FIFTH BOOK.

FIFTH BOOK.

Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hopeTo speak my poems in mysterious tuneWith man and nature,—with the lava-lymphThat trickles from successive galaxiesStill drop by drop adown the finger of God,In still new worlds?—with summer-days in this,That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?—With spring’s delicious trouble in the groundTormented by the quickened blood of roots,And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheavesIn token of the harvest-time of flowers?—With winters and with autumns,—and beyond,With the human heart’s large seasons,—when it hopesAnd fears, joys, grieves, and loves?—with all that strainOf sexual passion, which devours the fleshIn a sacrament of souls? with mother’s breasts,Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?—With multitudinous life, and finallyWith the great out-goings of ecstatic souls,Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,Their radiant faces upward, burn awayThis dark of the body, issuing on a worldBeyond our mortal?—can I speak my verseSo plainly in tune to these things and the rest,That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,As having the same warrant over themTo hold and move them, if they will or no,Alike imperious as the primal rhythmOf that theurgic nature? I must fail,Who fail at the beginning to hold and moveOne man,—and he my cousin, and he my friend,And he born tender, made intelligent,Inclined to ponder the precipitous sidesOf difficult questions; yet, obtuse tome,—Ofme, incurious! likes me very well,And wishes me a paradise of good,Good looks, good means, and good digestion!—ay,But otherwise evades me, puts me offWith kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,—Too light a book for a grave man’s reading! Go,Aurora Leigh: be humble.There it is;We women are too apt to look to one,Which proves a certain impotence in art.We strain our natures at doing something great,Far less because it’s something great to do,Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselvesAs being not small, and more appreciableTo some one friend. We must have mediatorsBetwixt our highest conscience and the judge;Some sweet saint’s blood must quicken in our palms,Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold:Good only, being perceived as the end of good,And God alone pleased,—that’s too poor, we think,And not enough for us, by any means.Ay—Romney, I remember, told me onceWe miss the abstract, when we comprehend!We miss it most when we aspire, ... and fail.Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s wayOf trailing garments, shall not trip me up.I’ll have no traffic with the personal thoughtIn art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain,Without the approbation of a man?It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself,That approbation of the general race,Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)And the highest fame was never reached exceptBy what was aimed above it. Art for art,And good for God Himself, the essential Good!We’ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;And if we fail.... But must we?—Shall I fail?The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,‘Let no one be called happy till his death.’To which I add,—Let no one till his deathBe called unhappy. Measure not the workUntil the day’s out and the labour done;Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant,Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;And, in that we have nobly striven at least,Deal with us nobly, women though we be,And honour us with truth, if not with praise.My ballads prospered; but the ballad’s raceIs rapid for a poet who bears weightsOf thought and golden image. He can standLike Atlas, in the sonnet,—and supportHis own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars;But then he must stand still, nor take a step.In that descriptive poem called ‘The Hills,’The prospects were too far and indistinct.’Tis true my critics said, ‘A fine view, that!’The public scarcely cared to climb the bookFor even the finest; and the public’s right,A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised;Which well the Greeks knew, when they stirred the barkWith close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,And made the forest-rivers garrulousWith babble of gods. For us, we are called to markA still more intimate humanityIn this inferior nature,—or, ourselves,Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfootBy veritabler artists. Earth, shut upBy Adam, like a fakir in a boxLeft too long buried, remained stiff and dry,A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,And used his kingly chrisms to straighten outThe leathery tongue turned back into the throat:Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitatesIn every limb, aspires in every breath,Embraces infinite relations. Now,We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves,Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest,To take possession of a senseless worldTo unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,The body of our body, the green earth,Indubitably human, like this fleshAnd these articulated veins through whichOur heart drives blood! there’s not a flower of spring,That dies ere June, but vaunts itself alliedBy issue and symbol, by significanceAnd correspondence, to that spirit-worldOutside the limits of our space and time,Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voiceWith human meanings; else they miss the thought,And henceforth step down lower, stand confessedInstructed poorly for interpreters,—Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.Even so my pastoral failed: it was a bookOf surface-pictures—pretty, cold, and falseWith literal transcript,—the worse done, I think,For being not ill-done. Let me set my markAgainst such doings, and do otherwise.This strikes me.—If the public whom we know,Could catch me at such admissions, I should passFor being right modest. Yet how proud we are,In daring to look down upon ourselves!The critics say that epics have died outWith Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—I’ll not believe it. I could never dreamAs Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineerWho travelled higher than he was born to live,And showed sometimes the goitre in his throatDiscoursing of an image seen through fog,)That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned greyLike any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plumeAs yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.All men are possible heroes: every age,Heroic in proportions, double-faced,Looks backward and before, expects a mornAnd claims an epos.Ay, but every ageAppears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!The thinkers scout it, and the poets aboundWho scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;An age of patches for old gaberdines;An age of mere transition, meaning nought,Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,And wrong thoughts make poor poems.Every age,Through being beheld too close, is ill-discernedBy those who have not lived past it. We’ll supposeMount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,To some colossal statue of a man:The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,Had guessed as little of any human formUp there, as would a flock of browsing goats.They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles offOr ere the giant image broke on them,Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,And fed at evening with the blood of suns;Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetuallyThe largesse of a silver river downTo all the country pastures. ’Tis even thusWith times we live in,—evermore too greatTo be apprehended near.But poets shouldExert a double vision; should have eyesTo see near things as comprehensivelyAs if afar they took their point of sight,And distant things, as intimately deep,As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.I do distrust the poet who discernsNo character or glory in his times,And trundles back his soul five hundred years,Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,Oh not to sing of lizards or of toadsAlive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable;But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,As dead as must be, for the greater part,The poems made on their chivalric bones.And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.Nay, if there’s room for poets in the worldA little overgrown, (I think there is)Their sole work is to represent the age,Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,And spends more passion, more heroic heat,Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,Cry out for togas and the picturesque,Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s selfWas commonplace to Lady Guenever;And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,As Regent Street to poets.Never flinch,But still, unscrupulously epic, catchUpon the burning lava of a song,The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:That, when the next shall come, the men of thatMay touch the impress with reverent hand, and say‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!That bosom seems to beat still, or at leastIt sets ours beating. This is living art,Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’What form is best for poems? Let me thinkOf forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,As sovran nature does, to make the form;For otherwise we only imprison spirit,And not embody. Inward evermoreTo outward,—so in life, and so in art,Which still is life.Five acts to make a play.And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?What matter for the number of the leaves,Supposing the tree lives and grows? exactThe literal unities of time and place,When ’tis the essence of passion to ignoreBoth time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire,And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.’Tis true the stage requires obsequiousnessTo this or that convention; ‘exit’ hereAnd ‘enter’ there; the points for clapping, fixed,Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams;And all the close-curled imagery clippedIn manner of their fleece at shearing-time.Forget to prick the galleries to the heartPrecisely at the fourth act,—culminateOur five pyramidal acts with one act more,—We’re lost so! Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely pleadAgainst our just damnation. Stand aside;We’ll muse for comfort that, last century,On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.And whosoever writes good poetry,Looks just to art. He does not write for youOr me,—for London or for Edinburgh;He will not suffer the best critic knownTo step into his sunshine of free thoughtAnd self-absorbed conception, and exactAn inch-long swerving of the holy lines.If virtue done for popularityDefiles like vice, can art for praise or hireStill keep its splendor, and remain pure art?Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passedFrom hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,Until the unborn snatch it, crying outIn pity on their fathers’ being so dull,And that’s success too.I will write no plays.Because the drama, less sublime in this,Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,Adopts the standard of the public tasteTo chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain roundIts regal neck, and learns to carry and fetchThe fashions of the day to please the day;Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,Commending chiefly its docilityAnd humour in stage-tricks; or else indeedGets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodiesBecause their grosser brains most naturallyMisjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)Shows teeth an almond’s breadth, protests the lengthOf a modest phrase,—‘My gentle countrymen,There’s something in it, haply, of your fault,’—Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,He’ll have five thousand, and five thousand more,Against him,—the whole public,—all the hoofsOf King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,—And obviously deserve it. He appealedTo these,—and why say more if they condemn,Than if they praised him?—Weep, my Æschylus,But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!For since ’twas Athens (so I read the myth)Who gave commission to that fatal weight,The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on theeAnd crush thee,—better cover thy bald head;She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan beeBefore thy loud’st protesting.—For the rest,The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage:I could not, in so little, accept success,Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,For manifester gains; let those who prize,Pursue them:Istand off.And yet, forbid,That any irreverent fancy or conceitShould litter in the Drama’s throne-room, whereThe rulers of our art, in whose full veinsDynastic glories mingle, sit in strengthAnd do their kingly work,—conceive, command,And, from the imagination’s crucial heat,Catch up their men and women all a-flameFor action, all alive, and forced to proveTheir life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,Until mankind makes witness, ‘These be menAs we are,’ and vouchsafes the kiss that’s dueTo Imogen and Juliet—sweetest kinOn art’s side.’Tis that, honouring to its worthThe drama, I would fear to keep it downTo the level of the footlights. Dies no moreThe sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,—His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling whiteOf choral vestures,—troubled in his blood,While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,Leapt high together with the altar-flame,And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,Which set the grand still front of Themis’ sonUpon the puckered visage of a player;—The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,Sweeps slowly past the piers;—the mouthpiece, whereThe mere man’s voice with all its breaths and breaksWent sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heightsIts phrasèd thunders;—these things are no more,Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,The growing drama has outgrown such toysOf simulated stature, face, and speech,It also, peradventure, may outgrowThe simulation of the painted scene,Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,With all its grand orchestral silencesTo keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.Alas, I still see something to be done,And what I do falls short of what I seeThough I waste myself on doing. Long green days,Worn bare of grass and sunshine,—long calm nights,From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,—Be witness for me, with no amateur’sIrreverent haste and busy idlenessI’ve set myself to art! What then? what’s done?What’s done, at last?Behold, at last, a book.If life-blood’s necessary,—which it is,(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood!)If life-blood’s fertilising, I wrung mineOn every leaf of this,—unless the dropsSlid heavily on one side and left it dry.That chances often: many a fervid manWrites books as cold and flat as grave-yard stonesFrom which the lichen’s scraped; and if St. PreuxHad written his own letters, as he might,We had never wept to think of the little mole’Neath Julie’s drooping eyelid. Passion isBut something suffered, after all.While ArtSets action on the top of suffering:The artist’s part is both to be and do,Transfixing with a special, central powerThe flat experience of the common man,And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,Half agony, half ecstasy, the thingHe feels the inmost: never felt the lessBecause he sings it. Does a torch less burnFor burning next reflectors of blue steel,Thatheshould be the colder for his place’Twixt two incessant fires,—his personal life’s,And that intense refraction which burns backPerpetually against him from the roundOf crystal conscience he was born intoIf artist-born? O sorrowful great giftConferred on poets, of a twofold life,When one life has been found enough for pain!We, staggering ’neath our burden as mere men,Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,Support the intolerable strain and stressOf the universal, and send clearly upWith voices broken by the human sob,Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!But soft!—a ‘poet’ is a word soon said;A book’s a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,The more the poet shall be questionable,The more unquestionably comes his book!And this of mine—well, granting to myselfSome passion in it, furrowing up the flats,Mere passion will not prove a volume worthIts gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keelMean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.There’s more than passion goes to make a man,Or book, which is a man too.I am sad.I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,And, feeling the hard marble first relent,Grow supple to the straining of his arms,And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toilOf stretching past the known and seen, to reachThe archetypal Beauty out of sight,Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,And with his own life dazed and blinded him!Not so; Pygmalion loved,—and whoso lovesBelieves the impossible.And I am sad:I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,Since none seems worthy of my thought and hopeMore highly mated. He has shot them down,My Phœbus Apollo, soul within my soul,Who judges, by the attempted, what’s attained,And with the silver arrow from his height,Has struck down all my works before my face,WhileIsaid nothing. Is there aught to say?I called the artist but a greatened man;He may be childless also, like a man.I laboured on alone. The wind and dustAnd sun of the world beat blistering in my face;And hope, now for me, now against me, draggedMy spirits onward,—as some fallen balloon,Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,Or seemed,—and generous souls cried out, ‘Be strong,Take courage; now you’re on our level,—now!The next step saves you!’ I was flushed with praise,But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,I could not choose but murmur to myself‘Is this all? all that’s done? and all that’s gained?If this then be success, ’tis dismallerThan any failure.’O my God, my God,O supreme Artist, who as sole returnFor all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,Demandest of us just a word ... a name,‘My Father!’—thou hast knowledge, only thou,How dreary ’tis for women to sit stillOn winter nights by solitary fires,And hear the nations praising them far off,Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,Our very heart of passionate womanhood,Which could not beat so in the verse withoutBeing present also in the unkissed lips,And eyes undried because there’s none to askThe reason they grew moist.To sit alone,And think, for comfort, how, that very night,Affianced lovers, leaning face to faceWith sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,Are reading haply from some page of ours,To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,When such a stanza, level to their mood,Seems floating their own thought out—‘So I feelFor thee,’—‘And I, for thee: this poet knowsWhat everlasting love is!’—how, that night,A father, issuing from the misty roadsUpon the luminous round of lamp and hearthAnd happy children, having caught up firstThe youngest there until it shrunk and shriekedTo feel the cold chin prick its dimples throughWith winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lapOf the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lidsTo hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)Our book and cry, ... ‘Ah you, you care for rhymes;So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,When April comes to let you! I’ve been toldThey are not idle as so many are,But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:It’s yours, the book; I’ll write your name in it,—That so you may not lose, however lostIn poet’s lore and charming reverie,The thought of how your father thought ofyouIn riding from the town.’To have our booksAppraised by love, associated with love,Whilewesit loveless! is it hard, you think?At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,Means simply love. It was a man said that.And then, there’s love and love: the love of all(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)Is but a small thing to the love of one.You bid a hungry child be satisfiedWith a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,He says he’s hungry,—he would rather haveThat little barley-cake you keep from himWhile reckoning up his harvests. So with us;(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)We’re hungry.Hungry! but it’s pitifulTo wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbsBecause we’re hungry. Who, in all this world,(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,And learn what good is by its opposite)Has never hungered? Woe to him who has foundThe meal enough! if Ugolino’s full,His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:For here satiety proves penuryMore utterly irremediable. And sinceWe needs must hunger,—better, for man’s love,Than God’s truth! better, for companions sweet,Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.Well, well! they say we’re envious, we who rhyme;But I, because I am a woman perhaps,And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.I never envied Graham his breadth of style,Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)Such delicate perspectives of full life;Nor Belmore, for the unity of aimTo which he cuts his cedarn poems, fineAs sketchers do their pencils; nor Mark Gage,For that caressing colour and trancing toneWhereby you’re swept away and melted inThe sensual element, which, with a back wave,Restores you to the level of pure soulsAnd leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,For native gifts or popular applause,I’ve envied; but for this,—that when, by chance,Says some one,—‘There goes Belmore, a great man!He leaves clean work behind him, and requiresNo sweeper up of the chips,’ ... a girl I know,Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,Smiles unaware, as if a guardian saintSmiled in her:—for this, too,—that Gage comes homeAnd lays his last book’s prodigal reviewUpon his mother’s knees, where, years ago,He had laid his childish spelling-book and learnedTo chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,As young birds must. ‘Well done,’ she murmured then,She will not say it now more wonderingly;And yet the last ‘Well done’ will touch him more,As catching up to-day and yesterdayIn a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage.I envy you your mother!—and you, Graham,Because you have a wife who loves you so,She half forgets, at moments, to be proudOf being Graham’s wife, until a friend observes,‘The boy here, has his father’s massive brow,Done small in wax ... if we push back the curls.’Who lovesme? Dearest father,—mother sweet,—I speak the names out sometimes by myself,And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,As Hindostanee to an Ind-born manAccustomed many years to English speech;Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,Which will not leave off singing. Up in heavenI have my father,—with my mother’s faceBeside him in a blotch of heavenly light;No more for earth’s familiar, household use,No more! The best verse written by this hand,Can never reach them where they sit, to seemWell-done tothem. Death quite unfellows us,Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,And makes us part as those at Babel did,Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.A living Cæsar would not dare to playAt bowls, with such as my dead father is.And yet, this may be less so than appears,This change and separation. Sparrows fiveFor just two farthings, and God cares for each.If God is not too great for little cares,Is any creature, because gone to God?I’ve seen some men, veracious, nowise mad,Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified,They’ve heard the Dead a-ticking like a clockWhich strikes the hours of the eternities,Beside them, with their natural ears,—and knownThat human spirits feel the human way,And hate the unreasoning awe which waves them offFrom possible communion. It may be.At least, earth separates as well as heaven.For instance, I have not seen Romney LeighFull eighteen months ... add six, you get two years.They say he’s very busy with good works,—Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses.He made an almshouse of his heart one day,Which ever since is loose upon the latchFor those who pull the string.—I never did.It always makes me sad to go abroad;And now I’m sadder that I went to-nightAmong the lights and talkers at Lord Howe’s.His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calmAs her other jewels. If she’s somewhat cold,Who wonders, when her blood has stood so longIn the ducal reservoir she calls her lineBy no means arrogantly? she’s not proud;Not prouder than the swan is of the lakeHe has always swum in;—’tis her element,And so she takes it with a natural grace,Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,Therearemen, move on without outriders,Which isn’t her fault. Ah, to watch her face,When good Lord Howe expounds his theoriesOf social justice and equality—’Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bendHer neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,‘Such clever talk—that dear, odd Algernon!’She listens on, exactly as if he talkedSome Scandinavian myth of Lemures,Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.She’s gracious to me as her husband’s friend,And would be gracious, were I not a Leigh,Being used to smile just so, without her eyes,On Joseph Strangways, the Leeds mesmerist,And Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from ‘the States’Upon the ‘Woman’s question.’ Then, for him,I like him ... he’s my friend. And all the roomsWere full of crinkling silks that swept aboutThe fine dust of most subtle courtesies.What then?—why then, we come home to be sad.How lovely One I love not, looked to-night!She’s very pretty, Lady Waldemar.Her maid must use both hands to twist that coilOf tresses, then be careful lest the richBronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a grey hair,A single one,—I saw it; otherwiseThe woman looked immortal. How they told,Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!They split the amaranth velvet-boddice downTo the waist, or nearly, with the audacious pressOf full-breathed beauty. If the heart withinWere half as white!