University of Virginia Library

DRAMATIC SCENES AND FRAGMENTS.

I. ERMINIA ABBANDONATA.

Erminia and female attendant.
Attend.
Come lift your head from that sad pillow, lady,
Let comfort kiss thee dry. Nay, weep no more:
Oh! sure thy brain has emptied all its tears,
Thy breast outsighed its passion, leaving room
For sleep to pour her sweetness into them,
And the cored sleep of sleep, tranquillity,
That opens but one window of the soul,
And, with her hand on sorrow's face, does keep her
Dark in her bed and dayless. Quiet now—
Will you take peace?

Ermin.
Good-night; you must go in:
The door of life is shut upon me now;
I'm sepulchred alone. Look in the west;
Mark you the dusty, weary traveller,
That stumbles down the clouds?

Attend.
I see the sun
Silently dying.

Ermin.
Weep till your sight is found.—
I have been one that thought there was a sun,
A joyful heat-maker; and, like a child
By a brook's side spooning the sparkles out,
I caught at his reflection in my soul,
And found 'twas water painted with a lie,
Cold, bitter water; I have cried it out.
Sometimes you may see some one through the clouds
Stepping about the sky,—and then, in sooth,
He robs some mountain of its child, the day,
And lays it at the sea's door: but for that
I' the west, 'tis the fat, unwholesome star,
The bald fool-planet, that has men upon it,
And they nick-name it ‘world.’
And oh! this humpy bastard of the sun,
It was my slave, my dog, and in my lap
Laid down its load of pleasure every night,
And spun me sunshine to delight my eyes,—
Carried my cities, and did make me summer,
And flower-limbed spring, and groves with shady autumn:
But now the whelp rolls up his woody back,
And turns it on me, and so trundles down,
Leaving this bit of rock for me to live on,
And his round shadow to be cold in. Go!
Follow the rabble clinging at his heels,
Get thee a seat among his rags.—Dost know
That Momus picked a burnt-out comet up
From Vulcan's floor, and stuck a man upon it;
Then, having laught, he flung the wick away,
And let the insect feed on planet oil:—
What was't? Man and his ball.

Attend.
O dearest lady!
Let not your thoughts find instruments of mirth
So on the shore where reason has been wrecked,
To lay them in your brain along with grief;
For grief and laughter, mingled in the skull,
Oft boil to madness. Did you hear my words?

Ermin.
Ay, comfort was among them,—that's a play-thing
For girls, a rattle full of noisy lies
To fright away black thoughts, and let the sun
In on the breast. For madness, though I hold it
Kinder to man's enjoyment than true sense,
And I would choose it, if they lay before me,
Even as a grape beside an adder's tongue,
To squeeze into my thoughts as in a cup,
Hating the forked and the bitter truth,—
I cannot find it. If my brain were capable
Of this dear madness, should it not be now
All in a bubble with't? What can make mad,
If not the abandonment of one, whose love
Is more true life than the veins' crimson sap?
Leonigild has cut my heart away,
And flung it from him: if I could be so,
Should I not be tempestuously mad?

Attend.
Alas! his cruelty looked like a snake
Upon Medusa's temple.

Ermin.
Had I been waked
By torchlight in my eyes, and by a voice
That said “your babes are burning, stabbed your husband,—
“Room on your bosom for their murderer's kisses!”
Why, that to this were tickling to a stab,
A pin-wound to an hell-jawed, laughing gash.
You saw me spurned by him who was—Oh! was!—
What was he? not a father, son, or husband,—
Lend me a word.—

Attend.
Indeed your love was much;
Your life but an inhabitant of his.

Ermin.
Loved him! 'tis not enough; the angels might,—
They might think what I mean, but could not speak it.
I dreamt it was the day of judgment once,
And that my soul, in fear of hidden sins,
Went with his stolen body on its shoulders,
And stood for him before the judgment seat:—
O that I now were damned as I was then!
But that same body, that same best-loved soul
Cursed, spurned me yesterday. Should I not rave,
Rave, my girl, rave?

Attend.
So most women would,
So all would wonder that another did not.

