 | The Student of Padua |  |
ACT V.
SCENE I.
—Interior of a Peasant's Hut on the Isle of Ledo.Julian.
Jul.
—Thank God! I have fulfill'd man's destiny!
That is, to be beloved, believed, bepraised—
And then to be betrayed, belied, bescorned!
To hear, in infancy, affection's blessings—
And feel, in manhood, hatred's bitter curse!
To harbour hopes as gorgeous as the heavens,
One after one for disappointments changed!
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And see its passion melt and die away!
To honor—as the heritors and lords
Of countless excellences—our superiors—
And find them out impostors, knaves, and fools!
Pursuing shadows—entertaining dreams!
Believing every one—believed of none!
Defamed by those we benefit—abused
By those we trusted—ridiculed by all!—
And elbowed through a clamorous, senseless crowd!—
Their wonder, or their mockery and scorn—
Such is our life—and mine, thank God! is ending!
Justice and honor, ye have fled this earth,
And left us to our natural destitution!
Enter Galeno.
Gal.
—Pardon me! a physician from your father,
Sent to consult with you about your health.
How feel you?
Jul.
Like a flower without the rain,
Beneath a parching sun! my brain is hot,
And lacks the dew of sympathy to cool
Its troubled pulse.
Gal.
This draught will lull to sleep
Your sorrows, and, to-morrow, you will cease
To recollect your cares.
Jul.
I do believe it!
How lovely is the night! how fairly pace
The marshall'd stars along the heavens! They say
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Dost thou believe it, friend? That ruin's hand
Shall quench these glorious lights, and dash these spheres
All into darkness, night, and anarchy,
While things like us shall rise to other life?
Gal.
—Such thoughts are impious—We're forbid to argue
On many things we think on.
Jul.
But to wrangle,
And wrestle with our doubts, is all our chance
To rectify our errors. Silently
The earth reclaims the earthly part of us!
But, when the curtain of another scene
Draws up, we all must argue for ourselves.
What recks it then, you told me this, or that
Is right, or wrong—as I have judged, so shall
I then be judg'd—it is an awful thought!
Gal.
—He's surely mad!
Jul.
Ha! mad? didst thou say mad?
Merciful God! I thought 't would come to this!
Mad! you said mad? Ay, that's the word! the shift
Of villainy, assassin like, to stab us,
And cut the throat of honest reputation!
Methinks there's far more madness living here
Than dying for a better place than this!
Go! get you gone! And, when I'm dead, be sure
You bury with me all my virtuous deeds,
And hawk my vices thro' the slanderous crowd!
Oh! what a bad, censorious world this is!
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Yet never died that mortal, o'er whose grave
Detraction did not, like a viper, crawl!
Gal.
—(Aside.
I have not courage for this sinful business!)
Jul.
—Each man, who would not have his purpose doubted,
Should chalk it up, or we'll belie his worth!
It is a monstrous and incongruous state,
Where truth and falsehood seem so like each other,
That no man living knoweth which is which!
Gal.
—(Aside.
Poor fellow! all the wisdom and the folly
Of his wreck'd nature, for the mastery strive.
I cannot pawn my soul to such a purpose,
Though Ruin's phantom goad me to the task!
I cannot, cannot do it!—Barbarigo
Is, in his vengeance, most unnatural,
And, what he wills in wrath, fulfils in blood!
Guide me, ye powers! I have no strength to stand!
Takes out a phial.
To think that such an instrument as this,
Creation's purposes can so defeat,
And change this stirring life so stirless death!
Jul.
—(Seizing the phial.)
What have we here?
Gal.
A sleep-inviting draught.
Jul.
—How nobly art helps limping nature on!
I will assay your cordial!
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No! for God's sake!
Jul.
—Like all the world, thou art a contradiction—
Witholding what is for our benefit,
And bountifully giving all that's bad!
Get thee to bed, and think of growing better!
Out! I will take this potion, and redream
The long lost pleasures of my happier days.
Hence! hence I say! I see you have a lie
Blistering upon your pandering lips—get hence!
Drives him off, and returns and Swallows the draught.
Enter Angelo.
Angelo! ha! how goes the chamelion world?
Cast off another colour? Thou art come
To see how pride can struggle with misfortune?
Ang.
—No, heaven forbid!
Jul.
Methinks heaven hath forbid
All good to dwell in such a bad abode,
As is this earth, where we but come to die!
Ang.
—We are not all so bad—
Jul.
As to put out
Of pain the victims of our cruelty!
We love to see the misery we make!
Oh! we're kind hearted scoundrels, all of us!
Ang.
—What means this?
Jul.
Nothing, but a fragment of
Philosophy, I learn'd just now.
Ang.
From whom?
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—A doctor—who informed me I am mad.
