<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116058" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Fifth Book</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">AURORA LEIGH, be humble. Shall I hope<br>To speak my poems in mysterious tune<br>With man and nature,–with the lava-lymph<br>That trickles from successive galaxies<br>Still drop by drop adown the finger of God,<br>In still new worlds?–with summer-days in this,<br>That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?–<br>With spring's delicious trouble in the ground<br>Tormented by the quickened blood of roots.<br>And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves<br>In token of the harvest-time of flowers?–<br>With winters and with autumns,–and beyond,<br>With the human heart's large seasons,–when it hopes<br>And fears, joys, grieves, and loves?–with all that strain<br>Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh<br>In a sacrament of souls? with mother's breasts,<br>Which, round the new made creatures hanging there,<br>Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?–<br>With multitudinous life, and finally<br>With the great out-goings of ecstatic souls,<br>Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,<br>Their radiant faces upward, burn away<br>This dark of the body, issuing on a world<br>Beyond our mortal?–can I speak my verse<br>So plainly in tune to these things and the rest,<br>That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,<br>As having the same warrant over them<br>To hold and move them, if they will or no,<br>Alike imperious as the primal rhythm<br>Of that theurgic nature? I must fail,<br>Who fail at the beginning to hold and move<br>One man,–and he my cousin, and he my friend,<br>And he born tender, made intelligent,<br>Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides<br>Of difficult questions; yet, obtuse to me,–<br>Of me, incurious! likes me very well,<br>And wishes me a paradise of good,<br>Good looks, good means, and good digestion!–ay,<br>But otherwise evades me, puts me off<br>With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,–<br>Too light a book for a grave man's reading! Go,<br>Aurora Leigh: be humble.<br> There it is;<br>We women are too apt to look to one,<br>Which proves a certain impotence in art.<br>We strain our natures at doing something great,<br>Far less because it's something great to do,<br>Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselves<br>As being not small, and more appreciable<br>To some one friend. We must have mediators<br>Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge;<br>Some sweet saint's blood must quicken in our palms.<br>Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold:<br>Good only, being perceived as the end of good,<br>And God alone pleased,–that's too poor, we think,<br>And not enough for us, by any means.<br>Ay–Romney, I remember, told me once<br>We miss the abstract, when we comprehend!<br>We miss it most when we aspire, . . and fail.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet, so, I will not.–This vile woman's way<br>Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up.<br>I'll have no traffic with the personal thought<br>In art's pure temple. Must I work in vain,<br>Without the approbation of a man?<br>It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself,<br>That approbation of the general race,<br>Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,<br>Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)<br>And the highest fame was never reached except<br>By what was aimed above it. Art for art,<br>And good for God Himself, the essential Good!<br>We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,<br>Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;<br>And if we fail . . But must we?–<br> Shall I fail?<br>The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,<br>'Let no one be called happy till his death.'<br>To which I add,–Let no one till his death<br>Be called unhappy. Measure not the work<br>Until the day's out and the labour done;<br>Then bring your gauges. If the day's work's scant,<br>Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;<br>And, in that we have nobly striven at least,<br>Deal with us nobly, women though we be,<br>And honour us with truth, if not with praise.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My ballads prospered; but the ballad's race<br>Is rapid for a poet who bears weights<br>Of thought and golden image. He can stand<br>Like Atlas, in the sonnet,–and support<br>His own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars;<br>But then he must stand still, nor take a step.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In that descriptive poem called 'The Hills,'<br>The prospects were too far and indistinct.<br>'Tis true my critics said, 'A fine view, that!'<br>The public scarcely cared to climb the book<br>For even the finest; and the public's right,<br>A tree's mere firewood, unless humanised;<br>Which well the Greeks knew, when they stirred the bark<br>With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,<br>And made the forest-rivers garrulous<br>With babble of gods. For us, we are called to mark<br>A still more intimate humanity<br>In this inferior nature,–or, ourselves,<br>Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfoot<br>By veritabler artists. Earth shut up<br>By Adam, like a fakir in a box<br>Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry,<br>A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,<br>Unlocked the doors, forced opened the blank eyes,<br>And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out<br>The leathery tongue turned back into the throat:<br>Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates<br>In every lip, aspires in every breath,<br>Embraces infinite relations. Now,<br>We want no half-gods, Panomph&alig;ean Joves,<br>Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads, and the rest,<br>To take possession of a senseless world<br>To unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,<br>The body of our body, the green earth,<br>Indubitably human, like this flesh<br>And these articulated veins through which<br>Our heart drives blood! There's not a flower of spring,<br>That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied<br>By issue and symbol, by significance<br>And correspondence, to that spirit-world<br>Outside the limits of our space and time,<br>Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice<br>With human meanings; else they miss the thought,<br>And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed<br>Instructed poorly for interpreters,–<br>Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Even so my pastoral failed: it was a book<br>Of surface-pictures–pretty, cold, and false<br>With literal transcript,–the worse done, I think,<br>For being not ill-done. Let me set my mark<br>Against such doings, and do otherwise.<br>This strikes me.–if the public whom we know,<br>Could catch me at such admissions, I should pass<br>For being right modest. Yet how proud we are,<br>In daring to look down upon ourselves!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The critics say that epics have died out<br>With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods–<br>I'll not believe it. I could never dream<br>As Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineer<br>Who travelled higher than he was born to live,<br>And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat<br>Discoursing of an image seen through fog,)<br>That Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high.<br>They were but men!–his Helen's hair turned grey<br>Like any plain Miss Smith's, who wears a front:<br>And Hector's infant blubbered at a plume<br>As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.<br>All men are possible heroes: every age,<br>Heroic in proportions, double-faced,<br>Looks backward and before, expects a morn<br>And claims an epos.<br> Ay, but every age<br>Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)<br>Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!