bodies,
Wine-cups of Gods desire; but their clay from my natural greatness
Falters betrayed to pain, their delight they have turned into ashes.
Nor to my peaks shall he rise and the perfect fruit of my promptings,
There where the senses swoon but the heart is delivered by rapture:
Never my touch can cling to his soul nor reply from his heart-strings.
Once could my godhead surprise all the stars with the seas of its rapture;
Once the world in its orbit danced to a marvellous rhythm.
Men in their limits, gods in their amplitudes answered my calling;
Life was moved by a chant of delight that sang from the spaces,
Sang from the Soul of the Vast, its rapture clasping its creatures.
Sweetly agreed my fire with their soil and their hearts were as altars.
Pure were its crests; twas not dulled with earth, twas not lost in the hazes
Then when the sons of earth and the daughters of heaven together
Met on lone mountain peaks or, linked on wild beach and green meadow,
Twining embraced. For I danced on Taygetus peaks and oer Ida
Naked and loosing my golden hair like a nimbus of glory
Oer a deep-ecstasied earth that was drunk with my roses and whiteness.
There was no shrinking nor veil in our old Saturnian kingdoms.
Equals were heaven and earth, twin gods on the lap of Dione.
Now shall my waning greatness perish and pass out of Nature.
For though the Romans, my children, shall grasp at the strength of their mother,
They shall not hold the god, but lose in unsatisfied orgies
Yet what the earth has kept of my joy, my glory, my puissance,
Who shall but drink for a troubled hour in the dusk of the sunset
Dregs of my wine Pandemian missing the Uranian sweetness.
So shall the night descend on the greatness and rapture of living;
Creeds that refuse shall persuade the world to revolt from its mother.
Pallas adorers shall loa the me and Heras scorn me for lowness;
Beauty shall pass from mens work and delight from their play and their labour;
Earth restored to the Cyclops shall shrink from the gold Aphrodite.
So shall I live diminished, owned but by beasts in the forest,
Birds of the air and the gods in their heavens, but disgraced in the mortal.
Then to the discontented rosy-mouthed Aphrodite
Zeus replied, the Father divine: O goddess Astarte,
What are these thoughts thou hast suffered to wing from thy rose-mouth immortal?
Bees that sting and delight are the words from thy lips, Cytherea.
Art thou not womb of the world and from thee are the thronging of creatures?
And didst thou cease the worlds too would cease and the aeons be ended.
Suffer my Greeks; accept who accept thee, O gold Dionaean.
They in the works of their craft and their dreams shall enthrone thee for ever,
Building thee temples in Paphos and Eryx and island Cythera,
Building the fane more enduring and bright of thy golden ideal.
Even if natures of men could renounce thee and God do without thee,
Rose of love and sea of delight, O my child Aphrodite,
Still wouldst thou live in the worship they gave thee protected from fading,
Splendidly statued and shrined in mens works and mens thoughts, Cytherea.
Pleased and blushing with bliss of her praise and the thought of her empire
Answered, as cries a harp in heaven, the gold Aphrodite:
Father, I know and I spoke but to hear from another my praises.
I am the womb of the world and the cause of this teeming of creatures,
And if discouraged I ceased, Gods world would lose heart and would perish.
How will you do then without me your works of wisdom and greatness,
Hera, queen of heaven, and thou, O my sister Athene?
Yes, I shall reign and endure though the pride of my workings be conquered.
What though no second Helen find a second Paris,
Lost though their glories of form to the earth, though their confident gladness
Pass from a race misled and forgetting the sap that it sprang from,
They are eternal in man in the worship of beauty and rapture.
Ever while earth is embraced by the sun and hot with his kisses
And while a Will supernal works through the passions of Nature,
Me shall men seek with my light or their darkness, sweetly or crudely,
Cold on the ice of the north or warm in the heats of the southland,
Slowly enduring my touch or with violence rapidly burning.
I am the sweetness of living, I am the touch of the Master.
Love shall die bound to my stake like a victim adorned as for bridal,
Life shall be bathed in my flames and be purified gold or be ashes.
I, Aphrodite, shall move the world for ever and ever.
Yet now since most to me, Father of all, the ages arriving,
Hostile, rebuke my heart and turn from my joy and my sweetness,
I will resist and not yield, nor care what I do, so I conquer.
Often I curbed my mood for your sakes and was gracious and kindly,
Often I lay at Heras feet and obeyed her commandments
Tranquil and proud or oercome by a honeyed and ancient compulsion
Fawned on thy pureness and served thy behests, O my sister Pallas.
Deep was the love that united us, happy the wrestle and clasping;
Love divided, Love united, Love was our mover.
But since you now overbear and would scourge me and chain and control me,
War I declare on you all, O my Father and brothers and sisters.
Henceforth I do my will as the joy in me prompts or the anger.
Ranging the earth with my beauty and passion and golden enjoyments
All whom I can, I will bind; I will drive at the bliss of my workings,
Whether mens hearts are seized by the joy or seized by the torture.
Most I will plague your men, your worshippers and in my malice
Break up your works with confusion divine, O my mother and sister;
Then shall you fume and resist and be helpless and pine with my torments.
Yet will I never relent but always be sweet and malignant,
Cruel and tyrannous, hurtful and subtle, a charm and a torture.
Thou too, O father Zeus, shalt always be vexed with my doings;
Called in each moment to judge thou shalt chafe at our cry and our quarrels,
Often grope for thy thunderbolt, often frown magisterial
Joining in vain thy awful brows oer thy turbulent children.
Yet in thy wrath recall my might and my wickedness, Father;
Hurt me not then too much lest the world and thyself too should suffer.
Save, O my Father, life and grace and the charm of the senses;
Love preserve lest the heart of the world grow dulled and forsaken.
Smiling her smile immortal of love and of mirth and of malice
White Aphrodite arose in her loveliness armed for the conflict.
Golden and careless and joyous she went like a wild bird that winging
Flits from bough to bough and resumes its chant interrupted.
Love where her white feet trod bloomed up like a flower from the spaces;
Mad round her touches billowed incessantly laughter and rapture.
Thrilled with her feet was the bosom of Space, for her amorous motion
Floated, a flower on the wave of her bliss or swayed like the lightning.
Rich as a summer fruit and fresh as Springs blossoms her body
Gleaming and blushing, veiled and bare and with ecstasy smiting
Burned out rosy and white through her happy ambrosial raiment,
Golden-tressed and a charm, her bosom a fragrance and peril.
So was she framed to the gaze as she came from the seats of the Mighty,
So embodied she visits the hearts of men and their dwellings
And in her breathing tenement laughs at the eyes that can see her.
Swift-footed down to the Troad she hastened thrilling the earth-gods.
There with ambrosial secrecy veiled, admiring the heroes
Strong and beautiful, might of the warring and glory of armour,
Over her son Aeneas she stood, his guard in the battle.
But in the courts divine the Thunderer spoke mid his children:
Thou for a day and a night and another day and a nightfall,
White Aphrodite, prevail; oer thee too the night is extended.
She has gone forth who made men like gods in their glory and gladness.
Now in the darkness coming all beauty must wane or be tarnished;
Joy shall fade and mighty Love grow fickle and fretful;
Even as a child that is scared in the night, he shall shake in his chambers.
Yet shall a portion be kept for these, Ares and white Aphrodite.
Thou whom already thy Pythoness bears not, torn by thy advent,
Caverned already who sittest in Delphi knowing thy future,
What wilt thou do with the veil and the night, O burning Apollo?
Then from the orb of his glory unbearable save to immortals
Bright and austere replied the beautiful mystic Apollo:
Zeus, I know that I fade; already the night is around me.
Dusk she extends her reign and obscures my lightnings with error.
Therefore my prophets mislead mens hearts to the ruin appointed,
Therefore Cassandra cries in vain to her sire and her brothers.
All I endure I foresee and the strength in me waits for its coming;
All I foresee I approve; for I know what is willed, O Cronion.
Yet is the fierce strength wroth in my breast at the need of approval
And for the human race fierce pity works in my bosom;
Wroth is my splendid heart with the cowering knowledge of mortals,
Wroth are my burning eyes with the purblind vision of reason.
I will go forth from your seats and descend to the night among mortals
There to guard the flame and the mystery; vast in my moments
Rare and sublime to sound like a sea against Time and its limits,
Cry like a spirit in pain in the hearts of the priest and the poet,
Cry against limits set and disorder sanities bounded.
Jealous for truth to the end my might shall prevail and for ever
Shatter the moulds that men make to imprison their limitless spirits.
Dire, overpowering the brain I shall speak out my oracles splendid.
Then in their ages of barren light or lucidity fruitful
Whenso the clear gods think they have conquered earth and its mortals,
Hidden God from all eyes, they shall wake from their dream and recoiling
Still they shall find in their paths the fallen and darkened Apollo.
So he spoke, repressing his dreadful might in his bosom,
And from their high seats passed, his soul august and resplendent
Drawn to the anguish of men and the fierce terrestrial labour.
Down he dropped with a roar of light invading the regions,
And in his fierce and burning spirit intense and uplifted
Sure of his luminous truth and careless for weakness of mortals
Flaming oppressed the earth with his dire intolerant beauty.
Over the summits descending that slept in the silence of heaven,
He through the spaces angrily drew towards the tramp and the shouting
Over the speeding of Xanthus and over the pastures of Troya.
Clang of his argent bow was the wrath restrained of the mighty,
Stern was his pace like Fates; so he came to the warfare of mortals
And behind Paris strong and inactive waited Gods moment
Knowing what should arrive, nor disturbed like men by their hopings.
But in the courts of Heaven Zeus to his brother immortal
Turned like a menaced king on his counsellor smiling augustly:
Seest thou, Poseidon, this sign that great gods revolting have left us,
Follow their hearts and strive with Ananke? Yet though they struggle,
Thou and I will do our will with the world, O earth-shaker.
Answered to Zeus the besieger of earth, the voice of the waters:
This is our strength and our right, for we are the kings and the masters.
Too much pity has been and yielding of Heaven to mortals.
I will go down with my chariot drawn by my thunder-maned coursers
Into the battle and thrust down Troy with my hand to the silence,
Even though she cling round the snowy knees of our child Aphrodite
Or with Apollos sun take refuge from Night and her shadows.
I will not pity her pain, who am ruthless even as my surges.
Brother, thou knowest, O Zeus, that I am a king and a trader;
For on my paths I receive earths skill and her merchandise gather,
Traffic richly in pearls and bear the swift ships on my bosom.
Blue are my waves and they call mens hearts to wealth and adventure.
Lured by the shifting surges they launch their delight and their treasures
Trusting the toil of years to the perilous moments of Ocean.
Huge mans soul in its petty frame goes wrestling with Nature
Over her vasts and his fragile ships between my horizons
Buffeting death in his solitudes labour through swell and through storm-blast
Bound for each land with her sons and watched for by eyes in each haven.
I from Tyre up to Gades trace on my billows their trade-routes
And on my vast and spuming Atlantic suffer their rudders.
Carthage and Greece are my children, the marts of the world are my term-posts.
Who then deserves the earth if not he who enriches and fosters?
But thou hast favoured thy sons, O Zeus; O Hera, earths sceptres
Still were denied me and kept for strong Ares and brilliant Apollo.
Now all your will shall be done, so you give me the earth for my nations.
Gold shall make men like gods and bind their thoughts into oneness;
Peace I will build with gold and heaven with the pearls of my caverns.
Smiling replied to his brothers craft the mighty Cronion:
Lord of the boundless seas, Poseidon, soul of the surges,
Well thou knowest that earth shall be seized as a booth for the trader.
Rome nor Greece nor France can drive back Carthage for ever.
Always each birth of the silence attaining the field and the movement
Takes from Time its reign; for it came for its throne and its godhead.
So too shall Mammon take and his sons their hour from the ages.
Yet is the flame and the dust last end of the silk and the iron,
And at their end the king and the prophet shall govern the nations.
Even as Troy, so shall Babylon flame up to heaven for the spoiler
Wailed by the merchant afar as he sees the red glow from the ocean.
Up from the seats of the Mighty the Earth-shaker rose. His raiment
Round him purple and dominant rippled and murmured and whispered,
Whispered of argosies sunk and the pearls and the Nereids playing,
Murmured of azure solitudes, sounded of storm and the death-wail.
Even as the march of his waters so was the pace of the sea-god
Flowing on endless through Time; with the glittering symbol of empire
Crowned were his fatal brows; in his grasp was the wrath of the trident,
Tripled force, life-shattering, brutal, imperial, sombre.
Resonant, surging, vast in the pomp of his clamorous greatness
Proud and victorious he came to his home in the far-spuming waters.
Even as a soul from the heights of thought plunges back into living,
So he plunged like a rock through the foam; for it falls from a mountain
Overpeering the waves in some silence of desolate waters
Left to the wind and the sea-gull where Ocean alone with the ages
Dreams of the calm of the skies or tosses its spray to the wind-gods,
Tosses for ever its foam in the solitude huge of its longings
Far from the homes and the noises of men. So the dark-browed Poseidon
Came to his coral halls and the sapphire stables of Nereus
Ever where champ their bits the harnessed steeds of the Ocean
Watched by foam-white girls in the caverns of still Amphitrite.
There was his chariot yoked by the Tritons, drawn by his coursers
Born of the fleeing sea-spray and shod with the northwind who journey
Black like the front of the storm and clothed with their manes as with thunder.
This now rose from its depths to the upper tumults of Ocean
Bearing the awful brows and the mighty form of the sea-god
And from the roar of the surges fast oer the giant margin
Came remembering the storm and the swiftness wide towards the Troad.
So among men he arrived to the clamorous labours of Ares,
Close by the stern Diomedes stood and frowned oer the battle.
He for the Trojan slaughter chose for his mace and his sword-edge
Iron Tydeus son and the adamant heart of young Pyrrhus.
But in the courts divine the Father high of the immortals
Turned in his heart to the brilliant offspring born of his musings,
She who tranquil observes and judges her father and all things.
What shall I say to the thought that is calm in thy breasts, O Athene?
Have I not given thee earth for thy portion, throned thee and armoured,
Darkened Cypris smile, dimmed Heras son and Latonas?
Swift in thy silent ambition, proud in thy radiant sternness,
Girl, thou shalt rule with the Greek and the Saxon, the Frank and the Roman.
Worker and fighter and builder and thinker, light of the reason,
Men shall leave all temples to crowd in thy courts, O Athene.
Go then and do my will, prepare mans tribes for their fullness.
But with her high clear smile on him answered the mighty Athene,
Wisely and soberly, tenderly smiled she chiding her father
Even as a mother might rail at her child when he hides and dissembles:
Zeus, I see and I am not deceived by thy words in my spirit.
We but build forms for thy thought while thou smilest down high oer our toiling;
Even as men are we tools for thee, who are thy children and dear ones.
All this life is thy sport and thou workst like a boy at his engines
Making a toil of the game and a play of the serious labour.
Then to that play thou callest us wearing a sombre visage,
This consulting, that to our wills confiding, O Ruler;
Choosing thy helpers, hastened by those whom thou lurest to oppose thee
Guile thou usest with gods as with mortals, scheming, deceiving,
And at the wrath and the love thou hast prompted laughest in secret.
So we two who are sisters and enemies, lovers and rivals,
Fondled and baffled in turn obey thy will and thy cunning,
I, thy girl of war, and the rosy-white Aphrodite.
Always we served but thy pleasure since our immortal beginnings,
Always each other we helped by our play and our wrestlings and quarrels.
This too I know that I pass preparing the paths of Apollo
And at the end as his sister and slave and bride I must sojourn
Rapt to his courts of mystic light and unbearable brilliance.
Was I not ever condemned since my birth from the toil of thy musings
Seized like a lyre in my body to sob and to laugh out his music,
Shake as a leaf in his fierceness and leap as a flame in his splendours!
So must I dwell overpowered and so must I labour subjected
Robbed of my loneliness pure and coerced in my radiant freedom,
Now whose clearness and pride are the sovereign joy of thy creatures.
Such the reward that thou keepst for my labour obedient always.
Yet I work and I do thy will, for tis mine, O my father.
Proud of her ruthless lust of thought and action and battle,
Swift-footed rose the daughter of Zeus from her sessions immortal:
Breasts of the morning unveiled in a purity awful and candid,
Head of the mighty Dawn, the goddess Pallas Athene!
Strong and rapacious she swooped on the world as her prey and her booty
Down from the courts of the Mighty descending, darting on Ida.
Dire she descended, a god in her reason, a child in her longings,
Joy and woe to the world that is given to the whims of the child-god
Greedy for rule and play and the minds of men and their doings!
So with her aegis scattering light oer the heads of the nations
Shining-eyed in her boyish beauty severe and attractive
Came to the fields of the Troad, came to the fateful warfare,
Veiled, the goddess calm and pure in her luminous raiment
Zoned with beauty and strength. Rejoicing, spurring the fighters
Close oer Odysseus she stood and clear-eyed governed the battle.
Zeus to Hephaestus next, the Cyclopean toiler
Turned, Hephaestus the strong-souled, priest and king and a bond-slave,
Servant of men in their homes and their workshops, servant of Nature,
He who has built these worlds and kindles the fire for a mortal.
Thou, my son, art obedient always. Wisdom is with thee,
Therefore thou knowst and obeyest. Submission is wisdom and knowledge;
He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish.
Troy and her sons and her works are thy food today, O Hephaestus.
And to his father the Toiler answered, the silent Seer:
Yes, I obey thee, my Father, and That which than thou is more mighty;
Even as thou obeyest by rule, so I by my labour.
Now must I heap the furnace, now must I toil at the smithy,
I who have flamed on the altar of sacrifice helping the sages.
I am the Cyclops, the lamester, who once was pure and a high-priest.
Holy the pomp of my flames ascendant from pyre and from altar
Robed mens souls for their heavens and my smoke was a pillar to Nature.
Though I have burned in the sight of the sage and the heart of the hero,
Now is no nobler hymn for my ear than the clanging of metal,
Breath of human greed and the dolorous pant of the engines.
Still I repine not, but toil; for to toil I was yoked by my Maker.
I am your servant, O Gods, and his of whom you are servants.
But to the toiler Zeus replied, to the servant of creatures:
What is the thought thou hast uttered betrayed by thy speech, O Hephaestus?
True is it earth shall grow as a smithy, the smoke of the furnace
Fill mens eyes and their souls shall be stunned with the clang of the hammers;
Yet in the end there is rest on the peak of a labour accomplished.
Nor shall the might of the thinker be quelled by that iron oppression,
Nor shall the soul of the warrior despair in the darkness triumphant;
For when the night shall be deepest, dawn shall increase on the mountains
And in the heart of the worst the best shall be born by my wisdom.
Pallas thy sister shall guard mans knowledge fighting the earth-smoke.
Thou too art mighty to live through the clamour even as Apollo.
Work then, endure; expect from the Silence an end and thy wages.
So King Hephaestus arose and passed from the courts of his father;
Down upon earth he came with his lame omnipotent motion;
And with uneven steps absorbed and silent the Master
Worked employed mid the wheels of the cars as a smith in his smithy,
But it was death and bale that he forged, not the bronze and the iron.
Stark, like a fire obscured by its smoke, through the spear-casts he laboured
Helping Ajax war and the Theban and Phocian fighters.
Zeus to his grandiose helper next, who proved and unmoving,
Calm in her greatness waited the mighty comm and of her husband:
Hera, sister and spouse, what my will is thou knowest, O consort.
One are our blood and our hearts, nor the thought for the words of the speaker
Waits, but each other we know and ourselves and the Vast and the heavens,
Life and all between and all beyond and the ages.
That which Space not knows nor Time, we have known, O my sister.
Therefore our souls are one soul and our minds become mirrors of oneness.
Go then and do my will, O thou mighty one, burning down Troya.
Silent she rose from the seats of the Blissful, Hera majestic,
And with her flowing garment and mystical zone through the spaces
Haloed came like the moon on an evening of luminous silence
Down upon Ida descending, a snow-white swan on the greenness,
Down upon Ida the mystic haunted by footsteps immortal
Ever since out of the Ocean it rose and lived gazing towards heaven.
There on a peak of the mountains alone with the sea and the azure
Voiceless and mighty she paused like a thought on the summits of being
Clasped by all heaven; the winds at play in her gust-scattered raiment
Sported insulting her gracious strength with their turbulent sweetness,
Played with their mother and queen; but she stood absorbed and unheeding,
Mute, with her sandalled foot for a moment thrilling the grasses,
Dumbly adored by a soul in the mountains, a thought in the rivers,
Roared to loud by her lions. The voice of the cataracts falling
Entered her soul profound and it heard eternitys rumour.
Silent its gaze immense contained the wheeling of aeons.
Huge-winged through Time flew her thought and its grandiose vast revolutions
Turned and returned. So musing her timeless creative spirit,
Master of Time, its instrument, grieflessly hastening forward
Parted with greatnesses dead and summoned new strengths from their stables;
Maned they came to her call and filled with their pacings the future.
Calm, with the vision satisfied, thrilled by the grandeurs within her,
Down in a billow of whiteness and gold and delicate raiment
Gliding the daughter of Heaven came to the earth that received her
Glad of the tread divine and bright with her more than with sunbeams.
King Agamemnon she found and smiling on Spartas levies
Mixed unseen with the far-glinting spears of haughty Mycenae.
Then to the Mighty who tranquil abode and august in his regions
Zeus, while his gaze over many forms and high-seated godheads
Passed like a swift-fleeing eagle over the peaks and the glaciers
When to his eyrie he flies alone through the vastness and silence:
Artemis, child of my loins and you, O legioned immortals,
All you have heard. Descend, O ye gods, to your sovereign stations,
Labour rejoicing whose task is joy and your bliss is creation;
Shrink from no act that Necessity asks from your luminous natures.
Thee I have given no part in the years that come, O my daughter,
Huntress swift of the worlds who with purity all things pursuest.
Yet not less is thy portion intended than theirs who oerpass thee:
Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and exhausted.
Archeress, brilliance, wait thine hour from the speed of the ages.
So they departed, Artemis leading lightning-tasselled.
Ancient Themis remained and awful Dis and Ananke.
Then mid these last of the gods who shall stand when all others have perished,
Zeus to the Silence obscure under iron brows of that goddess,
Griefless, unveiled was her visage, dire and unmoved and eternal:
Thou and I, O Dis, remain and our sister Ananke.
That which the joyous hearts of our children, radiant heaven-moths
Flitting mid flowers of sense for the honey of thought have not captured,
That which Poseidon forgets mid the pomp and the roar of his waters,
We three keep in our hearts. By the Light that I watch for unsleeping,
By thy tremendous consent to the silence and darkness, O Hades,
By her delight renounced and the prayers and the worship of mortals
Making herself as an engine of God without bowels or vision,
Yet in that engine are only heart-beats, yet is her riddle
Only Love that is veiled and pity that suffers and slaughters,
We three are free from ourselves, O Dis, and free from each other.
Do then, O King of the Night, observe then with Time for thy servant
Not my behest, but What she and thou and I are for ever.
Mute the Darkness sat like a soul unmoved through the aeons,
Then came a voice from the silence of Dis, from the night there came wisdom.
Yes, I have chosen and that which I chose I endure, O Cronion,
Though to the courts of the gods I come as a threat and a shadow,
Even though none to their counsels call me, none to their pastime,
None companions me willingly; even thy daughter, my consort,
Trembling whom once from our sister Demeter I plucked like a blossom
Torn from Sicilian fields, while Fate reluctant, consenting,
Bowed her head, lives but by her gasps of the sun and the azure;
Stretched are her hands to the light and she seeks for the clasp of her mother.
I, I am Night and her reign and that of which Night is a symbol.
All to me comes, even thou shalt come to me, brilliant Cronion.
All here exists by me whom all walk fearing and shunning;
He who shuns not, He am I and thou and Ananke.
All things I take to my bosom that Life may be swift in her voyage;
For out of death is Life and not by birth and her motions
And behind Night is light and not in the sun and his splendours.
Troy to the Night I will gather a wreath for my shadows, O grower.
So in his arrogance dire the vast invincible Death-god
Triumphing passed out of heaven with Themis and silent Ananke.
Zeus alone in the spheres of his bliss, in his kingdoms of brilliance
Sat divine and alarmed; for even the gods in their heavens
Scarce shall live who have gazed on the unveiled face of Ananke,
Heard the accents dire of the Darkness that waits for the ages.
Awful and dull grew his eyes and mighty and still grew his members.
Back from his nature he drew to the passionless peaks of the spirit,
Throned where it dwells for ever uplifted and silent and changeless
Far beyond living and death, beyond Nature and ending of Nature.
There for a while he dwelt veiled, protected from Dis and his greatness;
Then to the works of the world he returned and the joy of his musings.
Life and the blaze of the mighty soul that he was of Gods making
Dawned again in the heavenly eyes and the majestied semblance.
Comforted heaven he beheld, to the green of the earth was attracted.
But through this Space unreal, but through these worlds that are shadows
Went the awful Three. None saw them pass, none felt them.
Only in the heavens was a tread as of death, in the air was a winter,
Earth oppressed moaned long like a woman striving with anguish.
Ida saw them not, but her grim lions cowered in their caverns,
Ceased for a while on her slopes the eternal laughter of fountains.
Over the ancient ramparts of Dardanus high-roofed city
Darkening her victor domes and her gardens of life and its sweetness
Silent they came. Unseen and unheard was the dreadful arrival.
Troy and her gods dreamed secure in the moment flattered by sunlight.
Dim to the citadel high they arrived and their silence invaded
Pallas marble shrine where stern and white in her beauty,
Armed on her pedestal, trampling the prostrate image of darkness
Mighty Athenes statue guarded imperial Troya.
Dim and vast they entered in. Then through all the great city
Huge a rushing sound was heard from her gardens and places
And in their musings her seers as they strove with night and with error
And in the fane of Apollo Laocoon torn by his visions
Heard aghast the voice of Troys deities fleeing from Troya,
Saw the flaming lords of her households drive in a death-rout
Forth from her ancient halls and their noble familiar sessions.
Ghosts of her splendid centuries wailed on the wings of the doom-blast.
Moaning the Dryads fled and her Naiads passed from Scamander
Leaving the world to deities dumb of the clod and the earth-smoke,
And from their tombs and their shrines the shadowy Ancestors faded.
Filled was the air with their troops and the sound of a vast lamentation.
Wailing they went, lamenting mortalitys ages of greatness,
Ruthless Anankes deeds and the mortal conquests of Hades.
Then in the fane Palladian the shuddering priests of Athene
Entered the darkened shrine and saw on the suffering marble
Shattered Athenes mighty statue prostrate as conquered,
But on its pedestal rose oer the unhurt image of darkness
Awful shapes, a Trinity dim and dire unto mortals.
Dumb they fell down on the earth and the life-breath was slain in their bosoms.
And in the noon there was night. And Apollo passed out of Troya.
***

~ Sri Aurobindo, 8 - The Book of the Gods
,
336:1.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
2.

When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony - and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.

I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.

I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.
3.

I know not how thou singest, my master! I ever listen in silent amazement.

The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.

My heart longs to join in thy song, but vainly struggles for a voice. I would speak, but speech breaks not into song, and I cry out baffled. Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!
4.

Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.

I shall ever try to keep all untruths out from my thoughts, knowing that thou art that truth which has kindled the light of reason in my mind.

I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.

And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.
5.

I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.
6.

Pluck this little flower and take it, delay not! I fear lest it droop and drop into the dust.

I may not find a place in thy garland, but honour it with a touch of pain from thy hand and pluck it. I fear lest the day end before I am aware, and the time of offering go by.

Though its colour be not deep and its smell be faint, use this flower in thy service and pluck it while there is time.

7.

My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.

My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
8.

The child who is decked with prince's robes and who has jewelled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step.

In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move.

Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keeps one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.
9.

O Fool, try to carry thyself upon thy own shoulders! O beggar, to come beg at thy own door!

Leave all thy burdens on his hands who can bear all, and never look behind in regret.

Thy desire at once puts out the light from the lamp it touches with its breath. It is unholy - take not thy gifts through its unclean hands. Accept only what is offered by sacred love.
10.

Here is thy footstool and there rest thy feet where live the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

When I try to bow to thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depth where thy feet rest among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

Pride can never approach to where thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

My heart can never find its way to where thou keepest company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.
11.

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.

Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.
12.

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here art thou!'

The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'
13.

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.

The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.

The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.

I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
14.

My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked - this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind - saving me from perils of overmuch desire.

There are times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.
15.

I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.

In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.

When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.
16.

I have had my invitation to this world's festival, and thus my life has been blessed. My eyes have seen and my ears have heard.

It was my part at this feast to play upon my instrument, and I have done all I could.

Now, I ask, has the time come at last when I may go in and see thy face and offer thee my silent salutation?
17.

I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands. That is why it is so late and why I have been guilty of such omissions.

They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast; but I evade them ever, for I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

People blame me and call me heedless; I doubt not they are right in their blame.

The market day is over and work is all done for the busy. Those who came to call me in vain have gone back in anger. I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.
18.

Clouds heap upon clouds and it darkens. Ah, love, why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone?

In the busy moments of the noontide work I am with the crowd, but on this dark lonely day it is only for thee that I hope.

If thou showest me not thy face, if thou leavest me wholly aside, I know not how I am to pass these long, rainy hours.

I keep gazing on the far-away gloom of the sky, and my heart wanders wailing with the restless wind.
19.

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience.

The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.

Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.
20.

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.

That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing and it seemed to me that is was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.

I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.
21.

I must launch out my boat. The languid hours pass by on the shore - Alas for me!

The spring has done its flowering and taken leave. And now with the burden of faded futile flowers I wait and linger.

The waves have become clamorous, and upon the bank in the shady lane the yellow leaves flutter and fall.

What emptiness do you gaze upon! Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air with the notes of the far-away song floating from the other shore?
22.

In the deep shadows of the rainy July, with secret steps, thou walkest, silent as night, eluding all watchers.

Today the morning has closed its eyes, heedless of the insistent calls of the loud east wind, and a thick veil has been drawn over the ever-wakeful blue sky.

The woodlands have hushed their songs, and doors are all shut at every house. Thou art the solitary wayfarer in this deserted street. Oh my only friend, my best beloved, the gates are open in my house - do not pass by like a dream.
23.

Art thou abroad on this stormy night on thy journey of love, my friend? The sky groans like one in despair.

I have no sleep tonight. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!

I can see nothing before me. I wonder where lies thy path!

By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom art thou threading thy course to come to me, my friend?
24.

If the day is done, if birds sing no more, if the wind has flagged tired, then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me, even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk.

From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended, whose garment is torn and dustladen, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night.
25.

In the night of weariness let me give myself up to sleep without struggle, resting my trust upon thee.

Let me not force my flagging spirit into a poor preparation for thy worship.

It is thou who drawest the veil of night upon the tired eyes of the day to renew its sight in a fresher gladness of awakening.

26.

He came and sat by my side but I woke not. What a cursed sleep it was, O miserable me!

He came when the night was still; he had his harp in his hands, and my dreams became resonant with its melodies.

Alas, why are my nights all thus lost? Ah, why do I ever miss his sight whose breath touches my sleep?
27.

Light, oh where is the light? Kindle it with the burning fire of desire!

There is the lamp but never a flicker of a flame - is such thy fate, my heart? Ah, death were better by far for thee!

Misery knocks at thy door, and her message is that thy lord is wakeful, and he calls thee to the love-tryst through the darkness of night.

The sky is overcast with clouds and the rain is ceaseless. I know not what this is that stirs in me - I know not its meaning.

A moment's flash of lightning drags down a deeper gloom on my sight, and my heart gropes for the path to where the music of the night calls me.

Light, oh where is the light! Kindle it with the burning fire of desire! It thunders and the wind rushes screaming through the void. The night is black as a black stone. Let not the hours pass by in the dark. Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.
28.

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.

Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.

I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.

The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love.

My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
29.

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name; and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.
30.

I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark?

I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not.

He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter.

He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.
31.

'Prisoner, tell me, who was it that bound you?'

'It was my master,' said the prisoner. 'I thought I could outdo everybody in the world in wealth and power, and I amassed in my own treasure-house the money due to my king. When sleep overcame me I lay upon the bad that was for my lord, and on waking up I found I was a prisoner in my own treasure-house.'

'Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?'

'It was I,' said the prisoner, 'who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.'
32.

By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.

Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou art not seen.

If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.
33.

When it was day they came into my house and said, 'We shall only take the smallest room here.'

They said, 'We shall help you in the worship of your God and humbly accept only our own share in his grace'; and then they took their seat in a corner and they sat quiet and meek.

But in the darkness of night I find they break into my sacred shrine, strong and turbulent, and snatch with unholy greed the offerings from God's altar.
34.

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name thee my all.

Let only that little be left of my will whereby I may feel thee on every side, and come to thee in everything, and offer to thee my love every moment.

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may never hide thee.

Let only that little of my fetters be left whereby I am bound with thy will, and thy purpose is carried out in my life - and that is the fetter of thy love.
35.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
36.

This is my prayer to thee, my lord - strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart. Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows. Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service. Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might. Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles. And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love.
37.

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, - that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.

But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
38.

That I want thee, only thee - let my heart repeat without end. All desires that distract me, day and night, are false and empty to the core.

As the night keeps hidden in its gloom the petition for light, even thus in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry - 'I want thee, only thee'.

As the storm still seeks its end in peace when it strikes against peace with all its might, even thus my rebellion strikes against thy love and still its cry is - 'I want thee, only thee'.
39.

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.
40.

The rain has held back for days and days, my God, in my arid heart. The horizon is fiercely naked - not the thinnest cover of a soft cloud, not the vaguest hint of a distant cool shower.

Send thy angry storm, dark with death, if it is thy wish, and with lashes of lightning startle the sky from end to end.

But call back, my lord, call back this pervading silent heat, still and keen and cruel, burning the heart with dire despair.

Let the cloud of grace bend low from above like the tearful look of the mother on the day of the father's wrath.
41.

Where dost thou stand behind them all, my lover, hiding thyself in the shadows? They push thee and pass thee by on the dusty road, taking thee for naught. I wait here weary hours spreading my offerings for thee, while passers-by come and take my flowers, one by one, and my basket is nearly empty.

The morning time is past, and the noon. In the shade of evening my eyes are drowsy with sleep. Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.

Oh, how, indeed, could I tell them that for thee I wait, and that thou hast promised to come. How could I utter for shame that I keep for my dowry this poverty. Ah, I hug this pride in the secret of my heart.

I sit on the grass and gaze upon the sky and dream of the sudden splendour of thy coming - all the lights ablaze, golden pennons flying over thy car, and they at the roadside standing agape, when they see thee come down from thy seat to raise me from the dust, and set at thy side this ragged beggar girl a-tremble with shame and pride, like a creeper in a summer breeze.

But time glides on and still no sound of the wheels of thy chariot. Many a procession passes by with noise and shouts and glamour of glory. Is it only thou who wouldst stand in the shadow silent and behind them all? And only I who would wait and weep and wear out my heart in vain longing?
42.

Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end.

In that shoreless ocean, at thy silently listening smile my songs would swell in melodies, free as waves, free from all bondage of words.

Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do? Lo, the evening has come down upon the shore and in the fading light the seabirds come flying to their nests.

Who knows when the chains will be off, and the boat, like the last glimmer of sunset, vanish into the night?
43.

The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life.

And today when by chance I light upon them and see thy signature, I find they have lain scattered in the dust mixed with the memory of joys and sorrows of my trivial days forgotten.

Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoing from star to star.
44.

This is my delight, thus to wait and watch at the wayside where shadow chases light and the rain comes in the wake of the summer.

Messengers, with tidings from unknown skies, greet me and speed along the road. My heart is glad within, and the breath of the passing breeze is sweet.

From dawn till dusk I sit here before my door, and I know that of a sudden the happy moment will arrive when I shall see.

In the meanwhile I smile and I sing all alone. In the meanwhile the air is filling with the perfume of promise.
45.

Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.

Every moment and every age, every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.

Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind, but all their notes have always proclaimed, 'He comes, comes, ever comes.'

In the fragrant days of sunny April through the forest path he comes, comes, ever comes.

In the rainy gloom of July nights on the thundering chariot of clouds he comes, comes, ever comes.

In sorrow after sorrow it is his steps that press upon my heart, and it is the golden touch of his feet that makes my joy to shine.

-

46.

I know not from what distant time thou art ever coming nearer to meet me. Thy sun and stars can never keep thee hidden from me for aye.

In many a morning and eve thy footsteps have been heard and thy messenger has come within my heart and called me in secret.

I know not only why today my life is all astir, and a feeling of tremulous joy is passing through my heart.

It is as if the time were come to wind up my work, and I feel in the air a faint smell of thy sweet presence.
47.

The night is nearly spent waiting for him in vain. I fear lest in the morning he suddenly come to my door when I have fallen asleep wearied out. Oh friends, leave the way open to him - forbid him not.

If the sounds of his steps does not wake me, do not try to rouse me, I pray. I wish not to be called from my sleep by the clamorous choir of birds, by the riot of wind at the festival of morning light. Let me sleep undisturbed even if my lord comes of a sudden to my door.

Ah, my sleep, precious sleep, which only waits for his touch to vanish. Ah, my closed eyes that would open their lids only to the light of his smile when he stands before me like a dream emerging from darkness of sleep.

Let him appear before my sight as the first of all lights and all forms. The first thrill of joy to my awakened soul let it come from his glance. And let my return to myself be immediate return to him.
48.

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.

We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pave more and more as the time sped by.

The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.

My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation - in the shadow of a dim delight.

The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.

At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!
49.

You came down from your throne and stood at my cottage door.

I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear. You came down and stood at my cottage door.

Masters are many in your hall, and songs are sung there at all hours. But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love. One plaintive little strain mingled with the great music of the world, and with a flower for a prize you came down and stopped at my cottage door.

50.

I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path, when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings!

My hopes rose high and methought my evil days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.

The chariot stopped where I stood. Thy glance fell on me and thou camest down with a smile. I felt that the luck of my life had come at last. Then of a sudden thou didst hold out thy right hand and say 'What hast thou to give to me?'

Ah, what a kingly jest was it to open thy palm to a beggar to beg! I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my wallet I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to thee.

But how great my surprise when at the day's end I emptied my bag on the floor to find a least little gram of gold among the poor heap. I bitterly wept and wished that I had had the heart to give thee my all.
51.

The night darkened. Our day's works had been done. We thought that the last guest had arrived for the night and the doors in the village were all shut. Only some said the king was to come. We laughed and said 'No, it cannot be!'

It seemed there were knocks at the door and we said it was nothing but the wind. We put out the lamps and lay down to sleep. Only some said, 'It is the messenger!' We laughed and said 'No, it must be the wind!'

There came a sound in the dead of the night. We sleepily thought it was the distant thunder. The earth shook, the walls rocked, and it troubled us in our sleep. Only some said it was the sound of wheels. We said in a drowsy murmur, 'No, it must be the rumbling of clouds!'

The night was still dark when the drum sounded. The voice came 'Wake up! delay not!' We pressed our hands on our hearts and shuddered with fear. Some said, 'Lo, there is the king's flag!' We stood up on our feet and cried 'There is no time for delay!'

The king has come - but where are lights, where are wreaths? Where is the throne to seat him? Oh, shame! Oh utter shame! Where is the hall, the decorations? Someone has said, 'Vain is this cry! Greet him with empty hands, lead him into thy rooms all bare!'

Open the doors, let the conch-shells be sounded! in the depth of the night has come the king of our dark, dreary house. The thunder roars in the sky. The darkness shudders with lightning. Bring out thy tattered piece of mat and spread it in the courtyard. With the storm has come of a sudden our king of the fearful night.
52.

I thought I should ask of thee - but I dared not - the rose wreath thou hadst on thy neck. Thus I waited for the morning, when thou didst depart, to find a few fragments on the bed. And like a beggar I searched in the dawn only for a stray petal or two.

Ah me, what is it I find? What token left of thy love? It is no flower, no spices, no vase of perfumed water. It is thy mighty sword, flashing as a flame, heavy as a bolt of thunder. The young light of morning comes through the window and spread itself upon thy bed. The morning bird twitters and asks, 'Woman, what hast thou got?' No, it is no flower, nor spices, nor vase of perfumed water - it is thy dreadful sword.

I sit and muse in wonder, what gift is this of thine. I can find no place to hide it. I am ashamed to wear it, frail as I am, and it hurts me when press it to my bosom. Yet shall I bear in my heart this honour of the burden of pain, this gift of thine.

From now there shall be no fear left for me in this world, and thou shalt be victorious in all my strife. Thou hast left death for my companion and I shall crown him with my life. Thy sword is with me to cut asunder my bonds, and there shall be no fear left for me in the world.

From now I leave off all petty decorations. Lord of my heart, no more shall there be for me waiting and weeping in corners, no more coyness and sweetness of demeanour. Thou hast given me thy sword for adornment. No more doll's decorations for me!
53.

Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with stars and cunningly wrought in myriad-coloured jewels. But more beautiful to me thy sword with its curve of lightning like the outspread wings of the divine bird of Vishnu, perfectly poised in the angry red light of the sunset.

It quivers like the one last response of life in ecstasy of pain at the final stroke of death; it shines like the pure flame of being burning up earty sense with one fierce flash.

Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with starry gems; but thy sword, O lord of thunder, is wrought with uttermost beauty, terrible to behold or think of.
54.

I asked nothing from thee; I uttered not my name to thine ear. When thou took'st thy leave I stood silent. I was alone by the well where the shadow of the tree fell aslant, and the women had gone home with their brown earthen pitchers full to the brim. They called me and shouted, 'Come with us, the morning is wearing on to noon.' But I languidly lingered awhile lost in the midst of vague musings.

I heard not thy steps as thou camest. Thine eyes were sad when they fell on me; thy voice was tired as thou spokest low - 'Ah, I am a thirsty traveller.' I started up from my day-dreams and poured water from my jar on thy joined palms. The leaves rustled overhead; the cuckoo sang from the unseen dark, and perfume of babla flowers came from the bend of the road.

I stood speecess with shame when my name thou didst ask. Indeed, what had I done for thee to keep me in remembrance? But the memory that I could give water to thee to allay thy thirst will cling to my heart and enfold it in sweetness. The morning hour is late, the bird sings in weary notes, neem leaves rustle overhead and I sit and think and think.

55.

Languor is upon your heart and the slumber is still on your eyes.

Has not the word come to you that the flower is reigning in splendour among thorns? Wake, oh awaken! let not the time pass in vain!

At the end of the stony path, in the country of virgin solitude, my friend is sitting all alone. Deceive him not. Wake, oh awaken!

What if the sky pants and trembles with the heat of the midday sun - what if the burning sand spreads its mantle of thirst -

Is there no joy in the deep of your heart? At every footfall of yours, will not the harp of the road break out in sweet music of pain?
56.

Thus it is that thy joy in me is so full. Thus it is that thou hast come down to me. O thou lord of all heavens, where would be thy love if I were not?

Thou hast taken me as thy partner of all this wealth. In my heart is the endless play of thy delight. In my life thy will is ever taking shape.

And for this, thou who art the King of kings hast decked thyself in beauty to captivate my heart. And for this thy love loses itself in the love of thy lover, and there art thou seen in the perfect union of two.
57.

Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light!

Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth.

The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light.

The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion.

Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven's river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad.
58.

Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song - the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.
59.

Yes, I know, this is nothing but thy love, O beloved of my heart - this golden light that dances upon the leaves, these idle clouds sailing across the sky, this passing breeze leaving its coolness upon my forehead.

The morning light has flooded my eyes - this is thy message to my heart. Thy face is bent from above, thy eyes look down on my eyes, and my heart has touched thy feet.
60.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. they seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.

The sea surges up with laughter and pale gleams the smile of the sea beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the patess sky, ships get wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.
61.

The sleep that flits on baby's eyes - does anybody know from where it comes? Yes, there is a rumour that it has its dwelling where, in the fairy village among shadows of the forest dimly lit with glow-worms, there hang two timid buds of enchantment. From there it comes to kiss baby's eyes.

The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps - does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumour that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning - the smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps.

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby's limbs - does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love - the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby's limbs.
62.

When I bring to you coloured toys, my child, I understand why there is such a play of colours on clouds, on water, and why flowers are painted in tints - when I give coloured toys to you, my child.

When I sing to make you dance I truly now why there is music in leaves, and why waves send their chorus of voices to the heart of the listening earth - when I sing to make you dance.

When I bring sweet things to your greedy hands I know why there is honey in the cup of the flowers and why fruits are secretly filled with sweet juice - when I bring sweet things to your greedy hands.

When I kiss your face to make you smile, my darling, I surely understand what pleasure streams from the sky in morning light, and what delight that is that is which the summer breeze brings to my body - when I kiss you to make you smile.
63.

Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.

I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forget that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.

Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of many.
64.

On the slope of the desolate river among tall grasses I asked her, 'Maiden, where do you go shading your lamp with your mantle? My house is all dark and lonesome - lend me your light!' she raised her dark eyes for a moment and looked at my face through the dusk. 'I have come to the river,' she said, 'to float my lamp on the stream when the daylight wanes in the west.' I stood alone among tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp uselessly drifting in the tide.

In the silence of gathering night I asked her, 'Maiden, your lights are all lit - then where do you go with your lamp? My house is all dark and lonesome - lend me your light.' She raised her dark eyes on my face and stood for a moment doubtful. 'I have come,' she said at last, 'to dedicate my lamp to the sky.' I stood and watched her light uselessly burning in the void.

In the moonless gloom of midnight I ask her, 'Maiden, what is your quest, holding the lamp near your heart? My house is all dark and lonesome- - lend me your light.' She stopped for a minute and thought and gazed at my face in the dark. 'I have brought my light,' she said, 'to join the carnival of lamps.' I stood and watched her little lamp uselessly lost among lights.
65.

What divine drink wouldst thou have, my God, from this overflowing cup of my life?

My poet, is it thy delight to see thy creation through my eyes and to stand at the portals of my ears silently to listen to thine own eternal harmony?

Thy world is weaving words in my mind and thy joy is adding music to them. Thou givest thyself to me in love and then feelest thine own entire sweetness in me.
66.

She who ever had remained in the depth of my being, in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses; she who never opened her veils in the morning light, will be my last gift to thee, my God, folded in my final song.

Words have wooed yet failed to win her; persuasion has stretched to her its eager arms in vain.

I have roamed from country to country keeping her in the core of my heart, and around her have risen and fallen the growth and decay of my life.

Over my thoughts and actions, my slumbers and dreams, she reigned yet dwelled alone and apart.

many a man knocked at my door and asked for her and turned away in despair.

There was none in the world who ever saw her face to face, and she remained in her loneliness waiting for thy recognition.
67.

Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.

O thou beautiful, there in the nest is thy love that encloses the soul with colours and sounds and odours.

There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth.

And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest.

But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word.
68.

Thy sunbeam comes upon this earth of mine with arms outstretched and stands at my door the livelong day to carry back to thy feet clouds made of my tears and sighs and songs.

With fond delight thou wrappest about thy starry breast that mantle of misty cloud, turning it into numberless shapes and folds and colouring it with hues everchanging.

It is so light and so fleeting, tender and tearful and dark, that is why thou lovest it, O thou spotless and serene. And that is why it may cover thy awful white light with its pathetic shadows.
69.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
70.

Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? to be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?

All things rush on, they stop not, they look not behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on.

Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away - colours, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment.
71.

That I should make much of myself and turn it on all sides, thus casting coloured shadows on thy radiance - such is thy maya.

Thou settest a barrier in thine own being and then callest thy severed self in myriad notes. This thy self-separation has taken body in me.

The poignant song is echoed through all the sky in many-coloured tears and smiles, alarms and hopes; waves rise up and sink again, dreams break and form. In me is thy own defeat of self.

This screen that thou hast raised is painted with innumerable figures with the brush of the night and the day. Behind it thy seat is woven in wondrous mysteries of curves, casting away all barren lines of straightness.

The great pageant of thee and me has overspread the sky. With the tune of thee and me all the air is vibrant, and all ages pass with the hiding and seeking of thee and me.
72.

He it is, the innermost one, who awakens my being with his deep hidden touches.

He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart in varied cadence of pleasure and pain.

He it is who weaves the web of this maya in evanescent hues of gold and silver, blue and green, and lets peep out through the folds his feet, at whose touch I forget myself.

Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow.
73.

Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.

Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim.

My world will light its hundred different lamps with thy flame and place them before the altar of thy temple.

No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.
74.

The day is no more, the shadow is upon the earth. It is time that I go to the stream to fill my pitcher.

The evening air is eager with the sad music of the water. Ah, it calls me out into the dusk. In the lonely lane there is no passer-by, the wind is up, the ripples are rampant in the river.

I know not if I shall come back home. I know not whom I shall chance to meet. There at the fording in the little boat the unknown man plays upon his lute.
75.

Thy gifts to us mortals fulfil all our needs and yet run back to thee undiminished.

The river has its everyday work to do and hastens through fields and hamlets; yet its incessant stream winds towards the washing of thy feet.

The flower sweetens the air with its perfume; yet its last service is to offer itself to thee.

Thy worship does not impoverish the world.

From the words of the poet men take what meanings please them; yet their last meaning points to thee.
76.

Day after day, O lord of my life, shall I stand before thee face to face. With folded hands, O lord of all worlds, shall I stand before thee face to face.

Under thy great sky in solitude and silence, with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face.

In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil and with struggle, among hurrying crowds shall I stand before thee face to face.

And when my work shall be done in this world, O King of kings, alone and speecess shall I stand before thee face to face.
77.

I know thee as my God and stand apart - I do not know thee as my own and come closer. I know thee as my father and bow before thy feet- I do not grasp thy hand as my friend's.

I stand not where thou comest down and ownest thyself as mine, there to clasp thee to my heart and take thee as my comrade.

Thou art the Brother amongst my brothers, but I heed them not, I divide not my earnings with them, thus sharing my all with thee.

In pleasure and in pain I stand not by the side of men, and thus stand by thee. I shrink to give up my life, and thus do not plunge into the great waters of life.
78.

When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang 'Oh, the picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!'

But one cried of a sudden - 'It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.'

The golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and they cried in dismay - 'Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory of all heavens!'

From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy!

Only in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper among themselves - 'Vain is this seeking! unbroken perfection is over all!'
79.

If it is not my portion to meet thee in this life then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight - let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.

As my days pass in the crowded market of this world and my hands grow full with the daily profits, let me ever feel that I have gained nothing - let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.

When I sit by the roadside, tired and panting, when I spread my bed low in the dust, let me ever feel that the long journey is still before me - let me not forget a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.

When my rooms have been decked out and the flutes sound and the laughter there is loud, let me ever feel that I have not invited thee to my house - let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
80.

I am like a remnant of a cloud of autumn uselessly roaming in the sky, O my sun ever-glorious! Thy touch has not yet melted my vapour, making me one with thy light, and thus I count months and years separated from thee.

If this be thy wish and if this be thy play, then take this fleeting emptiness of mine, paint it with colours, gild it with gold, float it on the wanton wind and spread it in varied wonders.

And again when it shall be thy wish to end this play at night, I shall melt and vanish away in the dark, or it may be in a smile of the white morning, in a coolness of purity transparent.
81.

On many an idle day have I grieved over lost time. But it is never lost, my lord. Thou hast taken every moment of my life in thine own hands.

Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness.

I was tired and sleeping on my idle bed and imagined all work had ceased. In the morning I woke up and found my garden full with wonders of flowers.
82.

Time is endless in thy hands, my lord. There is none to count thy minutes.

Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou knowest how to wait.

Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.

We have no time to lose, and having no time we must scramble for a chances. We are too poor to be late.

And thus it is that time goes by while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.

At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate to be shut; but I find that yet there is time.
83.

Mother, I shall weave a chain of pearls for thy neck with my tears of sorrow.

The stars have wrought their anklets of light to deck thy feet, but mine will hang upon thy breast.

Wealth and fame come from thee and it is for thee to give or to withhold them. But this my sorrow is absolutely mine own, and when I bring it to thee as my offering thou rewardest me with thy grace.
84.

It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky.

It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence all nights from star to star and becomes lyric among rustling leaves in rainy darkness of July.

It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joy in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart.
85.

When the warriors came out first from their master's hall, where had they hid their power? Where were their armour and their arms?

They looked poor and helpless, and the arrows were showered upon them on the day they came out from their master's hall.

When the warriors marched back again to their master's hall where did they hide their power?

They had dropped the sword and dropped the bow and the arrow; peace was on their foreheads, and they had left the fruits of their life behind them on the day they marched back again to their master's hall.
86.

Death, thy servant, is at my door. He has crossed the unknown sea and brought thy call to my home.

The night is dark and my heart is fearful - yet I will take up the lamp, open my gates and bow to him my welcome. It is thy messenger who stands at my door.

I will worship him placing at his feet the treasure of my heart.

He will go back with his errand done, leaving a dark shadow on my morning; and in my desolate home only my forlorn self will remain as my last offering to thee.

87.

In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my room; I find her not.

My house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord, and seeking her I have to come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish - no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe.
88.

Deity of the ruined temple! The broken strings of Vina sing no more your praise. The bells in the evening proclaim not your time of worship. The air is still and silent about you.

In your desolate dwelling comes the vagrant spring breeze. It brings the tidings of flowers - the flowers that for your worship are offered no more.

Your worshipper of old wanders ever longing for favour still refused. In the eventide, when fires and shadows mingle with the gloom of dust, he wearily comes back to the ruined temple with hunger in his heart.

Many a festival day comes to you in silence, deity of the ruined temple. Many a night of worship goes away with lamp unlit.

Many new images are built by masters of cunning art and carried to the holy stream of oblivion when their time is come.

Only the deity of the ruined temple remains unworshipped in deatess neglect.

89.

No more noisy, loud words from me - such is my master's will. Henceforth I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.

Men hasten to the King's market. All the buyers and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of work.

Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time; and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum.

Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him; and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless inconsequence!
90.

On the day when death will knock at thy door what wilt thou offer to him?

Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life - I will never let him go with empty hands.

All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights, all the earnings and gleanings of my busy life will I place before him at the close of my days when death will knock at my door.
91.

O thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come and whisper to me!

Day after day I have kept watch for thee; for thee have I borne the joys and pangs of life.

All that I am, that I have, that I hope and all my love have ever flowed towards thee in depth of secrecy. One final glance from thine eyes and my life will be ever thine own.

