t!

The priest had sung alone so far, and now both priest and priestess
joined their voices in a marvellous song. Wilder, sweeter and more
intense, the violins stormed and wailed pathetic whirlwinds of
ecstasy. At times their insufferable moans caught the excited hearts
of the audience, and twin-souls in their passion would rise on their
wings and, revolving, sweep around the amphitheatre locked in each
other's arms.

PRIEST AND PRIESTESS.

Sharper than pain, we love, and the caress,
Keener than torment, overmaddens us!
There is no fasting when our feverish lips
Meet in the shock that strikes the spirit dumb
With swooning raptures! The dilated soul,
Intemperate with the enormous moan
Of passion, would outleap the strenuous will.
The flesh, transfigured with the crisis, reels,
Stretches the chain of duty and would leap
To grasp the tempting and forbidden fruit,
Were not that virtue is our comrade now.

We lift our eager faces to the sun
And feast on life and in each other's souls
Luxuriate, confounded with delight.
For us no mouldy cloister waits its prey,
Nor cave of darkness, where existence mourns
And dies beneath its scourgings. We have made
Our grim novitiate with reality.
Have known its agony, for we were born
So eminent for rapture, that the pain
All men inherit desolated us
And spread a living terror in our souls;
So that through clouds of everlasting woe
Scarce came the gleam of gladness or of love,
And earth was pitiless, and brutal souls
Who cannot feel there ruled. Oh, the wide world,
Degraded by ignoble brutishness,
Could yield no tendernesses infinite
For we who feed on rapture. Thus it was
Our souls on meeting, in the thrilling kiss
Were fused in indissoluble embrace;
We who were famished, in ideal love
Found sustenance and passed from death to life!

The song was perfect. The strange, fresh accents of the singers, so
full of love and passion, melted every heart in the temple with their
ecstasy. One might hear such measures without thought of lapse of time
or of worldly concerns. Ah! if one could hear such melody
forevermore!

With a burst of dramatic joy the singing of the last stanza revealed
whole worlds of rapture.

Reincarnated in an earthly heaven,
Now have we reached Nirvana, now
Above us open the wide gulfs of joy,