Puslapio vaizdai
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Statelier forms, and fairer faces,

To carry man to new degrees
Of power, and of comeliness.

These presents be the hostages
Which I pawn for my release;
See to thyself, O universe!

Thou art better and not worse.

And the god having given all,

Is freed for ever from his thrall.

THE VISIT.

ASKEST, 'How long thou shalt stay?'

Devastator of the day!

Know, each substance and relation

Thorough nature's operation,

Hath its unit, bound, and metre,

And every new compound

Is some product and repeater,

Product of the early found.

But the unit of the visit,

The encounter of the wise,

Say what other metre is it

Than the meeting of the eyes?

Nature poureth into nature

Through the channels of that feature.

Riding on the ray of Sight,

More fleet than waves or whirlwinds go,

Or for service or delight,

Hearts to hearts their meaning show,

Sum their long experience,

And import intelligence.

Single look has drained the breast,

Single moment years confessed.

The duration of a glance

Is the term of convenance,

And, though thy rede be church or state,

Frugal multiples of that.

Speeding Saturn cannot halt;

Linger, thou shalt rue the fault,

If Love his moment overstay,

Hatred's swift repulsions play.

URIEL.

Ir fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,

Or ever the wild Time coined itself

Into calendar months and days.

This was the lapse of Uriel,

Which in Paradise befel.

Once among the Pleiads walking,

SAID overheard the young gods talking,

And the treason too long pent

To his ears was evident.

The young deities discussed

Laws of form and metre just,

Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,

With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere,

Gave his sentiment divine

Against the being of a line:

'Line in nature is not found,

Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return,
Evil will bless, and ice will burn,'
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;

The stern old war-gods shook their heads,
The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival,

The rash word boded ill to all;

The balance-beam of Fate was bent;

The bonds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own.
But all slid to confusion.

A sad self-knowledge withering fell
On the beauty of Uriel.

In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew that hour into his cloud,
Whether doomed to long gyration

In the sea of generation,

Or by knowledge grown too bright

To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

Straightway a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,

If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But now and then truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings,

And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn;
And a blush tinged the upper sky,

And the gods shook, they knew not why.

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