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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS
 
 What if the Devil were a man in love, 
 And loved a woman good as women be 
 Who are not wicked ; — whafs the sequel, say? 
 
 — Diabolus A mans.
 
 V-S. 
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS 
 
 A DRAMATIC POEM 
 
 GLASGOW 
 WILSON & McCORMICK, Saint Vincent Street 
 
 1885
 
 H-B2S 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Scene Page 
 
 I. Midnight. Wine Party in the Rooms 
 
 of Angelus .... 9 
 
 II. A Field in the Sunset. Angelus sit- 
 ting on a fallen tree . . . 18 
 
 III. A Lighted Room. Night . . 40 
 
 IV. Afternoon. Porch of a Country 
 
 Church. Donna within playing 
 
 on the organ .... 49 
 
 V. Sunday. A Town in France. The 
 interior of an Evangelical Church. 
 Congregation singing. Angelus . 7 1 
 
 VI. Sunday Afternoon. Coffee-Room of 
 an Inn at Bex. The snowy sum- 
 mits of Dent du Morcle and Dent 
 du Midi seen through the open 
 windows. An English lady sing- 
 ing in the next room, the door of 
 which is partly open. Angelus 
 and Ferdinand .... 82 
 
 VII. The same as before . . . 105 
 
 VIII. Dusk. The Leads of a London 
 Hospital. Patient lying under an 
 awning. Angelus and Sister Sybil III 
 
 IX. Night. Donna and Angelus in a 
 balcony. House brilliantly lighted. 
 * Someone singing within . . 132 
 
 763607
 
 "A man can transform himself into an angel, if he 
 will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake 
 an angel's office." — Altered from The Scarlet Letter.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Scene I. — Midnight. Wine Party in the 
 Rooms 0/ Angelas. 
 
 Angelus {aside). 
 
 Well, one may live until he find the world 
 No wiser, books no deeper than himself, 
 And men no better ; — not that he is great 
 — God knows! — but they are little. You 
 
 may sound 
 The wells of old and new philosophy 
 And drag the sacred rivers, you shall find 
 Never a question drying up the life 
 And one to answer it, never a wound 
 And one to lay his hand upon the hurt 
 To heal it : found I ne'er and ne'er shall find, 
 Happen what may, and all things hap to me, 
 In poet or in psalmist precedent.
 
 IO MABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 First Guest. 
 
 What ails our Angelus, he sits so mute, 
 Contracting that most odious habit known 
 Of thinking answers to our table-talk 
 And saying none? This custom must be 
 
 checked 
 As most discouraging to that high art 
 In which we are such amateurs, although 
 We have more practice in it than our own, — 
 The finest of the arts, the art to talk, 
 The art to think with twenty brains at once. 
 What if our Angel were a man in love ? 
 
 Angelus. 
 What if the Devil were a man in love? 
 
 Second Guest. 
 What if the Devil were a God in love ! 
 Away with it, your fond antithesis, 
 Your sharp division into good and bad : 
 What has the Devil, I ask, to do with us, 
 Who has no place or name in classic cult, 
 Though pretty fairly dealt amongst the gods ;
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. II 
 
 And when 'tis clear to reasonable men 
 He cannot even live and much less love ? 
 
 Angeius. 
 
 But if the Devil were a man in love, 
 And loved a woman good as women be 
 Who are not wicked — what's the sequel, say, 
 In this world or the world completing this ? 
 If ever curve on Earth is sphered in Heaven, 
 [Pointing through the open window to the 
 bridge below] 
 As yonder arch is rounded in the stream. 
 
 Third Guest. 
 
 Sequel, my Angel, sequel there is none. 
 The Devil's duty were to hide his love 
 As if it were calamity or crime, 
 Lest haply his revealed awaken hers ; 
 For women — that's the worst of it, you know — 
 Will love you, if you love them, back again, 
 And you by contact soil the stainless soul 
 You love in all its petal-purity.
 
 12 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Fourth Guest. 
 
 The Devil hide his love ? — the Devil, no ! 
 Why should he ? why should we, and what 
 
 are we ? 
 — Not angels truly, what but in our way, 
 A petty retail way, diaboli, 
 Diaboli amantes ? Yet withal 
 Some woman loves us, and may live and die 
 In the belief that we are great and good, 
 If only we be wise and do not deem 
 It duty to profess ungodliness 
 Or even devilhood ; and she, dear heart, 
 Is none the worse for us though petal-pure, 
 But all the better for her lovely love, 
 That grows upon a ruin like a flower, 
 Or ripens o'er a chasm like a fruit. 
 
 Fifth Guest. 
 
 Nay, mask yourself like Mephistopheles, 
 And if you be the plague, you foul the air ; 
 If you be fire, you burn, although concealed 
 Or ladled out as water. She, poor soul, 
 When sitting by your side full-charged with 
 you,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 13 
 
 Will find it harder to believe in God 
 And keep the upward path that leads to Him. 
 Then let her angel whisper in her ear : 
 " O maiden, judge another by your mood, 
 The sort of love he wakens in your breast ; 
 Down-dragging are your earthy, sensual souls, 
 Uplifting are your stronger spirits ; say, 
 Are you the better or the worse for them ; 
 And know the spirits, know them by your 
 own." 
 
 Sixth Guest. 
 Fall to, my merry, merry men, fall to, 
 The while I watch the fun and see you 
 
 floored 
 Like ninepins when you side against the right. 
 I call upon the doughtiest here to bear 
 This witness unto Truth, — that though he go 
 Goliath-armed against her, he shall lie 
 Felled by a stripling-shepherd in a smock 
 Who fights for her. As far as I can see 
 There's nothing left the poor unfortunate, 
 The Devil, but to drop his devilry : 
 

 
 14 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Misgivings first, conviction, otherwise ; 
 Next high resolve, conversion, if you will ; 
 This is the sequel of the Devil's love. 
 
 Fourth Guest. 
 Ay, Hell, they say, is paved with good 
 resolves. 
 
 Seventh Guest. 
 — And Heaven no less. Now, citizens, it is 
 The hour of midnight, when the Wicked One, 
 In mediaeval language, walks the Earth ; 
 And, with the kind permission of our host, 
 We'll drink a parting cup, — success in such 
 An enterprise to him who took the Ash- 
 Tree Ygdrasil betwixt his burning palms, 
 And shook like fruit the shining stars from 
 Heaven. 
 
 Second Guest. 
 What, drink good luck unto the Devil's love ! 
 
 Angelus. 
 No, no, success to him, repenting, man.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 15 
 
 [They drink and depart, one singing a song 
 to the tune of "See the Conquer i fig Hero 
 comes"} 
 
 Well he knows who would be good, 
 He can be the thing he would ; 
 Ere the act the deed is done, 
 Ere the fight the field is won ; 
 In this realm alone can we 
 Cou?it upon the victory. 
 
 Rags beyond the Palace-gate 
 Soil the Palace purple state ; 
 Many a sick and sinful thing 
 Shames the sceptre of the King; 
 And the doubt will oft intrude, 
 Can this be and God be good ? 
 
 When we find in Nature's plan 
 Platform for a perfect man ; 
 Then we know the mind of Him 
 Whom these shapes appalling dim ; 
 Call him Christ or call him Buddh, 
 God is for us, — God is good.
 
 l6 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Angelus, alotie. 
 Tis well they did not wive and father him, 
 The Devil, for the wicked shall not wed 
 Like other couples whose conceit it is 
 To marry and have children. — Is it so ? 
 Lives there the man who fears not fatherhood, 
 To reproduce himself in son of his, 
 Perpetuating his besetting sin, 
 Creating generations yet unborn ? 
 
 What if I were the Devil ? — for who knows 
 But one is he incarnate ? — if I were 
 So damned I were happier in Hell ? 
 But no ! as often as I sink, I rise ; 
 However low I grovel, 'tis my virtue 
 Never to rest in vice, but evermore 
 My buoyant spirit boundeth back again 
 In its sublime resilience to the stars. 
 
 If Helen whose eidolon went to Troy, 
 Had met it wandering by the banks of Nile ! 
 If there arose betwixt the Night and me 
 The spectral self, and I survived the sight : 
 But, as it is, I cannot see myself
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 17 
 
 For others, whose pursuits so poor and vain, 
 Whose tastes and sports so barbarous, passion 
 
 prose, 
 Have sunk into my soul such scorn of men 
 That often I am half-inclined to fear, 
 " I am the best man I have ever known :" 
 A thought to make the middle-sized in God 
 Woeful as woman when 'tis proved too plain 
 Her lordly equal in the other sex 
 Is not a thought superior to herself 
 With all her weakness ; — sad as Socrates 
 On that bereaving night the messengers 
 Returned from Delphi with the oracle 
 That he, poor sage, not very great or wise, 
 Was yet the wisest in the Fatherland. 
 
 [Looks fixedly before him. 
 Horror of horrors ! what art thou ? — myself ; 
 O maddening apparition, how I hate thee ; 
 Would thou wert flesh and blood that I might 
 
 slay thee ! 
 
 [Hides his face in his hands.
 
 l8 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Scene II. — A Field in the Sunset. Angelus 
 sitting on a fallen tree. 
 
 Angelas. 
 
 Alas ! that virgin soul should fritter thus 
 Its lately-liberated force away 
 In fugitive affections, till 'tis fain 
 To warm itself at someone else's fire, 
 To light its lamp at other's. I am he 
 Who drank the soul of woman in her love, 
 Firing my blood with sacramental wine, 
 — O sacrilege ! My compact with my loves 
 Was that of Faust with Mephistopheles : 
 Fill my imagination, haunt my dreams 
 Waking, with rich romance, and I am thine, 
 So long, no longer ; when my life has ceased 
 To be atremble, and the air athrob 
 With passion and desire, our compact ends. 
 
 O withering Passion, what can wither thee ? 
 — Nothing but thine own self. Oh, predicate
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 19 
 
 Of Passion, above all that's fugitive, 
 
 It passes : yester-eve in flush of prime 
 
 Imperious, bearing down, and sweeping all 
 
 Before it as a flood ; to-day 'tis naught, 
 
 Forgotten, it has passed as utterly 
 
 As last night's storm, and left no trace but 
 
 wreck. 
 And now, I know not why, I think of you 
 Who once so stormed my senses, drave such 
 
 shocks 
 Through all my sky, but with no pulse the 
 
 more, 
 No warmth of heart, no moisture of the eye, 
 No tremor of the lip, no feeling left 
 But scorn sufficing to disown the self 
 That passed from fire to ice. Yes, I have 
 
 dreamed 
 Of loving, but I have not loved till now. 
 ^'hat if this passion were as vain as those, 
 What if this flood of feeling should subside 
 And leave the shore all strewn with empty 
 
 shells, 
 As other passions did before ! Ah no,
 
 20 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 A man may fondly think himself in love 
 With every moon, but when he loves he knows. 
 [Donna approaches in the distance. 
 Beautiful beings are not fetched from far, 
 The Beautiful comes. False ties are full of 
 
 fear 
 And troubled joy and anguish and unrest ; 
 True ties are perfect. 
 
 \He sees Donna. 
 
 Lovely as the light 
 Through lilies ! Brow for God, but mouth 
 
 for man ! 
 O lips, Love's very own, still strange to mine, 
 May I not feel for them but once, and live 
 On their remembered sweetness evermore ? 
 Never, no more than may Diabolus. 
 And I mistrust the love that can be won, 
 For if it can be won it can be lost, 
 Unstable as the gas that is condensed 
 At pressure of some thirty atmospheres. 
 
 She has perceived me and she makes for me ; 
 And I must play the part of middle age,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 21 
 
 Superior to her youth, and smiling down 
 Her ignorance and inexperience, 
 Goethe or god. So soon as she appears 
 I shall be all she thinks me, spite of me, 
 With eyes star-full of aspirations, though 
 Such looking-up is straining to a sense 
 So played upon as mine — akin to his 
 Reclining on his couch at dead of night, 
 Trembling on sleep, and wakened throbbing- 
 
 wide 
 With feeling as of falling far in space, 
 Yea, falling, falling from eternity. 
 
 [To Donna. 
 
 My child, sit "down by me, and say what 
 
 thought 
 As mute as yonder wistful woods is this, 
 A secret theirs and thine ; no thanks, I see, 
 To this book, . . " Poems by . ." 
 
 turned upside down ; 
 I wot it opens, this romance of life, 
 As every woman's at the page of love. 
 
 [Opens the book at the passage which 
 follows : —
 
 22 MIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 If thou be fit for friendship, art the called 
 To this high calling, tread with sacred awe 
 Within its precincts ; fear to enter, lest 
 The. early rashness be the latter doubt ; 
 Doubt once, to love and trust for evermore. 
 Take off thy shoes from off thy feet ere thou 
 I! ith infinite precautions, saving fears 
 And preparation of the heart, engage 
 In this the siveetest of the Mysteries. 
 Initiated in these sacred rites, 
 Return alone in silence to thy house, 
 Be love thy secret even from thy friend, 
 As the most potent charm thou knowest of, 
 When other charms and incantations fail 
 To lay the spirits or to summon them. 
 Reserve " / love "for some extremity, 
 Some supreme moment when this Time and 
 
 Space 
 Seem levelled to the nothingness they are, 
 And nothing but the soul of things survives : 
 Who dares to front the heavens and say he 
 
 loves ? 
 Love is too large a word for man to mouth.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 23 
 
 {Aside. 
 
 " Some supreme moment," what is that but 
 
 love ? — 
 The thrilling moment when two spirits meet, 
 Like streams that leapt from different heights 
 
 to meet 
 In some delicious hollow of the hills, 
 With added waters and a doubled life 
 To pass together to the Great Unknown. 
 
