th were better?

'Away! The demon tempts me. But to what? What nameless deed shall
desecrate this hand? It must not be: the royal blood of twice two
thousand years, it must not die, die like a dream. Oh! my heart is full
of care, and my soul is dark with sorrow!

'Hark! the trumpets that sound our dishonour. Oh, that they but sounded
to battle! Lord of Hosts, let me conquer or die! Let me conquer like
David; or die, Lord, like Saul!

'Why do I live? Ah! could the thought that lurks within my secret heart
but answer, not that trumpet's blast could speak as loud or clear.
The votary of a false idea, I linger in this shadowy life, and feed on
silent images which no eye but mine can gaze upon, till at length they
are invested with all the terrible circumstance of life, and breathe,
and act, and form a stirring world of fate and beauty, time, and death,
and glory. And then, from out this dazzling wilderness of deeds, I
wander forth and wake, and find myself in this dull house of bondage,
even as I do now. Horrible! horrible!

'God, of my fathers! for indeed I dare not style thee God of their
wretched sons; yet, by the memory of Sinai, let me tell thee that some
of the antique blood yet beats within these pulses, and there yet is one
who fain would commune with thee face to face, commune and conquer.

'And if the promise unto which we cling be not a cheat, why, let him
come, come, and come quickly, for thy servant Israel, Lord, is now a
slave so infamous, so woe-begone, and so contemned, that even when our
fathers hung their harps by the sad waters of the Babylonian stream,
why, it was paradise compared with what we suffer.

'Alas! they do not suffer; they endure and do not feel. Or by this time
our shadowy cherubim would guard again the ark. It is the will that is
the father to the deed, and he who broods over some long idea, however
wild, will find his dream was but the prophecy of coming fate.

'And even now a vivid flash darts through the darkness of my mind.
Methinks, methinks--ah! worst of woes to dream of glory in despair. No,
no; I live and die a most ignoble thing; beauty and love, and fame and
mighty deeds, the smile of women and the gaze of men, and the ennobling
consciousness of worth, and all the fiery course of the creative
passions, these are not for me, and I, Alroy, the descendant of sacred
kings, and with a soul that pants for empire, I stand here extending my
vain arm for my lost sceptre, a most dish