White robe of innocence! Spirit unstained By even this house! Your purity makes blind My eyes; your beauty takes my heart and mind With infinite gazing.--Rioting unrestrained In fierce self-martyrdom without repose-- You fight the soul’s unfathomable woes,-- Death in your face, and in your heart hot hate For all earth’s vain delights turned desolate! [_He kneels._] Let me be friend, be brother to you! Whether You give your body up to me--lies deep Beneath us!--so have you exalted me! To your slim knees here solemnly I vow That only as soul cleaves to soul art thou My own--so only am I thine--together! Out of hell’s agony to heaven’s steep You soared, and now unconscious of the sweep, Of lusts that ebb and flow beneath your height Must bleed your life out in sublimity Thru me shall that be shown to all men’s sight! From my chaste poetry the world shall learn To weigh the wrong and misery of sold love! I swear it by the eternal stars above, The purest light that in our night can burn. Give me a pledge, avow to me openly:-- Have you by love been gladden’d? once? or ever? LISISKA--[_Raising him._] If you killed me now straight off, I could never Say it differently! It was always only the hellish drive Whence no joy remained alive. Thus, once for all, it is in this place: Here is the rendezvous Of all to whom love is a pang without grace And a hankering ever new! What other chance callers may appear Aren’t taken in earnest by us here! Men such as you Are few For they count for nothing where We house, whom men compare With beasts unheeded.-- But now have I yet succeeded In bringing you round to grant Comfort to my wild want? HERR KÖNIG-- What wilderness of paths your hand may lead me, Still gleams a star above us that will speed me! LISISKA--[_Hugs and kisses him._] Then come, love! pliable at last, for trysts In ancient, ne’er-disturbed tranquillity, As uttermost lust’s calm bliss long known to me! Oh, if I only died under your fists! [_Both exeunt, right._] CASTI-PIANI--[_Breaking out of his hiding-place, wildly._] What was that? ELFRIEDE--[_Breaking out likewise, passionately._] What was that! Worthless parasite that I am! What did my withered brain ever think the joy of the senses was! Self-immolation, glowing martyrdom, that’s what the life in this house is! And I, in my lying arrogance, in my threadbare virtue, supposed this house a breeding-place of depravity! CASTI-PIANI--I am smashed and shattered!! ELFRIEDE--All my youth, that the good God gave me overflowing with the desire and the power to love,--I have wantonly dragged it through the gray, soul-smothering dirt of the streets! Coward that I was, the sacredness of sensual passion seemed to me the basest reprobacy! CASTI-PIANI--[_Stunned._] That was the blinding-bright enlightenment that unforeseen breaks his neck who walks in his sleep on the ridge-pole!