If thus you have taken jest for earnest thus

Loved me in earnest

NORBERT.

Ah, no jest holds here!

Where is the laughter in which jests break up?
And what this horror that grows palpable?

Madam

why grasp you thus the balcony?

Have I done ill? Have I not spoken the truth?
How could I other? Was it not your test,

To try me, and what my love for Constance meant?
Madam, your royal soul itself approves,

The first, that I should choose thus ! so one takes
A beggar asks him what would buy his child,
And then approves the expected laugh of scorn
Returned as something noble from the rags.
Speak, Constance, I'm the beggar! Ha, what's this?
You two glare each at each like panthers now.
Constance the world fades; only you stand there!
You did not in to-night's wild whirl of things

Sell me

No

your soul of souls, for any price?

no 'tis easy to believe in you.

Was it your love's mad trial to o'ertop

Mine by this vain self-sacrifice? well, still

Though I should curse, I love you. I am love

And cannot change! love's self is at your feet. [QUEEN goes out.

CONSTANCE.

Feel my heart; let it die against your own.

NORBERT.

Against my own! explain not; let this be.

In the centre of the labyrinth? men have died
Trying to find this place out, which we have found.

Found, found!

CONSTANCE.

NORBERT.

Sweet, never fear what she can do

We are past harm now.

CONSTANCE.

On the breast of God.

I thought of men as if you were a man.

Tempting him with a crown!

It is too perfect!

NORBERT.

This must end here

CONSTANCE.

There's the music stopped.

What measured heavy tread? it is one blaze

About me and within me.

NORBERT.

Oh, some death

Will run its sudden finger round this spark,

And sever us from the rest

SAUL.

1.

SAID Abner, "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak,

Kiss my cheek, wish me well!" Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.

And he, “Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent,

Neither drunken nor eaten nave we; nor until from his

tent

Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth

yet,

Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet.

For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three

days,

Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer or of praise,

To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their

strife,

And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back

2.

upon life.

Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child, with his dew

On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and

blue

Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild

heat

Were now raging to torture the desert!"

3.

Then I, as was meet,

Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my

feet,

And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder.

The tent was

unlooped;

I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I

stooped;

Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone,

That extends to the second inclosure, I groped my

way on

Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open.

more I prayed,

Then once

And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not

afraid,