<br>The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound<br>Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:<br>A pewter age,–mixed metal, silver-washed;<br>An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;<br>An age of patches for old gabardines;<br>An age of mere transition, meaning nought,<br>Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,<br>If God please. That's wrong thinking, to my mind,<br>And wrong thoughts make poor poems.<br> Every age,<br>Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned<br>By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose<br>Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,<br>To some colossal statue of a man:<br>The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,<br>Had guessed as little of any human form<br>Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.<br>They'd have, in fact, to travel ten miles off<br>Or ere the giant image broke on them,<br>Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,<br>Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,<br>And fed at evening with the blood of suns;<br>Grand torso,–hand, that flung perpetually<br>The largesse of a silver river down<br>To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus<br>With times we live in,–evermore too great<br>To be apprehended near.<br> But poets should<br>Exert a double vision; should have eyes<br>To see near things as comprehensibly<br>As if afar they took their point of sight,<br>And distant things, as intimately deep,<br>As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.<br>I do distrust the poet who discerns<br>No character or glory in his times,<br>And trundles back his soul five hundred years,<br>Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,<br>Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads<br>Alive i' the ditch there!–'twere excusable;<br>But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter<br>Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,<br>As dead as must be, for the greater part,<br>The poems made on their chivalric bones.<br>And that's no wonder: death inherits death.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Nay, if there's room for poets in the world<br>A little overgrown, (I think there is)<br>Their sole work is to represent the age,<br>Their age, not Charlemagne's,–this live, throbbing age,<br>That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,<br>And spends more passion, more heroic heat,<br>Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,<br>Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.<br>To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,<br>Cry out for togas and the picturesque,<br>Is fatal,–foolish too. King Arthur's self<br>Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;<br>And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,<br>As Regent street to poets.<br> Never flinch,<br>But still, unscrupulously epic, catch<br>Upon a burning lava of a song,<br>The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:<br>That, when the next shall come, the men of that<br>May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say<br>'Behold,–behold the paps we all have sucked!<br>That bosom seems to beat still, or at least<br>It sets ours beating. This is living art,<br>Which thus presents, and thus records true life.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What form is best for poems? Let me think<br>Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,<br>As sovran nature does, to make the form;<br>For otherwise we only imprison spirit,<br>And not embody. Inward evermore<br>To outward,–so in life, and so in art,<br>Which still is life.<br> Five acts to make a play.<br>And why not fifteen? Why not ten? or seven?<br>What matter for the number of the leaves,<br>Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact<br>The literal unities of time and place,<br>When 'tis the essence of passion to ignore<br>Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire<br>And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness<br>To this or that convention; 'exit' here<br>And 'enter' there; the points for clapping, fixed,<br>Like Jacob's white-peeled rods before the rams;<br>And all the close-curled imagery clipped<br>In manner of their fleece at shearing time.<br>Forget to prick the galleries to the heart<br>Precisely at the fourth act,–culminate<br>Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,–<br>We're lost so! Shakspeare's ghost could scarcely plead<br>Against our just damnation. Stand aside;<br>We'll muse for comfort that, last century,<br>On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,<br>A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And whosoever writes good poetry,<br>Looks just to art. He does not write for you<br>Or me,–for London or for Edinburgh;<br>He will not suffer the best critic known<br>To step into his sunshine of free thought<br>And self-absorbed conception, and exact<br>An inch-long swerving of the holy lines.<br>If virtue done for popularity<br>Defiles like vice, can art for praise or hire<br>Still keep its splendour, and remain pure art?<br>Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,<br>He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,<br>And that's success: if not, the poem's passed<br>From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,<br>Until the unborn snatch it, crying out<br>In pity on their fathers' being so dull,<br>And that's success too.<br> I will write no plays.<br>Because the drama, less sublime in this,<br>Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,<br>Adopts the standard of the public taste<br>To chalk its height on, wears a dog chain round<br>Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch<br>The fashions of the day to please the day;<br>Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,<br>Commending chiefly its docility<br>And humour in stage-tricks; or else indeed<br>Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,<br>Or worse, we'll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,<br>Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist<br>(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodies<br>Because their grosser brains most naturally<br>Misjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)<br>Shows teeth an almond's breath, protests the length<br>Of a.modest phrase,–' My gentle countrymen,<br>'There's something in it, haply of your fault,'–<br>Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,<br>He'll have five thousand, and five thousand more,<br>Against him,–the whole public,–all the hoofs<br>Of King Saul's father's asses, in full drove,–<br>And obviously deserve it. He appealed<br>To these,–and why say more if they condemn,<br>Than if they praised him?–Weep, my Æschylus,<br>But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!<br>For since 'twas Athens (so I read the myth)<br>Who gave commission to that fatal weight,<br>The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on thee<br>And crush thee,–better cover thy bald head;<br>She'll hear the softest hum of Hyblan bee<br>Before thy loud'st protesting.–For the rest,<br>The risk's still worse upon the modern stage;<br>I could not, in so little, accept success,<br>Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,<br>For manifester gains; let those who prize,<br>Pursue them: I stand off.<br> And yet, forbid,<br>That any irreverent fancy or conceit<br>Should litter in the Drama's throne-room, where<br>The rulers of our art, in whose full veins<br>Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength<br>And do their kingly work,–conceive, command,<br>And, from the imagination's crucial heat,<br>Catch up their men and women all a-flame<br>For action all alive, and forced to prove<br>Their life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,<br>Until mankind makes witness, 'These be men<br>As we are,' and vouchsafes the kiss that's due<br>To Imogen and Juliet–sweetest kin<br>On art's side.