What think you? will you try my pulse, sir?
Ang.
Julian?
Jul.
—Ha! ha! I find our senses all alike,
And ignorance is monarch every where!
Ang.
—Julian?
Jul.
No pity!
Ang.
There's my purse, adieu!
Jul.
Come hither! Let me gaze upon thee, man!
Before I quit this world, I fain would read
The lineaments that mark an honest face.
Ang.
—Take this, good fortune may again be yours.
Jul.
—Good fortune, to the miserable man,
Is but a foil to set his misery off.
Ang.
But take the purse!
Jul.
It can no longer turn
The hinge of my sad destinies. No! keep it!
Therein you have a talismanic charm
To ope the steel-lock'd lips of adulation,
And, god-like, rule the worship of mankind.
My hopes—the worse for me!—were never sunk
In gold.—How I'd have used it, were it mine,
The Oracle of Time alone could tell.
I have not worshipp'd it—therein hath been
My worldly folly—It was still to me
But as a shadow on a running stream.
If I have erred—the atonement is my death!
Ang.
—Then, Julian, thou'rt resolved to die against
The awful judgment of both earth and heaven?
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—In heaven there's mercy, but on earth there's none!—
And I am done with all whose condemnation,
Praise, smiles, or tears, can ever more affect me!
Ang.
—With all? Your poor old father now repents.
Jul.
—Pride ne'er repents! He would not ask forgiveness,
And could not look me in the face, and say
He has not injured me. O Angelo!
Language hath not the power to tell how much
I loved that father! How I would have given
My soul to study and my hand to labour,
But for a single smile of approbation!
A smile that I did value more than all
The praise, the honor of all other men!
For years I wooed his love, as sedulously
As the sun shines in heaven. I lived for him,
And him alone; I thought, in honorable
Emulation of the bards of old,
To shed reflected glory on his house,
And weave a halo round his aged brow.
For this, I broke companionship with pleasures
Proper to youth-time, and made solitude
My soul preceptress. Hours and hours I spent
In the dim woods, beneath the aged pine;
And, for each hour I gave to learning's search,
I spent another, thinking on my father!—
Visioning a father's happiness and pride,
In the fair reputation of his son!
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—Well, well! But he regrets his harsh demeanour—
None can do more than mourn and mend the past!
Jul.
—I do forgive each individual wrong,
And every injury he ever did me!
For I am journeying to a home, where all
The storms of earth die on th' eternal shore
Of peace and joy!—I do forgive my father!
Ang.
—Nay, you will soon be better!
Jul.
Soon? yes, soon!
Ang.
—There's hope enough to build an Eden on!
Jul.
—I raised my paradise on hopes as fair,
And honorable—I may say it now—
As ever arch'd the skies of promise.—See!
Here's the fulfilment of a poet's dream!
Ang.
—But think upon Bianca!
Jul.
Oh! I do!
And pray that she be happier, far more happy
Than ever I could make her! If there be
A blessing for the virtuous, it is hers!
Ang.
—Will you not see her?
Jul.
To unman my purpose?
Ang.
—Your purpose?
Jul.
My unchanging resolution
Never again to mingle with my kind!
No, Angelo! the lightning-blasted oak
Puts forth no more its blossoms to the storm.
The flowers of human sympathies are perished,
Like dead leaves, on my wither'd heart; and nothing
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Loathing and detestation! hate and scorn!
All of ye! every one! you're all alike!
Ang.
—(Aside.
Poor fellow! but I will not leave him thus.
Misfortune has unhinged his natural feelings,
And substituted these unholy passions.)
Julian sinks on a seat, overcome with the effects of the Opiate.
You're sadly fever'd! will you sleep awhile?
I'll watch you.
Jul.
Well, I care not if I do.
I have not slumbered peacefully of late—
Moons have roll'd by, while millions slept, and still
These burning eyes have watched the stars, and told,
Upon their march, the hours of misery!
When grief hath made the weary day too long,
What an exceeding blessing slumber is!
Ang.
—How is it, Julian? Thou art ghastly pale!
Jul.
—My troubled breath comes short and painfully!
The warm blood seems to stagnate in my heart!—
Angelo!—I am poison'd!
Ang.
Poison'd? Help!
Help, there, without!
Jul.
Hush! you invoke the winds!
I am alone—our misery needs no train
To follow its sad funeral to the grave!
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—Who tend upon you?
Jul.
Solitude and want!
Harsh ministers to smooth our death-bed pillow!
But habit soon familiarizes us
To love what once we loathed and trembled at.
Ang.
—I must bring succour!
Jul.
Stir not, if you love me!
I soon shall be beyond their aid, as now
I am beyond the injuries of men!
Ang.
—What shall I do?
Jul.
