No More Learning

THE SERAPHIM.


PART THE FIRST.

[_It is the time of the Crucifixion; and the Angels of Heaven have
departed towards the Earth, except the two Seraphim, ADOR the Strong
and ZERAH the Bright One. _
_The place is the outer side of the shut Heavenly Gate. _]

_Ador. _ O Seraph, pause no more!
Beside this gate of heaven we stand alone.

_Zerah. _ Of heaven!

_Ador. _ Our brother hosts are gone--

_Zerah. _ Are gone before.

_Ador. _ And the golden harps the angels bore
To help the songs of their desire,
Still burning from their hands of fire,
Lie without touch or tone
Upon the glass-sea shore.

_Zerah. _ Silent upon the glass-sea shore!

_Ador. _ There the Shadow from the throne
Formless with infinity
Hovers o'er the crystal sea
Awfuller than light derived,
And red with those primeval heats
Whereby all life has lived.

_Zerah. _ Our visible God, our heavenly seats!

_Ador. _ Beneath us sinks the pomp angelical,
Cherub and seraph, powers and virtues, all,--
The roar of whose descent has died
To a still sound, as thunder into rain.
Immeasurable space spreads magnified
With that thick life, along the plane
The worlds slid out on. What a fall
And eddy of wings innumerous, crossed
By trailing curls that have not lost
The glitter of the God-smile shed
On every prostrate angel's head!
What gleaming up of hands that fling
Their homage in retorted rays,
From high instinct of worshipping,
And habitude of praise!

_Zerah. _ Rapidly they drop below us:
Pointed palm and wing and hair
Indistinguishable show us
Only pulses in the air
Throbbing with a fiery beat,
As if a new creation heard
Some divine and plastic word,
And trembling at its new-found being,
Awakened at our feet.

_Ador. _ Zerah, do not wait for seeing!
HIS voice, his, that thrills us so
As we our harpstrings, uttered _Go_,
_Behold the Holy in his woe! _
And all are gone, save thee and--

_Zerah. _ Thee!

_Ador. _ I stood the nearest to the throne
In hierarchical degree,
What time the Voice said _Go_!
And whether I was moved alone
By the storm-pathos of the tone
Which swept through heaven the alien name of _woe_,
Or whether the subtle glory broke
Through my strong and shielding wings,
Bearing to my finite essence
Incapacious of their presence,
Infinite imaginings,
None knoweth save the Throned who spoke;
But I who at creation stood upright
And heard the God-breath move
Shaping the words that lightened, "Be there light,
Nor trembled but with love,
Now fell down shudderingly,
My face upon the pavement whence I had towered,
As if in mine immortal overpowered
By God's eternity.

_Zerah. _ Let me wait! --let me wait! --

_Ador. _ Nay, gaze not backward through the gate!
God fills our heaven with God's own solitude
Till all the pavements glow:
His Godhead being no more subdued,
By itself, to glories low
Which seraphs can sustain.
What if thou, in gazing so,
Shouldst behold but only one
Attribute, the veil undone--
Even that to which we dare to press
Nearest, for its gentleness--
Ay, his love!
How the deep ecstatic pain
Thy being's strength would capture!
Without language for the rapture,
Without music strong to come
And set the adoration free,
For ever, ever, wouldst thou be
Amid the general chorus dumb,
God-stricken to seraphic agony.
Or, brother, what if on thine eyes
In vision bare should rise
The life-fount whence his hand did gather
With solitary force
Our immortalities!
Straightway how thine own would wither,
Falter like a human breath,
And shrink into a point like death,
By gazing on its source! --
My words have imaged dread
Meekly hast thou bent thine head,
And dropt thy wings in languishment:
Overclouding foot and face,
As if God's throne were eminent
Before thee, in the place.
Yet not--not so,
O loving spirit and meek, dost thou fulfil
The supreme Will.
Not for obeisance but obedience,
Give motion to thy wings! Depart from hence!
The voice said "Go! "

_Zerah. _ Beloved, I depart,
His will is as a spirit within my spirit,
A portion of the being I inherit.
His will is mine obedience. I resemble
A flame all undefiled though it tremble;
I go and tremble. Love me, O beloved!
O thou, who stronger art,
And standest ever near the Infinite,
Pale with the light of Light,
Love me, beloved! me, more newly made,
More feeble, more afraid;
And let me hear with mine thy pinions moved,
As close and gentle as the loving are,
That love being near, heaven may not seem so far.

