Front matter (continued 2)
Reading edition
"the passionate heart of man, The proud imagination and the dream That hovers homeless as the myths decay, Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep In Substance one and multiform, and breathed In all the mystery of the things that are, Create indomitable will to truth, An open mind at home in space and time, A stainless memory splendidly endowed With actual knowledge, a Material soul At one with the Material Universe."
With the Bishop of St. James's I watch the future, an actual world wherein an actual man shall be and do greatly
"In majesty Material, the Nessus-shirt Of spirit, warp and woof of legend, dyed In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed With hideous woe, and in its proper filth Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world Begins again, not even a pallid dream Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn. I say it simply:—With the Universe Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space, In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam He follows, for the sun illumines him And every sun his kinsmen in the skies, The systems, constellations, galaxies. At home in the empyrean, issuing thence, His free imagination momently Remembers flame pellucid, which it was And will be in the nebula again When all the orbs that stock the loins of night Return into the sun, and fill with seed Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space."
To conclude for the present: Whence is the Universe and Why? The Universe itself is the only answer to these questions. Whence is the Universe? There is no whence; it fills space. Why is the Universe? It cannot tell: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary: it is. There are, properly, no answers to these questions; therefore these questions are not. The Universe says always and only, "Here and Now."
THE THEATROCRAT A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE
"This is the freedom of the Universe" Wordsworth
PERSONS
Sir Tristram Sumner … Proprietor and Manager of the Grosvenor Theatre. Gervase Sackville … Bishop of St. James's. Warwick Groom …} Silas Orchard … } Actors. Mark Belfry … An American Manager. Hildreth … Sir Tristram's Secretary. Abbot … Business Manager. Salerne … Stage Manager. Blyth … } Boulder … } Commissionaires. Temple … Sir Tristram's Dresser. Rouse … Call-boy. Two Doctors Lady Sumner … Sir Tristram's Wife. Europa Troop … An Actress. Actors, Scene-shifters, Property-men.