The flowers have been woven and the garland is ready for the bridegroom. After the wedding the bride shall leave her home and meet her lord alone in the solitude of night.
92.

I know that the day will come when my sight of this earth shall be lost, and life will take its leave in silence, drawing the last curtain over my eyes.

Yet stars will watch at night, and morning rise as before, and hours heave like sea waves casting up pleasures and pains.

When I think of this end of my moments, the barrier of the moments breaks and I see by the light of death thy world with its careless treasures. Rare is its lowliest seat, rare is its meanest of lives.

Things that I longed for in vain and things that I got - let them pass. Let me but truly possess the things that I ever spurned and overlooked.
93.

I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure.

Here I give back the keys of my door - and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you.

We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.
94.

At this time of my parting, wish me good luck, my friends! The sky is flushed with the dawn and my path lies beautiful.

Ask not what I have with me to take there. I start on my journey with empty hands and expectant heart.

I shall put on my wedding garland. Mine is not the red-brown dress of the traveller, and though there are dangers on the way I have no fear in mind.

The evening star will come out when my voyage is done and the plaintive notes of the twilight melodies be struck up from the King's gateway.

95.

I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life.

What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight!

When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well.

The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away, in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation.
96.

When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.

I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light, and thus am I blessed - let this be my parting word.

In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.

My whole body and my limbs have thrilled with his touch who is beyond touch; and if the end comes here, let it come - let this be my parting word.
97.

When my play was with thee I never questioned who thou wert. I knew nor shyness nor fear, my life was boisterous.

In the early morning thou wouldst call me from my sleep like my own comrade and lead me running from glade to glade.

On those days I never cared to know the meaning of songs thou sangest to me. Only my voice took up the tunes, and my heart danced in their cadence.

Now, when the playtime is over, what is this sudden sight that is come upon me? The world with eyes bent upon thy feet stands in awe with all its silent stars.
98.

I will deck thee with trophies, garlands of my defeat. It is never in my power to escape unconquered.

I surely know my pride will go to the wall, my life will burst its bonds in exceeding pain, and my empty heart will sob out in music like a hollow reed, and the stone will melt in tears.

I surely know the hundred petals of a lotus will not remain closed for ever and the secret recess of its honey will be bared.

From the blue sky an eye shall gaze upon me and summon me in silence. Nothing will be left for me, nothing whatever, and utter death shall I receive at thy feet.
99.

When I give up the helm I know that the time has come for thee to take it. What there is to do will be instantly done. Vain is this struggle.

Then take away your hands and silently put up with your defeat, my heart, and think it your good fortune to sit perfectly still where you are placed.

These my lamps are blown out at every little puff of wind, and trying to light them I forget all else again and again.

But I shall be wise this time and wait in the dark, spreading my mat on the floor; and whenever it is thy pleasure, my lord, come silently and take thy seat here.
100.

I dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.

No more sailing from harbour to harbour with this my weather-beaten boat. The days are long passed when my sport was to be tossed on waves.

And now I am eager to die into the deatess.

Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss where swells up the music of toneless strings I shall take this harp of my life.

I shall tune it to the notes of forever, and when it has sobbed out its last utterance, lay down my silent harp at the feet of the silent.
101.

Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs. It was they who led me from door to door, and with them have I felt about me, searching and touching my world.

It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt; they showed me secret paths, they brought before my sight many a star on the horizon of my heart.

They guided me all the day long to the mysteries of the country of pleasure and pain, and, at last, to what palace gate have the brought me in the evening at the end of my journey?
102.

I boasted among men that I had known you. They see your pictures in all works of mine. They come and ask me, 'Who is he?' I know not how to answer them. I say, 'Indeed, I cannot tell.' They blame me and they go away in scorn. And you sit there smiling.

I put my tales of you into lasting songs. The secret gushes out from my heart. They come and ask me, 'Tell me all your meanings.' I know not how to answer them. I say, 'Ah, who knows what they mean!' They smile and go away in utter scorn. And you sit there smiling.
103.

In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet.

Like a rain-cloud of July hung low with its burden of unshed showers let all my mind bend down at thy door in one salutation to thee.

Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.

Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.
In the introduction to Gitanjali, W.B Yeats says of Tagores poetry.

At every moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will understand; and it has filled itself with the circumstance of their lives.

An innocence, a simplicity that one does not find elsewhere in literature makes the birds and the leaves seem as near to him as they are near to children, and the changes of the seasons great events as before our thoughts had arisen between them and us.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
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337:class:Classics

BOOK THE THIRTEENTH

The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses

The chiefs were set; the soldiers crown'd the field:
To these the master of the seven-fold shield
Upstarted fierce: and kindled with disdain.
Eager to speak, unable to contain
His boiling rage, he rowl'd his eyes around
The shore, and Graecian gallies hall'd a-ground.
Then stretching out his hands, O Jove, he cry'd,
Must then our cause before the fleet be try'd?
And dares Ulysses for the prize contend,
In sight of what he durst not once defend?
But basely fled that memorable day,
When I from Hector's hands redeem'd the flaming prey.
So much 'tis safer at the noisie bar
With words to flourish, than ingage in war.
By diff'rent methods we maintain our right,
Nor am I made to talk, nor he to fight.
In bloody fields I labour to be great;
His arms are a smooth tongue, and soft deceit:
Nor need I speak my deeds, for those you see,
The sun, and day are witnesses for me.
Let him who fights unseen, relate his own,
And vouch the silent stars, and conscious moon.
Great is the prize demanded, I confess,
But such an abject rival makes it less;
That gift, those honours, he but hop'd to gain,
Can leave no room for Ajax to be vain:
Losing he wins, because his name will be
Ennobled by defeat, who durst contend with me.
Were my known valour question'd, yet my blood
Without that plea wou'd make my title good:
My sire was Telamon, whose arms, employ'd
With Hercules, these Trojan walls destroy'd;
And who before with Jason sent from Greece,
In the first ship brought home the golden fleece.
Great Telamon from Aeacus derives
His birth (th' inquisitor of guilty lives
In shades below; where Sisyphus, whose son
This thief is thought, rouls up the restless heavy stone),

Just Aeacus, the king of Gods above
Begot: thus Ajax is the third from Jove.
Nor shou'd I seek advantage from my line,
Unless (Achilles) it was mix'd with thine:
As next of kin, Achilles' arms I claim;
This fellow wou'd ingraft a foreign name
Upon our stock, and the Sisyphian seed
By fraud, and theft asserts his father's breed:
Then must I lose these arms, because I came
To fight uncall'd, a voluntary name,
Nor shunn'd the cause, but offer'd you my aid?
While he long lurking was to war betray'd:
Forc'd to the field he came, but in the reer;
And feign'd distraction to conceal his fear:
'Till one more cunning caught him in the snare
(Ill for himself); and dragg'd him into war.
Now let a hero's arms a coward vest,
And he who shunn'd all honours, gain the best:
And let me stand excluded from my right,
Robb'd of my kinsman's arms, who first appear'd in fight,

Better for us, at home had he remain'd,
Had it been true the madness which he feign'd,
Or so believ'd; the less had been our shame,
The less his counsell'd crime, which brands the Grecian name;

Nor Philoctetes had been left inclos'd
In a bare isle, to wants and pains expos'd,
Where to the rocks, with solitary groans,
His suff'rings, and our baseness he bemoans:
And wishes (so may Heav'n his wish fulfill)
The due reward to him, who caus'd his ill.
Now he, with us to Troy's destruction sworn,
Our brother of the war, by whom are born
Alcides' arrows, pent in narrow bounds,
With cold and hunger pinch'd, and pain'd with wounds,
To find him food and cloathing, must employ
Against the birds the shafts due to the fate of Troy.
Yet still he lives, and lives from treason free,
Because he left Ulysses' company;
Poor Palamede might wish, so void of aid,
Rather to have been left, than so to death betray'd.
The coward bore the man immortal spight,
Who sham'd him out of madness into fight:
Nor daring otherwise to vent his hate,
Accus'd him first of treason to the state;
And then for proof produc'd the golden store,
Himself had hidden in his tent before:
Thus of two champions he depriv'd our host,
By exile one, and one by treason lost.
Thus fights Ulysses, thus his fame extends,
A formidable man, but to his friends:
Great, for what greatness is in words, and sound,
Ev'n faithful Nestor less in both is found:
But that he might without a rival reign,
He left this faithful Nestor on the plain;
Forsook his friend ev'n at his utmost need,
Who tir'd, and tardy with his wounded steed,
Cry'd out for aid, and call'd him by his name;
But cowardice has neither ears nor shame;
Thus fled the good old man, bereft of aid,
And, for as much as lay in him, betray'd:
That this is not a fable forg'd by me,
Like one of his, an Ulyssean lie,
I vouch ev'n Diomede, who tho' his friend,
Cannot that act excuse, much less defend:
He call'd him back aloud, and tax'd his fear;
And sure enough he heard, but durst not hear.

The Gods with equal eyes on mortal look,
He justly was forsaken, who forsook:
Wanted that succour, he refus'd to lend,
Found ev'ry fellow such another friend:
No wonder, if he roar'd that all might hear;
His elocution was increas'd by fear:
I heard, I ran, I found him out of breath,
Pale, trembling, and half dead with fear of death.
Though he had judg'd himself by his own laws,
And stood condemn'd, I help'd the common cause:
With my broad buckler hid him from the foe
(Ev'n the shield trembled as he lay below);
And from impending Fate the coward freed:
Good Heav'n forgive me for so bad a deed!
If still he will persist, and urge the strife,
First let him give me back his forfeit life:
Let him return to that opprobrious field;
Again creep under my protecting shield:
Let him lie wounded, let the foe be near,
And let his quiv'ring heart confess his fear;
There put him in the very jaws of Fate;
And let him plead his cause in that estate:
And yet when snatch'd from death, when from below
My lifted shield I loos'd, and let him go;
Good Heav'ns, how light he rose, with what a bound
He sprung from earth, forgetful of his wound;
How fresh, how eager then his feet to ply;
Who had not strength to stand, had speed to fly!

Hector came on, and brought the Gods along;
Fear seiz'd alike the feeble, and the strong:
Each Greek was an Ulysses; such a dread
Th' approach, and ev'n the sound of Hector bred:
Him, flesh'd with slaughter, and with conquest crown'd,
I met, and over-turn'd him to the ground;
When after, matchless as he deem'd in might,
He challeng'd all our host to single fight;
All eyes were fix'd on me: the lots were thrown;
But for your champion I was wish'd alone:
Your vows were heard; we fought, and neither yield;
Yet I return'd unvanquish'd from the field.
With Jove to friend, th' insulting Trojan came,
And menac'd us with force, our fleet with flame.
Was it the strength of this tongue-valiant lord,
In that black hour, that sav'd you from the sword?
Or was my breast expos'd alone, to brave
A thousand swords, a thousand ships to save?
The hopes of your return! And can you yield,
For a sav'd fleet, less than a single shield?
Think it no boast, o Grecians, if I deem
These arms want Ajax, more than Ajax them:
Or, I with them an equal honour share;
They honour'd to be worn, and I to wear.
Will he compare my courage with his sleight?
As well he may compare the day with night.
Night is indeed the province of his reign:
Yet all his dark exploits no more contain
Than a spy taken, and a sleeper slain;
A priest made pris'ner, Pallas made a prey:
But none of all these actions done by day:
Nor ought of these was done, and Diomede away.
If on such petty merits you confer
So vast a prize, let each his portion share;
Make a just dividend; and if not all,
The greater part to Diomede will fall.
But why for Ithacus such arms as those,
Who naked, and by night invades his foes?
The glitt'ring helm by moonlight will proclaim
The latent robber, and prevent his game:
Nor cou'd he hold his tott'ring head upright
Beneath that morion, or sustain the weight;
Nor that right arm cou'd toss the beamy lance;
Much less the left that ampler shield advance;
Pond'rous with precious weight, and rough with cost
Of the round world in rising gold emboss'd.
That orb would ill become his hand to wield,
And look as for the gold he stole the shield;
Which, shou'd your error on the wretch bestow,
It would not frighten, but allure the foe:
Why asks he, what avails him not in fight,
And wou'd but cumber, and retard his flight,
In which his only excellence is plac'd?
You give him death, that intercept his haste.
Add, that his own is yet a maiden-shield,
Nor the least dint has suffer'd in the field,
Guiltless of fight: mine batter'd, hew'd, and bor'd,
Worn out of service, must forsake his lord,
What farther need of words our right to scan?
My arguments are deeds, let action speak the man.
Since from a champion's arms the strife arose,
Go cast the glorious prize amid the foes;
Then send us to redeem both arms, and shield,
And let him wear, who wins 'em in the field.

He said: a murmur from a multitude,
Or somewhat like a stifled shout, ensu'd:
'Till from his seat arose Laertes' son,
Look'd down a while, and paus'd, e'er he begun;
Then, to th' expecting audience, rais'd his look,
And not without prepar'd attention spoke:
Soft was his tone, and sober was his face;
Action his words, and words his action grace.

If Heav'n, my lords, had heard our common pray'r,
These arms had caus'd no quarrel for an heir;
Still great Achilles had his own possess'd,
And we with great Achilles had been bless'd;
But since hard Fate, and Heav'n's severe decree,
Have ravish'd him away from you, and me
(At this he sigh'd, and wip'd his eyes, and drew,
Or seem'd to draw, some drops of kindly dew),
Who better can succeed Achilles lost,
Than he, who gave Achilles to your hoast?
This only I request, that neither he
May gain, by being what he seems to be,
A stupid thing; nor I may lose the prize,
By having sense, which Heav'n to him denies:
Since great or small, the talent I enjoy'd
Was ever in the common cause employ'd;
Nor let my wit, and wonted eloquence,
Which often has been us'd in your defense,
And in my own, this only time be brought
To bear against my self, and deem'd a fault.
Make not a crime, where Nature made it none;
For ev'ry man may freely use his own.
The deeds of long-descended ancestors
Are but by grace of imputation ours,
Theirs in effect; but since he draws his line
From Jove, and seems to plead a right divine;
From Jove, like him, I claim my pedigree,
And am descended in the same degree:
My sire Laertes was Arcesius' heir,
Arcesius was the son of Jupiter:
No parricide, no banish'd man, is known
In all my line: let him excuse his own.
Hermes ennobles too my mother's side,
By both my parents to the Gods ally'd.
But not because that on the female part
My blood is better, dare I claim desert,
Or that my sire from parricide is free;
But judge by merit betwixt him, and me:
The prize be to the best; provided yet
That Ajax for a while his kin forget,
And his great sire, and greater uncle's name,
To fortifie by them his feeble claim:
Be kindred and relation laid aside,
And honour's cause by laws of honour try'd:
For if he plead proximity of blood;
That empty title is with ease withstood.
Peleus, the hero's sire, more nigh than he,
And Pyrrhus, his undoubted progeny,
Inherit first these trophies of the field;
To Scyros, or to Pthia, send the shield:
And Teucer has an uncle's right; yet he
Waves his pretensions, nor contends with me.

Then since the cause on pure desert is plac'd,
Whence shall I take my rise, what reckon last?
I not presume on ev'ry act to dwell,
But take these few, in order as they fell.

Thetis, who knew the Fates, apply'd her care
To keep Achilles in disguise from war;
And 'till the threatning influence was past,
A woman's habit on the hero cast:
All eyes were cozen'd by the borrow'd vest,
And Ajax (never wiser than the rest)
Found no Pelides there: at length I came
With proffer'd wares to this pretended dame;
She, not discover'd by her mien, or voice,
Betray'd her manhood by her manly choice;
And while on female toys her fellows look,
Grasp'd in her warlike hand, a javelin shook;
Whom, by this act reveal'd, I thus bespoke:
O Goddess-born! resist not Heav'n's decree,
The fall of Ilium is reserv'd for thee;
Then seiz'd him, and produc'd in open light,
Sent blushing to the field the fatal knight.
Mine then are all his actions of the war;
Great Telephus was conquer'd by my spear,
And after cur'd: to me the Thebans owe,
Lesbos, and Tenedos, their overthrow;
Syros and Cylla: not on all to dwell,
By me Lyrnesus, and strong Chrysa fell:
And since I sent the man who Hector slew,
To me the noble Hector's death is due:
Those arms I put into his living hand,
Those arms, Pelides dead, I now demand.

When Greece was injur'd in the Spartan prince,
And met at Aulis to avenge th' offence,
'Twas a dead calm, or adverse blasts, that reign'd,
And in the port the wind-bound fleet detain'd:
Bad signs were seen, and oracles severe
Were daily thunder'd in our gen'ral's ear;
That by his daughter's blood we must appease
Diana's kindled wrath, and free the seas.
Affection, int'rest, fame, his heart assail'd:
But soon the father o'er the king prevail'd:
Bold, on himself he took the pious crime,
As angry with the Gods, as they with him.
No subject cou'd sustain their sov'reign's look,
'Till this hard enterprize I undertook:
I only durst th' imperial pow'r controul,
And undermin'd the parent in his soul;
Forc'd him t' exert the king for common good,
And pay our ransom with his daughter's blood.
Never was cause more difficult to plead,
Than where the judge against himself decreed:
Yet this I won by dint of argument;
The wrongs his injur'd brother underwent,
And his own office, sham'd him to consent.

'Tis harder yet to move the mother's mind,
And to this heavy task was I design'd:
Reasons against her love I knew were vain;
I circumvented whom I could not gain:
Had Ajax been employ'd, our slacken'd sails
Had still at Aulis waited happy gales.

Arriv'd at Troy, your choice was fix'd on me,
A fearless envoy, fit for a bold embassy:
Secure, I enter'd through the hostile court,
Glitt'ring with steel, and crowded with resort:
There, in the midst of arms, I plead our cause,
Urge the foul rape, and violated laws;
Accuse the foes, as authors of the strife,
Reproach the ravisher, demand the wife.
Priam, Antenor, and the wiser few,
I mov'd; but Paris, and his lawless crew
Scarce held their hands, and lifted swords; but stood
In act to quench their impious thirst of blood:
This Menelaus knows; expos'd to share
With me the rough preludium of the war.

Endless it were to tell, what I have done,
In arms, or council, since the siege begun:
The first encounter's past, the foe repell'd,
They skulk'd within the town, we kept the field.
War seem'd asleep for nine long years; at length
Both sides resolv'd to push, we try'd our strength
Now what did Ajax, while our arms took breath,
Vers'd only in the gross mechanick trade of death?
If you require my deeds, with ambush'd arms
I trapp'd the foe, or tir'd with false alarms;
Secur'd the ships, drew lines along the plain,
The fainting chear'd, chastis'd the rebel-train,
Provided forage, our spent arms renew'd;
Employ'd at home, or sent abroad, the common cause pursu'd.

The king, deluded in a dream by Jove,
Despair'd to take the town, and order'd to remove.
What subject durst arraign the Pow'r supream,
Producing Jove to justifie his dream?
Ajax might wish the soldiers to retain
From shameful flight, but wishes were in vain:
As wanting of effect had been his words,
Such as of course his thundring tongue affords.
But did this boaster threaten, did he pray,
Or by his own example urge their stay?
None, none of these: but ran himself away.
I saw him run, and was asham'd to see;
Who ply'd his feet so fast to get aboard, as he?
Then speeding through the place, I made a stand,
And loudly cry'd, O base degenerate band,
To leave a town already in your hand!
After so long expence of blood, for fame,
To bring home nothing, but perpetual shame!
These words, or what I have forgotten since
(For grief inspir'd me then with eloquence),
Reduc'd their minds; they leave the crowded port,
And to their late forsaken camp resort:
Dismay'd the council met: this man was there,
But mute, and not recover'd of his fear:
Thersites tax'd the king, and loudly rail'd,
But his wide opening mouth with blows I seal'd.
Then, rising, I excite their souls to fame,
And kindle sleeping virtue into flame.
From thence, whatever he perform'd in fight
Is justly mine, who drew him back from flight.

Which of the Grecian chiefs consorts with thee?
But Diomede desires my company,
And still communicates his praise with me.
As guided by a God, secure he goes,
Arm'd with my fellowship, amid the foes:
And sure no little merit I may boast,
Whom such a man selects from such an hoast;
Unforc'd by lots I went without affright,
To dare with him the dangers of the night:
On the same errand sent, we met the spy
Of Hector, double-tongu'd, and us'd to lie;
Him I dispatch'd, but not 'till undermin'd,
I drew him first to tell, what treach'rous Troy design'd:

My task perform'd, with praise I had retir'd,
But not content with this, to greater praise aspir'd:
Invaded Rhesus, and his Thracian crew,
And him, and his, in their own strength I slew;
Return'd a victor, all my vows compleat,
With the king's chariot, in his royal seat:
Refuse me now his arms, whose fiery steeds
Were promis'd to the spy for his nocturnal deeds:
Yet let dull Ajax bear away my right,
When all his days out-balance this one night.

Nor fought I darkling still: the sun beheld
With slaughter'd Lycians when I strew'd the field:
You saw, and counted as I pass'd along,
Alastor, Chromius, Ceranos the strong,
Alcander, Prytanis, and Halius,
Noemon, Charopes, and Ennomus;
Coon, Chersidamas; and five beside,
Men of obscure descent, but courage try'd:
All these this hand laid breathless on the ground;
Nor want I proofs of many a manly wound:
All honest, all before: believe not me;
Words may deceive, but credit what you see.

At this he bar'd his breast, and show'd his scars,
As of a furrow'd field, well plow'd with wars;
Nor is this part unexercis'd, said he;
That gyant-bulk of his from wounds is free:
Safe in his shield he fears no foe to try,
And better manages his blood, than I:
But this avails me not; our boaster strove
Not with our foes alone, but partial Jove,
To save the fleet: this I confess is true
(Nor will I take from any man his due):
But thus assuming all, he robs from you.
Some part of honour to your share will fall,
He did the best indeed, but did not all.
Patroclus in Achilles' arms, and thought
The chief he seem'd, with equal ardour fought;
Preserv'd the fleet, repell'd the raging fire,
And forc'd the fearful Trojans to retire.

But Ajax boasts, that he was only thought
A match for Hector, who the combat sought:
Sure he forgets the king, the chiefs, and me:
All were as eager for the fight, as he:
He but the ninth, and not by publick voice,
Or ours preferr'd, was only Fortune's choice:
They fought; nor can our hero boast th' event,
For Hector from the field unwounded went.

Why am I forc'd to name that fatal day,
That snatch'd the prop and pride of Greece away?
I saw Pelides sink, with pious grief,
And ran in vain, alas! to his relief;
For the brave soul was fled: full of my friend
I rush'd amid the war, his relicks to defend:
Nor ceas'd my toil, 'till I redeem'd the prey,
And, loaded with Achilles, march'd away:
Those arms, which on these shoulders then I bore,
'Tis just you to these shoulders should restore.
You see I want not nerves, who cou'd sustain
The pond'rous ruins of so great a man:
Or if in others equal force you find,
None is endu'd with a more grateful mind.

Did Thetis then, ambitious in her care,
These arms thus labour'd for her son prepare;
That Ajax after him the heav'nly gift shou'd wear!
For that dull soul to stare with stupid eyes,
On the learn'd unintelligible prize!
What are to him the sculptures of the shield,
Heav'n's planets, Earth, and Ocean's watry field?
The Pleiads, Hyads; less, and greater Bear,
Undipp'd in seas; Orion's angry star;
Two diff'ring cities, grav'd on either hand;
Would he wear arms he cannot understand?

Beside, what wise objections he prepares
Against my late accession to the wars?
Does not the fool perceive his argument
Is with more force against Achilles bent?
For if dissembling be so great a crime,
The fault is common, and the same in him:
And if he taxes both of long delay,
My guilt is less, who sooner came away.
His pious mother, anxious for his life,
Detain'd her son; and me, my pious wife.
To them the blossoms of our youth were due,
Our riper manhood we reserv'd for you.
But grant me guilty, 'tis not much my care,
When with so great a man my guilt I share:
My wit to war the matchless hero brought,
But by this fool I never had been caught.

Nor need I wonder, that on me he threw
Such foul aspersions, when he spares not you:
If Palamede unjustly fell by me,
Your honour suffer'd in th' unjust decree:
I but accus'd, you doom'd: and yet he dy'd,
Convinc'd of treason, and was fairly try'd:
You heard not he was false; your eyes beheld
The traytor manifest; the bribe reveal'd.

That Philoctetes is on Lemnos left,
Wounded, forlorn, of human aid bereft,
Is not my crime, or not my crime alone;
Defend your justice, for the fact's your own:
'Tis true, th' advice was mine; that staying there
He might his weary limbs with rest repair,
From a long voyage free, and from a longer war.
He took the counsl, and he lives at least;
Th' event declares I counsell'd for the best:
Though faith is all in ministers of state;
For who can promise to be fortunate?
Now since his arrows are the Fate of Troy,
Do not my wit, or weak address, employ;
Send Ajax there, with his persuasive sense,
To mollifie the man, and draw him thence:
But Xanthus shall run backward; Ida stand
A leafless mountain; and the Grecian band
Shall fight for Troy; if, when my councils fail,
The wit of heavy Ajax can prevail.

Hard Philoctetes, exercise thy spleen
Against thy fellows, and the king of men;
Curse my devoted head, above the rest,
And wish in arms to meet me breast to breast:
Yet I the dang'rous task will undertake,
And either die my self, or bring thee back.

Nor doubt the same success, as when before
The Phrygian prophet to these tents I bore,
Surpriz'd by night, and forc'd him to declare
In what was plac'd the fortune of the war,
Heav'n's dark decrees, and answers to display,
And how to take the town, and where the secret lay:
Yet this I compass'd, and from Troy convey'd
The fatal image of their guardian-maid;
That work was mine; for Pallas, though our friend,
Yet while she was in Troy, did Troy defend.
Now what has Ajax done, or what design'd?
A noisie nothing, and an empty wind.
If he be what he promises in show,
Why was I sent, and why fear'd he to go?
Our boasting champion thought the task not light
To pass the guards, commit himself to night;
Not only through a hostile town to pass,
But scale, with steep ascent, the sacred place;
With wand'ring steps to search the cittadel,
And from the priests their patroness to steal:
Then through surrounding foes to force my way,
And bear in triumph home the heavn'ly prey;
Which had I not, Ajax in vain had held,
Before that monst'rous bulk, his sev'nfold shield.
That night to conquer Troy I might be said,
When Troy was liable to conquest made.

Why point'st thou to my partner of the war?
Tydides had indeed a worthy share
In all my toil, and praise; but when thy might
Our ships protected, did'st thou singly fight?
All join'd, and thou of many wert but one;
I ask'd no friend, nor had, but him alone:
Who, had he not been well assur'd, that art,
And conduct were of war the better part,
And more avail'd than strength, my valiant friend
Had urg'd a better right, than Ajax can pretend:
As good at least Eurypilus may claim,
And the more mod'rate Ajax of the name:
The Cretan king, and his brave charioteer,
And Menelaus bold with sword, and spear:
All these had been my rivals in the shield,
And yet all these to my pretensions yield.
Thy boist'rous hands are then of use, when I
With this directing head those hands apply.
Brawn without brain is thine: my prudent care
Foresees, provides, administers the war:
Thy province is to fight; but when shall be
The time to fight, the king consults with me:
No dram of judgment with thy force is join'd:
Thy body is of profit, and my mind.
By how much more the ship her safety owes
To him who steers, than him that only rows;
By how much more the captain merits praise,
Than he who fights, and fighting but obeys;
By so much greater is my worth than thine,
Who canst but execute, what I design.
What gain'st thou, brutal man, if I confess
Thy strength superior, when thy wit is less?
Mind is the man: I claim my whole desert,
From the mind's vigour, and th' immortal part.

But you, o Grecian chiefs, reward my care,
Be grateful to your watchman of the war:
For all my labours in so long a space,
Sure I may plead a title to your grace:
Enter the town, I then unbarr'd the gates,
When I remov'd their tutelary Fates.
By all our common hopes, if hopes they be
Which I have now reduc'd to certainty;
By falling Troy, by yonder tott'ring tow'rs,
And by their taken Gods, which now are ours;
Or if there yet a farther task remains,
To be perform'd by prudence, or by pains;
If yet some desp'rate action rests behind,
That asks high conduct, and a dauntless mind;
If ought be wanting to the Trojan doom,
Which none but I can manage, and o'ercome,
Award, those arms I ask, by your decree:
Or give to this, what you refuse to me.

He ceas'd: and ceasing with respect he bow'd,
And with his hand at once the fatal statue show'd.
Heav'n, air and ocean rung, with loud applause,
And by the gen'ral vote he gain'd his cause.
Thus conduct won the prize, when courage fail'd,
And eloquence o'er brutal force prevail'd.

The Death of Ajax

He who cou'd often, and alone, withstand
The foe, the fire, and Jove's own partial hand,
Now cannot his unmaster'd grief sustain,
But yields to rage, to madness, and disdain;
Then snatching out his fauchion, Thou, said he,
Art mine; Ulysses lays no claim to thee.
O often try'd, and ever-trusty sword,
Now do thy last kind office to thy lord:
'Tis Ajax who requests thy aid, to show
None but himself, himself cou'd overthrow:
He said, and with so good a will to die,
Did to his breast the fatal point apply,
It found his heart, a way 'till then unknown,
Where never weapon enter'd, but his own.
No hands cou'd force it thence, so fix'd it stood,
'Till out it rush'd, expell'd by streams of spouting blood.

The fruitful blood produc'd a flow'r, which grew
On a green stem; and of a purple hue:
Like his, whom unaware Apollo slew:
Inscrib'd in both, the letters are the same,
But those express the grief, and these the name.

The Story of Polyxena and Hecuba

The victor with full sails for Lemnos stood
(Once stain'd by matrons with their husbands' blood),
Thence great Alcides' fatal shafts to bear,
Assign'd to Philoctetes' secret care.
These with their guardian to the Greeks convey'd,
Their ten years' toil with wish'd success repaid.
With Troy old Priam falls: his queen survives;
'Till all her woes compleat, transform'd she grieves
In borrow'd sounds, nor with an human face,
Barking tremendous o'er the plains of Thrace.
Still Ilium's flames their pointed columns raise,
And the red Hellespont reflects the blaze.
Shed on Jove's altar are the poor remains
Of blood, which trickl'd from old Priam's veins.
Cassandra lifts her hands to Heav'n in vain,
Drag'd by her sacred hair; the trembling train
Of matrons to their burning temples fly:
There to their Gods for kind protection cry;
And to their statues cling 'till forc'd away,
The victor Greeks bear off th' invidious prey.
From those high tow'rs Astyanax is thrown,
Whence he was wont with pleasure to look down.
When oft his mother with a fond delight
Pointed to view his father's rage in fight,
To win renown, and guard his country's right.

The winds now call to sea; brisk northern gales
Sing in the shrowds, and court the spreading sails.
Farewel, dear Troy, the captive matrons cry;
Yes, we must leave our long-lov'd native sky.
Then prostrate on the shore they kiss the sand,
And quit the smoking ruines of the land.
Last Hecuba on board, sad sight! appears;
Found weeping o'er her children's sepulchres:
Drag'd by Ulysses from her slaughter'd sons,
Whilst yet she graspt their tombs, and kist their mouldring bones.

Yet Hector's ashes from his urn she bore,
And in her bosom the sad relique wore:
Then scatter'd on his tomb her hoary hairs,
A poor oblation mingled with her tears.

Oppos'd to Ilium lye the Thracian plains,
Where Polymestor safe in plenty reigns.
King Priam to his care commits his son,
Young Polydore, the chance of war to shun.
A wise precaution! had not gold, consign'd
For the child's use, debauch'd the tyrant's mind.
When sinking Troy to its last period drew,
With impious hands his royal charge he slew;
Then in the sea the lifeless coarse is thrown;
As with the body he the guilt could drown.

The Greeks now riding on the Thracian shore,
'Till kinder gales invite, their vessels moor.
Here the wide-op'ning Earth to sudden view
Disclos'd Achilles, great as when he drew
The vital air, but fierce with proud disdain,
As when he sought Briseis to regain;
When stern debate, and rash injurious strife
Unsheath'd his sword, to reach Atrides' life.
And will ye go? he said. Is then the name
Of the once great Achilles lost to fame?
Yet stay, ungrateful Greeks; nor let me sue
In vain for honours to my Manes due.
For this just end, Polyxena I doom
With victim-rites to grace my slighted tomb.

The phantom spoke; the ready Greeks obey'd,
And to the tomb led the devoted maid
Snatch'd from her mother, who with pious care
Cherish'd this last relief of her despair.
Superior to her sex, the fearless maid,
Approach'd the altar, and around survey'd
The cruel rites, and consecrated knife,
Which Pyrrhus pointed at her guiltless life,
Then as with stern amaze intent he stood,
"Now strike," she said; "now spill my genr'ous blood;
Deep in my breast, or throat, your dagger sheath,
Whilst thus I stand prepar'd to meet my death.
For life on terms of slav'ry I despise:
Yet sure no God approves this sacrifice.
O cou'd I but conceal this dire event
From my sad mother, I should dye content.
Yet should she not with tears my death deplore,
Since her own wretched life demands them more.
But let not the rude touch of man pollute
A virgin-victim; 'tis a modest suit.
It best will please, whoe'er demands my blood,
That I untainted reach the Stygian flood.
Yet let one short, last, dying prayer be heard;
To Priam's daughter pay this last regard;
'Tis Priam's daughter, not a captive, sues;
Do not the rites of sepulture refuse.
To my afflicted mother, I implore,
Free without ransom my dead corpse restore:
Nor barter me for gain, when I am cold;
But be her tears the price, if I am sold:
Time was she could have ransom'd me with gold".

Thus as she pray'd, one common shower of tears
Burst forth, and stream'd from ev'ry eye but hers.
Ev'n the priest wept, and with a rude remorse
Plung'd in her heart the steel's resistless force.
Her slacken'd limbs sunk gently to the ground,
Dauntless her looks, unalter'd by the wound.
And as she fell, she strove with decent pride
To hide, what suits a virgin's care to hide.
The Trojan matrons the pale corpse receive,
And the whole slaughter'd race of Priam grieve,
Sad they recount the long disastrous tale;
Then with fresh tears, thee, royal maid, bewail;
Thy widow'd mother too, who flourish'd late
The royal pride of Asia's happier state:
A captive lot now to Ulysses born;
Whom yet the victor would reject with scorn,
Were she not Hector's mother: Hector's fame
Scarce can a master for his mother claim!
With strict embrace the lifeless coarse she view'd;
And her fresh grief that flood of tears renew'd,
With which she lately mourn'd so many dead;
Tears for her country, sons, and husb and shed.
With the thick gushing stream she bath'd the wound;
Kiss'd her pale lips; then weltring on the ground,
With wonted rage her frantick bosom tore;
Sweeping her hair amidst the clotted gore;
Whilst her sad accents thus her loss deplore.

"Behold a mother's last dear pledge of woe!
Yes, 'tis the last I have to suffer now.
Thou, my Polyxena, my ills must crown:
Already in thy Fate, I feel my own.
'Tis thus, lest haply of my numerous seed
One should unslaughter'd fall, even thou must bleed:
And yet I hop'd thy sex had been thy guard;
But neither has thy tender sex been spar'd.
The same Achilles, by whose deadly hate
Thy brothers fell, urg'd thy untimely fate!
The same Achilles, whose destructive rage
Laid waste my realms, has robb'd my childless age.
When Paris' shafts with Phoebus' certain aid
At length had pierc'd this dreaded chief, I said,
Secure of future ills, he can no more:
But see, he still pursues me as before.
With rage rekindled his dead ashes burn;
And his yet murd'ring ghost my wretched house must mourn.

This tyrant's lust of slaughter I have fed
With large supplies from my too-fruitful bed.
Troy's tow'rs lye waste; and the wide ruin ends
The publick woe; but me fresh woe attends.
Troy still survives to me; to none but me;
And from its ills I never must be free.
I, who so late had power, and wealth, and ease,
Bless'd with my husband, and a large encrease,
Must now in poverty an exile mourn;
Ev'n from the tombs of my dead offspring torn:
Giv'n to Penelope, who proud of spoil,
Allots me to the loom's ungrateful toil;
Points to her dames, and crys with scorning mien:
See Hector's mother, and great Priam's queen!
And thou, my child, sole hope of all that's lost,
Thou now art slain, to sooth this hostile ghost.
Yes, my child falls an offering to my foe!
Then what am I, who still survive this woe?
Say, cruel Gods! for what new scenes of death
Must a poor aged wretch prolong this hated breath?
Troy fal'n, to whom could Priam happy seem?
Yet was he so; and happy must I deem
His death; for O! my child, he saw not thine,
When he his life did with his Troy resign.
Yet sure due obsequies thy tomb might grace;
And thou shalt sleep amidst thy kingly race.
Alas! my child, such fortune does not wait
Our suffering house in this abandon'd state.
A foreign grave, and thy poor mother's tears
Are all the honours that attend thy herse.
All now is lost!- Yet no; one comfort more
Of life remains, my much-lov'd Polydore.
My youngest hope: here on this coast he lives,
Nurs'd by the guardian-king, he still survives.
Then let me hasten to the cleansing flood,
And wash away these stains of guiltless blood."

Streit to the shore her feeble steps repair
With limping pace, and torn dishevell'd hair
Silver'd with age. "Give me an urn," she cry'd,
"To bear back water from this swelling tide":
When on the banks her son in ghastly hue
Transfix'd with Thracian arrows strikes her view.
The matrons shriek'd; her big-swoln grief surpast
The pow'r of utterance; she stood aghast;
She had nor speech, nor tears to give relief;
Excess of woe suppress'd the rising grief.
Lifeless as stone, on Earth she fix'd her eyes;
And then look'd up to Heav'n with wild surprise.
Now she contemplates o'er with sad delight
Her son's pale visage; then her aking sight
Dwells on his wounds: she varys thus by turns,
Wild as the mother-lion, when among
The haunts of prey she seeks her ravish'd young:
Swift flies the ravisher; she marks his trace,
And by the print directs her anxious chase.
So Hecuba with mingled grief, and rage
Pursues the king, regardless of her age.
She greets the murd'rer with dissembled joy
Of secret treasure hoarded for her boy.
The specious tale th' unwary king betray'd.
Fir'd with the hopes of prey: "Give quick," he said
With soft enticing speech, "the promis'd store:
Whate'er you give, you give to Polydore.
Your son, by the immortal Gods I swear,
Shall this with all your former bounty share."
She stands attentive to his soothing lyes,
And darts avenging horrour from her eyes.
Then full resentment fires her boyling blood:
She springs upon him, 'midst the captive crowd
(Her thirst of vengeance want of strength supplies):
Fastens her forky fingers in his eyes:
Tears out the rooted balls; her rage pursues,
And in the hollow orbs her hand imbrews.

The Thracians, fir'd, at this inhuman scene,
With darts, and stones assail the frantick queen.
She snarls, and growls, nor in an human tone;
Then bites impatient at the bounding stone;
Extends her jaws, as she her voice would raise
To keen invectives in her wonted phrase;
But barks, and thence the yelping brute betrays.
Still a sad monument the place remains,
And from this monstrous change its name obtains:
Where she, in long remembrance of her ills,
With plaintive howlings the wide desart fills.

Greeks, Trojans, friends, and foes, and Gods above
Her num'rous wrongs to just compassion move.
Ev'n Juno's self forgets her ancient hate,
And owns, she had deserv'd a milder fate.

The Funeral of Memnon

Yet bright Aurora, partial as she was
To Troy, and those that lov'd the Trojan cause,
Nor Troy, nor Hecuba can now bemoan,
But weeps a sad misfortune, more her own.
Her offspring Memnon, by Achilles slain,
She saw extended on the Phrygian plain:
She saw, and strait the purple beams, that grace
The rosie morning, vanish'd from her face;
A deadly pale her wonted bloom invades,
And veils the lowring skies with mournful shades.
But when his limbs upon the pile were laid,
The last kind duty that by friends is paid,
His mother to the skies directs her flight,
Nor cou'd sustain to view the doleful sight:
But frantick, with her loose neglected hair,
Hastens to Jove, and falls a suppliant there.
O king of Heav'n, o father of the skies,
The weeping Goddess passionately cries,
Tho' I the meanest of immortals am,
And fewest temples celebrate my fame,
Yet still a Goddess, I presume to come
Within the verge of your etherial dome:
Yet still may plead some merit, if my light
With purple dawn controuls the Pow'rs of night;
If from a female hand that virtue springs,
Which to the Gods, and men such pleasure brings.
Yet I nor honours seek, nor rites divine,
Nor for more altars, or more fanes repine;
Oh! that such trifles were the only cause,
From whence Aurora's mind its anguish draws!
For Memnon lost, my dearest only child,
With weightier grief my heavy heart is fill'd;
My warrior son! that liv'd but half his time,
Nipt in the bud, and blasted in his prime;
Who for his uncle early took the field,
And by Achilles' fatal spear was kill'd.
To whom but Jove shou'd I for succour come?
For Jove alone cou'd fix his cruel doom.
O sov'reign of the Gods accept my pray'r,
Grant my request, and sooth a mother's care;
On the deceas'd some solemn boon bestow,
To expiate the loss, and ease my woe.

Jove, with a nod, comply'd with her desire;
Around the body flam'd the fun'ral fire;
The pile decreas'd, that lately seem'd so high,
And sheets of smoak roll'd upward to the sky:
As humid vapours from a marshy bog,
Rise by degrees, condensing into fog,
That intercept the sun's enliv'ning ray,
And with a cloud infect the chearful day.
The sooty ashes wafted by the air,
Whirl round, and thicken in a body there;
Then take a form, which their own heat, and fire
With active life, and energy inspire.
Its lightness makes it seem to fly, and soon
It skims on real wings, that are its own;
A real bird, it beats the breezy wind,
Mix'd with a thousand sisters of the kind,
That, from the same formation newly sprung,
Up-born aloft on plumy pinions hung.
Thrice round the pile advanc'd the circling throng.
Thrice, with their wings, a whizzing consort rung.
In the fourth flight their squadron they divide,
Rank'd in two diff'rent troops, on either side:
Then two, and two, inspir'd with martial rage,
From either troop in equal pairs engage.
Each combatant with beak, and pounces press'd,
In wrathful ire, his adversary's breast;
Each falls a victim, to preserve the fame
Of that great hero, whence their being came.
From him their courage, and their name they take,
And, as they liv'd, they dye for Memnon's sake.
Punctual to time, with each revolving year,
In fresh array the champion birds appear;
Again, prepar'd with vengeful minds, they come
To bleed, in honour of the souldier's tomb.

Therefore in others it appear'd not strange,
To grieve for Hecuba's unhappy change:
But poor Aurora had enough to do
With her own loss, to mind another's woe;
Who still in tears, her tender nature shews,
Besprinkling all the world with pearly dews.

The Voyage of Aeneas

Troy thus destroy'd, 'twas still deny'd by Fate,
The hopes of Troy should perish with the state.
His sire, the son of Cytherea bore,
And household-Gods from burning Ilium's shore,
The pious prince (a double duty paid)
Each sacred bur then thro' the flames convey'd.
With young Ascanius, and this only prize,
Of heaps of wealth, he from Antandros flies;
But struck with horror, left the Thracian shore,
Stain'd with the blood of murder'd Polydore.
The Delian isle receives the banish'd train,
Driv'n by kind gales, and favour'd by the main.

Here pious Anius, priest, and monarch reign'd,
And either charge, with equal care sustain'd,
His subjects rul'd, to Phoebus homage pay'd,
His God obeying, and by those obey'd.

The priest displays his hospitable gate,
And shows the riches of his church, and state
The sacred shrubs, which eas'd Latona's pain,
The palm, and olive, and the votive fane.
Here grateful flames with fuming incense fed,
And mingled wine, ambrosial odours shed;
Of slaughter'd steers the crackling entrails burn'd:
And then the strangers to the court return'd.

On beds of tap'stry plac'd aloft, they dine
With Ceres' gift, and flowing bowls of wine;
When thus Anchises spoke, amidst the feast:
Say, mitred monarch, Phoebus' chosen priest,
Or (e'er from Troy by cruel Fate expell'd)
When first mine eyes these sacred walls beheld,
A son, and twice two daughters crown'd thy bliss?
Or errs my mem'ry, and I judge amiss?

The royal prophet shook his hoary head,
With snowy fillets bound, and sighing, said:
Thy mem'ry errs not, prince; thou saw'st me then,
The happy father of so large a train;
Behold me now (such turns of chance befall
The race of man!), almost bereft of all.
For (ah!) what comfort can my son bestow,
What help afford, to mitigate my woe!
While far from hence, in Andros' isle he reigns,
(From him so nam'd) and there my place sustains.
Him Delius praescience gave; the twice-born God
A boon more wond'rous on the maids bestow'd.
Whate'er they touch'd, he gave them to transmute
(A gift past credit, and above their suit)
To Ceres, Bacchus, and Minerva's fruit.
How great their value, and how rich their use,
Whose only touch such treasures could produce!

The dire destroyer of the Trojan reign,
Fierce Agamemnon, such a prize to gain
(A proof we also were design'd by Fate
To feel the tempest, that o'erturn'd your state),
With force superior, and a ruffian crew,
From these weak arms, the helpless virgins drew:
And sternly bad them use the grant divine,
To keep the fleet in corn, and oil, and wine.
Each, as they could, escap'd: two strove to gain
Euboea's isle, and two their brother's reign.
The soldier follows, and demands the dames;
If held by force, immediate war proclaims.
Fear conquer'd Nature in their brother's mind,
And gave them up to punishment assign'd.
Forgive the deed; nor Hector's arm was there,
Nor thine, Aeneas, to maintain the war;
Whose only force upheld your Ilium's tow'rs,
For ten long years, against the Grecian pow'rs.
Prepar'd to bind their captive arms in bands,
To Heav'n they rear'd their yet unfetter'd hands,
Help, Bacchus, author of the gift, they pray'd;
The gift's great author gave immediate aid;
If such destruction of their human frame
By ways so wond'rous, may deserve the name;
Nor could I hear, nor can I now relate
Exact, the manner of their alter'd state;
But this in gen'ral of my loss I knew,
Transform'd to doves, on milky plumes they flew,
Such as on Ida's mount thy consort's chariot drew.

With such discourse, they entertain'd the feast;
Then rose from table, and withdrew to rest.
The following morn, ere Sol was seen to shine,
Th' inquiring Trojans sought the sacred shrine;
The mystick Pow'r commands them to explore
Their ancient mother, and a kindred shore.
Attending to the sea, the gen'rous prince
Dismiss'd his guests with rich munificence,
In old Anchises' hand a sceptre plac'd,
A vest, and quiver young Ascanius grac'd,
His sire, a cup; which from th' Aonian coast,
Ismenian Therses sent his royal host.
Alcon of Myle made what Therses sent,
And carv'd thereon this ample argument.

A town with sev'n distinguish'd gates was shown,
Which spoke its name, and made the city known;
Before it, piles, and tombs, and rising flames,
The rites of death, and quires of mourning dames,
Who bar'd their breasts, and gave their hair to flow,
The signs of grief, and marks of publick woe.
Their fountains dry'd, the weeping Naiads mourn'd,
The trees stood bare, with searing cankers burn'd,
No herbage cloath'd the ground, a ragged flock
Of goats half-famish'd, lick'd the naked rock,
Of manly courage, and with mind serene,
Orion's daughters in the town were seen;
One heav'd her chest to meet the lifted knife,
One plung'd the poyniard thro' the seat of life,
Their country's victims; mourns the rescu'd state,
The bodies burns, and celebrates their Fate.
To save the failure of th' illustrious line,
From the pale ashes rose, of form divine,
Two gen'rous youths; these, fame Coronae calls,
Who join the pomp, and mourn their mother's falls.

These burnish'd figures form'd of antique mold,
Shone on the brass, with rising sculpture bold;
A wreath of gilt Acanthus round the brim was roll'd.

Nor less expence the Trojan gifts express'd;
A fuming censer for the royal priest,
A chalice, and a crown of princely cost,
With ruddy gold, and sparkling gems emboss'd.

Now hoisting sail, to Crete the Trojans stood,
Themselves remembring sprung from Teucer's blood;
But Heav'n forbids, and pestilential Jove
From noxious skies, the wand'ring navy drove.
Her hundred cities left, from Crete they bore,
And sought the destin'd land, Ausonia's shore;
But toss'd by storms at either Strophas lay,
'Till scar'd by Harpies from the faithless bay.
Then passing onward with a prosp'rous wind,
Left sly Ulysses' spacious realms behind;
Ambracia's state, in former ages known.
The strife of Gods, the judge transform'd to stone
They saw; for Actian Phoebus since renown'd,
Who Caesar's arms with naval conquest crown'd;
Next pass'd Dodona, wont of old to boast
Her vocal forest; and Chaonia's coast,
Where king Molossus' sons on wings aspir'd,
And saw secure the harmless fewel fir'd.

Now to Phaeacia's happy isle they came,
For fertile orchards known to early fame;
Epirus past, they next beheld with joy
A second Ilium, and fictitious Troy;
Here Trojan Helenus the sceptre sway'd,
Who show'd their fate and mystick truths display'd.
By him confirm'd Sicilia's isle they reach'd,
Whose sides to sea three promontories stretch'd,
Pachynos to the stormy south is plac'd,
On Lilybaeum blows the gentle west,
Peloro's cliffs the northern bear survey,
Who rolls above, and dreads to touch the sea.
By this they steer, and favour'd by the tide,
Secure by night in Zancle's harbour ride.

Here cruel Scylla guards the rocky shore,
And there the waves of loud Charybdis roar:
This sucks, and vomits ships, and bodies drown'd;
And rav'nous dogs the womb of that surround,
In face a virgin; and (if ought be true
By bards recorded) once a virgin too.

A train of youths in vain desir'd her bed;
By sea-nymphs lov'd, to nymphs of seas she fled;
The maid to these, with female pride, display'd
Their baffled courtship, and their love betray'd.

When Galatea thus bespoke the fair
(But first she sigh'd), while Scylla comb'd her hair:
You, lovely maid, a gen'rous race pursues,
Whom safe you may (as now you do) refuse;
To me, tho' pow'rful in a num'rous train
Of sisters, sprung from Gods, who rule the main,
My native seas could scarce a refuge prove,
To shun the fury of the Cyclops' love,

Tears choak'd her utt'rance here; the pity'ng maid
With marble fingers wip'd them off, and said:

My dearest Goddess, let thy Scylla know,
(For I am faithful) whence these sorrows flow.

The maid's intreaties o'er the nymph prevail,
Who thus to Scylla tells the mournful tale.

The Story of Acis, Polyphemus and Galatea

Acis, the lovely youth, whose loss I mourn,
From Faunus, and the nymph Symethis born,
Was both his parents' pleasure; but, to me
Was all that love could make a lover be.
The Gods our minds in mutual bands did join:
I was his only joy, and he was mine.
Now sixteen summers the sweet youth had seen;
And doubtful down began to shade his chin:
When Polyphemus first disturb'd our joy;
And lov'd me fiercely, as I lov'd the boy.
Ask not which passion in my soul was high'r,
My last aversion, or my first desire:
Nor this the greater was, nor that the less;
Both were alike, for both were in excess.
Thee, Venus, thee both Heav'n, and Earth obey;
Immense thy pow'r, and boundless is thy sway.
The Cyclops, who defy'd th' aetherial throne,
And thought no thunder louder than his own,
The terror of the woods, and wilder far
Than wolves in plains, or bears in forests are,
Th' inhuman host, who made his bloody feasts
On mangl'd members of his butcher'd guests,
Yet felt the force of love, and fierce desire,
And burnt for me, with unrelenting fire.
Forgot his caverns, and his woolly care,
Assum'd the softness of a lover's air;
And comb'd, with teeth of rakes, his rugged hair.
Now with a crooked scy the his beard he sleeks;
And mows the stubborn stubble of his cheeks:
Now in the crystal stream he looks, to try
His simagres, and rowls his glaring eye.
His cruelty, and thirst of blood are lost;
And ships securely sail along the coast.

The prophet Telemus (arriv'd by chance
Where Aetna's summets to the seas advance,
Who mark'd the tracts of every bird that flew,
And sure presages from their flying drew)
Foretold the Cyclops, that Ulysses' hand
In his broad eye shou'd thrust a flaming brand.
The giant, with a scornful grin, reply'd,
Vain augur, thou hast falsely prophesy'd;
Already love his flaming brand has tost;
Looking on two fair eyes, my sight I lost,
Thus, warn'd in vain, with stalking pace he strode,
And stamp'd the margin of the briny flood
With heavy steps; and weary, sought agen
The cool retirement of his gloomy den.

A promontory, sharp'ning by degrees,
Ends in a wedge, and overlooks the seas:
On either side, below, the water flows;
This airy walk the giant lover chose.
Here on the midst he sate; his flocks, unled,
Their shepherd follow'd, and securely fed.
A pine so burly, and of length so vast,
That sailing ships requir'd it for a mast,
He wielded for a staff, his steps to guide:
But laid it by, his whistle while he try'd.
A hundred reeds of a prodigious growth,
Scarce made a pipe, proportion'd to his mouth:
Which when he gave it wind, the rocks around,
And watry plains, the dreadful hiss resound.
I heard the ruffian-shepherd rudely blow,
Where, in a hollow cave, I sat below;
On Acis' bosom I my head reclin'd:
And still preserve the poem in my mind.

Oh lovely Galatea, whiter far
Than falling snows, and rising lillies are;
More flowry than the meads, as chrystal bright:
Erect as alders, and of equal height:
More wanton than a kid, more sleek thy skin,
Than orient shells, that on the shores are seen,
Than apples fairer, when the boughs they lade;
Pleasing, as winter suns, or summer shade:
More grateful to the sight, than goodly plains;
And softer to the touch, than down of swans;
Or curds new turn'd; and sweeter to the taste
Than swelling grapes, that to the vintage haste:
More clear than ice, or running streams, that stray
Through garden plots, but ah! more swift than they.