 [Some one at a distance sings unseen. 
 
 Spring, begin to ivake the dene, 
 Tingling into buds of green, 
 Soft suffusing loamy lea, 
 Meet for musing : 
 
 "Vive la Vie!" 
 
 Domia. 
 
 With one hand taking the book, and with 
 the other loosening Angelus's hold. 
 
 Nay, do not laugh at me, you must not laugh. 
 It is my wont, you know, to take out books
 
 24 DIABOLUS AMASS. 
 
 And not to read them. Who could read 
 
 to-night 
 While God is tracing yonder burning scroll, 
 Or speak when He is speaking? Oh, that sky, 
 The glowing furnace-heart of flameless fire ! 
 Is it not wonderful ? I am so glad 
 To find you here ; I somehow thought I 
 
 must, — 
 The sunset is so beautiful to-night. 
 
 Angelas. 
 Are not all sunsets beautiful, my child ? 
 The gray of eve as thrilling as the rose 
 That burns to amber? Heaven is every- 
 where, 
 The sky broods over all, the sole domain, 
 And no one shall sequester or enclose 
 That common, as the wretches fence the moor 
 And the sea-coast. 
 
 [The song goes on. 
 
 Till with mellow sutiny hours 
 Into yellow fields of flowers,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 25 
 
 Into clover-purpled sea, 
 Running over, 
 
 Vive la Vie I 
 
 All fair is Earth, and arts 
 That oust us from one inch of earth and sky 
 Are but a choice of evils ; in her court 
 Beside her thistles purpling into flower, 
 We are as brave in sacking as in silk 
 And broidery of gold. And yet the crowd 
 Prefer the rockets spat into the face 
 Of the majestic moon to yon expanse, 
 The night-blue stretch beyond the Northern 
 
 Star: 
 For men are beauty-blind and deaf to boot, 
 They do not see the glories at their gates, 
 Gape as they may for comet and eclipse, 
 And wonder at the lightning of the God 
 Who first insisted on Himself in thunder. 
 The poet sings unheard, Cassandra-wise, 
 Never believed and never understood, 
 Whate'er his language, 'tis a foreign tongue ;
 
 26 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 The vespers might be Latin for the sense 
 They bear to Protestant and Philistine. 
 
 [The song goes on. 
 
 Sure the glowing life that ca?ne 
 Budding, blowing, is the same 
 That is moving here in me, 
 Feeling, loving: 
 
 Vive la Vie .' 
 
 Donna. 
 
 leave them, leave them ! thou and they 
 
 have naught 
 In common but thy scorn and hatred. 
 
 A 71 gelus. 
 
 Nay, 
 
 1 have no hatred. Truly love, and lo, 
 
 All thought, all feeling, takes the form of love, 
 And none is left to hate with. 
 
 Donna. 
 
 None, none, none !
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 27 
 
 Oh, life is lovely, and the day too short 
 For happiness that goes on in your dreams, 
 Wakes you at morning to the song of birds, 
 And that mysterious movement ere the dawn 
 — The quiver of recovered consciousness ; — 
 The dawn as fresh as if it were the first, 
 Nay, fresher in this season rich and full 
 With cumulative springs, with every leaf 
 Fashioned for its own flower — no other; when 
 The night is made for morning, grief for joy, 
 And we to wonder if we are in Heaven. 
 
 [Song. 
 Never having life, my brother, 
 Ever craving for another, 
 In the next so wilt thou be 
 Ever vexed so / 
 
 Vive la Vie / 
 
 O Angelus, and is it possible 
 That some men in their deep ingratitude, 
 Having received God's gift of life, despise 
 The present, which He thought to please us 
 with,
 
 28 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 And dare to ask Him in return, " Is life 
 Worth living?" 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Fools, they stretch their powers ! not so 
 This lovely flower that dies upon thy breast; 
 The question was not its to ask, nor thine, 
 Nor mine, nor any man's. But dark the 
 
 hours 
 That settle o'er the soul, when you are 'ware 
 Of sorrow, and your path runs parallel 
 To the great host of the afflicted. Here 
 So certain is the course of joy and \#e 
 Alternate, summer, winter, that we count 
 Unhappy them who laugh for they shall weep ; 
 And sorrow is sad, believe me, child. 
 
 Like the sapless, leafless tree, 
 Joyless, hapless, though thou be, 
 Only live and soon with ?ne, 
 Shout thy vive and 
 
 Vive la Vie !
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 29 
 
 Ay me, 
 Who are we that we talk of happiness, 
 Whose love is but an instant charmed from 
 
 Life, 
 Whose life is but a moment gained from 
 
 Death. 
 As well might the condemned within the cell 
 Dilate on earthly happiness as we ; 
 We are not men discharged but men reprieved 
 From fear and pain and punishment and 
 
 death : 
 The sentence has been passed, the doom 
 
 decreed, 
 The execution only is delayed, 
 And well the happy know, at any hour 
 Of night and morning, with his rod may 
 
 knock 
 The Lictor, officer of justice, fell 
 Of fate, to call us or our dearer self 
 To that uncertain and most certain Death, 
 Which in the final act, the closing scene, 
 Doth make a tragedy of every life.
 
 30 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Donna. 
 If this is all, if there's no other. 
 
 Grief why grieve for, making moan, 
 Grief doth live for joy alo?ie ; 
 Without sadness, where would be 
 Sense of gladness ? 
 
 Vive la Vie! 
 
 Why 
 Need any be ashamed of happiness, 
 Or call it earthly when it comes from God, 
 The Giver of all good ? We will not wait 
 Till we are sad to say, His will be done, — 
 We'll say it now with glad and throbbing 
 
 hearts, 
 For sunlight is His will, and birds and flow- 
 ers 
 And childhood and high hopes and happi- 
 ness. 
 So later, when the night is closing round, 
 And lights are burning dim by open graves,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 3 1 
 
 We yet may stretch our empty arms to 
 
 Heaven ; 
 God cannot take away what once He gave, 
 But keeps it for us still, for God is good. 
 
 Nathless, in the last " amen " 
 Who'd begin the feast again ? 
 Could you give it, who'd agree 
 To relive it ? 
 
 Vive la Vie! 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Why that your life-worth-living-one might 
 
 doubt : 
 'Tis hard to see that God is good, and this 
 Belief is living as it were by miracle 
 Just as it sprang : the sights and sounds of 
 
 earth 
 Do give the lie to goodness, and the life 
 Of feeling is — a woman's, pardon me, 
 Staggering your fed-by-hand, your rescued 
 
 faiths,
 
 32 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Making you wonder where was God, and 
 
 where 
 His angels when the fledgeling fell from nest, 
 Making you question if the Lord of Love 
 Be loving, if the Maker have a heart. 
 
 With the best his life supplied, 
 Every guest is satisfied; 
 Wherefore, give a?id give with glee, 
 Vive and vive and 
 
 Vive la Vie ! 
 
 Donna. 
 Nay, He is good, and nothing if not good ! 
 I know it by the pity in my heart, 
 Which comes, I know not whence if not from 
 
 Him, 
 When sight of wrong and outrage cross my 
 
 path 
 And every pulse protests 'tis not of Him, 
 For I believe in God the Father. When 
 At early morn I watch Him make the day, 
 The glittering drops of rain upon the grass,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 33 
 
 The mass of cherry bloom against the sky, 
 The stainless white against the stainless blue, 
 Do give the lie to our dark thoughts of Him 
 And gently say to me : It must be Love, 
 At least I do not know what else it is 
 That makes the common hedge-row white 
 
 with bloom. 
 Oh, see the sky reflected in the pool 
 And in our faces ! We must paint this pool 
 To-morrow in the sunset. 
 
 Angelus {aside). 
 
 Oh, that " we," 
 Love's pronoun ! 
 
 Donna. 
 
 And how often have you said 
 That, spite of this alternate hope and fear, 
 Creation groaning in its pain till now, 
 That the last word would be pronounced by 
 
 God, 
 And that last word were love and blessedness.
 
 34 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Song. 
 
 I gathered for my love 
 
 A blossom warm and white, 
 She laid it on her breast, 
 
 And there it died by night, — 
 The night we parted, — pressed 
 
 In one the kiss of years ; 
 And still I see her eyes 
 
 That looked their love through tears. 
 
 Angelus. 
 My child, forgive my mournful middle age 
 Casting cold shadow on the light of youth. 
 Ah me, the last word has not yet been said, 
 And the next words are sadness and farewell, 
 Bereaving those who die as those who live, 
 As sad to those who go as those who stay. 
 
 Donna {pale). 
 What, are you weary of us, Angelus ? 
 
 Angelus. 
 No more than God is weary of His worlds :
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 35 
 
 And yet must we rehearse Scene Third, Act 
 
 Five, 
 The last, the awful parting shadowed out 
 In every farewell sobbed upon the earth. 
 
 [Tears fall down her cheeks. 
 
 Donna, this must not be, these lustrous eyes 
 Quite quenched in tears. Thou must not 
 
 love me, dear. 
 Listen ! I have this — is it second sight ? — 
 Power to project from me the spectral self — 
 The most appalling wraith, the ghost of 
 
 ghosts, 
 It came to me but now at dead of night, 
 Donna, I saw myself . . I saw myself. 
 
 [She ceases to weep and comes nearer. 
 
 Nay, hear me, Donna, is this self, this /, 
 The self I do not love, and could not love, 
 The self which I would slay if it were flesh, 
 A mate for my Beloved. O my love, 
 Thy peer should be a nobler than thyself; 
 I wish thee better lot than loving me : 
 Love thou the highest ; love not me but God.
 
 36 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Throwing her arms round him. 
 
 It is not thou I love but God in thee: 
 What else in one another do we love ? 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Now I am happy, I can part from thee, 
 There is nothing that I would not do or dare ; 
 Live we or die, no harm can come to love. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 And I ! I know thou wilt not let me lose 
 
 By absence or by death. I go secure 
 
 To the Antipodes or Further Heaven, 
 
 Knowing thy consecrating soul will set 
 
 And keep me where I could not keep myself, 
 
 And reach me in my exile or my heaven, 
 
 Not letting me grow strange. Never did she 
 
 Who prayed for him she loved forget to love 
 
 Her dearest even gathered to the dead: 
 
 Such sweet provision is in piety 
 
 For all fond hearts that fain would faithful be.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 37 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Angelus, I never prayed for this : 
 
 " You help me " said by thee were all enough 
 To make my heart beat high with happiness, 
 It were enough indeed. And if at times 
 
 1 did desire thy love, it was for thee 
 
 And love's sake, Angelus, because I feared 
 
 One cannot love quite perfectly alone, 
 
 And thou wert . •. wert not happy. Oh 
 
 to see 
 One's own love suffer and to sit apart 
 Helpless, and with no right to live or die,— 
 This is the pang of unrequited love, 
 AVhich hath no second shaft when this is 
 
 spent. 
 
 • 
 I feel what — what a child might feel perhaps, 
 With all its latent life in it. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 —A girl, 
 The coming womanhood, the wife of years, 
 Upfolded in her breast.
 
 38 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Do/ma. 
 
 — The spring, this spring, 
 The glowing summer, with its golden eves 
 And rosy mornings, in its plenteous lap. 
 
 Angelas. 
 
 — The crescent rim that yonder silver-white 
 Contains, as delicate as bubble blown, 
 The filmy sphere of light, the perfect moon. 
 
 Donna. 
 O Angelus, this rapture is a pain 
 Sharp and persistent; might it kill? ah what 
 If Life proved mortal and we called it Death : 
 If one could like the plant that flowers and 
 
 dies, 
 If one could love and die, as poets dream, 
 It were the sweetest death and one could die. 
 
 Some one singing and going. 
 
 As our hearts beat together in mingled pulsa- 
 tion, 
 
 A?id zvith waves ever widening beat through 
 creation,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 39 
 
 Till the Heavens are aquiver with harmonies 
 
 choral, 
 And Ether vibrates withthe splendour auroral; 
 
 So let our spirits, sister and brother, 
 
 Mingle together and melt in the other, 
 
 Like the tints that we watch from the glowing 
 
 embrasure, 
 Crimson in amber, and amber in azure. 
 
 There in the light of glory supernal, 
 In the broad day where sits the Eternal, 
 Girt with true spirits, the mystical seven, 
 Say, wilt thou love me, love me in Heaven ? 
 
 The song dies in the distance with the refrain : 
 
 Wilt thou, oh wilt thou, love me in Heaven ?
 
 40 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Scene III. — A Lighted Room. Night. 
 
 Donna, alone, 
 playing on the organ and singing. 
 
 Thy joy, O Lord, thy joy, 
 
 Ln cups of lilies stored, 
 Ln some sweet soul that floivered at last, 
 
 Some lovely life ignored; 
 Thy joy at holy eve, 
 
 Among the hills with God, 
 Left to the Priest and Pharisee 
 
 Their temple s " Lchabod " : — 
 Alas, I may not tell ; 
 
 Nor step ?wr glance of mine 
 Can follow thee where thou dost tread 
 
 Thai Beulah land of thine. 
 
 My joys, O Lord, my joys 
 
 With thine no kindred claim, 
 
 They sometimes cost another peace 
 And me regret and shame ; —
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS« 41 
 
 Some selfish pleasure planned, 
 
 Some paltry triumph won, 
 Some flower at best that blooms a day 
 
 To droop before the sun ; 
 Pd shed my tears anew, 
 
 These bitter tears of mine, 
 To feel one joy of thine, O Lord, 
 
 To feel one joy of thine. 
 
