FIRST BOOK.

OF writing many books there is no end;

And I who have written much in prose and verse

For others' uses, will write now for mine,–

Will write my story for my better self,

As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.

I, writing thus, am still what men call young;

I have not so far left the coasts of life

To travel inland, that I cannot hear

That murmur of the outer Infinite

Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep

When wondered at for smiling; not so far,

But still I catch my mother at her post

Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,

'Hush, hush–here's too much noise!' while her sweet eyes

Leap forward, taking part against her word

In the child's riot. Still I sit and feel

My father's slow hand, when she had left us both,

Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;

And hear Assunta's daily jest (she knew

He liked it better than a better jest)

Inquire how many golden scudi went

To make such ringlets. O my father's hand,

Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,–

Draw, press the child's head closer to thy knee!

I'm still too young, too young to sit alone.

I write. My mother was a Florentine,

Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me

When scarcely I was four years old; my life,

A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp

Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;

She could not bear the joy of giving life–

The mother's rapture slew her. If her kiss

Had left a longer weight upon my lips,

It might have steadied the uneasy breath,

And reconciled and fraternised my soul

With the new order. As it was, indeed,

I felt a mother-want about the world,

And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb

Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,–

As restless as a nest-deserted bird

Grown chill through something being away, though what

It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born

To make my father sadder, and myself

Not overjoyous, truly. Women know

The way to rear up children, (to be just,)

They know a simple, merry, tender knack

Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,

And stringing pretty words that make no sense,

And kissing full sense into empty words;

Which things are corals to cut life upon,

Although such trifles: children learn by such,

Love's holy earnest in a pretty play,

And get not over-early solemnised,–

But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love's Divine,

Which burns and hurts not,–not a single bloom,–

Become aware and unafraid of Love.

Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well

–Mine did, I know,–but still with heavier brains,

And wills more consciously responsible,

And not as wisely, since less foolishly;

So mothers have God's licence to be missed.

My father was an austere Englishman,

Who, after a dry life-time spent at home

In college-learning, law, and parish talk,

Was flooded with a passion unaware,

His whole provisioned and complacent past

Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood

In Florence, where he had come to spend a month

And note the secret of Da Vinci's drains,

He musing somewhat absently perhaps

Some English question . . whether men should pay

The unpopular but necessary tax

With left or right hand–in the alien sun

In that great square of the Santissima,

There drifted past him (scarcely marked enough

To move his comfortable island-scorn,)

A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,–

The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding up

Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant

To the blue luminous tremor of the air,

And letting drop the white wax as they went

To eat the bishop's wafer at the church;

From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,

A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,

And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,

Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,

He too received his sacramental gift

With eucharistic meanings; for he loved.

And thus beloved, she died. I've heard it said

That but to see him in the first surprise

Of widower and father, nursing me,

Unmothered little child of four years old,

His large man's hands afraid to touch my curls,

As if the gold would tarnish,–his grave lips

Contriving such a miserable smile,

As if he knew needs must, or I should die,

And yet 'twas hard,–would almost make the stones

Cry out for pity. There's a verse he set

In Santa Croce to her memory,

'Weep for an infant too young to weep much

When death removed this mother'–stops the mirth

To-day, on women's faces when they walk

With rosy children hanging on their gowns,

Under the cloister, to escape the sun

That scorches in the piazza. After which,

He left our Florence, and made haste to hide

Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,

Among the mountains above Pelago;

Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need

Of mother nature more than others use,

And Pan's white goats, with udders warm and full

Of mystic contemplations, come to feed

Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own–

Such scholar-scraps he talked, I've heard from friends,

For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,

Will get to wear it as a hat aside

With a flower stuck in't. Father, then, and child,

We lived among the mountains many years,

God's silence on the outside of the house,

And we, who did not speak too loud, within;

And old Assunta to make up the fire,

Crossing herself whene'er a sudden flame

Which lightened from the firewood, made alive

That picture of my mother on the wall.

The painter drew it after she was dead;

And when the face was finished, throat and hands,

Her cameriera carried him, in hate

Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade

She dressed in at the Pitti. 'He should paint

No sadder thing than that,' she swore, 'to wrong

Her poor signora.' Therefore, very strange

The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch

For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up

And gaze across them, half in terror, half

In adoration, at the picture there,–

That swan-like supernatural white life,

Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk

Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power

To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:

For hours I sate and stared. Asssunta's awe

And my poor father's melancholy eyes

Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts

When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew

In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,

Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,

Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,

Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,

With still that face . . . which did not therefore change,

But kept the mystic level of all forms

And fears and admirations; was by turn

Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,–

A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,

A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,

A still Medusa, with mild milky brows

All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes

Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,

Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords

Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first

Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,

And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;

Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile

In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth

My father pushed down on the bed for that,–

Or, my dead mother, without smile or kiss,

Buried at Florence. All which images,

Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves

Before my meditative childhood, . . as

The incoherencies of change and death

Are represented fully, mixed and merged,

In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.

And while I stared away my childish wits

Upon my mother's picture, (ah, poor child!)

My father, who through love had suddenly

Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose

From chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,

Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk

Or grow anew familiar with the sun,–

Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,

But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,–

Whom love had unmade from a common man

But not completed to an uncommon man,–

My father taught me what he had learnt the best

Before he died and left me,–grief and love.

And, seeing we had books among the hills,

Strong words of counselling souls, confederate

With vocal pines and waters,–out of books

He taught me all the ignorance of men,

And how God laughs in heaven when any man

Says, 'Here I'm learned; this, I understand;

In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.'

He sent the schools to school, demonstrating

A fool will pass for such through one mistake,

While a philosopher will pass for such,

Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross

And heaped up to a system.

I am like,

They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows

Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth

Of delicate features,–paler, near as grave;

But then my mother's smile breaks up the whole,

And makes it better sometimes than itself.

So, nine full years, our days were hid with God

Among his mountains. I was just thirteen,

Still growing like the plants from unseen roots

In tongue-tied Springs,–and suddenly awoke

To full life and its needs and agonies,

With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside

A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,

Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–'

'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief)

'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,

And none was left to love in all the world.

There, ended childhood: what succeeded next

I recollect as, after fevers, men

Thread back the passage of delirium,

Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;

Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;

A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i' the flank

With flame, that it should eat and end itself

Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,

I do remember clearly, how there came

A stranger with authority, not right,

(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up

From old Assunta's neck; how, with a shriek,

She let me go,–while I, with ears too full

Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word,

In all a child's astonishment at grief

Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,

My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!

The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,

Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,

Like one in anger drawing back her skirts

Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea

Inexorably pushed between us both,

And sweeping up the ship with my despair

Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.

Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;

Ten nights and days, without the common face

Of any day or night; the moon and sun

Cut off from the green reconciling earth,

To starve into a blind ferocity

And glare unnatural; the very sky

(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea

As if no human heart should 'scape alive,)

Bedraggled with the desolating salt,

Until it seemed no more than holy heaven

To which my father went. All new, and strange–

The universe turned stranger, for a child.

Then, land!–then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs

Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home

Among those mean red houses through the fog?

And when I heard my father's language first

From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,

I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,–

And some one near me said the child was mad

Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.

Was this my father's England? the great isle?

The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship

Or verdure, field from field, as man from man;

The skies themselves looked low and positive,

As almost you could touch them with a hand,

And dared to do it, they were so far off

From God's celestial crystals; all things, blurred

And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates

Absorb the light here?–not a hill or stone

With heart to strike a radiant colour up

Or active outline on the indifferent air!

I think I see my father's sister stand

Upon the hall-step of her country-house

To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight

As if for taming accidental thoughts

From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey

By frigid use of life, (she was not old,

Although my father's elder by a year)

A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;

A close mild mouth, a little soured about

The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,

Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;

Eyes of no colour,–once they might have smiled,

But never, never have forgot themselves

In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose

Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,

Kept more for ruth than pleasure,–if past bloom,

Past fading also.

She had lived we'll say,

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,

A quiet life, which was not life at all,

(But that, she had not lived enough to know)

Between the vicar and the county squires,

The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes

From the empyreal, to assure their souls

Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,

The apothecary looked on once a year,

To prove their soundness of humility.

The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts

Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,

Because we are of one flesh after all

And need one flannel, (with a proper sense

Of difference in the quality)–and still

The book-club guarded from your modern trick

Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,

Preserved her intellectual. She had lived

A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,

Accounting that to leap from perch to perch

Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live

In thickets and eat berries!

I, alas,

A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,

And she was there to meet me. Very kind.

Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.

She stood upon the steps to welcome me,

Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,–

Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool

To draw the new light closer, catch and cling

Less blindly. In my ears, my father's word

Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,

'Love, love, my child,' She, black there with my grief,

Might feel my love–she was his sister once–

I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved.

Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,

And drew me feebly through the hall, into

The room she sate in.

There, with some strange spasm

Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands

Imperiously, and held me at arm's length,

And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes

Searched through my face,–ay, stabbed it through and through,

Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find

A wicked murderer in my innocent face,

If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,

She struggled for her ordinary calm,

And missed it rather,–told me not to shrink,

As if she had told me not to lie or swear,–

'She loved my father, and would love me too

As long as I deserved it.' Very kind.

I understood her meaning afterward;

She thought to find my mother in my face,

And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,

Had loved my father truly, as she could,

And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,

My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away

A wise man from wise courses, a good man

From obvious duties, and, depriving her,

His sister, of the household precedence,

Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,

And made him mad, alike by life and death,

In love and sorrow. She had pored for years

What sort of woman could be suitable

To her sort of hate, to entertain it with;

And so, her very curiosity

Became hate too, and all the idealism

She ever used in life, was used for hate,

Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last

The love from which it grew, in strength and heat,

And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense

Of disputable virtue (say not, sin)

When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.

And thus my father's sister was to me

My mother's hater. From that day, she did

Her duty to me, (I appreciate it

In her own word as spoken to herself)

Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,

But measured always. She was generous, bland,

More courteous than was tender, gave me still

The first place,–as if fearful that God's saints

Would look down suddenly and say, 'Herein

You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.'

Alas, a mother never is afraid

Of speaking angrily to any child,

Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

And I, I was a good child on the whole,

A meek and manageable child. Why not?

I did not live, to have the faults of life:

There seemed more true life in my father's grave

Than in all England. Since that threw me off

Who fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,

Consigned me to his land) I only thought

Of lying quiet there where I was thrown

Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her

To prick me to a pattern with her pin,

Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,

And dry out from my drowned anatomy

The last sea-salt left in me.

So it was.

I broke the copious curls upon my head

In braids, because she liked smooth ordered hair.

I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words

Which still at any stirring of the heart

Came up to float across the English phrase,

As lilies, (Bene . . or che ch'è ) because

She liked my father's child to speak his tongue.

I learnt the collects and the catechism,

The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,

The Articles . . the Tracts against the times,

(By no means Buonaventure's 'Prick of Love,')

And various popular synopses of

Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,

Because she liked instructed piety.

I learnt my complement of classic French

(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)

And German also, since she liked a range

Of liberal education,–tongues, not books.

I learnt a little algebra, a little

Of the mathematics,–brushed with extreme flounce

The circle of the sciences, because

She misliked women who are frivolous.

I learnt the royal genealogies

Of Oviedo, the internal laws

Of the Burmese Empire, . . by how many feet

Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,

What navigable river joins itself

To Lara, and what census of the year five

Was taken at Klagenfurt,–because she liked

A general insight into useful facts.

I learnt much music,–such as would have been

As quite impossible in Johnson's day

As still it might be wished–fine sleights of hand

And unimagined fingering, shuffling off

The hearer's soul through hurricanes of notes

To a noisy Tophet; and I drew . . costumes

From French engravings, nereids neatly draped,

With smirks of simmering godship,–I washed in

From nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)

I danced the polka and Cellarius,

Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,

Because she liked accomplishments in girls.

I read a score of books on womanhood

To prove, if women do not think at all,

They may teach thinking, (to a maiden aunt

Or else the author)–books demonstrating

Their right of comprehending husband's talk

When not too deep, and even of answering

With pretty 'may it please you,' or 'so it is,'–

Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,

Particular worth and general missionariness,

As long as they keep quiet by the fire

And never say 'no' when the world says 'ay,'

For that is fatal,–their angelic reach

Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,

And fatten household sinners–their, in brief,

Potential faculty in everything

Of abdicating power in it: she owned

She liked a woman to be womanly,

And English women, she thanked God and sighed,

(Some people always sigh in thanking God)

Were models to the universe. And last

I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like

To see me wear the night with empty hands,

A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess

Was something after all, (the pastoral saints

Be praised for't) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes

To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;

Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat

So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell

Which slew the tragic poet.

By the way,

The works of women are symbolical.

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,

Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,

To put on when you're weary–or a stool

To tumble over and vex you . . 'curse that stool!'

Or else at best, a cushion where you lean

And sleep, and dream of something we are not,

But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!

This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid

The worth of our work, perhaps.

In looking down

Those years of education, (to return)

I wondered if Brinvilliers suffered more

In the water torture, . . flood succeeding flood

To drench the incapable throat and split the veins . .

Than I did. Certain of your feebler souls

Go out in such a process; many pine

To a sick, inodorous light; my own endured:

I had relations in the Unseen, and drew

The elemental nutriment and heat

From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,

Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark,

I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outside

Of the inner life, with all its ample room

For heart and lungs, for will and intellect,

Inviolable by conventions. God,

I thank thee for that grace of thine!

At first,

I felt no life which was not patience,–did

The thing she bade me, without heed to a thing

Beyond it, sate in just the chair she placed,

With back against the window, to exclude

The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,

Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods

To bring the house a message,–ay, and walked

Demurely in her carpeted low rooms,

As if I should not, harkening my own steps,

Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books,

Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,

Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,

And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup,

(I blushed for joy at that!)–'The Italian child,

For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,

Thrives ill in England; she is paler yet

Than when we came the last time; she will die.'

'Will die.' My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,

With sudden anger, and approaching me

Said low between his teeth–'You're wicked now?

You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk

For others, with your naughty light blown out?'

I looked into his face defyingly.

He might have known, that, being what I was,

'Twas natural to like to get away

As far as dead folk can; and then indeed

Some people make no trouble when they die.

He turned and went abruptly, slammed the door

And shut his dog out.

Romney, Romney Leigh.

I have not named my cousin hitherto,

And yet I used him as a sort of friend;

My elder by few years, but cold and shy

And absent . . tender when he thought of it,

Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes,

As well as early master of Leigh Hall,

Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youth

Repressing all its seasonable delights,

And agonising with a ghastly sense

Of universal hideous want and wrong

To incriminate possession. When he came

From college to the country, very oft

He crossed the hills on visits to my aunt,

With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses,

A book in one hand,–mere statistics, (if

I chanced to lift the cover) count of all

The goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell.

Against God's separating judgment-hour.

And she, she almost loved him,–even allowed

That sometimes he should seem to sigh my way;

It made him easier to be pitiful,

And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbed

At whiles she let him shut my music up

And push my needles down, and lead me out

To see in that south angle of the house

The figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock.

On some light pretext. She would turn her head

At other moments, go to fetch a thing,

And leave me breath enough to speak with him,

For his sake; it was simple.

Sometimes too

He would have saved me utterly, it seemed,

He stood and looked so.

Once, he stood so near

He dropped a sudden hand upon my head

Bent down on woman's work, as soft as rain–

But then I rose and shook it off as fire,

The stranger's touch that took my father's place,

Yet dared seem soft.

I used him for a friend

Before I ever knew him for a friend.

'Twas better, 'twas worse also, afterward:

We came so close, we saw our differences

Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh

Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.

A godlike nature his; the gods look down,

Incurious of themselves; and certainly

'Tis well I should remember, how, those days

I was a worm too, and he looked on me.

A little by his act perhaps, yet more

By something in me, surely not my will,

I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon,

To whom life creeps back in the form of death

With a sense of separation, a blind pain

Of blank obstruction, and a roar i' the ears

Of visionary chariots which retreat

As earth grows clearer . . slowly, by degrees,

I woke, rose up . . where was I? in the world:

For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.

I had a little chamber in the house,

As green as any privet-hedge a bird

Might choose to build in, though the nest itself

Could show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the walls

Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight

Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds

Hung green about the window, which let in

The out-door world with all its greenery.

You could not push your head out and escape

A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle,

But so you were baptised into the grace

And privilege of seeing. . .

First, the lime,

(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,–

My morning-dream was often hummed away

By the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,

Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,

Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream

Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself

Among the acacias, over which, you saw

The irregular line of elms by the deep lane

Which stopt the grounds and dammed the overflow

Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight

The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp

Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales

Could guess if lady's hall or tenant's lodge

Ddispensed such odours,–though his stick well -crooked

Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar

Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,

And through their tops, you saw the folded hills

Striped up and down with hedges, (burley oaks

Projecting from the lines to show themselves)

Thro' which my cousin Romney's chimneys smoked

As still as when a silent mouth in frost

Breathes–showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;

While far above, a jut of table-land,

A promontory without water, stretched,–

You could not catch it if the days were thick,

Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise

The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve

And use it for an anvil till he had filled

The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,

And proved he need not rest so early;–then

When all his setting trouble was resolved

Toa trance of passive glory, you might see

In apparition on the golden sky

(Alas, my Giotto's background!) the sheep run

Along the fine clear outline, small as mice

That run along a witch's scarlet thread.

Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods

Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs

To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps

Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear

In leaping through the palpitating pines,

Like a white soul tossed out to eternity

With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed

My multitudinous mountains, sitting in

The magic circle, with the mutual touch

Electric, panting from their full deep hearts

Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for

Communion and commission. Italy

Is one thing, England one.

On English ground

You understand the letter . . ere the fall,

How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields

Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;

The hills are crumpled plains–the plains, parterres–

The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;

And if you seek for any wilderness

You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed

And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,

Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,

Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,

But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of

Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause

Of finer meditation.

Rather say

A sweet familiar nature, stealing in

As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand

Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so

Of presence and affection, excellent

For inner uses, from the things without.

I could not be unthankful, I who was

Entreated thus and holpen. In the room

I speak of, ere the house was well awake,

And also after it was well asleep,

I sat alone, and drew the blessing in

Of all that nature. With a gradual step,

A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,

It came in softly, while the angels made

A place for it beside me. The moon came,

And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts

The sun came, saying, 'Shall I lift this light

Against the lime-tree, and you will not look?

I make the birds sing–listen! . . but, for you.

God never hears your voice, excepting when

You lie upon the bed at nights and weep.'

Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up

More slowly than I verily write now,

But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide

The window and my soul, and let the airs .

And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,

Regenerating what I was. O Life,

How oft we throw it off and think,–'Enough,

Enough of life in so much!–here's a cause

For rupture; herein we must break with Life,

Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,

Maimed, spoiled for aspiration; farewell Life!'

–And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes

And think all ended.–Then, Life calls to us,

In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,

Above us, or below us, or around . .

Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,

Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed

So own our compensations than our griefs:

Still, Life's voice!–still, we make our peace with Life.

And I, so young then, was not sullen. Soon

I used to get up early, just to sit

And watch the morning quicken in the grey,

And hear the silence open like a flower,

Leaf after leaf,–and stroke with listless hand

The woodbine through the window, till at last

I came to do it with a sort of love,

At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,–

A melancholy smile, to catch myself

Smiling for joy.

Capacity for joy

Admits temptation. It seemed, next, worth while

To dodge the sharp sword set against my life;

To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,

As mute as any dream there, and escape

As a soul from the body, out of doors,–

Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,

And wander on the hills an hour or two,

Then back again before the house should stir.

Or else I sat on in my chamber green,

And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed

My prayers without the vicar; read my books,

Without considering whether they were fit

To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good

By being ungenerous, even to a book,

And calculating profits . . so much help

By so much rending. It is rather when

We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge

Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,

Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–

'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

I read much. What my father taught before

From many a volume, Love re-emphasised

Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast

Grew tender with the memory of his eyes,

And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of Greek

And Latin, he had taught me, as he would

Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives

If such he had known.–most like a shipwrecked man

Who heaps his single platter with goats' cheese

And scarlet berries; or like any man

Who loves but one, and so gives all at once,

Because he has it, rather than because

He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;

And thus, as did the women formerly

By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil

Across the boy's audacious front, and swept

With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,

He wrapt his little daughter in his large

Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no.

But, after I had read for memory,

I read for hope. The path my father's foot

Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off,

(What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh

And passed) alone I carried on, and set

My child-heart 'gainst the thorny underwood,

To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.

Ah, babe i' the wood, without a brother-babe!

My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,

Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.

Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,

When any young wayfaring soul goes forth

Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,

The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,

To thrust his own way, he an alien, through

The world of books! Ah, you!–you think it fine,

You clap hands–'A fair day!'–you cheer him on,

As if the worst, could happen, were to rest

Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,

Behold!–the world of books is still the world;

And worldlings in it are less merciful

And more puissant. For the wicked there

Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,

Is edged from elemental fire to assail

A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right

By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong

Because of weakness. Power is justified,

Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown

Covers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,

There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings,

That shake the ashes of the grave aside

From their calm locks, and undiscomfited

Look stedfast truths against Time's changing mask.

True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;

True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens

Upon his own head in strong martyrdom,

In order to light men a moment's space.

But stay!–who judges?–who distinguishes

'Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,

And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,

To serve king David? who discerns at once

The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow

For Alaric as well as Charlemagne?

Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers

From conjurors? The child, there? Would you leave

That child to wander in a battle-field

And push his innocent smile against the guns?

Or even in the catacombs, . . his torch

Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all

The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!

I read books bad and good–some bad and good

At once: good aims not always make good books;

Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils

In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove

God's being so definitely, that man's doubt

Grows self-defined the other side the line,

Made Atheist by suggestion; moral books,

Exasperating to license; genial books,

Discounting from the human dignity;

And merry books, which set you weeping when

The sun shines,–ay, and melancholy books,

Which make you laugh that any one should weep

In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.

The world of books is still the world, I write,

And both worlds have God's providence, thank God,

To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,

Among the breakers, some hard swimming through

The deeps–I lost breath in my soul sometimes

And cried 'God save me if there's any God.'

But even so, God save me; and, being dashed

From error on to error, every turn

Still brought me nearer to the central truth.

I thought so. All this anguish in the thick

Of men's opinions . . press and counterpress

Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now

Emergent . . all the best of it perhaps,

But throws you back upon a noble trust

And use of your own instinct,–merely proves

Pure reason stronger than bare inference

At strongest. Try it,–fix against heaven's wall

Your scaling ladders of high logic–mount

Step by step!–Sight goes faster; that still ray

Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,

And why, you know not–(did you eliminate,

That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)

Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.

The cygnet finds the water: but the man

Is born in ignorance of his element,

And feels out blind at first, disorganised

By sin i' the blood,–his spirit-insight dulled

And crossed by his sensations. Presently

We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;

Then mark, be reverent, be obedient,–

For those dumb motions of imperfect life

Are oracles of vital Deity

Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says

'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say,

A palimpsest, a prophets holograph

Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's,–

The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on

Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps

Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,

Some upstroke of an alpha and omega

Expressing the old scripture.

Books, books, books!

I had found the secret of a garret-room

Piled high with cases in my father's name;

Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out

Among the giant fossils of my past,

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

The first book first. And how I felt it beat

Under my pillow, in the morning's dark,

An hour before the sun would let me read!

My books!

At last, because the time was ripe,

I chanced upon the poets.

As the earth

Plunges in fury, when the internal fires

Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat

The marts and temples, the triumphal gates

And towers of observation, clears herself

To elemental freedom–thus, my soul,

At poetry's divine first finger touch,

Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,

Convicted of the great eternities

Before two worlds.

What's this, Aurora Leigh,

You write so of the poets, and not laugh?

Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,

Exaggerators of the sun and moon,

And soothsayers in a tea-cup?

I write so

Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,–

The only speakers of essential truth,

Posed to relative, comparative,

And temporal truths; the only holders by

His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;

The only teachers who instruct mankind,

From just a shadow on a charnel wall,

To find man's veritable stature out,

Erect, sublime,–the measure of a man,

And that's the measure of an angel, says

The apostle. Ay, and while your common men

Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,

And dust the flaunty carpets of the world

For kings to walk on, or our senators,

The poet suddenly will catch them up

With his voice like a thunder. . 'This is soul,

This is life, this word is being said in heaven,

Here's God down on us! what are you about?

How all those workers start amid their work,

Look round, look up, and feel, a moment's space,

That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,

Is not the imperative labour after all.

My own best poets, am I one with you,

That thus I love you,–or but one through love?

Does all this smell of thyme about my feet

Conclude my visit to your holy hill

In personal presence, or but testify

The rustling of your vesture through my dreams

With influent odours? When my joy and pain,

My thought and aspiration, like the stops

Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb

If not melodious, do you play on me,

My pipers,–and if, sooth, you did not blow,

Would not sound come? or is the music mine,

As a man's voice or breath is called his own,

In breathed by the Life-breather? There's a doubt

For cloudy seasons!

But the sun was high

When first I felt my pulses set themselves

For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence

Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,

As wind upon the alders blanching them

By turning up their under-natures till

They trembled in dilation. O delight

And triumph of the poet,–who would say

A man's mere 'yes,' a woman's common 'no,'

A little human hope of that or this,

And says the word so that it burns you through

With a special revelation, shakes the heart

Of all the men and women in the world,

As if one came back from the dead and spoke,

With eyes too happy, a familiar thing

Become divine i' the utterance! while for him

The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;

The palpitating angel in his flesh

Thrills inly with consenting fellowship

To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves

Outside of time.

O life, O poetry,

Which means life in life! cognisant of life

Beyond this blood-beat,–passionate for truth

Beyond these senses, –poetry, my life,–

My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot

From Zeus's thunder, who has ravished me

Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,

And set me in the Olympian roar and round

Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,

To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist

For everlasting laughters,–I, myself,

Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!

How those gods look!

Enough so, Ganymede.

We shall not bear above a round or two–

We drop the golden cup at Heré's foot

And swoon back to the earth,–and find ourselves

Face-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,

While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,

'What's come now to the youth?' Such ups and downs

Have poets.

Am I such indeed? The name

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen,

Is what I dare not,–though some royal blood

Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

With sense of power and ache,–with imposthumes

And manias usual to the race. Howbeit

I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad,

And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;

The thing's too common.

Many fervent souls

Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel

If steel had offered, in a restless heat

Of doing something. Many tender souls

Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread.

As children, cowslips:–the more pains they take,

The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,

Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse.

Before they sit down under their own vine

And live for use. Alas, near all the birds

Will sing at dawn,–and yet we do not take

The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

In those days, though, I never analysed

Myself even. All analysis comes late.

You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,

In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink

And drop before the wonder of 't; you miss

The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,

And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else:

My heart beat in my brain. Life's violent flood

Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour's field,

Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.

We play at leap-frog over the god Term;

The love within us and the love without

Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,

We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.

Being acted on and acting seem the same:

In that first onrush of life's chariot-wheels,

We know not if the forests move or we.

And so, like most young poets, in a flush

Of individual life, I poured myself

Along the veins of others, and achieved

Mere lifeless imitations of life verse,

And made the living answer for the dead,

Profaning nature. 'Touch not, do not taste,

Nor handle,'–we're too legal, who write young:

We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,

As if still ignorant of counterpoint;

We call the Muse . . 'O Muse, benignant Muse!'–

As if we had seen her purple-braided head .

With the eyes in it start between the boughs

As often as a stag's. What make-believe,

With so much earnest! what effete results,

From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes

From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows

Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud

In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven

Against the heels of what the master said;

And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps

A babe might blow between two straining cheeks

Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;

And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,

Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,

The worse for being warm: all these things, writ

On happy mornings, with a morning heart,

That leaps for love, is active for resolve,

Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms

Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.

The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,

Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.

Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine.

By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped

In gradual progress like another man,

But, turning grandly on his central self,

Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years

And died, not young,–(the life of a long life,

Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear

Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn

For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,

I count it strange, and hard to understand,

That nearly all young poets should write old;

That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,

And beardless Byron academical,

And so with others. It may be, perhaps,

Such have not settled long and deep enough

In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still

The memory mixes with the vision, spoils,

And works it turbid.

Or perhaps, again,

In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,

The melancholy desert must sweep round,

Behind you, as before.–

For me, I wrote

False poems, like the rest, and thought them true.

Because myself was true in writing them.

I, peradventure, have writ true ones since

With less complacence.

But I could not hide

My quickening inner life from those at watch.

They saw a light at a window now and then,

They had not set there. Who had set it there?

My father's sister started when she caught

My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say

I had no business with a sort of soul,

But plainly she objected,–and demurred,

That souls were dangerous things to carry straight

Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world.

She said sometimes, 'Aurora, have you done

Your task this morning?–have you read that book?

And are you ready for the crochet here?'–

As if she said, 'I know there's something wrong,

I know I have not ground you down enough

To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust

For household uses and proprieties,

Before the rain has got into my barn

And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you're green

With out-door impudence? you almost grow?'

To which I answered, 'Would she hear my task,

And verify my abstract of the book?

And should I sit down to the crochet work?

Was such her pleasure?' . . Then I sate and teased

The patient needle til it split the thread,

Which oozed off from it in meandering lace

From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;

My soul was singing at a work apart

Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm

As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,

In vortices of glory and blue air.

And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,

The inner life informed the outer life,

Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,

Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,

And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin

Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,

Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across

My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,

And said, 'We'll live, Aurora! we'll be strong.

The dogs are on us–but we will not die.'

Whoever lives true life, will love true love.

