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Chosen to My honour, with impunity
May sate the lusts I planted in their heart.
Here I command thee hence to lead them on,
Until, with hardened feet, their conquering troops
Wade on the promised soil through woman’s blood,
120
And make My name be dreaded through the land.
Yet ever-burning flame and ceaseless woe
Shall be the doom of their eternal souls,
With every soul on this ungrateful earth,
Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong,—even all
125
Shall perish, to fulfil the blind revenge
(Which you, to men, call justice) of their God.’
The murderer’s brow
Quivered with horror.
‘God omnipotent,
Is there no mercy? must our punishment
130
Be endless? will long ages roll away
And see no term? Oh! wherefore hast Thou made
In mockery and wrath this evil earth?
Mercy becomes the powerful—be but just:
O God! repent and save.’
‘One way remains:
135
I will beget a Son, and He shall bear
The sins of all the world; He shall arise
In an unnoticed corner of the earth,
And there shall die upon a cross, and purge
The universal crime; so that the few
140
On whom My grace descends, those who are marked
As vessels to the honour of their God,
May credit this strange sacrifice, and save
Their souls alive: millions shall live and die,
Who ne’er shall call upon their Saviour’s name,
145
But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave.
Thousands shall deem it an old woman’s tale,
Such as the nurses frighten babes withal:
These in a gulf of anguish and of flame
Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,
150
Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow,
Even on their beds of torment where they howl,
My honour, and the justice of their doom.
What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts
Of purity, with radiant genius bright,
155
Or lit with human reason’s earthly ray?
Many are called, but few will I elect.
Do thou My bidding, Moses!’
Even the murderer’s cheek
Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lips
Scarce faintly uttered — ‘O almighty One,
160
I tremble and obey!’
‘O Spirit! centuries have set their seal
On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain,
Since the Incarnate came: humbly He came,
Veiling His horrible Godhead in the shape
165
Of man, scorned by the world, His name unheard,
Save by the rabble of His native town,
Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; He taught them justice, truth, and peace,
In semblance; but He lit within their souls
170
The quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the sword
He brought on earth to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom His malignant soul.
At length His mortal frame was led to death.
I stood beside Him: on the torturing cross
175
No pain assailed His unterrestrial sense;
And yet He groaned. Indignantly I summed
The massacres and miseries which His name
Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried,
“Go! Go!” in mockery.
A smile of godlike malice reillumed
His fading lineaments.—“I go,” He cried,
“But thou shalt wander o’er the unquiet earth
Eternally.”—The dampness of the grave
Bathed my imperishable front. I fell,
185
And long lay tranced upon the charmèd soil.
When I awoke Hell burned within my brain,
Which staggered on its seat; for all around
The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,
Even as the Almighty’s ire arrested them,
190
And in their various attitudes of death
My murdered children’s mute and eyeless skulls
Glared ghastlily upno me.
But my soul,
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, hid long learned to prefer
195
Hell’s freedom to the servitude of Heaven.
Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began
My lonely and unending pilgrimage,
Resolved to wage unweariable war
With my almighty Tyrant, and to hurl
Defiance at His impotence to harm
Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand
That barred my passage to the peaceful grave
Has crushed the earth to misery and given
Its empire to the chosen of His slaves.
205
These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn
Of weak, unstable and precarious power
Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;
So, when they turned but from the massacre
Of unoffending infidels, to quench
210
Their thirst for ruin in the very blood
That flowed in their own veins, and pitiless zeal
Froze every human feeling, as the wife
Sheathed in her husband’s heart the sacred steel,
Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love;
215
And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood
Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war,
Scarce satiable by fate’s last death-draught, waged,
Drunk from the winepress of the Almighty’s wrath;
Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace,
220
Pointed to victory! When the fray was done,
No remnant of the exterminated faith
Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh,
With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,
That rotted on the half-extinguished pile.
225
‘Yes! I have seen God’s worship pers unsheathe
The sword of His revenge, when grace descended,
Confirming all unnatural impulses,
To sanctify their desolating deeds;
And frantic priests waved the illomened cross
230
O’er the unhappy earth: then shone the sun
On showers of gore from the up-flashing steel
Of safe assassination, and all crime
Made stingless by the Spirits of the Lord,
And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.
