The Wine-Jar Maiden
If I leap through this window, a cloak of my heart-scent may hang to me. I shall touch the cloak, now and then, and that shall be my life.
The Mad Shepherd
I must sit here, and whirl with my young spirit. If I cannot knit together strands of music better than the tune I ran after, then I should not have chased it.
(After a short silence the Narcissus Peddler and the Slender Nun, hand in hand, leap through the window-corner and vanish. The Wine Jar Maiden leaps after them, a moment later, and also disappears. The Mad Shepherd sits down and blows little fragments of piping into his reed, long pauses separating them. As he does this, he looks up at the window, his head motionless. The Narcissus Peddler, the Slender Nun and the Wine Jar Maiden appear from the left walking slowly, in single file, as though in a trance. The Narcissus Peddler stands beside his basket, which he left behind him; the Wine Jar Maiden beside her jar, and the Slender Nun between them.)
The Mad Shepherd (looking up, astonished)
You return, like sleep-drooping poplar trees that have been given wings, and after long journeyings, fly back to their little blue-green hills.
The Narcissus Peddler
After we sprang we found ourselves in a high corridor, whose air was like the breath of a dying maiden—the corridor we first walked down, before we came to this palest purple window.
The Mad Shepherd (wonderingly)