SECOND BOOK.

SECOND BOOK.

Timesfollowed one another. Came a mornI stood upon the brink of twenty years,And looked before and after, as I stoodWoman and artist,—either incomplete,Both credulous of completion. There I heldThe whole creation in my little cup,And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank,‘Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,And all these peoples.’I was glad, that day;The June was in me, with its multitudesOf nightingales all singing in the dark,And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!So glad, I could not choose be very wise!And, old at twenty, was inclined to pullMy childhood backward in a childish jestTo see the face of’t once more, and farewell!In which fantastic mood I bounded forthAt early morning,—would not wait so longAs even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,But, brushing a green trail across the lawnWith my gown in the dew, took will and wayAmong the acacias of the shrubberies,To fly my fancies in the open airAnd keep my birthday, till my aunt awokeTo stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on,As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves;‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrownedTill death has bleached their foreheads to the bone,And so with me it must be, unless I proveUnworthy of the grand adversity,—And certainly I would not fail so much.What, therefore, if I crown myself to-dayIn sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it,Before my brows be numb as Dante’s ownTo all the tender pricking of such leaves?Such leaves! what leaves?’I pulled the branches down,To choose from.‘Not the bay! I choose no bay;The fates deny us if we are overbold:Nor myrtle—which means chiefly love; and loveIs something awful which one dares not touchSo early o’ mornings. This verbena strainsThe point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,This guelder-rose, at far too slight a beckOf the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,That headlong ivy! not a leaf will growBut thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,Serrated like my vines, and half as green.I like such ivy; bold to leap a height’Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on gravesAs twist about a thyrsus; pretty too,(And that’s not ill) when twisted round a comb,’Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bellTo ring with once being touched, I drew a wreathDrenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,And fastening it behind so, ... turning faced... My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouthTwice graver than his eyes.I stood there fixed—My arms up, like the caryatid, soleOf some abolished temple, helplesslyPersistent in a gesture which deridesA former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,As if from flax, not stone.‘Aurora Leigh,The earliest of Auroras!’Hand stretched outI clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tideHad caught me at my pastime, writing downMy foolish name too near upon the seaWhich drowned me with a blush as foolish. ‘You,My cousin!’The smile died out in his eyesAnd dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,For just a moment.... ‘Here’s a book, I found!No name writ on it—poems, by the form;Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek,Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’tWhereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits;I rather bring it to the witch.’‘My book!You found it‘....‘In the hollow by the stream,That beech leans down into—of which you said,The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heartAnd pines for waters.’‘Thank you.’‘Ratheryou,My cousin! that I have seen you not too muchA witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest,To be a woman also.’With a glanceThe smile rose in his eyes again, and touchedThe ivy on my forehead, light as air.I answered gravely, ‘Poets needs must beOr men or women—more’s the pity.’‘Ah,But men, and still less women, happily,Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,Since even dreaming of the stone and bronzeBrings headaches, pretty cousin, and defilesThe clean white morning dresses.’‘So you judge!Because I love the beautiful, I mustLove pleasure chiefly, and be overchargedFor ease and whiteness! Well—you know the world,And only miss your cousin; ’tis not much!—But learn this: I would rather take my partWith God’s Dead, who afford to walk in whiteYet spread His glory, than keep quiet here,And gather up my feet from even a step,For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if headsThat hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce,For my part, I choose headaches,—and today’sMy birthday.’‘Dear Aurora, choose insteadTo cure such. You have balsams.’‘I perceive!—The headache is too noble for my sex.You think the heartache would sound decenter,Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache,And altogether tolerable, exceptTo a woman.’Saying which, I loosed my wreath,And, swinging it beside me as I walked,Half petulant, half playful, as we walked,I sent a sidelong look to find his thought,—As falcon set on falconer’s finger may,With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye,Which means, ‘You’ll see—you’ll see! I’ll soon take flight—You shall not hinder.’ He, as shaking outHis hand and answering ‘Fly then,’ did not speak,Except by such a gesture. SilentlyWe paced, until, just coming into sightOf the house-windows, he abruptly caughtAt one end of the swinging wreath, and said‘Aurora!’ There I stopped short, breath and all.‘Aurora, let’s be serious, and throw byThis game of head and heart. Life means, be sure,Both heart and head,—both active, both complete,And both in earnest. Men and women makeThe world, as head and heart make human life.Work man, work woman, since there’s work to doIn this beleaguered earth, for head and heart,And thought can never do the work of love!But work for ends, I mean for uses; notFor such sleek fringes (do you call them ends?Still less God’s glory) as we sew ourselvesUpon the velvet of those baldaquinsHeld ’twixt us and the sun. That book of yours,I have not read a page of; but I tossA rose up—it falls calyx down, you see!...The chances are that, being a woman, young,And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, ...You write as well ... and ill ... upon the whole,As other women. If as well, what then?If even a little better, ... still, what then?We want the Best in art now, or no art.The time is done for facile settings upOf minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there;The polytheists have gone out in God,That unity of Bests. No best, no God!—And so with art, we say. Give art’s divine,Direct, indubitable, real as grief,—Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselvesDivine by overcoming with mere hopeAnd most prosaic patience. You, you are youngAs Eve with nature’s daybreak on her face;But this same world you are come to, dearest coz,Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreathsTo hang upon her ruins,—and forgetsTo rhyme the cry with which she still beats backThose savage, hungry dogs that hunt her downTo the empty grave of Christ. The world’s hard pressed;The sweat of labour in the early curseHas (turning acrid in six thousand years)Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,An hour’s time ... think!... to sit upon a bankAnd hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!—Before ... where’s Moses?’‘Ah—exactly that!Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?—You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,Such sounding brass has done some actual good,(The application in a woman’s hand,If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)In colonising beehives.’‘There it is!—You play beside a death-bed like a child,Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s placeTo teach the living. None of all these things,Can women understand. You generaliseOh, nothing!—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,So sympathetic to the personal pang,Close, on each separate knife-stroke, yielding upA whole life at each wound; incapableOf deepening, widening a large lap of lifeTo hold the world-full woe. The human raceTo you means, such a child, or such a man,You saw one morning waiting in the cold,Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather upA few such cases, and, when strong, sometimesWill write of factories and of slaves, as ifYour father were a negro, and your sonA spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,—All, coloured with your blood, or otherwiseJust nothing to you. Why, I call you hardTo general suffering. Here’s the world half blindWith intellectual light, half brutalisedWith civilisation, having caught the plagueIn silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and westAlong a thousand railroads, mad with painAnd sin too!... does one woman of you all,(You who weep easily) grow pale to seeThis tiger shake his cage?—does one of youStand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,And pine and die, because of the great sumOf universal anguish?—Show me a tearWet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,Because the world is mad! You cannot count,That you should weep for this account, not you!You weep for what you know. A red-haired childSick in a fever, if you touch him once,Though but so little as with a finger-tip,Will set you weeping; but a million sick ...You could as soon weep for the rule of three,Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same worldUncomprehended by you, must remainUninfluenced by you.—Women as you are,Mere women, personal and passionate,You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives,Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!We get no Christ from you,—and verilyWe shall not get a poet, in my mind.’‘With which conclusion you conclude’....‘But this—That you, Aurora, with the large live browAnd steady eyelids, cannot condescendTo play at art, as children play at swords,To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admiredBecause true action is impossible.You never can be satisfied with praiseWhich men give women when they judge a bookNot as mere work, but as mere woman’s work,Expressing the comparative respectWhich means the absolute scorn. ‘Oh, excellent!What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!What delicate discernment ... almost thought!The book does honour to the sex, we hold.Among our female authors we make roomFor this fair writer, and congratulateThe country that produces in these timesSuch women, competent to ... spell.’‘Stop there!’I answered—burning through his thread of talkWith a quick flame of emotion,—‘You have readMy soul, if not my book, and argue wellI would not condescend ... we will not sayTo such a kind of praise, (a worthless endIs praise of all kinds) but to such a useOf holy art and golden life. I am young,And peradventure weak—you tell me so—Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,Take thanks for justice. I would rather danceAt fairs on tight-rope, till the babies droppedTheir gingerbread for joy,—than shift the typesFor tolerable verse, intolerableTo men who act and suffer. Better far,Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.’‘You,Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes,And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are youngAurora, you and I. The world ... look round ...The world, we’re come to late, is swollen hardWith perished generations and their sins:The civiliser’s spade grinds horriblyOn dead men’s bones, and cannot turn up soilThat’s otherwise than fetid. All successProves partial failure; all advance impliesWhat’s left behind; all triumph, something crushedAt the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong:And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich,Who agonise together, rich and poor,Under and over, in the social spasmAnd crisis of the ages. Here’s an age,That makes its own vocation! here, we have steppedAcross the bounds of time! here’s nought to see,But just the rich man and just Lazarus,And both in torments; with a mediate gulph,Though not a hint of Abraham’s bosom. Who,Being man and human, can stand calmly byAnd view these things, and never tease his soulFor some great cure? No physic for this grief,In all the earth and heavens too?’‘You believeIn God, for your part?—ay? that He who makes,Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,As men plant tulips upon dunghills whenThey wish them finest?’‘True. A death-heat isThe same as life-heat, to be accurate;And in all nature is no death at all,As men account of death, as long as GodStands witnessing for life perpetually,By being just God. That’s abstract truth, I know,Philosophy, or sympathy with God:But I, I sympathise with man, not God,I think I was a man for chiefly this;And when I stand beside a dying bed,It’s death to me. Observe,—it had not muchConsoled the race of mastodons to knowBefore they went to fossil, that anonTheir place should quicken with the elephant;They were not elephants but mastodons:And I, a man, as men are now, and notAs men may be hereafter, feel with menIn the agonising present.’‘Is it so,’I said, ‘my cousin? is the world so bad,While I hear nothing of it through the trees?The world was always evil,—but so bad?’‘So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is greyWith poring over the long sum of ill;So much for vice, so much for discontent,So much for the necessities of power,So much for the connivances of fear,—Coherent in statistical despairsWith such a total of distracted life, ...To see it down in figures on a page,Plain, silent, clear ... as God sees through the earthThe sense of all the graves!... that’s terribleFor one who is not God, and cannot rightThe wrong he looks on. May I choose indeedBut vow away my years, my means, my aims,Among the helpers, if there’s any helpIn such a social strait? The common bloodThat swings along my veins, is strong enoughTo draw me to this duty.’Then I spoke.‘I have not stood long on the strand of life,And these salt waters have had scarcely timeTo creep so high up as to wet my feet.I cannot judge these tides—I shall, perhaps.A woman’s always younger than a manAt equal years, because she is disallowedMaturing by the outdoor sun and air,And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk.Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise!You think a woman ripens as a peach,—Inthe cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now;I’m young in age, and younger still, I think,As a woman. But a child may say amenTo a bishop’s prayer and see the way it goes;And I, incapable to loose the knotOf social questions, can approve, applaudAugust compassion, christian thoughts that shootBeyond the vulgar white of personal aims.Accept my reverence.’There he glowed on meWith all his face and eyes. ‘No other help?’Said he—‘no more than so?’‘What help?’ I asked.‘You’d scorn my help,—as Nature’s self, you say,Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,Because a woman’s. Do you now turn roundAnd ask for what a woman cannot give?’‘For what she only can, I turn and ask,’He answered, catching up my hands in his,And dropping on me from his high-eaved browThe full weight of his soul,—‘I ask for love,And that, she can; for life in fellowshipThrough bitter duties—that, I know she can;For wifehood ... will she?’‘Now,’ I said, ‘may GodBe witness ’twixt us two!’ and with the word,Meseemed I floated into a sudden lightAbove his stature,—‘am I proved too weakTo stand alone, yet strong enough to bearSuch leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,Yet competent to love, likehim?’I paused:Perhaps I darkened, as the light-house willThat turns upon the sea. ‘It’s always so!Anything does for a wife.’‘Aurora, dear,And dearly honoured’ ... he pressed in at onceWith eager utterance,—‘you translate me ill.I do not contradict my thought of youWhich is most reverent, with another thoughtFound less so. If your sex is weak for art,(And I who said so, did but honour youBy using truth in courtship) it is strongFor life and duty. Place your fecund heartIn mine, and let us blossom for the worldThat wants love’s colour in the grey of time.With all my talk I can but set you whereYou look down coldly on the arena-heapsOf headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct!The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his wayThrough such a heap of generalised distress,To the individual man with lips and eyes—Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down,And, hand in hand, we’ll go where yours shall touchThese victims, one by one! till, one by one,The formless, nameless trunk of every manShall seem to wear a head, with hair you know,And every woman catch your mother’s faceTo melt you into passion.’‘I am a girl,’I answered slowly; ‘you do well to nameMy mother’s face. Though far too early, alas,God’s hand did interpose ’twixt it and me,I know so much of love, as used to shineIn that face and another. Just so much;No more indeed at all. I have not seenSo much love since, I pray you pardon me,As answers even to make a marriage with,In this cold land of England. What you love,Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,—A wife to help your ends ... in her no end!Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,But I, being most unworthy of these and that,Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.’‘Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?’He said.‘Why, sir, you are married long ago.You have a wife already whom you love,Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.For my part, I am scarcely meek enoughTo be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.Do I look a Hagar, think you?’‘So, you jest!’‘Nay so, I speak in earnest,’ I replied.‘You treat of marriage too much like, at least,A chief apostle; you would bear with youA wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out?A sister of charity.’‘Then, must it beIndeed farewell? And was I so far wrongIn hope and in illusion, when I tookThe woman to be nobler than the man,Yourself the noblest woman,—in the useAnd comprehension of what love is,—love,That generates the likeness of itselfThrough all heroic duties? so far wrong,In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,Come, human creature, love and work with me,’—Instead of, ‘Lady, thou art wondrous fair,And, where the Graces walk before, the MuseWill follow at the lighting of their eyes,And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep:Turn round and love me, or I die of love.’With quiet indignation I broke in.‘You misconceive the question like a man,Who sees a woman as the complementOf his sex merely. You forget too muchThat every creature, female as the male,Stands single in responsible act and thought,As also in birth and death. Whoever saysTo a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’Will get fair answers, if the work and love,Being good themselves, are good for her—the bestShe was born for. Women of a softer mood,Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,And catch up with it any kind of work,Indifferent, so that dear love go with it:I do not blame such women, though, for love,They pick much oakum; earth’s fanatics makeToo frequently heaven’s saints. Butme, your workIs not the best for,—nor your love the best,Nor able to commend the kind of workFor love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,To be over-bold in speaking of myself,—I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,The heavens and earth have set me, since I changedMy father’s face for theirs,—and, though your worldWere twice as wretched as you represent,Most serious work, most necessary work,As any of the economists’. Reform,Make trade a Christian possibility,And individual right no general wrong;Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,With innings for them all!... what then, indeed,If mortals were not greater by the headThan any of their prosperities? what then,Unless the artist keep up open roadsBetwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting throughThe best of your conventions with his best,The speakable, imaginable bestGod bids him speak, to prove what lies beyondBoth speech and imagination? A starved manExceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,I hold you will not compass your poor endsOf barley-feeding and material ease,Without a poet’s individualismTo work your universal. It takes a soul,To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth offThe dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,Because not poets enough to understandThat life develops from within.——For me,Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,Of work like this!... perhaps a woman’s soulAspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;And if I fail ... why, burn me up my strawLike other false works—I’ll not ask for grace,Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. IWho love my art, would never wish it lowerTo suit my stature. I may love my art.You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,Seeing that to waste true love on anything,Is womanly, past question.’I retainThe very last word which I said, that day,As you the creaking of the door, years past,Which let upon you such disabling newsYou ever after have been graver. He,His eyes, the motions in his silent mouth,Were fiery points on which my words were caught,Transfixed for ever in my memoryFor his sake, not their own. And yet I knowI did not love him ... nor he me ... that’s sure....And what I said, is unrepented of,As truth is always. Yet ... a princely man!—If hard to me, heroic for himself!He bears down on me through the slanting years,The stronger for the distance. If he had loved,Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, ...I might have been a common woman now,And happier, less known and less left alone;Perhaps a better woman after all,—With chubby children hanging on my neckTo keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vinesThat bear such fruit, are proud to stoop with it.The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.And I, who spoke the truth then, stand upright,Still worthy of having spoken out the truth,By being content I spoke it, though it setHim there, me here.—O woman’s vile remorse,To hanker after a mere name, a show,A supposition, a potential love!Does every man who names love in our lives,Become a power for that? is love’s true thingSo much best to us, that what personates loveIs next best? A potential love, forsooth!We are not so vile. No, no—he cleaves, I think,This man, this image, ... chiefly for the wrongAnd shock he gave my life, in finding mePrecisely where the devil of my youthHad set me, on those mountain-peaks of hopeAll glittering with the dawn-dew, all erectAnd famished for the morning,—saying, whileI looked for empire and much tribute, ‘Come,I have some worthy work for thee below.Come, sweep my barns, and keep my hospitals,—And I will pay thee with a current coinWhich men give women.’As we spoke, the grassWas trod in haste beside us, and my aunt,With smile distorted by the sun,—face, voice,As much at issue with the summer-dayAs if you brought a candle out of doors,—Broke in with, ‘Romney, here!—My child, entreatYour cousin to the house, and have your talk,If girls must talk upon their birthdays. Come,’He answered for me calmly, with pale lipsThat seemed to motion for a smile in vain.‘The talk is ended, madam, where we stand.Your brother’s daughter has dismissed me here;And all my answer can be better saidBeneath the trees, than wrong by such a wordYour house’s hospitalities. Farewell.’With that he vanished. I could hear his heelRing bluntly in the lane, as down he leaptThe short way from us.—Then, a measured speechWithdrew me. ‘What means this, Aurora Leigh?My brother’s daughter has dismissed my guests?’The lion in me felt the keeper’s voice,Through all its quivering dewlaps: I was quelledBefore her,—meekened to the child she knew:I prayed her pardon, said, ‘I had little thoughtTo give dismissal to a guest of hers,In letting go a friend of mine, who cameTo take me into service as a wife,—No more than that, indeed.’‘No more, no more?Pray Heaven,’ she answered, ‘that I was not mad.I could not mean to tell her to her faceThat Romney Leigh had asked me for a wife,And I refused him?’‘Did he ask?’ I said;‘I think he rather stooped to take me upFor certain uses which he found to doFor something called a wife. He never asked.’‘What stuff!’ she answered; ‘are they queens, these girls?They must have mantles, stitched with twenty silks,Spread out upon the ground, before they’ll stepOne footstep for the noblest lover born.’‘But I am born,’ I said with firmness, ‘I,To walk another way than his, dear aunt.’‘You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen monthsWill walk as well as you,’ she cried in haste,‘Without a steadying finger. Why, you child,God help you, you are groping in the dark,For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps,That you, sole offspring of an opulent man,Are rich and free to choose a way to walk?You think, and it’s a reasonable thought,That I besides, being well to do in life,Will leave my handful in my niece’s handWhen death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray,Pray, child,—albeit I know you love me not,—As if you loved me, that I may not die!For when I die and leave you, out you go,(Unless I make room for you in my grave)Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother’s lamb,(Ah heaven,—that pains!)—without a right to cropA single blade of grass beneath these trees,Or cast a lamb’s small shadow on the lawn,Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here’sThe fruit you planted in your foreign loves!