If not,
Upon his soldiers he hath lavisht her.
Not he. Now they have known her, his filled senses
Never will leave go our wonderful Judith.
Ay, wonderful in Jewry. But there are
In Babylon women so beautiful,
They make men's spirits desperate, to know
Flesh cannot ever minister enough
Delight to ease the craving they are taskt with.
Who talks of Babylon when God even now
Is training her fierce champion, Holofernes,
Into the death a woman holds before him?
A woman killing Holofernes!
Ay;
Be she abused by him or not, I know
God means to give her marvellous hands to-night.
I know it by my heart so strangely sick
With looking out for the first drowsy stir
In that huge flaming quiet of the camp.
Now fearfuller qualm than famine eagerly
Handles my life and pulls at it,--my faith's
Hunger for being fed with sounds and visions:
The firelight mixt with a trooping bustle of shadows,
The silence suddenly shouting with surprise,
That tells of men astounded out of sleep
To find that God hath dreadfully been among them.
We have mistaken Judith.
Even as now
God is mistaken by your doubting hearts.
She that has dealt with such a pride of spirit
In all her ways of life, so that she seemed
To feel like shadow, falling on the light
Her own mind made, the common thoughts of men;
Ay, she that to-day came down into our woe
And stood among the griefs that buzz upon us,
Like one who is forced aside from a bright journey
To stoop in a small-room'd cottage, where loud flies
Pester the inmates and the windows darken;
This she, this Judith, out of her quiet pride,
And out of her guarded purity, to walk
Where God himself from violent whoredom could
Scarcely preserve her shuddering flesh! and all
For our sake, for the lives she hath in scorn,
This horrible Assyrian risk she ventures.
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