_Adam._ That is true. _Lucifer._ Ay, that is true. The clay-king testifies To the snake's counsel,--hear him!--very true. _Earth Spirits._ I wail, I wail! _Lucifer._ And certes, _that_ is true. Ye wail, ye all wail. Peradventure I Could wail among you. O thou universe, That holdest sin and woe,--more room for wail! _Distant Starry Voice._ Ah, ah, Heosphoros! Heosphoros! _Adam._ Mark Lucifer! He changes awfully. _Eve._ It seems as if he looked from grief to God And could not see him. Wretched Lucifer! _Adam._ How he stands--yet an angel! _Earth Spirits._ We all wail! _Lucifer (after a pause)._ Dost thou remember, Adam, when the curse Took us in Eden? On a mountain-peak Half-sheathed in primal woods and glittering In spasms of awful sunshine at that hour, A lion couched, part raised upon his paws, With his calm massive face turned full on thine, And his mane listening. When the ended curse Left silence in the world, right suddenly He sprang up rampant and stood straight and stiff, As if the new reality of death Were dashed against his eyes, and roared so fierce, (Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear) And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills Such fast keen echoes crumbling down the vales Precipitately,--that the forest beasts, One after one, did mutter a response Of savage and of sorrowful complaint Which trailed along the gorges. Then, at once, He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height Into the dusk of pines. _Adam._ It might have been. I heard the curse alone. _Earth Spirits._ I wail, I wail! _Lucifer._ That lion is the type of what I am. And as he fixed thee with his full-faced hate, And roared, O Adam, comprehending doom, So, gazing on the face of the Unseen, I cry out here between the Heavens and Earth My conscience of this sin, this woe, this wrath, Which damn me to this depth. _Earth Spirits._ I wail, I wail! _Eve._ I wail--O God! _Lucifer._ I scorn you that ye wail, Who use your petty griefs for pedestals To stand on, beckoning pity from without, And deal in pathos of antithesis Of what ye _were_ forsooth, and what ye are;-- I scorn you like an angel! Yet, one cry I, too, would drive up like a column erect, Marble to marble, from my heart to heaven, A monument of anguish to transpierce And overtop your vapoury complaints Expressed from feeble woes. _Earth Spirits._ I wail, I wail!