Ermin.
Why now, I rave not, laugh not, think not, care not;
But it is well; so far, I said, 'twas well.
Next was I not abandoned on the rock,
That I might starve? and then you know I prayed,
And when 'twas done, behold! there comes a boat,
Climbing about the waves; I thought and said,
O bless thee, ocean! hither dost thou come,
On the same errand as thy birds returning
Unto their hungry nest; thus has sweet nature
Sown kindness in thy great, and its small, bosom!
And, as I spoke, the waves came sporting on,
And laid their burthen, like a pillow, here:
Look! it's my brother dead. Should I not rave,
Rave, my girl, rave? What comet-dragon is there,
That makes the air bleed fire with galloping rage,
But should be dove-like in my simile?

Attend.
Alas! such things,
Such sudden pluckings by the heart as these,
People the mad-house, and cram up the grave!

Ermin.
Therefore I laugh: methinks, when I do tell it,
That I am supping up a draught of wine.
Would you know why there's death, and tears, and blood,
And wrenching hearts out by their shrieking roots,
Which are more tender than the mailed quick,
Or the wet eye-ball? I will tell you this,—
But O! be secret as rocks under sea,—
When the world draws the winter o'er his head,
Capping himself so whitely round his Alp,
Muffling his feet with ice, and beds him so;
Then underneath the coverlid and cloak
He has a poisonous strumpet in his arms,
On whom he gets confusion, war, disease,
Prodigies, earthquakes, blights: she's in his blood,
The hell-wombed witch, hagged and hideous nature!
But I'll unwind her.—Nay, I jest, my child:
Leave me; seek something—What is it we want?
O true! 'tis food: take this, and try the huts.

Attend.
'Tis needful truly: I'll procure it quick,
And turn the hour back I go upon.
A little then, good bye.

(Exit.
Ermin.
Yes, I do see
The wronger, and will cut her from my heart,—
Pare myself of her utterly. Thou nature,
Living or dead, thou influence or thou ruler,
I invocate the heaven to hear my charge.
Who tied my heart unto Leonigild
With gordian love-knots of its thousand strings,
Then tore them all away to bleed and wither?
Was it not nature?
Who quickened next that heart a lovely babe,
And when its little smile had learnt its mother,
When thought was rising in its heavenly eye,
Bade the grave jump and snap it? The same nature.
Here lies a brother in my dead embrace,
Loved after, as before, his human life;
For in each other's unborn arms we lay,
Bedfellows in our mother. Who poisoned him,
Alone among the horrible sea-waves,
And then—O murderess above fratricide,
To kill the sister with the brother's corpse!—
Sent him a gift to me? Again 'twas nature.
I had a husband; nature widowed me:—
A child; she kidnapped it to earth a tree:—
A brother; him she murdered with her waves:—
Me she would madden:—therefore I defy,
Curse, and abandon Nature henceforth ever.
And, though I cannot creep up to my mother,
Or flow back to my father's veins again,—
Resex or uncreate me; thus much can I:
I will spunge out the sweetness of my heart,
And suck up horror; woman's thoughts I'll kill,
And leave their bodies rotting in my mind,
Hoping their worms will sting; although not man,
Yet will I out of hate engender much,—
I'll be the father of a world of ghosts,
And get the grave with a carcase. For the rest,
I will encorpse me in my brother's garments,
Pick me a heart out of a devil's side,
And so, my own creator, my own child,
Tread on the womb of nature, unbegotten.
Now then, ye waves, I step on you again,
And into my new self, my life outlived:
Come back and kneel, thou world; submit thy side,
And take me on thy neck again, new-made,
Fiend-hearted, woman-corpsed, but man-arrayed.

II. AN APOTHEOSIS.

Dianeme and female attendants.
Dianeme.
Sing on, sing ever, and let sobs arise
Beneath the current of your harmony,
Breaking its silvery stillness into gushes
Of stealing sadness: let tears fall upon it,
And burst with such a sound, as when a lute-string,
Torn by the passion of its melody,
Gasps its whole soul of music in one sound,
And dies beneath the waves of its own voice!
Be pale thou mooned midnight, and ye stars
Shed fluttering tremours of inconstant light
Upon the moaning billows; timid leaves
O'erwhelm yourselves with shadow, and give out
Your dewy titterings to the air no more!
Clouds, clouds, dark, deadly clouds, let not the moon
Look on his grave!—It is too light: the day
Will rise before I die: how old is evening?

