THE DELPHIAN SIBYL (On her mountain-slope overlooking the Earth) The coastline ranges far, the skies unfold; In thickets dark where laurel blooms are fair. A thousand generations here have come, And wandered o'er these hills, and faced the light; A thousand times slight man from mortal womb Has leapt, and lapsed again into the night. Here tribesmen dwelt, and fought, and curst their star, And scoured both land and sea to sate their needs; Prophetic eyes of youth gazed here afar, With lips half open brooding on great deeds. Nor dreamed each little mortal of the Past, Nor the deep sources of his life divined, Watching his herds, or net in ocean cast, ·Deaf to th' ancestral voices down the wind; Nor guessed what strange sweet likenesses should rise, Selves of himself, far in the future years, With his own soul within their sunlit eyes, Yet I-I saw. Yea, from my lofty stand Beyond its mortal bound, and reach a hand To others and to others without end. I saw the generations like a river Flow down from age to age, and all the vast Complex of human passion float and quiver A wondrous mirror where the Gods were glassed. And still through all these ages scarce a change Has touched my mountain slopes or seaward curve, And still the folk beneath the old laws range, And from their ancient customs hardly swerve; Still Love and Death, veiled figures, hand in hand, 'Move o'er men's heads, dread, irresistible, To ope the portals of that other land Where the great Voices sound and Visions dwell. THE DRAMA OF LOVE AND DEATH CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY LOVE and Death move through this world of ours like things apart-underrunning it truly, and everywhere present, yet seeming to belong to some other mode of existence. When Death comes, breaking into the circle of our friends, words fail us, our mental machinery ceases to operate, all our little stores of wit and wisdom, our maxims, our mottoes, accumulated from daily experience, evaporate and are of no avail. These things do not seem to touch or illuminate in any effective way the strange vast Presence whose wings darken the world for us. And with Love, though in an opposite sense, it is the same. Words are of no use, all our philosophy failswhether to account for the pain, or to fortify against the glamour, or to describe the glory of the experience. These figures, Love and Death, move through the world, like closest friends indeed, never far separate, and together dominating it in a kind of triumphant superiority; and yet like bitterest enemies, dogging each other's footsteps, undoing each other's work, fighting for the bodies and souls of mankind. Is it possible that at length and after ages we may attain to liberate ourselves from their overlordship-to dominate them and make them our ministers and attendants? Can we wrest them from their seeming tyranny over the human race, and from their hostility to each other? Can we persuade them to lay aside their disguise and appear to us for what they no doubt are-even the angels and messengers of a new order of existence? It is a great and difficult enterprise. Yet it is one, I think, which we of this generation cannot avoid. We can no longer turn our faces away from Death, and make as if we did not perceive his presence or hear his challenge. This age, which is learning to look the facts of Nature steadily in the face, and see through them, must also learn to face this ultimate fact and look through it. And it will surely-and perhaps only -be by allying ourselves to Love that we shall be able to do so-that we shall succeed in our endeavor. For after all it is not in the main on account of ourselves that we cherish a grudge against the 'common enemy' and dispute his authority, but for the sake of those we love. For ourselves |