Yet, Galatea, harder to be broke
Than bullocks, unreclaim'd, to bear the yoke,
And far more stubborn, than the knotted oak:
Like sliding streams, impossible to hold;
Like them, fallacious, like their fountains, cold.
More warping, than the willow, to decline
My warm embrace, more brittle, than the vine;
Immovable, and fixt in thy disdain:
Tough, as these rocks, and of a harder grain.
More violent, than is the rising flood;
And the prais'd peacock is not half so proud.
Fierce, as the fire, and sharp, as thistles are,
And more outragious, than a mother-bear:
Deaf, as the billows to the vows I make;
And more revengeful, than a trodden snake.
In swiftness fleeter, than the flying hind,
Or driven tempests, or the driving wind.
All other faults, with patience I can bear;
But swiftness is the vice I only fear.

Yet if you knew me well, you wou'd not shun
My love, but to my wish'd embraces run:
Wou'd languish in your turn, and court my stay;
And much repent of your unwise delay.

My palace, in the living rock, is made
By Nature's hand; a spacious pleasing shade:
Which neither heat can pierce, nor cold invade.
My garden fill'd with fruits you may behold,
And grapes in clusters, imitating gold;
Some blushing bunches of a purple hue:
And these, and those, are all reserv'd for you.
Red strawberries, in shades, expecting stand,
Proud to be gather'd by so white a hand.
Autumnal cornels latter fruit provide;
And plumbs, to tempt you, turn their glossy side:
Not those of common kinds; but such alone,
As in Phaeacian orchards might have grown:
Nor chestnuts shall be wanting to your food,
Nor garden-fruits, nor wildings of the wood;
The laden boughs for you alone shall bear;
And yours shall be the product of the year.

The flocks you see, are all my own; beside
The rest that woods, and winding vallies hide;
And those that folded in the caves abide.
Ask not the numbers of my growing store;
Who knows how many, knows he has no more.
Nor will I praise my cattle; trust not me,
But judge your self, and pass your own decree:
Behold their swelling dugs; the sweepy weight
Of ewes, that sink beneath the milky freight;
In the warm folds their tender lambkins lye;
Apart from kids, that call with human cry.
New milk in nut-brown bowls is duely serv'd
For daily drink; the rest for cheese reserv'd.
Nor are these household dainties all my store:
The fields, and forests will afford us more;
The deer, the hare, the goat, the savage boar.
All sorts of ven'son; and of birds the best;
A pair of turtles taken from the nest.
I walk'd the mountains, and two cubs I found
(Whose dam had left 'em on the naked ground),
So like, that no distinction could be seen:
So pretty, they were presents for a queen;
And so they shall; I took them both away;
And keep, to be companions of your play.

Oh raise, fair nymph, your beauteous face above
The waves; nor scorn my presents, and my love.
Come, Galatea, come, and view my face;
I late beheld it, in the watry glass;
And found it lovelier, than I fear'd it was.
Survey my towring stature, and my size:
Not Jove, the Jove you dream, that rules the skies,
Bears such a bulk, or is so largely spread:
My locks (the plenteous harvest of my head)
Hang o'er my manly face; and dangling down,
As with a shady grove, my shoulders crown.
Nor think, because my limbs and body bear
A thick-set underwood of bristling hair,
My shape deform'd; what fouler sight can be,
Than the bald branches of a leafless tree?
Foul is the steed without a flowing mane:
And birds, without their feathers, and their train.
Wool decks the sheep; and Man receives a grace
From bushy limbs, and from a bearded face.
My forehead with a single eye is fill'd,
Round, as a ball, and ample, as a shield.
The glorious lamp of Heav'n, the radiant sun,
Is Nature's eye; and she's content with one.
Add, that my father sways your seas, and I,
Like you, am of the watry family.
I make you his, in making you my own;
You I adore; and kneel to you alone:
Jove, with his fabled thunder, I despise,
And only fear the lightning of your eyes.
Frown not, fair nymph; yet I cou'd bear to be
Disdain'd, if others were disdain'd with me.
But to repulse the Cyclops, and prefer
The love of Acis (Heav'ns!) I cannot bear.
But let the stripling please himself; nay more,
Please you, tho' that's the thing I most abhor;
The boy shall find, if e'er we cope in fight,
These giant limbs, endu'd with giant might.
His living bowels from his belly torn,
And scatter'd limbs shall on the flood be born:
Thy flood, ungrateful nymph; and fate shall find,
That way for thee, and Acis to be join'd.
For oh! I burn with love, and thy disdain
Augments at once my passion, and my pain.
Translated Aetna flames within my heart,
And thou, inhuman, wilt not ease my smart.

Lamenting thus in vain, he rose, and strode
With furious paces to the neighb'ring wood:
Restless his feet, distracted was his walk;
Mad were his motions, and confus'd his talk.
Mad, as the vanquish'd bull, when forc'd to yield
His lovely mistress, and forsake the field.

Thus far unseen I saw: when fatal chance,
His looks directing, with a sudden glance,
Acis and I were to his sight betray'd;
Where, nought suspecting, we securely play'd.
From his wide mouth a bellowing cry he cast,
I see, I see; but this shall be your last:
A roar so loud made Aetna to rebound:
And all the Cyclops labour'd in the sound.
Affrighted with his monstrous voice, I fled,
And in the neighbouring ocean plung'd my head.
Poor Acis turn'd his back, and Help, he cry'd,
Help, Galatea, help, my parent Gods,
And take me dying to your deep abodes.
The Cyclops follow'd; but he sent before
A rib, which from the living rock he tore:
Though but an angle reach'd him of the stone,
The mighty fragment was enough alone,
To crush all Acis; 'twas too late to save,
But what the Fates allow'd to give, I gave:
That Acis to his lineage should return;
And rowl, among the river Gods, his urn.
Straight issu'd from the stone a stream of blood;
Which lost the purple, mingling with the flood,
Then, like a troubled torrent, it appear'd:
The torrent too, in little space, was clear'd.
The stone was cleft, and through the yawning chink
New reeds arose, on the new river's brink.
The rock, from out its hollow womb, disclos'd
A sound like water in its course oppos'd,
When (wond'rous to behold), full in the flood,
Up starts a youth, and navel high he stood.
Horns from his temples rise; and either horn
Thick wreaths of reeds (his native growth) adorn.
Were not his stature taller than before,
His bulk augmented, and his beauty more,
His colour blue; for Acis he might pass:
And Acis chang'd into a stream he was,
But mine no more; he rowls along the plains
With rapid motion, and his name retains.

The Story of Glaucus and Scylla

Here ceas'd the nymph; the fair assembly broke,
The sea-green Nereids to the waves betook:
While Scylla, fearful of the wide-spread main,
Swift to the safer shore returns again.
There o'er the sandy margin, unarray'd,
With printless footsteps flies the bounding maid;
Or in some winding creek's secure retreat
She baths her weary limbs, and shuns the noonday's heat.

Her Glaucus saw, as o'er the deep he rode,
New to the seas, and late receiv'd a God.
He saw, and languish'd for the virgin's love;
With many an artful blandishment he strove
Her flight to hinder, and her fears remove.
The more he sues, the more she wings her flight,
And nimbly gains a neighb'ring mountain's height.
Steep shelving to the margin of the flood,
A neighb'ring mountain bare, and woodless stood;
Here, by the place secur'd, her steps she stay'd,
And, trembling still, her lover's form survey'd.
His shape, his hue, her troubled sense appall,
And dropping locks that o'er his shoulders fall;
She sees his face divine, and manly brow,
End in a fish's wreathy tail below:
She sees, and doubts within her anxious mind,
Whether he comes of God, or monster kind.
This Glaucus soon perceiv'd; and, Oh! forbear
(His hand supporting on a rock lay near),
Forbear, he cry'd, fond maid, this needless fear.
Nor fish am I, nor monster of the main,
But equal with the watry Gods I reign;
Nor Proteus, nor Palaemon me excell,
Nor he whose breath inspires the sounding shell.
My birth, 'tis true, I owe to mortal race,
And I my self but late a mortal was:
Ev'n then in seas, and seas alone, I joy'd;
The seas my hours, and all my cares employ'd,
In meshes now the twinkling prey I drew;
Now skilfully the slender line I threw,
And silent sat the moving float to view.
Not far from shore, there lies a verdant mead,
With herbage half, and half with water spread:
There, nor the horned heifers browsing stray,
Nor shaggy kids, nor wanton lambkins play;
There, nor the sounding bees their nectar cull,
Nor rural swains their genial chaplets pull,
Nor flocks, nor herds, nor mowers haunt the place,
To crop the flow'rs, or cut the bushy grass:
Thither, sure first of living race came I,
And sat by chance, my dropping nets to dry.
My scaly prize, in order all display'd,
By number on the greensward there I lay'd,
My captives, whom or in my nets I took,
Or hung unwary on my wily hook.
Strange to behold! yet what avails a lye?
I saw 'em bite the grass, as I sate by;
Then sudden darting o'er the verdant plain,
They spread their finns, as in their native main:
I paus'd, with wonder struck, while all my prey
Left their new master, and regain'd the sea.
Amaz'd, within my secret self I sought,
What God, what herb the miracle had wrought:
But sure no herbs have pow'r like this, I cry'd;
And strait I pluck'd some neighb'ring herbs, and try'd.
Scarce had I bit, and prov'd the wond'rous taste,
When strong convulsions shook my troubled breast;
I felt my heart grow fond of something strange,
And my whole Nature lab'ring with a change.
Restless I grew, and ev'ry place forsook,
And still upon the seas I bent my look.
Farewel for ever! farewel, land! I said;
And plung'd amidst the waves my sinking head.
The gentle Pow'rs, who that low empire keep,
Receiv'd me as a brother of the deep;
To Tethys, and to Ocean old, they pray
To purge my mortal earthy parts away.
The watry parents to their suit agreed,
And thrice nine times a secret charm they read,
Then with lustrations purify my limbs,
And bid me ba the beneath a hundred streams:
A hundred streams from various fountains run,
And on my head at once come rushing down.
Thus far each passage I remember well,
And faithfully thus far the tale I tell;
But then oblivion dark, on all my senses fell.
Again at length my thought reviving came,
When I no longer found my self the same;
Then first this sea-green beard I felt to grow,
And these large honours on my spreading brow;
My long-descending locks the billows sweep,
And my broad shoulders cleave the yielding deep;
My fishy tail, my arms of azure hue,
And ev'ry part divinely chang'd, I view.
But what avail these useless honours now?
What joys can immortality bestow?
What, tho' our Nereids all my form approve?
What boots it, while fair Scylla scorns my love?

Thus far the God; and more he wou'd have said;
When from his presence flew the ruthless maid.
Stung with repulse, in such disdainful sort,
He seeks Titanian Circe's horrid court.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
~ Ovid, BOOK THE THIRTEENTH

,
338:The Third Monarchy, Being The Grecian, Beginning
Under Alexander The Great In The 112. Olympiad.
Great Alexander was wise Philips son,
He to Amyntas, Kings of Macedon;
The cruel proud Olympias was his Mother,
She to Epirus warlike King was daughter.
This Prince (his father by Pausanias slain)
The twenty first of's age began to reign.
Great were the Gifts of nature which he had,
His education much to those did adde:
By art and nature both he was made fit,
To 'complish that which long before was writ.
The very day of his Nativity
To ground was burnt Dianaes Temple high:
An Omen to their near approaching woe,
Whose glory to the earth this king did throw.
His Rule to Greece he scorn'd should be confin'd,
The Universe scarce bound his proud vast mind.
This is the He-Goat which from Grecia came,
That ran in Choler on the Persian Ram,
That brake his horns, that threw him on the ground
To save him from his might no man was found:
Philip on this great Conquest had an eye,
But death did terminate those thoughts so high.
The Greeks had chose him Captain General,
Which honour to his Son did now befall.
(For as Worlds Monarch now we speak not on,
But as the King of little Macedon)
Restless both day and night his heart then was,
His high resolves which way to bring to pass;
Yet for a while in Greece is forc'd to stay,
Which makes each moment seem more then a day.
Thebes and stiff Athens both 'gainst him rebel,
Their mutinies by valour doth he quell.
This done against both right and natures Laws,
His kinsmen put to death, who gave no cause;
That no rebellion in in his absence be,
Nor making Title unto Sovereignty.
And all whom he suspects or fears will climbe,
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Now taste of death least they deserv'd in time,
Nor wonder is t if he in blood begin,
For Cruelty was his parental sin,
Thus eased now of troubles and of fears,
Next spring his course to Asia he steers;
Leavs Sage Antipater, at home to sway,
And through the Hellispont his Ships made way.
Coming to Land, his dart on shore he throws,
Then with alacrity he after goes;
And with a bount'ous heart and courage brave,
His little wealth among his Souldiers gave.
And being ask'd what for himself was left,
Reply'd, enough, sith only hope he kept.
Thirty two thousand made up his Foot force,
To which were joyn'd five thousand goodly horse.
Then on he marcht, in's way he view'd old Troy,
And on Achilles tomb with wondrous joy
He offer'd, and for good success did pray
To him, his Mothers Ancestors, (men say)
When news of Alexander came to Court,
To scorn at him Darius had good sport;
Sends him a frothy and contemptuous Letter,
Stiles him disloyal servant, and no better;
Reproves him for his proud audacity
To lift his hand 'gainst such a Monarchy.
Then to's Lieftenant he in Asia sends
That he be ta'ne alive, for he intends
To whip him well with rods, and so to bring
That boy so mallipert before the King.
Ah! fond vain man, whose pen ere while
In lower terms was taught a higher stile.
To River Granick Alexander hyes
Which in Phrygia near Propontike lyes.
The Persians ready for encounter stand,
And strive to keep his men from off the land;
Those banks so steep the Greeks yet scramble up,
And beat the coward Persians from the top,
And twenty thousand of their lives bereave,
Who in their backs did all their wounds receive.
This victory did Alexander gain,
With loss of thirty four of his there slain;
Then Sardis he, and Ephesus did gain,
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VVhere stood of late, Diana's wondrous Phane,
And by Parmenio (of renowned Fame,)
Miletus and Pamphilia overcame.
Hallicarnassus and Pisidia
He for his Master takes with Lycia.
Next Alexander marcht towards the black Sea,
And easily takes old Gordium in his way;
Of Ass ear'd Midas, once the Regal Seat,
VVhose touch turn'd all to gold, yea even his meat
VVhere the Prophetick knot he cuts in twain,
VVhich who so doth, must Lord of all remain.
Now news of Memnon's death (the Kings Viceroy)
To Alexanders heart's no little joy,
For in that Peer, more valour did abide,
Then in Darius multitude beside:
In's stead, was Arses plac'd, but durst not stay,
Yet set one in his room, and ran away;
His substitute as fearfull as his master,
Runs after two, and leaves all to Disaster.
Then Alexander all Cilicia takes,
No stroke for it he struck, their hearts so quakes.
To Greece he thirty thousand talents sends,
To raise more Force to further his intends:
Then o're he goes Darius now to meet,
Who came with thousand thousands at his feet.
Though some there be (perhaps) more likely write
He but four hundred thousand had to fight,
The rest Attendants, which made up no less,
Both Sexes there was almost numberless.
For this wise King had brought to see the sport,
With him the greatest Ladyes of the Court,
His mother, his beauteous Queen and daughters,
It seems to see the Macedonian slaughters.
Its much beyond my time and little art,
To shew how great Darius plaid his part;
The splendor and the pomp he marched in,
For since the world was no such Pageant seen.
Sure 'twas a goodly sight there to behold,
The Persians clad in silk, and glistering gold,
The stately horses trapt, the lances gilt,
As if addrest now all to run a tilt.
The holy fire was borne before the host,
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(For Sun and Fire the Persians worship most)
The Priests in their strange habit follow after,
An object, not so much of fear as laughter.
The King sate in a chariot made of gold,
With crown and Robes most glorious to behold,
And o're his head his golden Gods on high,
Support a party coloured Canopy.
A number of spare horses next were led,
Lest he should need them in his Chariots stead;
But those that saw him in this state to lye,
Suppos'd he neither meant to fight nor flye.
He fifteen hundred had like women drest;
For thus to fright the Greeks he judg'd was best.
Their golden ornaments how to set forth,
Would ask more time then was their bodies worth
Great Sysigambis she brought up the Reer,
Then such a world of waggons did appear,
Like several houses moving upon wheels,
As if she'd drawn whole Shushan at her heels:
This brave Virago to the King was mother,
And as much good she did as any other.
Now lest this gold, and all this goodly stuff
Had not been spoyle and booty rich enough
A thousand mules and Camels ready wait
Loaden with gold, with jewels and with plate:
For sure Darius thought at the first sight,
The Greeks would all adore, but none would fight
But when both Armies met, he might behold
That valour was more worth then pearls or gold,
And that his wealth serv'd but for baits to 'lure
To make his overthrow more fierce and sure.
The Greeks came on and with a gallant grace
Let fly their arrows in the Persians face.
The cowards feeling this sharp stinging charge
Most basely ran, and left their king at large:
Who from his golden coach is glad to 'light,
And cast away his crown for swifter flight:
Of late like some immoveable he lay,
Now finds both legs and horse to run away.
Two hundred thousand men that day were slain,
And forty thousand prisoners also tane,
Besides the Queens and Ladies of the court,
132
If Curtius be true in his report.
The Regal Ornaments were lost, the treasure
Divided at the Macedonians pleasure;
Yet all this grief, this loss, this overthrow,
Was but beginning of his future woe.
The royal Captives brought to Alexander
T'ward them demean'd himself like a Commander
For though their beauties were unparaled,
Conquer'd himself now he had conquered,
Preserv'd their honour, us'd them bounteously,
Commands no man should doe them injury:
And this to Alexander is more fame
Then that the Persian King he overcame.
Two hundred eighty Greeks he lost in fight,
By too much heat, not wounds (as authors write)
No sooner had this Victor won the field,
But all Phenicia to his pleasure yield,
Of which the Goverment he doth commit
Unto Parmenio of all most fit.
Darius now less lofty then before,
To Alexander writes he would restore
Those mournfull Ladies from Captivity,
For whom he offers him a ransome high:
But down his haughty stomach could not bring,
To give this Conquerour the Stile of King.
This Letter Alexander doth disdain,
And in short terms sends this reply again,
A King he was, and that not only so,
But of Darius King, as he should know.
Next Alexander unto Tyre doth goe,
His valour and his victoryes they know:
To gain his love the Tyrians intend,
Therefore a crown and great Provision send,
Their present he receives with thankfullness,
Desires to offer unto Hercules,
Protector of their town, by whom defended,
And from whom he lineally descended.
But they accept not this in any wise,
Lest he intend more fraud then sacrifice,
Sent word that Hercules his temple stood
In the old town, (which then lay like a wood)
With this reply he was so deep enrag'd,
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To win the town, his honour he ingag'd:
And now as Babels King did once before,
He leaves not till he made the sea firm shore,
But far less time and cost he did expend,
The former Ruines forwarded his end:
Moreover had a Navy at command,
The other by his men fetcht all by land.
In seven months time he took that wealthy town,
Whose glory now a second time's brought down.
Two thousand of the chief he crucifi'd,
Eight thousand by the sword then also di'd,
And thirteen thousand Gally slaves he made,
And thus the Tyrians for mistrust were paid.
The rule of this he to Philotas gave
Who was the son of that Parmenio brave.
Cilicia to Socrates doth give,
For now's the time Captains like Kings may live.
Zidon he on Ephestion bestowes;
(For that which freely comes, as freely goes)
He scorns to have one worse then had the other,
So gives his little Lordship to another.
Ephestion having chief command of th'Fleet,
At Gaza now must Alexander meet.
Darius finding troubles still increase,
By his Ambassadors now sues for peace,
And layes before great Alexanders eyes
The dangers difficultyes like to rise,
First at Euphrates what he's like to 'bide,
And then at Tygris and Araxis side,
These he may scape, and if he so desire,
A league of friendship make firm and entire.
His eldest daughter he in mariage profers,
And a most princely dowry with her offers.
All those rich Kingdomes large that do abide
Betwixt the Hellespont and Halys side.
But he with scorn his courtesie rejects,
And the distressed King no whit respects,
Tells him, these proffers great, in truth were none
For all he offers now was but his own.
But quoth Parmenio that brave Commander,
Was I as great, as is great Alexander,
Darius offers I would not reject,
134
But th'kingdomes and the Lady soon accept.
To which proud Alexander made reply,
And so if I Parmenio was, would I.
He now to Gaza goes, and there doth meet,
His Favorite Ephestion with his Fleet,
Where valiant Betis stoutly keeps the town,
(A loyal Subject to Darius Crown)
For more repulse the Grecians here abide
Then in the Persian Monarchy beside;
And by these walls so many men were slain,
That Greece was forc'd to yield supply again.
But yet this well defended Town was taken,
For 'twas decree'd, that Empire should be shaken;
Thus Betis ta'en had holes bor'd through his feet,
And by command was drawn through every street
To imitate Achilles in his shame,
Who did the like to Hector (of more fame)
What hast thou lost thy magnimity,
Can Alexander deal thus cruelly?
Sith valour with Heroicks is renown'd,
Though in an Enemy it should be found;
If of thy future fame thou hadst regard,
Why didst not heap up honours and reward?
From Gaza to Jerusalem he goes,
But in no hostile way, (as I suppose)
Him in his Priestly Robes high Jaddus meets,
Whom with great reverence Alexander greets;
The Priest shews him good Daniel's Prophesy,
How he should overthrow this Monarchy,
By which he was so much encouraged,
No future dangers he did ever dread.
From thence to fruitful Egypt marcht with speed,
Where happily in's wars he did succeed;
To see how fast he gain'd was no small wonder,
For in few dayes he brought that Kingdome under.
Then to the Phane of Jupiter he went,
To be install'd a God, was his intent.
The Pagan Priest through hire, or else mistake,
The Son of Jupiter did streight him make:
He Diobolical must needs remain,
That his humanity will not retain.
Thence back to Egypt goes, and in few dayes;
135
Fair Alexandria from the ground doth raise;
Then setling all things in less Asia;
In Syria, Egypt, and Phenicia,
Unto Euphrates marcht and overgoes,
For no man's there his Army to oppose;
Had Betis now been there but with his band,
Great Alexander had been kept from Land.
But as the King, so is the multitude,
And now of valour both are destitute.
Yet he (poor prince) another Host doth muster,
Of Persians, Scythians, Indians in a cluster;
Men but in shape and name, of valour none
Most fit, to blunt the Swords of Macedon.
Two hundred fifty thousand by account,
Of Horse and Foot his Army did amount;
For in his multitudes his trust still lay,
But on their fortitude he had small stay;
Yet had some hope that on the spacious plain,
His numbers might the victory obtain.
About this time Darius beautious Queen,
Who had sore travail and much sorrow seen,
Now bids the world adue, with pain being spent,
Whose death her Lord full sadly did lament.
Great Alexander mourns as well as he,
The more because not set at liberty;
When this sad news (at first Darius hears,
Some injury was offered he fears:
But when inform'd how royally the King,
Had used her, and hers, in every thing,
He prays the immortal Gods they would reward
Great Alexander for this good regard;
And if they down his Monarchy will throw,
Let them on him this dignity bestow.
And now for peace he sues as once before,
And offers all he did and Kingdomes more;
His eldest daughter for his princely bride,
(Nor was such match in all the world beside)
And all those Countryes which (betwixt) did lye
Phanisian Sea, and great Euphrates high:
With fertile Egypt and rich Syria,
And all those Kingdomes in less Asia.
With thirty thousand Talents to be paid,
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For the Queen Mother, and the royal maid;
And till all this be well perform'd, and sure,
Ochus his Son for Hostage should endure.
To this stout Alexander gives no ear,
No though Parmenio plead, yet will not hear;
Which had he done. (perhaps) his fame he'd kept,
Nor Infamy had wak'd, when he had slept,
For his unlimited prosperity
Him boundless made in vice and Cruelty.
Thus to Darius he writes back again,
The Firmament, two Suns cannot contain.
Two Monarchyes on Earth cannot abide,
Nor yet two Monarchs in one world reside;
The afflicted King finding him set to jar,
Prepares against to morrow, for the war,
Parmenio, Alexander, wisht that night,
To force his Camp, so vanquish them by flight.
For tumult in the night doth cause most dread,
And weakness of a Foe is covered,
But he disdain'd to steal a victory:
The Sun should witness of his valour be,
And careless in his bed, next morne he lyes,
By Captains twice is call'd before hee'l rise,
The Armyes joyn'd a while, the Persians fight,
And spilt the Greeks some bloud before their flight
But long they stood not e're they're forc'd to run,
So made an end, As soon as well begun.
Forty five thousand Alexander had,
But is not known what slaughter here was made,
Some write th'other had a million, some more,
But Quintus Curtius as before.
At Arbela this victory was gain'd,
Together with the Town also obtain'd;
Darius stript of all to Media came,
Accompan'ed with sorrow, fear, and shame,
At Arbela left his Ornaments and Treasure,
Which Alexander deals as suits his pleasure.
This conqueror to Babylon then goes,
Is entertain'd with joy and pompous showes,
With showrs of flours the streets along are strown,
And incense burnt the silver Altars on.
The glory of the Castle he admires,
137
The strong Foundation and the lofty Spires,
In this, a world of gold and Treasure lay,
Which in few hours was carried all away.
With greedy eyes he views this City round,
Whose fame throughout the world was so renownd
And to possess he counts no little bliss
The towres and bowres of proud Semiramis,
Though worne by time, and rac'd by foes full sore,
Yet old foundations shew'd and somewhat more.
With all the pleasures that on earth are found,
This city did abundantly abound,
Where four and thirty dayes he now did stay,
And gave himself to banqueting and play:
He and his souldiers wax effeminate,
And former discipline begin to hate.
Whilst revelling at Babylon he lyes,
Antipater from Greece sends fresh supplyes.
He then to Shushan goes with his new bands,
But needs no force, tis rendred to his hands.
He likewise here a world of treasure found;
For 'twas the seat of Persian Kings renownd.
Here stood the royal Houses of delight,
Where Kings have shown their glory wealth and might
The sumptuous palace of Queen Esther here,
And of good Mordicai, her kinsman dear,
Those purple hangings, mixt with green and white
Those beds of gold, and couches of delight.
And furniture the richest in all lands,
Now fall into the Macedonians hands.
From Shushan to Persipolis he goes,
Which news doth still augment Darius woes.
In his approach the governour sends word,
For his receipt with joy they all accord,
With open gates the wealthy town did stand,
And all in it was at his high command.
Of all the Cities that on earth was found,
None like to this in riches did abound:
Though Babylon was rich and Shushan too
Yet to compare with this they might not doe:
Here lay the bulk of all those precious things
That did pertain unto the Persian Kings:
For when the souldiers rifled had their pleasure,
138
And taken money plate and golden treasure,
Statues some gold, and silver numberless,
Yet after all, as storyes do express
The share of Alexander did amount
To an hundred thousand talents by account.
Here of his own he sets a Garison,
(As first at Shushan and at Babylon)
On their old Governours titles he laid,
But on their faithfulness he never staid,
Their place gave to his Captains (as was just)
For such revolters false, what King can trust?
The riches and the pleasures of this town
Now makes this King his virtues all to drown,
That wallowing in all licentiousness,
In pride and cruelty to high excess.
Being inflam'd with wine upon a season,
Filled with madness, and quite void of reason,
He at a bold proud strumpets leud desire,
Commands to set this goodly town on fire.
Parmenio wise intreats him to desist
And layes before his eyes if he persist
His fames dishonour, loss unto his state,
And just procuring of the Persians hate:
But deaf to reason, bent to have his will,
Those stately streets with raging flame did fill.
Then to Darius he directs his way,
Who was retir'd as far as Media,
And there with sorrows, fears & cares surrounded
Had now his army fourth and last compounded.
Which forty thousand made, but his intent
Was these in Bactria soon to augment:
But hearing Alexander was so near,
Thought now this once to try his fortunes here,
And rather chose an honourable death,
Then still with infamy to draw his breath:
But Bessus false, who was his chief Commander
Perswades him not to fight with Alexander.
With sage advice he sets before his eyes
The little hope of profit like to rise:
If when he'd multitudes the day he lost,
Then with so few, how likely to be crost.
This counsel for his safety he pretended,
139
But to deliver him to's foe intended.
Next day this treason to Darius known
Transported sore with grief and passion,
Grinding his teeth, and plucking off his hair,
Sate overwhelm'd with sorrow and dispair:
Then bids his servant Artabasus true,
Look to himself, and leave him to that crew,
Who was of hopes and comforts quite bereft,
And by his guard and Servitors all left.
Straight Bessus comes, & with his trait'rous hands
Layes hold on's Lord, and binding him with bands
Throws him into a Cart, covered with hides,
Who wanting means t'resist these wrongs abides,
Then draws the cart along with chains of gold,
In more despight the thraled prince to hold,
And thus t'ward Alexander on he goes,
Great recompence for this, he did propose:
But some detesting this his wicked fact,
To Alexander flyes and tells this act,
Who doubling of his march, posts on amain,
Darius from that traitors hands to gain.
Bessus gets knowledg his disloyalty
Had Alexanders wrath incensed high,
Whose army now was almost within sight,
His hopes being dasht prepares himself for flight:
Unto Darius first he brings a horse,
And bids him save himself by speedy course:
The wofull King his courtesie refuses,
Whom thus the execrable wretch abuses,
By throwing darts gave him his mortal wound,
Then slew his Servants that were faithfull found,
Yea wounds the beasts that drew him unto death,
And leaves him thus to gasp out his last breath.
Bessus his partner in this tragedy,
Was the false Governour of Media.
This done, they with their host soon speed away,
To hide themselves remote in Bactria.
Darius bath'd in blood, sends out his groans,
Invokes the heav'ns and earth to hear his moans:
His lost felicity did grieve him sore,
But this unheard of treachery much more:
But above all, that neither Ear nor Eye
140
Should hear nor see his dying misery;
As thus he lay, Polistrates a Greek,
Wearied with his long march, did water seek,
So chanc'd these bloudy Horses to espy,
Whose wounds had made their skins of purple dye
To them repairs then looking in the Cart,
Finds poor Darius pierced to the heart,
Who not a little chear'd to have some eye,
The witness of this horrid Tragedy;
Prays him to Alexander to commend
The just revenge of this his woful end:
And not to pardon such disloyalty,
Of Treason, Murther, and base Cruelty.
If not, because Darius thus did pray,
Yet that succeeding Kings in safety may
Their lives enjoy, their Crowns and dignity,
And not by Traitors hands untimely dye.
He also sends his humble thankfulness,
For all the Kingly grace he did express;
To's Mother, Children dear, and wife now gone.
Which made their long restraint seem to be none:
Praying the immortal Gods, that Sea and Land
Might be subjected to his royal hand,
And that his Rule as far extended be,
As men the rising, setting Sun shall see,
This said, the Greek for water doth intreat,
To quench his thirst, and to allay his heat:
Of all good things (quoth he) once in my power,
I've nothing left, at this my dying hour;
Thy service and compassion to reward,
But Alexander will, for this regard.
This said, his fainting breath did fleet away,
And though a Monarch late, now lyes like clay;
And thus must every Son of Adam lye,
Though Gods on Earth like Sons of men they dye.
Now to the East, great Alexander goes,
To see if any dare his might oppose,
For scarce the world or any bounds thereon,
Could bound his boundless fond Ambition;
Such as submits again he doth restore
Their riches, and their honours he makes more,
On Artabaces more then all bestow'd,
141
For his fidelity to's Master show'd.
Thalestris Queen of th'Amazons now brought
Her Train to Alexander, (as 'tis thought.)
Though most of reading best and soundest mind,
Such Country there, nor yet such people find.
Then tell her errand, we had better spare
To th'ignorant, her title will declare:
As Alexander in his greatness grows,
So dayly of his virtues doth he lose.
He baseness counts, his former Clemency,
And not beseeming such a dignity;
His past sobriety doth also bate,
As most incompatible to his State;
His temperance is but a sordid thing,
No wayes becoming such a mighty King;
His greatness now he takes to represent
His fancy'd Gods above the Firmament.
And such as shew'd but reverence before,
Now are commanded strictly to adore;
With Persian Robes himself doth dignifie,
Charging the same on his nobility,
His manners habit, gestures, all did fashion
After that conquer'd and luxurious Nation.
His Captains that were virtuously inclin'd,
Griev'd at this change of manners and of mind.
The ruder sort did openly deride,
His feigned Diety and foolish pride;
The certainty of both comes to his Ears,
But yet no notice takes of what he hears:
With those of worth he still desires esteem,
So heaps up gifts his credit to redeem
And for the rest new wars and travails finds,
That other matters might take up their minds,
And hearing Bessus, makes himself a King,
Intends that Traitor to his end to bring.
Now that his Host from luggage might be free,
And with his burthen no man burthened be;
Commands forthwith each man his fardle bring,
Into the market place before the King;
VVhich done, sets fire upon those goodly spoyles,
The recompence of travails wars and toyles.
And thus unwisely in a mading fume,
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The wealth of many Kingdomes did consume,
But marvell 'tis that without mutiny,
The Souldiers should let pass this injury;
Nor wonder less to Readers may it bring,
Here to observe the rashness of the King.
Now with his Army doth he post away
False Bessus to find out in Bactria:
But much distrest for water in their march,
The drought and heat their bodies sore did parch.
At length they came to th'river Oxus brink,
Where so immoderately these thirsty drink,
Which more mortality to them did bring,
Then all their warrs against the Persian King.
Here Alexander's almost at a stand,
To pass the River to the other land.
For boats here's none, nor near it any wood,
To make them Rafts to waft them o're the flood:
But he that was resolved in his mind,
Would without means some transportation find.
Then from the Carriages the hides he takes,
And stuffing them with straw, he bundles makes.
On these together ti'd, in six dayes space,
They all pass over to the other place.
Had Bessus had but valour to his will,
With little pain there might have kept them still:
But Coward durst not fight, nor could he fly,
Hated of all for's former treachery,
Is by his own now bound in iron chains,
A Coller of the same, his neck contains.
And in this sort they rather drag then bring
This Malefactor vile before the King,
Who to Darius brother gives the wretch,
With racks and tortures every limb to stretch.
Here was of Greeks a town in Bactria,
Whom Xerxes from their Country led away,
These not a little joy'd, this day to see,
Wherein their own had got the sov'raignty
And now reviv'd, with hopes held up their head
From bondage long to be Enfranchised.
But Alexander puts them to the sword
Without least cause from them in deed or word;
Nor Sex, nor age, nor one, nor other spar'd,
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But in his cruelty alike they shar'd:
Nor reason could he give for this great wrong,
But that they had forgot their mother tongue.
While thus some time he spent in Bactria,
And in his camp strong and securely lay,
Down from the mountains twenty thousand came
And there most fiercely set upon the same:
Repelling these, two marks of honour got
Imprinted in his leg, by arrows shot.
The Bactrians against him now rebel;
But he their stubborness in time doth quell.
From hence he to Jaxartis River goes,
Where Scythians rude his army doth oppose,
And with their outcryes in an hideous sort
Beset his camp, or military court,
Of darts and arrows, made so little spare,
They flew so thick, they seem'd to dark the air:
But soon his souldiers forc'd them to a flight,
Their nakedness could not endure their might.
Upon this rivers bank in seventeen dayes
A goodly City doth compleatly raise,
Which Alexandria he doth likewise name,
And sixty furlongs could but round the same.
A third Supply Antipater now sent,
Which did his former forces much augment;
And being one hundred twenty thousand strong;
He enters then the Indian Kings among:
Those that submit, he gives them rule again,
Such as do not, both them and theirs are slain.
His warrs with sundry nations I'le omit,
And also of the Mallians what is writ.
His Fights, his dangers, and the hurts he had,
How to submit their necks at last they're glad.
To Nisa goes by Bacchus built long since,
Whose feasts are celebrated by this prince;
Nor had that drunken god one who would take
His Liquors more devoutly for his sake.
When thus ten days his brain with wine he'd soakt,
And with delicious meats his palate choakt:
To th'River Indus next his course he bends,
Boats to prepare, Ephestion first he sends,
Who coming thither long before his Lord,
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Had to his mind made all things to accord,
The vessels ready were at his command,
And Omphis King of that part of the land,
Through his perswasion Alexander meets,
And as his Sov'raign Lord him humbly greets
Fifty six Elephants he brings to's hand,
And tenders him the strength of all his land;
Presents himself first with a golden crown,
Then eighty talents to his captains down:
But Alexander made him to behold
He glory sought, no silver nor no gold;
His presents all with thanks he did restore,
And of his own a thousand talents more.
Thus all the Indian Kings to him submit,
But Porus stout, who will not yeild as yet:
To him doth Alexander thus declare,
His pleasure is that forthwith he repair
Unto his Kingdomes borders, and as due,
His homage to himself as Soveraign doe:
But kingly Porus this brave answer sent,
That to attend him there was his intent,
And come as well provided as he could,
But for the rest, his sword advise him should.
Great Alexander vext at this reply,
Did more his valour then his crown envy,
Is now resolv'd to pass Hydaspes flood,
And there by force his soveraignty make good.
Stout Porus on the banks doth ready stand
To give him welcome when he comes to land.
A potent army with him like a King,
And ninety Elephants for warr did bring:
Had Alexander such resistance seen
On Tygris side, here now he had not been.
Within this spacious River deep and wide
Did here and there Isles full of trees abide.
His army Alexander doth divide
With Ptolemy sends part to th'other side;
Porus encounters them and thinks all's there,
When covertly the rest get o're else where,
And whilst the first he valiantly assail'd,
The last set on his back, and so prevail'd.
Yet work enough here Alexander found,
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For to the last stout Porus kept his ground:
Nor was't dishonour at the length to yield,
When Alexander strives to win the field.
The kingly Captive 'fore the Victor's brought,
In looks or gesture not abased ought,
But him a Prince of an undaunted mind
Did Alexander by his answers find:
His fortitude his royal foe commends,
Restores him and his bounds farther extends.
Now eastward Alexander would goe still,
But so to doe his souldiers had no will,
Long with excessive travails wearied,
Could by no means be farther drawn or led,
Yet that his fame might to posterity
Be had in everlasting memory,
Doth for his Camp a greater circuit take,
And for his souldiers larger Cabbins make.
His mangers he erected up so high
As never horse his Provender could eye.
Huge bridles made, which here and there he left,
Which might be found, and for great wonders kept
Twelve altars then for monuments he rears,
Whereon his acts and travels long appears.
But doubting wearing time might these decay,
And so his memory would fade away,
He on the fair Hydaspes pleasant side,
Two Cities built, his name might there abide,
First Nicea, the next Bucephalon,
Where he entomb'd his stately Stalion.
His fourth and last supply was hither sent,
Then down Hydaspes with his Fleet he went;
Some time he after spent upon that shore,
Whether Ambassadors, ninety or more,
Came with submission from the Indian Kings,
Bringing their presents rare, and precious things,
These all he feasts in state on beds of gold,
His Furniture most sumptuous to behold;
His meat & drink, attendants, every thing,
To th'utmost shew'd the glory of a King.
With rich rewards he sent them home again,
Acknowledged their Masters sovereign;
Then sailing South, and coming to that shore,
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Those obscure Nations yielded as before:
A City here he built, call'd by his Name,
Which could not sound too oft with too much fame
Then sailing by the mouth of Indus floud,
His Gallyes stuck upon the flats and mud;
Which the stout Macedonians amazed sore,
Depriv'd at once the use of Sail and Oar:
Observing well the nature of the Tide,
In those their fears they did not long abide.
Passing fair Indus mouth his course he steer'd
To th'coast which by Euphrates mouth appear'd;
Whose inlets near unto, he winter spent,
Unto his starved Souldiers small content,
By hunger and by cold so many slain,
That of them all the fourth did scarce remain.
Thus winter, Souldiers, and provisions spent,
From hence he then unto Gedrosia went.
And thence he marcht into Carmania,
And so at length drew near to Persia,
Now through these goodly Countryes as he past,
Much time in feasts and ryoting did waste;
Then visits Cyrus Sepulchre in's way,
Who now obscure at Passagardis lay:
Upon his Monument his Robe he spread,
And set his Crown on his supposed head.
From hence to Babylon, some time there spent,
He at the last to royal Shushan went;
A wedding Feast to's Nobles then he makes,
And Statyra, Darius daughter takes,
Her Sister gives to his Ephestian dear,
That by this match he might be yet more near;
He fourscore Persian Ladies also gave,
At this same time unto his Captains brave:
Six thousand guests unto this Feast invites,
Whose Sences all were glutted with delights.
It far exceeds my mean abilities
To shadow forth these short felicities,
Spectators here could scarce relate the story,
They were so rapt with this external glory:
If an Ideal Paradise a man would frame,
He might this Feast imagine by the same;
To every guess a cup of gold he sends,
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So after many dayes the Banquet ends.
Now Alexanders conquests all are done,
And his long Travails past and overgone;
His virtues dead, buried, and quite forgot,
But vice remains to his Eternal blot.
'Mongst those that of his cruelty did tast,
Philotus was not least, nor yet the last,
Accus'd because he did not certifie
The King of treason and conspiracy:
Upon suspition being apprehended,
Nothing was prov'd wherein he had offended
But silence, which was of such consequence,
He was judg'd guilty of the same offence,
But for his fathers great deserts the King
His royal pardon gave for this foul thing.
Yet is Phylotas unto judgment brought,
Must suffer, not for what is prov'd, but thought.
His master is accuser, judge and King,
Who to the height doth aggravate each thing,
Inveighs against his father now absent,
And's brethren who for him their lives had spent.
But Philotas his unpardonable crime,
No merit could obliterate, or time:
He did the Oracle of Jove deride,
By which his Majesty was diefi'd.
Philotas thus o'recharg'd with wrong and grief
Sunk in despair without hope of Relief,
Fain would have spoke and made his own defence,
The King would give no ear, but went from thence
To his malicious Foes delivers him,
To wreak their spight and hate on every limb.
Philotas after him sends out this cry,
O Alexander, thy free clemency
My foes exceeds in malice, and their hate
Thy kingly word can easily terminate.
Such torments great as wit could worst invent,
Or flesh and life could bear, till both were spent
Were now inflicted on Parmenio's son
He might accuse himself, as they had done,
At last he did, so they were justifi'd,
And told the world, that for his guilt he di'd.
But how these Captains should, or yet their master
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Look on Parmenio, after this disaster
They knew not, wherefore best now to be done,
Was to dispatch the father as the son.
This sound advice at heart pleas'd Alexander,
Who was so much ingag'd to this Commander,
As he would ne're confess, nor yet reward,
Nor could his Captains bear so great regard:
Wherefore at once, all these to satisfie,
It was decreed Parmenio should dye:
Polidamus, who seem'd Parmenio's friend
To do this deed they into Media send:
He walking in his garden to and fro,
Fearing no harm, because he none did doe,
Most wickedly was slain without least crime,
(The most renowned captain of his time)
This is Parmenio who so much had done
For Philip dead, and his surviving son,
Who from a petty King of Macedon
By him was set upon the Persian throne,
This that Parmenio who still overcame,
Yet gave his Master the immortal fame,
Who for his prudence, valour, care and trust
Had this reward, most cruel and unjust.
The next, who in untimely death had part,
Was one of more esteem, but less desert;
Clitus belov'd next to Ephestian,
And in his cups his chief companion;
When both were drunk, Clitus was wont to jeer,
Alexander to rage, to kill, and swear;
Nothing more pleasing to mad Clitus tongue,
Then's Masters Godhead to defie and wrong;
Nothing toucht Alexander to the quick,
Like this against his Diety to kick:
Both at a Feast when they had tippled well,
Upon this dangerous Theam fond Clitus fell;
From jest to earnest, and at last so bold,
That of Parmenio's death him plainly told.
Which Alexanders wrath incens'd so high,
Nought but his life for this could satisfie;
From one stood by he snatcht a partizan,
And in a rage him through the body ran,
Next day he tore his face for what he'd done,
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And would have slain himself for Clitus gone:
This pot Companion he did more bemoan,
Then all the wrongs to brave Parmenio done.
The next of worth that suffered after these,
Was learned, virtuous, wise Calisthenes,
VVho lov'd his Master more then did the rest,
As did appear, in flattering him the least;
In his esteem a God he could not be,
Nor would adore him for a Diety:
For this alone and for no other cause,
Against his Sovereign, or against his Laws,
He on the Rack his Limbs in pieces rent,
Thus was he tortur'd till his life was spent.
Of this unkingly act doth Seneca
This censure pass, and not unwisely say,
Of Alexander this th'eternal crime,
VVhich shall not be obliterate by time.
VVhich virtues fame can ne're redeem by far,
Nor all felicity of his in war.
VVhen e're 'tis said he thousand thousands slew,
Yea, and Calisthenes to death he drew.
The mighty Persian King he overcame,
Yea, and he kill'd Calistthenes of fame.
All Countryes, Kingdomes, Provinces, he wan
From Hellispont, to th'farthest Ocean.
All this he did, who knows' not to be true?
But yet withal, Catisthenes he slew.
From Macedon, his Empire did extend
Unto the utmost bounds o' th'orient:
All this he did, yea, and much more, 'tis true,
But yet withal, Catisthenes he slew.
Now Alexander goes to Media,
Finds there the want of wise Parmenio;
Here his chief favourite Ephestian dies,
He celebrates his mournful obsequies:
Hangs his Physitian, the Reason why
He suffered, his friend Ephestian dye.
This act (me-thinks) his Godhead should a shame,
To punish where himself deserved blame;
Or of necessity he must imply,
The other was the greatest Diety.
The Mules and Horses are for sorrow shorne,
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The battlements from off the walls are torne.
Of stately Ecbatane who now must shew,
A rueful face in this so general woe;
Twelve thousand Talents also did intend,
Upon a sumptuous monument to spend:
What e're he did, or thought not so content,
His messenger to Jupiter he sent,
That by his leave his friend Ephestion,
Among the Demy Gods they might inthrone.
From Media to Babylon he went,
To meet him there t'Antipater he'd sent,
That he might act also upon the Stage,
And in a Tragedy there end his age.
The Queen Olimpias bears him deadly hate,
Not suffering her to meddle with the State,
And by her Letters did her Son incite,
This great indignity he should requite;
His doing so, no whit displeas'd the King,
Though to his Mother he disprov'd the thing.
But now Antipater had liv'd so long,
He might well dye though he had done no wrong;
His service great is suddenly forgot,
Or if remembred, yet regarded not:
The King doth intimate 'twas his intent,
His honours and his riches to augment;
Of larger Provinces the rule to give,
And for his Counsel near the King to live.
So to be caught, Antipater's too wise,
Parmenio's death's too fresh before his eyes;
He was too subtil for his crafty foe.
Nor by his baits could be insnared so:
But his excuse with humble thanks he sends,
His Age and journy long he then pretends;
And pardon craves for his unwilling stay,
He shews his grief, he's forc'd to disobey.
Before his Answer came to Babylon,
The thread of Alexanders life was spun;
Poyson had put an end to's dayes ('twas thought)
By Philip and Cassander to him brought,
Sons to Antipater, and bearers of his Cup,
Lest of such like their Father chance to sup;
By others thought, and that more generally,
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That through excessive drinking he did dye:
The thirty third of's Age do all agree,
This Conquerour did yield to destiny.
When this sad news came to Darius Mother,
She laid it more to heart, then any other,
Nor meat, nor drink, nor comfort would she take,
But pin'd in grief till life did her forsake;
All friends she shuns, yea, banished the light,
Till death inwrapt her in perpetual night.
This Monarchs fame must last whilst world doth stand,
And Conquests be talkt of whilest there is land;
His Princely qualities had he retain'd,
Unparalled for ever had remain'd.
But with the world his virtues overcame,
And so with black beclouded, all his fame;
Wise Aristotle Tutor to his youth.
Had so instructed him in moral Truth:
The principles of what he then had learn'd
Might to the last (when sober) be discern'd.
Learning and learned men he much regarded,
And curious Artist evermore rewarded:
The Illiads of Homer he still kept.
And under's pillow laid them when he slept.
Achilles happiness he did envy,
'Cause Homer kept his acts to memory.
Profusely bountifull without desert,
For such as pleas'd him had both wealth and heart
Cruel by nature and by custome too,
As oft his acts throughout his reign doth shew:
Ambitious so, that nought could satisfie,
Vain, thirsting after immortality,
Still fearing that his name might hap to dye,
And fame not last unto eternity.
This Conqueror did oft lament (tis said)
There were no more worlds to be conquered.
This folly great Augustus did deride,
For had he had but wisdome to his pride,
He would had found enough there to be done,
To govern that he had already won.
His thoughts are perisht, he aspires no more,
Nor can he kill or save as heretofore.
A God alive, him all must Idolize,
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Now like a mortal helpless man he lyes.
Of all those Kingdomes large which he had got,
To his Posterity remain'd no jot;
For by that hand which still revengeth bloud,
None of his kindred, nor his race long stood:
But as he took delight much bloud to spill,
So the same cup to his, did others fill.
Four of his Captains now do all divide,
As Daniel before had prophysi'd.
The Leopard down, the four wings 'gan to rise,
The great horn broke, the less did tyranize.
What troubles and contentions did ensue
We may hereafter shew in season due.
Aridæus.
Great Alexander dead, his Armyes left,
Like to that Giant of his Eye bereft;
When of his monstrous bulk it was the guide,
His matchless force no creature could abide.
But by Ulisses having lost his sight,
All men began streight to contemn his might;
For aiming still amiss, his dreadful blows
Did harm himself, but never reacht his Foes.
Now Court and Camp all in confusion be,
A King they'l have, but who, none can agree;
Each Captain wisht this prize to bear away,
But none so hardy found as so durst say:
Great Alexander did leave Issue none,
Except by Artabasus daughter one;
And Roxane fair whom late he married,
Was near her time to be delivered.
By natures right these had enough to claim,
But meaness of their mothers bar'd the same,
Alledg'd by those who by their subtile Plea
Had hope themselves to bear the Crown away.
A Sister Alexander had, but she
Claim'd not, perhaps, her Sex might hindrance be.
After much tumult they at last proclaim'd
His base born brother Aridæus nam'd,
That so under his feeble wit and reign,
Their ends they might the better still attain.
This choice Perdiccas vehemently disclaim'd,
And Babe unborn of Roxane he proclaim'd;
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Some wished him to take the style of King,
Because his Master gave to him his Ring,
And had to him still since Ephestion di'd
More then to th'rest his favour testifi'd.
But he refus'd, with feigned modesty,
Hoping to be elect more generally.
He hold on this occasion should have laid,
For second offer there was never made.
'Mongst these contentions, tumults, jealousies,
Seven dayes the corps of their great master lies
Untoucht, uncovered slighted and neglected,
So much these princes their own ends respected:
A Contemplation to astonish Kings,
That he who late possest all earthly things,
And yet not so content unless that he
Might be esteemed for a Diety;
Now lay a Spectacle to testifie,
The wretchedness of mans mortality.
After some time, when stirs began to calm,
His body did the Egyptians embalme;
His countenance so lively did appear,
That for a while they durst not come so near:
No sign of poyson in his intrails sound,
But all his bowels coloured, well and sound.
Perdiccas seeing Arideus must be King,
Under his name began to rule each thing.
His chief Opponent who Control'd his sway,
Was Meleager whom he would take away,
And by a wile he got him in his power,
So took his life unworthily that hour.
Using the name, and the command of th'King
To authorize his acts in every thing.
The princes seeing Perdiccas power and pride,
For their security did now provide.
Antigonus for his share Asia takes,
And Ptolemy next sure of Egypt makes:
Seleucus afterward held Babylon,
Antipater had long rul'd Macedon.
These now to govern for the king pretends,
But nothing less each one himself intends.
Perdiccas took no province like the rest,
But held command of th'Army (which was best)
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And had a higher project in his head,
His Masters sister secretly to wed:
So to the Lady, covertly he sent,
(That none might know, to frustrate his intent)
But Cleopatra this Suitor did deny,
For Leonatus more lovely in her eye,
To whom she sent a message of her mind,
That if he came good welcome he should find.
In these tumultuous dayes the thralled Greeks,
Their Ancient Liberty afresh now seeks.
And gladly would the yoke shake off, laid on
Sometimes by Philip and his conquering son.
The Athenians force Antipater to fly
To Lamia where he shut up doth lye.
To brave Craterus then he sends with speed
For succours to relieve him in his need.
The like of Leonatus he requires,
(Which at this time well suited his desires)
For to Antipater he now might goe,
His Lady take in th'way, and no man know.
Antiphilus the Athenian General
With speed his Army doth together call;
And Leonatus seeks to stop, that so
He joyne not with Antipater their foe.
The Athenian Army was the greater far,
(Which did his Match with Cleopatra mar)
For fighting still, while there did hope remain
The valiant Chief amidst his foes was slain.
'Mongst all the princes of great Alexander
For personage, none like to this Commander.
Now to Antipater Craterus goes,
Blockt up in Lamia still by his foes,
Long marches through Cilicia he makes,
And the remains of Leonatus takes:
With them and his he into Grecia went,
Antipater releas'd from prisonment:
After which time the Greeks did never more
Act any thing of worth, as heretofore:
But under servitude their necks remain'd,
Nor former liberty or glory gain'd.
Now di'd about the end of th'Lamian war
Demosthenes, that sweet-tongue'd Orator,
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Who fear'd Antipater would take his life
For animating the Athenian strife:
To end his dayes by poison rather chose
Then fall into the hands of mortal foes.
Craterus and Antipater now joyne,
In love and in affinity combine,
Craterus doth his daughter Phila wed
Their friendship might the more be strengthened.
Whilst they in Macedon do thus agree,
In Asia they all asunder be.
Perdiccas griev'd to see the princes bold
So many Kingdomes in their power to hold,
Yet to regain them, how he did not know,
His souldiers 'gainst those captains would not goe
To suffer them go on as they begun,
Was to give way himself might be undone.
With Antipater to joyne he sometimes thought,
That by his help, the rest might low be brought,
But this again dislikes; he would remain,
If not in stile, in deed a soveraign;
(For all the princes of great Alexander
Acknowledged for Chief that old Commander)
Desires the King to goe to Macedon,
Which once was of his Ancestors the throne,
And by his presence there to nullifie
The acts of his Vice-Roy now grown so high.
Antigonus of treason first attaints,
And summons him to answer his complaints.
This he avoids, and ships himself and son,
goes to Antipater and tells what's done.
He and Craterus, both with him do joyne,
And 'gainst Perdiccas all their strength combine.
Brave Ptolemy, to make a fourth then sent
To save himself from danger imminent.
In midst of these garboyles, with wondrous state
His masters funeral doth celebrate:
In Alexandria his tomb he plac'd,
Which eating time hath scarcely yet defac'd.
Two years and more, since natures debt he paid,
And yet till now at quiet was not laid.
Great love did Ptolemy by this act gain,
And made the souldiers on his side remain.
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Perdiccas hears his foes are all combin'd,
'Gainst which to goe, is not resolv'd in mind.
But first 'gainst Ptolemy he judg'd was best,
Neer'st unto him, and farthest from the rest,
Leaves Eumenes the Asian Coast to free
From the invasions of the other three,
And with his army unto Egypt goes
Brave Ptolemy to th'utmost to oppose.
Perdiccas surly cariage, and his pride
Did alinate the souldiers from his side.
But Ptolemy by affability
His sweet demeanour and his courtesie,
Did make his own, firm to his cause remain,
And from the other side did dayly gain.
Perdiccas in his pride did ill intreat
Python of haughty mind, and courage great.
Who could not brook so great indignity,
But of his wrongs his friends doth certifie;
The souldiers 'gainst Perdiccas they incense,
Who vow to make this captain recompence,
And in a rage they rush into his tent,
Knock out his brains: to Ptolemy then went
And offer him his honours, and his place,
With stile of the Protector, him to grace.
Next day into the camp came Ptolemy,
And is receiv'd of all most joyfully.
Their proffers he refus'd with modesty,
Yields them to Python for his courtesie.
With what he held he was now more content,
Then by more trouble to grow eminent.
Now comes there news of a great victory
That Eumenes got of the other three.
Had it but in Perdiccas life ariv'd,
With greater joy it would have been receiv'd.
Thus Ptolemy rich Egypt did retain,
And Python turn'd to Asia again.
Whilst Perdiccas encamp'd in Affrica,
Antigonus did enter Asia,
And fain would Eumenes draw to their side,
But he alone most faithfull did abide:
The other all had Kingdomes in their eye,
But he was true to's masters family,
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Nor could Craterus, whom he much did love.
From his fidelity once make him move:
Two Battles fought, and had of both the best,
And brave Craterus slew among the rest:
For this sad strife he poures out his complaints,
And his beloved foe full sore laments.
I should but snip a story into bits
And his great Acts and glory much eclipse,
To shew the dangers Eumenes befel,
His stratagems wherein he did excel:
His Policies, how he did extricate
Himself from out of Lab'rinths intricate:
He that at large would satisfie his mind,
In Plutarchs Lives his history may find.
For all that should be said, let this suffice,
He was both valiant, faithfull, patient, wise.
Python now chose Protector of the state,
His rule Queen Euridice begins to hate,
Sees Arrideus must not King it long,
If once young Alexander grow more strong,
But that her husband serve for supplement,
To warm his seat, was never her intent.
She knew her birth-right gave her Macedon,
Grand-child to him who once sat on that throne
Who was Perdiccas, Philips eldest brother,
She daughter to his son, who had no other.
Pythons commands, as oft she countermands;
What he appoints, she purposely withstands.
He wearied out at last would needs be gone,
Resign'd his place, and so let all alone:
In's room the souldiers chose Antipater,
Who vext the Queen more then the other far.
From Macedon to Asia he came,
That he might settle matters in the same.
He plac'd, displac'd, control'd rul'd as he list,
And this no man durst question or resist;
For all the nobles of King Alexander
Their bonnets vail'd to him as chief Commander.
When to his pleasure all things they had done,
The King and Queen he takes to Macedon,
Two sons of Alexander, and the rest,
All to be order'd there as he thought best.
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The Army to Antigonus doth leave,
And Government of Asia to him gave.
And thus Antipater the ground-work layes,
On which Antigonus his height doth raise,
Who in few years, the rest so overtops,
For universal Monarchy he hopes.
With Eumenes he diverse Battels fought,
And by his slights to circumvent him sought:
But vain it was to use his policy,
'Gainst him that all deceits could scan and try.
In this Epitome too long to tell
How finely Eumenes did here excell,
And by the self same Traps the other laid,
He to his cost was righteously repaid.
But while these Chieftains doe in Asia fight,
To Greece and Macedon lets turn our sight.
When great Antipater the world must leave,
His place to Polisperchon did bequeath,
Fearing his son Cassander was unstaid,
Too rash to bear that charge, if on him laid.
Antigonus hearing of his decease
On most part of Assyria doth seize.
And Ptolemy next to incroach begins,
All Syria and Phenicia he wins,
Then Polisperchon 'gins to act in's place,
Recalls Olimpias the Court to grace.
Antipater had banish'd her from thence
Into Epire for her great turbulence;
This new Protector's of another mind,
Thinks by her Majesty much help to find.
Cassander like his Father could not see,
This Polisperchons great ability,
Slights his Commands, his actions he disclaims,
And to be chief himself now bends his aims;
Such as his Father had advanc'd to place,
Or by his favours any way had grac'd
Are now at the devotion of the Son,
Prest to accomplish what he would have done;
Besides he was the young Queens favourite,
On whom (t'was thought) she set her chief delight:
Unto these helps at home he seeks out more,
Goes to Antigonus and doth implore,
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By all the Bonds 'twixt him and's Father past,
And for that great gift which he gave him last.
By these and all to grant him some supply,
To take down Polisperchon grown so high;
For this Antigonus did need no spurs,
Hoping to gain yet more by these new stirs,
Streight furnish'd him with a sufficient aid,
And so he quick returns thus well appaid,
With Ships at Sea, an Army for the Land,
His proud opponent hopes soon to withstand.
But in his absence Polisperchon takes
Such friends away as for his Interest makes
By death, by prison, or by banishment,
That no supply by these here might be lent,
Cassander with his Host to Grecia goes,
Whom Polisperchon labours to oppose;
But beaten was at Sea, and foil'd at Land,
Cassanders forces had the upper hand,
Athens with many Towns in Greece beside,
Firm (for his Fathers sake) to him abide.
Whil'st hot in wars these two in Greece remain,
Antigonus doth all in Asia gain;
Still labours Eumenes, would with him side,
But all in vain, he faithful did abide:
Nor Mother could, nor Sons of Alexander,
Put trust in any but in this Commander.
The great ones now began to shew their mind,
And act as opportunity they find.
Aridæus the scorn'd and simple King,
More then he bidden was could act no thing.
Polisperchon for office hoping long,
Thinks to inthrone the Prince when riper grown;
Euridice this injury disdains,
And to Cassandar of this wrong complains.
Hateful the name and house of Alexander,
Was to this proud vindicative Cassander;
He still kept lockt within his memory,
His Fathers danger, with his Family;
Nor thought he that indignity was small,
When Alexander knockt his head to th'wall.
These with his love unto the amorous Queen,
Did make him vow her servant to be seen.
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Olimpias, Aridæus deadly hates,
As all her Husbands, Children by his mates,
She gave him poyson formerly ('tis thought)
Which damage both to mind and body brought;
She now with Polisperchon doth combine,
To make the King by force his Seat resigne:
And her young grand-child in his State inthrone,
That under him, she might rule, all alone.
For aid she goes t'Epire among her friends,
The better to accomplish these her ends;
Euridice hearing what she intends,
In haste unto her friend Cassander sends,
To leave his siege at Tegea, and with speed,
To save the King and her in this their need:
Then by intreaties, promises and Coyne,
Some forces did procure with her to joyn.
Olimpias soon enters Macedon,
The Queen to meet her bravely marches on,
But when her Souldiers saw their ancient Queen,
Calling to mind what sometime she had been;
The wife and Mother of their famous Kings,
Nor darts, nor arrows, now none shoots or flings.
The King and Queen seeing their destiny,
To save their lives t'Amphipolis do fly;
But the old Queen pursues them with her hate,
And needs will have their lives as well as State:
The King by extream torments had his end,
And to the Queen these presents she did send;
A Halter, cup of poyson, and a Sword,
Bids chuse her death, such kindness she'l afford.
The Queen with many a curse, and bitter check,
At length yields to the Halter her fair neck;
Praying that fatal day might quickly haste,
On which Olimpias of the like might taste.
This done the cruel Queen rests not content,
'Gainst all that lov'd Cassander she was bent;
His Brethren, Kinsfolk and his chiefest friends,
That fell within her reach came to their ends:
Dig'd up his brother dead, 'gainst natures right,
And threw his bones about to shew her spight:
The Courtiers wondring at her furious mind,
Wisht in Epire she had been still confin'd.
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In Peloponesus then Cassander lay,
Where hearing of this news he speeds away,
With rage, and with revenge he's hurried on,
To find this cruel Queen in Macedon;
But being stopt, at streight Thermopoly,
Sea passage gets, and lands in Thessaly:
His Army he divides, sends post away,
Polisperchon to hold a while in play;
And with the rest Olimpias pursues,
For all her cruelty, to give her dues.
She with the chief o' th'Court to Pydna flyes,
Well fortifi'd, (and on the Sea it lyes)
There by Cassander she's blockt up so long,
Untill the Famine grows exceeding strong,
Her Couzen of Epire did what he might,
To raise the Siege, and put her Foes to flight.
Cassander is resolved there to remain,
So succours and endeavours proves but vain;
Fain would this wretched Queen capitulate,
Her foe would give no Ear, (such is his hate)
The Souldiers pinched with this scarcity,
By stealth unto Cassander dayly fly;
Olimpias means to hold out to the last,
Expecting nothing but of death to tast:
But his occasions calling him away,
Gives promise for her life, so wins the day.
No sooner had he got her in his hand,
But made in judgement her accusers stand;
And plead the blood of friends and kindreds spilt,
Desiring justice might be done for guilt;
And so was he acquitted of his word,
For justice sake she being put to th'Sword:
This was the end of this most cruel Queen,
Whose fury scarcely parallel'd hath been.
The daughter, sister, Mother, Wife to Kings,
But Royalty no good conditions brings;
To Husbands death ('tis thought) she gave consent,
The murtherer she did so much lament:
With Garlands crown'd his head, bemoan'd his fates,
His Sword unto Apollo consecrates.
Her Outrages too tedious to relate,
How for no cause but her inveterate hate;
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Her Husbands wives and Children after's death,
Some slew, some fry'd, of others stopt the breath:
Now in her Age she's forc'd to tast that Cup,
Which she had others often made to sup.
Now many Towns in Macedon supprest,
And Pellas fain to yield among the rest;
The Funerals Cassander celebrates,
Of Aridæus and his Queen with State:
Among their Ancestors by him they're laid,
And shews of lamentation for them made.
Old Thebes he then rebuilt so much of fame,
And Cassandria rais'd after his name.
But leave him building, others in their Urne,
Let's for a while, now into Asia turn.
True Eumenes endeavours by all Skill,
To keep Antigonus from Shushan still;
Having command o'th' Treasure he can hire,
Such as no threats, nor favour could acquire.
In divers Battels he had good success,
Antigonus came off still honourless;
When Victor oft he'd been, and so might still,
Peucestes did betray him by a wile.
T'Antigonus, who took his Life unjust,
Because he never would forgoe his trust;
Thus lost he all for his fidelity,
Striving t'uphold his Masters Family.
But to a period as that did haste,
So Eumenes (the prop) of death must tast;
All Persia now Antigonus doth gain,
And Master of the Treasure sole remain:
Then with Seleucus streight at odds doth fall,
And he for aid to Ptolomy doth call,
The Princes all begin now to envy
Antigonus, he growing up so high;
Fearing his force, and what might hap e're long,
Enters into a Combination strong,
Seleucus, Ptolemy, Cassander joynes,
Lysimachus to make a fourth combines:
Antigonus desirous of the Greeks,
To make Cassander odious to them seeks,
Sends forth his declarations near and far,
And clears what cause he had to make this war,
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Cassanders outrages at large doth tell,
Shews his ambitious practises as well.
The mother of their King to death he'd put,
His wife and son in prison close had shut:
And aiming now to make himself a king,
And that some title he might seem to bring,
Thessalonica he had newly wed,
Daughter to Philip their renowned head:
Had built and call'd a City by his name,
Which none e're did, but those of royal fame:
And in despight of their two famous Kings
Hatefull Olinthians to Greece rebrings.
Rebellious Thebes he had reedified,
Which their late King in dust had damnified,
Requires them therefore to take up their arms
And to requite this traitor for these harms.
Then Ptolemy would gain the Greeks likewise,
And he declares the others injuryes:
First how he held the Empire in his hands,
Seleucus driven from Goverment and lands,
The valiant Eumenes unjustly slain,
And Lord of royal Shushan did remain;
Therefore requests their help to take him down
Before he wear the universal Crown.
These princes at the sea soon had a fight,
Where great Antigonus was put to flight:
His son at Gaza likewise lost the field,
So Syria to Ptolemy did yield:
And Seleucus recovers Babylon,
Still gaining Countryes eastward he goes on.
Demetrius with Ptolemy did fight,
And coming unawares, put him to flight;
But bravely sends the prisoners back again,
With all the spoyle and booty he had tane.
Courteous as noble Ptolemy, or more,
VVho at Gaza did the like to him before.
Antigonus did much rejoyce, his son
VVith victory, his lost repute had won.
At last these princes tired out with warrs,
Sought for a peace, and laid aside their jarrs:
The terms of their agreement, thus express
That each should hold what now he did possess,
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Till Alexander unto age was grown,
VVho then should be enstalled in the throne.
This toucht Cassander sore for what he'd done,
Imprisoning both the mother and the son:
He sees the Greeks now favour their young Prince
Whom he in durance held, now, and long since,
That in few years he must be forc'd or glad,
To render up such Kingdomes as he had;
Resolves to quit his fears by one deed done,
So puts to death the Mother and her Son.
This Roxane for her beauty all commend,
But for one act she did, just was her end.
No sooner was great Alexander dead,
But she Darius daughters murthered.
Both thrown into a well to hide her blot,
Perdiccas was her Partner in this plot.
The heavens seem'd slow in paying her the same;
But at the last the hand of vengeance came.
And for that double fact which she had done,
The life of her must goe, and of her son
Perdiccas had before for his amiss,
But by their hands who thought not once of this.
Cassanders deed the princes do detest,
But 'twas in shew; in heart it pleas'd them best.
That he is odious to the world, they'r glad:
And now they were free Lords of what they had.
When this foul tragedy was past and done,
Polysperchon brings the other son
Call'd Hercules, and elder then his brother,
(But Olimpias would prefer the other)
The Greeks toucht with the murther done of late,
This Orphan prince 'gan to compassionate,
Begin to mutter much 'gainst proud Cassander,
And place their hopes on th'heir of Alexander.
Cassander fear'd what might of this ensue,
So Polisperchon to his counsel drew,
And gives Peloponesus for his hire,
Who slew the prince according to desire.
Thus was the race and house of Alexander
Extinct by this inhumane wretch Cassander.
Antigonus, for all this doth not mourn,
He knows to's profit, this at last will turn,
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But that some Title now he might pretend,
To Cleopatra doth for marriage send;
Lysimachus and Ptolemy the same,
And lewd Cassander too, sticks not for shame:
She then in Lydia at Sardis lay,
Where by Embassage all these Princes pray.
Choice above all, of Ptolemy she makes,
With his Embassador her journy takes;
Antigonus Lieutenant stayes her still,
Untill he further know his Masters will:
Antigonus now had a Wolf by th'Ears,
To hold her still, or let her go he fears.
Resolves at last the Princess should be slain,
So hinders him of her, he could not gain;
Her women are appointed for this deed,
They for their great reward no better speed:
For by command, they streight were put to death,
As vile Conspirators that stopt her breath.
And now he hopes, he's order'd all so well,
The world must needs believe what he doth tell;
Thus Philips house was quite extinguished,
Except Cassanders wife who yet not dead.
And by their means who thought of nothing less,
Then vengeance just, against them to express;
Now blood was paid with blood for what was done
By cruel Father, Mother, cruel Son:
Thus may we hear, and fear, and ever say,
That hand is righteous still which doth repay.
These Captains now the stile of Kings do take,
For to their Crowns their's none can Title make;
Demetrius first the royal stile assum'd,
By his Example all the rest presum'd.
Antigonus himself to ingratiate,
Doth promise liberty to Athens State;
With Arms and with provision stores them well,
The better 'gainst Cassander to rebel.
Demetrius thether goes, is entertain'd
Not like a King, but like some God they feign'd;
Most grosly base was their great Adulation,
Who Incense burnt, and offered oblation:
These Kings afresh fall to their wars again,
Demetrius of Ptolemy doth gain.
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'Twould be an endless Story to relate
Their several Battels and their several fate,
Their fights by Sea, their victories by Land,
How some when down, straight got the upper hand
Antigonus and Seleucus then fight
Near Ephesus, each bringing all his might,
And he that Conquerour shall now remain,
The Lordship of all Asia shall retain;
This day 'twixt these two Kings ends all the strife,
For here Antigonus lost rule and life:
Nor to his Son, did e're one foot remain
Of those vast Kingdomes, he did sometimes gain.
Demetrius with his Troops to Athens flyes,
Hopes to find succours in his miseries;
But they adoring in prosperity,
Now shut their gates in his adversity:
He sorely griev'd at this his desperate State
Tryes Foes, sith friends will not compassionate.
His peace he then with old Seleucus makes,
Who his fair daughter Stratonica takes,
Antiochus, Seleucus, dear lov'd Son,
Is for this fresh young Lady quite undone;
Falls so extreamly sick, all fear'd his life,
Yet durst not say, he lov'd his Fathers wife,
When his disease the skill'd Physitian found,
His Fathers mind he wittily did sound,
Who did no sooner understand the same,
But willingly resign'd the beautious Dame:
Cassander now must dye his race is run,
And leaves the ill got Kingdomes he had won.
Two Sons he left, born of King Philips daughter,
Who had an end put to their dayes by slaughter;
Which should succeed at variance they fell,
The Mother would, the youngest might excell:
The eld'st inrag'd did play the Vipers part,
And with his Sword did run her through the heart:
Rather then Philips race should longer live,
He whom she gave his life her death shall give.
This by Lysimacus was after slain,
Whose daughter he not long before had ta'ne;
Demetrius is call'd in by th'youngest Son,
Against Lysimachus who from him won.
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But he a Kingdome more then's friend did eye,
Seaz'd upon that, and slew him traitrously.
Thus Philips and Cassander's race both gone,
And so falls out to be extinct in one;
And though Cassander died in his bed,
His Seed to be extirpt, was destined;
For blood, which was decre'd that he should spill,
Yet must his Children pay for Fathers ill;
Jehu in killing Ahab's house did well,
Yet be aveng'd must blood of Jezerel.
Demetrius thus Cassander's Kingdoms gains,
And now in Macedon as King he reigns;
Though men and mony both he hath at will,
In neither finds content if he sits still:
That Seleucus holds Asia grievs him sore,
Those Countryes large his Father got before.
These to recover, musters all his might,
And with his Son in Law will needs go fight;
A mighty Navy rig'd, an Army stout,
With these he hopes to turn the world about:
Leaving Antigonus his eldest Son,
In his long absence to rule Macedon.
Demetrius with so many troubles met,
As Heaven and Earth against him had been set;
Disaster on disaster him pursue,
His story seems a Fable more then true.
At last he's taken and imprisoned
Within an Isle that was with pleasures fed,
Injoy'd what ere beseem'd his Royalty,
Only restrained of his liberty:
After three years he died, left what he'd won,
In Greece unto Antigonus his Son.
For his Posterity unto this day,
Did ne're regain one foot in Asia;
His Body Seleucus sends to his Son,
Whose obsequies with wondrous pomp was done.
Next di'd the brave and noble Ptolemp,
Renown'd for bounty, valour, clemency,
Rich Egypt left, and what else he had won,
To Philadelphus his more worthy Son.
Of the old Heroes, now but two remain,
Seleucus and Lysimachus these twain,
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Must needs go try their fortune and their might,
And so Lysimachus was slain in fight;
'Twas no small joy unto Seleucus breast,
That now he had out-lived all the rest:
Possession of Europe thinks to take,
And so himself the only Monarch make;
Whilst with these hopes in Greece he did remain,
He was by Ptolemy Ceraunus slain.
The second Son of the first Ptolemy,
Who for Rebellion unto him did fly;
Seleucus was a Father and a friend,
Yet by him had this most unworthy end.
Thus with these Kingly Captains have we done,
A little now how the Succession run,
Antigonus, Seleucus and Cassander,
With Ptolemy, reign'd after Alexander;
Cassander's Sons soon after's death were slain,
So three Successors only did remain:
Antigonus his Kingdomes lost and life,
Unto Seleucus, Author of that strife.
His Son Demetrius, all Cassanders gains,
And his posterity, the same retains;
Demetrius Son was call'd Antigonus,
And his again was nam'd Demetrius.
I must let pass those many Battels fought,
Betwixt those Kings, and noble Pyrrhus stout,
And his Son Alexander of Epire,
Whereby immortal honour they acquire;
Demetrius had Philip to his Son,
(Part of whose Kingdomes Titus Quintius won)
Philip had Perseus, who was made a Thrale
T'Emilius the Roman General;
Him with his Sons in Triumph lead did he,
Such riches too as Rome did never see:
This of Antigonus, his Seed's the Fate,
VVhose Empire was subdu'd to th'Roman State.
Longer Seleucus held the royalty,
In Syria by his Posterity;
Antiochus Soter his Son was nam'd,
To whom the old Berosus (so much fam'd,)
His Book of Assurs Monarchs dedicates,
Tells of their names, their wars, their riches, fates;
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But this is perished with many more,
VVhich oft we wish was extant as before.
Antiochus Theos was Soter's Son,
VVho a long war with Egypts King begun;
The Affinityes and Wars Daniel sets forth,
And calls them there the Kings of South & North,
This Theos murther'd was by his lewd wife,
Seleucus reign'd, when he had lost his life.
A third Seleucus next sits on the Seat,
And then Antiochus sirnam'd the great,
VVhose large Dominions after was made small,
By Scipio the Roman General;
Fourth Seleucus Antiochus succeeds,
And next Epiphanes whose wicked deeds,
Horrid Massacres, Murthers, cruelties,
Amongst the Jews we read in Machabees.
Antiochus Eupater was the next,
By Rebels and Impostors dayly vext;
So many Princes still were murthered,
The Royal Blood was nigh extinguished;
Then Tygranes the great Armenian King,
To take the Government was called in,
Lucullus, Him, (the Roman General)
Vanquish'd in fight, and took those Kingdomes all;
Of Greece and Syria thus the rule did end,
In Egypt next, a little time wee'l spend.
First Ptolemy being dead, his famous Son
Call'd Philadelphus, did possess the Throne.
At Alexandria a Library did build,
And with seven hundred thousand Volumes fill'd;
The seventy two Interpreters did seek,
They might translate the Bible into Greek.
His Son was Evergetes the last Prince,
That valour shew'd, virtue, or excellence,
Philopater was Evergetes Son,
After Epiphanes sate on the Throne;
Philometor, Evergetes again,
And after him, did false Lathurus reign:
Then Alexander in Lathurus stead,
Next Auletes, who cut off Pompeys head.
To all these names, we Ptolemy must add,
For since the first, they still that Title had.
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Fair Cleopatra next, last of that race,
Whom Julius Cæsar set in Royal place,
She with her Paramour, Mark Anthony
Held for a time, the Egyptian Monarchy,
Till great Augustus had with him a fight
At Actium, where his Navy's put to flight;
He seeing his honour lost, his Kingdome end,
Did by his Sword his life soon after send.
His brave Virago Aspes sets to her Arms,
To take her life, and quit her from all harms;
For 'twas not death nor danger she did dread,
But some disgrace in triumph to be led.
Here ends at last the Grecian Monarchy,
Which by the Romans had its destiny;
Thus King & Kingdomes have their times & dates,
Their standings, overturnings, bounds and fates:
Now up, now down now chief, & then broght under,
The heavn's thus rule, to fil the world with wonder
The Assyrian Monarchy long time did stand,
But yet the Persian got the upper hand;
The Grecian them did utterly subdue,
And millions were subjected unto few:
The Grecian longer then the Persian stood,
Then came the Roman like a raging flood;
And with the torrent of his rapid course,
Their Crowns their Titles, riches bears by force.
The first was likened to a head of gold.
Next Arms and breast of silver to behold,
The third, Belly and Thighs of brass in sight,
And last was Iron, which breaketh all with might;
The stone out of the mountain then did rise,
and smote those feet those legs, those arms & thighs
Then gold, silver, brass, Iron and all the store,
Became like Chaff upon the threshing Floor.
The first a Lion, second was a Bear,
The third a Leopard, which four wings did rear;
The last more strong and dreadful then the rest,
Whose Iron teeth devoured every Beast,
And when he had no appetite to eat,
The residue he stamped under feet;
Yet shall this Lion, Bear, this Leopard, Ram,
All trembling stand before the powerful Lamb.
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With these three Monarchyes now have I done,
But how the fourth, their Kingdomes from them won,
And how from small beginnings it did grow,
To fill the world with terrour and with woe;
My tyred brain leavs to some better pen,
This task befits not women like to men:
For what is past, I blush, excuse to make,
But humbly stand, some grave reproof to take;
Pardon to crave for errours, is but vain,
The Subject was too high, beyond my strain,
To frame Apology for some offence,
Converts our boldness into impudence:
This my presumption some now to requite,
Ne sutor ultra crepidum may write.
The End of the Grecian Monarchy.
~ Anne Bradstreet,
339:A Lyrical Drama, In Four Acts.
Audisne haec amphiarae, sub terram abdite?