Attend.
The tide of darkness now is at its height.
Yon lily-woven cradle of the hours
Hath floated half her shining voyage, nor yet
Is by the current of the morn opposed.

Dianeme.
The hour is coming: I must give my soul
To the same moment on whose precious air
My Casimir soared heavenward, for I know
There are a million chambers of the dead,
And every other minute but the same
Would bear me to the one where he is not,
And that were madness. Bring me yon sick lily,—
Yon fevered one.

Attend.
Choose any other, lady,
For this is broken, odourless, and scorched,—
Where Death has graved his curse.

Dianeme.

[She dies.

III. The Israelite amid Philistines.

Enter Ezril dragged in by two Venetians.
Ezril.
Help! help, you kindly people of this place!
Help for the helpless old! Have mercy, sirs!
Oh! it is in your hearts, deny it not;
Shut not your ears to its enchanting tongue.
It will unlock a heaven in your souls,
Wherein my pardon and my pity sits.
I kneel to you, as you unto your god:
Reject me not, teach him not cruelty.
Be heavenly, as you can.

1st Venet.
Hush! frosty jew!
Or take my answer from this tongue of steel.

Ezril.
When you are old, and fearful,
With age's wintry winds shaking your limbs,
Thus may you cry, thus may you wring your hands,—

1st Venet.
And thus be struck. Once more have silence with thee,
Or death possess me if I stab thee not.
Now comrade, shall we let the coward live?

2nd Venet.
Wilt thou betray us, dotard?

Ezril.
By my life,
If you will grant me it to swear upon,
Never!

1st Venet.
It is a rubbed and brittle oath,
As what 'tis sworn: break one, thou breakest both.
I'll snap thy being like a frozen breath,
If thou breathest falsely.

Ezril.
If I kill my truth,
Drive thy revenge into my midmost heart.

1st Venet.
Hark, once again! Where wert thou journeying, jew,
With gold-stuffed panniers, thus?

Ezril.
To Venice town.—
Alas! remind me not of my dear riches,
The beauteous jewels of my bosom; take them.—
I would that I were stouter in my soul,
That I dared die!—Be gentle with the sacks;
They're full of fair, white silver: as I tied them,
I felt their strings run tickling through my veins.

1st Venet.
O ho! here's royal booty, on my soul:
A draught of ducats! By this silver sight
I love thee, bushy dog, and thou shalt live
To sweep the corners of men's souls again.
Be comforted. Let's toss them on our shoulders,
And swim the Po.

2nd Venet.
First, look you here, old man:
There's a clenched hand; dost see?

Ezril.
'Tis hard as iron: (aside)

Hell melt it so!

2nd Venet.
And in't a sword:—

Ezril.
(aside)
As sharp as are the teeth
Of my heart's father, a fierce curse of thee.—
What then, sir?

2nd Venet.
Speak once of us,
Look after us, or press that foot of thine
Upon yon lip of Po, where Venice grows,—
They're in thy muddy body to the wrist.

[Exeunt Veneti.
Ezril.

Enter Marcello.
Marcello.
Hail, country of my birth!
We're met in season; winter in us both,
The fruit picked from us, poor and snowy-scalped,
And almost solitary. I did turn
An ermined shoulder on thee, when I stepped
Out of thine airy door of earth and sky,
Upon that watery threshold;
And now I face thee with a ragged front:
A coin of Fate's cross-stamp, that side a Duke,
And this, which Time turns up, (so hell might stick
Upon the back of heaven,) a scratched despair! [OMITTED]

IV. Lovers' Identity.

Erminia.
Is it Zenobio?

Zenobio.
Ay, that's my body's name, for my dear soul
Is not so called: when you would speak of that,
Which is myself more than the thing you see,
Only say “Erminia.”—And what readeth she,
Who called Zenobio?

Erminia.
An unhappy tale
Of two who loved, with so unusual faith,
That their affection rose up into heaven,
And there was deified: (for the blind child,
Whom men of this late world invoke and swear by,
Is the usurper of that first love's name,
Indeed an idol, a false deity:)
—A pedant's dream!

