_Jul._ Father of mercies! show me none, whene’er The wrongs she suffers cease to wring my heart, Or I seek solace ever, but in death. _Opas_. What wilt thou do then, too unhappy man? _Jul._ What have I done already? All my peace Has vanished; my fair fame in after-times Will wear an alien and uncomely form, Seen o’er the cities I have laid in dust, Countrymen slaughtered, friends abjured! _Opas_. And faith? _Jul._ Alone now left me, filling up in part The narrow and waste intervals of grief: It promises that I shall see again My own lost child. _Opas_. Yes, at this very hour. _Jul._ Till I have met the tyrant face to face, And gain’d a conquest greater than the last; Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain, And not one Spaniard, not one enemy, The least relenting, flags upon his flight; Till we are equal in the eyes of men, The humblest and most wretched of our kind, No peace for me, no comfort, no—no child! _Opas_. No pity for the thousands fatherless, The thousands childless like thyself, nay more, The thousands friendless, helpless, comfortless— Such thou wilt make them, little thinking so, Who now, perhaps, round their first winter fire, Banish, to talk of thee, the tales of old, Shedding true honest tears for thee unknown: Precious be these, and sacred in thy sight, Mingle them not with blood from hearts thus kind. If only warlike spirits were evoked By the war-demon, I would not complain. Or dissolute and discontented men; But wherefor hurry down into the square The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race, Who would not injure us, and could not serve; Who, from their short and measured slumber risen, In the faint sunshine of their balconies, With a half-legend of a martyrdom And some weak wine and withered grapes before them, Note by their foot the wheel of melody That catches and rolls on the sabbath dance. To drag the steddy prop from failing age, Break the young stem that fondness twines around, Widen the solitude of lonely sighs, And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day The ruins and the phantoms that replied, Ne’er be it thine. _Jul._ Arise, and save me, Spain! ACT I. SCENE 2. MUZA _enters_. _Muza_. Infidel chief, thou tarriest here too long. And art, perhaps, repining at the days Of nine continued victories, o’er men Dear to thy soul, tho’ reprobate and base. Away! [_Muza retires_. _Jul._ I follow. Could my bitterest foes Hear this! ye Spaniards, this! which I foreknew And yet encounter’d; could they see your Julian Receiving orders from and answering These desperate and heaven-abandoned slaves, They might perceive some few external pangs, Some glimpses of the hell wherein I move, Who never have been fathers.