_Sp._ _De rigueur!_ can’t give you a voice. What matter? Oh, trust one who knows you, You’ll make an admirable sposo. _Di._ Enough. But action—look to that well, mind me; See that some not unworthy work you find me; If man I be, then give the man expression. _Sp._ Of course you’ll enter a profession; If not the Church, why then the Law. By Jove, we’ll teach you how to draw! Besides, the best of the concern is I’m hand and glove with the attorneys. With them and me to help, don’t doubt But in due season you’ll come out; Leave Kelly, Cockburn, in the lurch. But yet, do think about the Church. _Di._ ’Tis well, ill spirit, I admire your wit; As for your wisdom, I shall think of it. And now farewell. SCENE IV.—_In St. Mark’s. Dipsychus alone._ The Law! ’twere honester, if ’twere genteel, To say the dung-cart. What! shall I go about, And like the walking shoeblack roam the flags To see whose boots are dirtiest? Oh, the luck To stoop and clean a pair! Religion, if indeed it be in vain To expect to find in this more modern time That which the old world styled, in old-world phrase Walking with God. It seems His newer will We should not think of Him at all, but trudge it, And of the world He has assigned us make What best we can. Then love: I scarce can think That these be-maddening discords of the mind To pure melodious sequence could be changed, And all the vext conundrums of our life Solved to all time by this old pastoral Of a new Adam and a second Eve Set in a garden which no serpent seeks. And yet I hold heart can beat true to heart: And to hew down the tree which bears this fruit, To do a thing which cuts me off from hope, To falsify the movement of Love’s mind, To seat some alien trifler on the throne A queen may come to claim—that were ill done. What! to the close hand of the clutching Jew Hand up that rich reversion! and for what? This would be hard, did I indeed believe ’Twould ever fall. That love, the large repose Restorative, not to mere outside needs Skin-deep, but throughly to the total man, Exists, I will believe, but so, so rare, So doubtful, so exceptional, hard to guess; When guessed, so often counterfeit; in brief, A thing not possibly to be conceived An item in the reckonings of the wise.