ACT I
Scene.A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea andIone are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the Scene, morning slowly breaks.
Prometheus.
Monarch of Gods and Dmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!
The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's wingd hound, polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,
The ghastly people of the realm of dream,
Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind:
While from their loud abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.
And yet to me welcome is day and night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead
The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom
As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.
Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin
Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains,
Whose many-voicd Echoes, through the mist
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell!
Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air,
Through which the Sun walks burning without beams!
And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poisd wings
Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss,
As thunder, louder than your own, made rock
The orbd world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.
First Voice
(from the Mountains).
Thrice three hundred thousand years
O'er the Earthquake's couch we stood:
Oft, as men convulsed with fears,
We trembled in our multitude.
Second Voice
(from the Springs).
Thunderbolts had parched our water,
We had been stained with bitter blood,
And had run mute, 'mid shrieks of slaughter,
Thro' a city and a solitude.
Third Voice
(from the Air).
I had clothed, since Earth uprose,
Its wastes in colours not their own,
And oft had my serene repose
Been cloven by many a rending groan.
Fourth Voice
(from the Whirlwinds).
We had soared beneath these mountains
Unresting ages; nor had thunder,
Nor yon volcano's flaming fountains,
Nor any power above or under
Ever made us mute with wonder.
First Voice.
But never bowed our snowy crest
As at the voice of thine unrest.
Second Voice.
Never such a sound before
To the Indian waves we bore.
A pilot asleep on the howling sea
Leaped up from the deck in agony,
And heard, and cried, 'Ah, woe is me!'
And died as mad as the wild waves be.
Third Voice.
By such dread words from Earth to Heaven
My still realm was never riven:
When its wound was closed, there stood
Darkness o'er the day like blood.
Fourth Voice.
And we shrank back: for dreams of ruin
To frozen caves our flight pursuing
Made us keep silencethusand thus
Though silence is as hell to us.
The Earth.
The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills
Cried, 'Misery!' then; the hollow Heaven replied,
'Misery!' And the Ocean's purple waves,
Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds,
And the pale nations heard it, 'Misery!'
Prometheus.
I heard a sound of voices: not the voice
Which I gave forth. Mother, thy sons and thou
Scorn him, without whose all-enduring will
Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove,
Both they and thou had vanished, like thin mist
Unrolled on the morning wind. Know ye not me,
The Titan? He who made his agony
The barrier to your else all-conquering foe?
Oh, rock-embosomed lawns, and snow-fed streams,
Now seen athwart frore vapours, deep below,
Through whose o'ershadowing woods I wandered once
With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes;
Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now
To commune with me? me alone, who checked,
As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer,
The falsehood and the force of him who reigns
Supreme, and with the groans of pining slaves
Fills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses:
Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!
The Earth.
                   They dare not.
                   Prometheus.
Who dares? for I would hear that curse again.
Ha, what an awful whisper rises up!
'Tis scarce like sound: it tingles through the frame
As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike.
Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice
I only know that thou art moving near
And love. How cursed I him?
The Earth.
               How canst thou hear
Who knowest not the language of the dead?
Prometheus.
Thou art a living spirit; speak as they.
The Earth.
I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven's fell King
Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain
More torturing than the one whereon I roll.
Subtle thou art and good, and though the Gods
Hear not this voice, yet thou art more than God,
Being wise and kind: earnestly hearken now.
Prometheus.
Obscurely through my brain, like shadows dim,
Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick. I feel
Faint, like one mingled in entwining love;
Yet 'tis not pleasure.
The Earth.
            No, thou canst not hear:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
Only to those who die.
Prometheus.
            And what art thou,
O, melancholy Voice?
The Earth.
           I am the Earth,
Thy mother; she within whose stony veins,
To the last fibre of the loftiest tree
Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,
Joy ran, as blood within a living frame,
When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud
Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy!
And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted
Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust,
And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread
Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here.
Then, see those million worlds which burn and roll
Around us: their inhabitants beheld
My spherd light wane in wide Heaven; the sea
Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire
From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow
Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown;
Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains;
Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads
Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled:
When Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and worm,
And Famine; and black blight on herb and tree;
And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass,
Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds
Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry
With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained
With the contagion of a mother's hate
Breathed on her child's destroyer; ay, I heard
Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not,
Yet my innumerable seas and streams,
Mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air,
And the inarticulate people of the dead,
Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate
In secret joy and hope those dreadful words,
But dare not speak them.
Prometheus.
             Venerable mother!
All else who live and suffer take from thee
Some comfort; flowers, and fruits, and happy sounds,
And love, though fleeting; these may not be mine.
But mine own words, I pray, deny me not.
The Earth.
They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
And all that faith creates or love desires,
Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade,
'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the gods
Are there, and all the powers of nameless worlds,
Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts;
And Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom;
And he, the supreme Tyrant, on his throne
Of burning gold. Son, one of these shall utter
The curse which all remember. Call at will
Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter,
Hades or Typhon, or what mightier Gods
From all-prolific Evil, since thy ruin
Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons.
Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge
Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades,
As rainy wind through the abandoned gate
Of a fallen palace.
Prometheus.
          Mother, let not aught
Of that which may be evil, pass again
My lips, or those of aught resembling me.
Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear!
Ione.
My wings are folded o'er mine ears:
  My wings are crossd o'er mine eyes:
Yet through their silver shade appears,
  And through their lulling plumes arise,
A Shape, a throng of sounds;
  May it be no ill to thee
O thou of many wounds!
Near whom, for our sweet sister's sake,
Ever thus we watch and wake.
Panthea.
The sound is of whirlwind underground,
  Earthquake, and fire, and mountains cloven;
The shape is awful like the sound,
  Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven.
A sceptre of pale gold
  To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud
His veind hand doth hold.
Cruel he looks, but calm and strong,
Like one who does, not suffers wrong.
Phantasm of Jupiter.
Why have the secret powers of this strange world
Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither
On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds
Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice
With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk
In darkness? And, proud sufferer, who art thou?
Prometheus.
Tremendous Image, as thou art must be
He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe,
The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear,
Although no thought inform thine empty voice.
The Earth.
Listen! And though your echoes must be mute,
Gray mountains, and old woods, and haunted springs,
Prophetic caves, and isle-surrounding streams,
Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak.
Phantasm.
A spirit seizes me and speaks within:
It tears me as fire tears a thunder-cloud.
Panthea.
See, how he lifts his mighty looks, the Heaven
Darkens above.
Ione.
       He speaks! O shelter me!
       Prometheus.
I see the curse on gestures proud and cold,
And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate,
And such despair as mocks itself with smiles,
Written as on a scroll: yet speak: Oh, speak!
Phantasm.
Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind,
  All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do;
Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Human-kind,
  One only being shalt thou not subdue.
Rain then thy plagues upon me here,
Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear;
And let alternate frost and fire
Eat into me, and be thine ire
Lightning, and cutting hail, and legioned forms
Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms.
Ay, do thy worst. Thou art omnipotent.
  O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power,
And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent
  To blast mankind, from yon ethereal tower.
Let thy malignant spirit move
In darkness over those I love:
On me and mine I imprecate
The utmost torture of thy hate;
And thus devote to sleepless agony,
This undeclining head while thou must reign on high.
But thou, who art the God and Lord: O, thou,
  Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe,
To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow
  In fear and worship: all-prevailing foe!
I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse
Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse;
Till thine Infinity shall be
A robe of envenomed agony;
And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain,
To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.
Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this Curse,
  Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good;
Both infinite as is the universe,
  And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude.
An awful image of calm power
Though now thou sittest, let the hour
Come, when thou must appear to be
That which thou art internally;
And after many a false and fruitless crime
Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time.
Prometheus.
Were these my words, O Parent?
The Earth.
                They were thine.
                Prometheus.
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
The Earth.
Misery, Oh misery to me,
That Jove at length should vanquish thee.
Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sea,
The Earth's rent heart shall answer ye.
Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead,
Your refuge, your defence lies fallen and vanquishd.
First Echo.
Lies fallen and vanquishd!
Second Echo.
Fallen and vanquishd!
Ione.
Fear not: 'tis but some passing spasm,
The Titan is unvanquished still.
But see, where through the azure chasm
Of yon forked and snowy hill
Trampling the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet, that glow
Under plumes of purple dye,
Like rose-ensanguined ivory,
A Shape comes now,
Stretching on high from his right hand
A serpent-cinctured wand.
Panthea.
'Tis Jove's world-wandering herald, Mercury.
Ione.
And who are those with hydra tresses
And iron wings that climb the wind,
Whom the frowning God represses
Like vapours steaming up behind,
Clanging loud, an endless crowd
Panthea.
These are Jove's tempest-walking hounds,
Whom he gluts with groans and blood,
When charioted on sulphurous cloud
He bursts Heaven's bounds.
Ione.
Are they now led, from the thin dead
On new pangs to be fed?
Panthea.
The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud.
First Fury.
Ha! I scent life!
Second Fury.
         Let me but look into his eyes!
         Third Fury.
The hope of torturing him smells like a heap
Of corpses, to a death-bird after battle.
First Fury.
Darest thou delay, O Herald! take cheer, Hounds
Of Hell: what if the Son of Maia soon
Should make us food and sportwho can please long
The Omnipotent?
Mercury.
        Back to your towers of iron,
And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail,
Your foodless teeth. Geryon, arise! and Gorgon,
Chimra, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends
Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine,
Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate:
These shall perform your task.
First Fury.
                Oh, mercy! mercy!
We die with our desire: drive us not back!
Mercury.
Crouch then in silence.
            Awful Sufferer!
To thee unwilling, most unwillingly
I come, by the great Father's will driven down,
To execute a doom of new revenge.
Alas! I pity thee, and hate myself
That I can do no more: aye from thy sight
Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell,
So thy worn form pursues me night and day,
Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good,
But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife
Against the Omnipotent; as yon clear lamps
That measure and divide the weary years
From which there is no refuge, long have taught
And long must teach. Even now thy Torturer arms
With the strange might of unimagined pains
The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell,
And my commission is to lead them here,
Or what more subtle, foul, or savage fiends
People the abyss, and leave them to their task.
Be it not so! there is a secret known
To thee, and to none else of living things,
Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven,
The fear of which perplexes the Supreme:
Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne
In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer,
And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane,
Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart:
For benefits and meek submission tame
The fiercest and the mightiest.
Prometheus.
                 Evil minds
Change good to their own nature. I gave all
He has; and in return he chains me here
Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun
Split my parched skin, or in the moony night
The crystal-wingd snow cling round my hair:
Whilst my belovd race is trampled down
By his thought-executing ministers.
Such is the tyrant's recompense: 'tis just:
He who is evil can receive no good;
And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost,
He can feel hate, fear, shame; not gratitude:
He but requites me for his own misdeed.
Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks
With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.
Submission, thou dost know I cannot try:
For what submission but that fatal word,
The death-seal of mankind's captivity,
Like the Sicilian's hair-suspended sword,
Which trembles o'er his crown, would he accept,
Or could I yield? Which yet I will not yield.
Let others flatter Crime, where it sits throned
In brief Omnipotence: secure are they:
For Justice, when triumphant, will weep down
Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs,
Too much avenged by those who err. I wait,
Enduring thus, the retributive hour
Which since we spake is even nearer now.
But hark, the hell-hounds clamour: fear delay:
Behold! Heaven lowers under thy Father's frown.
Mercury.
Oh, that we might be spared: I to inflict
And thou to suffer! Once more answer me:
Thou knowest not the period of Jove's power?
Prometheus.
I know but this, that it must come.
Mercury.
                   Alas!
Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?
Prometheus.
They last while Jove must reign: nor more, nor less
Do I desire or fear.
Mercury.
           Yet pause, and plunge
Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight,
Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;
Perchance it has not numbered the slow years
Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved?
Prometheus.
Perchance no thought can count them, yet they pass.
Mercury.
If thou might'st dwell among the Gods the while
Lapped in voluptuous joy?
Prometheus.
              I would not quit
This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains.
Mercury.
Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee.
Prometheus.
Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven,
Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene,
As light in the sun, throned: how vain is talk!
Call up the fiends.
Ione.
          O, sister, look! White fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!
Mercury.
I must obey his words and thine: alas!
Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart!
Panthea.
See where the child of Heaven, with wingd feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
Ione.
Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes
Lest thou behold and die: they come: they come
Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death.
First Fury.
                  Prometheus!
                  Second Fury.
Immortal Titan!
Third Fury.
        Champion of Heaven's slaves!
        Prometheus.
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here,
Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms,
What and who are ye? Never yet there came
Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell
From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate,
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.
First Fury.
We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
When the great King betrays them to our will.
Prometheus.
Oh! many fearful natures in one name,
I know ye; and these lakes and echoes know
The darkness and the clangour of your wings.
But why more hideous than your loathd selves
Gather ye up in legions from the deep?
Second Fury.
We knew not that: Sisters, rejoice, rejoice!
Prometheus.
Can aught exult in its deformity?
Second Fury.
The beauty of delight makes lovers glad,
Gazing on one another: so are we.
As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers
The areal crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round,
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.
Prometheus.
I laugh your power, and his who sent you here,
To lowest scorn. Pour forth the cup of pain.
First Fury.
Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone,
And nerve from nerve, working like fire within?
Prometheus.
Pain is my element, as hate is thine;
Ye rend me now: I care not.
Second Fury.
               Dost imagine
We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes?
Prometheus.
I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer,
Being evil. Cruel was the power which called
You, or aught else so wretched, into light.
Third Fury.
Thou think'st we will live through thee, one by one,
Like animal life, and though we can obscure not
The soul which burns within, that we will dwell
Beside it, like a vain loud multitude
Vexing the self-content of wisest men:
That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,
And foul desire round thine astonished heart,
And blood within thy labyrinthine veins
Crawling like agony?
Prometheus.
           Why, ye are thus now;
Yet am I king over myself, and rule
The torturing and conflicting throngs within,
As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous.
Chorus of Furies.
From the ends of the earth, from the ends of the earth,
Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth,
     Come, come, come!
Oh, ye who shake hills with the scream of your mirth,
When cities sink howling in ruin; and ye
Who with wingless footsteps trample the sea,
And close upon Shipwreck and Famine's track,
Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck;
     Come, come, come!
Leave the bed, low, cold, and red,
Strewed beneath a nation dead;
Leave the hatred, as in ashes
  Fire is left for future burning:
It will burst in bloodier flashes
  When ye stir it, soon returning:
Leave the self-contempt implanted
In young spirits, sense-enchanted,
  Misery's yet unkindled fuel:
  Leave Hell's secrets half unchanted
   To the maniac dreamer; cruel
  More than ye can be with hate
    Is he with fear.
     Come, come, come!
We are steaming up from Hell's wide gate
And we burthen the blast of the atmosphere,
But vainly we toil till ye come here.
Ione.
Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings.
Panthea.
These solid mountains quiver with the sound
Even as the tremulous air: their shadows make
The space within my plumes more black than night.
First Fury.
Your call was as a wingd car
Driven on whirlwinds fast and far;
It rapped us from red gulfs of war.
Second Fury.
From wide cities, famine-wasted;
Third Fury.
Groans half heard, and blood untasted;
Fourth Fury.
Kingly conclaves stern and cold,
Where blood with gold is bought and sold;
Fifth Fury.
From the furnace, white and hot,
In which
A Fury.
     Speak not: whisper not:
I know all that ye would tell,
But to speak might break the spell
Which must bend the Invincible,
The stern of thought;
He yet defies the deepest power of Hell.
A Fury.
Tear the veil!
Another Fury.
       It is torn.
       Chorus.
              The pale stars of the morn
Shine on a misery, dire to be borne.
Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn.
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man?
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever,
Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever.
  One came forth of gentle worth
  Smiling on the sanguine earth;
  His words outlived him, like swift poison
   Withering up truth, peace, and pity.
  Look! where round the wide horizon
   Many a million-peopled city
  Vomits smoke in the bright air.
  Hark that outcry of despair!
  'Tis his mild and gentle ghost
   Wailing for the faith he kindled:
  Look again, the flames almost
   To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled:
The survivors round the embers
Gather in dread.
    Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.
Semichorus I.
Drops of bloody agony flow
From his white and quivering brow.
Grant a little respite now:
See a disenchanted nation
Springs like day from desolation;
To Truth its state is dedicate,
And Freedom leads it forth, her mate;
A legioned band of linkd brothers
Whom Love calls children
Semichorus II.
              'Tis another's:
See how kindred murder kin:
'Tis the vintage-time for death and sin:
Blood, like new wine, bubbles within:
  Till Despair smothers
The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants win.
[All the Furies vanish, except one.
Ione.
Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan
Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart
Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep,
And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves.
Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him?
Panthea.
Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more.
Ione.
What didst thou see?
Panthea.
           A woful sight: a youth
With patient looks nailed to a crucifix.
Ione.
What next?
Panthea.
     The heaven around, the earth below
Was peopled with thick shapes of human death,
All horrible, and wrought by human hands,
And some appeared the work of human hearts,
For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles:
And other sights too foul to speak and live
Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear
By looking forth: those groans are grief enough.
Fury.
Behold an emblem: those who do endure
Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap
Thousandfold torment on themselves and him.
Prometheus.
Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow
Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears!
Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death,
So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix,
So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.
O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak,
It hath become a curse. I see, I see,
The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just,
Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee,
Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home,
An early-chosen, late-lamented home;
As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind;
Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells:
SomeHear I not the multitude laugh loud?
Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms
Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles,
Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood
By the red light of their own burning homes.
Fury.
Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans;
Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind.
Prometheus.
Worse?
Fury.
   In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.
Prometheus.
Thy words are like a cloud of wingd snakes;
And yet I pity those they torture not.
Fury.
Thou pitiest them? I speak no more!
[Vanishes.
Prometheus.
                   Ah woe!
Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, for ever!
I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear
Thy works within my woe-illumd mind,
Thou subtle tyrant! Peace is in the grave.
The grave hides all things beautiful and good:
I am a God and cannot find it there,
Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge,
This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.
The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul
With new endurance, till the hour arrives
When they shall be no types of things which are.
Panthea.
Alas! what sawest thou more?
Prometheus.
               There are two woes:
To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one.
Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords, they
Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry;
The nations thronged around, and cried aloud,
As with one voice, Truth, liberty, and love!
Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven
Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear:
Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.
This was the shadow of the truth I saw.
The Earth.
I felt thy torture, son; with such mixed joy
As pain and virtue give. To cheer thy state
I bid ascend those subtle and fair spirits,
Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought,
And who inhabit, as birds wing the wind,
Its world-surrounding aether: they behold
Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass,
The future: may they speak comfort to thee!
Panthea.
Look, sister, where a troop of spirits gather,
Like flocks of clouds in spring's delightful weather,
Thronging in the blue air!
Ione.
              And see! more come,
Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,
That climb up the ravine in scattered lines.
And, hark! is it the music of the pines?
Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall?
Panthea.
'Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.
Chorus of Spirits.
From unremembered ages we
Gentle guides and guardians be
Of heaven-oppressed mortality;
And we breathe, and sicken not,
The atmosphere of human thought:
Be it dim, and dank, and gray,
Like a storm-extinguished day,
Travelled o'er by dying gleams;
Be it bright as all between
Cloudless skies and windless streams,
Silent, liquid, and serene;
As the birds within the wind,
As the fish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man's own mind
Float through all above the grave;
We make there our liquid lair,
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent
Through the boundless element:
Thence we bear the prophecy
Which begins and ends in thee!
Ione.
More yet come, one by one: the air around them
Looks radiant as the air around a star.
First Spirit.
On a battle-trumpet's blast
I fled hither, fast, fast, fast,
'Mid the darkness upward cast.
From the dust of creeds outworn,
From the tyrant's banner torn,
Gathering 'round me, onward borne,
There was mingled many a cry
Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory!
Till they faded through the sky;
And one sound, above, around,
One sound beneath, around, above,
Was moving; 'twas the soul of Love;
'Twas the hope, the prophecy,
Which begins and ends in thee.
Second Spirit.
A rainbow's arch stood on the sea,
Which rocked beneath, immovably;
And the triumphant storm did flee,
Like a conqueror, swift and proud,
Between, with many a captive cloud,
A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd,
Each by lightning riven in half:
I heard the thunder hoarsely laugh:
Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff
And spread beneath a hell of death
O'er the white waters. I alit
On a great ship lightning-split,
And speeded hither on the sigh
Of one who gave an enemy
His plank, then plunged aside to die.
Third Spirit.
I sate beside a sage's bed,
And the lamp was burning red
Near the book where he had fed,
When a Dream with plumes of flame,
To his pillow hovering came,
And I knew it was the same
Which had kindled long ago
Pity, eloquence, and woe;
And the world awhile below
Wore the shade, its lustre made.
It has borne me here as fleet
As Desire's lightning feet:
I must ride it back ere morrow,
Or the sage will wake in sorrow.
Fourth Spirit.
On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the areal kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
One of these awakened me,
And I sped to succour thee.
Ione.
Behold'st thou not two shapes from the east and west
Come, as two doves to one belovd nest,
Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air
On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere?
And, hark! their sweet, sad voices! 'tis despair
Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound.
Panthea.
Canst thou speak, sister? all my words are drowned.
Ione.
Their beauty gives me voice. See how they float
On their sustaining wings of skiey grain,
Orange and azure deepening into gold:
Their soft smiles light the air like a star's fire.
Chorus of Spirits.
Hast thou beheld the form of Love?
Fifth Spirit.
                  As over wide dominions
I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air's wildernesses,
That planet-crested shape swept by on lightning-braided pinions,
Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial tresses:
His footsteps paved the world with light; but as I passed 'twas fading,
And hollow Ruin yawned behind: great sages bound in madness,
And headless patriots, and pale youths who perished, unupbraiding,
Gleamed in the night. I wandered o'er, till thou, O King of sadness,
Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness.
Sixth Spirit.
Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing:
It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air,
But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing
The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear;
Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above
And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet,
Dream visions of areal joy, and call the monster, Love,
And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet.
Chorus.
Though Ruin now Love's shadow be,
Following him, destroyingly,
On Death's white and wingd steed,
Which the fleetest cannot flee,
Trampling down both flower and weed,
Man and beast, and foul and fair,
Like a tempest through the air;
Thou shalt quell this horseman grim,
Woundless though in heart or limb.
Prometheus.
Spirits! how know ye this shall be?
Chorus.
In the atmosphere we breathe,
As buds grow red when the snow-storms flee,
From Spring gathering up beneath,
Whose mild winds shake the elder brake,
And the wandering herdsmen know
That the white-thorn soon will blow:
Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace,
When they struggle to increase,
  Are to us as soft winds be
  To shepherd boys, the prophecy
  Which begins and ends in thee.
  Ione.
Where are the Spirits fled?
Panthea.
               Only a sense
Remains of them, like the omnipotence
Of music, when the inspired voice and lute
Languish, ere yet the responses are mute,
Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul,
Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll.
Prometheus.
How fair these airborn shapes! and yet I feel
Most vain all hope but love; and thou art far,
Asia! who, when my being overflowed,
Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine
Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust.
All things are still: alas! how heavily
This quiet morning weighs upon my heart;
Though I should dream I could even sleep with grief
If slumber were denied not. I would fain
Be what it is my destiny to be,
The saviour and the strength of suffering man,
Or sink into the original gulf of things:
There is no agony, and no solace left;
Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more.
Panthea.
Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee
The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when
The shadow of thy spirit falls on her?
Prometheus.
I said all hope was vain but love: thou lovest.
Panthea.
Deeply in truth; but the eastern star looks white,
And Asia waits in that far Indian vale,
The scene of her sad exile; rugged once
And desolate and frozen, like this ravine;
But now invested with fair flowers and herbs,
And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow
Among the woods and waters, from the aether
Of her transforming presence, which would fade
If it were mingled not with thine. Farewell!
END OF THE FIRST ACT.

ACT II
Scene I.
Morning. A lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia alone.
Asia.
From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended:
Yes, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes
Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,
And beatings haunt the desolated heart,
Which should have learnt repose: thou hast descended
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!
O child of many winds! As suddenly
Thou comest as the memory of a dream,
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet;
Like genius, or like joy which riseth up
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The desert of our life.
This is the season, this the day, the hour;
At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine,
Too long desired, too long delaying, come!
How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl!
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains. through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air:
'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not
The olian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn?
[Panthea enters.
               I feel, I see
Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears,
Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.
Belovd and most beautiful, who wearest
The shadow of that soul by which I live,
How late thou art! the spherd sun had climbed
The sea; my heart was sick with hope, before
The printless air felt thy belated plumes.
Panthea.
Pardon, great Sister! but my wings were faint
With the delight of a remembered dream,
As are the noontide plumes of summer winds
Satiate with sweet flowers. I was wont to sleep
Peacefully, and awake refreshed and calm
Before the sacred Titan's fall, and thy
Unhappy love, had made, through use and pity,
Both love and woe familiar to my heart
As they had grown to thine: erewhile I slept
Under the glaucous caverns of old Ocean
Within dim bowers of green and purple moss,
Our young Ione's soft and milky arms
Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair,
While my shut eyes and cheek were pressed within
The folded depth of her life-breathing bosom:
But not as now, since I am made the wind
Which fails beneath the music that I bear
Of thy most wordless converse; since dissolved
Into the sense with which love talks, my rest
Was troubled and yet sweet; my waking hours
Too full of care and pain.
Asia.
              Lift up thine eyes,
And let me read thy dream.
Panthea.
              As I have said
With our sea-sister at his feet I slept.
The mountain mists, condensing at our voice
Under the moon, had spread their snowy flakes,
From the keen ice shielding our linkd sleep.
Then two dreams came. One, I remember not.
But in the other his pale wound-worn limbs
Fell from Prometheus, and the azure night
Grew radiant with the glory of that form
Which lives unchanged within, and his voice fell
Like music which makes giddy the dim brain,
Faint with intoxication of keen joy:
'Sister of her whose footsteps pave the world
With lovelinessmore fair than aught but her,
Whose shadow thou artlift thine eyes on me.'
I lifted them: the overpowering light
Of that immortal shape was shadowed o'er
By love; which, from his soft and flowing limbs,
And passion-parted lips, and keen, faint eyes,
Steamed forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere
Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power,
As the warm aether of the morning sun
Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew.
I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt
His presence flow and mingle through my blood
Till it became his life, and his grew mine,
And I was thus absorbed, until it passed,
And like the vapours when the sun sinks down,
Gathering again in drops upon the pines,
And tremulous as they, in the deep night
My being was condensed; and as the rays
Of thought were slowly gathered, I could hear
His voice, whose accents lingered ere they died
Like footsteps of weak melody: thy name
Among the many sounds alone I heard
Of what might be articulate; though still
I listened through the night when sound was none.
Ione wakened then, and said to me:
'Canst thou divine what troubles me to-night?
I always knew what I desired before,
Nor ever found delight to wish in vain.
But now I cannot tell thee what I seek;
I know not; something sweet, since it is sweet
Even to desire; it is thy sport, false sister;
Thou hast discovered some enchantment old,
Whose spells have stolen my spirit as I slept
And mingled it with thine: for when just now
We kissed, I felt within thy parted lips
The sweet air that sustained me, and the warmth
Of the life-blood, for loss of which I faint,
Quivered between our intertwining arms.'
I answered not, for the Eastern star grew pale,
But fled to thee.
Asia.
         Thou speakest, but thy words
Are as the air: I feel them not: Oh, lift
Thine eyes, that I may read his written soul!
Panthea.
I lift them though they droop beneath the load
Of that they would express: what canst thou see
But thine own fairest shadow imaged there?
Asia.
Thine eyes are like the deep, blue, boundless heaven
Contracted to two circles underneath
Their long, fine lashes; dark, far, measureless,
Orb within orb, and line through line inwoven.
Panthea.
Why lookest thou as if a spirit passed?
Asia.
There is a change: beyond their inmost depth
I see a shade, a shape: 'tis He, arrayed
In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread
Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon.
Prometheus, it is thine! depart not yet!
Say not those smiles that we shall meet again
Within that bright pavilion which their beams
Shall build o'er the waste world? The dream is told.
What shape is that between us? Its rude hair
Roughens the wind that lifts it, its regard
Is wild and quick, yet 'tis a thing of air,
For through its gray robe gleams the golden dew
Whose stars the noon has quenched not.
Dream.
                     Follow! Follow!
                     Panthea.
It is mine other dream.
Asia.
            It disappears.
            Panthea.
It passes now into my mind. Methought
As we sate here, the flower-infolding buds
Burst on yon lightning-blasted almond-tree,
When swift from the white Scythian wilderness
A wind swept forth wrinkling the Earth with frost:
I looked, and all the blossoms were blown down;
But on each leaf was stamped, as the blue bells
Of Hyacinth tell Apollo's written grief,
O, follow, follow!
Asia.
          As you speak, your words
Fill, pause by pause, my own forgotten sleep
With shapes. Methought among these lawns together
We wandered, underneath the young gray dawn,
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind;
And the white dew on the new-bladed grass,
Just piercing the dark earth, hung silently;
And there was more which I remember not:
But on the shadows of the morning clouds,
Athwart the purple mountain slope, was written
Follow, O, follow! as they vanished by;
And on each herb, from which Heaven's dew had fallen,
The like was stamped, as with a withering fire;
A wind arose among the pines; it shook
The clinging music from their boughs, and then
Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts,
Were heard: O, follow, follow, follow me!
And then I said: 'Panthea, look on me.'
But in the depth of those belovd eyes
Still I saw, follow, follow!
Echo.
               Follow, follow!
               Panthea.
The crags, this clear spring morning, mock our voices
As they were spirit-tongued.
Asia.
               It is some being
Around the crags. What fine clear sounds! O, list!
Echoes
(unseen).
Echoes we: listen!
We cannot stay:
As dew-stars glisten
Then fade away
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
Hark! Spirits speak. The liquid responses
Of their areal tongues yet sound.
Panthea.
                  I hear.
                  Echoes.
O, follow, follow,
As our voice recedeth
Through the caverns hollow,
Where the forest spreadeth; (More distant.)