_Ador. _ I am near thee and I love thee.
Were I loveless, from thee gone,
Love is round, beneath, above thee,
God, the omnipresent one.
Spread the wing and lift the brow!
Well-beloved, what fearest thou?

_Zerah. _ I fear, I fear--

_Ador. _ What fear?

_Zerah. _ The fear of earth.

_Ador. _ Of earth, the God-created and God-praised
In the hour of birth?
Where every night the moon in light
Doth lead the waters silver-faced?
Where every day the sun doth lay
A rapture to the heart of all
The leafy and reeded pastoral,
As if the joyous shout which burst
From angel lips to see him first,
Had left a silent echo in his ray?

_Zerah. _ Of earth--the God-created and God-curst,
Where man is, and the thorn:
Where sun and moon have borne
No light to souls forlorn:
Where Eden's tree of life no more uprears
Its spiral leaves and fruitage, but instead
The yew-tree bows its melancholy head
And all the undergrasses kills and seres.

_Ador. _ Of earth the weak,
Made and unmade?
Where men, that faint, do strive for crowns that fade?
Where, having won the profit which they seek,
They lie beside the sceptre and the gold
With fleshless hands that cannot wield or hold,
And the stars shine in their unwinking eyes?

_Zerah. _ Of earth the bold,
Where the blind matter wrings
An awful potence out of impotence,
Bowing the spiritual things
To the things of sense.
Where the human will replies
With ay and no,
Because the human pulse is quick or slow.
Where Love succumbs to Change,
With only his own memories, for revenge.
And the fearful mystery--

_Ador. _ called Death?

_Zerah. _ Nay, death is fearful,--but who saith
"To die," is comprehensible.
What's fearfuller, thou knowest well,
Though the utterance be not for thee,
Lest it blanch thy lips from glory--
Ay! the cursed thing that moved
A shadow of ill, long time ago,
Across our heaven's own shining floor,
And when it vanished, some who were
On thrones of holy empire there,
Did reign--were seen--were--never more.
Come nearer, O beloved!

_Ador. _ I am near thee. Didst thou bear thee
Ever to this earth?

_Zerah. _ Before.
When thrilling from His hand along
Its lustrous path with spheric song
The earth was deathless, sorrowless.
Unfearing, then, pure feet might press
The grasses brightening with their feet,
For God's own voice did mix its sound
In a solemn confluence oft
With the rivers' flowing round,
And the life-tree's waving soft.
Beautiful new earth and strange!

_Ador. _ Hast thou seen it since--the change?

_Zerah. _ Nay, or wherefore should I fear
To look upon it now?
I have beheld the ruined things
Only in depicturings
Of angels from an earthly mission,--
Strong one, even upon thy brow,
When, with task completed, given
Back to us in that transition,
I have beheld thee silent stand,
Abstracted in the seraph band,
Without a smile in heaven.

_Ador. _ Then thou wast not one of those
Whom the loving Father chose
In visionary pomp to sweep
O'er Judaea's grassy places,
O'er the shepherds and the sheep,
Though thou art so tender? --dimming
All the stars except one star
With their brighter kinder faces,
And using heaven's own tune in hymning,
While deep response from earth's own mountains ran,
"Peace upon earth, goodwill to man. "

_Zerah. _ "Glory to God. " I said amen afar.
And those who from that earthly mission are,
Within mine ears have told
That the seven everlasting Spirits did hold
With such a sweet and prodigal constraint
The meaning yet the mystery of the song
What time they sang it, on their natures strong,
That, gazing down on earth's dark steadfastness
And speaking the new peace in promises,
The love and pity made their voices faint
Into the low and tender music, keeping
The place in heaven of what on earth is weeping.

_Ador. _ "Peace upon earth. " Come down to it.

_Zerah. _ Ah me!
I hear thereof uncomprehendingly.
Peace where the tempest, where the sighing is,
And worship of the idol, 'stead of His?

_Ador. _ Yea, peace, where He is.

_Zerah. _ He!
Say it again.

_Ador. _ Where He is.

_Zerah. _ Can it be
That earth retains a tree
Whose leaves, like Eden foliage, can be swayed
By the breathing of His voice, nor shrink and fade?

_Ador. _ There is a tree! --it hath no leaf nor root;
Upon it hangs a curse for all its fruit:
Its shadow on his head is laid.
For he, the crowned Son,
Has left his crown and throne,
Walks earth in Adam's clay,
Eve's snake to bruise and slay--

_Zerah. _ Walks earth in clay?

_Ador. _ And walking in the clay which he created,
He through it shall touch death.
What do I utter? what conceive? did breath
Of demon howl it in a blasphemy?
Or was it mine own voice, informed, dilated
By the seven confluent Spirits? --Speak--answer me!

_Who_ said man's victim was his deity?

_Zerah. _ Beloved, beloved, the word came forth from thee.
Thine eyes are rolling a tempestuous light
Above, below, around,
As putting thunder-questions without cloud,
Reverberate without sound,
To universal nature's depth and height.
The tremor of an inexpressive thought
Too self-amazed to shape itself aloud,
O'erruns the awful curving of thy lips;
And while thine hands are stretched above,
As newly they had caught
Some lightning from the Throne, or showed the Lord
Some retributive sword,
Thy brows do alternate with wild eclipse
And radiance, with contrasted wrath and love,
As God had called thee to a seraph's part,
With a man's quailing heart.

_Ador. _ O heart--O heart of man!
O ta'en from human clay
To be no seraph's but Jehovah's own!
Made holy in the taking,
And yet unseparate
From death's perpetual ban,
And human feelings sad and passionate:
Still subject to the treacherous forsaking
Of other hearts, and its own steadfast pain.
O heart of man--of God! which God has ta'en
From out the dust, with its humanity
Mournful and weak yet innocent around it,
And bade its many pulses beating lie
Beside that incommunicable stir
Of Deity wherewith he interwound it.
O man! and is thy nature so defiled
That all that holy Heart's devout law-keeping,
And low pathetic beat in deserts wild,
And gushings pitiful of tender weeping
For traitors who consigned it to such woe--
That all could cleanse thee not, without the flow
Of blood, the life-blood--_His_--and streaming _so_?
O earth the thundercleft, windshaken, where
The louder voice of "blood and blood" doth rise,
Hast thou an altar for this sacrifice?
O heaven! O vacant throne!
O crowned hierarchies that wear your crown
When His is put away!
Are ye unshamed that ye cannot dim
Your alien brightness to be liker him,
Assume a human passion, and down-lay
Your sweet secureness for congenial fears,
And teach your cloudless ever-burning eyes
The mystery of his tears?

_Zerah. _ I am strong, I am strong.
Were I never to see my heaven again,
I would wheel to earth like the tempest rain
Which sweeps there with an exultant sound
To lose its life as it reaches the ground.
I am strong, I am strong.
Away from mine inward vision swim
The shining seats of my heavenly birth,
I see but his, I see but him--
The Maker's steps on his cruel earth.
Will the bitter herbs of earth grow sweet
To me, as trodden by his feet?
Will the vexed, accurst humanity,
As worn by him, begin to be
A blessed, yea, a sacred thing
For love and awe and ministering?
I am strong, I am strong.
By our angel ken shall we survey
His loving smile through his woeful clay?
I am swift, I am strong,
The love is bearing me along.

_Ador. _ One love is bearing us along.


PART THE SECOND.

_Mid-air, above Judaea. ADOR and ZERAH are a little apart from the
visible Angelic Hosts. _

_Ador. _ Beloved! dost thou see? --

_Zerah. _ Thee,--thee.
Thy burning eyes already are
Grown wild and mournful as a star
Whose occupation is for aye
To look upon the place of clay
Whereon thou lookest now.
The crown is fainting on thy brow
To the likeness of a cloud,
The forehead's self a little bowed
From its aspect high and holy,
As it would in meekness meet
Some seraphic melancholy:
Thy very wings that lately flung
An outline clear, do flicker here
And wear to each a shadow hung,
Dropped across thy feet.
In these strange contrasting glooms
Stagnant with the scent of tombs,
Seraph faces, O my brother,
Show awfully to one another.

