University of Virginia Library

SCENE III.

—Without the Court. Calmstorm and Waning.
Calm.
The case is lost, blackly and forever lost!

Wan.
You should have bent your knee a little
To the judge, a little would have served you,
And not with that high voicing spoke,
As if you wished that Heaven, rather than he,
Should hear you. A sad mistake, no doubt,
Calmstorm, a sad mistake in policy.

[Exit Waning.
Calm.
[Looking upward.]
This, bear it in belief, thou looker-on,
Sun, that shinest calmly, yonder and here!
This is the chamber where justice lodges,
It is said. In her own habitation
She's a stranger, aloof from what goes on,
Hiding, perhaps, in crannies of her battered house,
And, looking archly forth from where she hides,
The spirit of the crevice and invisible,
Laughs at and mocks the doings of her servitors.

Enter Umena.
Umena.
It would not be amiss, I hope 'twould not,
Although the public court, the public trial's past,
To follow still this poor down-trodden prisoner—
To knit a few kind words to strew his prison with?

Calm.
[Musing.]
It would not be amiss.

Umena.
To bear him alms of truth,
And food to cherish body and spirit?

Calm.
It would not.

Umena.
A word upon the way he takes to prison,
Might cheer him through the first o'erwhelming night:
Shall I pursue him, as his jailors
Bear him on?

Calm.
You might.

[Exit Umena.
Calm.
O, come the time,
As swift and general as the night that folds
The world in shining arms, and runs its errands
To the sun, when on a thousand hills
Crowned right shall sit, and 'neath its sceptres
Earth lie calmly as the cradled babe!—
When, in and out of courts and council-chambers,
Lean Want may walk as free as lusty Pride,
And Justice bare her eyes in the full noon to see,
Nor in a bandaged twilight longer stumble,
Lured by the small gold's falsely-tinkling voice,
Rather than upright Truth's full-beaming look!

[Exit.