Stay, Bowtell! 
Open me yonder coffin, dost not hear? 
Quick, fool!  Thy mouth is all agape; as if
Thou didst lack tidings.  What dost quiver for? 
Give me thy sword. [Wrenches open the coffin.]
I would see how he looks: 
Perchance, I may undo the look he sent, [Aside.]
In search of me this morn from off the scaffold.

Bow. My Lord!  Shall we go?

Crom. Ay, I would lift my voice In prayer awhile.  Nay, leave your matchlocks.  So.

[Exeunt Soldiers.]

[The steps of the Soldiers are heard gradually retreating.  CROMWELL following them to the side.]

It is an hour since I did speak to them! 
The air is life-like and intelligent,
I seem to fret it as I move along;
Yet this is Death’s abode!

[Looks cautiously round—­calls in another tone.]

Ho! there—­hola! 
We are alone.  I do forget me—­stay—­

[Advances to the coffin.]

Like the hot iron to the quivering flesh
Be this test to my soul, to look on him,
To set my living face by his dead face;
Then tax him with the deeds for which I slew him.

[Opens the coffin very gently.]

O Thou discrowned and insensible clay! 
Thou beggar corpse! 
Stripp’d, ’midst a butcher’d score, or so, of men,
Upon a bleak hill-side, beneath the rack
Of flying clouds torn by the cannon’s boom,
If the red, trampled grass were all thy shroud,
The scowl of Heaven thy plumed canopy,
Thou might’st be any one! 
How is it with thee?  Man!  Charles Stuart!  King! 
See, the white, heavy, overhanging lids
Press on his grey eyes, set in gory death! 
How blanch’d his dusky cheek! that late was flush’d
Because a people would not be his slaves,
And now a, worm may mock him—­
This strong frame
Promis’d long life, ’tis constituted well;
’Twas but a lying promise, like the rest! 
Dark is the world, of tyranny within
Yon roofless house, where Silence holds her court
Before Decay’s last revel. 
Yet, O king,
I would insult thee not.  But if thy spirit
Circle unseen around the guilty clay,
Till it be buried, and those solemn words
Give “dust to dust,” leaving the soul no home
On this vain earth,
O hear me! 
Or if still
There be a something sentient in the body,
Through all corruption’s stages, till our frames
Rot, rot, and seem no more,—­and thus the soul
Is cag’d in bones through which the north wind rattles,
Or haunts the black skull wash’d up by the waves
Upon the moaning shore—­poor weeping skull,
From whose deep-blotted, eyeless socket-holes
The dank green seaweed drips its briny tear—­
If it be so, that round the festering grave,
Where yet some earth-brown, human relic moulders,
The parting ghost may linger to the last,
Till it have share in all the elements,
Shriek in the storm, or glide in summer air,
O hear me!