 I copied this, when was it ? I forget ; 
 I had not heard of Angelus, and now 
 It seems so insufficient, like my life 
 Before he came, or life without him now, 
 Not to be counted in the calendar. 
 
 [Opens a Bible and turns the pages from 
 the beginning. 
 
 What shall I read, — my early story-book, 
 I liked it well, the Book of Genesis ? 
 I read it so, I had it off by heart, 
 And never never saw the harm of it. 
 Leviticus and the Law I shall not read, 
 I'm sure it was not made for girls like me, 
 
 c
 
 42 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Nor any moderns, one would hope, but just 
 
 For priest and Levite and the laity 
 
 Of darker dispensation. " Joshua " 
 
 Is war, nine-tenths of it, and wars I hate, 
 
 At least aggressive wars, and read them not, 
 
 Especially when written by themselves, 
 
 The people who engaged in them, for fear 
 
 I take their part, as I am sure to do 
 
 In novels with the " I," whoe'er he be. 
 
 I won't read " Judges " ; — Samson figures 
 
 there, 
 He's not improving. Ah, the Book of Ruth 
 —A woman, that's refreshing ! but a man 
 Wrote it, of course ; — the Ancients were all 
 
 men : 
 A pretty love-scene with Naomi that ! 
 Though now-a-days a princess will be praised 
 Who sticks to her own Church if Protestant. 
 The rest of Ruth I skip, so Jewish 'tis 
 Of widows changing hands in Hebrew style. 
 If love is " secular," as it would seem, 
 " Esther " is secular enough for love 
 — The lowest word of all in some men's 
 
 mouths :
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 43 
 
 Of love for woman — friendship at white heat, 
 
 In Bible-worthies there is little sign, 
 
 And next to none in ancient literature, 
 
 Angelus says ; — nor is it wonderful, 
 
 The women were mewed-up in rooms, just 
 
 cooks 
 And needlewomen, but for here and there 
 A Deborah who lived a fuller life ; 
 And so no man of sense and intellect 
 Would make or could have made his wife 
 
 his friend, 
 But had his Jonathan. Poor Jonathan, 
 The love was on his side, it seems to me ; 
 And David, in his In Memoriam, 
 Confesses not his love for Jonathan, 
 But Jonathan's for him. Poor Jonathan ! 
 
 Ah, this is springy turf beneath our feet, 
 We rise into the air of higher plane, 
 The solemn epic of the soul and God, 
 The psalmody that perished like an art, 
 The wisdom — was it his ? — of Solomon, 
 Sweet moralist immoral, he who sang
 
 44 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 The Song of Songs, in which the headings 
 
 help, 
 Or who the lovers, I had never dreamed, 
 And yet if they were not the Church and 
 
 Christ, 
 They were such flesh as his own Fatimas. 
 The burden sad and stern of seer sublime 
 Is not the reading for the time of night, 
 I'll give the morning hours to Malachi, 
 And pass from lips to lives inspired — the Life 
 Writ by biographer — not novelist, 
 Who cannot draw Derondas ; — letters, too, 
 From grave apostles, martyrs, all grand men, 
 To whom my love were an impertinence, 
 And not the staple of a serious life, 
 Though God is Love, but that's another love, 
 They tell us; is it? Ends the book with 
 
 Heaven, 
 And that I am not ready for to-night ; 
 And if an angel called me, " Donna dear," 
 I should be loth to go, and I should say, 
 " Oh not to-night, dear Angel, not to-night ; 
 I cannot leave him yet, my Angelus."
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 45 
 
 [Again turns the pages without reading. 
 
 I have read these books before I went to 
 
 sleep 
 Since ever I could read, excepting once 
 I found no word for me, — I was so sad, 
 And now I am too glad, too trembling-glad ; 
 In vain I turn the leaves ; — the Bible seems 
 A volume with the closing chapters gone, 
 Or with the burning leaves of Sibyl lost ; 
 There's nothing here that's half as glad as I ; 
 There's nothing here that answers to my 
 
 mood ; 
 There's nothing like my love for Angelus. 
 
 And where are those lost leaves? — in other 
 
 books, 
 Sweet scripture of these latter times, the lay 
 Of modern minstrel, the romance of days 
 We love in. What's the Bible but the truth, 
 Especially the truth of God and man ? 
 And that is sacred be it here or there, 
 In Middlemarch or Palestine. And so
 
 46 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 If God is glad to see two love so well, 
 
 And there's no word in what they call His 
 
 Book 
 That's human-glad enough for our young 
 
 hearts 
 Whose love is all ignored, — then let us turn 
 Devoutly to a later word of God, 
 And read the Bible in some other book 
 Than Hebrew prophet or evangelist. 
 
 [Lays down the book, puts out the taper y 
 and sits by the window. ~\ 
 
 Ye stars, the same that on Creation's day 
 Shouted for joy together, was there one 
 Of all the sons of God that shouted then 
 Whose thought could pierce as far in time 
 
 and space 
 As He could feel who loves so long, and 
 
 dream 
 The matin-song would last till vesper-hour, 
 God never tiring of His stars in Heaven 
 Nor of His daisies on the Earth? The break 
 In Nature's course is not the miracle
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 47 
 
 Most marvellous, if such there ever were ; 
 If sun and moon and sea were ever stayed, 
 'Twas but to waken man by one brief pause 
 To that grand constancy — the Miracle 
 Perpetual which sustains their course, and 
 
 brings 
 The seasons back again from year to year 
 From age to age for ever, with a charm 
 Beyond the telling of variety, 
 The same, the same, so many of the same, 
 Because One wearies not of them or us, 
 But binds us to Him faster-fast ; and so 
 The love that moved our fathers moves in us, 
 And still the streams our fathers gazed upon 
 Do meet and mingle in the lonely moor. 
 * * • # 
 
 Oh, I am glad that when we cannot see 
 Each other we can see the stars, the same, 
 And the same heaven. 
 
 [Kneels. 
 
 O God, my heart is full 
 Of love and gratitude as yonder orb
 
 48 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Is full of light but has no pulse of prayer ; 
 I have no wishes for myself or him, 
 Except that all were happy as we are ; 
 Thou canst but keep to us the good we have; 
 To ask for aught when we have all, were vain ; 
 To ask for all with naught, were want of 
 
 faith ; 
 I cannot pray : unless the soul of prayer 
 Is thinking, feeling God, as I am now, 
 And haply I am praying after all.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 49 
 
 Scene IV. — Afternoon. Porch of a Country 
 Church. Donna within playing on the organ. 
 
 Angelus, alone, 
 singing to the tune played within. 
 
 Shadows gently setting 
 
 in the grass of June, 
 Under burning blue 
 
 of summer afternoon, 
 All the wealth I counted, 
 
 all the joy it gave, 
 Would I, could I, tell it, 
 
 I should seem to rave. 
 
 Not for sovereign Saturn 
 
 with his belt of light, 
 Travelling in his splendour, 
 
 with his moons by night; 
 Not for any planet 
 
 and the light it showers, 
 Would I change this planet, 
 
 this dear Earth of ours.
 
 5<D DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Come, Donna, from that vault to this large 
 
 heaven, 
 Leaving those painted flowers for yonder 
 
 slope 
 Less green with grass than gold with butter- 
 cups. 
 Give me a world of sky, for nothing else 
 Is wide enough to breathe in — not a church ; 
 The air that's bottled up from Sunday morn 
 To Sunday night is of the nether pit, 
 Diabolus, and God is out of doors ; 
 Yea, if there's any place where He is not, 
 It is a temple with its breathed breath, 
 Bad as a tavern or a theatre. 
 
 When, alas, the light 
 
 grows dim, the birds fly lenv, 
 Poitit not to the city 
 
 sheltered from the snow, 
 Amara?tths immortal, 
 
 gems and diamonds riven 
 From the lurking splendours 
 
 Of the Further Heaven ;
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 5 1 
 
 Not the heaven of angels 
 
 far away and cold, 
 Which the sick and dying 
 
 in their dreams behold. 
 Ask me not to love 
 
 the saints I never knew, 
 Send me not io angels 
 
 who would stay with you. 
 
 Donna, dear heart, is none the worse for 
 
 church, 
 And lists devoutly to the priest, although 
 The lessons for the day are in the fields, 
 And he has little fresh to teach, for he 
 Lives in a church and rarely climbs the hills 
 For the last word of God. What if I preached, 
 I might be found at church as oft as he. 
 A banquet hath been spread, a " come " 
 
 pronounced, 
 But one and all the guests excuse themselves; 
 For one is staring at a painted moon 
 That never lit the faces in the pit, 
 The pallid faces gazing at the play,
 
 52 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 And is at table d'hote in the hotel 
 When the moon rises ere the sun goes down y 
 And silver sheen takes up the amber rose 
 Of that snow-maid, the Jungfrau of the Alps ; 
 And one is in the Royal Institute, 
 Straining his neck for painter's buttercups, 
 While God's have dropped their petals all 
 
 unseen 
 In the sweet season of the Christian year, 
 The London season — blush, barbarians blush, 
 The spring will shed its bloom, the summer 
 
 end, 
 The harvest pass and thou wilt not be saved : 
 And he, the silly woman's god, the priest, 
 Who should announce the message to the 
 
 host, 
 Is holding octave services on end 
 In pest-polluted air, and cannot come. 
 This is the gospel of the open air, 
 The gospel of the grass — on which the Lord 
 Commanded his to sit and bade them too 
 Consider lilies. . . Donna . . well, no* 
 
 need
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 53 
 
 To say all this to her, for she loves both 
 The worship in the church and out-of-doors, 
 And this shall be suppressed with that worse 
 
 self 
 Which seems suspended, should that self 
 
 revive. 
 For if the Devil were a man in love, 
 And were beloved in spite of him by one 
 Earth-maiden, petal-pure, 'tis plain to all 
 The Devil's duty were, with fold on fold, 
 To live like Lamia at a fearful strain 
 Lest he should lapse into the thing he was. 
 
 Me when I first saw you 
 
 oft my heart misgave, 
 Lest I spake with spirit 
 
 who had passed the grave; 
 Yea, you seemed ever 
 
 in your sweet perfection, 
 Such as saint is storied 
 
 in the resurrection. 
 
 Loi>e, be my offences 
 
 lighter found or graver,
 
 54 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 When One comes to judgment, 
 
 witness in my favour, 
 When I satu God's best, 
 
 then best I loved it too, 
 Beauty — Goodness — God 
 
 I loved in loving you. 
 
 [The organ ceases, and presently Dotma ap- 
 pears in the porch. Angelus draws her 
 dotvn to his side on the bench. 
 
 Donna, my darling, what has come to thee ? 
 Thou art so tall and strong and free and gay 
 And self-sustaining, not like one I knew 
 That entered rooms as she would go again, 
 Not sure of welcome ; then I thought that 
 
 thou 
 Wouldst with the strength of weakness lean 
 
 on me, 
 And I should hold thee with the strength of 
 
 ten, 
 Incorporating thy sweet soul in mine ; 
 And lo ! I find thy forces shame my own :
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 55 
 
 Calmer and stronger dost thou seem to me, 
 Yes, even taller than in days gone by. 
 
 Donna. 
 Tall, am I ? — I am rather tall, I think ; 
 On tiptoe I were nearly tall as thou. 
 Thou wilt not smile me down in days to 
 
 come 
 As in the days gone by ; for in the hour 
 I knew myself beloved of thee, I lost 
 The old distrust of self and fear of thee 
 And others, reconciled my spirit rose, 
 I stood at my full height, I moved along 
 In a profounder heaven, a wider earth, 
 With lighter step and fuller pulse, the blood 
 Of heroes and of lovers in my veins. 
 If I grow grand and strong for love of thee, 
 Own sister to the Portias in the plays 
 I used to think of as a caste removed, 
 I shall not wonder much or count it strange ; 
 Love shall work miracles, transform the mood 
 As surely as the water into wine 
 At Cana in the presence of the Lord.
 
 56 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Angelas {aside). 
 
 Alas, I am not such that love of me 
 Should make thee even lovelier than thou art. 
 
 [To her. 
 Hast thou no fears, then ? 
 
 Donna. 
 — Fears of what, of whom ? 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Oh, Donna, thou hast never dreamed a 
 
 dream, 
 Saying the while, " I know it is a dream, 
 And yet I will pursue it." 
 
 Donna. 
 Not awake. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 And thou art safe from the devouring fears 
 Of the unfaithful.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 57 
 
 Donna. 
 I had fears at first 
 Because of my unworthiness. But love 
 Makes good my claim, and now I question if 
 There lives the hero-saint or poet-prince 
 Too high for her who loves him. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Would you deem 
 Diabolus that loved more worthy love 
 Than Angelus that loved not ? 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Yes, but then, 
 Could any be Diabolus and love, 
 Or loving could he be Diabolus ? 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 He could not love and be Diabolus ; 
 The more a being loves the less he sins ; 
 And perfect love were perfect purity ; 
 So ran the rhyme my mother taught to me : 
 
 D
 
 5° DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 " Heed the silver whisper. 
 Heard the din above ; 
 To be good, be happy, 
 To be happy, love." 
 
 Donna. 
 
 There should be other ways of being good 
 Than being happy, since we cannot all 
 Love and be happy and must all be good. 
 But yet I understand you, now I seem 
 To have no dealings any more with Death, 
 For there is naught of me that is not God, 
 Because I live His life and love His love. 
 O Angelus, you do believe in God. 
 
