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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116054" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>First Book</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">OF writing many books there is no end;<br>And I who have written much in prose and verse<br>For others' uses, will write now for mine,–<br>Will write my story for my better self,<br>As when you paint your portrait for a friend,<br>Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it<br>Long after he has ceased to love you, just<br>To hold together what he was and is.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I, writing thus, am still what men call young;<br>I have not so far left the coasts of life<br>To travel inland, that I cannot hear<br>That murmur of the outer Infinite<br>Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep<br>When wondered at for smiling; not so far,<br>But still I catch my mother at her post<br>Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,<br>'Hush, hush–here's too much noise!' while her sweet eyes<br>Leap forward, taking part against her word<br>In the child's riot. Still I sit and feel<br>My father's slow hand, when she had left us both,<br>Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;<br>And hear Assunta's daily jest (she knew<br>He liked it better than a better jest)<br>Inquire how many golden scudi went<br>To make such ringlets. O my father's hand,<br>Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,–<br>Draw, press the child's head closer to thy knee!<br>I'm still too young, too young to sit alone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I write. My mother was a Florentine,<br>Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me<br>When scarcely I was four years old; my life,<br>A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp<br>Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;<br>She could not bear the joy of giving life–<br>The mother's rapture slew her. If her kiss<br>Had left a longer weight upon my lips,<br>It might have steadied the uneasy breath,<br>And reconciled and fraternised my soul<br>With the new order. As it was, indeed,<br>I felt a mother-want about the world,<br>And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb<br>Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,–<br>As restless as a nest-deserted bird<br>Grown chill through something being away, though what<br>It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born<br>To make my father sadder, and myself<br>Not overjoyous, truly. Women know<br>The way to rear up children, (to be just,)<br>They know a simple, merry, tender knack<br>Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,<br>And stringing pretty words that make no sense,<br>And kissing full sense into empty words;<br>Which things are corals to cut life upon,<br>Although such trifles: children learn by such,<br>Love's holy earnest in a pretty play,<br>And get not over-early solemnised,–<br>But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love's Divine,<br>Which burns and hurts not,–not a single bloom,–<br>Become aware and unafraid of Love.<br>Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well<br>–Mine did, I know,–but still with heavier brains,<br>And wills more consciously responsible,<br>And not as wisely, since less foolishly;<br>So mothers have God's licence to be missed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My father was an austere Englishman,<br>Who, after a dry life-time spent at home<br>In college-learning, law, and parish talk,<br>Was flooded with a passion unaware,<br>His whole provisioned and complacent past<br>Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood<br>In Florence, where he had come to spend a month<br>And note the secret of Da Vinci's drains,<br>He musing somewhat absently perhaps<br>Some English question . . whether men should pay<br>The unpopular but necessary tax<br>With left or right hand–in the alien sun<br>In that great square of the Santissima,<br>There drifted past him (scarcely marked enough<br>To move his comfortable island-scorn,)<br>A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,–<br>The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding up<br>Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant<br>To the blue luminous tremor of the air,<br>And letting drop the white wax as they went<br>To eat the bishop's wafer at the church;<br>From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,<br>A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,<br>And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,<br>Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,<br>He too received his sacramental gift<br>With eucharistic meanings; for he loved.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And thus beloved, she died. I've heard it said<br>That but to see him in the first surprise<br>Of widower and father, nursing me,<br>Unmothered little child of four years old,<br>His large man's hands afraid to touch my curls,<br>As if the gold would tarnish,–his grave lips<br>Contriving such a miserable smile,<br>As if he knew needs must, or I should die,<br>And yet 'twas hard,–would almost make the stones<br>Cry out for pity. There's a verse he set<br>In Santa Croce to her memory,<br>'Weep for an infant too young to weep much<br>When death removed this mother'–stops the mirth<br>To-day, on women's faces when they walk<br>With rosy children hanging on their gowns,<br>Under the cloister, to escape the sun<br>That scorches in the piazza. After which,<br>He left our Florence, and made haste to hide<br>Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,<br>Among the mountains above Pelago;<br>Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need<br>Of mother nature more than others use,<br>And Pan's white goats, with udders warm and full<br>Of mystic contemplations, come to feed<br>Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own–<br>Such scholar-scraps he talked, I've heard from friends,<br>For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,<br>Will get to wear it as a hat aside<br>With a flower stuck in't. Father, then, and child,<br>We lived among the mountains many years,<br>God's silence on the outside of the house,<br>And we, who did not speak too loud, within;<br>And old Assunta to make up the fire,<br>Crossing herself whene'er a sudden flame<br>Which lightened from the firewood, made alive<br>That picture of my mother on the wall.<br>The painter drew it after she was dead;<br>And when the face was finished, throat and hands,<br>Her cameriera carried him, in hate<br>Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade<br>She dressed in at the Pitti. 