Aurora Leigh: 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
[44]
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 dares 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
[45]
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 Auroras!’
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
[46]
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 beech 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.’
[47]
‘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 today’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—
[48]
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
[49]
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 seek 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.’
[50]
‘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 civilisation, 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
[51]
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!
[52]
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:
[53]
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,
[54]
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,
[55]
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,
[56]
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 light-house 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
[57]
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!
[58]
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,
[59]
And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse
Will follow at the lighting of their 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
[60]
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 speakable, 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
[61]
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
[62]
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
[63]
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
[64]
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)
[65]
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
[66]
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.’
[67]
‘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 cousin 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,
[68]
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,
[69]
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
[70]
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,
[71]
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,
[72]
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
[73]
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
[74]
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,
Not 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,
[75]
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-tree 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,
[76]
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
[77]
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.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
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!
[78]
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,
[79]
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.
[80]
And now we’ll make the rest as clear; your aunt
Possessed these monies.’
‘You will 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
[81]
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 misfortune!—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, to-day,
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.
[82]
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,
[83]
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,
[84]
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
[85]
Of the burthen of it, than King Solomon
Considered, when he wore his holy ring
Charáctered 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 amazèd 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,
[86]
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,
Who fight against the mother’s ‘tiring hand,
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
[87]
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
[88]
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.
[89]

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,
[182]
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
[183]
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
[184]
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,
[185]
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,
Unlocked the doors, forced open 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 limb, aspires in every breath,
Embraces infinite relations. Now,
We want no half-gods, Panomphæan 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.
[186]
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 gaberdines;
An age of mere transition, meaning nought,
[187]
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 comprehensively
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,
[188]
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 the 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!
[189]
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
[190]
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 splendor, 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,
[191]
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 breadth, 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.
[192]
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
[193]
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, face, 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
[194]
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!
[195]
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 Phœbus Apollo, soul within my soul,
Who judges, by the attempted, what’s attained,
And with the silver arrow from his height,
[196]
Has struck down all my works before my face,
While I said 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
[197]
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 thought 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 dimples 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
[198]
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.
[199]
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; nor 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 unaware, 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,
[200]
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
[201]
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;
[202]
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
[203]
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 about to marry.’
Then replied
Sir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priestlike 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,
[204]
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,
[205]
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 through
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,’
[206]
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 your 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
[207]
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 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 Christian-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,
[208]
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,
[209]
She’s talked of, too, at least as certainly,
As Leigh’s disciple. You may find her name
On all his missions and commissions, schools,
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,’
[210]
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 Chipewa 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
[211]
Is still more potent than 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.’
[212]
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
[213]
For gathering winter-faggots!’
‘He likes art,
Buys books and pictures … of a certain kind;
Neglects no patent 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 it’s 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 a private box:
Pauline, the dancer, after the great pas,
In which her little feet winked overhead
Like other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:
[214]
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,
[215]
’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
[216]
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,
[217]
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 Blaise 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 favourite 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. I 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,
[218]
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 shall say
No 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;
[219]
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?
[220]
’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 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 judgment-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,
[221]
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:
[222]
I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,
With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughed
One day … (how full the memories come 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 thought of me,’—and drew my desk and wrote.

‘Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speak
With people round me, nor can sleep to-night
And not speak, after the great news I heard
Of you and of my cousin. May 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,
[223]
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
[224]
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 extatic 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!
[225]
At least I am a poet in being poor;
Thank God. I wonder if the manuscript
Of my long poem, if ’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 hæc 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 Florence 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!
[226]
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,
[227]
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.
[228]