So sang the song, a dreadful doom dissembling.
Yet undefined remained eternal Night,
The stern reminder of some distant might."


At length the old world bowed its head. The gay gardens of the
young race were withered; beyond into the freer, desert space
aspired less childish and maturing man. The gods then vanished with
their train. Lonely and lifeless, Nature stood. The scanty number
and the rigid measure bound her with fetters of iron. As into dust
and air melted the inconceivable blossoms of life into mysterious
words. Fled was the magic faith, and phantasy the all-changing,
all-uniting friend from heaven. Over the rigid earth, unfriendly,
blew a cold north wind, and the wonder-home, now without life, was
lost in ether; the recesses of the heavens were filled with beaming
worlds. Into a holier sphere, into the mind's far higher space, did
the world draw the soul with its powers, there to wander until the
break of the world's dawning glory. No longer was the light the
gods' abode, their token in the heavens: the veil of the night did
they cast over them. The night was the mighty bosom of revelations;
in it the gods returned, and slumbered there, to go forth in new and
in more glorious forms over the altered world.

Among the people above all despised, too soon matured, and wilful
strangers to the blessed innocence of youth; among them, with
features hitherto unseen, the new world came, in the poet's hut of
poverty, a son of the first virgin mother, endless fruit of a
mysterious embrace. The boding, budding wisdom of the East first
recognised another Time's beginning; to the humble cradle of the
monarch their star declared the way. In the name of the distant