I learnt to love that England. Very oft,

Before the day was born, or otherwise

Through secret windings of the afternoons,

I threw my hunters off and plunged myself

Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag

Will take the waters, shivering with the fear

And passion of the course. And when, at last

Escaped,–so many a green slope built on slope

Betwixt me and the enemy's house behind,

I dared to rest, or wander,–like a rest

Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,–

And view the ground's most gentle dimplement,

(As if God's finger touched but did not press

In making England!) such an up and down

Of verdure,–nothing too much up or down,

A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky

Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;

Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,

Fed full of noises by invisible streams;

And open pastures, where you scarcely tell

White daisies from white dew,–at intervals

The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out

Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,–

I thought my father's land was worthy too

Of being my Shakspeare's.

Very oft alone,

Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leave

To walk the third with Romney and his friend

The rising painter, Vincent Carrington,

Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonneted,

Because he holds that, paint a body well,

You paint a soul by implication, like

The grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for if

He said . . 'When I was last in Italy' . .

It sounded as an instrument that's played

Too far off for the tune–and yet it's fine

To listen.

Often we walked only two,

If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.

We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced;

We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched–

Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,

And thinkers disagreed; he, overfull

Of what is, and I, haply, overbold

For what might be.

But then the thrushes sang,

And shook my pulses and the elms' new leaves,–

And then I turned, and held my finger up,

And bade him mark that, howsoe'er the world

Went ill, as he related, certainly

The thrushes still sang in it.–At which word

His brow would soften,–and he bore with me

In melancholy patience, not unkind,

While, breaking into voluble ecstasy,

I flattered all the beauteous country round,

As poets use . . .the skies, the clouds, the fields,

The happy violets hiding from the roads

The primroses run down to, carrying gold,–

The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out

Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths

'Twixt dripping ash-boughs,–hedgerows all alive

With birds and gnats and large white butterflies

Which look as if the May-flower had sought life

And palpitated forth upon the wind,–

Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,

Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,

And cattle grazing in the watered vales,

And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,

And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,

Confused with smell of orchards. 'See,' I said,

'And see! is God not with us on the earth?

And shall we put Him down by aught we do?

Who says there's nothing for the poor and vile

Save poverty and wickedness? behold!'

And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,

And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

In the beginning when God called all good,

Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.

But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,

The evil is upon us while we speak;

Deliver us from evil, let us pray.

SECOND BOOK.

TIMES followed one another. Came a morn

I stood upon the brink of twenty years,

And looked before and after, as I stood

Woman and artist,–either incomplete,

Both credulous of completion. There I held

The whole creation in my little cup,

And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank,

'Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine

And all these peoples.'

I was glad, that day;

The June was in me, with its multitudes

Of nightingales all singing in the dark,

And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.

I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!

So glad, I could not choose be very wise!

And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull

My childhood backward in a childish jest

To see the face of't once more, and farewell!

In which fantastic mood I bounded forth

At early morning,–would not wait so long

As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,

But, brushing a green trail across the lawn

With my gown in the dew, took will and way

Among the acacias of the shrubberies,

To fly my fancies in the open air

And keep my birthday, till my aunt awoke

To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on,

As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves;

'The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned

Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone,

And so with me it must be, unless I prove

Unworthy of the grand adversity,–

And certainly I would not fail so much.

What, therefore, if I crown myself to-day

In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it,

Before my brows be numb as Dante's own

To all the tender pricking of such leaves?

Such leaves? what leaves?'

I pulled the branches down,

To choose from.

'Not the bay! I choose no bay;

The fates deny us if we are overbold:

Nor myrtle–which means chiefly love; and love

Is something awful which one dare not touch

So early o' mornings. This verbena strains

The point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,

This guelder rose, at far too slight a beck

Of the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.

Ah–there's my choice,–that ivy on the wall,

That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow

But thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,

Serrated like my vines, and half as green.

I like such ivy; bold to leap a height

'Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on graves

As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too,

(And that's not ill) when twisted round a comb.'

Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,

Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell

To ring with once being touched, I drew a wreath

Drenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,

And fastening it behind so, . . turning faced

. . My public!–Cousin Romney–with a mouth

Twice graver than his eyes.

I stood there fixed–

My arms up, like the caryatid, sole

Of some abolished temple, helplessly

Persistent in a gesture which derides

A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,

As if from flax, not stone.

'Aurora Leigh,

The earliest of Aurora's!'

Hand stretched out

I clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,

Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tide

Had caught me at my pastime, writing down

My foolish name too near upon the sea

Which drowned me with a blush as foolish. 'You,

My cousin!'

The smile died out in his eyes

And dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,

For just a moment . . 'Here's a book, I found!

No name writ on it–poems, by the form;

Some Greek upon the margin,–lady's Greek,

Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.

I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in't,

Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits;

I rather bring it to the witch.'

'My book!

You found it.' . .

'In the hollow by the stream,

That beach leans down into–of which you said,

The Oread in it has a Naiad's heart

And pines for waters.'

'Thank you.'

'Rather you,

My cousin! that I have seen you not too much

A witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest,

To be a woman also.'

With a glance

The smile rose in his eyes again, and touched

The ivy on my forehead, light as air.

I answered gravely, 'Poets needs must be

Or men or women–more's the pity.'

'Ah,

But men, and still less women, happily,

Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,

Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze

Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles

The clean white morning dresses.'

'So you judge!

Because I love the beautiful, I must

Love pleasure chiefly, and be overcharged

For ease and whiteness! Well–you know the world.

And only miss your cousin; 'tis not much!–

But learn this: I would rather take my part

With God's Dead, who afford to walk in white

Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here,

And gather up my feet from even a step,

For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.

I choose to walk at all risks.–Here, if heads

That hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce,

For my part, I choose headaches,–and to-day's

My birthday.'

'Dear Aurora, choose instead

To cure such. You have balsams.'

'I perceive!–

The headache is too noble for my sex.

You think the heartache would sound decenter,

Since that's the woman's special, proper ache,

And altogether tolerable, except

To a woman.'

Saying which, I loosed my wreath.

And, swinging it beside me as I walked,

Half petulant, half playful, as we walked,

I sent a sidelong look to find his thought,–

As falcon set on falconer's finger may,

With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye,

Which means, 'You'll see–you'll see! I'll soon take flight–

You shall not hinder.' He, as shaking out

His hand and answering 'Fly then,' did not speak,

Except by such a gesture. Silently

We paced, until, just coming into sight

Of the house-windows, he abruptly caught

At one end of the swinging wreath, and said

'Aurora!' There I stopped short, breath and all.

'Aurora, let's be serious, and throw by

This game of head and heart. Life means, be sure,

Both heart and head,–both active, both complete,

And both in earnest. Men and women make

The world, as head and heart make human life.

Work man, work woman, since there's work to do

In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart,

And thought can never do the work of love!

But work for ends, I mean for uses; not

For such sleek fringes (do you call them ends?

Still less God's glory) as we sew ourselves

Upon the velvet of those baldaquins

Held 'twixt us and the sun. That book of yours,

I have not read a page of; but I toss

A rose up–it falls calyx down, you see! . .

The chances are that, being a woman, young,

And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, . .

You write as well . . and ill . . upon the whole,

As other women. If as well, what then?

If even a little better, . . still what then?

We want the Best in art now, or no art.

The time is done for facile settings up

Of minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there;

The polytheists have gone out in God,

That unity of Bests. No best, no God!–

And so with art, we say. Give art's divine,

Direct, indubitable, real as grief,–

Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselves

Divine by overcoming with mere hope

And most prosaic patience. You, you are young

As Eve with nature's daybreak on her face;

But this same world you are come to, dearest coz,

Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreaths

To hang upon her ruins,–and forgets

To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back

Those savage, hungry dogs that hunt her down

To the empty grave of Christ. The world's hard pressed;

The sweat of labour in the early curse

Has (turning acrid in six thousand years)

Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,

An hour's time . . think! . . to sit upon a bank

And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands!

When Egypt's slain, I say, let Miriam sing!–

Before . . where's Moses?'

'Ah–exactly that

Where's Moses?–is a Moses to be found?–

You'll sink him vainly in the bulrushes,

While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,

Such sounding brass has done some actual good,

(The application in a woman's hand,

If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)

In colonising beehives.'

'There it is!–

You play beside a death-bed like a child,

Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place

To teach the living. None of all these things,

Can women understand. You generalise,

Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,

So sympathetic to the personal pang,

Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up

A whole life at each wound; incapable

Of deepening, widening a large lap of life

To hold the world-full woe. The human race

To you means, such a child, or such a man,

You saw one morning waiting in the cold,

Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up

A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes

Will write of factories and of slaves, as if

Your father were a negro, and your son

A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,–

All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise

Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard

To general suffering. Here's the world half blind

With intellectual light, half brutalised

With civilization, having caught the plague

In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west

Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain

And sin too! . . does one woman of you all,

(You who weep easily) grow pale to see

This tiger shake his cage?–does one of you

Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls

And pine and die, because of the great sum

Of universal anguish?–Show me a tear

Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours,

Because the world is mad? You cannot count,

That you should weep for this account, not you!

You weep for what you know. A red-haired child

Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,

Though but so little as with a finger-tip,

Will set you weeping! but a million sick . .

You could as soon weep for the rule of three,

Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world

Uncomprehended by you must remain

Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are,

Mere women, personal and passionate,

You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives.

Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!

We get no Christ from you,–and verily

We shall not get a poet, in my mind.'

'With which conclusion you conclude' . .

'But this–

That you, Aurora, with the large live brow

And steady eyelids, cannot condescend

To play at art, as children play at swords,

To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired

Because true action is impossible.

You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book

Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work,

Expressing the comparative respect

Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent!

'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!

'What delicate discernment . . almost thought!

'The book does honour to the sex, we hold.

'Among our female authors we make room

'For this fair writer, and congratulate

'The country that produces in these times

'Such women, competent to . . spell.''

'Stop there!'

I answered–burning through his thread of talk

With a quick flame of emotion,–'You have read

My soul, if not my book, and argue well

I would not condescend . . we will not say

To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end

Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use

Of holy art and golden life. I am young,

And peradventure weak–you tell me so–

Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,

Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance

At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped

Their gingerbread for joy,–than shift the types

For tolerable verse, intolerable

To men who act and suffer. Better far,

Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,

Than a sublime art frivolously.'

'You,

Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes,

And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are young

Aurora, you and I. The world . . look round . .

The world, we're come to late, is swollen hard

With perished generations and their sins:

The civiliser's spade grinds horribly

On dead men's bones, and cannot turn up soil

That's otherwise than fetid. All success

Proves partial failure; all advance implies

What's left behind; all triumph, something crushed

At the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong:

And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich,

Who agonise together, rich and poor,

Under and over, in the social spasm

And crisis of the ages. Here's an age,

That makes its own vocation! here, we have stepped

Across the bounds of time! here's nought to see,

But just the rich man and just Lazarus,

And both in torments; with a mediate gulph,

Though not a hint of Abraham's bosom. Who,

Being man and human, can stand calmly by

And view these things, and never tease his soul

For some great cure? No physic for this grief,

In all the earth and heavens too?'

'You believe

In God, for your part?–ay? That He who makes,

Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,

As men plant tulips upon dunghills when

They wish them finest?'

'True. A death-heat is

The same as life-heat, to be accurate;

And in all nature is no death at all,

As men account of death, as long as God

Stands witnessing for life perpetually,'

By being just God. That's abstract truth, I know,

Philosophy, or sympathy with God:

But I, I sympathise with man, not God,

I think I was a man for chiefly this;

And when I stand beside a dying bed,

It's death to me. Observe,–it had not much

Consoled the race of mastodons to know

Before they went to fossil, that anon

Their place should quicken with the elephant

They were not elephants but mastodons:

And I, a man, as men are now, and not

As men may be hereafter, feel with men

In the agonising present.'

'Is it so,'

I said, 'my cousin? is the world so bad,

While I hear nothing of it through the trees?

The world was always evil,–but so bad?'

'So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is grey

With poring over the long sum of ill;

So much for vice, so much for discontent,

So much for the necessities of power,

So much for the connivances of fear,–

Coherent in statistical despairs

With such a total of distracted life, . .

To see it down in figures on a page,

Plain, silent, clear . . as God sees through the earth

The sense of all the graves! . . . that's terrible

For one who is not God, and cannot right

The wrong he looks on. May I choose indeed

But vow away my years, my means, my aims,

Among the helpers, if there's any help

In such a social strait? The common blood

That swings along my veins, is strong enough

To draw me to this duty.'

Then I spoke.

'I have not stood long on the strand of life,

And these salt waters have had scarcely time

To creep so high up as to wet my feet.

I cannot judge these tides–I shall, perhaps.

A woman's always younger than a man

At equal years, because she is disallowed

Maturing by the outdoor sun and air,

And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk.

Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise!

You think a woman ripens as a peach,–

In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now;

I'm young in age, and younger still, I think,

As a woman. But a child may say amen

To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes;

And I, incapable to loose the knot

Of social questions, can approve, applaud

August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot

Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims.

Accept my reverence.'

There he glowed on me

With all his face and eyes. 'No other help?'

Said he–'no more than so?'

'What help?' I asked.

'You'd scorn my help,–as Nature's self, you say,

Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,

Because a woman's. Do you now turn round

And ask for what a woman cannot give?'

'For what she only can, I turn and ask,'

He answered, catching up my hands in his,

And dropping on me from his high-eaved brow

The full weight of his soul,–'I ask for love,

And that, she can; for life in fellowship

Through bitter duties–that, I know she can;

For wifehood . . will she?'

                      'Now,' I said, 'may God

Be witness 'twixt us two!' and with the word,

Meseemed I floated into a sudden light

Above his stature,–'am I proved too weak

To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear

Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,

Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?

Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,

Yet competent to love, like HIM?'

I paused:

Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will

That turns upon the sea. 'It's always so!

Anything does for a wife.'

'Aurora, dear,

And dearly honoured' . . he pressed in at once

With eager utterance,–'you translate me ill.

I do not contradict my thought of you

Which is most reverent, with another thought

Found less so. If your sex is weak for art,

(And I who said so, did but honour you

By using truth in courtship) it is strong

For life and duty. Place your fecund heart

In mine, and let us blossom for the world

That wants love's colour in the grey of time.

With all my talk I can but set you where

You look down coldly on the arena-heaps

Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct!

The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way

Through such a heap of generalised distress,

To the individual man with lips and eyes–

Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down,

And, hand in hand, we'll go where yours shall touch

These victims, one by one! till one by one,

The formless, nameless trunk of every man

Shall seem to wear a head, with hair you know,

And every woman catch your mother's face

To melt you into passion.'

'I am a girl,'

I answered slowly; 'you do well to name

My mother's face. Though far too early, alas,

God's hand did interpose 'twixt it and me,

I know so much of love, as used to shine

In that face and another. Just so much;

No more indeed at all. I have not seen

So much love since, I pray you pardon me,

As answers even to make a marriage with,

In this cold land of England. What you love,

Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:

You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,–

A wife to help your ends . . in her no end!

Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,

But I, being most unworthy of these and that,

Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.'

'Farewell, Aurora, you reject me thus?'

He said.

'Why, sir, you are married long ago.

You have a wife already whom you love,

Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.

For my part, I am scarcely meek enough

To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.

Do I look a Hagar, think you?'

'So, you jest!'

'Nay so, I speak in earnest,' I replied.

'You treat of marriage too much like, at least,

A chief apostle; you would bear with you

A wife . . a sister . . shall we speak it out?

A sister of charity.'

'Then, must it be

Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong

In hope and in illusion, when I took

The woman to be nobler than the man,

Yourself the noblest woman,–in the use

And comprehension of what love is,–love,

That generates the likeness of itself

Through all heroic duties? so far wrong

In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,

'Come, human creature, love and work with me,'–

Instead of, 'Lady, thou art wondrous fair,

'And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse

'Will follow at the lighting of the eyes,

'And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep

'Turn round and love me, or I die of love.''

With quiet indignation I broke in.

'You misconceive the question like a man,

Who sees a woman as the complement

Of his sex merely. You forget too much

That every creature, female as the male,

Stands single in responsible act and thought

As also in birth and death. Whoever says

To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,'

Will get fair answers, if the work and love

Being good themselves, are good for her–the best

She was born for. Women of a softer mood,

Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,

Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,

And catch up with it any kind of work,

Indifferent, so that dear love go with it:

I do not blame such women, though, for love,

They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make

Too frequently heaven's saints. But me, your work

Is not the best for,–nor your love the best,

Nor able to commend the kind of work

For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,

To be over-bold in speaking of myself,–

I, too, have my vocation,–work to do,

The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed

My father's face for theirs,–and though your world

Were twice as wretched as you represent

Most serious work, most necessary work,

As any of the economists'. Reform,

Make trade a Christian possibility,

And individual right no general wrong;

Wipe out earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine,

And leave one green, for men to play at bowls;

With innings for them all! . . what then, indeed,

If mortals were not greater by the head

Than any of their prosperities? what then,

Unless the artist keep up open roads

Betwixt the seen and unseen,–bursting through

The best of your conventions with his best

The unspeakable, imaginable best

God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond

Both speech and imagination? A starved man

Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir,

The beautiful for barley.–And, even so,

I hold you will not compass your poor ends

Of barley-feeding and material ease,

Without a poet's individualism

To work your universal. It takes a soul,

To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,

To move the masses . . even to a cleaner stye:

It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off

The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed,

Because not poets enough to understand

That life develops from within.–For me,

Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,

Of work like this! . . perhaps a woman's soul

Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,

And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir;

And if I fail . . why, burn me up my straw

Like other false works–I'll not ask for grace,

Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I

Who love my art, would never wish it lower

To suit my stature. I may love my art,

You'll grant that even a woman may love art,

Seeing that to waste true love on anything,

Is womanly, past question.'

I retain

The very last word which I said, that day,

As you the creaking of the door, years past,

Which let upon you such disabling news

You ever after have been graver. He,

His eyes, the motions in his silent mouth,

Were fiery points on which my words were caught,

Transfixed for ever in my memory

For his sake, not their own. And yet I know

I did not love him . . nor he me . . that's sure . .

And what I said, is unrepented of,

As truth is always. Yet . . a princely man!–

If hard to me, heroic for himself!

He bears down on me through the slanting years,

The stronger for the distance. If he had loved,

Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, . .

I might have been a common woman now,

And happier, less known and less left alone;

Perhaps a better woman after all,–

With chubby children hanging on my neck

To keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vines

That bear such fruit are proud to stoop with it.

The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.

And I, who spoke the truth then, stand upright,

Still worthy of having spoken out the truth,

By being content I spoke it, though it set

Him there, me here.–O woman's vile remorse,

To hanker after a mere name, a show,

A supposition, a potential love!

Does every man who names love in our lives,

Become a power for that? is love's true thing

So much best to us, that what personates love

Is next best? A potential love, forsooth!

We are not so vile. No, no–he cleaves, I think,

This man, this image, . . chiefly for the wrong

And shock he gave my life, in finding me

Precisely where the devil of my youth

Had set me, on those mountain-peaks of hope

All glittering with the dawn-dew, all erect

And famished for the morning,–saying, while

I looked for empire and much tribute, 'Come,

I have some worthy work for thee below.

Come, sweep my barns, and keep my hospitals,–

And I will pay thee with a current coin

Which men give women.'

As we spoke, the grass

Was trod in haste beside us, and my aunt,

With smile distorted by the sun,–face, voice,

As much at issue with the summer-day

As if you brought a candle out of doors,–

Broke in with, 'Romney, here!–My child, entreat

Your cousin to the house, and have your talk,

If girls must talk upon their birthdays. Come.'

He answered for me calmly, with pale lips

That seemed to motion for a smile in vain.

'The talk is ended, madam, where we stand.

Your brother's daughter has dismissed me here;

And all my answer can be better said

Beneath the trees, than wrong by such a word

Your house's hospitalities. Farewell.'

With that he vanished. I could hear his heel

Ring bluntly in the lane, as down he leapt

The short way, from us.–Then, a measured speech

Withdrew me. 'What means this, Aurora Leigh?

My brother's daughter has dismissed my guests?'

The lion in me felt the keeper's voice,

Through all its quivering dewlaps: I was quelled

Before her,–meekened to the child she knew:

I prayed her pardon, said, 'I had little thought

To give dismissal to a guest of hers,

In letting go a friend of mine, who came

To take me into service as a wife,–

No more than that, indeed.'

'No more, no more?

Pray heaven,' she answered, 'that I was not mad.

I could not mean to tell her to her face

That Romney Leigh had asked me for a wife,

And I refused him?'

'Did he ask?' I said;

'I think he rather stooped to take me up

For certain uses which he found to do

For something called a wife. He never asked.'

'What stuff!' she answered; 'are they queens, these girls?

They must have mantles, stitched with twenty silks,

Spread out upon the ground, before they'll step

One footstep for the noblest lover born.'

'But I am born,' I said with firmness, 'I,

To walk another way than his, dear aunt.'

'You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen months

Will walk as well as you,' she cried in haste,

'Without a steadying finger. Why, you child,

God help you, you are groping in the dark,

For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps,

That you, sole offspring of an opulent man,

Are rich and free to choose a way to walk?

You think, and it's a reasonable thought,

That I besides, being well to do in life,

Will leave my handful in my niece's hand

When death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray,

Pray, child,–albeit I know you love me not,–

As if you loved me, that I may not die!

For when I die and leave you, out you go,

(Unless I make room for you in my grave)

Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother's lamb,

(Ah heaven,–that pains!)–without a right to crop

A single blade of grass beneath these trees,

Or cast a lamb's small shadow on the lawn,

Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here's

The fruit you planted in your foreign loves!–

Ay, there's the fruit he planted! never look

Astonished at me with your mother's eyes,

For it was they, who set you where you are,

An undowered orphan. Child, your father's choice

Of that said mother, disinherited

His daughter, his and hers. Men do not think

Of sons and daughters, when they fall in love,

So much more than of sisters; otherwise,

He would have paused to ponder what he did,

And shrunk before that clause in the entail

Excluding offspring by a foreign wife

(The clause set up a hundred years ago

By a Leigh who wedded a French dancing-girl

And had his heart danced over in return)

But this man shrunk at nothing, never thought

Of you, Aurora, any more than me–

Your mother must have been a pretty thing,

For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns,

To make a good man, which my brother was,

Unchary of the duties to his house;

But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane,

Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wrote

Directly on your birth, to Italy,

'I ask your baby daughter for my son

In whom the entail now merges by the law.

Betroth her to us out of love, instead

Of colder reasons, and she shall not lose

By love or law from henceforth'–so he wrote;

A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane.

Remember how he drew you to his knee

The year you came here, just before he died,

And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks,

And wished them redder,–you remember Vane?

And now his son who represents our house

And holds the fiefs and manors in his place,

To whom reverts my pittance when I die,

(Except a few books and a pair of shawls)

The boy is generous like him, and prepared

To carry out his kindest word and thought

To you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young man

Is Romney Leigh; although the sun of youth

Has shone too straight upon his brain, I know,

And fevered him with dreams of doing good

To good-for-nothing people. But a wife

Will put all right, and stroke his temples cool

With healthy touches' . .

I broke in at that.

I could not lift my heavy heart to breathe

Till then, but then I raised it, and it fell

In broken words like these–'No need to wait.

The dream of doing good to . . me, at least,

Is ended, without waiting for a wife

To cool the fever for him. We've escaped

That danger . . thank Heaven for it.'

'You,' she cried,

'Have got a fever. What, I talk and talk

An hour long to you,–I instruct you how

You cannot eat or drink or stand or sit

Or even die, like any decent wretch

In all this unroofed and unfurnished world,

Without your cousin,–and you still maintain

There's room 'twixt him and you, for flirting fans

And running knots in eyebrows! You must have

A pattern lover sighing on his knee:

You do not count enough a noble heart,

Above book-patterns, which this very morn

Unclosed itself, in two dear fathers' names,

To embrace your orphaned life! fie, fie! But stay

I write a word, and counteract this sin.'

She would have turned to leave me, but I clung.

'O sweet my father's sister, hear my word

Before you write yours. Cousin Vane did well,

And Romney well,–and I well too,

In casting back with all my strength and will

The good they meant me. O my God, my God!

God meant me good, too, when he hindered me

From saying 'yes' this morning. If you write

A word, it shall be 'no.' I say no, no!

I tie up 'no' upon His altar-horns

Quite out of reach of perjury! At least

My soul is not a pauper; I can live

At least my soul's life, without alms from men,

And if it must be in heaven instead of earth,

Let heaven look to it,–I am not afraid.'

She seized my hands with both hers, strained them fast

And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyes

Right through me, body and heart. 'Yet, foolish Sweet,

You love this man. I have watched you when he came

And when he went, and when we've talked of him:

I am not old for nothing; I can tell

The weather-signs of love–you love this man.'

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,

Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.

The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;

They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,

And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?

Who's sorry for a gnat . . or girl?

I blushed.

I feel the brand upon my forehead now

Strike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feel

The felon's iron, say, and scorn the mark

Of what they are not. Most illogical

Irrational nature of our womanhood,

That blushes one way, feels another way,

And prays, perhaps, another! After all,

We cannot be the equal of the male,

Who rules his blood a little.

For although

I blushed indeed, as if I loved the man,

And her incisive smile, accrediting

That treason of false witness in my blush,

Did bow me downward like a swathe of grass

Below its level that struck me,–I attest

The conscious skies and all their daily suns,

I think I loved him not . . nor then, nor since . .

Nor ever. Do we love the schoolmaster,

Being busy in the woods? much less, being poor,

The overseer of the parish? Do we keep

Our love, to pay our debts with?

White and cold

I grew next moment. As my blood recoiled

From that imputed ignominy, I made

My heart great with it. Then, at last I spoke,–

Spoke veritable words, but passionate,

Too passionate perhaps . . ground up with sobs

To shapeless endings. She let fall my hands,

And took her smile off, in sedate disgust,

As peradventure she had touched a snake,–

A dead snake, mind!–and, turning round, replied

'We'll leave Italian manners, if you please.

I think you had an English father, child,

And ought to find it possible to speak

A quiet 'yes' or 'no,' like English girls,

Without convulsions. In another month

We'll take another answer . . no, or yes.'

With that she left me in the garden-walk.

I had a father! yes, but long ago–

How long it seemed that moment!–Oh, how far,

How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saints

When once gone from us! We may call against

The lighted windows of thy fair June-heaven

Where all the souls are happy,–and not one,

Not even my father, look from work or play

To ask, 'Who is it that cries after us,

Below there, in the dusk?' Yet formerly

He turned his face upon me quick enough,

If I said 'father.' Now I might cry loud;

The little lark reached higher with his song

Than I with crying. Oh, alone, alone,–

Not troubling any in heaven, nor any on earth,

I stood there in the garden, and looked up

The deaf blue sky that brings the roses out

On such June mornings.

You who keep account

Of crisis and transition in this life,

Set down the first time Nature says plain 'no'

To some 'yes' in you, and walks over you

In gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all begin

By singing with the birds, and running fast

With June-days, hand in hand: but once, for all,

The birds must sing against us, and the sun

Strike down upon us like a friend's sword caught

By an enemy to slay us, while we read

The dear name on the blade which bites at us!–

That's bitter and convincing: after that

We seldom doubt that something in the large

Smooth order of creation, though no more

Than haply a man's footstep, has gone wrong.

Some tears fell down my cheeks, and then I smiled,

As those smile who have no face in the world

To smile back to them. I had lost a friend

In Romney Leigh; the thing was sure–a friend,

Who had looked at me most gently now and then,

And spoken of my favourite books . . 'our books' . .

With such a voice! Well, voice and look were now

More utterly shut out from me, I felt,

Than even my father's. Romney now was turned

To a benefactor, to a generous man,

Who had tied himself to marry . . me, instead

Of such a woman, with low timorous lids

He lifted with a sudden word one day,

And left, perhaps, for my sake.–Ah, self-tied

By a contract,–male Iphigenia, bound

At a fatal Aulis, for the winds to change,

(But loose him–they'll not change;) he well might seem

A little cold and dominant in love!

He had a right to be dogmatical,

This poor, good Romney. Love, to him, was made

A simple law-clause. If I married him,

I would not dare to call my soul my own,

Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought

And every heart-beat down there in the bill,–

Not one found honestly deductible

From any use that pleased him! He might cut

My body into coins to give away

Among his other paupers; change my sons,

While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babes

Or piteous foundlings; might unquestioned set

My right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,

My left hand washing in the Public Baths,

What time my angel of the Ideal stretched

Both his to me in vain! I could not claim

The poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal.

And take so much as pity, from myself.

Farewell, good Romney! if I loved you even,

I could but ill afford to let you be

So generous to me. Farewell, friend, since friend

Betwixt us two, forsooth, must be a word

So heavily overladen. And, since help

Must come to me from those who love me not,

Farewell, all helpers–I must help myself,

And am alone from henceforth.–Then I stooped,

And lifted the soiled garland from the ground,

And set it on my head as bitterly

As when the Spanish king did crown the bones

Of his dead love. So be it. I preserve

That crown still,–in the drawer there! 'twas the first;

The rest are like it;–those Olympian crowns,

We run for, till we lose sight of the sun

In the dust of the racing chariots!

After that,

Before the evening fell, I had a note

Which ran,–'Aurora, sweet Chaldean, you read

My meaning backward like your eastern books,

While I am from the west, dear. Read me now

A little plainer. Did you hate me quite

But yesterday? I loved you for my part;

I love you. If I spoke untenderly

This morning, my beloved, pardon it;

And comprehend me that I loved you so,

I set you on the level of my soul,

And overwashed you with the bitter brine

Of some habitual thoughts. Henceforth, my flower,

Be planted out of reach of any such,

And lean the side you please, with all your leaves!

