she is spoken for?

SECOND BROTHER

If by then she is comely, we will get for her silver from a palace. If
she is not comely, we will get the value of cedar boards.

THE SHULAMITE

(_ironically intervening._)

I am comely, yet I made them let me be.

FIRST BROTHER

(_significantly._)

Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. He leased it to farmers each of
whom was to pay him a thousand pieces of silver.

THE SHULAMITE

But my vineyard which is mine I still have.

(_Laughing._)

A thousand pieces for thee, Solomon, and two hundred for the others.

(_At the door the_ SHEPHERD _appears. Behind him are comrades._)

THE SHEPHERD

Fair one, that dwelleth here, my companions hearken to thy voice, cause
me to hear it.

THE SHULAMITE

Hasten to me, my beloved. Hasten like a roe or a young hart on the
mountains of spices.

III

APHRODITE URANIA

Greece had many creeds, yet but one religion. That was Beauty. Israel
believed in hate, Greece in love. In Judaea the days of the righteous were
long. In Greece they were brief. Whom the gods loved died young. The gods
themselves were young. With the tribes that took possession of the
Hellenic hills they came in swarms. Sprung from the depths of the archaic
skies, they were sombre and impure. When they reached Olympus already
their Asiatic masks had fallen. Hecate was hideous, Hephaestos limped, but
among the others not an imperfection remained. Divested of attributes
monstrous and enigmatic, they rejuvenated into divinities of joy. Homer
said that their laughter was inextinguishable. He joined in it. So did
Greece. The gayety of the immortals was appreciated by a people that
counted their years by their games.

As the tribes dispersed the gods advanced. Their passage, marked here by a
temple, there by a shrine, had always the incense of legends. These Homer
gathered and from them formed a Pentateuch in which dread was replaced by
the ideal. Divinities, whom the Assyrian priests barely dared to invoke by
name, and whose mention by the laity was forbidden, he displayed, luminous
and indulgent, lifting, as he did so, the immense burden of mystery and
fear under which humanity had staggered. Homer turned religion into art,
belief into poetry. He evolved a creed that was more gracious than
austere, more aesthetic perhaps than moral, but which had the signal merit
of creating a serenity from which contemporaneous civilization proceed