<br> 'Tis that, honouring to its worth<br>The drama, I would fear to keep it down<br>To the level of the footlights. Dies no more<br>The sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,–<br>His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling white<br>Of choral vestures,–troubled in his blood<br>While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,<br>Leapt high together with the altar-flame,<br>And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,<br>Which set the grand still front of Themis' son<br>Upon the puckered visage of a player;–<br>The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,<br>As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,<br>Sweeps slowly past the piers;–the mouthpiece,where<br>The mere man's voice with all its breaths and breaks<br>Went sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heights<br>Its phrasèd thunders;–these things are no more,<br>Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,<br>The growing drama has outgrown such toys<br>Of simulated stature, faces and speech,<br>It also, peradventure, may outgrow<br>The simulation of the painted scene,<br>Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;<br>And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,<br>Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,<br>With all its grand orchestral silences<br>To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Alas, I still see something to be done,<br>And what I do falls short of what I see,<br>Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,<br>Worn bare of grass and sunshine,–long calm nights,<br>From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,–<br>Be witness for me, with no amateur's<br>Irreverent haste and busy idleness<br>I've set myself to art! What then? what's done?<br>What's done, at last?<br> Behold, at last, a book.<br>If life-blood's necessary,–which it is,<br>(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet's brow,<br>Each prophet-poet's book must show man's blood!)<br>If life-blood's fertilising, I wrung mine<br>On every leaf of this,–unless the drops<br>Slid heavily on one side and left it dry.<br>That chances often: many a fervid man<br>Writes books as cold and flat as grave-yard stones<br>From which the lichen's scraped; and if St. Preux<br>Had written his own letters, as he might,<br>We had never wept to think of the little mole<br>'Neath Julie's drooping eyelid. Passion is<br>But something suffered, after all.<br> While art<br>Sets action on the top of suffering:<br>The artist's part is both to be and do,<br>Transfixing with a special, central power<br>The flat experience of the common man,<br>And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,<br>Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing<br>He feels the inmost: never felt the less<br>Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn<br>For burning next reflectors of blue steel,<br>That he should be the colder for his place<br>'Twixt two incessant fires,–his personal life's,<br>And that intense refraction which burns back<br>Perpetually against him from the round<br>Of crystal conscience he was born into<br>If artist born? O sorrowful great gift<br>Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,<br>When one life has been found enough for pain!<br>We staggering 'neath our burden as mere men,<br>Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,<br>Support the intolerable strain and stress<br>Of the universal, and send clearly up<br>With voices broken by the human sob,<br>Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!<br>But soft!–a 'poet' is a word soon said;<br>A book's a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,<br>The more the poet shall be questionable,<br>The more unquestionably comes his book!<br>And this of mine,–well, granting to myself<br>Some passion in it, furrowing up the flats,<br>Mere passion will not prove a volume worth<br>Its gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keel<br>Mean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.<br>There's more than passion goes to make a man,<br>Or book, which is a man too.<br> I am sad:<br>I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,<br>And, feeling the hard marble first relent,<br>Grow supple to the straining of his arms,<br>And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,<br>Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toil<br>Of stretching past the known and seen, to reach<br>The archetypal Beauty out of sight,<br>Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,<br>And with his own life dazed and blinded him!<br>Not so; Pygmalion loved,–and whoso loves<br>Believes the impossible.<br> And I am sad:<br>I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,<br>Since none seems worthy of my thought and hope<br>More highly mated. He has shot them down,<br>My Phoebus Apollo, soul within my soul,<br>Who judges by the attempted, what's attained,<br>And with the silver arrow from his height,<br>Has struck down all my works before my face,<br>While I say nothing. Is there aught to say?<br>I called the artist but a greatened man:<br>He may be childless also, like a man.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I laboured on alone. The wind and dust<br>And sun of the world beat blistering in my face;<br>And hope, now for me, now against me, dragged<br>My spirits onward,–as some fallen balloon,<br>Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,<br>Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,<br>Or seemed,–and generous souls cried out, 'Be strong,<br>Take courage; now you're on our level,–now!<br>The next step saves you!' I was flushed with praise,<br>But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,<br>I could not choose but murmur to myself<br>'Is this all? all that's done? and all that's gained?<br>If this then be success, 'tis dismaller<br>Than any failure.'<br> O my God, my God,<br>O supreme Artist, who as sole return<br>For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,<br>Demandest of us just a word . . a name,<br>'My Father!'–thou hast knowledge, only thou,<br>How dreary 'tis for women to sit still<br>On winter nights by solitary fires,<br>And hear the nations praising them far off;<br>Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,<br>Our very heart of passionate womanhood,<br>Which could not beat so in the verse without<br>Being present also in the unkissed lips,<br>And eyes undried because there's none to ask<br>The reason they grew moist.<br> To sit alone,<br>And think, for comfort, how, that very night,<br>Affianced lovers, leaning face to face<br>With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath,<br>Are reading haply from some page of ours,<br>To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,<br>When such a stanza, level to their mood,<br>Seems floating their own thoughts out–'So I feel<br>For thee,'–'And I, for thee: this poet knows<br>What everlasting love is!'–how, that night.<br>A father, issuing from the misty roads<br>Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth<br>And happy children, having caught up first<br>The youngest there until it shrunk and shrieked<br>To feel the cold chin prick its dimple through<br>With winter from the hills, may throw i' the lap<br>Of the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lids<br>To hide some sweetness newer than last year's)<br>Our book and cry, . . 'Ah you, you care for rhymes;<br>So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,<br>When April comes to let you! I've been told<br>They are not idle as so many are,<br>But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:<br>It's yours, the book: I'll write your name in it,–<br>That so you may not lose, however lost<br>In poet's lore and charming reverie,<br>The thought of how your father thought of you<br>In riding from the town.'<br> To have our books<br>Appraised by love, associated with love,<br>While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?