University of Virginia Library

Scene I.

An apartment in the Governor's palace.
The Duke and an attendant.
Duke.
Your lord sleeps yet?

Attend.
An hour ago he rose:
About this time he's busy with his falcons,
And then he takes his meal.

Duke.
I'll wait for him. [Exit Attendant.

How strange it is that I can live to day;
Nay look like other men, who have been sleeping
On quiet pillows and not dreamt! Methinks
The look of the world's a lie, a face made up
O'er graves and fiery depths; and nothing's true
But what is horrible. If man could see
The perils and diseases that he elbows,
Each day he walks a mile; which catch at him,
Which fall behind and graze him as he passes;
Then would he know that Life's a single pilgrim,
Fighting unarmed amongst a thousand soldiers.
It is this infinite invisible
Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn,
And, from the scorn of that, regard the world
As from the edge of a far star. Now then
I feel me in the thickest of the battle;
The arrow-shower pours down, swords hew, mines open
Their ravenous mouths about me; it rains death;
But cheerly I defy the braggart storm,
And set my back against a rock, to fight
Till I am bloodily won.

Enter Thorwald.
Thorw.
How? here already?
I'm glad on't, and to see you look so clear
After that idle talk. How did it end?

Duke.
Scarcely as I expected.

Thorw.
Dared he conjure?
But surely you have seen no ghost last night:
You seem to have supped well and slept.

Duke.
We'd wine,
And some wild singing. Of the necromancy
We'll speak no more. Ha! Do you see a shadow?

Thorw.
Ay: and the man who casts it.

Duke.
Tis true; my eyes are dim and dull with watching.
This castle that fell down, and was rebuilt
With the same stones, is the same castle still;
And so with him.

Enter Wolfram.
Thorw.
What mean you?

Duke.
Impudent goblin!
Darest thou the day-light? Dar'st be seen of more
Than me, the guilty? Vanish! Though thou'rt there,
I'll not believe I see thee. Or is this
The work of necromantic Conscience? Ha!
'Tis nothing but a picture: curtain it.
Strange visions, my good Thorwald, are begotten,
When Sleep o'ershadows waking.

Thorw.
Who's the stranger?
You speak as one familiar.

Duke.
Is aught here
Besides our-selves? I think not.

Thorw.
Yet you gaze
Straight on the man.

Duke.
A villanous friend of mine;
Of whom I must speak well, and still permit him
To follow me. So thou'rt yet visible,
Thou grave-breaker! If thou wilt haunt me thus,
I'll make thee my fool, ghost, my jest and zany.
'Tis his officious gratitude that pains me:
The carcase owes to me its ruinous life,
(Between whose broken walls and hideous arches
You see the other world's grey spectral light;)
Therefore he clings to me so ivily.
Now, goblin, lie about it. 'Tis in truth
A faithful slave.

Wolfr.
If I had come unsummoned,
If I had burst into your sunny world,
And stolen visibility and birth
Against thy prayers, thus shouldst thou speak to me:
But thou hast forced me up, remember that.
I am no fiend, no foe; then let me hear
These stern and tyrannous rebukes no more.
Wilt thou be with the born, that have not died?
I vanish: now a short farewell. I fade;
The air doth melt me, and, my form being gone,
I'm all thou see'st not.

[He disappears.
Duke.
Dissolved like snow in water! Be my cloud,
My breath, and fellow soul, I can bear all,
As long as thou art viewless to these others.
Now there are two of us. How stands the bridal?

Thorw.
This evening 'twill be held.

Duke.
[Exit Thorwald.

Enter Isbrand, Adalmar, and Siegfried.
Isbr.
Come, let's be doing: we have talked whole nights
Of what an instant, with one flash of action,
Should have performed: you wise and speaking people
Need some one, with a hatchet-stroke, to free
The Pallas of your Jove-like headaches.

Duke.
Patience:
Fledging comes after hatching. One day more:
This evening brings the wedding of the prince,
And with it feasts and maskings. In mid bowls
And giddy dances let us fall upon them.