'He should paint<br>No sadder thing than that,' she swore, 'to wrong<br>Her poor signora.' Therefore, very strange<br>The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch<br>For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up<br>And gaze across them, half in terror, half<br>In adoration, at the picture there,–<br>That swan-like supernatural white life,<br>Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk<br>Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power<br>To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:<br>For hours I sate and stared. Asssunta's awe<br>And my poor father's melancholy eyes<br>Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts<br>When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew<br>In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,<br>Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,<br>Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,<br>Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,<br>With still that face . . . which did not therefore change,<br>But kept the mystic level of all forms<br>And fears and admirations; was by turn<br>Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,–<br>A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,<br>A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,<br>A still Medusa, with mild milky brows<br>All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes<br>Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,<br>Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords<br>Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first<br>Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,<br>And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;<br>Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile<br>In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth<br>My father pushed down on the bed for that,–<br>Or, my dead mother, without smile or kiss,<br>Buried at Florence. All which images,<br>Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves<br>Before my meditative childhood, . . as<br>The incoherencies of change and death<br>Are represented fully, mixed and merged,<br>In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And while I stared away my childish wits<br>Upon my mother's picture, (ah, poor child!)<br>My father, who through love had suddenly<br>Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose<br>From chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,<br>Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk<br>Or grow anew familiar with the sun,–<br>Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,<br>But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,–<br>Whom love had unmade from a common man<br>But not completed to an uncommon man,–<br>My father taught me what he had learnt the best<br>Before he died and left me,–grief and love.<br>And, seeing we had books among the hills,<br>Strong words of counselling souls, confederate<br>With vocal pines and waters,–out of books<br>He taught me all the ignorance of men,<br>And how God laughs in heaven when any man<br>Says, 'Here I'm learned; this, I understand;<br>In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.'<br>He sent the schools to school, demonstrating<br>A fool will pass for such through one mistake,<br>While a philosopher will pass for such,<br>Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross<br>And heaped up to a system.<br>   I am like,<br>They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows<br>Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth<br>Of delicate features,–paler, near as grave;<br>But then my mother's smile breaks up the whole,<br>And makes it better sometimes than itself.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So, nine full years, our days were hid with God<br>Among his mountains. I was just thirteen,<br>Still growing like the plants from unseen roots<br>In tongue-tied Springs,–and suddenly awoke<br>To full life and its needs and agonies,<br>With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside<br>A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,<br>Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–'<br>'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief)<br>'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,<br>And none was left to love in all the world.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There, ended childhood: what succeeded next<br>I recollect as, after fevers, men<br>Thread back the passage of delirium,<br>Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;<br>Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;<br>A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i' the flank<br>With flame, that it should eat and end itself<br>Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,<br>I do remember clearly, how there came<br>A stranger with authority, not right,<br>(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up<br>From old Assunta's neck; how, with a shriek,<br>She let me go,–while I, with ears too full<br>Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word,<br>In all a child's astonishment at grief<br>Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,<br>My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!<br>The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,<br>Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,<br>Like one in anger drawing back her skirts<br>Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea<br>Inexorably pushed between us both,<br>And sweeping up the ship with my despair<br>Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.<br>Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;<br>Ten nights and days, without the common face<br>Of any day or night; the moon and sun<br>Cut off from the green reconciling earth,<br>To starve into a blind ferocity<br>And glare unnatural; the very sky<br>(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea<br>As if no human heart should 'scape alive,)<br>Bedraggled with the desolating salt,<br>Until it seemed no more than holy heaven<br>To which my father went. All new, and strange–<br>The universe turned stranger, for a child.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then, land!–then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs<br>Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home<br>Among those mean red houses through the fog?<br>And when I heard my father's language first<br>From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,<br>I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,–<br>And some one near me said the child was mad<br>Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.<br>Was this my father's England? the great isle?<br>The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship<br>Or verdure, field from field, as man from man;<br>The skies themselves looked low and positive,<br>As almost you could touch them with a hand,<br>And dared to do it, they were so far off<br>From God's celestial crystals; all things, blurred<br>And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates<br>Absorb the light here?–not a hill or stone<br>With heart to strike a radiant colour up<br>Or active outline on the indifferent air!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I think I see my father's sister stand<br>Upon the hall-step of her country-house<br>To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,<br>Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight<br>As if for taming accidental thoughts<br>From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey<br>By frigid use of life, (she was not old,<br>Although my father's elder by a year)<br>A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;<br>A close mild mouth, a little soured about<br>The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,<br>Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;<br>Eyes of no colour,–once they might have smiled,<br>But never, never have forgot themselves<br>In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose<br>Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,<br>Kept more for ruth than pleasure,–if past bloom,<br>Past fading also.