<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116061" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Eighth Book</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">ONE eve it happened when I sate alone,<br>Alone upon the terrace of my tower,<br>A book upon my knees, to counterfeit<br>The reading that I never read at all,<br>While Marian, in the garden down below,<br>Knelt by the fountain (I could just hear thrill<br>The drowsy silence of the exhausted day)<br>And peeled a new fig from that purple heap<br>In the grass beside her,–turning out the red<br>To feed her eager child, who sucked at it<br>With vehement lips across a gap of air<br>As he stood opposite, face and curls a-flame<br>With that last sun-ray, crying, 'give me, give,'<br>And stamping with imperious baby-feet,<br>(We're all born princes)–something startled me,–<br>The laugh of sad and innocent souls, that breaks<br>Abruptly, as if frightened at itself;<br>'Twas Marian laughed. I saw her glance above<br>In sudden shame that I should hear her laugh,<br>And straightway dropped my eyes upon my book,<br>And knew, the first time, 'twas Boccaccio's tales,<br>The Falcon's,–of the lover who for love<br>Destroyed the best that loved him. Some of us<br>Do it still, and then we sit and laugh no more.<br>Laugh you, sweet Marian! you've the right to laugh,<br>Since God himself is for you, and a child!<br>For me there's somewhat less,–and so, I sigh.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The heavens were making room to hold the night,<br>The sevenfold heavens unfolding all their gates<br>To let the stars out slowly (prophesied<br>In close-approaching advent, not discerned),<br>While still the cue-owls from the cypresses<br>Of the Poggio called and counted every pulse<br>Of the skyey palpitation. Gradually<br>The purple and transparent shadows slow<br>Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,<br>And flooded all the city, which you saw<br>As some drowned city in some enchanted sea,<br>Cut off from nature,–drawing you who gaze,<br>With passionate desire, to leap and plunge,<br>And find a sea-king with a voice of waves,<br>And treacherous soft eyes, and slippery locks<br>You cannot kiss but you shall bring away<br>Their salt upon your lips. The duomo-bell<br>Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down,<br>So deep; and fifty churches answer it<br>The same, with fifty various instances.<br>Some gaslights tremble along squares and streets<br>The Pitti's palace-front is drawn in fire:<br>And, past the quays, Maria Novella's Place,<br>In which the mystic obelisks stand up<br>Triangular, pyramidal, each based<br>On a single trine of brazen tortoises,<br>To guard that fair church, Buonarroti's Bride,<br>That stares out from her large blind dial-eyes,<br>Her quadrant and armillary dials, black<br>With rhythms of many suns and moons, in vain<br>Enquiry for so rich a soul as his,–<br>Methinks I have plunged, I see it all so clear . . .<br>And, oh my heart . . .the sea-king!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> In my ears<br>The sound of waters. There he stood, my king!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I felt him, rather than beheld him. Up<br>I rose, as if he were my king indeed,<br>And then sate down, in trouble at myself,<br>And struggling for my woman's empery.<br>'Tis pitiful; but women are so made:<br>We'll die for you, perhaps,–'tis probable:<br>But we'll not spare you an inch of our full height:<br>We'll have our whole just stature,–five feet four,<br>Though laid out in our coffins: pitiful!<br>–'You, Romney!––Lady Waldemar is here?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He answered in a voice which was not his,<br>'I have her letter; you shall read it soon:<br>But first, I must be heard a little, I,<br>Who have waited long and travelled far for that,<br>Although you thought to have shut a tedious book<br>And farewell. Ah, you dog-eared such a page,<br>And here you find me.'<br> Did he touch my hand,<br>Or but my sleeve? I trembled, hand and foot,–<br>He must have touched me.–'Will you sit?' I asked,<br>And motioned to a chair; but down he sate,<br>A little slowly, as a man in doubt,<br>Upon the couch beside me,–couch and chair<br>Being wheeled upon the terrace.<br> 'You are come,<br>My cousin Romney?–this is wonderful.<br>But all is wonder on such summer-nights;<br>And nothing should surprise us any more,<br>Who see that miracle of stars. Behold.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I signed above, where all the stars were out,<br>As if an urgent heat had started there<br>A secret writing from a sombre page,<br>A blank last moment, crowded suddenly<br>With hurrying splendours.<br> 'Then you do not know–<br>He murmured.<br> 'Yes, I know,' I said, 'I know.<br>I had the news from Vincent Carrington.<br>And yet I did not think you'd leave the work<br>In England, for so much even,–though, of course,<br>You'll make a work-day of your holiday,<br>And turn it to our Tuscan people's use,–<br>Who much need helping since the Austrian boar<br>(So bold to cross the Alp by Lombardy<br>And dash his brute front unabashed against<br>The steep snow-bosses of that shield of God,<br>Who soon shall rise in wrath and shake it clear<br>Came hither also,–raking up our vines<br>And olive-gardens with his tyrannous tusks,<br>And rolling on our maize with all his swine.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'You had the news from Vincent Carrington,'<br>He echoed,–picking up the phrase beyond,<br>As if he knew the rest was merely talk<br>To fill a gap and keep out a strong wind,–<br>'You had, then, Vincent's personal news?'<br> 'His own,<br>I answered, 'All that ruined world of yours<br>Seems crumbling into marriage. Carrington<br>Has chosen wisely.'<br> 'Do you take it so?'<br>He cried, 'and is it possible at last' . .<br>He paused there,–and then, inward to himself,<br>'Too much at last, too late!–yet certainly' . .<br>(And there his voice swayed as an Alpine plank<br>That feels a passionate torrent underneath)<br>'The knowledge, if I had known it, first or last,<br>Had never changed the actual case for me.<br>And best, for her, at this time.'<br> Nay, I thought,<br>He loves Kate Ward, it seems, now, like a man,<br>Because he has married Lady Waldemar.<br>Ah, Vincent's letter said how Leigh was moved<br>To hear that Vincent was betrothed to Kate.<br>With what cracked pitchers go we to deep wells<br>In this world! Then I spoke,–'I did not think,<br>My cousin, you had ever known Kate Ward.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'In fact I never knew her. 'Tis enough<br>That Vincent did, before he chose his wife<br>For other reasons than those topaz eyes<br>I've heard of. Not to undervalue them,<br>For all that. One takes up the world with eyes.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">–Including Romney Leigh, I thought again,<br>Albeit he knows them only by repute.<br>How vile must all men be, since he's a man.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">His deep pathetic voice, as if he guessed<br>I did not surely love him, took the word;<br>'You never got a letter from Lord Howe<br>A month back, dear Aurora?'<br> 'None,' I said.<br>'I felt it was so,' he replied: 'Yet, strange!<br>Sir Blaise Delorme has passed through Florence?'<br> 'Ay,<br>By chance I saw him in Our Lady's church,<br>(I saw him, mark you, but he saw not me)<br>Clean-washed in holy-water from the count<br>Of things terrestrial,–letters and the rest;<br>He had crossed us out together with his sins.<br>Ay, strange; but only strange that good Lord Howe<br>Preferred him to the post because of pauls.