<br>At least 'tis mournful. Fame, indeed, 'twas said,<br>Means simply love. It was a man said that.<br>And then there's love and love: the love of all<br>(To risk, in turn, a woman's paradox,)<br>Is but a small thing to the love of one.<br>You bid a hungry child be satisfied<br>With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,<br>He says he's hungry,–he would rather have<br>That little barley-cake you keep from him<br>While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;<br>(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)<br>We're hungry.<br> Hungry! but it's pitiful<br>To wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbs<br>Because we're hungry. Who, in all this world,<br>(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,<br>And learn what good is by its opposite)<br>Has never hungered? Woe to him who has found<br>The meal enough: if Ugolino's full,<br>His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:<br>For here satiety proves penury<br>More utterly irremediable. And since<br>We needs must hunger,–better, for man's love,<br>Than God's truth! better, for companions sweet,<br>Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,<br>Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Well, well, they say we're envious, we who rhyme;<br>But I, because I am a woman, perhaps,<br>And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.<br>I never envied Graham his breadth of style,<br>Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,<br>(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)<br>Such delicate perspectives of full life;<br>Nor Belmore, for the unity of aim<br>To which he cuts his cedarn poems, fine<br>As sketchers do their pencils; not Mark Gage,<br>For that caressing colour and trancing tone<br>Whereby you're swept away and melted in<br>The sensual element, which, with a back wave,<br>Restores you to the level of pure souls<br>And leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,<br>For native gifts or popular applause,<br>I've envied; but for this,–that when, by chance,<br>Says some one,–'There goes Belmore, a great man!<br>He leaves clean work behind him, and requires<br>No sweeper up of the chips,' . . a girl I know,<br>Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,<br>Smiles unawares, as if a guardian saint<br>Smiled in her:–for this, too,–that Gage comes home<br>And lays his last book's prodigal review<br>Upon his mother's knees, where, years ago,<br>He had laid his childish spelling-book and learned<br>To chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,<br>As young birds must. 'Well done,' she murmured then,<br>She will not say it now more wonderingly;<br>And yet the last 'Well done' will touch him more,<br>As catching up to-day and yesterday<br>In a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage,<br>I envy you your mother!–and you, Graham,<br>Because you have a wife who loves you so,<br>She half forgets, at moments, to be proud<br>Of being Graham's wife, until a friend observes,<br>'The boy here, has his father's massive brow,<br>Done small in wax . . if we push back the curls.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Who loves me? Dearest father,–mother sweet,–<br>I speak the names out sometimes by myself,<br>And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,<br>As Hindostanee to an Ind-born man<br>Accustomed many years to English speech;<br>Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,<br>Which will not leave off singing. Up in heaven<br>I have my father,–with my mother's face<br>Beside him in a blotch of heavenly light;<br>No more for earth's familiar household use,<br>No more! The best verse written by this hand,<br>Can never reach them where they sit, to seem<br>Well-done to them. Death quite unfellows us,<br>Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,<br>And makes us part as those at Babel did,<br>Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.<br>A living Cæsar would not dare to play<br>At bowls, with such as my dead father is.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And yet, this may be less so than appears,<br>This change and separation. Sparrows five<br>For just two farthings, and God cares for each.<br>If God is not too great for little cares,<br>Is any creature, because gone to God?<br>I've seen some men, veracious, nowise mad,<br>Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified,<br>They've heard the Dead a-ticking like a clock<br>Which strikes the hours of the eternities,<br>Beside them, with their natural ears, and known<br>That human spirits feel the human way,<br>And hate the unreasoning awe which waves them off<br>From possible communion. It may be.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At least, earth separates as well as heaven.<br>For instance, I have not seen Romney Leigh<br>Full eighteen months . . add six, you get two years.<br>They say he's very busy with good works,–<br>Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses.<br>He made an almshouse of his heart one day,<br>Which ever since is loose upon the latch<br>For those who pull the string.–I never did.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It always makes me sad to go abroad;<br>And now I'm sadder that I went to-night<br>Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe's.<br>His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,<br>And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calm<br>As her other jewels. If she's somewhat cold,<br>Who wonders, when her blood has stood so long<br>In the ducal reservoir she calls her line<br>By no means arrogantly? she's not proud;<br>Not prouder than the swan is of the lake<br>He has always swum in;–'tis her element,<br>And so she takes it with a natural grace,<br>Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,<br>There are men, move on without outriders,<br>Which isn't her fault. Ah, to watch her face,<br>When good Lord Howe expounds his theories<br>Of social justice and equality–<br>'Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bend<br>Her neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,<br>Such clever talk–that dear, odd Algernon!'<br>She listens on, exactly as if he talked<br>Some Scandinavian myth of Lemures,<br>Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She's gracious to me as her husband's friend,<br>And would be gracious, were I not a Leigh,<br>Being used to smile just so, without her eyes,<br>On Joseph Strangways, the Leeds mesmerist,<br>And Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from 'the States'<br>Upon the 'Woman's question.' Then, for him,<br>I like him . . he's my friend. And all the rooms<br>Were full of crinkling silks that swept about<br>The fine dust of most subtle courtesies.<br>What then?–why then, we come home to be sad.<br>How lovely One I love not, looked to-night!<br>She's very pretty, Lady Waldemar.<br>Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil<br>Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich<br>Bronze rounds should slip :–she missed, though, a grey hair,<br>A single one,–I saw it; otherwise<br>The woman looked immortal. How they told,<br>Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,<br>On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,<br>Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!<br>They split the amaranth velvet-boddice down<br>To the waist, or nearly, with the audacious press<br>Of full-breathed beauty. If the heart within<br>Were half as white!–but, if it were, perhaps<br>The breast were closer covered, and the sight<br>Less aspectable, by half, too.<br> I heard<br>The young man with the German student's look–<br>A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick,<br>Which shot up straight against the parting line<br>So equally dividing the long hair,–<br>Say softly to his neighbour, (thirty-five<br>And mediæval) 'Look that way, Sir Blaise.<br>She's Lady Waldemar–to the left,–in red–<br>Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,<br>Is soon to marry.'