<br>  She had lived we'll say,<br>A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,<br>A quiet life, which was not life at all,<br>(But that, she had not lived enough to know)<br>Between the vicar and the county squires,<br>The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes<br>From the empyreal, to assure their souls<br>Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,<br>The apothecary looked on once a year,<br>To prove their soundness of humility.<br>The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts<br>Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,<br>Because we are of one flesh after all<br>And need one flannel, (with a proper sense<br>Of difference in the quality)–and still<br>The book-club guarded from your modern trick<br>Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,<br>Preserved her intellectual. She had lived<br>A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,<br>Accounting that to leap from perch to perch<br>Was act and joy enough for any bird.<br>Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live<br>In thickets and eat berries!<br>   I, alas,<br>A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,<br>And she was there to meet me. Very kind.<br>Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.<br>She stood upon the steps to welcome me,<br>Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,–<br>Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool<br>To draw the new light closer, catch and cling<br>Less blindly. In my ears, my father's word<br>Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,<br>'Love, love, my child,' She, black there with my grief,<br>Might feel my love–she was his sister once–<br>I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved.<br>Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,<br>And drew me feebly through the hall, into<br>The room she sate in.<br>   There, with some strange spasm<br>Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands<br>Imperiously, and held me at arm's length,<br>And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes<br>Searched through my face,–ay, stabbed it through and through,<br>Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find<br>A wicked murderer in my innocent face,<br>If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,<br>She struggled for her ordinary calm,<br>And missed it rather,–told me not to shrink,<br>As if she had told me not to lie or swear,–<br>'She loved my father, and would love me too<br>As long as I deserved it.' Very kind.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I understood her meaning afterward;<br>She thought to find my mother in my face,<br>And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,<br>Had loved my father truly, as she could,<br>And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,<br>My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away<br>A wise man from wise courses, a good man<br>From obvious duties, and, depriving her,<br>His sister, of the household precedence,<br>Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,<br>And made him mad, alike by life and death,<br>In love and sorrow. She had pored for years<br>What sort of woman could be suitable<br>To her sort of hate, to entertain it with;<br>And so, her very curiosity<br>Became hate too, and all the idealism<br>She ever used in life, was used for hate,<br>Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last<br>The love from which it grew, in strength and heat,<br>And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense<br>Of disputable virtue (say not, sin)<br>When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And thus my father's sister was to me<br>My mother's hater. From that day, she did<br>Her duty to me, (I appreciate it<br>In her own word as spoken to herself)<br>Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,<br>But measured always. She was generous, bland,<br>More courteous than was tender, gave me still<br>The first place,–as if fearful that God's saints<br>Would look down suddenly and say, 'Herein<br>You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.'<br>Alas, a mother never is afraid<br>Of speaking angrily to any child,<br>Since love, she knows, is justified of love.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I, I was a good child on the whole,<br>A meek and manageable child. Why not?<br>I did not live, to have the faults of life:<br>There seemed more true life in my father's grave<br>Than in all England. Since that threw me off<br>Who fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,<br>Consigned me to his land) I only thought<br>Of lying quiet there where I was thrown<br>Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her<br>To prick me to a pattern with her pin,<br>Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,<br>And dry out from my drowned anatomy<br>The last sea-salt left in me.<br>   So it was.<br>I broke the copious curls upon my head<br>In braids, because she liked smooth ordered hair.<br>I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words<br>Which still at any stirring of the heart<br>Came up to float across the English phrase,<br>As lilies, (Bene . . or che ch'è ) because<br>She liked my father's child to speak his tongue.<br>I learnt the collects and the catechism,<br>The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,<br>The Articles . . the Tracts against the times,<br>(By no means Buonaventure's 'Prick of Love,')<br>And various popular synopses of<br>Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,<br>Because she liked instructed piety.<br>I learnt my complement of classic French<br>(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)<br>And German also, since she liked a range<br>Of liberal education,–tongues, not books.<br>I learnt a little algebra, a little<br>Of the mathematics,–brushed with extreme flounce<br>The circle of the sciences, because<br>She misliked women who are frivolous.<br>I learnt the royal genealogies<br>Of Oviedo, the internal laws<br>Of the Burmese Empire, . . by how many feet<br>Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,<br>What navigable river joins itself<br>To Lara, and what census of the year five<br>Was taken at Klagenfurt,–because she liked<br>A general insight into useful facts.<br>I learnt much music,–such as would have been<br>As quite impossible in Johnson's day<br>As still it might be wished–fine sleights of hand<br>And unimagined fingering, shuffling off<br>The hearer's soul through hurricanes of notes<br>To a noisy Tophet; and I drew . . costumes<br>From French engravings, nereids neatly draped,<br>With smirks of simmering godship,–I washed in<br>From nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)<br>I danced the polka and Cellarius,<br>Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,<br>Because she liked accomplishments in girls.