Quite a dealer in death. And ours was a case That those difficult drugs of his laboratory Demanded. I visited; found him; his face, Bent over a sublimate,--safe from the hoary Light particles,--masked with a mask of fine glass. I told him your danger, Marie, and expounded Our passion, despair, with many an "Alas!" He smiled while a paste in a mortar he pounded.
Three fistfuls of Louis!--"He'd do it," he said.-- A delicate dust, gum, liquid and metal Crushed, crucibled.... "Stay! tie this mask on your head. You see, but a grain on your rose's pink petal Has shriveled and blasted it--look, how it dries!-- A perilous pulver ... could Satan make better?... To mix with that present of perfumes--she dies, And who is the wiser? Or, say in a letter
"To the husband of her who has smiled on you since Another grows bald?"--And he poured in a bottle The subtlety.--"Bah! be he beggar or prince, If he kiss but the seal the venom will throttle."-- "Well," I thought, "I will test ere I risk." Slyly drew My dagger; approached to the bandlet, that tightly Supported his mask, its keen point.... It was true!-- When it cracked he fell dead; he but breathed of it lightly.
Your letter is sealed and is sent. You are mine!-- By now he has broken the wax.... If there flutters Some dust in his nostrils, who, who will divine That thus it was poisoned?--Our alchemist utters No word!--You are happy? and I?--Oh, I feel That I love and am loved.--The tidings comes heavy To-night to the King; you are there; you will reel-- Will faint!--Now away to the royal levee.
Note.--In this poem, which originally appeared in a volume of mine entitled _Lyrics and Idylls_, published in 1890, some hypercritical critic in the New York _Nation_ accused me of imitating Browning's _The Laboratory_. The truth of the matter is that the poem was written ten months before I had ever read Browning's _Dramatic Lyrics_, and was suggested to me by the reading of the following passage in one of E. T. W. Hoffman's (the German Poe's) stories. The passage occurs in _Mademoiselle De Scuderi_ and is as follows: "The poisons which Sainte Croix prepared were of so subtle a nature that if the powder (called by the Parisians _Poudre de Succession_, or Succession Powder) were prepared with the face exposed, a single inhalation of it might cause instantaneous death. Sainte Croix therefore, when engaged in its manufacture, always wore a mask of fine glass. One day, just as he was pouring a prepared powder into a phial, his mask fell off, and inhaling the fine particles of the poison, he fell dead on the spot."