<br> Then replied<br>Sir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priest-like voice,<br>Too used to syllable damnations round<br>To make a natural emphasis worth while:<br>'Is Leigh your ablest man? the same, I think,<br>Once jilted by a recreant pretty maid<br>Adopted from the people? Now, in change,<br>He seems to have plucked a flower from the other side<br>Of the social hedge.'<br> 'A flower, a flower,' exclaimed<br>My German student,–his own eyes full-blown<br>Bent on her. He was twenty, certainly.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sir Blaise resumed with gentle arrogance,<br>As if he had dropped his alms into a hat,<br>And had the right to counsel,–'My young friend,<br>I doubt your ablest man's ability<br>To get the least good or help meet for him,<br>For pagan phalanstery or Christian home,<br>From such a flowery creature.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Beautiful!'<br>My student murmured, rapt,–'Mark how she stirs<br>Just waves her head, as if a flower indeed,<br>Touched far off by the vain breath of our talk.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At which that bilious Grimwald, (he who writes<br>For the Renovator) who had seemed absorbed<br>Upon the table-book of autographs,<br>(I dare say mentally he crunched the bones<br>Of all those writers, wishing them alive<br>To feel his tooth in earnest) turned short round<br>With low carnivorous laugh,–'A flower, of course!<br>She neither sews nor spins,–and takes no thought<br>Of her garments . . falling off.'<br> The student flinched,<br>Sir Blaise, the same; then both, drawing back their chairs<br>As if they spied black-beetles on the floor,<br>Pursued their talk, without a word being thrown<br>To the critic.<br> Good Sir Blaise's brow is high<br>And noticeably narrow; a strong wind,<br>You fancy, might unroof him suddenly,<br>And blow that great top attic off his head<br>So piled with feudal relics. You admire<br>His nose in profile, though you miss his chin;<br>But, though you miss his chin, you seldom miss<br>His golden cross worn innermostly, (carved<br>For penance, by a saintly Styrian monk<br>Whose flesh was too much with him,) slipping trough<br>Some unaware unbuttoned casualty<br>Of the under-waistcoat. With an absent air<br>Sir Blaise sate fingering it and speaking low,<br>While I, upon the sofa, heard it all.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyes<br>Like blessedest St. Lucy, on a plate,<br>They would not trick us into choosing wives,<br>As doublets, by the colour. Otherwise<br>Our fathers chose,–and therefore, when they had hung<br>Their household keys about a lady's waist,<br>The sense of duty gave her dignity:<br>She kept her bosom holy to her babes;<br>And, if a moralist reproved her dress,<br>'Twas, 'Too much starch!'–and not, 'Too little lawn!'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Now, pshaw!' returned the other in a heat,<br>A little fretted by being called 'young friend,'<br>Or so I took it,–'for St. Lucy's sake,<br>If she's the saint to curse by, let us leave<br>Our fathers,–plagued enough about our sons!'<br>(He stroked his beardless chin) 'yes, plagued, sir, plagued:<br>The future generations lie on us<br>As heavy as the nightmare of a seer;<br>Our meat and drink grow painful prophecy:<br>I ask you,–have we leisure, if we liked,<br>To hollow out our weary hands to keep<br>Your intermittent rushlight of the past<br>From draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,<br>And marriage-laws . . the socket drops them through<br>While we two speak,–however may protest<br>Some over-delicate nostrils, like our own,<br>'Gainst odours thence arising.'<br> 'You are young,'<br>Sir Blaise objected.<br> 'If I am,' he said<br>With fire,–'though somewhat less so than I seem.<br>The young run on before, and see the thing<br>That's coming. Reverence for the young, I cry.<br>In that new church for which the world's near ripe,<br>You'll have the younger in the elder's chair,<br>Presiding with his ivory front of hope<br>O'er foreheads clawed by cruel carrion birds<br>Of life's experience.'<br> 'Pray your blessing, sir,'<br>Sir Blaise replied good-humouredly,–'I plucked<br>A silver hair this morning from my beard,<br>Which left me your inferior. Would I were<br>Eighteen, and worthy to admonish you!<br>If young men of your order run before<br>To see such sights as sexual prejudice<br>And marriage-law dissolved,–in plainer words,<br>A general concubinage expressed<br>In a universal pruriency,–the thing<br>Is scarce worth running fast for, and you'd gain<br>By loitering with your elders.'<br> 'Ah,' he said,<br>'Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill,<br>Can talk with one at the bottom of the view,<br>To make it comprehensible? Why Leigh<br>Himself, although our ablest man, I said,<br>Is scarce advanced to see as far as this,<br>Which some are: he takes up imperfectly<br>The social question–by one handle–leaves<br>The rest to trail. A Christian socialist,<br>Is Romney Leigh, you understand.'<br> 'Not I.<br>I disbelieve in Christians-pagans, much<br>As you in women-fishes. If we mix<br>Two colours, we lose both, and make a third<br>Distinct from either. Mark you! to mistake<br>A colour is the sign of a sick brain,<br>And mine, I thank the saints, is clear and cool:<br>A neutral tint is here impossible.<br>The church,–and by the church, I mean, of course,<br>The catholic, apostolic, mother-church,–<br>Draws lines as plain and straight as her own wall;<br>Inside of which, are Christians, obviously,<br>And outside . . dogs.'<br> 'We thank you. Well I know<br>The ancient mother-church would fain still bite<br>For all her toothless gums,–as Leigh himself<br>Would fain be a Christian still, for all his wit;<br>Pass that; you two may settle it, for me.<br>You're slow in England. In a month I learnt<br>At Göttingen, enough philosophy<br>To stock your English schools for fifty years;<br>Pass that, too. Here, alone, I stop you short,<br>–Supposing a true man like Leigh could stand<br>Unequal in the stature of his life<br>To the height of his opinions. Choose a wife<br>Because of a smooth skin?–not he, not he!<br>He'd rail at Venus' self for creaking shoes,<br>Unless she walked his way of righteousness:<br>And if he takes a Venus Meretrix<br>(No imputation on the lady there)<br>Be sure that, by some sleight of Christian art,<br>He has metamorphosed and converted her<br>To a Blessed Virgin.'<br> 'Soft!' Sir Blaise drew breath<br>As if it hurt him,–'Soft! no blasphemy,<br>I pray you!'<br> 'The first Christians did the thing;<br>Why not the last?' asked he of Göttingen,<br>With just that shade of sneering on the lip,<br>Compensates for the lagging of the beard,–<br>'And so the case is. If that fairest fair<br>Is talked of as the future wife of Leigh,<br>She's talked of, too, at least as certainly,<br>As Leigh's disciple. You may find her name<br>On all his missions and commissions, school,<br>Asylums, hospitals,–he has had her down,<br>With other ladies whom her starry lead<br>Persuaded from their spheres, to his country-place<br>In Shropshire, to the famed phalanstery<br>At Leigh Hall, christianised from Fourier's own,<br>(In which he has planted out his sapling stocks<br>Of knowledge into social nurseries)<br>And there, they say, she has tarried half a week,<br>And milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,<br>And said 'my sister' to the lowest drab<br>Of all the assembled castaways; such girls!<br>Ay, sided with them at the washing-tub–<br>Conceive, Sir Blaise, those naked perfect arms,<br>Round glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,<br>Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lord Howe came up. 'What, talking poetry<br>So near the image of the unfavouring Muse?<br>That's you, Miss Leigh: I've watched you half an hour,<br>Precisely as I watched the statue called<br>A Pallas in the Vatican;–you mind<br>The face, Sir Blaise?–intensely calm and sad,<br>As wisdom cut it off from fellowship,–<br>But that spoke louder. Not a word from you!