 | The Queen of the Hid Isle |  |
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ACT III.
Scene I.
—A Beautiful Grove.Eulice.
Here, in the grove under the citron-trees,
He bade me tarry. How quick my heart beats!
Is it with haste o'erpast or love to come?
I will disrobe me of this heavy cloak,
And loose the cincture of my breathless waist,
And sit down in the moss. He hath well chosen.
'Tis a fit place for love. The dormant air
Swoons with its weight of perfume; the green heaven
Of leaves glitters with constellated flowers,
And all the grass engrailed with cyclamens
And clustering glomes of wondrous scarlet blooms.
No noyous insects flit in the strange air;
Only the burnished plumes of humming-birds,
And rainbow-painted sails of royal moths,
And steel-blue adderflies with needle shape
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And many a wondrous green habiliment,
That, like a breastplate of enamelled metal,
Sheathes up the drumbling beetle for the wars.
Yonder the red scales of the topaz-bird,
The overlapping plates of plumy mail,
Nestling among the florulent parasites,
Flame like the clear-cut edges of a gem,
Or mark his flying path with rubious flames
Through the wood's twilight green. How silver-clear
The meagre brooklet drops her chinking coins
Driblet by driblet on to the smooth rock,
Then wanders in a streak of silver green,
Chamfering through the glade her narrow way!
And how the birds sing!
Chaun.
What! before me, love?
Eulice.
The fonder feet are ever first at tryst
And the more eager lips.
Chaun.
The fairer one
Should be less eager, and the beautiful
Than the soul seeking beauty. Therefore, love,
You have usurped my right.
Eulice.
I have usurped
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And left to thee the niche that holds the god,
Which had I filled, I had usurped indeed,
Who now am no usurper.
Chaun.
Yet change parts;
Be you the saint, and I will kiss your feet.
Eulice.
You would waste kisses if you kissed my feet
That cannot taste them. Give them to my lips.
Chaun.
Then thus I greet their coralline delights
In melting joy. No red anemone,
No sea-flower of the ocean branching out
Under the burning Ethiopian sea
On shelving twilight rock, is ruddier.
What say you to the place? Have I done well?
Eulice.
You have chosen, as a poet, a sweet spot,
A fairer garden than the Hesperides'.
Chaun.
Feel what a couch of deep elastic moss
For comfort, and what colour for delight.
Have you a name for it? A wine-red hue
Deepening to russet brown, the brown to bronze
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Here will we lie and twitter in a nest
Of downier lining than the robin builds,
And when we are aweary of sweet play,
I'll bring you flowers and fruit. The orange boughs
And flush cornelian trees shall furnish us
With wild-wood dainties, Nature's confiture;
And the clear brook shall cool our fevered lips
With the pure wine the dipping fern-leaves drink.
And I have brought the lute.
Eulice.
Oh, sit by me
And pick up from the strings that tune once more
Which in the lamp-lit gardens first you played
Upon that night of franchised revelry,
And won my heart.
Chaun.
Then you must rest on me
With all your shoulder and your white arm's weight,
And make electric flashes in my brain;
Else cannot I play it so as then I did.
Eulice.
Will that serve?
Chaun.
Ay! Thy bare arm on my neck
Enchafes the very fountains of my life,
Which bubble to my lips in music. Hark!
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Which bubble to my lips in music. Hark!
Meet me where the river rushes through the valleys:
Meet me where the lotus leaves lie on the mere:
Meet me where the moonbeams slant adown green alleys:
Meet me where the forest leaves lie brown and sere:
Meet me in the twilight by the weir:
Meet me in my dreams,
Where I see the winds and hear
The moonbeams!
Meet me where the lotus leaves lie on the mere:
Meet me where the moonbeams slant adown green alleys:
Meet me where the forest leaves lie brown and sere:
Meet me in the twilight by the weir:
Meet me in my dreams,
Where I see the winds and hear
The moonbeams!
