Chapter I: The Golden Brotherhood

Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud.

In the still garden that Pythagoras made,
The Temple of the Muses, firm as truth,
Lucid as beauty, the white marriage-song
Made visible, of beauty and truth in one,
Flushed with the deepening East.
It was no dream.
The thrush that with his long beak shook and beat
The dark striped snail-shell on the marble flags
Between the cool white columns told me this.
The birds among the silvery olives pealed
So many jargoning rivulet-throated bells
That in their golden clashings discord drowned,
And one wild harmony closed and crowned them all
And yet, as if the spread wings of a hawk
Froze in the sky above them, every note
Died on an instant.
Over the sparkling grass
The long dark shadows of ash and pine began
To shrink, as though the rising of the sun
Menaced, not only shadows, but the world.

A frightened bird flew, crying, and scattering dew
Blindly away; though, on this dawn of dawns,
Nothing had changed. The Golden Brotherhood stole
Up through the drifts of wet rose-laurel bloom
As on so many a dawn for many a year,
To make their morning vows.
They thronged the porch,
The lean athletes of truth, trained body and mind,
For their immortal trial. Among them towered
Milon, the soldier-wrestler. His brown limbs
Moved with the panther’s grace, the warrior’s pride;
Milon, who in the Olympic contests won
Crown after crown, but wore them on broad brows
Cut like fine steel for thought; and, in his eyes,
Carried the light of those deep distances
That challenge the spirit of man.
They entered in;
And, like the very Muses following them,
Theano, and her Golden Sisterhood,
First of that chosen womanhood, by the grace
Of whose heaven-walking souls the race ascends,
Passed through the shining porch.
It was no dream.
In the bright marble, under the sandalled feet,
And in the glimmering columns as they passed,
The reflex of their flowing vestments glowed
White, violet, saffron, like another dawn.

...

Before them, through the temple’s fragrant gloom,
The Muses, in their dim half-circle, towered;
And, in the midst, over the smouldering myrrh,
The form of Hestia.
In her mighty shadow,
Pythagoras, with a scroll in his right hand,
Arose and spoke.
“Our work is well-nigh done.
Our enemies are closing round us now.
I have given the sacred scrolls into the hands
Of Lysis; and, though all else be destroyed,
If but a Golden Verse or two live on
In other lands, and kindle other souls
To seek the law, our work is not in vain.
If it be death that comes to us, we shall lose
Nothing that could endure. It was not chance
That sent us on this pilgrimage through time,
But that which lives within us, the desire
Of gods, to know what once was dark in heaven.
Gods were not gods who, in eternal bliss,
Had never known this wonder—the deep joy
Of coming home. But we have purchased it,
And now return, enriched with memories
Of mortal love, terrestrial grief and pain,
Into our own lost realm.”
His dark eyes flashed.
He lifted his proud head as one who heard
Strains of immortal music even now.
He towered among the Muses in the dusk,
And then, as though he, too, were carved in stone,
And all their voices breathed through his own voice,
“Fear nothing now,” he said. “Our foes can steal
The burdens we lay down, but nothing more.
All that we are we keep. They strike at shadows
And cannot hurt us. Little as we may know,
We have learned at least to know the abiding Power
From these poor masks of clay. This dust, this flesh,
All that we see and touch, are shadows of it,
And hourly change and perish. Have we not seen
Cities and nations, all that is built of earth,
Fleeting into the darkness, like grey clouds,
And only one thing constant—the great law,
The eternal order of their march to death?
Have we not seen it written upon the hills?
The continents and seas do not endure.
They change their borders. Where the seas are now
Mountains will rise; and, where the land was, once,
The dark Atlantic ends the world for man.
But all these changes are not wrought by chance.
They follow a great order. It may be
That all things are repeated and reborn;
And, in their mighty periods, men return
And pass through their forgotten lives anew.
It may be; for, at times, the mind recalls—
Or half recalls—the turning of a road,
A statue on a hill, a passing face....
It may be; for our universe is bound
In rhythm; and the setting star will rise.
This many a cunning ballad-singer knows
Who haunts the mind of man with dark refrains;
Or those deep poets who foretell in verse
The restoration of the world’s great Year.
Time never fails. Not Tanais, or the Nile
Can flow for ever. They spring up and perish;
But, after many changes, it may be
These, too, return, with Egypt and her kings.”

He paused a moment; then compassion, grief,
Wonder and triumph, like one music, spoke
Farewell to shadows, from his own deep soul
Rapt, in pure vision, above the vanishing world:
“The torrents drag the rocks into the sea.
The great sea smiles, and overflows the land.
It hollows out the valleys and returns.
The sea has washed the shining rocks away
And cleft the headland with its golden fields
That once bound Sicily to her mother’s breast.
Pharos, that was an island, far from shore
When Homer sang, is wedded now and one
With Egypt. The wild height where Sappho stood,
The beautiful, white, immortal promontory,
Crowned with Apollo’s temple, long ago
The struggling seas have severed from the land.
And those fair Grecian cities, Helice
And Buris, wondering fishermen see, far down,
With snowy walls and columns all aslant,
Trembling under the unremembering wave.
The waters of Anigris, that were sweet
As love, are bitter as death. There was a time
When Etna did not burn. A time will come
When it will cease to burn; for all things change;
And mightier things by far have changed than these
In the slow lapse of never-ending time.
I have seen an anchor on the naked hills,
And ocean-shells among the mountain-tops.
Continents, oceans, all things pass away;
But One, One only; for the Eternal Mind
Enfolds all changes, and can never change.”