story
To lift this man to yet intenser glory,
Let the exploit be done
With the least sting, or none,
To those, his kind, at whose expense such pitch is won!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Again ye deprecate the World-Soul's way
That I so long have told? Then note anew
[Since ye forget] the ordered potencies,
Nerves, sinews, trajects, eddies, ducts of It
The Eternal Urger, pressing change on change.

[At once, as earlier, a preternatural clearness possesses the
atmosphere of the battle-field, in which the scene becomes
anatomized and the living masses of humanity transparent. The
controlling Immanent Will appears therein, as a brain-like
network of currents and ejections, twitching, interpenetrating,
entangling, and thrusting hither and thither the human forms.]

SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music]

O Innocents, can ye forget
That things to be were shaped and set
Ere mortals and this planet met?

SEMICHORUS II

Stand ye apostrophizing That
Which, working all, works but thereat
Like some sublime fermenting-vat.

SEMICHORUS I

Heaving throughout its vast content
With strenuously transmutive bent
Though of its aim insentient?--

SEMICHORUS II

Could ye have seen Its early deeds
Ye would not cry, as one who pleads
For quarter, when a Europe bleeds!

SEMICHORUS I

Ere ye, young Pities, had upgrown
From out the deeps where mortals moan
Against a ruling not their own,

SEMICHORUS II

He of the Years beheld, and we,
Creation's prentice artistry
Express in forms that now unbe

SEMICHORUS I

Tentative dreams from day to day;
Mangle its types, re-knead the clay
In some more palpitating way;

SEMICHORUS II

Beheld the rarest wrecked amain,
Whole nigh-perfected species slain
By those that scarce could boast a brain;

SEMICHORUS I

Saw ravage, growth, diminish, add,
Here peoples sane, there peoples mad,
In choiceless throws of good and bad;

SEMICHORUS II

Heard laughters at the ruthless dooms
Which tortured to the eternal glooms
Quick, quivering hearts in hecatombs.

CHORUS

Us Ancients, then, it ill befits
To quake when