_Ador. _ Dost thou see?

_Zerah. _ Even so; I see
Our empyreal company,
Alone the memory of their brightness
Left in them, as in thee.
The circle upon circle, tier on tier,
Piling earth's hemisphere
With heavenly infiniteness,
Above us and around,
Straining the whole horizon like a bow:
Their songful lips divorced from all sound,
A darkness gliding down their silvery glances,--
Bowing their steadfast solemn countenances
As if they heard God speak, and could not glow.

_Ador. _ Look downward! dost thou see?

_Zerah. _ And wouldst thou press _that_ vision on my words?
Doth not earth speak enough
Of change and of undoing,
Without a seraph's witness? Oceans rough
With tempest, pastoral swards
Displaced by fiery deserts, mountains ruing
The bolt fallen yesterday,
That shake their piny heads, as who would say
"We are too beautiful for our decay"--
Shall seraphs speak of these things? Let alone
Earth to her earthly moan!

_Voice of all things. _ Is there no moan but hers?

_Ador. _ Hearest thou the attestation
Of the roused universe
Like a desert-lion shaking
Dews of silence from its mane?
With an irrepressive passion
Uprising at once,
Rising up and forsaking
Its solemn state in the circle of suns,
To attest the pain
Of him who stands (O patience sweet! )
In his own hand-prints of creation,
With human feet?

_Voice of all things. _ Is there no moan but ours?

_Zerah.
_ Forms, Spaces, Motions wide,
O meek, insensate things,
O congregated matters! who inherit,
Instead of vital powers,
Impulsions God-supplied;
Instead of influent spirit,
A clear informing beauty;
Instead of creature-duty,
Submission calm as rest.
Lights, without feet or wings,
In golden courses sliding!
Glooms, stagnantly subsiding,
Whose lustrous heart away was prest
Into the argent stars!
Ye crystal firmamental bars
That hold the skyey waters free
From tide or tempest's ecstasy!
Airs universal! thunders lorn
That wait your lightnings in cloud-cave
Hewn out by the winds! O brave
And subtle elements! the Holy
Hath charged me by your voice with folly. [D]
Enough, the mystic arrow leaves its wound.
Return ye to your silences inborn,
Or to your inarticulated sound!

_Ador. _ Zerah!

_Zerah. _ Wilt _thou_ rebuke?
God hath rebuked me, brother. I am weak.

_Ador. _ Zerah, my brother Zerah! could I speak
Of thee, 'twould be of love to thee.

_Zerah. _ Thy look
Is fixed on earth, as mine upon thy face.
Where shall I seek His?
I have thrown
One look upon earth, but one,
Over the blue mountain-lines,
Over the forests of palms and pines,
Over the harvest-lands golden,
Over the valleys that fold in
The gardens and vines--
He is not there.
All these are unworthy
Those footsteps to bear,
Before which, bowing down
I would fain quench the stars of my crown
In the dark of the earthy.
Where shall I seek him?
No reply?
Hath language left thy lips, to place
Its vocal in thine eye?
Ador, Ador! are we come
To a double portent, that
Dumb matter grows articulate
And songful seraphs dumb?
Ador, Ador!

_Ador. _ I constrain
The passion of my silence. None
Of those places gazed upon
Are gloomy enow to fit his pain.
Unto Him, whose forming word
Gave to Nature flower and sward.
She hath given back again,
For the myrtle--the thorn,
For the sylvan calm--the human scorn.
Still, still, reluctant seraph, gaze beneath!
There is a city----

_Zerah. _ Temple and tower,
Palace and purple would droop like a flower,
(Or a cloud at our breath)
If He neared in his state
The outermost gate.

_Ador. _ Ah me, not so
In the state of a king did the victim go!
And THOU who hangest mute of speech
'Twixt heaven and earth, with forehead yet
Stained by the bloody sweat,
God! man! Thou hast forgone thy throne in each.

_Zerah. _ Thine eyes behold him?

_Ador. _ Yea, below.
Track the gazing of mine eyes,
Naming God within thine heart
That its weakness may depart
And the vision rise!
Seest thou yet, beloved?

