 | The Queen of the Hid Isle |  |
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.
71
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,
72
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
73
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,
74
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.
75
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,
76
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,
77
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
78
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.
| The Queen of the Hid Isle | |