Be calm, be calm; and bear it like a man!

MELCH.

And all for me—­for my mad wilful folly! 
Blind, did you say?  Quite blind—­and both his eyes?

STAUFF.

Ev’n so.  ’The fountain of his sight is quench’d,
He ne’er will see the blessed sunshine more.

FUeRST.

Oh, spare his anguish!

MELCH.

Never, never more!

[Presses his hands upon his eyes and is silent for some moments:  then turning from one to the other speaks in a subdued tone, broken by sobs.]

O the eye’s light, of all the gifts of Heaven,
The dearest, best!  From light all beings live—­
Each fair created thing—­the very plants
Turn with a joyful transport to the light,
And he—­he must drag on through all his days
In endless darkness!  Never more for him
The sunny meads shall glow, the flow’rets bloom;
Nor shall he more behold the roseate tints
Of the iced mountain top!  To die is nothing. 
But to have life, and not have sight—­oh, that
Is misery indeed!  Why do you look
So piteously at me?  I have two eyes,
Yet to my poor blind father can give neither! 
No, not one gleam of that great sea of light,
That with its dazzling splendor floods my gaze.

STAUFF.

Ah, I must swell the measure of your grief,
Instead of soothing it.  The worst, alas! 
Remains to tell.  They’ve stripp’d him of his all;
Naught have they left him, save his staff, on which,
Blind, and in rags, he moves from door to door.

MELCH.

Naught but his staff to the old eyeless man! 
Stripp’d of his all—­even of the light of day,
The common blessing of the meanest wretch? 
Tell me no more of patience, of concealment! 
Oh, what a base and coward thing am I,
That on mine own security I thought
And took no care of thine!  Thy precious head
Left as a pledge within the tyrant’s grasp! 
Hence, craven-hearted prudence, hence!  And all
My thoughts be vengeance, and the despot’s blood! 
I’ll seek him straight—­no power shall stay me now—­
And at his hands demand my father’s eyes. 
I’ll beard him ’mid a thousand myrmidons! 
What’s life to me, if in his heart’s best blood
I cool the fever of this mighty anguish.

     [He is going.]

FUeRST.

Stay, this is madness, Melchthal!  What avails
Your single arm against his power?  He sits
At Sarnen high within his lordly keep,
And, safe within its battlemented walls,
May laugh to scorn your unavailing rage.

MELCH.

And though he sat within the icy domes
Of yon far Schreckhorn—­ay, or higher, where,
Veil’d since eternity, the Jungfrau soars,
Still to the tyrant would I make my way;
With twenty comrades minded like myself,
I’d lay his fastness level with the earth! 
And if none follow me, and if you all,
In terror for your homesteads and your herds,
Bow in submission to the tyrant’s yoke,
Round me I’ll call the herdsmen on the hills,
And there beneath heaven’s free and boundless roof,
Where men still feel as men, and hearts are true,
Proclaim aloud this foul enormity!