—but, if it were, perhapsThe breast were closer covered, and the sightLess aspectable, by half, too.I heardThe young man with the German student’s look—A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick,Which shot up straight against the parting lineSo equally dividing the long hair,—Say softly to his neighbour, (thirty-fiveAnd mediæval) ‘Look that way, Sir Blaise.She’s Lady Waldemar—to the left,—in red—Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,Is soon about to marry.’Then repliedSir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priestlike voice,Too used to syllable damnations roundTo make a natural emphasis worth while:‘Is Leigh your ablest man? the same, I think,Once jilted by a recreant pretty maidAdopted from the people? Now, in change,He seems to have plucked a flower from the other sideOf the social hedge,’‘A flower, a flower,’ exclaimedMy German student,—his own eyes full-blownBent on her. He was twenty, certainly.Sir Blaise resumed with gentle arrogance,As if he had dropped his alms into a hat,And had the right to counsel,—‘My young friend,I doubt your ablest man’s abilityTo get the least good or help meet for him,For pagan phalanstery or Christian home,From such a flowery creature,’‘Beautiful!’My student murmured, rapt,—‘Mark how she stirs!Just waves her head, as if a flower indeed,Touched far off by the vain breath of our talk.’At which that bilious Grimwald, (he who writesFor the Renovator) who had seemed absorbedUpon the table-book of autographs,(I dare say mentally he crunched the bonesOf all those writers, wishing them aliveTo feel his tooth in earnest) turned short roundWith low carnivorous laugh,—‘A flower, of course!She neither sews nor spins,—and takes no thoughtOf her garments ... falling off.’The student flinched,Sir Blaise, the same; then both, drawing back their chairsAs if they spied black-beetles on the floor,Pursued their talk, without a word being thrownTo the critic.Good Sir Blaise’s brow is highAnd noticeably narrow: a strong wind,You fancy, might unroof him suddenly,And blow that great top attic off his headSo piled with feudal relics. You admireHis nose in profile, though you miss his chin;But, though you miss his chin, you seldom missHis golden cross worn innermostly, (carvedFor penance, by a saintly Styrian monkWhose flesh was too much with him,) slipping throughSome unaware unbuttoned casualtyOf the under-waistcoat. With an absent airSir Blaise sate fingering it and speaking low,While I, upon the sofa, heard it all.‘My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyesLike blessedest St. Lucy, on a plate,They would not trick us into choosing wives,As doublets, by the colour. OtherwiseOur fathers chose,—and therefore, when they had hungTheir household keys about a lady’s waist,The sense of duty gave her dignity:She kept her bosom holy to her babes;And, if a moralist reproved her dress,’Twas, ‘Too much starch!’—and not, ‘Too little lawn!’'‘Now, pshaw!’ returned the other in a heat,A little fretted by being called ‘young friend,’Or so I took it,—‘for St. Lucy’s sake,If she’s the saint to curse by, let us leaveOur fathers,—plagued enough about our sons!’(He stroked his beardless chin) ‘yes, plagued, sir, plagued:The future generations lie on usAs heavy as the nightmare of a seer;Our meat and drink grow painful prophecy:I ask you,—have we leisure, if we liked,To hollow out our weary hands to keepYour intermittent rushlight of the pastFrom draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,And marriage-laws ... the socket drops them throughWhile we two speak,—however may protestSome over-delicate nostrils, like your own,’Gainst odours thence arising.’‘You are young,’Sir Blaise objected.‘If I am,’ he saidWith fire,—‘though somewhat less so than I seem,The young run on before, and see the thingThat’s coming. Reverence for the young, I cry.In that new church for which the world’s near ripe,You’ll have the younger in the Elder’s chair,Presiding with his ivory front of hopeO’er foreheads clawed by cruel carrion-birdsOf life’s experience.’‘Pray your blessing, sir,’Sir Blaise replied good-humouredly,—‘I pluckedA silver hair this morning from my beard,Which left me your inferior. Would I wereEighteen, and worthy to admonish you!If young men of your order run beforeTo see such sights as sexual prejudiceAnd marriage-law dissolved,—in plainer words,A general concubinage expressedIn a universal pruriency,—the thingIs scarce worth running fast for, and you’d gainBy loitering with your elders.’‘Ah,’ he said,‘Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill,Can talk with one at bottom of the view,To make it comprehensible? Why, LeighHimself, although our ablest man, I said,Is scarce advanced to see as far as this,Which some are: he takes up imperfectlyThe social question—by one handle—leavesThe rest to trail. A Christian socialist,Is Romney Leigh, you understand.’‘Not I.I disbelieve in Christian-pagans, muchAs you in women-fishes. If we mixTwo colours, we lose both, and make a thirdDistinct from either. Mark you! to mistakeA colour is the sign of a sick brain,And mine, I thank the saints, is clear and cool:A neutral tint is here impossible.The church,—and by the church, I mean, of course,The catholic, apostolic, mother-church,—Draws lines as plain and straight as her own wall;Inside of which, are Christians, obviously,And outside ... dogs.’‘We thank you. Well I knowThe ancient mother-church would fain still bite,For all her toothless gums,—as Leigh himselfWould fain be a Christian still, for all his wit;Pass that; you two may settle it, for me.You’re slow in England. In a month I learntAt Göttingen, enough philosophyTo stock your English schools for fifty years;Pass that, too. Here, alone, I stop you short,—Supposing a true man like Leigh could standUnequal in the stature of his lifeTo the height of his opinions. Choose a wifeBecause of a smooth skin?—not he, not he!He’d rail at Venus’ self for creaking shoes,Unless she walked his way of righteousness:And if he takes a Venus Meretrix,(No imputation on the lady there)Be sure that, by some sleight of Christian art,He has metamorphosed and converted herTo a Blessed Virgin.’‘Soft!’ Sir Blaise drew breathAs if it hurt him,—‘Soft! no blasphemy,I pray you!’‘The first Christians did the thing;Why not the last?’ asked he of Göttingen,With just that shade of sneering on the lip,Compensates for the lagging of the beard,—‘And so the case is. If that fairest fairIs talked of as the future wife of Leigh,She’s talked of, too, at least as certainly,As Leigh’s disciple. You may find her nameOn all his missions and commissions, schools,Asylums, hospitals,—he has had her down,With other ladies whom her starry leadPersuaded from their spheres, to his country-placeIn Shropshire, to the famed phalansteryAt Leigh Hall, christianised from Fourier’s own,(In which he has planted out his sapling stocksOf knowledge into social nurseries)And there, they say, she has tarried half a week,And milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,And said ‘my sister’ to the lowest drabOf all the assembled castaways; such girls!Ay, sided with them at the washing-tub—Conceive, Sir Blaise, those naked perfect arms,Round glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.’Lord Howe came up. ‘What, talking poetrySo near the image of the unfavouring Muse?That’s you, Miss Leigh: I’ve watched you half an hour,Precisely as I watched the statue calledA Pallas in the Vatican;—you mindThe face, Sir Blaise?—intensely calm and sad,As wisdom cut it off from fellowship,—Butthatspoke louder. Not a word fromyou!And these two gentlemen were bold, I marked,And unabashed by even your silence.’‘Ah,’Said I, ‘my dear Lord Howe, you shall not speakTo a printing woman who has lost her place,(The sweet safe corner of the household fireBehind the heads of children) compliments,As if she were a woman. We who have cliptThe curls before our eyes, may see at leastAs plain as men do: speak out, man to man;No compliments, beseech you.’‘Friend to friend,Let that be. We are sad to-night, I saw,(—Good night, Sir Blaise! Ah, Smith—he has slipped away)I saw you across the room, and stayed, Miss Leigh,To keep a crowd of lion-hunters off,With faces toward your jungle. There were three;A spacious lady, five feet ten and fat,Who has the devil in her (and there’s room)For walking to and fro upon the earth,From Chipewa to China; she requiresYour autograph upon a tinted leaf’Twixt Queen Pomare’s and Emperor Soulouque’s;Pray give it; she has energies, though fat:For me, I’d rather see a rick on fireThan such a woman angry. Then a youthFresh from the backwoods, green as the underboughs,Asks modestly, Miss Leigh, to kiss your shoe,And adds, he has an epic, in twelve parts,Which when you’ve read, you’ll do it for his boot,—All which I saved you, and absorb next weekBoth manuscript and man,—because a lordIs still more potent than a poetess,With any extreme republican. Ah, ah,You smile at last, then.’‘Thank you.’‘Leave the smile,I’ll lose the thanks for ’t,—ay, and throw you inMy transatlantic girl, with golden eyes,That draw you to her splendid whiteness, asThe pistil of a water-lily draws,Adust with gold. Those girls across the seaAre tyrannously pretty,—and I swore(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl)To bring her to you for a woman’s kiss,Not now, but on some other day or week:—We’ll call it perjury; I give her up.’‘No, bring her.’‘Now,’ said he, ‘you make it hardTo touch such goodness with a grimy palm.I thought to tease you well, and fret you cross,And steel myself, when rightly vexed with you,For telling you a thing to tease you more.’‘Of Romney?’‘No, no; nothing worse,’ he cried,‘Of Romney Leigh, than what is buzzed about,—Thatheis taken in an eye-trap too,Like many half as wise. The thing I meanRefers to you, not him.’‘Refers to me.’He echoed,—‘Me! You sound it like a stoneDropped down a dry well very listlessly,By one who never thinks about the toadAlive at the bottom. Presently perhapsYou’ll sound your ‘me’ more proudly—till I shrink.’‘Lord Howe’s the toad, then, in this question?’‘Brief,We’ll take it graver. Give me sofa-room,And quiet hearing. You know Eglinton,John Eglinton, of Eglinton in Kent?’‘Ishethe toad?—he’s rather like the snail;Known chiefly for the house upon his back:Divide the man and house—you kill the man;That’s Eglinton of Eglinton, Lord Howe.’He answered grave. ‘A reputable man,An excellent landlord of the olden stamp,If somewhat slack in new philanthropies;Who keeps his birthdays with a tenants’ dance,Is hard upon them when they miss the churchOr keep their children back from catechism,But not ungentle when the aged poorPick sticks at hedge-sides; nay, I’ve heard him say,‘The old dame has a twinge because she stoops:‘That’s punishment enough for felony.’’‘O tender-hearted landlord! May I takeMy long lease with him, when the time arrivesFor gathering winter-faggots!’‘He likes art,Buys books and pictures ... of a certain kind;Neglects no patent duty; a good son’....‘To a most obedient mother. Born to wearHis father’s shoes, he wears her husband’s too:Indeed, I’ve heard it’s touching. Dear Lord Howe,You shall not praisemeso against your heart,When I’m at worst for praise and faggots.’‘BeLess bitter with me, for ... in short,’ he said,‘I have a letter, which he urged me soTo bring you ... I could scarcely choose but yield;Insisting that a new love passing throughThe hand of an old friendship, caught from itSome reconciling perfume.’‘Love, you say?My lord, I cannot love. I only findThe rhymes for love,—and that’s not love, my lord.Take back your letter.’‘Pause: you’ll read it first?’‘I will not read it: it is stereotyped;The same he wrote to,—anybody’s name,—Anne Blythe, the actress, when she had died so true,A duchess fainted in a private box:Pauline, the dancer, after the greatpas,In which her little feet winked overheadLike other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:Or Baldinacci, when her F in altHad touched the silver tops of heaven itselfWith such a pungent soul-dart, even the QueenLaid softly, each to each, her white-gloved palms,And sighed for joy: or else (I thank your friend)Aurora Leigh,—when some indifferent rhymes,Like those the boys sang round the holy oxOn Memphis-road, have chanced, perhaps, to setOur Apis-public lowing. Oh, he wants,Instead of any worthy wife at home,A star upon his stage of Eglinton!Advise him that he is not overshrewdIn being so little modest: a dropped starMakes bitter waters, says a Book I’ve read,—And there’s his unread letter.’‘My dear friend,’Lord Howe began....In haste I tore the phrase.‘You mean your friend of Eglinton, or me?’‘I mean you, you,’ he answered with some fire.‘A happy life means prudent compromise;The tare runs through the farmer’s garnered sheaves;But though the gleaner’s apron holds pure wheat,We count her poorer. Tare with wheat, we cry,And good with drawbacks. You, you love your art,And, certain of vocation, set your soulOn utterance. Only, ... in this world we have made,(They say God made it first, but, if He did,’Twas so long since, ... and, since, we have spoiled it so,He scarce would know it, if He looked this way,From hells we preach of, with the flames blown out,)In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world,Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost,—In this uneven, unfostering England here,Where ledger-strokes and sword-strokes count indeed,But soul-strokes merely tell upon the fleshThey strike from,—it is hard to stand for art,Unless some golden tripod from the seaBe fished up, by Apollo’s divine chance,To throne such feet as yours, my prophetess,At Delphi. Think,—the god comes down as fierceAs twenty bloodhounds! shakes you, strangles you,Until the oracular shriek shall ooze in froth!At best it’s not all ease,—at worst too hard:A place to stand on is a ’vantage gained,And here’s your tripod. To be plain, dear friend,You’re poor, except in what you richly give;You labour for your own bread painfully,Or ere you pour our wine. For art’s sake, pause.’I answered slow,—as some wayfaring man,Who feels himself at night too far from home,Makes stedfast face against the bitter wind.‘Is art so less a thing than virtue is,That artists first must cater for their easeOr ever they make issue past themselvesTo generous use? alas, and is it so,That we, who would be somewhat clean, must sweepOur ways as well as walk them, and no friendConfirm us nobly,—‘Leave results to God,But you, be clean?’ What! ‘prudent compromiseMakes acceptable life,’ you say instead,You, you, Lord Howe?—in things indifferent, well.For instance, compromise the wheaten breadFor rye, the meat for lentils, silk for serge,And sleep on down, if needs, for sleep on straw;But there, end compromise. I will not bateOne artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.’So speaking, with less anger in my voiceThan sorrow, I rose quickly to depart;While he, thrown back upon the noble shameOf such high-stumbling natures, murmured words,The right words after wrong ones. Ah, the manIs worthy, but so given to entertainImpossible plans of superhuman life,—He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,To keep them at the grand millennial height,He has to mount a stool to get at them;And, meantime, lives on quite the common way,With everybody’s morals.As we passed,Lord Howe insisting that his friendly armShould oar me across the sparkling brawling streamWhich swept from room to room,—we fell at onceOn Lady Waldemar. ‘Miss Leigh,’ she said,And gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,As if she tried it in a ‘tiring glassAnd liked it; ‘all to-night I’ve strained at you,As babes at baubles held up out of reachBy spiteful nurses, (‘Never snatch,’ they say,)And there you sate, most perfectly shut inBy good Sir Blaise and clever Mister Smith,And then our dear Lord Howe! at last, indeed,I almost snatched. I have a world to speakAbout your cousin’s place in Shropshire, whereI’ve been to see his work ... our work,—you heardI went?... and of a letter, yesterday,In which, if I should read a page or two,You might feel interest, though you’re locked of courseIn literary toil.—You’ll like to hearYour last book lies at the phalanstery,As judged innocuous for the elder girlsAnd younger women who still care for books.We all must read, you see, before we live:But slowly the ineffable light comes up,And, as it deepens, drowns the written word,—So said your cousin, while we stood and feltA sunset from his favourite beech-tree seat:He might have been a poet if he would,But then he saw the higher thing at once,And climbed to it. I think he looks well now,Has quite got over that unfortunate ...Ah, ah ... I know it moved you. Tender-heart!You took a liking to the wretched girl.Perhaps you thought the marriage suitable,Who knows? a poet hankers for romance,And so on. As for Romney Leigh, ’tis sureHe never loved her,—never. By the way,You have not heard ofher...? quite out of sight,And out of saving? lost in every sense?’She might have gone on talking half-an-hour,And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,As a garden-statue a child pelts with snowFor pretty pastime. Every now and thenI put in ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ I scarce knew why;The blind man walks wherever the dog pulls,And so I answered. Till Lord Howe broke in;‘What penance takes the wretch who interruptsThe talk of charming women? I, at last,Must brave it. Pardon, Lady Waldemar!The lady on my arm is tired, unwell,And loyally I’ve promised she shall sayNo harder word this evening, than ... goodnight;The rest her face speaks for her.’—Then we went.And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak,Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that tiesMy hair ... now could I but unloose my soul!We are sepulchred alive in this close world,And want more room.The charming woman there—This reckoning up and writing down her talkAffects me singularly. How she talkedTo pain me! woman’s spite!—You wear steel-mail;A woman takes a housewife from her breast,And plucks the delicatest needle outAs ’twere a rose, and pricks you carefully’Neath nails, ’neath eyelids, in your nostrils,—say,A beast would roar so tortured,—but a man,A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,No, not for shame.What vexes, after all,Is just that such as she, with such as I,Knows how to vex. Sweet heaven, she takes me upAs if she had fingered me and dog-eared meAnd spelled me by the fireside, half a life!She knows my turns, my feeble points.—What then?The knowledge of a thing implies the thing;Of course, she foundthatin me, she sawthat,Her pencil underscoredthisfor a fault,And I, still ignorant. Shut the book up! close!And crush that beetle in the leaves.O heart,At last we shall grow hard too, like the rest,And call it self-defence because we are soft.And after all, now, ... why should I be pained,That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouseThis Lady Waldemar? And, say, she heldHer newly-blossomed gladness in my face, ...’Twas natural surely, if not generous,Considering how, when winter held her fast,I helped the frost with mine, and pained her moreThan she pains me. Pains me!—but wherefore pained?’Tis clear my cousin Romney wants a wife,—So, good!—The man’s need of the woman, here,Is greater than the woman’s of the man,And easier served; for where the man discernsA sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,Said he) we see but one, ideallyAnd really: where we yearn to lose ourselvesAnd melt like white pearls in another’s wine,He seeks to double himself by what he loves,And make his drink more costly by our pearls.At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,It is not good for man to be alone,—And that’s his way of thinking, first and last;And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.But then my cousin sets his dignityOn personal virtue. If he understandsBy love, like others, self-aggrandisement,It is that he may verily be greatBy doing rightly and kindly. Once he thought,For charitable ends set duly forthIn Heaven’s white judgment-book, to marry ... ah,We’ll call her name Aurora Leigh, althoughShe’s changed since then!—and once, for social ends,Poor Marian Erle, my sister Marian Erle,My woodland sister, sweet maid Marian,Whose memory moans on in me like the windThrough ill-shut casements, making me more sadThan ever I find reasons for. Alas,Poor pretty plaintive face, embodied ghost,He finds it easy, then, to clap thee offFrom pulling at his sleeve and book and pen,—He locks thee out at night into the cold,Away from butting with thy horny eyesAgainst his crystal dreams,—that, now, he’s strongTo love anew? that Lady WaldemarSucceeds my Marian?After all, why not?He loved not Marian, more than once he lovedAurora. If he loves, at last, that Third,Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oilOn marble floors, I will not augur himIll luck for that. Good love, howe’er ill-placed,Is better for a man’s soul in the end,Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,The wild-goat’s hoof-print on the loamy down,Exceeds our modern thinker who turns backThe strata ... granite, limestone, coal, and clay,Concluding coldly with, ‘Here’s law! Where’s God?’And then at worse,—if Romney loves her not,—At worst,—if he’s incapable of love,Which may be—then indeed, for such a manIncapable of love, she’s good enough;For she, at worst too, is a woman stillAnd loves him ... as the sort of woman can.My loose long hair began to burn and creep,Alive to the very ends, about my knees:I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughedOne day ... (how full the memories come up!)‘—Your Florence fire-flies live on in your hair,’He said, ‘it gleams so.’ Well, I wrung them out,My fire-flies; made a knot as hard as life,Of those loose, soft, impracticable curls,And then sat down and thought.... ‘She shall not thinkHer thought of me,’—and drew my desk and wrote.‘Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speakWith people round me, nor can sleep to-nightAnd not speak, after the great news I heardOf you and of my cousin. May you beMost happy; and the good he meant the world,Replenish his own life. Say what I say,And let my word be sweeter for your mouth,As you areyou... I only Aurora Leigh.’That’s quiet, guarded! though she hold it upAgainst the light, she’ll not see through it moreThan lies there to be seen. So much for pride;And now for peace, a little! Let me stopAll writing back.... ‘Sweet thanks, my sweetest friend,‘You’ve made more joyful my great joy itself,’—No, that’s too simple! she would twist it thus,‘My joy would still be as sweet as thyme in drawers,However shut up in the dark and dry;But violets, aired and dewed by love like yours,Out-smell all thyme! we keep that in our clothes,But drop the other down our bosoms, tillThey smell like’ ... ah, I see her writing backJust so. She’ll make a nosegay of her words,And tie it with blue ribbons at the endTo suit a poet;—pshaw!And then we’ll haveThe call to church; the broken, sad, bad dreamDreamed out at last; the marriage-vow completeWith the marriage-breakfast; praying in white gloves,Drawn off in haste for drinking pagan toastsIn somewhat stronger wine than any sippedBy gods, since Bacchus had his way with grapes.A postscript stops all that, and rescues me.‘You need not write. I have been overworked,And think of leaving London, England even,And hastening to get nearer to the sun,Where men sleep better. So, adieu.’—I foldAnd seal,—— and now I’m out of all the coil;I breathe now; I spring upward like a branch,A ten-years school-boy with a crooked stickMay pull down to his level, in search of nuts,But cannot hold a moment. How we twangBack on the blue sky, and assert our height,While he stares after! Now, the wonder seemsThat I could wrong myself by such a doubt.We poets always have uneasy hearts;Because our hearts, large-rounded as the globe,Can turn but one side to the sun at once.We are used to dip our artist-hands in gallAnd potash, trying potentialitiesOf alternated colour, till at lastWe get confused, and wonder for our skinHow nature tinged it first. Well—here’s the trueGood flesh-colour; I recognise my hand,—Which Romney Leigh may clasp as just a friend’s,And keep his clean.And now, my Italy.Alas, if we could ride with naked soulsAnd make no noise and pay no price at all,I would have seen thee sooner, Italy,—Forstill I have heard thee crying through my life,Thou piercing silence of extatic graves,Men call that name!But even a witch, to-day,Must melt down golden pieces in the nardWherewith to anoint her broomstick ere she rides;And poets evermore are scant of gold,And, if they find a piece behind the door,It turns by sunset to a withered leaf.The Devil himself scarce trusts his patentedGold-making art to any who make rhymes,But culls his Faustus from philosophersAnd not from poets. ‘Leave my Job,’ said God;And so, the Devil leaves him without pence,And poverty proves, plainly, special grace.In these new, just, administrative timesMen clamour for an order of merit. Why?Here’s black bread on the table, and no wine!At least I am a poet in being poor;Thank God. I wonder if the manuscriptOf my long poem, if ’twere sold outright,Would fetch enough to buy me shoes, to goA-foot, (thrown in, the necessary patchFor the other side the Alps)? it cannot be:I fear that I must sell this residueOf my father’s books; although the ElzevirsHave fly-leaves over-written by his hand,In faded notes as thick and fine and brownAs cobwebs on a tawny monumentOf the old Greeks—conferenda hæc cum his—Corruptè citat—lege potiùs,And so on, in the scholar’s regal wayOf giving judgment on the parts of speech,As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books and notesMust go together. And this Proclus too,In quaintly dear contracted Grecian types,Fantastically crumpled, like his thoughtsWhich would not seem too plain; you go round twiceFor one step forward, then you take it back,Because you’re somewhat giddy! there’s the ruleFor Proclus. Ah, I stained this middle leafWith pressing in’t my Florence iris-bell,Long stalk and all: my father chided meFor that stain of blue blood,—I recollectThe peevish turn his voice took,—‘Silly girls,Who plant their flowers in our philosophyTo make it fine, and only spoil the book!No more of it, Aurora.’ Yes—no more!Ah, blame of love, that’s sweeter than all praiseOf those who love not! ’tis so lost to me,I cannot, in such beggared life, affordTo lose my Proclus. Not for Florence, even.The kissing Judas, Wolff, shall go instead,Who builds us such a royal book as thisTo honour a chief-poet, folio-built,And writes above, ‘The house of Nobody:’Who floats in cream, as rich as any suckedFrom Juno’s breasts, the broad Homeric lines,And, while with their spondaic prodigious mouthsThey lap the lucent margins as babe-gods,Proclaims them bastards. Wolff’s an atheist;And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,We’ll guess as much, too, for the universe.That Wolff, those Platos: sweep the upper shelvesAs clean as this, and so I am almost rich,Which means, not forced to think of being poorIn sight of ends. To-morrow: no delay.I’ll wait in Paris till good CarringtonDispose of such, and, having chaffered forMy book’s price with the publisher, directAll proceeds to me. Just a line to askHis help.And now I come, my Italy,My own hills! Are you ’ware of me, my hills,How I burn toward you? do you feel to-nightThe urgency and yearning of my soul,As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babeAnd smile?—Nay, not so much as when, in heat,Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops,And tremble while ye are stedfast. Still, ye goYour own determined, calm, indifferent wayToward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light;Of all the grand progression nought left out;As if God verily made you for yourselves,And would not interrupt your life with ours.

Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hopeTo speak my poems in mysterious tuneWith man and nature,—with the lava-lymphThat trickles from successive galaxiesStill drop by drop adown the finger of God,In still new worlds?—with summer-days in this,That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?—With spring’s delicious trouble in the groundTormented by the quickened blood of roots,And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheavesIn token of the harvest-time of flowers?—With winters and with autumns,—and beyond,With the human heart’s large seasons,—when it hopesAnd fears, joys, grieves, and loves?—with all that strainOf sexual passion, which devours the fleshIn a sacrament of souls? with mother’s breasts,Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?—With multitudinous life, and finallyWith the great out-goings of ecstatic souls,Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,Their radiant faces upward, burn awayThis dark of the body, issuing on a worldBeyond our mortal?—can I speak my verseSo plainly in tune to these things and the rest,That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,As having the same warrant over themTo hold and move them, if they will or no,Alike imperious as the primal rhythmOf that theurgic nature? I must fail,Who fail at the beginning to hold and moveOne man,—and he my cousin, and he my friend,And he born tender, made intelligent,Inclined to ponder the precipitous sidesOf difficult questions; yet, obtuse tome,—Ofme, incurious! likes me very well,And wishes me a paradise of good,Good looks, good means, and good digestion!—ay,But otherwise evades me, puts me offWith kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,—Too light a book for a grave man’s reading! Go,Aurora Leigh: be humble.There it is;We women are too apt to look to one,Which proves a certain impotence in art.We strain our natures at doing something great,Far less because it’s something great to do,Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselvesAs being not small, and more appreciableTo some one friend. We must have mediatorsBetwixt our highest conscience and the judge;Some sweet saint’s blood must quicken in our palms,Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold:Good only, being perceived as the end of good,And God alone pleased,—that’s too poor, we think,And not enough for us, by any means.Ay—Romney, I remember, told me onceWe miss the abstract, when we comprehend!We miss it most when we aspire, ... and fail.Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s wayOf trailing garments, shall not trip me up.I’ll have no traffic with the personal thoughtIn art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain,Without the approbation of a man?It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself,That approbation of the general race,Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)And the highest fame was never reached exceptBy what was aimed above it. Art for art,And good for God Himself, the essential Good!We’ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;And if we fail.... But must we?—Shall I fail?The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,‘Let no one be called happy till his death.’To which I add,—Let no one till his deathBe called unhappy. Measure not the workUntil the day’s out and the labour done;Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant,Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;And, in that we have nobly striven at least,Deal with us nobly, women though we be,And honour us with truth, if not with praise.My ballads prospered; but the ballad’s raceIs rapid for a poet who bears weightsOf thought and golden image. He can standLike Atlas, in the sonnet,—and supportHis own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars;But then he must stand still, nor take a step.In that descriptive poem called ‘The Hills,’The prospects were too far and indistinct.’Tis true my critics said, ‘A fine view, that!’The public scarcely cared to climb the bookFor even the finest; and the public’s right,A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised;Which well the Greeks knew, when they stirred the barkWith close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,And made the forest-rivers garrulousWith babble of gods. For us, we are called to markA still more intimate humanityIn this inferior nature,—or, ourselves,Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfootBy veritabler artists. Earth, shut upBy Adam, like a fakir in a boxLeft too long buried, remained stiff and dry,A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,And used his kingly chrisms to straighten outThe leathery tongue turned back into the throat:Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitatesIn every limb, aspires in every breath,Embraces infinite relations. Now,We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves,Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest,To take possession of a senseless worldTo unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,The body of our body, the green earth,Indubitably human, like this fleshAnd these articulated veins through whichOur heart drives blood! there’s not a flower of spring,That dies ere June, but vaunts itself alliedBy issue and symbol, by significanceAnd correspondence, to that spirit-worldOutside the limits of our space and time,Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voiceWith human meanings; else they miss the thought,And henceforth step down lower, stand confessedInstructed poorly for interpreters,—Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.Even so my pastoral failed: it was a bookOf surface-pictures—pretty, cold, and falseWith literal transcript,—the worse done, I think,For being not ill-done. Let me set my markAgainst such doings, and do otherwise.This strikes me.—If the public whom we know,Could catch me at such admissions, I should passFor being right modest. Yet how proud we are,In daring to look down upon ourselves!The critics say that epics have died outWith Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—I’ll not believe it. I could never dreamAs Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineerWho travelled higher than he was born to live,And showed sometimes the goitre in his throatDiscoursing of an image seen through fog,)That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned greyLike any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plumeAs yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.All men are possible heroes: every age,Heroic in proportions, double-faced,Looks backward and before, expects a mornAnd claims an epos.Ay, but every ageAppears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!The thinkers scout it, and the poets aboundWho scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;An age of patches for old gaberdines;An age of mere transition, meaning nought,Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,And wrong thoughts make poor poems.Every age,Through being beheld too close, is ill-discernedBy those who have not lived past it. We’ll supposeMount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,To some colossal statue of a man:The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,Had guessed as little of any human formUp there, as would a flock of browsing goats.They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles offOr ere the giant image broke on them,Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,And fed at evening with the blood of suns;Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetuallyThe largesse of a silver river downTo all the country pastures. ’Tis even thusWith times we live in,—evermore too greatTo be apprehended near.But poets shouldExert a double vision; should have eyesTo see near things as comprehensivelyAs if afar they took their point of sight,And distant things, as intimately deep,As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.I do distrust the poet who discernsNo character or glory in his times,And trundles back his soul five hundred years,Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,Oh not to sing of lizards or of toadsAlive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable;But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,As dead as must be, for the greater part,The poems made on their chivalric bones.And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.Nay, if there’s room for poets in the worldA little overgrown, (I think there is)Their sole work is to represent the age,Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,And spends more passion, more heroic heat,Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,Cry out for togas and the picturesque,Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s selfWas commonplace to Lady Guenever;And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,As Regent Street to poets.Never flinch,But still, unscrupulously epic, catchUpon the burning lava of a song,The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:That, when the next shall come, the men of thatMay touch the impress with reverent hand, and say‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!That bosom seems to beat still, or at leastIt sets ours beating. This is living art,Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’What form is best for poems? Let me thinkOf forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,As sovran nature does, to make the form;For otherwise we only imprison spirit,And not embody. Inward evermoreTo outward,—so in life, and so in art,Which still is life.Five acts to make a play.And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?What matter for the number of the leaves,Supposing the tree lives and grows? exactThe literal unities of time and place,When ’tis the essence of passion to ignoreBoth time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire,And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.’Tis true the stage requires obsequiousnessTo this or that convention; ‘exit’ hereAnd ‘enter’ there; the points for clapping, fixed,Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams;And all the close-curled imagery clippedIn manner of their fleece at shearing-time.Forget to prick the galleries to the heartPrecisely at the fourth act,—culminateOur five pyramidal acts with one act more,—We’re lost so! Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely pleadAgainst our just damnation. Stand aside;We’ll muse for comfort that, last century,On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.And whosoever writes good poetry,Looks just to art. He does not write for youOr me,—for London or for Edinburgh;He will not suffer the best critic knownTo step into his sunshine of free thoughtAnd self-absorbed conception, and exactAn inch-long swerving of the holy lines.If virtue done for popularityDefiles like vice, can art for praise or hireStill keep its splendor, and remain pure art?Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passedFrom hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,Until the unborn snatch it, crying outIn pity on their fathers’ being so dull,And that’s success too.I will write no plays.Because the drama, less sublime in this,Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,Adopts the standard of the public tasteTo chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain roundIts regal neck, and learns to carry and fetchThe fashions of the day to please the day;Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,Commending chiefly its docilityAnd humour in stage-tricks; or else indeedGets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodiesBecause their grosser brains most naturallyMisjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)Shows teeth an almond’s breadth, protests the lengthOf a modest phrase,—‘My gentle countrymen,There’s something in it, haply, of your fault,’—Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,He’ll have five thousand, and five thousand more,Against him,—the whole public,—all the hoofsOf King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,—And obviously deserve it. He appealedTo these,—and why say more if they condemn,Than if they praised him?—Weep, my Æschylus,But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!For since ’twas Athens (so I read the myth)Who gave commission to that fatal weight,The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on theeAnd crush thee,—better cover thy bald head;She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan beeBefore thy loud’st protesting.—For the rest,The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage:I could not, in so little, accept success,Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,For manifester gains; let those who prize,Pursue them:Istand off.And yet, forbid,That any irreverent fancy or conceitShould litter in the Drama’s throne-room, whereThe rulers of our art, in whose full veinsDynastic glories mingle, sit in strengthAnd do their kingly work,—conceive, command,And, from the imagination’s crucial heat,Catch up their men and women all a-flameFor action, all alive, and forced to proveTheir life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,Until mankind makes witness, ‘These be menAs we are,’ and vouchsafes the kiss that’s dueTo Imogen and Juliet—sweetest kinOn art’s side.’Tis that, honouring to its worthThe drama, I would fear to keep it downTo the level of the footlights. Dies no moreThe sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,—His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling whiteOf choral vestures,—troubled in his blood,While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,Leapt high together with the altar-flame,And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,Which set the grand still front of Themis’ sonUpon the puckered visage of a player;—The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,Sweeps slowly past the piers;—the mouthpiece, whereThe mere man’s voice with all its breaths and breaksWent sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heightsIts phrasèd thunders;—these things are no more,Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,The growing drama has outgrown such toysOf simulated stature, face, and speech,It also, peradventure, may outgrowThe simulation of the painted scene,Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,With all its grand orchestral silencesTo keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.Alas, I still see something to be done,And what I do falls short of what I seeThough I waste myself on doing. Long green days,Worn bare of grass and sunshine,—long calm nights,From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,—Be witness for me, with no amateur’sIrreverent haste and busy idlenessI’ve set myself to art! What then? what’s done?What’s done, at last?Behold, at last, a book.If life-blood’s necessary,—which it is,(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood!)If life-blood’s fertilising, I wrung mineOn every leaf of this,—unless the dropsSlid heavily on one side and left it dry.That chances often: many a fervid manWrites books as cold and flat as grave-yard stonesFrom which the lichen’s scraped; and if St. PreuxHad written his own letters, as he might,We had never wept to think of the little mole’Neath Julie’s drooping eyelid. Passion isBut something suffered, after all.While ArtSets action on the top of suffering:The artist’s part is both to be and do,Transfixing with a special, central powerThe flat experience of the common man,And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,Half agony, half ecstasy, the thingHe feels the inmost: never felt the lessBecause he sings it. Does a torch less burnFor burning next reflectors of blue steel,Thatheshould be the colder for his place’Twixt two incessant fires,—his personal life’s,And that intense refraction which burns backPerpetually against him from the roundOf crystal conscience he was born intoIf artist-born? O sorrowful great giftConferred on poets, of a twofold life,When one life has been found enough for pain!We, staggering ’neath our burden as mere men,Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,Support the intolerable strain and stressOf the universal, and send clearly upWith voices broken by the human sob,Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!But soft!—a ‘poet’ is a word soon said;A book’s a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,The more the poet shall be questionable,The more unquestionably comes his book!And this of mine—well, granting to myselfSome passion in it, furrowing up the flats,Mere passion will not prove a volume worthIts gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keelMean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.There’s more than passion goes to make a man,Or book, which is a man too.I am sad.I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,And, feeling the hard marble first relent,Grow supple to the straining of his arms,And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toilOf stretching past the known and seen, to reachThe archetypal Beauty out of sight,Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,And with his own life dazed and blinded him!Not so; Pygmalion loved,—and whoso lovesBelieves the impossible.And I am sad:I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,Since none seems worthy of my thought and hopeMore highly mated. He has shot them down,My Phœbus Apollo, soul within my soul,Who judges, by the attempted, what’s attained,And with the silver arrow from his height,Has struck down all my works before my face,WhileIsaid nothing. Is there aught to say?I called the artist but a greatened man;He may be childless also, like a man.I laboured on alone. The wind and dustAnd sun of the world beat blistering in my face;And hope, now for me, now against me, draggedMy spirits onward,—as some fallen balloon,Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,Or seemed,—and generous souls cried out, ‘Be strong,Take courage; now you’re on our level,—now!The next step saves you!’ I was flushed with praise,But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,I could not choose but murmur to myself‘Is this all? all that’s done? and all that’s gained?If this then be success, ’tis dismallerThan any failure.’O my God, my God,O supreme Artist, who as sole returnFor all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,Demandest of us just a word ... a name,‘My Father!’—thou hast knowledge, only thou,How dreary ’tis for women to sit stillOn winter nights by solitary fires,And hear the nations praising them far off,Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,Our very heart of passionate womanhood,Which could not beat so in the verse withoutBeing present also in the unkissed lips,And eyes undried because there’s none to askThe reason they grew moist.To sit alone,And think, for comfort, how, that very night,Affianced lovers, leaning face to faceWith sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,Are reading haply from some page of ours,To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,When such a stanza, level to their mood,Seems floating their own thought out—‘So I feelFor thee,’—‘And I, for thee: this poet knowsWhat everlasting love is!’—how, that night,A father, issuing from the misty roadsUpon the luminous round of lamp and hearthAnd happy children, having caught up firstThe youngest there until it shrunk and shriekedTo feel the cold chin prick its dimples throughWith winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lapOf the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lidsTo hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)Our book and cry, ... ‘Ah you, you care for rhymes;So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,When April comes to let you! I’ve been toldThey are not idle as so many are,But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:It’s yours, the book; I’ll write your name in it,—That so you may not lose, however lostIn poet’s lore and charming reverie,The thought of how your father thought ofyouIn riding from the town.’To have our booksAppraised by love, associated with love,Whilewesit loveless! is it hard, you think?At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,Means simply love. It was a man said that.And then, there’s love and love: the love of all(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)Is but a small thing to the love of one.You bid a hungry child be satisfiedWith a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,He says he’s hungry,—he would rather haveThat little barley-cake you keep from himWhile reckoning up his harvests. So with us;(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)We’re hungry.Hungry! but it’s pitifulTo wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbsBecause we’re hungry. Who, in all this world,(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,And learn what good is by its opposite)Has never hungered? Woe to him who has foundThe meal enough! if Ugolino’s full,His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:For here satiety proves penuryMore utterly irremediable. And sinceWe needs must hunger,—better, for man’s love,Than God’s truth! better, for companions sweet,Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.Well, well! they say we’re envious, we who rhyme;But I, because I am a woman perhaps,And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.I never envied Graham his breadth of style,Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)Such delicate perspectives of full life;Nor Belmore, for the unity of aimTo which he cuts his cedarn poems, fineAs sketchers do their pencils; nor Mark Gage,For that caressing colour and trancing toneWhereby you’re swept away and melted inThe sensual element, which, with a back wave,Restores you to the level of pure soulsAnd leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,For native gifts or popular applause,I’ve envied; but for this,—that when, by chance,Says some one,—‘There goes Belmore, a great man!He leaves clean work behind him, and requiresNo sweeper up of the chips,’ ... a girl I know,Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,Smiles unaware, as if a guardian saintSmiled in her:—for this, too,—that Gage comes homeAnd lays his last book’s prodigal reviewUpon his mother’s knees, where, years ago,He had laid his childish spelling-book and learnedTo chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,As young birds must. ‘Well done,’ she murmured then,She will not say it now more wonderingly;And yet the last ‘Well done’ will touch him more,As catching up to-day and yesterdayIn a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage.I envy you your mother!—and you, Graham,Because you have a wife who loves you so,She half forgets, at moments, to be proudOf being Graham’s wife, until a friend observes,‘The boy here, has his father’s massive brow,Done small in wax ... if we push back the curls.’Who lovesme? Dearest father,—mother sweet,—I speak the names out sometimes by myself,And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,As Hindostanee to an Ind-born manAccustomed many years to English speech;Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,Which will not leave off singing. Up in heavenI have my father,—with my mother’s faceBeside him in a blotch of heavenly light;No more for earth’s familiar, household use,No more! The best verse written by this hand,Can never reach them where they sit, to seemWell-done tothem. Death quite unfellows us,Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,And makes us part as those at Babel did,Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.A living Cæsar would not dare to playAt bowls, with such as my dead father is.And yet, this may be less so than appears,This change and separation. Sparrows fiveFor just two farthings, and God cares for each.If God is not too great for little cares,Is any creature, because gone to God?I’ve seen some men, veracious, nowise mad,Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified,They’ve heard the Dead a-ticking like a clockWhich strikes the hours of the eternities,Beside them, with their natural ears,—and knownThat human spirits feel the human way,And hate the unreasoning awe which waves them offFrom possible communion. It may be.At least, earth separates as well as heaven.For instance, I have not seen Romney LeighFull eighteen months ... add six, you get two years.They say he’s very busy with good works,—Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses.He made an almshouse of his heart one day,Which ever since is loose upon the latchFor those who pull the string.—I never did.It always makes me sad to go abroad;And now I’m sadder that I went to-nightAmong the lights and talkers at Lord Howe’s.His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calmAs her other jewels. If she’s somewhat cold,Who wonders, when her blood has stood so longIn the ducal reservoir she calls her lineBy no means arrogantly? she’s not proud;Not prouder than the swan is of the lakeHe has always swum in;—’tis her element,And so she takes it with a natural grace,Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,Therearemen, move on without outriders,Which isn’t her fault. Ah, to watch her face,When good Lord Howe expounds his theoriesOf social justice and equality—’Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bendHer neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,‘Such clever talk—that dear, odd Algernon!’She listens on, exactly as if he talkedSome Scandinavian myth of Lemures,Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.She’s gracious to me as her husband’s friend,And would be gracious, were I not a Leigh,Being used to smile just so, without her eyes,On Joseph Strangways, the Leeds mesmerist,And Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from ‘the States’Upon the ‘Woman’s question.’ Then, for him,I like him ... he’s my friend. And all the roomsWere full of crinkling silks that swept aboutThe fine dust of most subtle courtesies.What then?—why then, we come home to be sad.How lovely One I love not, looked to-night!She’s very pretty, Lady Waldemar.Her maid must use both hands to twist that coilOf tresses, then be careful lest the richBronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a grey hair,A single one,—I saw it; otherwiseThe woman looked immortal. How they told,Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!They split the amaranth velvet-boddice downTo the waist, or nearly, with the audacious pressOf full-breathed beauty. If the heart withinWere half as white!