<br>And these two gentlemen were bold, I marked,<br>And unabashed by even your silence.'<br> 'Ah,'<br>Said I, 'my dear Lord Howe, you shall not speak<br>To a printing woman who has lost her place,<br>(The sweet safe corner of the household fire<br>Behind the heads of children) compliments<br>As if she were a woman. We who have clipt<br>The curls before our eyes, may see at least<br>As plain as men do: speak out, man to man;<br>No compliments, beseech you.'<br> 'Friend to friend,<br>Let that be. We are sad to-night, I saw,<br>(–Good night, Sir Blaise! Ah, Smith–he has slipped away)<br>I saw you across the room, and stayed, Miss Leigh,<br>To keep a crowd of lion-hunters off,<br>With faces toward your jungle. There were three;<br>A spacious lady, five feet ten and fat,<br>Who has the devil in her (and there's room)<br>For walking to and fro upon the earth,<br>From Chippewa to China; she requires<br>Your autograph upon a tinted leaf<br>'Twixt Queen Pomare's and Emperor Soulouque's;<br>Pray give it; she has energies, though fat:<br>For me, I'd rather see a rick on fire<br>Than such a woman angry. Then a youth<br>Fresh from the backwoods, green as the underboughs,<br>Asks modestly, Miss Leigh, to kiss your shoe,<br>And adds, he has an epic, in twelve parts,<br>Which when you've read, you'll do it for his boot,–<br>All which I saved you, and absorb next week<br>Both manuscript and man,–because a lord<br>Is still more potent that a poetess,<br>With any extreme republican. Ah, ah,<br>You smile at last, then.'<br> 'Thank you.'<br> 'Leave the smile,<br>I'll lose the thanks for't,–ay, and throw you in<br>My transatlantic girl, with golden eyes,<br>That draw you to her splendid whiteness, as<br>The pistil of a water-lily draws,<br>Adust with gold. Those girls across the sea<br>Are tyrannously pretty,–and I swore<br>(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl)<br>To bring her to you for a woman's kiss,<br>Not now, but on some other day or week:<br>–We'll call it perjury; I give her up.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'No, bring her.'<br> 'Now,' said he, 'you make it hard<br>To touch such goodness with a grimy palm.<br>I thought to tease you well, and fret you cross,<br>And steel myself, when rightly vexed with you,<br>For telling you a thing to tease you more.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Of Romney?'<br> 'No, no; nothing worse,' he cried,<br>'Of Romney Leigh, than what is buzzed about,–<br>That he is taken in an eye-trap too,<br>Like many half as wise. The thing I mean<br>Refers to you, not him.'<br> 'Refers to me,'<br>He echoed,–'Me! You sound it like a stone<br>Dropped down a dry well very listlessly,<br>By one who never thinks about the toad<br>Alive at the bottom. Presently perhaps<br>You'll sound your 'me' more proudly–till I shrink.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lord Howe's the toad, then, in this question?'<br> 'Brief,<br>We'll take it graver. Give me sofa-room,<br>And quiet hearing. You know Eglinton,<br>John Eglinton, of Eglinton in Kent?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Is he the toad?–he's rather like the snail;<br>Known chiefly for the house upon his back:<br>Divide the man and house–you kill the man;<br>That's Eglinton of Eglinton, Lord Howe.'<br>He answered grave. 'A reputable man,<br>An excellent landlord of the olden stamp,<br>If somewhat slack in new philanthropies;<br>Who keeps his birthdays with a tenants' dance,<br>Is hard upon them when they miss the church<br>Or keep their children back from catechism,<br>But not ungentle when the aged poor<br>Pick sticks at hedge-sides; nay, I've heard him say<br>'The old dame has a twinge because she stoops:<br>'That's punishment enough for felony.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'O tender-hearted landlord! May I take<br>My long lease with him, when the time arrives<br>For gathering winter-faggots?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'He likes art,<br>Buys books and pictures . . of a certain kind;<br>Neglects no patient duty; a good son' . . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'To a most obedient mother. Born to wear<br>His father's shoes, he wears her husband's too:<br>Indeed, I've heard its touching. Dear Lord Howe,<br>You shall not praise me so against your heart,<br>When I'm at worst for praise and faggots.'<br> 'Be<br>Less bitter with me, for . . in short,' he said,<br>'I have a letter, which he urged me so<br>To bring you . . I could scarcely choose but yield<br>Insisting that a new love passing through<br>The hand of an old friendship, caught from it<br>Some reconciling perfume.'<br> 'Love, you say?<br>My lord, I cannot love. I only find<br>The rhymes for love,–and that's not love, my lord.<br>Take back your letter.'<br> 'Pause: you'll read it first?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'I will not read it: it is stereotyped;<br>The same he wrote to,–anybody's name,–<br>Anne Blythe, the a�ctress, when she had died so true,<br>A duchess fainted in an open box:<br>Pauline, the dancer, after the great pas,<br>In which her little feet winked overhead<br>Like other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:<br>Or Baldinacci, when her F in alt<br>Had touched the silver tops of heaven itself<br>With such a pungent soul-dart, even the Queen<br>Laid softly, each to each, her white-gloved palms,<br>And sighed for joy: or else (I thank your friend)<br>Aurora Leigh,–when some indifferent rhymes,<br>Like those the boys sang round the holy ox<br>On Memphis-road, have chanced, perhaps, to set<br>Our Apis-public lowing. Oh, he wants,<br>Instead of any worthy wife at home,<br>A star upon his stage of Eglinton!<br>Advise him that he is not overshrewd<br>In being so little modest: a dropped star<br>Makes bitter waters, says a Book I've read,–<br>And there's his unread letter,'<br> 'My dear friend,'<br>Lord Howe began . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> In haste I tore the phrase.<br>'You mean your friend of Eglinton, or me?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'I mean you, you,' he answered with some fire.<br>'A happy life means prudent compromise;<br>The tare runs through the farmer's garnered sheaves;<br>But though the gleaner's apron holds pure wheat,<br>We count her poorer. Tare with wheat, we cry,<br>And good with drawbacks. You, you love your art,<br>And, certain of vocation, set your soul<br>On utterance. Only, . . in this world we have made,<br>(They say God made it first, but, if He did,<br>'Twas so long since, . . and, since, we have spoiled it so,<br>He scarce would know it, if He looked this way,<br>From hells we preach of, with the flames blown out,)<br>In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world,<br>Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost,–<br>In this uneven, unfostering England here,<br>Where ledger-strokes and sword-strokes count indeed,<br>But soul-strokes merely tell upon the flesh<br>They strike from,–it is hard to stand for art,<br>Unless some golden tripod from the sea<br>Be fished up, by Apollo's divine chance,<br>To throne such feet as yours, my prophetess,<br>At Delphi. Think,–the god comes down as fierce<br>As twenty bloodhounds! shakes you, strangles you,<br>Until the oracular shriek shall ooze in froth!<br>At best it's not all ease,–at worst too hard:<br>A place to stand on is a 'vantage gained,<br>And here's your tripod. To be plain, dear friend,<br>You're poor, except in what you richly give;<br>You labour for your own bread painfully,<br>Or ere you pour our wine. For art's sake, pause.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I answered slow,–as some wayfaring man,<br>Who feels himself at night too far from home,<br>Makes stedfast face against the bitter wind.<br>'Is art so less a thing than virtue is,<br>That artists first must cater for their ease<br>Or ever they make issue past themselves<br>To generous use? alas, and is it so,<br>That we, who would be somewhat clean, must sweep<br>Our ways as well as walk them, and no friend<br>Confirm us nobly,–'Leave results to God,<br>But you be clean?' What! 