The Chorus express their sympathy with Samson and he replies, bitterly reproaching his own folly and that of the rulers of Judah who gave him up to their enemies. But human blindness will not ultimately defeat the ways of God: and the Chorus sing their song of faith, in which rhyme is called in to give its touch of impatient contempt at the folly of the atheist.
"Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think not God at all.
If any be, they walk obscure;
For of such doctrine never was there school,
But the heart of the fool,
And no man therein doctor but himself."
So ends the first act or episode of the drama. The second is the visit of Samson's father Manoah, whose cry is—
"Who would be now a father in my stead?"
He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom: but Samson refuses, not desiring life, desiring rather to pay the full penalty of his sin. He cannot share his father's hopes that God will give him back the sight he so misused—
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"All otherwise to me my thoughts portend,
That these dark orbs no more shall treat with light,
Nor the other light of life continue long,
But yield to double darkness nigh at hand:
So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric he laments over his greatest sufferings, which are not those of the body but those of the mind—
"which no cooling herb Or med'cinal liquor can assuage, Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp."
A choral song on the mysterious dealings of God closes this episode which is followed by the most dramatically effective in the poem, that of the visit of Dalila. The moment the blind man is told that it is "Dalila, thy wife," he cries—