—but, if it were, perhapsThe breast were closer covered, and the sightLess aspectable, by half, too.I heardThe young man with the German student’s look—A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick,Which shot up straight against the parting lineSo equally dividing the long hair,—Say softly to his neighbour, (thirty-fiveAnd mediæval) ‘Look that way, Sir Blaise.She’s Lady Waldemar—to the left,—in red—Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,Is soon about to marry.’Then repliedSir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priestlike voice,Too used to syllable damnations roundTo make a natural emphasis worth while:‘Is Leigh your ablest man? the same, I think,Once jilted by a recreant pretty maidAdopted from the people? Now, in change,He seems to have plucked a flower from the other sideOf the social hedge,’‘A flower, a flower,’ exclaimedMy German student,—his own eyes full-blownBent on her. He was twenty, certainly.Sir Blaise resumed with gentle arrogance,As if he had dropped his alms into a hat,And had the right to counsel,—‘My young friend,I doubt your ablest man’s abilityTo get the least good or help meet for him,For pagan phalanstery or Christian home,From such a flowery creature,’‘Beautiful!’My student murmured, rapt,—‘Mark how she stirs!Just waves her head, as if a flower indeed,Touched far off by the vain breath of our talk.’At which that bilious Grimwald, (he who writesFor the Renovator) who had seemed absorbedUpon the table-book of autographs,(I dare say mentally he crunched the bonesOf all those writers, wishing them aliveTo feel his tooth in earnest) turned short roundWith low carnivorous laugh,—‘A flower, of course!She neither sews nor spins,—and takes no thoughtOf her garments ... falling off.’The student flinched,Sir Blaise, the same; then both, drawing back their chairsAs if they spied black-beetles on the floor,Pursued their talk, without a word being thrownTo the critic.Good Sir Blaise’s brow is highAnd noticeably narrow: a strong wind,You fancy, might unroof him suddenly,And blow that great top attic off his headSo piled with feudal relics. You admireHis nose in profile, though you miss his chin;But, though you miss his chin, you seldom missHis golden cross worn innermostly, (carvedFor penance, by a saintly Styrian monkWhose flesh was too much with him,) slipping throughSome unaware unbuttoned casualtyOf the under-waistcoat. With an absent airSir Blaise sate fingering it and speaking low,While I, upon the sofa, heard it all.‘My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyesLike blessedest St. Lucy, on a plate,They would not trick us into choosing wives,As doublets, by the colour. OtherwiseOur fathers chose,—and therefore, when they had hungTheir household keys about a lady’s waist,The sense of duty gave her dignity:She kept her bosom holy to her babes;And, if a moralist reproved her dress,’Twas, ‘Too much starch!’—and not, ‘Too little lawn!’'‘Now, pshaw!’ returned the other in a heat,A little fretted by being called ‘young friend,’Or so I took it,—‘for St. Lucy’s sake,If she’s the saint to curse by, let us leaveOur fathers,—plagued enough about our sons!’(He stroked his beardless chin) ‘yes, plagued, sir, plagued:The future generations lie on usAs heavy as the nightmare of a seer;Our meat and drink grow painful prophecy:I ask you,—have we leisure, if we liked,To hollow out our weary hands to keepYour intermittent rushlight of the pastFrom draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,And marriage-laws ... the socket drops them throughWhile we two speak,—however may protestSome over-delicate nostrils, like your own,’Gainst odours thence arising.’‘You are young,’Sir Blaise objected.‘If I am,’ he saidWith fire,—‘though somewhat less so than I seem,The young run on before, and see the thingThat’s coming. Reverence for the young, I cry.In that new church for which the world’s near ripe,You’ll have the younger in the Elder’s chair,Presiding with his ivory front of hopeO’er foreheads clawed by cruel carrion-birdsOf life’s experience.’‘Pray your blessing, sir,’Sir Blaise replied good-humouredly,—‘I pluckedA silver hair this morning from my beard,Which left me your inferior. Would I wereEighteen, and worthy to admonish you!If young men of your order run beforeTo see such sights as sexual prejudiceAnd marriage-law dissolved,—in plainer words,A general concubinage expressedIn a universal pruriency,—the thingIs scarce worth running fast for, and you’d gainBy loitering with your elders.’‘Ah,’ he said,‘Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill,Can talk with one at bottom of the view,To make it comprehensible? Why, LeighHimself, although our ablest man, I said,Is scarce advanced to see as far as this,Which some are: he takes up imperfectlyThe social question—by one handle—leavesThe rest to trail. A Christian socialist,Is Romney Leigh, you understand.’‘Not I.I disbelieve in Christian-pagans, muchAs you in women-fishes. If we mixTwo colours, we lose both, and make a thirdDistinct from either. Mark you! to mistakeA colour is the sign of a sick brain,And mine, I thank the saints, is clear and cool:A neutral tint is here impossible.The church,—and by the church, I mean, of course,The catholic, apostolic, mother-church,—Draws lines as plain and straight as her own wall;Inside of which, are Christians, obviously,And outside ... dogs.’‘We thank you. Well I knowThe ancient mother-church would fain still bite,For all her toothless gums,—as Leigh himselfWould fain be a Christian still, for all his wit;Pass that; you two may settle it, for me.You’re slow in England. In a month I learntAt Göttingen, enough philosophyTo stock your English schools for fifty years;Pass that, too. Here, alone, I stop you short,—Supposing a true man like Leigh could standUnequal in the stature of his lifeTo the height of his opinions. Choose a wifeBecause of a smooth skin?—not he, not he!He’d rail at Venus’ self for creaking shoes,Unless she walked his way of righteousness:And if he takes a Venus Meretrix,(No imputation on the lady there)Be sure that, by some sleight of Christian art,He has metamorphosed and converted herTo a Blessed Virgin.’‘Soft!’ Sir Blaise drew breathAs if it hurt him,—‘Soft! no blasphemy,I pray you!’‘The first Christians did the thing;Why not the last?’ asked he of Göttingen,With just that shade of sneering on the lip,Compensates for the lagging of the beard,—‘And so the case is. If that fairest fairIs talked of as the future wife of Leigh,She’s talked of, too, at least as certainly,As Leigh’s disciple. You may find her nameOn all his missions and commissions, schools,Asylums, hospitals,—he has had her down,With other ladies whom her starry leadPersuaded from their spheres, to his country-placeIn Shropshire, to the famed phalansteryAt Leigh Hall, christianised from Fourier’s own,(In which he has planted out his sapling stocksOf knowledge into social nurseries)And there, they say, she has tarried half a week,And milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,And said ‘my sister’ to the lowest drabOf all the assembled castaways; such girls!Ay, sided with them at the washing-tub—Conceive, Sir Blaise, those naked perfect arms,Round glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.’Lord Howe came up. ‘What, talking poetrySo near the image of the unfavouring Muse?That’s you, Miss Leigh: I’ve watched you half an hour,Precisely as I watched the statue calledA Pallas in the Vatican;—you mindThe face, Sir Blaise?—intensely calm and sad,As wisdom cut it off from fellowship,—Butthatspoke louder. Not a word fromyou!And these two gentlemen were bold, I marked,And unabashed by even your silence.’‘Ah,’Said I, ‘my dear Lord Howe, you shall not speakTo a printing woman who has lost her place,(The sweet safe corner of the household fireBehind the heads of children) compliments,As if she were a woman. We who have cliptThe curls before our eyes, may see at leastAs plain as men do: speak out, man to man;No compliments, beseech you.’‘Friend to friend,Let that be. We are sad to-night, I saw,(—Good night, Sir Blaise! Ah, Smith—he has slipped away)I saw you across the room, and stayed, Miss Leigh,To keep a crowd of lion-hunters off,With faces toward your jungle. There were three;A spacious lady, five feet ten and fat,Who has the devil in her (and there’s room)For walking to and fro upon the earth,From Chipewa to China; she requiresYour autograph upon a tinted leaf’Twixt Queen Pomare’s and Emperor Soulouque’s;Pray give it; she has energies, though fat:For me, I’d rather see a rick on fireThan such a woman angry. Then a youthFresh from the backwoods, green as the underboughs,Asks modestly, Miss Leigh, to kiss your shoe,And adds, he has an epic, in twelve parts,Which when you’ve read, you’ll do it for his boot,—All which I saved you, and absorb next weekBoth manuscript and man,—because a lordIs still more potent than a poetess,With any extreme republican. Ah, ah,You smile at last, then.’‘Thank you.’‘Leave the smile,I’ll lose the thanks for ’t,—ay, and throw you inMy transatlantic girl, with golden eyes,That draw you to her splendid whiteness, asThe pistil of a water-lily draws,Adust with gold. Those girls across the seaAre tyrannously pretty,—and I swore(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl)To bring her to you for a woman’s kiss,Not now, but on some other day or week:—We’ll call it perjury; I give her up.’‘No, bring her.’‘Now,’ said he, ‘you make it hardTo touch such goodness with a grimy palm.I thought to tease you well, and fret you cross,And steel myself, when rightly vexed with you,For telling you a thing to tease you more.’‘Of Romney?’‘No, no; nothing worse,’ he cried,‘Of Romney Leigh, than what is buzzed about,—Thatheis taken in an eye-trap too,Like many half as wise. The thing I meanRefers to you, not him.’‘Refers to me.’He echoed,—‘Me! You sound it like a stoneDropped down a dry well very listlessly,By one who never thinks about the toadAlive at the bottom. Presently perhapsYou’ll sound your ‘me’ more proudly—till I shrink.’‘Lord Howe’s the toad, then, in this question?’‘Brief,We’ll take it graver. Give me sofa-room,And quiet hearing. You know Eglinton,John Eglinton, of Eglinton in Kent?’‘Ishethe toad?—he’s rather like the snail;Known chiefly for the house upon his back:Divide the man and house—you kill the man;That’s Eglinton of Eglinton, Lord Howe.’He answered grave. ‘A reputable man,An excellent landlord of the olden stamp,If somewhat slack in new philanthropies;Who keeps his birthdays with a tenants’ dance,Is hard upon them when they miss the churchOr keep their children back from catechism,But not ungentle when the aged poorPick sticks at hedge-sides; nay, I’ve heard him say,‘The old dame has a twinge because she stoops:‘That’s punishment enough for felony.’’‘O tender-hearted landlord! May I takeMy long lease with him, when the time arrivesFor gathering winter-faggots!’‘He likes art,Buys books and pictures ... of a certain kind;Neglects no patent duty; a good son’....‘To a most obedient mother. Born to wearHis father’s shoes, he wears her husband’s too:Indeed, I’ve heard it’s touching. Dear Lord Howe,You shall not praisemeso against your heart,When I’m at worst for praise and faggots.’‘BeLess bitter with me, for ... in short,’ he said,‘I have a letter, which he urged me soTo bring you ... I could scarcely choose but yield;Insisting that a new love passing throughThe hand of an old friendship, caught from itSome reconciling perfume.’‘Love, you say?My lord, I cannot love. I only findThe rhymes for love,—and that’s not love, my lord.Take back your letter.’‘Pause: you’ll read it first?’‘I will not read it: it is stereotyped;The same he wrote to,—anybody’s name,—Anne Blythe, the actress, when she had died so true,A duchess fainted in a private box:Pauline, the dancer, after the greatpas,In which her little feet winked overheadLike other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:Or Baldinacci, when her F in altHad touched the silver tops of heaven itselfWith such a pungent soul-dart, even the QueenLaid softly, each to each, her white-gloved palms,And sighed for joy: or else (I thank your friend)Aurora Leigh,—when some indifferent rhymes,Like those the boys sang round the holy oxOn Memphis-road, have chanced, perhaps, to setOur Apis-public lowing. Oh, he wants,Instead of any worthy wife at home,A star upon his stage of Eglinton!Advise him that he is not overshrewdIn being so little modest: a dropped starMakes bitter waters, says a Book I’ve read,—And there’s his unread letter.’‘My dear friend,’Lord Howe began....In haste I tore the phrase.‘You mean your friend of Eglinton, or me?’‘I mean you, you,’ he answered with some fire.‘A happy life means prudent compromise;The tare runs through the farmer’s garnered sheaves;But though the gleaner’s apron holds pure wheat,We count her poorer. Tare with wheat, we cry,And good with drawbacks. You, you love your art,And, certain of vocation, set your soulOn utterance. Only, ... in this world we have made,(They say God made it first, but, if He did,’Twas so long since, ... and, since, we have spoiled it so,He scarce would know it, if He looked this way,From hells we preach of, with the flames blown out,)In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world,Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost,—In this uneven, unfostering England here,Where ledger-strokes and sword-strokes count indeed,But soul-strokes merely tell upon the fleshThey strike from,—it is hard to stand for art,Unless some golden tripod from the seaBe fished up, by Apollo’s divine chance,To throne such feet as yours, my prophetess,At Delphi. Think,—the god comes down as fierceAs twenty bloodhounds! shakes you, strangles you,Until the oracular shriek shall ooze in froth!At best it’s not all ease,—at worst too hard:A place to stand on is a ’vantage gained,And here’s your tripod. To be plain, dear friend,You’re poor, except in what you richly give;You labour for your own bread painfully,Or ere you pour our wine. For art’s sake, pause.’I answered slow,—as some wayfaring man,Who feels himself at night too far from home,Makes stedfast face against the bitter wind.‘Is art so less a thing than virtue is,That artists first must cater for their easeOr ever they make issue past themselvesTo generous use? alas, and is it so,That we, who would be somewhat clean, must sweepOur ways as well as walk them, and no friendConfirm us nobly,—‘Leave results to God,But you, be clean?’ What! ‘prudent compromiseMakes acceptable life,’ you say instead,You, you, Lord Howe?—in things indifferent, well.For instance, compromise the wheaten breadFor rye, the meat for lentils, silk for serge,And sleep on down, if needs, for sleep on straw;But there, end compromise. I will not bateOne artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.’So speaking, with less anger in my voiceThan sorrow, I rose quickly to depart;While he, thrown back upon the noble shameOf such high-stumbling natures, murmured words,The right words after wrong ones. Ah, the manIs worthy, but so given to entertainImpossible plans of superhuman life,—He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,To keep them at the grand millennial height,He has to mount a stool to get at them;And, meantime, lives on quite the common way,With everybody’s morals.As we passed,Lord Howe insisting that his friendly armShould oar me across the sparkling brawling streamWhich swept from room to room,—we fell at onceOn Lady Waldemar. ‘Miss Leigh,’ she said,And gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,As if she tried it in a ‘tiring glassAnd liked it; ‘all to-night I’ve strained at you,As babes at baubles held up out of reachBy spiteful nurses, (‘Never snatch,’ they say,)And there you sate, most perfectly shut inBy good Sir Blaise and clever Mister Smith,And then our dear Lord Howe! at last, indeed,I almost snatched. I have a world to speakAbout your cousin’s place in Shropshire, whereI’ve been to see his work ... our work,—you heardI went?... and of a letter, yesterday,In which, if I should read a page or two,You might feel interest, though you’re locked of courseIn literary toil.—You’ll like to hearYour last book lies at the phalanstery,As judged innocuous for the elder girlsAnd younger women who still care for books.We all must read, you see, before we live:But slowly the ineffable light comes up,And, as it deepens, drowns the written word,—So said your cousin, while we stood and feltA sunset from his favourite beech-tree seat:He might have been a poet if he would,But then he saw the higher thing at once,And climbed to it. I think he looks well now,Has quite got over that unfortunate ...Ah, ah ... I know it moved you. Tender-heart!You took a liking to the wretched girl.Perhaps you thought the marriage suitable,Who knows? a poet hankers for romance,And so on. As for Romney Leigh, ’tis sureHe never loved her,—never. By the way,You have not heard ofher...? quite out of sight,And out of saving? lost in every sense?’She might have gone on talking half-an-hour,And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,As a garden-statue a child pelts with snowFor pretty pastime. Every now and thenI put in ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ I scarce knew why;The blind man walks wherever the dog pulls,And so I answered. Till Lord Howe broke in;‘What penance takes the wretch who interruptsThe talk of charming women? I, at last,Must brave it. Pardon, Lady Waldemar!The lady on my arm is tired, unwell,And loyally I’ve promised she shall sayNo harder word this evening, than ... goodnight;The rest her face speaks for her.’—Then we went.And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak,Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that tiesMy hair ... now could I but unloose my soul!We are sepulchred alive in this close world,And want more room.The charming woman there—This reckoning up and writing down her talkAffects me singularly. How she talkedTo pain me! woman’s spite!—You wear steel-mail;A woman takes a housewife from her breast,And plucks the delicatest needle outAs ’twere a rose, and pricks you carefully’Neath nails, ’neath eyelids, in your nostrils,—say,A beast would roar so tortured,—but a man,A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,No, not for shame.What vexes, after all,Is just that such as she, with such as I,Knows how to vex. Sweet heaven, she takes me upAs if she had fingered me and dog-eared meAnd spelled me by the fireside, half a life!She knows my turns, my feeble points.—What then?The knowledge of a thing implies the thing;Of course, she foundthatin me, she sawthat,Her pencil underscoredthisfor a fault,And I, still ignorant. Shut the book up! close!And crush that beetle in the leaves.O heart,At last we shall grow hard too, like the rest,And call it self-defence because we are soft.And after all, now, ... why should I be pained,That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouseThis Lady Waldemar? And, say, she heldHer newly-blossomed gladness in my face, ...’Twas natural surely, if not generous,Considering how, when winter held her fast,I helped the frost with mine, and pained her moreThan she pains me. Pains me!—but wherefore pained?’Tis clear my cousin Romney wants a wife,—So, good!—The man’s need of the woman, here,Is greater than the woman’s of the man,And easier served; for where the man discernsA sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,Said he) we see but one, ideallyAnd really: where we yearn to lose ourselvesAnd melt like white pearls in another’s wine,He seeks to double himself by what he loves,And make his drink more costly by our pearls.At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,It is not good for man to be alone,—And that’s his way of thinking, first and last;And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.But then my cousin sets his dignityOn personal virtue. If he understandsBy love, like others, self-aggrandisement,It is that he may verily be greatBy doing rightly and kindly. Once he thought,For charitable ends set duly forthIn Heaven’s white judgment-book, to marry ... ah,We’ll call her name Aurora Leigh, althoughShe’s changed since then!—and once, for social ends,Poor Marian Erle, my sister Marian Erle,My woodland sister, sweet maid Marian,Whose memory moans on in me like the windThrough ill-shut casements, making me more sadThan ever I find reasons for. Alas,Poor pretty plaintive face, embodied ghost,He finds it easy, then, to clap thee offFrom pulling at his sleeve and book and pen,—He locks thee out at night into the cold,Away from butting with thy horny eyesAgainst his crystal dreams,—that, now, he’s strongTo love anew? that Lady WaldemarSucceeds my Marian?After all, why not?He loved not Marian, more than once he lovedAurora. If he loves, at last, that Third,Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oilOn marble floors, I will not augur himIll luck for that. Good love, howe’er ill-placed,Is better for a man’s soul in the end,Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,The wild-goat’s hoof-print on the loamy down,Exceeds our modern thinker who turns backThe strata ... granite, limestone, coal, and clay,Concluding coldly with, ‘Here’s law! Where’s God?’And then at worse,—if Romney loves her not,—At worst,—if he’s incapable of love,Which may be—then indeed, for such a manIncapable of love, she’s good enough;For she, at worst too, is a woman stillAnd loves him ... as the sort of woman can.My loose long hair began to burn and creep,Alive to the very ends, about my knees:I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughedOne day ... (how full the memories come up!)‘—Your Florence fire-flies live on in your hair,’He said, ‘it gleams so.’ Well, I wrung them out,My fire-flies; made a knot as hard as life,Of those loose, soft, impracticable curls,And then sat down and thought.... ‘She shall not thinkHer thought of me,’—and drew my desk and wrote.‘Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speakWith people round me, nor can sleep to-nightAnd not speak, after the great news I heardOf you and of my cousin. May you beMost happy; and the good he meant the world,Replenish his own life. Say what I say,And let my word be sweeter for your mouth,As you areyou... I only Aurora Leigh.’That’s quiet, guarded! though she hold it upAgainst the light, she’ll not see through it moreThan lies there to be seen. So much for pride;And now for peace, a little! Let me stopAll writing back.... ‘Sweet thanks, my sweetest friend,‘You’ve made more joyful my great joy itself,’—No, that’s too simple! she would twist it thus,‘My joy would still be as sweet as thyme in drawers,However shut up in the dark and dry;But violets, aired and dewed by love like yours,Out-smell all thyme! we keep that in our clothes,But drop the other down our bosoms, tillThey smell like’ ... ah, I see her writing backJust so. She’ll make a nosegay of her words,And tie it with blue ribbons at the endTo suit a poet;—pshaw!And then we’ll haveThe call to church; the broken, sad, bad dreamDreamed out at last; the marriage-vow completeWith the marriage-breakfast; praying in white gloves,Drawn off in haste for drinking pagan toastsIn somewhat stronger wine than any sippedBy gods, since Bacchus had his way with grapes.A postscript stops all that, and rescues me.‘You need not write. I have been overworked,And think of leaving London, England even,And hastening to get nearer to the sun,Where men sleep better. So, adieu.’—I foldAnd seal,—— and now I’m out of all the coil;I breathe now; I spring upward like a branch,A ten-years school-boy with a crooked stickMay pull down to his level, in search of nuts,But cannot hold a moment. How we twangBack on the blue sky, and assert our height,While he stares after! Now, the wonder seemsThat I could wrong myself by such a doubt.We poets always have uneasy hearts;Because our hearts, large-rounded as the globe,Can turn but one side to the sun at once.We are used to dip our artist-hands in gallAnd potash, trying potentialitiesOf alternated colour, till at lastWe get confused, and wonder for our skinHow nature tinged it first. Well—here’s the trueGood flesh-colour; I recognise my hand,—Which Romney Leigh may clasp as just a friend’s,And keep his clean.And now, my Italy.Alas, if we could ride with naked soulsAnd make no noise and pay no price at all,I would have seen thee sooner, Italy,—Forstill I have heard thee crying through my life,Thou piercing silence of extatic graves,Men call that name!But even a witch, to-day,Must melt down golden pieces in the nardWherewith to anoint her broomstick ere she rides;And poets evermore are scant of gold,And, if they find a piece behind the door,It turns by sunset to a withered leaf.The Devil himself scarce trusts his patentedGold-making art to any who make rhymes,But culls his Faustus from philosophersAnd not from poets. ‘Leave my Job,’ said God;And so, the Devil leaves him without pence,And poverty proves, plainly, special grace.In these new, just, administrative timesMen clamour for an order of merit. Why?Here’s black bread on the table, and no wine!At least I am a poet in being poor;Thank God. I wonder if the manuscriptOf my long poem, if ’twere sold outright,Would fetch enough to buy me shoes, to goA-foot, (thrown in, the necessary patchFor the other side the Alps)? it cannot be:I fear that I must sell this residueOf my father’s books; although the ElzevirsHave fly-leaves over-written by his hand,In faded notes as thick and fine and brownAs cobwebs on a tawny monumentOf the old Greeks—conferenda hæc cum his—Corruptè citat—lege potiùs,And so on, in the scholar’s regal wayOf giving judgment on the parts of speech,As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books and notesMust go together. And this Proclus too,In quaintly dear contracted Grecian types,Fantastically crumpled, like his thoughtsWhich would not seem too plain; you go round twiceFor one step forward, then you take it back,Because you’re somewhat giddy! there’s the ruleFor Proclus. Ah, I stained this middle leafWith pressing in’t my Florence iris-bell,Long stalk and all: my father chided meFor that stain of blue blood,—I recollectThe peevish turn his voice took,—‘Silly girls,Who plant their flowers in our philosophyTo make it fine, and only spoil the book!No more of it, Aurora.’ Yes—no more!Ah, blame of love, that’s sweeter than all praiseOf those who love not! ’tis so lost to me,I cannot, in such beggared life, affordTo lose my Proclus. Not for Florence, even.The kissing Judas, Wolff, shall go instead,Who builds us such a royal book as thisTo honour a chief-poet, folio-built,And writes above, ‘The house of Nobody:’Who floats in cream, as rich as any suckedFrom Juno’s breasts, the broad Homeric lines,And, while with their spondaic prodigious mouthsThey lap the lucent margins as babe-gods,Proclaims them bastards. Wolff’s an atheist;And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,We’ll guess as much, too, for the universe.That Wolff, those Platos: sweep the upper shelvesAs clean as this, and so I am almost rich,Which means, not forced to think of being poorIn sight of ends. To-morrow: no delay.I’ll wait in Paris till good CarringtonDispose of such, and, having chaffered forMy book’s price with the publisher, directAll proceeds to me. Just a line to askHis help.And now I come, my Italy,My own hills! Are you ’ware of me, my hills,How I burn toward you? do you feel to-nightThe urgency and yearning of my soul,As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babeAnd smile?—Nay, not so much as when, in heat,Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops,And tremble while ye are stedfast. Still, ye goYour own determined, calm, indifferent wayToward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light;Of all the grand progression nought left out;As if God verily made you for yourselves,And would not interrupt your life with ours.

Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hopeTo speak my poems in mysterious tuneWith man and nature,—with the lava-lymphThat trickles from successive galaxiesStill drop by drop adown the finger of God,In still new worlds?—with summer-days in this,That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?—With spring’s delicious trouble in the groundTormented by the quickened blood of roots,And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheavesIn token of the harvest-time of flowers?—With winters and with autumns,—and beyond,With the human heart’s large seasons,—when it hopesAnd fears, joys, grieves, and loves?—with all that strainOf sexual passion, which devours the fleshIn a sacrament of souls? with mother’s breasts,Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?—With multitudinous life, and finallyWith the great out-goings of ecstatic souls,Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,Their radiant faces upward, burn awayThis dark of the body, issuing on a worldBeyond our mortal?—can I speak my verseSo plainly in tune to these things and the rest,That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,As having the same warrant over themTo hold and move them, if they will or no,Alike imperious as the primal rhythmOf that theurgic nature? I must fail,Who fail at the beginning to hold and moveOne man,—and he my cousin, and he my friend,And he born tender, made intelligent,Inclined to ponder the precipitous sidesOf difficult questions; yet, obtuse tome,—Ofme, incurious! likes me very well,And wishes me a paradise of good,Good looks, good means, and good digestion!—ay,But otherwise evades me, puts me offWith kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,—Too light a book for a grave man’s reading! Go,Aurora Leigh: be humble.There it is;We women are too apt to look to one,Which proves a certain impotence in art.We strain our natures at doing something great,Far less because it’s something great to do,Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselvesAs being not small, and more appreciableTo some one friend. We must have mediatorsBetwixt our highest conscience and the judge;Some sweet saint’s blood must quicken in our palms,Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold:Good only, being perceived as the end of good,And God alone pleased,—that’s too poor, we think,And not enough for us, by any means.Ay—Romney, I remember, told me onceWe miss the abstract, when we comprehend!We miss it most when we aspire, ... and fail.

Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s wayOf trailing garments, shall not trip me up.I’ll have no traffic with the personal thoughtIn art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain,Without the approbation of a man?It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself,That approbation of the general race,Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)And the highest fame was never reached exceptBy what was aimed above it. Art for art,And good for God Himself, the essential Good!We’ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;And if we fail.... But must we?—Shall I fail?The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,‘Let no one be called happy till his death.’To which I add,—Let no one till his deathBe called unhappy. Measure not the workUntil the day’s out and the labour done;Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant,Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;And, in that we have nobly striven at least,Deal with us nobly, women though we be,And honour us with truth, if not with praise.

My ballads prospered; but the ballad’s raceIs rapid for a poet who bears weightsOf thought and golden image. He can standLike Atlas, in the sonnet,—and supportHis own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars;But then he must stand still, nor take a step.

In that descriptive poem called ‘The Hills,’The prospects were too far and indistinct.’Tis true my critics said, ‘A fine view, that!’The public scarcely cared to climb the bookFor even the finest; and the public’s right,A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised;Which well the Greeks knew, when they stirred the barkWith close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,And made the forest-rivers garrulousWith babble of gods. For us, we are called to markA still more intimate humanityIn this inferior nature,—or, ourselves,Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfootBy veritabler artists. Earth, shut upBy Adam, like a fakir in a boxLeft too long buried, remained stiff and dry,A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,And used his kingly chrisms to straighten outThe leathery tongue turned back into the throat:Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitatesIn every limb, aspires in every breath,Embraces infinite relations. Now,We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves,Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest,To take possession of a senseless worldTo unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,The body of our body, the green earth,Indubitably human, like this fleshAnd these articulated veins through whichOur heart drives blood! there’s not a flower of spring,That dies ere June, but vaunts itself alliedBy issue and symbol, by significanceAnd correspondence, to that spirit-worldOutside the limits of our space and time,Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voiceWith human meanings; else they miss the thought,And henceforth step down lower, stand confessedInstructed poorly for interpreters,—Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.

Even so my pastoral failed: it was a bookOf surface-pictures—pretty, cold, and falseWith literal transcript,—the worse done, I think,For being not ill-done. Let me set my markAgainst such doings, and do otherwise.This strikes me.—If the public whom we know,Could catch me at such admissions, I should passFor being right modest. Yet how proud we are,In daring to look down upon ourselves!

The critics say that epics have died outWith Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—I’ll not believe it. I could never dreamAs Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineerWho travelled higher than he was born to live,And showed sometimes the goitre in his throatDiscoursing of an image seen through fog,)That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned greyLike any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plumeAs yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.All men are possible heroes: every age,Heroic in proportions, double-faced,Looks backward and before, expects a mornAnd claims an epos.Ay, but every ageAppears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!The thinkers scout it, and the poets aboundWho scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;An age of patches for old gaberdines;An age of mere transition, meaning nought,Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,And wrong thoughts make poor poems.Every age,Through being beheld too close, is ill-discernedBy those who have not lived past it. We’ll supposeMount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,To some colossal statue of a man:The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,Had guessed as little of any human formUp there, as would a flock of browsing goats.They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles offOr ere the giant image broke on them,Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,And fed at evening with the blood of suns;Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetuallyThe largesse of a silver river downTo all the country pastures. ’Tis even thusWith times we live in,—evermore too greatTo be apprehended near.But poets shouldExert a double vision; should have eyesTo see near things as comprehensivelyAs if afar they took their point of sight,And distant things, as intimately deep,As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.I do distrust the poet who discernsNo character or glory in his times,And trundles back his soul five hundred years,Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,Oh not to sing of lizards or of toadsAlive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable;But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,As dead as must be, for the greater part,The poems made on their chivalric bones.And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.

Nay, if there’s room for poets in the worldA little overgrown, (I think there is)Their sole work is to represent the age,Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,And spends more passion, more heroic heat,Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,Cry out for togas and the picturesque,Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s selfWas commonplace to Lady Guenever;And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,As Regent Street to poets.Never flinch,But still, unscrupulously epic, catchUpon the burning lava of a song,The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:That, when the next shall come, the men of thatMay touch the impress with reverent hand, and say‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!That bosom seems to beat still, or at leastIt sets ours beating. This is living art,Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’

What form is best for poems? Let me thinkOf forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,As sovran nature does, to make the form;For otherwise we only imprison spirit,And not embody. Inward evermoreTo outward,—so in life, and so in art,Which still is life.Five acts to make a play.And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?What matter for the number of the leaves,Supposing the tree lives and grows? exactThe literal unities of time and place,When ’tis the essence of passion to ignoreBoth time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire,And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.

’Tis true the stage requires obsequiousnessTo this or that convention; ‘exit’ hereAnd ‘enter’ there; the points for clapping, fixed,Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams;And all the close-curled imagery clippedIn manner of their fleece at shearing-time.Forget to prick the galleries to the heartPrecisely at the fourth act,—culminateOur five pyramidal acts with one act more,—We’re lost so! Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely pleadAgainst our just damnation. Stand aside;We’ll muse for comfort that, last century,On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.

And whosoever writes good poetry,Looks just to art. He does not write for youOr me,—for London or for Edinburgh;He will not suffer the best critic knownTo step into his sunshine of free thoughtAnd self-absorbed conception, and exactAn inch-long swerving of the holy lines.If virtue done for popularityDefiles like vice, can art for praise or hireStill keep its splendor, and remain pure art?Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passedFrom hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,Until the unborn snatch it, crying outIn pity on their fathers’ being so dull,And that’s success too.I will write no plays.Because the drama, less sublime in this,Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,Adopts the standard of the public tasteTo chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain roundIts regal neck, and learns to carry and fetchThe fashions of the day to please the day;Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,Commending chiefly its docilityAnd humour in stage-tricks; or else indeedGets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodiesBecause their grosser brains most naturallyMisjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)Shows teeth an almond’s breadth, protests the lengthOf a modest phrase,—‘My gentle countrymen,There’s something in it, haply, of your fault,’—Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,He’ll have five thousand, and five thousand more,Against him,—the whole public,—all the hoofsOf King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,—And obviously deserve it. He appealedTo these,—and why say more if they condemn,Than if they praised him?—Weep, my Æschylus,But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!For since ’twas Athens (so I read the myth)Who gave commission to that fatal weight,The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on theeAnd crush thee,—better cover thy bald head;She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan beeBefore thy loud’st protesting.—For the rest,The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage:I could not, in so little, accept success,Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,For manifester gains; let those who prize,Pursue them:Istand off.And yet, forbid,That any irreverent fancy or conceitShould litter in the Drama’s throne-room, whereThe rulers of our art, in whose full veinsDynastic glories mingle, sit in strengthAnd do their kingly work,—conceive, command,And, from the imagination’s crucial heat,Catch up their men and women all a-flameFor action, all alive, and forced to proveTheir life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,Until mankind makes witness, ‘These be menAs we are,’ and vouchsafes the kiss that’s dueTo Imogen and Juliet—sweetest kinOn art’s side.’Tis that, honouring to its worthThe drama, I would fear to keep it downTo the level of the footlights. Dies no moreThe sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,—His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling whiteOf choral vestures,—troubled in his blood,While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,Leapt high together with the altar-flame,And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,Which set the grand still front of Themis’ sonUpon the puckered visage of a player;—The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,Sweeps slowly past the piers;—the mouthpiece, whereThe mere man’s voice with all its breaths and breaksWent sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heightsIts phrasèd thunders;—these things are no more,Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,The growing drama has outgrown such toysOf simulated stature, face, and speech,It also, peradventure, may outgrowThe simulation of the painted scene,Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,With all its grand orchestral silencesTo keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.

Alas, I still see something to be done,And what I do falls short of what I seeThough I waste myself on doing. Long green days,Worn bare of grass and sunshine,—long calm nights,From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,—Be witness for me, with no amateur’sIrreverent haste and busy idlenessI’ve set myself to art! What then? what’s done?What’s done, at last?Behold, at last, a book.If life-blood’s necessary,—which it is,(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood!)If life-blood’s fertilising, I wrung mineOn every leaf of this,—unless the dropsSlid heavily on one side and left it dry.That chances often: many a fervid manWrites books as cold and flat as grave-yard stonesFrom which the lichen’s scraped; and if St. PreuxHad written his own letters, as he might,We had never wept to think of the little mole’Neath Julie’s drooping eyelid. Passion isBut something suffered, after all.While ArtSets action on the top of suffering:The artist’s part is both to be and do,Transfixing with a special, central powerThe flat experience of the common man,And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,Half agony, half ecstasy, the thingHe feels the inmost: never felt the lessBecause he sings it. Does a torch less burnFor burning next reflectors of blue steel,Thatheshould be the colder for his place’Twixt two incessant fires,—his personal life’s,And that intense refraction which burns backPerpetually against him from the roundOf crystal conscience he was born intoIf artist-born? O sorrowful great giftConferred on poets, of a twofold life,When one life has been found enough for pain!We, staggering ’neath our burden as mere men,Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,Support the intolerable strain and stressOf the universal, and send clearly upWith voices broken by the human sob,Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!But soft!—a ‘poet’ is a word soon said;A book’s a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,The more the poet shall be questionable,The more unquestionably comes his book!And this of mine—well, granting to myselfSome passion in it, furrowing up the flats,Mere passion will not prove a volume worthIts gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keelMean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.There’s more than passion goes to make a man,Or book, which is a man too.I am sad.I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,And, feeling the hard marble first relent,Grow supple to the straining of his arms,And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toilOf stretching past the known and seen, to reachThe archetypal Beauty out of sight,Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,And with his own life dazed and blinded him!Not so; Pygmalion loved,—and whoso lovesBelieves the impossible.And I am sad:I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,Since none seems worthy of my thought and hopeMore highly mated. He has shot them down,My Phœbus Apollo, soul within my soul,Who judges, by the attempted, what’s attained,And with the silver arrow from his height,Has struck down all my works before my face,WhileIsaid nothing. Is there aught to say?I called the artist but a greatened man;He may be childless also, like a man.

