[Enter Lucretia, Beatrice, And Giacomo, Guarded.]

BEATRICE: I hardly dare to fear That thou bring'st other news than a just pardon.

CAMILLO: May God in heaven be less inexorable To the Pope's prayers than he has been to mine. Here is the sentence and the warrant.

BEATRICE [WILDLY]: O My God! Can it be possible I have To die so suddenly? So young to go Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! To be nailed down into a narrow place; To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost-- How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be... What? Oh, where am I? Let me not go mad! Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world! If all things then should be...my father's spirit, His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me; The atmosphere and breath of my dead life! If sometimes, as a shape more like himself, Even the form which tortured me on earth, Masked in gray hairs and wrinkles, he should come And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down! For was he not alone omnipotent On Earth, and ever present? Even though dead, Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, And work for me and mine still the same ruin, Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever yet returned To teach the laws of Death's untrodden realm? Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now, Oh, whither, whither?

LUCRETIA: Trust in God's sweet love, The tender promises of Christ: ere night, Think, we shall be in Paradise.

BEATRICE: 'Tis past! Whatever comes, my heart shall sink no more. And yet, I know not why, your words strike chill: How tedious, false, and cold seem all things. I Have met with much injustice in this world; No difference has been made by God or man, Or any power moulding my wretched lot, 'Twixt good or evil, as regarded me. I am cut off from the only world I know, From light, and life, and love, in youth's sweet prime. You do well telling me to trust in God; I hope I do trust in him. In whom else Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.

[DURING THE LATTER SPEECHES GIACOMO HAS RETIRED CONVERSING WITH CAMILLO, WHO NOW GOES OUT; GIACOMO ADVANCES.]

GIACOMO: Know you not, Mother...Sister, know you not? Bernardo even now is gone to implore The Pope to grant our pardon.

LUCRETIA: Child, perhaps It will be granted. We may all then live To make these woes a tale for distant years: Oh, what a thought! It gushes to my heart Like the warm blood.

BEATRICE: Yet both will soon be cold. Oh, trample out that thought! Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope: It is the only ill which can find place Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost That it should spare the eldest flower of spring: Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch Even now a city stands, strong, fair, and free; Now stench and blackness yawn, like death. Oh, plead With famine, or wind-walking Pestilence, Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man! Cruel, cold, formal man; righteous in words, In deeds a Cain. No, Mother, we must die: Since such is the reward of innocent lives; Such the alleviation of worst wrongs. And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold men, Smiling and slow, walk through a world of tears To death as to life's sleep; 'twere just the grave Were some strange joy for us. Come, obscure Death, And wind me in thine all-embracing arms! Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom, And rock me to the sleep from which none wake. Live ye, who live, subject to one another As we were once, who now...

NOTE: _105 yawn edition 1821; yawns editions 1819, 1839.