Which sweep out and around us vastily Eve. Strange phantasms of pale shadow! there are twelve. Thou who didst name all lives, hast names for these? By reason of the passion of our grief, And, from the top of sense, looked over sense, To the significance and heart of things Rather than things themselves. Eve. And the dim twelve... Adam. Are dim exponents of the creature-life Subduing the unknown and taming it From all prodigious dread. That phantasm, there, Presents a lion, albeit twenty times As large as any lion-with a roar Set soundless in his vibratory jaws, And a strange horror stirring in his mane. A bull stands hornèd here with gibbous glooms; Using the calm for waters, while their fins Throb out quick rhythms along the shallow air. Eve. How he stands, That phantasm of a man-who is not thou! Two phantasms of two men! Adam. One that sustains, Dost thou see And one that strives, resuming, so, the ends I have seen, * Adam recognises in Aquarius, the water-bearer, and Sagittarius, the archer, distinct types of the man bearing and the man combating, the passive and active forms of human labour. I hope that the preceding zodiacal signs-transferred to the earthly shadow and representative purpose-of Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Libra, Scorpio, Capricornus, and Pisces, are sufficiently obvious to the reader. But look off to those small humanities* Should light them forward from their outline vague [Two spirits, of organic and inorganic nature arise from the ground. But what Shapes Rise up between us in the open space, And thrust me into horror, back from hope! Adam. Colossal Shapes--twin sovran images, With a disconsolate, blank majesty Set in their wondrous faces! with no look, Of individual life and passionate ends, O bleak sound, O shadow of sound, O phantasm of thin sound! *Her maternal instinct is excited by Gemini. First Spirit. I am the spirit of the harmless earth. God spake me softly out among the stars, As softly as a blessing of much worth; And then, His smile did follow unawares, I drave on with the worlds exultingly, Of giratory orb and interval Lost in the fluent motion of delight Toward the high ends of Being beyond sight- Second Spirit. I am the spirit of the harmless beasts, Of flying things, and creeping things, and swimming; Of all the lives, erst set at silent feasts, That found the love-kiss on the goblet brimming, And tasted in each drop within the measure The sweetest pleasure of their Lord's good pleasureYet I wail! What a full hum of life around His lips Bore witness to the fulness of creation! To separate existence,--and each bearing Ere. They wail, beloved! they speak of glory and And they wail-wail. That burden of the song Drops from it like its fruit, and heavily falls Into the lap of silence. Adam. First Spirit. Hark, again! I was so beautiful, so beautiful, My joy stood up within me bold to add A word to God's,—and, when His work was full, To 'very good,' responded ‘very glad!' Filtered through roses, did the light inclose me, And bunches of the grape swam blue across me— Yet I wail! Second Spirit. I bounded with my panthers! I rejoiced In my young tumbling lions rolled together! My stag, the river at his fetlocks, poised Then dipped his antlers through the golden weather In the same ripple which the alligator Left, in his joyous troubling of the water- First Spirit. O my deep waters, cataract and flood, What wordless triumph did your voices render! How, with a holy quiet, did your Earthy Second Spirit. O my wild wood-dogs, with your listening eyes! My horses-my ground-eagles, for swift fleeing! My birds, with viewless wings of harmonies, My calm cold fishes of a silver being, |