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! St. J. Terror and splendour, Tristram! Who shall tell-- Who shall persuade the kings that God is not, The politicians, usurers, financiers, Priests, warriors, that depend on God to bear The burden of their inhumanities? All inhumanity that flings itself On God's unsearchable device will fight To the last drop of blood, last labouring sigh For God and Heaven and Hell. And who shall teach The orphans that their mothers are not; who Unpeople Heaven of lovers, children, saints? Women will fight with babies at their breasts, Old palsied hags, peace-lovers, cripples, cowards, When this is put to war. Their sons that died In battle, where are they? Their enemies That should lament in Hell? The little child That lived a year and holds its parents' hearts In dimpled hands for ever? Christ himself That pardoned wanton women, where is he? Sir T. It cannot be undone! St. J. It can, it will! For through the mist of tears and blood I see A greater breed of men, a nobler world, An independent power in the Universe, The Universe itself become aware. Sir T. The Universe itself become aware. [Neither speaks again, and shortly both die within a few moments of each other.]