Sir T. I lie here dying, Gervase.-- Ah! Ah! Why torture me! I cannot live.
1st Doctor. It is the order of our art----
Sir T. Desist! Desist, I say, at once; and damn your art.-- Pardon me, Doctor: I never could endure A scratch with patience: let me die at ease.
1st Doctor. I might preserve your life a little while.
1st Doctor. Oh no! Until the morning at the most.
Sir T. Take me to Gervase, Hildreth: quickly, Hildreth.
[Hildreth, Europa, and the Doctors bring St. James's and Sir Tristram together, and support them, that they may see each other while they converse.]
St. J. I wished to set them free. This war will last a thousand years.
Sir T. For us The war is over: notwithstanding, speak Your errand once again. Things in my life There are I would forget: your message wipes The world out.
St. J. All the past, both good and ill, My message clears away.
Sir T. Leaving pure Matter: I love it!--And a world begun anew: That moved me most of all:--to launch the world In space again upon a virgin track, As though the foul old rut and blood-drenched way Had never been. I feel it, as I die, So deeply: actual world, and actual man.
St. J. Yes; let us watch that man! I see him stand In majesty material, the Nessus-shirt Of spirit, warp, and woof of legend dyed In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide, About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed With hideous woe, and in its proper filth Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world Begins again, not even a pallid dream Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn. I say it simply;--With the Universe Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space, In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam He follows, for the sun illumines him, And every sun, his kinsmen in the skies, The systems, constellations, galaxies. At home in the empyrean, issuing thence, His free imagination momently Remembers flame pellucid, which it was And will be in the nebula again, When all the orbs that stock the loins of night Return into the sun, and fill with seed Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space.
Sir T. We fill the abyss, left in the Universe By cancelling God, with the Universe itself. Great is it, Gervase; but the terror of it!