<br>I read a score of books on womanhood<br>To prove, if women do not think at all,<br>They may teach thinking, (to a maiden aunt<br>Or else the author)–books demonstrating<br>Their right of comprehending husband's talk<br>When not too deep, and even of answering<br>With pretty 'may it please you,' or 'so it is,'–<br>Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,<br>Particular worth and general missionariness,<br>As long as they keep quiet by the fire<br>And never say 'no' when the world says 'ay,'<br>For that is fatal,–their angelic reach<br>Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,<br>And fatten household sinners–their, in brief,<br>Potential faculty in everything<br>Of abdicating power in it: she owned<br>She liked a woman to be womanly,<br>And English women, she thanked God and sighed,<br>(Some people always sigh in thanking God)<br>Were models to the universe. And last<br>I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like<br>To see me wear the night with empty hands,<br>A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess<br>Was something after all, (the pastoral saints<br>Be praised for't) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes<br>To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;<br>Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat<br>So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell<br>Which slew the tragic poet.<br>   By the way,<br>The works of women are symbolical.<br>We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,<br>Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,<br>To put on when you're weary–or a stool<br>To tumble over and vex you . . 'curse that stool!'<br>Or else at best, a cushion where you lean<br>And sleep, and dream of something we are not,<br>But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!<br>This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid<br>The worth of our work, perhaps.<br>    In looking down<br>Those years of education, (to return)<br>I wondered if Brinvilliers suffered more<br>In the water torture, . . flood succeeding flood<br>To drench the incapable throat and split the veins . .<br>Than I did. Certain of your feebler souls<br>Go out in such a process; many pine<br>To a sick, inodorous light; my own endured:<br>I had relations in the Unseen, and drew<br>The elemental nutriment and heat<br>From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,<br>Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark,<br>I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outside<br>Of the inner life, with all its ample room<br>For heart and lungs, for will and intellect,<br>Inviolable by conventions. God,<br>I thank thee for that grace of thine!<br>    At first,<br>I felt no life which was not patience,–did<br>The thing she bade me, without heed to a thing<br>Beyond it, sate in just the chair she placed,<br>With back against the window, to exclude<br>The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,<br>Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods<br>To bring the house a message,–ay, and walked<br>Demurely in her carpeted low rooms,<br>As if I should not, harkening my own steps,<br>Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books,<br>Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,<br>Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,<br>And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup,<br>(I blushed for joy at that!)–'The Italian child,<br>For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,<br>Thrives ill in England; she is paler yet<br>Than when we came the last time; she will die.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Will die.' My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,<br>With sudden anger, and approaching me<br>Said low between his teeth–'You're wicked now?<br>You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk<br>For others, with your naughty light blown out?'<br>I looked into his face defyingly.<br>He might have known, that, being what I was,<br>'Twas natural to like to get away<br>As far as dead folk can; and then indeed<br>Some people make no trouble when they die.<br>He turned and went abruptly, slammed the door<br>And shut his dog out.<br>   Romney, Romney Leigh.<br>I have not named my cousin hitherto,<br>And yet I used him as a sort of friend;<br>My elder by few years, but cold and shy<br>And absent . . tender when he thought of it,<br>Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes,<br>As well as early master of Leigh Hall,<br>Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youth<br>Repressing all its seasonable delights,<br>And agonising with a ghastly sense<br>Of universal hideous want and wrong<br>To incriminate possession. When he came<br>From college to the country, very oft<br>He crossed the hills on visits to my aunt,<br>With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses,<br>A book in one hand,–mere statistics, (if<br>I chanced to lift the cover) count of all<br>The goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell.<br>Against God's separating judgment-hour.<br>And she, she almost loved him,–even allowed<br>That sometimes he should seem to sigh my way;<br>It made him easier to be pitiful,<br>And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbed<br>At whiles she let him shut my music up<br>And push my needles down, and lead me out<br>To see in that south angle of the house<br>The figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock.<br>On some light pretext. She would turn her head<br>At other moments, go to fetch a thing,<br>And leave me breath enough to speak with him,<br>For his sake; it was simple.<br>   Sometimes too<br>He would have saved me utterly, it seemed,<br>He stood and looked so.<br>   Once, he stood so near<br>He dropped a sudden hand upon my head<br>Bent down on woman's work, as soft as rain–<br>But then I rose and shook it off as fire,<br>The stranger's touch that took my father's place,<br>Yet dared seem soft.<br>   I used him for a friend<br>Before I ever knew him for a friend.<br>'Twas better, 'twas worse also, afterward:<br>We came so close, we saw our differences<br>Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh<br>Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.<br>A godlike nature his; the gods look down,<br>Incurious of themselves; and certainly<br>'Tis well I should remember, how, those days<br>I was a worm too, and he looked on me.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A little by his act perhaps, yet more<br>By something in me, surely not my will,<br>I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon,<br>To whom life creeps back in the form of death<br>With a sense of separation, a blind pain<br>Of blank obstruction, and a roar i' the ears<br>Of visionary chariots which retreat<br>As earth grows clearer . . slowly, by degrees,<br>I woke, rose up . . where was I? in the world:<br>For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I had a little chamber in the house,<br>As green as any privet-hedge a bird<br>Might choose to build in, though the nest itself<br>Could show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the walls<br>Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight<br>Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds<br>Hung green about the window, which let in<br>The out-door world with all its greenery.<br>You could not push your head out and escape<br>A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle,<br>But so you were baptised into the grace<br>And privilege of seeing. . .<br>   First, the lime,<br>(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,–<br>My morning-dream was often hummed away<br>By the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,<br>Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,<br>Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream<br>Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself<br>Among the acacias, over which, you saw<br>The irregular line of elms by the deep lane<br>Which stopt the grounds and dammed the overflow<br>Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight<br>The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp<br>Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales<br>Could guess if lady's hall or tenant's lodge<br>Ddispensed such odours,–though his stick well -crooked<br>Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar<br>Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,<br>And through their tops, you saw the folded hills<br>Striped up and down with hedges, (burley oaks<br>Projecting from the lines to show themselves)<br>Thro' which my cousin Romney's chimneys smoked<br>As still as when a silent mouth in frost<br>Breathes–showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;<br>While far above, a jut of table-land,<br>A promontory without water, stretched,–<br>You could not catch it if the days were thick,<br>Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise<br>The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve<br>And use it for an anvil till he had filled<br>The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,<br>And proved he need not rest so early;–then<br>When all his setting trouble was resolved<br>Toa trance of passive glory, you might see<br>In apparition on the golden sky<br>(Alas, my Giotto's background!) the sheep run<br>Along the fine clear outline, small as mice<br>That run along a witch's scarlet thread.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods<br>Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs<br>To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps<br>Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear<br>In leaping through the palpitating pines,<br>Like a white soul tossed out to eternity<br>With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed<br>My multitudinous mountains, sitting in<br>The magic circle, with the mutual touch<br>Electric, panting from their full deep hearts<br>Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for<br>Communion and commission. Italy<br>Is one thing, England one.<br>   On English ground<br>You understand the letter . . ere the fall,<br>How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields<br>Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;<br>The hills are crumpled plains–the plains, parterres–<br>The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;<br>And if you seek for any wilderness<br>You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed<br>And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,<br>Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,<br>Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,<br>But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of<br>Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause<br>Of finer meditation.<br>   Rather say<br>A sweet familiar nature, stealing in<br>As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand<br>Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so<br>Of presence and affection, excellent<br>For inner uses, from the things without.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I could not be unthankful, I who was<br>Entreated thus and holpen. In the room<br>I speak of, ere the house was well awake,<br>And also after it was well asleep,<br>I sat alone, and drew the blessing in<br>Of all that nature. With a gradual step,<br>A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,<br>It came in softly, while the angels made<br>A place for it beside me. The moon came,<br>And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts<br>The sun came, saying, 'Shall I lift this light<br>Against the lime-tree, and you will not look?<br>I make the birds sing–listen! . . but, for you.<br>God never hears your voice, excepting when<br>You lie upon the bed at nights and weep.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up<br>More slowly than I verily write now,<br>But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide<br>The window and my soul, and let the airs .<br>And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,<br>Regenerating what I was. O Life,<br>How oft we throw it off and think,–'Enough,<br>Enough of life in so much!–here's a cause<br>For rupture; herein we must break with Life,<br>Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,<br>Maimed, spoiled for aspiration; farewell Life!'<br>–And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes<br>And think all ended.–Then, Life calls to us,<br>In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,<br>Above us, or below us, or around . .<br>Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,<br>Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed<br>So own our compensations than our griefs:<br>Still, Life's voice!–still, we make our peace with Life.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I, so young then, was not sullen. Soon<br>I used to get up early, just to sit<br>And watch the morning quicken in the grey,<br>And hear the silence open like a flower,<br>Leaf after leaf,–and stroke with listless hand<br>The woodbine through the window, till at last<br>I came to do it with a sort of love,<br>At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,–<br>A melancholy smile, to catch myself<br>Smiling for joy.<br>  Capacity for joy<br>Admits temptation. It seemed, next, worth while<br>To dodge the sharp sword set against my life;<br>To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,<br>As mute as any dream there, and escape<br>As a soul from the body, out of doors,–<br>Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,<br>And wander on the hills an hour or two,<br>Then back again before the house should stir.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or else I sat on in my chamber green,<br>And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed<br>My prayers without the vicar; read my books,<br>Without considering whether they were fit<br>To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good<br>By being ungenerous, even to a book,<br>And calculating profits . . so much help<br>By so much rending. It is rather when<br>We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge<br>Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,<br>Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–<br>'Tis then we get the right good from a book.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I read much. What my father taught before<br>From many a volume, Love re-emphasised<br>Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast<br>Grew tender with the memory of his eyes,<br>And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of Greek<br>And Latin, he had taught me, as he would<br>Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives<br>If such he had known.