face in her hands, and lies there motionless_. PALLAS _walks
up and down, in growing emotion, and at length breaks forth
in soliloquy_.]

PALLAS.

Higher than this dull circle of the sense--
Shrewd though its pulsing sharp reminders be,
With ceaseless fairy blows that ring and wake
The anvil of the brain--I rather choose
To lift mine eyes and pierce
The long transparent bar that floats above,
And hides, or feigns to hide, the choiring stars,
And dulls, or faintly dulls, the fiery sun,
And lacquers all the glassy sky with gold.
For so the strain that makes this mortal life
Irksome or squalid, chains that bind us down,
Rust on those chains which soils the reddening skin,
Passes; and in that concentrated calm,
And in that pure concinnity of soul,
And in that heart that almost fails to beat,
I read a faint beatitude, and dream
I walk once more upon the roof of Heaven,
And feel all knowledge, all capacity
For sovereign thought, all intellectual joy,
Blow on me, like fluttering and like dancing winds.
We are fallen, fallen!...
And yet a nameless mirth, flooding my veins,
And yet a sense of limpid happiness
And buoyancy and anxious fond desire
Quicken my being. It is much to see
The perfected geography of thought
Spread out before the gorged intelligence,
A map from further detail long absolved.
But ah! when we have tasted the delight
Of toilsome apprehension, how return
To that satiety of mental ease
Where all is known because it merely is?
Nay, here the joy will be to learn and learn,
To learn in error and correct in pain,
To learn through effort and with ease forget,
Building of rough and slippery stones a House,
Long schemed, and falling from us, and at the last
Imperfect. Knowledge not the aim, so much
As pleasure in the toil that leads to knowledge,
We shall build, although the house before our eyes
Crumble, and we shall gladden in the toil
Although it never leads to habitation--
Building our goal, though never a fabric rise.

V

[_The glen, down which a limpid and murmuring brook descends, with
numerous tiny cascades and pools. Beside one of the latter,
underneath a great beech-tree, and sitting on the root of it_,
APHRODITE, _alone. Enter from below, concealed at first by the
undergrowth_, ARES. _It is mid-day._]

APHRODITE [_to herself_].

Here he comes at last, and from