 Angelus. 
 Do I believe, Beloved, do I live ? 
 Such cold words could not come into my 
 
 heart, 
 Although they might be put into my lips, 
 When all my being palpitates with God : 
 Have I not said " I love ?" is not all said 
 When " love " is said ? stop with the name of 
 
 God:
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 59 
 
 Ah why so many words for what is one ? 
 What ! shall the mark of the unlettered boor 
 Be counted valid in the courts of law, 
 And not the signature of lettered scribe ? 
 Shall credo's uttered anxiously and oft 
 As if the Lord would die when these should 
 
 end, 
 Be counted as confession of belief, 
 And this " I love," the sum and substance 
 
 sure 
 Of all the faiths, not hold in Earth and 
 
 Heaven ? 
 My Best-Beloved, were I God Himself, 
 I could not be more sure of Him than now, 
 And wherefore ask me then if I believe ; 
 No lover lives and not believes in God. 
 
 Donna. 
 And if you loved me not you would believe. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Yes, I believe He is because I am, 
 That as my body and mine outward life
 
 60 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Are sacramental solely of a self 
 
 Invisible and real, so this., the world 
 
 I gaze on, this material universe, 
 
 Is but the sacrament of soul, and else 
 
 Nothing, unmeaning and irrelevant. 
 
 And there's another world in which we live 
 
 As sure and certain though invisible ; 
 
 I have been reasoned with and God revealed 
 
 In pages of my own biography, 
 
 That precious passage which is God's aside, 
 
 God's entre nous to man. Remember too 
 
 I am a poet, and as such I hang 
 
 Directly on the Being who inspires, 
 
 The Breath that bloweth when and where it 
 lists, 
 
 And without which I am as other men ; 
 
 Dependent as a babe upon the breast, 
 
 What can a poet but believe in God ? 
 
 Donna. 
 
 — And so in immortality. 'Twere strange 
 
 If the Eternal only loved in time, 
 
 If all the Father-pains He takes with us
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 6l 
 
 From birth to death were brought to sudden 
 
 close, 
 While we His creatures will not hear of Death 
 As bringing to an end immortal love : 
 
 {Points to an open grave and holds faster the 
 hand of Angelus. 
 
 Or how could we confront that dreadful day 
 When Death has come and gone, and phan- 
 toms rule 
 The house, and shadows flit upon the stair?, 
 And rooms are full of emptiness, and things 
 Are relics, and a nothing fills our eyes, 
 And just a print will pain us, and we turn 
 From happy sights — the mother and the child. 
 Even the mated robin on the lawn, 
 And we are sad for lovers, yes for all 
 That live and are to die as trembling doves 
 Pursued by bird of prey. If Death's a fact, 
 And God is not one or the life to come, 
 Ah, why begin what is so soon to end !
 
 62 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Ah why, indeed, e'en if a mortal man 
 Could entertain a love immortal, God 
 A mortal, which were sure absurd ! And so 
 We stand committed, Donna, thou and I, 
 For when two lovers sit as we do now, 
 Their arms encircled and their lives involved, 
 They hereby give it as their act and deed, 
 They do believe their loves will be prolonged, 
 They do believe in immortality. 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Ah yes, there ought to be another life 
 
 To which this leads us up, for here so much 
 
 It takes us long to learn is little used, 
 
 At least the last experience of Death. 
 
 Angelas. 
 
 There ought — there is; nothing so possible :— 
 My body has been paralysed by frost 
 And winter, and my soul been doubly live ; 
 And now my soul hath sickened unto death, 
 And this coarse clay, my body, never ailed ;
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 63 
 
 Methinks the twain might go their several 
 
 ways 
 Without a break in continuity 
 Of this mysterious Me. Nay, more than this, 
 I have dropped my body some five times or 
 
 so, 
 But / am I, the same / that I was, 
 I have risen again ; it is not hard 
 To hold the resurrection from the dead. 
 
 And now, my Donna, what was once a hope 
 And then a faith, is now a passionate 
 Conviction which no argument could shake 
 Or strengthen. Tis the heart that apprehends 
 Immortal verities and not the brain ; 
 Not with the ear is mortal beauty seen, 
 Not with the eye is earthly music heard, 
 Nor with the brain immortal truth perceived. 
 At church last night I stood not far from thee, 
 The people vanished from me and the priest, 
 The aisles receded and the lights grew dim, 
 The Nunc dimittis died upon my ear, 
 The Earth was far away as Hesperus,
 
 64 DIABOLDS AMANS. 
 
 And Heaven was all as breathing-close as 
 
 thou, 
 My heart was beating outwards into space, 
 I felt it pulsing at the furthest sphere 
 With ever-widening waves of consciousness, 
 I swept all space, I tenanted all time, 
 For I was God, I was Eternity : 
 And how then should I not believe myself 
 Eternal ? 
 
 Donna. 
 
 How indeed ! and I, dear love, 
 Was one with God for I was one with thee. 
 'Twas a strange night ! there was a power in 
 
 it 
 That filled all thought and left no interval 
 To think in. After you were gone, I went 
 Into my room and near the window sat, 
 There was no breeze and yet the air was live, 
 Night held her breath and yet the poplar 
 
 stirred, — 
 You know the tallest poplar near the house ?
 
 BIABOLUS AMANS. 65 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 yes, the poplar, that aspiring tree, 
 That earnest grower, with no leaf or shoot 
 But is determined upwards, no asides, 
 Deflections walnut-wise to right and left 
 With moods in growth. How life is simpli- 
 fied 
 
 By singleness of aim, and unity 
 
 Of purpose, one direction in the growth 
 
 And that to Heaven. 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Well, in that spot I sat 
 Where it is easiest to pray, since there 
 
 1 use to sit thinking of God and Heaven, 
 
 Angelus (aside.) 
 — Thinking of nothing at five minutes' end, 
 To my most certain knowledge. 
 
 Donna. 
 . . . . and of thee ; 
 There first to God I told my love for thee,
 
 66 DIAEOLUS AMANS. 
 
 And prayed for thee when I could naught but 
 
 pray. 
 And long I sat and mused but could not 
 
 pray ; 
 My lips were voiceless, dream-delayed and 
 
 locked, 
 Whene'er I thought of thee. For it were 
 
 hard 
 For me who am a part of thee. . . . 
 
 Atigelus. 
 
 Ay, ay, 
 A very part of me art thou ; in thee 
 I am young and innocent ; when thou dost 
 
 sing 
 Thine evening-hymn I seem to sing in thee ; 
 And when thou kneelest I am praying too. 
 
 Donna. 
 And when I do not pray, my Angelus ? 
 
 Angelas. 
 Ay me, my creed, I had forgotten that :
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 67 
 
 It is an accident — I mean the creed- 
 Concerning which you are not well informed. 
 If I be Christian or Mohammedan 
 Or both, or Catholic or Protestant 
 Or neither, — these are points you cannot 
 
 clear 
 More than the mother questioned by her child 
 If God were Catholic or Protestant. 
 And yet with some you'll not misunderstand 
 My slack observance of your special rites, 
 The service done to man in prayer and praise, 
 Deeming me " irreligious," " sceptical," 
 Joining two words that are not joined in 
 
 Heaven. 
 Albeit Science and Philosophy 
 And Resignation stop the mouth of Prayer, 
 You may believe since all who live and love, 
 Yea, all men under pressure speak with 
 
 Heaven, 
 Not to be nice or to prescribe the way, 
 Out of the depths I cry to thee, O God ! 
 And though I am not one of those who pat
 
 68 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 The Almighty on the back, and say " Good 
 
 God" 
 As if He were a dog, yet doubtless I 
 Being a man, do give some exercise 
 To that sublimest instinct of the soul 
 Its passion for its God, whate'er His name. 
 
 Donna. 
 Ah, be not vexed but hear me, Angelus. 
 I fell asleep at last, my prayer unprayed, 
 A sullen child that has not said " good-night," 
 And kissed its mother ere it goes to bed. 
 And as I slept I dreamed. And in my dream 
 We were together in a hollow earth, 
 A concave hemisphere, a dungeon deep, — 
 Deeper than heaven was high ; the sky a roof 
 Crossed by a sun that set in sickly haste 
 So to be quit of such a world as this, — 
 And by a moon, the moon's eye shot with 
 
 blood, 
 That opened on us but to close again 
 And leave us to a night outlasting day. 
 And thou didst chafe and suffer more than I,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 69 
 
 For I had wings and could have left that life, 
 Would I have come into the upper air 
 Without thee, Angelus. And when I woke, 
 Throb followed hard on throb, as wave on 
 
 wave, 
 In that full flood of feeling with the thought 
 I had been faithful in my dreams to thee, 
 And had not left my Angelus for Heaven. 
 
 Angelus. 
 Nay, better far leave Angelus for Heaven 
 Than Heaven for Angelus. 
 
 [aside. 
 
 Alas, if thou 
 Become assimilated unto that 
 Thou lovest . . grow like me ; thus with 
 
 the weeds 
 The flowers of sweetest superstitions pulled, 
 The garden of the soul a wilderness, 
 The fount of first affections choked and dry, 
 The track quite lost, forgotten the way Home. 
 Oh, I had rather lose thy love than thee ;
 
 70 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 I would not have thee by a touch the less, — 
 The pensive joy, the sympathetic grief, 
 The fond fidelity of heart that holds 
 To all the dear traditions of the hearth, — 
 The faith that was thy father's. Well I wot 
 Nothing is left me but to grow like thee, 
 And, as the children say, be good — but how 
 Is still the problem that remains to solve, 
 Nor yet perchance insoluble; for sure 
 The Devil's self were good for her he loved ; 
 For what is good, and love is not as good ? 
 And what is fair, and love is not as fair? 
 And what is high, and love is not as great ? 
 And so in circles ever widening out, 
 Love shall be co-extensive with the life, 
 And e'en Diabolus an angel be.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 7 1 
 
 SCENE V. 
 
 Sunday. A Town in France. The Interior 
 of an Evangelical Church. Congregation 
 Singing. Angelas. 
 
 Angelus {aside.) 
 
 This morning stopping short of Notre-Dame, 
 I passed into this church, in hopes, maybe, 
 To find some milder genius preside 
 Than that fat priest who preaches Christ and 
 
 Church 
 In the spirit of the Devil ; otherwise, 
 I had worshipped all as well in Notre-Dame, 
 In grand cathedral breathing ancient prayer, 
 As well as in a plain conventicle, 
 Sine qua non of Presbyterian sires 
 Whose God was just a good Scotch minister. 
 
 Hymn. 
 
 Hadst thou a desert earth tenanted lonely, 
 Hadst thou rebelled against goodness all- 
 tender,
 
 72 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Then had He died for thee, died for thee only ; 
 For so dire the offence, and so dear the 
 offender, 
 
 He had died for thee only. 
 
 Leaving the Fair of Earth's Folly, my Brother, 
 
 Go on a pilgrimage passionate, lonely ; 
 Weep by the River of Tears as if other 
 Never had sinned, and as if for thee only 
 He had died, O my Brother. 
 
 Angelus (aside.) 
 Weep, must we weep? the programme is begun 
 With tears and lamentations, pilgrims all, 
 Since Bunyan, start upon their pilgrimage 
 All sighs and tears, although their hearts be 
 
 dry 
 As last year's heather. Tell not us to weep 
 In Lenten woes of three-hour agonies, 
 When God is feeling through the violets, 
 And pilgrimages should be made to flowers. 
 We may control our words and then our acts 
 And next our thoughts, and, in the end 
 
 perchance,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 73 
 
 Our feelings even, but we would not weep 
 To order with a grief conventional 
 And hollow as the Sodom that we leave, 
 The rotten, burning city of the plain. 
 
 [Pastor preaches. 
 
 Folly to think a man had aught for me, 
 To linger in a place with hope forlorn 
 That any soul had struggled into light 
 And might descend at seasons to the plain 
 With an evangel. First we had a prayer 
 To listen to, didactic, beautiful, 
 To Milton's god who loves the livelong day 
 To list to his own praise, of which a man 
 Modestly wearies ; now the sequel in 
 A sermon, text, Prepare to meet thy God 
 — My childhood's monstr' horrenoV inform! 
 
 ingens. 
 Why have I hither come when after all 
 I must, with sense — the sixth of deafness, 
 
 sweep 
 The speaker from my mind to realise 
 The power of spirits and the world unseen. 
 
 E
 
 74 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Pastor. 
 O thou who sittest thus with folded arms 
 In pride of intellect and prime of days, 
 Shall I bate any word for ears refined 
 And tell thee less than the unlettered boor, 
 Thou art a sinner, knowest thou hast sinned, 
 And as a soul that sinneth thou must die. 
 
 Angelas (aside.) 
 Sin, what is sin ? — so artificial seems 
 The line 'twixt vice and virtue, changing so 
 With clime and century ; shifting for state 
 And subject, man and woman, you and me. 
 Ay, once I sinned a sin that was a sin 
 Though christened such, and knew ; and one 
 
 with me 
 Sinned without knowing, with a conscience 
 
 clear, 
 Died early in my arms as white a soul 
 As ever preened its plumage for the skies. 
 But I, I knew what Sin was by its wake, 
 Its scorching track of fire ; as in the East 
 You see the purples of the sun that sinks
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 75 
 
 In splendour, in the faces of the crowd 
 The power and passion of the orator, 
 And in the lover's eyes the loveliness 
 Of his affianced maiden. Then I knew 
 That I had dulled the edge of finer joys, 
 And lost the livelier sense of life and love 
 And beauty ; that thereafter, Eden lost, 
 I should not feel so finely, think so well, 
 Nor even love as I might else have loved : 
 I knew, in other phrase, that sin is sin, 
 And he who sinneth hath begun to die. 
 
