Segnius Irritant: or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories/Appendix 1
APPENDIX I.
The Herald’s speech, from the Lapp poem “The Son of Pissa Passa” (supposed to date from the Neolithic epoch):
I.
God alone can give remission.
When his lightnings he hath hurled,
And has planted the colours of shame in the soul and laid bare the abyss of its night;
When the conscience is seared by his levin and his spiritual power unfurled,
He alone can cancel, pardon, cleanse from hate and re-unite.
II.
He alone is in himself, not as I or thou is he—
Not as thou or I designing—
He alone enlightens, pardons,
All things for the best combining.
III.
But with joy must we receive him
As the heart’s most precious treasure—
Its divinest cup of pleasure.
IV.
Have a care, or the levin shall fall, and the blight
Of its spells hurl thee prone to the nethermost night;
For the souls of the next world are proof ’gainst decay
When the flesh and the bones shall have mouldered away.
V.
Space no more their home is, rocks cannot arrest them,
Nor the stream retain them, nor the ocean drown them.
Like the thoughts’ swift shuttle, through all space they wend them,
Suns and constellations, moon and earth that crown them.
VI.
Time no more they reck of, time has passed behind them;
And in dreaming
They reveal them to the moon-struck spirits,
Now in touch no longer with our world of seeming.
VII.
They are souls o’ the mirk whom Ilmaracca healed,
Sad shades of ill omen, blackened, blasted, sear,
Naked as the daylight-good and ill revealed—
Space no more contains them, nor the circling year.
VIII.
Some have donned the heavenly vesture,
Some the sombre weeds of night,
And have changed into forms of abhorrent despair and for ever and ever at strife;
Taste no more the sweet concord of love, unredeemed evermore to the light;
Warfare, vain recriminations, are for aye their death in life.
IX.
He, the father of the heaven, in himself is all in all,
Not as we and you; the rolling
Sphere of day and night sustaining,
And the spirit-world controlling.