235
‘Spirit, no year of my eventful being
Has passed unstained by crime and misery,
Which flows from God’s own faith. I’ve marked His slaves
With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile
The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red
240
With murder, feign to stretch the other out
For brotherhood and peace; and that they now
Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds
Are marked with all the narrowness and crime
That Freedom’s young arm dare not yet chastise,
245
Reason may claim our gratitude, who now
Establishing the imperishable throne
Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vain
The unprevailing malice of my Foe,
Whose bootless rage h
eaps torments for the brave,
Adds impotent eternities to pain,
Whilst keenest disappointment racks His breast
To see the smiles of peace around them play,
To frustrate or to sanctify their doom,
‘Thus have I stood—through a wild waste of years
255
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,
Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,
Mocking my powerless Tyrant’s horrible curse
With stubborn and unalterable will,
Even as a giant oak, which Heaven’s fierce flame
260
Had scathèd in the wilderness, to stand
A monument of fadeless ruin there;
Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads
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Its worn and withered arms on high
To meet the quiet of a summer’s noon.’
The Fairy waved her wand:
Ahasuerus fled
Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,
270
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,
Flee from the morning beam:
The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
275
Of wandering human thought.
VIII
The Fairy.
‘THE Present and the Past thou hast beheld:
It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn
The secrets of the Future.—Time!
Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,
5
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,
And from the cradles of eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud.— Spirit, behold
10
Thy glorious destiny!’
Joy to the Spirit came.
Through the wide rent in Time’s eternal veil,
Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear:
Earth was no longer Hell;
15
Love, freedom, health, had given
Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,
And all its pulses beat
Symphonious to the planetary spheres:
Then dulcet music swelled
20
Concordant with the life-strings of the soul;
It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,
Catching new life from transitory death,—
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,
That wakes the wavelets of the slum bering sea
25
And dies on the creation of its breath,
And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits:
Was the pure stream of feeling
That sprung from these sweet notes,
And o’er the Spirit’s human sympathies
30
With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.
Joy to the Spirit came,—
Such joy as when a lover sees
The chosen of his soul in happiness,
And witnesses her peace
35
Whose woe to him were bitterer than death,
Sees her unfaded cheek
Glow mantling in first luxury of health,
Thrills with her lovely eyes,
Which like two stars amid the heaving main
41
Sparkle through liquid bliss.
Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:
‘I will not call the ghost of ages gone
To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;
The present now is past,
45
And those events that desolate the earth
Have faded from the memory of Time,
Who dares not give reality to that
Whose being I annul. To me is given
The wonders of the human world to keep,
50
Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity
Exposes now its treasure; let the sight
Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.
O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal
Where virtue fixes universal peace,
55
And midst the ebb and flow of human things,
Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,
A lighthouse o’er the wild of dreary waves.
‘The habitable earth is full of bliss;
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
60
By everlasting snowstorms round the poles,
Where matter dared not vegetate or live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
65
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the Heaven-breathing groves
And melodize with man’s blest nature there.
70
‘Those deserts of immeasurable sand,
Whose age - collected fervours scarce allowed
A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,
Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard’s love
Broke on the sultry silentness alone,
75
Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,
Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;
And where the startled wilderness beheld
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs
80
The unnatural famine of her tooth less cubs,
Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang,
Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother’s door,
85
Sharing his morning’s meal
With the green and golden basilisk
That comes to lick his feet.
‘Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail
Has seen above the illimitable plain,
90
Morning on night, and night on morning rise,
Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread
Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,
Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves
So long have mingled with the gusty wind
95
In melancholy loneliness, and swept
The desert of those ocean solitudes,
But vocal to the sea-bird’s harrowing shriek,
The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,
Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds
100
Of kindliest human impulses respond.
Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,
With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,
And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,
Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,
105
Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,
To meet the kisses of the flow’rets there.
All things are recreated, and the flame
Of consentaneous love inspires all life:
The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck
110
To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,
Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:
The balmy breathings of the wind inhale
Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:
Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere
,
115
Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream:
No storms deform the beaming brow of Heaven,
Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride
The foliage of the ever-verdant trees;
But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,
120
And Autumn proudly bears her matron grace,
Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of Spring,
Whose virgin bloom beneath the rudoy fruit
Reflects its tint, and blushes into love.
‘The lion now forgets to thirst for blood:
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There might you see him sporting in the sun
Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,
His teeth are harmless, custom’s force has made
His nature as the nature of a lamb.
Like passion’s fruit, the nightshade’s tempting bane
130
Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows:
All bitterness is past; the cup of joy
Unmingled mantles to the goblet’s brim,
And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.
‘But chief, ambiguous Man, he that can know
135
More misery, and dream more joy than all;
Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast
To mingle with a loftier instinct there,
Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,
Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;
140
Who stands amid the ever-varying world,
The burthen or the glory of the earth;
He chief perceives the change, his being notes
The gradual renovation, and defines
Each movement of its progress on his mind.
145
‘Man, where the gloom of the long polar night
Lowers o’er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,
Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley Page 120