Zenobio.
We know it to be so.
For not externally this love can live,
But in the soul, as life within the body:
And what is Love alone? Are there not two?
—But, dearest, you were telling—

Erminia.
Of this pair:
One from the beauty and the grace of youth,
One, innocent and youthful, perished.
The other,—what could she, O widowed thing!
With but a pale and fading memory
Left in the hollow of her heart?

Zenobio.
What could she?
But let her deathly life pass into death,
Like music on the night-wind; moaning, moaning,
Until it sleeps.

Erminia.
Worse, worse, much worse than that,
Or aught else of despair or common madness.
Cheerfully did she live, quietly end
A joyous age alone! This is to me
More woeful, and more murderous of hope,
Than any desperate story.

Zenobio.
So it would be,
If thought on with the general sense of man.
But know this surely: in that woman's breast
Lived the two souls, that were before divided.
For otherwise, be sure, she could not live;
But so, much happier than ever.

V. Prison Thoughts.

Scene, a dungeon: Orazio solus.
Orazio.
I'll speak again:
This rocky wall's great silence frightens me,
Like a dead giant's.
Methought I heard a sound; but all is still.
This empty silence is so deadly low,
The very stir and winging of my thoughts
Make audible my being: every sense
Aches from its depth with hunger.
The pulse of time is stopped, and night's blind sun
Sheds its black light, the ashes of noon's beams,
On this forgotten tower, whose ugly round,
Amid the fluency of brilliant morn,
Hoops in a blot of parenthetic night,
Like ink upon the chrystal page of day,
Crossing its joy! But now some lamp awakes,
And, with the venom of a basilisk's wink,
Burns the dark winds. Who comes?

Enter Ezril.
Ezril.
There's food for thee.
Eat heartily; be mirthful with your cup;
Though coarse and scanty.

Orazio.
I'll not taste of it.
To the dust, to the air with the cursed liquids
And poison-kneaded bread.

Ezril.
Why dost thou this?

Orazio.
I know thee and thy master: honey-lipped,
Viper-tongued villain, that dost bait intents,
As crook'd and murderous as the scorpion's sting,
With mercy's sugared milk, and poisonest
The sweetest teat of matron charity! [OMITTED]

VI. Man's petty Universe contrasted with the True.

Scene: the abyss of Space: Ambrosius and Cynthia in the car, returning to the earth. Ambrosius loquitur.
O what a deep delight it is to cleave,
Out-darting thought, above all sight and sound,
And sweep the ceiling of the universe,
Thus with our locks! How it does mad the heart,
How dances it along the living veins,
Like hot and steaming wine! How my eyes ache
With gazing on this mighty vacancy!
O Universe of earth and air and ocean,
Which man calls infinite, where art thou now?
Sooner a babe should pierce the marble ear
Of death, and startle his tombed ancestor,
'Mid Hell's thick laughter, shrieks, and flamy noises,
With cradle-pulings, than the gathered voice
Of every thunder, ocean, and wild blast,
Find thee, thou atom, in this wilderness!
This boundless emptiness, this waveless sea,
This desert of vacuity, alone
Is great: and thou, for whom the word was made,
Art as the wren's small goblet of a home
Unto the holy vastness of the temple! [OMITTED]

VII. Recognition.

Soft! Stand away! those features—Do not stir!
Be breathless if thou canst!.. The trembling ray
Of some approaching thought, I know not what,
Gleams on my darkened mind. It will be here
Directly: now I feel it growing, growing,
Like a man's shadow, when the sun floats slowly
Through the white border of a baffled cloud:
And now the pale conception furls and thickens.
'Tis settled.—Yes—Beroe!—How dare thy cheek
Be wan and withered as a wrinkling moon
Upon the tumbled waves? Why camest thou here?
I dreamt of thee last night, as thou wert once,
But I shall never dream of thee again.

VIII. Reception of Evil Tidings.

IX. A Ruffian.

There's a fellow
With twisting root-like hair up to his eyes,
And they are streaked with red and starting out
Under their bristling brows; his crooked tusks
Part, like a hungry wolf's, his cursing mouth;
His head is frontless, and a swinish mane
Grows o'er his shoulders:—brown and warty hands,
Like roots, with pointed nails.—He is the man.