—Ay, there’s the fruit he planted! never lookAstonished at me with your mother’s eyes,For it was they, who set you where you are,An undowered orphan. Child, your father’s choiceOf that said mother, disinheritedHis daughter, his and hers. Men do not thinkOf sons and daughters, when they fall in love,So much more than of sisters; otherwise,He would have paused to ponder what he did,And shrunk before that clause in the entailExcluding offspring by a foreign wife,(The clause set up a hundred years agoBy a Leigh who wedded a French dancing-girlAnd had his heart danced over in return);But this man shrunk at nothing, never thoughtOf you, Aurora, any more than me—Your mother must have been a pretty thing,For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns,To make a good man, which my brother was,Unchary of the duties to his house;But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane,Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wroteDirectly on your birth, to Italy,‘I ask your baby daughter for my sonIn whom the entail now merges by the law.Betroth her to us out of love, insteadOf colder reasons, and she shall not loseBy love or law from henceforth’—so he wrote;A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane.Remember how he drew you to his kneeThe year you came here, just before he died,And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks,And wished them redder,—you remember Vane?And now his son who represents our houseAnd holds the fiefs and manors in his place,To whom reverts my pittance when I die,(Except a few books and a pair of shawls)The boy is generous like him, and preparedTo carry out his kindest word and thoughtTo you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young manIs Romney Leigh; although the sun of youthHas shone too straight upon his brain, I know,And fevered him with dreams of doing goodTo good-for-nothing people. But a wifeWill put all right, and stroke his temples coolWith healthy touches’....I broke in at that.I could not lift my heavy heart to breatheTill then, but then I raised it, and it fellIn broken words like these—‘No need to wait.The dream of doing good to ... me, at least,Is ended, without waiting for a wifeTo cool the fever for him. We’ve escapedThat danger ... thank Heaven for it.’‘You,’ she cried,‘Have got a fever. What, I talk and talkAn hour long to you,—I instruct you howYou cannot eat or drink or stand or sit,Or even die, like any decent wretchIn all this unroofed and unfurnished world,Without your cousin,—and you still maintainThere’s room ’twixt him and you, for flirting fansAnd running knots in eyebrows! You must haveA pattern lover sighing on his knee:You do not count enough a noble heart,Above book-patterns, which this very mornUnclosed itself, in two dear fathers’ names,To embrace your orphaned life! fie, fie! But stay,I write a word, and counteract this sin.’She would have turned to leave me, but I clung.‘O sweet my father’s sister, hear my wordBefore you write yours. Cousin Vane did well,And cousin Romney well,—and I well too,In casting back with all my strength and willThe good they meant me. O my God, my God!God meant me good, too, when he hindered meFrom saying ‘yes’ this morning. If you writeA word, it shall be ‘no.’ I say no, no!I tie up ‘no’ upon His altar-horns,Quite out of reach of perjury! At leastMy soul is not a pauper; I can liveAt least my soul’s life, without alms from men;And if it must be in heaven instead of earth,Let heaven look to it,—I am not afraid,’She seized my hands with both hers, strained them fast,And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyesRight through me, body and heart. ‘Yet, foolish Sweet,You love this man. I have watched you when he came,And when he went, and when we’ve talked of him:I am not old for nothing; I can tellThe weather-signs of love—you love this man.’Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?Who’s sorry for a gnat ... or girl?I blushed.I feel the brand upon my forehead nowStrike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feelThe felon’s iron, say, and scorn the markOf what they are not. Most illogicalIrrational nature of our womanhood,That blushes one way, feels another way,And prays, perhaps, another! After all,We cannot be the equal of the male,Who rules his blood a little.For althoughI blushed indeed, as if I loved the man,And her incisive smile, accreditingThat treason of false witness in my blush,Did bow me downward like a swathe of grassBelow its level that struck me,—I attestThe conscious skies and all their daily suns,I think I loved him not ... nor then, nor since....Nor ever. Do we love the schoolmaster,Being busy in the woods? much less, being poor,The overseer of the parish? Do we keepOur love, to pay our debts with?White and coldI grew next moment. As my blood recoiledFrom that imputed ignominy, I madeMy heart great with it. Then, at last, I spoke,—Spoke veritable words, but passionate,Too passionate perhaps ... ground up with sobsTo shapeless endings. She let fall my hands,And took her smile off, in sedate disgust,As peradventure she had touched a snake,—A dead snake, mind!—and, turning round, replied,‘We’ll leave Italian manners, if you please.I think you had an English father, child,And ought to find it possible to speakA quiet ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ like English girls,Without convulsions. In another monthWe’ll take another answer ... no, or yes.’With that, she left me in the garden-walk.I had a father! yes, but long ago—How long it seemed that moment. Oh, how far,How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saintsWhen once gone from us! We may call againstThe lighted windows of thy fair June-heavenWhere all the souls are happy,—and not one,Not even my father, look from work or playTo ask, ‘Who is it that cries after us,Below there, in the dusk?’ Yet formerlyHe turned his face upon me quick enough,If I said ‘father.’ Now I might cry loud;The little lark reached higher with his songThan I with crying. Oh, alone, alone,—Not troubling any in heaven, nor any on earth,I stood there in the garden, and looked upThe deaf blue sky that brings the roses outOn such June mornings.You who keep accountOf crisis and transition in this life,Set down the first time Nature says plain ‘no’To some ‘yes’ in you, and walks over youIn gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all beginBy singing with the birds, and running fastWith June-days, hand in hand: but once, for all,The birds must sing against us, and the sunStrike down upon us like a friend’s sword caughtBy an enemy to slay us, while we readThe dear name on the blade which bites at us!—That’s bitter and convincing: after that,We seldom doubt that something in the largeSmooth order of creation, though no moreThan haply a man’s footstep, has gone wrong.Some tears fell down my cheeks, and then I smiled,As those smile who have no face in the worldTo smile back to them. I had lost a friendIn Romney Leigh; the thing was sure—a friend,Who had looked at me most gently now and then,And spoken of my favourite books ... ‘our books’ ...With such a voice! Well, voice and look were nowMore utterly shut out from me, I felt,Than even my father’s. Romney now was turnedTo a benefactor, to a generous man,Who had tied himself to marry ... me, insteadOf such a woman, with low timorous lidsHe lifted with a sudden word one day,And left, perhaps, for my sake.—Ah, self-tiedBy a contract,—male Iphigenia, boundAt a fatal Aulis, for the winds to change,(But loose him—they’ll not change); he well might seemA little cold and dominant in love!He had a right to be dogmatical,This poor, good Romney. Love, to him, was madeA simple law-clause. If I married him,I would not dare to call my soul my own,Which so he had bought and paid for: every thoughtAnd every heart-beat down there in the bill,—Not one found honestly deductibleFrom any use that pleased him! He might cutMy body into coins to give awayAmong his other paupers; change my sons,While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babesOr piteous foundlings; might unquestioned setMy right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,My left hand washing in the Public Baths,What time my angel of the Ideal stretchedBoth his to me in vain! I could not claimThe poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal,And take so much as pity, from myself.Farewell, good Romney! if I loved you even,I could but ill afford to let you beSo generous to me. Farewell, friend, since friendBetwixt us two, forsooth, must be a wordSo heavily overladen. And, since helpMust come to me from those who love me not,Farewell, all helpers—I must help myself,And am alone from henceforth.—Then I stooped,And lifted the soiled garland from the ground,And set it on my head as bitterlyAs when the Spanish king did crown the bonesOf his dead love. So be it. I preserveThat crown still,—in the drawer there! ’twas the first;The rest are like it;—those Olympian crowns,We run for, till we lose sight of the sunIn the dust of the racing chariots!After that,Before the evening fell, I had a noteWhich ran,—‘Aurora, sweet Chaldean, you readMy meaning backward like your eastern books,While I am from the west, dear. Read me nowA little plainer. Did you hate me quiteBut yesterday? I loved you for my part;I love you. If I spoke untenderlyThis morning, my beloved, pardon it;And comprehend me that I loved you so,I set you on the level of my soul,And overwashed you with the bitter brineOf some habitual thoughts. Henceforth, my flower,Be planted out of reach of any such,And lean the side you please, with all your leaves!Write woman’s verses and dream woman’s dreams;But let me feel your perfume in my home,To make my sabbath after working-days;Bloom out your youth beside me,—be my wife.’I wrote in answer—‘We, Chaldeans, discernStill farther than we read. I know your heart,And shut it like the holy book it is,Reserved for mild-eyed saints to pore uponBetwixt their prayers at vespers. Well, you’re right,I did not surely hate you yesterday;And yet I do not love you enough to-dayTo wed you, cousin Romney. Take this word,And let it stop you as a generous manFrom speaking farther. You may tease, indeed,And blow about my feelings, or my leaves,—And here’s my aunt will help you with east winds,And break a stalk, perhaps, tormenting me;But certain flowers grow near as deep as trees,And, cousin, you’ll not move my root, not you,With all your confluent storms. Then let me growWithin my wayside hedge, and pass your way!This flower has never as much to say to youAs the antique tomb which said to travellers, ‘Pause,’‘Siste, viator.’ Ending thus, I signed.The next week passed in silence, so the next,And several after: Romney did not come,Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on,As if my heart were kept beneath a glass,And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,To see and hear it tick. I could not sit,Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down,Not sew on steadily, nor drop a stitchAnd a sigh with it, but I felt her looksStill cleaving to me, like the sucking aspTo Cleopatra’s breast, persistentlyThrough the intermittent pantings. Being observed,When observation is not sympathy,Is just being tortured. If she said a word,A ‘thank you,’ or an ‘if it please you, dear,’She meant a commination, or, at best,An exorcism against the devildomWhich plainly held me. So with all the house.Susannah could not stand and twist my hair,Without such glancing at the looking-glassTo see my face there, that she missed the plait:And John,—I never sent my plate for soup,Or did not send it, but the foolish JohnResolved the problem, ’twixt his napkined thumbs,Of what was signified by taking soupOr choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped inOn morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,Smiled admonition, sate uneasily,And talked with measured, emphasised reserve,Of parish news, like doctors to the sick,When not called in,—as if, with leave to speak,They might say something. Nay, the very dogWould watch me from his sun-patch on the floor,In alternation with the large black flyNot yet in reach of snapping. So I lived.A Roman died so; smeared with honey, teasedBy insects, stared to torture by the noon:And many patient souls ’neath English roofsHave died like Romans. I, in looking back,Wish only, now, I had borne the plague of allWith meeker spirits than were rife in Rome.For, on the sixth week, the dead sea broke up,Dashed suddenly through beneath the heel of HimWho stands upon the sea and earth, and swearsTime shall be nevermore. The clock struck nineThat morning, too,—no lark was out of tune;The hidden farms among the hills, breathed straightTheir smoke toward heaven; the lime-tree scarcely stirredBeneath the blue weight of the cloudless sky,Though still the July air came floating throughThe woodbine at my window, in and out,With touches of the out-door country-newsFor a bending forehead. There I sate, and wishedThat morning-truce of God would last till eve,Or longer. ‘Sleep,’ I thought, ‘late sleepers,—sleep,And spare me yet, the burden of your eyes.’Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriekTore upwards from the bottom of the house.Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks,The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,And shudder through its passages and stairsWith slam of doors and clash of bells.—I sprang,I stood up in the middle of the room,And there confronted at my chamber-door,A white face,—shivering, ineffectual lips.‘Come, come,’ they tried to utter, and I went;As if a ghost had drawn me at the pointOf a fiery finger through the uneven dark,I went with reeling footsteps down the stair,Nor asked a question.There she sate, my aunt,—Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bedFor that night’s sleeping ... yet slept well. My God,The dumb derision of that grey, peaked faceConcluded something grave against the sun,Which filled the chamber with its July burstWhen Susan drew the curtains, ignorantOf who sate open-eyed behind her. There,She sate ... it sate ... we said ‘she’ yesterday ...And held a letter with unbroken seal,As Susan gave it to her hand last night:All night she had held it. If its news referredTo duchies or to dunghills, not an inchShe’d budge, ’twas obvious, for such worthless odds:Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburnedTheir spheric limitations, swallowing upLike wax the azure spaces, could they forceThose open eyes to wink once. What last sightHad left them blank and flat so,—drawing outThe faculty of vision from the roots,As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?That dogged me up and down the hours and days,A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?And did I pray, a half hour back, but so,To escape the burden of those eyes ... those eyes?‘Sleep late’ I said.—Why now, indeed, they sleep.God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,A gauntlet with a gift in’t. Every wishIs like a prayer ... with God.I had my wish,—To read and meditate the thing I would,To fashion all my life upon my thought,And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, noneCould disapprove me, vex me, hamper me.Full ground-room, in this desert newly made,For Babylon or Balbec,—when the breath,Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns!The heir came over on the funeral day,And we two cousins met before the dead,With two pale faces. Was it death or lifeThat moved us? When the will was read and done,The official guest and witnesses withdrawn,We rose up in a silence almost hard,And looked at one another. Then I said,‘Farewell, my cousin.’But he touched, just touchedMy hatstrings tied for going, (at the doorThe carriage stood to take me) and said low,His voice a little unsteady through his smile,‘Siste, viator.’‘Is there time,’ I asked,‘In these last days of railroads, to stop shortLike Cæsar’s chariot (weighing half a ton)On the Appian road, for morals?’‘There is time,’He answered grave, ‘for necessary words,Inclusive, trust me, of no epitaphOn man or act, my cousin. We have readA will, which gives you all the personal goodsAnd funded monies of your aunt.’‘I thankHer memory for it. With three hundred poundsWe buy in England even, clear standing-roomTo stand and work in. Only two hours since,I fancied I was poor.’‘And, cousin, stillYou’re richer than you fancy. The will says,Three hundred pounds, and any other sumOf which the said testatrix dies possessed.I say she died possessed of other sums.’‘Dear Romney, need we chronicle the pence?I’m richer than I thought—that’s evident.Enough so.’‘Listen rather. You’ve to doWith business and a cousin,’ he resumed,‘And both, I fear, need patience. Here’s the fact.The other sum (thereisanother sum,Unspecified in any will which datesAfter possession, yet bequeathed as muchAnd clearly as those said three hundred pounds)Is thirty thousand. You will have it paidWhen?... where? My duty troubles you with words.’He struck the iron when the bar was hot;No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks.‘Pause there! I thank you. You are delicateIn glosing gifts;—but I, who share your blood,Am rather made for giving, like yourself,Than taking, like your pensioners. Farewell.’He stopped me with a gesture of calm pride.‘A Leigh,’ he said, ‘gives largesse and gives love,But gloses neither: if a Leigh could glose,He would not do it, moreover, to a Leigh,With blood trained up along nine centuriesTo hound and hate a lie, from eyes like yours.And now we’ll make the rest as clear; your auntPossessed these monies.’‘You will make it clear,My cousin, as the honour of us both,Or one of us speaks vainly—that’s not I.My aunt possessed this sum,—inheritedFrom whom, and when? bring documents, prove dates.’‘Why now indeed you throw your bonnet off,As if you had time left for a logarithm!The faith’s the want. Dear cousin, give me faith,And you shall walk this road with silken shoes,As clean as any lady of our houseSupposed the proudest. Oh, I comprehendThe whole position from your point of sight.I oust you from your father’s halls and lands,And make you poor by getting rich—that’s law;Considering which, in common circumstance,You would not scruple to accept from meSome compensation, some sufficiencyOf income—that were justice; but, alas,I love you ... that’s mere nature!—you rejectMy love ... that’s nature also;—and at once,You cannot, from a suitor disallowed,A hand thrown back as mine is, into yoursReceive a doit, a farthing, ... not for the world!That’s etiquette with women, obviouslyExceeding claim of nature, law, and right,Unanswerable to all. I grant, you see,The case as you conceive it,—leave you roomTo sweep your ample skirts of womanhood;While, standing humbly squeezed against the wall,I own myself excluded from being just,Restrained from paying indubitable debts,Because denied from giving you my soul—That’s my misfortune!—I submit to itAs if, in some more reasonable age,’Twould not be less inevitable. Enough.You’ll trust me, cousin, as a gentleman,To keep your honour, as you count it, pure,—Your scruples (just as if I thought them wise)Safe and inviolate from gifts of mine.’I answered mild but earnest. ‘I believeIn no one’s honour which another keeps,Nor man’s nor woman’s. As I keep, myself,My truth and my religion, I deputeNo father, though I had one this side death,Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you,Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh,To keep my honour pure. You face, to-day,A man who wants instruction, mark me, notA woman who wants protection. As to a man,Show manhood, speak out plainly, be preciseWith facts and dates. My aunt inheritedThis sum, you say—’‘I said she died possessedOf this, dear cousin.’‘Not by heritage.Thank you: we’re getting to the facts at last.Perhaps she played at commerce with a shipWhich came in heavy with Australian gold?Or touched a lottery with her finger-end,Which tumbled on a sudden into her lapSome old Rhine tower or principality?Perhaps she had to do with a marineSub-transatlantic railroad, which pre-paysAs well as pre-supposes? or perhapsSome stale ancestral debt was after-paidBy a hundred years, and took her by surprise?—You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.’‘You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride,—The truth is not afraid of hurting you.You’ll find no cause, in all your scruples, whyYour aunt should cavil at a deed of gift’Twixt her and me.’‘I thought so—ah! a gift.’‘You naturally thought so,’ he resumed.‘A very natural gift.’‘A gift, a gift!Her individual life being stranded highAbove all want, approaching opulence,Too haughty was she to accept a giftWithout some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see,—A gift intended plainly for her heirs,And so accepted ... if accepted ... ah,Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps,Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you,If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?’He answered gently, ‘Need you tremble and pantLike a netted lioness? is’t my fault, mine,That you’re a grand wild creature of the woods,And hate the stall built for you? Any way,Though triply netted, need you glare at me?I do not hold the cords of such a net;You’re free from me, Aurora!’‘Now may GodDeliver me from this strait! This gift of yoursWas tendered ... when? accepted ... when?’ I asked.‘A month ... a fortnight since? Six weeks agoIt was not tendered. By a word she dropped,I know it was not tendered nor received.When was it? bring your dates.’‘What matters when?A half-hour ere she died, or a half-year,Secured the gift, maintains the heritageInviolable with law. As easy pluckThe golden stars from heaven’s embroidered stole,To pin them on the grey side of this earth,As make you poor again, thank God.’‘Not poorNor clean again from henceforth, you thank God?Well, sir—I ask you ... I insist at need, ...Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.’‘The day before her death-day,’ he replied,‘The gift was in her hands. We’ll find that deed,And certify that date to you.’As oneWho has climbed a mountain-height and carried upHis own heart climbing, panting in his throatWith the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last,Looks back in triumph—so I stood and looked:‘Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the topOf this steep question, and may rest, I think.But first,—I pray you pardon, that the shockAnd surge of natural feeling and eventHad made me oblivious of acquainting youThat this, this letter ... unread, mark,—still sealed,Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand:That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address,Which could not find her though you wrote it clear,—I know your writing, Romney,—recogniseThe open-heartedA, the liberal sweepOf theG. Now listen,—let us understand;You will not find that famous deed of gift,Unless you find it in the letter here,Which, not being mine, I give you back.—RefuseTo take the letter? well then—you and I,As writer and as heiress, open itTogether, by your leave.—Exactly so:The words in which the noble offering’s made,Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own,The proudest and most delicate heart alive,Distracted from the measure of the giftBy such a grace in giving, might acceptYour largesse without thinking any moreOf the burthen of it, than King SolomonConsidered, when he wore his holy ringCharáctered over with the ineffable spell,How many carats of fine gold made upIts money-value. So, Leigh gives to Leigh—Or rather, might have given, observe!—for that’sThe point we come to. Here’s a proof of gift,But here’s no proof, sir, of acceptancy,But rather, disproof. Death’s black dust, being blown,Infiltrated through every secret foldOf this sealed letter by a puff of fate,Dried up for ever the fresh-written ink,Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace,And left these fragments.’As I spoke, I toreThe paper up and down, and down and upAnd crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands,As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and raptBy a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,Drop slow, and strew the melancholy groundBefore the amazèd hills ... why, so, indeed,I’m writing like a poet, somewhat largeIn the type of the image,—and exaggerateA small thing with a great thing, topping it!—But then I’m thinking how his eyes looked ... his,With what despondent and surprised reproach!I think the tears were in them, as he looked—I think the manly mouth just trembled. ThenHe broke the silence.‘I may ask, perhaps,Although no stranger ... only Romney Leigh,Which means still less ... than Vincent Carrington ...Your plans in going hence, and where you go.This cannot be a secret.’‘All my lifeIs open to you, cousin. I go henceTo London, to the gathering-place of souls,To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;Harmoniously for others, if indeedA woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enoughTo carry the whole octave (that’s to prove)Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.Pray God be with me, Romney.’‘Ah, poor child,Who fight against the mother’s ‘tiring hand,And choose the headsman’s! May God change his worldFor your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven,And juster than I have found you!’But I paused.‘And you, my cousin?’—‘I,’ he said,—‘you ask?You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds,And fain would know the end of everything,Of cousins, therefore, with the rest. For me,Aurora, I’ve my work; you know my work;And, having missed this year some personal hope,I must beware the rather that I missNo reasonable duty. While you singYour happy pastorals of the meads and trees,Bethink you that I go to impress and proveOn stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf,Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself,And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice,To make it vocal. While you ask of menYour audience, I may get their leave perhapsFor hungry orphans to say audibly‘We’re hungry, see,’—for beaten and bullied wivesTo hold their unweaned babies up in sight,Whom orphanage would better; and for allTo speak and claim their portion ... by no meansOf the soil, ... but of the sweat in tilling it,—Since this is now-a-days turned privilege,To have only God’s curse on us, and not man’s.Such work I have for doing, elbow-deepIn social problems,—as you tie your rhymes,To draw my uses to cohere with needs,And bring the uneven world back to its round;Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at leastTo smoother issues, some abysmal cracksAnd feuds of earth, intestine heats have madeTo keep men separate,—using sorry shiftsOf hospitals, almshouses, infant schools,And other practical stuff of partial good,You lovers of the beautiful and whole,Despise by system.’‘Idespise? The scornIs yours, my cousin. Poets become such,Through scorning nothing. You decry them forThe good of beauty, sung and taught by them,While they respect your practical partial goodAs being a part of beauty’s self. Adieu!When God helps all the workers for his world,The singers shall have help of Him, not last.’He smiled as men smile when they will not speakBecause of something bitter in the thought;And still I feel his melancholy eyesLook judgment on me. It is seven years since:I know not if ’twas pity or ’twas scornHas made them so far-reaching: judge it yeWho have had to do with pity more than love.And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,To other ways, from equal men. But so,Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,And, in between us, rushed the torrent-worldTo blanch our faces like divided rocks,And bar for ever mutual sight and touchExcept through swirl of spray and all that roar.

