Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness!
Our great Republic hears; we are blessed, and bless.
Ye happy Dead! whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to pourtray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered
A VOICE FROM BENEATH.
Whom we have left, we change and pass away—
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
From man's high mind even to the central stone
Of sullen lead; from heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on!
A CONFUSED VOICE.
We hear thy words waken Oblivion.
Spirits whose homes are flesh! ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms and fish, ye living leaves and buds,
Lightning and wind! and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes!
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day!
Speak! thy strong words may never pass away.
This is the day which down the void abysm,
At the Earth-born's spell, yawns for Heaven's despotism, And conquest is dragged captive through the deep. Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs,
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance-
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And, if with infirm hand Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to re-assume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ;+
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!
ANDREA, Servant to CENCI.
Nobles, Judges, Guards, Servants.
LUCRETIA, Wife of CENCI, and stepmother of his children.
The SCENE lies principally in Rome, but changes during the Fourth Act to Petrella, a Castle among the Apulian Apennines. TIME. During the Pontificate of Clement VIII.
SCENE I.-An Apartment in the Cenci Palace.
Enter COUNT CENCII and CARDINAL CAMILLO.
Camillo: That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate.
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point. He said that you
Bought perilous impunity with your gold;
That crimes like yours, if once or twice compounded,
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live;
But that the glory and the interest
Of the high throne he fills little consist
With making it a daily mart of guilt
So manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
Cenci. The third of my possessions-let it go !
Ay, I once heard the nephew of the Pope
Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded with his uncle :
I little thought he should outwit me so !
Henceforth no witness-not the lamp-shall see
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher-
Than his most worthless life :-it angers me!
"Respited me from hell!"-So may the Devil
Respite their souls from heaven! No doubt Pope Clement
And his most charitable nephews pray
That the Apostle Peter and the saints
Will grant for their sakes that I long enjoy
Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days
Wherein to act the deeds which are the stewards
Of their revenue.-But much yet remains
To which they show no title.
So much that you might honourably live,
And reconcile yourself with your own heart,
And with your God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow-white and venerable hairs!
Your children should be sitting round you now,
But that you fear to read upon their looks
The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you.
Why is she barred from all society
But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs?
Talk with me, Count; you know I mean you well.
I stood beside your dark and fiery youth,
Watching its bold and bad career, as men
Watch meteors,—but it vanished not; I marked
Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold you, in dishonoured age,
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend,
And in that hope have saved your life three times.
Cenci. For which Aldobrandino owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian.-Cardinal,
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint.
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter. ́
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day his wife and daughter came,
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled :-
I think they never saw him any more.
Camillo. Thou execrable man, beware!—
Cenci.
Of thee?
Nay, this is idle :-We should know each other.
As to my character for what men call crime,
Seeing I please my senses as
And vindicate that right with force or guile,
It is a public matter, and I care not
If I discuss it with you.
Alike to you and my own conscious heart;
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent,
If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.
All men delight in sensual luxury,
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel,
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain.
But I delight in nothing else. I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,—
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse, and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men.
This mood has grown upon me, until now
Any design my captious fancy makes
The picture of its wish (and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know)
Is as my natural food and rest debarred
Until it be accomplished.
No. I am what your theologians call
"Hardened;" which they must be in impudence, So to revile a man's peculiar taste.
True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought,-
While lust was sweeter than revenge.
Invention palls; ay, we must all grow old.
But that there yet remains a deed to act
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
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