GUIDO (seizing her hand): What! Am I fallen so low
That I may not have leave to die for you?

DUCHESS (tearing her hand away): Die for me? – no, my life is a vile thing,
Thrown to the miry highways of this world;
You shall not die for me, you shall not, Guido,
I am a guilty woman.

GUIDO: Guilty? – let those

Who know what a thing temptation is,
In the red fire of passion, those whose lives
Are dull and colourless, in a word let those,
If any such there be, who have not loved,
Cast stones against you. As for me—

DUCHESS: Alas!

GUIDO (falling at her feet): You are my lady, and you are my love!
O hair of gold, O crimson lips, O face
Made for the luring and the love of man!
Incarnate image of pure loveliness!
Worshipping thee I do forget the past,
Worshipping thee my soul comes close to thine,
Worshipping thee I seem to be a god,
And though they give my body to the block,
Yet is my love eternal!

DUCHESS puts her hands over her face: GUIDO draws them down.

Sweet, lift up
The trailing curtains that overhang thine eyes
That I may look into those eyes, and tell you
I love you, never more than now when Death
Thrusts his cold lips between us: Beatrice,
I love you: have you no word left to say?
Oh, I can bear the executioner,
But not this silence: will you not say you love me?
Speak but that word and Death shall lose his sting,
But speak it not, and fifty thousand deaths
Are, in comparison, mercy. Oh you are cruel,
And do not love me.

DUCHESS: Alas! I have no right.
For I have stained the innocent hands of love
With spilt-out blood: there is blood on the ground,
I set it there.

GUIDO: Sweet, it was not yourself,
It was some devil tempted you. No, no,

DUCHESS (rising suddenly):
We are each our own devil, and we make
This world our hell.

GUIDO: Then let high Paradise
Fall into Tartarus! For I shall make
This world my heaven for a little space.
I love you, Beatrice.

DUCHESS: I am not worthy,
Being a thing of sin.

GUIDO: No, my Lord Christ,
The sin was mine, if any sin there was.
’Twas I who nurtured murder in my heart,
Sweetened my meats, seasoned my wine with it,
And in my fancy slew the accursed Duke
A hundred times a day. Why, had this man
Died half so often as I wished him to,
Death had been stalking ever through the house,
And murder had not slept.

But you, fond heart,
Whose little eyes grew tender over a whipt hound,
You whom the little children laughed to see
Because you brought the sunlight where you passed,
You the white angel of God’s purity,
This which men call your sin, what was it?