Thou art lovelier than all shapes, or sounds, or visions,
Night-appearing phantoms, or conceived by day;
Sweeter than all fabled Edens and Elysians:
Heaven's angels, dreamland's houris fade away
And the Islands of the Blest decay
With their burning flowers:
Loves of angels pass away,
But not ours.
Night-appearing phantoms, or conceived by day;
Sweeter than all fabled Edens and Elysians:
Heaven's angels, dreamland's houris fade away
And the Islands of the Blest decay
With their burning flowers:
Loves of angels pass away,
But not ours.
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That tune enfires the very air with love,
And drowns the brook, and silences the birds,
And makes the air pant quick. Sing it again,
But drop the lute and twist about my neck
Thy liberated arm,—for I would dream,—
And sing it in mine ear.
Enter Amanda.
Aman.
What have we now?
My dame Eulice and Chauntval!
Eulice.
Pardon, lady.
Aman.
Eulice, I little deemed thee light of mood,
Whom I have kept to be about my bed
And share my board. And you, Sir Troubadour,
Who were my guest, have recompensed me well,
Making my virgin friend thy belamour.
Yet thou shalt make amends, and thou, Eulice,
Shalt have thy love.
Chaun.
I pray you, gentle queen,
Bid me go fight against the Saracens
Or seek the phœnix in Egyptian land,
Or where the Ethiop feels the scorching sun
Go groping for the fountains of the Nile,
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Or even flowery fetters on my limbs,
For I was born for freedom.
Eulice.
He speaks well.
Chauntval, I am not wroth with thee for this,
As many a maid of milder mould had been.
I am thy counterfeit, even such as thou,
Or we had never loved each other so!
I was not fashioned for a faithful wife:
I would not wed and hate thee.
Chaun.
Sweet Eulice!
Gracious, you hear her.
Aman.
Go, you light-o'-loves!
You quick, hot sparrows, sickly cooing doves,
That peck and flutter for a moment's sport.
You, lady, I will pardon for this once,
But, for I am not rich in pardons, know
Thou hast my whole store of them, having this.
You, Chauntval, ere the sun thrice set and rise
I bid begone, or dearly it aby,
From all the circle of my fair domains,
And ne'er again be seen about my court.
Chaun.
Fair queen, I bow to thy most righteous doom,
And thank thee in behalf of this dear dame,
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Farewell, Eulice. 'Tis hard to part so soon,
Before the cloying of the sweet.
Eulice.
Three days
Our lady gives thee. Bide with us for two,
And, gentle queen, I pray you join my prayer
With thy command.
Aman.
Well, be it as you will;
But breed no further scandal to our court.
Come, lovers, we will banquet you to-night,
And once again; but after you must part.
Scene II.
—The Exterior of the Necromancer's Grotto.Clar.
They said he dwelt hereby, under the bent
Of this same hill, in a deep-tunneled grot
Crusted with sparry branching minerals,
Lit up by facets of effulgent gems
And roofed with dropping crystals, all the mouth
Choked up with clambering flowers of parasites,
And matted elf-locks of entangled leaves
Covering a woody trellise of tough stems.
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Weaving broad shade to tempt the thirsty fawn
Over the vitrine marges of a pool.
Here be the pool and fig-tree, there the flowers
Vaunting their clusters on the embloomèd cliffs,
Clothing the bare scarped rock with royal robes,
But nowhere through the enshielding tanglement
Appear the mouth and ingate of the grot.
But hark! I hear strange music in the hill.
Following the sound with ear hard by the wall,
I'll find perchance the chink it issues from.
Enter the Necromancer.
Necro.
You seek my dwelling?
Clar.
Hermes of the rock?
Necro.
So I am called.
Clar.
I come to question thee.
I am sore plagued with many dreams and doubts,
That swarm in me awake, and when I sleep
Droning with dismal voices. But the sting
Of these dread hornets might be venomless,
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But for one high-pitched siren-song of hope
Of one that sits upon a moonlit rock
Far in the ocean, swathed with golden hair,
Enringed with whirling eddies of green light,
Singing over the sunken coral reefs,
Her sweet song marvelled at by the blue foam,—
One dream of happiness scarce to be won,
And yearned upon with everlasting pain.