 Pastor. 
 Thou feelest in thy soul the need of blood 
 Shed to remit thy sin. 
 
 Angelas, (aside.) 
 
 Not so, my friend, 
 The need of blood hath never crossed my 
 mind, 
 
 • • • • 
 
 And thou repeating wilt not prove thy point.
 
 76 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Pastor. 
 That blood was spilt for thee on Calvary ; 
 There did the Sinless for thy sins present 
 Himself a pure oblation ; yea, God sent 
 His Son — a dearer self to sacrifice — 
 To die for thee the death thou shouldst have 
 
 died, 
 To pay the penalty thou shoulds't have paid 
 Justice offended. 
 
 Angelus (aside.) 
 
 — which is satisfied 
 By one injustice more, a murder foul, 
 The death of innocence for guilt. Ah me, 
 Poor Pastor, thou art lost then more than I 
 Whose sense is not perverted to the point 
 Of seeing justice where no justice is. 
 
 Pastor. 
 
 Man, who art thou that thou shouldst answer 
 
 God? 
 Who hath declared it by the mouth of all
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 77 
 
 His servants — prophets and evangelists, 
 The soul that sinneth it shall die, but He 
 Hath raised a symbol for His sin-sick souls 
 Smitten of serpent in the wilderness, 
 And if they turn the eye of faith to Him, 
 And trust not to their works, which cannot 
 
 save, 
 And reason not upon the plank that's flung 
 To save them from destruction, they shall live : 
 Thou hast but to believe and thou art saved. 
 But thou hast scruples, learned moralist, 
 Too simple this for thy philosophy, 
 As was the plunge in Jordan's sacred stream 
 To the proud stomach of the Syrian. 
 
 Angelus {aside.) 
 O ye good Christians evangelical, 
 So satisfied no sinner can be saved 
 By what he all the same can lose himself 
 For ever and for ever — works, to wit ; 
 'Tis faith that saves, Believe and live, you 
 
 say, 
 Running away with texts to miss the sense
 
 78 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Of all the life and lessons of your Lord : 
 
 And yet, if you consider well, belief, 
 
 Be it a motion of the head or heart, 
 
 Is still a sort of work, not easy, nay 
 
 The hardest, and to some impossible, 
 
 If there be other things — a book or church — 
 
 We must believe ere we believe in him, 
 
 Who was, if we may heed evangelist, 
 
 Who was what God would be were God a man; 
 
 Who to the leper said, " I will . . be clean ! " 
 
 Never such stuff, your version of Saint Paul 
 
 — A nut as hard as Hegel — cried in streets 
 
 And corners by your cheap Salvation-Jacks, 
 
 Stuff which sublimest seer and gentlest bard 
 
 Soon as they lipped no longer soared in song, 
 
 But falling plump as Icarus they lay 
 
 Like lumber with the prose of sound divines. 
 
 Say, shall I make for chapel catholic 
 With cemetery beaded like bazaar, 
 And bow before their altar wax and paint 
 And paper, pour my sorrows on the breast 
 Of their enamelled Virgin, kiss the feet
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 79 
 
 Of their cold Christ in plaster; where the 
 
 priest, 
 The man who pulls the wires and scorns the 
 
 show, 
 The hoary sinner with the underlip, 
 Shrives you of sin, unshriven of his own, 
 And offers up a pagan sacrifice, 
 The body and the blood — revolting phrase 
 Which I reject with loathing. Once for all, 
 In rite or dogma flourished as divine, 
 Whate'er offends the taste and shocks the 
 
 sense, 
 And quarrels with the tints of Earth and Sky,— 
 Whate'er is prose and is not poetry, 
 Father of Lies, I relegate to thee, 
 And I will none of it : that rag and paste, 
 That papery sentiment, those stuccoed saints, 
 Those "stations" coloured ill and ill-bestowed, 
 That gilt o'erlaid with dirt most "catholic, 
 That manufactured wafer, — not for me ! 
 — I am a poet ! and the soul of all 
 Hath sacraments more fitting ; Sea and Sky,
 
 80 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 These are the symbols of the Infinite, 
 These are the letters of the Everlasting. 
 
 Christ went into a mountain once to pray ; 
 
 And who was ever on the lonely hills, 
 
 And leapt from crag to crag, and looked 
 
 adown 
 The long green hollows stretching far and fired 
 With mellow light, and dimpling with the soft 
 And growing shadows of the afternoon, 
 And could refrain from shouting up to 
 
 Heaven ? 
 And I remember in my early youth 
 I wandered through the Alps, and passed 
 
 inspired 
 Within the precincts of the Awful Mount, 
 Up through the pines, their branches stream- 
 ing hoar 
 With lichen, up into the light beyond, 
 Up where the torrent strode the precipice, 
 Up where the waves ran mountains high and 
 
 froze 
 In leaping, up where pinnacled in blue
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 8l 
 
 The glacier shot, the white blown flame of ice ; 
 And there, with hands uplifted like my soul, 
 I stood all prayer before the mighty Blanc. 
 Yes, I will visit those high Alps again ; 
 Olympus was the dwelling of the gods, 
 And still the mountains are the home of Him 
 Who dwelleth not in temples made with 
 hands.
 
 82 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 SCENE VI. 
 
 -Sunday Afternoon. Coffee-Room of an Inn at 
 Bex. The snowy summits of Dent du 
 
 Morcle and Dent du Midi seen through the 
 open windows. An English lady singing 
 in the next room, the door of which is 
 partly open. Angelus and Ferdinand. 
 
 Angelus, writing in the recess of a window. 
 
 Again from the Hotel des Bains at Bex 
 I write, my Donna, staying on because 
 I like the place — I won't think why, for sure 
 Even with persons though there be a " but " 
 There never is a " for " in love, much less 
 With places everyone of which is fair 
 And fairer than all others, though the snobs 
 Pester you, " Do you think Lucerne or Thun 
 The lovelier ? the glacier of the Rhone 
 Or Mer de Glace the finer ? " Then the inn 
 Lies out of Cockneydom, though even here 
 There are some English visitors, a set 
 Of three — best company excepting two
 
 BIABOLUS AMANS. 83 
 
 Entirely one. These three I like them much, 
 
 The elder lady and the gushing girls ; 
 
 Some good great-grand-mamma has lately 
 
 died, 
 And grand-mamma, with nothing earthly now 
 Detaining her at home, has come abroad, 
 Bringing these girls — kind creatures with a 
 
 thought 
 E'en for the stranger. Lonely of all guests 
 Are we, the strangers, torn from all we love, 
 Finding no solace but to reproduce 
 Our darlings and to make them live and act 
 Where we are, here and there, by doing that 
 Which they would do if they were here — 
 
 accost 
 The aged unbefriended, or give up 
 The corner of a carriage to a child 
 That thinks it such a treat to " ride " by 
 
 train. 
 What else is absence for ? what else is left 
 To the bereaved by absence or by death, 
 But thus to multiply the lovely lost,
 
 84 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 And make the blessed free of Earth and 
 
 Heaven, 
 And carry on the dead for evermore, 
 As Christians Christ? or absence were too 
 
 hard ; 
 To have one's body eating, drinking here, 
 The while one's soul was thinking, throbbing 
 
 there, 
 Were something worse than death to me who 
 
 am 
 Body and soul, heart, brain, for ever yours. 
 
 [Stops to listen to a song. 
 
 My heart is throbbing still 
 As in that heavenly dream 
 
 Of vessel moored at marge 
 And doubled in the stream : 
 O Love — O Pain, 
 
 Give me my land again. 
 
 God to the lonely man 
 
 In Patmos gave a dream, 
 A drea?n of Heaven, that did
 
 DIABOLUS AMANSw 85 
 
 Celestial city seem : 
 But I, O God, 
 Would kneel and kiss the sod. 
 
 Dreams of the fields are mine 
 
 Who in the city dwell; 
 And passion is of pain, 
 
 The sorrowful love well : 
 Gone is the pain, 
 I have my hills again. 
 
 My lips their kisses rain, 
 
 On one beloved head, 
 Warm as we give the quick, 
 
 Pure as we give the dead. 
 O Love — O Bliss, 
 My lips shall keep her kiss ! 
 
 Well, I was telling you about the three : — 
 This rainy day they met with one they knew 
 In England, and the pleasure felt by one 
 Of these two girls was pretty to behold 
 And plain, as happens, unto all save him
 
 S6 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Who roused it — sitting yonder, young, poor 
 
 thing, 
 But with a face expressing thought, and past 
 The rawness of the striplings we abide 
 With the reflection they may yet be men 
 And so endurable. — Whom the gods love 
 Do not die young, they live to seventy-five, 
 And suffer all the bliss and woe of men, 
 And learn whatever may be learned below 
 Even the sense of dying, since there is 
 Another life immortal. But this youth, 
 The hero of the girl with sea-blue eyes, 
 Looks wretched and is drinking — brandy 
 
 poured 
 On brain alight with Burgundy. 'Tis hard 
 That one should be so happy in her love, 
 The other reckless in his misery. 
 And if I risking wrath expostulate, 
 He'll rate me as a raving Ribbonite : 
 It is not pleasant in another's eyes 
 To see your face as in a gravy-spoon 
 Distorted, yet for yonder girl who might 
 Be you, my Donna, I will warn the lad.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 87 
 
 [To Ferdinand. 
 Pardon my ten years' seniority. 
 Brandy is not a beverage to be bought 
 At buffet or at bar, sir ; 'tis a drug] 
 To be prescribed by the practitioner, 
 Bottled and sold by druggists, labelled 
 " Poison." 
 
 Ferdinand, 
 having thrown the brandy out of the window. 
 
 Physician, heal thyself, the proverb runs, 
 And what if I, prescribed myself the drug, 
 Swallowed by spoonfuls with the wryest face, 
 And discontinued when the patient mends. 
 You find a fellow white about the lips 
 And ring for brandy, when, by Bacchus, O 
 Humiliating fact, the patient here 
 Whom friendship could not soothe nor love 
 
 console, 
 Is lightened of his load, his griefs are gone I 
 Give wine to him that is of heavy heart, 
 Yea, spirits, with a use quite scriptural.
 
 88 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Angelus. 
 Ay, give him brandy, since unholy writ 
 Declares 'tis better to be drunk than sad. 
 
 Ferdinand, fingering a cigar. 
 Or give him a cigar to drug despair ; 
 Nor count him all unhappy who can smoke, 
 Who knows the genial influence of a weed, 
 For he or crazed with care, or crossed in love 
 Or marriage, or still worse bedunned to death, 
 Where once he would have kept awake o' 
 
 nights, 
 Debating ways and means, if suicide 
 Is recommended in the case of some 
 To dodge our Tuke and Maudsley, — he, I 
 
 say, 
 Thanks to Sir Walter, carries in a case 
 A sovereign remedy against Despair : 
 Jove hath his lightning ; Ajax his cigar. 
 
 Angelus. 
 Is man, then, not to graduate in grief ? 
 Shall he, too clever for his god, elude
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 89 
 
 The pain which gives an opportunity 
 To be a hero ? happy he must feel ; 
 Care is too crushing, misery too mad : 
 The coward cannot suffer, so he smokes. 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 One of those cowards by your leave am I 
 Who cannot dwell with anguish, see no good 
 In grief which makes me wicked ; could I 
 
 smoke 
 Or burn him out, I would with all my heart, 
 This arch-blaspheming god of Christendom, 
 This devil of Despair and Misery. 
 
 Song. 
 
 Thy grief, O Lord, thy grief, 
 
 Was like thyself unknown, 
 For this bad dream of sin and shame 
 
 A fid sorrow not thine own : 
 The crucifixion-pain 
 
 Was lost in grief for man, 
 Who stoned the prophets, slew the saints, 
 
 Since ever Earth began. 
 
 F
 
 90 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 But who of woman born 
 
 Can sound a grief divine, 
 Who follow to Gethsemane 
 And grieve such griefs as thine ? 
 
 My griefs, O Lord, ??iy griefs, 
 
 Must I repent of these, 
 Of hopes below the stars that seem 
 
 The sport of every breeze ? 
 If selfishness and pride 
 
 Had fou?id no place therein, 
 Would happy love be jealous pain 
 
 And very sorrow sin ? 
 I'd give my latest joy, 
 
 Yea, all these joys of mine, 
 To weep one tear of thine, O Lord, 
 
 To weep one tear of thine. 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 You hear that hymn ? — the sorrow spawned 
 
 of sin 
 Is sinful ; good is grief and doing good 
 When you are good, no sooner, on my soul,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS* 91 
 
 Though worshipped and enshrined like any 
 
 saint 
 Illustrious in the Church's calendar. 
 Oh, name not grief to me, spell not the word, 
 It has no virtue. Sorrow as the soul 
 Is, selfish or sublime ; as pure as love 
 And purifying, or as passion foul 
 And fouling. Grief divine and sacred, griefs 
 Of heroes, martyrs and philanthropists, 
 A man — Prometheus downwards — well might 
 
 claim 
 His sole inheritance, nor yield an inch 
 For all that men call pleasure ; lower griefs 
 But shame and sicken. 
 
 [ Walks tip and dcntm, his hands thrust into his 
 pockets. Stops at Angelas. 
 
 I'll discharge my soul, 
 A stranger is as good as any priest, 
 And you shall moralise on misery. 
 Dogged by the Furies, I have left my land 
 To miss the play to be performed at church, 
 A marriage, call it, or a pantomime,
 
 92 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 A tableau-vivant, where no mortal pra\ s 
 Or thinks of praying. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 And the actors there ? 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 The woman that I loved was one and I 
 Was not the other. 
 