I laboured on alone. The wind and dustAnd sun of the world beat blistering in my face;And hope, now for me, now against me, draggedMy spirits onward,—as some fallen balloon,Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,Or seemed,—and generous souls cried out, ‘Be strong,Take courage; now you’re on our level,—now!The next step saves you!’ I was flushed with praise,But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,I could not choose but murmur to myself‘Is this all? all that’s done? and all that’s gained?If this then be success, ’tis dismallerThan any failure.’O my God, my God,O supreme Artist, who as sole returnFor all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,Demandest of us just a word ... a name,‘My Father!’—thou hast knowledge, only thou,How dreary ’tis for women to sit stillOn winter nights by solitary fires,And hear the nations praising them far off,Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,Our very heart of passionate womanhood,Which could not beat so in the verse withoutBeing present also in the unkissed lips,And eyes undried because there’s none to askThe reason they grew moist.To sit alone,And think, for comfort, how, that very night,Affianced lovers, leaning face to faceWith sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,Are reading haply from some page of ours,To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,When such a stanza, level to their mood,Seems floating their own thought out—‘So I feelFor thee,’—‘And I, for thee: this poet knowsWhat everlasting love is!’—how, that night,A father, issuing from the misty roadsUpon the luminous round of lamp and hearthAnd happy children, having caught up firstThe youngest there until it shrunk and shriekedTo feel the cold chin prick its dimples throughWith winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lapOf the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lidsTo hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)Our book and cry, ... ‘Ah you, you care for rhymes;So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,When April comes to let you! I’ve been toldThey are not idle as so many are,But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:It’s yours, the book; I’ll write your name in it,—That so you may not lose, however lostIn poet’s lore and charming reverie,The thought of how your father thought ofyouIn riding from the town.’To have our booksAppraised by love, associated with love,Whilewesit loveless! is it hard, you think?At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,Means simply love. It was a man said that.And then, there’s love and love: the love of all(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)Is but a small thing to the love of one.You bid a hungry child be satisfiedWith a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,He says he’s hungry,—he would rather haveThat little barley-cake you keep from himWhile reckoning up his harvests. So with us;(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)We’re hungry.Hungry! but it’s pitifulTo wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbsBecause we’re hungry. Who, in all this world,(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,And learn what good is by its opposite)Has never hungered? Woe to him who has foundThe meal enough! if Ugolino’s full,His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:For here satiety proves penuryMore utterly irremediable. And sinceWe needs must hunger,—better, for man’s love,Than God’s truth! better, for companions sweet,Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.Well, well! they say we’re envious, we who rhyme;But I, because I am a woman perhaps,And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.I never envied Graham his breadth of style,Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)Such delicate perspectives of full life;Nor Belmore, for the unity of aimTo which he cuts his cedarn poems, fineAs sketchers do their pencils; nor Mark Gage,For that caressing colour and trancing toneWhereby you’re swept away and melted inThe sensual element, which, with a back wave,Restores you to the level of pure soulsAnd leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,For native gifts or popular applause,I’ve envied; but for this,—that when, by chance,Says some one,—‘There goes Belmore, a great man!He leaves clean work behind him, and requiresNo sweeper up of the chips,’ ... a girl I know,Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,Smiles unaware, as if a guardian saintSmiled in her:—for this, too,—that Gage comes homeAnd lays his last book’s prodigal reviewUpon his mother’s knees, where, years ago,He had laid his childish spelling-book and learnedTo chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,As young birds must. ‘Well done,’ she murmured then,She will not say it now more wonderingly;And yet the last ‘Well done’ will touch him more,As catching up to-day and yesterdayIn a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage.I envy you your mother!—and you, Graham,Because you have a wife who loves you so,She half forgets, at moments, to be proudOf being Graham’s wife, until a friend observes,‘The boy here, has his father’s massive brow,Done small in wax ... if we push back the curls.’

Who lovesme? Dearest father,—mother sweet,—I speak the names out sometimes by myself,And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,As Hindostanee to an Ind-born manAccustomed many years to English speech;Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,Which will not leave off singing. Up in heavenI have my father,—with my mother’s faceBeside him in a blotch of heavenly light;No more for earth’s familiar, household use,No more! The best verse written by this hand,Can never reach them where they sit, to seemWell-done tothem. Death quite unfellows us,Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,And makes us part as those at Babel did,Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.A living Cæsar would not dare to playAt bowls, with such as my dead father is.

And yet, this may be less so than appears,This change and separation. Sparrows fiveFor just two farthings, and God cares for each.If God is not too great for little cares,Is any creature, because gone to God?I’ve seen some men, veracious, nowise mad,Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified,They’ve heard the Dead a-ticking like a clockWhich strikes the hours of the eternities,Beside them, with their natural ears,—and knownThat human spirits feel the human way,And hate the unreasoning awe which waves them offFrom possible communion. It may be.

At least, earth separates as well as heaven.For instance, I have not seen Romney LeighFull eighteen months ... add six, you get two years.They say he’s very busy with good works,—Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses.He made an almshouse of his heart one day,Which ever since is loose upon the latchFor those who pull the string.—I never did.

It always makes me sad to go abroad;And now I’m sadder that I went to-nightAmong the lights and talkers at Lord Howe’s.His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calmAs her other jewels. If she’s somewhat cold,Who wonders, when her blood has stood so longIn the ducal reservoir she calls her lineBy no means arrogantly? she’s not proud;Not prouder than the swan is of the lakeHe has always swum in;—’tis her element,And so she takes it with a natural grace,Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,Therearemen, move on without outriders,Which isn’t her fault. Ah, to watch her face,When good Lord Howe expounds his theoriesOf social justice and equality—’Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bendHer neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,‘Such clever talk—that dear, odd Algernon!’She listens on, exactly as if he talkedSome Scandinavian myth of Lemures,Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.

She’s gracious to me as her husband’s friend,And would be gracious, were I not a Leigh,Being used to smile just so, without her eyes,On Joseph Strangways, the Leeds mesmerist,And Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from ‘the States’Upon the ‘Woman’s question.’ Then, for him,I like him ... he’s my friend. And all the roomsWere full of crinkling silks that swept aboutThe fine dust of most subtle courtesies.What then?—why then, we come home to be sad.

How lovely One I love not, looked to-night!She’s very pretty, Lady Waldemar.Her maid must use both hands to twist that coilOf tresses, then be careful lest the richBronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a grey hair,A single one,—I saw it; otherwiseThe woman looked immortal. How they told,Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!They split the amaranth velvet-boddice downTo the waist, or nearly, with the audacious pressOf full-breathed beauty. If the heart withinWere half as white!—but, if it were, perhapsThe breast were closer covered, and the sightLess aspectable, by half, too.I heardThe young man with the German student’s look—A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick,Which shot up straight against the parting lineSo equally dividing the long hair,—Say softly to his neighbour, (thirty-fiveAnd mediæval) ‘Look that way, Sir Blaise.She’s Lady Waldemar—to the left,—in red—Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,Is soon about to marry.’Then repliedSir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priestlike voice,Too used to syllable damnations roundTo make a natural emphasis worth while:‘Is Leigh your ablest man? the same, I think,Once jilted by a recreant pretty maidAdopted from the people? Now, in change,He seems to have plucked a flower from the other sideOf the social hedge,’‘A flower, a flower,’ exclaimedMy German student,—his own eyes full-blownBent on her. He was twenty, certainly.

Sir Blaise resumed with gentle arrogance,As if he had dropped his alms into a hat,And had the right to counsel,—‘My young friend,I doubt your ablest man’s abilityTo get the least good or help meet for him,For pagan phalanstery or Christian home,From such a flowery creature,’‘Beautiful!’My student murmured, rapt,—‘Mark how she stirs!Just waves her head, as if a flower indeed,Touched far off by the vain breath of our talk.’

At which that bilious Grimwald, (he who writesFor the Renovator) who had seemed absorbedUpon the table-book of autographs,(I dare say mentally he crunched the bonesOf all those writers, wishing them aliveTo feel his tooth in earnest) turned short roundWith low carnivorous laugh,—‘A flower, of course!She neither sews nor spins,—and takes no thoughtOf her garments ... falling off.’The student flinched,Sir Blaise, the same; then both, drawing back their chairsAs if they spied black-beetles on the floor,Pursued their talk, without a word being thrownTo the critic.Good Sir Blaise’s brow is highAnd noticeably narrow: a strong wind,You fancy, might unroof him suddenly,And blow that great top attic off his headSo piled with feudal relics. You admireHis nose in profile, though you miss his chin;But, though you miss his chin, you seldom missHis golden cross worn innermostly, (carvedFor penance, by a saintly Styrian monkWhose flesh was too much with him,) slipping throughSome unaware unbuttoned casualtyOf the under-waistcoat. With an absent airSir Blaise sate fingering it and speaking low,While I, upon the sofa, heard it all.

‘My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyesLike blessedest St. Lucy, on a plate,They would not trick us into choosing wives,As doublets, by the colour. OtherwiseOur fathers chose,—and therefore, when they had hungTheir household keys about a lady’s waist,The sense of duty gave her dignity:She kept her bosom holy to her babes;And, if a moralist reproved her dress,’Twas, ‘Too much starch!’—and not, ‘Too little lawn!’'

‘Now, pshaw!’ returned the other in a heat,A little fretted by being called ‘young friend,’Or so I took it,—‘for St. Lucy’s sake,If she’s the saint to curse by, let us leaveOur fathers,—plagued enough about our sons!’(He stroked his beardless chin) ‘yes, plagued, sir, plagued:The future generations lie on usAs heavy as the nightmare of a seer;Our meat and drink grow painful prophecy:I ask you,—have we leisure, if we liked,To hollow out our weary hands to keepYour intermittent rushlight of the pastFrom draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,And marriage-laws ... the socket drops them throughWhile we two speak,—however may protestSome over-delicate nostrils, like your own,’Gainst odours thence arising.’‘You are young,’Sir Blaise objected.‘If I am,’ he saidWith fire,—‘though somewhat less so than I seem,The young run on before, and see the thingThat’s coming. Reverence for the young, I cry.In that new church for which the world’s near ripe,You’ll have the younger in the Elder’s chair,Presiding with his ivory front of hopeO’er foreheads clawed by cruel carrion-birdsOf life’s experience.’‘Pray your blessing, sir,’Sir Blaise replied good-humouredly,—‘I pluckedA silver hair this morning from my beard,Which left me your inferior. Would I wereEighteen, and worthy to admonish you!If young men of your order run beforeTo see such sights as sexual prejudiceAnd marriage-law dissolved,—in plainer words,A general concubinage expressedIn a universal pruriency,—the thingIs scarce worth running fast for, and you’d gainBy loitering with your elders.’‘Ah,’ he said,‘Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill,Can talk with one at bottom of the view,To make it comprehensible? Why, LeighHimself, although our ablest man, I said,Is scarce advanced to see as far as this,Which some are: he takes up imperfectlyThe social question—by one handle—leavesThe rest to trail. A Christian socialist,Is Romney Leigh, you understand.’‘Not I.I disbelieve in Christian-pagans, muchAs you in women-fishes. If we mixTwo colours, we lose both, and make a thirdDistinct from either. Mark you! to mistakeA colour is the sign of a sick brain,And mine, I thank the saints, is clear and cool:A neutral tint is here impossible.The church,—and by the church, I mean, of course,The catholic, apostolic, mother-church,—Draws lines as plain and straight as her own wall;Inside of which, are Christians, obviously,And outside ... dogs.’‘We thank you. Well I knowThe ancient mother-church would fain still bite,For all her toothless gums,—as Leigh himselfWould fain be a Christian still, for all his wit;Pass that; you two may settle it, for me.You’re slow in England. In a month I learntAt Göttingen, enough philosophyTo stock your English schools for fifty years;Pass that, too. Here, alone, I stop you short,—Supposing a true man like Leigh could standUnequal in the stature of his lifeTo the height of his opinions. Choose a wifeBecause of a smooth skin?—not he, not he!He’d rail at Venus’ self for creaking shoes,Unless she walked his way of righteousness:And if he takes a Venus Meretrix,(No imputation on the lady there)Be sure that, by some sleight of Christian art,He has metamorphosed and converted herTo a Blessed Virgin.’‘Soft!’ Sir Blaise drew breathAs if it hurt him,—‘Soft! no blasphemy,I pray you!’‘The first Christians did the thing;Why not the last?’ asked he of Göttingen,With just that shade of sneering on the lip,Compensates for the lagging of the beard,—‘And so the case is. If that fairest fairIs talked of as the future wife of Leigh,She’s talked of, too, at least as certainly,As Leigh’s disciple. You may find her nameOn all his missions and commissions, schools,Asylums, hospitals,—he has had her down,With other ladies whom her starry leadPersuaded from their spheres, to his country-placeIn Shropshire, to the famed phalansteryAt Leigh Hall, christianised from Fourier’s own,(In which he has planted out his sapling stocksOf knowledge into social nurseries)And there, they say, she has tarried half a week,And milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,And said ‘my sister’ to the lowest drabOf all the assembled castaways; such girls!Ay, sided with them at the washing-tub—Conceive, Sir Blaise, those naked perfect arms,Round glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.’

Lord Howe came up. ‘What, talking poetrySo near the image of the unfavouring Muse?That’s you, Miss Leigh: I’ve watched you half an hour,Precisely as I watched the statue calledA Pallas in the Vatican;—you mindThe face, Sir Blaise?—intensely calm and sad,As wisdom cut it off from fellowship,—Butthatspoke louder. Not a word fromyou!And these two gentlemen were bold, I marked,And unabashed by even your silence.’‘Ah,’Said I, ‘my dear Lord Howe, you shall not speakTo a printing woman who has lost her place,(The sweet safe corner of the household fireBehind the heads of children) compliments,As if she were a woman. We who have cliptThe curls before our eyes, may see at leastAs plain as men do: speak out, man to man;No compliments, beseech you.’‘Friend to friend,Let that be. We are sad to-night, I saw,(—Good night, Sir Blaise! Ah, Smith—he has slipped away)I saw you across the room, and stayed, Miss Leigh,To keep a crowd of lion-hunters off,With faces toward your jungle. There were three;A spacious lady, five feet ten and fat,Who has the devil in her (and there’s room)For walking to and fro upon the earth,From Chipewa to China; she requiresYour autograph upon a tinted leaf’Twixt Queen Pomare’s and Emperor Soulouque’s;Pray give it; she has energies, though fat:For me, I’d rather see a rick on fireThan such a woman angry. Then a youthFresh from the backwoods, green as the underboughs,Asks modestly, Miss Leigh, to kiss your shoe,And adds, he has an epic, in twelve parts,Which when you’ve read, you’ll do it for his boot,—All which I saved you, and absorb next weekBoth manuscript and man,—because a lordIs still more potent than a poetess,With any extreme republican. Ah, ah,You smile at last, then.’‘Thank you.’‘Leave the smile,I’ll lose the thanks for ’t,—ay, and throw you inMy transatlantic girl, with golden eyes,That draw you to her splendid whiteness, asThe pistil of a water-lily draws,Adust with gold. Those girls across the seaAre tyrannously pretty,—and I swore(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl)To bring her to you for a woman’s kiss,Not now, but on some other day or week:—We’ll call it perjury; I give her up.’

‘No, bring her.’‘Now,’ said he, ‘you make it hardTo touch such goodness with a grimy palm.I thought to tease you well, and fret you cross,And steel myself, when rightly vexed with you,For telling you a thing to tease you more.’

