But he strives in vain to persuade Frederick to the despised act of
homage, and it is only at the intercession of the Emperor's kinsmen
and the German princes that he consents to it. When it is done in the
presence of all the army and the clerical retinue, Adrian mounts, and
says to Frederick, with scarcely hidden irony:
In truth thou art
An apt and ready squire, and thou hast held
My stirrup firmly. Take, then, O my son,
The kiss of peace, for thou hast well fulfilled
All of thy duties.
But Frederick, crying aloud, and fixing the sense of the multitude
upon him, answers:
Nay, not all, O Father!--
Princes and soldiers, hear! I have done homage
To Peter, not to him.
The Church and the Empire being now reconciled, Frederick receives the
ambassadors of the Roman republic with scorn; he outrages all their
pretensions to restore Rome to her old freedom and renown; insults
their prayer that he will make her his capital, and heaps contempt
upon the weakness and vileness of the people they represent. Giordano
replies for them:
When will you dream,
You Germans, in your thousand stolid dreams,--
The fume of drunkenness,--a future greater
Than our Rome's memories? Never be her banner
Usurped by you! In prison and in darkness
Was born your eagle, that did but descend
Upon the helpless prey of Roman dead,
But never dared to try the ways of heaven,
With its weak vision wounded by the sun.
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