 Angelas. 
 Ha ! and who is she ? 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 — A Juno and a Venus rolled in one : 
 A siren tongue that talks your soul away 
 As others sing it ; what the sex is not, 
 Good fellow, civis mundi, facile, free, 
 All curves, no angles, saving to her foes ; 
 When she throws back her head and treads 
 
 the floor, 
 A sceptre would not make her more superb 
 Or men more subject. See her and at first
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 93 
 
 She shocks you, then she charms you, draws 
 
 you off 
 From all your company, absorbs you quite, 
 Clearing a space about you ; then when you 
 Adopt her gods and kin and are fast hers, 
 There comes a sense of insecurity, 
 The unreality you feel in dreams, 
 A jealous fear of people she has known, 
 Loathing of all the men who come too near, 
 Men who are stamped with strong virility, 
 For these are sure to gravitate to her, 
 Matter to matter. Comes at last a day 
 You find yourself a third for her you love, 
 De trop, supplanted. Then beneath the soil 
 Of easy temper, sweet facility, 
 You come to rock immovable to force, 
 Impermeable to tears. The game is up : 
 You know the woman when you break with 
 
 her. 
 
 Angelus. 
 And so you love this woman?
 
 94 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 Love, not I! 
 Loved, if you will. 
 
 Angelas. 
 There's no past tense to " love." 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 I never loved her then. A week ago 
 Taking my everlasting leave of her, 
 I thought of Humpty Dumpty on the wall, 
 Of love once fallen from its high estate, 
 And thought 'twas rather more than she 
 
 could do 
 To set my old love on its legs again. 
 It is not love from which I suffer now, 
 But selfish sense of vacancy, the pain 
 You deify, and which I seek to lull 
 With liquors, though I like them not, with 
 
 hate 
 That rushed to fill the vacuum left by love, 
 A hate of her and all and you and me, 
 The race is so accursed. Who trusts a man
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 95 
 
 Is just an Alpine sheep that does not know 
 The genus brute and beast, the species man, 
 And trusts the monster, as I trusted her, 
 Who now trust none, but hug my hatred — so. 
 
 \Folds his arms. 
 
 Hateful is every shape of humankind, 
 Just as the statue of the citizen 
 Unveiled before the rogue has been revealed, 
 Is hateful to his fellow-citizens, 
 Humiliated to have honoured him, 
 Curse of the widow and the fatherless. 
 
 An°elus. 
 
 Unrighteousness imputed, let it pass ; 
 I judged as harshly when I was your age ; 
 Misanthropy was ever young and raw. 
 But note ! a boy, I boated in a stream 
 A man was angling in ; he swore at me, 
 And wished my boat might be capsized ; but 
 
 when 
 I, voting him a brute, had leaned too far 
 Over the vessel and upset the boat
 
 96 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Just where the current was too strong for me, 
 Then he, perceiving I was overpowered, 
 Flung off his jacket, plunged into the stream, 
 Although he had a wife and child at home 
 To starve if any harm should come to him. 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 A hard-mouthed soft Samaritan was that ! 
 But will one swallow make a summer ? 
 
 Angelas. 
 
 —Or 
 
 The want of it a winter ? 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 No. Well, well, 
 You may a man among a thousand find, 
 But where's the woman ? Talk of Lucifer 
 As " he " and " him " ! our grammar is at 
 
 fault ; 
 The Devil is a woman with brown eyes.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 97 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Since you are suffering from those blinding 
 
 orbs 
 You spoke of and see naught but blots and 
 
 blurs, 
 I will not call you ingrate. Not far hence 
 Are eyes that melt in a diviner blue 
 Than heaven upon you. And you like a fool 
 Closed your palm over paste and dropped the 
 
 pearl. 
 
 Ferdinand, starting. 
 What Lucy yonder ! If the loveliest eyes 
 Lighted themselves at mine, alas for me ! 
 For bitter, three times bitter, is the love 
 We never can return at least ki kind, 
 Nor would return. Oh, never may I lapse 
 To those who love me ! come what may, from 
 
 that, 
 Ye Gods, preserve me ! 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Yet you'll lapse to them, 
 And rightly ; if the acorn fits the cup,
 
 98 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 The cup must fit the acorn. Second love, 
 
 What is it but the virtue of an oak, 
 
 The more than meekness of a willow-stump, 
 
 Which blasted by the thunder-bolt of Jove, 
 
 Or mutilated by the hand of men, 
 
 Doth not though headless, shelled of heart, 
 
 refuse 
 To put forth through the splinter that it is, 
 The early leaf and blossom, to the hour 
 Obedient, when the old feeling welleth up 
 In greenness at the coming of the Spring. 
 And sure there may be consciousness in trees, 
 And stirrings in the flowers of that Great Soul 
 Who feels His way through Nature up to 
 
 man. 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 Yes, yes, I see what you are driving at ! 
 Man, selfish to the last, must have a god 
 All to himself, and made express for him, 
 It were so dreadful not to have a god. 
 And on this showing the last wretch of all 
 Is God, the godless, and I now see why
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 99 
 
 I woke this morning saying, " God, poor 
 
 God :" 
 For His own sake, let us hope there is none 
 
 at all. 
 How can He bear His own Eternity, 
 Or why when He is strong are men so weak, 
 And why when makingdid He make us thus, — 
 So gross a failure that if I were God, 
 Grasping the pillars of the universe, 
 I would pull in my heavens upon their heads, 
 I would destroy the creatures I had made, 
 And then like Samson with the Philistines 
 I would bow down my head and perish with 
 
 them. 
 I hail the hour whene'er, I care not when, 
 The race of man may come to be extinct, 
 That with the last oi genus homo too 
 May perish this intolerable pain, 
 This aching, smarting, bleeding consciousness 
 With which you would inform the universe. 
 
 Angelus {aside). 
 Why should I try to prove him in the wrong ?
 
 IOO DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 One would not argue with a fevered pulse, 
 Or seek to contradict delirium, 
 But give the patient cooling drinks, and find 
 Some searching remedy for his complaint. 
 
 Ferdinand. 
 
 Then you in this same craze for consciousness 
 Will have the planets — thick as motes in 
 
 beams — 
 People with sentient beings like yourself 
 And organised to suffer ; not content, 
 The flowers, forsooth, are conscious and have 
 
 souls, 
 Which God forbid. For who would wish 
 
 them sense, 
 Those daises which the girls decapitate 
 To string them in a chain to deck themselves, 
 After their sex, — those primroses they pull 
 And drop at noonday on the dusty road 
 To faint and perish in their own limp leaves. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 -Which luckily escape these Philistines.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. IOI 
 
 This aching, smarting, bleeding consciousness 
 Conceive of — no you cannot — without pain, 
 And where's the curse of it ? Well, here is 
 
 grief, 
 And while we may not guess the good of it, 
 We'll see it does not harm us. Felled to 
 
 earth 
 By that hard hitter from the shoulder, Fate, 
 We'll go not to revenge ourselves on God 
 Straight to the Devil. Well do men predict 
 Of constitution throwing off disease, 
 Of sinful soul that falls to rise again 
 And falling is not utterly cast down. 
 Power to recover is a power, the mark 
 Distinctive between man and man, the seal 
 Set on the foreheads of the souls elect. 
 The soul of man, the Mansoul that we know, 
 Suffers a siege and lifelong, which demands 
 Protracted heroism, and the strength 
 That beaten, baffled, crushed and left for 
 
 dead, 
 Always recovers and repairs the breach 
 As fast as it is made, and from the walls
 
 102 DIABOLUS AMAN'S. 
 
 Shouts " no surrender ! " to the foe beneath : 
 Till Death, our good ally, with succour sure 
 Cuts through the sharp fire and relieves the 
 
 town, 
 And rolling clouds of dust retreating show 
 The enemy retires, the siege is raised. 
 
 [Ferdinand abruptly goes and is soon heard 
 singing to the instrument in the next room. 
 
 In the thick of battle we 
 Live and quick with misery, 
 Death, we name thee o'er and o'er, 
 Ours we claim thee : 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 By the dense artillery plied, 
 Sinew tense and nostril wide, 
 Those be raging, furious war 
 Sternly zvaging : 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 On the field of battle poured, 
 
 By their shield and broken sivord,
 
 DIAEOLUS AMANS. IO3 
 
 In the riot rolled in gore, 
 These be quiet : 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 Drums may rattle, but which way 
 Goes the battle, careless they, 
 Where the bending plain they tore 
 Fierce contending ; 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 Break ?iot lightest sleep that is, 
 For the brightest waking bliss 
 Never deeper blessing bore ; 
 Wake no sleeper : 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 We who grope and darkling move, 
 Lost to hope and left of love, 
 Death, we name thee o'er and o'er, 
 Ours we claim thee : 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 When thy morrow come at length. 
 In the sorrow that is strength,
 
 io 4 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 We will meet thee at the door, 
 Smile and greet thee, 
 
 Vive la Mort. 
 
 Angelas (alone). 
 Heureka ! I could whistle like a boy, 
 And throw my cap into the air for glee.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 105 
 
 SCENE VII. 
 The same as before. 
 
 Angelus {alone, writing). 
 
 Do you remember, Dear, that afternoon 
 We sat and talked together in the porch 
 — Saint Saviour's ;you, maybe, were satisfied 
 With that profession of one's faith, through me 
 Conviction like electric current ran : — 
 Believe in God and immortality 
 He cannot, he whose life is not divine, 
 Whose life is not eternal. W T hat if I 
 Named the seven devils in possession — if 
 There were but seven, or even one of these? — 
 It were not good for any man to hear 
 Though he were priest. What if I did but 
 
 hint 
 Mysterious at some guilty passion past ? — 
 
 G
 
 106 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 That were to gain in picturesque effect 
 And int'rest. Then if out of church I owned 
 To general sinfulness and no one sin, 
 Why, you would count such censure of one- 
 self 
 Mere modesty and think the more of me. 
 But after you were gone, I said : O God, 
 Send me to Heaven, if sent a man can be, 
 Send me to Purgatory, yea to Hell, 
 If so in me thou garner up the good, 
 And burn the bad in fire unquenchable. 
 
 Pythagoras and Plato taught their schools, 
 The soul of man, a spark from the Divine, 
 Contracted in its tenement of flesh 
 Impurities that must be purged away 
 Here and hereafter. And the Roman Church 
 Appoints full many penances on Earth, 
 And speaks to purgatory pains beyond 
 Burnt into Dante's verse ; but as we list 
 We marvel much what virtue is in Pain 
 Or what in Joy itself, to purify; 
 And be there such, a man's salvation, sure,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 107 
 
 Which he in fear and trembling shall work 
 
 out, 
 Cannot depend on such an accident 
 As pain and penitence, belief and joy ; 
 On what it lies not in his power to think, 
 On what it lies not in his power to feel. 
 
 And so I travelled from my home in thee, 
 Sore with the parting-pain, the open wound 
 Of absence, sick with longing for the land 
 That sprang in burning green from sapphire 
 
 sea, 
 The Land of the Beloved. Hour by hour 
 Among the saffron-fields of Switzerland 
 I sought to lull to sleep my lonely pain, 
 And solve the problem that was still unsolved 
 In halting by the wayside-images, 
 Or kneeling in the twilight of the shrines 
 Where other pilgrims knelt and seemed at 
 
 rest. 
 To dream of happiness was too absurd, 
 To help a little in the happiness 
 Of others, — that, no more, was left to me ;
 
 IOS DIAB0LUS AMANS. 
 
 And that I found at first a sedative, 
 And then a tonic ; calm I seemed and strong, 
 And much was clear that erst had been 
 obscure. 
 
 And lo ! one night, my early self, the Past, 
 Stood like an angel by the present Me ; 
 Linked and divided were we by a chain 
 That coiled about my feet and sent its chill 
 Through all my shuddering frame, a fearful 
 
 coil 
 Of actions forged and cast in triple steel. 
 And when the phantom-self and phantom- 
 chain 
 Had vanished like a vision, saw I then 
 That right was possible as wrong had been, 
 That as I lost my heaven I might regain 
 By doing good each day and all day long. 
 And I who pity Goodness in her teens, 
 Awkward, unhappy, dwelling on defect 
 In chronic penitence — the Devil's trick 
 To keep her harping on her wretched self, 
 I too will practise Virtue like an art,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. IO9 
 
 Until it be a habit, till it move 
 Involuntary as a muscle moves, 
 No longer studied, forced, unnatural 
 And conscious as a clown of Sunday clothes. 
 
 Sound the philosophy — believe and live ; 
 Live and believe were just as sound, I wis ; 
 Tf faith precede or works, or if the twain 
 Shall run abreast, ay, be discovered one, 
 I know not, care not, this, at least, I know : — 
 
 W< midst thou believe in God, thou must be 
 
 good; 
 Outside of goodness shalt thou find no God, 
 Although thou look for Him in His own 
 
 House 
 His Palace — emerald Earth and azure Heaven. 
 Thou must be true to trust, what not to trust 
 Were foulest wrong, the best-belove'd One, 
 So stainless, in her sweet integrity 
 Surrendered to thee, with her virgin heart 
 And that first love which trusts : — the true 
 
 can trust,
 
 110 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 They only, for the false no vow can hold, 
 
 Or silence satisfy, or oath assure ; 
 
 The faithless lover is an infidel; 
 
 The hell of liars is distrust and doubt 
 
 Of love and truth itself. So man projects 
 
 His shadow on the spacious universe, 
 
 E'en to the furthest satellite, the last 
 
 Outrider of the Majesty of Heaven. 
 
