No More Learning

Where are its walls,
And they who guard them?

_Lucifer_. Point me out the site
Of Paradise.

_Cain_. How should I? As we move
Like sunbeams onward, it grows small and smaller,
And as it waxes little, and then less,
Gathers a halo round it, like the light
Which shone the roundest of the stars, when I
Beheld them from the skirts of Paradise:
Methinks they both, as we recede from them, 40
Appear to join the innumerable stars
Which are around us; and, as we move on,
Increase their myriads.

_Lucifer_. And if there should be
Worlds greater than thine own--inhabited
By greater things--and they themselves far more
In number than the dust of thy dull earth,
Though multiplied to animated atoms,
All living--and all doomed to death--and wretched,
What wouldst thou think?

_Cain_. I should be proud of thought
Which knew such things.

_Lucifer_. But if that high thought were 50
Linked to a servile mass of matter--and,
Knowing such things, aspiring to such things,
And science still beyond them, were chained down
To the most gross and petty paltry wants,
All foul and fulsome--and the very best
Of thine enjoyments a sweet degradation,
A most enervating and filthy cheat
To lure thee on to the renewal of
Fresh souls and bodies[112], all foredoomed to be
As frail, and few so happy----

_Cain_. Spirit! I 60
Know nought of Death, save as a dreadful thing
Of which I have heard my parents speak, as of
A hideous heritage I owe to them
No less than life--a heritage not happy,
If I may judge, till now. But, Spirit!
if
It be as thou hast said (and I within
Feel the prophetic torture of its truth),
Here let me die: for to give birth to those
Who can but suffer many years, and die--
Methinks is merely propagating Death, 70
And multiplying murder.

_Lucifer_. Thou canst not
_All_ die--there is what must survive.

_Cain_. The Other
Spake not of this unto my father, when
He shut him forth from Paradise, with death
Written upon his forehead. But at least
Let what is mortal of me perish, that
I may be in the rest as angels are.

_Lucifer_. _I_ am angelic: wouldst thou be as I am?

_Cain_. I know not what thou art: I see thy power,
And see thou show'st me things beyond _my_ power, 80
Beyond all power of my born faculties,
Although inferior still to my desires
And my conceptions.

_Lucifer_. What are they which dwell
So humbly in their pride, as to sojourn
With worms in clay?

_Cain_. And what art thou who dwellest
So haughtily in spirit, and canst range
Nature and immortality--and yet
Seem'st sorrowful?

_Lucifer_. I seem that which I am;
And therefore do I ask of thee, if thou
Wouldst be immortal?