O, follow, follow!
Through the caverns hollow,
As the song floats thou pursue,
Where the wild bee never flew,
Through the noontide darkness deep,
By the odour-breathing sleep
Of faint night flowers, and the waves
At the fountain-lighted caves,
While our music, wild and sweet,
Mocks thy gently falling feet,
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
Shall we pursue the sound? It grows more faint And distant.
Panthea.
List! the strain floats nearer now.
Echoes.
In the world unknown
Sleeps a voice unspoken;
By thy step alone
Can its rest be broken;
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
How the notes sink upon the ebbing wind!
Echoes.
O, follow, follow!
Through the caverns hollow,
As the song floats thou pursue,
By the woodland noontide dew;
By the forest, lakes, and fountains,
Through the many-folded mountains;
To the rents, and gulfs, and chasms,
Where the Earth reposed from spasms,
On the day when He and thou
Parted, to commingle now;
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
Come, sweet Panthea, link thy hand in mine,
And follow, ere the voices fade away.
Scene II.
A Forest, intermingled with Rocks and Caverns. Asia and Panthea pass into it. Two young Fauns are sitting on a Rock listening.
Semichorus I. of Spirits.
The path through which that lovely twain
Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew,
And each dark tree that ever grew,
Is curtained out from Heaven's wide blue;
Nor sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain,
  Can pierce its interwoven bowers,
Nor aught, save where some cloud of dew,
Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze,
Between the trunks of the hoar trees,
  Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers
Of the green laurel, blown anew;
And bends, and then fades silently,
One frail and fair anemone:
Or when some star of many a one
That climbs and wanders through steep night,
Has found the cleft through which alone
Beams fall from high those depths upon
Ere it is borne away, away,
By the swift Heavens that cannot stay,
It scatters drops of golden light,
Like lines of rain that ne'er unite:
And the gloom divine is all around,
And underneath is the mossy ground.
Semichorus II.
There the voluptuous nightingales,
Are awake through all the broad noonday.
When one with bliss or sadness fails,
  And through the windless ivy-boughs,
Sick with sweet love, droops dying away
On its mate's music-panting bosom;
Another from the swinging blossom,
  Watching to catch the languid close
Of the last strain, then lifts on high
The wings of the weak melody,
'Till some new strain of feeling bear
The song, and all the woods are mute;
When there is heard through the dim air
The rush of wings, and rising there
Like many a lake-surrounded flute,
Sounds overflow the listener's brain
So sweet, that joy is almost pain.
Semichorus I.
There those enchanted eddies play
Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw,
By Demogorgon's mighty law,
With melting rapture, or sweet awe,
All spirits on that secret way;
As inland boats are driven to Ocean
Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw:
  And first there comes a gentle sound
  To those in talk or slumber bound,
And wakes the destined soft emotion,
Attracts, impels them; those who saw
Say from the breathing earth behind
There steams a plume-uplifting wind
Which drives them on their path, while they
Believe their own swift wings and feet
The sweet desires within obey:
And so they float upon their way,
Until, still sweet, but loud and strong,
The storm of sound is driven along,
Sucked up and hurrying: as they fleet
Behind, its gathering billows meet
And to the fatal mountain bear
Like clouds amid the yielding air.
First Faun.
Canst thou imagine where those spirits live
Which make such delicate music in the woods?
We haunt within the least frequented caves
And closest coverts, and we know these wilds,
Yet never meet them, though we hear them oft:
Where may they hide themselves?
Second Faun.
                 'Tis hard to tell:
I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,
The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again.
First Faun.
If such live thus, have others other lives,
Under pink blossoms or within the bells
Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep,
Or on their dying odours, when they die,
Or in the sunlight of the spherd dew?
Second Faun.
Ay, many more which we may well divine.
But, should we stay to speak, noontide would come,
And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn,
And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs
Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old,
And Love, and the chained Titan's woful doom,
And how he shall be loosed, and make the earth
One brotherhood: delightful strains which cheer
Our solitary twilights, and which charm
To silence the unenvying nightingales.
Scene III.
A Pinnacle of Rock among Mountains.
Asia and Panthea.
Panthea.
Hither the sound has borne usto the realm
Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal,
Like a volcano's meteor-breathing chasm,
Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up
Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth,
And call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy,
That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain
To deep intoxication; and uplift,
Like Mnads who cry loud, Evoe! Evoe!
The voice which is contagion to the world.
Asia.
Fit throne for such a Power! Magnificent!
How glorious art thou, Earth! And if thou be
The shadow of some spirit lovelier still,
Though evil stain its work, and it should be
Like its creation, weak yet beautiful,
I could fall down and worship that and thee.
Even now my heart adoreth: Wonderful!
Look, sister, ere the vapour dim thy brain:
Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,
As a lake, paving in the morning sky,
With azure waves which burst in silver light,
Some Indian vale. Behold it, rolling on
Under the curdling winds, and islanding
The peak whereon we stand, midway, around,
Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests,
Dim twilight-lawns, and stream-illumd caves,
And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist;
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains
From icy spires of sun-like radiance fling
The dawn, as lifted Ocean's dazzling spray,
From some Atlantic islet scattered up,
Spangles the wind with lamp-like water-drops.
The vale is girdled with their walls, a howl
Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines,
Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast,
Awful as silence. Hark! the rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
Panthea.
Look how the gusty sea of mist is breaking
In crimson foam, even at our feet! it rises
As Ocean at the enchantment of the moon
Round foodless men wrecked on some oozy isle.
Asia.
The fragments of the cloud are scattered up;
The wind that lifts them disentwines my hair;
Its billows now sweep o'er mine eyes; my brain
Grows dizzy; see'st thou shapes within the mist?
Panthea.
A countenance with beckoning smiles: there burns
An azure fire within its golden locks!
Another and another: hark! they speak!
Song of Spirits.
To the deep, to the deep,
  Down, down!
Through the shade of sleep,
Through the cloudy strife
Of Death and of Life;
Through the veil and the bar
Of things which seem and are
Even to the steps of the remotest throne,
  Down, down!
   While the sound whirls around,
  Down, down!
As the fawn draws the hound,
As the lightning the vapour,
As a weak moth the taper;
Death, despair; love, sorrow;
Time both; to-day, to-morrow;
As steel obeys the spirit of the stone,
  Down, down!
   Through the gray, void abysm,
  Down, down!
Where the air is no prism,
And the moon and stars are not,
And the cavern-crags wear not
The radiance of Heaven,
Nor the gloom to Earth given,
Where there is One pervading, One alone,
  Down, down!
   In the depth of the deep,
  Down, down!
Like veiled lightning asleep,
Like the spark nursed in embers,
The last look Love remembers,
Like a diamond, which shines
On the dark wealth of mines,
A spell is treasured but for thee alone.
  Down, down!
   We have bound thee, we guide thee;
  Down, down!
With the bright form beside thee;
Resist not the weakness,
Such strength is in meekness
That the Eternal, the Immortal,
Most unloose through life's portal
The snake-like Doom coiled underneath his throne
  By that alone.
  Scene IV.
The Cave of Demogorgon.
Asia and Panthea.
Panthea.
What viled form sits on that ebon throne?
Asia.
The veil has fallen.
Panthea.
           I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.
Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.
Demogorgon.
         Ask what thou wouldst know.
         Asia.
What canst thou tell?
Demogorgon.
           All things thou dar'st demand.
           Asia.
Who made the living world?
Demogorgon.
              God.
              Asia.
                Who made all
That it contains? thought, passion, reason, will, Imagination?
Demogorgon.
God: Almighty God.
Asia.
Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one belovd heard in youth alone,
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim
The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,
And leaves this peopled earth a solitude
When it returns no more?
Demogorgon.
             Merciful God.
             Asia.
And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things,
To every thought within the mind of man
Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels
Under the load towards the pit of death;
Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;
Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech
Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?
Demogorgon.
                    He reigns.
                    Asia.
Utter his name: a world pining in pain
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.
Demogorgon.
He reigns.
Asia.
     I feel, I know it: who?
     Demogorgon.
                  He reigns.
                  Asia.
Who reigns? There was the Heaven and Earth at first,
And Light and Love; then Saturn, from whose throne
Time fell, an envious shadow: such the state
Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway,
As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves
Before the wind or sun has withered them
And semivital worms; but he refused
The birthright of their being, knowledge, power,
The skill which wields the elements, the thought
Which pierces this dim universe like light,
Self-empire, and the majesty of love;
For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus
Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter,
And with this law alone, 'Let man be free,'
Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven.
To know nor faith, nor love, nor law; to be
Omnipotent but friendless is to reign;
And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man
First famine, and then toil, and then disease,
Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before,
Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove
With alternating shafts of frost and fire,
Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves:
And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent,
And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle
Of unreal good, which levied mutual war,
So ruining the lair wherein they raged.
Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes
Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers,
Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms,
That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings
The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind
The disunited tendrils of that vine
Which bears the wine of life, the human heart;
And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey,
Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath
The frown of man; and tortured to his will
Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,
And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms
Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.
He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe;
And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven,
Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind
Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song;
And music lifted up the listening spirit
Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,
Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound;
And human hands first mimicked and then mocked,
With moulded limbs more lovely than its own,
The human form, till marble grew divine;
And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see
Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.
He told the hidden power of herbs and springs,
And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep.
He taught the implicated orbits woven
Of the wide-wandering stars; and how the sun
Changes his lair, and by what secret spell
The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye
Gazes not on the interlunar sea:
He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs,
The tempest-wingd chariots of the Ocean,
And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then
Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed
The warm winds, and the azure aether shone,
And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen.
Such, the alleviations of his state,
Prometheus gave to man, for which he hangs
Withering in destined pain: but who rains down
Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while
Man looks on his creation like a God
And sees that it is glorious, drives him on,
The wreck of his own will, the scorn of earth,
The outcast, the abandoned, the alone?
Not Jove: while yet his frown shook Heaven, ay, when
His adversary from adamantine chains
Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare
Who is his master? Is he too a slave?
Demogorgon.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil:
Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no.
Asia.
Whom calledst thou God?
Demogorgon.
            I spoke but as ye speak,
For Jove is the supreme of living things.
Asia.
Who is the master of the slave?
Demogorgon.
                 If the abysm
Could vomit forth its secrets. . . But a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;
For what would it avail to bid thee gaze
On the revolving world? What to bid speak
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these
All things are subject but eternal Love.
Asia.
So much I asked before, and my heart gave
The response thou hast given; and of such truths
Each to itself must be the oracle.
One more demand; and do thou answer me
As mine own soul would answer, did it know
That which I ask. Prometheus shall arise
Henceforth the sun of this rejoicing world:
When shall the destined hour arrive?
Demogorgon.
                    Behold!
                    Asia.
The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingd steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward.
Demogorgon.
       These are the immortal Hours,
Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee.
Asia.
A spirit with a dreadful countenance
Checks its dark chariot by the craggy gulf.
Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer,
Who art thou? Whither wouldst thou bear me? Speak!
Spirit.
I am the shadow of a destiny
More dread than is my aspect: ere yon planet
Has set, the darkness which ascends with me
Shall wrap in lasting night heaven's kingless throne.
Asia.
What meanest thou?
Panthea.
          That terrible shadow floats
Up from its throne, as may the lurid smoke
Of earthquake-ruined cities o'er the sea.
Lo! it ascends the car; the coursers fly
Terrified: watch its path among the stars
Blackening the night!
Asia.
           Thus I am answered: strange!
           Panthea.
See, near the verge, another chariot stays;
An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire,
Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim
Of delicate strange tracery; the young spirit
That guides it has the dove-like eyes of hope;
How its soft smiles attract the soul! as light
Lures wingd insects through the lampless air.
Spirit.
My coursers are fed with the lightning,
They drink of the whirlwind's stream,
And when the red morning is bright'ning
They bathe in the fresh sunbeam;
They have strength for their swiftness I deem,
Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.
I desire: and their speed makes night kindle;
I fear: they outstrip the Typhoon;
Ere the cloud piled on Atlas can dwindle
We encircle the earth and the moon:
We shall rest from long labours at noon:
Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.
Scene V.
The Car pauses within a Cloud on the top of a snowy Mountain. Asia, Panthea, and the Spirit of the Hour.
Spirit.
On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire;
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire:
They shall drink the hot speed of desire!
Asia.
Thou breathest on their nostrils, but my breath
Would give them swifter speed.
Spirit.
                Alas! it could not.
                Panthea.
Oh Spirit! pause, and tell whence is the light
Which fills this cloud? the sun is yet unrisen.
Spirit.
The sun will rise not until noon. Apollo
Is held in heaven by wonder; and the light
Which fills this vapour, as the areal hue
Of fountain-gazing roses fills the water,
Flows from thy mighty sister.
Panthea.
                Yes, I feel
                Asia.
What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale.
Panthea.
How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee;
I feel but see thee not. I scarce endure
The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change
Is working in the elements, which suffer
Thy presence thus unveiled. The Nereids tell
That on the day when the clear hyaline
Was cloven at thine uprise, and thou didst stand
Within a veind shell, which floated on
Over the calm floor of the crystal sea,
Among the gean isles, and by the shores
Which bear thy name; love, like the atmosphere
Of the sun's fire filling the living world,
Burst from thee, and illumined earth and heaven
And the deep ocean and the sunless caves
And all that dwells within them; till grief cast
Eclipse upon the soul from which it came:
Such art thou now; nor is it I alone,
Thy sister, thy companion, thine own chosen one,
But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy.
Hearest thou not sounds i' the air which speak the love
Of all articulate beings? Feelest thou not
The inanimate winds enamoured of thee? List!
[Music.
Asia.
Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his
Whose echoes they are: yet all love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God:
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still, after long sufferings,
As I shall soon become.
Panthea.
            List! Spirits speak.
            Voice in the Air, singing.
Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them;
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds ere they divide them;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee,
But thy voice sounds low and tender
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,
As I feel now, lost for ever!
Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
Asia.
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound:
Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music's most serene dominions;
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course, without a star,
But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided:
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.
We have passed Age's icy caves,
And Manhood's dark and tossing waves,
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray:
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;
A paradise of vaulted bowers,
Lit by downward-gazing flowers,
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee;
Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!
END OF THE SECOND ACT.

ACT III
Scene I.
Heaven. Jupiter on his Throne; Thetis and the other Deities assembled.
Jupiter.
Ye congregated powers of heaven, who share
The glory and the strength of him ye serve,
Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent.
All else had been subdued to me; alone
The soul of man, like unextinguished fire,
Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt,
And lamentation, and reluctant prayer,
Hurling up insurrection, which might make
Our antique empire insecure, though built
On eldest faith, and hell's coeval, fear;
And though my curses through the pendulous air,
Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake,
And cling to it; though under my wrath's night
It climbs the crags of life, step after step,
Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet,
It yet remains supreme o'er misery,
Aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:
Even now have I begotten a strange wonder,
That fatal child, the terror of the earth,
Who waits but till the destined hour arrive,
Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne
The dreadful might of ever-living limbs
Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld,
To redescend, and trample out the spark.
Pour forth heaven's wine, Idan Ganymede,
And let it fill the Ddal cups like fire,
And from the flower-inwoven soil divine
Ye all-triumphant harmonies arise,
As dew from earth under the twilight stars:
Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins
The soul of joy, ye ever-living Gods,
Till exultation burst in one wide voice
Like music from Elysian winds.
                And thou
Ascend beside me, veild in the light
Of the desire which makes thee one with me,
Thetis, bright image of eternity!
When thou didst cry, 'Insufferable might!
God! Spare me! I sustain not the quick flames,
The penetrating presence; all my being,
Like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw
Into a dew with poison, is dissolved,
Sinking through its foundations:' even then
Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third
Mightier than either, which, unbodied now,
Between us floats, felt, although unbeheld,
Waiting the incarnation, which ascends,
(Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels
Griding the winds?) from Demogorgon's throne.
Victory! victory! Feel'st thou not, O world,
The earthquake of his chariot thundering up
Olympus?
[The Car of the Hour arrives. Demogorgon descends, and moves towards the Throne of Jupiter.
    Awful shape, what art thou? Speak!
    Demogorgon.
Eternity. Demand no direr name.
Descend, and follow me down the abyss.
I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn's child;
Mightier than thee: and we must dwell together
Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not.
The tyranny of heaven none may retain,
Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee:
Yet if thou wilt, as 'tis the destiny
Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead,
Put forth thy might.
Jupiter.
           Detested prodigy!
Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons
I trample thee! thou lingerest?
                 Mercy! mercy!
No pity, no release, no respite! Oh,
That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge,
Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge,
On Caucasus! he would not doom me thus.
Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not
The monarch of the world? What then art thou?
No refuge! no appeal!
           Sink with me then,
We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin,
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea. Let hell unlock
Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire,
And whelm on them into the bottomless void
This desolated world, and thee, and me,
The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck
Of that for which they combated.
                 Ai! Ai!
The elements obey me not. I sink
Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down.
And, like a cloud, mine enemy above
Darkens my fall with victory! Ai, Ai!
Scene II.
The Mouth of a great River in the Island Atlantis.Ocean is discovered reclining near the Shore; Apollo stands beside him.
Ocean.
He fell, thou sayest, beneath his conqueror's frown?
Apollo.
Ay, when the strife was ended which made dim
The orb I rule, and shook the solid stars,
The terrors of his eye illumined heaven
With sanguine light, through the thick ragged skirts
Of the victorious darkness, as he fell:
Like the last glare of day's red agony,
Which, from a rent among the fiery clouds,
Burns far along the tempest-wrinkled deep.
Ocean.
He sunk to the abyss? To the dark void?
Apollo.
An eagle so caught in some bursting cloud
On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings
Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes
Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded
By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail
Beats on his struggling form, which sinks at length
Prone, and the areal ice clings over it.
Ocean.
Henceforth the fields of heaven-reflecting sea
Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood,
Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn
Swayed by the summer air; my streams will flow
Round many-peopled continents, and round
Fortunate isles; and from their glassy thrones
Blue Proteus and his humid nymphs shall mark
The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see
The floating bark of the light-laden moon
With that white star, its sightless pilot's crest,
Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea;
Tracking their path no more by blood and groans,
And desolation, and the mingled voice
Of slavery and command; but by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices,
And sweetest music, such as spirits love.
Apollo.
And I shall gaze not on the deeds which make
My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse
Darkens the sphere I guide; but list, I hear
The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit
That sits i' the morning star.
Ocean.
                Thou must away;
Thy steeds will pause at even, till when farewell:
The loud deep calls me home even now to feed it
With azure calm out of the emerald urns
Which stand for ever full beside my throne.
Behold the Nereids under the green sea,
Their wavering limbs borne on the wind-like stream,
Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair
With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns,
Hastening to grace their mighty sister's joy. [A sound of waves is heard.

It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm.
Peace, monster; I come now. Farewell.
Apollo.
                    Farewell.
                    Scene III.
Caucasus. Prometheus, Hercules, Ione, the Earth, Spirits, Asia, and Panthea, borne in the Car with the Spirit of the Hour. Hercules unbinds Prometheus, who descends.
Hercules.
Most glorious among Spirits, thus doth strength
To wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love,
And thee, who art the form they animate,
Minister like a slave.
Prometheus.
            Thy gentle words
Are sweeter even than freedom long desired
And long delayed.
         Asia, thou light of life,
Shadow of beauty unbeheld: and ye,
Fair sister nymphs, who made long years of pain
Sweet to remember, through your love and care:
Henceforth we will not part. There is a cave,
All overgrown with trailing odorous plants,
Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers,
And paved with veind emerald, and a fountain
Leaps in the midst with an awakening sound.
From its curved roof the mountain's frozen tears
Like snow, or silver, or long diamond spires,
Hang downward, raining forth a doubtful light:
And there is heard the ever-moving air,
Whispering without from tree to tree, and birds,
And bees; and all around are mossy seats,
And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass;
A simple dwelling, which shall be our own;
Where we will sit and talk of time and change,
As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged.
What can hide man from mutability?
And if ye sigh, then I will smile; and thou,
Ione, shalt chant fragments of sea-music,
Until I weep, when ye shal smile away
The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed.
We will entangle buds and flowers and beams
Which twinkle on the fountain's brim, and make
Strange combinations out of common things,
Like human babes in their brief innocence;
And we will search, with looks and words of love,
For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last,
Our unexhausted spirits; and like lutes
Touched by the skill of the enamoured wind,
Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new,
From difference sweet where discord cannot be;
And hither come, sped on the charmd winds,
Which meet from all the points of heaven, as bees
From every flower areal Enna feeds,
At their known island-homes in Himera,
The echoes of the human world, which tell
Of the low voice of love, almost unheard,
And dove-eyed pity's murmured pain, and music,
Itself the echo of the heart, and all
That tempers or improves man's life, now free;
And lovely apparitions,dim at first,
Then radiant, as the mind, arising bright
From the embrace of beauty (whence the forms
Of which these are the phantoms) casts on them
The gathered rays which are reality
Shall visit us, the progeny immortal
Of Painting, Sculpture, and rapt Poesy,
And arts, though unimagined, yet to be.
The wandering voices and the shadows these
Of all that man becomes, the mediators
Of that best worship love, by him and us
Given and returned; swift shapes and sounds, which grow
More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind,
And, veil by veil, evil and error fall:
Such virtue has the cave and place around. [Turning to the Spirit of the Hour.

For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. Ione,
Give her that curvd shell, which Proteus old
Made Asia's nuptial boon, breathing within it
A voice to be accomplished, and which thou
Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock.
Ione.
Thou most desired Hour, more loved and lovely
Than all thy sisters, this is the mystic shell;
See the pale azure fading into silver
Lining it with a soft yet glowing light:
Looks it not like lulled music sleeping there?
Spirit.
It seems in truth the fairest shell of Ocean:
Its sound must be at once both sweet and strange.
Prometheus.
Go, borne over the cities of mankind
On whirlwind-footed coursers: once again
Outspeed the sun around the orbd world;
And as thy chariot cleaves the kindling air,
Thou breathe into the many-folded shell,
Loosening its mighty music; it shall be
As thunder mingled with clear echoes: then
Return; and thou shalt dwell beside our cave.
And thou, O, Mother Earth!
The Earth.
               I hear, I feel;
Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along these marble nerves; 'tis life, 'tis joy,
And through my withered, old, and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling. Henceforth the many children fair
Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,
And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged,
And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes,
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom,
Draining the poison of despair, shall take
And interchange sweet nutriment; to me
Shall they become like sister-antelopes
By one fair dam, snow-white and swift as wind,
Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream.
The dew-mists of my sunless sleep shall float
Under the stars like balm: night-folded flowers
Shall suck unwithering hues in their repose:
And men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather
Strength for the coming day, and all its joy:
And death shall be the last embrace of her
Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother
Folding her child, says, 'Leave me not again.'
Asia.
Oh, mother! wherefore speak the name of death?
Cease they to love, and move, and breathe, and speak,
Who die?
The Earth.
    It would avail not to reply:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
But to the uncommunicating dead.
Death is the veil which those who live call life:
They sleep, and it is lifted: and meanwhile
In mild variety the seasons mild
With rainbow-skirted showers, and odorous winds,
And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night,
And the life-kindling shafts of the keen sun's
All-piercing bow, and the dew-mingled rain
Of the calm moonbeams, a soft influence mild,
Shall clothe the forests and the fields, ay, even
The crag-built deserts of the barren deep,
With ever-living leaves, and fruits, and flowers.
And thou! There is a cavern where my spirit
Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain
Made my heart mad, and those who did inhale it
Became mad too, and built a temple there,
And spoke, and were oracular, and lured
The erring nations round to mutual war,
And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee;
Which breath now rises, as amongst tall weeds
A violet's exhalation, and it fills
With a serener light and crimson air
Intense, yet soft, the rocks and woods around;
It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine,
And the dark linkd ivy tangling wild,
And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms
Which star the winds with points of coloured light,
As they rain through them, and bright golden globes
Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven,
And through their veind leaves and amber stems
The flowers whose purple and translucid bowls
Stand ever mantling with areal dew,
The drink of spirits: and it circles round,
Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams,
Inspiring calm and happy thoughts, like mine,
Now thou art thus restored. This cave is thine.
Arise! Appear!
[A Spirit rises in the likeness of a winged child.
       This is my torch-bearer;
Who let his lamp out in old time with gazing
On eyes from which he kindled it anew
With love, which is as fire, sweet daughter mine,
For such is that within thine own. Run, wayward,
And guide this company beyond the peak
Of Bacchic Nysa, Mnad-haunted mountain,
And beyond Indus and its tribute rivers,
Trampling the torrent streams and glassy lakes
With feet unwet, unwearied, undelaying,
And up the green ravine, across the vale,
Beside the windless and crystalline pool,
Where ever lies, on unerasing waves,
The image of a temple, built above,
Distinct with column, arch, and architrave,
And palm-like capital, and over-wrought,
And populous with most living imagery,
Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles
Fill the hushed air with everlasting love.
It is deserted now, but once it bore
Thy name, Prometheus; there the emulous youths
Bore to thy honour through the divine gloom
The lamp which was thine emblem; even as those
Who bear the untransmitted torch of hope
Into the grave, across the night of life,
As thou hast borne it most triumphantly
To this far goal of Time. Depart, farewell.
Beside that temple is the destined cave.
Scene IV.
A Forest. In the Background a Cave. Prometheus, Asia, Panthea, Ione, and the Spirit of the Earth.
Ione.
Sister, it is not earthly: how it glides
Under the leaves! how on its head there burns
A light, like a green star, whose emerald beams
Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves,
The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass!
Knowest thou it?
Panthea.
         It is the delicate spirit
That guides the earth through heaven. From afar
The populous constellations call that light
The loveliest of the planets; and sometimes
It floats along the spray of the salt sea,
Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud,
Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep,
Or o'er the mountain tops, or down the rivers,
Or through the green waste wilderness, as now,
Wondering at all it sees. Before Jove reigned
It loved our sister Asia, and it came
Each leisure hour to drink the liquid light
Out of her eyes, for which it said it thirsted
As one bit by a dipsas, and with her
It made its childish confidence, and told her
All it had known or seen, for it saw much,
Yet idly reasoned what it saw; and called her
For whence it sprung it knew not, nor do I
Mother, dear mother.
The Spirit of the Earth
(running to Asia).
           Mother, dearest mother;
May I then talk with thee as I was wont?
May I then hide my eyes in thy soft arms,
After thy looks have made them tired of joy?
May I then play beside thee the long noons,
When work is none in the bright silent air?
Asia.
I love thee, gentlest being, and henceforth
Can cherish thee unenvied: speak, I pray:
Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights.
Spirit of the Earth.
Mother, I am grown wiser, though a child
Cannot be wise like thee, within this day;
And happier too; happier and wiser both.
Thou knowest that toads, and snakes, and loathly worms,
And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs
That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever
An hindrance to my walks o'er the green world:
And that, among the haunts of humankind,
Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks,
Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles,
Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance,
Or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts
Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man;
And women too, ugliest of all things evil,
(Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair,
When good and kind, free and sincere like thee),
When false or frowning made me sick at heart
To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen.
Well, my path lately lay through a great city
Into the woody hills surrounding it:
A sentinel was sleeping at the gate:
When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook
The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet
Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all;
A long, long sound, as it would never end:
And all the inhabitants leaped suddenly
Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets,
Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet
The music pealed along. I hid myself
Within a fountain in the public square,
Where I lay like the reflex of the moon
Seen in a wave under green leaves; and soon
Those ugly human shapes and visages
Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain,
Passed floating through the air, and fading still
Into the winds that scattered them; and those
From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms
After some foul disguise had fallen, and all
Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise
And greetings of delighted wonder, all
Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn
Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, and efts,
Could e'er be beautiful? yet so they were,
And that with little change of shape or hue:
All things had put their evil nature off:
I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake
Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined,
I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward
And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries,
With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay
Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky;
So, with my thoughts full of these happy changes,
We meet again, the happiest change of all.
Asia.
And never will we part, till thy chaste sister
Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon
Will look on thy more warm and equal light
Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow
And love thee.
Spirit of the Earth.
       What; as Asia loves Prometheus?
       Asia.
Peace, wanton, thou art yet not old enough.
Think ye by gazing on each other's eyes
To multiply your lovely selves, and fill
With spherd fires the interlunar air?
Spirit of the Earth.
Nay, mother, while my sister trims her lamp
'Tis hard I should go darkling.
Asia.
                 Listen; look!
                 [The Spirit of the Hour enters.
Prometheus.
We feel what thou hast heard and seen: yet speak.
Spirit of the Hour.
Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky and the wide earth,
There was a change: the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed,
As if the sense of love dissolved in them
Had folded itself round the spherd world.
My vision then grew clear, and I could see
Into the mysteries of the universe:
Dizzy as with delight I floated down,
Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes,
My coursers sought their birthplace in the sun,
Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil,
Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire;
And where my moonlike car will stand within
A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms
Of thee, and Asia, and the Earth, and me,
And you fair nymphs looking the love we feel,
In memory of the tidings it has borne,
Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers,
Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone,
And open to the bright and liquid sky.
Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake
The likeness of those wingd steeds will mock
The flight from which they find repose. Alas,
Whither has wandered now my partial tongue
When all remains untold which ye would hear?
As I have said, I floated to the earth:
It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss
To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went
Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind,
And first was disappointed not to see
Such mighty change as I had felt within
Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked,
And behold, thrones were kingless, and men walked
One with the other even as spirits do,
None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear,
Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows
No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell,
'All hope abandon ye who enter here;'
None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear
Gazed on another's eye of cold command,
Until the subject of a tyrant's will
Became, worse fate, the abject of his own,
Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death.
None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines
Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;
None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart
The sparks of love and hope till there remained
Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,
And the wretch crept a vampire among men,
Infecting all with his own hideous ill;
None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk
Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes,
Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy
With such a self-mistrust as has no name.
And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind
As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew
On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,
From custom's evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
And changed to all which once they dared not be,
Yet being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,
Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill shame,
The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,
Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.
Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons; wherein,
And beside which, by wretched men were borne
Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,
The ghosts of a no-more-remembered fame,
Which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth
In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs
Of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round,
These imaged to the pride of kings and priests
A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
As is the world it wasted, and are now
But an astonishment; even so the tools
And emblems of its last captivity,
Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth,
Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.
And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man,
Which, under many a name and many a form
Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable,
Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world;
And which the nations, panic-stricken, served
With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love
Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless,
And slain amid men's unreclaiming tears,
Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate,
Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines:
The painted veil, by those who were, called life,
Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread,
All men believed or hoped, is torn aside;
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless?no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
END OF THE THIRD ACT.

ACT IV
Scene.A Part of the Forest near the Cave of Prometheus.Panthea and Ione are sleeping: they awaken gradually during the first Song.
Voice of unseen Spirits.
The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.
  But where are ye?
  A Train of dark Forms and Shadows passes by confusedly, singing.
Here, oh, here:
We bear the bier
Of the Father of many a cancelled year!
Spectres we
Of the dead Hours be,
We bear Time to his tomb in eternity.
Strew, oh, strew
Hair, not yew!
Wet the dusty pall with tears, not dew!
Be the faded flowers
Of Death's bare bowers
Spread on the corpse of the King of Hours!
Haste, oh, haste!
As shades are chased,
Trembling, by day, from heaven's blue waste.
We melt away,
Like dissolving spray,
From the children of a diviner day,
With the lullaby
Of winds that die
On the bosom of their own harmony!
Ione.
What dark forms were they?
Panthea.
The past Hours weak and gray,
With the spoil which their toil
Raked together
From the conquest but One could foil.
Ione.
Have they passed?
Panthea.
         They have passed;
They outspeeded the blast,
While 'tis said, they are fled:
Ione.
Whither, oh, whither?
Panthea.
To the dark, to the past, to the dead.
Voice of unseen Spirits.
Bright clouds float in heaven,
Dew-stars gleam on earth,
Waves assemble on ocean,
They are gathered and driven
By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee!
They shake with emotion,
They dance in their mirth.
  But where are ye?
   The pine boughs are singing
Old songs with new gladness,
The billows and fountains
Fresh music are flinging,
Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;
The storms mock the mountains
With the thunder of gladness.
  But where are ye?
  Ione.
What charioteers are these?
Panthea.
               Where are their chariots?
               Semichorus of Hours.
The voice of the Spirits of Air and of Earth
Have drawn back the figured curtain of sleep
Which covered our being and darkened our birth
In the deep.
A Voice.
      In the deep?
      Semichorus II.
             Oh, below the deep.
             Semichorus I.
An hundred ages we had been kept
Cradled in visions of hate and care,
And each one who waked as his brother slept,
Found the truth
Semichorus II.
          Worse than his visions were!
          Semichorus I.
We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep;
We have known the voice of Love in dreams;
We have felt the wand of Power, and leap
Semichorus II.
As the billows leap in the morning beams!
Chorus.
Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,
Pierce with song heaven's silent light,
Enchant the day that too swiftly flees,
To check its flight ere the cave of Night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds
Which chased the day like a bleeding deer,
And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desert year.
But now, oh weave the mystic measure
Of music, and dance, and shapes of light,
Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure,
Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite.
A Voice.
                    Unite!
                    Panthea.
See, where the Spirits of the human mind
Wrapped in sweet sounds, as in bright veils, approach.
Chorus of Spirits.
We join the throng
Of the dance and the song,
By the whirlwind of gladness borne along;
As the flying-fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the sea-birds, half asleep.
Chorus of Hours.
Whence come ye, so wild and so fleet,
For sandals of lightning are on your feet,
And your wings are soft and swift as thought,
And your eyes are as love which is veild not?
Chorus of Spirits.
We come from the mind
Of human kind
Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind,
Now 'tis an ocean
Of clear emotion,
A heaven of serene and mighty motion
From that deep abyss
Of wonder and bliss,
Whose caverns are crystal palaces;
From those skiey towers
Where Thought's crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
From the dim recesses
Of woven caresses,
Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses
From the azure isles,
Where sweet Wisdom smiles,
Delaying your ships with her siren wiles.
From the temples high
Of Man's ear and eye,
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy;
From the murmurings
Of the unsealed springs
Where Science bedews her Ddal wings.
Years after years,
Through blood, and tears,
And a thick hell of hatreds, and hopes, and fears;
We waded and flew,
And the islets were few
Where the bud-blighted flowers of happiness grew.
Our feet now, every palm,
Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
And, beyond our eyes,
The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.
Chorus of Spirits and Hours.
Then weave the web of the mystic measure;
From the depths of the sky and the ends of the earth,
Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure,
Fill the dance and the music of mirth,
As the waves of a thousand streams rush by
To an ocean of splendour and harmony!
Chorus of Spirits.
Our spoil is won,
Our task is done,
We are free to dive, or soar, or run;
Beyond and around,
Or within the bound
Which clips the world with darkness round.
We'll pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonize:
Death, Chaos, and Night,
From the sound of our flight,
Shall flee, like mist from a tempest's might.
And Earth, Air, and Light,
And the Spirit of Might,
Which drives round the stars in their fiery flight;
And Love, Thought, and Breath,
The powers that quell Death,
Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath.
And our singing shall build
In the void's loose field
A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield;
We will take our plan
From the new world of man,
And our work shall be called the Promethean.
Chorus of Hours.
Break the dance, and scatter the song;
Let some depart, and some remain.
Semichorus I.
We, beyond heaven, are driven along:
Semichorus II.
Us the enchantments of earth retain:
Semichorus I.
Ceaseless, and rapid, and fierce, and free,
With the Spirits which build a new earth and sea,
And a heaven where yet heaven could never be.
Semichorus II.
Solemn, and slow, and serene, and bright,
Leading the Day and outspeeding the Night,
With the powers of a world of perfect light.
Semichorus I.
We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere,
Till the trees, and the beasts, and the clouds appear
From its chaos made calm by love, not fear.
Semichorus II.
We encircle the ocean and mountains of earth,
And the happy forms of its death and birth
Change to the music of our sweet mirth.
Chorus of Hours and Spirits.
Break the dance, and scatter the song,
Let some depart, and some remain,
Wherever we fly we lead along
In leashes, like starbeams, soft yet strong,
The clouds that are heavy with love's sweet rain.
Panthea.
Ha! they are gone!
Ione.
          Yet feel you no delight
From the past sweetness?
Panthea.
             As the bare green hill
When some soft cloud vanishes into rain,
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky!
Ione.
             Even whilst we speak
New notes arise. What is that awful sound?
Panthea.
'Tis the deep music of the rolling world
Kindling within the strings of the waved air
olian modulations.
Ione.
          Listen too,
How every pause is filled with under-notes,
Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones,
Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul,
As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea.
Panthea.
But see where through two openings in the forest
Which hanging branches overcanopy,
And where two runnels of a rivulet,
Between the close moss violet-inwoven,
Have made their path of melody, like sisters
Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles,
Turning their dear disunion to an isle
Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts;
Two visions of strange radiance float upon
The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound,
Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet
Under the ground and through the windless air.
Ione.
I see a chariot like that thinnest boat,
In which the Mother of the Months is borne
By ebbing light into her western cave,
When she upsprings from interlunar dreams;
O'er which is curved an orblike canopy
Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods,
Distinctly seen through that dusk aery veil,
Regard like shapes in an enchanter's glass;
Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold,
Such as the genii of the thunderstorm
Pile on the floor of the illumined sea
When the sun rushes under it; they roll
And move and grow as with an inward wind;
Within it sits a wingd infant, white
Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow,
Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost,
Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds
Of its white robe, woof of ethereal pearl.
Its hair is white, the brightness of white light
Scattered in strings; yet its two eyes are heavens
Of liquid darkness, which the Deity
Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured
From jaggd clouds, out of their arrowy lashes,
Tempering the cold and radiant air around,
With fire that is not brightness; in its hand
It sways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point
A guiding power directs the chariot's prow
Over its wheeld clouds, which as they roll
Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds,
Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.
Panthea.
And from the other opening in the wood
Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony,
A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,
Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass
Flow, as through empty space, music and light:
Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,
Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden,
Sphere within sphere; and every space between
Peopled with unimaginable shapes,
Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep,
Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl
Over each other with a thousand motions,
Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning,
And with the force of self-destroying swiftness,
Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on,
Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones,
Intelligible words and music wild.
With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
Of elemental subtlety, like light;
And the wild odour of the forest flowers,
The music of the living grass and air,
The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams
Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed,
Seem kneaded into one areal mass
Which drowns the sense. Within the orb itself,
Pillowed upon its alabaster arms,
Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil,
On its own folded wings, and wavy hair,
The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep,
And you can see its little lips are moving,
Amid the changing light of their own smiles,
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream.
Ione.
'Tis only mocking the orb's harmony.
Panthea.
And from a star upon its forehead, shoot,
Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears
With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined,
Embleming heaven and earth united now,
Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel
Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought,
Filling the abyss with sun-like lightenings,
And perpendicular now, and now transverse,
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass,
Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart;
Infinite mines of adamant and gold,
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems,
And caverns on crystalline columns poised
With vegetable silver overspread;
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs
Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed,
Whose vapours clothe earth's monarch mountain-tops
With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythd chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,
The anatomies of unknown wingd things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jaggd alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God
Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried,
'Be not!' And like my words they were no more.
The Earth.
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! ha! the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
The Moon.
Brother mine, calm wanderer,
Happy globe of land and air,
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame,
With love, and odour, and deep melody
  Through me, through me!
  The Earth.
Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.
The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses,
And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses,
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse,
Who all our green and azure universe
Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending
A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones,
And splinter and knead down my children's bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending,
Until each crag-like tower, and storied column,
Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn,
My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire;
My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom
Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire:
How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all;
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, love
Burst in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball.
The Moon.
The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
  On mine, on mine!
   Gazing on thee I feel, I know
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
And living shapes upon my bosom move:
Music is in the sea and air,
Wingd clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
  'Tis love, all love!
  The Earth.
It interpenetrates my granite mass,
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,
They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers.
And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being:
With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever,
Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,
Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error,
This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love;
Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven
Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even,
Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move:
Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left,
Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured;
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored.
Man, oh, not men! a chain of linkd thought,
Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!
His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-wingd ship, whose helm
Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm,
Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his dreams pass;
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Ddal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.
The Moon.
The shadow of white death has passed
From my path in heaven at last,
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep;
And through my newly-woven bowers,
Wander happy paramours,
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
  Thy vales more deep.
  The Earth.
As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold
A half unfrozen dew-globe, green, and gold,
And crystalline, till it becomes a wingd mist,
And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
Outlives the moon, and on the sun's last ray
Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst.
The Moon.
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy, and heaven's smile divine;
All suns and constellations shower
On thee a light, a life, a power
Which doth array thy sphere; thou pourest thine
  On mine, on mine!
  The Earth.
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
The Moon.
As in the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
  Full, oh, too full!
   Thou art speeding round the sun
Brightest world of many a one;
Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour
Borne beside thee by a power
Like the polar Paradise,
Magnet-like of lovers' eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
Maniac-like around thee move
Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side
Like a Mnad, round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
In the weird Cadman forest.
Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
Of thy soul from hungry space,
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or a chameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
As a violet's gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a gray and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
Athwart the western mountain it enfolds,
When the sunset sleeps
  Upon its snow
  The Earth.
  And the weak day weeps
   That it should be so.
Oh, gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night,
Through isles for ever calm;
Oh, gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce
The caverns of my pride's deep universe,
Charming the tiger joy, whose tramplings fierce
Made wounds which need thy balm.
Panthea.
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
Out of the stream of sound.
Ione.
               Ah me! sweet sister,
The stream of sound has ebbed away from us,
And you pretend to rise out of its wave,
Because your words fall like the clear, soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph's limbs and hair.
Panthea.
Peace! peace! A mighty Power, which is as darkness,
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight: the bright visions,
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone,
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
Ione.
There is a sense of words upon mine ear.
Panthea.
An universal sound like words: Oh, list!
Demogorgon.
Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul,
Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies,
Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll
The love which paves thy path along the skies:
The Earth.
I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies.
Demogorgon.
Thou, Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
With wonder, as it gazes upon thee;
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth
Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:
The Moon.
I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee!
Demogorgon.
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Dmons and Gods,
Aetherial Dominations, who possess
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness:
A Voice from above.
Our great Republic hears, we are blest, and bless.
Demogorgon.
Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered
A Voice from beneath.
                 Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
Demogorgon.
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
From man's high mind even to the central stone
Of sullen lead; from heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on:
A confused Voice.
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
Demogorgon.
Spirits, whose homes are flesh: ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms, and fish; ye living leaves and buds;
Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes:
A Voice.
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
Demogorgon.
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
All.
Speak: thy strong words may never pass away.
Demogorgon.
This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
Composed at Este, Sept., Oct., 1818 (Act I); at Rome, March - April 6, 1819 (Acts II, III); at Florence, close of 1819 (Act IV). Published by C. and J. Ollier, London, summer of 1820.

Note from Mrs. Shelley: 'On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. .....Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the law of the world. ....And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in their decay, or gaed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many passages in the Prometheus which show the intense delight he received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and he wrote from Rome, ''My Prometheus Unbound is just finished, and in a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts.'''
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
,

IN CHAPTERS [150/303]



   92 Integral Yoga
   59 Poetry
   21 Christianity
   15 Philosophy
   12 Occultism
   10 Fiction
   7 Yoga
   7 Psychology
   7 Mysticism
   5 Hinduism
   4 Baha i Faith
   2 Mythology
   1 Philsophy
   1 Buddhism
   1 Alchemy


  119 Sri Aurobindo
   47 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   17 The Mother
   15 Saint Augustine of Hippo
   12 Satprem
   8 Percy Bysshe Shelley
   6 Carl Jung
   5 William Wordsworth
   5 Walt Whitman
   5 Plotinus
   5 Plato
   4 William Butler Yeats
   4 Sri Ramakrishna
   4 Rabindranath Tagore
   4 James George Frazer
   4 Friedrich Schiller
   4 Baha u llah
   3 Vyasa
   3 Swami Vivekananda
   2 Jorge Luis Borges
   2 Jordan Peterson
   2 John Keats
   2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   2 H P Lovecraft
   2 Franz Bardon


   30 Savitri
   14 City of God
   12 Collected Poems
   11 The Secret Of The Veda
   11 The Life Divine
   10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   8 Shelley - Poems
   8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   7 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   7 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
   7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
   7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   7 5.1.01 - Ilion
   6 The Secret Doctrine
   6 Isha Upanishad
   6 Essays On The Gita
   5 Wordsworth - Poems
   5 Whitman - Poems
   5 Vedic and Philological Studies
   5 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
   4 Yeats - Poems
   4 The Golden Bough
   4 Schiller - Poems
   4 Kena and Other Upanishads
   3 Vishnu Purana
   3 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
   3 Tagore - Poems
   3 Some Answers From The Mother
   3 On the Way to Supermanhood
   2 The Book of Certitude
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Talks
   2 Raja-Yoga
   2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
   2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
   2 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   2 Maps of Meaning
   2 Lovecraft - Poems
   2 Letters On Yoga I
   2 Keats - Poems
   2 Initiation Into Hermetics
   2 Goethe - Poems
   2 Essays Divine And Human
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   2 Aion
   2 Agenda Vol 03
   2 Agenda Vol 02


00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Gods feed upon Svdh and Vaa, as these represent the ascending movement of human consciousness: it is man's self-giving and aspiration and the upward urge of his heart and soul that reach to the Gods, and it is that which the Immortals take into themselves and are, as it were, nourished by, since it is something that appertains to their own nature.
   And in response they descend and approach and enter into the aspiring human soulthis descent and revelation and near and concrete presence of Divinity, this Hanta is man's food, for by it his consciousness is nourished.
  --
   The one, however, is not completely divorced from the other. The apparent, the inferior nature is only a preparation for the real, the superior nature. The Path of the Fathers concerns itself with man as a mental being and seeks so to ordain and accomplish its duties and ideals as to lead him on to the Path of the Gods; the mind, the life, and the body consciousness should be so disciplined, educated, purified, they should develop along such a line and gradually rise to such a stage as to make them fit to receive the light which belongs to the higher level, so allowing the human soul imbedded in them to extricate itself and pass on to the Immortal Life.
   And they who are thus lifted up into the Higher Orbit are freed from the bondage to the cycle of rebirth. They enjoy the supreme Liberation that is of the Spirit; and even when they descend into the Inferior Path, it is to work out as free agents, as vehicles of the Divine, a special purpose, to bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher.
  --
   The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death brings about. Death, of course, means the dissolution of the body, but it represents also dissolution pure and simple. Indeed death is a process which does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first necessity for the aspiring mortalfor, it is said, the body is the first instrument for the working out of one's life ideal. But man's true personality, the real individuality lies beyond, beyond the body, beyond the life, beyond the mind, beyond the triple region that Death lords it over. That is the divine world, the Heaven of the Immortals, beyond death and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni, man's true soul. This soul can be reached only when one exceeds the bounds and limitations of the triple cord and experiences one's communion and identity with all souls and all existence. Agni is the secret divinity within, within the individual and within the world; he is the Immanent Divine, the cosmic godhead that holds together and marshals all the elements and components, all the principles that make up the manifest universe. He it is that has entered into the world and created facets of his own reality in multiple forms: and it is he that lies secret in the human being as the Immortal soul through all its adventure of life and death in the series of incarnations in terrestrial evolution. The adoration and realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master of the psychic being, is called jtaveds, he who knows the births, all the transmigrations from life to life.
   The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinctionDeath in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not, waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the present and the actual.
   But Yama did answer and unveil the mystery and impart the supreme secret knowledge the knowledge of the Transcendent Brahman: it is out of the transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Mastersarvabhtntartm, antarymis called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it is at present) is to ascend and evolve. The first step is to learn to distinguish between the Good and the Pleasurable (reya and preya). The line of pleasure leads to the external, the superficial, the false: while the other path leads towards the inner and the higher truth. So the second step is the gradual withdrawal of the consciousness from the physical and the sensual and even the mental preoccupation and focussing it upon what is certain and permanent. In the midst of the death-ridden consciousness in the heart of all that is unstable and fleetingone has to look for Agni, the eternal godhead, the Immortal in mortality, the Timeless in time through whom lies the passage to Immortality beyond Time.
   Man has two souls corresponding to his double status. In the inferior, the soul looks downward and is involved in the current of Impermanence and Ignorance, it tastes of grief and sorrow and suffers death and dissolution: in the higher it looks upward and communes and joins with the Eternal (the cosmic) and then with the Absolute (the transcendent). The lower is a reflection of the higher, the higher comes down in a diminished and hence tarnished light. The message is that of deliverance, the deliverance and reintegration of the lower soul out of its bondage of worldly ignorant life into the freedom and immortality first of its higher and then of its highest status. It is true, however, that the Upanishad does not make a trenchant distinction between the cosmic and the transcendent and often it speaks of both in the same breath, as it were. For in fact they are realities involved in each other and interwoven. Indeed the triple status, including the Individual, forms one single totality and the three do not exclude or cancel each other; on the contrary, they combine and may be said to enhance each other's reality. The Transcendence expresses or deploys itself in the cosmoshe goes abroad,sa paryagt: and the cosmic individualises, concretises itself in the particular and the personal. The one single spiritual reality holds itself, aspects itself in a threefold manner.

00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   it cannot be defined or figured in the terms of the phenomenal consciousness. In speaking of it, however, the Upanishads invariably and repeatedly refer to two attributes that characterise its fundamental nature. These two aspects have made such an impression upon the consciousness of the Upanishadic seer that his enthusiasm almost wholly plays about them and is centred on them. When he contemplates or communes with the Supreme Object, these seem to him to be the mark of its au thenticity, the seal of its high status and the reason of all the charm and magic it possesses. The first aspect or attri bute is that of light the brilliance, the solar effulgenceravituly-arpa the bright, clear, shadow less Light of lightsvirajam ubhram jyotim jyoti The second aspect is that of delight, the bliss, the Immortality inherent in that wide effulgencenandarpam amtam yad vibhti.
   And what else is the true character, the soul of beauty than light and delight? "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." And a thing of joy is a thing of light. Joy is the radiance rippling over a thing of beauty. Beauty is always radiant: the charm, the loveliness of an object is but the glow of light that it emanates. And it would not be a very incorrect mensuration to measure the degree of beauty by the degree of light radiated. The diamond is not only a thing of value, but a thing of beauty also, because of the concentrated and undimmed light that it enshrines within itself. A dark, dull and dismal thing, devoid of interest and attraction becomes aesthetically precious and significant as soon as the artist presents it in terms of the values of light. The entire art of painting is nothing but the expression of beauty, in and through the modalities of light.
  --
   In the Little there lies no happiness, the Vast alone is the Happiness. The Vast is the Immortality, the Little is the Mortality.
   The rich and sensuous beauty luxuriating in high colour and ample decoration that one meets often in the creation of the earlier Vedic seers returned again, in a more chiselled and polished and stylised manner, in the classical poets. The Upanishads in this respect have a certain kinship with the early poets of the intervening ageVyasa and Valmiki. Upam KlidsasyaKalidasa revels in figures and images; they are profusely heaped on one another and usually possess a complex and composite texture. Valmiki's images are simple and elemental, brief and instinct with a vast resonance, spare and full of power. The same brevity and simplicity, vibrant with an extraordinary power of evocation, are also characteristic of the Upanishadic mantra With Valmiki's
  --
   Art at its highest tends to become also the simplest and the most unconventional; and it is then the highest art, precisely because it does not aim at being artistic. The aesthetic motive is totally absent in the Upanishads; the sense of beauty is there, but it is attendant upon and involved in a deeper strand of consciousness. That consciousness seeks consciousness itself, the fullness of consciousness, the awareness and possession of the Truth and Reality,the one thing which, if known, gives the knowledge of all else. And this consciousness of the Truth is also Delight, the perfect Bliss, the Immortality where the whole universe resolves itself into its original state of rasa, that is to say, of essential and inalienable harmony and beauty.
   ***

00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Indeed delight is the third and the supremely intimate element of the poetic personality. Dear and delightful is the poet, dear and delightful his works, priya, priyi His hand is dripping with sweetness,kavir hi madhuhastya.24 The Poet-God shines in his pristine beauty and is showering delight.25 He is filled with utter ecstasy so that he may rise to the very source of the luminous Energy.26? Pure is the Divine Joy and it enters and purifies all forms as it moves to the seat of the Immortals.27Indeed this sparkling Delight is the Poet-Seer and it is that that brings forth the creative word, the utterance of Indra.28
   The solar vision of the Poet encompasses in its might the wide Earth and Heaven, fuses them in supreme Delight in the womb of the Truth.29 The Earth is lifted up and given in marriage to Heaven in the home of Truth, for the creation and expression of the Truth in its varied beauty,cru citram.