Necro.
I know the voice. I too in youthful dreams
Have heard her singing down the golden trail
Of the swift-shifting moonbeams on the sea.
Clar.
I pray you tell me what her singing means.
Necro.
Young knight, I said I heard her song in youth,
But I am old now. When it struck mine ears,
It filled all blood in me with sudden fire,
And through my veins the liquid current ran,
And I became as light as lark in cloud,
Dancing with soft vibrations of the heart,
Like bubbling water or like frothing wine.
And then I said I will not drench my lids
With dews of night, or ope to rays of morn
In drowsy peace or waking, till I learn
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But the far-off evangel of my youth,
Hath never sounded nearer. I have strained
Spirit and sense to part the confluent notes,
And make the vague wild voice articulate;
But more I make division of the notes,
The more their sweetness fades and vanishes:
And I am left an old man in the wild,
Alone with the dim sweetness of a dream,
A vanished dream.
Clar.
What, then, is magic vain?
May a man sell his soul and have no profit?
And canst thou not, under Avernian glades,
By mystic incantation o'er the fumes
Of chafing-dishes charged with glamoured herbs,
Call up thin spectres and lewd Lamiæ
From Acheron, that with their bloodless lips
Shall utter thee the secrets of the dead?
Necro.
Ay, from the trackless regions, from the slime
Of Stygian lakes and the red glare of Hell
I can raise phantoms.
Clar.
Then thou knowest all.
Necro.
Nay, for these know not. E'en the prince of them,
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Abaddon, the destroyer, knows not this.
Clar.
Methought the demons had a seraph's mind
With a fiend's heart.
Necro.
The poison at the core
Affects the rind and all the pulp between.
Charred ashes and red putrid powder fill
The Sodom-fruit and grate upon the teeth.
So hath their evil spirit threaded them,
And turned their wisdom's fruit to rotten dust,
And whoso eats of it shall writhe his mouth.
Clar.
Then these know not the path to the Hid Isle?
Hermes.
I said not so. Some know that secret well
Despite the canker of their crime; but these
Owe not to crime the secret; nor shall one
By aping of their sin go up to heaven.
Clar.
Nay, but can these not tell us?
Necro.
If they would,
They could not; for the path to the Hid Isle
Hath, among other barriers and delays,
This chiefly—none that ever came thereat
Could point the way to his heart's dearest friend.
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I am one groping in a twilight wood,
And grow more wildered farther that I stray.
I wander with no clue, and come again
To the old place. I question whom I meet.
Some know not; others, knowing, tell me nought.
Is there no outlet?
Necro.
Good youth, look on me.
Are not my hairs white and my forehead trenched?
A lifetime have I circled in this wood,
O'er silken moss, through cruel hookèd briars
That tear the flesh, and in rank undergrowths
Where, with forked flickering tongue and sibilant lips,
The horned cerastes slides along the grass
And bites the passing feet, that straight swell up,
Turn blue with lurid dropsy, and are dead.
And still I saw above me the green boughs
Lamping with globy fruit and clustering flowers,
And found the sylvan tropic had no end
That my feet should attain to. Nay, at times
It grew a withered garden of dead trees
Planted in shaly sand or burnt-out marl,
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And now they are all withered, and I stand
As in a fossil forest of the prime,
Long petrified under the icy sea,
And feel my heart grow stone in sympathy
With the dead universe I live in. Friend,
Such is my life,—such has been, such shall be.
And dost thou murmur, who art young, and crave
With frantic cry an outlet? I have none:
And thou art answered.
Clar.
Nay, I pity thee.
I cannot claim thy pity, which is dead,
Or should be after so great suffering.
But that my life lack not the meagre joys
That helped thee bear thine thus far, I would learn
To talk with spirits.
Necro.
Oh, forbear it, friend!
