I am, God’s Judgment, ready to comply;
Yea, and so quickly shall my service run
That ere the word is said the deed is done!”
Death then recounts some of his past achievements to prove his readiness to inflict punishment on the king.
Daniel, however, expressly forbids him to kill Baltassar, and gives him leave only to awaken him to a sense of coming woe and the fact that he is mortal.
This Death does by appearing to the king and showing him a small book lost by him some time before (i.e., the remembrance of his mortality, which he had forgotten), in which is written his debt to Death.
He leaves the terror-stricken monarch with an admonition to remember his obligation.
Thought, hovering between Vanity and Idolatry, soon, however, effaces the impression left by the terrible visitor.
The king and Thought, lulled by their combined flatteries, fall asleep, while Death enters and delivers the following monologue, which, as Mr. MacCarthy truly says, “belongs unquestionably to the deepest and most beautiful poetry that has ever flown from the pen of Calderon”: