No More Learning

Last beautiful, last heavenly, that I loved!
If I could drench thy golden locks with tears,
What were it to this angel?

_Gabriel. _ What love is.
And now I have named God.

_Lucifer. _ Yet, Gabriel,
By the lie in me which I keep myself,
Thou'rt a false swearer. Were it otherwise,
What dost thou here, vouchsafing tender thoughts
To that earth-angel or earth-demon--which,
Thou and I have not solved the problem yet
Enough to argue,--that fallen Adam there,--
That red-clay and a breath,--who must, forsooth,
Live in a new apocalypse of sense,
With beauty and music waving in his trees
And running in his rivers, to make glad
His soul made perfect? --is it not for hope,
A hope within thee deeper than thy truth,
Of finally conducting him and his
To fill the vacant thrones of me and mine,
Which affront heaven with their vacuity?

_Gabriel. _ Angel, there are no vacant thrones in heaven
To suit thy empty words. Glory and life
Fulfil their own depletions; and if God
Sighed you far from him, his next breath drew in
A compensative splendour up the vast,
Flushing the starry arteries.

_Lucifer. _ What a change!
So, let the vacant thrones and gardens too
Fill as may please you!
--and be pitiful,
As ye translate that word, to the dethroned
And exiled, man or angel. The fact stands,
That I, the rebel, the cast out and down,
Am here and will not go; while there, along
The light to which ye flash the desert out,
Flies your adopted Adam, your red-clay
In two kinds, both being flawed. Why, what is this?
Whose work is this? Whose hand was in the work?
Against whose hand? In this last strife, methinks,
I am not a fallen angel!

_Gabriel. _ Dost thou know
Aught of those exiles?

_Lucifer. _ Ay: I know they have fled
Silent all day along the wilderness:
I know they wear, for burden on their backs,
The thought of a shut gate of Paradise,
And faces of the marshalled cherubim
Shining against, not for them; and I know
They dare not look in one another's face,--
As if each were a cherub!

_Gabriel. _ Dost thou know
Aught of their future?

_Lucifer. _ Only as much as this:
That evil will increase and multiply
Without a benediction.

_Gabriel.