Timesfollowed one another. Came a mornI stood upon the brink of twenty years,And looked before and after, as I stoodWoman and artist,—either incomplete,Both credulous of completion. There I heldThe whole creation in my little cup,And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank,‘Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,And all these peoples.’I was glad, that day;The June was in me, with its multitudesOf nightingales all singing in the dark,And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!So glad, I could not choose be very wise!And, old at twenty, was inclined to pullMy childhood backward in a childish jestTo see the face of’t once more, and farewell!In which fantastic mood I bounded forthAt early morning,—would not wait so longAs even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,But, brushing a green trail across the lawnWith my gown in the dew, took will and wayAmong the acacias of the shrubberies,To fly my fancies in the open airAnd keep my birthday, till my aunt awokeTo stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on,As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves;‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrownedTill death has bleached their foreheads to the bone,And so with me it must be, unless I proveUnworthy of the grand adversity,—And certainly I would not fail so much.What, therefore, if I crown myself to-dayIn sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it,Before my brows be numb as Dante’s ownTo all the tender pricking of such leaves?Such leaves! what leaves?’I pulled the branches down,To choose from.‘Not the bay! I choose no bay;The fates deny us if we are overbold:Nor myrtle—which means chiefly love; and loveIs something awful which one dares not touchSo early o’ mornings. This verbena strainsThe point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,This guelder-rose, at far too slight a beckOf the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,That headlong ivy! not a leaf will growBut thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,Serrated like my vines, and half as green.I like such ivy; bold to leap a height’Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on gravesAs twist about a thyrsus; pretty too,(And that’s not ill) when twisted round a comb,’Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bellTo ring with once being touched, I drew a wreathDrenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,And fastening it behind so, ... turning faced... My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouthTwice graver than his eyes.I stood there fixed—My arms up, like the caryatid, soleOf some abolished temple, helplesslyPersistent in a gesture which deridesA former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,As if from flax, not stone.‘Aurora Leigh,The earliest of Auroras!’Hand stretched outI clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tideHad caught me at my pastime, writing downMy foolish name too near upon the seaWhich drowned me with a blush as foolish. ‘You,My cousin!’The smile died out in his eyesAnd dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,For just a moment.... ‘Here’s a book, I found!No name writ on it—poems, by the form;Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek,Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’tWhereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits;I rather bring it to the witch.’‘My book!You found it‘....‘In the hollow by the stream,That beech leans down into—of which you said,The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heartAnd pines for waters.’‘Thank you.’‘Ratheryou,My cousin! that I have seen you not too muchA witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest,To be a woman also.’With a glanceThe smile rose in his eyes again, and touchedThe ivy on my forehead, light as air.I answered gravely, ‘Poets needs must beOr men or women—more’s the pity.’‘Ah,But men, and still less women, happily,Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,Since even dreaming of the stone and bronzeBrings headaches, pretty cousin, and defilesThe clean white morning dresses.’‘So you judge!Because I love the beautiful, I mustLove pleasure chiefly, and be overchargedFor ease and whiteness! Well—you know the world,And only miss your cousin; ’tis not much!—But learn this: I would rather take my partWith God’s Dead, who afford to walk in whiteYet spread His glory, than keep quiet here,And gather up my feet from even a step,For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if headsThat hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce,For my part, I choose headaches,—and today’sMy birthday.’‘Dear Aurora, choose insteadTo cure such. You have balsams.’‘I perceive!—The headache is too noble for my sex.You think the heartache would sound decenter,Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache,And altogether tolerable, exceptTo a woman.’Saying which, I loosed my wreath,And, swinging it beside me as I walked,Half petulant, half playful, as we walked,I sent a sidelong look to find his thought,—As falcon set on falconer’s finger may,With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye,Which means, ‘You’ll see—you’ll see! I’ll soon take flight—You shall not hinder.’ He, as shaking outHis hand and answering ‘Fly then,’ did not speak,Except by such a gesture. SilentlyWe paced, until, just coming into sightOf the house-windows, he abruptly caughtAt one end of the swinging wreath, and said‘Aurora!’ There I stopped short, breath and all.‘Aurora, let’s be serious, and throw byThis game of head and heart. Life means, be sure,Both heart and head,—both active, both complete,And both in earnest. Men and women makeThe world, as head and heart make human life.Work man, work woman, since there’s work to doIn this beleaguered earth, for head and heart,And thought can never do the work of love!But work for ends, I mean for uses; notFor such sleek fringes (do you call them ends?Still less God’s glory) as we sew ourselvesUpon the velvet of those baldaquinsHeld ’twixt us and the sun. That book of yours,I have not read a page of; but I tossA rose up—it falls calyx down, you see!...The chances are that, being a woman, young,And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, ...You write as well ... and ill ... upon the whole,As other women. If as well, what then?If even a little better, ... still, what then?We want the Best in art now, or no art.The time is done for facile settings upOf minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there;The polytheists have gone out in God,That unity of Bests. No best, no God!—And so with art, we say. Give art’s divine,Direct, indubitable, real as grief,—Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselvesDivine by overcoming with mere hopeAnd most prosaic patience. You, you are youngAs Eve with nature’s daybreak on her face;But this same world you are come to, dearest coz,Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreathsTo hang upon her ruins,—and forgetsTo rhyme the cry with which she still beats backThose savage, hungry dogs that hunt her downTo the empty grave of Christ. The world’s hard pressed;The sweat of labour in the early curseHas (turning acrid in six thousand years)Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,An hour’s time ... think!... to sit upon a bankAnd hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!—Before ... where’s Moses?’‘Ah—exactly that!Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?—You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,Such sounding brass has done some actual good,(The application in a woman’s hand,If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)In colonising beehives.’‘There it is!—You play beside a death-bed like a child,Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s placeTo teach the living. None of all these things,Can women understand. You generaliseOh, nothing!—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,So sympathetic to the personal pang,Close, on each separate knife-stroke, yielding upA whole life at each wound; incapableOf deepening, widening a large lap of lifeTo hold the world-full woe. The human raceTo you means, such a child, or such a man,You saw one morning waiting in the cold,Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather upA few such cases, and, when strong, sometimesWill write of factories and of slaves, as ifYour father were a negro, and your sonA spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,—All, coloured with your blood, or otherwiseJust nothing to you. Why, I call you hardTo general suffering. Here’s the world half blindWith intellectual light, half brutalisedWith civilisation, having caught the plagueIn silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and westAlong a thousand railroads, mad with painAnd sin too!... does one woman of you all,(You who weep easily) grow pale to seeThis tiger shake his cage?—does one of youStand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,And pine and die, because of the great sumOf universal anguish?—Show me a tearWet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,Because the world is mad! You cannot count,That you should weep for this account, not you!You weep for what you know. A red-haired childSick in a fever, if you touch him once,Though but so little as with a finger-tip,Will set you weeping; but a million sick ...You could as soon weep for the rule of three,Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same worldUncomprehended by you, must remainUninfluenced by you.—Women as you are,Mere women, personal and passionate,You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives,Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!We get no Christ from you,—and verilyWe shall not get a poet, in my mind.’‘With which conclusion you conclude’....‘But this—That you, Aurora, with the large live browAnd steady eyelids, cannot condescendTo play at art, as children play at swords,To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admiredBecause true action is impossible.You never can be satisfied with praiseWhich men give women when they judge a bookNot as mere work, but as mere woman’s work,Expressing the comparative respectWhich means the absolute scorn. ‘Oh, excellent!What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!What delicate discernment ... almost thought!The book does honour to the sex, we hold.Among our female authors we make roomFor this fair writer, and congratulateThe country that produces in these timesSuch women, competent to ... spell.’‘Stop there!’I answered—burning through his thread of talkWith a quick flame of emotion,—‘You have readMy soul, if not my book, and argue wellI would not condescend ... we will not sayTo such a kind of praise, (a worthless endIs praise of all kinds) but to such a useOf holy art and golden life. I am young,And peradventure weak—you tell me so—Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,Take thanks for justice. I would rather danceAt fairs on tight-rope, till the babies droppedTheir gingerbread for joy,—than shift the typesFor tolerable verse, intolerableTo men who act and suffer. Better far,Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.’‘You,Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes,And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are youngAurora, you and I. The world ... look round ...The world, we’re come to late, is swollen hardWith perished generations and their sins:The civiliser’s spade grinds horriblyOn dead men’s bones, and cannot turn up soilThat’s otherwise than fetid. All successProves partial failure; all advance impliesWhat’s left behind; all triumph, something crushedAt the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong:And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich,Who agonise together, rich and poor,Under and over, in the social spasmAnd crisis of the ages. Here’s an age,That makes its own vocation! here, we have steppedAcross the bounds of time! here’s nought to see,But just the rich man and just Lazarus,And both in torments; with a mediate gulph,Though not a hint of Abraham’s bosom. Who,Being man and human, can stand calmly byAnd view these things, and never tease his soulFor some great cure? No physic for this grief,In all the earth and heavens too?’‘You believeIn God, for your part?—ay? that He who makes,Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,As men plant tulips upon dunghills whenThey wish them finest?’‘True. A death-heat isThe same as life-heat, to be accurate;And in all nature is no death at all,As men account of death, as long as GodStands witnessing for life perpetually,By being just God. That’s abstract truth, I know,Philosophy, or sympathy with God:But I, I sympathise with man, not God,I think I was a man for chiefly this;And when I stand beside a dying bed,It’s death to me. Observe,—it had not muchConsoled the race of mastodons to knowBefore they went to fossil, that anonTheir place should quicken with the elephant;They were not elephants but mastodons:And I, a man, as men are now, and notAs men may be hereafter, feel with menIn the agonising present.’‘Is it so,’I said, ‘my cousin? is the world so bad,While I hear nothing of it through the trees?The world was always evil,—but so bad?’‘So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is greyWith poring over the long sum of ill;So much for vice, so much for discontent,So much for the necessities of power,So much for the connivances of fear,—Coherent in statistical despairsWith such a total of distracted life, ...To see it down in figures on a page,Plain, silent, clear ... as God sees through the earthThe sense of all the graves!... that’s terribleFor one who is not God, and cannot rightThe wrong he looks on. May I choose indeedBut vow away my years, my means, my aims,Among the helpers, if there’s any helpIn such a social strait? The common bloodThat swings along my veins, is strong enoughTo draw me to this duty.’Then I spoke.‘I have not stood long on the strand of life,And these salt waters have had scarcely timeTo creep so high up as to wet my feet.I cannot judge these tides—I shall, perhaps.A woman’s always younger than a manAt equal years, because she is disallowedMaturing by the outdoor sun and air,And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk.Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise!You think a woman ripens as a peach,—Inthe cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now;I’m young in age, and younger still, I think,As a woman. But a child may say amenTo a bishop’s prayer and see the way it goes;And I, incapable to loose the knotOf social questions, can approve, applaudAugust compassion, christian thoughts that shootBeyond the vulgar white of personal aims.Accept my reverence.’There he glowed on meWith all his face and eyes. ‘No other help?’Said he—‘no more than so?’‘What help?’ I asked.‘You’d scorn my help,—as Nature’s self, you say,Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,Because a woman’s. Do you now turn roundAnd ask for what a woman cannot give?’‘For what she only can, I turn and ask,’He answered, catching up my hands in his,And dropping on me from his high-eaved browThe full weight of his soul,—‘I ask for love,And that, she can; for life in fellowshipThrough bitter duties—that, I know she can;For wifehood ... will she?’‘Now,’ I said, ‘may GodBe witness ’twixt us two!’ and with the word,Meseemed I floated into a sudden lightAbove his stature,—‘am I proved too weakTo stand alone, yet strong enough to bearSuch leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,Yet competent to love, likehim?’I paused:Perhaps I darkened, as the light-house willThat turns upon the sea. ‘It’s always so!Anything does for a wife.’‘Aurora, dear,And dearly honoured’ ... he pressed in at onceWith eager utterance,—‘you translate me ill.I do not contradict my thought of youWhich is most reverent, with another thoughtFound less so. If your sex is weak for art,(And I who said so, did but honour youBy using truth in courtship) it is strongFor life and duty. Place your fecund heartIn mine, and let us blossom for the worldThat wants love’s colour in the grey of time.With all my talk I can but set you whereYou look down coldly on the arena-heapsOf headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct!The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his wayThrough such a heap of generalised distress,To the individual man with lips and eyes—Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down,And, hand in hand, we’ll go where yours shall touchThese victims, one by one! till, one by one,The formless, nameless trunk of every manShall seem to wear a head, with hair you know,And every woman catch your mother’s faceTo melt you into passion.’‘I am a girl,’I answered slowly; ‘you do well to nameMy mother’s face. Though far too early, alas,God’s hand did interpose ’twixt it and me,I know so much of love, as used to shineIn that face and another. Just so much;No more indeed at all. I have not seenSo much love since, I pray you pardon me,As answers even to make a marriage with,In this cold land of England. What you love,Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,—A wife to help your ends ... in her no end!Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,But I, being most unworthy of these and that,Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.’‘Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?’He said.‘Why, sir, you are married long ago.You have a wife already whom you love,Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.For my part, I am scarcely meek enoughTo be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.Do I look a Hagar, think you?’‘So, you jest!’‘Nay so, I speak in earnest,’ I replied.‘You treat of marriage too much like, at least,A chief apostle; you would bear with youA wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out?A sister of charity.’‘Then, must it beIndeed farewell? And was I so far wrongIn hope and in illusion, when I tookThe woman to be nobler than the man,Yourself the noblest woman,—in the useAnd comprehension of what love is,—love,That generates the likeness of itselfThrough all heroic duties? so far wrong,In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,Come, human creature, love and work with me,’—Instead of, ‘Lady, thou art wondrous fair,And, where the Graces walk before, the MuseWill follow at the lighting of their eyes,And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep:Turn round and love me, or I die of love.’With quiet indignation I broke in.‘You misconceive the question like a man,Who sees a woman as the complementOf his sex merely. You forget too muchThat every creature, female as the male,Stands single in responsible act and thought,As also in birth and death. Whoever saysTo a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’Will get fair answers, if the work and love,Being good themselves, are good for her—the bestShe was born for. Women of a softer mood,Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,And catch up with it any kind of work,Indifferent, so that dear love go with it:I do not blame such women, though, for love,They pick much oakum; earth’s fanatics makeToo frequently heaven’s saints. Butme, your workIs not the best for,—nor your love the best,Nor able to commend the kind of workFor love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,To be over-bold in speaking of myself,—I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,The heavens and earth have set me, since I changedMy father’s face for theirs,—and, though your worldWere twice as wretched as you represent,Most serious work, most necessary work,As any of the economists’. Reform,Make trade a Christian possibility,And individual right no general wrong;Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,With innings for them all!... what then, indeed,If mortals were not greater by the headThan any of their prosperities? what then,Unless the artist keep up open roadsBetwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting throughThe best of your conventions with his best,The speakable, imaginable bestGod bids him speak, to prove what lies beyondBoth speech and imagination? A starved manExceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,I hold you will not compass your poor endsOf barley-feeding and material ease,Without a poet’s individualismTo work your universal. It takes a soul,To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth offThe dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,Because not poets enough to understandThat life develops from within.——For me,Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,Of work like this!... perhaps a woman’s soulAspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;And if I fail ... why, burn me up my strawLike other false works—I’ll not ask for grace,Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. IWho love my art, would never wish it lowerTo suit my stature. I may love my art.You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,Seeing that to waste true love on anything,Is womanly, past question.’I retainThe very last word which I said, that day,As you the creaking of the door, years past,Which let upon you such disabling newsYou ever after have been graver. He,His eyes, the motions in his silent mouth,Were fiery points on which my words were caught,Transfixed for ever in my memoryFor his sake, not their own. And yet I knowI did not love him ... nor he me ... that’s sure....And what I said, is unrepented of,As truth is always. Yet ... a princely man!—If hard to me, heroic for himself!He bears down on me through the slanting years,The stronger for the distance. If he had loved,Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, ...I might have been a common woman now,And happier, less known and less left alone;Perhaps a better woman after all,—With chubby children hanging on my neckTo keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vinesThat bear such fruit, are proud to stoop with it.The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.And I, who spoke the truth then, stand upright,Still worthy of having spoken out the truth,By being content I spoke it, though it setHim there, me here.—O woman’s vile remorse,To hanker after a mere name, a show,A supposition, a potential love!Does every man who names love in our lives,Become a power for that? is love’s true thingSo much best to us, that what personates loveIs next best? A potential love, forsooth!We are not so vile. No, no—he cleaves, I think,This man, this image, ... chiefly for the wrongAnd shock he gave my life, in finding mePrecisely where the devil of my youthHad set me, on those mountain-peaks of hopeAll glittering with the dawn-dew, all erectAnd famished for the morning,—saying, whileI looked for empire and much tribute, ‘Come,I have some worthy work for thee below.Come, sweep my barns, and keep my hospitals,—And I will pay thee with a current coinWhich men give women.’As we spoke, the grassWas trod in haste beside us, and my aunt,With smile distorted by the sun,—face, voice,As much at issue with the summer-dayAs if you brought a candle out of doors,—Broke in with, ‘Romney, here!—My child, entreatYour cousin to the house, and have your talk,If girls must talk upon their birthdays. Come,’He answered for me calmly, with pale lipsThat seemed to motion for a smile in vain.‘The talk is ended, madam, where we stand.Your brother’s daughter has dismissed me here;And all my answer can be better saidBeneath the trees, than wrong by such a wordYour house’s hospitalities. Farewell.’With that he vanished. I could hear his heelRing bluntly in the lane, as down he leaptThe short way from us.—Then, a measured speechWithdrew me. ‘What means this, Aurora Leigh?My brother’s daughter has dismissed my guests?’The lion in me felt the keeper’s voice,Through all its quivering dewlaps: I was quelledBefore her,—meekened to the child she knew:I prayed her pardon, said, ‘I had little thoughtTo give dismissal to a guest of hers,In letting go a friend of mine, who cameTo take me into service as a wife,—No more than that, indeed.’‘No more, no more?Pray Heaven,’ she answered, ‘that I was not mad.I could not mean to tell her to her faceThat Romney Leigh had asked me for a wife,And I refused him?’‘Did he ask?’ I said;‘I think he rather stooped to take me upFor certain uses which he found to doFor something called a wife. He never asked.’‘What stuff!’ she answered; ‘are they queens, these girls?They must have mantles, stitched with twenty silks,Spread out upon the ground, before they’ll stepOne footstep for the noblest lover born.’‘But I am born,’ I said with firmness, ‘I,To walk another way than his, dear aunt.’‘You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen monthsWill walk as well as you,’ she cried in haste,‘Without a steadying finger. Why, you child,God help you, you are groping in the dark,For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps,That you, sole offspring of an opulent man,Are rich and free to choose a way to walk?You think, and it’s a reasonable thought,That I besides, being well to do in life,Will leave my handful in my niece’s handWhen death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray,Pray, child,—albeit I know you love me not,—As if you loved me, that I may not die!For when I die and leave you, out you go,(Unless I make room for you in my grave)Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother’s lamb,(Ah heaven,—that pains!)—without a right to cropA single blade of grass beneath these trees,Or cast a lamb’s small shadow on the lawn,Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here’sThe fruit you planted in your foreign loves!—Ay, there’s the fruit he planted! never lookAstonished at me with your mother’s eyes,For it was they, who set you where you are,An undowered orphan. Child, your father’s choiceOf that said mother, disinheritedHis daughter, his and hers. Men do not thinkOf sons and daughters, when they fall in love,So much more than of sisters; otherwise,He would have paused to ponder what he did,And shrunk before that clause in the entailExcluding offspring by a foreign wife,(The clause set up a hundred years agoBy a Leigh who wedded a French dancing-girlAnd had his heart danced over in return);But this man shrunk at nothing, never thoughtOf you, Aurora, any more than me—Your mother must have been a pretty thing,For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns,To make a good man, which my brother was,Unchary of the duties to his house;But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane,Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wroteDirectly on your birth, to Italy,‘I ask your baby daughter for my sonIn whom the entail now merges by the law.Betroth her to us out of love, insteadOf colder reasons, and she shall not loseBy love or law from henceforth’—so he wrote;A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane.Remember how he drew you to his kneeThe year you came here, just before he died,And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks,And wished them redder,—you remember Vane?And now his son who represents our houseAnd holds the fiefs and manors in his place,To whom reverts my pittance when I die,(Except a few books and a pair of shawls)The boy is generous like him, and preparedTo carry out his kindest word and thoughtTo you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young manIs Romney Leigh; although the sun of youthHas shone too straight upon his brain, I know,And fevered him with dreams of doing goodTo good-for-nothing people. But a wifeWill put all right, and stroke his temples coolWith healthy touches’....I broke in at that.I could not lift my heavy heart to breatheTill then, but then I raised it, and it fellIn broken words like these—‘No need to wait.The dream of doing good to ... me, at least,Is ended, without waiting for a wifeTo cool the fever for him. We’ve escapedThat danger ... thank Heaven for it.’‘You,’ she cried,‘Have got a fever. What, I talk and talkAn hour long to you,—I instruct you howYou cannot eat or drink or stand or sit,Or even die, like any decent wretchIn all this unroofed and unfurnished world,Without your cousin,—and you still maintainThere’s room ’twixt him and you, for flirting fansAnd running knots in eyebrows! You must haveA pattern lover sighing on his knee:You do not count enough a noble heart,Above book-patterns, which this very mornUnclosed itself, in two dear fathers’ names,To embrace your orphaned life! fie, fie! But stay,I write a word, and counteract this sin.’She would have turned to leave me, but I clung.‘O sweet my father’s sister, hear my wordBefore you write yours. Cousin Vane did well,And cousin Romney well,—and I well too,In casting back with all my strength and willThe good they meant me. O my God, my God!God meant me good, too, when he hindered meFrom saying ‘yes’ this morning. If you writeA word, it shall be ‘no.’ I say no, no!I tie up ‘no’ upon His altar-horns,Quite out of reach of perjury! At leastMy soul is not a pauper; I can liveAt least my soul’s life, without alms from men;And if it must be in heaven instead of earth,Let heaven look to it,—I am not afraid,’She seized my hands with both hers, strained them fast,And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyesRight through me, body and heart. ‘Yet, foolish Sweet,You love this man. I have watched you when he came,And when he went, and when we’ve talked of him:I am not old for nothing; I can tellThe weather-signs of love—you love this man.’Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?Who’s sorry for a gnat ... or girl?I blushed.I feel the brand upon my forehead nowStrike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feelThe felon’s iron, say, and scorn the markOf what they are not. Most illogicalIrrational nature of our womanhood,That blushes one way, feels another way,And prays, perhaps, another! After all,We cannot be the equal of the male,Who rules his blood a little.For althoughI blushed indeed, as if I loved the man,And her incisive smile, accreditingThat treason of false witness in my blush,Did bow me downward like a swathe of grassBelow its level that struck me,—I attestThe conscious skies and all their daily suns,I think I loved him not ... nor then, nor since....Nor ever. Do we love the schoolmaster,Being busy in the woods? much less, being poor,The overseer of the parish? Do we keepOur love, to pay our debts with?White and coldI grew next moment. As my blood recoiledFrom that imputed ignominy, I madeMy heart great with it. Then, at last, I spoke,—Spoke veritable words, but passionate,Too passionate perhaps ... ground up with sobsTo shapeless endings. She let fall my hands,And took her smile off, in sedate disgust,As peradventure she had touched a snake,—A dead snake, mind!—and, turning round, replied,‘We’ll leave Italian manners, if you please.I think you had an English father, child,And ought to find it possible to speakA quiet ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ like English girls,Without convulsions. In another monthWe’ll take another answer ... no, or yes.’With that, she left me in the garden-walk.I had a father! yes, but long ago—How long it seemed that moment. Oh, how far,How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saintsWhen once gone from us! We may call againstThe lighted windows of thy fair June-heavenWhere all the souls are happy,—and not one,Not even my father, look from work or playTo ask, ‘Who is it that cries after us,Below there, in the dusk?’ Yet formerlyHe turned his face upon me quick enough,If I said ‘father.’ Now I might cry loud;The little lark reached higher with his songThan I with crying. Oh, alone, alone,—Not troubling any in heaven, nor any on earth,I stood there in the garden, and looked upThe deaf blue sky that brings the roses outOn such June mornings.You who keep accountOf crisis and transition in this life,Set down the first time Nature says plain ‘no’To some ‘yes’ in you, and walks over youIn gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all beginBy singing with the birds, and running fastWith June-days, hand in hand: but once, for all,The birds must sing against us, and the sunStrike down upon us like a friend’s sword caughtBy an enemy to slay us, while we readThe dear name on the blade which bites at us!—That’s bitter and convincing: after that,We seldom doubt that something in the largeSmooth order of creation, though no moreThan haply a man’s footstep, has gone wrong.Some tears fell down my cheeks, and then I smiled,As those smile who have no face in the worldTo smile back to them. I had lost a friendIn Romney Leigh; the thing was sure—a friend,Who had looked at me most gently now and then,And spoken of my favourite books ... ‘our books’ ...With such a voice! Well, voice and look were nowMore utterly shut out from me, I felt,Than even my father’s. Romney now was turnedTo a benefactor, to a generous man,Who had tied himself to marry ... me, insteadOf such a woman, with low timorous lidsHe lifted with a sudden word one day,And left, perhaps, for my sake.—Ah, self-tiedBy a contract,—male Iphigenia, boundAt a fatal Aulis, for the winds to change,(But loose him—they’ll not change); he well might seemA little cold and dominant in love!He had a right to be dogmatical,This poor, good Romney. Love, to him, was madeA simple law-clause. If I married him,I would not dare to call my soul my own,Which so he had bought and paid for: every thoughtAnd every heart-beat down there in the bill,—Not one found honestly deductibleFrom any use that pleased him! He might cutMy body into coins to give awayAmong his other paupers; change my sons,While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babesOr piteous foundlings; might unquestioned setMy right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,My left hand washing in the Public Baths,What time my angel of the Ideal stretchedBoth his to me in vain! I could not claimThe poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal,And take so much as pity, from myself.Farewell, good Romney! if I loved you even,I could but ill afford to let you beSo generous to me. Farewell, friend, since friendBetwixt us two, forsooth, must be a wordSo heavily overladen. And, since helpMust come to me from those who love me not,Farewell, all helpers—I must help myself,And am alone from henceforth.—Then I stooped,And lifted the soiled garland from the ground,And set it on my head as bitterlyAs when the Spanish king did crown the bonesOf his dead love. So be it. I preserveThat crown still,—in the drawer there! ’twas the first;The rest are like it;—those Olympian crowns,We run for, till we lose sight of the sunIn the dust of the racing chariots!After that,Before the evening fell, I had a noteWhich ran,—‘Aurora, sweet Chaldean, you readMy meaning backward like your eastern books,While I am from the west, dear. Read me nowA little plainer. Did you hate me quiteBut yesterday? I loved you for my part;I love you. If I spoke untenderlyThis morning, my beloved, pardon it;And comprehend me that I loved you so,I set you on the level of my soul,And overwashed you with the bitter brineOf some habitual thoughts. Henceforth, my flower,Be planted out of reach of any such,And lean the side you please, with all your leaves!Write woman’s verses and dream woman’s dreams;But let me feel your perfume in my home,To make my sabbath after working-days;Bloom out your youth beside me,—be my wife.’I wrote in answer—‘We, Chaldeans, discernStill farther than we read. I know your heart,And shut it like the holy book it is,Reserved for mild-eyed saints to pore uponBetwixt their prayers at vespers. Well, you’re right,I did not surely hate you yesterday;And yet I do not love you enough to-dayTo wed you, cousin Romney. Take this word,And let it stop you as a generous manFrom speaking farther. You may tease, indeed,And blow about my feelings, or my leaves,—And here’s my aunt will help you with east winds,And break a stalk, perhaps, tormenting me;But certain flowers grow near as deep as trees,And, cousin, you’ll not move my root, not you,With all your confluent storms. Then let me growWithin my wayside hedge, and pass your way!This flower has never as much to say to youAs the antique tomb which said to travellers, ‘Pause,’‘Siste, viator.’ Ending thus, I signed.The next week passed in silence, so the next,And several after: Romney did not come,Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on,As if my heart were kept beneath a glass,And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,To see and hear it tick. I could not sit,Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down,Not sew on steadily, nor drop a stitchAnd a sigh with it, but I felt her looksStill cleaving to me, like the sucking aspTo Cleopatra’s breast, persistentlyThrough the intermittent pantings. Being observed,When observation is not sympathy,Is just being tortured. If she said a word,A ‘thank you,’ or an ‘if it please you, dear,’She meant a commination, or, at best,An exorcism against the devildomWhich plainly held me. So with all the house.Susannah could not stand and twist my hair,Without such glancing at the looking-glassTo see my face there, that she missed the plait:And John,—I never sent my plate for soup,Or did not send it, but the foolish JohnResolved the problem, ’twixt his napkined thumbs,Of what was signified by taking soupOr choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped inOn morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,Smiled admonition, sate uneasily,And talked with measured, emphasised reserve,Of parish news, like doctors to the sick,When not called in,—as if, with leave to speak,They might say something. Nay, the very dogWould watch me from his sun-patch on the floor,In alternation with the large black flyNot yet in reach of snapping. So I lived.A Roman died so; smeared with honey, teasedBy insects, stared to torture by the noon:And many patient souls ’neath English roofsHave died like Romans. I, in looking back,Wish only, now, I had borne the plague of allWith meeker spirits than were rife in Rome.For, on the sixth week, the dead sea broke up,Dashed suddenly through beneath the heel of HimWho stands upon the sea and earth, and swearsTime shall be nevermore. The clock struck nineThat morning, too,—no lark was out of tune;The hidden farms among the hills, breathed straightTheir smoke toward heaven; the lime-tree scarcely stirredBeneath the blue weight of the cloudless sky,Though still the July air came floating throughThe woodbine at my window, in and out,With touches of the out-door country-newsFor a bending forehead. There I sate, and wishedThat morning-truce of God would last till eve,Or longer. ‘Sleep,’ I thought, ‘late sleepers,—sleep,And spare me yet, the burden of your eyes.’Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriekTore upwards from the bottom of the house.Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks,The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,And shudder through its passages and stairsWith slam of doors and clash of bells.—I sprang,I stood up in the middle of the room,And there confronted at my chamber-door,A white face,—shivering, ineffectual lips.‘Come, come,’ they tried to utter, and I went;As if a ghost had drawn me at the pointOf a fiery finger through the uneven dark,I went with reeling footsteps down the stair,Nor asked a question.There she sate, my aunt,—Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bedFor that night’s sleeping ... yet slept well. My God,The dumb derision of that grey, peaked faceConcluded something grave against the sun,Which filled the chamber with its July burstWhen Susan drew the curtains, ignorantOf who sate open-eyed behind her. There,She sate ... it sate ... we said ‘she’ yesterday ...And held a letter with unbroken seal,As Susan gave it to her hand last night:All night she had held it. If its news referredTo duchies or to dunghills, not an inchShe’d budge, ’twas obvious, for such worthless odds:Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburnedTheir spheric limitations, swallowing upLike wax the azure spaces, could they forceThose open eyes to wink once. What last sightHad left them blank and flat so,—drawing outThe faculty of vision from the roots,As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?That dogged me up and down the hours and days,A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?And did I pray, a half hour back, but so,To escape the burden of those eyes ... those eyes?‘Sleep late’ I said.—Why now, indeed, they sleep.God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,A gauntlet with a gift in’t. Every wishIs like a prayer ... with God.I had my wish,—To read and meditate the thing I would,To fashion all my life upon my thought,And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, noneCould disapprove me, vex me, hamper me.Full ground-room, in this desert newly made,For Babylon or Balbec,—when the breath,Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns!The heir came over on the funeral day,And we two cousins met before the dead,With two pale faces. Was it death or lifeThat moved us? When the will was read and done,The official guest and witnesses withdrawn,We rose up in a silence almost hard,And looked at one another. Then I said,‘Farewell, my cousin.’But he touched, just touchedMy hatstrings tied for going, (at the doorThe carriage stood to take me) and said low,His voice a little unsteady through his smile,‘Siste, viator.’‘Is there time,’ I asked,‘In these last days of railroads, to stop shortLike Cæsar’s chariot (weighing half a ton)On the Appian road, for morals?’‘There is time,’He answered grave, ‘for necessary words,Inclusive, trust me, of no epitaphOn man or act, my cousin. We have readA will, which gives you all the personal goodsAnd funded monies of your aunt.’‘I thankHer memory for it. With three hundred poundsWe buy in England even, clear standing-roomTo stand and work in. Only two hours since,I fancied I was poor.’‘And, cousin, stillYou’re richer than you fancy. The will says,Three hundred pounds, and any other sumOf which the said testatrix dies possessed.I say she died possessed of other sums.’‘Dear Romney, need we chronicle the pence?I’m richer than I thought—that’s evident.Enough so.’‘Listen rather. You’ve to doWith business and a cousin,’ he resumed,‘And both, I fear, need patience. Here’s the fact.The other sum (thereisanother sum,Unspecified in any will which datesAfter possession, yet bequeathed as muchAnd clearly as those said three hundred pounds)Is thirty thousand. You will have it paidWhen?... where? My duty troubles you with words.’He struck the iron when the bar was hot;No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks.‘Pause there! I thank you. You are delicateIn glosing gifts;—but I, who share your blood,Am rather made for giving, like yourself,Than taking, like your pensioners. Farewell.’He stopped me with a gesture of calm pride.‘A Leigh,’ he said, ‘gives largesse and gives love,But gloses neither: if a Leigh could glose,He would not do it, moreover, to a Leigh,With blood trained up along nine centuriesTo hound and hate a lie, from eyes like yours.And now we’ll make the rest as clear; your auntPossessed these monies.’‘You will make it clear,My cousin, as the honour of us both,Or one of us speaks vainly—that’s not I.My aunt possessed this sum,—inheritedFrom whom, and when? bring documents, prove dates.’‘Why now indeed you throw your bonnet off,As if you had time left for a logarithm!The faith’s the want. Dear cousin, give me faith,And you shall walk this road with silken shoes,As clean as any lady of our houseSupposed the proudest. Oh, I comprehendThe whole position from your point of sight.I oust you from your father’s halls and lands,And make you poor by getting rich—that’s law;Considering which, in common circumstance,You would not scruple to accept from meSome compensation, some sufficiencyOf income—that were justice; but, alas,I love you ... that’s mere nature!—you rejectMy love ... that’s nature also;—and at once,You cannot, from a suitor disallowed,A hand thrown back as mine is, into yoursReceive a doit, a farthing, ... not for the world!That’s etiquette with women, obviouslyExceeding claim of nature, law, and right,Unanswerable to all. I grant, you see,The case as you conceive it,—leave you roomTo sweep your ample skirts of womanhood;While, standing humbly squeezed against the wall,I own myself excluded from being just,Restrained from paying indubitable debts,Because denied from giving you my soul—That’s my misfortune!—I submit to itAs if, in some more reasonable age,’Twould not be less inevitable. Enough.You’ll trust me, cousin, as a gentleman,To keep your honour, as you count it, pure,—Your scruples (just as if I thought them wise)Safe and inviolate from gifts of mine.’I answered mild but earnest. ‘I believeIn no one’s honour which another keeps,Nor man’s nor woman’s. As I keep, myself,My truth and my religion, I deputeNo father, though I had one this side death,Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you,Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh,To keep my honour pure. You face, to-day,A man who wants instruction, mark me, notA woman who wants protection. As to a man,Show manhood, speak out plainly, be preciseWith facts and dates. My aunt inheritedThis sum, you say—’‘I said she died possessedOf this, dear cousin.’‘Not by heritage.Thank you: we’re getting to the facts at last.Perhaps she played at commerce with a shipWhich came in heavy with Australian gold?Or touched a lottery with her finger-end,Which tumbled on a sudden into her lapSome old Rhine tower or principality?Perhaps she had to do with a marineSub-transatlantic railroad, which pre-paysAs well as pre-supposes? or perhapsSome stale ancestral debt was after-paidBy a hundred years, and took her by surprise?—You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.’‘You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride,—The truth is not afraid of hurting you.You’ll find no cause, in all your scruples, whyYour aunt should cavil at a deed of gift’Twixt her and me.’‘I thought so—ah! a gift.’‘You naturally thought so,’ he resumed.‘A very natural gift.’‘A gift, a gift!Her individual life being stranded highAbove all want, approaching opulence,Too haughty was she to accept a giftWithout some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see,—A gift intended plainly for her heirs,And so accepted ... if accepted ... ah,Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps,Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you,If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?’He answered gently, ‘Need you tremble and pantLike a netted lioness? is’t my fault, mine,That you’re a grand wild creature of the woods,And hate the stall built for you? Any way,Though triply netted, need you glare at me?I do not hold the cords of such a net;You’re free from me, Aurora!’‘Now may GodDeliver me from this strait! This gift of yoursWas tendered ... when? accepted ... when?’ I asked.‘A month ... a fortnight since? Six weeks agoIt was not tendered. By a word she dropped,I know it was not tendered nor received.When was it? bring your dates.’‘What matters when?A half-hour ere she died, or a half-year,Secured the gift, maintains the heritageInviolable with law. As easy pluckThe golden stars from heaven’s embroidered stole,To pin them on the grey side of this earth,As make you poor again, thank God.’‘Not poorNor clean again from henceforth, you thank God?Well, sir—I ask you ... I insist at need, ...Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.’‘The day before her death-day,’ he replied,‘The gift was in her hands. We’ll find that deed,And certify that date to you.’As oneWho has climbed a mountain-height and carried upHis own heart climbing, panting in his throatWith the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last,Looks back in triumph—so I stood and looked:‘Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the topOf this steep question, and may rest, I think.But first,—I pray you pardon, that the shockAnd surge of natural feeling and eventHad made me oblivious of acquainting youThat this, this letter ... unread, mark,—still sealed,Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand:That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address,Which could not find her though you wrote it clear,—I know your writing, Romney,—recogniseThe open-heartedA, the liberal sweepOf theG. Now listen,—let us understand;You will not find that famous deed of gift,Unless you find it in the letter here,Which, not being mine, I give you back.—RefuseTo take the letter? well then—you and I,As writer and as heiress, open itTogether, by your leave.—Exactly so:The words in which the noble offering’s made,Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own,The proudest and most delicate heart alive,Distracted from the measure of the giftBy such a grace in giving, might acceptYour largesse without thinking any moreOf the burthen of it, than King SolomonConsidered, when he wore his holy ringCharáctered over with the ineffable spell,How many carats of fine gold made upIts money-value. So, Leigh gives to Leigh—Or rather, might have given, observe!—for that’sThe point we come to. Here’s a proof of gift,But here’s no proof, sir, of acceptancy,But rather, disproof. Death’s black dust, being blown,Infiltrated through every secret foldOf this sealed letter by a puff of fate,Dried up for ever the fresh-written ink,Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace,And left these fragments.’As I spoke, I toreThe paper up and down, and down and upAnd crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands,As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and raptBy a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,Drop slow, and strew the melancholy groundBefore the amazèd hills ... why, so, indeed,I’m writing like a poet, somewhat largeIn the type of the image,—and exaggerateA small thing with a great thing, topping it!—But then I’m thinking how his eyes looked ... his,With what despondent and surprised reproach!I think the tears were in them, as he looked—I think the manly mouth just trembled. ThenHe broke the silence.‘I may ask, perhaps,Although no stranger ... only Romney Leigh,Which means still less ... than Vincent Carrington ...Your plans in going hence, and where you go.This cannot be a secret.’‘All my lifeIs open to you, cousin. I go henceTo London, to the gathering-place of souls,To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;Harmoniously for others, if indeedA woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enoughTo carry the whole octave (that’s to prove)Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.Pray God be with me, Romney.’‘Ah, poor child,Who fight against the mother’s ‘tiring hand,And choose the headsman’s! May God change his worldFor your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven,And juster than I have found you!’But I paused.‘And you, my cousin?’—‘I,’ he said,—‘you ask?You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds,And fain would know the end of everything,Of cousins, therefore, with the rest. For me,Aurora, I’ve my work; you know my work;And, having missed this year some personal hope,I must beware the rather that I missNo reasonable duty. While you singYour happy pastorals of the meads and trees,Bethink you that I go to impress and proveOn stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf,Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself,And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice,To make it vocal. While you ask of menYour audience, I may get their leave perhapsFor hungry orphans to say audibly‘We’re hungry, see,’—for beaten and bullied wivesTo hold their unweaned babies up in sight,Whom orphanage would better; and for allTo speak and claim their portion ... by no meansOf the soil, ... but of the sweat in tilling it,—Since this is now-a-days turned privilege,To have only God’s curse on us, and not man’s.Such work I have for doing, elbow-deepIn social problems,—as you tie your rhymes,To draw my uses to cohere with needs,And bring the uneven world back to its round;Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at leastTo smoother issues, some abysmal cracksAnd feuds of earth, intestine heats have madeTo keep men separate,—using sorry shiftsOf hospitals, almshouses, infant schools,And other practical stuff of partial good,You lovers of the beautiful and whole,Despise by system.’‘Idespise? The scornIs yours, my cousin. Poets become such,Through scorning nothing. You decry them forThe good of beauty, sung and taught by them,While they respect your practical partial goodAs being a part of beauty’s self. Adieu!When God helps all the workers for his world,The singers shall have help of Him, not last.’He smiled as men smile when they will not speakBecause of something bitter in the thought;And still I feel his melancholy eyesLook judgment on me. It is seven years since:I know not if ’twas pity or ’twas scornHas made them so far-reaching: judge it yeWho have had to do with pity more than love.And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,To other ways, from equal men. But so,Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,And, in between us, rushed the torrent-worldTo blanch our faces like divided rocks,And bar for ever mutual sight and touchExcept through swirl of spray and all that roar.

Timesfollowed one another. Came a mornI stood upon the brink of twenty years,And looked before and after, as I stoodWoman and artist,—either incomplete,Both credulous of completion. There I heldThe whole creation in my little cup,And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank,‘Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,And all these peoples.’I was glad, that day;The June was in me, with its multitudesOf nightingales all singing in the dark,And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!So glad, I could not choose be very wise!And, old at twenty, was inclined to pullMy childhood backward in a childish jestTo see the face of’t once more, and farewell!In which fantastic mood I bounded forthAt early morning,—would not wait so longAs even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,But, brushing a green trail across the lawnWith my gown in the dew, took will and wayAmong the acacias of the shrubberies,To fly my fancies in the open airAnd keep my birthday, till my aunt awokeTo stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on,As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves;‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrownedTill death has bleached their foreheads to the bone,And so with me it must be, unless I proveUnworthy of the grand adversity,—And certainly I would not fail so much.What, therefore, if I crown myself to-dayIn sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it,Before my brows be numb as Dante’s ownTo all the tender pricking of such leaves?Such leaves! what leaves?’I pulled the branches down,To choose from.‘Not the bay! I choose no bay;The fates deny us if we are overbold:Nor myrtle—which means chiefly love; and loveIs something awful which one dares not touchSo early o’ mornings. This verbena strainsThe point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,This guelder-rose, at far too slight a beckOf the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,That headlong ivy! not a leaf will growBut thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,Serrated like my vines, and half as green.I like such ivy; bold to leap a height’Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on gravesAs twist about a thyrsus; pretty too,(And that’s not ill) when twisted round a comb,’

Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bellTo ring with once being touched, I drew a wreathDrenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,And fastening it behind so, ... turning faced... My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouthTwice graver than his eyes.I stood there fixed—My arms up, like the caryatid, soleOf some abolished temple, helplesslyPersistent in a gesture which deridesA former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,As if from flax, not stone.‘Aurora Leigh,The earliest of Auroras!’Hand stretched outI clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tideHad caught me at my pastime, writing downMy foolish name too near upon the seaWhich drowned me with a blush as foolish. ‘You,My cousin!’The smile died out in his eyesAnd dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,For just a moment.... ‘Here’s a book, I found!No name writ on it—poems, by the form;Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek,Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’tWhereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits;I rather bring it to the witch.’‘My book!You found it‘....‘In the hollow by the stream,That beech leans down into—of which you said,The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heartAnd pines for waters.’‘Thank you.’‘Ratheryou,My cousin! that I have seen you not too muchA witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest,To be a woman also.’With a glanceThe smile rose in his eyes again, and touchedThe ivy on my forehead, light as air.I answered gravely, ‘Poets needs must beOr men or women—more’s the pity.’‘Ah,But men, and still less women, happily,Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,Since even dreaming of the stone and bronzeBrings headaches, pretty cousin, and defilesThe clean white morning dresses.’‘So you judge!Because I love the beautiful, I mustLove pleasure chiefly, and be overchargedFor ease and whiteness! Well—you know the world,And only miss your cousin; ’tis not much!—But learn this: I would rather take my partWith God’s Dead, who afford to walk in whiteYet spread His glory, than keep quiet here,And gather up my feet from even a step,For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if headsThat hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce,For my part, I choose headaches,—and today’sMy birthday.’‘Dear Aurora, choose insteadTo cure such. You have balsams.’‘I perceive!—The headache is too noble for my sex.You think the heartache would sound decenter,Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache,And altogether tolerable, exceptTo a woman.’Saying which, I loosed my wreath,And, swinging it beside me as I walked,Half petulant, half playful, as we walked,I sent a sidelong look to find his thought,—As falcon set on falconer’s finger may,With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye,Which means, ‘You’ll see—you’ll see! I’ll soon take flight—You shall not hinder.’ He, as shaking outHis hand and answering ‘Fly then,’ did not speak,Except by such a gesture. SilentlyWe paced, until, just coming into sightOf the house-windows, he abruptly caughtAt one end of the swinging wreath, and said‘Aurora!’ There I stopped short, breath and all.