–most like a shipwrecked man<br>Who heaps his single platter with goats' cheese<br>And scarlet berries; or like any man<br>Who loves but one, and so gives all at once,<br>Because he has it, rather than because<br>He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;<br>And thus, as did the women formerly<br>By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil<br>Across the boy's audacious front, and swept<br>With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,<br>He wrapt his little daughter in his large<br>Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But, after I had read for memory,<br>I read for hope. The path my father's foot<br>Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off,<br>(What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh<br>And passed) alone I carried on, and set<br>My child-heart 'gainst the thorny underwood,<br>To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.<br>Ah, babe i' the wood, without a brother-babe!<br>My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,<br>Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,<br>When any young wayfaring soul goes forth<br>Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,<br>The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,<br>To thrust his own way, he an alien, through<br>The world of books! Ah, you!–you think it fine,<br>You clap hands–'A fair day!'–you cheer him on,<br>As if the worst, could happen, were to rest<br>Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,<br>Behold!–the world of books is still the world;<br>And worldlings in it are less merciful<br>And more puissant. For the wicked there<br>Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,<br>Is edged from elemental fire to assail<br>A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right<br>By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong<br>Because of weakness. Power is justified,<br>Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown<br>Covers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,<br>There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings,<br>That shake the ashes of the grave aside<br>From their calm locks, and undiscomfited<br>Look stedfast truths against Time's changing mask.<br>True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;<br>True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens<br>Upon his own head in strong martyrdom,<br>In order to light men a moment's space.<br>But stay!–who judges?–who distinguishes<br>'Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,<br>And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,<br>To serve king David? who discerns at once<br>The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow<br>For Alaric as well as Charlemagne?<br>Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers<br>From conjurors? The child, there? Would you leave<br>That child to wander in a battle-field<br>And push his innocent smile against the guns?<br>Or even in the catacombs, . . his torch<br>Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all<br>The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I read books bad and good–some bad and good<br>At once: good aims not always make good books;<br>Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils<br>In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove<br>God's being so definitely, that man's doubt<br>Grows self-defined the other side the line,<br>Made Atheist by suggestion; moral books,<br>Exasperating to license; genial books,<br>Discounting from the human dignity;<br>And merry books, which set you weeping when<br>The sun shines,–ay, and melancholy books,<br>Which make you laugh that any one should weep<br>In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The world of books is still the world, I write,<br>And both worlds have God's providence, thank God,<br>To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,<br>Among the breakers, some hard swimming through<br>The deeps–I lost breath in my soul sometimes<br>And cried 'God save me if there's any God.'<br>But even so, God save me; and, being dashed<br>From error on to error, every turn<br>Still brought me nearer to the central truth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I thought so. All this anguish in the thick<br>Of men's opinions . . press and counterpress<br>Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now<br>Emergent . . all the best of it perhaps,<br>But throws you back upon a noble trust<br>And use of your own instinct,–merely proves<br>Pure reason stronger than bare inference<br>At strongest. Try it,–fix against heaven's wall<br>Your scaling ladders of high logic–mount<br>Step by step!–Sight goes faster; that still ray<br>Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,<br>And why, you know not–(did you eliminate,<br>That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)<br>Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The cygnet finds the water: but the man<br>Is born in ignorance of his element,<br>And feels out blind at first, disorganised<br>By sin i' the blood,–his spirit-insight dulled<br>And crossed by his sensations. Presently<br>We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;<br>Then mark, be reverent, be obedient,–<br>For those dumb motions of imperfect life<br>Are oracles of vital Deity<br>Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says<br>'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say,<br>A palimpsest, a prophets holograph<br>Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's,–<br>The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on<br>Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps<br>Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,<br>Some upstroke of an alpha and omega<br>Expressing the old scripture.<br>   Books, books, books!<br>I had found the secret of a garret-room<br>Piled high with cases in my father's name;<br>Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out<br>Among the giant fossils of my past,<br>Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs<br>Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there<br>At this or that box, pulling through the gap,<br>In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,<br>The first book first. And how I felt it beat<br>Under my pillow, in the morning's dark,<br>An hour before the sun would let me read!<br>My books!<br>  At last, because the time was ripe,<br>I chanced upon the poets.<br>   As the earth<br>Plunges in fury, when the internal fires<br>Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat<br>The marts and temples, the triumphal gates<br>And towers of observation, clears herself<br>To elemental freedom–thus, my soul,<br>At poetry's divine first finger touch,<br>Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,<br>Convicted of the great eternities<br>Before two worlds.<br>   What's this, Aurora Leigh,<br>You write so of the poets, and not laugh?<br>Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,<br>Exaggerators of the sun and moon,<br>And soothsayers in a tea-cup?