"How long! how long ago since we beheld The rose of morning and the lily of noon, The great red rhododendron of the eve! How long! how long ago since we beheld Those thoughts of God, the stars, that set their flowers Imperishably in the fields of heaven, And the still changing yet unchanging moon! So long, that I unto myself seem grown, As thou, long since, to rock; in sympathy With all the rock above us and around. My countenance hath won, long since, with thee, The reflex of an alabaster black That builds vast walls around us, and whose frown Makes stone thy brow as mine. O woe! O woe! And now that Idun's apples are denied, Are not for lips of thee nor lips of me,-- The apples of gold that still keep young the gods,-- The years shall cleave this beautiful brow of thine With myriad wrinkles; and, in time, this hair, Brown, brown, and softer than the fur of seals, Shall lose its lustre and instead shall lie, A drift of winter in a winter cave, A feeble gray seen in the glimmering gloom. But I shall age, too, even as thou dost age. Yet, yet we can not die; the immortal gods Can never die! what punishment to know! What pain to know we age yet can not die! Death will not come except with Ragnarok.-- That thought be near! take comfort from the word, The dark word Ragnarok, which is thyself; Thy vast revenge; thy monster synonym; Thy banquet of destruction. Thou, whom fate, The Norns, reserve to war and waste the worlds Of gods and men, with thy two henchmen huge, The wolf and snake, the Fenris, that devours, The Midgard, that engulfs the universe. O joy! O joy! then shall those stars, that glue Their blinking scales unto old Ymer's skull,-- The dome of heaven,--shudder from their spheres, A streaming fire; and thou, O Loké, thou, Elected annihilation, shalt arise, To devastate the Earth and Asaheim. And as this darkness now, this heavy night, Clings to and chokes us till we, strangling, strive With purple lips for light, and feel the dark Drag freezing down the throat to swell the weight That houses in our hearts and peoples our veins, So shall thy hate insufferably spread In fires of Hel, in fogs of Niflheim, Storm-like from pole to pole, o'erwhelming all.-- The Twilight of the Gods, behold, it comes! The Twilight of the Gods!--The root-red cock I seem to hear crow in the halls of Hel! The blood-red cock, whose cry shall bid thee rise!