<br>For me I'm sworn never to trust a man–<br>At least with letters.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'There were facts to tell,–<br>To smooth with eye and accent. Howe supposed . .<br>Well, well, no matter! there was dubious need;<br>You heard the news from Vincent Carrington.<br>And yet perhaps you had been startled less<br>To see me, dear Aurora, if you had read<br>That letter.'<br> –Now he sets me down as vexed.<br>I think I've draped myself in woman's pride<br>To a perfect purpose. Oh, I'm vexed, it seems!<br>My friend Lord Howe deputes his friend Sir Blaise<br>To break as softly as a sparrow's egg<br>That lets a bird out tenderly, the news<br>Of Romney's marriage to a certain saint;<br>To smooth with eye and accent,–indicate<br>His possible presence. Excellently well<br>You've played your part, my Lady Waldemar,–<br>As I've played mine.<br> 'Dear Romney,' I began,<br>'You did not use, of old, to be so like<br>A Greek king coming from a taken Troy,<br>'Twas needful that precursors spread your path<br>With three-piled carpets, to receive your foot<br>And dull the sound of't. For myself, be sure<br>Although it frankly ground the gravel here<br>I still could bear it. Yet I'm sorry, too,<br>To lose this famous letter, which Sir Blaise<br>Has twisted to a lighter absently<br>To fire some holy taper with: Lord Howe<br>Writes letters good for all things but to lose;<br>And many a flower of London gossipry<br>Has dropt wherever such a stem broke off,–<br>Of course I know that, lonely among my vines,<br>Where nothing's talked of, save the blight again,<br>And no more Chianti! Still the letter's use<br>As preparation . . . . . Did I start indeed?<br>Last night I started at a cochchafer,<br>And shook a half-hour after. Have you learnt<br>No more of women, 'spite of privilege,<br>Than still to take account too seriously<br>Of such weak flutterings? Why, we like it, sir,–<br>We get our powers and our effects that way.<br>The trees stand stiff and still at time of frost,<br>If no wind tears them; but, let summer come,<br>When trees are happy,–and a breath avails<br>To set them trembling through a million leaves<br>In luxury of emotion. Something less<br>It takes to move a woman: let her start<br>And shake at pleasure,–nor conclude at yours,<br>The winter's bitter,–but the summer's green.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He answered, 'Be the summer ever green<br>With you, Aurora!–though you sweep your sex<br>With somewhat bitter gusts from where you live<br>Above them,–whirling downward from your heights<br>Your very own pine-cones, in a grand disdain<br>Of the lowland burrs with which you scatter them.<br>So high and cold to others and yourself,<br>A little less to Romney, were unjust,<br>And thus, I would not have you. Let it pass:<br>I feel content, so. You can bear indeed<br>My sudden step beside you: but for me,<br>'Twould move me sore to hear your softened voice,–<br>Aurora's voice,–if softened unaware<br>In pity of what I am.'<br> Ah friend, I thought,<br>As husband of the Lady Waldemar<br>You're granted very sorely pitiable!<br>And yet Aurora Leigh must guard her voice<br>From softening in the pity of your case,<br>As if from lie or licence. Certainly<br>We'll soak up all the slush and soil of life<br>With softened voices, ere we come to you.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At which I interrupted my own thought<br>And spoke out calmly. 'Let us ponder, friend,<br>Whate'er our state, we must have made it first;<br>And though the thing displease us, ay, perhaps<br>Displease us warrantably, never doubt<br>That other states, thought possible once, and then<br>Rejected by the instinct of our lives,–<br>If then adopted, had displeased us more<br>Than this, in which the choice, the will, the love,<br>Has stamped the honour of a patent act<br>From henceforth. What we choose, may not be good;<br>But, that we choose it, proves it good for us<br>Potentially, fantastically, now<br>Or last year, rather than a thing we saw,<br>And saw no need for choosing. Moths will burn<br>Their wings,–which proves that light is good for moths,<br>Or else they had flown not, where they agonise.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Ay, light is good,' he echoed, and there paused.<br>And then abruptly, . . 'Marian. Marian's well?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I bowed my head but found no word. 'Twas hard<br>To speak of her to Lady Waldemar's<br>New husband. How much did he know, at last?<br>How much? how little?––He would take no sign,<br>But straight repeated,–'Marian. Is she well?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'She's well,' I answered.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> She was there in sight<br>An hour back, but the night had drawn her home;<br>Where still I heard her in an upper room,<br>Her low voice singing to the child in bed,<br>Who restless with the summer-heat and play<br>And slumber snatched at noon, was long sometimes<br>At falling off, and took a score of songs<br>And mother-hushes, ere she saw him sound.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'She's well,' I answered.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Here?' he asked.<br> 'Yes, here.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He stopped and sighed. 'That shall be presently,<br>But now this must be. I have words to say,<br>And would be alone to say them, I with you,<br>And no third troubling.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Speak then,' I returned,<br>'She will not vex you.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> At which, suddenly<br>He turned his face upon me with its smile,<br>As if to crush me. 'I have read your book,<br>Aurora.'<br> 'You have read it,' I replied,<br>'And I have writ it,–we have done with it.<br>And now the rest?'<br> 'The rest is like the first,'<br>He answered,–'for the book is in my heart,<br>Lives in me, wakes in me, and dreams in me:<br>My daily bread tastes of it,–and my wine<br>Which has no smack of it, I pour it out;<br>It seems unnatural drinking.'<br> Bitterly<br>I took the word up; 'Never waste your wine.<br>The book lived in me ere it lived in you;<br>I know it closer than another does,<br>And that it's foolish, feeble, and afraid,<br>And all unworthy so much compliment.<br>Beseech you, keep your wine,–and, when you drink,<br>Still wish some happier fortune to your friend,<br>Than even to have written a far better book.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He answered gently, 'That is consequent:<br>The poet looks beyond the book he has made,<br>Or else he had not made it. If a man<br>Could make a man, he'd henceforth be a god<br>In feeling what a little thing is man:<br>It is not my case. And this special book,<br>I did not make it, to make light of it:<br>It stands above my knowledge, draws me up;<br>'Tis high to me. It may be that the book<br>Is not so high, but I so low, instead;<br>Still high to me. I mean no compliment:<br>I will not say there are not, young or old,<br>Male writers, ay, or female,–let it pass,<br>Who'll write us richer and completer books.<br>A man may love a woman perfectly,<br>And yet by no means ignorantly maintain<br>A thousand women have not larger eyes:<br>Enough that she alone has looked at him<br>With eyes that, large or small, have won his soul.<br>And so, this book, Aurora,–so, your book.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Alas,' I answered, 'is it so, indeed?'<br>And then was silent.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'Is it so, indeed,'<br>He echoed, 'that alas is all your word?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I said,–'I'm thinking of a far-off June,<br>When you and I, upon my birthday once,<br>Discoursed of life and art, with both untried.<br>I'm thinking, Romney, how 'twas morning then,<br>And now 'tis night.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'And now,' he said, tis night.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'I'm thinking,' I resumed, tis somewhat sad<br>That if I had known, that morning in the dew,<br>My cousin Romney would have said such words<br>On such a night, at close of many years,<br>In speaking of a future book of mine,<br>It would have pleased me better as a hope,<br>Than as an actual grace it can at all.<br>That's sad, I'm thinking.'<br> 'Ay,' he said, tis night.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'And there,' I added lightly, 'are the stars!<br>And here, we'll talk of stars, and not of books.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'You have the stars,' he murmured,–'it is well.<br>Be like them! shine, Aurora, on my dark,<br>Though high and cold and only like star,<br>And for this short night only,–you, who keep<br>The same Aurora of the bright June-day<br>That withered up the flowers before my face,<br>And turned my from the garden evermore<br>Because I was not worthy. Oh, deserved,<br>Deserved! That I, who verily had not learnt<br>God's lesson half, attaining as a dunce<br>To obliterate good words with fractious thumbs<br>And cheat myself of the context,–I should push<br>Aside, with male ferocious impudence,<br>The world's Aurora who had conned her part<br>On the other side the leaf! ignore her so,<br>Because she was a woman and a queen,<br>And had no beard to bristle through her song,–<br>My teacher, who has taught me with a book,<br>My Miriam, whose sweet mouth, when nearly drowned<br>I still heard singing on the shore! Deserved,<br>That here I should look up unto the stars<br>And miss the glory' . .<br> 'Can I understand?'<br>I broke in. 'You speak wildly, Romney Leigh,<br>Or I hear wildly. In that morning-time<br>We recollect, the roses were too red,<br>The trees too green, reproach too natural<br>If one should see not what the other saw:<br>And now, it's night, remember; we have shades<br>In place of colours; we are now grown cold,<br>And old, my cousin Romney. Pardon me,–<br>I'm very happy that you like my book,<br>And very sorry that I quoted back<br>A ten years' birthday; 'twas so mad a thing<br>In any woman, I scarce marvel much<br>You took it for a venturous piece of spite,<br>Provoking such excuses, as indeed<br>I cannot call you slack in.'<br> 'Understand,'<br>He answered sadly, 'something, if but so.<br>This night is softer than an English day,<br>And men may well come hither when they're sick,<br>To draw in easier breath from larger air.<br>'Tis thus with me; I've come to you,–to you,<br>My Italy of women, just to breathe<br>My soul out once before you, ere I go,<br>As humble as God makes me at the last,<br>(I thank Him) quite out of the way of men,<br>And yours, Aurora,–like a punished child,<br>His cheeks all blurred with tears and naughtiness,<br>To silence in a corner. I am come<br>To speak, beloved' . .<br> 'Wisely, cousin Leigh,<br>And worthily of us both!'<br> 'Yes, worthily;<br>For this time I must speak out and confess<br>That I, so truculent in assumption once,<br>So absolute in dogma, proud in aim,<br>And fierce in expectation,–I, who felt<br>The whole world tugging at my skirts for help,<br>As if no other man than I, could pull,<br>Nor woman, but I led her by the hand,<br>Nor cloth hold, but I had it in my coat,–<br>Do know myself to-night for what I was<br>On that June-day, Aurora. Poor bright day,<br>Which meant the best . . a woman and a rose, . .<br>And which I smote upon the cheek with words,<br>Until it turned and rent me! Young you were,<br>That birthday, poet, but you talked the right:<br>While I, . . I built up follies like a wall<br>To intercept the sunshine and your face.<br>Your face! that's worse.'<br> 'Speak wisely, cousin Leigh.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Yes, wisely, dear Aurora, though too late:<br>But then, not wisely. I was heavy then,<br>And stupid, and distracted with the cries<br>Of tortured prisoners in the polished brass<br>Of that Phalarian bull, society,–<br>Which seems to bellow bravely like ten bulls,<br>But, if you listen, moans and cries instead<br>Despairingly, like victims tossed and gored<br>And trampled by their hoofs. I heard the cries<br>Too close: I could not hear the angels lift<br>A fold of rustling air, nor what they said<br>To help my pity. I beheld the world<br>As one great famishing carnivorous mouth,–<br>A huge, deserted, callow, black, bird Thing,<br>With piteous open beak that hurt my heart,<br>Till down upon the filthy ground I dropped,<br>And tore the violets up to get the worms.<br>Worms, worms, was all my cry: an open mouth,<br>A gross want, bread to fill it to the lips,<br>No more! That poor men narrowed their demands<br>To such an end, was virtue, I supposed,<br>Adjudicating that to see it so<br>Was reason. Oh, I did not push the case<br>Up higher, and ponder how it answers, when<br>The rich take up the same cry for themselves,<br>Professing equally,–'an open mouth<br>A gross want, food to fill us, and no more!'<br>Why that's so far from virtue, only vice<br>Finds reason for it! That makes libertines:<br>That slurs our cruel streets from end to end<br>With eighty thousand women in one smile,<br>Who only smile at night beneath the gas:<br>The body's satisfaction and no more,<br>Being used for argument against the soul's,<br>Her too! the want, here too, implying the right.<br>–How dark I stood that morning in the sun,<br>My best Aurora, though I saw your eyes,–<br>When first you told me . . oh, I recollect<br>The words . . and how you lifted your white hand,<br>And how your white dress and your burnished curls<br>Went greatening round you in the still blue air,<br>As if an inspiration from within<br>Had blown them all out when you spoke the same,<br>Even these,–'You will not compass your poor ends<br>'Of barley-feeding and material ease,<br>'Without the poet's individualism<br>'To work your universal. It takes a soul,<br>'To move a body,–it takes a high-souled man,<br>'To move the masses . . even to a cleaner stye:<br>'It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside<br>'The dust of the actual: and your Fouriers failed<br>'Because not poets enough to understand<br>'That life develops from within.' I say<br>Your words,–I could say other words of yours<br>For none of all your words has been more lost<br>Than sweet verbena, which, being brushed against,<br>Will hold you three hours after by the smell,<br>In spite of long walks on the windy hills.<br>But these words dealt in sharper perfume,–these<br>Were ever on me, stinging through my dreams,<br>And saying themselves for ever o'er my acts<br>Like some unhappy verdict. That I failed,<br>Is certain. Stye or no stye, to contrive<br>The swine's propulsion toward the precipice,<br>Proved easy and plain. I subtly organised<br>And ordered, built the cards up higher and higher,<br>Till, some one breathing, all fell flat again!