46
A DRAMA OF EXILE.
To those celestial, constellated twelve
Which palpitate adown the silent nights
Under the pressure of the hand of God,
Stretched wide in benediction. At this hour,
Not a star pricketh the flat gloom of heaven!
But, girdling close our nether wilderness,
The zodiac-figures of the earth loom slow,—
Drawn out, as suiteth with the place and time,
In twelve colossal shades, instead of stars,
Through which the ecliptic line of mystery
Strikes bleakly with an unrelenting scope,
Foreshowing life and death.
Eve.By dream or sense,
Do we see this?
Adam.Our spirits have climbed high
By reason of the passion of our grief,—
And, from the top of sense, looked over sense,
To the significance and heart of things
Bather than things themselves.
Eve.And the dim twelve . . .
Adam. Are dim exponents of the creature-life
As earth contains it. Gaze on them, beloved!
By stricter apprehension of the sight,
Suggestions of the creatures shall assuage
Thy terror of the shadows;—what is known
Subduing the unknown, and taming it
From all prodigious dread. That phantasm, there,
Presents a lion,—albeit, twenty times
As large as any lion—with a roar
Set soundless in his vibratory jaws,
And a strange horror stirring in his mane!
And, there, a pendulous shadow seems to weigh—
Good against ill, perchance; and there, a crab
Puts coldly out its gradual shadow-claws,
Like a slow blot that spreads,—till all the ground,
Crawled over by it, seems to crawl itself;
A bull stands horned here with gibbous glooms;
And a ram likewise; and a scorpion writhes
Which palpitate adown the silent nights
Under the pressure of the hand of God,
Stretched wide in benediction. At this hour,
Not a star pricketh the flat gloom of heaven!
But, girdling close our nether wilderness,
The zodiac-figures of the earth loom slow,—
Drawn out, as suiteth with the place and time,
In twelve colossal shades, instead of stars,
Through which the ecliptic line of mystery
Strikes bleakly with an unrelenting scope,
Foreshowing life and death.
Eve.By dream or sense,
Do we see this?
Adam.Our spirits have climbed high
By reason of the passion of our grief,—
And, from the top of sense, looked over sense,
To the significance and heart of things
Bather than things themselves.
Eve.And the dim twelve . . .
Adam. Are dim exponents of the creature-life
As earth contains it. Gaze on them, beloved!
By stricter apprehension of the sight,
Suggestions of the creatures shall assuage
Thy terror of the shadows;—what is known
Subduing the unknown, and taming it
From all prodigious dread. That phantasm, there,
Presents a lion,—albeit, twenty times
As large as any lion—with a roar
Set soundless in his vibratory jaws,
And a strange horror stirring in his mane!
And, there, a pendulous shadow seems to weigh—
Good against ill, perchance; and there, a crab
Puts coldly out its gradual shadow-claws,
Like a slow blot that spreads,—till all the ground,
Crawled over by it, seems to crawl itself;
A bull stands horned here with gibbous glooms;
And a ram likewise; and a scorpion writhes