X. Recollection of Early Life.

Leaf after leaf, like a magician's book
Turned in a dragon-guarded hermitage
By tress-disheveling spirits of the air,
My life unfolds.

XI. A Crocodile.

Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
A duskish river-dragon stretched along,
The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine almandines and rainy pearl:
And on his back there lay a young one sleeping,
No bigger than a mouse; with eyes like beads,
And a small fragment of its speckled egg
Remaining on its harmless, pulpy snout;
A thing to laugh at, as it gaped to catch
The baulking, merry flies. In the iron jaws
Of the great devil-beast, like a pale soul
Fluttering in rocky hell, lightsomely flew
A snowy troculus, with roseate beak
Tearing the hairy leeches from his throat.

XII. “Bona de Mortuis.”

Ay, ay: good man, kind father, best of friends—
These are the words that grow, like grass and nettles,
Out of dead men, and speckled hatreds hide,
Like toads, among them.

XIII. Rosily dying.

I'll take that fainting rose
Out of his breast; perhaps some sigh of his
Lives in the gyre of its kiss-coloured leaves.
O pretty rose, hast thou thy flowery passions
Then put thyself into a scented rage,
And breathe on me some poisonous revenge.
For it was I, thou languid, silken blush,
Who orphaned thy green family of thee,
In their closed infancy: therefore receive
My life, and spread it on thy shrunken petals,
And give to me thy pink, reclining death.

XIV. Speaker's Meaning dimly descried.

I know not whether
I see your meaning: if I do, it lies
Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice,
Dim as an evening shadow in a brook,
When the least moon has silver on't no larger
Than the pure white of Hebe's pinkish nail.

XV. Anticipation of Evil Tidings.

I fear there is some maddening secret
Hid in your words, (and at each turn of thought
Comes up a scull,) like an anatomy
Found in a weedy hole, 'mongst stones and roots
And straggling reptiles, with his tongueless mouth
Telling of murder.

XVI. Midnight Hymn.

And many voices marshalled in one hymn
Wound through the night, whose still, translucent moments
Lay on each side their breath; and the hymn passed
Its long, harmonious populace of words
Between the silvery silences, as when
The slaves of Egypt, like a wind between
The head and trunk of a dismembered king
On a strewn plank, with blood and footsteps sealed,
Vallied the unaccustomed sea.

XVII. Concealed Joy.

Just now a beam of joy hung on his eye-lash;
But, as I looked, it sunk into his eye,
Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings
Into a darkening hole.

XVIII. Life a Glass Window.

Let him lean
Against his life, that glassy interval
'Twixt us and nothing; and, upon the ground
Of his own slippery breath, draw hueless dreams,
And gaze on frost-work hopes. Uncourteous Death
Knuckles the pane, and [OMITTED]

XIX. A Dream.

Last night I looked into a dream; 'twas drawn
On the black midnight of a velvet sleep,
And set in woeful thoughts; and there I saw
A thin, pale Cupid, with bare, ragged wings
Like skeletons of leaves, in autumn left,
That sift the frosty air. One hand was shut,
And in its little hold of ivory
Fastened a May-morn zephyr, frozen straight,
Made deadly with a hornet's rugged sting,
Gilt with the influence of an adverse star.
Such was his weapon, and he traced with it,
Upon the waters of my thoughts, these words:
“I am the death of flowers, and nightingales,
And small-lipped babes, that give their souls to summer
To make a perfumed day with: I shall come,
A death no larger than a sigh to thee,
Upon a sunset hour.”—And so he passed
Into the place where faded rainbows are,
Dying along the distance of my mind;
As down the sea Europa's hair-pearls fell
When, through the Cretan waves, the curly bull
Dashed, tugging at a stormy plough, whose share
Was of the northern hurricane—

XX. Metaphor of Rain.

An amorous cloud
Lets down her rustling hair over the sun.

XXI. Meditation.

The bitter past
And the untasted future I mix up,
Making the present a dream-figured bowl
For the black poison, which is caked and moulded,
By the inside of the enchasing thoughts,
Even as I taste it.