0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
   Totapuri was the bearer of a philosophy new to Sri Ramakrishna, the non-dualistic Vedanta philosophy, whose conclusions Totapuri had experienced in his own life. This ancient Hindu system designates the Ultimate Reality as Brahman, also described as Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brahman is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity. But through maya, Its inscrutable Power, time, space, and causality are created and the One appears to break into the many. The eternal Spirit appears as a manifold of individuals endowed with form and subject to the conditions of time. the Immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The Changeless undergoes change. The sinless Pure Soul, hypnotized by Its own maya, experiences the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. But these experiences based on the duality of the subject-object relationship are unreal. Even the vision of a Personal God
   is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the experience of any other object. Man attains his liberation, therefore, by piercing the veil of maya and rediscovering his total identity with Brahman. Knowing himself to be one with the Universal Spirit, he realizes ineffable Peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death; only then does he become immortal. 'And this is the ultimate goal of all religions — to dehypnotize the soul now hypnotized by its own ignorance.
  --
   During this period Sri Ramakrishna suffered several bereavements. The first was the death of a nephew named Akshay. After the young man's death Sri Ramakrishna said: "Akshay died before my very eyes. But it did not affect me in the least. I stood by and watched a man die. It was like a sword being drawn from its scabbard. I enjoyed the scene, and laughed and sang and danced over it. They removed the body and cremated it. But the next day as I stood there (pointing to the southeast verandah of his room), I felt a racking pain for the loss of Akshay, as if somebody were squeezing my heart like a wet towel. I wondered at it and thought that the Mother was teaching me a lesson. I was not much concerned even with my own body — much less with a relative. But if such was my pain at the loss of a nephew, how much more must be the grief of the householders at the loss of their near and dear ones!" In 1871 Mathur died, and some five years later Sambhu Mallick — who, after Mathur's passing away, had taken care of the Master's comfort. In 1873 died his elder brother Rameswar, and in 1876, his beloved mother. These bereavements left their imprint on the tender human heart of Sri Ramakrishna, albeit he had realized the Immortality of the soul and the illusoriness of birth and death.
   In March 1875, about a year before the death of his mother, the Master met Keshab Chandra Sen. The meeting was a momentous event for both Sri Ramakrishna and Keshab. Here the Master for the first time came into actual, contact with a worthy representative of modern India.

0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  This brings us to the circumstances that led to the writing and publication of this monumental work, which has made M. one of the Immortals in hagiographic literature.
  While many educated people heard Sri Ramakrishna's talks, it was given to this illustrious personage alone to leave a graphic and exact account of them for posterity, with details like date, hour, place, names and particulars about participants. Humanity owes this great book to the ingrained habit of diary-keeping with which M. was endowed.

0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the Immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life.
  In each of these forms Nature acts both individually and collectively; for the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence, whether family, clan and nation or groupings dependent on less physical principles or the supreme group of all, our collective humanity. Man also may seek his own individual good from any or all of these spheres of activity, or identify himself in them with the collectivity and live for it, or, rising to a truer perception of this complex universe, harmonise the individual realisation with the collective aim. For as it is the right relation of the soul with the Supreme, while it is in the universe, neither to assert egoistically its separate being nor to blot itself out in the Indefinable, but to realise its unity with the Divine and the world and unite them in the individual, so the right relation of the individual with the collectivity is neither to pursue egoistically his own material or mental progress or spiritual salvation without regard to his fellows, nor for the sake of the community to suppress or maim his proper development, but to sum up in himself all its best and completest possibilities and pour them out by thought, action and all other means on his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities.

0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  It must become aware of the Immortality of the elements constituting it (which is a scientifically recognised fact), then it must
  submit itself to the influence and the will of the psychic being

0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  to have or to keep than the nectar of the Immortals."7
  What does this mean? Doesn't the Divine Grace always

01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.
  2.17
  --
  Earth offers to the Immortal Ecstasy
  Began again beneath the eternal Hand.

01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Her past, a block on the Immortal's road,
  Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A builder of the Immortal's secret house,
  An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:
  --
  Our body's cells must hold the Immortal's flame.
  Else would the spirit reach alone its source
  --
  And flame-wrapped outbursts of the Immortal Word
  And flashes of an occult revealing Light
  --
  The omniscient hush, womb of the Immortal Word,
  And of the Timeless the still brooding face,
  --
  And Nature bore the Immortal in her womb,
  That she might climb through him to eternal life.

01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And the riddle of the Immortal's birth in Time.
  Along a path of aeons serpentine
  --
  Only the Immortals on their deathless heights
  Dwelling beyond the walls of Time and Space,
  --
  In a body obscuring the Immortal Spirit
  A nameless Resident vesting unseen powers
  --
  And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house
  And make the finite one with Infinity.

01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Thoughts that were born in the Immortals' world,
  Oracles that break out from behind the shrine,
  --
  And the Immortality of the eternal Voice.
  There was no quarrel more of truth with truth;
  --
  A cry of the moments to the Immortal's bliss.
  As if the strophes of a cosmic ode,
  --
  Above were the Immortal's changeless seats,
  White chambers of dalliance with eternity

0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  "Our body's cells must hold the Immortal's flame."17
  Is this the secret of the luminous body?

0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   Oh! But you see, from an occult standpoint, it is a selection. From an external standpoint you could say that there are people in the world who are far superior to you (and I would not disagree!), but from an occult standpoint, it is a selection. There are It can be said that without a doubt the majority of young people here have come because it was promised them that they would be present at the Hour of Realization but they just dont remember it! (Mother laughs) I have already said several times that when you come down on earth, you fall on your head, which leaves you a little dazed! (laughter) Its a pity, but after all, you dont have to remain dazed all your lives, do you? You should go deep within yourselves and there find the Immortal consciousness then you can see very well, you can very clearly remember the circumstances in which you you aspired to be here for the Hour of the Works realization.
   But actually, to tell you the truth, I think your lives are so easy that you dont exert yourselves very much! How many among you have truly an INTENSE need to find their psychic beings? To find out truly who they are? To find out what their roles are, why they are here? You just let yourselves drift. You even complain when things arent easy enough! You just take things as they come. And sometimes, should an aspiration arise in you and you encounter some difficulty in yourself, you say, Oh, Mother is there! Shell take care of it for me! And you think about something else.

0 1961-01-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   53The quarrels of religious sects are like the disputing of pots, which shall be alone allowed to hold the Immortalizing nectar. Let them dispute, but the thing for us is to get at the nectar in whatever pot and attain immortality.
   What is this nectar of immortality?

0 1961-05-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Aphorism 60There is no mortality. It is only the Immortal who can die; the mortal could neither be born nor perish.
   the Immortal can pass from the condition of life to the condition of death (but not death as we understand it); can die means can change condition. the Immortal can pass from this condition to that condition and back and forth again. We call it death, but it has nothing to do with either life or death. They are changes of state.
   (silence)

0 1962-02-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   In Sri Aurobindo's play, Andromeda, daughter of the King of Syria, is condemned by her own people to be devoured by Poseidon, the Sea-god, for some impiety she had committed against him. The story is actually about the passage of a half-primitive tribe, living in terror of the old dark and cruel gods, to a more evolved and sunlit stage. Perseus, son of Diana and Zeus, and protected by Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom and intelligence, comes to deliver Andromeda from the rock she is chained to (the rock symbolizes the Inconscient for the Rishis), and founds the religion of Athene, "... the Omnipotent / Made from His being to lead and discipline / the Immortal spirit of man, till it attain / To order and magnificent mastery / Of all his outward world" (in the words of Sri Aurobindo). It is the force of progress pitted against the old priests of the old religions, symbolized by the cruel and ambitious Polydaon. Here Mother is scrutinizing an old problem"Always the same problem"that she must have encountered in many existences (Egypt included) and would encounter again eleven years later: the acceptance of the death she is forced into as the Supreme's Will, and then this "love of Life" she twice mentions here.
   ***

0 1962-12-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   This B. seems to have had the idea that the perfect man, the Immortal man, would be spherical! And then Thon always used to say (he told me the whole story himself): I told him it wasnt possible, it would be too impracticalpeople couldnt kiss! His idea of a joke. Thon also told me that when B. came to Tlemcen (they first met in Egypt, then again in Tlemcen), he saw the house Thon was building and asked, Why is your house painted red? Does it have some mystical significance? And Thon replied, No, its because red goes well with green! So you get the picture. But I dont remember his name any more; in his time he was very well known, he was a contemporary of the fellow who wrote The Great Initiates.
   Schur?

0 1963-03-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   And force to be mortal the Immortal spirit.
   (X.IV.667)
  --
   And force to be mortal the Immortal spirit.
   Wonderful.

0 1964-11-21, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   God knows, never, not one minute in my life, even when things were the darkest, the blackest, the most negative, the most painful, not once did the thought come, I would like to die. And ever since I had the experience of psychic immortality, the Immortality of consciousness, that is, in 1902 or 3, or 4 at the latest (sixty years ago now), all fear of death went away. Now the bodys cells have the sense of their immortality. There was also a time when I almost had a sort of curiosity about death; it was satisfied by my two experiences in which, according to the surface illusion, my body was dead, while, within, I had a wonderfully intense life (the first time, it was in the vital, the other time, way up above2). So that even that curiosity (I cant call it curiosity), even that question is no longer asked by the cells. But the possibility does present itself: according to the ordinary outer logic, if this isnt transformed, it must necessarily come to an end. And always, always, I receive the same answer, which isnt an answer with words, but an answer with a knowledge (how can I put it?), a FACTUAL knowledge: Its no solution. To say things in quite a banal way, this is the answer: Its no solution.
   So we are after another solution, since death isnt considered to be a solution. And its obvious that it is no solution.

0 1969-02-01, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body,for it is only by living in the Immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.
   Sri Aurobindo

0 1972-04-08, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Our bodys cells must hold the Immortals flame.
   Savitri, I.III.35

02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   To begin with, we refuse to admit or recognise that there is or is bound to be a contradiction or opposition between Matter and Spirit, between body and soul or between the human and the divine. We start with an experience, a realisation which declares the essential unity and identity of the duality. That is the thing that has to be posited first clear and nett. The question next arises how the two are one and identical; this demands some clarification. For, is it meant that they are one and the same in the sense that Zeus and Jupiter are the same or that water and H2O are the same? Apart from any barren theorising, is it not a universal and eternal and invariable experience that to attain to the Divine one must leave behind the human, to become the Immortal one must cease to be a mortal and to live in the Spirit one has to deny Matter? The real answer, however, is that it is so and it is not so. The dilemma is not so trenchant as it has been made out to be.
   To the regard of one line of experience, Matter seems opposed to Spirit only so far as the actual and outer formulation of Matter is concerned: even then the opposition is only apparent and relative. This is the very crux of the problem. For, to such a regard Spirit becomes Matter also, it is also Matterannam brahma eva. Spirit is consciousness, cit; and Matter, it is said, is unconsciousness, acit. But unconsciousness need not be and is not, in our view, the absolute negation or utter absence of consciousness, it is only an involved or involute consciousness. If consciousness is wakefulness, unconsciousness is nothing more than forgetfulness: it is only an abeyance or suspension of consciousness, not annihilation.

02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   A great opportunity is offered to India's soul, a mighty auspicious moment is come, if she can choose. If she chooses rightly, then can she arrive at the perfect fulfilment of her agelong endeavour, her life mission. India has preserved and fostered through the immemorial spiritual living of her saints and seers and sages the invaluable treasure, the vitalising, the Immortalising power of spirituality, so that it can be placed at the service of terrestrial life for the deliverance of mankind, for the transfiguration of the human type. It is this for which India lives; by losing this India loses all her reason of existenceraison d'tre the earth and humanity too lose all significance. Today we are in the midst of an incomparable ordeal. If we know how to take the final and crucial step, we come out of it triumphant, a new soul and a new body, and we make the path straight for the Lord. We have to recognise clearly and unequivocally that victory on' one side will mean that the path of the Divineof progress and evolution and fulfilmentwill remain open, become wider and smoother and safer; but if the victory is on the other side, the path will be closed perhaps for ever, at least for many ages and even then the travail will have to be undergone again under the most difficult conditions and circumstances. Not with a political shortsightedness, not out of -the considerations of convenience or diplomacy, of narrow parochial interests, but with the steady vision of the soul that encompasses the supreme welfare of humanity, we have to make our choice, we have to go over to the right side and oppose the wrong one with all the integrity of our life and being. The Allies, as they have been justly called, are really our allies, our friends and comrades, in spite of their thousand faults and defects; they have stood on the side of the Truth whose manifestation and triumph is our goal. Even though they did not know perhaps in, the beginning what they stood for, even though perhaps as yet they do not comprehend the full sense and solemnity of the issues, still they have chosen a side which is ours, and we have to stand by them whole-heartedly in an all-round comradeship if we want to be saved from a great perdition.
   This war is a great menace; it is also a great opportunity. It can land humanity into a catastrophe; it can also raise it to levels which would not have been within its reach but for the occasion. The Forces of Darkness have precipitated themselves with all their might upon the world, but by their very downrush have called upon the higher Forces of Light also to descend. The true' use of the opportunity offered to man would be to bring about a change, better still, a reversal, in his consciousness, that is to say, it will be of highest utility if it forces upon him by the pressure of inexorable circumstancessince normally he is so unwilling and incapable to do it through a spontaneous inner awakening the inescapable decision that he must change and shall change; and the change is to be for or towards the birth of a spiritual consciousness in earthly life. Indeed the war might be viewed" as the birth-pangs of such a spiritual consciousness. Whether the labour would be sublimely fruitful here and how or end in barrenness is the question the Fates and the gods are asking of man the mortal beingtoday.

02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And bright dews drip from the Immortal's sky.
  A passage for the Powers that move our days,
  --
  Some far tone of the Immortal rhapsodist Voice,
  Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,

02.03 - The Glory and the Fall of Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The voice of Time sang of the Immortal's joy;
  An inspiration and a lyric cry,
  --
  In her nature housing the Immortal's power,
  In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,
  --
  In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,
  In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,

02.03 - The Shakespearean Word, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   O Word, cry out the Immortal litany:
   Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born. ||154.44||

02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It knew not the Immortal in its house;
  It had no greater deeper cause to live.

02.04 - Two Sonnets of Shakespeare, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Shakespeare has treated love in a novel way; he has given a new figure to that common familiar sentiment. And incidentally he has given a new sense and bearing to Death. From a human carnal base there is a struggle, an effort here to rise into something extracorporeal; that is, something outside and independent of the body and impersonal. The sense of the first sonnet is this: the body decays and dies, even as bleak winter seizes upon the beauties of Nature or black Night swallows up the light of the day. But love lingers stillas the song of sweet birdsand the dying cadence of love curiously invokes and evokes a resurgent love in the beloved. The second sonnet hymns the soul's conquest over Death. The soul is that which is sinless in the sinful, it is the pure, the unsullied the Immortal lovein this filth and dirt of a mortal body with its crude passions. Death eats away the body, but in this way the soul grows and eats away Death. This is the final epiphany, the death of Death and the resurgence of the soul divine in its love divine.
   Sonnet 73

02.05 - Robert Graves, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In ancient days and in some spiritual practice and discipline this fungus had a special use for a definite purpose. Its use produces on one a drowsy effect, perhaps a strong and poisonous intoxicating effect. What is the final result of this drugging? We know that in our country among the sadhus and some sects practising occult science, taking of certain herbal drugs is recommended, even obligatory. Today Aldous Huxley has taken up the cue, in the most modern fashion indeed, and prescribed mescalin in the process of Yoga and spiritual practice. Did the Vedic Rishis see in the same way a usefulness of Soma, the proverbial creeper secreting the Immortal drink of delight? However, the Tantriksadhaks hold that particular soporifics possess the virtue of quieting the external senses and dulling and deadening the sense organs, and thereby freeing the inner and subtler consciousness in its play and manifestation.
   Our poet too is saying something in the same line. He is appealing to the toadstool god to give him the right vision, to take him to the other shore, to lead him to the presence of the gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, evenwhile in the physical body, existence in heaven,ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said.

02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Publishes the Immortality of its rule,
  Its claim to be the perfect form of things,

02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
    Whose lethal touch pursued the Immortal spirit,
    On life was laid the haunting finger of death

02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.
  Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage

02.11 - Hymn to Darkness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   (II) the Immortal Goddess fills up the Vast, above and below. She compels the darkness with her light.
   (III) The Goddess comes and veils her sister, the Dawn and glows through the blackness.

02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  An errant ray from the Immortal Mind
  Accepted the earth's blindness and became
  --
  The Thinker entered the Immortals' air
  And drank again his pure and mighty source.
  --
  A laughter from the Immortal heart of Bliss,
  And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness,
  --
  They bring the Immortal fire to mortal men.
  Iridescent, bodying the invisible,

02.12 - The Heavens of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Upholding with his flame the Immortal hope,
  As if a radiant God had given his soul
  --
  Pressed on the bosom the Immortal's touch is felt,
  Heard are the flutings of the Infinite.

03.02 - The Adoration of the Divine Mother, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Bring into life's closed room the Immortal's air
  And fill the finite with the Infinite.

03.03 - Arjuna or the Ideal Disciple, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   What makes a true disciple? For it is not everyone that can claim or be worthy of or meet the demands of the title. Disciplehood, like all great qualities, that is to say, qualities taken at their source and origin, is a function of the soul. Indeed, it is the soul itself coming up and asking for it'! native divine status; it is the call of the Immortal in the mortal, the voice of the inmost being rising above the clamours and lures of the world, above the hungers and ties of one's own nature. When that rings out clear and unmistakable, the Divine reveals Himself as the Guru, the Path is shown and the initiation given. Even such a cry was Arjuna's when he said: iyaste ham sdhi mm twam prapannamit is a most poignant utterance in which the whole being bursts forth as it were, and delivers itself of all that it needs and of all that it gives. It needs the Illumination: it can no longer bear the darkness and confusion of Ignorance in which it is entangled; and it gives itself whole and entire, absolutely and without reserve, throws itself simply at the mercy of the Divine. Arjuna fulfils, as very few can so completely, the fundamental conditions the sine qua nonof discipleship.
   A certain modern critic, however, demurs. He asks why Arjuna was chosen in preference to Yudhisthira and doubts the wisdom and justice of the choice (made by Sri Krishna or the author of the Gita). Is not the eldest of the Pandavas also the best? He possesses in every way a superior dhra. He has knowledge and wisdom; he is free from passions, calm and self-controlled; he always acts according to the dictates of what is right and true. He is not swayed by the impulses of the moment or by considerations relating to his personal self; serene and unruffled he seeks to fashion his conduct by the highest possible standard available to him. That is why he is called dharmarja. If such a one is not to be considered as an ideal disciple, who else can be?

03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  His toys were the Immortal verities.
  All here self-lost had there its divine place.

03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The conception of a personal immortality the impersonal is naturally always immortal, there is no problem thereof a physical immortality even attains a significant value looked at from this standpoint. The urge for immortality is not merely a wish to continue indefinitely an earthly life, because of its pleasures or because of an unreasoning attachment; it means regaining and establishing the Immortal body that one has or that one is essentially and potentially. The body seeks to be immortal, for it contains and secretly is its immortal Formal Cause (to make use of an Aristotelian term). The materialisation of an immortal being and figure of being that is the consummation demanded of human life on earth.
   The spirit, the pure self in man is formless; but his soul the spirit cast into the evolutionary mould in manifestationhas a form: it possesses a personal identity of its own. Each soul or Psyche is a contoured consciousness, as it were: it is not a vague indefinite charge of consciousness, but consciousness having magnitude and dimensions. And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an imagea faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life,of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the phenomenon. And the human appearance too is an extension or projection of an inner and essential reality which brings out or takes up that configuration when fronting the soul in its evolutionary march through terrestrial life. A mystic poet says:

03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal's heights,
  His life still keeps the human middle way;
  --
  Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
  Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
  --
  And on her lips the Immortal's joy took shape.
  "O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Other peoples may be the arms and the feet and the head of Humanity, but India is its heart, its soul for she cherishes always within her the Truth that lives for ever, the flaming God-head, the Immortal awake in mortality, as say the Vedas, amto martyeu tv .
   ***

04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Moving when feet of the Immortals pass,
  A fiery halo over sleeping hills,

04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Divine then descends into the earth-frame, not merely as an immanent and hidden essencesarvabhtntratm but as an individual person embodying that essencemnu tanumritam. Man too, however earthly and impure he maybe, is essentially the Divine himself, carries in him the spark of the supreme consciousness that he is in his true and highest reality. That is how in him is bridged the gulf that apparently exists between the mortal and the Immortal, the Infinite and the Finite, the Eternal and the Momentary, and the Divine too can come into him and become, so to say, his lower self.
   The individual or personal Divine leaves his home of all blissVaikunthaforgets himself and enters into this world of all misery; but this does not mean that he becomes wholly the Man of Misery: he encompasses all misery within himself, penetrates as well into the stuff and substance of all misery, but suffuses all that with the purifying and transforming pressure of his own supreme consciousness. And yet pain and suffering are real, cruelly real, even to the Divine Man. Just as the ordinary human creature suffers and agonises in spite of the divine essence in him, in spite of his other deeper truth and reality, his soul of inalienable bliss, his psychic being, the Divine too suffers in the same way in spite of his divinity. This double line of consciousness, this system of parallels running alongside each other, interacting upon each other (even intersecting each other, when viewed in a frame of infinity) gives the whole secret mechanism of creation, its purpose, its working and its fulfilment. It is nothing else than the gradual replacement or elimination, elevation or sublimation of the elements on one line that are transmuted into those of the other. The Divine enters into the Evil to root out the Evil and plant there or release and fructify the seed of Divinity lying covered over and lost in the depths of dead inconscience.

04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Aspiring to the Immortals' unseen world.
  Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind

04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   We have spoken of the Inner Consciousness. But there is also, we must now point out, an Inmost Consciousness. As the Superconsciousness is a consciousness-energy in height, the Inmost Consciousness is a consciousness-energy in depth, the deepest depth, beyond or behind the Inner Consciousness. If we wish to put it geometrically, we can say, the vertical section of consciousness represents the line from the superconsciousness to the subconscious or vice versa; the horizontal section represents the normal waking state of consciousness; and there is a transverse section leading from the surface first to the Inner and finally to the Inmost. This inmost consciousness the consciousness most profound and secreted in the cave of the heart, guhhitam gahvaretham,is the consciousness of the soul, the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it: it is the Immortal in the mortal. It is, as has often been described, the nucleus round which is crystallised and organised the triple nature of man consisting of his mind and life and body, the centre of dynamic energy that secretly vivifies them, gradually purifies and transforms them into higher functions and embodiments of consciousness. As a matter of fact, it is this inmost consciousness that serves as the link, at least as the most powerful link, between the higher and lower forms of consciousness, between the Superconscient and the Subsconscient or Inconscient. It takes up within itself all the elements of consciousness that the past in its evolutionary career from the very lowest and basic levels has acquired and elaborated, and by its inherent pressure and secret gestation delivers what was crude and base and unformed as the purest luminous noble substance of the perfectly organised superconscient reality. Indeed, that is the mystic alchemy which the philosophers experimented in the Middle Ages. In this context, the Inner Consciousness, we may note, serves as a medium through which the action of the Inmost (as well as that of the Uppermost) takes place.
   We can picture the whole phenomenon in another way and say in the devotional language of the Mystics that the Inmost Consciousness is the Divine Child, the Superconscient is the Divine Father and the Inferior Consciousness is the Great Mother (Magna Mater): the Inner and the Outer Consciousness are the field of play and the instrument of action as well of this Divine Trinity.

04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Out of the Immortal's substance you were made;
  Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
  --
  Who cam'st from the Immortal spaces here
  

04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Eternal East and West the Immortal Nation
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The March of CivilisationA Global Humanity
  --
   The Eternal East and West the Immortal Nation

04.05 - The Immortal Nation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
  object:04.05 - the Immortal Nation
  author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
  --
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The March of Civilisation the Immortal Nation
   the Immortal Nation
   Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must have been the original source of the inspiration that moved later on Spengler and Toynbee and others to posit a life-line for nations and races and mark its various stages of growth and evolution. The general theory put in a nutshell would be like this: mankind is composed of groups or aggregates of individuals and each has a life-history of its own even like an individual human being, in other words, an inescapable cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and disintegration. All groupspeoples; races, nationshave to pass through these destined stages, although, naturally, at different times and with a varying tempo. The view implies two conclusions or rather postulates:(l) that whatever is born must die, there is no resurrection or rejuvenation, neither in the individual nor in the collective life and (2) that humanity remains on the whole more or less the same, there is no global progress: there is no continued march forward towards a kingdom of heaven upon earth, even as there has not been a decline and deterioration from some Golden Age in the past.
  --
   In any case, the revival or renaissance of a nationa collective consciousness and beingis quite possible, and the normal curve of lifebirth and growth and deathis not even for it the ineluctable destiny. For like the individual, the group too has that in it or the possibility of that in it which is akin, toan isotope of the soul or self, the Immortal conscious being.
   Toynbee also speaks of the possibility of, national regenerationfreedom from the cycle of decline and deaththrough religion (although he limits religion to the Christian faith).

04.06 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   the Immortal Nation Matter Aspires
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The March of CivilisationEvolution of the Spiritual Consciousness
  --
   the Immortal Nation Matter Aspires

04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   That is the meaning of human life, the significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a dire debate, a fierce question, a constant struggle between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will or aspiration to be and the will of inertia not to be the friction, to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, arani out of which the flame is to leap forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusionare symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its petty innocent-looking moments and events are the steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the Immortal godhead in man.
   II

05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   We have spoken of the stability, the fixity, the rigidity even, of the god type and we contrasted it with the variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this material sheath. The gods have no body, but they have a form which is supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human figure. Gods, we said, are cosmic forceslines (or vectors, if we wish to be scientifically precise) of universal forces; this does not mean that they have no shape or form. They too have a form and can be recognised by it even as a human being is recognisable by his body. In spite of variability the form retains its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and artist often seeks to convey this character of the Immortals by giving them a plurality of arms and heads. In modern times the inspiration behind the surrealist movement lies precisely in this attempt to express simultaneity of diverse gestures and activities, a synthetic close-up of succeeding moments and disparate objects or events. But in spite of all changes Proteus remains Proteus and can be recognised as such by the vigilant and careful eye. The human frame, we have said, is more fixed and rigid, being made of the material substance. It has not evidently the variability of the body of a god. And yet there is a deeper mystery: the human body is not or need not be so inflexible as it appears to be or as it usually is. It has considerable plastic capacities. We would say that the human body holds a marvellous juste milieu. By its solid concreteness it acts as a fortress for the inner consciousness to dwell in safe from easy attacks of the hostiles: it acts also as a firm weapon for the same inner consciousness to cut into the material world and indent and impress its pattern of truth upon an otherwise hard and refractory material made of ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the alchemy of which the human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult knowledge and power. The human body can suffer a sea-change which is not within the reach of the radiant body of an immortal.
   IV

05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A spell to bring the Immortal's bliss on earth,
  To mate with heaven's truth our mortal thought,
  --
  Divines the Immortalities of form
  And takes the body for the sculptured soul.

05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Gods Labour the Immortal Person
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the GoalBypaths of Souls Journey
  --
   Gods Labour the Immortal Person

05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
  object:05.04 - the Immortal Person
  author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
  --
   the Immortal Person
   The whole purpose of man's life upon earth, it may be said, is to make an individuality of himself and to grow in that individuality and organise it perfectly.
  --
   And that is the soul of the man. We have spoken of the body, the life and the mind of the individual, but beside and beyond these elements which are only instruments there is this secret master and overlord. It is the particle of divinity in each, the developing consciousness the spark of Fire, the ray of Light the Immortal in the mortal no bigger than one's thumb." The soul is an individual, an individual formation of the divine reality: it is a godhead formulating an aspect or function of God. We may thus say that the whole purpose of earthly evolution is the evolution of this soul-formation, that is to say, its growing individualisation in light and power, in the expression of the godhead. This growth is first in itself and of itself, its inherent being and consciousness; then, the growth is that of its instrumentation, in other words, the development and organisation of the mind, the life and the body.
   So the individualisation and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but' in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the surface, only when they obey and subserve the culture of the soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment of the true personality.
  --
   Finally, it is the turn of the body to become individualised, personalised, that is to say, when it takes up the disposition and configurationof the psychic person and individual. The first stage is that of a subtle body individualised, a radiant form of etherealised elements consisting of the concentrated light particles of the divine consciousness of the Psyche. This too is an immortalisation of the personal identity which can be achieved and is achieved by the gnostic man who is to come, who will wholly psychicise and divinise his personality. The second stage is the reorganisation and individualisation of the material sheath itself. The very cells of the body are impregnated with the radiant substance of the supreme spiritual consciousness; they live the life of the spiritual individual, the personal divine embodied in the individual. When the whole process is gone through and the work clone, the individual body, physically too, shares in and attains the Immortality of the soul. The body is firm enough to maintain its physical identity and yet plastic enough to change in the manner and to the degree demanded of it at any time.
   In the process of making the body personal and divine and immortal, death or what appears as such may be a needed operation. It is no longer an ineluctable destiny forced upon you, but an instrument which you use consciously for a definite purpose. It is a mystic or occult work (kriy:) which we can try to understand by an analogy. The evolution of the ideal or divine man, the assumption of the mortal by the Immortal involves a twofold operation: rejection and integration. Rejection means throwing out the elements that belong exclusively to the lower grade and cannot be taken up and incorporated into the higher; while integration means taking up and absorbing utilisable elements of the lower into the higher. This double process goes on on all the levels, on the mental, on the vital, on the subtle physical and even on the physical level. At a certain stage or in a concentrated process of alchemy the process of rejection may demand a mode of reshuffling and redisposition which physically appears like death, but it is inevitably followed or accompanied by the process of integration or recreation.
   Perhaps this supreme and dangerous gesture only the Master can makeas the pioneer and pathfinder and he has made it.

05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   the Immortal Person Physics or philosophy
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the Goal In Quest of Reality
  --
   the Immortal Person Physics or philosophy

05.05 - Of Some Supreme Mysteries, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Soul is a portion of the Divine, enshrined in the heart of the human being; it is the child of the Mahakti , it is the Immortal in mortality, the secret godhead that urges the earthly creature ever forward and upward in the march of-evolution, ever expressing and embodying more and more of its inner truth in the actualities of life.
   The Self is the Purua in the individual; it is the consciousness as pure being, simply existent in its own delight, which sees and sanctions all and is yet aloof from the mutabilities of the life becoming.

05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   When a man dies, his soul or psychic being, after a time goes to the psychic world and takes rest there till the hour comes to take birth again in another body upon earth. There are then these two periods in the life after death. First, the passage and next the rest. The passage means the gradual shedding of all the other sheaths or envelopes that surround the psychic being and form its earthly frame. With the physical body has to go also the subtle body, then the vital and finally the mental too. The reason why one does not remember the past lives is this that one leaves behind the instrument of memory the brain mindwith one's death. One does not carryover with the psychic being the other parts that constitute the terrestrial life. They are dispersed and dissolved in their respective cosmic spheres. The subtle body gives up its elements to the subtle physical plane, the vital elements are taken up into the vital world and the mental elements go into the mental world,unless the psychic being is highly developed and has organised around itself as its instrument of self-expression any of these elements. In that case, as much of the terrestrial partsnamely, of the subtle body and life and mindas have come into direct contact with the psychic and have allowed themselves to be moved and moulded by its consciousness, will alone persist and share in the Immortality of the soul. Normally, the elements of the human vehicle form a loose and unorganised aggregate massed round the psychic centre. When the centre withdraws, they too fall off automatically and are scattered into the universal storehouse of Nature. Only when they have been organised and when they have attained a definite form and character expressing something of the psychic nature, can they maintain their identity, for this identity is part and parcel of the psychic identity.
   I have said that the memory of past lives is effaced because of the effacement of the instrument. But there is a higher memory which is the attribute of the psychic consciousness. The psychic being is made of light and knowledge: it knows, rather it sees and can survey the whole curve of its past growth and development. Of course, it may not see or remembervery often it does notall the physical details of things and happenings of an earthly life, the hundred incidents, accidents and contingencies that are not directly linked to its consciousness. But all things that have had its touch and have contri buted to its growth and development and have in their turn received its influenceobjects, persons, happenings or movementsfind themselves harboured in the psychic memory. And thus the only sure way of remembering the past, remembering, that is to say, what is worth remembering, is to go into the psychic being, possess the psychic consciousness. There one has the whole panorama of the soul's odyssey revealed. Any other way leads only to imagination, conjecture and delusion.

05.18 - Man to be Surpassed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The limitation of such a human ideal is for us evident. We demand a total surpassing of man, although that does not mean a rejection of man. Unless human life is built upon foundations quite other than what they are now, we say there can be no permanent or radical remedy to the ills it suffers from. Hence we are for utter transcendence; for, the highest height it is possible for the consciousness to reach and the being to dwell in, even the experience of Brahman or un-mitigated Absolute of the Mayavadin or the Zero, Shunyam of the Buddhist not excluded. Since it is there that the true foundations of creation lie hidden and it is from there that a new world has to be recreated, a new humanity reshaped. The very stuff of human nature has to be changed, not only what is considered as bad in it but what is valued as good also. For beyond good and evil is Nature Divine. Man has to find out this divine nature and dissolve his human nature into that, remould it, reshape it in that pattern. So long as human consciousness remains too human, it will be always branded with the bar sinister of all earthly things. Man has to grow into the Immortal seated within mortality, into the light that shines inviolate on the other side of the darkness we live in. That immortality, that light one has to bring down here on earth and in ourselves, and out of it build a new earth and a new human self and life.
   ***

06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  He passed from the Immortals' happy paths
  To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,
  --
  He who has conquered the Immortals' seats,
  Came down to men on earth the Man divine.
  --
  It has drunk of the Immortal's wells of joy,
  It has looked across the jewel bars of heaven,
  --
  Then let thy blessing put the Immortals' seal
  On these bright lives' unstained felicity
  --
  An aspiration to the Immortals' air
  Lain on the lap of mortal ecstasy.

06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  What power forced the Immortal spirit to birth?
  The eternal witness once of eternity,
  --
  But hides the Immortal's meaning in the world.
  Thy mind's light hides from thee the Eternal's thought,
  --
  Earth's joys shut from thee the Immortal's bliss.
  Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,
  --
  From life and Nature the Immortals' right;
  He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.
  --
  Once in the Immortal boundlessness of Self,
  In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light

07.03 - The Entry into the Inner Countries, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And opens the Immortal's golden door.
  Man, human, follows in God's human steps.
  --
  Then perish vomiting the Immortal soul
  Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.

07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Into mortal limbs the Immortal's rapture and power.
  An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;

09.02 - The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  His mortality vexing with the Immortal's dreams,
  Troubling his transience with the infinite's breath,
  --
  Thou grim jest played with the Immortal spirit.
  Conscious of immortality I walk.

10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Thou hast woven on the Immortals' borrowed loom
  The ideal's gorgeous and unfading robe.

10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Trample thee down to reach the Immortal heights,
  Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.
  --
  And the Immortal spirit shall make its own.
  Mine is a heart that worshipped, though forsaken,

10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The life to call the Immortal into birth,
  The body to enshrine the Illimitable.
  --
  My life a breath drawn by the Immortal Guest,
  My mortal body is the Eternal's house.
  --
  Already the life is the Immortal's force,
  The house grows of the householder part and one.
  --
  In the realms of the Immortal Supermind
  661
  --
  And in her speech throbbed the Immortal Word,
  Her life sounded with the steps of the world-soul
  --
  And force to be mortal the Immortal spirit.
  Afar he fled shunning her dreaded touch

1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
    The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the Immortal and unheroic.
    It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts.

10.11 - Savitri, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In the traditional work of the Immortal outside
  Eyes open with joy in life

10.12 - The Divine Grace and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Grace is of Maheshwari, that is to say, it is the special attribute, a particular emanation of her own self, it is a form of herself in an attitude that belongs particularly to her. Love is of Mahalaxmi it is her own special form and gesture. Or, varying the image we may say Grace is Shiva, the benign white radiance on the supreme heights enveloping the creation in its calm immutable compassion; while Krishna is Love, the Immortal delight dwelling in the heart of mortality.
   ***

1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  He is not thinking of the Nature-Power presiding over the outer element of fire or of the fire of the ceremonial sacrifice. Or he speaks of Saraswati as one who impels the words of Truth and awakes to right thinkings or as one opulent with the thought: Saraswati awakes to consciousness or makes us conscious of the "Great Ocean and illumines all our thoughts." It is surely not the River Goddess whom he is thus hymning but the Power, theRiver if you will, of inspiration, the word of the Truth, bringing its light into our thoughts, building up in us that Truth, an inner knowledge. The Gods constantly stand out in their psychological functions; the sacrifice is the outer symbol of an inner work, an inner interchange between the gods and men, - man givingwhat he has, the gods giving in return the horses of power, the herds of light, the heroes of Strength to be his retinue, winning for him victory in his battle with the hosts of Darkness, Vritras, Dasyus, Panis. When the Rishi says, "Let us become conscious whether by the War-Horse or by the Word of a Strength beyond men", his words have either a mystic significance or they have no coherent meaning at all. In the portions translated in this book we have many mystic verses and whole hymns which, however mystic, tear the veil off the outer sacrificial images covering the real sense of the Veda. "Thought", says the Rishi, "has nourished for us human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens; it is the milch-cow which milks of itself the wealth of many forms" - the many kinds of wealth, cows, horses and the rest for which the sacrificer prays; evidently this is no material wealth, it is something which Thought, the Thought embodied in the Mantra, can give and it is the result of the same Thought that nourishes our human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens. A process of divinisation, and of a bringing down of great and luminous riches, treasures won from the Gods by the inner work of sacrifice, is hinted at in terms necessarily covert but still for one who knows how to read these secret words, nin.ya vacamsi, sufficiently expressive, kavaye nivacana. Again, Night and Dawn the eternal sisters are like "joyful weaving women weaving the weft of our perfected works into the form of a sacrifice."
  Again, words with a mystic form and meaning, but there
  --
  and Truth, the Gods who are the Immortals and the powers of
  Darkness. These are spoken of under various names as Vritra
  --
  the mystic Fire into the Immortal being, into the Great Heaven,
  and the things divine come down into us. As the doctrine of

1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2:These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the Immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.
  3:For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material immortality of a fully organised mind-supporting animal body. The accordance of conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or subconscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings.

1.02.2.2 - Self-Realisation, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  into the terms of the Immortality; to have the freedom and peace
  of the Non-Birth simultaneously with the activity of the Birth.

1.02.3.2 - Knowledge and Ignorance, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  of the Multiplicity. By Vidya he enjoys even in the birth the Immortality.
  IMMORTALITY

1.02.4.2 - Action and the Divine Will, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  the right or good path towards the Truth and the Immortality.
  Governed by desire, exposed to the shock of the forces around
  --
  He is described as the Immortal in mortals, the leader of the
  journey, the divine Horse that bears us on the road, the "son
  --
  and finally fulfils the godhead, the Immortality. He is the worker
  of the divine Work. It is these symbols which govern the sense
  --
  into the Immortality, the good, the beatitude. The Vedic gods
  are a parable of human life emerging, mounting, lifting itself
  --
  The Life-principle in us survives. It is the Immortal Breath2
  or, as the phrase really means, the subtle force of existence which
  --
  the straight path towards the Immortal felicity. The mental will,
  kratu, becomes what it at present only represents, the divine

1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  life itself the field of the Immortal existence which is the goal
  and aspiration of all life. In this conclusion it agrees with the

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  to the existence of the Immortal deity of evil. Seth, the kings brother and opposite, represents the mythic
  hostile twin or adversary who eternally opposes the process of creative encounter with the unknown;
  --
  be, devoted (at least from the perspective of the Immortal soul.) The Kingdom of God, promised by
  Christ, is in fact re-establishment of Paradise (although a Paradise characterized by reconciliation of
  --
  often devoured, in reality or symbolically, as aid to embodiment of the Immortal human spirit; as aid to
  incorporation of the heroic process. Such rituals were abstracted and altered, as they developed with the
  --
  established and organized by the Immortal and central human spirit who constantly battles the fear of death
  and creates the conditions that promote life:

1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
  infinite, the Immortal. That is the Self of man. And what are
  the instruments? The Chitta, or mind-stuff, the Buddhi,

1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the Immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
  Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.

10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.
   Thy golden Light came down into my heart

1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
  the Sacred Self, the Immortal, the Great Sage. Its names vary but
  not its essence. Buddhas vary too, but none leaves his own mind.

1.03 - Hymns of Gritsamada, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
    14. O Fire, all the Gods, the Immortals unhurtful to man, eat in thee and by thy mouth the offering cast before them; by thee mortal men taste of the libation. Pure art thou born, a child of the growths of the earth.
    15. O Fire that hast come to perfect birth, thou art with the Gods and thou frontest them in thy might and thou exceedest them too, O God, when here the satisfying fullness of thee becomes all-pervading in its greatness along both the continents, Earth and Heaven.
  --
    9. O pristine Fire, even thus the Thought has nourished our human things in the Immortals, in the great Heavens. The Thought is our milch-cow, of herself she milks for the doer of works in his battles and in his speed to the journey the many forms and the hundreds of the Treasure.
    10. O Fire, let us conquer a hero-strength by the War-Horse, or let us awake to knowledge beyond men by the Word;7 let our light shine out in the Five Nations high and inviolable like the world of the Sun.
  --
  1. Fire is to us as our first father and to him must rise our call when he is kindled by man in the seat of his aspiration. He puts on glory and beauty like a robe; he is our Horse of swiftness full of inspiration to be groomed by us, he is the Immortal wide in knowledge.
  2. May Fire in the rich diversity of his lights, the Immortal wide in knowledge, hearken to my cry in all its words. Two tawny horses bear him or two that are red or ruddy in glow. Oh, one widely borne has been created.
  3. They have given him birth in one laid supine who with happy delivery bore him; the Fire became a child in mothers of many forms. This thinker and knower by the greatness of his lights dwells30 even in the destroying Night unenveloped by the darkness.

1.04 - Homage to the Twenty-one Taras, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
  lord, spoke to Manjughosha, the Immortal bodhisattva of wisdom,
  O Manjushri, the female form symbolizes the source of the Buddhas

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
   dangerous. It is easy to criticize the notion of the Immortal soul, for example and the traditional forms
  of morality that tend to accompany such a belief without realizing that there is much more to the idea

1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  Sephiros the Immortal Man, so called. Keser is the Monad, the unextended and indivisible centre of spiritual force and consciousness - the Yechidah, which is translated by the
  " Only One ", the " Unique One ", or the Real Self, which is the Undying Spiritual Pilgrim who incarnates from time to time " to take his pleasure among the living ", It is the quintessential point of consciousness making man identical with every other spark of divinity, and, at the same time, different with reference to his individual point of view.
  --
  The third aspect of the Immortal entity is Neschamah, or Intuition, the faculty for the Understanding of the Will of the Monad. In Theosophy, this is Higher or Buddhi-
  Manas, which, together with Atma-Buddhi, is the god of a high and noble rank, who incarnates in the brute forms of the early races of mankind in order to endow them with mind. The Manasaputras have both Solar and Mercurial connections. The Vedantists call this principle the Vijnana- mayakosa, the Sheath of Knowledge ; and its correspond- ing Chakra in the Yogas is the Yisuddhi, said to be located in the subtle body on the spine at a point opposite to the larynx.

1.05 - Buddhism and Women, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
  except that she obtained the Immortality of the
  rainbow body and that she is alive in the mysterious

1.05 - Hymns of Bharadwaja, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
    2. He is wide in his light like a seer of the Day; he is the one we must know and founds an adorable joy. In him is universal life, he is the Immortal in mortals; he is the Waker in the Dawn, our Guest, the Godhead who knows all births that are.
      1 Or, the cry of him in his worship of sacrifice is like the voice of Heaven;
  --
    6. The heights of heaven were measured into form by the eye of this universal Force, they were shaped by the intuition of the Immortal. All the worlds are upon his head; the seven far-flowing rivers climbed from him like branches.
    7. The Universal mighty of will measured into form the kingdoms of middle space; a Seer, he shaped the luminous planes of Heaven. He has spread around us all these worlds; he is the guardian of immortality and its indomitable defender.
  --
    4. This is the pristine priest of the call, behold him! this is the Immortal Light in mortals. This is he that is born and grows with a body and is the Immortal seated and steadfast for ever.
    5. An immortal Light set inward for seeing, a swiftest mind within in men that walk on the way. All the Gods with a single mind, a common intuition, move aright in their divergent paths towards the one Will.
  --
    7. All the gods were in awe of thee when thou stoodest in the darkness and bowed down before thee, O Fire. May the Universal Godhead keep us that we may be safe, may the Immortal keep us that we may be safe.
  SUKTA 10
  --
    3. A splendour in the forest, most brilliant-forceful is the speed of his journeying; he is like a whip on the path and ever he grows and blazes. He is like a smelter who does hurt to none; he is the Immortal who wakes of himself to knowledge: he cannot be turned from his way mid the growths of the earth.
    4. Fire, the knower of all things born, is hymned by our paeans in the house as if in one that walks on the way. He feeds on the Tree and conquers by our will like a war-horse; this shining Bull is adored by us with sacrifice like a father.
  --
  8. O Fire, they have set thee here the Messenger, the Immortal
  in generation after generation, the Carrier of offerings, protector of man and the Godhead of his prayer. Gods alike and
  --
  the Gods, for our peace. Bring the gods to us, the Immortals,
  the builders of the growing Truth; give to our sacrifice touch
  --
  6. Thou art the Immortal Messenger; lend ear to the laud of
  the seer and bring the Divine People.
  --
  mortal, the vision of the Immortal, and it imparts to him its
  impulse.

1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Soma is the lord of the Immortalising nectar, he is the god of Ananda, the divine bliss which belongs to the Amrita or divine nature of Sacchidananda and is its foundation. The most high seat of the truth, Mahas, the pure ideal principle which links the kingdom of Immortality to our mortal worlds, is peopled with the children of Immortalitywe recall at once the phrase of the Upanishad, visve amritasya putrh, all ye children of immortality & the lord of Ananda is to take them into his being through knowledge, the head, through enjoyment, the navel. By Ritam, the ideal Truth, the Rishi ascends through the gates [of] Ananda, divine beatitude, out of this death into the kingdom of Immortality, mrityum trtw amritam asnute.
  And then, to complete this preliminary foundation of our knowledge of the Ritam, we can go back to a neglected passage of the thirteenth hymn, to a couple of riks in which the secret of the Veda, the true symbolic nature of Vedic ritual & Vedic sacrifice, start out clearly before the eyes.
  --
  We find once more, so fixed are the terms & associations, so persistently coherent is the language of the Veda, ghritaprishtha in connection with mental activity, ghritaprishtham placed designedly before manshinah, just as we find elsewhere ghritaprishth manoyujah, just as we find in the passage from which we started dhiyam ghritchm sdhant. Have we not, then, a right considering this remarkable persistence & considering the rest of the context to suggest & even to infer that the sacrificial seat anointed with the shining ghee is in symbol the fullness of the mind clarified & purified, continuously bright & just in its activity, without flaw or crevice, richly bright of surface & therefore receiving without distortion the messages of the ideal faculty? It is in this clear, pure & rightly ordered state of his thinking & emotional mind that man gets the first taste of the Immortal life to which he aspires, yatr mritasya chakshanam, through the joy of the self-fulfilling activity of Gods Truth in him. The condition of his entry into the kingdom of immortality, the kingdom of heaven is that he shall increase ideal truth in him and the condition again of increasing ideal truth is that he shall be unattached, rit vridho asaschatah. For so long as the mind is attached either by wish or predilection, passion or impulse, pre-judgment or impatience, so long as it clings to anything & limits its pure & all-comprehensive wideness of potential knowledge, the wideness of Varuna in it, it cannot attain to the self-effulgent nature of Truth, it can only grope after & grasp portions of Truth, not Truth in itself & in its nature. And so long as it clings to any one thing in wish & enjoyment, it must by the very act shut out others & cannot then embrace the divine vast & all-comprehending love & bliss of the Immortal nature which it is, as I shall suggest, the function of Mitra to establish in the human temperament. But when these conditions are fulfilled, the bright-surfaced purified mind widely extended without flaw or crevice as the seat of the gods in their sacrificial activity, the taste of the wine of immortality, the freedom from attachment, the increasing force of ideal Truth in the human being, then it is impossible for the great divine Powers to fling wide open for us the doors of the higher Heavens, the gates of Ananda, the portals of our immortal life. They start wide open on their hinges to receive before the throne of God the sacrifice & the sacrificer.
  Truth & purity the Road, divine bliss the gate, the Immortal nature the seat & kingdom, this is the formula of Vedic aspiration. Truth the roadPraskanwa the Knwa makes it clear enough in his hymn to the Aswins, the 46th of the MandalaMade was the road of Truth for our going to that other effectively fulfilling shore, seen was the wide-flowing stream of Heaven. It is the heaven of the pure mind of which he speaks; beyond, on its other shore, are the gates divine, the higher heaven, the realms of immortality.
  ***

1.05 - The Destiny of the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  19:Through Avidya, the Multiplicity, lies our path out of the transitional egoistic self-expression in which death and suffering predominate; through Vidya consenting with Avidya by the perfect sense of oneness even in that multiplicity, we enjoy integrally the Immortality and the beatitude. By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the Immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity.

1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  - it knows all manifestations or phenomena or it possesses all forms and activities of the divine wisdom. Moreover it is repeatedly said that the gods have established Agni as the Immortal in mortals, the divine power in man, the energy of fulfilment through which they do their work in him. It is this work which is symbolised by the sacrifice.
  Psychologically, then, we may take Agni to be the divine will perfectly inspired by divine Wisdom, and indeed one with it,
  --
  The importance of the sacrificial fire in the outward ritual corresponds to the importance of this inward force of unified Light and Power in the inward rite by which there is communication and interchange between the mortal and the Immortal. Agni is elsewhere frequently described as the envoy, duta, the medium of that communication and interchange.
  We see, then, in what capacity Agni is called to the sacrifice.
  "Let him come, a god with the gods." The emphasis given to the idea of divinity by this repetition, devo devebhir, becomes intelligible when we recall the standing description of Agni as the god in human beings, the Immortal in mortals, the divine guest. We may give the full psychological sense by translating,
  "Let him come, a divine power with the divine powers." For in the external sense of the Veda the Gods are universal powers of physical Nature personified; in any inner sense they must be universal powers of Nature in her subjective activities, Will,
  --
   one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means of the divine consummation. All the rest of Vedic thought in its spiritual aspects is grouped around these central conceptions.

1.06 - Dhyana and Samadhi, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
  This, in short, is the idea of Samadhi. What is its application? The application is here. The field of reason, or of the conscious workings of the mind, is narrow and limited. There is a little circle within which human reason must move. It cannot go beyond. Every attempt to go beyond is impossible, yet it is beyond this circle of reason that there lies all that humanity holds most dear. All these questions, whether there is an immortal soul, whether there is a God, whether there is any supreme intelligence guiding this universe or not, are beyond the field of reason. Reason can never answer these questions. What does reason say? It says, "I am agnostic; I do not know either yea or nay." Yet these questions are so important to us. Without a proper answer to them, human life will be purposeless. All our ethical theories, all our moral attitudes, all that is good and great in human nature, have been moulded upon answers that have come from beyond the circle. It is very important, therefore, that we should have answers to these questions. If life is only a short play, if the universe is only a "fortuitous combination of atoms," then why should I do good to another? Why should there be mercy, justice, or fellow-feeling? The best thing for this world would be to make hay while the sun shines, each man for himself. If there is no hope, why should I love my brother, and not cut his throat? If there is nothing beyond, if there is no freedom, but only rigorous dead laws, I should only try to make myself happy here. You will find people saying nowadays that they have utilitarian grounds as the basis of morality. What is this basis? Procuring the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number. Why should I do this? Why should I not produce the greatest unhappiness to the greatest number, if that serves my purpose? How will utilitarians answer this question? How do you know what is right, or what is wrong? I am impelled by my desire for happiness, and I fulfil it, and it is in my nature; I know nothing beyond. I have these desires, and must fulfil them; why should you complain? Whence come all these truths about human life, about morality, about the Immortal soul, about God, about love and sympathy, about being good, and, above all, about being unselfish?
  All ethics, all human action and all human thought, hang upon this one idea of unselfishness. The whole idea of human life can be put into that one word, unselfishness. Why should we be unselfish? Where is the necessity, the force, the power, of my being unselfish? You call yourself a rational man, a utilitarian; but if you do not show me a reason for utility, I say you are irrational. Show me the reason why I should not be selfish. To ask one to be unselfish may be good as poetry, but poetry is not reason. Show me a reason. Why shall I be unselfish, and why be good? Because Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so say so does not weigh with me. Where is the utility of my being unselfish? My utility is to be selfish if utility means the greatest amount of happiness. What is the answer? The utilitarian can never give it. The answer is that this world is only one drop in an infinite ocean, one link in an infinite chain. Where did those that preached unselfishness, and taught it to the human race, get this idea? We know it is not instinctive; the animals, which have instinct, do not know it. Neither is it reason; reason does not know anything about these ideas. Whence then did they come?
  --
  When, by the previous preparations, it becomes strong and controlled, and has the power of finer perception, the mind should be employed in meditation. This meditation must begin with gross objects and slowly rise to finer and finer, until it becomes objectless. The mind should first be employed in perceiving the external causes of sensations, then the internal motions, and then its own reaction. When it has succeeded in perceiving the external causes of sensations by themselves, the mind will acquire the power of perceiving all fine material existences, all fine bodies and forms. When it can succeed in perceiving the motions inside by themselves, it will gain the control of all mental waves, in itself or in others, even before they have translated themselves into physical energy; and when he will be able to perceive the mental reaction by itself, the Yogi will acquire the knowledge of everything, as every sensible object, and every thought is the result of this reaction. Then will he have seen the very foundations of his mind, and it will be under his perfect control. Different powers will come to the Yogi, and if he yields to the temptations of any one of these, the road to his further progress will be barred. Such is the evil of running after enjoyments. But if he is strong enough to reject even these miraculous powers, he will attain to the goal of Yoga, the complete suppression of the waves in the ocean of the mind. Then the glory of the soul, undisturbed by the distractions of the mind, or motions of the body, will shine in its full effulgence; and the Yogi will find himself as he is and as he always was, the essence of knowledge, the Immortal, the all-pervading.
  Samadhi is the property of every human being nay, every animal. From the lowest animal to the highest angel, some time or other, each one will have to come to that state, and then, and then alone, will real religion begin for him. Until then we only struggle towards that stage. There is no difference now between us and those who have no religion, because we have no experience. What is concentration good for, save to bring us to this experience? Each one of the steps to attain Samadhi has been reasoned out, properly adjusted, scientifically organised, and, when faithfully practiced, will surely lead us to the desired end. Then will all sorrows cease, all miseries vanish; the seeds for actions will be burnt, and the soul will be free for ever.

1.06 - Hymns of Parashara, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2. All the Immortals, the wise ones, desired but found not in
  us the Child who is all around; turning to toil on his track,
  --
  10. When the Immortals made the two eyes of Heaven, they set
  in him the splendour and the beauty. Then there flow as if

1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  17:The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother The Mother s power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the Immortal's Ananda.

