There's bloom upon her cheek;
But now I see it is not living hue,
But a strange hectic—like the unnatural red
Which Autumn plants upon the perish'd leaf.
.... Hear me, hear me—
Astarte! my beloved! speak to me:
I have so much endured—so much endure—
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me
Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not, that I do bear
This punishment for both—that thou wilt be
One of the blessed—and that I shall die.
For hitherto all hateful things conspire
To bind me in existence—in a life
Which makes me shrink from immortality—
A future like the past. I cannot rest.
I know not what I ask, nor what I seek:
I feel but what thou art, and what I am;
And I would hear yet once before I perish
The voice which was my music—Speak to me!
For I have call'd on thee in the still night,
Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs
And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves
Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name,
Which answer'd me—many things answer'd me—
Spirits and men—but thou wert silent all.
.... Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth,
And never found thy likeness—speak to me!
Look on the fiends around, they feel for me:
I fear them not, and feel for thee alone—
Speak to me! though it be in wrath; but say—
I reck not what—but let me hear thee once—
This once—once more!
.... Yet see, he mastereth himself, and makes
His torture tributary to his will.
Had he been one of us, he would have made
An awful spirit.
.... Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time;—its innate sense,
When stripp'd of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without;
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me.
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.—Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me—but not yours!
[353]: Don Juan.
There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink
With the three thousandth curtsy;
.... Saloon, room, hall, o'erflow beyond their brink,
And long the latest of arrivals halts,
'Midst royal dukes and dames condemn'd to climb,
And gain an inch of staircase at a time....
[354]: It was as if the house had been divided between your public and understood courtesans. But the intriguantes much outnumbered the regular mercenaries. Now where lay the difference between Pauline and her mamma, and Lady.... and daughter? Except that the two last may enter Carleton and any other house and the two first are limited to the Opera and b—house. How I delight in observing life as it really is—and myself after all the worst of any!