40">ALICIA.
O! love you have not understood.
You have not guessed its secret food.
You have not seen its single eye;
But fear and doubt and jealousy
Have risen, and now your love is trembling
Like a mountebank dissembling
When his trick's detected. Come!
To find home we must leave home.
 

CRASSUS.
Starless and moonless, hidden in cloud,
The night's one flame of pearl.
 

ALICIA.
The bat flaps; the owl hoots aloud.
 

CRASSUS.
Lead on; I trust you, girl.
 

ALICIA.
You are bold to trust me; or, have you divined
My secret?
 

CRASSUS.
No; the crystal of your mind
Shows only faint disturbing images,
Things passing strange, as if enchanted seas
Kept their great swell upon it, and strange fish
Played in its oily depths. Some monstrous wish,
The shadow of some unspeakable desire,
Strikes my heart cold, and sets my brain on fire.
 

ALICIA.
Learn this, as we pass through the portico:
Fear nothing; there is nothing you can know!
And by these terraces and steps that gleam
Wintry, although the summer night is hot,
This - what we seek is never what we find!
 

Life is a dream, like love; and from the dream
If we may wake, we never find it what
We would; for the wisdom of a mightier mind
Leads us in its own ways
To a perfected praise.
 

CRASSUS.
Why are these shadows thrown across the lawn
From the elms and yews? They were not wont to reach
Beyond the branches of that copper-beech.
 

ALICIA.
Attend the dawn
Of an unknown comet, that shall come
From the unfathomable wells of space
Into its halidom.
 

CRASSUS.
I know it not. Last night I walked alone
Here, and saw noth