Appendix
And quicklier than word had the seas wave
70 Disjoined; and man’s dear form with His own hands
Did love to mould; and furthermore did will
His own fair likeness to exist in him;
And by His Spirit on his countenance
The breath of life did breathe. Unmindful he
Of God, such guilt rashly t’ incur! Beyond
The warning’s range he was not ought to touch.
One fruit illicit, whence he was to know
Forthwith how to discriminate alike
Evil and equity, God him forbade
To touch. What functions of the world did God
Permit to man, and sealed the sweet sweet pledge
Of His own love! and jurisdiction gave
O’er birds, and granted him both deep and soil
To tame, and mandates useful did impart
Of dear salvation! ’Neath his sway He gave
The lands, the souls of flying things, the race
Feathered, and every race, or tame or wild,
Of beasts, and the sea’s race, and monsterforms
Shapeless of swimming things. But since so soon
The primal man by primal crime transgressed
The law, and left the mandates of the Lord
(Led by a wife who counselled all the ills),
By death he ’gan to perish. Woman ’twas
Who sin’s first ill committed, and (the law
Transgressed) deceived her husband. Eve, induced
By guile, the thresholds oped to death, and proved
To her own self, with her whole race as well,
A procreatrix of funereal woes.
Hence unanticipated wickedness,
Hence death, like seed, for aye, is scattered. Then
More frequent grew atrocious deed; and toil
More savage set the corrupt orb astir:
(This lure the crafty serpent spread, inspired
By envy’s self:) then peoples more invent
Practices of ill deeds; and by ill deeds
Gave birth to seeds of wickedness. And so
The only Lord, whose is the power supreme.
Who o’er the heights the summits holds of heaven
Supreme, and in exalted regions dwells
In lofty light for ages, mindful too
Of present time, and of futurity
Prescient beforehand, keeps the progeny
Of ill-desert, and all the souls which move
By reason’s force much-erring man—nor less
Their tardy bodies governs He—against
The age decreed, so soon as, stretched in death,
Men lay aside their ponderous limbs, and light
As air, shall go, their earthly bonds undone,
And take in diverse parts their proper spheres
(But some He bids be forthwith by glad gales
Recalled to life, and be in secret kept
To wait the decreed law’s awards, until
Their bodies with resuscitated limbs
Revive.) Then shall men ’gin to weigh the awards
Of their first life, and on their crime and faults
To think, and keep them for their penalties
Which will be far from death; and mindful grow
Of pious duties, by God’s judgments taught;
To wait expectant for their penalty
And their descendants’, fruit of their own crime;
Or else to live wholly the life of sheep,
Without a name; and in God’s ear, now deaf,
Pour unavailing weeping. Shall not God
Almighty, ’neath whose law are all things ruled,
Be able after death life to restore?
Or is there ought which the creation’s Lord
Unable seems to do? If, darkness chased,
He could outstretch the light, and could compound
All the world’s mass by a word suddenly,
And raise by potent voice all things from nought,
Why out of somewhat could He not compound
The well-known shape which erst had been, which He
Had moulded formerly; and bid the form
Arise assimilated to Himself
Again? Since God’s are all things, earth the more
Gives Him all back; for she will, when He bids,
Unweave whate’er she woven had before.
If one, perhaps, laid on sepulchral pyre,
The flame consumed; or one in its blind waves
The ocean have dismembered; if of one
The entrails have, in hunger, satisfied
The fishes; or on any’s limbs wild beasts
Have fastened cruel death; or any’s blood,
His body reft by birds, unhid have lain:
Yet shall they not wrest from the mighty Lord
His latest dues. Need is that men appear
Quickened from death ’fore God, and at His bar
Stand in their shapes resumed. Thus arid seeds
Are drops into the vacant lands, and deep
In the fixt furrows die and rot: and hence
Is not their surface animated soon
With stalks repaired? and do they not grow strong
And yellow with the living grains? and, rich
With various usury, new harvests rise
In mass? The stars all set, and, born again,
Renew their sheen; and day dies with its light
Lost in dense night; and now night wanes herself
As light unveils creation presently;
And now another and another day
Rises from its own stars; and the sun sets,
Bright as it is with splendour—bearing light;
Light perishes when by the coming eve
The world is shaded; and the phœnix lives
By her own soot renewed, and presently
Rises, again a bird, O wondrous sight!
After her burnings! The bare tree in time
Shoots with her leaves; and once more are her boughs
Curved by the germen of the fruits.
While then The world throughout is trembling at God’s voice,
And deeply moved are the high air’s powers,
Then comes a crash unwonted, then ensue
Heaven’s mightiest murmurs, on the approach of God,
The whole world’s Judge! His countless ministers
Forthwith conjoin their rushing march, and God
With majesty supernal fence around.
Angelic bands will from the heaven descend
To earth; all, God’s host, whose is faculty
Divine; in form and visage spirits all
Of virtue: in them fiery vigour is;
Rutilant are their bodies; heaven’s might
Divine about them flashes; the whole orb
Hence murmurs; and earth, trembling to her depths
(Or whatsoe’er her bulk is), echoes back
The roar, parturient of men, whom she,
Being bidden, will with grief upyield. All stand
In wonderment. At last disturbed are
The clouds, and the stars move and quake from height
Of sudden power. When thus God comes, with voice
Of potent sound, at once throughout all realms
The sepulchres are burst, and every ground
Outpours bones from wide chasms, and opening sand
Outbelches living peoples; to the hair
The members cleave; the bones inwoven are
With marrow; the entwined sinews rule
The breathing bodies; and the veins ’gin throb
With simultaneously infused blood:
And, from their caves dismissed, to open day
Souls are restored, and seek to find again
Each its own organs, as at their own place
They rise. O wondrous faith! Hence every age
Shoots forth; forth shoots from ancient dust the host
Of dead. Regaining light, there rise again
Mothers, and sires, and high-souled youths, and boys,
And maids unwedded; and deceased old men
Stand by with living souls; and with the cries
Of babes the groaning orb resounds. Then tribes
Various from their lowest seats will come:
Bands of the Easterns; those which earth’s extreme
Sees; those which dwell in the downsloping clime
Of the mid-world, and hold the frosty star’s
Riphæan citadels. Every colonist
Of every land stands frighted here: the boor;
The son of Atreus with his diadem
Of royalty put off; the rich man mixt
Coequally in line with pauper peers.
Deep tremor everywhere: then groans the orb
With prayers; and peoples stretching forth their hands
Grow stupid with the din! The Lord Himself
Seated, is bright with light sublime; and fire
Potent in all the Virtues flashing shines.
And on His high-raised throne the Heavenly One
Coruscates from His seat; with martyrs hemmed
(A dazzling troop of men), and by His seers
Elect accompanied (whose bodies bright
Effulgent are with snowy stoles), He towers
Above them. And now priests in lustrous robes
Attend, who wear upon their marked front
Wreaths golden-red; and all submissive kneel
And reverently adore. The cry of all
Is one: “O Holy, Holy Holy, God!”
To these the Lord will mandate give, to range
The people in twin lines; and orders them
To set apart by number the depraved;
While such as have His biddings followed
With placid words He calls, and bids them, clad
With vigour—death quite conquered—ever dwell
Amid light’s inextinguishable airs,
Stroll through the ancients’ ever blooming realm,
Through promised wealth, through ever sunny swards,
And in bright body spend perpetual life.
A place there is, beloved of the Lord,
In Eastern coasts, where light is bright and clear,
And healthier blows the breeze; day is eterne,
Time changeless: ’tis a region set apart
By God, most rich in plains, and passing blest,
In the meridian of His cloudless seat.
There gladsome the air, and is in light
Ever to be; soft is the wind, and breathes
Life-giving blasts; earth, fruitful with a soil
Luxuriant, bears all things; in the meads
Flowers shed their fragrance; and upon the plains
The purple—not in envy—mingles all
With golden-ruddy light. One gladsome flower,
With its own lustre clad, another clothes;
And here with many a seed the dewy fields
Are dappled, and the snowy tilths are crisped
With rosy flowers. No region happier
Is known in other spots; none which in look
Is fairer, or in honour more excels.
Never in flowery gardens are there born
Such lilies, nor do such upon our plains
Outbloom; nor does the rose so blush, what time,
New-born, ’tis opened by the breeze; nor is
The purple with such hue by Tyrian dye
Imbued. With coloured pebbles beauteous gleams
The gem: here shines the prasinus; there glows
The carbuncle; and giant-emerald
Is green with grassy light. Here too are born
The cinnamons, with odoriferous twigs;
And with dense leaf gladsome amomum joins
Its fragrance. Here, a native, lies the gold
Of radiant sheen; and lofty groves reach heaven
In blooming time, and germens fruitfullest
Burden the living boughs. No glades like these
Hath Ind herself forth-stretcht; no tops so dense
Rears on her mount the pine; nor with a shade
So lofty-leaved is her cypress crisped;
Nor better in its season blooms her bough