Write woman's verses and dream woman's dreams;

But let me feel your perfume in my home,

To make my sabbath after working-days;

Bloom out your youth beside me,–be my wife.'

I wrote in answer–'We, Chaldeans, discern

Still farther than we read. I know your heart

And shut it like the holy book it is,

Reserved for mild-eyed saints to pore upon

Betwixt their prayers at vespers. Well, you're right,

I did not surely hate you yesterday;

And yet I do not love you enough to-day

To wed you, cousin Romney. Take this word,

And let it stop you as a generous man

From speaking farther. You may tease, indeed,

And blow about my feelings, or my leaves,–

And here's my aunt will help you with east winds,

And break a stalk, perhaps, tormenting me;

But certain flowers grow near as deep as trees,

And, cousin, you'll not move my root, not you,

With all your confluent storms. Then let me grow

Within my wayside hedge, and pass your way!

This flower has never as much to say to you

As the antique tomb which said to travellers, 'Pause,

'Siste, viator.'' Ending thus, I signed.

The next week passed in silence, so the next,

And several after: Romney did not come,

Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on,

As if my heart were kept beneath a glass,

And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,

To see and hear it tick. I could not sit,

Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down,

Nor sew on steadily, nor drop a stitch

And a sigh with it, but I felt her looks

Still cleaving to me, like the sucking asp

To Cleopatra's breast, persistently

Through the intermittent pantings. Being observed,

When observation is not sympathy,

Is just being tortured. If she said a word,

A 'thank you,' or an 'if it please you, dear.'

She meant a commination, or, at best,

An exorcism against the devildom

Which plainly held me. So with all the house.

Susannah could not stand and twist my hair,

Without such glancing at the looking-glass

To see my face there, that she missed the plait:

And John,–I never sent my plate for soup,

Or did not send it, but the foolish John

Resolved the problem, 'twixt his napkined thumbs,

Of what was signified by taking soup

Or choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped in

On morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,

Smiled admonition, sate uneasily,

And talked with measured, emphasised reserve,

Of parish news, like doctors to the sick,

When not called in,–as if, with leave to speak,

They might say something. Nay, the very dog

Would watch me from his sun-patch on the floor,

In alternation with the large black fly

Not yet in reach of snapping. So I lived.

A Roman died so: smeared with honey, teased

By insects, stared to torture by the noon:

And many patient souls 'neath English roofs

Have died like Romans. I, in looking back,

Wish only, now, I had borne the plague of all

With meeker spirits than were rife in Rome.

For, on the sixth week, the dead sea broke up,

Dashed suddenly through beneath the heel of Him

Who stands upon the sea and earth, and swears

Time shall be nevermore. The clock struck nine

That morning, too,–no lark was out of tune;

The hidden farms among the hills, breathed straight

Their smoke toward heaven; the lime-trees scarcely stirred

Beneath the blue weight of the cloudless sky,

Though still the July air came floating through

The woodbine at my window, in and out,

With touches of the out-door country-news

For a bending forehead. There I sate, and wished

That morning-truce of God would last till eve,

Or longer. 'Sleep,' I thought, 'late sleepers,–sleep,

And spare me yet the burden of your eyes.'

Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriek

Tore upwards from the bottom of the house.

Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks,

The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,

And shudder through its passages and stairs

With slam of doors and clash of bells.–I sprang,

I stood up in the middle of the room,

And there confronted at my chamber-door,

A white face,–shivering, ineffectual lips.

'Come, come,' they tried to utter, and I went;

As if a ghost had drawn me at the point

Of a fiery finger through the uneven dark,

I went with reeling footsteps down the stair.

Nor asked a question.

There she sate, my aunt,–

Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,

Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bed

For that night's sleeping . . yet slept well. My God

The dumb derision of that grey, peaked face

Concluded something grave against the sun,

Which filled the chamber with its July burst

When Susan drew the curtains, ignorant

Of who sate open-eyed behind her. There,

She sate . . it sate . . we said 'she' yesterday . .

And held a letter with unbroken seal,

As Susan gave it to her hand last night:

All night she had held it. If its news referred

To duchies or to dunghills, not an inch

She'd budge, 'twas obvious, for such worthless odds:

Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburned

Their spheric limitations, swallowing up

Like wax the azure spaces, could they force

Those open eyes to wink once. What last sight

Had left them blank and flat so,–drawing out

The faculty of vision from the roots,

As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?

Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?

That dogged me up and down the hours and days,

A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?

And did I pray, a half hour back, but so,

To escape the burden of those eyes . . those eyes?

'Sleep late' I said.–

Why now, indeed, they sleep.

And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,

A gauntlet with a gift in't. Every wish

Is like a prayer . . With God.

I had my wish,–

To read and meditate the thing I would,

To fashion all my life upon my thought,

And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, none

Could disapprove me, vex me, hamper me.

Full ground-room, in this desert newly made,

For Babylon or Balbec,–when the breath,

Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns!

The heir came over on the funeral day,

And we two cousins met before the dead,

With two pale faces. Was it death or life

That moved us? When the will was read and done,

The official guest and witnesses withdrawn,

We rose up in a silence almost hard,

And looked at one another. Then I said,

'Farewell, my cousin.'

But he touched, just touched

My hatstrings tied for going, (at the door

The carriage stood to take me) and said low,

His voice a little unsteady through his smile,

'Siste, viator.'

'Is there time,' I asked,

'In these last days of railroads, to stop short

Like Cæsar's chariot (weighing half a ton)

On the Appian road for morals?'

'There is time,'

He answered grave, 'for necessary words,

Inclusive, trust me, of no epitaph

On man or act, my cousin. We have read

A will, which gives you all the personal goods

And funded monies of your aunt.'

'I thank

Her memory for it. With three hundred pounds

We buy in England even, clear standing-room

To stand and work in. Only two hours since,

I fancied I was poor.'

'And cousin, still

You're richer than you fancy. The will says,

Three hundred pounds, and any other sum

Of which the said testatrix dies possessed.

I say she died possessed of other sums.'

'Dear Romney, need we chronicle the pence?

I'm richer than I thought–that's evident.

Enough so.'

'Listen rather. You've to do

With business and a cousin,' he resumed,

'And both, I fear, need patience. Here's the fact.

The other sum (there is another sum,

Unspecified in any will which dates

After possession, yet bequeathed as much

And clearly as those said three hundred pounds)

Is thirty thousand. You will have it paid

When? . . where? My duty troubles you with words.'

He struck the iron when the bar was hot;

No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks.

'Pause there! I thank you. You are delicate

In glosing gifts;–but I, who share your blood,

Am rather made for giving, like yourself,

Than taking, like your pensioners. Farewell.'

He stopped me with a gesture of calm pride.

'A Leigh,' he said, 'gives largesse and gives love,

But gloses neither: if a Leigh could glose,

He would not do it, moreover, to a Leigh,

With blood trained up along nine centuries

To hound and hate a lie, from eyes like yours.

And now we'll make the rest as clear; your aunt

Possessed these monies.'

'You'll make it clear,

My cousin, as the honour of us both,

Or one of us speaks vainly–that's not I.

My aunt possessed this sum,–inherited

From whom, and when? bring documents, prove dates.'

'Why now indeed you throw your bonnet off.

As if you had time left for a logarithm!

The faith's the want. Dear cousin, give me faith,

And you shall walk this road with silken shoes,

As clean as any lady of our house

Supposed the proudest. Oh, I comprehend

The whole position from your point of sight.

I oust you from your father's halls and lands,

And make you poor by getting rich–that's law;

Considering which, in common circumstance,

You would not scruple to accept from me

Some compensation, some sufficiency

Of income–that were justice; but, alas,

I love you . . that's mere nature!–you reject

My love . . that's nature also;–and at once,

You cannot, from a suitor disallowed,

A hand thrown back as mine is, into yours

Receive a doit, a farthing, . . not for the world!

That's etiquette with women, obviously

Exceeding claim of nature, law, and right,

Unanswerable to all. I grant, you see,

The case as you conceive it,–leave you room

To sweep your ample skirts of womanhood;

While, standing humbly squeezed against the wall,

I own myself excluded from being just,

Restrained from paying indubitable debts,

Because denied from giving you my soul–

That's my fortune!–I submit to it

As if, in some more reasonable age,

'Twould not be less inevitable. Enough.

You'll trust me, cousin, as a gentleman,

To keep your honour, as you count it, pure,–

Your scruples (just as if I thought them wise)

Safe and inviolate from gifts of mine.'

I answered mild but earnest. 'I believe

In no one's honour which another keeps,

Nor man's nor woman's. As I keep, myself,

My truth and my religion, I depute

No father, though I had one this side death,

Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you,

Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh,

To keep my honour pure. You face, today,

A man who wants instruction, mark me, not

A woman who wants protection. As to a man,

Show manhood, speak out plainly, be precise

With facts and dates. My aunt inherited

This sum, you say–'

'I said she died possessed

Of this, dear cousin.'

'Not by heritage.

Thank you: we're getting to the facts at last.

Perhaps she played at commerce with a ship

Which came in heavy with Australian gold?

Or touched a lottery with her finger-end,

Which tumbled on a sudden into her lap

Some old Rhine tower or principality?

Perhaps she had to do with a marine

Sub-transatlantic railroad, which pre-pays

As well as pre-supposes? or perhaps

Some stale ancestral debt was after-paid

By a hundred years, and took her by surprise?–

You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.'

'You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride,

The truth is not afraid of hurting you.

You'll find no cause, in all your scruples, why

Your aunt should cavil at a deed of gift

'Twixt her and me.'

'I thought so–ah! a gift.'

'You naturally thought so,' he resumed.

'A very natural gift.'

'A gift, a gift!

Her individual life being stranded high

Above all want, approaching opulence,

Too haughty was she to accept a gift

Without some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see,–

A gift intended plainly for her heirs,

And so accepted . . if accepted . . ah,

Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps,

Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you,

If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?'

He answered gently, 'Need you tremble and pant

Like a netted lioness? is't my fault, mine,

That you're a grand wild creature of the woods,

And hate the stall built for you? Any way,

Though triply netted, need you glare at me?

I do not hold the cords of such a net,

You're free from me, Aurora!'

'Now may God

Deliver me from this strait! This gift of yours

Was tendered . . when? accepted . . when?' I asked.

'A month . . a fortnight since? Six weeks ago

It was not tendered. By a word she dropped,

I know it was not tendered nor received.

When was it? bring your dates.'

'What matters when?

A half-hour ere she died, or a half-year,

Secured the gift, maintains the heritage

Inviolable with law. As easy pluck

The golden stars from heaven's embroidered stole,

To pin them on the grey side of this earth,

As make you poor again, thank God.'

'Not poor

Nor clean again from henceforth, you thank God?

Well, sir–I ask you . . I insist at need . .

Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.'

'The day before her death-day,' he replied,

'The gift was in her hands. We'll find that deed,

And certify that date to you.'

As one

Who has climbed a mountain-height and carried up

His own heart climbing, panting in his throat

With the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last,

Looks back in triumph–so I stood and looked:

'Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the top

Of this steep question, and may rest, I think.

But first, I pray you pardon, that the shock

And surge of natural feeling and event

Had made me oblivious of acquainting you

That this, this letter . . unread, mark,–still sealed,

Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand:

That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address,

Which could not find her though you wrote it clear.–

I know your writing, Romney,–recognise

The open-hearted A, the liberal sweep

Of the G. Now listen,–let us understand;

You will not find that famous deed of gift,

Unless you find it in the letter here,

Which, not being mine, I give you back.–Refuse

To take the letter? well then–you and I,

As writer and as heiress, open it

Together, by your leave.–Exactly so:

The words in which the noble offering's made,

Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own,

The proudest and most delicate heart alive,

Distracted from the measure of the gift

By such a grace in giving, might accept

Your largesse without thinking any more

Of the burthen of it, than King Solomon

Considered, when he wore his holy ring

Charactered over with the ineffable spell,

How many carats of fine gold made up

Its money-value. So, Leigh gives to Leigh–

Or rather, might have given, observe!–for that's

The point we come to. Here's a proof of gift,

But here's no proof, sir, of acceptancy,

But rather, disproof. Death's black dust, being blown,

Infiltrated through every secret fold

Of this sealed letter by a puff of fate,

Dried up for ever the fresh-written ink,

Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace,

And left these fragments.'

As I spoke, I tore

The paper up and down, and down and up

And crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands,

As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and rapt

By a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,

Drop slow, and strew the melancholy ground

Before the amazed hills . . why, so, indeed,

I'm writing like a poet, somewhat large

In the type of the image,–and exaggerate

A small thing with a great thing, topping it!–

But then I'm thinking how his eyes looked . . his

With what despondent and surprised reproach!

I think the tears were in them as he looked–

I think the manly mouth just trembled. Then

He broke the silence.

'I may ask, perhaps,

Although no stranger . . only Romney Leigh,

Which means still less . . than Vincent Carrington . .

Your plans in going hence, and where you go.

This cannot be a secret.'

'All my life

Is open to you, cousin. I go hence

To London, to the gathering-place of souls,

To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;

Harmoniously for others, if indeed

A woman's soul, like man's, be wide enough

To carry the whole octave (that's to prove)

Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.

Pray God be with me, Romney.'

'Ah, poor child,

And choose the headsman's! May God change his world

For your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven,

And juster than I have found you!'

But I paused.

'And you, my cousin?'–

'I,' he said,–'you ask?

You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds,

And fain would know the end of everything,

Of cousins, therefore, with the rest.

For me, Aurora, I've my work; you know my work;

And having missed this year some personal hope,

I must beware the rather that I miss

No reasonable duty. While you sing

Your happy pastorals of the meads and trees,

Bethink you that I go to impress and prove

On stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf,

Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself,

And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice,

To make it vocal. While you ask of men

Your audience, I may get their leave perhaps

For hungry orphans to say audibly

'We're hungry, see,'–for beaten and bullied wives

To hold their unweaned babies up in sight,

Whom orphanage would better; and for all

To speak and claim their portion . . by no means

Of the soil, . . but of the sweat in tilling it,–

Since this is now-a-days turned privilege,

To have only God's curse on us, and not man's

Such work I have for doing, elbow-deep

In social problems,–as you tie your rhymes,

To draw my uses to cohere with needs,

And bring the uneven world back to its round;

Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at least

To smoother issues, some abysmal cracks

And feuds of earth, intestine heats have made

To keep men separate,–using sorry shifts

Of hospitals, almshouses, infant schools,

And other practical stuff of partial good,

You lovers of the beautiful and whole,

Despise by system.'

'I despise? The scorn

Is yours, my cousin. Poets become such,

Through scorning nothing. You decry them for

The good of beauty, sung and taught by them,

While they respect your practical partial good

As being a part of beauty's self. Adieu!

When God helps all the workers for his world,

The singers shall have help of Him, not last.'

He smiled as men smile when they will not speak

Because of something bitter in the thought;

And still I feel his melancholy eyes

Look judgment on me. It is seven years since:

I know not if 'twas pity or 'twas scorn

Has made them so far-reaching: judge it ye

Who have had to do with pity more than love,

And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,

To other ways, from equal men. But so,

Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,

And, in between us, rushed the torrent-world

To blanch our faces like divided rocks,

And bar for ever mutual sight and touch

Except through swirl of spray and all that roar.

THIRD BOOK.

'TO-DAY thou girdest up thy loins thyself,

And goest where thou wouldest: presently

Others shall gird thee,' said the Lord, 'to go

Where thou would'st not.' He spoke to Peter thus,

To signify the death which he should die

When crucified head downwards.

If He spoke

To Peter then, He speaks to us the same;

The word suits many different martyrdoms,

And signifies a multiform of death,

Although we scarcely die apostles, we,

And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth.

For tis not in mere death that men die most;

And, after our first girding of the loins

In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,

To run up hill and meet the rising sun,

We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,

While others gird us with the violent bands

Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,

Reversing our straight nature, lifting up

Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,

Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.

Yet He can pluck us from the shameful cross.

God, set our feet low and our forehead high,

And show us how a man was made to walk!

Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed.

The room does very well; I have to write

Beyond the stroke of midnight. Get away;

Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,

Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them down

At once, as I must have them, to be sure,

Whether I bid you never bring me such

At such an hour, or bid you. No excuse.

You choose to bring them, as I choose perhaps

To throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed,

And dream, if possible, I am not cross.

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,–

A mere, mere woman,–a mere flaccid nerve,-

A kerchief left out all night in the rain,

Turned soft so,–overtasked and overstrained

And overlived in this close London life!

And yet I should be stronger.

Never burn

Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare

With red seals from the table, saying each,

'Here's something that you know not.' Out alas,

'Tis scarcely that the world's more good and wise

Or even straighter and more consequent

Since yesterday at this time–yet, again,

If but one angel spoke from Ararat,

I should be very sorry not to hear:

So open all the letters! let me read.

Blanche Ord, the writer in the 'Lady's Fan,'

Requests my judgment on . . that, afterwards.

Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,

And signs, 'Elisha to you.' Pringle Sharpe

Presents his work on 'Social Conduct,' . . craves

A little money for his pressing debts . .

From me, who scarce have money for my needs,–

Art's fiery chariot which we journey in

Being apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,

Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!

Here's Rudgely knows it,–editor and scribe–

He's 'forced to marry where his heart is not,

Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.'

Ah,–lost it because no one picked it up!

That's really loss! (and passable impudence.)

My critic Hammond flatters prettily,

And wants another volume like the last.

My critic Belfair wants another book

Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?)

A striking book, yet not a startling book,

The public blames originalities.

(You must not pump spring-water unawares

Upon a gracious public, full of nerves–)

Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,

As easy reading as the dog-eared page

That's fingered by said public, fifty years,

Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,

And yet a revelation in some sort:

That's hard, my critic, Belfair! So–what next?

My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;

'Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,' says he,

'And do not prate so of humanities:'

Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.

My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,

Because a cheerful genius suits the times,

And all true poets laugh unquenchably

Like Shakspeare and the gods. That's very hard,

The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled

With such a needy heart on two pale lips,

We cry, 'Weep rather, Dante.' Poems are

Men, if true poems: and who dares exclaim

At any man's door, 'Here, 'tis probable

The thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,

And scared a sickly husband–what of that?

Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,

Because a cheerful genius suits the times–'?

None says so to the man,–and why indeed

Should any to the poem? A ninth seal;

The apocalypse is drawing to a close.

Ha,–this from Vincent Carrington,–'Dear friend,

I want good counsel. Will you lend me wings

To raise me to the subject, in a sketch

I'll bring to-morrow–may I? at eleven?

A poet's only born to turn to use;

So save you! for the world . . and Carrington.'

'(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh,

Beyond what's said of him in newspapers,

His phalansteries there, his speeches here,

His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?

He dropped me long ago; but no one drops

A golden apple–though, indeed, one day,

You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least,

You know Lord Howe, who sees him . . whom he sees,

And you see, and I hate to see,–for Howe

Stands high upon the brink of theories,

Observes the swimmers, and cries 'Very fine,'

But keeps dry linen equally,–unlike

That gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is,

Such sudden madness, seizing a young man,

To make earth over again,–while I'm content

To make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch.

A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot:

Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing Jove

Halfway, and burn him faster down; the face

And breasts upturned and straining, the loose locks

All glowing with the anticipated gold.

Or here's another on the self-same theme.

She lies here–flat upon her prison-floor,

The long hair swathed about her to the heel,

Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her through

The glittering haze of that prodigious rain,

Half blotted out of nature by a love

As heavy as fate. I'll bring you either sketch.

I think, myself, the second indicates

More passion. '

Surely. Self is put away,

And calm with abdication. She is Jove,

And no more Danae–greater thus. Perhaps

The painter symbolises unawares

Two states of the recipient artist-soul;

One, forward, personal, wanting reverence,

Because aspiring only. We'll be calm,

And know that, when indeed our Joves come down.

We all turn stiller than we have ever been.

Kind Vincent Carrington. I'll let him come.

He talks of Florence,–and may say a word

Of something as it chanced seven years ago,–

A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird,

In those green country walks, in that good time,

When certainly I was so miserable . .

I seem to have missed a blessing ever since.

The music soars within the little lark,

And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.

We do not make our places with our strains,–

Content, while they rise, to remain behind,

Alone on earth instead of so in heaven.

No matter–I bear on my broken tale.

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,

I took a chamber up three flights of stairs

Not far from being as steep as some larks climb,

And, in a certain house in Kensington,

Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work

In this world,–'tis the best you get at all;

For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts

Than men in benediction. God says, 'Sweat

For foreheads;' men say 'crowns;' and so we are crowned,

Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel

Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work; get work;

Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.

So, happy and unafraid of solitude,

I worked the short days out,–and watched the sun

On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,

Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass,

With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,

In which the blood of wretches pent inside

Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,–

Push out through fog with his dilated disk,

And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots

With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw

Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,

Involve the passive city, strangle it

Alive, and draw it off into the void,

Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge

Had wiped out London,–or as noon and night

Had clapped together and utterly struck out

The intermediate time, undoing themselves

In the act. Your city poets see such things,

Not despicable. Mountains of the south,

When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,

They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,

Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,

Descending Sinai; on Parnassus mount,

You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,

Except in fable and figure: forests chant

Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.

But sit in London, at the day's decline,

And view the city perish in the mist

Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,–

The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,

Sucked down and choked to silence–then, surprised

By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,

You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,

And you and Israel's other singing girls,

Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.

I worked with patience which means almost power

I did some excellent things indifferently,

Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,

The latter loudest. And by such a time

That I myself had set them down as sins

Scarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week,

Arrived some letter through the sedulous post,

Like these I've read, and yet dissimilar,

With pretty maiden seals,–initials twined

Of lilies, or a heart marked Emily,

(Convicting Emily of being all heart);

Or rarer tokens from young bachelors,

Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,

Suppose, they had been just plucked of) and a snatch

From Horace, 'Collegisse juvat,' set

Upon the first page. Many a letter signed

Or unsigned, showing the writers at eighteen

Had lived too long, though every muse should help

The daylight, holding candles,–compliments,

To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with me

No more than coins from Moscow circulate

At Paris. Would ten rubles buy a tag

Of ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou?

I smiled that all this youth should love me,–sighed

That such a love could scarcely raise them up

To love what was more worthy than myself;

Then sighed again, again, less generously,

To think the very love they lavished so,

Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not,

And he . . my cousin Romney . . did not write.

I felt the silent finger of his scorn

Prick every bubble of my frivolous fame

As my breath blew it, and resolve it back

To the air it came from. Oh, I justified

The measure he had taken of my height:

The thing was plain–he was not wrong a line;

I played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword,

Amused the lads and maidens.

Came a sigh

Deep, hoarse with resolution,–I would work

To better ends, or play in earnest. 'Heavens,

I think I should be almost popular

If this went on!'–I ripped my verses up,

And found no blood upon the rapier's point:

The heart in them was just an embryo's heart,

Which never yet had beat, that it should die:

Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;

Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.

And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,

Like those hot fire-seeds of creation held

In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown;

But I–I was not Juno even! my hand

Was shut in weak convulsion, woman's ill,

And when I yearned to loose a finger–lo,

The nerve revolted. 'Tis the same even now:

This hand may never, haply, open large,

Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred,

To prove the power not else than by the pain.

It burns, it burnt–my whole life burnt with it,

And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashed

My steps out through the slow and difficult road.

I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs,

The season's books in drear significance

Of morals, dropping round me. Lively books?

The ash has livelier verdure than the yew;

And yet the yew's green longer, and alone

Found worthy of the holy Christmas time.

We'll plant more yews if possible, albeit

We plant the graveyards with them.

Day and night

I worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed up

Both watch and slumber with long lines of life

Which did not suit their season. The rose fell

From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous

Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse

Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist

Like a shot bird. Youth's stern, set face to face

With youth's ideal: and when people came

And said, 'You work too much, you are looking ill,'

I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,

And thought I should be better soon perhaps

For those ill looks. Observe–' I,' means in youth

Just I . . the conscious and eternal soul

With all its ends,–and not the outside life,

The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,

The so much liver, lung, integument,

Which make the sum of 'I' hereafter, when

World-talkers talk of doing well or ill.

I prosper, if I gain a step, although

A nail then pierced my foot: although my brain

Embracing any truth, froze paralysed,

I prosper. I but change my instrument;

I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,

And catch the mattock up.

I worked on, on.

Through all the bristling fence of nights and days

Which hedges time in from the eternities,

I struggled, . . never stopped to note the stakes

Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil

Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:

I had to live, that therefore I might work.

And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,

To work with one hand for the booksellers,

While working with the other for myself

And art. You swim with feet as well as hands

Or make small way. I apprehended this,–

In England, no one lives by verse that lives;

And, apprehending, I resolved by prose

To make a space to sphere my living verse.

I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,

And weekly papers, holding up my name

To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use

Of the editorial 'we' in a review,

As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,

And swept it grandly through the open doors

As if one could not pass through doors at all

Save so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,

Carved many an article on cherry-stones

To suit light readers,–something in the lines

Revealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,

But that, I'll never vouch for. What you do

For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,

Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,–

Much less in Nephelococcygia,

As mine was, peradventure.

Having bread

For just so many days, just breathing room

For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked

My veritable work. And as the soul

Which grows within a child, makes the child grow,–

Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,

Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,

And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes

The summer foliage out in a green flame–

So life, in deepening with me, deepened all

The course I took, the work I did. Indeed,

The academic law convinced of sin;

The critics cried out on the falling off

Regretting the first manner. But I felt

My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show

It lived, it also–certes incomplete,

Disordered with all Adam in the blood,

But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,

Still organised by, and implying life.

A lady called upon me on such a day.

She had the low voice of your English dames,

Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note

To catch attention,–and their quiet mood,

As if they lived too high above the earth

For that to put them out in anything:

So gentle, because verily so proud;

So wary and afeared of hurting you,

By no means that you are not really vile,

But that they would not touch you with their foot

To push you to your place; so self-possessed

Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes

An effort in their presence to speak truth:

You know the sort of woman,–brilliant stuff,

And out of nature. 'Lady Waldemar.'

She said her name quite simply, as if it meant

Not much indeed, but something,–took my hands,

And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,

And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.

'Is this,' she said, 'the Muse?'

'No sibyl even,'

I answered, 'since she fails to guess the cause

Which taxed you with this visit, madam.'

'Good,'

She said, 'I like to be sincere at once;

Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,

The visit might have taxed me. As it is,

You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,

My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,

It comforts me entirely for your fame,

As well as for the trouble of my ascent

To this Olympus. '

There, a silver laugh

Ran rippling through her quickened little breaths

The steep stair somewhat justified.

'But still

Your ladyship has left me curious why

You dared the risk of finding the said Muse?'

'Ah,–keep me, notwithstanding, to the point

Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyes

As awful as in stockings, after all,

I wonder, that you'd have my business out

Before I breathe–exact the epic plunge

In spite of gasps? Well, naturally you think

I've come here, as the lion-hunters go

To deserts, to secure you, with a trap

For exhibition in my drawing-rooms

On zoologic soirées? Not in the least.

Roar softly at me; I am frivolous,

I dare say; I have played at lions, too

Like other women of my class,–but now

I meet my lion simply as Androcles

Met his . . when at his mercy.'

So, she bent

Her head, as queens may mock,–then lifting up

Her eyelids with a real grave queenly look,

Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself,

'I think you have a cousin:–Romney Leigh.'

'You bring a word from him? '–my eyes leapt up

To the very height of hers,– 'a word from him? '

'I bring a word about him, actually.

But first,'–she pressed me with her urgent eyes–

'You do not love him,–you?'

'You're frank at least

In putting questions, madam,' I replied.

'I love my cousin cousinly–no more.'

'I guessed as much. I'm ready to be frank

In answering also, if you'll question me,

Or even with something less. You stand outside,

You artist women, of the common sex;

You share not with us, and exceed us so

Perhaps by what you're mulcted in, your hearts

Being starved to make your heads: so run the old

Traditions of you. I can therefore speak,

Without the natural shame which creatures feel

When speaking on their level, to their like.

There's many a papist she, would rather die

Than own to her maid she put a ribbon on

To catch the indifferent eye of such a man,–

Who yet would count adulteries on her beads

At holy Mary's shrine, and never blush;

Because the saints are so far off, we lose

All modesty before them. Thus, to-day.

'Tis I, love Romney Leigh.'

'Forbear,' I cried.

'If here's no muse, still less is any saint;

Nor even a friend, that Lady Waldemar

Should make confessions' . .

'That's unkindly said.

If no friend, what forbids to make a friend

To join to our confession ere we have done?

I love your cousin. If it seems unwise

To say so, it's still foolisher (we're frank)

To feel so. My first husband left me young,

And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,

To keep my booth in May-fair with the rest

To happy issues. There are marquises

Would serve seven years to call me wife, I know:

And, after seven, I might consider it,

For there's some comfort in a marquisate

When all's said,–yes, but after the seven years;

I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip,

So like a Leigh! so like him!–Pardon me,

I am well aware I do not derogate

In loving Romney Leigh. The name is good,

The means are excellent; but the man, the man–

Heaven help us both,–I am near as mad as he

In loving such an one.'

She slowly wrung

Her heavy ringlets till they touched her smile,

As reasonably sorry for herself;

And thus continued,–

'Of a truth, Miss Leigh,

I have not, without a struggle, come to this.

I took a master in the German tongue,

I gamed a little, went to Paris twice;

But, after all, this love! . . . you eat of love,

And do as vile a thing as if you ate

Of garlic–which, whatever else you eat,

Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peach

Reminds you of your onion! Am I coarse?

