No More Learning

If thou hadst gazed upon the face of God
This morning for a moment, thou hadst known
That only pity fitly can chastise:
Hate but avenges.

_Lucifer. _ As it is, I know
Something of pity. When I reeled in heaven,
And my sword grew too heavy for my grasp,
Stabbing through matter, which it could not pierce
So much as the first shell of,--toward the throne;
When I fell back, down,--staring up as I fell,--
The lightnings holding open my scathed lids,
And that thought of the infinite of God,
Hurled after to precipitate descent;
When countless angel faces still and stern
Pressed out upon me from the level heavens
Adown the abysmal spaces, and I fell
Trampled down by your stillness, and struck blind
By the sight within your eyes,--'twas then I knew
How ye could pity, my kind angelhood!

_Gabriel. _ Alas, discrowned one, by the truth in me
Which God keeps in me, I would give away
All--save that truth and his love keeping it,--
To lead thee home again into the light
And hear thy voice chant with the morning stars,
When their rays tremble round them with much song
Sung in more gladness!

_Lucifer. _ Sing, my Morning Star!
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.