No More Learning

Permit that I for Thine immortal head
A yielding couch prepare. Behold the shrubs
And saplings of the cedar, far and near,
Their balmy foliage already show.
Among the tombs in which Thy prophets rest
The cooling earth yields unmolested moss.

Jesus answered not, but regarded Gabriel with a look of divine
complacency. He went up to the summit, where were the confines of
heaven, and there prayed. Earth rejoiced at the renewal of her beauty
as His voice resounded and penetrated the gates of the deep, but
only He and the Eternal Father knew the whole meaning of the divine
petition. As Jesus arose from prayer, in His face shone sublimity,
love, and resignation.

Now He and the Eternal Father entered on discourse mysterious and
profound, obscure even to immortals; discourse of things which in
future ages should display to man the love of God. A seraph entered
the borders of the celestial world, whose whole extent is surrounded
by suns. No dark planet approaches the refulgent blaze.

There, central of the circumvolving suns,
Heaven, archetype of every blissful sphere,
Orbicular in blazing glory, swims,
And circumfuges through infinitude
In copious streams, the splendour of the spheres.
Harmonious sounds of its revolving motion
Are wafted on the pinions of the winds
To circumambient suns. The potent songs
Of voice and harp celestial intermingle
And seem the animation of the whole.

Up to this sacred way Gabriel ascended, approaching heaven, which, in
the very centre of the assemblage of suns, rises into a vast dome.
When the Eternal walks forth, the harmonic choirs, borne on the wings
of the wind to the borders of the sunny arch, chant His praise,
joining the melody of their golden harps.
During the hymn the seraph,
as messenger of the Mediator, stood on one of the suns nearest heaven.
The Eternal Father rewarded the choirs with a look of benignity and
then beheld the Chief Seraph, whose name with God is _The Chosen_, and
by the heavenly host is called _Eloah_.

The awful thunder seven times rolled forth,
The sacred gloom dispelling, and the Voice
Divine gently descended: "God is Love.
E'er beings gently emanated I was Love.
Creating worlds, I ever was the same,
And such I am in the accomplishment
Of my profoundest, most mysterious deed.
But in the death of the Eternal Son
Ye learn to know Me wholly--God, the Judge
Of every world. New adoration then
Ye will to the Supreme of heaven address. "

The seraph having descended to the altar of the earth, Adam, filled
with eager expectation, hastened to him. A lucid, ethereal body was
the radiant mansion of his blessed spirit, and his form was as lovely
as the bright image in the Creator's mind when meditating on the form
of man in the blooming fields of Paradise. Adam approached with a
radiant smile, which suffused over his countenance an air of ineffable
and sweetest dignity, and thus with impassioned accents he spoke.

Hail, blessed seraph, messenger of peace!
Thy voice, resounding of thy message high,
Has filled our souls with rapture. Son of God,
Messiah, O that Thee I could behold,
Behold Thee in the beauty of Thy manhood,
E'en as this seraph sees Thee in the form
Which Thy compassion prompted Thee to take
My wretched progeny from death to save.
Point out to me, O seraph, show to me,
Where my Redeemer walked, my loving Lord;
Only from far I will His step attend.

Gabriel descends again to earth, the stars silently saluting him with
a universal morn. He finds Jesus placidly sleeping on a bare rock, and
after long contemplation, apostrophises all nature to be silent, for
her Creator sleeps.