A CLOUD OF SERAPHIM
He smiles on Beauty! We will not die! Hail! Hail!
AMBITION
(A hovering, terrible figure in the gloom.) He rests and drools! All is light and song! He thinks not on death!
(The shadows recede into the darkness, to all but nothingness; the endless legions of suns twinkle; the clouds of CHERUBIM and SERAPHIM swirl and turn.)
SCENE III: THE HOUSE OF DEATH
SCENE: A chamber of unimaginable horrors, vast, murky, involute, in which serpents twist and writhe; tortured figures crawl and groan; beasts of many heads and paws prowl to and fro, and all slimy odorous forms interlace in welters and sloughs and draperies and festoons. At the center, the Throne of the Lord, a mound of unclean beasts and serpents, hung over by clouds of evil spirits; his present embodied thoughts. At his side, huddled in despair, faint, pale shadows of their former selves, the thinnest of dreams—BEAUTY, REASON, PITY, HOPE, LOVE. Before him in glowering fullness, grown to vast proportions, AMBITION, and behind him the legions of his fancy, black and fulgurous, drawn close about. Insane, fevered, maundering, the LORD OF THE UNIVERSE bellows of destruction.
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Death! Death! Death! Thou dearest death! Bring thou me heaps of dead—the endless slain! Breed winged and forked things, horrors all! Bring thou me shames, despairs, disasters, with which to torture and slay! Go forth! Go forth! Sweep thou with Hate, with Rage, with Despair, with Fear! Breed me vast powers of evil, and still vaster! Rank thou me them rank on rank—file by file! (He thinks on tortured forms.) Make me armies of horrors, of woes, of immedicable griefs! (As he thinks, from his brain leap forth, many-headed, forked, winged, the first six Powers of Darkness, and after them, clawed and winged forces of ravening aspect and disaster.)