_Zerah. _ I see
Beyond the city, crosses three
And mortals three that hang thereon
'Ghast and silent to the sun.
Round them blacken and welter and press
Staring multitudes whose father
Adam was, whose brows are dark
With his Cain's corroded mark,--
Who curse with looks. Nay--let me rather
Turn unto the wilderness!

_Ador. _ Turn not! God dwells with men.

_Zerah. _ Above
He dwells with angels, and they love.
Can these love? With the living's pride
They stare at those who die, who hang
In their sight and die. They bear the streak
Of the crosses' shadow, black not wide,
To fall on their heads, as it swerves aside
When the victims' pang
Makes the dry wood creak.

_Ador. _ The cross--the cross!

_Zerah. _ A woman kneels
The mid cross under,
With white lips asunder,
And motion on each.
They throb, as she feels,
With a spasm, not a speech;
And her lids, close as sleep,
Are less calm, for the eyes
Have made room there to weep
Drop on drop--

_Ador. _ Weep? Weep blood,
All women, all men!
He sweated it, He,
For your pale womanhood
And base manhood. Agree
That these water-tears, then,
Are vain, mocking like laughter:
Weep blood! Shall the flood
Of salt curses, whose foam is the darkness, on roll
Forward, on from the strand of the storm-beaten years,
And back from the rocks of the horrid hereafter,
And up, in a coil, from the present's wrath-spring,
Yea, down from the windows of heaven opening,
Deep calling to deep as they meet on His soul--
And men weep only tears?

_Zerah. _ Little drops in the lapse!
And yet, Ador, perhaps
It is all that they can.
Tears! the lovingest man
Has no better bestowed
Upon man.

_Ador. _ Nor on God.

_Zerah. _ Do all-givers need gifts?
If the Giver said "Give," the first motion would slay
Our Immortals, the echo would ruin away
The same worlds which he made. Why, what angel uplifts
Such a music, so clear,
It may seem in God's ear
Worth more than a woman's hoarse weeping? And thus,
Pity tender as tears, I above thee would speak,
Thou woman that weepest! weep unscorned of us!
I, the tearless and pure, am but loving and weak.

_Ador. _ Speak low, my brother, low,--and not of love
Or human or angelic! Rather stand
Before the throne of that Supreme above,
In whose infinitude the secrecies
Of thine own being lie hid, and lift thine hand
Exultant, saying, "Lord God, I am wise! "--
Than utter _here_, "I love. "

_Zerah. _ And yet thine eyes
Do utter it. They melt in tender light,
The tears of heaven.

_Ador. _ Of heaven. Ah me!

_Zerah. _ Ador!

_Ador. _ Say on!

_Zerah. _ The crucified are three.
Beloved, they are unlike.

_Ador. _ Unlike.

_Zerah. _ For one
Is as a man who has sinned and still
Doth wear the wicked will,
The hard malign life-energy,
Tossed outward, in the parting soul's disdain,
On brow and lip that cannot change again.

_Ador. _ And one--

_Zerah. _ Has also sinned.
And yet (O marvel! ) doth the Spirit-wind
Blow white those waters? Death upon his face
Is rather shine than shade,
A tender shine by looks beloved made:
He seemeth dying in a quiet place,
And less by iron wounds in hands and feet
Than heart-broke by new joy too sudden and sweet.

_Ador. _ And ONE! --

_Zerah. _ And ONE! --

_Ador. _ Why dost thou pause?

_Zerah. _ God! God!
Spirit of my spirit! who movest
Through seraph veins in burning deity
To light the quenchless pulses! --

_Ador. _ But hast trod
The depths of love in thy peculiar nature,
And not in any thou hast made and lovest
In narrow seraph hearts! --

_Zerah. _ Above, Creator!
Within, Upholder!

_Ador. _ And below, below,
The creature's and the upholden's sacrifice!

