And in God’s consecrated house,
       All motionless from head to feet,
     My heart awaits her heavenly Spouse,
       As white I lie on my white sheet;
     With body lulled and soul awake,
     I watch in anguish for your sake.

     And suddenly, across the gloom,
       The naked moonlight sharply swings;
     A Presence stirs within the room,
       A breath of flowers and hovering wings: 
     Your presence without form and void,
     Beyond all earthly joys enjoyed.

     My heart is hushed, my tongue is mute,
       My life is centred in your will;
     You play upon me like a lute
       Which answers to its master’s skill,
     Till passionately vibrating,
     Each nerve becomes a throbbing string.

     Oh, incommunicably sweet! 
       No longer aching and apart,
     As rain upon the tender wheat,
       You pour upon my thirsty heart;
     As scent is bound up in the rose,
     Your love within my bosom glows.

* * * * *

FROM ‘TARANTELLA’

Sounds of human mirth and laughter from somewhere among them were borne from time to time to the desolate spot I had reached.  It was a Festa day, and a number of young people were apparently enjoying their games and dances, to judge by the shouts and laughter which woke echoes of ghostly mirth in the vaults and galleries that looked as though they had lain dumb under the pressure of centuries.

There was I know not what of weird contrast between this gaping ruin, with its fragments confusedly scattered about like the bleaching bones of some antediluvian monster, and the clear youthful ring of those joyous voices.

I had sat down on some fragment of wall directly overhanging the sea.  In my present mood it afforded me a singular kind of pleasure to take up stones or pieces of marble and throw them down the precipice.  From time to time I could hear them striking against the sharp projections of the rocks as they leaped down the giddy height.  Should I let my violin follow in their wake?

I was in a mood of savage despair; a mood in which my heart turned at bay on what I had best loved.  Hither it had led me, this art I had worshiped!  After years of patient toil, after sacrificing to it hearth and home, and the security of a settled profession, I was not a tittle further advanced than at the commencement of my career.  For requital of my devoted service, starvation stared me in the face.  My miserable subsistence was barely earned by giving lessons to females, young and old, who, while inflicting prolonged tortures on their victim, still exacted the tribute of smiles and compliments.

Weakened and ill, I shuddered to think of returning and bowing my neck once more to that detested yoke.

“No!  I’ll never go back to that!” I cried, jumping up.  “I’ll sooner earn a precarious livelihood by turning fisherman in this island!  Any labor will be preferable to that daily renewing torture.”  I seized my violin in a desperate clutch, and feverishly leant over the wall, where I could hear the dirge-like boom of the breakers in the hollow caves.