Festus · Scene 5 (2/2) (2/2)

| Festus | Oh! why was woman made so fair? or man So weak as to see that more than one had beaaty? It is impossible to love but one. And yet I dare not love thee as I could; For all that the heart most longs for and deserves, Passes the soonest and most utterly. The moral of the world’s great fable, life. All we enjoy seems given to deceive, Or may be, undeceive us; who cares which? And when the sum is done, and we have proved it, Why work it over and over still again? I am not what I would be. Hear me, God! And speak to me in thine invisible likeness The wind, as once of yore. Let me be pure! Oh! I wish I was a pure child again, As ere the clear could trouble me: when life Was sweet and calm as is a sister’s kiss; And not the wild and whirlwind touch of passion, Which though it hardly light upon the lip, With breathless swiftness sucks the soul out of sight So that we lose it, and all thought of it. What is this life wherein Thou hast founded me, But a bright wheel which burns itself away, Benighting even night with its grim limbs, When it hath done and fainted into darkness? Flesh is but fiction, and it flies away; The gaunt and ghastly thing we bear about us And which we hate and fear to look upon Is truth; in death’s dark likeness limned⁠—no more. |