SEMICHORUS II.

Us the enchantments of earth retain:

SEMICHORUS I.

Ceaseless, and rapid, and fierce, and free,
With the Spirits which build a new earth and sea,
And a heaven where yet heaven could never be.

SEMICHORUS II.

Solemn, and slow, and serene, and bright,
Leading the Day and outspeeding the Night,
With the powers of a world of perfect light.

SEMICHORUS I.

We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere, 'Till the trees, and the beasts, and the clouds appear From its chaos made calm by love, not fear.

SEMICHORUS II.

We encircle the ocean and mountains of earth,
And the happy forms of its death and birth
Change to the music of our sweet mirth.

CHORUS OF HOURS AND SPIRITS.

Break the dance, and scatter the song.
Let some depart, and some remain,

Wherever we fly we lead along

In leashes, like star-beams, soft yet strong,
The clouds that are heavy with love's sweet rain.

Pan. Ha! they are gone!

Ione.

Yet feel you no delight

As the bare green hill

From the past sweetness?

Pan.

When some soft cloud vanishes into rain,

Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky!

Ione.

Even whilst we speak

New notes arise. What is that awful sound?
Pan. 'Tis the deep music of the rolling world
Kindling within the strings of the waved air,
Eolian modulations.

How every pause is filled with under-notes,

Clear, silver, icy, keen awakening tones,

Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul,

As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air

And gaze upon themselves within the sea.

Pan. But see where through two openings in the forest

Which hanging branches overcanopy,

And where two runnels of a rivulet,

Between the close moss, violet-inwoven,

Have made their path of melody, like sisters

Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles,
Turning their dear disunion to an isle

Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sat thoughts;
Two visions of strange radiance float upon
The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound,
Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet
Under the ground and through the windless air.
Ione. I see a chariot like that thinnest boat,
In which the mother of the months is borne
By ebbing night into her western cave,
When she upsprings from interlunar dreams,
O'er which is curved an orblike canopy
Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods
Distinctly seen through that dusk airy veil,
Regard like shapes in an enchanter's glass;
Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold,
Such as the genii of the thunder-storm
Pile on the floor of the illumined sea
When the sun rushes under it; they roll
And move and grow as with an inward wind;
Within it sits a winged infant, white

Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow,

Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost,

Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds

Of its white robe, woof of ethereal pearl.

Its hair is white, the brightness of white light
Scattered in string; yet its two eyes are heavens
Of liquid darkness, which the Deity

Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured
From jagged clouds, out of their arrowy lashes,
Tempering the cold and radiant air around,
With fire that is not brightness; in its hand
It sways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point
A guiding power directs the chariot's prow
Over its wheeled clouds, which as they roll

Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds,
Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.

Pan. And from the other opening in the wood Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony,

A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,

Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass

Flow, as through empty space, music and light:
Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,
Purple and azure, white, green, and golden,
Sphere within sphere; and every space between
Peopled with unimaginable shapes,

Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep,
Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl
Over each other with a thousand motions,
Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning,
And with the force of self-destroying swiftness,
Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on,

Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones,
Intelligible words and music wild.

With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist

Of elemental subtlety, like light;

And the wild odour of the forest flowers,

The music of the living grass and air,

The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams

Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed,
Seem kneaded into one aërial mass

Which drowns the sense. Within the orb itself,
Pillowed upon its alabaster arms,

Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil,
On its own folded wings, and wavy hair,
The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep,
And you can see its little lips are moving,
Amid the changing light of their own smiles,
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream.
Ione. Tis only mocking the orb's harmony.
Pan. And from a star upon its forehead, shoot,
Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears
With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined,
Embleming heaven and earth united now,
Vast beams like spoke of some invisible wheel
Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought,
Filling the abyss with sunlike lightnings,

And perpendicular now, and now transverse,
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass,
Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart;
Infinite mine of adamant and gold,
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems,
And caverns on crystalline columns poured
With vegetable silver overspread;

Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs
Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed,

Whose vapours clothe earth's monarch mountain-tops

With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on

And make appear the melancholy ruins

Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;

Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels

Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,

Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in grey annihilation, split,

Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust

To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jagged alligator, and the might

Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
Wrapt deluge round it like a cloke, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God

Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried,
Be not! And like my words they were no more.

THE EARTH,

The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha ha! the animation of delight

Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.

THE MOON.

Brother mine, calm wanderer,
Happy globe of land and air,

Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame,
With love, and odour, and deep melody
Through me, through me!

THE EARTH.

Ha ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.

The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses,
And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses,
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse,
Who all our green and azure universe

Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending
A solid cloud to rain hot thunder-stones,

And splinter and knead down my children's bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending.

Until each crag-like tower, and storied column,
Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn,

My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire; My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom

Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire.

How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup

Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all;
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, love

Bursts in like light on caves cloven by thunder-ball.

THE MOON.

The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth

My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
On mine, on mine!

Gazing on thee I feel, I know

Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow, And living shapes upon my bosom move:

Music is in the sea and air,

Winged clouds soar here and there,

Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of: 'Tis love, all love!

THE EARTH.

It interpenetrates my granite mass,

Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass,
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;

Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,

They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers.

And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being:

With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever,

Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,

Leave man, who was a many sided mirror, Which could distort to many a shape of error, This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love; Which over all his kind as the sun's heaven Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even

Darting from starry depths radiance and light, doth move.

Leave man, even as a leprous child is left,

Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured; Then when it wanders home with rosy smile, Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile

It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored.

Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought,
Of love and might to be divided not,

Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze

Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.

Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,

Whose nature is its own divine control,

Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;

Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!

His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,

A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,

Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm

Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.