 The pure in heart, the true in word and 
 
 deed, 
 The strong to suffer and renounce, the great 
 In loving, as they live the Blessed Life, 
 May come to know the else unknowable, 
 Best known unto the best. Thou must be 
 
 God 
 To see Him, know Him and believe in Him.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. Ill 
 
 Scene VIII. — Dusk. The Leads of a London 
 Hospital. Patient lying under an awning. 
 Angelus and Sister Sibyl. 
 
 Atigelus (aside). 
 
 Tis good to be upon the housetops here, 
 The city with its surging roofs below, 
 The murmur like the murmur of the sea, 
 The breezes like the wind from western wave; 
 While yonder, one by one, the stars appear 
 Summoning Earth, their fellow-citizen, 
 To take upon herself her ancient rights, 
 And sit with them in council most sublime, 
 The solemn council of the universe : 
 Not by the ocean, not among the Alps, 
 Have I beheld sight more significant, 
 More sacramental of the Infinite. 
 
 Sister Sibyl, 
 singing at the bedside of the patient.
 
 112 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 " Meadows mounting to the sky, 
 Cowslips, Daisies, here am I, 
 Come to see you where you grow, 
 Not to gather you and go." 
 
 " Come to see us, come again, 
 You who leave the flowers for men ; 
 We have stayed and you have ranged, 
 Wire the same and you are changed ; " 
 
 " yes, my treasure-trove re-found, 
 Plantain, leaning on the ground, 
 Still the bloomy stalk I knew, 
 Still the down to keep the dew." 
 
 " Eye afire and cheek aflame, 
 Once with burning steps you came, 
 And an hour or more would lie 
 Looking in the Daisy's eye." 
 
 " So as in and out I pass, 
 Daisy-Pleiads in the grass, 
 Fair as those that star the Blue, 
 I would fill my soul with you."
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 1 1 J 
 
 " Then you brought us one whose eyes 
 Came between you and the skies, 
 While we flowers of little worth, 
 Came between her and the earth." 
 
 " Name her not ; that joy is brief, — 
 Nay, that joy is past, is grief ; 
 Short the pleasure, long the pain, 
 Which we mortals give or gain," 
 
 " Once you were alone and glad, 
 Now you're lonely and so sad ; 
 Is there nothing we can do, 
 Are we not enough for you ?" 
 
 " No, alas, I would ye were, 
 Burdened is the sense I bear ; 
 Wisdom's self could scarce atone 
 For the fresher feeling floivn." 
 
 " O my dear ones, to be healed 
 Of the hurt that's ill-concealed, 
 Of the deadness after pain, 
 God must make me o'er again."
 
 I 14 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 " But when He this way shall walk, 
 Cowslip drooping on the stalk, 
 Little Daisy, perfect star, 
 He will leave you as you are.'" 
 
 [To Angel us. 
 
 Oh this homesickness for the country which 
 You feel in London in a hospital ! 
 Whene'er I close my eyes I see the moors, 
 The gorgeous intergrowth of gorse and heath, 
 The shadows of the fern and glittering brake, 
 Beside the waters of the lovely Lyd 
 Where it is doubled by a nameless stream. 
 
 Angelas. 
 You have not then forgotten those old days 
 At Darland ; I was thinking of them too ; 
 The days when we would strike across the 
 
 moor : 
 Of those who started with us, one we left 
 Upon the road, or rather he left us, 
 And one has dipped into the Northern Lights, 
 And one has gone into the Southern Sun,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 115 
 
 And some have served the state and most 
 
 themselves : 
 But unto you of us it has been given 
 To live a life, the hardest task of all ; 
 And so when first I set myself to live, 
 I thought of Sibyl then as an expert, 
 Yes, as a traveller who has cut his way 
 Through half a continent, whom it were well 
 To question of the road, the Blessed Life, 
 That is your own, up to this House of God. 
 Ay, do you now retrace the path for me, 
 Now that the twilight touches tenderly 
 The dreary line of brick and stone and slate, 
 Till earth seems no more solid than a cloud 
 Or land the sailor sights and leaves behind ; 
 And flesh is spirit that has passed the grave 
 And haply from some other sphere at eve 
 Watches the stars, that one by one come 
 
 forth, 
 And far among them all this old old Earth. 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 Indeed you have distanced me ; for I, as one
 
 Il6 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Who would recover a forgotten dream, 
 I painfully have plodded through the Past 
 To Darland days, the early womanhood 
 Of study, music, travel, life ahead ; 
 What was I not to do, what not believe, 
 All, all, the Wonderful, the Beautiful ! 
 Most vivid to me is the day I left 
 And wandered round the rooms, the empty 
 
 rooms, 
 — One does, you know — and knew that I had 
 
 been 
 Happier than I suspected at the time. 
 But no ! that youth and childhood are not 
 
 mine, 
 I being other : know you, ah, you must, 
 How a great grief annihilates the Past, 
 Annihilating us ? But women's woes, 
 As like each other they as woman is 
 To woman ! note you at the word how men 
 Will shrug their shoulders, look significant, 
 Self-satisfied, as who should say, "We know; 
 We ask not what but who is woman's grief."
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 1 17 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 The idiots, with their cant about the sex ! 
 You suffered and a wounded life you bore 
 Like the Phoenician Queen, or wounded hind 
 That hurt by careless marksman drags itself 
 Into the thickets seeking some relief, 
 Ah vainly, with the weapon in its side. 
 At length the healing forces of the soul, 
 The disposition to recovery, 
 The sights and sounds of the external world, 
 The barley blown in ripples by the breeze, — 
 All these begin to tell upon the soul, 
 And it consents to live : and when you rise 
 You find the sunsets still are beautiful, 
 And there the poppy peers above the corn 
 To see a world whose very weeds are flowers. 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 
 But I am other than the one I was ; 
 My strength has spent itself in suffering ; 
 And that initial force of life and love 
 Which goes with some men even to the grave, 
 The initial force with which my soul was flung
 
 Il8 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 From out the Fiery Fount of Energy, 
 
 Hath slackened, and I feel them slackening 
 
 still — 
 These energies so bright which fired my 
 
 cheek 
 And lit mine eye with more than mortal fire ; 
 And I, with halting step and languid pulse, 
 Should penetrate the silence of the hills, 
 And wander listless up those endless lanes 
 Of flowery loveliness, where the Sweet Spirit 
 As one who murmurs the beloved name, 
 Repeats Himself in foxglove and in fern. 
 
 Well, we have God, but in those days of death 
 The Heart that pulses through the universe 
 Seemed very cold, — I knew not if it beat. 
 When the advancing tide did flood my heart 
 And flush my soul with streams of life and 
 
 love, 
 How could I other than believe in God ? 
 But now the tide was low and being ebbed, 
 I could not feel Him flood the soul as then, 
 And often questioned if there was a God.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 119 
 
 But then at times the logic of events, 
 The drift of Providence, was so pronounced, 
 So argued Thought and Feeling, as to force 
 Conviction there's a God and if there's none 
 There ought to be one : then I felt for Him, 
 And spoke as those in dimly-lighted rooms, 
 Uncertain whether there was One to hear. 
 
 Angelns. 
 
 A sceptic yet not undevout, ye wise ! 
 A man may say " No God," more piously 
 Than others shriek " The Devil, Hell, for 
 ever ! " 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 My heart was overcome with weariness, 
 And did not quicken at the thought of 
 
 Heaven ; 
 With His bright gift of immortality 
 God could not tempt my soul ; I turned 
 
 away, 
 Like a sick child that is not pleased with 
 
 toys,
 
 120 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 From all that saint or poet dreamed of 
 
 Heaven, 
 Or Sybarite invented. Then methought 
 If I had sighted land and gained the port 
 // Paradiso, I would ask to see 
 The father whom I never saw on Earth, 
 And then perhaps to die, at least to sleep ; 
 And I would lay me for a long repose, 
 And God should suffer and respect my sleep. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 And those who met you, Cousin Sibyl, then, 
 Supposed you languid and indifferent, 
 Judging you harshly ; truly, who can know 
 Another well enough to blame and scorn ? 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 And then I came to London. Here the life 
 Of cities with their sorrows lodged in me 
 A passion for the simply-suffering, — 
 The aged with the burdens of the young, 
 The young as worn and weary as the old, 
 The sickly, pining, starving underpaid, —
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 121 
 
 We padded with the pleasant theory 
 
 Of "their own fault" and cuckoo cry of 
 
 " drink " 
 — Effect or cause, what Solomon can say 
 Pending the Judgment. " Sights " of London 
 
 town, 
 " Attractions of the city," lie beyond 
 The beat of Regent Circus, Rotten Row, — 
 The squalid thoroughfare, the sunless close, 
 The loveless lane, the tatter-tenement, 
 The lodging foul — where one can haply 
 
 breathe 
 Through broken window-pane unstuffed with 
 
 rag— 
 Of bodies scarce as starving as the soul, 
 So hideous that our little children here 
 Cry, not to leave the hospital for home. 
 And once I thought : " What if I clear my 
 
 caste, 
 Work in a mill, adopt the garb of these,— 
 Their scanty fare, the people of one room, 
 I hardly dare to look them in the face 
 Ashamed of being better-off than they, 
 
 H
 
 122 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 More healthy, warmer-housed, and fuller 
 
 grown, 
 More cultured, more refined and even loved.' 
 And then I saw it all. — If I were God, 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Who would be, — conscious of the woe of all 
 Creation ? 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 
 . . . and I sat among the stars, 
 The sons of morn, and missed but one of 
 
 these, 
 Then would I sit delightless, lost in thought, 
 And leaving all the happy born in Heaven, 
 And striking out into the gulfs of space, 
 Would go a-mourning through Eternity 
 Would go a-wandering after the one lost : 
 And so did God, so must, recover Earth 
 And that sad star of morning, Lucifer, 
 Or in my thoughts I had transcended Him,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. I23 
 
 The stream had bubbled up above its Fount, 
 And — Death and Darkness ! — I, not He, 
 were God. 
 
 Angelas (aside). 
 
 And yet our highest thought may miss the 
 
 mark, 
 Stop short of Him ; for who of mortal men. 
 Who, saving God, dare predicate of Him, 
 More than my dog may predicate of me. 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 
 And so disrobed of His divinity 
 Emmanuel took our flesh and lived our life, 
 And shared our grief, and bore our very sin, 
 And drew us up to Him upon the Cross. 
 Well is the crucifix the sign of her 
 Who carries on the Passion of our Lord, 
 And promises the most to doubtful hearts. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Can that which promises perform the most ? 
 " Methinks the lady doth protest too much."
 
 124 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Cousin, this crucifix upon the sleeve, 
 Depicting Christ in His death-agony 
 As none would wear a friend, doth only give 
 A suffering Lord, one-sided view of Him 
 Whose joy was quenchless even on the cross. 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 But I, you see, was ever ware of pain, 
 And only bore the woe of all the world 
 By thinking of our Lord's. At length one 
 
 night 
 Which I had watched and fasted through, He 
 
 came, 
 Majestic, calm, and still the crucified, 
 And all my course was clear ; — the convent- 
 life, 
 That and no other now was possible. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Ah there we must have parted company ! 
 And no more chance in this low world of ours 
 With you and such as you to meet, and so 
 Recover from the pleasure-loving sets
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 1 25 
 
 With which the paths of social life are snared. 
 Oh leave us not, spirits of stronger wing, 
 Lest bent beneath the weight of earthy souls, 
 Society describe a sharper depth, 
 And gravitate for ever to the earth. 
 Ah, be you sure that what is bad for us, 
 Your fellow-creatures, is not good for you— 
 This cooping cloister walling out the world. 
 Have you at least the freedom of a fowl 
 To forage in the fields with dainty step 
 For grain and gravel, — freedom of a cat 
 That loves to find, else sickly, spiritless, 
 Its tender blade of grass, its patch of sun, 
 Its little interests. Do ye not know, 
 Ye pietists prospective, saints would-be, 
 To flourish like a tree of God, you spread 
 Your roots in earth, your branches in the sky, 
 You spread a surface to the sun and air, 
 You cut yourself from nought in heaven or 
 
 earth 
 To the last influence of the Pleiades, 
 To the last molecule, the particle 
 Infinitesimal, which goes to make
 
 126 DIAISOLUS AMANS. 
 
 The miscellaneous man : for what is saint 
 
 But man complete and likest Him who is 
 
 The Universal, not a Specialist 
 
 As was the Dweller on Olympus, Mars 
 
 Lord of the spear, Apollo of the lyre. 
 
 No monk is God, no mediaeval saint, 
 
 No priest or deacon, pope or pietist, 
 
 And who shall take upon himself to say 
 
 What son of mortal man most pleasures Him? 
 
 The painter Brown, Bohemian, camping out, 
 
 And reproducing with devoutest hand 
 
 The latest touches of the Master, may 
 
 Be pillar of the temple all as much 
 
 As priests who dole out sacramental wine. 
 
 As presbyters who pass the plate for pence. 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 Well, in my convent — one of Mercy — was 
 Small leisure for the dreaming devotee, 
 The luxury of solitude was brief, 
 Your prayer and meditation were prescribed 
 And every hour was ruled. I scrubbed the 
 floor,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 1 27 
 
 And taught the young, and visited the old, 
 Doing as bid, — I was not bid to read, 
 There were no books except devotional. 
 You need to have no brain to lead that life. 
 Imagination, judgment, little used 
 As climbing muscle grow as obsolete, 
 And you decline from that grand Prototype 
 The Intellect Supreme, the Eternal Mind. 
 At such starvation and the flabbiness 
 Of intellectual famine panic-struck, 
 Although in presence of the nuns full oft 
 The last " prostration " scene had been re- 
 hearsed, 
 In constancy of soul I changed my course, — 
 I left my convent, still a Catholic, 
 And in my ward here Sister Sibyl still. 
 