‘Aurora, let’s be serious, and throw byThis game of head and heart. Life means, be sure,Both heart and head,—both active, both complete,And both in earnest. Men and women makeThe world, as head and heart make human life.Work man, work woman, since there’s work to doIn this beleaguered earth, for head and heart,And thought can never do the work of love!But work for ends, I mean for uses; notFor such sleek fringes (do you call them ends?Still less God’s glory) as we sew ourselvesUpon the velvet of those baldaquinsHeld ’twixt us and the sun. That book of yours,I have not read a page of; but I tossA rose up—it falls calyx down, you see!...The chances are that, being a woman, young,And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, ...You write as well ... and ill ... upon the whole,As other women. If as well, what then?If even a little better, ... still, what then?We want the Best in art now, or no art.The time is done for facile settings upOf minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there;The polytheists have gone out in God,That unity of Bests. No best, no God!—And so with art, we say. Give art’s divine,Direct, indubitable, real as grief,—Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselvesDivine by overcoming with mere hopeAnd most prosaic patience. You, you are youngAs Eve with nature’s daybreak on her face;But this same world you are come to, dearest coz,Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreathsTo hang upon her ruins,—and forgetsTo rhyme the cry with which she still beats backThose savage, hungry dogs that hunt her downTo the empty grave of Christ. The world’s hard pressed;The sweat of labour in the early curseHas (turning acrid in six thousand years)Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,An hour’s time ... think!... to sit upon a bankAnd hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!—Before ... where’s Moses?’‘Ah—exactly that!Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?—You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,Such sounding brass has done some actual good,(The application in a woman’s hand,If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)In colonising beehives.’‘There it is!—You play beside a death-bed like a child,Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s placeTo teach the living. None of all these things,Can women understand. You generaliseOh, nothing!—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,So sympathetic to the personal pang,Close, on each separate knife-stroke, yielding upA whole life at each wound; incapableOf deepening, widening a large lap of lifeTo hold the world-full woe. The human raceTo you means, such a child, or such a man,You saw one morning waiting in the cold,Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather upA few such cases, and, when strong, sometimesWill write of factories and of slaves, as ifYour father were a negro, and your sonA spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,—All, coloured with your blood, or otherwiseJust nothing to you. Why, I call you hardTo general suffering. Here’s the world half blindWith intellectual light, half brutalisedWith civilisation, having caught the plagueIn silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and westAlong a thousand railroads, mad with painAnd sin too!... does one woman of you all,(You who weep easily) grow pale to seeThis tiger shake his cage?—does one of youStand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,And pine and die, because of the great sumOf universal anguish?—Show me a tearWet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,Because the world is mad! You cannot count,That you should weep for this account, not you!You weep for what you know. A red-haired childSick in a fever, if you touch him once,Though but so little as with a finger-tip,Will set you weeping; but a million sick ...You could as soon weep for the rule of three,Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same worldUncomprehended by you, must remainUninfluenced by you.—Women as you are,Mere women, personal and passionate,You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives,Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!We get no Christ from you,—and verilyWe shall not get a poet, in my mind.’

‘With which conclusion you conclude’....‘But this—That you, Aurora, with the large live browAnd steady eyelids, cannot condescendTo play at art, as children play at swords,To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admiredBecause true action is impossible.You never can be satisfied with praiseWhich men give women when they judge a bookNot as mere work, but as mere woman’s work,Expressing the comparative respectWhich means the absolute scorn. ‘Oh, excellent!What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!What delicate discernment ... almost thought!The book does honour to the sex, we hold.Among our female authors we make roomFor this fair writer, and congratulateThe country that produces in these timesSuch women, competent to ... spell.’‘Stop there!’I answered—burning through his thread of talkWith a quick flame of emotion,—‘You have readMy soul, if not my book, and argue wellI would not condescend ... we will not sayTo such a kind of praise, (a worthless endIs praise of all kinds) but to such a useOf holy art and golden life. I am young,And peradventure weak—you tell me so—Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,Take thanks for justice. I would rather danceAt fairs on tight-rope, till the babies droppedTheir gingerbread for joy,—than shift the typesFor tolerable verse, intolerableTo men who act and suffer. Better far,Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.’‘You,Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes,And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are youngAurora, you and I. The world ... look round ...The world, we’re come to late, is swollen hardWith perished generations and their sins:The civiliser’s spade grinds horriblyOn dead men’s bones, and cannot turn up soilThat’s otherwise than fetid. All successProves partial failure; all advance impliesWhat’s left behind; all triumph, something crushedAt the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong:And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich,Who agonise together, rich and poor,Under and over, in the social spasmAnd crisis of the ages. Here’s an age,That makes its own vocation! here, we have steppedAcross the bounds of time! here’s nought to see,But just the rich man and just Lazarus,And both in torments; with a mediate gulph,Though not a hint of Abraham’s bosom. Who,Being man and human, can stand calmly byAnd view these things, and never tease his soulFor some great cure? No physic for this grief,In all the earth and heavens too?’‘You believeIn God, for your part?—ay? that He who makes,Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,As men plant tulips upon dunghills whenThey wish them finest?’‘True. A death-heat isThe same as life-heat, to be accurate;And in all nature is no death at all,As men account of death, as long as GodStands witnessing for life perpetually,By being just God. That’s abstract truth, I know,Philosophy, or sympathy with God:But I, I sympathise with man, not God,I think I was a man for chiefly this;And when I stand beside a dying bed,It’s death to me. Observe,—it had not muchConsoled the race of mastodons to knowBefore they went to fossil, that anonTheir place should quicken with the elephant;They were not elephants but mastodons:And I, a man, as men are now, and notAs men may be hereafter, feel with menIn the agonising present.’‘Is it so,’I said, ‘my cousin? is the world so bad,While I hear nothing of it through the trees?The world was always evil,—but so bad?’

‘So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is greyWith poring over the long sum of ill;So much for vice, so much for discontent,So much for the necessities of power,So much for the connivances of fear,—Coherent in statistical despairsWith such a total of distracted life, ...To see it down in figures on a page,Plain, silent, clear ... as God sees through the earthThe sense of all the graves!... that’s terribleFor one who is not God, and cannot rightThe wrong he looks on. May I choose indeedBut vow away my years, my means, my aims,Among the helpers, if there’s any helpIn such a social strait? The common bloodThat swings along my veins, is strong enoughTo draw me to this duty.’Then I spoke.‘I have not stood long on the strand of life,And these salt waters have had scarcely timeTo creep so high up as to wet my feet.I cannot judge these tides—I shall, perhaps.A woman’s always younger than a manAt equal years, because she is disallowedMaturing by the outdoor sun and air,And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk.Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise!You think a woman ripens as a peach,—Inthe cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now;I’m young in age, and younger still, I think,As a woman. But a child may say amenTo a bishop’s prayer and see the way it goes;And I, incapable to loose the knotOf social questions, can approve, applaudAugust compassion, christian thoughts that shootBeyond the vulgar white of personal aims.Accept my reverence.’There he glowed on meWith all his face and eyes. ‘No other help?’Said he—‘no more than so?’‘What help?’ I asked.‘You’d scorn my help,—as Nature’s self, you say,Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,Because a woman’s. Do you now turn roundAnd ask for what a woman cannot give?’

‘For what she only can, I turn and ask,’He answered, catching up my hands in his,And dropping on me from his high-eaved browThe full weight of his soul,—‘I ask for love,And that, she can; for life in fellowshipThrough bitter duties—that, I know she can;For wifehood ... will she?’‘Now,’ I said, ‘may GodBe witness ’twixt us two!’ and with the word,Meseemed I floated into a sudden lightAbove his stature,—‘am I proved too weakTo stand alone, yet strong enough to bearSuch leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,Yet competent to love, likehim?’I paused:Perhaps I darkened, as the light-house willThat turns upon the sea. ‘It’s always so!Anything does for a wife.’‘Aurora, dear,And dearly honoured’ ... he pressed in at onceWith eager utterance,—‘you translate me ill.I do not contradict my thought of youWhich is most reverent, with another thoughtFound less so. If your sex is weak for art,(And I who said so, did but honour youBy using truth in courtship) it is strongFor life and duty. Place your fecund heartIn mine, and let us blossom for the worldThat wants love’s colour in the grey of time.With all my talk I can but set you whereYou look down coldly on the arena-heapsOf headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct!The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his wayThrough such a heap of generalised distress,To the individual man with lips and eyes—Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down,And, hand in hand, we’ll go where yours shall touchThese victims, one by one! till, one by one,The formless, nameless trunk of every manShall seem to wear a head, with hair you know,And every woman catch your mother’s faceTo melt you into passion.’‘I am a girl,’I answered slowly; ‘you do well to nameMy mother’s face. Though far too early, alas,God’s hand did interpose ’twixt it and me,I know so much of love, as used to shineIn that face and another. Just so much;No more indeed at all. I have not seenSo much love since, I pray you pardon me,As answers even to make a marriage with,In this cold land of England. What you love,Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,—A wife to help your ends ... in her no end!Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,But I, being most unworthy of these and that,Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.’

‘Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?’He said.‘Why, sir, you are married long ago.You have a wife already whom you love,Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.For my part, I am scarcely meek enoughTo be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.Do I look a Hagar, think you?’‘So, you jest!’

‘Nay so, I speak in earnest,’ I replied.‘You treat of marriage too much like, at least,A chief apostle; you would bear with youA wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out?A sister of charity.’‘Then, must it beIndeed farewell? And was I so far wrongIn hope and in illusion, when I tookThe woman to be nobler than the man,Yourself the noblest woman,—in the useAnd comprehension of what love is,—love,That generates the likeness of itselfThrough all heroic duties? so far wrong,In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,Come, human creature, love and work with me,’—Instead of, ‘Lady, thou art wondrous fair,And, where the Graces walk before, the MuseWill follow at the lighting of their eyes,And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep:Turn round and love me, or I die of love.’

With quiet indignation I broke in.‘You misconceive the question like a man,Who sees a woman as the complementOf his sex merely. You forget too muchThat every creature, female as the male,Stands single in responsible act and thought,As also in birth and death. Whoever saysTo a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’Will get fair answers, if the work and love,Being good themselves, are good for her—the bestShe was born for. Women of a softer mood,Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,And catch up with it any kind of work,Indifferent, so that dear love go with it:I do not blame such women, though, for love,They pick much oakum; earth’s fanatics makeToo frequently heaven’s saints. Butme, your workIs not the best for,—nor your love the best,Nor able to commend the kind of workFor love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,To be over-bold in speaking of myself,—I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,The heavens and earth have set me, since I changedMy father’s face for theirs,—and, though your worldWere twice as wretched as you represent,Most serious work, most necessary work,As any of the economists’. Reform,Make trade a Christian possibility,And individual right no general wrong;Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,With innings for them all!... what then, indeed,If mortals were not greater by the headThan any of their prosperities? what then,Unless the artist keep up open roadsBetwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting throughThe best of your conventions with his best,The speakable, imaginable bestGod bids him speak, to prove what lies beyondBoth speech and imagination? A starved manExceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,I hold you will not compass your poor endsOf barley-feeding and material ease,Without a poet’s individualismTo work your universal. It takes a soul,To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth offThe dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,Because not poets enough to understandThat life develops from within.——For me,Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,Of work like this!... perhaps a woman’s soulAspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;And if I fail ... why, burn me up my strawLike other false works—I’ll not ask for grace,Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. IWho love my art, would never wish it lowerTo suit my stature. I may love my art.You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,Seeing that to waste true love on anything,Is womanly, past question.’I retainThe very last word which I said, that day,As you the creaking of the door, years past,Which let upon you such disabling newsYou ever after have been graver. He,His eyes, the motions in his silent mouth,Were fiery points on which my words were caught,Transfixed for ever in my memoryFor his sake, not their own. And yet I knowI did not love him ... nor he me ... that’s sure....And what I said, is unrepented of,As truth is always. Yet ... a princely man!—If hard to me, heroic for himself!He bears down on me through the slanting years,The stronger for the distance. If he had loved,Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, ...I might have been a common woman now,And happier, less known and less left alone;Perhaps a better woman after all,—With chubby children hanging on my neckTo keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vinesThat bear such fruit, are proud to stoop with it.The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.

And I, who spoke the truth then, stand upright,Still worthy of having spoken out the truth,By being content I spoke it, though it setHim there, me here.—O woman’s vile remorse,To hanker after a mere name, a show,A supposition, a potential love!Does every man who names love in our lives,Become a power for that? is love’s true thingSo much best to us, that what personates loveIs next best? A potential love, forsooth!We are not so vile. No, no—he cleaves, I think,This man, this image, ... chiefly for the wrongAnd shock he gave my life, in finding mePrecisely where the devil of my youthHad set me, on those mountain-peaks of hopeAll glittering with the dawn-dew, all erectAnd famished for the morning,—saying, whileI looked for empire and much tribute, ‘Come,I have some worthy work for thee below.Come, sweep my barns, and keep my hospitals,—And I will pay thee with a current coinWhich men give women.’As we spoke, the grassWas trod in haste beside us, and my aunt,With smile distorted by the sun,—face, voice,As much at issue with the summer-dayAs if you brought a candle out of doors,—Broke in with, ‘Romney, here!—My child, entreatYour cousin to the house, and have your talk,If girls must talk upon their birthdays. Come,’

He answered for me calmly, with pale lipsThat seemed to motion for a smile in vain.‘The talk is ended, madam, where we stand.Your brother’s daughter has dismissed me here;And all my answer can be better saidBeneath the trees, than wrong by such a wordYour house’s hospitalities. Farewell.’

With that he vanished. I could hear his heelRing bluntly in the lane, as down he leaptThe short way from us.—Then, a measured speechWithdrew me. ‘What means this, Aurora Leigh?My brother’s daughter has dismissed my guests?’

The lion in me felt the keeper’s voice,Through all its quivering dewlaps: I was quelledBefore her,—meekened to the child she knew:I prayed her pardon, said, ‘I had little thoughtTo give dismissal to a guest of hers,In letting go a friend of mine, who cameTo take me into service as a wife,—No more than that, indeed.’‘No more, no more?Pray Heaven,’ she answered, ‘that I was not mad.I could not mean to tell her to her faceThat Romney Leigh had asked me for a wife,And I refused him?’‘Did he ask?’ I said;‘I think he rather stooped to take me upFor certain uses which he found to doFor something called a wife. He never asked.’

‘What stuff!’ she answered; ‘are they queens, these girls?They must have mantles, stitched with twenty silks,Spread out upon the ground, before they’ll stepOne footstep for the noblest lover born.’

‘But I am born,’ I said with firmness, ‘I,To walk another way than his, dear aunt.’

‘You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen monthsWill walk as well as you,’ she cried in haste,‘Without a steadying finger. Why, you child,God help you, you are groping in the dark,For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps,That you, sole offspring of an opulent man,Are rich and free to choose a way to walk?You think, and it’s a reasonable thought,That I besides, being well to do in life,Will leave my handful in my niece’s handWhen death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray,Pray, child,—albeit I know you love me not,—As if you loved me, that I may not die!For when I die and leave you, out you go,(Unless I make room for you in my grave)Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother’s lamb,(Ah heaven,—that pains!)—without a right to cropA single blade of grass beneath these trees,Or cast a lamb’s small shadow on the lawn,Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here’sThe fruit you planted in your foreign loves!—Ay, there’s the fruit he planted! never lookAstonished at me with your mother’s eyes,For it was they, who set you where you are,An undowered orphan. Child, your father’s choiceOf that said mother, disinheritedHis daughter, his and hers. Men do not thinkOf sons and daughters, when they fall in love,So much more than of sisters; otherwise,He would have paused to ponder what he did,And shrunk before that clause in the entailExcluding offspring by a foreign wife,(The clause set up a hundred years agoBy a Leigh who wedded a French dancing-girlAnd had his heart danced over in return);But this man shrunk at nothing, never thoughtOf you, Aurora, any more than me—Your mother must have been a pretty thing,For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns,To make a good man, which my brother was,Unchary of the duties to his house;But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane,Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wroteDirectly on your birth, to Italy,‘I ask your baby daughter for my sonIn whom the entail now merges by the law.Betroth her to us out of love, insteadOf colder reasons, and she shall not loseBy love or law from henceforth’—so he wrote;A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane.Remember how he drew you to his kneeThe year you came here, just before he died,And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks,And wished them redder,—you remember Vane?And now his son who represents our houseAnd holds the fiefs and manors in his place,To whom reverts my pittance when I die,(Except a few books and a pair of shawls)The boy is generous like him, and preparedTo carry out his kindest word and thoughtTo you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young manIs Romney Leigh; although the sun of youthHas shone too straight upon his brain, I know,And fevered him with dreams of doing goodTo good-for-nothing people. But a wifeWill put all right, and stroke his temples coolWith healthy touches’....I broke in at that.I could not lift my heavy heart to breatheTill then, but then I raised it, and it fellIn broken words like these—‘No need to wait.The dream of doing good to ... me, at least,Is ended, without waiting for a wifeTo cool the fever for him. We’ve escapedThat danger ... thank Heaven for it.’‘You,’ she cried,‘Have got a fever. What, I talk and talkAn hour long to you,—I instruct you howYou cannot eat or drink or stand or sit,Or even die, like any decent wretchIn all this unroofed and unfurnished world,Without your cousin,—and you still maintainThere’s room ’twixt him and you, for flirting fansAnd running knots in eyebrows! You must haveA pattern lover sighing on his knee:You do not count enough a noble heart,Above book-patterns, which this very mornUnclosed itself, in two dear fathers’ names,To embrace your orphaned life! fie, fie! But stay,I write a word, and counteract this sin.’

She would have turned to leave me, but I clung.‘O sweet my father’s sister, hear my wordBefore you write yours. Cousin Vane did well,And cousin Romney well,—and I well too,In casting back with all my strength and willThe good they meant me. O my God, my God!God meant me good, too, when he hindered meFrom saying ‘yes’ this morning. If you writeA word, it shall be ‘no.’ I say no, no!I tie up ‘no’ upon His altar-horns,Quite out of reach of perjury! At leastMy soul is not a pauper; I can liveAt least my soul’s life, without alms from men;And if it must be in heaven instead of earth,Let heaven look to it,—I am not afraid,’

She seized my hands with both hers, strained them fast,And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyesRight through me, body and heart. ‘Yet, foolish Sweet,You love this man. I have watched you when he came,And when he went, and when we’ve talked of him:I am not old for nothing; I can tellThe weather-signs of love—you love this man.’

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?Who’s sorry for a gnat ... or girl?I blushed.I feel the brand upon my forehead nowStrike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feelThe felon’s iron, say, and scorn the markOf what they are not. Most illogicalIrrational nature of our womanhood,That blushes one way, feels another way,And prays, perhaps, another! After all,We cannot be the equal of the male,Who rules his blood a little.For althoughI blushed indeed, as if I loved the man,And her incisive smile, accreditingThat treason of false witness in my blush,Did bow me downward like a swathe of grassBelow its level that struck me,—I attestThe conscious skies and all their daily suns,I think I loved him not ... nor then, nor since....Nor ever. Do we love the schoolmaster,Being busy in the woods? much less, being poor,The overseer of the parish? Do we keepOur love, to pay our debts with?White and coldI grew next moment. As my blood recoiledFrom that imputed ignominy, I madeMy heart great with it. Then, at last, I spoke,—Spoke veritable words, but passionate,Too passionate perhaps ... ground up with sobsTo shapeless endings. She let fall my hands,And took her smile off, in sedate disgust,As peradventure she had touched a snake,—A dead snake, mind!—and, turning round, replied,‘We’ll leave Italian manners, if you please.I think you had an English father, child,And ought to find it possible to speakA quiet ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ like English girls,Without convulsions. In another monthWe’ll take another answer ... no, or yes.’With that, she left me in the garden-walk.

I had a father! yes, but long ago—How long it seemed that moment. Oh, how far,How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saintsWhen once gone from us! We may call againstThe lighted windows of thy fair June-heavenWhere all the souls are happy,—and not one,Not even my father, look from work or playTo ask, ‘Who is it that cries after us,Below there, in the dusk?’ Yet formerlyHe turned his face upon me quick enough,If I said ‘father.’ Now I might cry loud;The little lark reached higher with his songThan I with crying. Oh, alone, alone,—Not troubling any in heaven, nor any on earth,I stood there in the garden, and looked upThe deaf blue sky that brings the roses outOn such June mornings.You who keep accountOf crisis and transition in this life,Set down the first time Nature says plain ‘no’To some ‘yes’ in you, and walks over youIn gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all beginBy singing with the birds, and running fastWith June-days, hand in hand: but once, for all,The birds must sing against us, and the sunStrike down upon us like a friend’s sword caughtBy an enemy to slay us, while we readThe dear name on the blade which bites at us!—That’s bitter and convincing: after that,We seldom doubt that something in the largeSmooth order of creation, though no moreThan haply a man’s footstep, has gone wrong.