XXII. Sweet to Die.

Is it not sweet to die? for, what is death,
But sighing that we ne'er may sigh again,
Getting at length beyond our tedious selves;
But trampling the last tear from poisonous sorrow,
Spilling our woes, crushing our frozen hopes,
And passing like an incense out of man?
Then, if the body felt, what were its sense,
Turning to daisies gently in the grave,
If not the soul's most delicate delight
When it does filtrate, through the pores of thought,
In love and the enamelled flowers of song?

XXIII. Extreme Acclivity.

Its impossible ascent was steep,
As are the million pillars of a shower
Torn, shivered, and dashed hard against the earth,
When Day no longer breathes.

XXIV. Rain.

The blue, between yon star-nailed cloud
The double-mountain and this narrow valley,
Is strung with rain, like a fantastic lyre.

XXV. Life's Uncertainty.

A.
The king looks well, red in its proper place
The middle of the cheek, and his eye's round
Black as a bit of night.

B.
Yet men die suddenly:
One sits upon a strong and rocky life,
Watching a street of many opulent years,
And Hope's his mason. Well! to-day do this,
And so to-morrow; twenty hollow years
Are stuffed with action:—lo! upon his head
Drops a pin's point of time; tick! quoth the clock,
And the grave snaps him.

A.
Such things may have been;
The crevice 'twixt two after-dinner minutes,
The crack between a pair of syllables,
May sometimes be a grave as deep as 'tis
From noon to midnight in the hoop of time.
But for this man, his life wears ever steel
From which disease drops blunted. If indeed
Death lay in the market-place, or were—but hush!
See you the tremble of that myrtle bough?
Does no one listen?

B.
Nothing with a tongue:
The grass is dumb since Midas, and no Æsop
Translates the crow or hog. Within the myrtle
Sits a hen-robin, trembling like a star,
Over her brittle eggs.

A.
Is it no more?

B.
Nought: let her hatch.

XXVI. Kisses.

Her kisses are
Soft as a snow-tuft in the dewless cup
Of a redoubled rose, noiselessly falling
When heaven is brimful of starry night.

XXVII. Subterranean City.

Can it then be, that the earth loved some city,
Another planet's child, so long, so truly,
That here we find its image next her heart,
Like an abandoned, melancholy thought?

XXVIII. Dream of Dying.

Shivering in fever, weak, and parched to sand,
My ears, those entrances of word-dressed thoughts,
My pictured eyes, and my assuring touch,
Fell from me, and my body turned me forth
From its beloved abode: then I was dead;
And in my grave beside my corpse I sat,
In vain attempting to return: meantime
There came the untimely spectres of two babes,
And played in my abandoned body's ruins;
They went away; and, one by one, by snakes
My limbs were swallowed; and, at last, I sat
With only one, blue-eyed, curled round my ribs,
Eating the last remainder of my heart,
And hissing to himself. O sleep, thou fiend!
Thou blackness of the night! how sad and frightful
Are these thy dreams!

XXIX. Insignificance of the World.

Why what's the world and time? a fleeting thought
In the great meditating universe,
A brief parenthesis in chaos.

XXX. Sleeper's Countenance contemplated.

Duke.
There smiles methinks
A cherished dream, that lies upon her lips
As the word love deep written in a rose,
With which the story of our youth begins.
Could'st thou but see whose image so delights her!

Ziba.
Her thoughts are far from us in early childhood:
For 'tis our wont to dream of distant friends
And half-forgotten times.

XXXI. A beautiful Night.

How lovely is the heaven of this night,
How deadly still its earth! The forest brute
Has crept into his cave, and laid himself
Where sleep has made him harmless like the lamb.
The horrid snake, his venom now forgot,
Is still and innocent as the honied flower
Under his head: and man, in whom are met
Leopard and snake, and all the gentleness
And beauty of the young lamb and the bud,
Has let his ghost out, put his thoughts aside
And lent his senses unto death himself.

XXXII. Humble Beginnings.

Why, Rome was naked once, a bastard smudge,
Tumbled on straw, the denfellow of whelps,
Fattened on roots, and, when a-thirst for milk,
He crept beneath and drank the swagging udder
Of Tyber's brave she-wolf; and Heaven's Judea
Was folded in a pannier.

