PRINCE HENRY. 
None whatever!

LUCIFER. 
               The dead are dead,
And their oracles dumb, when questioned
Of the new diseases that human life
Evolves in its progress, rank and rife. 
Consult the dead upon things that were,
But the living only on things that are. 
Have you done this, by the appliance
And aid of doctors?

PRINCE HENRY. 
                   Ay, whole schools
Of doctors, with their learned rules;
But the case is quite beyond their science. 
Even the doctors of Salern
Send me back word they can discern
No cure for a malady like this,
Save one which in its nature is
Impossible and cannot be!

LUCIFER. 
That sounds oracular!

PRINCE HENRY. 
                      Unendurable!

LUCIFER. 
What is their remedy?

PRINCE HENRY. 
                      You shall see;
Writ in this scroll is the mystery.

LUCIFER, reading. 
“Not to be cured, yet not incurable! 
The only remedy that remains
Is the blood that flows from a maiden’s veins,
Who of her own free will shall die,
And give her life as the price of yours!”

That is the strangest of all cures,
And one, I think, you will never try;
The prescription you may well put by,
As something impossible to find
Before the world itself shall end! 
And yet who knows?  One cannot say
That into some maiden’s brain that kind
Of madness will not find its way. 
Meanwhile permit me to recommend,
As the matter admits of no delay,
My wonderful Catholicon,
Of very subtile and magical powers!

PRINCE HENRY. 
Purge with your nostrums and drugs infernal
The spouts and gargoyles of these towers,
Not me!  My faith is utterly gone
In every power but the Power Supernal! 
Pray tell ne, of what school are you?

LUCIFER. 
Both of the Old and of the New! 
The school of Hermes Trismegistus,
Who uttered his oracles sublime
Before the Olympiads, in the dew
Of the early dusk and dawn of time,
The reign of dateless old Hephaestus! 
As northward, from its Nubian springs,
The Nile, forever new and old,
Among the living and the dead,
Its mighty mystic stream has rolled;
So, starting from its fountain-head
Under the lotus-leaves of Isis,
From the dead demigods of eld,
Through long unbroken lines of kings
Its course the sacred art has held,
Unchecked, unchanged by man’s devices. 
This art the Arabian Geber taught,
And in alembics, finely wrought,
Distilling herbs and flowers, discovered
The secret that so long had hovered
Upon the misty verge of Truth,
The Elixir of Perpetual Youth,
Called Alcohol, in the Arab speech! 
Like him, this wondrous lore I teach!

PRINCE HENRY. 
What! an adept?

LUCIFFR.
              Nor less, nor more!