'prudent compromise<br>Makes acceptable life,' you say instead,<br>You, you, Lord Howe?–in things indifferent, well.<br>For instance, compromise the wheaten bread<br>For rye, the meat for lentils, silk for serge,<br>And sleep on down, if needs, for sleep on straw;<br>But there, end compromise. I will not bate<br>One artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,<br>Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,<br>Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So speaking, with less anger in my voice<br>Than sorrow, I rose quickly to depart;<br>While he, thrown back upon the noble shame<br>Of such high-stumbling natures, murmured words,<br>The right words after wrong ones. Ah, the man<br>Is worthy, but so given to entertain<br>Impossible plans of superhuman life,–<br>He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,<br>To keep them at the grand millennial height,<br>He has to mount a stool to get at them;<br>And meantime, lives on quite the common way,<br>With everybody's morals.<br> As we passed,<br>Lord Howe insisting that his friendly arm<br>Should oar me across the sparkling brawling stream<br>Which swept from room to room, we fell at once<br>On Lady Waldemar. 'Miss Leigh,' she said,<br>And gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,<br>As if she tried it in a 'tiring glass<br>And liked it; 'all to-night I've strained at you,<br>As babes at baubles held up out of reach<br>By spiteful nurses, ('Never snatch,' they say,)<br>And there you sate, most perfectly shut in<br>By good Sir Blaize and clever Mister Smith,<br>And then our dear Lord Howe! at last, indeed,<br>I almost snatched. I have a world to speak<br>About your cousin's place in Shropshire, where<br>I've been to see his work . . our work,–you heard<br>I went? . . and of a letter yesterday,<br>In which, if I should read a page or two,<br>You might feel interest, though you're locked of course<br>In literary toil.–You'll like to hear<br>Your last book lies at the phalanstery,<br>As judged innocuous for the elder girls<br>And younger women who still care for books.<br>We all must read, you see, before we live:<br>But slowly the ineffable light comes up,<br>And, as it deepens, drowns the written word,–<br>So said your cousin, while we stood and felt<br>A sunset from his favorite beech-tree seat:<br>He might have been a poet if he would,<br>But then he saw the higher thing at once,<br>And climbed to it. It think he looks well now,<br>Has quite got over that unfortunate . .<br>Ah, ah . . I know it moved you. Tender-heart!<br>You took a liking to the wretched girl.<br>Perhaps you thought the marriage suitable,<br>Who knows? a poet hankers for romance,<br>And so on. As for Romney Leigh, 'tis sure<br>He never loved her,–never. By the way,<br>You have not heard of her . .? quite out of sight.<br>And out of saving? lost in every sense?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She might have gone on talking half-an-hour,<br>And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,<br>As a garden-statue a child pelts with snow<br>For pretty pastime. Every now and then<br>I put in 'yes' or 'no,' I scarce knew why;<br>The blind man walks wherever the dog pulls,<br>And so I answered. Till Lord Howe broke in;<br>'What penance takes the wretch who interrupts<br>The talk of charming women? I, at last,<br>Must brave it. Pardon, Lady Waldemar!<br>The lady on my arm is tired, unwell,<br>And loyally I've promised she may say<br>Nor harder word this evening, than . . goodnight;<br>The rest her face speaks for her.'–Then we went.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak,<br>Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that ties<br>My hair . . now could I but unloose my soul!<br>We are sepulchred alive in this close world,<br>And want more room.<br> The charming woman there–<br>This reckoning up and writing down her talk<br>Affects me singularly. How she talked<br>To pain me! woman's spite!–You wear steel-mail;<br>A woman takes a housewife from her breast,<br>And plucks the delicatest needle out<br>As 'twere a rose, and pricks you carefully<br>'Neath nails, 'neath eyelids, in your nostrils,–say,<br>A beast would roar so tortured,–but a man,<br>A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,<br>No, not for shame.<br> What vexes after all,<br>Is just that such as she, with such as I,<br>Knows how to vex. Sweet heaven, she takes me up<br>As if she had fingered me and dog-eared me<br>And spelled me by the fireside, half a life!<br>She knows my turns, my feeble points,–What then?<br>The knowledge of a thing implies the thing;<br>Of course she found that in me, she saw that,<br>Her pencil underscored this for a fault,<br>And I, still ignorant. Shut the book up! close!<br>And crush that beetle in the leaves.<br> O heart,<br>At last we shall grow hard too, like the rest,<br>And call it self-defence because we are soft.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And after all, now, . . why should I be pained,<br>That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouse<br>This Lady Waldemar? And, say, she held<br>Her newly-blossomed gladness in my face, . .<br>'Twas natural surely, if not generous,<br>Considering how, when winter held her fast,<br>I helped the frost with mine, and pained her more<br>Than she pains me. Pains me!–but wherefore pained?<br>'Tis clear my cousin Romney wants a wife,–<br>So, good!–The man's need of the woman, here,<br>Is greater than the woman's of the man,<br>And easier served; for where the man discerns<br>A sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,<br>Said he) we see but one, ideally<br>And really: where we yearn to lose ourselves<br>And melt like white pearls in another's wine,<br>He seeks to double himself by what he loves,<br>And make his drink more costly by our pearls.<br>At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,<br>It is not good for a man to be alone,–<br>And that's his way of thinking, first and last;<br>And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But then my cousin sets his dignity<br>On personal virtue. If he understands<br>By love, like others, self-aggrandisement,<br>It is that he may verily be great<br>By doing rightly and kindly. Once he thought,<br>For charitable ends set duly forth<br>In heaven's white judgement-book, to marry . . ah,<br>We'll call her name Aurora Leigh, although<br>She's changed since then!–and once, for social ends,<br>Poor Marian Erle, my sister Marian Erle,<br>My woodland sister, sweet Maid Marian,<br>Whose memory moans on in me like the wind<br>Through ill-shut casements, making me more sad<br>Than ever I find reasons for. Alas,<br>Poor pretty plaintive face, embodied ghost,<br>He finds it easy, then, to clap thee off<br>From pulling at his sleeve and book and pen,–<br>He locks thee out at night into the cold,<br>Away from butting with thy horny eyes<br>Against his crystal dreams,–that, now, he's strong<br>To love anew? that Lady Waldemar<br>Succeeds my Marian?<br> After all, why not?<br>He loved not Marian, more than once he loved<br>Aurora. If he loves, at last, that Third,<br>Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oil<br>On marble floors, I will not augur him<br>Ill luck for that. Good love, howe'er ill-placed,<br>Is better for a man's soul in the end,<br>Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.<br>A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,<br>The wild-goat's hoof-print on the loamy down,<br>Exceeds our modern thinker who turns back<br>The strata . . granite, limestone, coal, and clay,<br>Concluding coldly with, 'Here's law! Where's God?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then at worse,–if Romney loves her not,–<br>At worst,–if he's incapable of love,<br>Which may be–then indeed, for such a man<br>Incapable of love, she's good enough;<br>For she, at worst too, is a woman still<br>And loves him as the sort of woman can.