<br>In setting right society's wide wrong,<br>Mere life's so fatal! So I failed indeed<br>Once, twice, and oftener,–hearing through the rents<br>Of obstinate purpose, still those words of yours,<br>'You will not compass your poor ends, not you! '<br>But harder than you said them; every time<br>Still farther from your voice, until they came<br>To overcrow me with triumphant scorn<br>Which vexed me to resistance. Set down this<br>For condemnation,–I was guilty here:<br>I stood upon my deed and fought my doubt,<br>As men will,–for I doubted,–till at last<br>My deed gave way beneath me suddenly,<br>And left me what I am. The curtain dropped,<br>My part quite ended, all the footlights quenched.<br>My own soul hissing at me through the dark,<br>I, ready for confession,–I was wrong,<br>I've sorely failed; I've slipped the ends of life,<br>I yield; you have conquered.'<br> 'Stay,' I answered him;<br>'I've something for your hearing, also. I<br>Have failed too.'<br> 'You!' he said, 'you're very great:<br>The sadness of your greatness fits you well:<br>As if the plume upon a hero's casque<br>Should nod a shadow upon his victor face.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I took him up austerely,–'You have read<br>My book but not my heart; for recollect,<br>'Tis writ in Sanscrit, which you bungle at.<br>I've surely failed, I know; if failure means<br>To look back sadly on work gladly done,–<br>To wander on my mountains of Delight,<br>So called, (I can remember a friend's words<br>As well as you, sir,) weary and in want<br>Of even a sheep-path, thinking bitterly . .<br>Well, well! no matter. I but say so much,<br>To keep you, Romney Leigh, from saying more,<br>And let you feel I am not so high indeed,<br>That I can bear to have you at my foot,–<br>Or safe, that I can help you. That June-day,<br>Too deeply sunk in craterous sunsets now<br>For you or me to dig it up alive;<br>To pluck it out all bleeding with spent flame<br>At the roots, before those moralising stars<br>We have got instead,–that poor lost day, you said<br>Some words as truthful as the thing of mine<br>You care to keep in memory: and I hold<br>If I, that day, and, being the girl I was,<br>Had shown a gentler spirit, less arrogance,<br>It had not hurt me. Ah, you'll not mistake<br>The point here. I but only think, you see,<br>More justly, that's more humbly, of myself,<br>Than when I tried a crown on and supposed . . .<br>Nay, laugh, sir,–I'll laugh with you!–pray you, laugh.<br>I've had so many birthdays since that day,<br>I've learnt to prize mirth's opportunities,<br>Which come too seldom. Was it you who said<br>I was not changed? the same Aurora? Ah,<br>We could laugh there, too! Why, Ulysses' dog<br>Knew him, and wagged his tail and died: but if<br>I had owned a dog, I too, before my Troy,<br>And if you brought him here, . . I warrant you<br>He'd look into my face, bark lustily,<br>And live on stoutly, as the creatures will<br>Whose spirits are not troubled by long loves.<br>A dog would never know me, I'm so changed;<br>Much less a friend . . except that you're misled<br>By the colour of the hair, the trick of the voice,<br>Like that of Aurora Leigh's.'<br> 'Sweet trick of voice<br>I would be a dog for this, to know it at last,<br>And die upon the falls of it. O love,<br>O best Aurora! are you then so sad,<br>You scarcely had been sadder as my wife?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Your wife, sir! I must certainly be changed,<br>If I, Aurora, can have said a thing<br>So light, it catches at the knightly spurs<br>Of a noble gentleman like Romney Leigh,<br>And trips him from his honourable sense<br>Of what befits' . .<br> 'You wholly misconceive,'<br>He answered.<br> I returned,–'I'm glad of it:<br>But keep from misconception, too, yourself:<br>I am not humbled to so low a point,<br>Nor so far saddened. If I am sad at all,<br>Ten layers of birthdays on a woman's head,<br>Are apt to fossilise her girlish mirth,<br>Though ne'er so merry: I'm perforce more wise,<br>And that, in truth, means sadder. For the rest,<br>Look here, sir: I was right upon the whole,<br>That birthday morning. 'Tis impossible<br>To get at men excepting through their souls,<br>However open their carnivorous jaws;<br>And poets get directlier at the soul,<br>Than any of you oeconomists:–for which,<br>You must not overlook the poet's work<br>When scheming for the world's necessities.<br>The soul's the way. Not even Christ himself<br>Can save man else than as He hold man's soul;<br>And therefore did He come into our flesh,<br>As some wise hunter creeping on his knees<br>With a torch, into the blackness of some cave,<br>To face and quell the beast there,–take the soul,<br>And so possess the whole man, body and soul.<br>I said, so far, right, yes; not farther, though:<br>We both were wrong that June-day,–both as wrong<br>As an east wind had been. I who talked of art,<br>And you who grieved for all men's griefs . . . what then?<br>We surely made too small a part for God<br>In these things. What we are, imports us more<br>Than what we eat; and life you've granted me,<br>Develops from within. But innermost<br>Of the inmost, most interior of the interne,<br>God claims his own, Divine humanity<br>Renewing nature,–or the piercingest verse,<br>Prest in by subtlest poet, still must keep<br>As much upon the outside of a man,<br>As the very bowl, in which he dips his beard.<br>–And then, . . the rest. I cannot surely speak.<br>Perhaps I doubt more than you doubted then,<br>If I, the poet's veritable charge,<br>Have borne upon my forehead. If I have,<br>It might feel somewhat liker to a crown,<br>The foolish green one even.–Ah, I think,<br>And chiefly when the sun shines, that I've failed.<br>But what then, Romney? Though we fail indeed,<br>You . . I . . a score of such weak workers, . . He<br>Fails never. If He cannot work by us,<br>He will work over us. Does he want a man,<br>Much less a woman, think you? Every time<br>The star winks there, so many souls are born,<br>Who shall work too. Let our own be calm:<br>We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,<br>Impatient that we're nothing.'<br> 'Could we sit<br>Just so for ever, sweetest friend,' he said,<br>'My failure would seem better than success.<br>And yet, indeed, your book has dealt with me<br>More gently, cousin, than you ever will!<br>The book brought down entire the bright June-day,<br>And set me wandering in the garden-walks,<br>And let me watch the garland in a place,<br>You blushed so . . nay, forgive me; do not stir:<br>I only thank the book for what it taught,<br>And what, permitted. Poet, doubt yourself;<br>But never doubt that you're a poet to me<br>From henceforth. Ah, you've written poems, sweet,<br>Which moved me in secret as the sap is moved<br>In still March branches, signless as a stone:<br>But this last book o'ercame me like soft rain<br>Which falls at midnight, when the tightened bark<br>Breaks out into unhesitating buds,<br>And sudden protestations of the spring.