Philip James Bailey (Филип Джеймс Бэйли)
Festus – 41
Millennial earth, transfigured to a star, The rebegotten world, see, born again; Good, universal order, peace and joy. Fruits of the new creation, all the heirs Holy, of light, share; sweet command in these, In those, obedience sweeter still. All art Sublimed, all science hallowed, to best ends, Life worldly made life heavenly by God's law Pervasive, spiritual ill, pain bodily, cease. Are gloriously disproven all godless doubts, Earth's caverned prophesies, of oracular reek Voiced, not divine breath, of mere fleshlihood. Virtues incorporate spiritual--wise, with heaven Linked, their original nature show and end. Life lower now with more intelligence dowered, Docile, unharmful, gladdens in fates humane. Earth Millennial. Archangel, Angel of Earth, Luniel, Angels, Saints, Angela, Festus, and Clara. Angel of Earth. God and the world one Holy family; The houses of the heavens and earth allied; That was the prophecy, and this the proof; Love the beginning of the great return. Luniel. I had a happy vision yesternight. Methought I saw the gathering of all tribes Of men returning out of dateless death, Unto the Holy land, the land of life. Saints. We saw it likewise; we, yea, all of us, And heard the angels sing: far up mid heaven Their blessèd words resounded, of our thoughts The pure celestial echoes; this their hymn. They come from the ends of the earth, White with its aged snows; From the bounding breast of the tropic tide, Where the day--beam ever glows; From the east where first they dwelt, From the north, and the south, and the west, Where the sun puts on his robe of light, And lays down his crown to rest. Out of every land they come; Where the palm triumphant grows, Where the vine overshadows the roofs and the hills, And the gold orbed orange glows: Where the olive and fig--tree thrive, And the rich pomegranates red, Where the citron blooms, and the apple of ill Bows down its fragrant head. From the lands where the gems are born; Opal and emerald bright; From shores where the ruddy corals grow, And pearls with their mellow light; Where silver and gold are dug, And the diamond rivers roll, And the marble white as the still moonlight Is quarried, and jetty coal;-- They come--with a gladdening shout; They come--with a tear of joy; Father and daughter, youth and maid, Mother and blooming boy. A thousand dwellings they leave, Dwellings--but not a home; To them there is none but the sacred soil, And the land whereto they come. And the Temple again shall be built, And filled as it was of yore; And the burden be lift from the heart of the world, And the nations all adore; Prayers to the throne of heaven Morning and eve shall rise, And unto and not of the Lamb Shall be the sacrifice. Angel of Earth. As isles, disjoined by superficial deeps, Yet rooted stand in unity with worlds; So with the interior continent of heaven, Earth and its own. Saints. Now know we the whole world The land of heavenly commerce, where both kinds Of men and angels mix with mutual gain; With knowledge, and with wisdom, and with joy Flowing; the final festival of time. Archangel. Angels, God's gracious ministry, doubt ye not, In many a sphere,--by laws of light and weight With yours commutual bound, as ye to them, Spiritual, by sense of right and truth, by proof, By love of Deity, and by bonds to both Common of virtue and piety, interchange With chosen intelligences and spirits of power, Thrones and all heavenly excellences, who scale The star--stair of perfection's tower, glad news Of orbs, even yours, regenerate. Every globe A mansion of the spirit, world--blessing souls Mingle at large with men. Know, who would prove Divinity by deeds works miracles; who By words, speaks mysteries mixed with clearest truths. All revelation is a mystery, here. Angel of Earth. The ultimate mysteries faith shall celebrate, Perfective, of the holy spirit, are God's; Whose manifold salvation all imbounds, Sinner and saint, one world completing plan. Saints. O holy Angel, warden of the world, Who guidedst its first footsteps o'er the path, Untried of newest space, well trodden now, Which round the sun it circleth; and thou, too, Serenest of all angels, fairest, first, Of those here culled, the flower of heaven's bright hosts, Who knowest the heart of truth, and well may'st smile At legends of the birth of sun and stars, The atomic ancestries of elements, And infantile antiquity of time,-- We in this sphere rejoice that with ye we The truth possess and glory in. Do thou Speak then, who canst, bright angel guide of earth, If leisure thine, whose long experience tends Far past the immediate parentage