By now he has broken the wax.... If there flutters
Some dust in his nostrils, who, who will divine
That thus it was poisoned?—Our alchemist utters
No word!—You are happy? and I?—Oh, I feel
That I love and am loved.—The tidings comes heavy
To-night to the King; you are there; you will reel—
Will faint!—Now away to the royal levee.
Note.—In this poem, which originally appeared in a volume of mine entitled Lyrics and Idylls, published in 1890, some hypercritical critic in the New York Nation accused me of imitating Browning's The Laboratory. The truth of the matter is that the poem was written ten months before I had ever read Browning's Dramatic Lyrics, and was suggested to me by the reading of the following passage in one of E. T. W. Hoffman's (the German Poe's) stories. The passage occurs in Mademoiselle De Scuderi and is as follows: "The poisons which Sainte Croix prepared were of so subtle a nature that if the powder (called by the Parisians Poudre de Succession, or Succession Powder) were prepared with the face exposed, a single inhalation of it might cause instantaneous death. Sainte Croix therefore, when engaged in its manufacture, always wore a mask of fine glass. One day, just as he was pouring a prepared powder into a phial, his mask fell off, and inhaling the fine particles of the poison, he fell dead on the spot."