Companions dear in our high happiness. Oh! brothers, why? Oh! sons of the glad Light, Why thus depressed at heart? Who gave you cause Thus to complain and thus to mourn? Ye had 60 Begun to lift your heads aloft to Heaven, To bloom amid the day, whose lustre streams From God's deep glow. The Heavens brought you forth To mount in rapid flight from firmament To firmament beyond, from court to court; To flit amid the shadeless light content, In one delightful life, an endless feast; And e'er to taste the heavenly manna sweet Of God's eternity, among your friends In peaceful joys. Oh! why? This is not meet 70 For dwellers of the Spirit world. Oh! nay. Nor meet for Dominations, Powers, and Thrones, Nor for the ruling Heavens. Ye gorge your grief, And sit perplexed and dumb. Give voice to your Necessity: reveal it to your friends. Reveal your heart-sore, that we may relieve.
[Illustration: "Alas! alas! where is our bliss departed?"]
O brothers, can ye ask with earnestness Why we thus grieve? Did ye also not hear What Gabriel's trump revealed: how we through this New-given command, down from our state are thrust 80 Into a slavery of Earth and of As many souls as from a little blood And seed may haply spring? What have we done Amiss? how erred, that God a water-bubble, Blown full of vapid air, exalts. His sons, The Angels, to abase?--a bastardy Exalts, formed out of clay and dust? But now We stood as trusty pillars, consecrate Unto His court, adorned our various place As faithful members of His Realm; and now, 90 In one brief hour, we are expelled and shorn Of all our dignity,--oppressed, alas! Too sternly and with too much heaviness. The charter and the primal privilege Received from God are now by Him repealed. And there where we had thought to rule with God And under God, shall now this Adam reign, Triumphant in his seed and blood forever. The sun of Spirits hath set for them too soon. Ah I comrades, hear our sorrow and our woes. 100 Alas! alas! where is our bliss departed?
And doth the charge that Gabriel brought from God You thus disturb? This but a frenzy seems. Who dares to reprehend the high command? Who so presumptuous himself against The Godhead to oppose? To give to God His honor and His Right, to rest upon His law, this is our bounden charge. Who dares To enter here with God's Omnipotence In such dispute? His word and nod and will 110 Serve as our law and pace and precept firm. Who contradiction breathes doth break the seal Of the Most High. Obedience doth please The Ruler of this Realm far more than smell Of incense or divinest harmonies. Ye are (oh! be ye not so vain, we pray, Of boasted lineage) created more For such subjection than for rulership. O brothers, cease this wailing and lament. And bow beneath the yoke of the Power Supreme. 120