DRAMATIS PERSONE.

MEN.

WERNER.

ULRIC.

STRALENHEIM.

IDENSTEIN.

Gabor.

FRITZ.

HENRICK.

ERIC.

ARNHEIM.

MEISTER.

RODOLPH.

LUDWIG.

WOMEN.

JOSEPHINE.

IDA STRALENHEIM.

Scene-partly on the frontier of Silesia, and partly in Siegendorf Castle, near Prague.

Time-the close of the thirty years' war.

OR,

THE INHERITANCE.

ACT I.

SCENE I.

The Hall of a decayed Palace near a small Town on the northern Frontier of Silesia—the Night tempestuous. WERNER and JOSEPHINE his wife.

JOSEPHINE.

My love, be calmer!

WERNER.

I am calm.

JOSEPHINE.

To me

Yes, but not to thyself: thy pace is hurried,
And no one walks a chamber like to ours
With steps like thine when his heart is at rest.
Were it a garden, I should deem thee happy,
And stepping with the bee from flower to flower;
But here !

WERNER.

'Tis chill; the tapestry lets through

The wind to which it waves: my blood is frozen.

WERNER.

Let it flow

Until 'tis spilt or check'd-how soon, I care not.

JOSEPHINE.

And am I nothing in thy heart?

WERNER.

All-all.

JOSEPHINE.

Then canst thou wish for that which must break mine? WERNER (approaching her slowy).

But for thee I had been-no matter what,

But much of good and evil; what I am,

Thou knowest; what I might or should have been, Thou knowest not: but still I love thee, nor

Shall aught divide us.

(WERNER walks on abruptly, and then approaches JOSEPHINE.)

The storm of the night,

Perhaps, affects me; I'm a thing of feelings,
And have of late been sickly, as, alas!

Thou know'st by sufferings more than mine, my love!

In watching me.

JOSEPHINE.

To see thee well is much

To see thee happy

WERNER.

Where hast thou seen such?

Let me be wretched with the rest!

JOSEPHINE.

But think

How many in this hour of tempest shiver

Beneath the biting wind and heavy rain,

Whose every drop bows them down nearer earth,

Which hath no chamber for them save beneath

Her surface.

WERNER.

And that's not the worst: who cares

For chambers? rest is all. The wretches whom
Thou namest―ay, the wind howls round them, and
The dull and dropping rain saps in their bones
The creeping marrow. I have been a soldier,
A hunter, and a traveller, and am

A beggar, and should know the thing thou talk'st of.

JOSEPHINE.

And art thou not now shelter'd from them all?

Be thankless for that refuge which their habits
Of early delicacy render more

Needful than to the peasant, when the ebb

Of fortune leaves them on the shoals of life?

WERNER.

It is not that, thou know'st it is not; we
Have borne all this, I'll not say patiently,
Except in thee—but we have borne it.

Something beyond our outward sufferings (though

These were enough to gnaw into our souls)