LITMIR.BIZ

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       Slighted by us amid our converse here.

      RECORDING ANGEL [from a book, in recitative]

       Now mellow-eyed Peace is made captive,

       And Vengeance is chartered

       To deal forth its dooms on the Peoples

       With sword and with spear.

       Men's musings are busy with forecasts

       Of muster and battle,

       And visions of shock and disaster

       Rise red on the year.

       The easternmost ruler sits wistful,

       And tense he to midward;

       The King to the west mans his borders

       In front and in rear.

       While one they eye, flushed from his crowning,

       Ranks legions around him

       To shake the enisled neighbour nation

       And close her career!

      SEMICHORUS I OF RUMOURS [aerial music]

       O woven-winged squadrons of Toulon

       And fellows of Rochefort,

       Wait, wait for a wind, and draw westward

       Ere Nelson be near!

       For he reads not your force, or your freightage

       Of warriors fell-handed,

       Or when they will join for the onset,

       Or whither they steer!

      SEMICHORUS II

       O Nelson, so zealous a watcher

       Through months-long of cruizing,

       Thy foes may elide thee a moment,

       Put forth, and get clear;

       And rendezvous westerly straightway

       With Spain's aiding navies,

       And hasten to head violation

       Of Albion's frontier!

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Methinks too much assurance thrills your note

       On secrets in my locker, gentle sprites;

       But it may serve.—Our thought being now reflexed

       To forces operant on this English isle,

       Behoves it us to enter scene by scene,

       And watch the spectacle of Europe's moves

       In her embroil, as they were self-ordained

       According to the naive and liberal creed

       Of our great-hearted young Compassionates,

       Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear,

       As puppet-watchers him who pulls the strings.—

       You'll mark the twitchings of this Bonaparte

       As he with other figures foots his reel,

       Until he twitch him into his lonely grave:

       Also regard the frail ones that his flings

       Have made gyrate like animalcula

       In tepid pools.—Hence to the precinct, then,

       And count as framework to the stagery

       Yon architraves of sunbeam-smitten cloud.—

       So may ye judge Earth's jackaclocks to be

       No fugled by one Will, but function-free.

       [The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and

       emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the

       branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of

       Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from

       the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed

       by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean.

       The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws

       near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples,

       distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing,

       crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and

       nationalities.]

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS [to the Spirit of the Pities]

       As key-scene to the whole, I first lay bare

       The Will-webs of thy fearful questioning;

       For know that of my antique privileges

       This gift to visualize the Mode is one

       [Though by exhaustive strain and effort only].

       See, then, and learn, ere my power pass again.

       [A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduring

       men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one

       organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and

       vitalized matter included in the display.]

      SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       Amid this scene of bodies substantive

       Strange waves I sight like winds grown visible,

       Which bear men's forms on their innumerous coils,

       Twining and serpenting round and through.

       Also retracting threads like gossamers—

       Except in being irresistible—

       Which complicate with some, and balance all.

      SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       These are the Prime Volitions,—fibrils, veins,

       Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause,

       That heave throughout the Earth's compositure.

       Their sum is like the lobule of a Brain

       Evolving always that it wots not of;

       A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere,

       And whose procedure may but be discerned

       By phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessed

       Of those it stirs, who [even as ye do] dream

       Their motions free, their orderings supreme;

       Each life apart from each, with power to mete

       Its own day's measures; balanced, self complete;

       Though they subsist but atoms of the One

       Labouring through all, divisible from none;

       But this no further now. Deem yet man's deeds self-done.

      GENERAL CHORUS OF INTELLIGENCES [aerial music]

       We'll close up Time, as a bird its van,

       We'll traverse Space, as spirits can,

       Link pulses severed by leagues and years,

       Bring cradles into touch with biers;

       So that the far-off Consequence appear

       Prompt at the heel of foregone Cause.—

       The PRIME, that willed ere wareness was,

       Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws,

       Which we as threads and streams discern,

       We may but muse on, never learn.

      END OF THE FORE SCENE

ACT

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