INTERLUDE I.

Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!

Over the rolling waters go,

Come from the dying moon, and blow,

Blow him again to me;

While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,

Father will come to thee soon;

Rest, rest, on mother's breast,

Father will come to thee soon;

Father will come to his babe in the nest,

Silver sails all out of the west

Under the silver moon:

Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.

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ACT II.

SCENE I.—THE COURT OF THE PRINCESS'S PALACE.

Columns, and urns of flowers. Statues of Muses and Graces. A fountain. The PRINCE, FLORIAN, and CYRIL are viewing the sunrise.

FLORIAN. NOW morn in the white wake of the morning

star,

Comes furrowing all the orient into gold, -
Fit presage of our dawning, golden hopes!
PRINCE. Last night, as I read omens, Florian,
My dreams were not so golden as the dawn.
There lives an ancient legend in our house :
Some sorcerer, whom a far-off grandsire burnt
Because he cast no shadow, dying foretold
That none of all our blood should ever know
The shadow from the substance, and that one
Should come to fight with shadows, and to fall.
For so, my mother says, the story ran.
And, truly, waking dreams were more or less
An old and strange affection of the house.
Myself too have weird seizures, Heaven knows what!
Our great court-Galen calls them "catalepsy."
And last night, musing on the sorcerer's curse,

I saw contending armies in the land,

camp hard by these gates, and mail-clad men

Trampling the flowers, and gleaming through the halls,

While tourney-lists were marshalled on the plain.

I seemed to move in old memorial tilts;

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And, doing battle with forgotten ghosts,
To dream myself the shadow of a dream,
When like a flash the weird affection came,
Camp, college, army, turned to hollow shows,
And, gasping, I awoke in the broad day.

CYRIL. Such fancies, Prince, are only bred of dreams And shadows: bid them with the darkness flee.

The daylight cheerily calls us to our task:

I would that were as warlike as the dream.

(Enter MELISSA in terror, exclaiming.)

MELISSA. Fly! fly! while yet you may! My mother knows.

PRINCE. HOW? Why?

MELISSA (weeping). My fault, my fault! and yet not mine: Yet mine in part. O hear me, pardon me!

My mother, 'tis her wont from night to night
To rail at Lady Psyche and her side.

She says the Princess should have been the Head,
Herself and Lady Psyche the two arms:
And so it was agreed when first they came;
But Lady Psyche was the right hand now,
And she the left, or not, or seldom, used;

Her's more than half the students, all the love.

And so last night she fell to canvass you.

FLORIAN. The countrywomen of the Lady Psyche? MELISSA. "Her countrywomen! she did not envy her. Who ever saw such wild barbarians?"

CYRIL. Why, we are very modest, proper girls.

MELISSA. "Girls? more like men!" and at these words

the snake,

My secret, seemed to stir within my breast ;

And O sirs! could I help it? but my cheek

Began to burn and burn, and her lynx eye
To fix and make me hotter, till she laughed :
'O marvellously modest maiden, you !

Men! girls, like men! why, if they had been men
You need not set your thoughts in rubric thus

For wholesale comment!"

My mother went revolving on the word),
'And so they are - very like men indeed·
And with that woman closeted for hours!

Then came these dreadful words out one by one,
Why — these are

know it!"

O ask me nothing, I said.
And she conceals it!"
PRINCE.

And whelmed in failure.
MELISSA.

men:

I shuddered: "and you

"And she knows too,

All is known, I fear,

So my mother clutched

The truth at once, but with no word from me;
And now thus early risen she goes to inform
The Princess: Lady Psyche will be crushed;
But you may yet be saved, and therefore fly:
But heal me with your pardon ere you go.
CYRIL. What pardon, sweet Melissa, for a blush?
Pale one, blush again: than wear those lilies,
t were better to blush our lives away.

Yet let us breathe for one hour more in heaven,
Lest, hereafter, some classic angel speak
In scorn of us, "They mounted, Ganymedes,
To tumble, Vulcans, on the second morn."
But I will melt this marble into wax

To yield us further furlough.

(MELISSA shakes her head doubtingly. Exit CYRIL.)

How grew this feud betwixt the right and left?
MELISSA. O it was long ago: betwixt these two
Division smoulders hidden: 'tis my mother,
Too jealous, often fretful as the wind
Pent in a crevice; much I bear with her.

I never knew my father, but she says
(God help her!) she was wedded to a fool.
And still she railed against the state of things.
She had the care of Lady Ida's youth,

And from the Queen's decease she brought her up.
But when your sister came she won the heart
Of Ida; they were still together, grew
(For so they said themselves) inosculated;
Consonant chords that shiver to one note:
One mind in all things: yet my mother still
Affirms your Psyche thieved her theories,
And angled with them for her pupils' love;
She calls her plagiarist; I know not what :
But I must go; I dare not tarry here.

[Exit MELISSA.

FLORIAN (gazing after her). An open-hearted maiden,

true and pure.

If I could love, why, this were she. How pretty

Her blushing was, and how she blushed again,