Antonio: What thought impels and wrings
These angers from your eyes?
Charles (slowly, gazing at him): You're like your mother.
Antonio: In trouble for your peace, more than in feature.
Charles: Peace—peace? Antonio, a dream has come:
To stir—to wake—to learn it is a dream—
I must not, will not look on such abyss.
You love me, boy?
Antonio: Sir, well: you cannot doubt it.
Charles: There has been darkness in me—and it seems
Such night as would put out a heaven of hope,
Quench an eternity of flaming joy!
I have sunk down under the world and hit
On nethermost despair: flown blind across
An infinite unrest!
Antonio: Forget it, now.
Charles: Had I drunk Lethe's all 'twould not have stilled
The crying of my desolation's want.
Within me tenderness to iron turned,
Gladness to worm and gloom.—But 'tis o'erpast.
A rift, a smile, a breath has come—blown me
From torture to an ecstasy.
Antonio: To——?
Charles: Ecstasy!
Such as surrounds Hyperion on his sun,
Or Pleiads sweeping seven-fold the night.