LITMIR.BIZ

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And not their consequence.

       CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music]

       Still thus? Still thus?

       Ever unconscious!

       An automatic sense

       Unweeting why or whence?

       Be, then, the inevitable, as of old,

       Although that SO it be we dare not hold!

       SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Hold what ye list, fond believing Sprites,

       You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,

       Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought,

       Unchecks Its clock-like laws.

       SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]

       Good, as before.

       My little engines, then, will still have play.

       SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       Why doth It so and so, and ever so,

       This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

       SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       As one sad story runs, It lends Its heed

       To other worlds, being wearied out with this;

       Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes.

       Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfully

       Its warefulness, Its care, this planet lost

       When in her early growth and crudity

       By bad mad acts of severance men contrived,

       Working such nescience by their own device.—

       Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles,

       Though not in mine.

       SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       Meet is it, none the less,

       To bear in thought that though Its consciousness

       May be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed,

       Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon?

       SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being,

       Nothing appears of shape to indicate

       That cognizance has marshalled things terrene,

       Or will [such is my thinking] in my span.

       Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed,

       Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,

       The Will has woven with an absent heed

       Since life first was; and ever will so weave.

       SPIRIT SINISTER

       Hence we've rare dramas going—more so since

       It wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb!

       SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Well, no more this on what no mind can mete.

       Our scope is but to register and watch

       By means of this great gift accorded us—

       The free trajection of our entities.

       SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       On things terrene, then, I would say that though

       The human news wherewith the Rumours stirred us

       May please thy temper, Years, 'twere better far

       Such deeds were nulled, and this strange man's career

       Wound up, as making inharmonious jars

       In her creation whose meek wraith we know.

       The more that he, turned man of mere traditions,

       Now profits naught. For the large potencies

       Instilled into his idiosyncrasy—

       To throne fair Liberty in Privilege' room—

       Are taking taint, and sink to common plots

       For his own gain.

      SHADE OF THE EARTH

       And who, then, Cordial One,

       Wouldst substitute for this Intractable?

      CHORUS OF THE EARTH

       We would establish those of kindlier build,

       In fair Compassions skilled,

       Men of deep art in life-development;

       Watchers and warders of thy varied lands,

       Men surfeited of laying heavy hands,

       Upon the innocent,

       The mild, the fragile, the obscure content

       Among the myriads of thy family.

       Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,

       And make their daily moves a melody.

      SHADE OF THE EARTH

       They may come, will they. I am not averse.

       Yet know I am but the ineffectual Shade

       Of her the Travailler, herself a thrall

       To It; in all her labourings curbed and kinged!

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Shall such be mooted now? Already change

       Hath played strange pranks since first I brooded here.

       But old Laws operate yet; and phase and phase

       Of men's dynastic and imperial moils

       Shape on accustomed lines. Though, as for me,

       I care not thy shape, or what they be.

      SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       You seem to have small sense of mercy, Sire?

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Mercy I view, not urge;—nor more than mark

       What designate your titles Good and Ill.

       'Tis not in me to feel with, or against,

       These flesh-hinged mannikins Its hand upwinds

       To click-clack off Its preadjusted laws;

       But only through my centuries to behold

       Their aspects, and their movements, and their mould.

      SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       They are shapes that bleed, mere mannikins or no,

       And each has parcel in the total Will.

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Which overrides them as a whole its parts

       In other entities.

      SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]

       Limbs of Itself:

       Each one a jot of It in quaint disguise?

       I'll fear all men henceforward!

      SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       Go to. Let this terrestrial tragedy—

      SPIRIT IRONIC

       Nay, Comedy—

      SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       Let this earth-tragedy

       Whereof we spake, afford a spectacle

       Forthwith conned closelier than your custom is.—

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       How does it stand? [To a Recording Angel]

       Open and chant the page

       Thou'st lately writ, that sums these happenings,

       In brief reminder

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