Opas. And faith?
Jul. Alone now left me, filling up in part
The narrow and waste intervals of grief:
It promises that I shall see again
My own lost child.
Jul. Till I have met the tyrant face to face,
And gain’d a conquest greater than the last;
Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain,
And not one Spaniard, not one enemy,
The least relenting, flags upon his flight;
Till we are equal in the eyes of men,
The humblest and most wretched of our kind,
No peace for me, no comfort, no—no child!
Opas. No pity for the thousands fatherless,
The thousands childless like thyself, nay more,
The thousands friendless, helpless, comfortless—
Such thou wilt make them, little thinking so,
Who now, perhaps, round their first winter fire,
Banish, to talk of thee, the tales of old,
Shedding true honest tears for thee unknown:
Precious be these, and sacred in thy sight,
Mingle them not with blood from hearts thus kind.
If only warlike spirits were evoked
By the war-demon, I would not complain.
Or dissolute and discontented men;
But wherefor hurry down into the square
The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race,
Who would not injure us, and could not serve;
Who, from their short and measured slumber risen,
In the faint sunshine of their balconies,
With a half-legend of a martyrdom
And some weak wine and withered grapes before them,
Note by their foot the wheel of melody
That catches and rolls on the sabbath dance.
To drag the steddy prop from failing age,
Break the young stem that fondness twines around,
Widen the solitude of lonely sighs,
And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day
The ruins and the phantoms that replied,
Ne’er be it thine.
Jul. Arise, and save me, Spain!
ACT I. SCENE 2.
Muza enters.
Muza. Infidel chief, thou tarriest here too long.
And art, perhaps, repining at the days
Of nine continued victories, o’er men
Dear to thy soul, tho’ reprobate and base.
Away!
[Muza retires.