olled it, yet ever
Seeming to bear us on athwart those shining expanses
Out to shining seas beyond pursuit or returning--
There, while we lingered, and lingered, and would not break from our
rapture,
Down the mirrored night another gondola drifted
Nearer and slowly nearer our own, and moonlighted faces
Stared. And that sweet trance grew a rigid and dreadful possession,
Which, if no dream indeed, yet mocked with such semblance of
dreaming,
That, as it happens in dreams, when a dear face, stooping to kiss
us,
Takes, ere the lips have touched, some malign and horrible aspect,
_His_ face faded away, and the face of the Dead--of that other--
Flashed on mine, and writhing, through every change of emotion,--
Wild amaze and scorn, accusation and pitiless mocking,--
Vanished into the swoon whose blackness encompassed and hid me.

PHILIP--_To Bertha_.

I am not sure, I own, that if first I had seen my delusion
When I saw _you_, last night, I should be so ready to give you
Now your promises back, and hold myself nothing above you,
That it is mine to offer a freedom you never could ask for.
Yet, believe me, indeed, from no bitter heart I release you:
You are as free of me now as though I had died in the battle,
Or as I never had lived. Nay, if it is mine to forgive you,
Go without share of the blame that could hardly be all upon your
side.

Ghosts are not sensitive things; yet, after my death in the
papers,
Sometimes a harrowing doubt assailed this impalpable essence:
Had I done so well to plead my cause at that moment,
When your consent must be yielded less to the lover than soldier?
"Not so well," I was answered by that ethereal conscience
Ghosts have about them, "and not so nobly or wisely as might be."
--Truly, I loved you, then, as now I love you no longer.

I was a prisoner then, and this doubt in the languor of sickness
Came; and it clung to my convalescence, and grew to the purpose,
After my days of captivity ended, to seek you and solve it,
And, if I haply had erred, to undo the wrong, and release you.

Well, you have solved me the doubt. I dare to trust that you wept
me,
Just a little, at first, when you heard of me dead in the battle?
For we were plighted, you know, and even in this saintly humor,
I would scarce like to believe that my loss had merely relieved
you.
Yet,