Bellosguardo or Fiesole,
Where roses in their fin’st profusion hide
Some marble villa whose cool walls have rung
A laughing echo to Decameron,
And where thy laughter shall as gaily sound.
Say thou canst love or with a silent kiss
Instil that balmy knowledge on my soul.
bianca
Canst tell me what love is?
guido
It is consent,
The union of two minds, two souls, two hearts.
In all they think and hope and feel.
bianca
Such lovers might as well be dumb, for those
Who think and hope and feel alike can never
Have anything for one another’s ear.
·145· guido
Love is? Love is the meeting of two worlds
In never-ending change and counter-change.
bianca
Thus will my husband praise the mercer’s mart,
Where the two worlds of East and West exchange.
guido
Come. Love is love, a kiss, a close embrace.
It is …
bianca
My husband calls that love
When he hath slammed his weekly ledger to.
guido
I find my wit no better match for thine
Than thou art match for an old crabbed man;
But I am sure my youth and strength and blood
Keep better tune with beauty gay and bright
As thine is, than lean age and miser toil.
bianca
Well said, well said, I think he would not dare
·146· To face thee, more than owls dare face the sun;
He’s the bent shadow such a form as thine
Might cast upon a dung heap by the road,
Though should it fall upon a proper floor
Twould be at once a better man than he.
guido
Your merchant living in the dread of loss
Becomes perforce a coward, eats his heart.
Dull souls they are, who, like caged prisoners watch
And envy others’ joy; they taste no food
But what its cost is present to their thought.
bianca
I am my father’s daughter, in his eyes
A home-bred girl who has been taught to spin.
He never seems to think I have a face
Which makes you gallants turn where’er I pass.
guido
Thy night is darker than I dreamed, bright Star.
·147· bianca
He waits, stands by, and mutters to himself,
And never enters with a frank address
To any company. His eyes meet mine
And with a shudder I am sure he counts
The cost of what I wear.
guido
Forget him quite.
Come, come, escape from out this dismal life,
As a bright butterfly breaks spider’s web,
And nest with me among those rosy bowers,
Where we will love, as though the lives we led
Till yesterday were ghoulish dreams dispersed
By the great dawn of limpid joyous life.
bianca
Will I not come?
guido
O, make no question, come.
They waste their time who ponder o’er bad dreams.
We will away to hills, red roses clothe,
·148· And though the persons who did haunt that dream
Live on, they shall by distance dwindled, seem
No bigger than the smallest ear of corn
That cowers at the passing of a bird,
And silent shall they seem, out of ear-shot,
Those voices that could jar, while we gaze back
From rosy caves upon the hill-brow open,
And ask ourselves if what we see is not
A picture merely,—if dusty, dingy lives
Continue there to choke themselves with malice.
Wilt thou not come, Bianca? Wilt thou not?
[A sound on the stair.]
guido
What’s that?
[The door opens, they separate guiltily, and the husband enters.]
simone
My good wife, you come slowly; were it not better
To run to meet your lord? Here, take my cloak.
·149· Take this pack first. ’Tis heavy. I have sold nothing:
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