<br>In all your other books I saw but you:<br>A man may see the moon so, in a pond,<br>And not the nearer therefore to the moon,<br>Nor use the sight . . except to drown himself<br>And so I forced my heart back from the sigh<br>For what had I, I thought, to do with her,–<br>Aurora . . Romney? But, in this last book,<br>You showed me something separate from yourself,<br>Beyond you; and I bore to take it in,<br>And let it draw me. You have shown me truths,<br>O June-day friend, that help me now at night,<br>When June is over! truths not yours, indeed,<br>But set within my reach by means of you:<br>Presented by your voice and verse the way<br>To take them clearest. Verily I was wrong;<br>And verily, many thinkers of this age,<br>Ay, many Christian teachers, half in heaven,<br>Are wrong in just my sense, who understood<br>Our natural world too insularly, as if<br>No spiritual counterpart completed it<br>Consummating its meaning, rounding all<br>To justice and perfection, line by line,<br>Form by form, nothing single, nor alone,–<br>The great below clenched by the great above;<br>Shade here authenticating substance there;<br>The body proving spirit, as the effect<br>The cause: we, meantime, being too grossly apt<br>To hold the natural, as dogs a bone,<br>(Though reason and nature beat us in the face),<br>So obstinately, that we'll break our teeth<br>Or ever we let go. For everywhere<br>We're too materialistic,–eating clay,<br>(Like men of the west) instead of Adam's corn<br>And Noah's wine; clay by handfuls, clay by lumps,<br>Until we're filled up to the throat with clay,<br>And grow the grimy colour of the ground<br>On which we are feeding. Ay, materialist<br>The age's name is. God himself, with some,<br>Is apprehended as the bare result<br>Of what his hand materially has made,<br>Expressed in such an algebraic sign,<br>Called God;–that is, to put it otherwise,<br>They add up nature to a naught of God<br>And cross the quotient. There are many, even,<br>Whose names are written in the Christian church<br>To no dishonour,–diet still on mud,<br>And splash the altars with it. You might think<br>The clay, Christ laid upon their eyelids when,<br>Still blind, he called them to the use of sight,<br>Remained there to retard its exercise<br>With clogging incrustations. Close to heaven,<br>They see, for mysteries, through the open doors,<br>Vague puffs of smoke from pots of earthenware;<br>And fain would enter, when their time shall come,<br>With quite a different body than St. Paul<br>Has promised,–husk and chaff, the whole barley-corn,<br>Or where's the resurrection?'<br> 'Thus it is,'<br>I sighed. And he resumed with mournful face.<br>'Beginning so, and filling up with clay<br>The wards of this great key, the natural world,<br>And fumbling vainly therefore at the lock<br>Of the spiritual,–we feel ourselves shut in<br>With all the wild-beast roar of struggling life,<br>The terrors and compunctions of our souls,<br>As saints with lions,–we who are not saints,<br>And have no heavenly lordship in our stare<br>To awe them backward! Ay, we are forced so pent<br>To judge the whole too partially, . . confound<br>Conclusions. Is there any common phrase<br>Significant, when the adverb's heard alone,<br>The verb being absent, and the pronoun out?<br>But we distracted in the roar of life,<br>Still insolently at God's adverb snatch,<br>And bruit against Him that his thought is void,<br>His meaning hopeless;–cry, that everywhere<br>The government is slipping from his hand,<br>Unless some other Christ . . say Romney Leigh . .<br>Come up, and toil and moil, and change the world,<br>For which the First has proved inadequate,<br>However we talk bigly of His work<br>And piously of His person. We blaspheme<br>At last, to finish that doxology,<br>Despairing on the earth for which He died.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'So now,' I asked, 'you have more hope of men?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'I hope,' he answered: 'I am come to think<br>That God will have his work done, as you said,<br>And that we need not be disturbed too much<br>For Romney Leigh or others having failed<br>With this or that quack nostrum,–recipes<br>For keeping summits by annulling depths,<br>For learning wrestling with long lounging sleeves,<br>And perfect heroism without a scratch.<br>We fail,–what then? Aurora, if I smiled<br>To see you, in your lovely morning-pride,<br>Try on the poet's wreath which suits the noon,–<br>(Sweet cousin, walls must get the weather-stain<br>Before they grow the ivy!) certainly<br>I stood myself there worthier of contempt,<br>Self-rated, in disastrous arrogance,<br>As competent to sorrow for mankind<br>And even their odds. A man may well despair,<br>Who counts himself so needful to success.<br>I failed. I throw the remedy back on God,<br>And sit down here beside you, in good hope.'<br>'And yet, take heed,' I answered, 'lest we lean<br>Too dangerously on the other side,<br>And so fail twice. Be sure, no earnest work<br>Of any honest creature, howbeit weak,<br>Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,<br>It is not gathered as a grain of sand<br>To enlarge the sum of human action used<br>For carrying out God's end. No creature works<br>So ill, observe, that therefore he's cashiered.<br>The honest earnest man must stand and work:<br>The woman also; otherwise she drops<br>At once below the dignity of man,<br>Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work:<br>Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He cried, 'True. After Adam, work was curse;<br>The natural creature labours, sweats and frets.<br>But, after Christ, work turns to privilege;<br>And henceforth one with our humanity,<br>The Six-day Worker, working still in us,<br>Has called us freely to work on with Him<br>In high companionship. So happiest!<br>I count that Heaven itself is only work<br>To a surer issue. Let us work, indeed,–<br>But, no more, work as Adam . . nor as Leigh<br>Erewhile, as if the only man on earth,<br>Responsible for all the thistles blown<br>And tigers couchant,–struggling in amaze<br>Against disease and winter,–snarling on<br>For ever, that the world's not paradise.<br>Oh cousin, let us be content, in work,<br>To do the thing we can, and not presume<br>To fret because it's little. 'Twill employ<br>Seven men, they say, to make a perfect pin!<br>Who makes the head, content to miss the point,–<br>Who makes the point, agreed to leave the join:<br>And if a man should cry, 'I want a pin,<br>'And I must make it straightway, head and point,'–<br>His wisdom is not worth the pin he wants.<br>Seven men to a pin,–and not a man too much!<br>Seven generations, haply, to this world,<br>To right it visibly, a finger's breadth,<br>And mend its rents a little. Oh, to storm<br>And say,–'This world here is intolerable;<br>'I will not eat this corn, nor drink this wine,<br>'Nor love this woman, flinging her my soul<br>'Without a bond for't, as a lover should,<br>'Nor use the generous leave of happiness<br>'As not too good for using generously'–<br>(Since virtue kindles at the touch of joy,<br>Like a man's cheek laid on a woman's hand;<br>And God, who knows it, looks for quick returns<br>From joys)!–to stand and claim to have a life<br>Beyond the bounds of the individual man,<br>And raise all personal cloisters of the soul<br>To build up public stores and magazines,<br>As if God's creatures otherwise were lost,<br>The builder surely saved by any means!<br>To think,–I have a pattern on my nail,<br>And I will carve the world new after it,<br>And solve so, these hard social questions,–nay,<br>Impossible social questions,–since their roots<br>Strike deep in Evil's own existence here,<br>Which God permits because the question's hard<br>To abolish evil nor attaint free-will.<br>Ay, hard to God, but not to Romney Leigh!<br>For Romney has a pattern on his nail,<br>(Whatever may be lacking on the Mount)<br>And not being overnice to separate<br>What's element from what's convention, hastes<br>By line on line, to draw you out a world,<br>Without your help indeed, unless you take<br>His yoke upon you and will learn of him,–<br>So much he has to teach! so good a world!<br>The same, the whole creation's groaning for!<br>No rich nor poor, no gain nor loss nor stint,<br>No potage in it able to exclude<br>A brother's birthright, and no right of birth,<br>The potage,–both secured to every man;<br>And perfect virtue dealt out like the rest,<br>Gratuitously, with the soup at six,<br>To whoso does not seek it.'