 Angel us. 
 
 And here the index of intelligence 
 Must stand a little low ; you need to fill 
 Your soul when drained and dry at every 
 
 fount, 
 At books and music and society,
 
 128 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 And at the silence of the sky and stars. 
 Methinks the common nurse might best supply 
 The need of these 
 
 [Points to the sleeping patient. 
 
 with less of private loss. 
 
 Sister Sibyl. 
 It may be so. I came to learn to nurse, 
 Beginning so the programme I had planned, 
 And longer than I thought I linger here 
 — Beyond my convent-term — in hospital ; 
 One stays the longer for the power to go. 
 When I was trained to nurse and trained to 
 
 teach, 
 I thought to settle down in yonder East, 
 To live what seemed to me the life of lives, 
 Worthy of Christ if He should come again, 
 Forming a little centre there of light 
 And love among the lost of London poor. 
 But all the same, as you yourself have said, 
 In labouring up this ladder to the stars, 
 The help that's given comes better from the 
 
 rung
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 129 
 
 Above our own, as in a family 
 
 " Five " brings up " Three." You on your 
 
 vantage-ground, 
 Raise your own learned level, raising this, 
 You raise the layer next your own, and that 
 The lower raises, till our Earth is Heaven. 
 And so a woman in her house and home 
 And little world she calls society, 
 Who wonders every day why she was born, — 
 What dearer day-dream could invite her on, 
 Than in the place she is to move and act, 
 Helping to raise the standard character, 
 Living a life, and making women feel 
 They must be excellent or not endured. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 Such culture never shall defeat itself. 
 
 Oh, had we realised the grand ideal, 
 
 The self we might have been or yet may be, 
 
 And it appeared betwixt the night and us, 
 
 Shedding a gentle light where'er it moved, 
 
 We should like him in Patmos bow the knee 
 
 Before the angel of our dreams and worship
 
 130 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Sister Sibyl {aside). 
 
 My cousin here has that he would not change, 
 So rich is he, with Shakspeare or the Lord, 
 
 [crosses herself. 
 Or her he loves, — his own identity ; 
 Lose it or merge it would he not for worlds, 
 Not though he lost the part to gain the whole. 
 And yet the future in this life and next 
 Awaiting, rich and deep, may be the bliss 
 We should not choose or even care for now, 
 Nay, all we deprecate ; just as a child 
 Would now reject his coming happiness, 
 And would despise and would abhor the joys 
 Of manhood, which he cannot understand, 
 And which are larger than his little heart, 
 But which shall none the less be surely his. 
 Whate'er my future in this life or next, 
 I solemnly commit myself to Thee, 
 Now and for ever. But to-day, methinks, 
 There never shall be rest for any, till 
 This isolating individual life, 
 This scattered light, this stray and orphaned 
 beam,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 131 
 
 This personality, this man — this God 
 
 Made bitterly conscious, shall divert its course, 
 
 Shall wander back to That from whence it 
 
 came, 
 Shall widen into Universal Being, 
 And die into the Life of the Eternal.
 
 Ij 2 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 SCENE IX. 
 
 Night. Donna and Angelus in a balcony. 
 House brilliantly lighted. Someone sing- 
 ing within. 
 
 Treinbles the air all live with love, 
 Falters the star in light above ; 
 So still the Night, we hear the Hours, 
 The while we feel not see the flowers. 
 
 Over our head the willow streams, 
 Sharing our sense and ah I our dreams ; 
 The tree must leaf, it asks not why, 
 The heart must love, or both will die. 
 
 Though bare the hills, deep in the dene, 
 Sheltered and still the woods are green ; 
 Some days there are all fair and bright, 
 Some lives there are all love, all light.
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 1 33 
 
 So may thy life be written fair, 
 Not scored by Error, crossed by Care ; 
 But glowing warm at Love's behest : 
 Into each page some flower be prest. 
 
 Angelas. 
 
 These wishes for unclouded happiness, 
 Were they not wholly weak and imbecile 
 Were almost wicked, like those silly cards 
 They send you, — Christmas-motto, Birthday- 
 wish, 
 And Marriage-gratulation : " May your life 
 Be roses ; may it lie through lilies ! " Peace ! 
 May it ? — it cannot; vain the wish as fond. 
 
 Donna. 
 Perhaps we would not wish it for ourselves. 
 
 Angelus. 
 Why should I wish for any other what 
 I would not for myself ? why for myself 
 A pleasure or a pang on New Year's Morn 
 With which I could dispense on New Year's 
 Eve
 
 IJ4 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Or in the Dies Irce ? Who of us 
 
 Were happy, only happy ? Even I 
 
 In my worst days, I thought not at the end, 
 
 What pleasure have I had, but, what work 
 
 done ? 
 " O Song, to whom I dedicate my days, 
 Spirit, thou knowest, even in the fires 
 I have not faltered, do not falter now • 
 And if I groan, 'tis not that I repent." 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Ah, those "worst days" of yours, dear 
 
 Angelus, 
 Were not so bad as you would have us think ; 
 Good men there are whose craze is they are 
 
 bad, 
 And millionaires whose plea is they are poor, 
 And women — one in ten — who Brutus-wise 
 Assume, for reasons, imbecility. 
 
 Angelus. 
 — Or rather ignorance to humour men, 
 As we with women air our gracelessness,
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 135 
 
 Each fondling love to life with the conceit 
 Of female virtue, male sagacity . . . 
 Yes, not to gloze we overstate our guilt, 
 Since no one dare with hand pre- Raphael ite 
 Detail what all the same he dared to do : 
 The "how" and "why," if nor the "what." I 
 
 will, 
 Never to turn the trashy page again. 
 
 When in my youth I gave myself to art 
 And letters, for a while I went to church, 
 As if the Sunday were the Lord's " at home," 
 And temples were His house and habitat, 
 And prayer the only pass-word to Himself, 
 And He portentously " religious,'' not 
 As now I love to think Him, "secular," 
 I also working in the Master's lines, 
 Artist Supreme, and Dramatist Divine, — 
 Doing the same as God ; and when I, tired 
 Of sitting in religious reverie 
 — Nirvana— nothingness, came back to Art, 
 The god presented by the pulpiteer, 
 The god devoted to the devotee,
 
 '36 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Appeared indifferent to my pursuit, 
 If not irrelevant to life and love 
 And everything that occupies a man ; 
 So left, without the consecrating sense 
 Of sympathy sublime, I, in my search 
 Of matter for the novel or the play, 
 I lived the thing I wrote ; — even the crime : 
 Behold me then committed to a course, 
 The future all foreclosed, or ere I saw 
 The folly of it, — thus to take on trust, 
 The church's idol, other people's god. 
 The rest of my career who runs may read. 
 
 Donna. 
 Yes, yes, I know it all, we all do know ; — 
 The feeling we are wicked is not good ; 
 When we are ankle-deep in mud or vice, 
 We do not pick our way or live with care ; 
 But ever with the feeling we are bad 
 Demoralised, we worsen, day by day. 
 
 Angelas. 
 And then we met, my Donna ; then did love
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 137 
 
 Surprise me, like the spring with bud and leaf 
 From some dead-seeming stock announcing 
 
 life 
 In presence of decay. In thy dear eyes 
 I was confronted by my early self, 
 And saw at end of years what is not seen 
 At end of days, the progress — the decline. 
 Then with the problem of recovery vexed, 
 I lighted on the heresy of " works," 
 Whose theatre shall be my daily life, 
 My art, my calling, so I phrased it while 
 I talked with Sibyl on the leads at night. 
 Expect not from me the phenomenon 
 Conversion, or attendance on the chairs 
 Of that which postulates at every turn, 
 Theology, breeding a fear and doubt 
 Of all it calls upon us to assert ; 
 I like not schools where men dissect their 
 
 Christ 
 And pull their god to pieces like a flower, 
 Deeming all those who do not come t' assist 
 At these their rites unholy, infidel : 
 I rather listen to the scientist
 
 I38 blABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 — Inspired interpreter of holy writ, 
 
 Why then the mountain burns with fire and 
 
 smoke, 
 Till all I see and all I touch is God, 
 And science seems the true theology. 
 
 Yet fear not, Donna, for thy loftier mood 
 No marriage ; good thou art as in the dream 
 That made the day delicious to me. I 
 Was in the Minster on the Sabbath-day, 
 The organ with its swelling sea of sound 
 Searched to its last recess that hallowed fane 
 And filled my sense of being without bounds. 
 Then as the congregation sang the psalm, 
 I gazed at them, and all of them I knew, 
 And live and dead they sang their matin 
 
 song. 
 But they were railed from me by iron bars 
 Impassible as those stern faces there 
 With eyes that looked at me and saw me not. 
 Then, as against the palisade I pressed, 
 A hand stole through the bars seeking my 
 
 own, 
 And nestling thus : no need to see to know
 
 DIABOLUS AMANS. 139 
 
 Whose hand it was ; for surely as thy face 
 I know the feel of this beloved hand. 
 
 Don?ia. • 
 
 That dream of thine, dear Angelus, was true, 
 There are no bars between my soul and thine ; 
 And never, though I love the public prayer 
 And anthem, will I deem that thou and I 
 Are not at one so long as each shall call 
 Good good, and evil evil. 
 
 Angelus. 
 
 More I ask, 
 My Donna, when upon our marriage-eve, 
 My soul is flooded with its tidal wave 
 Of being ; I appeal to thee who art 
 Less weighted on the side of sense than I, 
 As far as in thee lies, see that we lose 
 In dear delights no passion for the Highest 
 Which is the secret of the strength of man. 
 But charged each with other's consciousness 
 Deepening and doubling individual life, 
 Let us with stronger pinion make for Heaven,
 
 140 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Though it were but the future of mankind. 
 
 Only as we are loyal to the light 
 
 Within us, shall we love each other ; else, 
 
 Eath by the other's side would wake at morn 
 
 Sad as Ulysses in Calypso's isle 
 
 Making the salt sea fuller for his tears. 
 
 Donna. 
 
 Thy ship shall never rot in port for me. 
 So help me God ! 
 
 [Kisses the book in her hand 
 
 Do you remember this 
 — I love it so — this book ; 'twas in my hand 
 That evening — you remember — in the fields. 
 
 Angelas. 
 
 Ay, ay, I read a passage which methought 
 I must have met before, some sentiment 
 In Cicero or Emerson or both. 
 What if you draw for me Vergilian lot 
 And read the page the book may open at ; 
 And if the passage suits the time and place,
 
 DIAROLUS AMANS. I4I 
 
 Good ; and if not, no matter ; aught I do 
 Or read with thee is many times its worth, 
 Just as the pebble that we tread upon 
 Were many times its weight upon the sun : 
 I tremble at the thought of so much wealth ; 
 For if an evening is so rich a store, 
 Ah, what a year of evenings, life with thee ! 
 
 Donna, reading. 
 
 When like the heir to an inheritance 
 You yield and take possession each of each, 
 And harvest one another, leave some ears 
 For others gleaning after you ; stand off 
 From that most sacred, reverend one, thy friend. 
 Let every breath have leave to visit him, 
 Be every sunbeam free to fall on him, 
 Nor thou sequester to thy use and wont 
 The sunlight of his eyes ; thou didst not make 
 Thou canst not keep the glory that he is ; 
 Not by one sunset more or less is he ; 
 All Art and Nature had a hand in him, 
 All men and women are concerned in him : — 
 Think not of this and other dame or don
 
 142 DIABOLUS AMANS. 
 
 Who taught him; from the little child, inspired 
 Interrogator, to thai poor old man 
 
 Who breaks the stones along the King's high- 
 way, 
 A fid rests from labour for his midday meal, 
 Thanking the Lord and Giver of all good, — 
 All ever seen, and haply some unseen, 
 
 Yea, all mankind, have educated him 
 
 Thy friend, their foster-son, the children' 's child. 
 
 Even his own. And thou thyself no less, 
 
 Be thou at leisure for the universe, 
 
 A fid if the shining ones should stand without, 
 
 Make not too strict inquiry whence they come 
 
 Or ere thou open; for it is not man's 
 
 To love exclusively, to limit God. 
 
 Guard the crown-jetvels of thy friend's esteem 
 As mother doth her babe, as priest the Host, 
 And maiden her virginity. At night 
 Pillow thy head upon the thought of him, 
 And in the morn with thinking of thy friend 
 Recover thine identity. And let 
 No rudeness or suspicion vulgarise,
 
 btABOLUS AMANS. 143 
 
 Or jealousy imperil, faith and love ; 
 Friends are no more conceded littleness 
 Than poets mediocrity ; and now 
 Thou art happy and thy pulse is strong as two, 
 Thou art expected to be great and good, 
 And notv or never must thou be sublime : 
 For like the early Argonauts, or those 
 Who sailed in expedition against Troy, 
 Friends should be heroes, pairs invincible. 
 Sine 'V and muscle and redundant strength 
 And frank exulting love and happiness, 
 Go ye together, a young Heracles, 
 On some new labour for the good of men. 
 
 Thus have I said, or rather left unsaid, 
 The thoughts that troop on me in companies, 
 Celestial visitants from near and far ; 
 I cannot titter what is in my soul ; 
 My bark is grating the unspeakable. 
 
 THE END.
 
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