of time, Into eternal aeons, what to us The Godblessed words may prove of living light. Instruct us in the wisdom of the heavens, At once the gate and goal of the true life The empyrean shadows, so that we, Like self obedient elements, which contain Their total laws and partial liberties, The reign of God may honour in all spheres, And act therewith concordantly, as here. Angel of Earth. As when one wise in Nature's ways of old, Gazing through optic lens, heaven's spatial plains, Perceived that what to naked eye black blanks Unfathomable, and lonesome adits seemed From universe to universe, were in truth Crowded with suns; so, too, created mind, Scanning the depths of Deity, must confess, When by his will enlightened, that what shows As mere inexplicable judgment, fate, Imposed by arbitrary ruler, first, Proves, rightly known of good and glory full, As firmamental fields with orbs of life. For infinitely various are the ways Wherein God conquers evil; at one time Slowly eradicating, line by line, Its fatal features, and again, by one Annihilative word, destroying it. The sphere I mourned as mine, to ruin doomed, God hath restored to being; and newly dowered With life, and holy soul, transformed, it beams Self--shining. And, recipient of all bliss Unmerited, unmeasured, she the like Imparts to all who in her hallowed light, Gladden. Thereto, I now; God bidden to tend. Luniel. The issue of all ages is at hand. Angel of Earth. Heaven's ways are always cyclical; its events, All orbital, its aeras; and albeit The sin of man, Promethean, never cease, Nor the avenging vulture's beak, blood--wet; Yet is the arrow always on the wing, Which seeks the heart of vengeance, seeks and slays. So from the first divine forgiveness clasps, To her all quickening bosom, all which live; Calls all by name, and naming, halloweth them. Saints. Thus, by God's goodness, goodness comes to us Out of his boundless plenitude; and man, The shadowy semblance of the vast divine, Like a dark sphere absorbed into the sun, As in presecular time emergent thence, His constellated seat assumes in heaven, A deathless incarnation of the light. And this despite of evil, sin, and pain, That every faculty be perfected, And all affection purified in man; Love being love of good, hate, hate of ill; Divinest hate, unanimous with love. Wherefore to those who realize God's will, And with the same their own assimilate, Water in water flowing, air in air, Passive as silence, active as the light, Receiving and dispensing, moments fall Like silver raindrops stippled in the ground, Whose resurrection is in grain of gold. But with the generation of the world, Who their back turned upon the sun to toy With their own shadows, meanly pleased to mark Their selfgrowth, not considering that the more These things extend themselves, the nearer they To their extinction;--not thus. Night comes on; And lo! the whole flock in the fold of death. Angel of Earth. Ends and beginnings mingle at the last; All ultimates are foreordained; these days, And those far times, when yon fair flowering orb, Lily--like, beamed out of time's shadowy tide; And spread its bright and continental leaves, Fragrant with sunny incense, to the heavens. But his infallible eye, beneath whose beam Essence becomes appearance, every day Doomsday, an inner circlet of pure time, Concentric with eternity, and part Of the same all inclusive octave here, The darkness from the light shall sejugate; The visible veil of the invisible. And the times near when all shall be complete; The golden seed from ripe fulfilment fall; Eternal mind immortal utterance make; The many--coloured arch a circle be; Earth's orb elect her crescent horns conjoin With light perpetual, total, vital light; And, the mixed past made pure and holy, cause The present paradise, the future heaven. Saints. Man's being is an everlasting birth; We are ourselves the elements of heaven. And as the eye is sacred to the sun, So be the soul to God. It is sweet to point To prophecies fulfilled, when spells of good. To us extinct all ill, all sin, all woe; The world seems wreathed from end to end with joy, And garlanded with glory, as the hall Of some great populous palace at a feast. Our nature we relume, too, as the sun, From the bright burning atmosphere he breathes, The starry spirits of his frame renews, And revels in his glory without end. So we in that divinity rejoice, Wherein all spiritual essence is and acts, Authentic because free. Angels. Praise therefore heaven. Saints. To thee, God, maker, ruler, saviour, judge! The Infinite, the Universal One, Whose righteousnesses are as numberless As creature sins; who giver art of