AND many there were hurt by that strong boy, His name, they said, was Pleasure,

And near him stood, glorious beyond measure, Four Ladies who possess all empery

In earth and air and sea;

Nothing that lives from their award is free.
Their names will I declare to thee,
Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear,

And they the regents are

'Of the four elements that frame the heart,
And each diversely exercised her art

By force or circumstance or sleight
To prove her dreadful might
Upon that poor domain.

Desire presented her [false] glass, and then
The spirit dwelling there

10

Was spell-bound to embrace what seemed so fair

Within that magic mirror,

And dazed by that bright error,

It would have scorned the [shafts] of the

avenger,

And death, and penitence, and danger,
Had not then silent Fear

Touched with her palsying spear,

So that as if a frozen torrent

The blood was curdled in its current; It dared not speak, even in look or motion, But chained within itself its proud devotion. Between Desire and Fear thou wert A wretched thing, poor heart!

20

Sad was his life who bore thee in his breast, 30 Wild bird for that weak nest.

Till Love even from fierce Desire it bought,
And from the very wound of tender thought
Drew solace, and the pity of sweet eyes
Gave strength to bear those gentle agonies,
Surmount the loss, the terror, and the sorrow.

Then Hope approached, she who can borrow
For poor to-day, from rich to-morrow,
And Fear withdrew, as night when day
Descends upon the orient ray,

And after long and vain endurance

The poor

heart woke to her assurance.

-At one birth these four were born
With the world's forgotten morn,
And from Pleasure still they hold
All it circles, as of old.

When, as summer lures the swallow,
Pleasure lures the heart to follow-
O weak heart of little wit!

The fair hand that wounded it,
Seeking, like a panting hare,
Refuge in the lynx's lair,

Love, Desire, Hope, and Fear,
Ever will be near.

40

50

PROLOGUE TO HELLAS.'

HERALD OF ETERNITY.

It is the day when all the sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor
Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss

1 Dr. Garnett, who first deciphered and published this priceless fragment, called it a Prologue to Helias; and it has become well known under that name. Matter connected with Hellas occurs among that in which no such connexion is clearly distin

Frozen by his steadfast word to hyaline

*

*

*

The shadow of God, and delegate

Of that before whose breath the universe
Is as a print of dew.

Hierarchs and kings
Who from yon thrones pinnacled on the past
Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom

Of mortal thought, which like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the

heaven

Which gave it birth,

assemble here

of

Before your Father's throne; the swift decree
Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation

Is yet withheld, clothed in which it shall

annul

The fairest of those wandering isles that gem
The sapphire space of interstellar air,1

That green and azure sphere, that earth in-
wrapped

Less in the beauty of its tender light
Than in an atmosphere of living spirit
Which interpenetrating all the. . .

it rolls from realm to realm

And age to age, and in its ebb and flow
Impels the generations
To their appointed place,
Whilst the high Arbiter

20

guishable; and it might perhaps have been better to entitle the piece differently. Probably more of it is related to the scheme for a lyrical drama based on the Book of Job (see Memoir, vol. i. p. xliv) than to Hellas.-ED.

1 Compare Hellas line 771 (vol. iv. p. 74)

Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air.—ED.

Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time
Sends his decrees veiled in eternal. .

Within the circuit of this pendant orb

30

There lies an antique region, on which fell
The dews of thought in the world's golden dawn
Earliest and most benign, and from it sprung
Temples and cities and immortal forms
And harmonies of wisdom and of song,
And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts
so fair.

And when the sun of its dominion failed,
And when the winter of its glory came,

The winds that stripped it bare blew on and
swept

That dew into the utmost wildernesses

40

In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, sons of God,

for ye beheld, Reluctant, or consenting, or astonished,

The stern decrees go forth, which heaped on
Greece

Ruin and degradation and despair.

A fourth now waits: assemble, sons of God,
To speed or to prevent or to suspend,

If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld, 50
The unaccomplished destiny.

X

CHORUS.

The curtain of the Universe

Is rent and shattered,

The splendour-wingèd worlds disperse
Like wild doves scattered.

Space is roofless and bare,

And in the midst a cloudy shrine,

Dark amid thrones of light.

In the blue glow of hyaline

Golden worlds revolve and shine.
In

60

flight

From every point of the Infinite,

Like a thousand dawns on a single night The splendours rise and spread;

And through thunder and darkness dread
Light and music are radiated,

And in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings high overhead

The giant Powers move,

Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill. 70

The senate of the Gods is met,
Each in his rank and station set;
There is silence in the spaces-
Lo! Satan, Christ, and Mahomet
Start from their places!

CHRIST.

*

There are two fountains in which spirits weep 80
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named,
And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns; the third,
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and
added

Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion's lymph,
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain

*

*

*

*