Obey my dying words—
Silence! I have a thousand things to say;
Yet ere this feeble pulse half numbers that,
With all my countless sins—we all are sinners
Alike!—I shall be with the things that were!
But when the multitude point out the grave
Of the—the suicide—give them the lie!
I am not mad!—I am no murderer!—
Will you believe me?
Ang.
'On my soul I will!
Jul.
—Thanks! thanks! ye gods! at last I've found a friend!
Angelo, I am dying!—you inquire
If desperation raised Want's bony hand
Against the tyranny of life? You think
I am a suicide—the word will choke me!
Ang.
—What am I to believe, then?
Jul.
What you see,
Not what you should believe your friend to be!
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—Appearances—
Jul.
Are such poor evidence
To try and judge those thou whom we value by,
That we deserve our eyes pluck'd out, who would
Permit them to see aught against our reason.
Oh! how my throat is parching! burning!—ah!
Some water! blessings on you! may they fall
In shower-like plenteousness upon your heart!
Angelo! I am poison'd by the malice
Of some one.—Oh! it could not be my father!
He hath abandon'd me most cruelly!
But then he loved his gold—his pride—his power—
Better than he could love his child.—He loved me
Next to his avarice! he would not slay me!
Ang.
—Divest yourself of such unnatural thoughts—
He could not, would not lift his hand against you!
Ha! I suspect that coward, Barbarigo!
Jul.
—Then may the gods forgive, as I forgive him!
I would not change that grave, to which I'm hurrying,
With all its horrors, for a thousand years
Of life, strength, glory, and a guilty heart!
O! what strange shadows glide before my vision!
Ang.
—He sinks! he dies! Julian! Ha! Thou art better?
Jul.
—Angelo! It may be I have not lived
To day, as I would live to-morrow—none—
None do so! for still we err, and age,
As well as youth, deplores its yesterday!
Much we could rectify, if life were leased
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Would sin again—and, therefore, it is better,
Better to die, when young in our enjoyments—
Than when the heart's grown old in sin and sorrow!
No epitaph, except a sigh, for me!
A tear from thee, my beautiful Bianca!—
Bianca's dead?
Ang.
No, surely not! (Aside.
Poor fellow!
His dying fancy wanders to the past!)
Jul.
—O, my dear girl!—And so they buried her
Under the flowerless earth, because she lov'd—
Loved me! Ah! woe, woe, woe is me!
All things that love me die! Well, I will die!
And we will meet in far and happier lands!
In the lone stars, love, which we gazed upon
Full many an evening by the ocean shore!
Art thou Bianca's spirit?
Ang.
Look upon me!
Jul.
—I cannot see—my sight grows very dim!
Is that old man my father?
Ang.
Where?
Jul.
Look! there!
He's weeping o'er a new made grave—alas!
How very old and sad my father's grown!
Look, look! They're strewing flowers upon a corpse!
It is my mother's!—Mother! Barbarigo!
Unhand me! Take your grasp from off my throat!
Let me but breathe!—you choke me!—let me breathe!
I feel I've yet a giant's strength to tear
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Villain! you strangle me!—Ha! murder! Ha!
You choke—cho—choke me! Ah! help! oh!
Dies.
Lorenzo rushes in, followed by Antonio and Giacomo.
Lor.
—What do I see? What voice is that I hear!
Words words ye have no power to utter this!
Ang.
—Where lingers Julian's mother?
Ant.
With his spirit!
Ang.
—Dead?
Lor.
Yes, I murder'd her! I broke her heart!
Broke hers!—broke his! and cannot break my own!
Ang.
—God pity our disasters, and forgive us!
Lor.
—God makes, and man unmakes, deforms, defiles,
Abuses all the bounteous gifts of nature,
And, to worst curses, heaven's best blessings turns!
Ang.
—Lorenzo!—
Lor.
Do not curse me! O, my God!
The very criminal, with blood-stained hands
Clasp'd, on the scaffold, o'er his weeping child,
Would show more pity than I did to mine!
Ang.
—I would—
Lor.
I know it! curse and blast my heart,
Ten thousand times more black than it is cursed!
I do deserve it all! That all mankind,
All human nature, yea the stones o'the street,
Rise up in judgment, and, with tongues of fire,
Pursue me down to hell for ever!
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Sir,
Your passion doth forget all proper reverence!
Lor.
—Rev'rence! what thing upon the wide, wide world
Reveres Lorenzo! poverty, starvation,
Famine, disease, death—all, all things are better,
Happier—yea nothing—to be nothing were
To be more envied than to be Lorenzo!
I, on whom Providence bestowed so much—
Wealth, marriage, offspring, and ten thousand blessings
Denied to twice ten thousand wretched creatures!—
Years link'd unto years, for ever and ever,
Cannot make guilt return to innocence!
