39                                      
(el)u80ici1.11h48.  O my Lord, my beloved!  How shall I indite songs, when even the memory of the shadow of thy glory is a thing beyond all music of speech or of silence?

49.  Behold!  I am a man.  Even a little child might not endure Thee.  And lo!

50.  I was alone in a great park, and by a certain hillock was a ring of deep enamelled grass wherein green-clad ones, most beautiful, played.

51.  In their play I came even unto the land of Fairy Sleep.

         All my thoughts were clad in green; most beautiful were they.

52.  All night they danced and sang; but Thou art the morning, O my darling, my serpent that twinest Thee about this heart.

53.  I am the heart, and Thou the serpent.  Wind Thy coils closer about me, so that no light nor bliss may penetrate.

54.  Crush out the blood of me, as a grape upon the tongue of a white Doric girl that languishes with her lover in the moonlight.

55.  Then let the End awake.  Long hast thou slept, O great God Terminus!  Long ages hast thou waited at the end of the city and the roads thereof.

         Awake Thou! wait no more!

56.  Nay, Lord! but I am come to Thee.  It is I that wait at last.

57.  The prophet cried against the mountain; come thou hither, that I may speak with thee!

58.  The mountain stirred not.  Therefore went the prophet unto the mountain, and spake unto it.  But the feet of the prophet were weary, and the mountain heard not his voice.

59.  But I have called unto Thee, and I have journeyed unto Thee, and it availed me not.

60.  I waited patiently, and Thou wast with me from the beginning.

61.  This now I know, O my beloved, and we are stretched at our ease among the vines.

62.  But these thy prophets; they must cry aloud and scourge themselves; they must cross trackless wastes and unfathomed oceans; to await Thee is the end, not the beginning.

63.  Let darkness cover up the writing!  Let the scribe depart among his ways.

64.  But thou and I are stretched at our ease among the vines; what is he?

65.  O Thou beloved One! is there not an end?  Nay, but there is an end.  Awake! arise! gird up thy limbs, O thou runner; bear thou the Word unto the mighty cities, yea, unto the mighty cities.