life; Who sawest from the first that all was good, Which thou didst make, and seal'dst it with thy love, Thy boundless benediction on the world; To thee be honour, glory, prayer and praise, And full--orbed worship from all worlds, all heavens. May every being bless thee in return As thou dost bless it; every age and orb Utter to thee the praise thou dost inspire. Let man, Lord! praise thee most, as all redeemed, As many in the saints, as one in thee. Oh may perpetual pleasure, peace, and joy, And spiritual light inform all souls; And grace and mercy in bliss thousandfold Enwrap the world of life. May all who dwell On open earth, or in the hid abyss, Howe'er they sin or suffer, in the end, Receive, as beings born at first of thee, The mercy that is mightier than all ill. May all souls love each other in all worlds, And all conditions of existence: even As now these lower lives that dwell with man In amity, rejoicing in the care Of their superior, and in useful peace, Upon the common earth, no more distained With mutual slaughter--no more doomed to groan At sight of woe, and cruelty, and crime. Lo! all things now rejoicing in the life Thou art to each and givest, live to thee; And knowing other's nature and their own Live in serene delight, content with good, Yet earnest for the last and best degree. Their hands are full of kindness, and their tongues Are full of blessings, and their hearts of good. All things are happy here. May kindness, truth, Wisdom, and knowledge, liberty and power, Virtue and holiness, o'erspread all orbs As this star now; the world be bliss and love; And heaven alone be all things; till at last The music from all souls redeemed shall rise, Like a perpetual fountain of pure sound, Upspringing, sparkling in the silvery blue; From round creation to thy feet, O God! Festus. One's fellow conquerors recognized in peace, How calm, how sweet this life! from passion pure, From natural evils freed. The storm of time The world hath wept through, and the whirl of life Once mine, shows like an agonizèd dream Hung in the halls of memory, bannerwise; Proof--sign of victory passed. Speak, angel--bride, Being of bliss and beauty, seems not this The peace serene thy spirit longed for once? Clara. It is. How doubly dear all sacred thing Show to the soul elect salvation here Hath hallowed; and how blessed the high employ, God's wisdom teaching to millennial man, And learning love divine. Festus. Doubt's tempest--age Soothed into silent and profound belief; The soul's ambitious and ill--ordered quests Chastened to aspirations; all desires, Calm as the regular breathings of the breast. What joy to worship, in our heart recrowned, The exiled sovereign of earth's youth, long lost, Our old paternal faith!--What joy to feel, Though life--deforming passions come and go, Stormlike, and cloudlike, high o'er all, the spirit Stands, in impassive purity and peace, Identical with heaven. See, soul of light, Thy kindred angel! Angela. Yes. This joy is mine, To quit betimes the grandeurs of the sun, His continents of light and sea--like springs Of radiance, here to wander by their side Beloved on earth as mine; and ye are they I loved most. Most of all it gladdeneth me In hallowed commune thus to help expand The spirit capacious of extremest truth, With ends beneficent; so that kindly act Keep pace with godly thought. Festus. God's universe, A boundless field for ever--active good, To soul so bent, unfolds. While, world by world,-- Through all successive spheres, the aspiring spirit, Death born, yet reascendent, till it come, Through many a cradling starlet, to the orb Whence its predestined rise shall end all proof, Restore the wanderer to the way, and blend Life momentary with the eternal state, The everlasting order of all days,-- Wisdom her many--chambered dome reveals, Her graduated heaven. Clara. Content with this, One altar in her thousand--shrinèd fane, Earth's simpler souls their rites of truth and love Like faithfully fulfil with those enthroned Who look down on the empyrean. Here All knowledge sanctified, all mind enlarged, All faculties reformed, how perfect seems To eyes illumed with truth's interior light, Self--opening, flowerlike, those most gracious trials Our souls once suffered; sufferings now enjoyed. Angela. What lengths we reach of spiritual light; What breadths now compass of celestial views; What heights faith's visionary eye commands; What depths we fathom of divinity; Let him tell, who can count the motes of air, Stars, and the rays of stars, or God's good deeds. Festus. Alas! what mean conceptions once were man's Of God; his essence, nature, ends. In vain Men thought to magnify