FIRST BOOK.

FIRST BOOK.

Ofwriting many books there is no end;And I who have written much in prose and verseFor others’ uses, will write now for mine,—Will write my story for my better self,As when you paint your portrait for a friend,Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at itLong after he has ceased to love you, justTo hold together what he was and is.I, writing thus, am still what men call young;I have not so far left the coasts of lifeTo travel inland, that I cannot hearThat murmur of the outer InfiniteWhich unweaned babies smile at in their sleepWhen wondered at for smiling; not so far,But still I catch my mother at her postBeside the nursery-door, with finger up,‘Hush, hush—here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet eyesLeap forward, taking part against her wordIn the child’s riot. Still I sit and feelMy father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knewHe liked it better than a better jest)Inquire how many golden scudi wentTo make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,—Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone.I write. My mother was a Florentine,Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing meWhen scarcely I was four years old; my life,A poor spark snatched up from a failing lampWhich went out therefore. She was weak and frail;She could not bear the joy of giving life—The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kissHad left a longer weight upon my lips,It might have steadied the uneasy breath,And reconciled and fraternised my soulWith the new order. As it was, indeed,I felt a mother-want about the world,And still went seeking, like a bleating lambLeft out at night, in shutting up the fold,—As restless as a nest-deserted birdGrown chill through something being away, though whatIt knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was bornTo make my father sadder, and myselfNot overjoyous, truly. Women knowThe way to rear up children, (to be just,)They know a simple, merry, tender knackOf tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,And stringing pretty words that make no sense,And kissing full sense into empty words;Which things are corals to cut life upon,Although such trifles: children learn by such,Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,And get not over-early solemnised,—But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,—Become aware and unafraid of Love.Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,And wills more consciously responsible,And not as wisely, since less foolishly;So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.My father was an austere Englishman,Who, after a dry life-time spent at homeIn college-learning, law, and parish talk,Was flooded with a passion unaware,His whole provisioned and complacent pastDrowned out from him that moment. As he stoodIn Florence, where he had come to spend a monthAnd note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains,He musing somewhat absently perhapsSome English question ... whether men should payThe unpopular but necessary taxWith left or right hand—in the alien sunIn that great square of the Santissima,There drifted past him (scarcely marked enoughTo move his comfortable island-scorn,)A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,—The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding upTall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslantTo the blue luminous tremor of the air,And letting drop the white wax as they wentTo eat the bishop’s wafer at the church;From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,He too received his sacramental giftWith eucharistic meanings; for he loved.And thus beloved, she died. I’ve heard it saidThat but to see him in the first surpriseOf widower and father, nursing me,Unmothered little child of four years old,His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,As if the gold would tarnish,—his grave lipsContriving such a miserable smile,As if he knew needs must, or I should die,And yet ’twas hard,—would almost make the stonesCry out for pity. There’s a verse he setIn Santa Croce to her memory,‘Weep for an infant too young to weep muchWhen death removed this mother’—stops the mirthTo-day, on women’s faces when they walkWith rosy children hanging on their gowns,Under the cloister, to escape the sunThat scorches in the piazza. After which,He left our Florence, and made haste to hideHimself, his prattling child, and silent grief,Among the mountains above Pelago;Because unmothered babes, he thought, had needOf mother nature more than others use,And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and fullOf mystic contemplations, come to feedPoor milkless lips of orphans like his own—Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,Will get to wear it as a hat asideWith a flower stuck in’t. Father, then, and child,We lived among the mountains many years,God’s silence on the outside of the house,And we, who did not speak too loud, within;And old Assunta to make up the fire,Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flameWhich lightened from the firewood, made aliveThat picture of my mother on the wall.The painter drew it after she was dead;And when the face was finished, throat and hands,Her cameriera carried him, in hateOf the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocadeShe dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paintNo sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrongHer poor signora.’ Therefore very strangeThe effect was. I, a little child, would crouchFor hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,And gaze across them, half in terror, halfIn adoration, at the picture there,—That swan-like supernatural white life,Just sailing upward from the red stiff silkWhich seemed to have no part in it, nor powerTo keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s aweAnd my poor father’s melancholy eyesStill pointed that way. That way, went my thoughtsWhen wandering beyond sight. And as I grewIn years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,With still that face ... which did not therefore change,But kept the mystic level of all formsAnd fears and admirations; was by turnsGhost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,A still Medusa, with mild milky browsAll curdled and all clothed upon with snakesWhose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swordsWhere the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her firstMoonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;Or, my own mother, leaving her last smileIn her last kiss, upon the baby-mouthMy father pushed down on the bed for that,—Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,Buried at Florence. All which images,Concentred on the picture, glassed themselvesBefore my meditative childhood, ... asThe incoherencies of change and deathAre represented fully, mixed and merged,In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.And while I stared away my childish witsUpon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)My father, who through love had suddenlyThrown off the old conventions, broken looseFrom chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,Yet had no time to learn to talk and walkOr grow anew familiar with the sun,—Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,—Whom love had unmade from a common manBut not completed to an uncommon man,—My father taught me what he had learnt the bestBefore he died and left me,—grief and love.And, seeing we had books among the hills,Strong words of counselling souls, confederateWith vocal pines and waters,—out of booksHe taught me all the ignorance of men,And how God laughs in heaven when any manSays ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.’He sent the schools to school, demonstratingA fool will pass for such through one mistake,While a philosopher will pass for such,Through said mistakes being ventured in the grossAnd heaped up to a system.I am like,They tell me, my dear father. Broader browsHowbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowthOf delicate features,—paler, near as grave;But then my mother’s smile breaks up the whole,And makes it better sometimes than itself.So, nine full years, our days were hid with GodAmong his mountains. I was just thirteen,Still growing like the plants from unseen rootsIn tongue-tied Springs,—and suddenly awokeTo full life and its needs and agonies,With an intense, strong, struggling heart besideA stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,Makes awful lightning. His last word was, ‘Love—’‘Love, my child, love, love!’—(then he had done with grief)‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone,And none was left to love in all the world.There, ended childhood: what succeeded nextI recollect as, after fevers, menThread back the passage of delirium,Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flankWith flame, that it should eat and end itselfLike some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,I do remember clearly, how there cameA stranger with authority, not right,(I thought not) who commanded, caught me upFrom old Assunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,She let me go,—while I, with ears too fullOf my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,In all a child’s astonishment at griefStared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,Like one in anger drawing back her skirtsWhich suppliants catch at. Then the bitter seaInexorably pushed between us both,And sweeping up the ship with my despairThrew us out as a pasture to the stars.Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;Ten nights and days, without the common faceOf any day or night; the moon and sunCut off from the green reconciling earth,To starve into a blind ferocityAnd glare unnatural; the very sky(Dropping its bell-net down upon the seaAs if no human heart should scape alive,)Bedraggled with the desolating salt,Until it seemed no more that holy heavenTo which my father went. All new, and strange—The universe turned stranger, for a child.Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffsLooked cold upon me. Could I find a homeAmong those mean red houses through the fog?And when I heard my father’s language firstFrom alien lips which had no kiss for mine,I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—And some one near me said the child was madThrough much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.Was this my father’s England? the great isle?The ground seemed cut up from the fellowshipOf verdure, field from field, as man from man;The skies themselves looked low and positive,As almost you could touch them with a hand,And dared to do it, they were so far offFrom God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurredAnd dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his matesAbsorb the light here?—not a hill or stoneWith heart to strike a radiant colour upOr active outline on the indifferent air!I think I see my father’s sister standUpon the hall-step of her country-houseTo give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tightAs if for taming accidental thoughtsFrom possible pulses; brown hair pricked with greyBy frigid use of life, (she was not old,Although my father’s elder by a year)A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;A close mild mouth, a little soured aboutThe ends, through speaking unrequited loves,Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,But never, never have forgot themselvesIn smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a roseOf perished summers, like a rose in a book,Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,Past fading also.She had lived, we’ll say,A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,A quiet life, which was not life at all,(But that, she had not lived enough to know)Between the vicar and the county squires,The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimesFrom the empyreal, to assure their soulsAgainst chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,The apothecary looked on once a year,To prove their soundness of humility.The poor-club exercised her Christian giftsOf knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,Because we are of one flesh after allAnd need one flannel, (with a proper senseOf difference in the quality)—and stillThe book-club, guarded from your modern trickOf shaking dangerous questions from the crease,Preserved her intellectual. She had livedA sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,Accounting that to leap from perch to perchWas act and joy enough for any bird.Dear heaven, how silly are the things that liveIn thickets, and eat berries!I, alas,A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,And she was there to meet me. Very kind.Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.She stood upon the steps to welcome me,Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,—Young babes, who catch at every shred of woolTo draw the new light closer, catch and clingLess blindly. In my ears, my father’s wordHummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,‘Love, love, my child.’ She, black there with my grief,Might feel my love—she was his sister once—I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,And drew me feebly through the hall, intoThe room she sate in.There, with some strange spasmOf pain and passion, she wrung loose my handsImperiously, and held me at arm’s length,And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyesSearched through my face,—ay, stabbed it through and through,Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to findA wicked murderer in my innocent face,If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,She struggled for her ordinary calm,And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—‘She loved my father, and would love me tooAs long as I deserved it.’ Very kind.I understood her meaning afterward;She thought to find my mother in my face,And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,Had loved my father truly, as she could,And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,My Tuscan mother, who had fooled awayA wise man from wise courses, a good manFrom obvious duties, and, depriving her,His sister, of the household precedence,Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,And made him mad, alike by life and death,In love and sorrow. She had pored for yearsWhat sort of woman could be suitableTo her sort of hate, to entertain it with;And so, her very curiosityBecame hate too, and all the idealismShe ever used in life, was used for hate,Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at lastThe love from which it grew, in strength and heat,And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a senseOf disputable virtue (say not, sin)When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.And thus my father’s sister was to meMy mother’s hater. From that day, she didHer duty to me, (I appreciate itIn her own word as spoken to herself)Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,But measured always. She was generous, bland,More courteous than was tender, gave me stillThe first place,—as if fearful that God’s saintsWould look down suddenly and say, ‘HereinYou missed a point, I think, through lack of love.’Alas, a mother never is afraidOf speaking angerly to any child,Since love, she knows, is justified of love.And I, I was a good child on the whole,A meek and manageable child. Why not?I did not live, to have the faults of life:There seemed more true life in my father’s graveThan in all England. Sincethatthrew me offWho fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,Consigned me to his land) I only thoughtOf lying quiet there where I was thrownLike sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer herTo prick me to a pattern with her pin,Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,And dry out from my drowned anatomyThe last sea-salt left in me.So it was.I broke the copious curls upon my headIn braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.I left off saying my sweet Tuscan wordsWhich still at any stirring of the heartCame up to float across the English phrase,As lilies, (Bene... orche ch’è) becauseShe liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.I learnt the collects and the catechism,The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,The Articles ... the Tractsagainstthe times,(By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love,’)And various popular synopses ofInhuman doctrines never taught by John,Because she liked instructed piety.I learnt my complement of classic French(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)And German also, since she liked a rangeOf liberal education,—tongues, not books.I learnt a little algebra, a littleOf the mathematics,—brushed with extreme flounceThe circle of the sciences, becauseShe misliked women who are frivolous.I learnt the royal genealogiesOf Oviedo, the internal lawsOf the Burmese empire, ... by how many feetMount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,What navigable river joins itselfTo Lara, and what census of the year fiveWas taken at Klagenfurt,—because she likedA general insight into useful facts.I learnt much music,—such as would have beenAs quite impossible in Johnson’s dayAs still it might be wished—fine sleights of handAnd unimagined fingering, shuffling offThe hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notesTo a noisy Tophet; and I drew ... costumesFrom French engravings, nereids neatly draped,With smirks of simmering godship,—I washed inFrom nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)I danced the polka and Cellarius,Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,Because she liked accomplishments in girls.I read a score of books on womanhoodTo prove, if women do not think at all,They may teach thinking, (to a maiden-auntOr else the author)—books demonstratingTheir right of comprehending husband’s talkWhen not too deep, and even of answeringWith pretty ‘may it please you,’ or ‘so it is,’—Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,Particular worth and general missionariness,As long as they keep quiet by the fireAnd never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay,’For that is fatal,—their angelic reachOf virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,Potential faculty in everythingOf abdicating power in it: she ownedShe liked a woman to be womanly,And English women, she thanked God and sighed,(Some people always sigh in thanking God)Were models to the universe. And lastI learnt cross-stitch, because she did not likeTo see me wear the night with empty hands,A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdessWas something after all, (the pastoral saintsBe praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyesTo match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hatSo strangely similar to the tortoise-shellWhich slew the tragic poet.By the way,The works of women are symbolical.We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,To put on when you’re weary—or a stoolTo stumble over and vex you ... ‘curse that stool!’Or else at best, a cushion, where you leanAnd sleep, and dream of something we are not,But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paidThe worth of our work, perhaps.In looking downThose years of education, (to return)I wonder if Brinvilliers suffered moreIn the water-torture, ... flood succeeding floodTo drench the incapable throat and split the veins ...Than I did. Certain of your feebler soulsGo out in such a process; many pineTo a sick, inodorous light; my own endured:I had relations in the Unseen, and drewThe elemental nutriment and heatFrom nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark.I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outsideOf the inner life, with all its ample roomFor heart and lungs, for will and intellect,Inviolable by conventions. God,I thank thee for that grace of thine!At first,I felt no life which was not patience,—didThe thing she bade me, without heed to a thingBeyond it, sate in just the chair she placed,With back against the window, to excludeThe sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woodsTo bring the house a message,—ay, and walkedDemurely in her carpeted low rooms,As if I should not, harkening my own steps,Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books,Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup,(I blushed for joy at that)—‘The Italian child,For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,Thrives ill in England: she is paler yetThan when we came the last time; she will die.’‘Will die.’ My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,With sudden anger, and approaching meSaid low between his teeth—‘You’re wicked now?You wish to die and leave the world a-duskFor others, with your naughty light blown out?’I looked into his face defyingly.He might have known, that, being what I was,’Twas natural to like to get awayAs far as dead folk can; and then indeedSome people make no trouble when they die.He turned and went abruptly, slammed the doorAnd shut his dog out.Romney, Romney Leigh.I have not named my cousin hitherto,And yet I used him as a sort of friend;My elder by few years, but cold and shyAnd absent ... tender, when he thought of it,Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes,As well as early master of Leigh Hall,Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youthRepressing all its seasonable delights,And agonising with a ghastly senseOf universal hideous want and wrongTo incriminate possession. When he cameFrom college to the country, very oftHe crossed the hills on visits to my aunt,With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses,A book in one hand,—mere statistics, (ifI chanced to lift the cover) count of allThe goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell,Against God’s separating judgment-hour.And she, she almost loved him,—even allowedThat sometimes he should seem to sigh my way;It made him easier to be pitiful,And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbedAt whiles she let him shut my music upAnd push my needles down, and lead me outTo see in that south angle of the houseThe figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock,On some light pretext. She would turn her headAt other moments, go to fetch a thing,And leave me breath enough to speak with him,For his sake; it was simple.Sometimes tooHe would have saved me utterly, it seemed,He stood and looked so.Once, he stood so nearHe dropped a sudden hand upon my headBent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain—But then I rose and shook it off as fire,The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place,Yet dared seem soft.I used him for a friendBefore I ever knew him for a friend.’Twas better, ’twas worse also, afterward:We came so close, we saw our differencesToo intimately. Always Romney LeighWas looking for the worms, I for the gods.A godlike nature his; the gods look down,Incurious of themselves; and certainly’Tis well I should remember, how, those days,I was a worm too, and he looked on me.A little by his act perhaps, yet moreBy something in me, surely not my will,I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon,To whom life creeps back in the form of death,With a sense of separation, a blind painOf blank obstruction, and a roar i’ the earsOf visionary chariots which retreatAs earth grows clearer ... slowly, by degrees,I woke, rose up ... where was I? in the world;For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.I had a little chamber in the house,As green as any privet-hedge a birdMight choose to build in, though the nest itselfCould show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the wallsWere green, the carpet was pure green, the straightSmall bed was curtained greenly, and the foldsHung green about the window, which let inThe out-door world with all its greenery.You could not push your head out and escapeA dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle,But so you were baptised into the graceAnd privilege of seeing....First, the lime,(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,—My morning-dream was often hummed awayBy the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,Went trickling through the shrubberies in a streamOf tender turf, and wore and lost itselfAmong the acacias, over which, you sawThe irregular line of elms by the deep laneWhich stopped the grounds and dammed the overflowOf arbutus and laurel. Out of sightThe lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign trampNor drover of wild ponies out of WalesCould guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodgeDispensed such odours,—though his stick well-crookedMight reach the lowest trail of blossoming briarWhich dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,And through their tops, you saw the folded hillsStriped up and down with hedges, (burly oaksProjecting from the lines to show themselves)Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smokedAs still as when a silent mouth in frostBreathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;While, far above, a jut of table-land,A promontory without water, stretched,—You could not catch it if the days were thick,Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwiseThe vigorous sun would catch it up at eveAnd use it for an anvil till he had filledThe shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,And proved he need not rest so early:—then,When all his setting trouble was resolvedTo a trance of passive glory, you might seeIn apparition on the golden sky(Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep runAlong the fine clear outline, small as miceThat run along a witch’s scarlet thread.Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woodsOf Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spursTo the precipices. Not my headlong leapsOf waters, that cry out for joy or fearIn leaping through the palpitating pines,Like a white soul tossed out to eternityWith thrills of time upon it. Not indeedMy multitudinous mountains, sitting inThe magic circle, with the mutual touchElectric, panting from their full deep heartsBeneath the influent heavens, and waiting forCommunion and commission. ItalyIs one thing, England one.On English groundYou understand the letter ... ere the fall,How Adam lived in a garden. All the fieldsAre tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;The hills are crumpled plains,—the plains, parterres,—The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;And if you seek for any wildernessYou find, at best, a park. A nature tamedAnd grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,But which, in cackling, sets you thinking ofYour eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pauseOf finer meditation.Rather say,A sweet familiar nature, stealing inAs a dog might, or child, to touch your handOr pluck your gown, and humbly mind you soOf presence and affection, excellentFor inner uses, from the things without.I could not be unthankful, I who wasEntreated thus and holpen. In the roomI speak of, ere the house was well awake,And also after it was well asleep,I sate alone, and drew the blessing inOf all that nature. With a gradual step,A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,It came in softly, while the angels madeA place for it beside me. The moon came,And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts.The sun came, saying, ‘Shall I lift this lightAgainst the lime-tree, and you will not look?I make the birds sing—listen!... but, for you,God never hears your voice, excepting whenYou lie upon the bed at nights and weep.’Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened upMore slowly than I verily write now,But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wideThe window and my soul, and let the airsAnd out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,Regenerating what I was. O Life,How oft we throw it off and think,—‘Enough,Enough of life in so much!—here’s a causeFor rupture;—herein we must break with Life,Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!’—And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyesAnd think all ended.—Then, Life calls to usIn some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,Above us, or below us, or around....Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s,Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamedTo own our compensations than our griefs:Still, Life’s voice!—still, we make our peace with Life.And I, so young then, was not sullen. SoonI used to get up early, just to sitAnd watch the morning quicken in the grey,And hear the silence open like a flower,Leaf after leaf,—and stroke with listless handThe woodbine through the window, till at lastI came to do it with a sort of love,At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,—A melancholy smile, to catch myselfSmiling for joy.Capacity for joyAdmits temptation. It seemed, next, worth whileTo dodge the sharp sword set against my life;To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,As mute as any dream there, and escapeAs a soul from the body, out of doors,—Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,And wander on the hills an hour or two,Then back again before the house should stir.Or else I sate on in my chamber green,And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayedMy prayers without the vicar; read my books,Without considering whether they were fitTo do me good. Mark, there. We get no goodBy being ungenerous, even to a book,And calculating profits ... so much helpBy so much reading. It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—’Tis then we get the right good from a book.I read much. What my father taught beforeFrom many a volume, Love re-emphasisedUpon the self-same pages: TheophrastGrew tender with the memory of his eyes,And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of GreekAnd Latin, he had taught me, as he wouldHave taught me wrestling or the game of fivesIf such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked manWho heaps his single platter with goats’ cheeseAnd scarlet berries; or like any manWho loves but one, and so gives all at once,Because he has it, rather than becauseHe counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;And thus, as did the women formerlyBy young Achilles, when they pinned the veilAcross the boy’s audacious front, and sweptWith tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,He wrapt his little daughter in his largeMan’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.But, after I had read for memory,I read for hope. The path my father’s footHad trod me out, which suddenly broke off,(What time he dropped the wallet of the fleshAnd passed) alone I carried on, and setMy child-heart ’gainst the thorny underwood,To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother-babe!My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,When any young wayfaring soul goes forthAlone, unconscious of the perilous road,The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,To thrust his own way, he an alien, throughThe world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,You clap hands—‘A fair day!’—you cheer him on,As if the worst, could happen, were to restToo long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,Behold!—the world of books is still the world;And worldlings in it are less mercifulAnd more puissant. For the wicked thereAre winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,Is edged from elemental fire to assailA spiritual life. The beautiful seems rightBy force of beauty, and the feeble wrongBecause of weakness. Power is justified,Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crownCovers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,There’s no lack, neither, of God’s saints and kings,That shake the ashes of the grave asideFrom their calm locks, and undiscomfitedLook stedfast truths against Time’s changing mask.True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavensUpon his own head in strong martyrdom,In order to light men a moment’s space.But stay!—who judges?—who distinguishes’Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,To serve king David? who discerns at onceThe sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blowFor Alaric as well as Charlemagne?Who judges prophets, and can tell true seersFrom conjurors? The child, there? Would you leaveThat child to wander in a battle-fieldAnd push his innocent smile against the guns?Or even in the catacombs, ... his torchGrown ragged in the fluttering air, and allThe dark a-mutter round him? not a child!I read books bad and good—some bad and goodAt once: good aims not always make good books:Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soilsIn digging vineyards, even: books, that proveGod’s being so definitely, that man’s doubtGrows self-defined the other side the line,Made atheist by suggestion; moral books,Exasperating to license; genial books,Discounting from the human dignity;And merry books, which set you weeping whenThe sun shines,—ay, and melancholy books,Which make you laugh that any one should weepIn this disjointed life, for one wrong more.The world of books is still the world, I write,And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,Among the breakers, some hard swimming throughThe deeps—I lost breath in my soul sometimes,And cried, ‘God save me if there’s any God,’But, even so, God saved me; and, being dashedFrom error on to error, every turnStill brought me nearer to the central truth.I thought so. All this anguish in the thickOf men’s opinions ... press and counterpress,Now up, now down, now underfoot, and nowEmergent ... all the best of it, perhaps,But throws you back upon a noble trustAnd use of your own instinct,—merely provesPure reason stronger than bare inferenceAt strongest. Try it,—fix against heaven’s wallYour scaling ladders of high logic—mountStep by step!—Sight goes faster; that still rayWhich strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,And why, you know not—(did you eliminate,That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.The cygnet finds the water; but the manIs born in ignorance of his element,And feels out blind at first, disorganisedBy sin i’ the blood,—his spirit-insight dulledAnd crossed by his sensations. PresentlyWe feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;Then, mark, be reverent, be obedient,—For those dumb motions of imperfect lifeAre oracles of vital DeityAttesting the Hereafter. Let who says‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,A palimpsest, a prophet’s holographDefiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,—The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring onWhich obscene text, we may discern perhapsSome fair, fine trace of what was written once,Some upstroke of an alpha and omegaExpressing the old scripture.Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret-roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!At last, because the time was ripe,I chanced upon the poets.As the earthPlunges in fury, when the internal firesHave reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flatThe marts and temples, the triumphal gatesAnd towers of observation, clears herselfTo elemental freedom—thus, my soul,At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,Convicted of the great eternitiesBefore two worlds.What’s this, Aurora Leigh,You write so of the poets, and not laugh?Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,Exaggerators of the sun and moon,And soothsayers in a tea-cup?I write soOf the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—The only speakers of essential truth,Opposed to relative, comparative,And temporal truths; the only holders byHis sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;The only teachers who instruct mankind,From just a shadow on a charnel-wall,To find man’s veritable stature out,Erect, sublime,—the measure of a man,And that’s the measure of an angel, saysThe apostle. Ay, and while your common menBuild pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,And dust the flaunty carpets of the worldFor kings to walk on, or our senators,The poet suddenly will catch them upWith his voice like a thunder ... ‘This is soul,This is life, this word is being said in heaven,Here’s God down on us! what are you about?’How all those workers start amid their work,Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,Is not the imperative labour after all.My own best poets, am I one with you,That thus I love you,—or but one through love?Does all this smell of thyme about my feetConclude my visit to your holy hillIn personal presence, or but testifyThe rustling of your vesture through my dreamsWith influent odours? When my joy and pain,My thought and aspiration, like the stopsOf pipe or flute, are absolutely dumbIf not melodious, do you play on me,My pipers,—and if, sooth, you did not blow,Would no sound come? or is the music mine,As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubtFor cloudy seasons!But the sun was highWhen first I felt my pulses set themselvesFor concords; when the rhythmic turbulenceOf blood and brain swept outward upon words,As wind upon the alders, blanching themBy turning up their under-natures tillThey trembled in dilation. O delightAnd triumph of the poet,—who would sayA man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’A little human hope of that or this,And says the word so that it burns you throughWith a special revelation, shakes the heartOf all the men and women in the world,As if one came back from the dead and spoke,With eyes too happy, a familiar thingBecome divine i’ the utterance! while for himThe poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;The palpitating angel in his fleshThrills inly with consenting fellowshipTo those innumerous spirits who sun themselvesOutside of time.O life, O poetry,—Which means life in life! cognisant of lifeBeyond this blood-beat,—passionate for truthBeyond these senses,—poetry, my life,—My eagle, with both grappling feet still hotFrom Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished meAway from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,And set me in the Olympian roar and roundOf luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,To keep the mouths of all the godheads moistFor everlasting laughters,—I, myself,Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!How those gods look!Enough so, Ganymede.We shall not bear above a round or two—We drop the golden cup at Heré’s footAnd swoon back to the earth,—and find ourselvesFace-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downsHave poets.Am I such indeed? The nameIs royal, and to sign it like a queen,Is what I dare not,—though some royal bloodWould seem to tingle in me now and then,With sense of power and ache,—with imposthumesAnd manias usual to the race. HowbeitI dare not: ’tis too easy to go mad,And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;The thing’s too common.Many fervent soulsStrike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steelIf steel had offered, in a restless heatOf doing something. Many tender soulsHave strung their losses on a rhyming thread,As children, cowslips:—the more pains they take,The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,Before they sit down under their own vineAnd live for use. Alas, near all the birdsWill sing at dawn,—and yet we do not takeThe chaffering swallow for the holy lark.In those days, though, I never analysedMyself even. All analysis comes late.You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,In full front sun-face, and your eyelids winkAnd drop before the wonder of’t; you missThe form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else:My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent floodAbolished bounds,—and, which my neighbour’s field,Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.We play at leap-frog over the god Term;The love within us and the love withoutAre mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.Being acted on and acting seem the same:In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels,We know not if the forests move or we.And so, like most young poets, in a flushOf individual life, I poured myselfAlong the veins of others, and achievedMere lifeless imitations of live verse,And made the living answer for the dead,Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste,Nor handle,’—we’re too legal, who write young:We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,As if still ignorant of counterpoint;We call the Muse.... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’—As if we had seen her purple-braided headWith the eyes in it, start between the boughsAs often as a stag’s. What make-believe,With so much earnest! what effete results,From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes,From such white heats!—bucolics, where the cowsWould scare the writer if they splashed the mudIn lashing off the flies,—didactics, drivenAgainst the heels of what the master said;And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumpsA babe might blow between two straining cheeksOf bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,The worse for being warm: all these things, writOn happy mornings, with a morning heart,That leaps for love, is active for resolve,Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient formsWill thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.Spare the old bottles!—spill not the new wine.By Keats’s soul, the man who never steppedIn gradual progress like another man,But, turning grandly on his central self,Ensphered himself in twenty perfect yearsAnd died, not young,—(the life of a long life,Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tearUpon the world’s cold cheek to make it burnFor ever;) by that strong excepted soul,I count it strange, and hard to understand,That nearly all young poets should write old;That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,And beardless Byron academical,And so with others. It may be, perhaps,Such have not settled long and deep enoughIn trance, to attain to clairvoyance,—and stillThe memory mixes with the vision, spoils,And works it turbid.Or perhaps, again,In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,The melancholy desert must sweep round,Behind you, as before.—For me, I wroteFalse poems, like the rest, and thought them true,Because myself was true in writing them.I, peradventure, have writ true ones sinceWith less complacence.But I could not hideMy quickening inner life from those at watch.They saw a light at a window now and then,They had not set there. Who had set it there?My father’s sister started when she caughtMy soul agaze in my eyes. She could not sayI had no business with a sort of soul,But plainly she objected,—and demurred,That souls were dangerous things to carry straightThrough all the spilt saltpetre of the world.She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you doneYour task this morning?—have you read that book?And are you ready for the crochet here?’—As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong;I know I have not ground you down enoughTo flatten and bake you to a wholesome crustFor household uses and proprieties,Before the rain has got into my barnAnd set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re greenWith out-door impudence? you almost grow?’To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task,And verify my abstract of the book?And should I sit down to the crochet work?Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teasedThe patient needle till it spilt the thread,Which oozed off from it in meandering laceFrom hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;My soul was singing at a work apartBehind the wall of sense, as safe from harmAs sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,In vortices of glory and blue air.And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,The inner life informed the outer life,Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,And, rounding to the spheric soul the thinPined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows acrossMy blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong.The dogs are on us—but we will not die.’Whoever lives true life, will love true love.I learnt to love that England. Very oft,Before the day was born, or otherwiseThrough secret windings of the afternoons,I threw my hunters off and plunged myselfAmong the deep hills, as a hunted stagWill take the waters, shivering with the fearAnd passion of the course. And when, at lastEscaped,—so many a green slope built on slopeBetwixt me and the enemy’s house behind,I dared to rest, or wander,—like a restMade sweeter for the step upon the grass,—And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement,(As if God’s finger touched but did not pressIn making England!) such an up and downOf verdure,—nothing too much up or down,A ripple of land; such little hills, the skyCan stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,Fed full of noises by invisible streams;And open pastures, where you scarcely tellWhite daisies from white dew,—at intervalsThe mythic oaks and elm-trees standing outSelf-poised upon their prodigy of shade,—I thought my father’s land was worthy tooOf being my Shakspeare’s.Very oft alone,Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leaveTo walk the third with Romney and his friendThe rising painter, Vincent Carrington,Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonnetted,Because he holds that, paint a body well,You paint a soul by implication, likeThe grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for ifHe said ... ‘When I was last in Italy’ ...It sounded as an instrument that’s playedToo far off for the tune—and yet it’s fineTo listen.Ofter we walked only two,If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced:We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched—Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,And thinkers disagreed; he, overfullOf what is, and I, haply, overboldFor what might be.But then the thrushes sang,And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves,—And then I turned, and held my finger up,And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the worldWent ill, as he related, certainlyThe thrushes still sang in it.—At which wordHis brow would soften,—and he bore with meIn melancholy patience, not unkind,While, breaking into voluble ecstacy,I flattered all the beauteous country round,As poets use ... the skies, the clouds, the fields,The happy violets hiding from the roadsThe primroses run down to, carrying gold,—The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push outImpatient horns and tolerant churning mouths’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all aliveWith birds and gnats and large white butterfliesWhich look as if the May-flower had caught lifeAnd palpitated forth upon the wind,—Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,And cattle grazing in the watered vales,And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,Confused with smell of orchards. ‘See,’ I said,‘And see! is God not with us on the earth?And shall we put Him down by aught we do?Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vileSave poverty and wickedness? behold!’And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.In the beginning when God called all good,Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,The evil is upon us while we speak;Deliver us from evil, let us pray.

Ofwriting many books there is no end;And I who have written much in prose and verseFor others’ uses, will write now for mine,—Will write my story for my better self,As when you paint your portrait for a friend,Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at itLong after he has ceased to love you, justTo hold together what he was and is.I, writing thus, am still what men call young;I have not so far left the coasts of lifeTo travel inland, that I cannot hearThat murmur of the outer InfiniteWhich unweaned babies smile at in their sleepWhen wondered at for smiling; not so far,But still I catch my mother at her postBeside the nursery-door, with finger up,‘Hush, hush—here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet eyesLeap forward, taking part against her wordIn the child’s riot. Still I sit and feelMy father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knewHe liked it better than a better jest)Inquire how many golden scudi wentTo make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,—Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone.I write. My mother was a Florentine,Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing meWhen scarcely I was four years old; my life,A poor spark snatched up from a failing lampWhich went out therefore. She was weak and frail;She could not bear the joy of giving life—The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kissHad left a longer weight upon my lips,It might have steadied the uneasy breath,And reconciled and fraternised my soulWith the new order. As it was, indeed,I felt a mother-want about the world,And still went seeking, like a bleating lambLeft out at night, in shutting up the fold,—As restless as a nest-deserted birdGrown chill through something being away, though whatIt knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was bornTo make my father sadder, and myselfNot overjoyous, truly. Women knowThe way to rear up children, (to be just,)They know a simple, merry, tender knackOf tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,And stringing pretty words that make no sense,And kissing full sense into empty words;Which things are corals to cut life upon,Although such trifles: children learn by such,Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,And get not over-early solemnised,—But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,—Become aware and unafraid of Love.Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,And wills more consciously responsible,And not as wisely, since less foolishly;So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.My father was an austere Englishman,Who, after a dry life-time spent at homeIn college-learning, law, and parish talk,Was flooded with a passion unaware,His whole provisioned and complacent pastDrowned out from him that moment. As he stoodIn Florence, where he had come to spend a monthAnd note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains,He musing somewhat absently perhapsSome English question ... whether men should payThe unpopular but necessary taxWith left or right hand—in the alien sunIn that great square of the Santissima,There drifted past him (scarcely marked enoughTo move his comfortable island-scorn,)A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,—The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding upTall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslantTo the blue luminous tremor of the air,And letting drop the white wax as they wentTo eat the bishop’s wafer at the church;From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,He too received his sacramental giftWith eucharistic meanings; for he loved.And thus beloved, she died. I’ve heard it saidThat but to see him in the first surpriseOf widower and father, nursing me,Unmothered little child of four years old,His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,As if the gold would tarnish,—his grave lipsContriving such a miserable smile,As if he knew needs must, or I should die,And yet ’twas hard,—would almost make the stonesCry out for pity. There’s a verse he setIn Santa Croce to her memory,‘Weep for an infant too young to weep muchWhen death removed this mother’—stops the mirthTo-day, on women’s faces when they walkWith rosy children hanging on their gowns,Under the cloister, to escape the sunThat scorches in the piazza. After which,He left our Florence, and made haste to hideHimself, his prattling child, and silent grief,Among the mountains above Pelago;Because unmothered babes, he thought, had needOf mother nature more than others use,And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and fullOf mystic contemplations, come to feedPoor milkless lips of orphans like his own—Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,Will get to wear it as a hat asideWith a flower stuck in’t. Father, then, and child,We lived among the mountains many years,God’s silence on the outside of the house,And we, who did not speak too loud, within;And old Assunta to make up the fire,Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flameWhich lightened from the firewood, made aliveThat picture of my mother on the wall.The painter drew it after she was dead;And when the face was finished, throat and hands,Her cameriera carried him, in hateOf the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocadeShe dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paintNo sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrongHer poor signora.’ Therefore very strangeThe effect was. I, a little child, would crouchFor hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,And gaze across them, half in terror, halfIn adoration, at the picture there,—That swan-like supernatural white life,Just sailing upward from the red stiff silkWhich seemed to have no part in it, nor powerTo keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s aweAnd my poor father’s melancholy eyesStill pointed that way. That way, went my thoughtsWhen wandering beyond sight. And as I grewIn years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,With still that face ... which did not therefore change,But kept the mystic level of all formsAnd fears and admirations; was by turnsGhost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,A still Medusa, with mild milky browsAll curdled and all clothed upon with snakesWhose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swordsWhere the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her firstMoonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;Or, my own mother, leaving her last smileIn her last kiss, upon the baby-mouthMy father pushed down on the bed for that,—Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,Buried at Florence. All which images,Concentred on the picture, glassed themselvesBefore my meditative childhood, ... asThe incoherencies of change and deathAre represented fully, mixed and merged,In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.And while I stared away my childish witsUpon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)My father, who through love had suddenlyThrown off the old conventions, broken looseFrom chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,Yet had no time to learn to talk and walkOr grow anew familiar with the sun,—Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,—Whom love had unmade from a common manBut not completed to an uncommon man,—My father taught me what he had learnt the bestBefore he died and left me,—grief and love.And, seeing we had books among the hills,Strong words of counselling souls, confederateWith vocal pines and waters,—out of booksHe taught me all the ignorance of men,And how God laughs in heaven when any manSays ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.’He sent the schools to school, demonstratingA fool will pass for such through one mistake,While a philosopher will pass for such,Through said mistakes being ventured in the grossAnd heaped up to a system.I am like,They tell me, my dear father. Broader browsHowbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowthOf delicate features,—paler, near as grave;But then my mother’s smile breaks up the whole,And makes it better sometimes than itself.So, nine full years, our days were hid with GodAmong his mountains. I was just thirteen,Still growing like the plants from unseen rootsIn tongue-tied Springs,—and suddenly awokeTo full life and its needs and agonies,With an intense, strong, struggling heart besideA stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,Makes awful lightning. His last word was, ‘Love—’‘Love, my child, love, love!’—(then he had done with grief)‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone,And none was left to love in all the world.There, ended childhood: what succeeded nextI recollect as, after fevers, menThread back the passage of delirium,Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flankWith flame, that it should eat and end itselfLike some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,I do remember clearly, how there cameA stranger with authority, not right,(I thought not) who commanded, caught me upFrom old Assunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,She let me go,—while I, with ears too fullOf my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,In all a child’s astonishment at griefStared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,Like one in anger drawing back her skirtsWhich suppliants catch at. Then the bitter seaInexorably pushed between us both,And sweeping up the ship with my despairThrew us out as a pasture to the stars.Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;Ten nights and days, without the common faceOf any day or night; the moon and sunCut off from the green reconciling earth,To starve into a blind ferocityAnd glare unnatural; the very sky(Dropping its bell-net down upon the seaAs if no human heart should scape alive,)Bedraggled with the desolating salt,Until it seemed no more that holy heavenTo which my father went. All new, and strange—The universe turned stranger, for a child.Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffsLooked cold upon me. Could I find a homeAmong those mean red houses through the fog?And when I heard my father’s language firstFrom alien lips which had no kiss for mine,I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—And some one near me said the child was madThrough much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.Was this my father’s England? the great isle?The ground seemed cut up from the fellowshipOf verdure, field from field, as man from man;The skies themselves looked low and positive,As almost you could touch them with a hand,And dared to do it, they were so far offFrom God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurredAnd dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his matesAbsorb the light here?—not a hill or stoneWith heart to strike a radiant colour upOr active outline on the indifferent air!I think I see my father’s sister standUpon the hall-step of her country-houseTo give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tightAs if for taming accidental thoughtsFrom possible pulses; brown hair pricked with greyBy frigid use of life, (she was not old,Although my father’s elder by a year)A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;A close mild mouth, a little soured aboutThe ends, through speaking unrequited loves,Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,But never, never have forgot themselvesIn smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a roseOf perished summers, like a rose in a book,Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,Past fading also.She had lived, we’ll say,A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,A quiet life, which was not life at all,(But that, she had not lived enough to know)Between the vicar and the county squires,The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimesFrom the empyreal, to assure their soulsAgainst chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,The apothecary looked on once a year,To prove their soundness of humility.The poor-club exercised her Christian giftsOf knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,Because we are of one flesh after allAnd need one flannel, (with a proper senseOf difference in the quality)—and stillThe book-club, guarded from your modern trickOf shaking dangerous questions from the crease,Preserved her intellectual. She had livedA sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,Accounting that to leap from perch to perchWas act and joy enough for any bird.Dear heaven, how silly are the things that liveIn thickets, and eat berries!I, alas,A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,And she was there to meet me. Very kind.Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.She stood upon the steps to welcome me,Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,—Young babes, who catch at every shred of woolTo draw the new light closer, catch and clingLess blindly. In my ears, my father’s wordHummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,‘Love, love, my child.’ She, black there with my grief,Might feel my love—she was his sister once—I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,And drew me feebly through the hall, intoThe room she sate in.There, with some strange spasmOf pain and passion, she wrung loose my handsImperiously, and held me at arm’s length,And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyesSearched through my face,—ay, stabbed it through and through,Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to findA wicked murderer in my innocent face,If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,She struggled for her ordinary calm,And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—‘She loved my father, and would love me tooAs long as I deserved it.’ Very kind.I understood her meaning afterward;She thought to find my mother in my face,And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,Had loved my father truly, as she could,And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,My Tuscan mother, who had fooled awayA wise man from wise courses, a good manFrom obvious duties, and, depriving her,His sister, of the household precedence,Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,And made him mad, alike by life and death,In love and sorrow. She had pored for yearsWhat sort of woman could be suitableTo her sort of hate, to entertain it with;And so, her very curiosityBecame hate too, and all the idealismShe ever used in life, was used for hate,Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at lastThe love from which it grew, in strength and heat,And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a senseOf disputable virtue (say not, sin)When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.And thus my father’s sister was to meMy mother’s hater. From that day, she didHer duty to me, (I appreciate itIn her own word as spoken to herself)Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,But measured always. She was generous, bland,More courteous than was tender, gave me stillThe first place,—as if fearful that God’s saintsWould look down suddenly and say, ‘HereinYou missed a point, I think, through lack of love.’Alas, a mother never is afraidOf speaking angerly to any child,Since love, she knows, is justified of love.And I, I was a good child on the whole,A meek and manageable child. Why not?I did not live, to have the faults of life:There seemed more true life in my father’s graveThan in all England. Sincethatthrew me offWho fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,Consigned me to his land) I only thoughtOf lying quiet there where I was thrownLike sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer herTo prick me to a pattern with her pin,Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,And dry out from my drowned anatomyThe last sea-salt left in me.So it was.I broke the copious curls upon my headIn braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.I left off saying my sweet Tuscan wordsWhich still at any stirring of the heartCame up to float across the English phrase,As lilies, (Bene... orche ch’è) becauseShe liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.I learnt the collects and the catechism,The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,The Articles ... the Tractsagainstthe times,(By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love,’)And various popular synopses ofInhuman doctrines never taught by John,Because she liked instructed piety.I learnt my complement of classic French(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)And German also, since she liked a rangeOf liberal education,—tongues, not books.I learnt a little algebra, a littleOf the mathematics,—brushed with extreme flounceThe circle of the sciences, becauseShe misliked women who are frivolous.I learnt the royal genealogiesOf Oviedo, the internal lawsOf the Burmese empire, ... by how many feetMount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,What navigable river joins itselfTo Lara, and what census of the year fiveWas taken at Klagenfurt,—because she likedA general insight into useful facts.I learnt much music,—such as would have beenAs quite impossible in Johnson’s dayAs still it might be wished—fine sleights of handAnd unimagined fingering, shuffling offThe hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notesTo a noisy Tophet; and I drew ... costumesFrom French engravings, nereids neatly draped,With smirks of simmering godship,—I washed inFrom nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)I danced the polka and Cellarius,Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,Because she liked accomplishments in girls.I read a score of books on womanhoodTo prove, if women do not think at all,They may teach thinking, (to a maiden-auntOr else the author)—books demonstratingTheir right of comprehending husband’s talkWhen not too deep, and even of answeringWith pretty ‘may it please you,’ or ‘so it is,’—Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,Particular worth and general missionariness,As long as they keep quiet by the fireAnd never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay,’For that is fatal,—their angelic reachOf virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,Potential faculty in everythingOf abdicating power in it: she ownedShe liked a woman to be womanly,And English women, she thanked God and sighed,(Some people always sigh in thanking God)Were models to the universe. And lastI learnt cross-stitch, because she did not likeTo see me wear the night with empty hands,A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdessWas something after all, (the pastoral saintsBe praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyesTo match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hatSo strangely similar to the tortoise-shellWhich slew the tragic poet.By the way,The works of women are symbolical.We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,To put on when you’re weary—or a stoolTo stumble over and vex you ... ‘curse that stool!’Or else at best, a cushion, where you leanAnd sleep, and dream of something we are not,But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paidThe worth of our work, perhaps.In looking downThose years of education, (to return)I wonder if Brinvilliers suffered moreIn the water-torture, ... flood succeeding floodTo drench the incapable throat and split the veins ...Than I did. Certain of your feebler soulsGo out in such a process; many pineTo a sick, inodorous light; my own endured:I had relations in the Unseen, and drewThe elemental nutriment and heatFrom nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark.I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outsideOf the inner life, with all its ample roomFor heart and lungs, for will and intellect,Inviolable by conventions. God,I thank thee for that grace of thine!At first,I felt no life which was not patience,—didThe thing she bade me, without heed to a thingBeyond it, sate in just the chair she placed,With back against the window, to excludeThe sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woodsTo bring the house a message,—ay, and walkedDemurely in her carpeted low rooms,As if I should not, harkening my own steps,Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books,Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup,(I blushed for joy at that)—‘The Italian child,For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,Thrives ill in England: she is paler yetThan when we came the last time; she will die.’‘Will die.’ My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,With sudden anger, and approaching meSaid low between his teeth—‘You’re wicked now?You wish to die and leave the world a-duskFor others, with your naughty light blown out?’I looked into his face defyingly.He might have known, that, being what I was,’Twas natural to like to get awayAs far as dead folk can; and then indeedSome people make no trouble when they die.He turned and went abruptly, slammed the doorAnd shut his dog out.Romney, Romney Leigh.I have not named my cousin hitherto,And yet I used him as a sort of friend;My elder by few years, but cold and shyAnd absent ... tender, when he thought of it,Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes,As well as early master of Leigh Hall,Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youthRepressing all its seasonable delights,And agonising with a ghastly senseOf universal hideous want and wrongTo incriminate possession. When he cameFrom college to the country, very oftHe crossed the hills on visits to my aunt,With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses,A book in one hand,—mere statistics, (ifI chanced to lift the cover) count of allThe goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell,Against God’s separating judgment-hour.And she, she almost loved him,—even allowedThat sometimes he should seem to sigh my way;It made him easier to be pitiful,And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbedAt whiles she let him shut my music upAnd push my needles down, and lead me outTo see in that south angle of the houseThe figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock,On some light pretext. She would turn her headAt other moments, go to fetch a thing,And leave me breath enough to speak with him,For his sake; it was simple.Sometimes tooHe would have saved me utterly, it seemed,He stood and looked so.Once, he stood so nearHe dropped a sudden hand upon my headBent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain—But then I rose and shook it off as fire,The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place,Yet dared seem soft.I used him for a friendBefore I ever knew him for a friend.’Twas better, ’twas worse also, afterward:We came so close, we saw our differencesToo intimately. Always Romney LeighWas looking for the worms, I for the gods.A godlike nature his; the gods look down,Incurious of themselves; and certainly’Tis well I should remember, how, those days,I was a worm too, and he looked on me.A little by his act perhaps, yet moreBy something in me, surely not my will,I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon,To whom life creeps back in the form of death,With a sense of separation, a blind painOf blank obstruction, and a roar i’ the earsOf visionary chariots which retreatAs earth grows clearer ... slowly, by degrees,I woke, rose up ... where was I? in the world;For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.I had a little chamber in the house,As green as any privet-hedge a birdMight choose to build in, though the nest itselfCould show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the wallsWere green, the carpet was pure green, the straightSmall bed was curtained greenly, and the foldsHung green about the window, which let inThe out-door world with all its greenery.You could not push your head out and escapeA dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle,But so you were baptised into the graceAnd privilege of seeing....First, the lime,(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,—My morning-dream was often hummed awayBy the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,Went trickling through the shrubberies in a streamOf tender turf, and wore and lost itselfAmong the acacias, over which, you sawThe irregular line of elms by the deep laneWhich stopped the grounds and dammed the overflowOf arbutus and laurel. Out of sightThe lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign trampNor drover of wild ponies out of WalesCould guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodgeDispensed such odours,—though his stick well-crookedMight reach the lowest trail of blossoming briarWhich dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,And through their tops, you saw the folded hillsStriped up and down with hedges, (burly oaksProjecting from the lines to show themselves)Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smokedAs still as when a silent mouth in frostBreathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;While, far above, a jut of table-land,A promontory without water, stretched,—You could not catch it if the days were thick,Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwiseThe vigorous sun would catch it up at eveAnd use it for an anvil till he had filledThe shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,And proved he need not rest so early:—then,When all his setting trouble was resolvedTo a trance of passive glory, you might seeIn apparition on the golden sky(Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep runAlong the fine clear outline, small as miceThat run along a witch’s scarlet thread.Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woodsOf Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spursTo the precipices. Not my headlong leapsOf waters, that cry out for joy or fearIn leaping through the palpitating pines,Like a white soul tossed out to eternityWith thrills of time upon it. Not indeedMy multitudinous mountains, sitting inThe magic circle, with the mutual touchElectric, panting from their full deep heartsBeneath the influent heavens, and waiting forCommunion and commission. ItalyIs one thing, England one.On English groundYou understand the letter ... ere the fall,How Adam lived in a garden. All the fieldsAre tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;The hills are crumpled plains,—the plains, parterres,—The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;And if you seek for any wildernessYou find, at best, a park. A nature tamedAnd grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,But which, in cackling, sets you thinking ofYour eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pauseOf finer meditation.Rather say,A sweet familiar nature, stealing inAs a dog might, or child, to touch your handOr pluck your gown, and humbly mind you soOf presence and affection, excellentFor inner uses, from the things without.I could not be unthankful, I who wasEntreated thus and holpen. In the roomI speak of, ere the house was well awake,And also after it was well asleep,I sate alone, and drew the blessing inOf all that nature. With a gradual step,A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,It came in softly, while the angels madeA place for it beside me. The moon came,And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts.The sun came, saying, ‘Shall I lift this lightAgainst the lime-tree, and you will not look?I make the birds sing—listen!... but, for you,God never hears your voice, excepting whenYou lie upon the bed at nights and weep.’Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened upMore slowly than I verily write now,But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wideThe window and my soul, and let the airsAnd out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,Regenerating what I was. O Life,How oft we throw it off and think,—‘Enough,Enough of life in so much!—here’s a causeFor rupture;—herein we must break with Life,Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!’—And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyesAnd think all ended.—Then, Life calls to usIn some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,Above us, or below us, or around....Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s,Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamedTo own our compensations than our griefs:Still, Life’s voice!—still, we make our peace with Life.And I, so young then, was not sullen. SoonI used to get up early, just to sitAnd watch the morning quicken in the grey,And hear the silence open like a flower,Leaf after leaf,—and stroke with listless handThe woodbine through the window, till at lastI came to do it with a sort of love,At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,—A melancholy smile, to catch myselfSmiling for joy.Capacity for joyAdmits temptation. It seemed, next, worth whileTo dodge the sharp sword set against my life;To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,As mute as any dream there, and escapeAs a soul from the body, out of doors,—Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,And wander on the hills an hour or two,Then back again before the house should stir.Or else I sate on in my chamber green,And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayedMy prayers without the vicar; read my books,Without considering whether they were fitTo do me good. Mark, there. We get no goodBy being ungenerous, even to a book,And calculating profits ... so much helpBy so much reading. It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—’Tis then we get the right good from a book.I read much. What my father taught beforeFrom many a volume, Love re-emphasisedUpon the self-same pages: TheophrastGrew tender with the memory of his eyes,And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of GreekAnd Latin, he had taught me, as he wouldHave taught me wrestling or the game of fivesIf such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked manWho heaps his single platter with goats’ cheeseAnd scarlet berries; or like any manWho loves but one, and so gives all at once,Because he has it, rather than becauseHe counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;And thus, as did the women formerlyBy young Achilles, when they pinned the veilAcross the boy’s audacious front, and sweptWith tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,He wrapt his little daughter in his largeMan’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.But, after I had read for memory,I read for hope. The path my father’s footHad trod me out, which suddenly broke off,(What time he dropped the wallet of the fleshAnd passed) alone I carried on, and setMy child-heart ’gainst the thorny underwood,To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother-babe!My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,When any young wayfaring soul goes forthAlone, unconscious of the perilous road,The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,To thrust his own way, he an alien, throughThe world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,You clap hands—‘A fair day!’—you cheer him on,As if the worst, could happen, were to restToo long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,Behold!—the world of books is still the world;And worldlings in it are less mercifulAnd more puissant. For the wicked thereAre winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,Is edged from elemental fire to assailA spiritual life. The beautiful seems rightBy force of beauty, and the feeble wrongBecause of weakness. Power is justified,Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crownCovers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,There’s no lack, neither, of God’s saints and kings,That shake the ashes of the grave asideFrom their calm locks, and undiscomfitedLook stedfast truths against Time’s changing mask.True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavensUpon his own head in strong martyrdom,In order to light men a moment’s space.But stay!—who judges?—who distinguishes’Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,To serve king David? who discerns at onceThe sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blowFor Alaric as well as Charlemagne?Who judges prophets, and can tell true seersFrom conjurors? The child, there? Would you leaveThat child to wander in a battle-fieldAnd push his innocent smile against the guns?Or even in the catacombs, ... his torchGrown ragged in the fluttering air, and allThe dark a-mutter round him? not a child!I read books bad and good—some bad and goodAt once: good aims not always make good books:Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soilsIn digging vineyards, even: books, that proveGod’s being so definitely, that man’s doubtGrows self-defined the other side the line,Made atheist by suggestion; moral books,Exasperating to license; genial books,Discounting from the human dignity;And merry books, which set you weeping whenThe sun shines,—ay, and melancholy books,Which make you laugh that any one should weepIn this disjointed life, for one wrong more.The world of books is still the world, I write,And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,Among the breakers, some hard swimming throughThe deeps—I lost breath in my soul sometimes,And cried, ‘God save me if there’s any God,’But, even so, God saved me; and, being dashedFrom error on to error, every turnStill brought me nearer to the central truth.I thought so. All this anguish in the thickOf men’s opinions ... press and counterpress,Now up, now down, now underfoot, and nowEmergent ... all the best of it, perhaps,But throws you back upon a noble trustAnd use of your own instinct,—merely provesPure reason stronger than bare inferenceAt strongest. Try it,—fix against heaven’s wallYour scaling ladders of high logic—mountStep by step!—Sight goes faster; that still rayWhich strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,And why, you know not—(did you eliminate,That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.The cygnet finds the water; but the manIs born in ignorance of his element,And feels out blind at first, disorganisedBy sin i’ the blood,—his spirit-insight dulledAnd crossed by his sensations. PresentlyWe feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;Then, mark, be reverent, be obedient,—For those dumb motions of imperfect lifeAre oracles of vital DeityAttesting the Hereafter. Let who says‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,A palimpsest, a prophet’s holographDefiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,—The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring onWhich obscene text, we may discern perhapsSome fair, fine trace of what was written once,Some upstroke of an alpha and omegaExpressing the old scripture.Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret-roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!At last, because the time was ripe,I chanced upon the poets.As the earthPlunges in fury, when the internal firesHave reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flatThe marts and temples, the triumphal gatesAnd towers of observation, clears herselfTo elemental freedom—thus, my soul,At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,Convicted of the great eternitiesBefore two worlds.What’s this, Aurora Leigh,You write so of the poets, and not laugh?Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,Exaggerators of the sun and moon,And soothsayers in a tea-cup?I write soOf the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—The only speakers of essential truth,Opposed to relative, comparative,And temporal truths; the only holders byHis sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;The only teachers who instruct mankind,From just a shadow on a charnel-wall,To find man’s veritable stature out,Erect, sublime,—the measure of a man,And that’s the measure of an angel, saysThe apostle. Ay, and while your common menBuild pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,And dust the flaunty carpets of the worldFor kings to walk on, or our senators,The poet suddenly will catch them upWith his voice like a thunder ... ‘This is soul,This is life, this word is being said in heaven,Here’s God down on us! what are you about?’How all those workers start amid their work,Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,Is not the imperative labour after all.My own best poets, am I one with you,That thus I love you,—or but one through love?Does all this smell of thyme about my feetConclude my visit to your holy hillIn personal presence, or but testifyThe rustling of your vesture through my dreamsWith influent odours? When my joy and pain,My thought and aspiration, like the stopsOf pipe or flute, are absolutely dumbIf not melodious, do you play on me,My pipers,—and if, sooth, you did not blow,Would no sound come? or is the music mine,As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubtFor cloudy seasons!But the sun was highWhen first I felt my pulses set themselvesFor concords; when the rhythmic turbulenceOf blood and brain swept outward upon words,As wind upon the alders, blanching themBy turning up their under-natures tillThey trembled in dilation. O delightAnd triumph of the poet,—who would sayA man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’A little human hope of that or this,And says the word so that it burns you throughWith a special revelation, shakes the heartOf all the men and women in the world,As if one came back from the dead and spoke,With eyes too happy, a familiar thingBecome divine i’ the utterance! while for himThe poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;The palpitating angel in his fleshThrills inly with consenting fellowshipTo those innumerous spirits who sun themselvesOutside of time.O life, O poetry,—Which means life in life! cognisant of lifeBeyond this blood-beat,—passionate for truthBeyond these senses,—poetry, my life,—My eagle, with both grappling feet still hotFrom Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished meAway from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,And set me in the Olympian roar and roundOf luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,To keep the mouths of all the godheads moistFor everlasting laughters,—I, myself,Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!How those gods look!Enough so, Ganymede.We shall not bear above a round or two—We drop the golden cup at Heré’s footAnd swoon back to the earth,—and find ourselvesFace-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downsHave poets.Am I such indeed? The nameIs royal, and to sign it like a queen,Is what I dare not,—though some royal bloodWould seem to tingle in me now and then,With sense of power and ache,—with imposthumesAnd manias usual to the race. HowbeitI dare not: ’tis too easy to go mad,And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;The thing’s too common.Many fervent soulsStrike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steelIf steel had offered, in a restless heatOf doing something. Many tender soulsHave strung their losses on a rhyming thread,As children, cowslips:—the more pains they take,The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,Before they sit down under their own vineAnd live for use. Alas, near all the birdsWill sing at dawn,—and yet we do not takeThe chaffering swallow for the holy lark.In those days, though, I never analysedMyself even. All analysis comes late.You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,In full front sun-face, and your eyelids winkAnd drop before the wonder of’t; you missThe form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else:My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent floodAbolished bounds,—and, which my neighbour’s field,Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.We play at leap-frog over the god Term;The love within us and the love withoutAre mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.Being acted on and acting seem the same:In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels,We know not if the forests move or we.And so, like most young poets, in a flushOf individual life, I poured myselfAlong the veins of others, and achievedMere lifeless imitations of live verse,And made the living answer for the dead,Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste,Nor handle,’—we’re too legal, who write young:We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,As if still ignorant of counterpoint;We call the Muse.... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’—As if we had seen her purple-braided headWith the eyes in it, start between the boughsAs often as a stag’s. What make-believe,With so much earnest! what effete results,From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes,From such white heats!—bucolics, where the cowsWould scare the writer if they splashed the mudIn lashing off the flies,—didactics, drivenAgainst the heels of what the master said;And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumpsA babe might blow between two straining cheeksOf bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,The worse for being warm: all these things, writOn happy mornings, with a morning heart,That leaps for love, is active for resolve,Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient formsWill thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.Spare the old bottles!—spill not the new wine.By Keats’s soul, the man who never steppedIn gradual progress like another man,But, turning grandly on his central self,Ensphered himself in twenty perfect yearsAnd died, not young,—(the life of a long life,Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tearUpon the world’s cold cheek to make it burnFor ever;) by that strong excepted soul,I count it strange, and hard to understand,That nearly all young poets should write old;That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,And beardless Byron academical,And so with others. It may be, perhaps,Such have not settled long and deep enoughIn trance, to attain to clairvoyance,—and stillThe memory mixes with the vision, spoils,And works it turbid.Or perhaps, again,In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,The melancholy desert must sweep round,Behind you, as before.—For me, I wroteFalse poems, like the rest, and thought them true,Because myself was true in writing them.I, peradventure, have writ true ones sinceWith less complacence.But I could not hideMy quickening inner life from those at watch.They saw a light at a window now and then,They had not set there. Who had set it there?My father’s sister started when she caughtMy soul agaze in my eyes. She could not sayI had no business with a sort of soul,But plainly she objected,—and demurred,That souls were dangerous things to carry straightThrough all the spilt saltpetre of the world.She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you doneYour task this morning?—have you read that book?And are you ready for the crochet here?’—As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong;I know I have not ground you down enoughTo flatten and bake you to a wholesome crustFor household uses and proprieties,Before the rain has got into my barnAnd set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re greenWith out-door impudence? you almost grow?’To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task,And verify my abstract of the book?And should I sit down to the crochet work?Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teasedThe patient needle till it spilt the thread,Which oozed off from it in meandering laceFrom hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;My soul was singing at a work apartBehind the wall of sense, as safe from harmAs sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,In vortices of glory and blue air.And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,The inner life informed the outer life,Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,And, rounding to the spheric soul the thinPined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows acrossMy blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong.The dogs are on us—but we will not die.’Whoever lives true life, will love true love.I learnt to love that England. Very oft,Before the day was born, or otherwiseThrough secret windings of the afternoons,I threw my hunters off and plunged myselfAmong the deep hills, as a hunted stagWill take the waters, shivering with the fearAnd passion of the course. And when, at lastEscaped,—so many a green slope built on slopeBetwixt me and the enemy’s house behind,I dared to rest, or wander,—like a restMade sweeter for the step upon the grass,—And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement,(As if God’s finger touched but did not pressIn making England!) such an up and downOf verdure,—nothing too much up or down,A ripple of land; such little hills, the skyCan stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,Fed full of noises by invisible streams;And open pastures, where you scarcely tellWhite daisies from white dew,—at intervalsThe mythic oaks and elm-trees standing outSelf-poised upon their prodigy of shade,—I thought my father’s land was worthy tooOf being my Shakspeare’s.Very oft alone,Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leaveTo walk the third with Romney and his friendThe rising painter, Vincent Carrington,Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonnetted,Because he holds that, paint a body well,You paint a soul by implication, likeThe grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for ifHe said ... ‘When I was last in Italy’ ...It sounded as an instrument that’s playedToo far off for the tune—and yet it’s fineTo listen.Ofter we walked only two,If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced:We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched—Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,And thinkers disagreed; he, overfullOf what is, and I, haply, overboldFor what might be.But then the thrushes sang,And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves,—And then I turned, and held my finger up,And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the worldWent ill, as he related, certainlyThe thrushes still sang in it.—At which wordHis brow would soften,—and he bore with meIn melancholy patience, not unkind,While, breaking into voluble ecstacy,I flattered all the beauteous country round,As poets use ... the skies, the clouds, the fields,The happy violets hiding from the roadsThe primroses run down to, carrying gold,—The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push outImpatient horns and tolerant churning mouths’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all aliveWith birds and gnats and large white butterfliesWhich look as if the May-flower had caught lifeAnd palpitated forth upon the wind,—Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,And cattle grazing in the watered vales,And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,Confused with smell of orchards. ‘See,’ I said,‘And see! is God not with us on the earth?And shall we put Him down by aught we do?Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vileSave poverty and wickedness? behold!’And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.In the beginning when God called all good,Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,The evil is upon us while we speak;Deliver us from evil, let us pray.

Ofwriting many books there is no end;And I who have written much in prose and verseFor others’ uses, will write now for mine,—Will write my story for my better self,As when you paint your portrait for a friend,Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at itLong after he has ceased to love you, justTo hold together what he was and is.

I, writing thus, am still what men call young;I have not so far left the coasts of lifeTo travel inland, that I cannot hearThat murmur of the outer InfiniteWhich unweaned babies smile at in their sleepWhen wondered at for smiling; not so far,But still I catch my mother at her postBeside the nursery-door, with finger up,‘Hush, hush—here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet eyesLeap forward, taking part against her wordIn the child’s riot. Still I sit and feelMy father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knewHe liked it better than a better jest)Inquire how many golden scudi wentTo make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,—Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone.

I write. My mother was a Florentine,Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing meWhen scarcely I was four years old; my life,A poor spark snatched up from a failing lampWhich went out therefore. She was weak and frail;She could not bear the joy of giving life—The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kissHad left a longer weight upon my lips,It might have steadied the uneasy breath,And reconciled and fraternised my soulWith the new order. As it was, indeed,I felt a mother-want about the world,And still went seeking, like a bleating lambLeft out at night, in shutting up the fold,—As restless as a nest-deserted birdGrown chill through something being away, though whatIt knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was bornTo make my father sadder, and myselfNot overjoyous, truly. Women knowThe way to rear up children, (to be just,)They know a simple, merry, tender knackOf tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,And stringing pretty words that make no sense,And kissing full sense into empty words;Which things are corals to cut life upon,Although such trifles: children learn by such,Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,And get not over-early solemnised,—But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,—Become aware and unafraid of Love.Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,And wills more consciously responsible,And not as wisely, since less foolishly;So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.

My father was an austere Englishman,Who, after a dry life-time spent at homeIn college-learning, law, and parish talk,Was flooded with a passion unaware,His whole provisioned and complacent pastDrowned out from him that moment. As he stoodIn Florence, where he had come to spend a monthAnd note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains,He musing somewhat absently perhapsSome English question ... whether men should payThe unpopular but necessary taxWith left or right hand—in the alien sunIn that great square of the Santissima,There drifted past him (scarcely marked enoughTo move his comfortable island-scorn,)A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,—The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding upTall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslantTo the blue luminous tremor of the air,And letting drop the white wax as they wentTo eat the bishop’s wafer at the church;From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,He too received his sacramental giftWith eucharistic meanings; for he loved.

And thus beloved, she died. I’ve heard it saidThat but to see him in the first surpriseOf widower and father, nursing me,Unmothered little child of four years old,His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,As if the gold would tarnish,—his grave lipsContriving such a miserable smile,As if he knew needs must, or I should die,And yet ’twas hard,—would almost make the stonesCry out for pity. There’s a verse he setIn Santa Croce to her memory,‘Weep for an infant too young to weep muchWhen death removed this mother’—stops the mirthTo-day, on women’s faces when they walkWith rosy children hanging on their gowns,Under the cloister, to escape the sunThat scorches in the piazza. After which,He left our Florence, and made haste to hideHimself, his prattling child, and silent grief,Among the mountains above Pelago;Because unmothered babes, he thought, had needOf mother nature more than others use,And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and fullOf mystic contemplations, come to feedPoor milkless lips of orphans like his own—Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,Will get to wear it as a hat asideWith a flower stuck in’t. Father, then, and child,We lived among the mountains many years,God’s silence on the outside of the house,And we, who did not speak too loud, within;And old Assunta to make up the fire,Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flameWhich lightened from the firewood, made aliveThat picture of my mother on the wall.The painter drew it after she was dead;And when the face was finished, throat and hands,Her cameriera carried him, in hateOf the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocadeShe dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paintNo sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrongHer poor signora.’ Therefore very strangeThe effect was. I, a little child, would crouchFor hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,And gaze across them, half in terror, halfIn adoration, at the picture there,—That swan-like supernatural white life,Just sailing upward from the red stiff silkWhich seemed to have no part in it, nor powerTo keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s aweAnd my poor father’s melancholy eyesStill pointed that way. That way, went my thoughtsWhen wandering beyond sight. And as I grewIn years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,With still that face ... which did not therefore change,But kept the mystic level of all formsAnd fears and admirations; was by turnsGhost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,A still Medusa, with mild milky browsAll curdled and all clothed upon with snakesWhose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swordsWhere the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her firstMoonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;Or, my own mother, leaving her last smileIn her last kiss, upon the baby-mouthMy father pushed down on the bed for that,—Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,Buried at Florence. All which images,Concentred on the picture, glassed themselvesBefore my meditative childhood, ... asThe incoherencies of change and deathAre represented fully, mixed and merged,In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.

And while I stared away my childish witsUpon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)My father, who through love had suddenlyThrown off the old conventions, broken looseFrom chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,Yet had no time to learn to talk and walkOr grow anew familiar with the sun,—Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,—Whom love had unmade from a common manBut not completed to an uncommon man,—My father taught me what he had learnt the bestBefore he died and left me,—grief and love.And, seeing we had books among the hills,Strong words of counselling souls, confederateWith vocal pines and waters,—out of booksHe taught me all the ignorance of men,And how God laughs in heaven when any manSays ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.’He sent the schools to school, demonstratingA fool will pass for such through one mistake,While a philosopher will pass for such,Through said mistakes being ventured in the grossAnd heaped up to a system.I am like,They tell me, my dear father. Broader browsHowbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowthOf delicate features,—paler, near as grave;But then my mother’s smile breaks up the whole,And makes it better sometimes than itself.

So, nine full years, our days were hid with GodAmong his mountains. I was just thirteen,Still growing like the plants from unseen rootsIn tongue-tied Springs,—and suddenly awokeTo full life and its needs and agonies,With an intense, strong, struggling heart besideA stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,Makes awful lightning. His last word was, ‘Love—’‘Love, my child, love, love!’—(then he had done with grief)‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone,And none was left to love in all the world.

There, ended childhood: what succeeded nextI recollect as, after fevers, menThread back the passage of delirium,Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flankWith flame, that it should eat and end itselfLike some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,I do remember clearly, how there cameA stranger with authority, not right,(I thought not) who commanded, caught me upFrom old Assunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,She let me go,—while I, with ears too fullOf my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,In all a child’s astonishment at griefStared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,Like one in anger drawing back her skirtsWhich suppliants catch at. Then the bitter seaInexorably pushed between us both,And sweeping up the ship with my despairThrew us out as a pasture to the stars.

Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;Ten nights and days, without the common faceOf any day or night; the moon and sunCut off from the green reconciling earth,To starve into a blind ferocityAnd glare unnatural; the very sky(Dropping its bell-net down upon the seaAs if no human heart should scape alive,)Bedraggled with the desolating salt,Until it seemed no more that holy heavenTo which my father went. All new, and strange—The universe turned stranger, for a child.

Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffsLooked cold upon me. Could I find a homeAmong those mean red houses through the fog?And when I heard my father’s language firstFrom alien lips which had no kiss for mine,I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—And some one near me said the child was madThrough much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.Was this my father’s England? the great isle?The ground seemed cut up from the fellowshipOf verdure, field from field, as man from man;The skies themselves looked low and positive,As almost you could touch them with a hand,And dared to do it, they were so far offFrom God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurredAnd dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his matesAbsorb the light here?—not a hill or stoneWith heart to strike a radiant colour upOr active outline on the indifferent air!

I think I see my father’s sister standUpon the hall-step of her country-houseTo give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tightAs if for taming accidental thoughtsFrom possible pulses; brown hair pricked with greyBy frigid use of life, (she was not old,Although my father’s elder by a year)A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;A close mild mouth, a little soured aboutThe ends, through speaking unrequited loves,Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,But never, never have forgot themselvesIn smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a roseOf perished summers, like a rose in a book,Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,Past fading also.She had lived, we’ll say,A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,A quiet life, which was not life at all,(But that, she had not lived enough to know)Between the vicar and the county squires,The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimesFrom the empyreal, to assure their soulsAgainst chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,The apothecary looked on once a year,To prove their soundness of humility.The poor-club exercised her Christian giftsOf knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,Because we are of one flesh after allAnd need one flannel, (with a proper senseOf difference in the quality)—and stillThe book-club, guarded from your modern trickOf shaking dangerous questions from the crease,Preserved her intellectual. She had livedA sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,Accounting that to leap from perch to perchWas act and joy enough for any bird.Dear heaven, how silly are the things that liveIn thickets, and eat berries!I, alas,A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,And she was there to meet me. Very kind.Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.

She stood upon the steps to welcome me,Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,—Young babes, who catch at every shred of woolTo draw the new light closer, catch and clingLess blindly. In my ears, my father’s wordHummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,‘Love, love, my child.’ She, black there with my grief,Might feel my love—she was his sister once—I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,And drew me feebly through the hall, intoThe room she sate in.There, with some strange spasmOf pain and passion, she wrung loose my handsImperiously, and held me at arm’s length,And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyesSearched through my face,—ay, stabbed it through and through,Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to findA wicked murderer in my innocent face,If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,She struggled for her ordinary calm,And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—‘She loved my father, and would love me tooAs long as I deserved it.’ Very kind.

I understood her meaning afterward;She thought to find my mother in my face,And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,Had loved my father truly, as she could,And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,My Tuscan mother, who had fooled awayA wise man from wise courses, a good manFrom obvious duties, and, depriving her,His sister, of the household precedence,Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,And made him mad, alike by life and death,In love and sorrow. She had pored for yearsWhat sort of woman could be suitableTo her sort of hate, to entertain it with;And so, her very curiosityBecame hate too, and all the idealismShe ever used in life, was used for hate,Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at lastThe love from which it grew, in strength and heat,And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a senseOf disputable virtue (say not, sin)When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.

And thus my father’s sister was to meMy mother’s hater. From that day, she didHer duty to me, (I appreciate itIn her own word as spoken to herself)Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,But measured always. She was generous, bland,More courteous than was tender, gave me stillThe first place,—as if fearful that God’s saintsWould look down suddenly and say, ‘HereinYou missed a point, I think, through lack of love.’Alas, a mother never is afraidOf speaking angerly to any child,Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

And I, I was a good child on the whole,A meek and manageable child. Why not?I did not live, to have the faults of life:There seemed more true life in my father’s graveThan in all England. Sincethatthrew me offWho fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,Consigned me to his land) I only thoughtOf lying quiet there where I was thrownLike sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer herTo prick me to a pattern with her pin,Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,And dry out from my drowned anatomyThe last sea-salt left in me.So it was.I broke the copious curls upon my headIn braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.I left off saying my sweet Tuscan wordsWhich still at any stirring of the heartCame up to float across the English phrase,As lilies, (Bene... orche ch’è) becauseShe liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.I learnt the collects and the catechism,The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,The Articles ... the Tractsagainstthe times,(By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love,’)And various popular synopses ofInhuman doctrines never taught by John,Because she liked instructed piety.I learnt my complement of classic French(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)And German also, since she liked a rangeOf liberal education,—tongues, not books.I learnt a little algebra, a littleOf the mathematics,—brushed with extreme flounceThe circle of the sciences, becauseShe misliked women who are frivolous.I learnt the royal genealogiesOf Oviedo, the internal lawsOf the Burmese empire, ... by how many feetMount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,What navigable river joins itselfTo Lara, and what census of the year fiveWas taken at Klagenfurt,—because she likedA general insight into useful facts.I learnt much music,—such as would have beenAs quite impossible in Johnson’s dayAs still it might be wished—fine sleights of handAnd unimagined fingering, shuffling offThe hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notesTo a noisy Tophet; and I drew ... costumesFrom French engravings, nereids neatly draped,With smirks of simmering godship,—I washed inFrom nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)I danced the polka and Cellarius,Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,Because she liked accomplishments in girls.I read a score of books on womanhoodTo prove, if women do not think at all,They may teach thinking, (to a maiden-auntOr else the author)—books demonstratingTheir right of comprehending husband’s talkWhen not too deep, and even of answeringWith pretty ‘may it please you,’ or ‘so it is,’—Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,Particular worth and general missionariness,As long as they keep quiet by the fireAnd never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay,’For that is fatal,—their angelic reachOf virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,Potential faculty in everythingOf abdicating power in it: she ownedShe liked a woman to be womanly,And English women, she thanked God and sighed,(Some people always sigh in thanking God)Were models to the universe. And lastI learnt cross-stitch, because she did not likeTo see me wear the night with empty hands,A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdessWas something after all, (the pastoral saintsBe praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyesTo match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hatSo strangely similar to the tortoise-shellWhich slew the tragic poet.By the way,The works of women are symbolical.We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,To put on when you’re weary—or a stoolTo stumble over and vex you ... ‘curse that stool!’Or else at best, a cushion, where you leanAnd sleep, and dream of something we are not,But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paidThe worth of our work, perhaps.In looking downThose years of education, (to return)I wonder if Brinvilliers suffered moreIn the water-torture, ... flood succeeding floodTo drench the incapable throat and split the veins ...Than I did. Certain of your feebler soulsGo out in such a process; many pineTo a sick, inodorous light; my own endured:I had relations in the Unseen, and drewThe elemental nutriment and heatFrom nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark.I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outsideOf the inner life, with all its ample roomFor heart and lungs, for will and intellect,Inviolable by conventions. God,I thank thee for that grace of thine!At first,I felt no life which was not patience,—didThe thing she bade me, without heed to a thingBeyond it, sate in just the chair she placed,With back against the window, to excludeThe sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woodsTo bring the house a message,—ay, and walkedDemurely in her carpeted low rooms,As if I should not, harkening my own steps,Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books,Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup,(I blushed for joy at that)—‘The Italian child,For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,Thrives ill in England: she is paler yetThan when we came the last time; she will die.’

‘Will die.’ My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,With sudden anger, and approaching meSaid low between his teeth—‘You’re wicked now?You wish to die and leave the world a-duskFor others, with your naughty light blown out?’I looked into his face defyingly.He might have known, that, being what I was,’Twas natural to like to get awayAs far as dead folk can; and then indeedSome people make no trouble when they die.He turned and went abruptly, slammed the doorAnd shut his dog out.Romney, Romney Leigh.I have not named my cousin hitherto,And yet I used him as a sort of friend;My elder by few years, but cold and shyAnd absent ... tender, when he thought of it,Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes,As well as early master of Leigh Hall,Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youthRepressing all its seasonable delights,And agonising with a ghastly senseOf universal hideous want and wrongTo incriminate possession. When he cameFrom college to the country, very oftHe crossed the hills on visits to my aunt,With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses,A book in one hand,—mere statistics, (ifI chanced to lift the cover) count of allThe goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell,Against God’s separating judgment-hour.And she, she almost loved him,—even allowedThat sometimes he should seem to sigh my way;It made him easier to be pitiful,And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbedAt whiles she let him shut my music upAnd push my needles down, and lead me outTo see in that south angle of the houseThe figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock,On some light pretext. She would turn her headAt other moments, go to fetch a thing,And leave me breath enough to speak with him,For his sake; it was simple.Sometimes tooHe would have saved me utterly, it seemed,He stood and looked so.Once, he stood so nearHe dropped a sudden hand upon my headBent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain—But then I rose and shook it off as fire,The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place,Yet dared seem soft.I used him for a friendBefore I ever knew him for a friend.’Twas better, ’twas worse also, afterward:We came so close, we saw our differencesToo intimately. Always Romney LeighWas looking for the worms, I for the gods.A godlike nature his; the gods look down,Incurious of themselves; and certainly’Tis well I should remember, how, those days,I was a worm too, and he looked on me.

A little by his act perhaps, yet moreBy something in me, surely not my will,I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon,To whom life creeps back in the form of death,With a sense of separation, a blind painOf blank obstruction, and a roar i’ the earsOf visionary chariots which retreatAs earth grows clearer ... slowly, by degrees,I woke, rose up ... where was I? in the world;For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.

I had a little chamber in the house,As green as any privet-hedge a birdMight choose to build in, though the nest itselfCould show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the wallsWere green, the carpet was pure green, the straightSmall bed was curtained greenly, and the foldsHung green about the window, which let inThe out-door world with all its greenery.You could not push your head out and escapeA dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle,But so you were baptised into the graceAnd privilege of seeing....First, the lime,(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,—My morning-dream was often hummed awayBy the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,Went trickling through the shrubberies in a streamOf tender turf, and wore and lost itselfAmong the acacias, over which, you sawThe irregular line of elms by the deep laneWhich stopped the grounds and dammed the overflowOf arbutus and laurel. Out of sightThe lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign trampNor drover of wild ponies out of WalesCould guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodgeDispensed such odours,—though his stick well-crookedMight reach the lowest trail of blossoming briarWhich dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,And through their tops, you saw the folded hillsStriped up and down with hedges, (burly oaksProjecting from the lines to show themselves)Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smokedAs still as when a silent mouth in frostBreathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;While, far above, a jut of table-land,A promontory without water, stretched,—You could not catch it if the days were thick,Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwiseThe vigorous sun would catch it up at eveAnd use it for an anvil till he had filledThe shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,And proved he need not rest so early:—then,When all his setting trouble was resolvedTo a trance of passive glory, you might seeIn apparition on the golden sky(Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep runAlong the fine clear outline, small as miceThat run along a witch’s scarlet thread.

Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woodsOf Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spursTo the precipices. Not my headlong leapsOf waters, that cry out for joy or fearIn leaping through the palpitating pines,Like a white soul tossed out to eternityWith thrills of time upon it. Not indeedMy multitudinous mountains, sitting inThe magic circle, with the mutual touchElectric, panting from their full deep heartsBeneath the influent heavens, and waiting forCommunion and commission. ItalyIs one thing, England one.On English groundYou understand the letter ... ere the fall,How Adam lived in a garden. All the fieldsAre tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;The hills are crumpled plains,—the plains, parterres,—The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;And if you seek for any wildernessYou find, at best, a park. A nature tamedAnd grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,But which, in cackling, sets you thinking ofYour eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pauseOf finer meditation.Rather say,A sweet familiar nature, stealing inAs a dog might, or child, to touch your handOr pluck your gown, and humbly mind you soOf presence and affection, excellentFor inner uses, from the things without.

I could not be unthankful, I who wasEntreated thus and holpen. In the roomI speak of, ere the house was well awake,And also after it was well asleep,I sate alone, and drew the blessing inOf all that nature. With a gradual step,A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,It came in softly, while the angels madeA place for it beside me. The moon came,And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts.The sun came, saying, ‘Shall I lift this lightAgainst the lime-tree, and you will not look?I make the birds sing—listen!... but, for you,God never hears your voice, excepting whenYou lie upon the bed at nights and weep.’

Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened upMore slowly than I verily write now,But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wideThe window and my soul, and let the airsAnd out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,Regenerating what I was. O Life,How oft we throw it off and think,—‘Enough,Enough of life in so much!—here’s a causeFor rupture;—herein we must break with Life,Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!’—And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyesAnd think all ended.—Then, Life calls to usIn some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,Above us, or below us, or around....Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s,Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamedTo own our compensations than our griefs:Still, Life’s voice!—still, we make our peace with Life.

And I, so young then, was not sullen. SoonI used to get up early, just to sitAnd watch the morning quicken in the grey,And hear the silence open like a flower,Leaf after leaf,—and stroke with listless handThe woodbine through the window, till at lastI came to do it with a sort of love,At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,—A melancholy smile, to catch myselfSmiling for joy.Capacity for joyAdmits temptation. It seemed, next, worth whileTo dodge the sharp sword set against my life;To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,As mute as any dream there, and escapeAs a soul from the body, out of doors,—Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,And wander on the hills an hour or two,Then back again before the house should stir.

Or else I sate on in my chamber green,And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayedMy prayers without the vicar; read my books,Without considering whether they were fitTo do me good. Mark, there. We get no goodBy being ungenerous, even to a book,And calculating profits ... so much helpBy so much reading. It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—’Tis then we get the right good from a book.