<br> 'Softly, sir,'<br>I interrupted,–'I had a cousin once<br>I held in reverence. If he strained too wide,<br>It was not to take honour, but give help;<br>The gesture was heroic. If his hand<br>Accomplished nothing . . (well, it is not proved)<br>That empty hand thrown impotently out<br>Were sooner caught, I think, by One in heaven,<br>Than many a hand that reaped a harvest in<br>And keeps the scythe's glow on it. Pray you, then,<br>For my sake merely, use less bitterness<br>In speaking of my cousin.'<br> 'Ah,' he said,<br>'Aurora! when the prophet beats the ass,<br>The angel intercedes.' He shook his head–<br>'And yet to mean so well, and fail so foul,<br>Expresses ne'er another beast than man;<br>The antithesis is human. Harken, dear;<br>There's too much abstract willing, purposing,<br>In this poor world. We talk by aggregates,<br>And think by systems; and, being used to face<br>Our evils in statistics, are inclined<br>To cap them with unreal remedies<br>Drawn out in haste on the other side the slate.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'That's true,' I answered, fain to throw up thought<br>And make a game of't; 'Oh, we generalise<br>Enough to please you. If we pray at all,<br>We pray no longer for our daily bread,<br>But next centenary's harvests. If we give,<br>Our cup of water is not tendered till<br>We lay down pipes and found a Company<br>With Branches. Ass or angel, 'tis the same:<br>A woman cannot do the thing she ought,<br>Which means whatever perfect thing she can,<br>In life, in art, in science, but she fears<br>To let the perfect action take her part<br>And rest there: she must prove what she can do<br>Before she does it,–prate of woman's rights,<br>Of woman's mission, woman's function, till<br>The men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,<br>'A woman's function plainly is . . to talk.<br>Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!<br>They cannot hear each other speak.'<br> 'And you,<br>An artist, judge so?'<br> 'I, an artist,–yes,<br>Because, precisely, I'm an artist, sir,<br>And woman,–if another sate in sight,<br>I'd whisper,–soft, my sister! not a word!<br>By speaking we prove only we can speak:<br>Which he, the man here, never doubted. What<br>He doubts, is whether we can do the thing<br>With decent grace, we've not yet done at all:<br>Now, do it; bring your statue,–you have room!<br>He'll see it even by the starlight here;<br>And if 'tis e'er so little like the god<br>Who looks out from the marble silently<br>Along the track of his own shining dart<br>Through the dusk of ages,–there's no need to speak;<br>The universe shall henceforth speak for you,<br>And witness, 'She who did this thing, was born<br>To do it,–claims her license in her work.'<br>–And so with more works. Whoso cures the plague,<br>Though twice a woman, shall be called a leech:<br>Who rights a land's finances, is excused<br>For touching coppers, though her hands be white,–<br>But we, we talk!'<br> 'It is the age's mood,'<br>He said; 'we boast, and do not. We put up<br>Hostelry signs where'er we lodge a day,–<br>Some red colossal cow, with mighty paps<br>A Cyclops' fingers could not strain to milk;<br>Then bring out presently our saucer-full<br>of curds. We want more quiet in our works,<br>More knowledge of the bounds in which we work;<br>More knowledge that each individual man<br>Remains an Adam to the general race,<br>Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep<br>His personal state's condition honestly,<br>Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world,<br>Which still must be developed from its one,<br>If bettered in its many. We, indeed,<br>Who think to lay it out new like a park,<br>We take a work on us which is not man's;<br>For God alone sits far enough above,<br>To speculate so largely. None of us<br>(Not Romney Leigh) is mad enough to say,<br>We'll have a grove of oaks upon that slope<br>And sink the need of acorns. Government,<br>If veritable and lawful, is not given<br>By imposition of the foreign hand,–<br>Nor chosen from a pretty pattern-book<br>Of some domestic idealogue, who sits<br>And coldly chooses empire, where as well<br>He might republic. Genuine government<br>Is but the expression of a nation, good<br>Or less good,–even as all society,<br>Howe'er unequal, monstrous, crazed and cursed,<br>Is but the expression of men's single lives,<br>The loud sum of the silent units. What,<br>We'd change the aggregate and yet retain<br>Each separate figure? Whom do we cheat by that?<br>Now, not even Romney.'<br> 'Cousin, you are sad.<br>Did all your social labour at Leigh Hall<br>And elsewhere, come to nought then?'<br> 'It was nought,'<br>He answered mildly. 'There is room indeed,<br>For statues still, in this large world of God's,<br>But not for vacuums,–so I am not sad:<br>Not sadder than is good for what I am.<br>My vain phalanstery dissolved itself;<br>My men and women of disordered lives,<br>I brought in orderly to dine and sleep,<br>Broke up those waxen masks I made them wear,<br>With fierce contortions of the natural face;<br>And cursed me for my tyrannous constraint<br>In forcing crooked creatures to live straight;<br>And set the country hounds upon my back<br>To bite and tear me for my wicked deed<br>Of trying to do good without the church<br>Or even the squires, Aurora. Do you mind<br>Your ancient neighbours? The great book-club teems<br>With 'sketches,' 'summaries,' and 'last tracts' but twelve,<br>On socialistic troublers of close bonds<br>Betwixt the generous rich and grateful poor.<br>The vicar preached from 'Revelations,' (till<br>The doctor woke) and found me with 'the frogs'<br>On three successive Sundays; ay, and stopped<br>To weep a little (for he's getting old)<br>That such perdition should o'ertake a man<br>Of such fair acres,–in the parish, too!<br>He printed his discourses 'by request;'<br>And if your book shall sell as his did, then<br>Your verses are less good than I suppose.<br>The women of the neighbourhood subscribed,<br>And sent me a copy bound in scarlet silk,<br>Tooled edges, blazoned with the arms of Leigh:<br>I own that touched me.'<br> 'What, the pretty ones?<br>Poor Romney!'<br> 'Otherwise the effect was small.<br>I had my windows broken once or twice<br>By liberal peasants, naturally incensed<br>At such a vexer of Arcadian peace,<br>Who would not let men call their wives their own<br>To kick like Britons,–and made obstacles<br>When things went smoothly as a baby drugged,<br>Toward freedom and starvation; bringing down<br>The wicked London tavern-thieves and drabs,<br>To affront the blessed hillside drabs and thieves<br>With mended morals, quotha,–fine new lives!–<br>My windows paid for't. I was shot at, once,<br>By an active poacher who had hit a hare<br>From the other barrel, tired of springeing game<br>So long upon my acres, undisturbed,<br>And restless for the country's virtue, (yet<br>He missed me)–ay, and pelted very oft<br>In riding through the village. 'There he goes,<br>'Who'd drive away our Christian gentlefolks,<br>'To catch us undefended in the trap<br>'He baits with poisonous cheese, and locks us up<br>'In that pernicious prison of Leigh Hall<br>'With all his murderers! Give another name,<br>'And say Leigh Hell, and burn it up with fire.'<br>And so they did at last, Aurora.'<br> 'Did?'<br>'You never heard it, cousin? Vincent's news<br>Came stinted, then.'<br> 'They did? they burnt Leigh Hall?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'You're sorry, dear Aurora? Yes indeed,<br>They did it perfectly: a thorough work,<br>And not a failure, this time. Let us grant<br>'Tis somewhat easier, though, to burn a house<br>Than build a system:–yet that's easy, too,<br>In a dream. Books, pictures,–ay, the pictures what,<br>You think your dear Vandykes would give them pause?