the Infinite, Who merely magnified their own small thought, And made it monstrous. Not in vain for such May we thy pity ask, thy pardon, Lord; For us, the joy to feel, the gift to prove Love, power, and wisdom omnicausal thine, Which from the fount divine of being flow. With hatred and revenge are base effects, And passions, to mean natures only known; Not to be charged to God, nor named with him. Passions are proofs of imperfection. Thou Only hast all perfections, God! who art Eternal reason quickening boundless laws; The laws of love, life, light, wherein be based The world's sublime foundations. Angela. Oh, how vast The glories of the future, once mismatched 'Gainst earth--life merely, and all its littleness. Clara. Were happiness alone our being's aim, We, over nature reigning and mere soul, Pure intellect, and all whom, led by them Our better lot is here to raise, refine, Enlighten, free from inner mental bonds, Oh, glorious rule! it might indeed seem well For good of others and our own delight, This natural dispensation and divine, This first degree of heaven should aye perdure. Angela. True; earth is all one Eden. Pity 'twere, That it should ever end. Saint. I say not so; Although I have a thousand plans in hand, Some interwoven with the farthest stars-- Each one of which might ask a year of years To perfect. Clara. Be it; our Maker knoweth best What thought or deed may best belong to time, Or to eternity. Saint. All prophecy Hath said the earth shall cease, and that right soon. Festus. It is like enough. Beauty's akin to death. Angel. Behold, our sister graces of the skies, Faith, Hope, and Love, descend! Methinks of late Ye chiefly dwell on earth. Love. Where lives and reigns The divine humanity, there are we ever seen, Successive, as the seasons to the sun. Saints. Well are ye known and welcome in all worlds. Wherever lofty thought or godly deed Is lodged or compassed, there your blessings rest. Hope. How sweet, how sacred now, this earth of man's, The prelude of a yet sublimer bliss!-- I marked it from the first, while yet it lay Lightless and stirless; ere the forming fire Was kindled in its bosom, or the land Lift its volcanic breastwork up from sea. The deluge and idolatries of men I viewed, though shuddering, and with faltering eye, E'en to the incarnation of heaven's Truth, And dawn of earth's best faith; that faith which fled An infant, waxed anon a giant; peeped, A star, and grew a heaven--fulfilling sun; Which was an outcast, and became, ere long, A dweller in all palaces; which hid Its head in dens of deserts, and sat throned, After, in richest temples high as hills: Which, poured out painfully in mortal blood, Rose an immortal spirit; as a slave Was sold for gold and prostrated to power;-- And now that lowly bondmaid is a queen; And lo! she is beloved in earth and heaven; And lieth in the bosom of her Lord, The bride of the all--worshipped, one with God. Love. We, even of divinest origin, In infinite progression view all worlds; And we are happy. Faith. The dead sleep as yet; But their day cometh, and the bonds of death Already slacken around the living soul; The mortal sleep of ages, which began When time sank down into his slumberous west, Thins even now o'er the reviving eyes, Gathering their heaven--lent light, no more to wane In woe or age: never be quenched in tears, Like a star in the sea. It is as I ever knew; My life is to receive and to believe The word and words of God. Love. I who am Love, And Grace, and Charity, rejoice with you, Whither ye wend I with ye; whether here, Or on the utmost rim of Light's broad reign, The least and last of stars which even seems To tremble at its insignificance, In presence of Infinity; where yet No angel's wing hath waved, nor foot of fiend Left its hot imprint;--still, in all do we Find fit delight and honour, as now here. Now earth and heaven hold commune, day and night; There's not a wind but bears upon its wing The messages of God; and not a star But knows the bliss of earth. Festus. The earth hath God Remade, and all its elements refined, Fit for sublimer being. Flesh hath passed Its fiery baptism, and come forth clear As crystal gold: all that of vile or mean Pertained to it hath perished atomless. The kindred ties of family and race, Intensified into identity, now, Earth, like a diamond, basks in her own free light, Unfed, unaided, unrequiring aught. All now is purity, and power, and peace. The first--born of creation, they who hail Archangels as their brethren, mountainlike Reign o'er the plains of men, converting all; Reaping the fields of immortality, Each one his sheaf, for him the harvest--Lord; To whom belongs earth's whole estate and life, And every world's. Angel. And he shall garner all. The awful tribes which have in Hades dwelt, Passed count of time, await their rising. God's Great day, the sabbath of the world's long week, Is at high noon; and Christ hath yet to come, To judge and save the living and the dead. Clara. The shadows of eternity o'ercast Already time's bright towers. The heavens shall come Down like a cloud upon the hill, and sweep Their spirit over earth, and the whole face And form of things shall be dissolved and changed. Nothing shall be but essence, perfect, pure, And void of every attribute but God's. This even is too gross for that to come, The holy have the earth, and heaven is theirs. Festus. Nor pain, nor toil of mind or frame, nor doubt Nor discontent, nor enmity to God, Disturb the steady joy the spirit feels; Nor element can torture, nor time tire; Nor sea nor mountain make or bar or fear; Sickness and woe and death are things gone by; Destroyed with the destruction of the world:-- Shadows of things which have been, never more To waste the world's bright hours, nor grate the heart Of mighty man; now fit for thrones and wings; Ruler of worlds, main minister of heaven, Inheritor of all the prophecies Of God, fore--uttered through the tongues of time, Ages of ages. Evil is no more. Archangel. And does earth satisfy thee now? Festus. As earth. There is a brighter, loftier life for man Even yet, the very union with God. Archangel. God works by means. Between the two extremes Of earth and heaven there lies a mediate state,-- A pause between the lightning lapse of life And following thunders of eternity;-- Between eternity and time a lapse, To soul unconscious, though agelasting, where Spirit is tempered to its final fate; Within or between worlds, repose or bliss Divested, man shall mix with deity, And the eternal and immortal make One being. As in earth's first paradise God's spirit walked with man, and commune made With him, so in the second, after death, Man's spirit walks with God in an elect Existence, and a vigil of the great, The holy day which is to break in heaven. Thither Truth's prophet went, in the dread hour That hell by earth on heaven revenged itself, With one soul penitent 'companied;--nor long Remained, but while enough to cheer earth's troop Of foremost disobedients, heads of Sin's Long line, who soul enlightened firm received With time--outwearing hope that yet in God They should partake the fulness of his love. And with him rose then, in prophetic proof Of immortality, many a deathless ghost, Triumphant o'er that blind revenge which wrought Hell! thy destruction--thy salvation, earth! Festus. That such will be, the just well know; and all Earth's great events and changes tend thereto; Its fiery dissolution in the passed, And supernatural rebirth which now The chosen and the world--redeemed partake. Archangel. And this shall last, till like the setting sun Deserting earth, he shall retire to heaven, With all his captive victors in his train, Triumphant, and translated evermore Into the hierarchal skies. Wilt see, While yet time is, earth's shadowy world within-- The living death she hearts, and, augur--like, Explore the ominous bowels of the sphere? As one great life it is pervadeth all That bud, breathe, beam, so in the spirit world, Of God, his will through countless ministries Confided potently, works publicly; And I, the liberating angel, marked From supramundane time, act to this end. To me are given the secrets of the centre, The keys of earth, to lock and to unlock, Coffer--like. I it was who seized and bound, At his behest who wills and it is done, Even on their thrones, the mighty thou wilt see. Festus. Angel of heaven! I would view these things. Archangel. Nor these alone, but other wonders yet. The valley Death's dark pinions brooded o'er, A life--offending night, unvisited By sun or star, where but the fatuous fire Of man's weak judgment, wandered till God's hand Laid o'er the black abyss a bridge of life, And married earth to heaven's mainland thou'lt see, Death's grave; and over him, that monument Of light, enlightening earth. The gods and fiends Of old, and all the fictions of man's heart, Imagined of the future passed for aye, Thou shalt inspect. Behold this mountain! We Must pass through it; for under lie the gates Of the invisible regions whereunto We tend, for a brief season. Festus. On then! Archangel. Bare Thy marble breast, O mountain, to its depths! An angel and a man divine demand A way through these foundations. Festus. And the rocks Open like mists before thee. Archangel. Follow me!
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