Well, love's coarse, nature's coarse–ah there's the rub!

We fair fine ladies, who park out our lives

From common sheep-paths, cannot help the crows

From flying over,–we're as natural still

As Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectly

In Lyons' velvet,–we are not, for that,

Lay-figures, like you! we have hearts within,

Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,

As ready for distracted ends and acts

As any distressed sempstress of them all

That Romney groans and toils for. We catch love

And other fevers, in the vulgar way.

Love will not be outwitted by our wit,

Nor outrun by our equipages:–mine

Persisted, spite of efforts. All my cards

Turned up but Romney Leigh; my German stopped

At germane Wertherism; my Paris rounds

Returned me from the Champs Elysées just

A ghost, and sighing like Dido's. I came home

Uncured,–convicted rather to myself

Of being in love . . in love! That's coarse you'll say

I'm talking garlic.'

Coldly I replied.

'Apologise for atheism, not love!

For, me, I do believe in love, and God.

I know my cousin: Lady Waldemar

I know not: yet I say as much as this–

Whoever loves him, let her not excuse

But cleanse herself; that, loving such a man,

She may not do it with such unworthy love

He cannot stoop and take it.'

'That is said

Austerely, like a youthful prophetess,

Who knits her brows across her pretty eyes

To keep them back from following the grey flight

Of doves between the temple-columns. Dear,

Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.

I'm a mere woman–the more weak perhaps

Through being so proud; you're better; as for him,

He's best. Indeed he builds his goodness up

So high, it topples down to the other side,

And makes a sort of badness; there's the worst

I have to say against your cousin's best!

And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,

For his sake, if not mine.'

'I own myself

Incredulous of confidence like this

Availing him or you.'

'I, worthy of him?

In your sense I am not so–let it pass.

And yet I save him if I marry him;

Let that pass too.'

'Pass, pass, we play police

Upon my cousin's life, to indicate

What may or may not pass?' I cried. 'He knows

what's worthy of him; the choice remains with him;

And what he chooses, act or wife, I think

I shall not call unworthy, I, for one.'

'Tis somewhat rashly said,' she answered slow.

Now let's talk reason, though we talk of love.

Your cousin Romney Leigh's a monster! there,

The word's out fairly; let me prove the fact.

We'll take, say, that most perfect of antiques,

They call the Genius of the Vatican,

Which seems too beauteous to endure itself

In this mixed world, and fasten it for once

Upon the torso of the Drunken Fawn,

(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,)

Instead of Buonarroti's mask: what then?

We show the sort of monster Romney is,

With god-like virtue and heroic aims

Subjoined to limping possibilities

Of mismade human nature. Grant the man

Twice godlike, twice heroic,–still he limps,

And here's the point we come to.'

'Pardon me,

But, Lady Waldemar, the point's the thing

We never come to.'

'Caustic, insolent

At need! I like you'–(there, she took my hands)

'And now my lioness, help Androcles,

For all your roaring. Help me! for myself

I would not say so–but for him. He limps

So certainly, he'll fall into the pit

A week hence,–so I lose him–so he is lost!

And when he's fairly married, he a Leigh,

To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth,

Starved out in London, till her coarse-grained hands

Are whiter than her morals,–you, for one,

May call his choice most worthy.'

'Married! lost!

He, . . . Romney!'

'Ah, you're moved at last,' she said.

'These monsters, set out in the open sun,

Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who think

Awry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he?

And who but you can wonder? He has been mad,

The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man,

He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen's wits,

With equal scorn of triangles and wine,

And took no honours, yet was honourable.

They'll tell you he lost count of Homer's ships

In Melbourne's poor-bills, Ashley's factory bills,–

Ignored the Aspasia we all dared to praise,

For other women, dear, we could not name

Because we're decent. Well, he had some right

On his side probably; men always have,

Who go absurdly wrong. The living boor

Who brews your ale, exceeds in vital worth

Dead Caesar who 'stops bungholes' in the cask;

And also, to do good is excellent,

For persons of his income, even to boors:

I sympathise with all such things. But he

Went mad upon them . . madder and more mad,

From college times to these,–as, going down hill,

The faster still, the farther! you must know

Your Leigh by heart; he has sown his black young curls

With bleaching cares of half a million men

Already. If you do not starve, or sin,

You're nothing to him. Pay the income-tax,

And break your heart upon't . . . he'll scarce be touched;

But come upon the parish, qualified

For the parish stocks, and Romney will be there

To call you brother, sister, or perhaps

A tenderer name still. Had I any chance

With Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar,

And never committed felony?'

'You speak

Too bitterly,' I said, 'for the literal truth.'

'The truth is bitter. Here's a man who looks

For ever on the ground! you must be low;

Or else a pictured ceiling overhead,

Good painting thrown away. For me, I've done

What women may, (we're somewhat limited,

We modest women) but I've done my best.

–How men are perjured when they swear our eyes

Have meaning in them! they're just blue or brown,–

They just can drop their lids a little. In fact,

Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through,

Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc

With various other of his socialists;

And if I had been a fathom less in love,

Had cured myself with gaping. As it was,

I quoted from them prettily enough,

Perhaps, to make them sound half rational

To a saner man than he, whene'er we talked,

(For which I dodged occasion)–learnt by heart

His speeches in the Commons and elsewhere

Upon the social question; heaped reports

Of wicked women and penitentiaries,

On all my tables, with a place for Sue;

And gave my name to swell subscription-lists

Toward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven,

And other possible ends. All things I did,

Except the impossible . . such as wearing gowns

Provided by the Ten Hours' movement! there,

I stopped–we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile,

Unmoved as the Indian tortoise 'neath the world

Let all that noise go on upon his back;

He would not disconcert or throw me out;

'Twas well to see a woman of my class

With such a dawn of conscience. For the heart,

Made firewood for his sake, and flaming up

To his very face . . he warmed his feet at it:

But deigned to let my carriage stop him short

In park or street,–he leaning on the door

With news of the committee which sate last

On pickpockets at suck.'

'You jest–you jest.'

'As martyrs jest, dear (if you read their lives),

Upon the axe which kills them. When all's done

By me, . . for him–you'll ask him presently

The color of my hair–he cannot tell,

Or answers 'dark' at random,–while, be sure,

He's absolute on the figure, five or ten,

Of my last subscription. Is it bearable,

And I a woman?'

'Is it reparable,

Though I were a man?'

'I know not. That's to prove.

But, first, this shameful marriage?'

'Ay?' I cried.

'Then really there's a marriage.'

'Yesterday

I held him fast upon it. 'Mister Leigh,'

Said I, 'shut up a thing, it makes more noise.

'The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I've known

'Yours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so:

'You feel I'm not the woman of the world

'The world thinks; you have borne with me before

'And used me in your noble work, our work,

'And now you shall not cast me off because

'You're at the difficult point, the join. 'Tis true

'Even if I can scarce admit the cogency

'Of such a marriage . . where you do not love

'(Except the class), yet marry and throw your name

'Down to the gutter, for a fire-escape

'To future generation! it's sublime,

'A great example,–a true Genesis

'Of the opening social era. But take heed;

'This virtuous act must have a patent weight,

'Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell,

'Interpret it, and set it in the light,

'And do not muffle it in a winter-cloak

'As a vulgar bit of shame,–as if, at best,

'A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushed

'A Howard should know it.' Then, I pressed him more–

'He would not choose,' I said, 'that even his kin, . .

'Aurora Leigh, even . . should conceive his act

'Less sacrifice, more appetite.' At which

He grew so pale, dear, . . to the lips, I knew

I had touched him. 'Do you know her,' he inquired,

'My cousin Aurora?' 'Yes,' I said, and lied

(But truly we all know you by your books),

And so I offered to come straight to you,

Explain the subject, justify the cause,

And take you with me to Saint Margaret's Court

To see this miracle, this Marian Erle,

This drover's daughter (she's not pretty, he swears),

Upon whose finger, exquisitely pricked

By a hundred needles, we're to hang the tie

'Twixt class and class in England,–thus indeed

By such a presence, yours and mine, to lift

The match up from the doubtful place. At once

He thanked me, sighing, . . murmured to himself

'She'll do it perhaps; she's noble,'–thanked me, twice,

And promised, as my guerdon, to put off

His marriage for a month.'

I answered then.

'I understand your drift imperfectly.

You wish to lead me to my cousin's betrothed,

To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her hand

If feeble, thus to justify his match.

So be it then. But how this serves your ends,

And how the strange confession of your love

Serves this, I have to learn–I cannot see.'

She knit her restless forehead. 'Then, despite,

Aurora, that most radiant morning name,

You're dull as any London afternoon.

I wanted time,–and gained it,–wanted you,

And gain you! You will come and see the girl

In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearl

And pride of all your lofty race of Leighs

Is destined to solution. Authorised

By sight and knowledge, then, you'll speak your mind,

And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way,

He'll wrong the people and posterity

(Say such a thing is bad for you and me,

And you fail utterly), by concluding thus

An execrable marriage. Break it up.

Disroot it–peradventure, presently,

We'll plant a better fortune in its place.

Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me less

For saying the thing I should not. Well I know

I should not. I have kept, as others have,

The iron rule of womanly reserve

In lip and life, till now: I wept a week

Before I came here.'–Ending, she was pale;

The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous.

This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck,

And, only by the foam upon the bit,

You saw she champed against it.

Then I rose.

'I love love: truth's no cleaner thing than love.

I comprehend a love so fiery hot

It burns its natural veil of august shame,

And stands sublimely in the nude, as chaste

As Medicean Venus. But I know,

A love that burns through veils will burn through masks

And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!

Nay–go to the opera! your love's curable.'

'I love and lie!' she said–'I lie, forsooth?'

And beat her taper foot upon the floor,

And smiled against the shoe,–'You're hard, Miss Leigh,

Unversed in current phrases.–Bowling-greens

Of poets are fresher than the world's highways:

Forgive me that I rashly blew the dust

Which dims our hedges even, in your eyes,

And vexed you so much. You find, probably,

No evil in this marriage,–rather good

Of innocence, to pastoralise in song:

You'll give the bond your signature, perhaps,

Beneath the lady's work,–indifferent

That Romney chose a wife, could write her name,

In witnessing he loved her.'

'Loved!' I cried;

'Who tells you that he wants a wife to love?

He gets a horse to use, not love, I think:

There's work for wives as well,–and after, straw,

When men are liberal. For myself, you err

Supposing power in me to break this match.

I could not do it, to save Romney's life,

And would not, to save mine.'

'You take it so,'

She said, 'farewell then. Write your books in peace,

As far as may be for some secret stir

Now obvious to me,–for, most obviously,

In coming hither I mistook the way.'

Whereat she touched my hand and bent her head,

And floated from me like a silent cloud

That leaves the sense of thunder.

I drew breath,

As hard as in a sick-room. After all,

This woman breaks her social system up

For love, so counted–the love possible

To such,–and lilies are still lilies, pulled

By smutty hands, though spotted from their white;

And thus she is better, haply, of her kind,

Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams,

And crosses out the spontaneities

Of all his individual, personal life

With formal universals. As if man

Were set upon a high stool at a desk,

To keep God's books for Him, in red and black,

And feel by millions! What, if even God

Were chiefly God by living out Himself

To an individualism of the Infinite,

Eterne, intense, profuse,–still throwing up

The golden spray of multitudinous worlds

In measure to the proclive weight and rush

Of his inner nature,–the spontaneous love

Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?

Then live, Aurora!

Two hours afterward,

Within Saint Margaret's Court I stood alone,

Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,

Whose wasted right hand gambled 'gainst his left

With an old brass button, in a blot of sun,

Jeered weakly at me as I passed across

The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged

Upon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,

Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,

Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,

By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,–

'Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog

You'll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,

Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!

We cover up our face from doing good,

As if it were our purse! What brings you here,

My lady? is't to find my gentleman

Who visits his tame pigeon in the eaves?

Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,

And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,

And turn your whiteness dead-blue.' I looked up;

I think I could have walked through hell that day,

And never flinched. 'The dear Christ comfort you,'

I said, 'you must have been most miserable

To be so cruel,'–and I emptied out

My purse upon the stones: when, as I had cast

The last charm in the cauldron, the whole court

Went boiling, bubbling up, from all its doors

And windows, with a hideous wail of laughs

And roar of oaths, and blows perhaps . . I passed

Too quickly for distinguishing . . and pushed

A little side-door hanging on a hinge,

And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbed

The long, steep, narrow stair 'twixt broken rail

And mildewed wall that let the plaster drop

To startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up!

So high lived Romney's bride. I paused at last

Before a low door in the roof, and knocked;

There came an answer like a hurried dove–

'So soon! can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?'

And, as I entered, an ineffable face

Met mine upon the threshold. 'Oh, not you,

Not you!' . . the dropping of the voice implied;

'Then, if not you, for me not any one.'

I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands,

And said 'I am his cousin,–Romney Leigh's;

And here I'm come to see my cousin too.'

She touched me with her face and with her voice,

This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers

From such rough roots? The people, under there,

Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so . . . faugh!

Yet have such daughters!

Nowise beautiful

Was Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown,

But could look either, like a mist that changed

According to being shone on more or less:

The hair, too, ran its opulence of curls

In doubt 'twixt dark and bright, nor left you clear

To name the color. Too much hair perhaps

(I'll name a fault here) for so small a head,

Which seemed to droop on that side and on this,

As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight,

Though not a breath should trouble it. Again,

The dimple in the cheek had better gone

With redder, fuller rounds; and somewhat large

The mouth was, though the milky little teeth

Dissolved it to so infantile a smile!

For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too,

But 'twas as if remembering they had wept,

And knowing they should, some day, weep again.

We talked. She told me all her story out,

Which I'll re-tell with fuller utterance,

As coloured and confirmed in aftertimes

By others, and herself too. Marian Erle

Was born upon the ledge of Malvern Hill,

To eastward, in a hut, built up at night,

To evade the landlord's eye, of mud and turf,

Still liable, if once he looked that way,

To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot,

Like any other anthill. Born, I say;

God sent her to his world, commissioned right,

Her human testimonials fully signed,

Not scant in soul–complete in lineaments;

But others had to swindle her a place

To wail in when she had come. No place for her,

By man's law! born an outlaw, was this babe;

Her first cry in our strange and strangling air,

When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,

Was wrong against the social code,–forced wrong.

What business had the baby to cry there?

I tell her story and grow passionate.

She, Marian, did not tell it so, but used

Meek words that made no wonder of herself

For being so sad a creature. 'Mister Leigh

Considered truly that such things should change.

They will, in heaven–but meantime, on the earth,

There's none can like a nettle as a pink,

Except himself. We're nettles, some of us,

And give offence by the act of springing up;

And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,

The hoes, of course, are on us.' So she said.

Her father earned his life by random jobs

Despised by steadier workmen–keeping swine

On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on

The harvest at wet seasons,–or, at need,

Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove

Of startled horses plunged into the mist

Below the mountain-road, and sowed the wind

With wandering neighings. In between the gaps

Of such irregular work, he drank and slept,

And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,

She could not buy more drink. At which she turned,

(The worm), and beat her baby in revenge

For her own broken heart. There's not a crime

But takes its proper change out still in crime

If once rung on the counter of this world:

Let sinners look to it.

Yet the outcast child,

For whom the very mother's face forewent

The mother's special patience, lived and grew;

Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,

With that pathetic vacillating roll

Of the infant body on the uncertain feet,

(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon)

At which most women's arms unclose at once

With irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,

This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,

This babe would steal off from the mother's chair,

And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,

Would find some keyhole toward the secrecy

Of Heaven's high blue, and, nestling down, peer out–

Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,

She had never heard of angels, but to gaze

She knew not why, to see she knew not what,

A-hungering outward from the barren earth

For something like a joy. She liked, she said,

To dazzle black her sight against the sky,

For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,

And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;

She learnt God that way, and was beat for it

Whenever she went home,–yet came again,

As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,

Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,

This skyey father and mother both in one,

Instructed her and civilised her more

Than even the Sunday-school did afterward,

To which a lady sent her to learn books

And sit upon a long bench in a row

With other children. Well, she laughed sometimes

To see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts;

But ofter she was sorrowful with noise,

And wondered if their mothers beat them hard

That ever they should laugh so. There was one

She loved indeed,–Rose Bell, a seven years' child,

So pretty and clever, who read syllables

When Marian was at letters; she would laugh

At nothing–hold your finger up, she laughed,

Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouth

To hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster.

And Rose's pelting glee, as frank as rain

On cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,

To see another merry whom she loved.

She whispered once (the children side by side,

With mutual arms entwined about their necks)

'Your mother lets you laugh so?' 'Ay,' said Rose,

'She lets me. She was dug into the ground

Six years since, I being but a yearling wean.

Such mothers let us play and lose our time,

And never scold nor beat us! Don't you wish

You had one like that?' There, Marian, breaking off

Looked suddenly in my face. 'Poor Rose,' said she,

'I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.

I'd pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,–

Poor Rose, poor Rose!' said Marian.

She resumed.

It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-school

What God was, what he wanted from us all,

And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,

To go straight home and hear her father pull

The name down on us from the thunder-shelf,

Then drink away his soul into the dark

From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,

Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more

She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong:

Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know

The vileness of her kindred: through her heart,

Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth

They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, 'tis hard

To learn you have a father up in heaven

By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,

Still worse than orphaned: 'tis too heavy a grief,

The having to thank God for such a joy!

And so passed Marian's life from year to year.

Her parents took her with them when they tramped,

Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,

And once went farther and saw Manchester,

And once the sea, that blue end of the world,

That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,–

And twice a prison, back at intervals,

Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,

And stronger sometimes, holding out their hands

To pull you from the vile flats up to them;

And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back,

As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,

They certainly felt bettered unawares

Emerging from the social smut of towns

To wipe their feet clean on the mountain turf.

In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,

Endured and learned. The people on the roads

Would stop and ask her how her eyes outgrew

Her cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birds

In all that hair; and then they lifted her,

The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,

The butcher's boy on horseback. Often, too,

The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the head

With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,

And asked if peradventure she could read:

And when she answered 'ay,' would toss her down

Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack,

A Thomson's Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,

Or half a play of Shakespeare's, torn across:

(She had to guess the bottom of a page

By just the top sometimes,–as difficult,

As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!),

Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth's

Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,

From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,

From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones.

'Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,

And oft the jangling influence jarred the child

Like looking at a sunset full of grace

Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths

Went on behind her; but she weeded out

Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,

(First tore them small, that none should find a word),

And made a nosegay of the sweet and good

To fold within her breast, and pore upon

At broken moments of the noontide glare,

When leave was given her to untie her cloak

And rest upon the dusty roadside bank

From the highway's dust. Or oft, the journey done,

Some city friend would lead her by the hand

To hear a lecture at an institute.

And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,

To no book-learning,–she was ignorant

Of authors,–not in earshot of the things

Out-spoken o'er the heads of common men,

By men who are uncommon,–but within

The cadenced hum of such, and capable

Of catching from the fringes of the wind

Some fragmentary phrases, here and there,

Of that fine music,–which, being carried in

To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh

In finer motions of the lips and lids.

She said, in speaking of it, 'If a flower

Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,

You'd soon attain to a trick of looking up,–

And so with her.' She counted me her years,

Till I felt old; and then she counted me

Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.

She told me she was almost glad and calm

On such and such a season; sate and sewed,

With no one to break up her crystal thoughts:

While rhymes from lovely poems span around

Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune,

Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.

Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,

Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,

And smile into the hedges and the clouds,

And tremble if one shook her from her fit

By any blow, or word even. Out-door jobs

Went ill with her; and household quiet work

She was not born to. Had they kept the north,

They might have had their pennyworth out of her

Like other parents, in the factories;

(Your children work for you, not you for them,

Or else they better had been choked with air

The first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,

Was nothing to be done with such a child,

But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose

Not ill, and was not dull at needlework;

And all the country people gave her pence

For darning stockings past their natural age,

And patching petticoats from old to new,

And other light work done for thrifty wives.

One day, said Marian–the sun shone that day–

Her mother had been badly beat, and felt

The bruises sore about her wretched soul

(That must have been): she came in suddenly,

And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,

Her daughter's headgear comb, let down the hair

Upon her, like a sudden waterfall,

Then drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,

Outside the hut they lived in. When the child

Could clear her blinded face from all that stream

Of tresses . . there, a man stood, with beasts' eyes

That seemed as they would swallow her alive,

Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,–

With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,

He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,

Saying hard between her teeth–'Why wench, why wench,

The squire speaks to you now–the squire's too good,

He means to set you up and comfort us.

Be mannerly at least.' The child turned round

And looked up piteous in the mother's face

(Be sure that mother's death-bed will not want

Another devil to damn, than such a look),

'Oh, mother!' then, with desperate glance to heaven,

'Good, free me from my mother,' she shrieked out,

'These mothers are too dreadful.' And, with force

As passionate as fear, she tore her hands,

Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,

And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,

Away from both–away, if possible,

As far as God,–away! They yelled at her,

As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell;

She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,

Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast

The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear

Was running in her feet and killing the ground;

The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,

The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back

To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed;

Trees, fields, turned on her and ran after her;

She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,

Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,

Could run no more, yet somehow went as fast,–

The horizon, red, 'twixt steeples in the east

So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart

Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big

It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,

And overflowed the world and swamped the light,

'And now I am dead and safe,' thought Marian Erle–

She had dropped, she had fainted.

When the sense returned,

The night had passed–not life's night. She was 'ware

Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,

The driver shouting to the lazy team

That swung their rankling bells against her brain,

While, through the waggon's coverture and chinks,

The cruel yellow morning pecked at her

Alive or dead, upon the straw inside,–

At which her soul ached back into the dark

And prayed, 'no more of that.' A waggoner

Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon,

As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.

At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped

The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,

And laid her in his waggon in the straw,

And so conveyed her to the distant town

To which his business called himself, and left

That heap of misery at the hospital.

She stirred;–the place seemed new and strange as death.

The white strait bed, with others strait and white,

Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,

And quiet people walking in and out

With wonderful low voices and soft steps,

And apparitional equal care for each,

Astonished her with order, silence, law:

And when a gentle hand held out a cup,

She took it, as you do at sacrament,

Half awed, half melted,–not being used, indeed,

To so much love as makes the form of love

And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks

And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes

Were turned in observation. O my God,

How sick we must be, ere we make men just!

I think it frets the saints in heaven to see

How many Desolate creatures on the earth

Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship

And social comfort, in a hospital,

As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,

And wished, at intervals of growing sense,

She might be sicker yet, if sickness made

The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,

And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;

For now she understood, (as such things were)

How sickness ended very oft in heaven,

Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,

And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,

And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,

Would lose no moment of the blessed time.

She lay and seethed in fever many weeks;

But youth was strong and overcame the test;

Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled

And fetched back to the necessary day

And daylight duties. She could creep about

The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily

From any narrow window on the street,

Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,

Said coldly to her, as an enemy,

'She had leave to go next week, being well enough,'

While only her heart ached. 'Go next week,' thought she,

'Next week! how would it be with her next week,

Let out into that terrible street alone

Among the pushing people, . . to go . . where?'

One day, the last before the dreaded last,

Among the convalescents, like herself

Prepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,

And heard half absently the women talk,

How one was famished for her baby's cheeks–

'The little wretch would know her! a year old,

And lively, like his father!' one was keen

To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;

And one was tender for her dear goodman

Who had missed her sorely,–and one, querulous . .

'Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had dared

To talk about her as already dead,'–

And one was proud . . 'and if her sweetheart Luke

Had left her for a ruddier face than hers,

(The gossip would be seen through at a glance)

Sweet riddance of such sweethearts–let him hang!

'Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.'

And while they talked, and Marian felt the worse

For having missed the worst of all their wrongs,

A visitor was ushered through the wards

And paused among the talkers. 'When he looked,

It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke

He sang perhaps,' said Marian; 'could she tell?

She only knew' (so much she had chronicled,

As seraphs might, the making of the sun)

'That he who came and spake was Romney Leigh,

And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.'

And when it was her turn to have the face

Upon her,–all those buzzing pallid lips

Being satisfied with comfort–when he changed

To Marian, saying, 'And you? You're going, where?'–

She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone

Which some one's stumbling foot has spurned aside,

Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,

And breaking into sobs cried, 'Where I go?

None asked me till this moment. Can I say

Where I go? When it has not seemed worth while

To God himself, who thinks of every one,

To think of me, and fix where I shall go?'

'So young,' he gently asked her, 'you have lost

Your father and your mother?'

'Both' she said,

'Both lost! My father was burnt up with gin

Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.

My mother sold me to a man last month,

And so my mother's lost, 'tis manifest.

And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,

As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell

Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)

It seems I shall be lost too, presently,

And so we end, all three of us.'

'Poor child!'

He said,–with such a pity in his voice,

It soothed her more than her own tears,–'poor child!

'Tis simple that betrayal by mother's love

Should bring despair of God's too. Yet be taught

He's better to us than many mothers are,

And children cannot wander beyond reach

Of the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold'

And if you weep still, weep where John was laid

While Jesus loved him.'

'She could say the words,'

She told me, 'exactly as he uttered them

A year back, . . since in any doubt or dark,

They came out like the stars, and shone on her

With just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;

The ministers in church might say the same;

But he, he made the church with what he spoke,–

The difference was the miracle,' said she.

Then catching up her smile to ravishment,

She added quickly, 'I repeat his words,

But not his tones: can any one repeat

The music of an organ, out of church?

And when he said 'poor child,' I shut my eyes

To feel how tenderly his voice broke through,

As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feet

To let out the rich medicative nard.'

She told me how he had raised and rescued her

With reverent pity, as, in touching grief,

He touched the wounds of Christ,–and made her feel

More self-respecting. Hope, he called, belief

In God,–work, worship . . therefore let us pray!

And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,

And keep it stainless from her mother's face,

He sent her to a famous sempstress-house

Far off in London, there to work and hope.

With that they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,

But not of Romney. He had good to do

To others: through the days and through the nights,

She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,

And wondered, while, along the tawny light,

She struck the new thread into her needle's eye,

How people without mothers on the hills,

Could choose the town to live in!–then she drew

The stitch, and mused how Romney's face would look,

And if 'twere likely he'd remember hers,

When they two had their meeting after death.

FOURTH BOOK.

THEY met still sooner. 'Twas a year from thence

When Lucy Gresham, the sick semptress girl,

Who sewed by Marian's chair so still and quick,

And leant her head upon the back to cough

More freely when, the mistress turning round,

The others took occasion to laugh out,–

Gave up a last. Among the workers, spoke

A bold girl with black eyebrows and red lips,–

'You know the news? Who's dying, do you think?

Our Lucy Gresham. I expected it

As little as Nell Hart's wedding. Blush not, Nell,

Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks;

And, some day, there'll be found a man to dote

On red curls.–Lucy Gresham swooned last night,

Dropped sudden in the street while going home;

And now the baker says, who took her up

And laid her by her grandmother in bed,

He'll give her a week to die in. Pass the silk.

Let's hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach,

For otherwise they'll starve before they die,

That funny pair of bedfellows! Miss Bell,

I'll thank you for the scissors. The old crone

Is paralytic–that's the reason why

Our Lucy's thread went faster than her breath,

Which went too quick, we all know. Marian Erle!

Why, Marian Erle, you're not the fool to cry?

Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar's new dress,

You piece of pity!'

Marian rose up straight,

And, breaking through the talk and through the work,

Went outward, in the face of their surprise,

To Lucy's home, to nurse her back to life

Or down to death. She knew by such an act,

All place and grace were forfeit in the house,

Whose mistress would supply the missing hand

With necessary, not inhuman haste,

And take no blame. But pity, too, had dues:

She could not leave a solitary soul

To founder in the dark, while she sate still

And lavished stitches on a lady's hem

As if no other work were paramount.

'Why, God,' thought Marian, 'has a missing hand

This moment; Lucy wants a drink, perhaps.

Let others miss me! never miss me, God!'

So Marian sat by Lucy's bed, content

With duty, and was strong, for recompense,

To hold the lamp of human love arm-high

To catch the death-strained eyes and comfort them,

Until the angels, on the luminous side

Of death, had got theirs ready. And she said,

When Lucy thanked her sometimes, called her kind,

It touched her strangely. 'Marian Erle called kind!

What, Marian, beaten and sold, who could not die!

'Tis verily good fortune to be kind.

Ah, you,' she said, 'who are born to such a grace,

Be sorry for the unlicensed class, the poor,

Reduced to think the best good fortune means

That others, simply, should be kind to them.'

From sleep to sleep while Lucy slid away

So gently, like a light upon a hill,

Of which none names the moment when it goes,

Though all see when 'tis gone,–a man came in

And stood beside the bed. The old idiot wretch

Screamed feebly, like a baby overlain,

'Sir, sir, you won't mistake me for the corpse?

Don't look at me, sir! never bury me!

Although I lie here, I'm alive as you,

Except my legs and arms,–I eat and drink,

And understand,–(that you're the gentleman

Who fits the funerals up, Heaven speed you, sir,)

And certainly I should be livelier still

If Lucy here . . sir, Lucy is the corpse . .

Had worked more properly to buy me wine:

But Lucy, sir, was always slow at work,

I shan't lose much by Lucy. Marian Erle,

Speak up and show the gentleman the corpse.'

And then a voice said, 'Marian Erle.' She rose;

It was the hour for angels–there, stood hers!

She scarcely marvelled to see Romney Leigh.

As light November snows to empty nests,

As grass to graves, as moss to mildewed stones,

As July suns to ruins, through the rents,

As ministering spirits to mourners, through a loss,

As Heaven itself to men, through pangs of death,

He came uncalled wherever grief had come.

