Historia Amoris. Saltus Edgar
looks scornfully at him.)
Solomon
Thou art beautiful as Tirzah, my love, and comely as Jerusalem, but terrible as an army in battle. Turn thine eyes away. They trouble me. …
The Shepherd
(from without.)
There are sixty queens, eighty favorites, and numberless young girls. But among them all my immaculate dove is unique, she is the darling of her mother. The young girls have seen her and called her blessed. The queens and the favorites have praised her.
The Chorus
(astonished at the Shulamite’s scorn of the King.)
Who is it that is beautiful as Tirzah but terrible as an army in battle?
The Shulamite
(impatiently turning her back, and relating again her abduction.)
I went down into the garden of nuts, to see the green plants in the valley, to see whether the vine budded, and the pomegranates were in flower. But before I was aware of it, I was among the chariots of my princely people.
The Chorus
Turn about, turn again, O Shulamite, that we may see thee.
A Dancer
What will you see in the Shulamite whom the King has compared to an army?
Solomon
(to the Shulamite.)
How beautiful are thy feet, prince’s daughter, … How fair and how pleasant art thou. …
The Shulamite
(impatiently as before.)
I am my beloved’s and he is sighing for me.
(Exit Solomon. Enter the Shepherd.)
The Shulamite
(hastening to her lover.)
Come, my beloved, let us go forth to the fields, let us lodge in the villages. We will rise early and see if the vine flourishes and the grape is ripe and the pomegranates bud. There will I caress thee. The love-apples perfume the air and at our gates are all manner of rich fruit, new and old, which I have kept for thee, my beloved. Oh, that thou wert my brother, that, when I am with thee without, I might kiss thee and not be mocked at. I want to take and bring thee into my mother’s house. There thou shalt instruct me and I will give thee spiced wine and the juice of my pomegranates.
(Falling in his arms and calling to the Odalisques.)
His left hand is under my head and his right hand doth embrace me.
The Shepherd
(to the chorus.)
I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not nor awake my beloved till she will.
Act V.
The Village of Shulam.
(The Shulamite, who has escaped from the seraglio is carried in by her lover.)
Chorus of Villagers
Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?
The Shepherd
(to the Shulamite.)
I awake thee under the apple tree.
(He points to the house.)
There thou wert born.
The Shulamite
Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy cruel as the grave; the flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord. But many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it. The man who seeks to purchase it acquires but contempt.
EPILOGUE.
A Cottage at Shulam.
First Brother of the Shulamite
(thinking of a younger sister whom he would sell when she is older.)
We have a little sister, still immature. What shall we do with her when she is spoken for?
Second Brother
If by then she is comely, we will get for her silver from a palace. If she is not comely, we will get the value of cedar boards.
The Shulamite
(ironically intervening.)
I am comely, yet I made them let me be.
First Brother
(significantly.)
Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. He leased it to farmers each of whom was to pay him a thousand pieces of silver.
The Shulamite
But my vineyard which is mine I still have.
(Laughing.)
A thousand pieces for thee, Solomon, and two hundred for the others.
(At the door the Shepherd appears. Behind him are comrades.)
The Shepherd
Fair one, that dwelleth here, my companions hearken to thy voice, cause me to hear it.
The Shulamite
Hasten to me, my beloved. Hasten like a roe or a young hart on the mountains of spices.
III
APHRODITE URANIA
Greece had many creeds, yet but one religion. That was Beauty. Israel believed in hate, Greece in love. In Judæa the days of the righteous were long. In Greece they were brief. Whom the gods loved died young. The gods themselves were young. With the tribes that took possession of the Hellenic hills they came in swarms. Sprung from the depths of the archaic skies, they were sombre and impure. When they reached Olympus already their Asiatic masks had fallen. Hecate was hideous, Hephæstos limped, but among the others not an imperfection remained. Divested of attributes monstrous and enigmatic, they rejuvenated into divinities of joy. Homer said that their laughter was inextinguishable. He joined in it. So did Greece. The gayety of the immortals was appreciated by a people that counted their years by their games.
As the tribes dispersed the gods advanced. Their passage, marked here by a temple, there by a shrine, had always the incense of legends. These Homer gathered and from them formed a Pentateuch in which dread was replaced by the ideal. Divinities, whom the Assyrian priests barely dared to invoke by name, and whose mention by the laity was forbidden, he displayed, luminous and indulgent, lifting, as he did so, the immense burden of mystery and fear under which humanity had staggered. Homer turned religion into art, belief into poetry. He evolved a creed that was more gracious than austere, more æsthetic perhaps than moral, but which had the signal merit of creating a serenity from which contemporaneous civilization proceeds. Greece to-day lies buried with her gods. She has been dead for twenty centuries and over. But the beauty of which she was the temple existed before death did and survived her.
To Homer beauty was an article of faith. But not the divinities that radiated it. He laughed at them. Pythagoras found him expiating his mirth in hell. A later echo of it bubbled in the farce of Aristophanes. It reverberated in the verses of Euripides. It rippled through the gardens of Epicurus. It amused sceptics to whom the story of the gods and their amours was but gossip concerning the elements. They believed