Festus

and Thou may’st slay,
Const make a mortal soul
In Thee eternal; in a day
Wilt bring to nought the whole.

Thou hardenest, and Thou openest hearts,
As in Thy Word is shown;
Thou safest and destroyest parts,
By Thy right will alone.
Let down Thy grace, then, Lord! on all
Whom Thou wilt save to live;
Oh! if they stumble, stop their fall!
Oh! if they fall, forgive!

They are forgiven from the first,
They are predestined Thine;
And though in sin they were the worst,
In Thee they are divine.
They are, and were, and will be, Lord!
In one, in Heaven, in Thee,
Yea with the Spirit, and the Word,
One God in Trinity.

These principles and doctrines pending not
Upon the action of the poem here,
But over and above it, influencing
Nevertheless the story, as the course
Of stars enwoven with our system, earth,
Vary the view of this life’s hemisphere,
And mingle it more palpably with Heaven,
And with its changeless, ceaseless, boundless God.
It is thus that by creating to and from
Eternity, and multiplying ever
His own one Being through the universe,
He doth eternize happiness, and make
Good infinite by making all in Him.
There is but one great right and good; and ill
And wrong are shades thereof, not substances.
Nothing can be antagonist to God.

Necessity, like electricity,
Is in ourselves and all things, and no more
Without us than within us; and we live,
We of this mortal mixture, in the same law
As the pure colourless intelligence
Which dwells in Heaven, and the dead Hadëan shades.
We will and act and talk of liberty;
And all our wills and all our doings both
Are limited within this little life.
Free will is but necessity in play⁠—
The clattering of the golden reins which guide
The thunder-footed coursers of the sun.
The ship which goes to sea informed with fire⁠—
Obeying only its own iron force,
Reckless of adverse tide, breeze dead, or weak
As infant’s parting breath, too faint to stir
The feather held before it⁠—is as much
The appointed thrall of all the elements,
As the white-bosomed bark which wooes the wind,
And when it dies desists. And thus with man;
However contrary he set his heart
To God, he is but working out His will;
And, at an infinite angle, more or less
Obeying his own soul’s necessity.
He only hath freewill whose will is fate.

Evil and good are God’s right hand and left.
By ministry of evil good is clear,
And by temptation virtue; as of yore
Out of the grave rose God. Let this be deemed
Enough to justify the portion weighed
To the great spirit Evil, named herein.
If evil seem the most, yet good most is:
As water may be deep and pure below
Although the face be filmy for a time.
And if the spirit of evil seem more in
The work than God, it is but to work His will,
Who therefore is all that the, other seems.
And evil is in almost every scene
Of life more or less forward. Above all
The mystery of the Trinity is held,
Whose mystery is its reasonableness.
All that is said of Deity is said
In love and reverence. Be it so conceived.
What comes before and after the great world⁠—
Deep in the secretest abyss of Light,
And Being’s most reserved immensity⁠—
God alone knows eternally, who rends
The mantling Heavens with his hands; but with
The present is communion creatural:
He liveth in the sacrament of life.
And for the soul of man delineate here⁠—
The outline half invisible⁠—is shown
The self-sought grace, the self-aspiring truth
And natural religion of the heart
Contrasting Godhood with humanity
Ever; whereas the Spirit aye unites.
Temptation, and its workings in the heart
Whose faint and false resistance but assists⁠—
Ambition, thirst of secret lore, joy, love⁠—
Riverlike, doubling sometimes on itself⁠—
Adventure, pleasure, travel heavenly
And earthly, friendship, passion, poesie,
Viewed ever in their spiritual end⁠—
And power, celestial happiness and earth’s
Millenial foretaste, ill annihilate,
The restoration of the angels lost,
And one salvation universal given
To all create⁠—all these, related, form,
With much beside, the body of the work:⁠—
The islands, seas, and mainland of its orb.

Thus much then for this book. It aims to mark
The various belief as well as doubts
Which hold or search by turns the mind of youth
Unresting anywhere. Its heresies,
If such they be, are charitable ones;⁠—
For they who read not in the blest belief
That all souls may be saved, read to no end.
We were made to be saved. We are of God.
Nor bates the book one tittle of the truth,
To smoothe its way to favour with the fearful.

All rests with those who read. A work or thought
Is what each makes it to himself, and may
Be full of great dark meanings, like the sea,
With shoals of life rushing; or like the air,
Benighted with the wing of the wild dove,
Sweepng miles broad o’er the far western woods,
With mighty glimpses of the central light⁠—
Or may be nothing⁠—bodiless, spiritless.

Now therefore to his work and to the world
The writer bids, God speed! It matters not
If they agree or differ. Each perchance
May bear true witness to another end.
Let then what hath been, be. It boots not here
To palliate misdoings. ’Twere less toil
To build Colossus than to hew a hill
Into a statue. Hail and farewell, all!

I

Scene⁠—Heaven.

God	Eternity hath snowed its years upon them; And the white winter of their age is come, The World and all its worlds; and all shall end.
Seraphim	God! God! God! As flames in skies We burn and rise And lose ourselves in Thee! Years on years! And nought appears Save God to be. God! God! God! To us no thought Hath Being brought Toward Thee that doth not move! Years on years! And what appears Save God to love? God! God! God! All Thou dost make Lies like a lake Below Thine infinite eye: Years on years! And all appears Save God to die.
Cherubim	As sun and star, How high or far, Show but a boundless sky; So creature mind Is all confined To show Thee, God, most High! The sun still burns, The sun still turns Bound, round himself and round; So creature mind To self’s confined, But Thou God hast no bound! Systems arise. Or a world dies, Each constant hour in air; But creature mind, In Heaven confined, Lives on like Thee, God! there.
Seraphim Cherubim	God! God! God! Thou fill’st our eyes A were the skies One burning, boundless sun! While creature mind, In path confined, Passeth a spot thereon. God! God! God!
Lucifer	Ye thrones of Heaven, how bright, how pure ye are! How have ye brightened since I saw ye first! How have I