Hades,
Lands of Immortal light and shores of gloom.
Eternal as the chorus of their wail,
And the dim isthmus of that middle space,
Where the compassioned soul may purge its sins
In pious expiation. Then advance
Ye children of all sorrows, and all sins,
Doubts that perplex, and hopes that tantalize,
All the wild forms the fiend Temptation takes
To tamper with the soul! Come with the care
That eats your daily life; come with the thought
That is conceived in the noon of night,
And makes us stare around us though alone;
Come with the engendering sin, and with the crime
That is full-born. To counsel and to soothe,
I sit within this chair.

[ALARCOS advances and kneels by the Confessional.]

III:1:3 ALAR.
O, holy father
My soul is burthened with a crime.

III:1:4 PRIOR.
My son,
The church awaits thy sin.

III:1:5 ALAR.
It is a sin
Most black and terrible. Prepare thine ear
For what must make it tremble.

III:1:6 PRIOR.
Thou dost speak
To Power above all passion, not to man.

III:1:7 ALAR.
There was a lady, father, whom I loved,
And with a holy love, and she loved me
As holily. Our vows were blessed, if favour
Hang on a father's benediction.

III:1:8 PRIOR.
Her
Mother?

III:1:9 ALAR.
She had a mother, if to bear
Children be all that makes a mother: one
Who looked on me, about to be her child,
With eyes of lust.

III:1:10 PRIOR.
And thou?

III:1:11 ALAR.
O, if to trace
But with the memory's too veracious aid
This tale be anguish, what must be its life
And terrible action? Father, I abjured
This lewd she-wolf. But ah! her fatal vengeance
Struck to my heart. A banished scatterling
I