There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's _Prince Deukalion_, which, though not extending to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene Gæa, the Earth, mother of men, is represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She says:
"I change with man, Mother, not more than partner, of his fate. Ere he was born I dreamed that he might be, And through long ages of imperfect life Waited for him. Then vexed with monstrous shapes, That spawned and wallowed in primeval ooze, I lay supine and slept, or dreamed to sleep; And dreamed, or waking felt as in a dream, Some touch of hands, some soft delivering help, And he was there! His faint new voice I heard; His eye that met the sun, his upright tread, Thenceforth were mine! And with him came the palm, The oak, the rose, the swan, the nightingale; The barren bough hung apples to the sun; Dry stalks made harvest: breezes in the woods Then first found music, and the turbid sea First rolled a crystal breaker to the shore. His foot was on the mountains, and the wave Upheld him: over all things huge and coarse There came the breathing of a regal sway, Which bent them into beauty. Order new Followed the march of new necessity, And what was useless, or unclaimed before, Took value from the seizure of his hands."
In the midst of like thoughts, a bud on a rose which stands by Gæa bursts open, and Eros, the antique god of young love, appears from it.
Blithe, tricksome spirit! art thou left alone Of gods and all their intermediate kin The sweet survivor? Yet a single seed, When soil and seasons lend their alchemy, May clothe a barren continent in green.
Was I born, that I should die? Stars that fringe the outer sky Know me: yonder sun were dim Save my torch enkindle him. Then, when first the primal pair Found me in the twilight air, I was older than their day, Yet to them as young as they. All decrees of fate I spurn; Banishment is my return: Hate and force purvey for me, Death is shining victory.
If you should be wandering meditatively along the banks of some tiny brook, so narrow that you can leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece of violet petal in a little eddy off somewhere,--if, I say, you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great wheels for man's profit as it swept on to the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of human aspirations; you would behold the aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction--_The Scenes from Clerical Life_ appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and magically enlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a small circle of literary people in London to the width of all England.