'And so,' said Marian Erle, 'we meet anew,'

And added softly, 'so, we shall not part.'

He was not angry that she had left the house

Wherein he placed her. Well–she had feared it might

Have vexed him. Also, when he found her set

On keeping, though the dead was out of sight,

That half-dead, half-live body left behind

With cankerous heart and flesh,–which took your best

And cursed you for the little good it did,

(Could any leave the bedrid wretch alone,

So joyless, she was thankless even to God,

Much less to you?) he did not say 'twas well

Yet Marian thought he did not take it ill,–

Since day by day he came, and, every day,

She felt within his utterance and his eyes

A closer, tenderer presence of the soul,

Until at last he said, 'We shall not part.'

On that same day, was Marian's work complete:

She had smoothed the empty bed, and swept the floor

Of coffin sawdust, set the chairs anew

The dead had ended gossip in, and stood

In that poor room so cold and orderly,

The door-key in her hand, prepared to go

As they had, howbeit not their way. He spoke.

'Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all,

And though men push and poke and paddle in't

(As children play at fashioning dirt-pies)

And call their fancies by the name of facts,

Assuming difference, lordship, privilege,

When all's plain dirt,–they come back to it at last;

The first grave-digger proves it with a spade,

And pats all even. Need we wait for this,

You, Marian, and I, Romney?'

She at that,

Looked blindly in his face, as when one looks

Through drying autumn-rains to find the sky.

He went on speaking.

'Marian, I being born

What men call noble, and you, issued from

The noble people,–though the tyrannous sword

Which pierced Christ's heart, has cleft the world in twain

'Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor,–

Shall we keep parted? Not so. Let us lean

And strain together rather, each to each,

Compress the red lips of this gaping wound,

As far as two souls can,–ay, lean and league,

I, from my superabundance,–from your want,

You,–joining in a protest 'gainst the wrong

On both sides!'–

All the rest, he held her hand

In speaking, which confused the sense of much;

Her heart, against his words, beat out so thick

They might as well be written on the dust

Where some poor bird, escaping from hawk's beak,

Has dropped, and beats its shuddering wings,–the lines

Are rubbed so,–yet 'twas something like to this,

–'That they two, standing at the two extremes

Of social classes, had received one seal,

Been dedicate and drawn beyond themselves

To mercy and ministration,–he, indeed,

Through what he knew, and she, through what she felt,

He, by man's conscience, she, by woman's heart,

Relinquishing their several 'vantage posts

Of wealthy case and honourable toil,

To work with God at love. And, since God willed

That, putting out his hand to touch this ark,

He found a woman's hand there, he'd accept

The sign too, hold the tender fingers fast,

And say, 'My fellow-worker, be my wife!'

She told the tale with simple, rustic turns,–

Strong leaps of meaning in her sudden eyes

That took the gaps of any imperfect phrase

Of the unschooled speaker: I have rather writ

The thing I understood so, than the thing

I heard so. And I cannot render right

Her quick gesticulation, wild yet soft,

Self-startled from the habitual mood she used,

Half sad, half languid,–like dumb creatures (now

A rustling bird, and now a wandering deer,

Or squirrel against the oak-gloom flashing up

His sidelong burnished head, in just her way

Of savage spontaneity,) that stir

Abruptly the green silence of the woods,

And make it stranger, holier, more profound;

As Nature's general heart confessed itself

Of life, and then fell backward on repose.

I kissed the lips that ended.–'So indeed

He loves you, Marian?'

'Loves me!' She looked up

With a child's wonder when you ask him first

Who made the sun–a puzzled blush, that grew,

Then broke off in a rapid radiant smile

Of sure solution. 'Loves me! he loves all,–

And me, of course. He had not asked me else

To work with him for ever, and be his wife.'

Her words reproved me. This perhaps was love–

To have its hands too full of gifts to give,

For putting out a hand to take a gift;

To love so much, the perfect round of love

Includes, in strictly conclusion, the being loved;

As Eden-dew went up and fell again,

Enough for watering Eden. Obviously

She had not thought about his love at all:

The cataracts of her soul had poured themselves

And risen self-crowned in rainbow; would she ask

Who crowned her?–it sufficed that she was crowned.

With women of my class, 'tis otherwise:

We haggle for the small change of our gold,

And so much love, accord, for so much love,

Rialto-prices. Are we therefore wrong?

If marriage be a contract, look to it then,

Contracting parties should be equal, just;

Bit if, a simple fealty on one side,

A mere religion,–right to give, is all,

And certain brides of Europe duly ask

To mount the pile, as Indian widows do,

The spices of their tender youth heaped up,

The jewels of their gracious virtues worn,

More gems, more glory,–to consume entire

For a living husband! as the man's alive,

Not dead,–the woman's duty, by so much,

Advanced in England, beyond Hindostan.

I sate there, musing, till she touched my hand

With hers, as softly as a strange white bird

She feared to startle in touching. 'You are kind.

But are you, peradventure, vexed at heart

Because your cousin takes me for a wife?

I know I am not worthy–nay, in truth,

I'm glad on't, since, for that, he chooses me.

He likes the poor things of the world the best;

I would not therefore, if I could, be rich,

It pleasures him to stoop for buttercups;

I would not be a rose upon the wall

A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,

To say to a courtier, 'Pluck that rose for me,

'It's prettier than the rest.' O Romeny Leigh!

I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,

Than like in a great queen's bosom'

Out of breath

She paused.

'Sweet Marian, do you disavow

The roses with that face?'

She dropt her head

As if the wind had caught that flower of her,

And bent it in the garden,–then looked up

With grave assurance. 'Well, you think me bold!

But so we all are, when we're praying to God.

And if I'm bold–yet, lady, credit me,

That, since I know myself for what I am

Much fitter for his handmaid than his wife,

I'll prove the handmaid and the wife at once,

Serve tenderly, and love obediently,

And be a worthier mate, perhaps, than some

Who are wooed in silk among their learned books;

While I shall set myself to read his eyes,

Till such grow plainer to me than the French

To wisest ladies. Do you think I'll miss

A letter, in the spelling of his mind?'

No more than they do, when they sit and write

Their flying words with flickering wild-fowl tails,

Nor ever pause to ask how many t s,

Should that be a y or i –they know't so well:

I've seen them writing, when I brought a dress

And waited,–floating out their soft white hands

On shining paper. But they're hard sometimes,

For all those hands!–we've used out many nights,

And worn the yellow daylight into shreds

Which flapped and shivered down our aching eyes

Till night appeared more tolerable, just

That pretty ladies might look beautiful,

Who said at last . . 'You're lazy in that house!

'You're slow in sending home the work,–I count

'I've waited near an hour for't.' Pardon me–

I do not blame them, madam, nor misprize;

They are fair and gracious; ay, but not like you,

Since none but you has Mister Leigh's own blood

Both noble and gentle,–and without it . . well,

They are fair, I said; so fair, it scarce seems strange

That, flashing out in any looking-glass

The wonder of their glorious brows and breasts,

They are charmed so, they forget to look behind

And mark how pale we've grown, we pitiful

Remainders of the world. And so, perhaps,

If Mister Leigh had chosen a wife from these,

She might . . although he's better than her best,

And dearly she would know it . . steal a thought

Which should be all his, an eye-glance from his face,

To plunge into the mirror opposite,

In search of her own beauty's pearl: while I . .

Ah, dearest lady, serge will outweigh silk

For winter-wear, when bodies feel a-cold,

And I'll be a true wife to your cousin Leigh.'

Before I answered, he was there himself.

I think he had been standing in the room,

And listened probably to half her talk,

Arrested, turned to stone,–as white as stone.

Will tender sayings make men look so white?

He loves her then profoundly.

'You are here,

Aurora? Here I meet you!'–We clasped hands.

'Even so, dear Romney. Lady Waldemar

Has sent me in haste to find a cousin of mine

Who shall be.'

'Lady Waldemar is good.'

'Here's one, at least, who is good,' I sighed and touched

Poor Marian's happy head, as, doglike, she

Most passionately patient, waited on,

A-tremble for her turn of greeting words;

'I've sat a full hour with your Marian Erle,

And learnt the thing by heart,–and, from my heart,

Am therefore competent to give you thanks

For such a cousin.'

'You accept at last

A gift from me, Aurora, without scorn?

At last I please you?'–How his voice was changed!

'You cannot please a woman against her will,

And once you vexed me. Shall we speak of that?

We'll say, then, you were noble in it all,

And I not ignorant–let it pass. And now,

You please me, Romney, when you please yourself;

So, please you, be fanatical in love,

And I'm well pleased. Ah, cousin! at the old hall,

Among the gallery portraits of our Leighs,

We shall not find a sweeter signory

Than this pure forehead's.'

Not a word he said.

How arrogant men are!–Even philanthropists,

Who try to take a wife up in the way

They put down a subscription-cheque,–if once

She turns and says, 'I will not tax you so,

Most charitable sir,'–feel ill at ease,

As though she had wronged them somehow. I suppose

We women should remember what we are,

And not throw back an obolus inscribed

With Cæsar's image, lightly. I resumed.

'It strikes me, some of those sublime Vandykes

Were not too proud, to make good saints in heaven;

And, if so, then they're not too proud to-day

To bow down (now the ruffs are off their necks)

And own this good, true, noble Marian, . . yours,

And mine, I'll say!–For poets (bear the word)

Half-poets even, are still whole democrats,–

Oh, not that we're disloyal to the high,

But loyal to the low, and cognisant

Of the less scrutable majesties. For me,

I comprehend your choice–I justify

Your right in choosing.'

'No, no, no' he sighed,

With a sort of melancholy impatient scorn,

As some grown man, who never had a child,

Puts by some child who plays at being a man;

–'You did not, do not, cannot comprehend

My choice, my ends, my motives, nor myself:

No matter now–we'll let it pass, you say.

I thank you for your generous cousinship

Which helps this present; I accept for her

Your favourable thoughts. We're fallen on days,

We two, who are not poets, when to wed

Requires less mutual love than common love,

For two together to bear out at once

Upon the loveless many. Work in pairs,

In galley-couplings or in marriage-rings,

The difference lies in the honour, not the work,–

And such we're bound to, I and she. But love,

(You poets are benighted in this age;

The hour's too late for catching even moths,

You've gnats instead,) love!–love's fool-paradise

Is out of date, like Adam's. Set a swan

To swim the Trenton, rather than true love

To float its fabulous plumage safely down

The cataracts of this loud transition-time,–

Whose roar, for ever, henceforth, in my ears,

Must keep me deaf to music.'

There, I turned

And kissed poor Marian, out of discontent.

The man had baffled, chafed me, till I flung

For refuge to the woman,–as, sometimes,

Impatient of some crowded room's close smell,

You throw a window open, and lean out

To breathe a long breath, in the dewy night,

And cool your angry forehead. She, at least,

Was not built up, as walls are, brick by brick;

Each fancy squared, each feeling ranged by line,

The very heat of burning youth applied

To indurate forms and systems! excellent bricks,

A well-built wall,–which stops you on the road,

And, into which, you cannot see an inch

Although you beat your head against it–pshaw!

'Adieu,' I said, 'for this time, cousins both:

And, cousin Romney, pardon me the word,

Be happy!–oh, in some esoteric sense

Of course!–I mean no harm in wishing well.

Adieu, my Marian:–may she come to me,

Dear Romney, and be married from my house?

It is not part of your philosophy

To keep your bird upon the blackthorn?'

'Ay,'

He answered, 'but it is:–I take my wife

Directly from the people,–and she comes,

As Austria's daughter to imperial France,

Betwixt her eagles, blinking not her race,

From Margaret's Court at garret-height, to meet

And wed me at St. James's, nor put off

Her gown of serge for that. The things we do,

We do: we'll wear no mask, as if we blushed.'

'Dear Romney, you're the poet,' I replied,–

But felt my smile too mournful for my word,

And turned and went. Ay, masks, I thought,–beware

Of tragic masks, we tie before the glass,

Uplifted on the cothurn half a yard

Above the natural stature! we would play

Heroic parts to ourselves,–and end, perhaps,

As impotently as Athenian wives

Who shrieked in fits at the Eumenides.

His foot pursued me down the stair. 'At least,

You'll suffer me to walk with you beyond

These hideous streets, these graves, where men alive,

Packed close with earthworms, burr unconsciously

About the plague that slew them; let me go.

The very women pelt their souls in mud

At any woman who walks here alone.

How came you here alone?–you are ignorant.'

We had a strange and melancholy walk:

The night came drizzling downward in dark rain;

And, as we walked, the colour of the time,

The act, the presence, my hand upon his arm,

His voice in my ear, and mine to my own sense,

Appeared unnatural. We talked modern books,

And daily papers; Spanish marriage-schemes,

And English climate–was't so cold last year?

And will the wind change by to-morrow morn?

Can Guizot stand? is London full? is trade

Competitive? has Dickens turned his hinge

A-pinch upon the fingers of the great?

And are potatoes to grow mythical

Like moly? will the apple die out too?

Which way is the wind to-night? south-east? due east?

We talked on fast, while every common word

Seemed tangled with the thunder at one end,

And ready to pull down upon our heads

A terror out of sight. And yet to pause

Were surelier mortal: we tore greedily up

All silence, all the innocent breathing -points,

As if, like pale conspirators in haste,

We tore up papers where our signatures

Imperilled us to an ugly shame or death.

I cannot tell you why it was. 'Tis plain

We had not loved nor hated: wherefore dread

To spill gunpowder on ground safe from fire?

Perhaps we had lived too closely, to diverge

So absolutely: leave two clocks, they say,

Wound up to different hours, upon one shelf,

And slowly, through the interior wheels of each,

The blind mechanic motion sets itself

A-throb, to feel out for the mutual time.

It was not so with us, indeed. While he

Struck midnight, I kept striking six at dawn,

While he marked judgment, I, redemption-day;

And such exception to a general law,

Imperious upon inert matter even,

Might make us, each to either insecure,

A beckoning mystery, or a troubling fear.

I mind me, when we parted at the door,

How strange his good-night sounded,–like good-night

Beside a deathbed, where the morrow's sun

Is sure to come too late for more good days:–

And all that night I thought . . 'Good-night,' said he.

And so, a month passed. Let me set it down

At once,–I have been wrong, I have been wrong.

We are wrong always, when we think too much

Of what we think or are; albeit our thoughts

Be verily bitter as self-sacrifice,

We're no less selfish. If we sleep on rocks

Or roses, sleeping past the hour of noon

We're lazy. This I write against myself.

I had done a duty in the visit paid

To Marian, and was ready otherwise

To give the witness of my presence and name

Whenever she should marry.–Which, I thought

Sufficed. I even had cast into the scale

An overweight of justice toward the match;

The Lady Waldemar had missed her tool,

Had broken it in the lock as being too straight

For a crooked purpose, while poor Marian Erle

Missed nothing in my accents or my acts:

I had not been ungenerous on the whole,

Nor yet untender; so, enough. I felt

Tired, overworked: this marriage somewhat jarred;

Or, if it did not, all the bridal noise . .

The pricking of the map of life with pins,

In schemes of . . 'Here we'll go,' and 'There we'll stay,'

And 'Everywhere we'll prosper in our love,'

Was scarce my business. Let them order it;

Who else should care? I threw myself aside,

As one who had done her work and shuts her eyes

To rest the better.

I, who should have known,

Forereckoned mischief! Where we disavow

Being keeper to our brother, we're his Cain.

I might have held that poor child to my heart

A little longer! 'twould have hurt me much

To have hastened by its beats the marriage day,

And kept her safe meantime from tampering hands,

Or, peradventure, traps? What drew me back

From telling Romney plainly, the designs

Of Lady Waldemar, as spoken out

To me . . me? had I any right, ay, right,

With womanly compassion and reserve

To break the fall of woman's impudence?–

To stand by calmly, knowing what I knew,

And hear him call her good?

Distrust that word.

'There is none good save God,' said Jesus Christ.

If He once, in the first creation-week,

Called creatures good,–for ever afterward,

The Devil only has done it, and his heirs.

The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose;

The world's grown dangerous. In the middle age,

I think they called malignant fays and imps

Good people. A good neighbour, even in this

Is fatal sometimes,–cuts your morning up

To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,

Then helps to sugar her bohea at night

With her reputation. I have known good wives,

As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar's;

And good, good mothers, who would use a child

To better an intrigue; good friends, beside.

(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck

And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do

By sleeping infants. And we all have known

Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes;

Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state;

Good patriots, who for a theory, risked a cause

Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax;

Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;

Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,

And damned the general world for standing up.–

Now, may the good God pardon all good men!

How bitterly I speak,–how certainly

The innocent white milk in us is turned,

By much persistent shining of the sun!

Shake up the sweetest in us long enough

With men, it drips to foolish curd, too sour

To feed the most untender of Christ's lambs.

I should have thought . . .a woman of the world

Like her I'm meaning,–centre to herself,

Who has wheeled on her own pivot half a life

In isolated self-love and self-will,

As a windmill seen at distance radiating

Its delicate white vans against the sky,

So soft and soundless, simply beautiful,–

Seen nearer . . what a roar and tear it makes,

How it grinds and bruises! . . if she loves at last,

Her love's a re-adjustment of self-love,

No more; a need felt of another's use

To her one advantage,–as the mill wants grain,

The fire wants fuel, the very wolf wants prey;

And none of these is more unscrupulous

Than such a charming woman when she loves.

She'll not be thwarted by an obstacle

So trifling as . . her soul is, . . much less yours!–

Is God a consideration?–she loves you,

Not God; she will not flinch for him indeed:

She did not for the Marchioness of Perth,

When wanting tickets for the birthnight ball.

She loves you, sir, with passion, to lunacy;

She loves you like her diamonds . . almost.

Well,

A month passed so, and then the notice came;

On such a day the marriage at the church.

I was not backward.

Half St. Giles in frieze

Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold,

And, after contract at the altar, pass

To eat a marriage-feast on Hampstead Heath.

Of course the people came in uncompelled,

Lame, blind, and worse–sick, sorrowful, and worse,

The humours of the peccant social wound

All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico.

Exasperating the unaccustomed air

With hideous interfusion: you'd suppose

A finished generation, dead of plague,

Swept outward from their graves into the sun,

The moil of death upon them. What a sight!

A holiday of miserable men

Is sadder than a burial-day of kings.

They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church

In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,

The noble ladies stood up in their pews,

Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,

Some simply curious , some just insolent,

And some in wondering scorn,–'What next? what next?'

These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile

That misbecame them in a holy place,

With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs;

Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes

And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;

While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,

Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,

As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole

With shuddering involutions, swaying slow

From right to left, and then from left to right,

In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest

Of faces, rose upon you everywhere,

From that crammed mass! you did not usually

See faces like them in the open day:

They hide in cellars, not to make you mad

As Romney Leigh is.–Faces?–O my God,

We call those, faces? men's and women's . . ay,

And children's;–babies, hanging like a rag

Forgotten on their mother's neck,–poor mouths.

Wiped clean of mother's milk by mother's blow

Before they are taught her cursing. Faces . . phew,

We'll call them vices festering to despairs,

Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not

A finger-touch of God left whole on them;

All ruined, lost–the countenance worn out

As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts,

The passions loose and draggling in the dirt

To trip the foot up at the first free step!–

Those, faces! 'twas as if you had stirred up hell

To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost

In fiery swirls of slime,–such strangled fronts,

Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,

To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,

And grind to devilish colors all your dreams

Henceforth, . . though, haply, you should drop asleep

By clink of silver waters, in a muse

On Raffael's mild Madonna of the Bird.

I've waked and slept through many nights and days

Since then,–but still that day will catch my breath

Like a nightmare. There are fatal days, indeed,

In which the fibrous years have taken root

So deeply, that they quiver to their tops

Whene'er you stir the dust of such a day.

My cousin met me with his eyes and hand,

And then, with just a word, . . that 'Marian Erle

Was coming with her bridesmaids presently,'

Made haste to place me by the altar-stair,

Where he and other noble gentlemen

And high-born ladies, waited for the bride.

We waited. It was early: there was time

For greeting, and the morning's compliment;

And gradually a ripple of women's talk

Arose and fell, and tossed about a spray

Of English s s, soft as a silent hush,

And, notwithstanding, quite as audible

As louder phrases thrown out by the men.

–'Yes really, if we've need to wait in church,

We've need to talk there.'–'She? 'Tis Lady Ayr

In blue–not purple! that's the dowager.'

–'She looks as young.'–'She flirts as young, you mean!

Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,

You'd call Miss Norris modest.'–' You again!

I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,

Up still at ten: scarce time to change one's shoes.

I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,

So pray don't speak to me, Lord Belcher.'–'No,

I'll look at you instead, and it's enough

While you have that face.' 'In church, my lord! fie, fie!'

–'Adair, you stayed for the Division?'–'Lost

By one.' 'The devil it is! I'm sorry for't.

And if I had not promised Mistress Grove' . .

–'You might have kept your word to Liverpool.'

'Constituents must remember, after all,

We're mortal.'–'We remind them of it.'–'Hark,

The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!'

–'There? Dear, you are asleep still; don't you know

The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white

To show they're ready to be married.'–'Lower!

The aunt is at your elbow.'–'Lady Maud,

Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen

This girl of Leigh's?' 'No,–wait! 'twas Mrs. Brookes,

Who told me Lady Waldemar told her–

No, 'twasn't Mrs. Brookes.'–'She's pretty?'–'Who?

Mrs.Brookes? Lady Waldemar?'–'How hot!

Pray is't the law to-day we're not to breathe?

You're treading on my shawl–I thank you, sir.'

–'They say the bride's a mere child, who can't read,

But knows the things she shouldn't, with wide-awake

Great eyes. I'd go through fire to look at her.'

–'You do, I think.'–'and Lady Waldemar

(You see her; sitting close to Romney Leigh;

How beautiful she looks, a little flushed!)

Has taken up the girl, and organised

Leigh's folly. Should I have come here, you suppose,

Except she'd asked me?'–'She'd have served him more

By marrying him herself.'

'Ah–there she comes,

The bride, at last!'

'Indeed, no. Past eleven.

She puts off her patched petticoat to-day

And puts on May-fair manners, so begins

By setting us to wait.'–'Yes, yes, this Leigh

Was always odd; it's in the blood, I think;

His father's uncle's cousin's second son

Was, was . . you understand me–and for him,

He's stark!–has turned quite lunatic upon

This modern question of the poor–the poor:

An excellent subject when you're moderate;

You've seen Prince Albert's model lodging-house?

Does honour to his royal highness. Good:

But would he stop his carriage in Cheapside

To shake a common fellow by the fist

Whose name was . . Shakspeare? no. We draw a line,

And if we stand not by our order, we

In England, we fall headlong. Here's a sight,–

A hideous sight, a most indecent sight,–

My wife would come, sir, or I had kept her back.

By heaven, sir, when poor Damiens' trunk and limbs

Were torn by horses, women of the court

Stood by and stared, exactly as to-day

On this dismembering of society,

With pretty troubled faces.'

'Now, at last.

She comes now.'

'Where? who sees? you push me, sir,

Beyond the point of what is mannerly.

You're standing, madam, on my second flounce–

I do beseech you.'

'No–it's not the bride.

Half-past eleven. How late! the bridegroom, mark,

Gets anxious and goes out.'

'And as I said . .

These Leighs! our best blood running in the rut!

It's something awful. We had pardoned him

A simple misalliance, got up aside

For a pair of sky-blue eyes; our House of Lords

Has winked at such things, and we've all been young.

But here's an inter-marriage reasoned out,

A contract (carried boldly to the light,

To challenge observation, pioneer

Good acts by a great example) 'twixt the extremes

Of martyrised society,–on the left,

The well-born,–on the right, the merest mob.

To treat as equals!–'tis anarchical!

It means more than it says–'tis damnable!

Why, sir, we can't have even our coffee good,

Unless we strain it.'

'Here, Miss Leigh!'

'Lord Howe,

You're Romney's friend. What's all this waiting for?'

'I cannot tell. The bride has lost her head

(And way, perhaps!) to prove her sympathy

With the bridegroom.'

'What,–you also, disapprove!'

'Oh I approve of nothing in the world,'

He answered; 'not of you, still less of me,

Nor even of Romney–though he's worth us both.

We're all gone wrong. The tune in us is lost:

And whistling in back alleys to the moon,

Will never catch it.'

Let me draw Lord Howe;

A born aristocrat, bred radical,

And educated socialist, who still

Goes floating, on traditions of his kind,

Across the theoretic flood from France,–

Though, like a drenched Noah on a rotten deck,

Scarce safer for his place there. He, at least,

Will never land on Ararat, he knows,

To recommence the world on the old plan:

Indeed, he thinks, said world had better end;

He sympathises rather with the fish

Outside, than with the drowned paired beasts within

Who cannot couple again or multiply:

And that's the sort of Noah he is, Lord Howe.

He never could be anything complete,

Except a loyal, upright gentleman,

A liberal landlord, graceful diner-out,

And entertainer more than hospitable,

Whom authors dine with and forget the port.

Whatever he believes, and it is much,

But no-wise certain . . now here and now there, . .

He still has sympathies beyond his creed,

Diverting him from action. In the House,

No party counts upon him, and all praise:

All like his books too, (for he has written books)

Which, good to lie beside a bishop's chair,

So oft outreach themselves with jets of fire

At which the foremost of the progressists

May warm audacious hands in passing by.

–Of stature over-tall, lounging for ease;

Light hair, that seems to carry a wind in it,

And eyes that, when they look on you, will lean

Their whole weight half in indolence, and half

In wishing you unmitigated good,

Until you know not if to flinch from him

Or thank him.–'Tis Lord Howe.

'We're all gone wrong,'

Said he, 'and Romney, that dear friend of ours,

Is no-wise right. There's one true thing on earth;

That's love! He takes it up, and dresses it,

And acts a play with it, as Hamlet did,

To show what cruel uncles we have been,

And how we should be uneasy in our minds,

While he, Prince Hamlet, weds a pretty maid

(Who keeps us too long waiting, we'll confess)

By symbol, to instruct us formally

To fill the ditches up 'twixt class and class,

And live together in phalansteries.

What then?–he's mad, our Hamlet! clap his play,

And bind him.'

'Ah, Lord Howe, this spectacle

Pulls stronger at us than the Dane's. See there!

The crammed aisles heave and strain and steam with life–

Dear Heaven, what life!'

'Why , yes,–a poet sees;

Which makes him different from a common man.

I, too, see somewhat, though I cannot sing;

I should have been a poet, only that

My mother took fright at the ugly world,

And bore me tongue-tied. If you'll grant me now

That Romney gives us a fine actor-piece

To make us merry on his marriage-morn,–

The fable's worse than Hamlet's, I'll concede

The terrible people, old and poor and blind,

Their eyes eat out with plague and poverty

From seeing beautiful and cheerful sights,

We'll liken to a brutalized King Lear,

Led out,–by no means to clear scores with wrongs–

His wrongs are so far back, . . he has forgot;

All's past like youth; but just to witness here

A simple contract,–he, upon his side,

And Regan with her sister Goneril

And all the dappled courtiers and court-fools,

On their side. Not that any of these would say

They're sorry, neither. What is done, is done.

And violence is now turned privilege,

As cream turns cheese, if buried long enough.

What could such lovely ladies have to do

With the old man there, in those ill-odorous rags,

Except to keep the wind-side of him? Lear

Is flat and quiet, as a decent grave;

He does not curse his daughters in the least.

Be these his daughters? Lear is thinking of

His porridge chiefly . . is it getting cold

At Hampstead? will the ale be served in pots?

Poor Lear, poor daughters? Bravo, Romney's play?'

A murmur and a movement drew around;

A naked whisper touched us. Something wrong!

What's wrong! That black crowd, as an overstrained

Cord, quivered in vibrations, and I saw

Was that his face I saw? . . his . . Romney Leigh's.

Which tossed a sudden horror like a sponge

Into all eyes,–while himself stood white upon

The topmost altar-stair, and tried to speak,

And failed, and lifted higher above his head

A letter, . . as a man who drowns and gasps.

'My brothers, bear with me! I am very weak.

I meant but only good. Perhaps I meant

Too proudly,–and God snatched the circumstance

And changed it therefore. There's no marriage–none

She leaves me,–she departs,–she disappears,–

I lose her. Yet I never forced her 'ay'

To have her 'no' so cast into my teeth

In manner of an accusation, thus.

My friends, you are all dismissed. Go, eat and drink

According to the programme,–and farewell!'

He ended. There was silence in the church;

We heard a baby sucking in its sleep

At the farthest end of the aisle. Then spoke a man,

'Now, look to it, coves, that all the beef and drink

Be not filched from us like the other fun;

For beer's spilt easier than a woman is!

This gentry is not honest with the poor;

They bring us up, to trick us.'–'Go it, Jim,'

A woman screamed back,–'I'm a tender soul;

I never banged a child at two years old

And drew blood from him, but I sobbed for it

Next moment,–and I've had a plague of seven.

I'm tender;   I've no stomach even for beef.

Until I know about the girl that's lost,

That's killed, mayhap. I did misdoubt, at first,

The fine lord meant no good by her, or us.

He, maybe, got the upper hand of her

By holding up a wedding-ring, and then . .

A choking finger on her throat, last night,

And just a clever tale to keep us still,

As she is, poor lost innocent. 'Disappear!'

Who ever disappears except a ghost?

And who believes a story of a ghost?

I ask you,–would a girl go off, instead

Of staying to be married? a fine tale!

A wicked man, I say, a wicked man!