To curse what blest me!—Hate what loved me so!—
Pride, avarice!—O ye damned, damned demons!
What loosed ye out of hell to scourge us so!
O death! My boy so doubly blest in death!
The guilty never, never, never die!
Rushes out.
Enter suddenly, from one side Bianca, and from the opposite, her Mother, Lodoro, Barbarigo, Maria, and Attendants.
Bia.
—Where is he? Julian! Julian! dead and cold!
Throws herself on the body.
Ang.
—Confusion on confusion, grief on grief!
Antonio, follow, or that desperate man,
Lorenzo, may take vengeance on himself.
Exit Antonio.
Lod.
—Unhappy girl! come hence! what sight is this?
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—(Rising.)
You do not know it? No, no! It is death!
Death! murder! death! gaze on its ghastly face
Until you know the aspect of its horror,
It soon shall be the tenant of thy halls!
Lod.
—We must remove her!
Bia.
Angelo, they call you?
Ang.
—Yes, lady.
Bia.
Thou wert friend of my poor Julian's?
Ang.
—I watched him to the last!
Bia.
O happy you!
The very bed on which he died was happier
To be beside my Julian, than Bianca!
Oh! how I envy you that last sad blessing,
To close the dying eyes of one you loved!
Ang.
—His last breath murmur'd forth Bianca's name.
Bia.
—There! there! I knew—I told you how he loved!
I felt it! swore it! yes I swore he loved
Me worthily! O Julian! to thy spirit
I pledge this vow of an eternal love!
Withstand me not! I will pour o'er the dead
The offering that ye would not give the living!
O Julian! They have sealed thy coral lips
In endless silence! they have closed thine eyes
In everlasting darkness! never more
Can eye or lip assure me of thy love!
But even death thy spirit could not slay!
No, no! it smiles upon me even now!
Look you, it smiles! smiles as it smiled in life—
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It goes! I follow! Julian! gentle Julian!
Smile love! thy lady follows thee! My boy!
They can't pursue us now! come, sit thee down,
Under the shadow of these leafy trees,
And sing me songs of olden chivalry!
Lod.
—We must remove her from the body!
Bia.
Hush!
It is the murmur of the little brook!
Fear not! they cannot persecute us now!
Come, gentle Julian! Come, my poet boy!
Sing me some wild old song, that shall recall
The pleasant times gone by, when, side by side,
We wandered on the Adriatic shore!
Well, never mind! we will not mourn the past!
It is a memory on which to dwell,
That ocean, with the sun-light on its bosom,
Like lovers sleeping in each others arms!
But we'll forget these things, and hope shall roam,
Like angels, through the future's azure skies!
We will not think on fathers or on mothers,
But all in all will be unto ourselves!
My love is weary! we have travelled far!
Far, far away from earth and all its cares!
Sleep, love! the sound of sorrow never more
Shall travel from the distant world of woe!
Sleep, my beloved, on this mossy bank!
While I will strew with violets thy head,
And pleasant dreams attend thee in thy slumbers!
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Off.
—Barbarigo, thou'rt attach'd upon the charge
Of this physician, with the death of Julian.
Bia.
—'Tis false! He is not dead, my gentle Julian!
Lo! he but slumbers! hush! you will awake him!
How came you to this distant land? we're spirits!
You cannot harm us now! we're sinless spirits,
And god hath told us we may love each other!
Off.
—Alas! this is indeed a mournful scene!
Bia.
—The little birds have sung my boy to rest!
The music of the forest leaves hath lull'd
His heart to sleep beside the running stream!
How cold he is! poor child, how cold he is!
But never mind, his love is warm as ever!
Mo.
—This is thy doing, Barbarigo!
Off.
Justice
Demands its victim—off with him to prison!
Lod.
—Have you no sorrow? no remorse? Hard hearted,
Unnatural, monstrous, bloody murderer?
Off.
—Lord Barbarigo!—
Bia.
Barbarigo! ha!
Up Julian! Julian! Barbarigo's here!
Protect me, love! O waken, waken, Julian!
Fly! fly! up, Julian! Julian, let us fly!
O'er plains and mountains, valleys, rivers, seas—
Through the unfooted desert! let us brave
Cold, hunger, thirst, fatigue—Oh! death itself!—
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Up, Julian! Oh! my love, he will not hear me!
He cannot! God of heaven! they have murdered him!
Falls on the Body.
Off.
—The state commands the evidence of these!
Ang.
—Now retribution falls upon you all!
Vengeance may slumber, but she never dies!
Time brings our deepest hidden sins to light,
And justice one day overtakes us all!
Long, long, throughout the startled land, shall ring,
The sad recital of this Tragedy—
And may the moral not be cast away!
THE END.
| The Student of Padua | |