[p. 158]
Gifts and gold are nought to me;
I would only look on thee;
Tell to thee, the high-wrought feeling,
Ecstasy but in revealing;
Paint to thee the deep sensation,
Rapture in participation,
Yet but torture, if comprest
In a lone unfriended breast.
Absent still?
Ah, come and bless me!
Let these eyes again caress thee.
Once, in caution, I could fly thee,
Now I nothing could deny thee.
In a look if death there be,
Come, and I will gaze on thee!
Zophiel, just returned from his subterranean search, approaches Egla as the song is concluded and, with rapture, he hears her breathe his own name.
‘The joy of a whole mortal life he felt in that one moment.’
He was about to make his presence known when the half-crazed Zameia rushes in and accuses Egla of the murder of her lover,
Meles.
Zameia falls dead, in the attempt to kill Egla.
The long-suffering Egla, weary at last of the repeated horrors of which she is the innocent cause, prepares to take her own life.
Alas for Egla!
Now her hands intwine
The guilty knot: she springs!
“Hold, hold!
thy life, Maiden, is not thine own but God's and mine!
”
'Twas Helon's voice.
Helon, Egla's predestined bridegroom, is brought in at this opportune moment by the angel
Raphael, and while the unhappy
Zophiel is held in combat with ‘the dark spirit of the storm,’ Helon and Egla plight a solemn troth before the Almighty—and Egla, freed from the unholy influence of Zophiel, prays Heaven