‘Of Romney?’‘No, no; nothing worse,’ he cried,‘Of Romney Leigh, than what is buzzed about,—Thatheis taken in an eye-trap too,Like many half as wise. The thing I meanRefers to you, not him.’‘Refers to me.’He echoed,—‘Me! You sound it like a stoneDropped down a dry well very listlessly,By one who never thinks about the toadAlive at the bottom. Presently perhapsYou’ll sound your ‘me’ more proudly—till I shrink.’

‘Lord Howe’s the toad, then, in this question?’‘Brief,We’ll take it graver. Give me sofa-room,And quiet hearing. You know Eglinton,John Eglinton, of Eglinton in Kent?’

‘Ishethe toad?—he’s rather like the snail;Known chiefly for the house upon his back:Divide the man and house—you kill the man;That’s Eglinton of Eglinton, Lord Howe.’

He answered grave. ‘A reputable man,An excellent landlord of the olden stamp,If somewhat slack in new philanthropies;Who keeps his birthdays with a tenants’ dance,Is hard upon them when they miss the churchOr keep their children back from catechism,But not ungentle when the aged poorPick sticks at hedge-sides; nay, I’ve heard him say,‘The old dame has a twinge because she stoops:‘That’s punishment enough for felony.’’

‘O tender-hearted landlord! May I takeMy long lease with him, when the time arrivesFor gathering winter-faggots!’‘He likes art,Buys books and pictures ... of a certain kind;Neglects no patent duty; a good son’....

‘To a most obedient mother. Born to wearHis father’s shoes, he wears her husband’s too:Indeed, I’ve heard it’s touching. Dear Lord Howe,You shall not praisemeso against your heart,When I’m at worst for praise and faggots.’‘BeLess bitter with me, for ... in short,’ he said,‘I have a letter, which he urged me soTo bring you ... I could scarcely choose but yield;Insisting that a new love passing throughThe hand of an old friendship, caught from itSome reconciling perfume.’‘Love, you say?My lord, I cannot love. I only findThe rhymes for love,—and that’s not love, my lord.Take back your letter.’‘Pause: you’ll read it first?’

‘I will not read it: it is stereotyped;The same he wrote to,—anybody’s name,—Anne Blythe, the actress, when she had died so true,A duchess fainted in a private box:Pauline, the dancer, after the greatpas,In which her little feet winked overheadLike other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:Or Baldinacci, when her F in altHad touched the silver tops of heaven itselfWith such a pungent soul-dart, even the QueenLaid softly, each to each, her white-gloved palms,And sighed for joy: or else (I thank your friend)Aurora Leigh,—when some indifferent rhymes,Like those the boys sang round the holy oxOn Memphis-road, have chanced, perhaps, to setOur Apis-public lowing. Oh, he wants,Instead of any worthy wife at home,A star upon his stage of Eglinton!Advise him that he is not overshrewdIn being so little modest: a dropped starMakes bitter waters, says a Book I’ve read,—And there’s his unread letter.’‘My dear friend,’Lord Howe began....

In haste I tore the phrase.‘You mean your friend of Eglinton, or me?’

‘I mean you, you,’ he answered with some fire.‘A happy life means prudent compromise;The tare runs through the farmer’s garnered sheaves;But though the gleaner’s apron holds pure wheat,We count her poorer. Tare with wheat, we cry,And good with drawbacks. You, you love your art,And, certain of vocation, set your soulOn utterance. Only, ... in this world we have made,(They say God made it first, but, if He did,’Twas so long since, ... and, since, we have spoiled it so,He scarce would know it, if He looked this way,From hells we preach of, with the flames blown out,)In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world,Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost,—In this uneven, unfostering England here,Where ledger-strokes and sword-strokes count indeed,But soul-strokes merely tell upon the fleshThey strike from,—it is hard to stand for art,Unless some golden tripod from the seaBe fished up, by Apollo’s divine chance,To throne such feet as yours, my prophetess,At Delphi. Think,—the god comes down as fierceAs twenty bloodhounds! shakes you, strangles you,Until the oracular shriek shall ooze in froth!At best it’s not all ease,—at worst too hard:A place to stand on is a ’vantage gained,And here’s your tripod. To be plain, dear friend,You’re poor, except in what you richly give;You labour for your own bread painfully,Or ere you pour our wine. For art’s sake, pause.’

I answered slow,—as some wayfaring man,Who feels himself at night too far from home,Makes stedfast face against the bitter wind.‘Is art so less a thing than virtue is,That artists first must cater for their easeOr ever they make issue past themselvesTo generous use? alas, and is it so,That we, who would be somewhat clean, must sweepOur ways as well as walk them, and no friendConfirm us nobly,—‘Leave results to God,But you, be clean?’ What! ‘prudent compromiseMakes acceptable life,’ you say instead,You, you, Lord Howe?—in things indifferent, well.For instance, compromise the wheaten breadFor rye, the meat for lentils, silk for serge,And sleep on down, if needs, for sleep on straw;But there, end compromise. I will not bateOne artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.’

So speaking, with less anger in my voiceThan sorrow, I rose quickly to depart;While he, thrown back upon the noble shameOf such high-stumbling natures, murmured words,The right words after wrong ones. Ah, the manIs worthy, but so given to entertainImpossible plans of superhuman life,—He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,To keep them at the grand millennial height,He has to mount a stool to get at them;And, meantime, lives on quite the common way,With everybody’s morals.As we passed,Lord Howe insisting that his friendly armShould oar me across the sparkling brawling streamWhich swept from room to room,—we fell at onceOn Lady Waldemar. ‘Miss Leigh,’ she said,And gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,As if she tried it in a ‘tiring glassAnd liked it; ‘all to-night I’ve strained at you,As babes at baubles held up out of reachBy spiteful nurses, (‘Never snatch,’ they say,)And there you sate, most perfectly shut inBy good Sir Blaise and clever Mister Smith,And then our dear Lord Howe! at last, indeed,I almost snatched. I have a world to speakAbout your cousin’s place in Shropshire, whereI’ve been to see his work ... our work,—you heardI went?... and of a letter, yesterday,In which, if I should read a page or two,You might feel interest, though you’re locked of courseIn literary toil.—You’ll like to hearYour last book lies at the phalanstery,As judged innocuous for the elder girlsAnd younger women who still care for books.We all must read, you see, before we live:But slowly the ineffable light comes up,And, as it deepens, drowns the written word,—So said your cousin, while we stood and feltA sunset from his favourite beech-tree seat:He might have been a poet if he would,But then he saw the higher thing at once,And climbed to it. I think he looks well now,Has quite got over that unfortunate ...Ah, ah ... I know it moved you. Tender-heart!You took a liking to the wretched girl.Perhaps you thought the marriage suitable,Who knows? a poet hankers for romance,And so on. As for Romney Leigh, ’tis sureHe never loved her,—never. By the way,You have not heard ofher...? quite out of sight,And out of saving? lost in every sense?’

She might have gone on talking half-an-hour,And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,As a garden-statue a child pelts with snowFor pretty pastime. Every now and thenI put in ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ I scarce knew why;The blind man walks wherever the dog pulls,And so I answered. Till Lord Howe broke in;‘What penance takes the wretch who interruptsThe talk of charming women? I, at last,Must brave it. Pardon, Lady Waldemar!The lady on my arm is tired, unwell,And loyally I’ve promised she shall sayNo harder word this evening, than ... goodnight;The rest her face speaks for her.’—Then we went.

And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak,Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that tiesMy hair ... now could I but unloose my soul!We are sepulchred alive in this close world,And want more room.The charming woman there—This reckoning up and writing down her talkAffects me singularly. How she talkedTo pain me! woman’s spite!—You wear steel-mail;A woman takes a housewife from her breast,And plucks the delicatest needle outAs ’twere a rose, and pricks you carefully’Neath nails, ’neath eyelids, in your nostrils,—say,A beast would roar so tortured,—but a man,A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,No, not for shame.What vexes, after all,Is just that such as she, with such as I,Knows how to vex. Sweet heaven, she takes me upAs if she had fingered me and dog-eared meAnd spelled me by the fireside, half a life!She knows my turns, my feeble points.—What then?The knowledge of a thing implies the thing;Of course, she foundthatin me, she sawthat,Her pencil underscoredthisfor a fault,And I, still ignorant. Shut the book up! close!And crush that beetle in the leaves.O heart,At last we shall grow hard too, like the rest,And call it self-defence because we are soft.

And after all, now, ... why should I be pained,That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouseThis Lady Waldemar? And, say, she heldHer newly-blossomed gladness in my face, ...’Twas natural surely, if not generous,Considering how, when winter held her fast,I helped the frost with mine, and pained her moreThan she pains me. Pains me!—but wherefore pained?’Tis clear my cousin Romney wants a wife,—So, good!—The man’s need of the woman, here,Is greater than the woman’s of the man,And easier served; for where the man discernsA sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,Said he) we see but one, ideallyAnd really: where we yearn to lose ourselvesAnd melt like white pearls in another’s wine,He seeks to double himself by what he loves,And make his drink more costly by our pearls.At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,It is not good for man to be alone,—And that’s his way of thinking, first and last;And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.

But then my cousin sets his dignityOn personal virtue. If he understandsBy love, like others, self-aggrandisement,It is that he may verily be greatBy doing rightly and kindly. Once he thought,For charitable ends set duly forthIn Heaven’s white judgment-book, to marry ... ah,We’ll call her name Aurora Leigh, althoughShe’s changed since then!—and once, for social ends,Poor Marian Erle, my sister Marian Erle,My woodland sister, sweet maid Marian,Whose memory moans on in me like the windThrough ill-shut casements, making me more sadThan ever I find reasons for. Alas,Poor pretty plaintive face, embodied ghost,He finds it easy, then, to clap thee offFrom pulling at his sleeve and book and pen,—He locks thee out at night into the cold,Away from butting with thy horny eyesAgainst his crystal dreams,—that, now, he’s strongTo love anew? that Lady WaldemarSucceeds my Marian?After all, why not?He loved not Marian, more than once he lovedAurora. If he loves, at last, that Third,Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oilOn marble floors, I will not augur himIll luck for that. Good love, howe’er ill-placed,Is better for a man’s soul in the end,Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,The wild-goat’s hoof-print on the loamy down,Exceeds our modern thinker who turns backThe strata ... granite, limestone, coal, and clay,Concluding coldly with, ‘Here’s law! Where’s God?’

And then at worse,—if Romney loves her not,—At worst,—if he’s incapable of love,Which may be—then indeed, for such a manIncapable of love, she’s good enough;For she, at worst too, is a woman stillAnd loves him ... as the sort of woman can.

My loose long hair began to burn and creep,Alive to the very ends, about my knees:I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughedOne day ... (how full the memories come up!)‘—Your Florence fire-flies live on in your hair,’He said, ‘it gleams so.’ Well, I wrung them out,My fire-flies; made a knot as hard as life,Of those loose, soft, impracticable curls,And then sat down and thought.... ‘She shall not thinkHer thought of me,’—and drew my desk and wrote.

‘Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speakWith people round me, nor can sleep to-nightAnd not speak, after the great news I heardOf you and of my cousin. May you beMost happy; and the good he meant the world,Replenish his own life. Say what I say,And let my word be sweeter for your mouth,As you areyou... I only Aurora Leigh.’

That’s quiet, guarded! though she hold it upAgainst the light, she’ll not see through it moreThan lies there to be seen. So much for pride;And now for peace, a little! Let me stopAll writing back.... ‘Sweet thanks, my sweetest friend,‘You’ve made more joyful my great joy itself,’—No, that’s too simple! she would twist it thus,‘My joy would still be as sweet as thyme in drawers,However shut up in the dark and dry;But violets, aired and dewed by love like yours,Out-smell all thyme! we keep that in our clothes,But drop the other down our bosoms, tillThey smell like’ ... ah, I see her writing backJust so. She’ll make a nosegay of her words,And tie it with blue ribbons at the endTo suit a poet;—pshaw!And then we’ll haveThe call to church; the broken, sad, bad dreamDreamed out at last; the marriage-vow completeWith the marriage-breakfast; praying in white gloves,Drawn off in haste for drinking pagan toastsIn somewhat stronger wine than any sippedBy gods, since Bacchus had his way with grapes.

A postscript stops all that, and rescues me.‘You need not write. I have been overworked,And think of leaving London, England even,And hastening to get nearer to the sun,Where men sleep better. So, adieu.’—I foldAnd seal,—— and now I’m out of all the coil;I breathe now; I spring upward like a branch,A ten-years school-boy with a crooked stickMay pull down to his level, in search of nuts,But cannot hold a moment. How we twangBack on the blue sky, and assert our height,While he stares after! Now, the wonder seemsThat I could wrong myself by such a doubt.We poets always have uneasy hearts;Because our hearts, large-rounded as the globe,Can turn but one side to the sun at once.We are used to dip our artist-hands in gallAnd potash, trying potentialitiesOf alternated colour, till at lastWe get confused, and wonder for our skinHow nature tinged it first. Well—here’s the trueGood flesh-colour; I recognise my hand,—Which Romney Leigh may clasp as just a friend’s,And keep his clean.And now, my Italy.Alas, if we could ride with naked soulsAnd make no noise and pay no price at all,I would have seen thee sooner, Italy,—Forstill I have heard thee crying through my life,Thou piercing silence of extatic graves,Men call that name!

But even a witch, to-day,Must melt down golden pieces in the nardWherewith to anoint her broomstick ere she rides;And poets evermore are scant of gold,And, if they find a piece behind the door,It turns by sunset to a withered leaf.The Devil himself scarce trusts his patentedGold-making art to any who make rhymes,But culls his Faustus from philosophersAnd not from poets. ‘Leave my Job,’ said God;And so, the Devil leaves him without pence,And poverty proves, plainly, special grace.In these new, just, administrative timesMen clamour for an order of merit. Why?Here’s black bread on the table, and no wine!At least I am a poet in being poor;Thank God. I wonder if the manuscriptOf my long poem, if ’twere sold outright,Would fetch enough to buy me shoes, to goA-foot, (thrown in, the necessary patchFor the other side the Alps)? it cannot be:I fear that I must sell this residueOf my father’s books; although the ElzevirsHave fly-leaves over-written by his hand,In faded notes as thick and fine and brownAs cobwebs on a tawny monumentOf the old Greeks—conferenda hæc cum his—Corruptè citat—lege potiùs,And so on, in the scholar’s regal wayOf giving judgment on the parts of speech,As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books and notesMust go together. And this Proclus too,In quaintly dear contracted Grecian types,Fantastically crumpled, like his thoughtsWhich would not seem too plain; you go round twiceFor one step forward, then you take it back,Because you’re somewhat giddy! there’s the ruleFor Proclus. Ah, I stained this middle leafWith pressing in’t my Florence iris-bell,Long stalk and all: my father chided meFor that stain of blue blood,—I recollectThe peevish turn his voice took,—‘Silly girls,Who plant their flowers in our philosophyTo make it fine, and only spoil the book!No more of it, Aurora.’ Yes—no more!Ah, blame of love, that’s sweeter than all praiseOf those who love not! ’tis so lost to me,I cannot, in such beggared life, affordTo lose my Proclus. Not for Florence, even.

The kissing Judas, Wolff, shall go instead,Who builds us such a royal book as thisTo honour a chief-poet, folio-built,And writes above, ‘The house of Nobody:’Who floats in cream, as rich as any suckedFrom Juno’s breasts, the broad Homeric lines,And, while with their spondaic prodigious mouthsThey lap the lucent margins as babe-gods,Proclaims them bastards. Wolff’s an atheist;And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,We’ll guess as much, too, for the universe.

That Wolff, those Platos: sweep the upper shelvesAs clean as this, and so I am almost rich,Which means, not forced to think of being poorIn sight of ends. To-morrow: no delay.I’ll wait in Paris till good CarringtonDispose of such, and, having chaffered forMy book’s price with the publisher, directAll proceeds to me. Just a line to askHis help.And now I come, my Italy,My own hills! Are you ’ware of me, my hills,How I burn toward you? do you feel to-nightThe urgency and yearning of my soul,As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babeAnd smile?—Nay, not so much as when, in heat,Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops,And tremble while ye are stedfast. Still, ye goYour own determined, calm, indifferent wayToward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light;Of all the grand progression nought left out;As if God verily made you for yourselves,And would not interrupt your life with ours.

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