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My loose long hair began to burn and creep,<br>Alive to the very ends, about my knees:<br>I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,<br>With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughed<br>One day . . (how full the memories came up!)<br>'–Your Florence fire-flies live on in your hair,'<br>He said, 'it gleams so.' Well, I wrung them out,<br>My fire-flies; made a knot as hard as life,<br>Of those loose, soft, impracticable curls,<br>And then sat down and thought . . 'She shall not think<br>Her thoughts of me,'–and drew my desk and wrote.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speak<br>With people around me, nor can sleep to-night<br>And not speak, after the great news I heard<br>Of you and of my cousin. My you be<br>Most happy; and the good he meant the world,<br>Replenish his own life. Say what I say,<br>And let my word be sweeter for your mouth,<br>As you are you . . I only Aurora Leigh.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That's quiet, guarded! Though she hold it up<br>Against the light, she'll not see through it more<br>Than lies there to be seen. So much for pride;<br>And now for peace, a little! Let me stop<br>All writing back . . 'Sweet thanks, my sweetest friend,<br>'You've made more joyful my great joy itself.'<br>–No, that's too simple! she would twist it thus,<br>'My joy would still be as sweet as thyme in drawers,<br>However shut up in the dark and dry;<br>But violets, aired and dewed by love like yours,<br>Out-smell all thyme! we keep that in our clothes,<br>But drop the other down our bosoms, till<br>they smell like' . . ah, I see her writing back<br>Just so. She'll make a nosegay of her words,<br>And tie it with blue ribbons at the end<br>To suit a poet;–pshaw!<br> And then we'll have<br>The call to church; the broken, sad, bad dream<br>Dreamed out at last; the marriage-vow complete<br>With the marriage-breakfast; praying in white gloves,<br>Drawn off in haste for drinking pagan toasts<br>In somewhat stronger wine than any sipped<br>By gods, since Bacchus had his way with grapes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A postscript stops all that, and rescues me.<br>'You need not write. I have been overworked,<br>And think of leaving London, England, even,<br>And hastening to get nearer to the sun,<br>Where men sleep better. So, adieu,'–I fold<br>And seal,–and now I'm out of all the coil;<br>I breathe now; I spring upward like a branch,<br>A ten-years school-boy with a crooked stick<br>May pull down to his level, in search of nuts,<br>But cannot hold a moment. How we twang<br>Back on the blue sky, and assert our height,<br>While he stares after! Now, the wonder seems<br>That I could wrong myself by such a doubt.<br>We poets always have uneasy hearts;<br>Because our hearts, large-rounded as the globe,<br>Can turn but one side to the sun at once.<br>We are used to dip our artist-hands in gall<br>And potash, trying potentialities<br>Of alternated colour, till at last<br>We get confused, and wonder for our skin<br>How nature tinged it first. Well–here's the true<br>Good flesh-colour; I recognise my hand,–<br>Which Romney Leigh may clasp as just a friend's,<br>And keep his clean.<br> And now, my Italy.<br>Alas, if we could ride with naked souls<br>And make no noise and pay no price at all,<br>I would have seen thee sooner, Italy,–<br>For still I have heard thee crying through my life,<br>Thou piercing silence of ecstatic graves,<br>Men call that name!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> But even a witch, to-day,<br>Must melt down golden pieces in the nard<br>Wherewith to anoint her broomstick ere she rides;<br>And poets evermore are scant of gold,<br>And, if they find a piece behind the door,<br>It turns by sunset to a withered leaf.<br>The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented<br>Gold-making art to any who make rhymes,<br>But culls his Faustus from philosophers<br>And not from poets. 'Leave my Job,' said God;<br>And so, the Devil leaves him without pence,<br>And poverty proves, plainly, special grace.<br>In these new, just, administrative times,<br>Men clamour for an order of merit. Why?<br>Here's black bread on the table, and no wine!<br>At least I am a poet in being poor;<br>Thank God. I wonder if the manuscript<br>Of my long poem, it 'twere sold outright,<br>Would fetch enough to buy me shoes, to go<br>A-foot, (thrown in, the necessary patch<br>For the other side the Alps)? it cannot be:<br>I fear that I must sell this residue<br>Of my father's books; although the Elzevirs<br>Have fly-leaves over-written by his hand,<br>In faded notes as thick and fine and brown<br>as cobwebs on a tawny monument<br>Of the old Greeks–conferenda hoec cum his–<br>Corruptè citat–lege potiùs,<br>And so on, in the scholar's regal way<br>Of giving judgment on the parts of speech,<br>As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,<br>Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books and notes<br>Must go together. And this Proclus too,<br>In quaintly dear contracted Grecian types,<br>Fantastically crumpled, like his thoughts<br>Which would not seem too plain; you go round twice<br>For one step forward, then you take it back<br>Because you're somewhat giddy! there's the rule<br>For Proclus. Ah, I stained this middle leaf<br>With pressing in't my Florentine iris-bell,<br>Long stalk and all; my father chided me<br>For that stain of blue blood,–I recollect<br>The peevish turn his voice took,–'Silly girls,<br>Who plant their flowers in our philosophy<br>To make it fine, and only spoil the book!<br>No more of it, Aurora.' Yes–no more!<br>Ah, blame of love, that's sweeter than all praise<br>Of those who love not! 'tis so lost to me,<br>I cannot, in such beggared life, afford<br>To lose my Proclus. Not for Florence, even.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The kissing Judas, Wolff, shall go instead,<br>Who builds us such a royal book as this<br>To honour a chief-poet, folio-built,<br>And writes above, 'The house of Nobody:'<br>Who floats in cream, as rich as any sucked<br>From Juno's breasts, the broad Homeric lines,<br>And, while with their spondaic prodigious mouths<br>They lap the lucent margins as babe-gods,<br>Proclaims them bastards. Wolff's an atheist;<br>And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,<br>By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,<br>We'll guess as much, too, for the universe.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That Wolff, those Platos: sweep the upper shelves<br>As clean as this, and so I am almost rich,<br>Which means, not forced to think of being poor<br>In sight of ends. To-morrow: no delay.<br>I'll wait in Paris till good Carrington<br>Dispose of such, and, having chaffered for<br>My book's price with the publisher, direct<br>All proceeds to me. Just a line to ask<br>His help.<br> And now I come, my Italy,<br>My own hills! are you 'ware of me, my hills,<br>How I burn toward you? do you feel to-night<br>The urgency and yearning of my soul,<br>As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe<br>And smile?–Nay, not so much as when, in heat,<br>Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops,<br>And tremble while ye are stedfast. Still, ye go<br>Your own determined, calm, indifferent way<br>Toward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light;<br>Of all the grand progression nought left out;<br>As if God verily made you for yourselves,<br>And would not interrupt your life with ours.</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> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <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=116058" data-title="Fifth Book de Elizabeth Barrett Browning" data-description="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 thi..."></div> </div> </div>

solid border dashed border dotted border double border groove border ridge border inset border outset border no border blue green red purple cyan gold silver black