CHRISTUS.
Draw out now
And bear unto the Ruler of the Feast.
MANAHEM aside. O thou, brought up among the Essenians, Nurtured in abstinence, taste not the wine! It is the poison of dragons from the vineyards Of Sodom, and the taste of death is in it!
ARCHITRICLINUS to the BRIDEGROOM. All men set forth good wine at the beginning, And when men have well drunk, that which is worse; But thou hast kept the good wine until now.
MANAHEM aside.
The things that have been and shall be no more, The things that are, and that hereafter shall he, The things that might have been, and yet were not, The fading twilight of great joys departed, The daybreak of great truths as yet unrisen, The intuition and the expectation Of something, which, when come, is not the same, But only like its forecast in men's dreams, The longing, the delay, and the delight, Sweeter for the delay; youth, hope, love, death, And disappointment which is also death, All these make up the sum of human life; A dream within a dream, a wind at night Howling across the desert in despair, Seeking for something lost it cannot find. Fate or foreseeing, or whatever name Men call it, matters not; what is to be Hath been fore-written in the thought divine From the beginning. None can hide from it, But it will find him out; nor run from it, But it o'ertaketh him! The Lord hath said it.
THE BRIDEGROOM to the BRIDE, on the balcony. When Abraham went with Sarah into Egypt, The land was all illumined with her beauty; But thou dost make the very night itself Brighter than day! Behold, in glad procession, Crowding the threshold of the sky above us, The stars come forth to meet thee with their lamps; And the soft winds, the ambassadors of flowers, From neighboring gardens and from fields unseen, Come laden with odors unto thee, my Queen!
THE MUSICIANS. Awake, O north-wind, And come, thou wind of the South. Blow, blow upon my garden, That the spices thereof may flow out.
IV
IN THE CORNFIELDS
PHILIP. Onward through leagues of sun-illumined corn, As if through parted seas, the pathway runs, And crowned with sunshine as the Prince of Peace Walks the beloved Master, leading us, As Moses led our fathers in old times Out of the land of bondage! We have found Him of whom Moses and the Prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph.