e is the bride of
darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe
of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful
illusion of thy strength was taken from thee--and in vain. No son of thy
loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was
for Rudolph.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the
infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions
of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight
ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her
dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with
ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms
are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely
haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They
fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of
screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And
on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion,
the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads
them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and
yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come
trooping to the sunken sea, _Lacus Mortis_. Ominous revengeful zodiacal
host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the
trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter
and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning
multitude, murderers of the sun.

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible
gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent
grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own
magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder
of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the
daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one,
Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now
arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour,
shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call
it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it
streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents
of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling,
writhi