Will by one full and last development
     Complete the plot for that catastrophe
     That he must put to all; God grant it be
     The crown of Poland on his brows!—­Hark! hark!—­
     Was that his voice within!—­Now louder—­Oh,
     Clotaldo, what! so soon begun to roar!—­
     Again! above the music—­But betide
     What may, until the moment, we must hide.

     (Exeunt King and Clotaldo.)

     Segismund (within). 
     Forbear!  I stifle with your perfume!  Cease
     Your crazy salutations! peace, I say
     Begone, or let me go, ere I go mad
     With all this babble, mummery, and glare,
     For I am growing dangerous—­Air! room! air!—­
     (He rushes in.  Music ceases.)
     Oh but to save the reeling brain from wreck
     With its bewilder’d senses! 
     (He covers his eyes for a while.)
     What!  E’en now
     That Babel left behind me, but my eyes
     Pursued by the same glamour, that—­unless
     Alike bewitch’d too—­the confederate sense
     Vouches for palpable:  bright-shining floors
     That ring hard answer back to the stamp’d heel,
     And shoot up airy columns marble-cold,
     That, as they climb, break into golden leaf
     And capital, till they embrace aloft
     In clustering flower and fruitage over walls
     Hung with such purple curtain as the West
     Fringes with such a gold; or over-laid
     With sanguine-glowing semblances of men,
     Each in his all but living action busied,
     Or from the wall they look from, with fix’d eyes
     Pursuing me; and one most strange of all
     That, as I pass’d the crystal on the wall,
     Look’d from it—­left it—­and as I return,
     Returns, and looks me face to face again—­
     Unless some false reflection of my brain,
     The outward semblance of myself—­Myself? 
     How know that tawdry shadow for myself,
     But that it moves as I move; lifts his hand
     With mine; each motion echoing so close
     The immediate suggestion of the will
     In which myself I recognize—­Myself!—­
     What, this fantastic Segismund the same
     Who last night, as for all his nights before,
     Lay down to sleep in wolf-skin on the ground
     In a black turret which the wolf howl’d round,
     And woke again upon a golden bed,
     Round which as clouds about a rising sun,
     In scarce less glittering caparison,
     Gather’d gay shapes that, underneath a breeze
     Of music, handed him upon their knees
     The wine of heaven in a cup of gold,
     And still in soft melodious under-song
     Hailing me Prince of Poland!—­’Segismund,’
     They said, ‘Our Prince!  The Prince of Poland!’ and
     Again, ’Oh, welcome, welcome, to his own,
     ‘Our own Prince Segismund—­’
     Oh, but a blast—­
     One blast of the rough