Sweet lips! he who hath
On my desolate path

Cast the darkness of absence, worse than death!

(The ENCHANTRESS makes her spell: she is answered by a Spirit)

SPIRIT

Within the silent centre of the earth

My mansion is; where I have lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery

Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world;
Infinite depths of unknown elements

Massed into one impenetrable mask;
Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins
Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.

And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven
I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and

clouds,

And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns.
In the dark space of interstellar air.

[A good Spirit, who watches over the Pirate's fate, leads, in a mysterious manner, the lady of his love to the Enchanted Isle. She is accompanied by a youth, who loves the lady, but whose passion she returns only with a sisterly affection. The ensuing scene takes place between them on their arrival at the Isle.]

INDIAN YOUTH and LADY

INDIAN

And, if my grief should still be dearer to me
Than all the pleasures in the world beside,
Why would you lighten it?

LADY

I offer only

That which I seek, some human sympathy
In this mysterious island.

INDIAN

Oh, my friend,

My sister, my beloved!

What do I say?

My brain is dizzy, and I scarce know whether
I speak to thee or her.

LADY

Peace, perturbed heart!

I am to thee only as thou to mine,

The passing wind which heals the brow at noon,
And may strike cold into the breast at night,
Yet cannot linger where it soothes the most,
Or long soothe could it linger.

You also loved?

INDIAN

But you said

LADY

Loved! Oh, I love. Methinks

This word of love is fit for all the world,

And that for gentle hearts another name

Would speak of gentler thoughts than the world

owns.

I have loved.

INDIAN

And thou lovest not? if so

Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.

LADY

Oh, would that I could claim exemption
From all the bitterness of that sweet name.
I loved, I love, and when I love no more
Let joys and grief perish, and leave despair
To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me,
The embodied vision of the brightest dream,
Which like a dawn heralds the day of life;
The shadow of his presence made my world
A paradise. All familiar things he touched,
All common words he spoke, became to me
Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.
He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest;
He came, and went, and left me what I am.
Alas! Why must I think how oft we two
Have sate together near the river springs,
Under the green pavilion which the willow
Spreads on the floor of the unbroken fountain,
Strewn, by the nurslings that linger there,
Over that islet paved with flowers and moss,
While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson

snow,

Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine,
Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own?

The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt,
And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn;
And on a wintry bough the widowed bird,
Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves,
Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow.
I, left like her, and leaving one like her,
Alike abandoned and abandoning

(Oh! unlike her in this!) the gentlest youth, Whose love had made my sorrows dear to him, Even as my sorrow made his love to me!

INDIAN

One curse of Nature stamps in the same mould
The features of the wretched; and they are
As like as violet to violet,

When memory, the ghost, their odors keeps
Mid the cold relics of abandoned joy.-
Proceed.

LADY

He was a simple innocent boy.

I loved him well, but not as he desired;
Yet even thus he was content to be:-

A short content, for I was

INDIAN (aside)

God of heaven!

.

!

From such an islet, such a river-spring

I dare not ask her if there stood upon it

A pleasure-dome, surmounted by a crescent,
With steps to the blue water. (Aloud) It may be
That Nature masks in life several copies

Of the same lot, so that the sufferers
May feel another's sorrow as their own
And find in friendship what they lost in love.
That cannot be: yet it is strange that we,
From the same scene, by the same path to this
Realm of abandonment

breath

But speak! your

Your breath is like soft music, your words are
The echoes of a voice which on my heart

Sleeps like a melody of early days.

But as you said

LADY

He was so awful, yet

So beautiful in mystery and terror,

Calming me as the loveliness of heaven
Soothes the unquiet sea: - and yet not so,
For he seemed stormy, and would often seem
A quenchless sun masked in portentous clouds;
For such his thoughts, and even his actions were;
But he was not of them, nor they of him,
But as they hid his splendor from the earth.
Some said he was a man of blood and peril,
And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips.
More need was there I should be innocent,
More need that I should be most true and kind,
And much more need that there should be found

one

To share remorse, and scorn and solitude,
And all the ills that wait on those who do
The tasks of ruin in the world of life.

He fled, and I have followed him.

INDIAN

Such a one

Is he who was the winter of my peace.

But, fairest stranger, when didst thou depart

From the far hills where rise the springs of India? How didst thou pass the intervening sea?

LADY

If I be sure I am not dreaming now,
I should not doubt to say it was a dream.