ll" to that--say "well!"
Because you gaze--am I fantastic, sweet?
Gaze like my very life's-stuff, marble--marbly 80
Even to the silence! Why, before I found
The real flesh Phene, I inured myself
To see, throughout all nature, varied stuff
For better nature's birth by means of art:
With me, each substance tended to one form 85
Of beauty--to the human archetype.
On every side occurred suggestive germs
Of that--the tree, the flower--or take the fruit--
Some rosy shape, continuing the peach,
Curved beewise o'er its bough; as rosy limbs, 90
Depending, nestled in the leaves; and just
From a cleft rose-peach the whole Dryad sprang.
But of the stuffs one can be master of,
How I divined their capabilities!
From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk 95
That yields your outline to the air's embrace,
Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom;
Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure
To cut its one confided thought clean out
Of all the world. But marble!--'neath my tools 100
More pliable than jelly--as it were
Some clear primordial creature dug from depths
In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself,
And whence all baser substance may be worked;
Refine it off to air, you may--condense it 105
Down to the diamond--is not metal there,
When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips?
--Not flesh, as flake off flake I scale, approach,
Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep?
Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised 110
By the swift implement sent home at once,
Flushes and glowings radiate and hover
About its track?
Phene? what--why is this?
That whitening cheek, those still dilating eyes!
Ah, you will die--I knew that you would die! 115

PHENE _begins, on his having long remained silent._

Now the end's coming; to be sure, it must
Have ended sometime! Tush, why need I speak
Their foolish speech? I cannot bring to mind
One half of it, beside; and do not care
For old Natalia now, nor any of them. 120
Oh, you--what are you?--if I do not try
To say the words Natalia made me learn;
To please your friends--it is to keep myself
Where your voice lifted me, by letting that