For my part I would rather starve on gin

Than make my dinner on his beef and beer.'–

At which a cry rose up–'We'll have our rights.

We'll have the girl, the girl! Your ladies there

Are married safely and smoothly every day,

And she shall not drop through into a trap

Because she's poor and of the people: shame!

We'll have no tricks played off by gentlefolks;

We'll see her righted.

Through the rage and roar

I heard the broken words which Romney flung

Among the turbulent masses, from the ground

He held still, with his masterful pale face–

As huntsmen throw the ration to the pack,

Who, falling on it headlong, dog on dog

In heaps of fury, rend it, swallow it up

With yelling hound jaws,–his indignant words,

His piteous words, his most pathetic words,

Whereof I caught the meaning here and there

By his gesture . . torn in morsels, yelled across,

And so devoured. From end to end, the church

Rocked round us like the sea in storm, and then

Broke up like the earth in earthquake. Men cried out

'Police!'–and women stood and shrieked for God,

Or dropt and swooned; or, like a herd of deer,

(For whom the black woods suddenly grow alive,

Unleashing their wild shadows down the wind

To hunt the creatures into corners, back

And forward) madly fled, or blindly fell,

Trod screeching underneath the feet of those

Who fled and screeched.

The last sight left to me

Was Romney's terrible calm face above

The tumult!–the last sound was 'Pull him down!

Strike–Kill him!' Stretching my unreasoning arms,

As men in dreams, who vainly interpose

'Twixt gods and their undoing, with a cry

I struggled to precipitate myself

Head-foremost to the rescue of my soul

In that white face, . . till some one caught me back,

And so the world went out,–I felt no more.

What followed, was told after by Lord Howe,

Who bore me senseless from the strangling crowd

In church and street, and then returned alone

To see the tumult quelled. The men of law

Had fallen as thunder on a roaring fire,

And made all silent,–while the people's smoke

Passed eddying slowly from the emptied aisles.

Here's Marian's letter, which a ragged child

Brought running, just as Romney at the porch

Looked out expectant of the bride. He sent

The letter to me by his friend Lord Howe

Some two hours after, folded in a sheet

On which his well-known hand had left a word.

Here's Marian's letter.

'Noble friend, dear saint

Be patient with me. Never think me vile,

Who might to-morrow morning be your wife

But that I loved you more than such a name.

Farewell, my Romney. Let me write it once,–

My Romney.

''Tis so pretty a coupled word,

I have no heart to pluck it with a blot.

We say 'My God' sometimes, upon our knees,

Who is not therefore vexed: so bear with it . .

And me. I know I'm foolish, weak, and vain;

Yet most of all I'm angry with myself

For losing your last footstep on the stair,

The last time of your coming,–yesterday!

The very first time I lost step of yours,

(Its sweetness comes the next to what you speak)

But yesterday sobs took me by the throat,

And cut me off from music.

'Mister Leigh,

You'll set me down as wrong in many things.

You've praised me, sir, for truth,–and now you'll learn

I had not courage to be rightly true.

I once began to tell you how she came,

The woman . . and you stared upon the floor

In one of your fixed thoughts . . which put me out

For that day. After, some one spoke of me,

So wisely, and of you, so tenderly,

Persuading me to silence for your sake . . .

Well, well! it seems this moment I was wrong

In keeping back from telling you the truth:

There might be truth betwixt us two, at least,

If nothing else. And yet 'twas dangerous.

Suppose a real angel came from heaven

To live with men and women! he'd go mad,

If no considerate hand should tie a blind

Across his piercing eyes. 'Tis thus with you:

You see us too much in your heavenly light;

I always thought so, angel,–and indeed

There's danger that you beat yourself to death

Against the edges of this alien world,

In some divine and fluttering pity.

'Yes

It would be dreadful for a friend of yours,

To see all England thrust you out of doors

And mock you from the windows. You might say,

Or think (that's worse), 'There's some one in the house

I miss and love still.' Dreadful!

'Very kind,

I pray you mark, was Lady Waldemar.

She came to see me nine times, rather ten–

So beautiful, she hurts me like the day

Let suddenly on sick eyes.

'Most kind of all,

Your cousin!–ah, most like you! Ere you came

She kissed me mouth to mouth: I felt her soul

Dip through her serious lips in holy fire.

God help me, but it made me arrogant;

I almost told her that you would not lose

By taking me to wife: though, ever since,

I've pondered much a certain thing she asked . .

'He love's you, Marian?' . . in a sort of mild

Derisive sadness . . as a mother asks

Her babe, 'You'll touch that star, you think?'

'Farewell!

I know I never touched it.

'This is worst:

Babes grow, and lose the hope of things above;

A silver threepence sets them leaping high–

But no more stars! mark that.

'I've writ all night,

And told you nothing. God, if I could die,

And let this letter break off innocent

Just here! But no–for your sake . .

'Here's the last:

I never could be happy as your wife,

I never could be harmless as your friend,

I never will look more into your face,

Till God says, 'Look!' I charge you, seek me not,

Nor vex yourself with lamentable thoughts

That peradventure I have come to grief;

Be sure I'm well, I'm merry, I'm at ease,

But such a long way, long way, long way off,

I think you'll find me sooner in my grave;

And that's my choice, observe. For what remains,

An over-generous friend will care for me,

And keep me happy . . happier . .

'There's a blot!

This ink runs thick . . we light girls lightly weep . .

And keep me happier . . was the thing to say, . .

Than as your wife I could be!–O, my star,

My saint, my soul! for surely you're my soul,

Through whom God touched me! I am not so lost

I cannot thank you for the good you did,

The tears you stopped, which fell down bitterly,

Like these–the times you made me weep for joy

At hoping I should learn to write your notes

And save the tiring of your eyes, at night;

And most for that sweet thrice you kissed my lips

And said 'Dear Marian.'

''Twould be hard to read,

This letter, for a reader half as learn'd,

But you'll be sure to master it, in spite

Of ups and downs. My hand shakes, I am blind,

I'm poor at writing, at the best,–and yet

I tried to make my g s the way you showed.

Farewell–Christ love you.–Say 'Poor Marian' now.'

Poor Marian!–wanton Marian!–was it so,

Or so? For days, her touching, foolish lines

We mused on with conjectural fantasy,

As if some riddle of a summer-cloud

On which some one tries unlike similitudes

Of now a spotted Hydra-skin cast off,

And now a screen of carven ivory

That shuts the heaven's conventual secrets up

From mortals over-bold. We sought the sense:

She loved him so perhaps, (such words mean love,)

That, worked on by some shrewd perfidious tongue,

(And then I thought of Lady Waldemar)

She left him, not to hurt him; or perhaps

She loved one in her class,–or did not love,

But mused upon her wild bad tramping life,

Until the free blood fluttered at her heart,

And black bread eaten by the road-side hedge

Seemed sweeter than being put to Romney's school

Of philanthropical self-sacrifice,

Irrevocably.–Girls are girls, beside,

Thought I, and like a wedding by one rule.

You seldom catch these birds, except with chaff:

They feel it almost an immoral thing

To go out and be married in broad day,

Unless some winning special flattery should

Excuse them to themselves for't, . . 'No one parts

Her hair with such a silver line as you,

One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown!'

Or else . . 'You bite your lip in such a way,

It spoils me for the smiling of the rest'–

And so on. Then a worthless gaud or two,

To keep for love,–a ribbon for the neck,

Or some glass pin,–they have their weight with girls.

And Romney sought her many days and weeks:

He sifted all the refuse of the town,

Explored the trains, enquired among the ships,

And felt the country through from end to end;

No Marian!–Though I hinted what I knew,–

A friend of his had reasons of her own

For throwing back the match–he would not hear:

The lady had been ailing ever since,

The shock had harmed her. Something in his tone

Repressed me; something in me shamed my doubt

To a sigh, repressed too. He went on to say

That, putting questions where his Marian lodged,

He found she had received for visitors,

Besides himself and Lady Waldemar

And, that once, me–a dubious woman dressed

Beyond us both. The rings upon her hands

Had dazed the children when she threw them pence.

'She wore her bonnet as the queen might hers,

To show the crown,' they said,–'a scarlet crown

Of roses that had never been in bud.'

When Romney told me that,–for now and then

He came to tell me how the search advanced,

His voice dropped: I bent forward for the rest:

The woman had been with her, it appeared,

At first from week to week, then day by day,

And last, 'twas sure . .

I looked upon the ground

To escape the anguish of his eyes, and asked

As low as when you speak to mourners new

Of those they cannot bear yet to call dead,

If Marian had as much as named to him

A certain Rose, an early friend of hers,

A ruined creature.'

'Never.'–Starting up

He strode from side to side about the room,

Most like some prisoned lion sprung awake,

Who has felt the desert sting him through his dreams.

'What was I to her, that she should tell me aught?

A friend! Was I a friend? I see all clear.

Such devils would pull angels out of heaven,

Provided they could reach them; 'tis their pride;

And that's the odds 'twixt soul and body-plague!

The veriest slave who drops in Cairo's street,

Cries, 'Stand off from me,' to the passengers;

While these blotched souls are eager to infect,

And blow their bad breath in a sister's face

As if they got some ease by it.'

I broke through.

'Some natures catch no plagues. I've read of babes

Found whole and sleeping by the spotted breast

Of one a full day dead. I hold it true,

As I'm a woman and know womanhood,

That Marian Erle, however lured from place,

Deceived in way, keeps pure in aim and heart,

As snow that's drifted from the garden-bank

To the open road.'

'Twas hard to hear him laugh.

'The figure's happy. Well–a dozen carts

And trampers will secure you presently

A fine white snow-drift. Leave it there, your snow!

'Twill pass for soot ere sunset. Pure in aim?

She's pure in aim, I grant you,–like myself,

Who thought to take the world upon my back

To carry it over a chasm of social ill,

And end by letting slip through impotence

A single soul, a child's weight in a soul,

Straight down the pit of hell! yes, I and she

Have reason to be proud of our pure aims.'

Then softly, as the last repenting drops

Of a thunder shower, he added, 'The poor child;

Poor Marian! 'twas a luckless day for her,

When first she chanced on my philanthropy.'

He drew a chair beside me, and sate down;

And I, instinctively, as women use

Before a sweet friend's grief,–when, in his ear,

They hum the tune of comfort, though themselves

Most ignorant of the special words of such,

And quiet so and fortify his brain

And give it time and strength for feeling out

To reach the availing sense beyond that sound,–

Went murmuring to him, what, if written here,

Would seem not much, yet fetched him better help

Than, peradventure, if it had been more.

I've known the pregnant thinkers of this time

And stood by breathless, hanging on their lips,

When some chromatic sequence of fine thought

In learned modulation phrased itself

To an unconjectured harmony of truth.

And yet I've been more moved, more raised, I say,

By a simple word . . a broken easy thing,

A three-years infant might say after you,–

A look, a sigh, a touch upon the palm,

Which meant less than 'I love you' . . than by all

The full-voiced rhetoric of those master-mouths.

'Ah, dear Aurora,' he began at last,

His pale lips fumbling for a sort of smile,

'Your printer's devils have not spoilt your heart:

That's well. And who knows but, long years ago,

When you and I talked, you were somewhat right

In being so peevish with me? You, at least,

Have ruined no one through your dreams! Instead,

You've helped the facile youth to live youth's day

With innocent distraction, still perhaps

Suggestive of things better than your rhymes.

The little shepherd-maiden, eight years old,

I've seen upon the mountains of Vaucluse,

Asleep i' the sun her head upon her knees,

The flocks all scattered,–is more laudable

Than any sheep-dog trained imperfectly,

Who bites the kids through too much zeal.'

'I look

As if I had slept, then?'

He was touched at once

By something in my face. Indeed 'twas sure

That he and I,–despite a year or two

Of younger life on my side, and on his,

The heaping of the years' work on the days,–

The three-hour speeches from the member's seat,

The hot committees, in and out the House,

The pamphlets, 'Arguments,' 'Collective Views,'

Tossed out as straw before sick houses, just

To show one's sick and so be trod to dirt,

And no more use,–through this world's underground

The burrowing, groping effort, whence the arm

And heart came bleeding,–sure, that he and I

Were, after all, unequally fatigued!

That he, in his developed manhood, stood

A little sunburnt by the glare of life;

While I . . it seemed no sun had shone on me,

So many seasons I had forgot my Springs;

My cheeks had pined and perished from their orbs.

And all the youth blood in them had grown white

As dew on autumn cyclamens: alone

My eyes and forehead answered for my face.

He said . . 'Aurora, you are changed–are ill!'

'Not so, my cousin,–only not asleep!'

I answered, smiling gently. 'Let it be.

You scarcely found the poet of Vaucluse

As drowsy as the shepherds. What is art,

But life upon the larger scale, the higher,

When, graduating up in a spiral line

Of still expanding and ascending gyres,

It pushes toward the intense significance

Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?

Art's life,–and where we live, we suffer and toil.'

He seemed to sift me with his painful eyes.

'Alas! You take it gravely; you refuse

Your dreamland, right of common, and green rest.

You break the mythic turf where danced the nymphs,

With crooked ploughs of actual life,–let in

The axes to the legendary woods,

To pay the head-tax. You are fallen indeed

On evil days, you poets, if yourselves

Can praise that art of yours no otherwise;

And, if you cannot, . .better take a trade

And be of use! 'twere cheaper for your youth.'

'Of use!' I softly echoed, 'there's the point

We sweep about for ever in an argument;

Like swallows, which the exasperate, dying year

Sets spinning in black circles, round and round,

Preparing for far flights o'er unknown seas.

And we . . where tend we?'

'Where?' he said, and sighed.

'The whole creation, from the hour we are born,

Perplexes us with questions. Not a stone

But cries behind us, every weary step,

'Where, where?' I leave stones to reply to stones.

Enough for me and for my fleshly heart

To harken the invocations of my kind,

When men catch hold upon my shuddering nerves

And shriek, 'What help? what hope? what bread i' the house,

'What fire i' the frost?' There must be some response,

Though mine fail utterly. This social Sphinx,

Who sits between the sepulchres and stews,

Makes mock and mow against the crystal heavens,

And bullies God,–exacts a word at least

From each man standing on the side of God,

However paying a sphinx-price for it.

We pay it also if we hold our peace,

In pangs and pity. Let me speak and die.

Alas! you'll say, I speak and kill, instead.'

I pressed in there; 'The best men, doing their best,

Know peradventure least of what they do:

Men usefullest i' the world, are simply used;

The nail that holds the wood, must pierce it first,

And He alone who wields the hammer, sees

The work advanced by the earliest blow. Take heart.'

'Ah, if I could have taken yours!' he said,

'But that's past now.' Then rising . . 'I will take

At least your kindness and encouragement.

I thank you. Dear, be happy. Sing your songs,

If that's your way! but sometimes slumber too,

Nor tire too much with following, out of breath,

The rhymes upon your mountains of Delight.

Reflect, if Art be, in truth, the higher life,

You need the lower life to stand upon,

In order to reach up into that higher:

And none can stand a-tiptoe in the place

He cannot stand in with two stable feet.

Remember then!–for art's sake, hold your life.'

We parted so. I held him in respect.

I comprehended what he was in heart

And sacrificial greatness. Ay, but he

Supposed me a thing too small to deign to know;

He blew me, plainly, from the crucible,

As some intruding, interrupting fly

Not worth the pains of his analysis

Absorbed on nobler subjects. Hurt a fly!

He would not for the world: he's pitiful

To flies even. 'Sing,' says he, 'and teaze me still,

If that's your way, poor insect.' That's your way!

FIFTH BOOK.

AURORA LEIGH, be humble. Shall I hope

To speak my poems in mysterious tune

With man and nature,–with the lava-lymph

That trickles from successive galaxies

Still drop by drop adown the finger of God,

In still new worlds?–with summer-days in this,

That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?–

With spring's delicious trouble in the ground

Tormented by the quickened blood of roots.

And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves

In token of the harvest-time of flowers?–

With winters and with autumns,–and beyond,

With the human heart's large seasons,–when it hopes

And fears, joys, grieves, and loves?–with all that strain

Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh

In a sacrament of souls? with mother's breasts,

Which, round the new made creatures hanging there,

Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?–

With multitudinous life, and finally

With the great out-goings of ecstatic souls,

Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,

Their radiant faces upward, burn away

This dark of the body, issuing on a world

Beyond our mortal?–can I speak my verse

So plainly in tune to these things and the rest,

That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,

As having the same warrant over them

To hold and move them, if they will or no,

Alike imperious as the primal rhythm

Of that theurgic nature? I must fail,

Who fail at the beginning to hold and move

One man,–and he my cousin, and he my friend,

And he born tender, made intelligent,

Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides

Of difficult questions; yet, obtuse to me,–

Of me, incurious! likes me very well,

And wishes me a paradise of good,

Good looks, good means, and good digestion!–ay,

But otherwise evades me, puts me off

With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,–

Too light a book for a grave man's reading! Go,

Aurora Leigh: be humble.

There it is;

We women are too apt to look to one,

Which proves a certain impotence in art.

We strain our natures at doing something great,

Far less because it's something great to do,

Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselves

As being not small, and more appreciable

To some one friend. We must have mediators

Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge;

Some sweet saint's blood must quicken in our palms.

Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold:

Good only, being perceived as the end of good,

And God alone pleased,–that's too poor, we think,

And not enough for us, by any means.

Ay–Romney, I remember, told me once

We miss the abstract, when we comprehend!

We miss it most when we aspire, . . and fail.

Yet, so, I will not.–This vile woman's way

Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up.

I'll have no traffic with the personal thought

In art's pure temple. Must I work in vain,

Without the approbation of a man?

It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself,

That approbation of the general race,

Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,

Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)

And the highest fame was never reached except

By what was aimed above it. Art for art,

And good for God Himself, the essential Good!

We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,

Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;

And if we fail . . But must we?–

Shall I fail?

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,

'Let no one be called happy till his death.'

To which I add,–Let no one till his death

Be called unhappy. Measure not the work

Until the day's out and the labour done;

Then bring your gauges. If the day's work's scant,

Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;

And, in that we have nobly striven at least,

Deal with us nobly, women though we be,

And honour us with truth, if not with praise.

My ballads prospered; but the ballad's race

Is rapid for a poet who bears weights

Of thought and golden image. He can stand

Like Atlas, in the sonnet,–and support

His own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars;

But then he must stand still, nor take a step.

In that descriptive poem called 'The Hills,'

The prospects were too far and indistinct.

'Tis true my critics said, 'A fine view, that!'

The public scarcely cared to climb the book

For even the finest; and the public's right,

A tree's mere firewood, unless humanised;

Which well the Greeks knew, when they stirred the bark

With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,

And made the forest-rivers garrulous

With babble of gods. For us, we are called to mark

A still more intimate humanity

In this inferior nature,–or, ourselves,

Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfoot

By veritabler artists. Earth shut up

By Adam, like a fakir in a box

Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry,

A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,

Unlocked the doors, forced opened the blank eyes,

And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out

The leathery tongue turned back into the throat:

Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates

In every lip, aspires in every breath,

Embraces infinite relations. Now,

We want no half-gods, Panomphæean Joves,

Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads, and the rest,

To take possession of a senseless world

To unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,

The body of our body, the green earth,

Indubitably human, like this flesh

And these articulated veins through which

Our heart drives blood! There's not a flower of spring,

That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied

By issue and symbol, by significance

And correspondence, to that spirit-world

Outside the limits of our space and time,

Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice

With human meanings; else they miss the thought,

And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed

Instructed poorly for interpreters,–

Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.

Even so my pastoral failed: it was a book

Of surface-pictures–pretty, cold, and false

With literal transcript,–the worse done, I think,

For being not ill-done. Let me set my mark

Against such doings, and do otherwise.

This strikes me.–if the public whom we know,

Could catch me at such admissions, I should pass

For being right modest. Yet how proud we are,

In daring to look down upon ourselves!

The critics say that epics have died out

With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods–

I'll not believe it. I could never dream

As Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineer

Who travelled higher than he was born to live,

And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat

Discoursing of an image seen through fog,)

That Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high.

They were but men!–his Helen's hair turned grey

Like any plain Miss Smith's, who wears a front:

And Hector's infant blubbered at a plume

As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.

All men are possible heroes: every age,

Heroic in proportions, double-faced,

Looks backward and before, expects a morn

And claims an epos.

Ay, but every age

Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)

Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!

The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound

Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:

A pewter age,–mixed metal, silver-washed;

An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;

An age of patches for old gabardines;

An age of mere transition, meaning nought,

Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,

If God please. That's wrong thinking, to my mind,

And wrong thoughts make poor poems.

Every age,

Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned

By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose

Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,

To some colossal statue of a man:

The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,

Had guessed as little of any human form

Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.

They'd have, in fact, to travel ten miles off

Or ere the giant image broke on them,

Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,

Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,

And fed at evening with the blood of suns;

Grand torso,–hand, that flung perpetually

The largesse of a silver river down

To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus

With times we live in,–evermore too great

To be apprehended near.

But poets should

Exert a double vision; should have eyes

To see near things as comprehensibly

As if afar they took their point of sight,

And distant things, as intimately deep,

As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.

I do distrust the poet who discerns

No character or glory in his times,

And trundles back his soul five hundred years,

Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,

Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads

Alive i' the ditch there!–'twere excusable;

But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter

Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,

As dead as must be, for the greater part,

The poems made on their chivalric bones.

And that's no wonder: death inherits death.

Nay, if there's room for poets in the world

A little overgrown, (I think there is)

Their sole work is to represent the age,

Their age, not Charlemagne's,–this live, throbbing age,

That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,

And spends more passion, more heroic heat,

Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,

Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.

To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,

Cry out for togas and the picturesque,

Is fatal,–foolish too. King Arthur's self

Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;

And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,

As Regent street to poets.

Never flinch,

But still, unscrupulously epic, catch

Upon a burning lava of a song,

The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:

That, when the next shall come, the men of that

May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say

'Behold,–behold the paps we all have sucked!

That bosom seems to beat still, or at least

It sets ours beating. This is living art,

Which thus presents, and thus records true life.'

What form is best for poems? Let me think

Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,

As sovran nature does, to make the form;

For otherwise we only imprison spirit,

And not embody. Inward evermore

To outward,–so in life, and so in art,

Which still is life.

Five acts to make a play.

And why not fifteen? Why not ten? or seven?

What matter for the number of the leaves,

Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact

The literal unities of time and place,

When 'tis the essence of passion to ignore

Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire

And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.

'Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness

To this or that convention; 'exit' here

And 'enter' there; the points for clapping, fixed,

Like Jacob's white-peeled rods before the rams;

And all the close-curled imagery clipped

In manner of their fleece at shearing time.

Forget to prick the galleries to the heart

Precisely at the fourth act,–culminate

Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,–

We're lost so! Shakspeare's ghost could scarcely plead

Against our just damnation. Stand aside;

We'll muse for comfort that, last century,

On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,

A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.

And whosoever writes good poetry,

Looks just to art. He does not write for you

Or me,–for London or for Edinburgh;

He will not suffer the best critic known

To step into his sunshine of free thought

And self-absorbed conception, and exact

An inch-long swerving of the holy lines.

If virtue done for popularity

Defiles like vice, can art for praise or hire

Still keep its splendour, and remain pure art?

Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,

He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,

And that's success: if not, the poem's passed

From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,

Until the unborn snatch it, crying out

In pity on their fathers' being so dull,

And that's success too.

I will write no plays.

Because the drama, less sublime in this,

Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,

Adopts the standard of the public taste

To chalk its height on, wears a dog chain round

Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch

The fashions of the day to please the day;

Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,

Commending chiefly its docility

And humour in stage-tricks; or else indeed

Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,

Or worse, we'll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,

Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist

(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodies

Because their grosser brains most naturally

Misjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)

Shows teeth an almond's breath, protests the length

Of a.modest phrase,–' My gentle countrymen,

'There's something in it, haply of your fault,'–

Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,

He'll have five thousand, and five thousand more,

Against him,–the whole public,–all the hoofs

Of King Saul's father's asses, in full drove,–

And obviously deserve it. He appealed

To these,–and why say more if they condemn,

Than if they praised him?–Weep, my Æschylus,

But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!

For since 'twas Athens (so I read the myth)

Who gave commission to that fatal weight,

The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on thee

And crush thee,–better cover thy bald head;

She'll hear the softest hum of Hyblan bee

Before thy loud'st protesting.–For the rest,

The risk's still worse upon the modern stage;

I could not, in so little, accept success,

Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,

For manifester gains; let those who prize,

Pursue them: I stand off.

And yet, forbid,

That any irreverent fancy or conceit

Should litter in the Drama's throne-room, where

The rulers of our art, in whose full veins

Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength

And do their kingly work,–conceive, command,

And, from the imagination's crucial heat,

Catch up their men and women all a-flame

For action all alive, and forced to prove

Their life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,

Until mankind makes witness, 'These be men

As we are,' and vouchsafes the kiss that's due

To Imogen and Juliet–sweetest kin

On art's side.

'Tis that, honouring to its worth

The drama, I would fear to keep it down

To the level of the footlights. Dies no more

The sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,–

His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling white

Of choral vestures,–troubled in his blood

While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,

Leapt high together with the altar-flame,

And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,

Which set the grand still front of Themis' son

Upon the puckered visage of a player;–

The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,

As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,

Sweeps slowly past the piers;–the mouthpiece,where

The mere man's voice with all its breaths and breaks

Went sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heights

Its phrasèd thunders;–these things are no more,

Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,

The growing drama has outgrown such toys

Of simulated stature, faces and speech,

It also, peradventure, may outgrow

The simulation of the painted scene,

Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;

And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,

Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,

With all its grand orchestral silences

To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.

Alas, I still see something to be done,

And what I do falls short of what I see,

Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,

Worn bare of grass and sunshine,–long calm nights,

From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,–

Be witness for me, with no amateur's

Irreverent haste and busy idleness

I've set myself to art! What then? what's done?

What's done, at last?

Behold, at last, a book.

If life-blood's necessary,–which it is,

(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet's brow,

Each prophet-poet's book must show man's blood!)

If life-blood's fertilising, I wrung mine

On every leaf of this,–unless the drops

Slid heavily on one side and left it dry.

That chances often: many a fervid man

Writes books as cold and flat as grave-yard stones

From which the lichen's scraped; and if St. Preux

Had written his own letters, as he might,

We had never wept to think of the little mole

'Neath Julie's drooping eyelid. Passion is

But something suffered, after all.

While art

Sets action on the top of suffering:

The artist's part is both to be and do,

Transfixing with a special, central power

The flat experience of the common man,

And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,

Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing

He feels the inmost: never felt the less

Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn

For burning next reflectors of blue steel,

That he should be the colder for his place

'Twixt two incessant fires,–his personal life's,

And that intense refraction which burns back

Perpetually against him from the round

Of crystal conscience he was born into

If artist born? O sorrowful great gift

Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,

When one life has been found enough for pain!

We staggering 'neath our burden as mere men,

Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,

Support the intolerable strain and stress

Of the universal, and send clearly up

With voices broken by the human sob,

Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!

But soft!–a 'poet' is a word soon said;

A book's a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,

The more the poet shall be questionable,

The more unquestionably comes his book!

And this of mine,–well, granting to myself

Some passion in it, furrowing up the flats,

Mere passion will not prove a volume worth

Its gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keel

Mean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.

There's more than passion goes to make a man,

Or book, which is a man too.

I am sad:

I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,

And, feeling the hard marble first relent,

Grow supple to the straining of his arms,

And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,

Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toil

Of stretching past the known and seen, to reach

The archetypal Beauty out of sight,

Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,

And with his own life dazed and blinded him!

Not so; Pygmalion loved,–and whoso loves

Believes the impossible.

And I am sad:

I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,

Since none seems worthy of my thought and hope

More highly mated. He has shot them down,

My Phoebus Apollo, soul within my soul,

Who judges by the attempted, what's attained,

And with the silver arrow from his height,

Has struck down all my works before my face,

While I say nothing. Is there aught to say?

I called the artist but a greatened man:

He may be childless also, like a man.

I laboured on alone. The wind and dust

And sun of the world beat blistering in my face;

And hope, now for me, now against me, dragged

My spirits onward,–as some fallen balloon,

Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,

Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,

Or seemed,–and generous souls cried out, 'Be strong,

Take courage; now you're on our level,–now!

The next step saves you!' I was flushed with praise,

But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,

I could not choose but murmur to myself

'Is this all? all that's done? and all that's gained?

If this then be success, 'tis dismaller

Than any failure.'

O my God, my God,

O supreme Artist, who as sole return

For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,

Demandest of us just a word . . a name,

'My Father!'–thou hast knowledge, only thou,

How dreary 'tis for women to sit still

On winter nights by solitary fires,

And hear the nations praising them far off;

Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,

Our very heart of passionate womanhood,

Which could not beat so in the verse without

Being present also in the unkissed lips,

And eyes undried because there's none to ask

The reason they grew moist.

To sit alone,

And think, for comfort, how, that very night,

Affianced lovers, leaning face to face

With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath,

Are reading haply from some page of ours,

To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,

When such a stanza, level to their mood,

Seems floating their own thoughts out–'So I feel

For thee,'–'And I, for thee: this poet knows

What everlasting love is!'–how, that night.

A father, issuing from the misty roads

Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth

And happy children, having caught up first

The youngest there until it shrunk and shrieked

To feel the cold chin prick its dimple through

With winter from the hills, may throw i' the lap

Of the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lids

To hide some sweetness newer than last year's)

Our book and cry, . . 'Ah you, you care for rhymes;

So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,

When April comes to let you! I've been told

They are not idle as so many are,

But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:

It's yours, the book: I'll write your name in it,–

That so you may not lose, however lost

In poet's lore and charming reverie,

The thought of how your father thought of you

In riding from the town.'

