God appears, and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But doth a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

THE GATES OF PARADISE.

INTRODUCTION.

MUTUAL forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise,
Against the Accuser's chief desire,
Who walked among the stones of fire.
Jehovah's fingers wrote the Law:
He wept; then rose in zeal and awe,
And, in the midst of Sinai's heat,
Hid it beneath His Mercy-seat.

O Christians! Christians! tell me why You rear it on your altars high!

THE KEYS OF THE GATES.

THE caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy mother's grief.
My Eternal Man set in repose,
The Female from his darkness rose;
And she found me beneath a tree,
A mandrake, and in her veil hid .ne.
Serpent reasonings us entice
Of good and evil, virtue, vice.
Doubt self-jealous, watery folly,

Struggling through Earth's melancholy.
Naked in air, in shame and fear,
Blind in fire, with shield and spear,
Two horrid reasoning cloven fictions,
In doubt which is self-contradiction,
A dark hermaphrodite I stood,-
Rational truth, root of evil and good.
Round me, flew the flaming sword;
Round her, snowy whirlwinds roared,
Freezing her veil, the mundane shell.
I rent the veil where the dead dwell:
When weary man enters his cave,
He meets his Saviour in the grave.
Some find a female garment there,
And some a male, woven with care,
Lest the sexual garments sweet
Should grow a devouring winding-sheet.
One dies! alas! the living and dead !
One is slain, and one is fled !
In vain-glory hatched and nursed,
By double spectres, self-accursed.
My son! my son ! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.

On the shadows of the moon,
Climbing through night's highest noon :
In Time's ocean falling, drowned:
In aged ignorance profound,

Holy and cold, I clipped the wings

Of all sublunary things:

And in depths of icy dungeons
Closed the father and the sons.
But, when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot die.

Through evening shades I haste away
To close the labours of my day.
The door of Death I open found,
And the worm weaving in the ground:
Thou'rt my mother, from the womb;
Wife, sister, daughter, to the tomb:
Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life.

EPILOGUE.

TO THE ACCUSER, WHO IS THE GOD OF THIS WORLD.

TRULY, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,

And dost not know the garment from the man; Every harlot was a virgin once,

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Though thou art worshipped by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still

The son of morn in weary night's decline,
The lost traveller's dream under the hill.

A SONG OF SORROW.

LEAVE, O leave me to my sorrow,
Here I'll sit and fade away
Till I'm nothing but a spirit,

And I love this form of clay.

Then if chance along this forest

Any walk in pathless ways,

Through the gloom he'll see my shadow,

Hear my voice upon the breeze.

IN A MYRTLE SHADE.

To a lovely myrtle bound,
Blossoms showering all around,
O how weak and weary I
Underneath my myrtle lie!

Why should I be bound to thee,
O my lovely myrtle-tree?
Love, free love, cannot be bound
To any tree that grows on ground.

FREEDOM AND CAPTIVITY.

LOVE to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclined,

Lawless, winged, unconfined,

And breaks all chains from every mind.

The souls of men are bought and sold
In milk-fed infancy for gold,

And youths to slaughter-houses led,
And beauty, for a bit of bread.

THE TWO THRONES.

I ROSE up at the dawn of day.
'Get thee away! get thee away!
Pray'st thou for riches? Away! away!
This is the throne of Mammon grey.'

I said, 'This sure is very odd,
I took it to be the throne of God.
Everything else besides I have,
It's only riches I can crave.

'I have mental joys and mental health,
Mental friends and mental wealth.

I've a wife that I love and that loves me,
I've all but riches bodily.

'I am in God's presence night and day,
He never turns His face away.

The Accuser of Sins by my side does stand,
And he holds my money-bags in his hand.

'For my worldly things God makes him pay,
And he'd pay for more if to him I would pray.
And you may do the worst you can do ;
Be assured, Mr. Devil, I won't pray to you.

'Then if for riches I must not pray,
God knows, I little of prayers need say.
So, as a church is known by its steeple,
If I pray, it must be for other people.

'He says, if I don't worship him for a god,
I shall eat coarser food and go worse shod;
But as I don't value such things as these,
You must do, Mr. Devil, just as God please.'