Is strangely moved.

HASSAN.

Your Sublime Highness

MAHMUD.

The times do cast strange shadows

On those who watch and who must rule their course.

Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,

Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:-and these are of them.

Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me

As thus from sleep into the troubled day;

It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,

Leaving no figure upon memory's glass.

Would that no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest

A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle

Of strange and secret and forgotten things.

I bade thee summon him :-'tis said his tribe

Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.
HASSAN.

The Jew of whom I spake is old,—so old
He seems to have outlived a world's decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he; his hair and beard
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct

With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift

To the winter wind :—but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The present, and the past, and the to-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.

The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretch'd beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.

With this old Jew.

MAHMUD.

I would talk

HASSAN.

Thy will is even now

Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern

'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible

Than thou or God! He who would question him

Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the waye;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
Ahasuerus! and the caverns round

Will answer Ahasuerus! If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind.
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him

Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference

The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare

Win the desired communion-but that shout
Bodes-

(a shout within.)

MAHMUD.

Evil, doubtless; like all human sounds.

Let me converse with spirits.

HASSAN.

That shout again.

MAHMUD.

This Jew whom thou hast summon'd

HASSAN.

MAHMUD.

Will be here

When the omnipotent hour to which are yoked
He, I, and all things shall compel—enough.
Silence those mutineers-that drunken crew,
That crowd about the pilot in the storm.
Ay! strike the foremost shorter by a head!
They weary me, and I have need of rest.

Kings are like stars—they rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.

CHORUS. (2)

(Exeunt severally.

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever

From creation to decay,

Like the bubbles on a river

Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

But they are still immortal

Who, through birth's orient portal

And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,

Clothe their unceasing flight

In the brief dust and light

Gather'd around their chariots as they go;

New shapes they still may weave,

New gods, new laws receive,

Bright or dim are they as the robes they last
On Death's bare ribs had cast.

A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror came;

Like a triumphal path he trod

The thorns of death and shame.

A mortal shape to him

Was like the vapour dim

Which the orient planet animates with light;

Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,

Like blood-hounds mild and tame,

Nor prey'd, until their Lord had taken flight;

The moon of Mahomet

Arose, and it shall set:

While blazon'd as on heaven's immortal noon

The cross leads generations on.

Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep

From one whose dreams are Paradise

Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes;
So fleet, so faint, so fair,

The Powers of earth and air

Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem :