Closing in night and dreams, and so prolonged. BEATRICE (awaking.) I was just dreaming That we were all in Paradise. Thou knowest This cell seems like a kind of Paradise After our father's presence. BERNARDO. Dear, dear sister, Would that thy dream were not a dream! O, God! How shall I tell? BEATRICE. What would'st thou tell, sweet brother? BERNARDO. Look not so calm and happy, or even whilst BEATRICE. See now, thou makest me weep: How very friendless thou wouldst be, dear child, If I were dead. Say what thou hast to say. BERNARDO. They have confessed; they could endure no more The tortures BEATRICE. Ha! What was there to confess? They must have told some weak and wicked lie To flatter their tormentors. Have they said That they were guilty? O white innocence, That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide Thine awful and serenest countenance From those who know thee not! Enter JUDGE, with LUCRETIA and GIACOMO, guarded. And leave-what memory of our having been? Kill not thy child! Let not her wrongs kill thee! And let us each be silent as a corpse; GIACOMO. They will tear the truth Even from thee at last, those cruel pains: For pity's sake say thou art guilty now. LUCRETIA. O, speak the truth! Let us all quickly die; And after death, God is our judge, not they; He will have mercy on us. BERNARDO. If indeed It can be true, say so dear sister mine; And then the Pope will surely pardon you, And all be well. JUDGE. Confess, or I will warp Your limbs with such keen tortures BEATRICE. Tortures! Turn The rack henceforth into a spinning-wheel! Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God All refuge, all revenge, all consequence, But that which thou hast called my father's death? JUDGE. She is convicted, but has not confessed. BEATRICE. O, tear him not away! Have I confessed? Is it all over now? SCENE IV. A Hall of the Prison. Enter CAMILLO and BERNARDO. CAMILLO. The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent. A rite, a law, a custom; not a man. He frowned, as if to frown had been the trick And threw behind, muttering with hoarse, harsh voice: "Which among ye defended their old father Killed in his sleep?" Then to another: "Thou Dost this in virtue of thy place; 'tis well." He turned to me then, looking deprecation, And said these three words, coldly: «They must die." [made What 'twas weak to do, "Tis weaker to lament, once being done; Take cheer! The God who knew my wrong, and Our speedy act the angel of his wrath, Seems, and but seems, to have abandoned us. Let us not think that we shall die for this. Brother, sit near me; give me your firm hand, You had a manly heart. Bear up! bear up! Oh! dearest lady, put your gentle head Upon my lap, and try to sleep awhile: Your eyes look pale, hollow, and overworn, With heaviness of watching and slow grief. Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune, Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing, Some outworn and unused monotony, Such as our country gossips sing and spin, Till they almost forget they live: lie down! So; that will do. Have I forgot the words? Faith! they are sadder than I thought they were. SONG. False friend, wilt thou smile or weep What is this whispers low? Sweet sleep! were death like to thee, And yet you left him? CAMILLO. I urged him still; Pleading, as I could guess, the devilish wrong Which prompted your unnatural parent's death. And he replied, "Paolo Santa Croce Murdered his mother yester evening, And he is fled. Parricide grows so rife, That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs. Authority, and power, and hoary hair Are grown crimes capital. You are my nephew, You come to ask their pardon: stay a moment! Here is their sentence; never see me more Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled." BERNARDO. O, God, not so! I did believe indeed That all you said was but sad preparation He strike me with his pastoral cross, and trample [Rushes out. My God! Can it be possible I have To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; On Earth, and ever present? even though dead, 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 LUCRETIA. Child, perhaps It will be granted. We may all then live To make these woes a tale for distant years: O, what a thought! It gushes to my heart Like the warm blood. BEATRICE. Yet both will soon be cold: O, 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 yawns, like death. O, With famine, or wind-walking pestilence, [plead, 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 BERNARDO rushes in. BERNARDO. O, horrible! That tears, that looks, that hope poured forth in Enter CAMILLO and Guards. They come! Let me Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves Are blighted-white-cold. Say farewell, before Death chokes that gentle voice! O let me hear You speak! BEATRICE. Farewell, my tender brother. Think Lived ever holy and unstained. And though So mayest thou die as I do; fear and pain BERNARDO. I cannot say farewell! CAMILLO. O, Lady Beatrice! BEATRICE, Give yourself no unnecessary pain, NOTE ON THE CENCI. BY THE EDITOR. THE sort of mistake that Shelley made, as to the extent of his own genius and powers, which led him deviously at first, but lastly into the direct track that enabled him fully to develope them, is a curious instance of his modesty of feeling, and of the methods which the human mind uses at once to deceive itself, and yet, in its very delusion, to make its way out of error into the path which nature has marked out as its right one. He often incited me to attempt the writing a tragedy-he conceived that I possessed some dramatic talent, and he was always most earnest and energetic in his exhortations that I should cultivate any talent I possessed, to the utmost. I entertained a truer estimate of my powers; and, above all, though at that time not exactly aware of the fact, I was far too young to have any chance of succeeding, even moderately, in a species of composition, that requires a greater scope of experience in, and sympathy with, human passion than could then have fallen to my lot, or than any perhaps, except Shelley, ever possessed, even at the age of twentysix, at which he wrote the Cenci. On the other hand, Shelley most erroneously conceived himself to be destitute of this talent. He believed that one of the first requisites was