<br>Our proud ancestral Leighs with those peaked beards,<br>Or bosoms white as foam thrown up on rocks<br>From the old-spent wave. Such calm defiant looks<br>They flared up with! now, nevermore they'll twit<br>The bones in the family-vault with ugly death.<br>Not one was rescued, save the Lady Maud,<br>Who threw you down, that morning you were born,<br>The undeniable lineal mouth and chin,<br>To wear for ever for her gracious sake;<br>For which good deed I saved her: the rest went:<br>And you, your sorry, cousin. Well, for me,<br>With all my phalansterians safely out,<br>(Poor hearts, they helped the burners, it was said,<br>And certainly a few clapped hands and yelled)<br>The ruin did not hurt me as it might,–<br>As when for instance I was hurt one day,<br>A certain letter being destroyed. In fact,<br>To see the great house flare so . . oaken floors,<br>Our fathers made so fine with rushes once,<br>Before our mothers furbished them with trains,–<br>Carved wainscots, panelled walls, the favourite slide<br>For draining off a martyr, (or a rogue)<br>The echoing galleries, half a half-mile long,<br>And all the various stairs that took you up<br>And took you down, and took you round about<br>Upon their slippery darkness, recollect,<br>All helping to keep up one blazing jest;<br>The flames through all the casements pushing forth,<br>Like red-hot devils crinkled into snakes,<br>All signifying,–'Look you, Romney Leigh,<br>'We save the people from your saving, here,<br>'Yet so as by fire! we make a pretty show<br>'Besides,–and that's the best you've ever done.'–<br>–To see this, almost moved myself to clap!<br>The 'vale et plaude' came, too, with effect,<br>When, in the roof fell, and the fire, that paused,<br>Stunned momently beneath the stroke of slates<br>And tumbling rafters, rose at once and roared,<br>And wrapping the whole house, (which disappeared<br>In a mounting whirlwind of dilated flame,)<br>Blew upward, straight, its drift of fiery chaff<br>In the face of heaven, . . which blenched and ran up higher.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Poor Romney!'<br> 'Sometimes when I dream,' he said,<br>'I hear the silence after; 'twas so still.<br>For all those wild beasts, yelling, cursing round,<br>Were suddenly silent, while you counted five!<br>So silent, that you heard a young bird fall<br>From the top-nest in the neighbouring rookery<br>Through edging over-rashly toward the light.<br>The old rooks had already fled too far,<br>To hear the screech they fled with, though you saw<br>Some flying on still, like scatterings of dead leaves<br>In autumn-gusts, seen dark against the sky:<br>All flying,–ousted, like the house of Leigh.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Dear Romney!'<br> 'Evidently 'twould have been<br>A fine sight for a poet, sweet, like you,<br>To make the verse blaze after. I myself,<br>Even I, felt something in the grand old trees,<br>Which stood that moment like brute Druid gods,<br>Amazed upon the rim of ruin, where,<br>As into a blackened socket, the great fire<br>Had dropped,–still throwing up splinters now and then,<br>To show them grey with all their centuries,<br>Left there to witness that on such a day<br>The house went out.'<br> 'Ah!'<br> 'While you counted five<br>I seemed to feel a little like a Leigh,–<br>But then it passed, Aurora. A child cried;<br>And I had enough to think of what to do<br>With all those houseless wretches in the dark,<br>And ponder where they'd dance the next time, they<br>Who had burnt the viol.'<br> 'Did you think of that?<br>Who burns his viol will not dance, I know,<br>To cymbals, Romney.'<br> 'O my sweet sad voice,'<br>He cried,–'O voice that speaks and overcomes!<br>The sun is silent, but Aurora speaks.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Alas,' I said; 'I speak I know not what:<br>I'm back in childhood, thinking as a child,<br>A foolish fancy–will it make you smile?<br>I shall not from the window of my room<br>Catch sight of those old chimneys any more.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'No more,' he answered. 'If you pushed one day<br>Through all the green hills to our father's house,<br>You'd come upon a great charred circle where<br>The patient earth was singed an acre round;<br>With one stone-stair, symbolic of my life,<br>Ascending, winding, leading up to nought!<br>'Tis worth a poet's seeing. Will you go?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I made no answer. Had I any right<br>To weep with this man, that I dared to speak!<br>A woman stood between his soul and mine,<br>And waved us off from touching evermore<br>With those unclean white hands of hers. Enough.<br>We had burnt our viols and were silent.<br> So,<br>The silence lengthened till it pressed. I spoke,<br>To breathe: 'I think you were ill afterward.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'More ill,' he answered, 'had been scarcely ill.<br>I hoped this feeble fumbling at life's knot<br>Might end concisely,–but I failed to die,<br>As formerly I failed to live,–and thus<br>Grew willing, having tried all other ways,<br>To try just God's. Humility's so good,<br>When pride's impossible. Mark us, how we make<br>Our virtues, cousin, from our worn-out sins,<br>Which smack of them from henceforth. Is it right,<br>For instance, to wed here, while you love there?<br>And yet because a man sins once, the sin<br>Cleaves to him, in necessity to sin;<br>That if he sin not so, to damn himself,<br>He sins so, to damn others with himself:<br>And thus, to wed here, loving there, becomes<br>A duty. Virtue buds a dubious leaf<br>Round mortal brows; your ivy's better, dear.<br>–Yet she, 'tis certain, is my very wife;<br>The very lamb left mangled by the wolves<br>Through my own bad shepherding: and could I choose<br>But take her on my shoulder past this stretch<br>Of rough, uneasy wilderness, poor lamb,<br>Poor child, poor child?–Aurora, my beloved,<br>I will not vex you any more to-night;<br>But, having spoken what I came to say,<br>The rest shall please you. What she can, in me,–<br>Protection, tender liking, freedom, ease,<br>She shall have surely, liberally, for her<br>And hers, Aurora. Small amends they'll make<br>For hideous evils (which she had not known<br>Except by me) and for this imminent loss,<br>This forfeit presence of a gracious friend,<br>Which also she must forfeit for my sake,<br>Since, . . . drop your hand in mine a moment, sweet,<br>We're parting!–Ah, my snowdrop, what a touch,<br>As if the wind had swept it off! you grudge<br>Your gelid sweetness on my palm but so,<br>A moment? angry, that I could not bear<br>You . . speaking, breathing, living, side by side<br>With some one called my wife . . and live, myself?<br>Nay, be not cruel–you must understand!<br>Your lightest footfall on a floor of mine<br>Would shake the house, my lintel being uncrossed<br>'Gainst angels: henceforth it is night with me,<br>And so, henceforth, I put the shutters up;<br>Auroras must not come to spoil my dark.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He smiled so feebly, with an empty hand<br>Stretched sideway from me,–as indeed he looked<br>To any one but me to give him help,–<br>And, while the moon came suddenly out full,<br>The double rose of our Italian moons,<br>Sufficient, plainly, for the heaven and earth,<br>(The stars, struck dumb and washed away in dews<br>Of golden glory, and the mountains steeped<br>In divine languor) he, the man, appeared<br>So pale and patient, like the marble man<br>A sculptor puts his personal sadness in<br>To join his grandeur of ideal thought,–<br>As if his mallet struck me from my height<br>Of passionate indignation, I who had risen<br>Pale,–doubting, paused, . . . . Was Romney mad indeed?