<br>    I write so<br>Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,–<br>The only speakers of essential truth,<br>Posed to relative, comparative,<br>And temporal truths; the only holders by<br>His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;<br>The only teachers who instruct mankind,<br>From just a shadow on a charnel wall,<br>To find man's veritable stature out,<br>Erect, sublime,–the measure of a man,<br>And that's the measure of an angel, says<br>The apostle. Ay, and while your common men<br>Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,<br>And dust the flaunty carpets of the world<br>For kings to walk on, or our senators,<br>The poet suddenly will catch them up<br>With his voice like a thunder. . 'This is soul,<br>This is life, this word is being said in heaven,<br>Here's God down on us! what are you about?<br>How all those workers start amid their work,<br>Look round, look up, and feel, a moment's space,<br>That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,<br>Is not the imperative labour after all.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My own best poets, am I one with you,<br>That thus I love you,–or but one through love?<br>Does all this smell of thyme about my feet<br>Conclude my visit to your holy hill<br>In personal presence, or but testify<br>The rustling of your vesture through my dreams<br>With influent odours? When my joy and pain,<br>My thought and aspiration, like the stops<br>Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb<br>If not melodious, do you play on me,<br>My pipers,–and if, sooth, you did not blow,<br>Would not sound come? or is the music mine,<br>As a man's voice or breath is called his own,<br>In breathed by the Life-breather? There's a doubt<br>For cloudy seasons!<br>   But the sun was high<br>When first I felt my pulses set themselves<br>For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence<br>Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,<br>As wind upon the alders blanching them<br>By turning up their under-natures till<br>They trembled in dilation. O delight<br>And triumph of the poet,–who would say<br>A man's mere 'yes,' a woman's common 'no,'<br>A little human hope of that or this,<br>And says the word so that it burns you through<br>With a special revelation, shakes the heart<br>Of all the men and women in the world,<br>As if one came back from the dead and spoke,<br>With eyes too happy, a familiar thing<br>Become divine i' the utterance! while for him<br>The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;<br>The palpitating angel in his flesh<br>Thrills inly with consenting fellowship<br>To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves<br>Outside of time.<br>  O life, O poetry,<br> Which means life in life! cognisant of life<br>Beyond this blood-beat,–passionate for truth<br>Beyond these senses, –poetry, my life,–<br>My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot<br>From Zeus's thunder, who has ravished me<br>Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,<br>And set me in the Olympian roar and round<br>Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,<br>To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist<br>For everlasting laughters,–I, myself,<br>Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!<br>How those gods look!<br>   Enough so, Ganymede.<br>We shall not bear above a round or two–<br>We drop the golden cup at Heré's foot<br>And swoon back to the earth,–and find ourselves<br>Face-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,<br>While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,<br>'What's come now to the youth?' Such ups and downs<br>Have poets.<br>  Am I such indeed? The name<br>Is royal, and to sign it like a queen,<br>Is what I dare not,–though some royal blood<br>Would seem to tingle in me now and then,<br>With sense of power and ache,–with imposthumes<br>And manias usual to the race. Howbeit<br>I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad,<br>And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;<br>The thing's too common.<br>   Many fervent souls<br>Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel<br>If steel had offered, in a restless heat<br>Of doing something. Many tender souls<br>Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread.<br>As children, cowslips:–the more pains they take,<br>The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,<br>Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse.<br>Before they sit down under their own vine<br>And live for use. Alas, near all the birds<br>Will sing at dawn,–and yet we do not take<br>The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In those days, though, I never analysed<br>Myself even. All analysis comes late.<br>You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,<br>In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink<br>And drop before the wonder of 't; you miss<br>The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,<br>And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else:<br>My heart beat in my brain. Life's violent flood<br>Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour's field,<br>Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.<br>We play at leap-frog over the god Term;<br>The love within us and the love without<br>Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,<br>We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.<br>Being acted on and acting seem the same:<br>In that first onrush of life's chariot-wheels,<br>We know not if the forests move or we.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And so, like most young poets, in a flush<br>Of individual life, I poured myself<br>Along the veins of others, and achieved<br>Mere lifeless imitations of life verse,<br>And made the living answer for the dead,<br>Profaning nature. 'Touch not, do not taste,<br>Nor handle,'–we're too legal, who write young:<br>We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,<br>As if still ignorant of counterpoint;<br>We call the Muse . . 'O Muse, benignant Muse!'–<br>As if we had seen her purple-braided head .<br>With the eyes in it start between the boughs<br>As often as a stag's. What make-believe,<br>With so much earnest! what effete results,<br>From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes<br>From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows<br>Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud<br>In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven<br>Against the heels of what the master said;<br>And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps<br>A babe might blow between two straining cheeks<br>Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;<br>And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,<br>Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,<br>The worse for being warm: all these things, writ<br>On happy mornings, with a morning heart,<br>That leaps for love, is active for resolve,<br>Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms<br>Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.<br>The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,<br>Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.<br>Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped<br>In gradual progress like another man,<br>But, turning grandly on his central self,<br>Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years<br>And died, not young,–(the life of a long life,<br>Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear<br>Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn<br>For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,<br>I count it strange, and hard to understand,<br>That nearly all young poets should write old;<br>That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,<br>And beardless Byron academical,<br>And so with others. It may be, perhaps,<br>Such have not settled long and deep enough<br>In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still<br>The memory mixes with the vision, spoils,<br>And works it turbid.