Exceed the service, leap the line: such check—
A secret which this life finds hard to keep,
And, often guessed, is never quite revealed. (810)
Guido must needs trip on a stumbling-block
Too vulgar, too absurdly plain i’ the path!
Study this single oversight of care,
This hebetude that mars sagacity,
Forgetfulness of what the man best knew!
Here is a stranger who, with need to fly,
Needs but to ask and have the means of flight.
Why, the first urchin tells you, to leave Rome,
Get horses, you must show the warrant, just
The banal scrap, clerk’s scribble, a fair word buys, (820)
Or foul one, if a ducat sweeten word,—
And straight authority will back demand,
Give you the pick o’ the post- house!—in such wise,
The resident at Rome for thirty years,
Guido, instructs a stranger! And himself
Forgets just this poor paper scrap, wherewith
Armed, every door he knocks at opens wide
To save him: horsed and manned, with such advance
O’ the hunt behind, why ’twere the easy task
Of hours told on the fingers of one hand, (830)
To reach the Tuscan Frontier, laugh at home,
Light-hearted with his fellows of the place,—
Prepared by that strange shameful judgment, that
Satire upon a sentence just pronounced
By the Rota and confirmed by the Granduke,—
Ready in a circle to receive their peer,
Appreciate his good story how, when Rome,
The Pope-King and the populace of priests
Made common cause with their confederate
The other priestling who seduced his wife, (840)
He, all unaided, wiped out the affront
With decent bloodshed and could face his friends,
Frolic it in the world’s eye. Ay, such tale
Missed such applause, all by such oversight!
So, tired and footsore, those blood-flustered five
Went reeling on the road through dark and cold,
The few permissible miles, to sink at length,
Wallow and sleep in the first wayside straw,
As the other herd quenched, i’ the wash o’ the wave,
—Each swine, the devil inside him: so slept they, (850)
And so were caught and caged—all through one trip,
Touch of the fool in Guido the astute!
He curses the omission, I surmise,
More than the murder. Why, thou fool and blind,
It is the mercy-stroke that stops thy fate,
Hamstrings and holds thee to thy hurt,—but how?
On the edge o’ the precipice! One minute more,
Thou hadst gone farther and fared worse, my son,
Fathoms down on the flint and fire beneath!
Thy comrades each and all were of one mind (860)
Straightway, thy murder done, to murder thee
In turn, because of promised pay withheld.
So, to the last, greed found itself at odds
With craft in thee, and, proving conqueror,
Had sent thee, the same night that crowned thy hope,
Thither where, this same day, I see thee not,
Nor, through God’s mercy, need, to-morrow, see.
Discernible in this group of clustered crimes
Huddling together in the cave they call (870)
Their palace, outraged day thus penetrates.
Around him ranged, now close and now remote,
Prominent or obscure to meet the needs
O’ the mage and master, I detect each shape
Subsidiary i’ the scene nor loathed the less,
All alike coloured, all descried akin
By one and the same pitchy furnace stirred
At the centre: see, they lick the master’s hand,—
This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-brute
The Abate,—why, mere wolfishness looks well, (880)
Guido stands honest in the red o’ the flame,
Beside this yellow that would pass for white,
This Guido, all craft but no violence,
This copier of the mien and gait and garb
Of Peter and Paul, that he may go disguised,
Rob halt and lame, sick folk i’ the temple- porch!
Armed with religion, fortified by law,
A man of peace, who trims the midnight lamp
And turns the classic page—and all for craft,
All to work harm with, yet incur no scratch! (890)
While Guido brings the struggle to a close,
Paul steps back the due distance, clear o’ the trap
He builds and baits. Guido I catch and judge;
Paul is past reach in this world and my time:
That is a case reserved. Pass to the next,
The boy of the brood, the young Girolamo
Priest, Canon, and what more? nor wolf nor fox,
But hybrid, neither craft nor violence
Wholly, part violence part craft: such cross
Tempts speculation—will both blend one day, (900)
And prove hell’s better product? Or subside
And let the simple quality emerge,
Go on with Satan’s service the old way?
Meanwhile, what promise,—what performance too!
For there’s a new distinctive touch, I see,
Lust—lacking in the two—hell’s own blue tint
That gives a character and marks the man
More than a match for yellow and red. Once more,
A case reserved: should I doubt? Then comes
The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke, (910)
The hag that gave these three abortions birth,
Unmotherly mother and unwomanly
Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame,
Womanliness to loathing: no one word,
No gesture to curb cruelty a whit
More than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelps
Trying their milk-teeth on the soft o’ the throat
O’ the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,
Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,
Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw, (920)
Catch ’twixt her placid eyewinks at what chance
Old bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,
Born when herself was novice to the taste,
The while she lets youth take its pleasure. Last,
These God-abandoned wretched lumps of life,
These four
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