<br>Had all this wrong of heart made sick the brain?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then quiet, with a sort of tremulous pride,<br>'Go, cousin,' I said coldly. 'A farewell<br>Was sooner spoken 'twixt a pair of friends<br>In those old days, than seems to suit you now:<br>And if, since then, I've writ a book or two,<br>I'm somewhat dull still in the manly art<br>Of phrase and metaphrase. Why, any man<br>Can carve a score of white Loves out of snow,<br>As Buonarroti down in Florence there,<br>And set them on the wall in some safe shade,<br>As safe, sir, as your marriage! very good;<br>Though if a woman took one from the ledge<br>To put it on the table by her flowers,<br>And let it mind her of a certain friend,<br>'Twould drop at once, (so better,) would not bear<br>Her nail-mark even, where she took it up<br>A little tenderly; so best, I say:<br>For me, I would not touch so light a thing,<br>And risk to spoil it half an hour before<br>The sun shall shine to melt it; leave it there.<br>I'm plain at speech, direct in purpose: when<br>I speak, you'll take the meaning as it is,<br>And not allow for puckerings in the silks<br>By clever stitches. I'm a woman, sir,<br>And use the woman's figures naturally,<br>As you, the male license. So, I wish you well.<br>I'm simply sorry for the griefs you've had–<br>And not for your sake only, but mankind's.<br>This race is never grateful: from the first,<br>One fills their cup at supper with pure wine,<br>Which back they give at cross-time on a sponge,<br>In bitter vinegar.'<br> 'If gratefuller,'<br>He murmured,–'by so much less pitiable!<br>God's self would never have come down to die,<br>Could man have thanked him for it.'<br> 'Happily<br>'Tis patent that, whatever,' I resumed,<br>'You suffered from this thanklessness of men,<br>You sink no more than Moses' bulrush-boat,<br>When once relieved of Moses; for you're light,<br>You're light, my cousin! which is well for you,<br>And manly. For myself,–now mark me, sir,<br>They burnt Leigh Hall; but if, consummated<br>To devils, heightened beyond Lucifers,<br>They had burnt instead a star or two, of those<br>We saw above there just a moment back,<br>Before the moon abolished them,–destroyed<br>And riddled them in ashes through a sieve<br>On the head of the foundering universe,–what then?<br>If you and I remained still you and I,<br>It would not shift our places as mere friends,<br>Nor render decent you should toss a phrase<br>Beyond the point of actual feeling!–nay<br>You shall not interrupt me: as you said,<br>We're parting. Certainly, not once or twice,<br>To-night you've mocked me somewhat, or yourself,<br>And I, at least, have not deserved it so<br>That I should meet it unsurprised. But now,<br>Enough: we're parting . . parting. Cousin Leigh,<br>I wish you well through all the acts of life<br>And life's relation, wedlock, not the least;<br>And it shall 'please me,' in your words, to know<br>You yield your wife, protection, freedom, ease,<br>And very tender liking. May you live<br>So happy with her, Romney, that your friends<br>May praise her for it. Meantime, some of us<br>Are wholly dull in keeping ignorant<br>Of what she has suffered by you, and what debt<br>Of sorrow your rich love sits down to pay:<br>But if 'tis sweet for love to pay its debt,<br>'Tis sweeter still for love to give its gift;<br>and you, be liberal in the sweeter way,–<br>You can, I think. At least, as touches me,<br>You owe her, cousin Romney, no amends;<br>She is not used to hold my gown so fast,<br>You need entreat her now to let it go:<br>The lady never was a friend of mine,<br>Nor capable,–I thought you knew as much,–<br>Of losing for your sake so poor a prize<br>As such a worthless friendship. Be content,<br>Good cousin, therefore, both for her and you!<br>I'll never spoil your dark, nor dull your noon,<br>Nor vex you when you're merry, nor when you rest:<br>You shall not need to put a shutter up<br>To keep out this Aurora. Ah, your north<br>Can make Auroras which vex nobody,<br>Scarce known from evenings! also, let me say,<br>My larks fly higher than some windows. Right;<br>You've read your Leighs. Indeed 'twould shake a house,<br>If such as I came in with outstretched hand,<br>Still warm and thrilling from the clasp of one . .<br>Of one we know, . . to acknowledge, palm to palm,<br>As mistress there . . the Lady Waldemar.'<br>'Now God be with us' . . with a sudden clash<br>Of voice he interrupted–'what name's that?<br>You spoke a name, Aurora.'<br> 'Pardon me;<br>I would that, Romney, I could name your wife<br>Nor wound you, yet be worthy.'<br> 'Are we mad?'<br>He echoed–'wife! mine! Lady Waldemar!<br>I think you said my wife.' He sprang to his feet,<br>And threw his noble head back toward the moon<br>As one who swims against a stormy sea,<br>And laughed with such a helpless, hopeless scorn,<br>I stood and trembled.<br> 'May God judge me so,'<br>He said at last,–'I came convicted here,<br>And humbled sorely if not enough. I came,<br>Because this woman from her crystal soul<br>Had shown me something which a man calls light:<br>Because too, formerly, I sinned by her<br>As, then and ever since, I have, by God,<br>Through arrogance of nature,–though I loved . .<br>Whom best, I need not say, . . since that is writ<br>Too plainly in the book of my misdeeds;<br>And thus I came here to abase myself,<br>And fasten, kneeling, on her regent brows<br>A garland which I startled thence one day<br>Of her beautiful June-youth. But here again<br>I'm baffled!–fail in my abasement as<br>My aggrandisement: there's no room left for me,<br>At any woman's foot, who misconceives<br>My nature, purpose, possible actions. What!<br>Are you the Aurora who made large my dreams<br>To frame your greatness? you conceive so small?<br>You stand so less than woman, through being more,<br>And lose your natural instinct, like a beast,<br>Through intellectual culture? since indeed<br>I do not think that any common she<br>Would dare adopt such fancy-forgeries<br>For the legible life-signature of such<br>As I, with all my blots: with all my blots!<br>At last then, peerless cousin, we are peers–<br>At last we're even. Ah, you've left your height:<br>And here upon my level we take hands,<br>And here I reach you to forgive you, sweet,<br>And that's a fall, Aurora. Long ago<br>You seldom understood me,–but, before,<br>I could not blame you. Then you only seemed<br>So high above, you could not see below;<br>But now I breathe,–but now I pardon!–nay,<br>We're parting. Dearest, men have burnt my house,<br>Maligned my motives,–but not one, I swear,<br>Has wronged my soul as this Aurora has,<br>Who called the Lady Waldemar my wife.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Not married to her! yet you said' . .<br> 'Again?<br>Nay, read the lines' (he held a letter out)<br>'She sent you through me.'<br> By the moonlight there,<br>I tore the meaning out with passionate haste<br>Much rather than I read it. Thus it ran.</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=116061" data-title="Eighth Book de Elizabeth Barrett Browning" data-description="ONE eve it happened when I sate alone,/Alone upon the terrace of my tower,/A book upon my knees, to counterfeit/The reading that I never read at all,/While Marian, in the garden down below,/Knelt by the fountain (I could just hear thrill/The drows..."></div> </div> </div>

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