1.07 - Jnana Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  8. This perishable body will certainly pass away. Indweller can never perish. Thou art the Immortal soul. Therefore, over the inevitable thou shalt not grieve.
  9. Brahman or Atman is beyond the reach of the mind and speech. He is beyond logic, reason, mental process, science. He must be realised through meditation.
  --
  2l. Constantly think of the Immortal, all-pervading Atman. Give up thinking of body. You will attain Self-realisation.
  22. You are ever free. You are already free. Moksha is not a thing to be attained. You will have to know that you are Atman, that you are free.

1.07 - Note on the word Go, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The word Go in the Vedas appears to bear two ordinary meanings, first, cow, secondly, ray, light or lustre. In the hymns of Madhuchchhanda it occurs 6 times, in five hymns. It occurs twice in the fourth hymn addressed to Indra in the first three verses which are all of them important for the discovery of the proper sense of the word as it is used in this passage. In the third verse which is the key to the passage, we find the prayer Then may we know (of) thy ultimate good thoughts. Then may we know. When? as a consequence to what? Obviously as a consequence to the result of the second verse, which I translate Come to us, O bringer out of the nectar (savana), thou the Soma-drinker; drink of the ecstatic Soma wine, a giver of illumination, enraptured or in better English bringing out the sense & association of the words, Come to us, O thou who art a distiller of the nectar, thou, the Soma-drinker, drink of the impetuously ecstatic Soma wine & be in the rapture of its intoxication our giver of illuminating light. Then may we know thy ultimate perceptions of the intellect. Pass us not byO come! Id lays emphasis on goda as the capacity in which, the purpose for which Indra is to drink. Revato and madah give the conditions under which Indra becomes a giver of illumination, the rushing & impetuous ecstasy produced by the Soma wine. It is then that men know the ultimate perceptions of mind, the highest realisations that can be given by the intellect when Indra, lord of mental force & power, is full of the ecstasy of the Immortalising juice. This clear & easy sense being fixed for these two verses, we can return to the first & discover its connection with what follows. From sky to sky, its Rishi says to Indra, thou callest forth for uti, (for favour or kindness, as the ordinary interpretation would have it or for manifestation, expansion in being, as I suggest), the maker of beautiful forms, (who, being compared with a cow, must be some goddess), who is like one that gives milk freely to the milker of the cows, or, as I suggest, who milks freely to the milker of the rays. Undoubtedly, sudugham goduhe may be translated, a good milch cow to the milker of the cows; undoubtedly the poet had this idea in his mind when he wrote. The goddess is in the simile a milch cow, Indra is the milker. In each of the skies (the lower, middle & higher) he calls to her & makes her bring out the beautiful forms which she reveals to the drinker of the Soma. But it is impossible, when we take the connection with the two following verses, to avoid seeing that he is taking advantage of the double sense of go, and that while in the simile Indra is goduh the cow-milker, in the subject of the comparison he is goduh, the bringer out of the illumination, the flashes of higher light which produce the beautiful forms by the power of the goddess. The goddess herself must be one who is habitually associated with illumination, either Ila or Mahi. To anyone acquainted with the processes of Yoga, the whole passage at once becomes perfectly clear & true. The forms are those beautiful & myriad images of things in all the three worlds, the three akashas, dyavi dyavi, which appear to the eye of the Yogin when mental force in the Yoga is at its height, the impetuous & joyous activity (revato madah) of the mingled Ananda and Mahas fills the brain with Ojas and the highest intellectual perceptions, those akin to the supra-rational revelation, become not only possible, but easy, common & multitudinous. The passage describes the condition in which the mind, whether by drinking the material wine, the Karanajal of the Tantrics, or, as I hold, by feeding on the internal amrita, is raised to its highest exalted condition, before it is taken up into mahas or karanam, (whether in the state of Samadhi or in the waking state of the man who has realised his mahan atma, his ideal self), a state in which it is full of revealing thoughts & revealing visions which descend to it from the supra-rational level of the mahat, luminous & unerring, sunrita gomati mahi, where all is Truth & Light. Uti is the state of manifestation in Sat, in being, when that conscious existence which we are is stimulated into intensity & produces easily to the waking consciousness states of existence, movements of knowledge, outpourings of bliss which ordinarily it holds guha, in the secret parts of being.
  The next passage to which I shall turn is the eighth verse of the eighth hymn, also to Indra, in which occurs the expression , a passage which when taken in the plain and ordinary sense of the epithets sheds a great light on the nature of Mahi. Sunrita means really true and is opposed to anrita, false for in the early Aryan speech su and s would equally signify, well, good, very; and the euphonic n is of a very ancient type of sandhioriginally, it was probably no more than a strong anuswartraces of which can still be found in Tamil; in the case of su this n euphonic seems to have been dropped after the movement of the literary Aryan tongue towards the modern principle of Sandhi,a movement the imperfect progress of which we see in the Vedas; but by that time the form an, composed of privative a and the euphonic n, had become a recognised alternative form to a and the omission of the n would have left the meaning of words very ambiguous; therefore n was preserved in the negative form, omitted from the affirmative where its omission caused no inconvenience,for to write gni instead of anagni would be confusing, but to write svagni instead of sunagni would create no confusion. In the pair sunrita and anrita it is probable that the usage had become so confirmed, so much of an almost technical phraseology, that confirmed habit prevailed over new rule. The second meaning of the word is auspicious, derived from the idea good or beneficent in its regular action. The Vedic scholars give a third sense, quick, active; but this is probably due to confusion with an originally distinct word derived from the root , to move on rapidly, to be strong, swift, active from which we have to dance, & strong and a number of other derivatives, for although ri means to go, it does not appear that rita was used in the sense of motion or swiftness. In any case our choice (apart from unnecessary ingenuities) lies here between auspicious and true. If we take Mahi in the sense of earth, the first is its simplest & most natural significance.We shall have then to translate the earth auspicious (or might it mean true in the sense observing the law of the seasons), wide-watered, full of cows becomes like a ripe branch to the giver. This gives a clear connected sense, although gross and pedestrian and open to the objection that it has no natural and inevitable connection with the preceding verses. My objection is that sunrita and gomati seem to me to have in the Veda a different and deeper sense and that the whole passage becomes not only ennobled in sense, but clearer & more connected in sense if we give them that deeper significance. Gomatir ushasah in Kutsas hymn to the Dawn is certainly the luminous dawns; Saraswati in the third hymn who as chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam shines pervading all the actions of the understanding, certainly does so because she is the impeller to high truths, the awakener to right thoughts, clear perceptions and not because she is the impeller of things auspiciousa phrase which would have no sense or appropriateness to the context. Mahi is one of the three goddesses Ila, Saraswati and Mahi who are described as tisro devir mayobhuvah, the three goddesses born of delight or Ananda, and her companions being goddesses of knowledge, children of Mahas, she also must be a goddess of knowledge, not the earth; the word mahi also bears the sense of knowledge, intellect, and Mahas undoubtedly refers in many passages to the vijnana or supra-rational level of consciousness, the fourth Vyahriti of the Taittiriya Upanishad. What then prevents us from taking Mahi, here as there, in the sense of the goddess of suprarational knowledge or, if taken objectively, the world of Mahat? Nothing, except a tradition born in classical times when mahi was the earth and the new Nature-worship theory. In this sense I shall take it. I translate the line For thus Mahi the true, manifest in action, luminous becomes like a ripe branch to the giveror, again in better English, For thus Mahi the perfect in truth, manifesting herself in action, full of illumination, becomes as a ripe branch to the giver. For the Yogin again the sense is clear. All things are contained in the Mahat, derived from the Mahat, depend on theMahat, but we here in the movement of the alpam, have not our desire, are blinded & confined, enjoy an imperfect, erroneous & usually baffled & futile activity. It is only when we regain the movement of the Mahat, the large & uncontracted consciousness that comes from rising to the infinite,it is only then that we escape from this limitation. She is perfect in truth, full of illumination; error and ignorance disappear; she manifests herself virapshi in a wide & various activity; our activities are enlarged, our desires are fulfilled. The connection with the preceding stanzas becomes clear. The Vritras, the great obstructors & upholders of limitation, are slain by the help of Indra, by the result of the yajnartham karma, by alliance with the armed gods in mighty internal battle; Indra, the god within our mental force, manifests himself as supreme and full of the nature of ideal truth from which his greatness weaponed with the vajra, vidyut or electric principle, derives (mahitwam astu vajrine). The mind, instinct with amrita, is then full of equality, samata; it drinks in the flood of activity of all kinds as the sea takes in the rivers. For the condition then results in which the ideal consciousness Mahi is like a ripe branch to the giver, when all powers & expansions of being at once (without obstacle as the Vritras are slain) become active in consciousness as masterful and effective knowledge or awareness (chit). This is the process prayed for by the poet. The whole hymn becomes a consecutive & intelligible whole, a single thought worked out logically & coherently and relating with perfect accuracy of ensemble & detail to one of the commonest experiences of Yogic fulfilment. In both these passages the faithful adherence to the intimations of language, Vedantic idea & Yogic experience have shed a flood of light, illuminating the obscurity of the Vedas, bringing coherence into the incoherence of the naturalistic explanation, close & strict logic, great depth of meaning with great simplicity of expression, and, as I shall show when I take up the final interpretation of the separate hymns, a rational meaning & reason of existence in that particular place for each word & phrase and a faultless & inevitable connection with what goes before & with what goes after. It is worth noticing that by the naturalistic interpretation one can indeed generally make out a meaning, often a clear or fluent sense for the separate verses of the Veda, but the ensemble of the hymn has almost always about it an air bizarre, artificial, incoherent, almost purposeless, frequently illogical and self-contradictoryas in Max Mullers translation of the 39th hymn, Kanwas to the Maruts,never straightforward, self-assured & easy. One would expect in these primitive writers,if they are primitive,crudeness of belief perhaps, but still plainness of expression and a simple development of thought. One finds instead everything tortuous, rugged, gnarled, obscure, great emptiness with great pretentiousness of mind, a labour of diction & development which seems to be striving towards great things & effecting a nullity. The Vedic singers, in the modern version, have nothing to say and do not know how to say it. I sacrifice, you drink, you are fine fellows, dont hurt me or let others hurt me, hurt my enemies, make me safe & comfortablethis is practically all that the ten Mandalas have to say to the gods & it is astonishing that they should be utterly at a loss how to say it intelligibly. A system which yields such results must have at its root some radical falsity, some cardinal error.

1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Brahmni therefore may mean either the soul-activities, as dhiyas means the mental activities, or it may mean the words of the mantra which express the soul. If we take it in the latter sense, we must refer it to the girah of the second rik, the mantras taken up by the Aswins into the understanding in order to prepare for action & creation. Indra is to come to these mantras and support them by the brilliant substance of a mental force richly varied in its effulgent manifestation, controlled by the understanding and driven forward to its task in various ways. But it seems to me that the rendering is not quite satisfactory. The main point in this hymn is not the mantras, but the Soma wine and the power that it generates. It is in the forces of the Soma that the Aswins are to rejoice, in that strength they are to take up the girah, in that strength they are to rise to their fiercest intensity of strength & delight. Indra, as mental power, arrives in his richly varied lustre; yhi chitrabhno. Here says the Rishi are these life-forces in the nectar-wine; they are purified in their minute parts & in their whole extent, for so I understand anwbhis tan ptsah; that is to say the distillings of Ananda or divine delight whether in the body as nectar, [or] in the subjective system as streams of life-giving delight are purified of all that impairs & weakens the life forces, purified both in their little several movements & in the whole extent of their stream. These are phenomena that can easily be experienced & understood in Yoga, and the whole hymn like many in the Veda reads to those who have experience like a practical account of a great Yogic internal movement accurate in its every detail. Streng thened, like the Aswins, by the nectar, Indra is to prepare the many-sided activity supported by the Visve devah; therefore he has to come not only controlled by the understanding, dhishnya, like the Aswins, but driven forward in various paths. For an energetic & many-sided activity is the object & for this there must be an energetic and many-sided but well-ordered action of the mental power. He has to come, thus manifold, thus controlled, to the spiritual activities generated by the Soma & the Aswins in the increasing soul (vghatah) full of the life-giving nectar, the Immortalising Ananda, sutvatah. He has to come to those soul-activities, in this substance of mental brilliancy, yhi upa brahmni harivas. He has to come, ttujna, with a protective force, or else with a rapidly striving force & uphold by mind the joy of the Sacrificer in the nectar-offering, the offering of this Ananda to the gods of life & action & thought, sute dadhishwa na chanah. Protecting is, here, the best sense for ttujna. For Indra is not only to support swift & energetic action; that has already been provided for; he has also to uphold or bear in mind and by the power of mind the great & rapid delight which the Sacrificer is about to pour out into life & action, jvayja. The divine delight must not fail us in our activity; hostile shocks must not be allowed to disturb our established pleasure in the great offering. Therefore Indra must be there in his light & power to uphold and to protect.
  We have gained, therefore, another great step in the understanding of the Veda. The figure of the mighty Indra, in his most essential quality & function, begins to appear to us as in a half-luminous silhouette full of suggestions. We have much yet to learn about him, especially his war with Vritra, his thunderbolt & his dealings with the seven rivers. But the central or root idea is fixed. The rest is the outgrowth, foliage & branchings.

1.09 - Legend of Lakshmi, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
  kara (Śiva)[1], was wandering over the earth; when be beheld, in the hands of a nymph of air[2], a garland of flowers culled from the trees of heaven, the fragrant odour of which spread throughout the forest, and enraptured all who dwelt beneath its shade. The sage, who was then possessed by religious phrensy[3], when he beheld that garland, demanded it of the graceful and full-eyed nymph, who, bowing to him reverentially, immediately presented it to him. He, as one frantic, placed the chaplet upon his brow, and thus decorated resumed his path; when he beheld (Indra) the husband of Śacī, the ruler of the three worlds, approach, seated on his infuriated elephant Airāvata, and attended by the gods. The phrensied sage, taking from his head the garland of flowers, amidst which the bees collected ambrosia, threw it to the king of the gods, who caught it, and suspended it on the brow of Airāvata, where it shone like the river Jāhnavī, glittering on the dark summit of the mountain Kailāsa. The elephant, whose eyes were dim with inebriety, and attracted by the smell, took hold of the garland with his trunk, and cast it on the earth. That chief of sages, Durvāsas, was highly incensed at this disrespectful treatment of his gift, and thus angrily addressed the sovereign of the Immortals: "Inflated with the intoxication of power, Vāsava, vile of spirit, thou art an idiot not to respect the garland I presented to thee, which was the dwelling of Fortune (Śrī). Thou hast not acknowledged it as a largess; thou hast not bowed thyself before me; thou hast not placed the wreath upon thy head, with thy countenance expanding with delight. Now, fool, for that thou hast not infinitely prized the garland that I gave thee, thy sovereignty over the three worlds shall be subverted. Thou confoundest me, Śakra, with other Brahmans, and hence I have suffered disrespect from thy arrogance: but in like manner as thou hast cast the garland I gave thee down on the ground, so shall thy dominion over the universe be whelmed in ruin. Thou hast offended one whose wrath is dreaded by all created things, king of the gods, even me, by thine excessive pride."
  Descending hastily from his elephant, Mahendra endeavoured to appease the sinless Durvāsas: but to the excuses and prostrations of the thousand-eyed, the Muni answered, "I am not of a compassionate heart, nor is forgiveness congenial to my nature. Other Munis may relent; but know me, Śakra, to be Durvāsas. Thou hast in vain been rendered insolent by Gautama and others; for know me, Indra, to be Durvāsas, whose nature is a stranger to remorse. Thou hast been flattered by Vaśiṣṭha and other tender-hearted saints, whose loud praises (lave made thee so arrogant, that thou hast insulted me. But who is there in the universe that can behold my countenance, dark with frowns, and surrounded by my blazing hair, and not tremble? What need of words? I will not forgive, whatever semblance of humility thou mayest assume."
  --
  The three regions being thus wholly divested of prosperity, and deprived of energy, the Dānavas and sons of Diti, the enemies of the gods, who were incapable of steadiness, and agitated by ambition, put forth their strength against the gods. They engaged in war with the feeble and unfortunate divinities; and Indra and the rest, being overcome in fight, fled for refuge to Brahmā, preceded by the god of flame (Hutāśana). When the great father of the universe had heard all that had come to pass, he said to the deities, "Repair for protection to the god of high and low; the tamer of the demons; the causeless cause of creation, preservation, and destruction; the progenitor of the progenitors; the Immortal, unconquerable Viṣṇu; the cause of matter and spirit, of his unengendered products; the remover of the grief of all who humble themselves before him: he will give you aid." Having thus spoken to the deities, Brahmā proceeded along with them to the northern shore of the sea of milk; and with reverential words thus prayed to the supreme Hari:-
  "We glorify him who is all things; the lord supreme over all; unborn, imperishable; the protector of the mighty ones of creation; the unperceived, indivisible Nārāyaṇa; the smallest of the smallest, the largest of the largest, of the elements; in whom are all things, from whom are all things; who was before existence; the god who is all beings; who is the end of ultimate objects; who is beyond final spirit, and is one with supreme soul; who is contemplated as the cause of final liberation by sages anxious to be free; in whom are not the qualities of goodness, foulness, or darkness, that belong to undeveloped nature. May that purest of all pure spirits this day be propitious to us. May that Hari be propitious to us, whose inherent might is not an object of the progressive chain of moments or of days, that make up time. May he who is called the supreme god, who is not in need of assistance, Hari, the soul of all embodied substance, be favourable unto us. May that Hari, who is both cause and effect; who is the cause of cause, the effect of effect; he who is the effect of successive effect; who is the effect of the effect of the effect himself; the product of the effect of the effect of the effect, or elemental substance; to him I bow[5]. The cause of the cause; the cause of the cause of the cause; the cause of them all; to him I bow. To him who is the enjoyer and thing to be enjoyed; the creator and thing to be created; who is the agent and the effect; to that supreme being I bow. The infinite nature of Viṣṇu is pure, intelligent, perpetual, unborn, undecayable, inexhaustible, inscrutable, immutable; it is neither gross nor subtile, nor capable of being defined: to that ever holy nature of Viṣṇu I bow. To him whose faculty to create the universe abides in but a part of but the ten-millionth part of him; to him who is one with the inexhaustible supreme spirit, I bow: and to the glorious nature of the supreme Viṣṇu, which nor gods, nor sages, nor I, nor Śa
  --
  The gods, having heard this prayer uttered by Brahmā, bowed down, and cried, "Be favourable to us; be present to our sight: we bow down to that glorious nature which the mighty Brahmā does not know; that which is thy nature, oh imperishable, in whom the universe abides." Then the gods having ended, Vrihaspati and the divine Ṛṣis thus prayed: "We bow down to the being entitled to adoration; who is the first object of sacrifice; who was before the first of things; the creator of the creator of the world; the undefinable: oh lord of all that has been or is to be; imperishable type of sacrifice; have pity upon thy worshippers; appear to them, prostrate before thee. Here is Brahmā; here is Trilocana (the three-eyed Śiva), with the Rudras; Puṣā, (the sun), with the Ādityas; and Fire, with all the mighty luminaries: here are the sons of Asvinī (the two Asvinī Kumāras), the Vasus and all the winds, the Sādhyas, the Viśvadevas, and Indra the king of the gods: all of whom bow lowly before thee: all the tribes of the Immortals, vanquished by the demon host, have fled to thee for succour."
  Thus prayed to, the supreme deity, the mighty holder of the conch and discus, shewed himself to them: and beholding the lord of gods, bearing a shell, a discus, and a mace, the assemblage of primeval form, and radiant with embodied light, Pitāmahā and the other deities, their eyes moistened with rapture, first paid him homage, and then thus addressed him: "Repeated salutation to thee, who art indefinable: thou art Brahmā; thou art the wielder of the Pināka bow (Śiva); thou art Indra; thou art fire, air, the god of waters, the sun, the king of death (Yama), the Vasus, the Māruts (the winds), the Sādhyas, and Viśvadevas. This assembly of divinities, that now has come before thee, thou art; for, the creator of the world, thou art every where. Thou art the sacrifice, the prayer of oblation, the mystic syllable Om, the sovereign of all creatures: thou art all that is to be known, or to be unknown: oh universal soul, the whole world consists of thee. We, discomfited by the Daityas, have fled to thee, oh Viṣṇu, for refuge. Spirit of all, have compassion upon us; defend us with thy mighty power. There will be affliction, desire, trouble, and grief, until thy protection is obtained: but thou art the remover of all sins. Do thou then, oh pure of spirit, shew favour unto us, who have fled to thee: oh lord of all, protect us with thy great power, in union with the goddess who is thy strength[6]." Hari, the creator of the universe, being thus prayed to by the prostrate divinities, smiled, and thus spake: "With renovated energy, oh gods, I will restore your strength. Do you act as I enjoin. Let all the gods, associated with the Asuras, cast all sorts of medicinal herbs into the sea of milk; and then taking the mountain Mandara for the churning-stick, the serpent Vāsuki for the rope, churn the ocean together for ambrosia; depending upon my aid. To secure the assistance of the Daityas, you must be at peace with them, and engage to give them an equal portion of the fruit of your associated toil; promising them, that by drinking the Amrita that shall be produced from the agitated ocean, they shall become mighty and immortal. I will take care that the enemies of the gods shall not partake of the precious draught; that they shall share in the labour alone."

11.01 - The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A happiness never lost, the Immortal's ease,
  A glad eternity's blissful multitude.
  --
  His wordless silence brings the Immortal word.
  He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,
  --
  I know that he can bring the Immortal down.
  Our will labours permitted by thy will
  --
  And feel the Immortal and spiritual joy
  Of a soul that never lost felicity.
  --
  And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
  Else were creation vain and this great world
  --
  O Word, cry out the Immortal litany:
  Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born.
  --
  Touch of the Immortal and the infinite.
  He is my soul that gropes out of the beast
  --
  Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,
  Light shall invade the darkness of its base.
  --
  In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal's fire.
  A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house;

11.02 - The Golden Life-line, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The transference from the lower chain to the higher is to be effected by the consciousness of nothingness (Shunyam) being filled or impregnated with the new consciousness of Immortality; for the units of the normal or ignorant consciousness are themselves not wholly or essentially ignorant and mortal. They have in them what Buddha did not see or recognise the Immortal soul or selfas the Vedic Rishis said: that which is immortal in the mortal. What is mortal in the apparently mortal unit is the covering that hides the Immortal nucleus. This covering is made of, as we know, the mental, the vital and the physical beings. These perish, that is to say, change; but that does not affect the Immortal being within. Thus the consciousness is to be drawn away or detached from the covering and hitched on to the unchanging reality within. That forms the golden link of the chain of immortality of the Supreme Light. The transference from the lower chain is to be effected through the consciousness of the luminous immortal divine unit. It is the Divine in man, familiarly called 'antaryamin.'
   Naturally, the transference of the consciousness and being from the lower or surface line to the line that lies in a higher and deeper level does not mean, we must note, the rejection or annihilation of the lower in favour of the higher. The consciousness of the soul or self does not negate the consciousness of the body and the life and the mind. It only purifies, elevates, and transmutes them into its true and divine expression and embodiment.

11.06 - The Mounting Fire, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Tantriks devised a different way, an about-turn way. Instead of trying to bring down the superior or the supreme consciousness into these lower darknesses, they sought to attack these from below, set a blazing fire below that would shoot up its tongues into those nether regions of the brain or mind. Instead of a force of light from above coming down, a force of fire is rocketed upward and made to strike as it were at the back of the lower masses of the mind. Now where to find this fire, this mounting tongue of a living flame? That is what the Tantras have imaged in the concept of the Kundalini Shakti. There is a force, a mighty energy coiled and concentrated at the base of the spine holding it and supporting at its top, first, the subliminal region of the brain at the bottom, and over it the other two. There is a secret fire at the base of the human system. It is a fire as invoked by the Vedic Rishis: the tantriks view it as a coiled python the universal nature-power, her massive ingathered creative energy. This energy is forceful and fierce because it is as much creative as it is destructive. That is the poison which the python carries, it is a poison in the ignorant state and unconsciousness, to the ignorant and the unconscious, but to the aspirant and the awakened and the luminous consciousness it begins to work as the Immortalising draughtnectar.
   The energy at the root of the spine is stored, as it is said, in the muladhara, the root, that is to say, in the root of the very material constitution of the human being. It is the concentrated energy in matter, indeed it is the energy of the mother earth. The Vedic Rishis speak of fire as being a deity of earth, as the Sun or the God of Light is the deity of the heaven. The earth-energy has to be awakened or kindled and it has to move upward and forward, piercing and burning and illumining all the inferior and denser regions of consciousness till it pierces through and enters into the head, and then goes beyond, into the supreme solar light. That is the image given in the Tantras calling it a-chakrabheda.

11.08 - Body-Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Labours of the Gods: The five Purifications Towards the Immortal Body
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part ElevenBody-Energy
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   The Labours of the Gods: The five Purifications Towards the Immortal Body

11.09 - Towards the Immortal Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
  object:11.09 - Towards the Immortal Body
  author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part ElevenTowards the Immortal Body
   Towards the Immortal Body
   To be immortal one must live in that which is immortal. One may be immortal outside and beyond the world and one may be immortal in the world upon the earth. The first is the Immortality of Transcendence, of the Self, of Sachchidananda. The other is that of Immanence, of the Soul, the delegated Emanation in Matter upon earth. To be immortal here upon earth one must find that which is immortal here below. To be immortal in the body one must find that which is immortal in the body, and the body must become it integrally and absolutely.
   It is the soul that is immortal upon earth and in the mortal being. For the life to be immortal here this soul has to be found not only in its own domain, in its own home, the central psychic behind and within the heart; but it must be found also in each and every part of the being the soul in the mind, the soul in the vital, the soul in the body the Immortal in the mortalities, as the rishis used to say.
   This then is the first necessity, one should awake in the central psychic being and then awaken the same psychic being in all the parts of the being that are now apparently soulless. With that consciousness in front one must face the question set by death and dissolution. Now, to start on the way one must get rid of all fear of deathone must not be afraid of it in the least or shrink from it even a jot or tittle. The attitude of perfect indifference must be there not only in the mind but also in the vital and in the body itself. All has to be in a block, solidly calm and stilludsnaseated above the contingencies.
   The consciousness, the consciousness of every element must be of absolute passivity and integral neutrality: one must in every limb leave it to the Divine to make the decision whether to continue or not to continue, must be equally happy in either case. No thought or movement of such a kind should be there that because immortality is the ideal to be achieved, therefore one must or can seek for it, try for it, that it is not wrong to make an effort towards it: instead one must learn to be absolutely indifferent, the supreme indifference taught by the Gita. And it must be a true indifference, with no arrire pense, no notion in the background that as I am indifferent, as I do not care for gain and loss, therefore I shall automatically attain the desired immortality. In fact, this I does not attain immortality. This 'I in whatever form is the very negation of immortality, it is mortality. As we have said, it is the Immortal in the mortal that becomes the Immortal, that is to say, manifests and embodies its immortality.
   Even this is just the beginning, the very first step, the indispensable primary condition, Every part and element of the whole being, down to the material cells of the body itself must be filled with the soul's consciousness, a field suffused with the consciousness of the soul. Next there wil1 come the question of changing the very substance of the constituents. That is the final and crucial discipline. For a pervading soul-consciousness may, by its pressure and influence, bring about the prolongation of life, even indefinitely, but immortality is assured only when the very substance of the material body is changed into its immortal essence.

1.10 - Concentration - Its Practice, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
  The seer is really the Self, the pure one, the ever holy, the infinite, the Immortal. This is the Self of man. And what are the instruments? The Chitta or mind-stuff, the Buddhi or determinative faculty, the Manas or mind, and the Indriyas or sense-organs. These are the instruments for him to see the external world, and the identification of the Self with the instruments is what is called the ignorance of egoism. We say, "I am the mind," "I am thought," "I am angry," or "I am happy". How can we be angry and how can we hate? We should identify ourselves with the Self that cannot change. If It is unchangeable, how can It be one moment happy, and one moment unhappy? It is formless, infinite, omnipresent. What can change It ? It is beyond all law. What can affect it? Nothing in the universe can produce an effect on It. Yet through ignorance, we identify ourselves with the mind-stuff, and think we feel pleasure or pain.
  

1.10 - Life and Death. The Greater Guardian of the Threshold, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
  Thus man is twofold: mortal and immortal. The mortal is in its last, the Immortal in its first stage. But it is only within this twofold world, which finds its expression in the sense-world, that he can acquire the requisite faculties to lead the world to immortality. Indeed, this task is precisely to gather the fruits of the mortal for the Immortal. And as he glances at himself as the result of his own work in the past he cannot but say: "I have in me the elements of a decaying world. They are at work in me, and I can only break their power little by little, thanks to the new immortal elements coming to life within me." This is the path leading man from death to life. Could he but speak to himself with full consciousness at the hour of his death, he would say: "The perishing world was my task-master. I am now dying as the result of the entire past in which I am enmeshed. Yet the soil of mortal life has matured the seeds of immortal life. I carry them with me into another world.
   p. 251

1.10 - The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Therefore Ananda is the tongue of the gods with which they taste the delight of existence; it is the nodus in which all the activities of the Immortal state or divine existence are bound together. Vamadeva goes on to say, "Let us give expression to this secret name of the clarity, - that is to say, let us bring out this Soma wine, this hidden delight of existence; let us hold it in this world-sacrifice by our surrenderings or submissions to
  Agni, the divine Will or Conscious-Power which is the Master of being. He is the four-horned Bull of the worlds and when he listens to the soul-thought of man in its self-expression, he ejects this secret name of delight from its hiding-place."

1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  Once in the Immortal boundlessness of Self,
  In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light

1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In what light did these ancient thinkers understand the Vedic gods? As material Nature Powers called only to give worldly wealth to their worshippers? Certainly, the Vedic gods are in the Vedanta also accredited with material functions. In the Kena Upanishad Agnis power & glory is to burn, Vayus to seize & bear away. But these are not their only functions. In the same Upanishad, in the same apologue, told as a Vedantic parable, Indra, Agni & Vayu, especially Indra, are declared to be the greatest of the gods because they came nearest into contact with the Brahman. Indra, although unable to recognise the Brahman directly, learned of his identity from Uma daughter of the snowy mountains. Certainly, the sense of the parable is not that Dawn told the Sky who Brahman was or that material Sky, Fire & Wind are best able to come into contact with the Supreme Existence. It is clear & it is recognised by all the commentators, that in the Upanishads the gods are masters not only of material functions in the outer physical world but also of mental, vital and physical functions in the intelligent living creature. This will be directly evident from the passage describing the creation of the gods by the One & Supreme Being in the Aitareya Upanishad & the subsequent movement by which they enter in the body of man and take up the control of his activities. In the same Upanishad it is even hinted that Indra is in his secret being the Eternal Lord himself, for Idandra is his secret name; nor should we forget that this piece of mysticism is founded on the hymns of the Veda itself which speak of the secret names of the gods. Shankaracharya recognised this truth so perfectly that he uses the gods and the senses as equivalent terms in his great commentary. Finally in the Isha Upanishad,itself a part of the White Yajur Veda and a work, as I have shown elsewhere, full of the most lofty & deep Vedantic truth, in which the eternal problems of human existence are briefly proposed and masterfully solved,we find Surya and Agni prayed to & invoked with as much solemnity & reverence as in the Rigveda and indeed in language borrowed from the Rigveda, not as the material Sun and material Fire, but as the master of divine God-revealing knowledge & the master of divine purifying force of knowledge, and not to drive away the terrors of night from a trembling savage nor to burn the offered cake & the dripping ghee in a barbarian ritual, but to reveal the ultimate truth to the eyes of the Seer and to raise the Immortal part in us that lives before & after the body is ashes to the supreme felicity of the perfected & sinless soul. Even subsequently we have seen that the Gita speaks of the Vedas as having the supreme for their subject of knowledge, and if later thinkers put it aside as karmakanda, yet they too, though drawing chiefly on the Upanishads, appealed occasionally to the texts of the hymns as authorities for the Brahmavidya. This could not have been if they were merely a ritual hymnology. We see therefore that the real Hindu tradition contains nothing excluding the interpretation which I put upon the Rigveda. On one side the current notion, caused by the immense overgrowth of ritualism in the millennium previous to the Christian era and the violence of the subsequent revolt against it, has been fixed in our minds by Buddhistic ideas as a result of the most formidable & damaging attack which the ancient Vedic religion had ever to endure. On the other side, the Vedantic sense of Veda is supported by the highest authorities we have, the Gita & the Upanishads, & evidenced even by the tradition that seems to deny or at least belittle it. True orthodoxy therefore demands not that we should regard the Veda as a ritualist hymn book, but that we should seek in it for the substance or at least the foundation of that sublime Brahmavidya which is formally placed before us in the Upanishads, regarding it as the revelation of the deepest truth of the world & man revealed to illuminated Seers by the Eternal Ruler of the Universe.
  Modern thought & scholarship stands on a different foundation. It proceeds by inference, imagination and conjecture to novel theories of old subjects and regards itself as rational, not traditional. It professes to rebuild lost worlds out of their disjected fragments. By reason, then, and without regard to ancient authority the modern account of the Veda should be judged. The European scholars suppose that the mysticism of the Upanishads was neither founded upon nor, in the main, developed from the substance of the Vedas, but came into being as part of a great movement away from the naturalistic materialism of the early half-savage hymns. Unable to accept a barbarous mummery of ritual and incantation as the highest truth & highest good, yet compelled by religious tradition to regard the ancient hymns as sacred, the early thinkers, it is thought, began to seek an escape from this impasse by reading mystic & esoteric meanings into the simple text of the sacrificial bards; so by speculations sometimes entirely sublime, sometimes grievously silly & childish, they developed Vedanta. This theory, simple, trenchant and attractive, supported to the European mind by parallels from the history of Western religions, is neither so convincing nor, on a broad survey of the facts, so conclusive as it at first appears. It is certainly inconsistent with what the old Vedantic thinkers themselves knew and thought about the tradition of the Veda. From the Brahmanas as well as from the Upanishads it is evident that the Veda came down to the men of those days in a double aspect, as the heart of a great body of effective ritual, but also as the repository of a deep and sacred knowledge, Veda and not merely worship. This idea of a philosophic or theosophic purport in the hymns was not created by the early Hindu mystics, it was inherited by them. Their attitude to the ritual even when it was performed mechanically without the possession of this knowledge was far from hostile; but as ritual, they held it to be inferior in force and value, avaram karma, a lower kind of works and not the highest good; only when performed with possession of the knowledge could it lead to its ultimate results, to Vedanta. By that, says the Chhandogya Upanishad, both perform karma, both he who knows this so and he who knows not. Yet the Ignorance and the Knowledge are different things and only what one does with the knowledge,with faith, with the Upanishad,that has the greater potency. And in the closing section of its second chapter, a passage which sounds merely like ritualistic jargon when one has not the secret of Vedic symbolism but when that secret has once been revealed to us becomes full of meaning and interest, the Upanishad starts by saying The Brahmavadins say, The morning offering to the Vasus, the afternoon offering to the Rudras and the evening offering to the Adityas and all the gods,where then is the world of the Yajamana? (that is to say, what is the spiritual efficacy beyond this material life of the three different sacrifices & why, to what purpose, is the first offered to the Vasus, the second to the Rudras, the third to the Adityas?) He who knows this not, how should he perform (effectively) ,therefore knowing let him perform. There was at any rate the tradition that these things, the sacrifice, the god of the sacrifice, the world or future state of the sacrificer had a deep significance and were not mere ritual arranged superstitiously for material ends. But this deeper significance, this inner Vedic knowledge was difficult and esoteric, not known easily in its profundity and subtlety even by the majority of the Brahmavadins themselves; hence the searching, the mutual questionings, the record of famous discussions that occupy so much space in the Upanishadsdiscussions which, we shall see, are not intellectual debates but comparisons of illuminated knowledge & spiritual experience.

11.10 - The Test of Truth, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Towards the Immortal Body The Ideal Centre
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part Eleven The Test of Truth
  --
   Towards the Immortal Body The Ideal Centre

1.11 - Delight of Existence - The Problem, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  17:In the egoistic human being, the mental person emergent out of the dim shell of matter, delight of existence is neutral, semilatent, still in the shadow of the subconscious, hardly more than a concealed soil of plenty covered by desire with a luxuriant growth of poisonous weeds and hardly less poisonous flowers, the pains and pleasures of our egoistic existence. When the divine conscious-force working secretly in us has devoured these growths of desire, when in the image of the Rig Veda the fire of God has burnt up the shoots of earth, that which is concealed at the roots of these pains and pleasures, their cause and secret being, the sap of delight in them, will emerge in new forms not of desire, but of self-existent satisfaction which will replace mortal pleasure by the Immortal's ecstasy. And this transformation is possible because these growths of sensation and emotion are in their essential being, the pains no less than the pleasures, that delight of existence which they seek but fail to reveal, - fail because of division, ignorance of self and egoism.

1.11 - The Seven Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternal worlds, then manifest, "born", building up in man the Truth and the Immortality.
  Gods and men, says Vishwamitra in effect, kindle this divine force by lighting the fires of the inner sacrifice; they enable it to work by their adoration and submission to it; they express in heaven, that is to say, in the pure mentality which is symbolised by Dyaus, the knowings of the Seers, in other words the illuminations of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds Mind; and they do this in order to make a passage for this divine force which in its strength seeking always to find the word of right self-expression aspires beyond mind. This divine will carrying in all its workings the secret of the divine knowledge, kavikratuh., befriends or builds up the mental and physical consciousness in man, divah. pr.thivyah., perfects the intellect, purifies the discernment so that they grow to be capable of the "knowings of the seers" and by the superconscient Truth thus made conscient in us establishes firmly the Beatitude (vs. 2-3).
  The rest of the passage describes the ascent of this divine conscious-force, Agni, this Immortal in mortals who in the sacrifice takes the place of the ordinary will and knowledge of man, from the mortal and physical consciousness to the Immortality of the Truth and the Beatitude. The Vedic Rishis speak of five births for man, five worlds of creatures where works are done, panca janah., panca kr.s.t.h. or ks.ith.. Dyaus and Prithivi represent the pure mental and the physical consciousness; between them is the Antariksha, the intermediate or connecting level of the vital or nervous consciousness. Dyaus and Prithivi are Rodasi, our two firmaments; but these have to be overpassed, for then we find admission to another heaven than that of the pure mind - to the wide, the Vast which is the basis, the foundation (budhna) of the infinite consciousness, Aditi. This Vast is the Truth which supports the supreme triple world, those highest steps or seats
  (padani, sadamsi) of Agni, of Vishnu, those supreme Names of the Mother, the cow, Aditi. The Vast or Truth is declared to be
  --
  Then we are told expressly that this infinite into which he has entered and in which he grows, in which the many Waters victoriously reaching their goal (yasasah.) increase him, is the unobstructed vast where the Truth is born, the shoreless infinite, his own natural seat in which he now takes up his home. There the seven rivers, the sisters, work no longer separated though of one origin as on the earth and in the mortal life, but rather as indivisible companions (jamnam apasi svasr.n.am). In that entire meeting of these great ones Agni moves in all things and upbears all things; the rays of his vision are perfectly straight, no longer affected by the lower crookedness; he from whom the radiances of knowledge, the brilliant herds, were born, now gives them this high and supreme birth; he turns them into the divine knowledge, the Immortal consciousness (vs. 11-12).
  This also is his own new and last birth. He who was born as the Son of Force from the growths of earth, he who was born as the child of the Waters, is now born in many forms to the goddess of bliss, she who has the entire felicity, that is to say to the divine conscious beatitude, in the shoreless infinite. The gods or divine powers in man using the mind as an instrument reach him there, unite around him, set him to the great work of the world in this new, mighty and effective birth. They, the outshinings of that vast consciousness, cleave to this divine Force as its bright lightnings and from him in the super-conscient, the shoreless vast, his own home, they draw for man the Immortality.
  Such then, profound, coherent, luminous behind the veil of figures is the sense of the Vedic symbol of the seven rivers, of the Waters, of the five worlds, of the birth and ascent of

1.11 - The Soul or the Astral Body, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
  As the spirit would not be able to operate without the intervention of the soul, the astral body is the seat of all the qualities the Immortal spirit has. According to its development and maturity, spirit has a different electric or magnetic fluid vibration, which becomes outwardly patent, in soul, in the four temperaments. In accordance with the predominant elements, we distinguish the choleric, the sanguine, the melancholic, and the phlegmatic temper. The choleric temper is due to the element of air, the sanguine temper is due to the element of air, the melancholic temper is born from the water element, and the phlegmatic one is ascribed to the earthy element. The strength and vibration of the respective element corresponds in the various properties to the strength, vigour, and expansion of the respective fluid vibrations.
  Each of these four elements, which determine mans temper, in the active form, owns the good properties, and in its passive form, the contrary or bad qualities. It would be too prolix to inform here about the effects of the elements, and it is better for the incipient adept to find out himself further effects by his own meditation. This manner also has a very special reason, on the path to initiation. Here I shall a few examples only:

1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  be the Immortal and Eternal. Otherwise he feels that he has lost
  himself, has fallen from his true salvation.
  --
  experience, the Immortal substance of Nature and mentality.
  For behind all and dominating all that we become and experience, there is something that originates, uses, determines,
  --
  proceeds; that is the Immortality, while what we cling to as life
  is "hunger that is death". Therefore the object of the wise must
  --
  jurisdiction of death and limitation; beyond is the Immortality.
  The wise, therefore, the souls seated and accomplished in
  --
  go beyond to the unity and the Immortality. The word used for
  going forward is that which expresses the passage of death; it is
  --
  cause nor effects exist? Is not even the Immortality spoken of
  in the Veda and Upanishads a petty thing to be overpassed and
  --
  which is meant by the Immortality of the Upanishads. And what
  will be the result of knowing and possessing Brahman as the

1.12 - The Herds of the Dawn, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Truths are won out of the Nights. This is the rising of the Sun which was lost in the obscurity - the familiar figure of the lost sun recovered by the Gods and the Angiras Rishis - the sun of Truth, and it now shoots out its tongue of fire towards the golden Light: - for hiran.ya, gold is the concrete symbol of the higher light, the gold of the Truth, and it is this treasure not golden coin for which the Vedic Rishis pray to the Gods. This great change from the inner obscuration to the illumination is effected by the Ashwins, lords of the joyous upward action of the mind and the vital powers, through the Immortal wine of the Ananda poured into mind and body and there drunk by them. They mentalise the expressive Word, they lead us into the heaven of pure mind beyond this darkness and there by the
  Thought they set the powers of the Delight to work. But even over the heavenly waters they cross, for the power of the Soma helps them to dissolve all mental constructions, and they cast aside even this veil; they go beyond Mind and the last attaining is described as the crossing of the rivers, the passage through the heaven of the pure mind, the journey by the path of the Truth to the other side. Not till we reach the highest supreme, parama paravat, do we rest at last from the great human journey.

1.12 - The Significance of Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Soma-wine was the physical symbol of the amr.ta, the Immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy won by the sacrifice, offered to the gods and drunk by men. The offering itself is whatever working of his energy, physical or psychological, is consecrated by him in action of body or action of mind to the gods or God, to the Self or to the universal powers, to one's own higher Self or to the Self in mankind and in all existences.
  This elaborate explanation of the Yajna sets out with a vast and comprehensive definition in which it is declared that the act and energy and materials of the sacrifice, the giver and receiver of the sacrifice, the goal and object of the sacrifice are all the one Brahman. "Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire,

1.13 - And Then?, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Our body's cells must hold the Immortal's flame.
  Else would the spirit reach alone its source

1.13 - BOOK THE THIRTEENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
  Your son, by the Immortal Gods I swear,
  Shall this with all your former bounty share."

1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  them to Oceanus and - in the Immortal words of Homer - to
  "the doors of Helios and the land of dreams." "He [Hermes] is

1.13 - The Kings of Rome and Alba, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  the Wood and the Immortal Queen of the Wood, Diana. In this
  connexion an important figure in the grove was the water-nymph

1.13 - The Spirit, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
  It has been said before that the spirit of man has been created in the image of God and consists of body, soul and spirit. The preceding chapters have made it evident that body and soul serve only as a veil or garment for the spirit. The spirit is the Immortal part and the image of God. It is not easy to define something divine, immortal, imperishable, and to put it into the correct terms. But here, as well as with any other problems, the key of the four-pole magnet will be a great help for us.
  From the supreme prototype (akasa), the original source of all beings, has proceeded the spirit, the spiritual EGO with the four specific elemental qualities, proper to the Immortal spirit, which was created in Gods image.
  The fiery principle, the impulsive part, means the will (volition). The airy principle shows up in the intellect (mind), the watery principle respectively in the life and the feeling, and the earthy principle is representing the union of all the three elements in the consciousness of the ego.

1.14 - The Structure and Dynamics of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  troller, the Immortal. . . . There is no other seer but he, no
  other hearer but he, no other perceiver but he, no other knower
  but he. He is your Self, the inner controller, the Immortal. All
  else is of sorrow. 4

1.14 - The Victory Over Death, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Hence, it is not through an arbitrary and morbid decision of his own that the seeker will undertake this dark descent for a long time he has stopped willing anything, he only obeys the little rhythm, the flowing that is growing in him, and directs it here or there according to where it presses. The descent takes place gradually, almost unknown to him, but it is accompanied, as it were, by certain phenomena which become increasingly clear and define the psychological conditions of the descent. These psychological conditions are threefold. There is that little flowing we have often spoken about, there is that rhythm, and there is that fire of being which opens the doors of the new world. One may be tempted to think that this is a poetic fiction, an imagery for children, but it is nothing of the sort, and the whole world is a poem becoming true, an image becoming clear, a rhythm taking body. Little by little, a Child looks at the world with eyes of Truth and discovers the lovely Image that was always there; he listens to an undying Rhythm and, attuned to that Rhythm, he enters the Immortality he had never ceased to be. That flowing actually grows, that rhythm becomes clearer, that fire intensifies as the first mental and vital layers are clarified. In fact, it is no longer simply a flowing but a sort of continuous current, a descending mass that envelops first the crown of the head and the nape of the neck, then the chest, the heart, the solar plexus, the abdomen, the sex organs, the legs, and which even seems to reach under the feet, as if there were an extension of being all the way down there, an abyss of existence. The farther the current descends, the warmer and more compact and denser, almost solid, it becomes it feels like an unmoving cataract. The descent is proportionate to our degree of clarification and the downthrust of the Force (which grows as we become clearer). No mental or psychoanalytical machinery has the power to reach those deeper layers. The movement is irresistibly powerful, sometimes even doubling one over, as if crushing one under the pressure. But at the same time as the power grows so does the stability, as if finally, at the end of the descent, there were a motionless mass of energy or with such an intense vibration, so swift and instantaneous, that it seems solidified, immobile, yet moving unbelievably fast in place a powdering of warm gold, says Mother. That is what Sri Aurobindo called the supramental Force. It would almost seem as if it became supramental, or acquired supramental qualities, as it descends into matter (that is to say, as we consent to let it go through, as the resistances fall away under its pressure and it victoriously penetrates all the way down to the bottom). We say supramental, but it is the same with this word as with everything else: there is only one Force, as there is only one moon, which gradually becomes full to our vision, but the moon was always full and the Force always the same. It is our receptivity which changes and makes it look different from what it always was. It is that flowing which spontaneously, automatically, without any will or decision on our part (all our wills add more confusion), effects the descent, overturns obstacles, exposes falsehoods under its relentless searchlight, exposes the gray elf, brings to light all our hiding places, cleanses, purifies, widens and brings infinity to each level and into each cranny and does not give up, does not stop for a second until everything, down to the least detail, the smallest movement, is restored to its original joy, its infinity, its light, its clear vision, its right will and divine acquiescence. This is the Force of the yoga, the Consciousness-Force Sri Aurobindo spoke of. It is the one which forges the superman, the one which will forge the supramental being the one which will forge itself in that forgetfulness of itself.
  Thy golden Light came down into my brain
  --
  My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.
  Thy golden Light came down into my heart
  --
  So we can at least indicate the direction, the simple direction, for as usual the secrets are simple. The fire is built by the particle of consciousness we put into an unconscious act. Viewed from above, it is unconsciousness resisting and heating up from the friction of the new consciousness seeking entry it is that futile and automatic gesture which has trouble untwisting its habitual groove and turning differently, under another impulsion; and we have to untwist the old turn a thousand times, insist and persist until a little flame of consciousness replaces the dark routine. Viewed from below, it is that unconsciousness which suffocates and calls out and knocks and seeks. And both are true. It is the memory within which summons the golden ray; it is the great eternal Sun which makes that call for sunlight well up. The process, the great Process, is simple: we must light that little fire by degrees, put the ray into each gesture, each movement, each breath, each body function. Instead of doing things as usual, automatically, mechanically, we must remember Truth there too, yearn for Truth there too, infuse Truth there too. And we meet with resistance, forgetfulness, breakdowns; the machine goes on strike, falls ill, refuses to take the path of light. We must begin again thousands and thousands of times, point by point, gesture by gesture, function by function. We must remember again and again. Then, all of a sudden, in one little point of the body, in that passing little breath, something no longer vibrates in the old way, no longer works as usual; our breathing suddenly follows another rhythm, becomes wide and sunny, like a comfortable lungful of air, a breath of an air never known before, never tasted before, which refreshes everything, cures everything, even nourishes as if we were inhaling the nectar of the Immortals. Then everything falls back into the old habit. We must start all over again, on one point, on another point, at each instant life becomes filled with an extreme preoccupation, an intense absorption. A second's minuscule victory streng thens us for another discovery, another victory. And we begin to work in every nook and cranny, every movement; we would like everything to be filled with truth and with that sun which changes everything, gives another flavor to everything, another rhythm, another plenitude. The body itself then begins to awaken, to yearn for truth, for sunshine. It begins to light its own fire of aspiration here and there, begins to want not to forget anymore; and whenever it forgets that new little vibration, it suddenly feels suffocated, as if it were sliding back into death. The process is simple, infinite, perpetual: each gesture or operation accomplished with a particle of consciousness binds that consciousness, that little fire of being, to the gesture or operation, and gradually transforms it. It is an infusion of consciousness, a microscopic and methodical and innumerable infusion of fire, until matter itself, under that conscious pressure, awakens to the need of consciousness as the seed awakens to the need for sunlight. Everything then starts growing together, inevitably, irresistibly, under that golden attraction. By degrees, the fire is lit, the vibration radiates, the note spreads, the cells respond to the Influx. The body inaugurates a new type of functioning, a functioning of conscious truth.
  The body's virtue is its obstinate permanence; once it has learned something, it never forgets it it goes on repeating its luminous functioning twenty-four hours a day, day and night, with the same obstinacy with which it used to repeat its diseases, fears, weaknesses and all its dark, age-old animal functioning.
  --
  Like the other changes of program mental, vital, and subconscious this change of bodily, cellular program is, as one can gather, extremely upsetting to the old equilibrium, for the very first task of Truth is always to sow chaos, that is, to dislodge falsehood, aim its searchlight and expose all the little rats burrowing in the recesses of the body, or the thousand and one bacteria of death, we should say. If wrong thoughts and wrong impulses are the falsehoods of the mind and heart, illnesses are the falsehoods of the body and death the foremost of all falsehoods. But, as usual, our falsehoods turn out to be not so much a fundamental error or fundamental falseness as a resistance against a higher order. This resistance is life's protection and its entombment. We always regard illness as a struggle against a noxious and destructive agent, but it may be, first, the superficial sign of a struggle against truth and a refusal of truth, which spontaneously and automatically invites death. The seeker will therefore be confronted by the falsehoods of the body; illness and death will become his daily battlefield, maybe even hour by hour and minute by minute flash-illnesses and flash-deaths in order for him to learn the trade of Truth and the Immortal code in this mortality.
  But death is a word for something that does not exist. One does not die when one leaves one's body, any more than when one goes from one room to another or changes clothes. Actually, death is not on the other side; it is right here, at every instant, inextricably mingled with life; we take it along everywhere we go and, sometimes, it becomes death. That sometimes, that moment, or more complete movement of death in us, is what we must catch hold of. Death is not another state, an accident suddenly thrusting us into something else. It is ingrained in life itself; it is its base, its dark foundation. And if we could unravel those tightly knit threads, that death in the quick, that self of death that beats softly within us and tries day after day, almost hour after hour and every instant, to supplant life at will. One dies only from want of truth. It is the only want in the world. If we were totally true, we would be totally immortal. Death is dissolution of falsehood for falsehood is in essence decay and we will die only so long as we are not truthful from head to toe and in every cell of our body. In short, death is the keeper of Truth, the dark angel standing at the Immortal threshold that destroys anything incapable of passing purely into Truth. We have already crossed the threshold in our purified mind; we have perhaps crossed it in our heart and feelings we must cross it in our body. The self of truth must completely replace the self of death. The process of immortalization takes place from the top down: first in the mind, then in the heart and senses, then in the body but the supreme resistance is also the supreme victory.
  It is indeed a resistance. Death is a resistance to the law of Truth, to the ever-renewed flow of Harmony. Deep down, we are founded on the rock of the Inconscient45 the Vedic Rishis spoke of, the rock that is perhaps the first moment when the great Energy solidified, turned into matter, plunged into a dark contraction of itself, sank into an inert stillness of its triumphant flow, lost itself in a black, motionless ecstasy that was like the inversion of its solar ecstasy on the summits. Those who have had the experience of descending into the material Inconscient know that the image of the Vedic Rishis is not just an image but a rather formidable reality to go through. It is truly a rock immense and seemingly bottomless a sheer drop into a basalt chasm, which cannot even be termed black because there is not one spark of blackness there, not one glimmer that would permit one to call it black it is the Blackness, absolute, without one breath, without one vibration of anything whatever: an instantaneous suffocation, a mortal stifling, a world utterly still, utterly closed, as if strangled on itself, without a sound, without a movement, without an echo of anything whatsoever. An utter void, and yet like a black, asphyxiating existence, something that is in spite of everything but is like a density of absolute negation, a tremendous refusal which raises its walls of basalt and plunges, plunges like an abyss into an abyss, like a death into a death. To descend there is in fact like dying. It is death. It is the Inconscient. One cannot be there; one must not be there. It is like a supreme repudiation of everything that moves and breathes, everything that bears a particle of light making it possible to live. It does not move. It does not breathe. It is a NO. A tremendous NO to everything and of everything, which swallows you or expels you or forces you to summon a light greater than that Darkness.

