Very strange is the heart of a woman! I, remembering her scorn for this very Prince and her will to slay him with her own hand, could not at all commend nor comprehend her passion for him dead whom living she trod as the dust beneath her feet. She permitted my speech gently, but would reply only,
“He loved me and gave his life for me.” And I venturing to rejoin,
“But O exalted Lady, men will give their lives for a little thing, a jewel, a worthless intrigue, the slaying of a tiger, and is his sacrifice worth such a return as yours?” she replied with calm; “Greater love hath no man than in silence to lay down his life uncheered by commendation or the joy of battle, and to him I swore fidelity. Should I change? In his death was the high heart that in life would have grown to glory—and I broke it.”
And I said:
“It is greater love to live for a woman than to die for her and this he could never have done, for his profligacy and selfishness would have swept all love to ruin,”—and she, smiling, put this by, as one who has attained in her own heart to behold the innermost secrets of love. And which of us was right I cannot now tell.
But as love rose about her like a tide her thoughts turned more and more to the Supreme, the Self-Existent,—and this love also consumed her for He wounded her heart with the august secrets of His beauty, and perceiving in vision wafts of His sweetness she sank into a deep melancholy, desiring that to which no earthly passion may attain. So in this poem she beheld Him as the Hunter of the Soul:
“I have no peace, the quarry I, a Hunter chases me,
It is Thy memory.
I turn to flee but fall: for over me He casts His snare,
His perfumed hair,