_Adam._ I see all. How the spirits in thine eyes From their dilated orbits bound before To meet the spectral Dread! _Eve._ I am afraid-- Ah, ah! the twilight bristles wild with shapes Of intermittent motion, aspect vague And mystic bearings, which o'ercreep the earth, Keeping slow time with horrors in the blood. How near they reach ... and far! How grey they move-- Treading upon the darkness without feet, And fluttering on the darkness without wings! Some run like dogs, with noses to the ground; Some keep one path, like sheep; some rock like trees; Some glide like a fallen leaf, and some flow on Copious as rivers. _Adam._ Some spring up like fire; And some coil ... _Eve._ Ah, ah! dost thou pause to say Like what?--coil like the serpent, when he fell From all the emerald splendour of his height And writhed, and could not climb against the curse, Not a ring's length. I am afraid--afraid-- I think it is God's will to make me afraid,-- Permitting THESE to haunt us in the place Of his belovèd angels--gone from us Because we are not pure. Dear Pity of God, That didst permit the angels to go home And live no more with us who are not pure, Save _us_ too from a loathly company-- Almost as loathly in our eyes, perhaps, As _we_ are in the purest! Pity us-- Us too! nor shut us in the dark, away From verity and from stability, Or what we name such through the precedence Of earth's adjusted uses,--leave us not To doubt betwixt our senses and our souls, Which are the more distraught and full of pain And weak of apprehension! _Adam._ Courage, Sweet! The mystic shapes ebb back from us, and drop With slow concentric movement, each on each,-- Expressing wider spaces,--and collapsed In lines more definite for imagery And clearer for relation, till the throng Of shapeless spectra merge into a few Distinguishable phantasms vague and grand Which sweep out and around us vastily And hold us in a circle and a calm. _Eve._ Strange phantasms of pale shadow! there are twelve. Thou who didst name all lives, hast names for these? _Adam._ Methinks this is the zodiac of the earth, Which rounds us with a visionary dread, Responding with twelve shadowy signs of earth, In fantasque apposition and approach, To those celestial, constellated twelve Which palpitate adown the silent nights Under the pressure of the hand of God Stretched wide in benediction. At this hour, Not a star pricketh the flat gloom of heaven: But, girdling close our nether wilderness, The zodiac-figures of the earth loom slow,-- Drawn out, as suiteth with the place and time, In twelve colossal shades instead of stars, Through which the ecliptic line of mystery Strikes bleakly with an unrelenting scope, Foreshowing life and death. _Eve._ By dream or sense, Do we see this?