XXXIII. A Countenance foreboding Evil.

Thy gloomy features, like a midnight dial,
Scowl the dark index of a fearful hour.

XXXIV. A lofty Mind.

His thoughts are so much higher than his state,
That, like a mountain hanging o'er a hut,
They chill and darken it.

XXXV. Sorrow.

Sorrow! Hast thou seen Sorrow asleep,
When thick sighs break the wholeness of her mouth,
And one tear trembles in her upward eye,
Part clammy on the dark threads of her lash,
Part yet within her dream? One moony night
I found her so, a pale, cold babe, and beauteous,
In slumber, as Consumption, just before
She's christened Death. I pressed her in my arms,
And took upon my lip the hurrying tear
Off her warm neck.

XXXVI. Sad and cheerful Songs contrasted.

Sing me no more such ditties: they are well
For the last gossips, when the snowy wind
Howls in the chimney till the very taper
Trembles with its blue flame, and the bolted gates
Rattle before old winter's palsied hand.
If you will sing, let it be cheerily
Of dallying love. There's many a one among you
Hath sung, beneath our oak trees to his maiden,
Light bird-like mockeries, fit for love in spring time.
Sing such a one.

XXXVII. A subterranean City.

I followed once a fleet and mighty serpent
Into a cavern in a mountain's side;
And, wading many lakes, descending gulphs,
At last I reached the ruins of a city,
Built not like ours but of another world,
As if the aged earth had loved in youth
The mightiest city of a perished planet,
And kept the image of it in her heart,
So dream-like, shadowy, and spectral was it.
Nought seemed alive there, and the bony dead
Were of another world the skeletons.
The mammoth, ribbed like to an arched cathedral,
Lay there, and ruins of great creatures else
More like a shipwrecked fleet, too vast they seemed
For all the life that is to animate:
And vegetable rocks, tall sculptured palms,
Pines grown, not hewn, in stone; and giant ferns,
Whose earthquake-shaken leaves bore graves for nests.

XXXVIII. Man's anxious, but ineffectual, Guard against Death.

Luckless man
Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,
And, flinching from the insect's little sting,
In pitiful security keeps watch,
While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun,
To which he prays, comes windless pestilence,
Transparent as a glass of poisoned water
Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling;
She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,
Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,
And every breath of her's as full of ghosts
As a sunbeam with motes.

XXXIX. A Day of surpassing Beauty.

The earth is bright, her forests all are golden;
A cloud of flowers breathes blushing over her,
And, whispering from bud to blossom, opens
The half-awakened memory of the song
She heard in childhood from the mystic sun.
There is some secret stirring in the world,
A thought that seeks impatiently its word:
A crown, or cross, for one is born to day.

XL. The slight and degenerate Nature of Man.

Antediluvianus loquitur.
Pitiful post-diluvians! from whose hearts
The print of passions by the tide of hours
Is washed away for ever and for ever,
As lions' footmark on the ocean sands;
While we, Adam's coevals, carry in us
The words indelible of buried feelings,
Like the millennial trees, whose hoary barks
Grow o'er the secrets cut into their core.

XLI. A Night-Scene.

The lake, like her, heaves gently
Its breast of waves under a heaven of sleep,
And pictures in its soothed, transparent being
The depth of worlds o'erhanging: o'er the pillow,
Washed by the overflowing, flowery locks,
A silver promise of the moon is breathed:
And the light veil of hieroglyphic clouds
The curious wind rends ever and anon,
Revealing the deep dream of Alpine heights,
Which fill the distance of its wondering spirit,
And on its hectic cheeks the prophecies
Do fearfully reflect, that flicker up
Out of the sun's grave underneath the world.