To have our books

Appraised by love, associated with love,

While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?

At least 'tis mournful. Fame, indeed, 'twas said,

Means simply love. It was a man said that.

And then there's love and love: the love of all

(To risk, in turn, a woman's paradox,)

Is but a small thing to the love of one.

You bid a hungry child be satisfied

With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,

He says he's hungry,–he would rather have

That little barley-cake you keep from him

While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;

(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)

We're hungry.

Hungry! but it's pitiful

To wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbs

Because we're hungry. Who, in all this world,

(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,

And learn what good is by its opposite)

Has never hungered? Woe to him who has found

The meal enough: if Ugolino's full,

His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:

For here satiety proves penury

More utterly irremediable. And since

We needs must hunger,–better, for man's love,

Than God's truth! better, for companions sweet,

Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,

Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.

Well, well, they say we're envious, we who rhyme;

But I, because I am a woman, perhaps,

And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.

I never envied Graham his breadth of style,

Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,

(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)

Such delicate perspectives of full life;

Nor Belmore, for the unity of aim

To which he cuts his cedarn poems, fine

As sketchers do their pencils; not Mark Gage,

For that caressing colour and trancing tone

Whereby you're swept away and melted in

The sensual element, which, with a back wave,

Restores you to the level of pure souls

And leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,

For native gifts or popular applause,

I've envied; but for this,–that when, by chance,

Says some one,–'There goes Belmore, a great man!

He leaves clean work behind him, and requires

No sweeper up of the chips,' . . a girl I know,

Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,

Smiles unawares, as if a guardian saint

Smiled in her:–for this, too,–that Gage comes home

And lays his last book's prodigal review

Upon his mother's knees, where, years ago,

He had laid his childish spelling-book and learned

To chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,

As young birds must. 'Well done,' she murmured then,

She will not say it now more wonderingly;

And yet the last 'Well done' will touch him more,

As catching up to-day and yesterday

In a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage,

I envy you your mother!–and you, Graham,

Because you have a wife who loves you so,

She half forgets, at moments, to be proud

Of being Graham's wife, until a friend observes,

'The boy here, has his father's massive brow,

Done small in wax . . if we push back the curls.'

Who loves me? Dearest father,–mother sweet,–

I speak the names out sometimes by myself,

And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,

As Hindostanee to an Ind-born man

Accustomed many years to English speech;

Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,

Which will not leave off singing. Up in heaven

I have my father,–with my mother's face

Beside him in a blotch of heavenly light;

No more for earth's familiar household use,

No more! The best verse written by this hand,

Can never reach them where they sit, to seem

Well-done to them. Death quite unfellows us,

Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,

And makes us part as those at Babel did,

Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.

A living Cæsar would not dare to play

At bowls, with such as my dead father is.

And yet, this may be less so than appears,

This change and separation. Sparrows five

For just two farthings, and God cares for each.

If God is not too great for little cares,

Is any creature, because gone to God?

I've seen some men, veracious, nowise mad,

Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified,

They've heard the Dead a-ticking like a clock

Which strikes the hours of the eternities,

Beside them, with their natural ears, and known

That human spirits feel the human way,

And hate the unreasoning awe which waves them off

From possible communion. It may be.

At least, earth separates as well as heaven.

For instance, I have not seen Romney Leigh

Full eighteen months . . add six, you get two years.

They say he's very busy with good works,–

Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses.

He made an almshouse of his heart one day,

Which ever since is loose upon the latch

For those who pull the string.–I never did.

It always makes me sad to go abroad;

And now I'm sadder that I went to-night

Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe's.

His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,

And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calm

As her other jewels. If she's somewhat cold,

Who wonders, when her blood has stood so long

In the ducal reservoir she calls her line

By no means arrogantly? she's not proud;

Not prouder than the swan is of the lake

He has always swum in;–'tis her element,

And so she takes it with a natural grace,

Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,

There are men, move on without outriders,

Which isn't her fault. Ah, to watch her face,

When good Lord Howe expounds his theories

Of social justice and equality–

'Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bend

Her neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,

Such clever talk–that dear, odd Algernon!'

She listens on, exactly as if he talked

Some Scandinavian myth of Lemures,

Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.

She's gracious to me as her husband's friend,

And would be gracious, were I not a Leigh,

Being used to smile just so, without her eyes,

On Joseph Strangways, the Leeds mesmerist,

And Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from 'the States'

Upon the 'Woman's question.' Then, for him,

I like him . . he's my friend. And all the rooms

Were full of crinkling silks that swept about

The fine dust of most subtle courtesies.

What then?–why then, we come home to be sad.

How lovely One I love not, looked to-night!

She's very pretty, Lady Waldemar.

Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil

Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich

Bronze rounds should slip :–she missed, though, a grey hair,

A single one,–I saw it; otherwise

The woman looked immortal. How they told,

Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,

On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,

Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!

They split the amaranth velvet-boddice down

To the waist, or nearly, with the audacious press

Of full-breathed beauty. If the heart within

Were half as white!–but, if it were, perhaps

The breast were closer covered, and the sight

Less aspectable, by half, too.

I heard

The young man with the German student's look–

A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick,

Which shot up straight against the parting line

So equally dividing the long hair,–

Say softly to his neighbour, (thirty-five

And mediæval) 'Look that way, Sir Blaise.

She's Lady Waldemar–to the left,–in red–

Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,

Is soon to marry.'

Then replied

Sir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priest-like voice,

Too used to syllable damnations round

To make a natural emphasis worth while:

'Is Leigh your ablest man? the same, I think,

Once jilted by a recreant pretty maid

Adopted from the people? Now, in change,

He seems to have plucked a flower from the other side

Of the social hedge.'

'A flower, a flower,' exclaimed

My German student,–his own eyes full-blown

Bent on her. He was twenty, certainly.

Sir Blaise resumed with gentle arrogance,

As if he had dropped his alms into a hat,

And had the right to counsel,–'My young friend,

I doubt your ablest man's ability

To get the least good or help meet for him,

For pagan phalanstery or Christian home,

From such a flowery creature.'

'Beautiful!'

My student murmured, rapt,–'Mark how she stirs

Just waves her head, as if a flower indeed,

Touched far off by the vain breath of our talk.'

At which that bilious Grimwald, (he who writes

For the Renovator) who had seemed absorbed

Upon the table-book of autographs,

(I dare say mentally he crunched the bones

Of all those writers, wishing them alive

To feel his tooth in earnest) turned short round

With low carnivorous laugh,–'A flower, of course!

She neither sews nor spins,–and takes no thought

Of her garments . . falling off.'

The student flinched,

Sir Blaise, the same; then both, drawing back their chairs

As if they spied black-beetles on the floor,

Pursued their talk, without a word being thrown

To the critic.

Good Sir Blaise's brow is high

And noticeably narrow; a strong wind,

You fancy, might unroof him suddenly,

And blow that great top attic off his head

So piled with feudal relics. You admire

His nose in profile, though you miss his chin;

But, though you miss his chin, you seldom miss

His golden cross worn innermostly, (carved

For penance, by a saintly Styrian monk

Whose flesh was too much with him,) slipping trough

Some unaware unbuttoned casualty

Of the under-waistcoat. With an absent air

Sir Blaise sate fingering it and speaking low,

While I, upon the sofa, heard it all.

'My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyes

Like blessedest St. Lucy, on a plate,

They would not trick us into choosing wives,

As doublets, by the colour. Otherwise

Our fathers chose,–and therefore, when they had hung

Their household keys about a lady's waist,

The sense of duty gave her dignity:

She kept her bosom holy to her babes;

And, if a moralist reproved her dress,

'Twas, 'Too much starch!'–and not, 'Too little lawn!'

'Now, pshaw!' returned the other in a heat,

A little fretted by being called 'young friend,'

Or so I took it,–'for St. Lucy's sake,

If she's the saint to curse by, let us leave

Our fathers,–plagued enough about our sons!'

(He stroked his beardless chin) 'yes, plagued, sir, plagued:

The future generations lie on us

As heavy as the nightmare of a seer;

Our meat and drink grow painful prophecy:

I ask you,–have we leisure, if we liked,

To hollow out our weary hands to keep

Your intermittent rushlight of the past

From draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,

And marriage-laws . . the socket drops them through

While we two speak,–however may protest

Some over-delicate nostrils, like our own,

'Gainst odours thence arising.'

'You are young,'

Sir Blaise objected.

'If I am,' he said

With fire,–'though somewhat less so than I seem.

The young run on before, and see the thing

That's coming. Reverence for the young, I cry.

In that new church for which the world's near ripe,

You'll have the younger in the elder's chair,

Presiding with his ivory front of hope

O'er foreheads clawed by cruel carrion birds

Of life's experience.'

'Pray your blessing, sir,'

Sir Blaise replied good-humouredly,–'I plucked

A silver hair this morning from my beard,

Which left me your inferior. Would I were

Eighteen, and worthy to admonish you!

If young men of your order run before

To see such sights as sexual prejudice

And marriage-law dissolved,–in plainer words,

A general concubinage expressed

In a universal pruriency,–the thing

Is scarce worth running fast for, and you'd gain

By loitering with your elders.'

'Ah,' he said,

'Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill,

Can talk with one at the bottom of the view,

To make it comprehensible? Why Leigh

Himself, although our ablest man, I said,

Is scarce advanced to see as far as this,

Which some are: he takes up imperfectly

The social question–by one handle–leaves

The rest to trail. A Christian socialist,

Is Romney Leigh, you understand.'

'Not I.

I disbelieve in Christians-pagans, much

As you in women-fishes. If we mix

Two colours, we lose both, and make a third

Distinct from either. Mark you! to mistake

A colour is the sign of a sick brain,

And mine, I thank the saints, is clear and cool:

A neutral tint is here impossible.

The church,–and by the church, I mean, of course,

The catholic, apostolic, mother-church,–

Draws lines as plain and straight as her own wall;

Inside of which, are Christians, obviously,

And outside . . dogs.'

'We thank you. Well I know

The ancient mother-church would fain still bite

For all her toothless gums,–as Leigh himself

Would fain be a Christian still, for all his wit;

Pass that; you two may settle it, for me.

You're slow in England. In a month I learnt

At Göttingen, enough philosophy

To stock your English schools for fifty years;

Pass that, too. Here, alone, I stop you short,

–Supposing a true man like Leigh could stand

Unequal in the stature of his life

To the height of his opinions. Choose a wife

Because of a smooth skin?–not he, not he!

He'd rail at Venus' self for creaking shoes,

Unless she walked his way of righteousness:

And if he takes a Venus Meretrix

(No imputation on the lady there)

Be sure that, by some sleight of Christian art,

He has metamorphosed and converted her

To a Blessed Virgin.'

'Soft!' Sir Blaise drew breath

As if it hurt him,–'Soft! no blasphemy,

I pray you!'

'The first Christians did the thing;

Why not the last?' asked he of Göttingen,

With just that shade of sneering on the lip,

Compensates for the lagging of the beard,–

'And so the case is. If that fairest fair

Is talked of as the future wife of Leigh,

She's talked of, too, at least as certainly,

As Leigh's disciple. You may find her name

On all his missions and commissions, school,

Asylums, hospitals,–he has had her down,

With other ladies whom her starry lead

Persuaded from their spheres, to his country-place

In Shropshire, to the famed phalanstery

At Leigh Hall, christianised from Fourier's own,

(In which he has planted out his sapling stocks

Of knowledge into social nurseries)

And there, they say, she has tarried half a week,

And milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,

And said 'my sister' to the lowest drab

Of all the assembled castaways; such girls!

Ay, sided with them at the washing-tub–

Conceive, Sir Blaise, those naked perfect arms,

Round glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,

Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.'

Lord Howe came up. 'What, talking poetry

So near the image of the unfavouring Muse?

That's you, Miss Leigh: I've watched you half an hour,

Precisely as I watched the statue called

A Pallas in the Vatican;–you mind

The face, Sir Blaise?–intensely calm and sad,

As wisdom cut it off from fellowship,–

But that spoke louder. Not a word from you!

And these two gentlemen were bold, I marked,

And unabashed by even your silence.'

'Ah,'

Said I, 'my dear Lord Howe, you shall not speak

To a printing woman who has lost her place,

(The sweet safe corner of the household fire

Behind the heads of children) compliments

As if she were a woman. We who have clipt

The curls before our eyes, may see at least

As plain as men do: speak out, man to man;

No compliments, beseech you.'

'Friend to friend,

Let that be. We are sad to-night, I saw,

(–Good night, Sir Blaise! Ah, Smith–he has slipped away)

I saw you across the room, and stayed, Miss Leigh,

To keep a crowd of lion-hunters off,

With faces toward your jungle. There were three;

A spacious lady, five feet ten and fat,

Who has the devil in her (and there's room)

For walking to and fro upon the earth,

From Chippewa to China; she requires

Your autograph upon a tinted leaf

'Twixt Queen Pomare's and Emperor Soulouque's;

Pray give it; she has energies, though fat:

For me, I'd rather see a rick on fire

Than such a woman angry. Then a youth

Fresh from the backwoods, green as the underboughs,

Asks modestly, Miss Leigh, to kiss your shoe,

And adds, he has an epic, in twelve parts,

Which when you've read, you'll do it for his boot,–

All which I saved you, and absorb next week

Both manuscript and man,–because a lord

Is still more potent that a poetess,

With any extreme republican. Ah, ah,

You smile at last, then.'

'Thank you.'

'Leave the smile,

I'll lose the thanks for't,–ay, and throw you in

My transatlantic girl, with golden eyes,

That draw you to her splendid whiteness, as

The pistil of a water-lily draws,

Adust with gold. Those girls across the sea

Are tyrannously pretty,–and I swore

(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl)

To bring her to you for a woman's kiss,

Not now, but on some other day or week:

–We'll call it perjury; I give her up.'

'No, bring her.'

'Now,' said he, 'you make it hard

To touch such goodness with a grimy palm.

I thought to tease you well, and fret you cross,

And steel myself, when rightly vexed with you,

For telling you a thing to tease you more.'

'Of Romney?'

'No, no; nothing worse,' he cried,

'Of Romney Leigh, than what is buzzed about,–

That he is taken in an eye-trap too,

Like many half as wise. The thing I mean

Refers to you, not him.'

'Refers to me,'

He echoed,–'Me! You sound it like a stone

Dropped down a dry well very listlessly,

By one who never thinks about the toad

Alive at the bottom. Presently perhaps

You'll sound your 'me' more proudly–till I shrink.

Lord Howe's the toad, then, in this question?'

'Brief,

We'll take it graver. Give me sofa-room,

And quiet hearing. You know Eglinton,

John Eglinton, of Eglinton in Kent?'

'Is he the toad?–he's rather like the snail;

Known chiefly for the house upon his back:

Divide the man and house–you kill the man;

That's Eglinton of Eglinton, Lord Howe.'

He answered grave. 'A reputable man,

An excellent landlord of the olden stamp,

If somewhat slack in new philanthropies;

Who keeps his birthdays with a tenants' dance,

Is hard upon them when they miss the church

Or keep their children back from catechism,

But not ungentle when the aged poor

Pick sticks at hedge-sides; nay, I've heard him say

'The old dame has a twinge because she stoops:

'That's punishment enough for felony.''

'O tender-hearted landlord! May I take

My long lease with him, when the time arrives

For gathering winter-faggots?'

'He likes art,

Buys books and pictures . . of a certain kind;

Neglects no patient duty; a good son' . . .

'To a most obedient mother. Born to wear

His father's shoes, he wears her husband's too:

Indeed, I've heard its touching. Dear Lord Howe,

You shall not praise me so against your heart,

When I'm at worst for praise and faggots.'

'Be

Less bitter with me, for . . in short,' he said,

'I have a letter, which he urged me so

To bring you . . I could scarcely choose but yield

Insisting that a new love passing through

The hand of an old friendship, caught from it

Some reconciling perfume.'

'Love, you say?

My lord, I cannot love. I only find

The rhymes for love,–and that's not love, my lord.

Take back your letter.'

'Pause: you'll read it first?'

'I will not read it: it is stereotyped;

The same he wrote to,–anybody's name,–

Anne Blythe, the actress, when she had died so true,

A duchess fainted in an open box:

Pauline, the dancer, after the great pas,

In which her little feet winked overhead

Like other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:

Or Baldinacci, when her F in alt

Had touched the silver tops of heaven itself

With such a pungent soul-dart, even the Queen

Laid softly, each to each, her white-gloved palms,

And sighed for joy: or else (I thank your friend)

Aurora Leigh,–when some indifferent rhymes,

Like those the boys sang round the holy ox

On Memphis-road, have chanced, perhaps, to set

Our Apis-public lowing. Oh, he wants,

Instead of any worthy wife at home,

A star upon his stage of Eglinton!

Advise him that he is not overshrewd

In being so little modest: a dropped star

Makes bitter waters, says a Book I've read,–

And there's his unread letter,'

'My dear friend,'

Lord Howe began . .

In haste I tore the phrase.

'You mean your friend of Eglinton, or me?'

'I mean you, you,' he answered with some fire.

'A happy life means prudent compromise;

The tare runs through the farmer's garnered sheaves;

But though the gleaner's apron holds pure wheat,

We count her poorer. Tare with wheat, we cry,

And good with drawbacks. You, you love your art,

And, certain of vocation, set your soul

On utterance. Only, . . in this world we have made,

(They say God made it first, but, if He did,

'Twas so long since, . . and, since, we have spoiled it so,

He scarce would know it, if He looked this way,

From hells we preach of, with the flames blown out,)

In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world,

Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost,–

In this uneven, unfostering England here,

Where ledger-strokes and sword-strokes count indeed,

But soul-strokes merely tell upon the flesh

They strike from,–it is hard to stand for art,

Unless some golden tripod from the sea

Be fished up, by Apollo's divine chance,

To throne such feet as yours, my prophetess,

At Delphi. Think,–the god comes down as fierce

As twenty bloodhounds! shakes you, strangles you,

Until the oracular shriek shall ooze in froth!

At best it's not all ease,–at worst too hard:

A place to stand on is a 'vantage gained,

And here's your tripod. To be plain, dear friend,

You're poor, except in what you richly give;

You labour for your own bread painfully,

Or ere you pour our wine. For art's sake, pause.'

I answered slow,–as some wayfaring man,

Who feels himself at night too far from home,

Makes stedfast face against the bitter wind.

'Is art so less a thing than virtue is,

That artists first must cater for their ease

Or ever they make issue past themselves

To generous use? alas, and is it so,

That we, who would be somewhat clean, must sweep

Our ways as well as walk them, and no friend

Confirm us nobly,–'Leave results to God,

But you be clean?' What! 'prudent compromise

Makes acceptable life,' you say instead,

You, you, Lord Howe?–in things indifferent, well.

For instance, compromise the wheaten bread

For rye, the meat for lentils, silk for serge,

And sleep on down, if needs, for sleep on straw;

But there, end compromise. I will not bate

One artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,

Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,

Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.

So speaking, with less anger in my voice

Than sorrow, I rose quickly to depart;

While he, thrown back upon the noble shame

Of such high-stumbling natures, murmured words,

The right words after wrong ones. Ah, the man

Is worthy, but so given to entertain

Impossible plans of superhuman life,–

He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,

To keep them at the grand millennial height,

He has to mount a stool to get at them;

And meantime, lives on quite the common way,

With everybody's morals.

As we passed,

Lord Howe insisting that his friendly arm

Should oar me across the sparkling brawling stream

Which swept from room to room, we fell at once

On Lady Waldemar. 'Miss Leigh,' she said,

And gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,

As if she tried it in a 'tiring glass

And liked it; 'all to-night I've strained at you,

As babes at baubles held up out of reach

By spiteful nurses, ('Never snatch,' they say,)

And there you sate, most perfectly shut in

By good Sir Blaize and clever Mister Smith,

And then our dear Lord Howe! at last, indeed,

I almost snatched. I have a world to speak

About your cousin's place in Shropshire, where

I've been to see his work . . our work,–you heard

I went? . . and of a letter yesterday,

In which, if I should read a page or two,

You might feel interest, though you're locked of course

In literary toil.–You'll like to hear

Your last book lies at the phalanstery,

As judged innocuous for the elder girls

And younger women who still care for books.

We all must read, you see, before we live:

But slowly the ineffable light comes up,

And, as it deepens, drowns the written word,–

So said your cousin, while we stood and felt

A sunset from his favorite beech-tree seat:

He might have been a poet if he would,

But then he saw the higher thing at once,

And climbed to it. It think he looks well now,

Has quite got over that unfortunate . .

Ah, ah . . I know it moved you. Tender-heart!

You took a liking to the wretched girl.

Perhaps you thought the marriage suitable,

Who knows? a poet hankers for romance,

And so on. As for Romney Leigh, 'tis sure

He never loved her,–never. By the way,

You have not heard of her . .? quite out of sight.

And out of saving? lost in every sense?'

She might have gone on talking half-an-hour,

And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,

As a garden-statue a child pelts with snow

For pretty pastime. Every now and then

I put in 'yes' or 'no,' I scarce knew why;

The blind man walks wherever the dog pulls,

And so I answered. Till Lord Howe broke in;

'What penance takes the wretch who interrupts

The talk of charming women? I, at last,

Must brave it. Pardon, Lady Waldemar!

The lady on my arm is tired, unwell,

And loyally I've promised she may say

Nor harder word this evening, than . . goodnight;

The rest her face speaks for her.'–Then we went.

And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak,

Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that ties

My hair . . now could I but unloose my soul!

We are sepulchred alive in this close world,

And want more room.

The charming woman there–

This reckoning up and writing down her talk

Affects me singularly. How she talked

To pain me! woman's spite!–You wear steel-mail;

A woman takes a housewife from her breast,

And plucks the delicatest needle out

As 'twere a rose, and pricks you carefully

'Neath nails, 'neath eyelids, in your nostrils,–say,

A beast would roar so tortured,–but a man,

A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,

No, not for shame.

What vexes after all,

Is just that such as she, with such as I,

Knows how to vex. Sweet heaven, she takes me up

As if she had fingered me and dog-eared me

And spelled me by the fireside, half a life!

She knows my turns, my feeble points,–What then?

The knowledge of a thing implies the thing;

Of course she found that in me, she saw that,

Her pencil underscored this for a fault,

And I, still ignorant. Shut the book up! close!

And crush that beetle in the leaves.

O heart,

At last we shall grow hard too, like the rest,

And call it self-defence because we are soft.

And after all, now, . . why should I be pained,

That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouse

This Lady Waldemar? And, say, she held

Her newly-blossomed gladness in my face, . .

'Twas natural surely, if not generous,

Considering how, when winter held her fast,

I helped the frost with mine, and pained her more

Than she pains me. Pains me!–but wherefore pained?

'Tis clear my cousin Romney wants a wife,–

So, good!–The man's need of the woman, here,

Is greater than the woman's of the man,

And easier served; for where the man discerns

A sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,

Said he) we see but one, ideally

And really: where we yearn to lose ourselves

And melt like white pearls in another's wine,

He seeks to double himself by what he loves,

And make his drink more costly by our pearls.

At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,

It is not good for a man to be alone,–

And that's his way of thinking, first and last;

And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.

But then my cousin sets his dignity

On personal virtue. If he understands

By love, like others, self-aggrandisement,

It is that he may verily be great

By doing rightly and kindly. Once he thought,

For charitable ends set duly forth

In heaven's white judgement-book, to marry . . ah,

We'll call her name Aurora Leigh, although

She's changed since then!–and once, for social ends,

Poor Marian Erle, my sister Marian Erle,

My woodland sister, sweet Maid Marian,

Whose memory moans on in me like the wind

Through ill-shut casements, making me more sad

Than ever I find reasons for. Alas,

Poor pretty plaintive face, embodied ghost,

He finds it easy, then, to clap thee off

From pulling at his sleeve and book and pen,–

He locks thee out at night into the cold,

Away from butting with thy horny eyes

Against his crystal dreams,–that, now, he's strong

To love anew? that Lady Waldemar

Succeeds my Marian?

After all, why not?

He loved not Marian, more than once he loved

Aurora. If he loves, at last, that Third,

Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oil

On marble floors, I will not augur him

Ill luck for that. Good love, howe'er ill-placed,

Is better for a man's soul in the end,

Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.

A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,

The wild-goat's hoof-print on the loamy down,

Exceeds our modern thinker who turns back

The strata . . granite, limestone, coal, and clay,

Concluding coldly with, 'Here's law! Where's God?'

And then at worse,–if Romney loves her not,–

At worst,–if he's incapable of love,

Which may be–then indeed, for such a man

Incapable of love, she's good enough;

For she, at worst too, is a woman still

And loves him as the sort of woman can.

My loose long hair began to burn and creep,

Alive to the very ends, about my knees:

I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,

With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughed

One day . . (how full the memories came up!)

'–Your Florence fire-flies live on in your hair,'

He said, 'it gleams so.' Well, I wrung them out,

My fire-flies; made a knot as hard as life,

Of those loose, soft, impracticable curls,

And then sat down and thought . . 'She shall not think

Her thoughts of me,'–and drew my desk and wrote.

'Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speak

With people around me, nor can sleep to-night

And not speak, after the great news I heard

Of you and of my cousin. My you be

Most happy; and the good he meant the world,

Replenish his own life. Say what I say,

And let my word be sweeter for your mouth,

As you are you . . I only Aurora Leigh.'

That's quiet, guarded! Though she hold it up

Against the light, she'll not see through it more

Than lies there to be seen. So much for pride;

And now for peace, a little! Let me stop

All writing back . . 'Sweet thanks, my sweetest friend,

'You've made more joyful my great joy itself.'

–No, that's too simple! she would twist it thus,

'My joy would still be as sweet as thyme in drawers,

However shut up in the dark and dry;

But violets, aired and dewed by love like yours,

Out-smell all thyme! we keep that in our clothes,

But drop the other down our bosoms, till

they smell like' . . ah, I see her writing back

Just so. She'll make a nosegay of her words,

And tie it with blue ribbons at the end

To suit a poet;–pshaw!

And then we'll have

The call to church; the broken, sad, bad dream

Dreamed out at last; the marriage-vow complete

With the marriage-breakfast; praying in white gloves,

Drawn off in haste for drinking pagan toasts

In somewhat stronger wine than any sipped

By gods, since Bacchus had his way with grapes.

A postscript stops all that, and rescues me.

'You need not write. I have been overworked,

And think of leaving London, England, even,

And hastening to get nearer to the sun,

Where men sleep better. So, adieu,'–I fold

And seal,–and now I'm out of all the coil;

I breathe now; I spring upward like a branch,

A ten-years school-boy with a crooked stick

May pull down to his level, in search of nuts,

But cannot hold a moment. How we twang

Back on the blue sky, and assert our height,

While he stares after! Now, the wonder seems

That I could wrong myself by such a doubt.

We poets always have uneasy hearts;

Because our hearts, large-rounded as the globe,

Can turn but one side to the sun at once.

We are used to dip our artist-hands in gall

And potash, trying potentialities

Of alternated colour, till at last

We get confused, and wonder for our skin

How nature tinged it first. Well–here's the true

Good flesh-colour; I recognise my hand,–

Which Romney Leigh may clasp as just a friend's,

And keep his clean.

And now, my Italy.

Alas, if we could ride with naked souls

And make no noise and pay no price at all,

I would have seen thee sooner, Italy,–

For still I have heard thee crying through my life,

Thou piercing silence of ecstatic graves,

Men call that name!

But even a witch, to-day,

Must melt down golden pieces in the nard

Wherewith to anoint her broomstick ere she rides;

And poets evermore are scant of gold,

And, if they find a piece behind the door,

It turns by sunset to a withered leaf.

The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented

Gold-making art to any who make rhymes,

But culls his Faustus from philosophers

And not from poets. 'Leave my Job,' said God;

And so, the Devil leaves him without pence,

And poverty proves, plainly, special grace.

In these new, just, administrative times,

Men clamour for an order of merit. Why?

Here's black bread on the table, and no wine!

At least I am a poet in being poor;

Thank God. I wonder if the manuscript

Of my long poem, it 'twere sold outright,

Would fetch enough to buy me shoes, to go

A-foot, (thrown in, the necessary patch

For the other side the Alps)? it cannot be:

I fear that I must sell this residue

Of my father's books; although the Elzevirs

Have fly-leaves over-written by his hand,

In faded notes as thick and fine and brown

as cobwebs on a tawny monument

Of the old Greeks–conferenda hoec cum his–

Corruptè citat–lege potiùs,

And so on, in the scholar's regal way

Of giving judgment on the parts of speech,

As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,

Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books and notes

Must go together. And this Proclus too,

In quaintly dear contracted Grecian types,

Fantastically crumpled, like his thoughts

Which would not seem too plain; you go round twice

For one step forward, then you take it back

Because you're somewhat giddy! there's the rule

For Proclus. Ah, I stained this middle leaf

With pressing in't my Florentine iris-bell,

Long stalk and all; my father chided me

For that stain of blue blood,–I recollect

The peevish turn his voice took,–'Silly girls,

Who plant their flowers in our philosophy

To make it fine, and only spoil the book!

No more of it, Aurora.' Yes–no more!

Ah, blame of love, that's sweeter than all praise

Of those who love not! 'tis so lost to me,

I cannot, in such beggared life, afford

To lose my Proclus. Not for Florence, even.

