_Sp._ O yes! you thought you had escaped, no doubt, This worldly fiend that follows you about, This compound of convention and impiety, This mongrel of uncleanness and propriety. What else were bad enough? but, let me say, I too have my _grandes manières_ in my way; Could speak high sentiment as well as you, And out-blank-verse you without much ado; Have my religion also in my kind, For dreaming unfit, because not designed. What! you know not that I too can be serious, Can speak big words, and use the tone imperious; Can speak, not honiedly, of love and beauty, But sternly of a something much like duty. Oh, do you look surprised? were never told, Perhaps, that all that glitters is not gold. The Devil oft the Holy Scripture uses, But God can act the Devil when He chooses. Farewell! But, _verbum sapienti satis_— I do not make this revelation gratis. Farewell: beware! _Di._ Ill spirits can quote holy books I knew; What will they _not_ say? what not dare to do? _Sp._ Beware, beware! _Di._ What, loitering still? Still, O foul spirit, there? Go hence, I tell thee, go! I _will_ beware. (_Alone._) It must be then. I feel it in my soul; The iron enters, sundering flesh and bone, And sharper than the two-edged sword of God. I come into deep waters—help, O help! The floods run over me. Therefore, farewell! a long and last farewell, Ye pious sweet simplicities of life, Good books, good friends, and holy moods, and all That lent rough life sweet Sunday seeming rests, Making earth heaven-like. Welcome, wicked world, The hardening heart, the calculating brain Narrowing its doors to thought, the lying lips, The calm-dissembling eyes; the greedy flesh, The world, the Devil—welcome, welcome, welcome! _Sp._ (_from within._) This stern necessity of things On every side our being rings; Our sallying eager actions fall Vainly against that iron wall. Where once her finger points the way, The wise thinks only to obey; Take life as she has ordered it, And come what may of it, submit, Submit, submit! Who take implicitly her will, For these her vassal chances still Bring store of joys, successes, pleasures; But whoso ponders, weighs, and measures, She calls her torturers up to goad With spur and scourges on the road; He does at last with pain whate’er He spurned at first. Of such, beware, Beware, beware! _Di._ O God, O God! The great floods of the soul Flow over me! I come into deep waters Where no ground is!