THE DYNASTS FORE SCENE
Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought, Unchecks Its clock-like laws.
SPIRIT SINISTER (aside)
Good, as before. My little engines, then, will still have play.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
Why doth It so and so, and ever so,
This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel ?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
As one sad story runs, It lends Its heed To other worlds, being wearied out with this ; Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes. Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfully Its warefulness, Its care, this planet lost When in her early growth and crudity By bad mad acts of severance men contrived, Working such nescience by their own device.— Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles, Though not in mine.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
Meet is it, none the less,
To bear in thought that though Its consciousness May be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed, Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon ?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being, Nothing appears of shape to indicate That cognizance has marshalled things terrene, Or will (such is my thinking] in my span. Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed, Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,