University of Virginia Library

FIRST SCENE.

Camp of Julian.
Opas. Julian.
Opas.
See her, Count Julian: if thou lovest God,
See thy lost child.

Julian.
I have avenged me, Opas,
More than enough: I only sought to hurl
The brand of war on one detested head,
And die upon his ruin. O my country!
O lost to honour, to thyself, to me,
Why on barbarian hands devolves thy cause,
Spoilers, blasphemers!

Opas.
Is it thus, Don Julian,
When thy own offspring, that beloved child
For whom alone these very acts were done
By them and thee, when thy Covilla stands
An outcast and a suppliant at thy gate,
Why that still stubborn agony of soul,
Those struggles with the bars thyself imposed?
Is she not thine? not dear to thee as ever?

Julian.
Father of mercies! show me none, whene'er
The wrongs she suffers cease to wring my heart,
Or I seek solace ever, but in death.

Opas.
What wilt thou do then, too unhappy man?

Julian.
What have I done already? All my peace
Has vanisht; my fair fame in aftertime
Will wear an alien and uncomely form,
Seen o'er the cities I have laid in dust,
Countrymen slaughtered, friends abjured!

Opas.
And faith?

Julian.
Alone now left me, filling up in part
The narrow and waste interval of grief:
It promises that I shall see again
My own lost child.

Opas.
Yes, at this very hour.

Julian.
Till I have met the tyrant face to face,
And gain'd a conquest greater than the last,
Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain,
And not one Spaniard, not one enemy,
The least relenting, flags upon his flight,
Till we are equal in the eyes of men,
The humblest and most wretched of our kind,
No peace for me, no comfort, no . . no child!

Opas.
No pity for the thousands fatherless,
The thousands childless like thyself, nay more,
The thousands friendless, helpless, comfortless . .
Such thou wilt make them, little thinking so,
Who now perhaps, round their first winter fire,
Banish, to talk of thee, the tales of old,
Shedding true honest tears for thee unknown:
Precious be these and sacred in thy sight,
Mingle them not with blood from hearts thus kind.
If only warlike spirits were evoked
By the war-demon, I would not complain,
Or dissolute and discontented men;
But wherefore hurry down into the square
The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race,
Who would not injure us, and can not serve;
Who, from their short and measured slumber risen,
In the faint sunshine of their balconies,
With a half-legend of a martyrdom
And some weak wine and withered grapes before them,
Note by their foot the wheel of melody
That catches and rolls on the Sabbath dance.
To drag the steady prop from failing age,
Break the young stem that fondness twines around,
Widen the solitude of lonely sighs,
And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day
The ruins and the phantoms that replied,
Ne'er be it thine.

Julian.
Arise, and save me, Spain!