_Zerah. _ Why do I pause? --

_Ador. _ There is a silentness
That answers thee enow,
That, like a brazen sound
Excluding others, doth ensheathe us round,--
Hear it. It is not from the visible skies
Though they are still,
Unconscious that their own dropped dews express
The light of heaven on every earthly hill.
It is not from the hills, though calm and bare
They, since their first creation,
Through midnight cloud or morning's glittering air
Or the deep deluge blindness, toward the place
Whence thrilled the mystic word's creative grace,
And whence again shall come
The word that uncreates,
Have lift their brows in voiceless expectation.
It is not from the places that entomb
Man's dead, though common Silence there dilates
Her soul to grand proportions, worthily
To fill life's vacant room.
Not there: not there.
Not yet within those chambers lieth He,
A dead one in his living world; his south
And west winds blowing over earth and sea,
And not a breath on that creating mouth.
But now,--a silence keeps
(Not death's, nor sleep's)
The lips whose whispered word
Might roll the thunders round reverberated.
Silent art thou, O my Lord,
Bowing down thy stricken head!
Fearest thou, a groan of thine
Would make the pulse of thy creation fail
As thine own pulse? --would rend the veil
Of visible things and let the flood
Of the unseen Light, the essential God,
Rush in to whelm the undivine?
Thy silence, to my thinking, is as dread.

_Zerah. _ O silence!

_Ador. _ Doth it say to thee--the NAME,
Slow-learning seraph?

_Zerah. _ I have learnt.

_Ador. _ The flame
Perishes in thine eyes.

_Zerah. _ He opened his,
And looked. I cannot bear--

_Ador. _ Their agony?

_Zerah. _ Their love. God's depth is in them. From his brows
White, terrible in meekness, didst thou see
The lifted eyes unclose?
He is God, seraph! Look no more on me,
O God--I am not God.

_Ador. _ The loving is
Sublimed within them by the sorrowful.
In heaven we could sustain them.

_Zerah. _ Heaven is dull,
Mine Ador, to man's earth. The light that burns
In fluent, refluent motion
Along the crystal ocean;
The springing of the golden harps between
The bowery wings, in fountains of sweet sound,
The winding, wandering music that returns
Upon itself, exultingly self-bound
In the great spheric round
Of everlasting praises;
The God-thoughts in our midst that intervene,
Visibly flashing from the supreme throne
Full in seraphic faces
Till each astonishes the other, grown
More beautiful with worship and delight--
My heaven! my home of heaven! my infinite
Heaven-choirs! what are ye to this dust and death,
This cloud, this cold, these tears, this failing breath,
Where God's immortal love now issueth
In this MAN'S woe?

_Ador. _ His eyes are very deep yet calm.

_Zerah. _ No more
On _me_, Jehovah-man--

_Ador. _ Calm-deep. They show
A passion which is tranquil. They are seeing
No earth, no heaven, no men that slay and curse,
No seraphs that adore;
Their gaze is on the invisible, the dread,
The things we cannot view or think or speak,
Because we are too happy, or too weak,--
The sea of ill, for which the universe,
With all its piled space, can find no shore,
With all its life, no living foot to tread.
But he, accomplished in Jehovah-being,
Sustains the gaze adown,
Conceives the vast despair,
And feels the billowy griefs come up to drown,
Nor fears, nor faints, nor fails, till all be finished.

_Zerah. _ Thus, do I find Thee thus? My undiminished
And undiminishable God! --my God!
The echoes are still tremulous along
The heavenly mountains, of the latest song
Thy manifested glory swept abroad
In rushing past our lips: they echo aye
"Creator, thou art strong!
Creator, thou art blessed over all. "
By what new utterance shall I now recall,
Unteaching the heaven-echoes? Dare I say,
"Creator, thou art feebler than thy work!
Creator, thou art sadder than thy creature!
A worm, and not a man,
Yea, no worm, but a curse? "
I dare not so mine heavenly phrase reverse.
Albeit the piercing thorn and thistle-fork
(Whose seed disordered ran
From Eve's hand trembling when the curse did reach her)
Be garnered darklier in thy soul, the rod
That smites thee never blossoming, and thou
Grief-bearer for thy world, with unkinged brow--
I leave to men their song of Ichabod:
I have an angel-tongue--I know but praise.

_Ador. _ Hereafter shall the blood-bought captives raise
The passion-song of blood.

_Zerah. _ And _we_, extend
Our holy vacant hands towards the Throne,
Crying "We have no music. "

_Ador. _ Rather, blend
Both musics into one.
The sanctities and sanctified above
Shall each to each, with lifted looks serene,
Their shining faces lean,
And mix the adoring breath
And breathe the full thanksgiving.

_Zerah. _ But the love--
The love, mine Ador!