Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/312

 The traitor Judas sold his Master for;

And men still handling them in peace and war

Catch foul disease, that comes as appetite,

And lurks and clings as withering, damning blight.

But Tubal-Cain wot not of treachery,

Nor greedy lust, nor any ill to be,

Save the one ill of sinking into naught,

Banished from action and act-shaping thought.

He was the sire of swift-transforming skill,

Which arms for conquest man's ambitious will;

And round him gladly, as his hammer rung,

Gathered the elders and the growing young:

These handled vaguely and those plied the tools,

Till, happy chance begetting conscious rules,

The home of Cain with industry was rife,

And glimpses of a strong persistent life,

Panting through generations as one breath,

And filling with its soul the blank of death.

Jubal, too, watched the hammer, till his eyes,

No longer following its fall or rise,

Seemed glad with something that they could not see,

But only listened to—some melody,

Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found,

Won from the common store of struggling sound.

Then, as the metal shapes more various grew,

And, hurled upon each other, resonance drew,

Each gave new tones, the revelations dim

Of some external soul that spoke for him:

The hollow vessel's clang, the clash, the boom,

Like light that makes wide spiritual room

And skyey spaces in the spaceless thought,

To Jubal such enlargéd passion brought

That love, hope, rage, and all experience,

Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence