“Our joy is dead, and only smiles on us,
A loving shade from out the place of tombs.”
Then comes the interposition of the Gypsy chief, Fedalma’s sweet sad steadfastness to her “high allegiance, higher than our love;” the brief moment of suspense, when
“His will was prisoner to the double grasp
Of rage and hesitancy;”—
and then before the stormful revulsion of baffled and despairing passion all else is swept away, and there only survives in the self-clouded mind and soul the fixed resolve to secure that which for him has come to overmaster all allegiance. Strange and sad beyond all description are the sophistries under which the sinner strives to veil his sin,—by which to silence that still small voice which will not be hushed amid all that inward moil. Fedalma’s earnest pleadings with his better self, Zarca’s calm, pitying, almost sorrowful scorn—
“Our poor faith
Allows not rightful choice save of the right
Our birth has made for us”—
fall unheeded amid that fierce tempest of aroused self-will; and the Spanish knight and noble of that very age when
“Castilian gentlemen
Choose not their task—they choose to do it well,”
becomes the renegade, abjuring and forswearing country, honour, and God.
We have hitherto abstained from quotation, except where necessary to illustrate our remarks. But we cannot forbear extracting from this scene the most exquisite of the many beautiful lyrics scattered throughout the poem, expressing, as it does, with a mystic power and depth beyond what the most elaborate commentary could do, the all but hopelessness of return from such a fall as Don Silva’s:—
“Push off the boat,
Quit, quit the shore,
The stars will guide us back:—
O gathering cloud,
O wide, wide sea,
O waves that keep no track!On through the pines!
The pillared woods,
Where silence breathes sweet breath:—
O labyrinth,
O sunless gloom,
The other side of death!”