Chronicles and Characters :: :: University of Virginia Library

Now, therefore, when Alexius saw that both
The creatures and destroyers of his power
Were on him, to his soul he said—“The Hour
Is mine no more. Soul, we have lived our day.”
Then, waiting for the night, he fled away
Into the night. Night took him by the hand
And led him silently into the land
Of darkness. Darkness o'er his forehead cast
Her mighty mantle, murmuring “Mine, at last!”

In the great audience chamber at Byzance
A Latin soldier, leaning on his lance
Fatigued with slaughter, on the marble ground
Blood-bathed an empty purple garment found.
And then, for the first time, immersed in thought,

The Latin soldier mutter'd “I have fought
Against an Emperor!”

Jewels in her head
And serpents in her hand,—smiling, and dead,
And beautiful in death,—each glorious globe
(Loosed from the glittering murrey satin robe)
Of her upturn'd defiant bosom, bare
Save for the few looks of delicious hair
That swept them—saved by scornful death from scorn—
Only the beauty left of her—at morn
They found the Egyptian Jezraäl.

So fades
Star after star along the cypress glades,
Face after face from the rose-bowers: so song
After song dies the lonesome lawns along.
Each to his time! The revel and the rout
Lamp after lamp, mask after mask, go out;
Still for new singers the old songs to sing
In the same place to the same lute-playing:
Still for new dancers, to new tunes the same
Dance dancing ever, to take up the game
All lose in turn.

Another time begins.
New passions, and new pleasures, and new sins,
For ever the old failure in new forms;
To fashion a metropolis for worms
And write in dust man's moral!

Meanwhile, where
Hides Muzufer? what doth he? how doth fare?
How fares the small sunshiny insect thing
That feeds on death and in the beam doth sing,
When quench'd the beam, and stopp'd the moment's play?
Nature both brings to birth and sweeps away
Myriads of minims such: whose souls minute
For loss or gain doth Heaven or Hell compute?
Please they, or tease they, how shall Fate devise
Fit retribution for dead butterflies?

Then, Power being changed, the changeful people went,
And from the noisome pit where he was pent
Drew forth blind Isaac.

Seven black years of night
Clung to him, and kept him cold in the sun's light.
For he had grown to hold familiar talk
With newts and creeping things,—long wont to walk
About him in the silent dark down there,
Which he would miss henceforth. He was aware
Of little else. And it was hard to him
To understand (so very faint and dim
To his dull memory were the former times)
Why the great world, intent upon its crimes
And pleasures, was at pains to take him back
Unto itself, from that oblivion black,
Where he, the loveless man of long ago,

Had learn'd to love, what men abhor—the slow
Soft-footed dwellers of the dark. He had
So lost the habitude of being glad,
And all the strength of it, that, tho' thrice o'er
New friends explain'd to him his joy, no more
Than one born deaf and dumb he seem'd to find
A meaning to the matter in his mind.
So, passively, he yielded to the crowd
That robed him, crown'd him, and proclaim'd aloud
Him only the true Cæsar.