1.15 - The Transformed Being, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  But this is still a negative way of saying things, for the traveler of the sunlit path seeks neither hells nor Night, nor the tiny flash-deaths, though they sometimes befall him in a cry of suffocation. He seeks to remain always tuned in to the great flow of Harmony and Light and Truth, in everything he does, his every function, every breath of air he takes, every heartbeat. He is a meticulous colonizer of the Light. He pushes it into every nook and cranny of his body, into his sleep as well as his waking, into every activity, every movement, every dark alley of the body, as in the past on the boulevards outside, and he gains ground step by step, cell by cell. He lights the fire of need need for truth, need for light, need for space in every one of those infinitesimal fortresses and pushes back ever farther the line of unconsciousness. Illnesses befall him, his strength declines,49 death smirks for an instant, but this is no longer even a trap or a fall, for he has his eyes wide open and sees that an infallible Hand has led him into this abyss so he can light a fire of truth there, too, a cry for help, a need of space and infinity and the second the true cry bursts out, everything vanishes; illness, death, all are gone in a split second, like an unreal dream. He learns the unreality of death. It is the supreme unreality; it crumbles in the twinkling of an eye under a single little breath of truth. But if we believe in it, it is instantaneous death. The implacable flow of basalt swallows us up into its nothingness which is nothing really, nonexistent; the cry of a child pierces it effortlessly! There is but one reality, which is the Immortal Truth, the eternal Sun, the great and soft flowing that moves the worlds and bodies if we want to believe in it, want to let ourselves be carried by It; if we consent to the sunlit path. It is the only Reality. Death does not exist; it is only the forgetting of That. A second of recall, and everything sparkles in the sun again everything has never ceased sparkling in the sun. There was never any shadow, never any death; there was that false look. Death is a false look. The world is growing toward its true Look, which will change everything into what it really is; it is growing toward its Fire, which will transmute everything into what it really is. The Truth of one point will unveil the Truth of all points; the Truth of matter will act on every fragment of matter and death and the shadow and the NO buried in the heart of the world will reveal their immortal face, their eternal light, their consenting and glorious YES, because they will have touched their supreme bottom and completed their mission, which was to take us to the gates of the Sun, in our body and upon an earth of truth.
  But tracking down falsehood and unconsciousness in the body would still not bring us immortality. It would only prolong life at will. And who would care to wear one coat for a hundred years or be confined in one narrow and changeless lodging unto a long eternity, said Sri Aurobindo.50 To perpetuate life in its present, coarse functioning would indeed be a dreadful burden, which we would soon wish to be rid of. Thus, this prolongation of life at will is only a first operational step to give us the time to build the supramental being in our body. Doing it takes time; it is a race between the swiftness of death and the speed of the transformation. Sri Aurobindo estimated that it would take three hundred years to form that being. But it does seem that the movement is accelerating more and more, and perhaps that supreme transformation does not depend so much on the length of time of individual preparation as it does on the preparation of the earth body as a whole and on its ability to accept the new world. And the Force of the New World is pounding the earth mercilessly; it is advancing with giant strides. The seams are cracking, and what seemed like a distant peal is becoming a thunderous death knell, which hides the next resurrection. We are touching rock bottom; we are before the gate of the deep Night which veils the unexpected.
  --
  What will that supramental body be like, that life divine on earth? Here again, miracles will turn out to be the simple nature of the world and the new life to follow a divine logic, the logic of the divine truth of matter. What will be is already here, crude, coarse, scarcely aware of itself, limited by our own limited vision, for truly the world is a vision being unveiled. That stupendous, innumerable, inexhaustible Energy, that Consciousness-Force, that immense Harmony we are cut from barricaded as we are in an egoistic little body, confined in a little quiver of desire and pain will flow through us unimpeded, because our self will have become the world's self, our mind the transmitter of the great rhythm, our heart the diffuser of the great throbbing of oneness, our law the one sunlit Law that moves the worlds, and our body the symbol of the great earthly body. There will be no more false note in us, no more personal screen, no more distorting glass, no more egoistic will, but the one Will that moves the worlds and the one note that makes the spheres sing. The Harmony will then be able to flow at all the levels of our body, directly, mightily, purely. The little centers of consciousness,54 the chakras of the various plexuses, will have become powerful condensers of the cosmic Energy, its projectors onto matter. They will nourish our own body directly the way today food nourishes us indirectly and heavily. They will each receive the exact vibration corresponding to their function, the light frequency corresponding to their action: the rays of the instant will-thought that executes, the flashes of the truth-vision that puts things into place and opens up and frees the truth of each being, each object, each circumstance, the sun of the heart that heals, the flood of Life-Force that sweeps away obstacles, the great ray of the original Force that fashions matter by the truth of matter. All the nerves, tissues, cells that we have demechanized, purified, freed from their congestion of unconsciousness will become free channels for the supramental Force and will flood our body with the lights of the Spirit, with the Joy of the Spirit, with the Immortal nectar until the day this golden Influx is sufficiently concentrated and individualized to replace the heavy functioning of the organs and shows through all the pores of the old skin, permeating and transmuting the gross body, or reabsorbing it into its solar blaze, as the powerful gravitation of atoms reabsorbs the particles and frees their body of radiant energy.
  We know nothing, nothing at all of the ultimate movement! But it will take place, as unavoidably as the laburnum pod bursts open to release its golden cascade. The mortal body will have finished its work, which was to generate an immortal body on earth by its own cry and to reveal the Spirit forever contained in its dark cells.

1.17 - The Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Veda. Indra and the Ashwins are the great Soma-drinkers, but all the gods have their share of the Immortalising draught. The
  Angirases also conquer in the strength of the Soma. Sarama threatens the Panis with the coming of Ayasya and the Navagwa Angirases in the keen intensity of their Soma rapture, eha gamann r.s.ayah. somasita ayasyo angiraso navagvah. (X.108.8). It is the great force by which men have the power to follow the path of the Truth. "That rapture of the Soma we desire by which thou,

1.18 - Mind and Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  19:Yet is all ignorance and all perversity only the distortion of the truth and right of things and not the play of an absolute falsehood. It is the result of Mind viewing things in the division it makes, avidyayam antare, instead of viewing itself and its divisions as instrumentation and phenomenon of the play of the truth of Sachchidananda. If it gets back to the truth from which it fell, it becomes again the final action of the Truth-consciousness in its apprehensive operation, and the relations it helps to create in that light and power will be relations of the Truth and not of the perversity. They will be the straight things and not the crooked, to use the expressive distinction of the Vedic Rishis, - Truths, that is to say, of divine being with its self-possessive consciousness, will and delight moving harmoniously in itself. Now we have rather the warped and zigzag movement of mind and life, the contortions created by the struggle of the soul once grown oblivious of its true being to find itself again, to resolve back all error into the truth which both our truth and our error, our right and our wrong limit or distort, all incapacity into the strength which both our power and our weakness are a struggle of force to grasp, all suffering into the delight which both our joy and our pain are a convulsive effort of sensation to realise, all death into the Immortality to which both our life and our death are a constant effort of being to return.

1.18 - The Human Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Veda also called upon in a less definite but a larger and more significant imagery. It is for the great human journey that they are invoked; for it is the human journey from the mortality to the Immortality, from the falsehood to the truth that the Ancestors accomplished, opening the way to their descendants.
  We see this characteristic of their working in VII.42 and
  --
  Word, the cry of Heaven which is the voice of Swar the luminous heaven and of its lightnings thundering out from the Word, the divine waters or seven rivers that are set free to their flowing by that heavenly lightning of Indra the master of Swar, and with the outflowing of the divine waters the outpressing of the Immortalising Soma, these constitute the form, pesah., of the adhvara yajna. And its general characteristic is forward movement, the advance of all to the divine goal, as emphasised by the three verbs of motion, naks.anta, vetu, navanta and the emphatic pra, forward, which opens and sets the key to each clause.
  But the fifty-second hymn is still more significant and suggestive. The first Rik runs, "O Sons of the infinite Mother

1.19 - Equality, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Gita, however, admits and makes room for this movement; it allows as a recoiling starting-point the perception of the defects of the world-existence, birth and disease and death and old age and sorrow, the historic starting-point of the Buddha, janmamr.tyu-jara-vyadhi-duh.kha-dos.anudarsanam, and it accepts the effort of those whose self-discipline is motived by a desire for release, even in this spirit, from the curse of age and death, jara-maran.a-moks.aya mam asritya yatanti ye. But that, to be of any profit, must be accompanied by the sattwic perception of a higher state and the taking delight and refuge in the existence of the Divine, mam asritya. Then the soul by its recoil comes to a greater condition of being, lifted beyond the three gunas and free from birth and death and age and grief, and enjoys the Immortality of its self-existence, janma-mr.tyu-jara-duh.khair vimukto
  'mr.tam asnute. The tamasic unwillingness to accept the pain and effort of life is indeed by itself a weakening and degrading thing, and in this lies the danger of preaching to all alike the gospel of asceticism and world-disgust, that it puts the stamp of a tamasic weakness and shrinking on unfit souls, confuses their understanding, buddhibhedam janayet, diminishes the sustained aspiration, the confidence in living, the power of effort which the soul of man needs for its salutary, its necessary rajasic struggle to master its environment, without really opening to it - for it is yet incapable of that - a higher goal, a greater endeavour, a mightier victory. But in souls that are fit this tamasic recoil may serve a useful spiritual purpose by slaying their rajasic attraction, their eager preoccupation with the lower life which prevents the sattwic awakening to a higher possibility. Seeking then for a refuge in the void they have created, they are able to hear the divine call, "O soul that findest thyself in this transient and unhappy world, turn and put thy delight in Me," anityam asukham lokam imam prapya bhajasva mam.

1.19 - The Victory of the Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  "they who entered into all things that bear right fruit formed a path towards the Immortality; earth stood wide for them by the greatness and by the Great Ones, the mother Aditi with her sons came (or, manifested herself) for the upholding" (I.72.9).1 That
  A ye visva svapatyani tasthuh., kr.n.vanaso amr.tatvaya gatum; mahna mahadbhih. pr.thiv vi tasthe, mata putrair aditir dhayase veh..
  --
   all enjoy godhead attaining to the truth and the Immortality by their movements, bhajanta visve devatvam nama, r.tam sapanto amr.tam evaih.. The impulse of the Truth, the thinking of the
  Truth becomes a universal life (or pervades all the life), and in it all fulfil their workings," r.tasya pres.a r.tasya dhtir, visvayur visve apamsi cakruh..
  --
  It is now perfectly clear that the achievement of the Angirases is the conquest of the Truth and the Immortality, that
  Swar called also the great heaven, br.hat dyauh., is the plane of the Truth above the ordinary heaven and earth which can be no other than the ordinary mental and physical being; that the path of the great heaven, the path of the Truth created by the Angirases and followed by the hound Sarama is the path to the Immortality, amr.tatvaya gatum; that the vision (ketu) of the Dawn, the Day won by the Angirases, is the vision proper to the Truth-consciousness; that the luminous cows of the Sun and Dawn wrested from the Panis are the illuminations of this truth-consciousness which help to form the thought of the Truth, r.tasya dhtih., complete in the seven-headed thought of Ayasya; that the Night of the Veda is the obscured consciousness of the mortal being in which the Truth is subconscient, hidden in the cave of the hill; that the recovery of the lost sun lying in this darkness of Night is the recovery of the sun of Truth out of the darkened subconscient condition; and that the downflowing earthward of the seven rivers must be the outstreaming action of the sevenfold principle of our being as it is formulated in the
  Truth of the divine or immortal existence. Equally then must the
  Panis be the powers that prevent the Truth from emerging out of the subconscient condition and that constantly strive to steal its illuminations from man and throw him back into the Night, and Vritra must be the power that obstructs and prevents the free movement of the illumined rivers of the Truth, obstructs the impulsion of the Truth in us, r.tasya pres.a, the luminous impulsion, jyotis.matm is.am, which carries us beyond the Night to the Immortality. And the gods, the sons of Aditi, must be on the contrary the luminous divine powers, born of the infinite consciousness Aditi, whose formation and activity in our human and mortal being are necessary for our growth into the godhead, into the being of the Deva (devatvam) which is the Immortality.
  Agni, the truth-conscious seer-will, is the principal godhead who enables us to effect the sacrifice; he leads it on the path of the
  --
  Truth, he is the warrior of the battle, the doer of the work, and his unity and universality in us comprehending in itself all the other godheads is the basis of the Immortality. The plane of the
  Truth to which we arrive is his own home and the own home of the other gods, and the final home also of the soul of man. And this immortality is described as a beatitude, a state of infinite spiritual wealth and plenitude, ratna, rayi, vaja, radhas, etc.; the opening doors of our divine home are the doors of the felicity, rayo durah., the divine doors which swing wide open to those who increase the Truth (r.tavr.dhah.) and which are discovered for us by Saraswati and her sisters, by the seven Rivers, by Sarama; to them and to the wide pasture (ks.etra) in the unobstructed and equal infinities of the vast Truth Brihaspati and Indra lead upward the shining Herds.
  With these conceptions clearly fixed in our minds we shall be able to understand the verses of Vamadeva which only repeat in symbolic language the substance of the thought expressed more openly by Parashara. It is to Agni the Seer-Will that Vamadeva's opening hymns are addressed. He is hymned as the friend or builder of man's sacrifice who awakes him to the vision, the knowledge (ketu), sa cetayan manus.o yajnabandhuh. (IV.1.9); so doing, "he dwells in the gated homes of this being, accomplishing; he, a god, has come to be the means of accomplishment of the mortal," sa ks.eti asya duryasu sadhan, devo martasya sadhanitvam apa. What is it that he accomplishes? The next verse tells us. "May this Agni lead us in his knowledge towards that bliss of him which is enjoyed by the gods, that which by the thought all the Immortals created and Dyauspita the father out-pouring the Truth"; sa tu no agnir nayatu prajanann, accha ratnam devabhaktam yad asya; dhiya yad visve amr.ta akr.n.van, dyaus.pita janita satyam uks.an. This is Parashara's beatitude of the Immortality created by all the powers of the Immortal godhead doing their work in the thought of the Truth and in its impulsion, and the out-pouring of the Truth is evidently the out-pouring of the waters as is indicated by the word uks.an,
  Parashara's equal diffusion of the seven rivers of the truth over the hill.
  --
  Agni, Satya, Tapas and Jana of the Puranas, which correspond to these three infinities of the Deva and each fulfils in its own way the sevenfold principle of our existence: thus we get the series of thrice seven seats of Aditi manifested in all her glory by the opening out of the Dawn of Truth.3 Thus we see that the achievement of the Light and Truth by the human fathers is also an ascent to the Immortality of the supreme and divine status, to the first name of the all-creating infinite Mother, to her thrice seven supreme degrees of this ascending existence, to the highest levels of the eternal hill (sanu, adri).
  This immortality is the beatitude enjoyed by the gods of which Vamadeva has already spoken as the thing which Agni has to accomplish by the sacrifice, the supreme bliss with its thrice seven ecstasies (I.20.7). For he proceeds; "Vanished the darkness, shaken in its foundation; Heaven shone out (rocata dyauh., implying the manifestation of the three luminous worlds of Swar, divo rocanani); upward rose the light of the divine Dawn; the
  --
  Parashara Shaktya, the pervasion of the whole existence by the thought and impulse of the Truth and the working of all the godheads in that thought and impulsion to create in every part of our existence the bliss and the Immortality.
  The hymn closes thus: "May I speak the word towards Agni shining pure, the priest of the offering greatest in sacrifice who brings to us the all; may he press out both the pure udder of the
  --
  Truth the Angirases broke open and hurled asunder the hill and came to union with the Cows; human souls, they took up their dwelling in the blissful Dawn, Swar became manifest when Agni was born. By Truth the divine immortal waters, unoppressed, with their honeyed floods, O Agni, like a horse breasting forward in its gallopings ran in an eternal flowing." These four verses in fact are meant to give the preliminary conditions for the great achievement of the Immortality. They are the symbols of the grand Mythus, the mythus of the Mystics in which they hid their supreme spiritual experience from the profane and, alas! effectively enough from their posterity. That they were secret symbols, images meant to reveal the truth which they protected but only to the initiated, to the knower, to the seer, Vamadeva himself tells us in the most plain and emphatic language in the last verse of this very hymn; "All these are secret words that I have uttered to thee who knowest, O Agni, O Disposer, words of leading, words of seer-knowledge that express their meaning to the seer, - I have spoken them illumined in my words and my thinkings"; eta visva vidus.e tubhyam vedho, nthani agne nin.ya vacamsi; nivacana kavaye kavyani, asamsis.am matibhir vipra ukthaih.. Secret words that have kept indeed their secret ignored by the priest, the ritualist, the grammarian, the pandit, the historian, the mythologist, to whom they have been words of darkness or seals of confusion and not what they were to the supreme ancient forefa thers and their illumined posterity, nin.ya vacamsi nthani nivacana kavyani.

12.01 - The Return to Earth, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Into some semblance of the Immortal's plan,
  To shape it closer to an image of God,

12.09 - The Story of Dr. Faustus Retold, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But man, the human soul, has to go through hell, that is to say, through trials and tribulations and ordeals in order to reach heaven. We know there are innumerable legends to illustrate the point. You must have read, all of you, stories of saints, how they were tempted and obstructed by hostile forces, the armies of the undivine. The great Buddha before his illumination as he sat under the Bo-tree firmly resolved on pursuing in his inner consciousness the path of realisation till the very end, was surroundedwe should say today, 'gheraoed'by all the varieties of dark forces, forces of ambition, of passion, of attachment, of enjoyment: they pleaded, they threatened, tried to draw him away by violence and trickery and temptation, but his was a great heroic soul, he refused all invitations and threats, unmoved he held fast to his resolution and in the end came out into the vast illumination. To the Christ too, the same thing happened. Satan came to him, showed to him all the luxury and grandeur and majesty that lay at his disposal if he would only consent to follow him. Christ only told him "Get thee behind, Satan" (Apage Satana) and he was free. In the Upanishads also, we know of the story of the boy Nachiketas who wanted to possess the truth, the Immortality, and Yama came to him or rather he came to Yam a and asked for these things. Yama, the King of Immortality, said in effect, a young boy like him need not strive for such abstract things that confuse the mind even of gods, "I will give you better things these beautiful chariots and horses, the resounding musical instruments or these abounding riches and even these beautiful women that take and be happy." You all know Nachiketas, the boy's answer: "Dear Sir, all these good things keep for your good self, let me have the one thing that I need, the Divine Knowledge." I am sure many of our children here will be bold enough to say as Nachiketas did.
   In our Puranas too we see whenever and wherever the Rishis assemble and start doing tapasya, the hostiles they are called rakshasasrush in, try to break their tapasya, even kill them. The akshasas are the embodiments of the dark forces, agents and armies of the Devil himself. The Rishis had to seek refuge in the help of the gods, that is to say, take refuge in the strength and sincerity of their souls, that is the only way to safety and security, to the achievement of their goal.

1.20 - The Hound of Heaven, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Shaktya, I.72. This is one of the Suktas which most clearly reveal the sense of the Vedic imagery, like most indeed of the hymns of Parashara, a very luminous poet who loves always to throw back something more than a corner of the mystic's veil. It is brief and I shall translate it in full. "He has created, within, the seer-knowings of the eternal Disposer of things, holding in his hand many powers (powers of the divine Purushas, narya purun.i); Agni creating together all immortalities becomes the master of the (divine) riches. All the Immortals, they who are not limited (by ignorance), desiring, found him in us as if the
  Calf (of the cow Aditi) existing everywhere; labouring, travelling to the Seat, holding the Thought they attained in the supreme seat to the shining (glory) of Agni. O Agni, when through the three years (three symbolic seasons or periods corresponding perhaps to the passage through the three mental heavens) they,
  --
   pure, had served thee, the pure one, with the ghr.ta, they held the sacrificial names and set moving (to the supreme heaven) forms well born. They had knowledge of the vast heaven and earth and bore them forward, they the sons of Rudra, the lords of the sacrifice; the mortal awoke to vision and found Agni standing in the seat supreme. Knowing perfectly (or in harmony) they kneeled down to him; they with their wives (the female energies of the gods) bowed down to him who is worthy of obeisance; purifying themselves (or, perhaps, exceeding the limits of heaven and earth) they created their own (their proper or divine) forms, guarded in the gaze, each friend, of the Friend. In thee the gods of the sacrifice found the thrice seven secret seats hidden within; they, being of one heart, protect by them the Immortality. Guard thou the herds that stand and that which moves. O Agni, having knowledge of all manifestations (or births) in the worlds (or, knowing all the knowledge of the peoples) establish thy forces, continuous, for life. Knowing, within, the paths of the journeying of the gods thou becamest their sleepless messenger and the bearer of the offerings. The seven mighty ones of heaven (the rivers) placing aright the thought, knowing the Truth, discerned the doors of the felicity; Sarama found the fastness, the wideness of the cows whereby now the human creature enjoys (the supreme riches). They who entered upon all things that bear right issue, made the path to Immortality; by the great ones and by the greatness earth stood wide; the mother Aditi with her sons came for the upholding. the Immortals planted in him the shining glory, when they made the two eyes of heaven (identical probably with the two vision-powers of the Sun, the two horses of Indra); rivers, as it were, flow down released; the shining ones
  (the cows) who were here below knew, O Agni."
  --
  Dravidian ancestors over their mutual plunderings and cattleliftings to do with this luminous apocalypse of the Immortality and the godhead? Or what are these rivers that think and know the Truth and discover the hidden doors? Or must we still say that these were the rivers of the Punjab dammed up by drought or by the Dravidians and Sarama a mythological figure for an
  Aryan embassy or else only the physical Dawn?
  --
  We are still in the order of the old Vedic ideas, the Light and the Bliss and the Immortality, and these Sarameya dogs have the essential characteristics of Sarama, the vision, the wide-ranging movement, the power to travel on the path by which the goal is reached. Sarama leads to the wideness of the cows; these dogs protect the soul on its journey to the inviolable pasture, the field
  (ks.etra) of the luminous and imperishable herds. Sarama brings us to the truth, to the sun-vision which is the way to the bliss; these dogs bring the weal to man in this world of suffering so that he shall have the vision of the Sun. Whether Sarama figures as the fair-footed goddess speeding on the path or the heavenly hound, mother of these wide-ranging guardians of the path, the idea is the same, a power of the Truth that seeks and discovers, that finds by a divine faculty of insight the hidden Light and the denied Immortality. But it is to this seeking and finding that her function is limited.

1.21 - Families of the Daityas, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
  Diti, having lost her children, propitiated Kaśyapa; and the best of ascetics, being pleased with her, promised her a boon; on which she prayed for a son of irresistible prowess and valour, who should destroy Indra. The excellent Muni granted his wife the great gift she had solicited, but with one condition: "You shall bear a son," he said, "who shall slay Indra, if with thoughts wholly pious, and person entirely pure, you carefully carry the babe in your womb for a hundred years." Having thus said, Kaśyapa departed; and the dame conceived, and during gestation assiduously observed the rules of mental and personal purity. When the king of the Immortals, learnt that Diti bore a son destined for his destruction, he came to her, and attended upon her with the utmost humility, watching for an opportunity to disappoint her intention. At last, in the last year of the century, the opportunity occurred. Diti retired one night to rest without performing the prescribed ablution of her feet, and fell asleep; on which the thunderer divided with his thunderbolt the embryo in her womb into seven portions. The child, thus mutilated, cried bitterly; and Indra repeatedly attempted to console and silence it, but in vain: on which the god, being incensed, again divided each of the seven portions into seven, and thus formed the swift-moving deities called Mārutas (winds). They derived this appellation from the words with which Indra had addressed them (Mā rodīh, 'Weep not'); and they became forty-nine subordinate divinities, the associates of the wielder of the thunderbolt[24].
  Footnotes and references:

1.21 - Tabooed Things, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  detains and imprisons the Immortal spirit in spite of its efforts to
  escape from the tabernacle of clay; in short the ring, like the

1.22 - Dominion over different provinces of creation assigned to different beings, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
  khapāda, the son of the patriarch Kardama, of the south; the Immortal Ketumat, the son of Rajas, regent of the west; and Hiraṇyaroman, the son of the patriarch Parjanya, regent of the north[2]. By these the whole earth, with its seven continents and its cities, is to the present day vigilantly protected, according to their several limits.
  All these monarchs, and whatever others may be invested with authority by the mighty Viṣṇu, as instruments for the preservation of the world; all the kings who have been, and all who shall be; are all, most worthy Brahman, but portions of the universal Viṣṇu. The rulers of the gods, the rulers of the Daityas, the rulers of the Dānavas, and the rulers of all malignant spirits; the chief amongst beasts, amongst birds, amongst men, amongst serpents; the best of trees, of mountains, of planets; either those that now are, or that shall hereafter be, the most exalted of their kind; are but portions of the universal Viṣṇu. The power of protecting created things, the preservation of the world, resides with no other than Hari, the lord of all. He is the creator, who creates the world; he, the eternal, preserves it in its existence; and he, the destroyer, destroys it; invested severally with the attributes of foulness, goodness, and gloom. By a fourfold manifestation does Janārddana operate in creation, preservation, and destruction. In one portion, as Brahmā, the invisible assumes a visible form; in another portion he, as Marīci and the rest, is the progenitor of all creatures; his third portion is time; his fourth is all beings: and thus he becomes quadruple in creation, invested with the quality of passion. In the preservation of the world he is, in one portion, Viṣṇu; in another portion he is Manu and the other patriarchs; he is time in a third; and all beings in a fourth portion: and thus, endowed with the property of goodness, Puruṣottama preserves the world. When he assumes the property of darkness, at the end of all things, the unborn deity becomes in one portion Rudra; in another, the destroying fire; in a third, time; and in a fourth, all beings: and thus, in a quadruple form, he is the destroyer of the world. This, Brahman, is the fourfold condition of the deity at all seasons.

1.25 - The Knot of Matter, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  13:Now it is true that the principle of division in Matter can be only a creation of the divided Mind which has precipitated itself into material existence; for that material existence has no selfbeing, is not the original phenomenon but only a form created by an all-dividing Life-force which works out the conceptions of an all-dividing Mind. By working out being into these appearances of the ignorance, inertia and division of Matter the dividing Mind has lost and imprisoned itself in a dungeon of its own building, is bound with chains which it has itself forged. And if it be true that the dividing Mind is the first principle of creation, then it must be also the ultimate attainment possible in the creation, and the mental being struggling vainly with Life and Matter, overpowering them only to be overpowered by them, repeating eternally a fruitless cycle must be the last and highest word of cosmic existence. But no such consequence ensues if, on the contrary, it is the Immortal and infinite Spirit that has veiled itself in the dense robe of material substance and works there by the supreme creative power of Supermind, permitting the divisions of Mind and the reign of the lowest or material principle only as initial conditions for a certain evolutionary play of the One in the Many. If, in other words, it is not merely a mental being who is hidden in the forms of the universe, but the infinite Being, Knowledge, Will which emerges out of Matter first as Life, then as Mind, with the rest of it still unrevealed, then the emergence of consciousness out of the apparently Inconscient must have another and completer term; the appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible. On the contrary, it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic existence.
  14:Such a supramental being would, as we have seen, liberate the mind from the knot of its divided existence and use the individualisation of mind as merely a useful subordinate action of the all-embracing Supermind; and he would liberate the life also from the knot of its divided existence and use the individualisation of life as merely a useful subordinate action of the one Conscious-Force fulfilling its being and joy in a diversified unity. Is there any reason why he should not also liberate the bodily existence from the present law of death, division and mutual devouring and use individualisation of body as merely a useful subordinate term of the one divine Conscious-Existence made serviceable for the joy of the Infinite in the finite? or why this spirit should not be free in a sovereign occupation of form, consciously immortal even in the changing of his robe of Matter, possessed of his self-delight in a world subjected to the law of unity and love and beauty? And if man be the inhabitant of terrestrial existence through whom that transformation of the mental into the supramental can at last be operated, is it not possible that he may develop, as well as a divine mind and a divine life, also a divine body? or, if the phrase seem to be too startling to our present limited conceptions of human potentiality, may he not in his development of his true being and its light and joy and power arrive at a divine use of mind and life and body by which the descent of Spirit into form shall be at once humanly and divinely justified?

1.29 - Concerning heaven on earth, or godlike dispassion and perfection, and the resurrection of the soul before the general resurrection., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
  11. He who has been granted such a state, while still in the flesh, always has God dwelling within him as his Guide in all his words, deeds and thoughts. Therefore, through illumination he apprehends the Lords will as a sort of inner voice. He is above all human instruction and says: When shall I come and appear before the face of God?10 For I can no longer bear the force of love; I long for the Immortal beauty which Thou hast given me in exchange for this clay.
  1 Psalm xlvi, 10.

1.2 - Katha Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  thunderbolt uplifted. Who know Him are the Immortals.
  124
  --
  are the Immortals.
  ydA p0cAvEt: t

13.07 - The Inter-Zone, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There is yet a last choice to make. Death has been annihilated and immortality attained. One can rest there and enjoy immortality eternally beyond the mortal creation. But there is a greater destiny for the human soul. Ignorance is darkness indeed but to enter into Light alone is to enter into a greater darkness. And Savitri has attained the Immortality as a human being, as human personality. She is to bring down that immortality into the human creature upon earth. She refuses the everlasting day and turns to come down again into the twilight mortality with all her immortal stature so that human beings may be rebuilt in that mould.
   So they come down, Satyavan and Savitri, from the Supreme heavens, rushing down as heaven's blessing as it were, through ethereal atmospheres, gradually re-assuming the texture of earthly form till they found their material body again upon this concrete earth.

1.3.5.01 - The Law of the Way, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   change and are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in their visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward is a battle. There are precipitous descents, there are unending ascensions and ever higher peaks upon peaks to conquer. Each plateau climbed is but a stage on the way and reveals endless heights beyond it. Each victory thou thinkest the last triumphant struggle proves to be but the prelude to a hundred fierce and perilous battles... But thou sayest God's hand will be with me and the Divine Mother near with her gracious smile of succour? And thou knowest not then that God's grace is more difficult to have or to keep than the nectar of the Immortals or Kuvera's priceless treasures? Ask of His chosen and they will tell thee how often the Eternal has covered his face from them, how often he has withdrawn from them behind his mysterious veil and they have found themselves alone in the grip of Hell, solitary in the horror of the darkness, naked and defenceless in the anguish of the battle. And if his presence is felt behind the veil, yet is it like the winter sun behind clouds and saves not from the rain and snow and the calamitous storm and the harsh wind and the bitter cold and the grey of a sorrowful atmosphere and the dun weary dullness. Doubtless the help is there even when it seems to be withdrawn, but still is there the appearance of total night with no sun to come and no star of hope to pierce the blackness. Beautiful is the face of the
  Divine Mother, but she too can be hard and terrible. Nay, then, is immortality a plaything to be given lightly to a child or the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling?

1.3 - Mundaka Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  gate of the Sun they pass on there where is the Immortal,
  the Spirit, the Self undecaying and imperishable.

14.05 - The Golden Rule, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.
   Thy golden Light came down into my heart

1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  You get rid of it by realising the Immortal nature of the Self.
  3rd May, 1938
  --
  Fruit is to reflect on the subject-matter and gain Knowledge which is ever-present, here and now. The stanza ends with the Immortal ones.
  3. The five senses mean the subtle functions (tanmatras), namely, hearing, touch, seeing, taste and smell. Variations of these form the whole universe; they vary according to the three gunas as follows: by tamas (dullness) the gross elements; by rajas (activity) the instruments for knowing objects; by sattva (clearness) the different kinds of knowledge of the senses; also: by tamas - the gross objects i.e., the world; by rajas - the vital airs and the karmendriyas by sattva - the sense organs of perception (jnanendriyas).

1.43 - Dionysus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  thought of the Immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and
  revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A different form of the myth

1.450 - 1.500 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  You get rid of it by realising the Immortal nature of the Self.
  484

1.61 - The Myth of Balder, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  wisest, mildest, best beloved of all the Immortals. The story of his
  death, as it is told in the younger or prose _Edda,_ runs thus. Once

17.01 - Hymn to Dawn, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   and these he enjoys who has the Immortal drink purified. [18]
   O Mother of the gods, the very Army of Aditi, the flaming

17.02 - Hymn to the Sun, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The soul in the mortal moves by its self-law; the Immortal springs from the same source as the mortals. [30]
   I saw him who protects, who never stumbles, who moves by paths here below and beyond.
  --
   The one below goes upward seized by its own self-law: the mortal is one with the Immortal at its origin.
   They are eternal and move about divergently; one knows the other within oneself, another knows not the other within itself. [38]

17.04 - Hymn to the Purusha, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   All the worlds are His feet, His other three steps are the Immortality in heaven. [3]
   The Supreme Being with his three steppings went upwards, He came down again in his fourth stepping:

17.07 - Ode to Darkness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   the Immortal Goddess fills up the Vast above and below. She compels the darkness with her light. [2]
   The Goddess comes and veils her sister, the Dawn, and glows through the blackness. [3]

17.11 - A Prayer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Next the sadhak must think himself flooded in his body with the outpourings of nectar from His lotus-feet; the Immortalising streamings from the wash of those Feet purge him of all evil and free him from all the impurities obstructing the fulfilment, viz., the inflow of the Force (Shakti-pata) that must result from the Shiva-Initiation, contemplation on the Supreme Shiva as Guru, uttering the Japa-mantra of the Holy Feet. It is thus that the sadhak must adore the divine Master.
   Then he must contemplate, as force in his mantric vision, the Light wave ranging from the lowest mystical circle to the opening in the crown he must know and realise it as rising up from the bottom of the spine to the crown of the head. He should meditate on it and realise that it is the tan-coloured point of lightning and the golden rising sun; it is a flaming Force which is no other than the Original Consciousness, it acts like a kindled fire that burns the knots of sin. Then he should contemplate on himself and see that his tangles of evil and sin that impede the fruition of Initiation and the flow of shakti, have all been burnt out by the gathered rays reflected from the spontaneous Grace of the original consciousness-force. All the bonds of evil and sin having thus been destroyed by its rays, he must remember in his inner heart the original Divine Knowledge with the following prayer:

WORDNET














IN WEBGEN [10000/220]

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The Immortal (1970 - 1971) - The Immortal was a adventure series with a sci-fi twist about a man who has blood that makes him immune to all disease & aging. He could never die. He was being pursued by a henchman of an evil tycoon who wants his blood. The show starred Christopher George as race car driver Ben Richards. The show...
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Highlander III: The Final Dimension(1994) - In feudal Japan, Connor McLeod, the immortal highlander, seeks out an immortal master of illusion in order to learn the magician's art. He is unknowingly followed by an evil immortal, Kane, who want Connor's head. They fight and Connor gets away while Kane is trapped in a cave. Now in the present Co...
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The Tomb(1986) - A tomb robber steals artifacts from an unmarked tomb in Egypt and sells them to different archeologists in America. This displeases the immortal woman whose tomb has been desecrated, so she follows the artifacts to America, where she busies herself extracting revenge for the theft.
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Rise of the Guardians (2012) ::: 7.3/10 -- PG | 1h 37min | Animation, Action, Adventure | 21 November 2012 (USA) -- When the evil spirit Pitch launches an assault on Earth, the Immortal Guardians team up to protect the innocence of children all around the world. Director: Peter Ramsey Writers:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017) ::: 6.3/10 -- TV-MA | 1h 33min | Biography, Drama, History | TV Movie 22 April 2017 -- An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s. Director: George C. Wolfe Writers:
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https://comics.fandom.com/wiki/The_Immortal_Iron_Fist
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Arion_the_Immortal_Vol_1
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https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Immortal_Emperor_(comic_story)
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https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Immortals_(short_story)
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3x3 Eyes -- -- Toei Animation -- 4 eps -- Manga -- Action Demons Fantasy Horror Romance -- 3x3 Eyes 3x3 Eyes -- 3X3 Eyes is the story of a young man named Yakumo Fuuji, who through a strange series of events becomes the immortal slave of the last of a race of 3 Eyed demons. The demon absorbs his soul to save his life, making him immortal in the process. Now, he begins a journey with the female demon in an attempt to find a way of becoming human. Of course, there are many complications along the way, not the least of which being that the demon is a female with a split personality, one achingly cute and the other being no-nonsense destructive power, and the romances that develop between. -- -- Licensor: -- Geneon Entertainment USA -- OVA - Jul 25, 1991 -- 23,239 6.76
3x3 Eyes: Seima Densetsu -- -- Studio Junio -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Horror Demons Romance Fantasy -- 3x3 Eyes: Seima Densetsu 3x3 Eyes: Seima Densetsu -- Yakumo has trained and searched for 4 years, following Pai's mysterious disappearance. However, when he finally finds her, not all is well as her memory seems to be gone. They attempt to return her memory by going to the Holy Land, birthplace of the immortal race of Sanjiyans. -- -- Licensor: -- Geneon Entertainment USA -- OVA - Jul 25, 1995 -- 12,615 6.96
Ajin 2nd Season -- -- Polygon Pictures -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Horror Mystery Seinen Supernatural -- Ajin 2nd Season Ajin 2nd Season -- After escaping certain death, Kei Nagai and his new companion Kou Nakano plot revenge on Satou, their fellow Ajin who is hellbent on world domination. As Satou embarks on a string of public executions, the human race rushes to come up with a solution to stop the immortal villain. -- -- Kei discovers unlikely allies in the form of two former adversaries: high-ranking government official Yuu Tosaki, whose extensive research on Ajin gives him a tactical advantage in the fight against Satou, and Tosaki's Ajin assistant Izumi Shimomura. As his faction continues to gather allies, Kei races against time to put a stop to Satou's crusade before it brings about an end to civilization as he knows it. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 235,591 7.65
Baccano! -- -- Brain's Base -- 13 eps -- Light novel -- Action Comedy Historical Mystery Supernatural -- Baccano! Baccano! -- During the early 1930s in Chicago, the transcontinental train, Flying Pussyfoot, is starting its legendary journey that will leave a trail of blood all over the country. At the same time in New York, the ambitious scientist Szilard and his unwilling aide Ennis are looking for missing bottles of the immortality elixir. In addition, a war between the mafia groups is getting worse. On board the Advena Avis, in 1711, alchemists are about to learn the price of immortality. -- -- Based on the award-winning light novels of the same name, Baccano! follows several events that initially seem unrelated, both in time and place, but are part of a much bigger story—one of alchemy, survival, and immortality. Merging these events together are the kindhearted would-be thieves, Isaac and Miria, connecting various people, all of them with their own hidden ambitions and agendas, and creating lifelong bonds and consequences for everyone involved. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America, Funimation -- 735,544 8.41
Blade of the Immortal -- -- Bee Train -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Historical Supernatural Samurai -- Blade of the Immortal Blade of the Immortal -- Manji is an infamous swordsman in feudal Japan who is known as the "Hundred Man Killer," as he has killed one hundred innocent men. However, there is something far more frightening than his ominous reputation: the fact that he is immortal. This is the handiwork of eight-hundred-year-old nun Yaobikuni, who placed bloodworms capable of healing almost any wound in Manji's body. -- -- To atone for his crimes, Manji resolves to kill one thousand evil men. Yaobikuni agrees to this proposal, saying that if he succeeds, she will undo his curse of immortality. Soon after this promise, Manji meets Rin Asano, a 16-year-old girl who requests Manji's assistance in killing those who slaughtered her parents. -- -- Initially reluctant, Manji refuses Rin's desperate plea. However, owing to her evident lack of strength, Manji changes his mind and agrees to protect Rin for four years. With this partnership set in stone, the two embark on a perilous journey of bloodshed, vengeance, and redemption, each to fulfill their own life's cause. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Media Blasters -- TV - Jul 14, 2008 -- 57,921 6.82
Blade of the Immortal -- -- Bee Train -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Historical Supernatural Samurai -- Blade of the Immortal Blade of the Immortal -- Manji is an infamous swordsman in feudal Japan who is known as the "Hundred Man Killer," as he has killed one hundred innocent men. However, there is something far more frightening than his ominous reputation: the fact that he is immortal. This is the handiwork of eight-hundred-year-old nun Yaobikuni, who placed bloodworms capable of healing almost any wound in Manji's body. -- -- To atone for his crimes, Manji resolves to kill one thousand evil men. Yaobikuni agrees to this proposal, saying that if he succeeds, she will undo his curse of immortality. Soon after this promise, Manji meets Rin Asano, a 16-year-old girl who requests Manji's assistance in killing those who slaughtered her parents. -- -- Initially reluctant, Manji refuses Rin's desperate plea. However, owing to her evident lack of strength, Manji changes his mind and agrees to protect Rin for four years. With this partnership set in stone, the two embark on a perilous journey of bloodshed, vengeance, and redemption, each to fulfill their own life's cause. -- -- TV - Jul 14, 2008 -- 57,921 6.82
Code Geass: Fukkatsu no Lelouch -- -- Sunrise -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Super Power Drama Mecha -- Code Geass: Fukkatsu no Lelouch Code Geass: Fukkatsu no Lelouch -- Since the demise of the man believed to be Britannia's most wicked emperor one year ago, the world has enjoyed an unprecedented peace under the guidance of the United Federation of Nations. However, this fragile calm is shattered when armed militants successfully kidnap former princess Nunnally vi Britannia and Suzaku Kururugi, the chief advisor of the Black Knights, sparking an international crisis. -- -- The powerful and untrustworthy Kingdom of Zilkhstan is accused of orchestrating their capture. To investigate, world authorities send Kallen Stadtfeld and her associates on a covert operation into the country. There, they encounter the immortal witch C.C., who is on a mission to complete the resurrection of the man responsible for the greatest revolution in history—a legend who will rise up, take command, and save the world from peril once again. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Feb 9, 2019 -- 225,953 7.95
Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen -- -- Bandai Namco Pictures -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Historical Parody Samurai Sci-Fi Shounen -- Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen -- After the fierce battle on Rakuyou, the untold past and true goal of the immortal Naraku leader, Utsuro, are finally revealed. By corrupting the Altana reserves of several planets, Utsuro has successfully triggered the intervention of the Tendoshuu’s greatest enemy: the Altana Liberation Army. With Earth as the main battleground in this interplanetary war, Utsuro's master plan to destroy the planet—and himself—is nearly complete. -- -- An attack on the O-Edo Central Terminal marks the beginning of the final battle to take back the land of the samurai. With the Yorozuya nowhere in sight, the bakufu all but collapsed, and the Shogun missing, the people are left completely helpless as the Liberation Army begins pillaging Edo in the name of freeing them from the Tendoshuu's rule. -- -- Caught in the crossfire between two equally imposing forces, can Gintoki, Kagura, Shinpachi, and the former students of Shouyou Yoshida put aside their differences and unite their allies to protect what they hold dear? -- -- 135,931 8.81
Golden Kamuy 2nd Season -- -- Geno Studio -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Historical Seinen -- Golden Kamuy 2nd Season Golden Kamuy 2nd Season -- In Hokkaido, it is rumored that there is a stash of hidden gold. This gold was supposedly stolen by a man who killed the original Ainu owners; and before being captured and imprisoned by the police, he hid it in a secret location. In order to relay the gold's location to his comrades on the outside, he tattooed the map on the bodies of his cellmates and promised them a share of the gold—provided they managed to escape and find it. -- -- In Golden Kamuy 2nd Season, First Lieutenant Tokushirou Tsurumi plans to give the 7th Division an advantage in the war for the tattoos by getting a taxidermist to create skins that only he can distinguish as fake. Meanwhile, Saichi "The Immortal" Sugimoto, Asirpa, and their companions continue their hunt for the skins by following a strange rumor: a thief who broke into a home in Yubari found taxidermied human corpses, among which was a torso with strange tattoos. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 122,433 8.21
Golden Kamuy -- -- Geno Studio -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Historical Seinen -- Golden Kamuy Golden Kamuy -- In early 1900s Hokkaido after the Russo-Japanese war, Saichi Sugimoto tirelessly pans for gold. Nicknamed "Sugimoto the Immortal" for his death-defying acts in battle, the ex-soldier seeks fortune in order to fulfill a promise made to his best friend before he was killed in action: to support his family, especially his widow who needs treatment overseas for her deteriorating eyesight. One day, a drunken companion tells Sugimoto the tale of a man who murdered a group of Ainu and stole a fortune in gold. Before his arrest by the police, he hid the gold somewhere in Hokkaido. The only clue to its location is the coded map he tattooed on the bodies of his cellmates in exchange for a share of the treasure, should they manage to escape and find it. -- -- Sugimoto does not think much of the tale until he discovers the drunken man’s corpse bearing the same tattoos described in the story. But before he can collect his thoughts, a grizzly bear—the cause of the man's demise—approaches Sugimoto, intent on finishing her meal. He is saved by a young Ainu girl named Asirpa, whose father happened to be one of the murdered Ainu. With Asirpa's hunting skills and Sugimoto's survival instincts, the pair agree to join forces and find the hidden treasure—one to get back what was rightfully her people's, and the other to fulfill his friend's dying wish. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 235,656 7.83
Highlander: The Search for Vengeance -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- - -- Action Horror Sci-Fi -- Highlander: The Search for Vengeance Highlander: The Search for Vengeance -- Colin MacLeod, the immortal Scottish Highlander, travels with the wise-cracking ghost Amergan in search of the immortal despot Marcus Octavius, who killed Colin's lover on the Celtic plains centuries earlier. The once great city of New York is now submerged under water, with only one dominant fortress towering over the sea, the fortress of Marcus Octavius. MacLeod is torn between saving the survivors of New York and hunting down his nemesis. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Anchor Bay Films -- Movie - Feb 14, 2007 -- 14,710 6.74
JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders 2nd Season -- -- David Production -- 24 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Supernatural Drama Shounen -- JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders 2nd Season JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders 2nd Season -- Joutarou Kuujou and his allies have finally made it to Egypt, where the immortal Dio awaits. Upon their arrival, the group gains a new comrade: Iggy, a mutt who wields the Stand "The Fool." It's not all good news however, as standing in their path is a new group of Stand users who serve Dio, each with a Stand representative of an ancient Egyptian god. As their final battle approaches, it is a race against time to break Joutarou's mother free from her curse and end Dio's reign of terror over the Joestar family once and for all. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- 693,792 8.44
JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders -- -- David Production -- 24 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Supernatural Drama Shounen -- JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders -- Years after an ancient evil was salvaged from the depths of the sea, Joutarou Kuujou sits peacefully within a Japanese jail cell. He's committed no crime yet demands he not be released, believing he's been possessed by an evil spirit capable of harming those around him. Concerned for her son, Holly Kuujou asks her father, Joseph Joestar, to convince Joutarou to leave the prison. Joseph informs his grandson that the "evil spirit" is in fact something called a "Stand," the physical manifestation of one's fighting spirit which can adopt a variety of deadly forms. After a fiery brawl with Joseph's friend Mohammed Avdol, Joutarou is forced out of his cell and begins learning how to control the power of his Stand. -- -- However, when a Stand awakens within Holly and threatens to consume her in 50 days, Joutarou, his grandfather, and their allies must seek out and destroy the immortal vampire responsible for her condition. They must travel halfway across the world to Cairo, Egypt and along the way, do battle with ferocious Stand users set on thwarting them. If Joutarou and his allies fail in their mission, humanity is destined for a grim fate. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- 758,045 8.10
Juubee Ninpuuchou: Ryuuhougyoku-hen -- -- Madhouse -- 13 eps -- Original -- Adventure Horror Magic Martial Arts Samurai Shounen Supernatural -- Juubee Ninpuuchou: Ryuuhougyoku-hen Juubee Ninpuuchou: Ryuuhougyoku-hen -- Fourteen years after defeating the immortal warrior Himuro Genma and thwarting the Shogun of the Dark's evil plans, Kibagami Jubei continues to roam all over Japan as a masterless swordsman. During his journey, he meets Shigure, a priestess who has never seen the world outside her village. But when a group of demons destroys the village and kills everyone, Jubei becomes a prime target after acquiring the Dragon Jewel—a stone with an unknown origin. Meanwhile, Shigure—along with the monk Dakuan and a young thief named Tsubute—travels to the village of Yagyu. And with two demon clans now hunting down Shigure, Dakuan must once again acquire the services of Jubei to protect the Priestess of Light. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media, Urban Vision -- TV - Apr 15, 2003 -- 34,373 6.69
Juubee Ninpuuchou: Ryuuhougyoku-hen -- -- Madhouse -- 13 eps -- Original -- Adventure Horror Magic Martial Arts Samurai Shounen Supernatural -- Juubee Ninpuuchou: Ryuuhougyoku-hen Juubee Ninpuuchou: Ryuuhougyoku-hen -- Fourteen years after defeating the immortal warrior Himuro Genma and thwarting the Shogun of the Dark's evil plans, Kibagami Jubei continues to roam all over Japan as a masterless swordsman. During his journey, he meets Shigure, a priestess who has never seen the world outside her village. But when a group of demons destroys the village and kills everyone, Jubei becomes a prime target after acquiring the Dragon Jewel—a stone with an unknown origin. Meanwhile, Shigure—along with the monk Dakuan and a young thief named Tsubute—travels to the village of Yagyu. And with two demon clans now hunting down Shigure, Dakuan must once again acquire the services of Jubei to protect the Priestess of Light. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- TV - Apr 15, 2003 -- 34,373 6.69
Juusenki L-Gaim -- -- Sunrise -- 54 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Adventure Space Drama Mecha Shounen -- Juusenki L-Gaim Juusenki L-Gaim -- In the year 3990, the immortal Oldna Poseidal rules Pentagona, a war-torn solar system of five planets. Daba Myroad is a survivor of the Yaman Clan, just one of numerous native societies nearly wiped out by the tyrant. Living on the remote planet Koam with his friend Mirao Kyao, Daba possesses L-Gaim, a humanoid mecha known commonly as a "Heavy Metal" and the last known relic of the Yaman Clan. The pair befriend Fanneria Amu, an aspiring actress, and Lilith Fau, the last surviving fairy in Pentagona while on the run from a band of thieves attempting to steal L-Gaim. -- -- Daba promises to fulfill the dying wish of one of the thieves hunting him—an honorable act that leads him to the powerful merchant Amandara Kamandara. With their mission in sight, the ragtag group will face powerful adversaries and become entangled in a rebellion against Poseidal's reign. -- -- TV - Feb 4, 1984 -- 4,700 6.69
Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wo Kazarou -- -- P.A. Works -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Fantasy -- Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wo Kazarou Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wo Kazarou -- Maquia is a member of a special race called the Iorph—mystical beings who can live for hundreds of years and remain separate from the lives and daily troubles of mankind. However, Maquia has always felt lonely despite being surrounded by her people, as she was orphaned from a young age. She daydreams about the outside world, but dares not travel from her home due to the warnings of the clan's chief. -- -- One day however, the outside world finds her, as the power-hungry kingdom of Mezarte invades her homeland. They already have what is left of the giant dragons, the Renato, under their control, and now their king wishes to add the immortality of the Iorph to his bloodline. -- -- The humans and their Renato ravage the Iorph homeland and kill most of its inhabitants. Caught in the midst of the attack, Maquia is carried off by one of the Renato that has gone berserk. It soon dies, and she is left deserted in a forest far from home, now truly alone save for the cries of a single baby off in the distance. Maquia finds the baby in a destroyed village and decides to raise him as her own, naming him Ariel. Although she knows nothing of the human world, how to raise a child that ages much faster than her, or how to live with the smoldering loneliness inside, she is determined to make it all work somehow. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Eleven Arts, Shout! Factory -- Movie - Feb 24, 2018 -- 264,866 8.44
Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wo Kazarou -- -- P.A. Works -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Fantasy -- Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wo Kazarou Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wo Kazarou -- Maquia is a member of a special race called the Iorph—mystical beings who can live for hundreds of years and remain separate from the lives and daily troubles of mankind. However, Maquia has always felt lonely despite being surrounded by her people, as she was orphaned from a young age. She daydreams about the outside world, but dares not travel from her home due to the warnings of the clan's chief. -- -- One day however, the outside world finds her, as the power-hungry kingdom of Mezarte invades her homeland. They already have what is left of the giant dragons, the Renato, under their control, and now their king wishes to add the immortality of the Iorph to his bloodline. -- -- The humans and their Renato ravage the Iorph homeland and kill most of its inhabitants. Caught in the midst of the attack, Maquia is carried off by one of the Renato that has gone berserk. It soon dies, and she is left deserted in a forest far from home, now truly alone save for the cries of a single baby off in the distance. Maquia finds the baby in a destroyed village and decides to raise him as her own, naming him Ariel. Although she knows nothing of the human world, how to raise a child that ages much faster than her, or how to live with the smoldering loneliness inside, she is determined to make it all work somehow. -- -- Movie - Feb 24, 2018 -- 264,866 8.44
Senkaiden Houshin Engi -- -- Studio Deen -- 26 eps -- Manga -- Magic Adventure Fantasy Supernatural Historical Shounen -- Senkaiden Houshin Engi Senkaiden Houshin Engi -- Thousands of years ago, it was a time of witchcraft and dark magic. An evil sorceress has bewitched the emperor of the mighty dynasty and he has become a mindless puppet. The country is in shambles, and evil spirits lurk everywhere. The human world is on the verge of utter destruction. A bold mission is planned by the Confederation of the Immortal Masters. They send a young master wizard to hunt down the villains and evil warlocks in the devastated lands. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films, Discotek Media -- TV - Jul 3, 1999 -- 15,015 7.12
Senkaiden Houshin Engi -- -- Studio Deen -- 26 eps -- Manga -- Magic Adventure Fantasy Supernatural Historical Shounen -- Senkaiden Houshin Engi Senkaiden Houshin Engi -- Thousands of years ago, it was a time of witchcraft and dark magic. An evil sorceress has bewitched the emperor of the mighty dynasty and he has become a mindless puppet. The country is in shambles, and evil spirits lurk everywhere. The human world is on the verge of utter destruction. A bold mission is planned by the Confederation of the Immortal Masters. They send a young master wizard to hunt down the villains and evil warlocks in the devastated lands. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- TV - Jul 3, 1999 -- 15,015 7.12
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