"... Hear me, hear me-- Astarte! my beloved! speak to me: I have so much endured--so much endure-- Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me Too much as I loved thee: we were not made To torture thus each other, though it were The deadliest sin to love as we have loved. Say that thou loath'st me not--that I do bear This punishment for both--that thou wilt be One of the blessed--and that I shall die; For hitherto all hateful things conspire To bind me in existence--in a life Which makes me shrink from immortality-- A future like the past. I cannot rest. I know not what I ask, nor what I seek: I feel but what thou art--and what I am; And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music--Speak to me! For I have call'd on thee in the still night, Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs, And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answer'd me--many things answer'd me-- Spirits and men--but thou wert silent all.... Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth, And never found thy likeness--Speak to me! Look on the fiends around--they feel for me: I fear them not, and feel for thee alone-- Speak to me! though it be in wrath;--but say-- I reck not what--but let me hear thee once-- This once--once more!"[198] She speaks. What a sad and doubtful reply! Manfred's limbs are convulsed when she disappears. But an instant after the spirits see that: "... He mastereth himself, and makes His torture tributary to his will. Had he been one of us, he would have made An awful spirit."[199] Will is the unshaken basis of this soul. He did not bend before the chief of the spirits; he stood firm and calm before the infernal throne, whilst all the demons were raging who would tear him to pieces: now he dies, and they assail him, but he still strives and conquers: "... Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know: What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts-- Is its own origin of ill and end-- And its own place and time--its innate sense, When stripp'd of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without; But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey-- But was my own destroyer, and will be My own hereafter.--Back, ye baffled fiends! The hand of death is on me--but not yours!"[200]