the capacity of forming and following up a story or plot. He fancied himself to be defective in this portion of imagination-it was that which gave him least pleasure in the writings of others--though he laid great store by it, as the proper framework to support the sublimest efforts of poetry. He asserted that he was too metaphysical and abstract -too fond of the theoretical and the ideal, to suc ceed as a tragedian. It perhaps is not strange that I shared this opinion with himself, for he had hitherto shown no inclination for, nor given any specimen of his powers in framing and supporting the interest of a story, either in prose or verse. Once or twice, when he attempted such, he had speedily thrown it aside, as being even disagreeable to him as an occupation. The subject he had suggested for a tragedy was Charles I., and he had written to me, "Remember, remember Charles I. I have been already imagining how you would conduct some scenes. The second volume of St. Leon begins with this proud and true sentiment, There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute.' Shakspeare was only a human being." These words were written in 1818, while we were in Lombardy, when he little thought how soon a work of his own would prove a proud comment on the passage he quoted. When in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of the Cenci. We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story. Shelley's imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy. More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it instead; and he began and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose passions, so long cold in the tomb, he revived, and gifted with poetic language. This tragedy is the only one of his works that he com municated to me during its progress. We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together. I speedily saw the great mistake we had made, and triumphed in the discovery of the new talent brought to light from that mine of wealth, never, alas! through his untimely death, worked to its depths his richly-gifted mind. We suffered a severe affliction in Rome by the loss of our eldest child, who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him deservedly to be the idol of our hearts. We left the capital of the world, anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too intimately with his presence and loss.* Some friends of ours were residing in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer. Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel cracked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fireflies flashed from among the myrtle hedges;-nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed. At the top of the house, there was a sort of terrace. There is often such in Italy, generally roofed. This one was very small, yet not only roofed but glazed; this Shelley made his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid clouds dipped towards the waves, and became waterspouts, that churned up the waters beneath, as they were chased onward, and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence. In this airy cell he wrote the principal part of The Cenci. He was making a study of Calderon at the time, reading his best tragedies with an accomplished lady living near us, to whom his letter from Leghorn was addressed during the following year. He admired Calderon, both for his poetry *Such feelings haunted him when, in the Cenci, he makes Beatrice speak to Cardinal Camillo of that fair blue-eyed child, Who was the loadstar of your life. And say All see, since his most piteous death, That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time, and his dramatic genius; but it shows his judgment and originality, that, though greatly struck by his first acquaintance with the Spanish poet, none of his peculiarities crept into the composition of The Cenci; and there is no trace of his new studies, except in that passage to which he himself alludes, as suggested by one in El Purgatorio de San Patricio. Shelley wished The Cenci to be acted. He was not a play-goer, being of such fastidious taste that he was easily disgusted by the bad filling up of the inferior parts. While preparing for our departure from England, however, he saw Miss O'Neil several times; she was then in the zenith of her glory, and Shelley was deeply moved by her impersonation of several parts, and by the graceful sweetness, the intense pathos, and sublime vehemence of passion she displayed. She was often in his thoughts as he wrote, and when he had finished, he became anxious that his tragedy should be acted, and receive the advantage of having this accomplished actress to fill the part of the heroine. With this view he wrote the following letter to a friend in London: "The object of the present letter is to ask a favour of you. I have written a tragedy on a story well known in Italy and, in my conception, eminently dramatic. I have taken some pains to make my play fit for representation, and those who have already seen it judge favourably. It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which characterize my other compositions; I having attended simply to the impartial developement of such characters as it is probable the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree of popular effect to be produced by such a developement. I send you a translation of the Italian MS. on which my play is founded; the chief circumstance of which I have touched very delicately; for my principal doubt as to whether it would succeed, as an acting play, hangs entirely on the question as to whether any such a thing as incest in this shape, however treated, would be admitted on the stage. I think, however, it will form no objection, considering, first, that the facts are matters of history, and, secondly, the peculiar delicacy with which I have treated it.* "I am exceedingly interested in the question of whether this attempt of mine will succeed or not. *In speaking of his mode of treating this main incident, Shelley said that it might be remarked that, in the course of the play, he had never mentioned expressly Cenci's worst crime. Every one knew what it must be, but it was never imaged in words-the nearest allusion to it being that portion of Cenci's curse, beginning, "That if she have a child," &c. Q |