NORBERT. Against my own! explain not; let this be. This is life's height. CONSTANCE. Yours! Yours ! Yours ! NORBERT. You and I Why care by what meanders we are here In the centre of the labyrinth? men have died 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 upon life. 2. 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. Then once more I prayed, And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid, But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied. At the first I saw nought but the blackness; but soon I descried A something more black than the blackness the upright - the vast, Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all ;— Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof, — showed Saul. - 4. He stood as erect as that tent-prop; both arms stretched out wide On the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side: He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there,—as, caught in his pangs And waiting his change the king-serpent all heavily hangs, Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance - come With the spring-time, so agonized Saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb. b. Then I tuned my harp,- took off the lilies we twine round its chords |