I deem, at times, 'twas this that slew the flowers,
And blasted all the fruit, and dried the grass;
And I might yet be wandering in the wood
Where my youth wandered, finding still no end,
But treading on the glumes of glossy grass,
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Under the red spikes of the coral trees,
My nostrils drunk with aromatic fumes
From the magnolias and the balsam-fruit.
Clar.
Ay, and the serpents gnawing on thine heels!
But be my master, for I love not flowers,
And I have never trod in the soft grass,
Nor smelt the woodland odours. From the first
My wood hath been the fossil wood you tell of,
Stern rock and shingle. Therefore never fear
To kill the flowers.
Necro.
Then come to me by night,
And to thine eager ears by spirit-mouths
I will unfold the mystic wanderings
Of those who most have groped among the trees
Wherein we dwell, and dreamed they found the isle,
And could to other men declare the path,
Which, whensoever other men have tried,
They have been lost in endless wanderings,
And found the treacherous teachings of the wise
A meteor or a fen-fire, and the isle
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But as the visioned palms that hang in air
And mock the traveller on the burning sands,
Who seeks for some green isle of water-wells
Where he may drink and sleep in shade or die.
Clar.
Yet will I prove this for myself, and learn
All that thou hast to teach. At midnight hour
Will I come hither.
Necro.
I will welcome thee.
Poor foot-sore wretch! my life's Gehenna past
Hath been, I fear, to thine a Paradise.
Scene III.
—Interior of Necromancer's Cavern. Globes, Telescopes, Instruments everywhere. In the middle a Tripod and a Ring of Dead Bones and Skulls.Necro.
Within this sacred halo of dry bones
And old worm-fretted skulls of men long dead,
Let none plant footing save whose middle wears
The cincture, and whose back the ermined cape
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Or him by some so plumed initiated!
The glamourous ingredients of the spell
Give off a fume upon the candent plate,
Potsherds, and crazy crocks, and halms of straw,
And husks of grain thrice threshed away to nothing
At Athens, Rome, and Alexandria,
Or by stout threshers on the banks of Rhine;
Some remnants of old bricks, that once had part
And portion in a stately edifice,
Raked up by me from dunghills, so divorced
From their true station and significance
At cope or groundsill, or to prop a frieze
Borne high aloft on Caryatid's brows,
And worshipped out of all proportion; sticks,
Old acorn-cups, and pale caducous leaves
Or fever-florid, grubbed up at the roots
Of none but dead or black fire-blasted trees.—
Alas! at dawn some few days past I met
(It seemed as 'twere myself in the old days)
A young magician gathering herbs. His face,
Over whose white the red of youth distreamed
Brighter than achiote, was shadowed by
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And in his arms he bore a fragrant heap,
Sleepful cup-roses and grape-hyacinths,
Bed-straw and lady-smocks, and gemmy buds
Of myrtles, cereous waterlilies, shocks
And loose luxuriant twines of caprifole,
And heavy globe-flowers of the amaranth,
Flamy gold celandines from fenny flats,
And sheaves of yellow flaglike flower-de-luce
Glomes of white guelder roses, clustering balls
Of cowslips, bunches of bright daffodils,
Whole nodding swaths of the corn-marigold,
Red tiger-lilies, purple passion-flowers,
And rigid swordy sheaths of gladioles:
Nor had the youth forgot to mix therewith
Poisonous weeds culled on damp everglades,
Or swampy isles 'twixt bends of diffluent streams,
The enwombèd venom of lurid nightshade blooms
Buried in knotty glumes of adder's grass.
These he bore off and in a brazier burned.
Whereat uprose a sleepy fume of sweets:
But I drew nigh and plucked him by the gown,
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Behold these bricks wet from baptismal fonts,
Or from the apsis of old Christian churches—
(Knocking.)
It is the knight Sir Clarimonde. Thrice welcome!
Clar.
How foul a stench comes from the stinkpot there!
Are these your rites?
Necro.
Ay, sit you down awhile,
And I will call the dead to talk with you.
