A brief and solemn parley o’er a grave
Follows, in which youth vows to trust in God,
Be the end what it may. A prescient view
Of what is true repentance to the soul,
Spirit-informed, expands; and over all
The spiritual harmonies of Heaven
By the raised soul are heard, and God’s great rule
To creatures justified. And next we find
Ourselves in Heaven. Even man’s deadly life
Can be there, by God’s leave. Once brought to God,
The soul’s foredoom is set before it brightly,
And Heaven’s designs are seen to be brought to bear.
A lightning revelation of the Heavens,
And what is in them. Let it not be said
He sought his God in the self-slayer’s way,
Whose highest aim was but to worship in
All humbleness; for he was called thereto,
To show the holy God, in three scenes, first
And last in Threelihood, and midst in One:
Although less hard to shape the wide-winged wind
O’er the bright heights of air. He will forgive:
For we, this moment, and all living souls—
All matter, are as much within his presence,
And known through, like a glass film in the sun,
As we can ever be. Through sundry worlds
The mortal wends, returning, and relates
To her he loves—and joyously, they greet,
As boat by breeze and billow backed by tide—
His bright experience of celestial homes;
Where spiritual natures, kind and high,
Light-born, which can divine immortal things,
Abide embosomed in Eternity.
Something he tells, too, of the friendly fiend,
Something of ancient ages, infant Earth.
To this succeeds a scene explaining much,
Of retrospective and prospective cast,
Between the bard his beauty and his friend.
Our story ties us here to earth again,
And sea all aged. Evil is in love;
And ever those who are unhappiest have
Their hearts desire the oftenest, but in dreams.
Dreams are mind-clouds, high, and unshapen beauties,
Or but God-shaped, like mountains, which contain
Much and rich matter; often not for us,
But for another. Dreams are rudiments
Of the great state to come. We dream what is
About to happen to us.
What may be
The dream in this case?
It is one of death.
Of death! is that all? Well, I too have had,
What every one hath once, at least, in life—
A vision of the region of the dead;
It was the land of shadows: yea, the land
Itself was but a shadow, and the race
Which seemed therein were voices, forms of forms,
And echoes of themselves. And there was nought,
Of substance seemed, save one thing in the midst,
A great red sepulchre—a granite grave;
And at the bottom lay a skeleton,
From whose decaying jaws the shades were born;
Making its only sign of life, its dying
Continually. Some were bright, some dark.
Those that were bright, went upwards heavenly.
They which were dark, grew darker and remained.
A land of change, yet did the half things nothing
That I could see; but passed stilly on,
Taking no note of other, mate or child;
For all had lost their love when they put off
The beauty of the body. And as I
Looked on, the grave before me backed away;
And I began to dream it was a dream;
And I rushed after it: when the earth quaked,
Opened and shut, like the eye of one in fits;
It shut to with a shout. The grave was gone.
And in the stead there stood a gleedlike throne,
Which all the shadows shook to see, and swooned;
For fiends were standing, loaded with long chains,
The links whereof were fire, waiting the word
To bind and cast the shadows into hell;
For Death the second sat upon that throne,
Which set on fire the air not to be breathed.
And as he lifted up his arm to speak,
Fear preyed upon all souls, like fire on paper,
And mine among the rest, and I awoke.
By Hades, ’twas most awful.
And when love
Merges in creature-worship, let us mind:
We know not what it is we love: perhaps
It is incarnate evil. In the time
It takes to turn a leaf, we are in Heaven;
Making our way among the wheeling worlds,
Millions of suns, half infinite each, and space
For ever shone into, for ever dark,
As God is, to and by created mind,
Upheld by the companion spirit. There
The nature of the all in one, and whence
Evil; the fixed impossibility
Of creatures’ perfectness, until made one
With God; and the necessity of ill
As yet, are things all touched upon and proven.
The next scene shows us hell, in the mad mock
Of mortal revelry—the quelling truth
That all life’s sinful follies run to hell;
That lies, debauches, murders never die,
But live in hell forever; make, are hell.
And truth is there too. Hell is its own moral.
Perdition certain to the unrepentant;
Redemption on a like scale with creation;
And all creation needing it and having.
What follows is of earth, and setteth forth
God’s mercy, and the mystery of sin;
And a great gathering of the worlds round God,
Told by the youth to his truthful, trustful, love;
Who, light and lowly as a little glow-worm,
Sheddeth her beauty round her like a rose
Sweet smelling dew upon the ground it grows on.
And then a rest in light, as though ’tween earth
And Heaven there were a mediate spirit point,
A bright effect original of God,
Enlightening all ways, inwardly and round.
Then comes a scene of passion, brought about
By the bad spirit’s means for his own ends,
Whom we know not when come, so dark we grow;
Making it but a blind for the next scene,
Laid by the lonely seashore, as before,
Where the great waves come in frothed, like a horse
Put to his heart-burst speed, sobbing up hill,
Wherein he works his victim’s death, to clear
His way, and keep his name of murderer;
As he in other parts makes good his titles,
Deceiver, liar, tempter, and accuser;
Hater of man, and, most of all, of God.
In the next scene we picture back our life,
Contrasting the pure joys of earlier years,
With the unsatedness of current sin;
And the sad feel that love’s own heart turns sick
Like a bad pearl; but that the feeling still
Is adamantine, though the splendid thing
Whereon it writes its record, is of all
Frailest; and though earth shows to good and bad,
The same blind kindness, beautiful to see,
Wherewith our lovely mother loveth us,
The world in vain unbosometh her beauty,
We have no lust to live; for things may be
Corrupted into beauty; and that love,
Where