I read much. What my father taught beforeFrom many a volume, Love re-emphasisedUpon the self-same pages: TheophrastGrew tender with the memory of his eyes,And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of GreekAnd Latin, he had taught me, as he wouldHave taught me wrestling or the game of fivesIf such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked manWho heaps his single platter with goats’ cheeseAnd scarlet berries; or like any manWho loves but one, and so gives all at once,Because he has it, rather than becauseHe counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;And thus, as did the women formerlyBy young Achilles, when they pinned the veilAcross the boy’s audacious front, and sweptWith tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,He wrapt his little daughter in his largeMan’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.

But, after I had read for memory,I read for hope. The path my father’s footHad trod me out, which suddenly broke off,(What time he dropped the wallet of the fleshAnd passed) alone I carried on, and setMy child-heart ’gainst the thorny underwood,To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother-babe!My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.

Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,When any young wayfaring soul goes forthAlone, unconscious of the perilous road,The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,To thrust his own way, he an alien, throughThe world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,You clap hands—‘A fair day!’—you cheer him on,As if the worst, could happen, were to restToo long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,Behold!—the world of books is still the world;And worldlings in it are less mercifulAnd more puissant. For the wicked thereAre winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,Is edged from elemental fire to assailA spiritual life. The beautiful seems rightBy force of beauty, and the feeble wrongBecause of weakness. Power is justified,Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crownCovers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,There’s no lack, neither, of God’s saints and kings,That shake the ashes of the grave asideFrom their calm locks, and undiscomfitedLook stedfast truths against Time’s changing mask.True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavensUpon his own head in strong martyrdom,In order to light men a moment’s space.But stay!—who judges?—who distinguishes’Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,To serve king David? who discerns at onceThe sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blowFor Alaric as well as Charlemagne?Who judges prophets, and can tell true seersFrom conjurors? The child, there? Would you leaveThat child to wander in a battle-fieldAnd push his innocent smile against the guns?Or even in the catacombs, ... his torchGrown ragged in the fluttering air, and allThe dark a-mutter round him? not a child!

I read books bad and good—some bad and goodAt once: good aims not always make good books:Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soilsIn digging vineyards, even: books, that proveGod’s being so definitely, that man’s doubtGrows self-defined the other side the line,Made atheist by suggestion; moral books,Exasperating to license; genial books,Discounting from the human dignity;And merry books, which set you weeping whenThe sun shines,—ay, and melancholy books,Which make you laugh that any one should weepIn this disjointed life, for one wrong more.

The world of books is still the world, I write,And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,Among the breakers, some hard swimming throughThe deeps—I lost breath in my soul sometimes,And cried, ‘God save me if there’s any God,’But, even so, God saved me; and, being dashedFrom error on to error, every turnStill brought me nearer to the central truth.

I thought so. All this anguish in the thickOf men’s opinions ... press and counterpress,Now up, now down, now underfoot, and nowEmergent ... all the best of it, perhaps,But throws you back upon a noble trustAnd use of your own instinct,—merely provesPure reason stronger than bare inferenceAt strongest. Try it,—fix against heaven’s wallYour scaling ladders of high logic—mountStep by step!—Sight goes faster; that still rayWhich strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,And why, you know not—(did you eliminate,That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.

The cygnet finds the water; but the manIs born in ignorance of his element,And feels out blind at first, disorganisedBy sin i’ the blood,—his spirit-insight dulledAnd crossed by his sensations. PresentlyWe feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;Then, mark, be reverent, be obedient,—For those dumb motions of imperfect lifeAre oracles of vital DeityAttesting the Hereafter. Let who says‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,A palimpsest, a prophet’s holographDefiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,—The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring onWhich obscene text, we may discern perhapsSome fair, fine trace of what was written once,Some upstroke of an alpha and omegaExpressing the old scripture.Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret-roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!At last, because the time was ripe,I chanced upon the poets.As the earthPlunges in fury, when the internal firesHave reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flatThe marts and temples, the triumphal gatesAnd towers of observation, clears herselfTo elemental freedom—thus, my soul,At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,Convicted of the great eternitiesBefore two worlds.What’s this, Aurora Leigh,You write so of the poets, and not laugh?Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,Exaggerators of the sun and moon,And soothsayers in a tea-cup?I write soOf the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—The only speakers of essential truth,Opposed to relative, comparative,And temporal truths; the only holders byHis sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;The only teachers who instruct mankind,From just a shadow on a charnel-wall,To find man’s veritable stature out,Erect, sublime,—the measure of a man,And that’s the measure of an angel, saysThe apostle. Ay, and while your common menBuild pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,And dust the flaunty carpets of the worldFor kings to walk on, or our senators,The poet suddenly will catch them upWith his voice like a thunder ... ‘This is soul,This is life, this word is being said in heaven,Here’s God down on us! what are you about?’How all those workers start amid their work,Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,Is not the imperative labour after all.

My own best poets, am I one with you,That thus I love you,—or but one through love?Does all this smell of thyme about my feetConclude my visit to your holy hillIn personal presence, or but testifyThe rustling of your vesture through my dreamsWith influent odours? When my joy and pain,My thought and aspiration, like the stopsOf pipe or flute, are absolutely dumbIf not melodious, do you play on me,My pipers,—and if, sooth, you did not blow,Would no sound come? or is the music mine,As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubtFor cloudy seasons!But the sun was highWhen first I felt my pulses set themselvesFor concords; when the rhythmic turbulenceOf blood and brain swept outward upon words,As wind upon the alders, blanching themBy turning up their under-natures tillThey trembled in dilation. O delightAnd triumph of the poet,—who would sayA man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’A little human hope of that or this,And says the word so that it burns you throughWith a special revelation, shakes the heartOf all the men and women in the world,As if one came back from the dead and spoke,With eyes too happy, a familiar thingBecome divine i’ the utterance! while for himThe poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;The palpitating angel in his fleshThrills inly with consenting fellowshipTo those innumerous spirits who sun themselvesOutside of time.O life, O poetry,—Which means life in life! cognisant of lifeBeyond this blood-beat,—passionate for truthBeyond these senses,—poetry, my life,—My eagle, with both grappling feet still hotFrom Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished meAway from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,And set me in the Olympian roar and roundOf luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,To keep the mouths of all the godheads moistFor everlasting laughters,—I, myself,Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!How those gods look!Enough so, Ganymede.We shall not bear above a round or two—We drop the golden cup at Heré’s footAnd swoon back to the earth,—and find ourselvesFace-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downsHave poets.Am I such indeed? The nameIs royal, and to sign it like a queen,Is what I dare not,—though some royal bloodWould seem to tingle in me now and then,With sense of power and ache,—with imposthumesAnd manias usual to the race. HowbeitI dare not: ’tis too easy to go mad,And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;The thing’s too common.Many fervent soulsStrike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steelIf steel had offered, in a restless heatOf doing something. Many tender soulsHave strung their losses on a rhyming thread,As children, cowslips:—the more pains they take,The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,Before they sit down under their own vineAnd live for use. Alas, near all the birdsWill sing at dawn,—and yet we do not takeThe chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

In those days, though, I never analysedMyself even. All analysis comes late.You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,In full front sun-face, and your eyelids winkAnd drop before the wonder of’t; you missThe form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else:My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent floodAbolished bounds,—and, which my neighbour’s field,Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.We play at leap-frog over the god Term;The love within us and the love withoutAre mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.Being acted on and acting seem the same:In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels,We know not if the forests move or we.

And so, like most young poets, in a flushOf individual life, I poured myselfAlong the veins of others, and achievedMere lifeless imitations of live verse,And made the living answer for the dead,Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste,Nor handle,’—we’re too legal, who write young:We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,As if still ignorant of counterpoint;We call the Muse.... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’—As if we had seen her purple-braided headWith the eyes in it, start between the boughsAs often as a stag’s. What make-believe,With so much earnest! what effete results,From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes,From such white heats!—bucolics, where the cowsWould scare the writer if they splashed the mudIn lashing off the flies,—didactics, drivenAgainst the heels of what the master said;And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumpsA babe might blow between two straining cheeksOf bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,The worse for being warm: all these things, writOn happy mornings, with a morning heart,That leaps for love, is active for resolve,Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient formsWill thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.Spare the old bottles!—spill not the new wine.

By Keats’s soul, the man who never steppedIn gradual progress like another man,But, turning grandly on his central self,Ensphered himself in twenty perfect yearsAnd died, not young,—(the life of a long life,Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tearUpon the world’s cold cheek to make it burnFor ever;) by that strong excepted soul,I count it strange, and hard to understand,That nearly all young poets should write old;That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,And beardless Byron academical,And so with others. It may be, perhaps,Such have not settled long and deep enoughIn trance, to attain to clairvoyance,—and stillThe memory mixes with the vision, spoils,And works it turbid.Or perhaps, again,In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,The melancholy desert must sweep round,Behind you, as before.—For me, I wroteFalse poems, like the rest, and thought them true,Because myself was true in writing them.I, peradventure, have writ true ones sinceWith less complacence.But I could not hideMy quickening inner life from those at watch.They saw a light at a window now and then,They had not set there. Who had set it there?My father’s sister started when she caughtMy soul agaze in my eyes. She could not sayI had no business with a sort of soul,But plainly she objected,—and demurred,That souls were dangerous things to carry straightThrough all the spilt saltpetre of the world.

She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you doneYour task this morning?—have you read that book?And are you ready for the crochet here?’—As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong;I know I have not ground you down enoughTo flatten and bake you to a wholesome crustFor household uses and proprieties,Before the rain has got into my barnAnd set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re greenWith out-door impudence? you almost grow?’To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task,And verify my abstract of the book?And should I sit down to the crochet work?Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teasedThe patient needle till it spilt the thread,Which oozed off from it in meandering laceFrom hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;My soul was singing at a work apartBehind the wall of sense, as safe from harmAs sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,In vortices of glory and blue air.

And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,The inner life informed the outer life,Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,And, rounding to the spheric soul the thinPined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows acrossMy blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong.The dogs are on us—but we will not die.’

Whoever lives true life, will love true love.I learnt to love that England. Very oft,Before the day was born, or otherwiseThrough secret windings of the afternoons,I threw my hunters off and plunged myselfAmong the deep hills, as a hunted stagWill take the waters, shivering with the fearAnd passion of the course. And when, at lastEscaped,—so many a green slope built on slopeBetwixt me and the enemy’s house behind,I dared to rest, or wander,—like a restMade sweeter for the step upon the grass,—And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement,(As if God’s finger touched but did not pressIn making England!) such an up and downOf verdure,—nothing too much up or down,A ripple of land; such little hills, the skyCan stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,Fed full of noises by invisible streams;And open pastures, where you scarcely tellWhite daisies from white dew,—at intervalsThe mythic oaks and elm-trees standing outSelf-poised upon their prodigy of shade,—I thought my father’s land was worthy tooOf being my Shakspeare’s.Very oft alone,Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leaveTo walk the third with Romney and his friendThe rising painter, Vincent Carrington,Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonnetted,Because he holds that, paint a body well,You paint a soul by implication, likeThe grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for ifHe said ... ‘When I was last in Italy’ ...It sounded as an instrument that’s playedToo far off for the tune—and yet it’s fineTo listen.Ofter we walked only two,If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced:We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched—Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,And thinkers disagreed; he, overfullOf what is, and I, haply, overboldFor what might be.But then the thrushes sang,And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves,—And then I turned, and held my finger up,And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the worldWent ill, as he related, certainlyThe thrushes still sang in it.—At which wordHis brow would soften,—and he bore with meIn melancholy patience, not unkind,While, breaking into voluble ecstacy,I flattered all the beauteous country round,As poets use ... the skies, the clouds, the fields,The happy violets hiding from the roadsThe primroses run down to, carrying gold,—The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push outImpatient horns and tolerant churning mouths’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all aliveWith birds and gnats and large white butterfliesWhich look as if the May-flower had caught lifeAnd palpitated forth upon the wind,—Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,And cattle grazing in the watered vales,And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,Confused with smell of orchards. ‘See,’ I said,‘And see! is God not with us on the earth?And shall we put Him down by aught we do?Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vileSave poverty and wickedness? behold!’And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

In the beginning when God called all good,Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,The evil is upon us while we speak;Deliver us from evil, let us pray.

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