"Stand the hidden springs of life revealed,
The wondrous mechanism from earth concealed.
There Nature's primal premises appear
In simple grandeur, deep and crystal clear,
Flowing from out the heart of boundless ocean
Of the eternal Now. With rapt devotion
A myriad ministering forces there await
The summons of His awful eyes of fate,
The mandates of His all-compelling voice."
Far, far below those empyrean vaults is Earth, with its pristine inhabitants. God and man—the Creator and the thing created, the First Cause and the last effect—are both judiciously only introduced into the drama by hearsay.
Deep in the vague immensity lies Chaos, the uninhabited, through which the vanquished rebels are to be hurled to their endless doom.
But the poet also takes us
"Where meteors glare and stormy glooms invest;"
as, leaving Elysium's fields of light, he views
"Hell's punishments and horrors dire,
Its gulfs of woe and lakes of rayless fire,
Where demons laugh and fiends and furies rage
Round writhing victims whose parched tongues assuage
No cooling drops of hope."
Such is the grand perspective from the scene of this stupendous drama.
THE PEACEFUL JOYS OF PARADISE.
The play opens as softly as the opening strains of some grand oratorio. The first act is largely descriptive, a picture of the beautiful serenity of Heaven and of the joys of Paradise.