ing spells
Upon a mind o'erwrought!

[The service closes. The clergy advance with the canopy to the
foot of the throne, and the procession forms to return to the
Palace.]

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Officious sprite,
Thou art young, and dost not heed the Cause of things
Which some of us have inkled to thee here;
Else wouldst thou not have hailed the Emperor,
Whose acts do but outshape Its governing.

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

I feel, Sire, as I must! This tale of Will
And Life's impulsion by Incognizance
I cannot take!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Let me then once again
Show to thy sceptic eye the very streams
And currents of this all-inhering Power,
And bring conclusion to thy unbelief.

[The scene assumes the preternatural transparency before mentioned,
and there is again beheld as it were the interior of a brain which
seems to manifest the volitions of a Universal Will, of whose
tissues the personages of the action form portion.]

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

Enough. And yet for very sorriness
I cannot own the weird phantasma real!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Affection ever was illogical.

SPIRIT IRONIC [aside]

How should the Sprite own to such logic--a mere juvenile-- who only
came into being in what the earthlings call their Tertiary Age!

[The scene changes. The exterior of the Cathedral takes the place
of the interior, and the point of view recedes, the whole fabric
smalling into distance and becoming like a rare, delicately carved
alabaster ornament. The city itself sinks to miniature, the Alps
show afar as a white corrugation, the Adriatic and the Gulf of
Genoa appear on this and on that hand, with Italy between them,
till clouds cover the panorama.]

ACT SECOND

SCENE I

THE DOCKYARD, GIBRALTAR

[The Rock is seen rising behind the town and the Alameda Gardens,
and the English fleet rides at anchor in the Bay, across which the
Spanish shore from Algeciras to Carnero Point shuts in the West.
Southward over the Strait is the African coast.]

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Our migratory Proskenion now presents
An outlook on the storied Kalpe Rock,
As preface to the vision of the Fleets
Spanish and French, linked for fell purposings.

REC