Siegfr.
Well thought: our enemies will be assembled.

Isbr.
I like to see Ruin at dinner time,
Firing his cannons with the match they lit
For the buck-roasting faggots. But what say you
To what concerns you most?

[to Adalmar.
Adalm.
That I am ready
To hang my hopeful crown of happiness
Upon the temple of the public good.

Isbr.
Of that no need. Your wedding shall be finished;
Or left, like a full goblet yet untasted,
To be drunk up with greater thirst from toil.
I'll wed too when I've time. My honest pilgrim,
The melancholy lady, you brought with you,
Looks on me with an eye of much content:
I have sent some rhymed love-letters unto her,
In my best style. D' you think we're well matched?

Adalm.
How? Would you prop the peach upon the upas?

Isbr.
True: I am rough, a surly bellowing storm;
But fallen, never tear did hang more tender
Upon the eye-lash of a love-lorn girl,
Or any Frenchman's long, frost-bitten nose,
Than in the rosecup of that lady's life
I shall lie trembling. Pilgrim, plead for me
With a tongue love-oiled.

Duke.
Win her, sir, and wear her.
But you and she are scarcely for one world.

Isbr.
Enough; I'll wed her. Siegfried, come with me;
We'll talk about it in the rainy weather.
Pilgrim, anon I find you in the ruins,
Where we had wine last night.

[Exit with Siegfried.
Adalm.
Would that it all were over, and well over!
Suspicions flash upon me here and there:
But we're in the mid ocean without compass,
Winds wild, and billows rolling us away:
Onwards with hope!

Duke.
Of what? Youth, is it possible
That thou art toiling here for liberty,
And others' welfare, and such virtuous shadows
As philosophic fools and beggars raise
Out of the world that's gone? Thou'lt sell thy birth-right
For incense praise, less tickling to the sense
Than Esau's pottage steam?

Adalm.
No, not for these,
Fame's breath and praise, its shadow. 'Tis my humour
To do what's right and good.

Duke.
Thou'rt a strange prince.
Why all the world, except some fifty lean ones,
Would, in your place and at your ardent years,
Seek the delight that lies in woman's limbs
And mountain-covering grapes. What's to be royal,
Unless you pick those girls, whose cheeks you fancy,
As one would cowslips? And soo hills and valleys
Mantled in autumn with the snaky plant,
Whose juice is the right madness, the best godship?
Have men, and beasts, and woods, with flower and fruit
From all the earth, one's slaves; bid the worm eat
Your next year's purple from the mulberry leaf,
The tiger shed his skin to line your car,
And men die, thousands in a day, for glory?
Such things should kings bid from their solitude
Upon the top of Man. Justice and Good,
All penniless, base, earthy kind of fellows,
So low, one wonders they were not born dogs,
Can do as well, alas!

Adalm.
There's cunning in thee.
A year ago this doctrine might have pleased me:
But since, I have remembered, in my childhood
My teachers told me that I was immortal,
And had within me something like a god;
Now, by believing firmly in that promise,
I do enjoy a part of its fulfilment,
And, antedating my eternity,
Act as I were immortal.

Duke.
Think of now.
This Hope and Memory are wild horses, tearing
The precious now to pieces. Grasp and use
The breath within you; for you know not, whether
That wind about the trees brings you one more.
Thus far yourself. But tell me, hath no other
A right, which you would injure? Is this sceptre,
Which you would stamp to dust and let each varlet
Pick out his grain of power; this great spirit,
This store of mighty men's concentrate souls,
Which kept your fathers in god's breath, and you
Would waste in the wide, smoky, pestilent air
For every dog to snuff in; is this royalty
Your own? O! when you were a boy, young prince,
I would have laid my heart upon your spirit:
Now both are broken.

Adalm.
Father?

Duke.
Yes, my son:
We'll live to be most proud of those two names.
Go on thy way: I follow and o'erlook.
This pilgrim's shape will hang about and guard thee,
Being but the shadow of my sunniness,
Looking in patience through a cloudy time.

[Exeunt.