Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (618 page)

A want that did but stronger grow with gain

Of all good else, as spirits might be sad

For lack of speech to tell us they are glad.

Now Jabal learned to tame the lowing kine,

And from their udders drew the snow-white wine

That stirs the innocent joy, and makes the stream

Of elemental life with fulness teem;

The star-browed calves he nursed With feeding hand,

And sheltered them, till all the little band

Stood mustered gazing at the sunset way

Whence he would come with store at close of day.

He soothed the silly sheep with friendly tone,

And reared their staggering lambs, that, older grown,

Followed his steps with sense-taught memory;

Till he, their shepherd, could their leader be,

And guide them through the pastures as he would,

With sway that grew from ministry of good.

He spread his tents upon the grassy plain

Which, eastward widening like the open main,

Showed the first whiteness ‘neath the morning star;

Near him his sister, deft, as women are,

Plied her quick skill in sequence to his thought

Till the hid treasures of the milk she caught

Revealed like pollen ‘mid the petals white,

The golden pollen, virgin to the light.

Even the she-wolf with young, on rapine bent,

He caught and tethered in his mat-walled tent,

And cherished all her little sharp-nosed young

Till the small race with hope and terror clung

About his footsteps, till each new-reared brood,

Remoter from the memories of the wood,

More glad discerned their common home with man.

This was the work of Jabal: he began

The pastoral life, and, sire of joys to be,

Spread the sweet ties that bind the family

O’er dear dumb souls that thrilled at man’s caress,

And shared his pain with patient helpfulness.

But Tubal-Cain had caught and yoked the fire,

Yoked it with stones that bent the flaming spire

And made it roar in prisoned servitude

Within the furnace, till with force subdued

It changed all forms he willed to work upon,

Till hard from soft,-and soft from hard, he won.

The pliant clay he moulded as he would,

And laughed with joy when ‘mid the heat it stood

Shaped as his hand had chosen, while the mass

That from his hold, dark, obstinate, would pass,

He drew all glowing from the busy heat,

All breathing as with life that he could beat

With thundering hammer, making it obey

His will creative, like the pale soft clay.

Each day he wrought and better than he planned,

Shape breeding shape beneath his restless hand.

(The soul without still helps the soul within,

And its deft magic ends what we begin.)

Nay, in his dreams his hammer he would wield

And seem to see a myriad types revealed,

Then spring with wondering triumphant cry,

And, lest the inspiring vision should go by,

Would rush to labor with that plastic zeal

Which all the passion of our life can steal

For force to work with. Each day saw the birth

Of various forms, which, flung upon the earth,

Seemed harmless toys to cheat the exacting hour,

But were as seeds instinct with hidden power.

The axe, the club, the spiked wheel, the chain,

Held silently the shrieks and moans of pain;

And near them latent lay in share and spade,

In the strong bar, the saw, and deep-curved blade,

Glad voices of the hearth and harvest-home,

The social good, and all earth’s joy to come.

Thus to mixed ends wrought Tubal; and they say,

Some things he made have lasted to this day;

As, thirty silver pieces that were found

By Noah’s children buried in the ground.

He made them from mere hunger of device,

Those small white’ discs; but they became the price

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 nought,

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 enlarged passion brought,

That love, hope, rage, and all experience,

Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence

Concords and discords, cadences and cries

That seemed from some world-shrouded soul to rise,

Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage,

Some living sea that burst the bounds of man’s brief age.

Then with such blissful trouble and glad care

For growth. within unborn as mothers bear,

To the far woods he wandered, listening,

And heard the birds their little stories sing

In notes whose rise and fall seem melted speech--

Melted with tears, smiles, glances--that can reach

More quickly through our frame’s deep-winding night,

And without thought raise thought’s best fruit, delight.

Pondering, he sought his home again and heard

The fluctuant changes of the spoken word:

The deep remonstrance and the argued want,

Insistent first in close monotonous chant,

Next leaping upward to defiant stand

Or downward beating like the resolute hand;

The mother’s call, the children’s answering cry,

The laugh’s light cataract tumbling from on high;

The suasive repetitions Jabal taught,

That timid browsing cattle homeward brought:

The clear-winged fugue of echoes vanishing;

And through them all the hammer’s rhythmic ring.

Jubal sat lonely, all around was dim,

Yet his face glowed with light revealed to him:

For as the delicate stream of odor wakes

The thought-wed sentience, and some image makes

From out the mingled fragments of the past,

Finely compact in wholeness that will last,

So streamed as from the body of each sound

Subtler pulsations, swift as warmth, which found

All prisoned germs and all their powers unbound,

Till thought self-luminous flamed from memory,

And in creative vision wandered free.

Then Jubal, standing, rapturous arms upraised,

And on the dark with eager eyes he gazed,

As had some manifested god been there.

It was his thought he saw: the presence fair

Of unachieved achievement, the high task,

The mighty unborn spirit that doth ask

With irresistible cry for blood and breath,

Till feeding its great life we sink in death.

He said, “Were now those mighty tones and cries

That from the giant soul of earth arise,