X
Scene—The centre.
Festus and Lucifer.
Lucifer
Behold us in the fire-crypts of the world!
Through seas and buried mountains tomblike tracts,
Fit to receive the skeleton of Death
When he is dead—through earthquakes, and the bones
Of earthquake-swallowed cities, have we wormed
Down to the ever burning forge of fire,
Whereon in awful and omnipotent ease
Nature, the delegate of God, brings forth
Her everlasting elements, and breathes
Around that fluent heat of life which clothes
Itself in lightnings, wandering through the air,
And pierces to the last and loftiest pore
Of Earth’s snow-mantled mountains. In these vaults
Are hid the archives of the universe;
And here, the ashes of all ages gone,
Each finally inurned. These pillars stand,
Earth’s testimony to eternity.
Festus
All that is solid now was fluid once;
Water, or air, or fire, or some one
Permanent, permeating, element;
As in this focal, world-evolving fire
Like what I see around—the vacuous power
Whereon the world is based, e’en as wherein
It rolls, I must believe.
Lucifer
The original
Of all things is one thing. Creation is
One whole. The differences a mortal sees
Are diverse only to the finite mind.
Festus
This marble-walled immensity o’erroofed
With pendant mountains glittering, awes my soul.
God’s hand hath scooped the hollow of this world;
Yea, none but His could; and I stand in it,
Like a forgotten atom of the light,
Some star hath lost upon its lightning flight.
Lucifer
Here mayst thou lay thy hand on nature’s heart,
And feel its thousand yeared throbbings cease.
High overhead, and deep beneath our feet,
The sea’s broad thunder booms, scarce heard; around,
The arches, like uplifted continents
Of starry matter, burning inwardly,
Stand; and, hard by, earth’s gleaming axle sleeps,
All moving, all unmoved.
Festus
Age here on age
Lie heaped like withered leaves. And must it end?
Lucifer
God worketh slowly: and a thousand years
He takes to lift His hand off. Layer on layer
He made earth, fashioned it and hardened it
Into the great, bright, useful thing it is;
Its seas, life-crowded, and soul-hallowed lands
He girded with the girdle of the sun,
That sets its bosom glowing like Love’s own
Breathless embrace, close-clinging as for life;—
Veined it with gold, and dusted it with gems,
Lined it with fire, and round its heart-fire bowed
Rock-ribs unbreakable: until at last
Earth took her shining station as a star,
In Heaven’s dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds.
All this and thus did God; and yet it ends.
The ball He rolled and rounded, melts away
E’en now to its constituent atomies.
Festus
It is enough. Though here were posited
All secrets of existence, natural
Or supernatural, dwell not here would I,
Though ’twere to drain profoundest fountains. No!
I love it not, the science nor the scene.
I long to know again the fresh green earth,
The breathing breeze, the sea and sacred stars.
These recollections crowd upon my soul,
As constellations on the evening skies,
And will not be forgotten. Let us leave!
Lucifer
Aught that reminds the exile of his home
Is surely pleasant. I, friend, am content.
Festus
I cannot be content with less than Heaven.
O Heaven, I love thee ever! sole and whole,
Living and comprehensive of all life;
Thee, agy world, thee, universal Heaven,
And heavenly universe! thee, sacred seat
Of intellective Time, the throned stars
And old oracular night;—by night or day,
To me thou canst not but be beautiful,
Boundless, all-central, universal sphere!
Whether the sun all-light thee, or the moon,
Embayed in clouds, mid starry island round,
With mighty beauty inundate the air;—
Or when one star, like a great drop of light,
From her full flowing urn hangs tremulous—
Yea, like a tear from her the eye of night,
Let fall o’er nature’s volume as she reads:—
Or, when in radiant thousands, each star reigns
In imparticipable royalty,
Leaderless, uncontrasted with the light
Wherein their light is lost, the sons of fire,
Arch element of the Heavens;—when storm and cloud
Debar the mortal vision of the eye
From wandering o’er thy threshold—more and more
I love thee, thinking on the splendid calm
Which bounds the deadly fever of these days—
The higher, holier, spiritual Heaven.
And when this world, within whose heartstrings now
I feel myself encoiled, shall be resolved,
Thee I shall be permitted still perchance,
To love and live in endlessly.
Lucifer
All here
Thou seet hath holden fellowship with gods;
With eldest Time and primal matter, space,
And stars, and air, and all-inherent fire,
The watery deep and chaos, night, the all,
And the interior immortality,
And first-begotten Love. These rocks retain
Their caverned footsteps printed in pure fire.
Those were the times, the ancient youth of earth,
The elemental years, when earth and Heaven
Made one in holy bridals—royal gods
Their bright immortal issue: when men’s minds
Were vast as continents, and not as now
Minute and indistinguishable plots,
With here and there acres of untilled brains; when lived
The great original, broad-eyed, sunken race,
Whose wisdom, like these sea-sustaining rocks,
Hath formed the base of the world’s fluctuous lore:—
When too, by mountainous travail, human might
Sought to possess the everlasting Heavens,
And incommunicable, by the right
Of self-acquirement and high kindred with
Celestial virtues;—when the mortal powers—
Forecounsel, wisdom, and experience,
Teachers of all arts, founders of all good,
With Godhood strove, and gloriously failed—
In failure half successful; as these scenes,
Fire-fountains, and volcano-utterances,
Earth-heavings, island vomitings, evince.
Festus
The world hath made such comet-like advance
Lately on science, we may almost hope,
Before we die of sheer decay, to learn
Something about our infancy. But me
This troubles not. Were all earth’s mountain chains
To utter fire at once, what a grand show
Of pyrotechny for our neighbor moon!
Let us ascend; but not through the charred throat
Of an extinct volcano.
Lucifer
This way—down.
So shalt thou thread the world at once.
Festus
Haste, haste.