The kissing Judas, Wolff, shall go instead,

Who builds us such a royal book as this

To honour a chief-poet, folio-built,

And writes above, 'The house of Nobody:'

Who floats in cream, as rich as any sucked

From Juno's breasts, the broad Homeric lines,

And, while with their spondaic prodigious mouths

They lap the lucent margins as babe-gods,

Proclaims them bastards. Wolff's an atheist;

And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,

By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,

We'll guess as much, too, for the universe.

That Wolff, those Platos: sweep the upper shelves

As clean as this, and so I am almost rich,

Which means, not forced to think of being poor

In sight of ends. To-morrow: no delay.

I'll wait in Paris till good Carrington

Dispose of such, and, having chaffered for

My book's price with the publisher, direct

All proceeds to me. Just a line to ask

His help.

And now I come, my Italy,

My own hills! are you 'ware of me, my hills,

How I burn toward you? do you feel to-night

The urgency and yearning of my soul,

As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe

And smile?–Nay, not so much as when, in heat,

Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops,

And tremble while ye are stedfast. Still, ye go

Your own determined, calm, indifferent way

Toward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light;

Of all the grand progression nought left out;

As if God verily made you for yourselves,

And would not interrupt your life with ours.

SIXTH BOOK.

THE English have a scornful insular way

Of calling the French light. The levity

Is in the judgment only, which yet stands;

For say a foolish thing but oft enough,

(And here's the secret of a hundred creeds,–

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,

By re-iteration chiefly) the same thing

Shall pass at least for absolutely wise,

And not with fools exclusively. And so,

We say the French are light, as if we said

The cat mews, or the milch-cow gives us milk:

Say rather, cats are milked, and milch cows mew,

For what is lightness but inconsequence,

Vague fluctuation 'twixt effect and cause,

Compelled by neither? Is a bullet light,

That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eye

Winks, and the heart beats one, to flatten itself

To a wafer on the white speck on a wall

A hundred paces off? Even so direct,

So sternly undivertible of aim,

Is this French people.

All idealists

Too absolute and earnest, with them all

The idea of a knife cuts real flesh;

And still, devouring the safe interval

Which Nature placed between the thought and act,

They threaten conflagration to the world

And rush with most unscrupulous logic on

Impossible practice. Set your orators

To blow upon them with loud windy mouths

Through watchword phrases, jest or sentiment,

Which drive our burley brutal English mobs

Like so much chaff, whichever way they blow,–

This light French people will not thus be driven.

They turn indeed; but then they turn upon

Some central pivot of their thought and choice,

And veer out by the force of holding fast.

–That's hard to understand, for Englishmen

Unused to abstract questions, and untrained

To trace the involutions, valve by valve,

In each orbed bulb-root of a general truth,

And mark what subtly fine integument

Divides opposed compartments. Freedom's self

Comes concrete to us, to be understood,

Fixed in a feudal form incarnately

To suit our ways of thought and reverence,

The special form, with us, being still the thing.

With us, I say, though I'm of Italy

My mother's birth and grave, by father's grave

And memory; let it be,–a poet's heart

Can swell to a pair of nationalities,

However ill-lodged in a woman's breast.

And so I am strong to love this noble France,

This poet of the nations, who dream on

And wails on (while the household goes to wreck)

For ever, after some ideal good,–

Some equal poise of sex, some unvowed love

Inviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood,

Some wealth, that leaves none poor and finds none tired,

Some freedom of the many, that respects

The wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams!

Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake:

And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,

Erected for the building of a church,

To build instead, a brothel . . or a prison–

May God save France!

However she have sighed

Her great soul up into a great man's face,

To flush his temples out so gloriously

That few dare carp at Cæsar for being bald,

What then?–this Cæsar represents, not reigns,

And is not despot, though twice absolute;

This Head has all the people for a heart;

This purple's lined with the democracy,–

Now let him see to it! for a rent within

Must leave irreparable rags without.

A serious riddle: find such anywhere

Except in France; and when it's found in France,

Be sure to read it rightly. So, I mused

Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets,

The glittering Boulevards, the white colonnades

Of fair fantastic Paris who wears boughs

Like plumes, as if a man made them,–tossing up

Her fountains in the sunshine from the squares,

As dice i' the game of beauty, sure to win;

Or as she blew the down-balls of her dreams,

And only waited for their falling back,

To breathe up more, and count her festive hours.

The city swims in verdure, beautiful

As Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.

What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts,

As plums in ladies' laps, who start and laugh:

What miles of streets that run on after trees,

Still carrying the necessary shops,

Those open caskets, with the jewels seen!

And trade is art, and art's philosophy,

In Paris. There's a silk, for instance, there,

As worth an artist's study for the folds,

As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults;

Art's here too artful,–conscious as a maid,

Who leans to mark her shadow on the wall

Until she lose a 'vantage in her step.

Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk:

The artists also, are idealists,

Too absolute for nature, logical

To austerity in the application of

The special theory; not a soul content

To paint a crooked pollard and an ass,

As the English will, because they find it so,

And like it somehow.–Ah, the old Tuileries

Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes,

Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed

By the apparition of a new fair face

In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate,

Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,

Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees,

From every street and alley of the town,

By the ghosts perhaps that blow too bleak this way

A-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes,

I'll wish them luck to have their ball-play out

Before the next change comes.–And further on,

What statues, posed upon their columns fine,

As if to stand a moment were a feat,

Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-room

For a nation that funs fast,–ay, runs against

The dentist's teeth at the corner, in pale rows,

Which grin at progress in an epigram.

I walked the day out, listening to the chink

Of the first Napoleon's dry bones, as they lay

In his second grave beneath the golden dome

That caps all Paris like a bubble. 'Shall

These dry bones live,' thought Louis Philippe once,

And lived to know. Herein is argument

For kings and politicians, but still more

For poets, who bear buckets to the well,

Of ampler draught.

These crowds are very good

For meditation, (when we are very strong)

Though love of beauty makes us timorous,

And draws us backward from the coarse town-sights

To count the daisies upon dappled fields,

And hear the streams bleat on among the hills

In innocent and indolent repose;

While still with silken elegiac thoughts

We wind out from us the distracting world,

And die into the chrysalis of a man,

And leave the best that may, to come of us

In some brown moth. Be, rather, bold, and bear

To look into the swarthiest face of things,

For God's sake who has made them.

Seven days' work;

The last day shutting 'twixt its dawn and eve,

The whole work bettered, of the previous six!

Since God collected and resumed in man

The firmaments, the strata, and the lights,

Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect,–all their trains

Of various life caught back upon His arm,

Reorganised, and constituted MAN,

The microcosm, the adding up of works;

Within whose fluttering nostrils, then at last,

Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed,

As some strong winner at the foot race sighs

Touching the goal.

Humanity is great;

And, if I would not rather pore upon

An ounce of common, ugly, human dust,

An artisan's palm, or a peasant's brow,

Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,

Than track old Nilus to his silver roots,

And wait on all the changes of the moon

Among the mountain-peaks of Thessaly,

(Until her magic crystal round itself

For many a witch to see in)–set it down

As weakness,–strength by no means. How is this

That men of science, osteologists

And surgeons, beat some poets, in respect

For nature,–count nought common or unclean,

Spend raptures upon perfect specimens

Of indurated veins, distorted joints,

Or beautiful new cases of curved spine:

While we, we are shocked at nature's falling off,

We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains,

We will not, when she sneezes, look at her,

Not even to say 'God bless her'? That's our wrong;

For that, she will not trust us often with

Her larger sense of beauty and desire,

But tethers us to a lily or a rose

And bids us diet on the dew inside,–

Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy

(Who stares unseen against our absent eyes,

And wonders at the gods that we must be,

To pass so careless for the oranges!)

Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-world

To this world, undisparaged, undespoiled,

And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,

As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)

Contains, himself, both flowers and firmaments

And surging seas and aspectable stars,

And all that we would push him out of sight

In order to see nearer. Let us pray

God's grace to keep God's image in repute;

That so, the poet and philanthropist

(Even I and Romney) may stand side by side,

Because we both stand face to face with men

Contemplating the people in the rough,–

Yet each so follow a vocation,–his

And mine.

I walked on, musing with myself

On life and art, and whether, after all,

A larger metaphysics might not help

Our physics, a completer poetry

Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants,

More fully than the special outside plans,

Phalansteries, material institutes

The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries

Preferred by modern thinkers, as they thought

The bread of man indeed made all his life,

And washing seven times in the 'People's Baths'

Were sovereign for a people's leprosy,–

Still leaving out the essential prophet's word

That comes in power. On which, we thunder down,

We prophets, poets,–Virtue's in the word!

The maker burnt the darkness up with His,

To inaugurate the use of vocal life;

And, plant a poet's word even, deep enough

In any man's breast, looking presently

For offshoots, you have done more for the man,

Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coat

And warmed his Sunday potage at your fire.

Yet Romney leaves me . . .

God! what face is that?

O Romney, O Marian!

Walking on the quays

And pulling thoughts to pieces leisurely,

As if I caught at grasses in a field,

And bit them slow between my absent lips,

And shred them with my hands . .

What face is that?

What a face, what a look, what a likeness! Full on mine

The sudden blow of it came down, till all

My blood swam, my eyes dazzled. Then I sprang–

If was as if a meditative man

Were dreaming out a summer afternoon

And watching gnats a-prick upon a pond,

When something floats up suddenly, out there,

Turns over . . a dead face, known once alive–

So old, so new! It would be dreadful now

To lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.

He plunges–ha! he has lost it in the splash.

I plunged–I tore the crowd up, either side,

And rushed on,–forward, forward . . after her.

Her? whom?

A woman sauntered slow, in front,

Munching an apple,–she left off amazed

As if I had snatched it: that's not she, at least.

A man walked arm-linked with a lady veiled,

Both heads dropped closer than the need of talk:

They started; he forgot her with his face,

And she, herself,–and clung to him as if

My look were fatal. Such a stream of folk,

All with cares and business of their own!

I ran the whole quay down against their eyes;

No Marian; nowhere Marian. Almost, now,

I could call Marian, Marian, with the shriek

Of desperate creatures calling for the Dead.

Where is she, was she? was she anywhere?

I stood still, breathless, gazing, straining out

In every uncertain distance, till, at last,

A gentleman abstracted as myself

Came full against me, then resolved the clash

In voluble excuses,–obviously

Some learned member of the Institute

Upon his way there, walking, for his health,

While meditating on the last 'Discourse;'

Pinching the empty air 'twixt finger and thumb,

From which the snuff being ousted by that shock,

Defiled his snow-white waistcoat, duly pricked

At the button-hole with honourable red;

'Madame, your pardon,'–there, he swerved from me

A metre, as confounded as he had heard

That Dumas would be chosen to fill up

The next chair vacant, by his 'men in us,'

Since when was genius found respectable?

It passes in its place, indeed,–which means

The seventh floor back, or else the hospital;

Revolving pistols are ingenious things,

But prudent men (Academicians are)

Scare keep them in the cupboard, next the prunes.

And so, abandoned to a bitter mirth,

I loitered to my inn. O world, O world,

O jurists, rhymers, dreamers, what you please,

We play a weary game of hide and seek!

We shape a figure of our fantasy,

Call nothing something, and run after it

And lose it, lose ourselves too in the search,

Till clash against us, comes a somebody

Who also has lost something and is lost,

Philosopher against philanthropist,

Academician against poet, man

Against woman, against the living, the dead,–

Then home, with a bad headache and worse jest!

To change the water for my heliotropes

And yellow roses. Paris has such flowers,

But England, also. 'Twas a yellow rose,

By that south window of the little house,

My cousin Romney gathered with his hand

On all my birthdays for me, save the last;

And then I shook the tree too rough, too rough,

For roses to stay after.

Now, my maps

I must not linger here from Italy

Till the last nightingale is tired of song,

And the last fire-fly dies off in the maize.

My soul's in haste to leap into the sun

And scorch and seethe itself to a finer mood,

Which here, in this chill north, is apt to stand

Too stiffly in former moulds.

That face persists.

It floats up, it turns over in my mind,

As like to Marian, as one dead is like

That same alive. In very deed a face

And not a fancy, though it vanished so;

The small fair face between the darks of hair,

I used to liken, when I saw her first,

To a point of moonlit water down a well:

The low brow, the frank space between the eyes,

Which always had the brown pathetic look

Of a dumb creature who had been beaten once,

And never since was easy with the world.

Ah, ah–now I remember perfectly

Those eyes to-day,–how overlarge they seemed

As if some patient passionate despair

(Like a coal dropt and forgot on tapestry,

Which slowly burns a widening circle out)

Had burnt them larger, larger. And those eyes,

To-day, I do remember, saw me too,

As I saw them, with conscious lids astrain

In recognition. Now, a fantasy,

A simple shade or image of the brain,

Is merely passive, does not retro-act,

Is seen, but sees not.

'Twas a real face,

Perhaps a real Marian.

Which being so,

I ought to write to Romney, 'Marian's here.

Be comforted for Marian.'

My pen fell,

My hands struck sharp together, as hands do

Which hold at nothing. Can I write to him

A half truth? can I keep my own soul blind

To the other half, . . the worse? What are our souls,

If still, to run on straight a sober pace

Nor start at every pebble or dead leaf,

They must wear blinkers, ignore facts, suppress

Six-tenths of the road? Confront the truth, my soul!

And oh, as truly as that was Marian's face,

The arms of the same Marian clasped a thing

. . Not hid so well beneath the scanty shawl,

I cannot name it now for what it was.

A child. Small business has a cast-away

Like Marian, with that crown of prosperous wives

At which the gentlest she grows arrogant

And says, 'my child.' Who'll find an emerald ring

On a beggar's middle finger, and require

More testimony to convict a thief?

A child's too costly for so mere a wretch;

She filched it somewhere; and it means, with her,

Instead of honour, blessing, . . merely shame.

I cannot write to Romney, 'Here she is,

Here's Marian found! I'll set you on her track:

I saw her here, in Paris, . . and her child.

She put away your love two years ago,

But, plainly, not to starve. You suffered then;

And, now that you've forgot her utterly

As any lost year's annual in whose place

You've planted a thick flowering evergreen,

I choose, being kind, to write and tell you this

To make you wholly easy–she's not dead,

But only . . damned.'

Stop there: I go too fast;

I'm cruel like the rest,–in haste to take

The first stir in the arras for a rat,

And set my barking, biting thoughts upon't.

–A child! what then? Suppose a neighbour's sick

And asked her, 'Marian, carry out my child

In this spring air,'–I punish her for that?

Or say, the child should hold her round the neck

For good child-reasons, that he liked it so

And would not leave her–she had winning ways–

I brand her therefore, that she took the child?

Not so.

I will not write to Romney Leigh.

For now he's happy,–and she may indeed

Be guilty,–and the knowledeg of her fault

Would draggle his smooth time. But I, whose days

Are not so fine they cannot bear the rain,

And who, moreover, having seen her face,

Must see it again, . . will see it, by my hopes

Of one day seeing heaven too. The police

Shall track her, hound her, ferret their own soil;

We'll dig this Paris to its catacombs

But certainly we'll find her, have her out,

And save her, if she will or will not–child

Or no child,–if a child, then one to save!

The long weeks passed on without consequence.

As easy find a footstep on the sand

The morning after spring-tied, as the trace

Of Marian's feet between the incessant surfs

Of this live flood. She may have moved this way,–

But so the star-fish does, and crosses out

The dent of her small shoe. The foiled police

Renounced me; 'Could they find a girl and child,

No other signalment but girl and child?

No data shown, but noticeable eyes

And hair in masses, low upon the brow,

As if it were an iron crown and pressed?

Friends heighten, and suppose they specify:

Why, girls with hair and eyes are everywhere

In Paris; they had turned me up in vain

No Marian Erle indeed, but certainly

Mathildes, Justines, Victoires, . . or, if I sought

The English, Betsis, Saras, by the score.

They might as well go out into the fields

To find a speckled bean, that's somehow specked,

And somewhere in the pod.'–They left me so.

Shall I leave Marian? have I dreamed a dream?

–I thank God I have found her! I must say

'Thank, God,' for finding her, although 'tis true

I find the world more sad and wicked for't.

But she–

I'll write about her, presently;

My hand's a-tremble as I had just caught up

My heart to write with, in the place of it.

At least you'd take these letters to be writ

At sea, in storm!–wait now . .

A simple chance

Did all. I could not sleep last night, and tired

Of turning on my pillow and harder thoughts

Went out at early morning, when the air

Is delicate with some last starry touch,

To wander through the Market-place of Flowers

(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sure

At worst, that there were roses in the world.

So wandering, musing with the artist's eye,

That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,

Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowd

Of young vivacioius and black-braided heads

Dipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,

Among the nosegays, cheapening this and that

In such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,–

My heart leapt in me, startled by a voice

That slowly, faintly, with long breaths that marked

The interval between the wish and word,

Inquired in stranger's French, 'Would that be much,

That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?'–'So much?

Too much for me, then!' turning the face round

So close upon me, that I felt the sigh

It turned with.

'Marian, Marian!'–face to face–

'Marian! I find you. Shall I let you go?'

I held her two slight wrists with both my hands;

'Ah, Marian, Marian, can I let you go?'

–She fluttered from me like a cyclamen,

As white, which, taken in a sudden wind,

Beats on against the palisade.–'Let pass,'

She said at last. 'I will not,' I replied;

'I lost my sister Marian many days,

And sought her ever in my walks and prayers,

And now I find her . . . do we thrown away

The bread we worked and prayed for,–crumble it

And drop it, . . to do even so by thee

Whom still I've hungered after more than bread,

My sister Marian?–can I hurt thee, dear?

Then why distrust me? Never tremble so.

Come with me rather, where we'll talk and live,

And none shall vex us. I've a home for you

And me and no one else' . . .

She shook her head.

'A home for you and me and no one else

Ill-suits one of us: I prefer to such,

A roof of grass on which a flower might spring,

Less costly to me than the cheapest here;

And yet I could not, at this hour, afford

A like home, even. That you offer yours,

I thank you. You are good as heaven itself–

As good as one I knew before . . Farewell.'

I loosed her hands. 'In his name, no farewell!'

(She stood as if I held her,) 'for his sake,

For his sake, Romney's! by the good he meant,

Ay, always! by the love he pressed for once,–

And by the grief, reproach, abandonment,

He took in change' . .

'He, Romney! who grieved him?

Who had the heart for't? what reproach touch'd him?

Be merciful,–speak quickly.'

'Therefore come.

I answered with authority,–'I think

We dare to speak such things, and name such names,

In the open squares of Paris!'

Not a word

She said, but, in a gentle humbled way,

(As one who had forgot herself in grief)

Turned round and followed closely where I went.

As if I led her by a narrow plank

Across devouring waters, step by step,–

And so in silence we walked on a mile.

And then she stopped: her face was white as wax.

'We go much further?'

'You are ill,' I asked,

'Or tired?'

She looked the whiter for her smile.

'There's one at home,' she said, 'has need of me

By this time,–and I must not let him wait.'

'Not even,' I asked, 'to hear of Romney Leigh?'

'Not even,' she said, 'to hear of Mister Leigh.'

'In that case,' I resumed, 'I go with you,

And we can talk the same thing there as here.

None waits for me: I have my day to spend.'

Her lips moved in a spasm without a sound,–

But then she spoke. 'It shall be as you please;

And better so,–'tis shorter seen than told.

And though you will not find me worth your pains,

That even, may be worth some pains to know,

For one as good as you are.'

Then she led

The way, and I, as by a narrow plank

Across devouring waters, followed her,

Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath,

And holding her with eyes that would not slip;

And so, without a word, we walked a mile,

And so, another mile, without a word.

Until the peopled streets being all dismissed,

House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock,

The market-gardens thickened, and the long

White walls beyond, like spiders' outside threads,

Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fields

Through half-built habitations and half-dug

Foundations,–intervals of trenchant chalk,

That bite betwixt the grassy uneven turfs

Where goats (vine tendrils trailing from their mouths)

Stood perched on edges of the cellarage

Which should be, staring as about to leap

To find their coming Bacchus. All the place

Seemed less a cultivation than a waste:

Men work here, only,–scarce begin to live:

All's sad, the country struggling with the town,

Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man's fist,

That beats its wings and tries to get away,

And cannot choose be satisfied so soon

To hop through court-yards with its right foot tied,

The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight!

We stopped beside a house too high and slim

To stand there by itself, but waiting till

Five others, two on this side, three on that,

Should grow up from the sullen second floor

They pause at now, to build it to a row.

The upper windows partly were unglazed

Meantime,–a meagre, unripe house: a line

Of rigid poplars elbowed it behind,

And just in front, beyond the lime and bricks

That wronged the grass between it and the road,

A great acacia, with its slender trunk

And overpoise of multitudinous leaves,

(In which a hundred fields might spill their dew

And intense verdure, yet find room enough)

Stood reconciling all the place with green.

I follwoed up the stair upon her step.

She hurried upward, shot across a face,

A woman's on the landing,–'How now, now!

Is no one to have holidays but you?

You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think,

And Julie waiting for your betters here!

Why if he had waked, he might have waked for me.'

–Just murmuring an excusing word she passed

And shut the rest out with the chamber-door,

Myself shut in beside her.

'Twas a room

Scarce large than a grave, and near as bare;

Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room;

A mouse could find no sort of shelter in't,

Much less a greater secret; curtainless,–

The window fixed you with its torturing eye,

Defying you to take a step apart.

If peradventure you would hide a thing.

I saw the whole room, I and Marian there

Alone.

Alone? She threw her bonnet off,

Then sighing as 'twere sighing the last time,

Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:

You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise

More calmly and more carefully than so,–

Nor would you find within, a rosier flushed

Pomegranate–

There he lay, upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life

To the bottom of his dimples,–to the ends

Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;

For since he had been covered over-much

To keep him from the light glare, both his cheeks

Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose

The shepherd's heart blood ebbed away into,

The faster for his love. And love was here

As instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,

Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;

The little naked feet drawn up the way

Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft

And tender,–to the little holdfast hands,

Which, closing on a finger into sleep,

Had kept the mould of't.

While we stood there dumb,–

For oh, that it should take such innocence

To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;

The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,

And staring out at us with all their blue,

As half perplexed between the angelhood

He had been away to visit in his sleep,

And our most mortal presence,–gradually

He saw his mother's face, accepting it

In change for heaven itself, with such a smile

As might have well been learnt there,–never moved,

But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,

So happy (half with her and half with heaven)

He could not have the trouble to be stirred,

But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:

As red and still indeed as any rose,

That blows in all the silence of its leaves,

Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.

She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)

In that extremity of love, 'twill pass

For agony or rapture, seeing that love

Includes the whole of nature, rounding it

To love . . no more,–since more can never be

Than just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,

And drowning in the transport of the sight,

Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,

One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,

She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,

And drawing from his countenance to hers

A fainter red, as if she watched a flame

And stood in it a-glow. 'How beautiful!'

Said she.

I answered, trying to be cold.

(Must sin have compensations, was my thought,

As if it were a holy thing like grief?

And is a woman to be fooled aside

From putting vice down, with that woman's toy,

A baby?)––'Ay! the child is well enough,'

I answered. 'If his mother's palms are clean,

They need be glad, of course, in clasping such:

But if not,–I would rather lay my hand,

Were I she,–on God's brazen altar-bars

Red-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,

Than touch the sacred curls of such a child.'

She plunged her fingers in his clustering locks,

As one who would not be afraid of fire;

And then, with indrawn steady utterance, said,–

'My lamb, my lamb! although, through such as thou,

The most unclean got courage and approach

To God, once,–now they cannot, even with men,

Find grace enough for pity and gentle words.'

'My Marian,' I made answer, grave and sad,

'The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,

Was still a thief. And if a woman steals

(Through God's own barrier-hedges of true love,

Which fence out licence in securing love)

A child like this, that smiles so in her face,

She is no mother, but a kidnapper,

And he's a dismal orphan . . not a son;

Whom all her kisses cannot feed so full

He will not miss herafter a pure home

To live in, a pure heart to lean against,

A pure good mother's name and memory

To hope by when the world grows thick and bad,

And he feels out for virtue.'

'Oh,' she smiled

With bitter patience, 'the child takes his chance,–

Not much worse off in being fatherless

Than I was fathered. He will say, belike,

His mother was the saddest creature born;

He'll say his mother lived so contrary

To joy, that even the kindest, seeing her,

Grew sometimes almost cruel: he'll not say

She flew contrarious in the face of God

With bat-wings of her vices. Stole my child,–

My flower of earth, my only flower on earth,

My sweet, my beauty!' . . Up she snatched the child,

And breaking on him in a storm of tears,

Drew out her long sobs from their shivering roots,

Until he took it for a game, and stretched

His feet, and flapped his eager arms like wings,

And crowed and gurgled through his infant laugh:

'Mine, mine,' she said; 'I have as sure a right

As any glad pround mother in the world,

Who sets her darling down to cut his teeth

Upon her church-ring. If she talks of law,

I talk of law! I claim my mother-dues

By law,–the law which now is paramount;

The common law, by which the poor and weak

Are trodden underfoot by vicious men,

And loathed for ever after by the good.

Let pass! I did not filch . . I found the child.'

'You found him, Marian?'

'Ay, I found him where

I found my curse,–in the gutter with my shame!

What have you, any of you, to say to that,

Who all are happy, and sit safe and high,

And never spoke before to arraign my right

To grief itself? What, what, . . being beaten down

By hoofs of maddened oxen into a ditch,

Half-dead, whole mangled . . when a girl, at last,

Breathes, sees . . and finds, there, bedded in her flesh,

Because of the overcoming shock perhaps,

Some coin of price! . . and when a good man comes

(That's God! the best men are not quite as good)

And says, 'I dropped the coin there: take it, you,

And keep it,–it shall pay you for the loss,–

You all put up your finger–'See the thief!

'Observe that precious thing she has come to filch!

'How bad those girls are!' Oh, my flower, my pet,

I dare forget I have you in my arms,

And fly off to be angry with the world,

And fright you, hurt you with my tempers, till

You double up your lip? Ah, that indeed

Is bad: a naughty mother!'

'You mistake,'

I interrupted. 'If I loved you not,

I should not, Marian, certainly be here.'

'Alas,' she said, 'you are so very good;

And yet I wish, indeed, you had never come

To make me sob until I vex the child.

It is not wholesome for these pleasure-plats

To be so early watered by our brine.

And then, who knows? he may not like me now

As well, perhaps, as ere he saw me fret,–

One's ugly fretting! he has eyes the same

As angels, but he cannot see as deep,

And so I've kept for ever in his sight

A sort of smile to please him, as you place

A green thing from the garden in a cup,

To make believe it grows there. Look, my sweet,

My cowslip-ball! we've done with that cross face,

And here's the face come back you used to like.

And, ah! he laughs! he likes me. Ah, Miss Leigh,

You're great and pure; but were you purer still,–

As if you had walked, we'll say, no otherwhere

Than up and down the new Jerusalem,

And held your trailing lutestring up yourself

From brushing the twelve stones, for fear of some

Small speck as little as a needle prick,

White stitched on white,–the child would keep to me,

Would choose his poor lost Marian, like me best,

And, though you stretched your arms, cry back and cling,

As we do, when God says it's time to die

And bids us go up higher. Leave us then;

We two are happy. Does he push me off?

He's satisfied with me, as I with him.'

'So soft to one, so hard to others! Nay.'

I cried, more angry that she melted me,

'We make henceforth a cushion of our faults

To sit and practise easy virtues on?

I thought a child was given to sanctify

A woman,–set her in the sight of all

The clear-eyed heavens, a chosen minister

To do their business and lead spirits up

The difficult blue heights. A woman lives,

Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and good

Through being a mother? . . . then she's none although

She damps her baby's cheeks by kissing them,

As we kill roses.'

'Kill! O Christ,' she said,

And turned her wild sad face from side to side

With most despairing wonder in it–'What,

What have you in your souls against me then,

All of you? am I wicked, do you think?

God knows me, trusts me with a child! but you,

You think me really wicked?'

'Complaisant,'

I answered softly, 'to a wrong you've done,

Because of certain profits,–which is wrong

Beyond the first wrong, Marian. When you left

The pure place and the noble heart, to take

The hand of a seducer' . .

'Whom? whose hand?

I took the hand of' . .

Springing up erect,

And lifting up the child at full arm's length,

As if to bear him like an oriflamme

Unconquerable to armies of reproach,–

'By him,' she said, 'my child's head and its curls,

By those blue eyes no woman born could dare

A perjury on, I make my mother's oath,

That if I left that Heart, to lighten it,

The blood of mine was still, except for grief!

No cleaner maid than I was, took a step

To a sadder cup,–no matron-mother now

Looks backwards to her early maidenhood

Through chaster pulses. I speak steadily:

And if I lie so, . . if, being fouled in will

And paltered with in soul by devil's lust,

I dare to bid this angel take my part, . .

Would God sit quiet, let us think, in heaven,

Nor strike me dumb with thunder? Yet I speak:

He clears me therefore. What, 'seduced' 's your word?

Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?

Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,

Seduce it into carrion? So with me.

I was not ever as you say, seduced,

But simply murdered.'

There she paused, and sighed,

With such a sigh as drops from agony

To exhaustion,–sighing while she let the babe

Slide down upon her bosom from her arms,

And all her face's light fell after him,

Like a torch quenched in falling. Down she sank,

And sate upon the bedside with the child.

But I, convicted, broken utterly,

With woman's passion clung about her waist,

And kissed her hair and eyes,–'I have been wrong,

Sweet Marian' . . (weeping in a tender rage)