<br>   Or perhaps, again,<br>In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,<br>The melancholy desert must sweep round,<br>Behind you, as before.–<br>   For me, I wrote<br>False poems, like the rest, and thought them true.<br>Because myself was true in writing them.<br>I, peradventure, have writ true ones since<br>With less complacence.<br>   But I could not hide<br>My quickening inner life from those at watch.<br>They saw a light at a window now and then,<br>They had not set there. Who had set it there?<br>My father's sister started when she caught<br>My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say<br>I had no business with a sort of soul,<br>But plainly she objected,–and demurred,<br>That souls were dangerous things to carry straight<br>Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She said sometimes, 'Aurora, have you done<br>Your task this morning?–have you read that book?<br>And are you ready for the crochet here?'–<br>As if she said, 'I know there's something wrong,<br>I know I have not ground you down enough<br>To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust<br>For household uses and proprieties,<br>Before the rain has got into my barn<br>And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you're green<br>With out-door impudence? you almost grow?'<br>To which I answered, 'Would she hear my task,<br>And verify my abstract of the book?<br>And should I sit down to the crochet work?<br>Was such her pleasure?' . . Then I sate and teased<br>The patient needle til it split the thread,<br>Which oozed off from it in meandering lace<br>From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;<br>My soul was singing at a work apart<br>Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm<br>As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,<br>In vortices of glory and blue air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,<br>The inner life informed the outer life,<br>Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,<br>Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,<br>And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin<br>Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,<br>Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across<br>My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,<br>And said, 'We'll live, Aurora! we'll be strong.<br>The dogs are on us–but we will not die.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Whoever lives true life, will love true love.<br>I learnt to love that England. Very oft,<br>Before the day was born, or otherwise<br>Through secret windings of the afternoons,<br>I threw my hunters off and plunged myself<br>Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag<br>Will take the waters, shivering with the fear<br>And passion of the course. And when, at last<br>Escaped,–so many a green slope built on slope<br>Betwixt me and the enemy's house behind,<br>I dared to rest, or wander,–like a rest<br>Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,–<br>And view the ground's most gentle dimplement,<br>(As if God's finger touched but did not press<br>In making England!) such an up and down<br>Of verdure,–nothing too much up or down,<br>A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky<br>Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;<br>Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,<br>Fed full of noises by invisible streams;<br>And open pastures, where you scarcely tell<br>White daisies from white dew,–at intervals<br>The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out<br>Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,–<br>I thought my father's land was worthy too<br>Of being my Shakspeare's.<br>   Very oft alone,<br>Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leave<br>To walk the third with Romney and his friend<br>The rising painter, Vincent Carrington,<br>Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonneted,<br>Because he holds that, paint a body well,<br>You paint a soul by implication, like<br>The grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for if<br>He said . . 'When I was last in Italy' . .<br>It sounded as an instrument that's played<br>Too far off for the tune–and yet it's fine<br>To listen.<br>  Often we walked only two,<br>If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.<br>We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced;<br>We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched–<br>Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,<br>And thinkers disagreed; he, overfull<br>Of what is, and I, haply, overbold<br>For what might be.<br>   But then the thrushes sang,<br>And shook my pulses and the elms' new leaves,–<br>And then I turned, and held my finger up,<br>And bade him mark that, howsoe'er the world<br>Went ill, as he related, certainly<br>The thrushes still sang in it.–At which word<br>His brow would soften,–and he bore with me<br>In melancholy patience, not unkind,<br>While, breaking into voluble ecstasy,<br>I flattered all the beauteous country round,<br>As poets use . . .the skies, the clouds, the fields,<br>The happy violets hiding from the roads<br>The primroses run down to, carrying gold,–<br>The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out<br>Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths<br>'Twixt dripping ash-boughs,–hedgerows all alive<br>With birds and gnats and large white butterflies<br>Which look as if the May-flower had sought life<br>And palpitated forth upon the wind,–<br>Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,<br>Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,<br>And cattle grazing in the watered vales,<br>And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,<br>And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,<br>Confused with smell of orchards. 'See,' I said,<br>'And see! is God not with us on the earth?<br>And shall we put Him down by aught we do?<br>Who says there's nothing for the poor and vile<br>Save poverty and wickedness? behold!'<br>And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,<br>And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the beginning when God called all good,<br>Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.<br>But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,<br>The evil is upon us while we speak;<br>Deliver us from evil, let us pray.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Elizabeth+Barrett+Browning">Elizabeth Barrett Browning</a> from <i>Aurora Leigh</i><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116054" data-title="First Book de Elizabeth Barrett Browning" data-description="OF writing many books there is no end;/And I who have written much in prose and verse/For others' uses, will write now for mine,–/Will write my story for my better self,/As when you paint your portrait for a friend,/Who keeps it in a drawer and ..."></div>
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