XLII. Dirge.

No tears, no sighings, no despair,
No trembling dewy smile of care,
No mourning weeds,
Nought that discloses
A heart that bleeds;
But looks contented I will bear,
And o'er my cheeks strew roses.
Unto the world I may not weep,
But save my sorrow all, and keep
A secret heart, sweet soul, for thee,
As the great earth and swelling sea— [OMITTED]

XLIII. Mourners consoled.

Dead, is he? What's that further than a word,
Hollow as is the armour of a ghost
Whose chinks the moon he haunts doth penetrate.
Belief in death is the fell superstition,
That hath appalled mankind and chained it down,
A slave unto the dismal mystery
Which old opinion dreams beneath the tombstone.
Dead is he, and the grave shall wrap him up?
And this you see is he? And all is ended?
Ay this is cold, that was a glance of him
Out of the depth of his immortal self;
This utterance and token of his being
His spirit hath let fall, and now is gone
To fill up nature and complete her being.
The form, that here is fallen, was the engine,
Which drew a mighty stream of spiritual power
Out of the world's own soul, and made it play
In visible motion, as the lofty tower
Leads down the animating fire of heaven
To the world's use. That instrument is broken,
And in another sphere the spirit works,
Which did appropriate to human functions
A portion of the ghostly element.—
This then is all your Death.

XLIV. A great Sacrifice self-compensated.

True I have had much comfort gazing on thee,
Much too perhaps in thinking I might have thee
Nearly myself, a fellow soul to live with.
But, weighing well man's frail and perilous tenure
Of all good in the restless, wavy world,
Ne'er dared I set my soul on any thing
Which but a touch of time can shake to pieces.
Alone in the eternal is my hope.
Took I thee? that intensest joy of love
Would soon grow fainter and at last dissolve.
But, if I yield thee, there is something done
Which from the crumbling earth my soul divorces,
And gives it room to be a greater spirit.
There is a greater pang, methinks, in nature
When she takes back the life of a dead world,
Than when a new one severs from her depth
Its bright, revolving birth. So I'll not hoard thee,
But let thee part, reluctant, though in hope
That greater happiness will thence arise.

XLV. “Love is wiser than Ambition.”

Amala.
O give not up the promise of your time
For me: for what? an evanescent woman,
A rose-leaf scarce unfolded ere it falls. Your days
Should be a wood of laurels evergreen:
Seek glory!

Athulf.
Glory! To be sung to tuneless harps!
A picture, and a name; to live for death!
Seek glory? Never. The world's gossip Fame
Is busy in the market-place, the change,
At court or wrangling senate, noting down
Him of the fattest purse, the fabulous crest,
The tongue right honied or most poisonous.
If Glory goes among the bristling spears,
Which war is mowing down; or walks the wave,
When Fate weighs kingdoms in their battle-fleets;
Or watches the still student at his work,
Reading the laws of nature in the heavens,
Or earth's minutest creature; she may find me:
If not, I am contented with oblivion,
As all the other millions. My sweet fair,
One little word of confidence and love,
From lips beloved, thrilleth more my heart
Than brightest trumpet-touch of statued Fame.
My bird of Paradise, tell me some news
Of your own home.

Amala.
My home should be your heart:
What shall I tell of that?

Athulf.
Can you not see?
Surely the love that burns before thy image,
As sunny as a burning diamond,
Must shed its light without.

XLVI. The Murderer's haunted Couch.

Isbr.
[he seizes the sleeping Duke.

Duke.
Angel of Death!
Can it be? No, 'tis a grave-digging vision:
The world is somewhere else. Yet even this
Methought I dreamt, and now it stands beside me,
Rattling in iron.

Isbr.
Ay, the murderer's vision
Is ever so: for at the word, “I'm murdered,”
The gaolers of the dead throw back the grave-stone,
Split the deep ocean, and unclose the mountain,
And let the buried pass. I am more real
Than any airy spirit of a dream,
As Death is mightier, stronger, and more faithful
To man, than Life.

Duke.
Wolfram!—Nay thy grasp
Is warm, thy bosom heaves, thou breath'st, imposter—
Let iron answer iron, flesh crush flesh;
Thou art no spirit, fool.

Isbr.

[Exit.
Duke.
Hold! mercy! . . . 'Tis enough . . .
Curse shoulders curse, as in a bloody river.
I will no more.

XLVII. Human Life: its value.

Think, what I plead for: for a life! the gift
Of God alone, whom he, who saves't, is likest.
How glorious to live! Even in one thought
The wisdom of past-times to fit together,
And from the luminous minds of many men
Catch a reflected truth; as, in one eye,
Light, from unnumbered worlds and furthest planets
Of the star-crowded universe, is gathered
Into one ray.—