Alectryomancy, geomancy too,
And ceromancy, and all other forms
Of divination, are but void and null,
Save only glorious necromancy! See
At my hand's wavure how the spectres rise!
1st Spectre.
I dwelt at Athens.—Things you seem to see
Are shadows cast by true existences,
Ideas and archetypes, as images
By sunlight or by starlight seen in water
Are but vague pictures of true beasts and trees;
And all ideas stream from the sun of Good.
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Gazeful on shadows, till to lead you forth
Gold-footed comes Eros—
Necro.
Leave out Eros.
He is dangerous and we are sick of him.
[1st Spectre vanishes.
Necro.
He is insulted. Never mind! There's more.
2nd Spectre.
Ideas are foolery. Start from principles.
The pure intuitive mind will give them you
Upon experience (see my Topica).
Necro.
Ay, but we wish some goal of life.
2nd Spectre.
The goal
Is happiness, and happiness abides
In the brain-whirl of true philosophy.
Necro.
You hear, my son?
Clar.
So this is then the queen.
The queen of the Hid Isle is but a headache!
[2nd Spectre vanishes.
3rd Spectre.
I come from Alexandria.—The soul
Is pure before its birth, but, floating down
From the region of fixed stars, contracts a taint
At birth, whereof to rid it is the end
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By purging spirit of the alloy of matter,
Killing the flesh and lifting up the soul
In lofty speculation. I at last
Blushed that I had a body.
Clar.
'Tis the same:
Only the other called it happiness.
[3rd Spectre vanishes.
Necro.
You scared him with that word, for happiness
He counts the only sin. But see the next:
He wears the madman's lean and haggard face.
4th Spectre.
Atoms and void: these make the world and man,
The carolling birds, the fishes of the sea,
The soul, and tranquil orders of the gods;
Wherefore have peace: the soul is but a fume
Of finer, smoother globules than the rest,
Which being scattered, memory's link is snapt,
And sufferings on death's other side not ours.
Divinest Epicurus taught me this.
5th Spectre.
I spin out truths from the cocoons of texts.
I am a silkworm and no spider, I!
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We will have no ideas. Let us have forms,
Which when we know, we may turn stones to gold.
“The end of knowledge is to enrich life
With new inventions.”
Clar.
Then the queen is mine
If I contrive a novel sort of jakes!
7th Spectre.
I think; therefore I am. And God is true;
Therefore the world is as I see it—
Clar.
Yes,
But you yourself a spectre.
Necro.
He is gone.
8th Spectre.
God is the one sole substance. All the world
Is but God's raiment. Pious thoughts not true
Are food for man, and to be pious means
To live in charity with all men.
Clar.
Thanks!
That is the best as yet.
Necro.
His life be witness.
9th Spectre.
All truth lies in experience. Self and God
Are built thereon. No truth is born in us.
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My spirit makes my world. The world is but
A dream to which I give the colours.
11th Spectre.
Truth!
There is no truth. Thy soul is but a dream.
12th Spectre.
There is truth. 'Tis but when we stray too far
We come to cross-roads. What things are themselves
We cannot know. Into the moulds of Sense
And Understanding pour Experience,
And lo, 'tis truth; but soar above thy pitch,
God and the soul in the thin air of Reason
Give double aspects to thee. Yet have faith!
Thought fails, but duty proves there is a God.
13th Spectre.
Stay there! Each step to God with the pure mind,
Through the enlarging spheres of all the heavens,
Up the steep Jacob's ladder, is made fast,
So thou hast strength to climb, and wilt confess
That being and not being are the same
In all things saving but the Soul and God,
Of whom they have no meaning. Follow me!
14th Spectre.
The sciences are one great pyramid;
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Worship Humanity.
15th Spectre.
Humanity!
Mere jargon. Love the good of other men.
16th Spectre.
But suffer me to say our own good first.
Clar.
O God! let me begone out of this place!
[Rushes out, leaving the Necromancer.
| The Queen of the Hid Isle | |