What could I bring in dower? A restless heart,
As eager, ardent, hungry, as his own,
Face burned pale olive by our Southern sun,
A mind long used to musings grave apart.
Gold, noble name or fame I ne'er regret,
Albeit all are lacking; but the glow
Of spring-like beauty, but the overflow
Of simple, youthful joy. And yet—and yet—
A proud voice whispers: Vain may be his quest,
What fruit soe'er he pluck, what laurels green,
Through all the world, for just this prize unseen
I in my deep heart harbor quite unguessed:
I alone know what full hands I should bring
Were I to lay my wealth before my king.
Emma Lazarus.
PIPISTRELLO.
I am only Pipistrello. Nothing but that—nothing more than any one of the round brown pebbles that the wind sets rolling down the dry bed of the Tiber in summer.
I am Pipistrello, the mime, the fool, the posturer, the juggler, the spangled saltinbanco, the people's plaything, that runs and leaps and turns and twists, and laughs at himself and is laughed at by all, and lives by his limbs like his brother the dancing bear and his cousin the monkey in a red coat and a feathered cap.
I am Pipistrello, five-and-twenty years old, and strong as you see, and good to look at, the women have said. I can leap and run against any man, and I can break a bar of iron against my knee, and I can keep up with the fastest horse that flies, and I can root up a young oak without too much effort. I am strong enough, and my life is at the full, and a day's sickness I never have known, and my mother is living. Yet I lie under sentence of death, and to-morrow I die on the scaffold: if nothing come between this and the break of dawn, I am a dead man with to-morrow's sun.
And nothing will come: why should it?
I am only Pipistrello. The people have loved me, indeed, but that is no reason why the law should spare me. Nor would I wish that it should—not I. They come and stand and stare at me through the grating, men and women and maidens and babies. A few of them cry a little, and one little mite of a child thrusts at me with a little brown hand the half of a red pomegranate. But for the most part they laugh. Why, of course they do. The street-children always laugh to see a big black steer with his bold horned head go down under the mace of the butcher: the street always finds that droll. The strength of the bull could scatter the crowd as the north wind scatters the dust, if he were free; but he is not, and his strength serves him nothing: the hammer fells him and the crowd laughs.