Some tears fell down my cheeks, and then I smiled,As those smile who have no face in the worldTo smile back to them. I had lost a friendIn Romney Leigh; the thing was sure—a friend,Who had looked at me most gently now and then,And spoken of my favourite books ... ‘our books’ ...With such a voice! Well, voice and look were nowMore utterly shut out from me, I felt,Than even my father’s. Romney now was turnedTo a benefactor, to a generous man,Who had tied himself to marry ... me, insteadOf such a woman, with low timorous lidsHe lifted with a sudden word one day,And left, perhaps, for my sake.—Ah, self-tiedBy a contract,—male Iphigenia, boundAt a fatal Aulis, for the winds to change,(But loose him—they’ll not change); he well might seemA little cold and dominant in love!He had a right to be dogmatical,This poor, good Romney. Love, to him, was madeA simple law-clause. If I married him,I would not dare to call my soul my own,Which so he had bought and paid for: every thoughtAnd every heart-beat down there in the bill,—Not one found honestly deductibleFrom any use that pleased him! He might cutMy body into coins to give awayAmong his other paupers; change my sons,While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babesOr piteous foundlings; might unquestioned setMy right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,My left hand washing in the Public Baths,What time my angel of the Ideal stretchedBoth his to me in vain! I could not claimThe poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal,And take so much as pity, from myself.

Farewell, good Romney! if I loved you even,I could but ill afford to let you beSo generous to me. Farewell, friend, since friendBetwixt us two, forsooth, must be a wordSo heavily overladen. And, since helpMust come to me from those who love me not,Farewell, all helpers—I must help myself,And am alone from henceforth.—Then I stooped,And lifted the soiled garland from the ground,And set it on my head as bitterlyAs when the Spanish king did crown the bonesOf his dead love. So be it. I preserveThat crown still,—in the drawer there! ’twas the first;The rest are like it;—those Olympian crowns,We run for, till we lose sight of the sunIn the dust of the racing chariots!After that,Before the evening fell, I had a noteWhich ran,—‘Aurora, sweet Chaldean, you readMy meaning backward like your eastern books,While I am from the west, dear. Read me nowA little plainer. Did you hate me quiteBut yesterday? I loved you for my part;I love you. If I spoke untenderlyThis morning, my beloved, pardon it;And comprehend me that I loved you so,I set you on the level of my soul,And overwashed you with the bitter brineOf some habitual thoughts. Henceforth, my flower,Be planted out of reach of any such,And lean the side you please, with all your leaves!Write woman’s verses and dream woman’s dreams;But let me feel your perfume in my home,To make my sabbath after working-days;Bloom out your youth beside me,—be my wife.’

I wrote in answer—‘We, Chaldeans, discernStill farther than we read. I know your heart,And shut it like the holy book it is,Reserved for mild-eyed saints to pore uponBetwixt their prayers at vespers. Well, you’re right,I did not surely hate you yesterday;And yet I do not love you enough to-dayTo wed you, cousin Romney. Take this word,And let it stop you as a generous manFrom speaking farther. You may tease, indeed,And blow about my feelings, or my leaves,—And here’s my aunt will help you with east winds,And break a stalk, perhaps, tormenting me;But certain flowers grow near as deep as trees,And, cousin, you’ll not move my root, not you,With all your confluent storms. Then let me growWithin my wayside hedge, and pass your way!This flower has never as much to say to youAs the antique tomb which said to travellers, ‘Pause,’‘Siste, viator.’ Ending thus, I signed.

The next week passed in silence, so the next,And several after: Romney did not come,Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on,As if my heart were kept beneath a glass,And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,To see and hear it tick. I could not sit,Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down,Not sew on steadily, nor drop a stitchAnd a sigh with it, but I felt her looksStill cleaving to me, like the sucking aspTo Cleopatra’s breast, persistentlyThrough the intermittent pantings. Being observed,When observation is not sympathy,Is just being tortured. If she said a word,A ‘thank you,’ or an ‘if it please you, dear,’She meant a commination, or, at best,An exorcism against the devildomWhich plainly held me. So with all the house.Susannah could not stand and twist my hair,Without such glancing at the looking-glassTo see my face there, that she missed the plait:And John,—I never sent my plate for soup,Or did not send it, but the foolish JohnResolved the problem, ’twixt his napkined thumbs,Of what was signified by taking soupOr choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped inOn morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,Smiled admonition, sate uneasily,And talked with measured, emphasised reserve,Of parish news, like doctors to the sick,When not called in,—as if, with leave to speak,They might say something. Nay, the very dogWould watch me from his sun-patch on the floor,In alternation with the large black flyNot yet in reach of snapping. So I lived.

A Roman died so; smeared with honey, teasedBy insects, stared to torture by the noon:And many patient souls ’neath English roofsHave died like Romans. I, in looking back,Wish only, now, I had borne the plague of allWith meeker spirits than were rife in Rome.

For, on the sixth week, the dead sea broke up,Dashed suddenly through beneath the heel of HimWho stands upon the sea and earth, and swearsTime shall be nevermore. The clock struck nineThat morning, too,—no lark was out of tune;The hidden farms among the hills, breathed straightTheir smoke toward heaven; the lime-tree scarcely stirredBeneath the blue weight of the cloudless sky,Though still the July air came floating throughThe woodbine at my window, in and out,With touches of the out-door country-newsFor a bending forehead. There I sate, and wishedThat morning-truce of God would last till eve,Or longer. ‘Sleep,’ I thought, ‘late sleepers,—sleep,And spare me yet, the burden of your eyes.’

Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriekTore upwards from the bottom of the house.Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks,The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,And shudder through its passages and stairsWith slam of doors and clash of bells.—I sprang,I stood up in the middle of the room,And there confronted at my chamber-door,A white face,—shivering, ineffectual lips.

‘Come, come,’ they tried to utter, and I went;As if a ghost had drawn me at the pointOf a fiery finger through the uneven dark,I went with reeling footsteps down the stair,Nor asked a question.There she sate, my aunt,—Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bedFor that night’s sleeping ... yet slept well. My God,The dumb derision of that grey, peaked faceConcluded something grave against the sun,Which filled the chamber with its July burstWhen Susan drew the curtains, ignorantOf who sate open-eyed behind her. There,She sate ... it sate ... we said ‘she’ yesterday ...And held a letter with unbroken seal,As Susan gave it to her hand last night:All night she had held it. If its news referredTo duchies or to dunghills, not an inchShe’d budge, ’twas obvious, for such worthless odds:Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburnedTheir spheric limitations, swallowing upLike wax the azure spaces, could they forceThose open eyes to wink once. What last sightHad left them blank and flat so,—drawing outThe faculty of vision from the roots,As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?

Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?That dogged me up and down the hours and days,A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?And did I pray, a half hour back, but so,To escape the burden of those eyes ... those eyes?‘Sleep late’ I said.—Why now, indeed, they sleep.God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,A gauntlet with a gift in’t. Every wishIs like a prayer ... with God.I had my wish,—To read and meditate the thing I would,To fashion all my life upon my thought,And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, noneCould disapprove me, vex me, hamper me.Full ground-room, in this desert newly made,For Babylon or Balbec,—when the breath,Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns!The heir came over on the funeral day,And we two cousins met before the dead,With two pale faces. Was it death or lifeThat moved us? When the will was read and done,The official guest and witnesses withdrawn,We rose up in a silence almost hard,And looked at one another. Then I said,‘Farewell, my cousin.’But he touched, just touchedMy hatstrings tied for going, (at the doorThe carriage stood to take me) and said low,His voice a little unsteady through his smile,‘Siste, viator.’‘Is there time,’ I asked,‘In these last days of railroads, to stop shortLike Cæsar’s chariot (weighing half a ton)On the Appian road, for morals?’‘There is time,’He answered grave, ‘for necessary words,Inclusive, trust me, of no epitaphOn man or act, my cousin. We have readA will, which gives you all the personal goodsAnd funded monies of your aunt.’‘I thankHer memory for it. With three hundred poundsWe buy in England even, clear standing-roomTo stand and work in. Only two hours since,I fancied I was poor.’‘And, cousin, stillYou’re richer than you fancy. The will says,Three hundred pounds, and any other sumOf which the said testatrix dies possessed.I say she died possessed of other sums.’

‘Dear Romney, need we chronicle the pence?I’m richer than I thought—that’s evident.Enough so.’‘Listen rather. You’ve to doWith business and a cousin,’ he resumed,‘And both, I fear, need patience. Here’s the fact.The other sum (thereisanother sum,Unspecified in any will which datesAfter possession, yet bequeathed as muchAnd clearly as those said three hundred pounds)Is thirty thousand. You will have it paidWhen?... where? My duty troubles you with words.’

He struck the iron when the bar was hot;No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks.‘Pause there! I thank you. You are delicateIn glosing gifts;—but I, who share your blood,Am rather made for giving, like yourself,Than taking, like your pensioners. Farewell.’

He stopped me with a gesture of calm pride.‘A Leigh,’ he said, ‘gives largesse and gives love,But gloses neither: if a Leigh could glose,He would not do it, moreover, to a Leigh,With blood trained up along nine centuriesTo hound and hate a lie, from eyes like yours.And now we’ll make the rest as clear; your auntPossessed these monies.’‘You will make it clear,My cousin, as the honour of us both,Or one of us speaks vainly—that’s not I.My aunt possessed this sum,—inheritedFrom whom, and when? bring documents, prove dates.’

‘Why now indeed you throw your bonnet off,As if you had time left for a logarithm!The faith’s the want. Dear cousin, give me faith,And you shall walk this road with silken shoes,As clean as any lady of our houseSupposed the proudest. Oh, I comprehendThe whole position from your point of sight.I oust you from your father’s halls and lands,And make you poor by getting rich—that’s law;Considering which, in common circumstance,You would not scruple to accept from meSome compensation, some sufficiencyOf income—that were justice; but, alas,I love you ... that’s mere nature!—you rejectMy love ... that’s nature also;—and at once,You cannot, from a suitor disallowed,A hand thrown back as mine is, into yoursReceive a doit, a farthing, ... not for the world!That’s etiquette with women, obviouslyExceeding claim of nature, law, and right,Unanswerable to all. I grant, you see,The case as you conceive it,—leave you roomTo sweep your ample skirts of womanhood;While, standing humbly squeezed against the wall,I own myself excluded from being just,Restrained from paying indubitable debts,Because denied from giving you my soul—That’s my misfortune!—I submit to itAs if, in some more reasonable age,’Twould not be less inevitable. Enough.You’ll trust me, cousin, as a gentleman,To keep your honour, as you count it, pure,—Your scruples (just as if I thought them wise)Safe and inviolate from gifts of mine.’

I answered mild but earnest. ‘I believeIn no one’s honour which another keeps,Nor man’s nor woman’s. As I keep, myself,My truth and my religion, I deputeNo father, though I had one this side death,Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you,Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh,To keep my honour pure. You face, to-day,A man who wants instruction, mark me, notA woman who wants protection. As to a man,Show manhood, speak out plainly, be preciseWith facts and dates. My aunt inheritedThis sum, you say—’‘I said she died possessedOf this, dear cousin.’‘Not by heritage.Thank you: we’re getting to the facts at last.Perhaps she played at commerce with a shipWhich came in heavy with Australian gold?Or touched a lottery with her finger-end,Which tumbled on a sudden into her lapSome old Rhine tower or principality?Perhaps she had to do with a marineSub-transatlantic railroad, which pre-paysAs well as pre-supposes? or perhapsSome stale ancestral debt was after-paidBy a hundred years, and took her by surprise?—You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.’

‘You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride,—The truth is not afraid of hurting you.You’ll find no cause, in all your scruples, whyYour aunt should cavil at a deed of gift’Twixt her and me.’‘I thought so—ah! a gift.’

‘You naturally thought so,’ he resumed.‘A very natural gift.’‘A gift, a gift!Her individual life being stranded highAbove all want, approaching opulence,Too haughty was she to accept a giftWithout some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see,—A gift intended plainly for her heirs,And so accepted ... if accepted ... ah,Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps,Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you,If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?’

He answered gently, ‘Need you tremble and pantLike a netted lioness? is’t my fault, mine,That you’re a grand wild creature of the woods,And hate the stall built for you? Any way,Though triply netted, need you glare at me?I do not hold the cords of such a net;You’re free from me, Aurora!’‘Now may GodDeliver me from this strait! This gift of yoursWas tendered ... when? accepted ... when?’ I asked.‘A month ... a fortnight since? Six weeks agoIt was not tendered. By a word she dropped,I know it was not tendered nor received.When was it? bring your dates.’‘What matters when?A half-hour ere she died, or a half-year,Secured the gift, maintains the heritageInviolable with law. As easy pluckThe golden stars from heaven’s embroidered stole,To pin them on the grey side of this earth,As make you poor again, thank God.’‘Not poorNor clean again from henceforth, you thank God?Well, sir—I ask you ... I insist at need, ...Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.’

‘The day before her death-day,’ he replied,‘The gift was in her hands. We’ll find that deed,And certify that date to you.’As oneWho has climbed a mountain-height and carried upHis own heart climbing, panting in his throatWith the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last,Looks back in triumph—so I stood and looked:‘Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the topOf this steep question, and may rest, I think.But first,—I pray you pardon, that the shockAnd surge of natural feeling and eventHad made me oblivious of acquainting youThat this, this letter ... unread, mark,—still sealed,Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand:That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address,Which could not find her though you wrote it clear,—I know your writing, Romney,—recogniseThe open-heartedA, the liberal sweepOf theG. Now listen,—let us understand;You will not find that famous deed of gift,Unless you find it in the letter here,Which, not being mine, I give you back.—RefuseTo take the letter? well then—you and I,As writer and as heiress, open itTogether, by your leave.—Exactly so:The words in which the noble offering’s made,Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own,The proudest and most delicate heart alive,Distracted from the measure of the giftBy such a grace in giving, might acceptYour largesse without thinking any moreOf the burthen of it, than King SolomonConsidered, when he wore his holy ringCharáctered over with the ineffable spell,How many carats of fine gold made upIts money-value. So, Leigh gives to Leigh—Or rather, might have given, observe!—for that’sThe point we come to. Here’s a proof of gift,But here’s no proof, sir, of acceptancy,But rather, disproof. Death’s black dust, being blown,Infiltrated through every secret foldOf this sealed letter by a puff of fate,Dried up for ever the fresh-written ink,Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace,And left these fragments.’As I spoke, I toreThe paper up and down, and down and upAnd crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands,As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and raptBy a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,Drop slow, and strew the melancholy groundBefore the amazèd hills ... why, so, indeed,I’m writing like a poet, somewhat largeIn the type of the image,—and exaggerateA small thing with a great thing, topping it!—But then I’m thinking how his eyes looked ... his,With what despondent and surprised reproach!I think the tears were in them, as he looked—I think the manly mouth just trembled. ThenHe broke the silence.‘I may ask, perhaps,Although no stranger ... only Romney Leigh,Which means still less ... than Vincent Carrington ...Your plans in going hence, and where you go.This cannot be a secret.’‘All my lifeIs open to you, cousin. I go henceTo London, to the gathering-place of souls,To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;Harmoniously for others, if indeedA woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enoughTo carry the whole octave (that’s to prove)Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.Pray God be with me, Romney.’‘Ah, poor child,Who fight against the mother’s ‘tiring hand,And choose the headsman’s! May God change his worldFor your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven,And juster than I have found you!’But I paused.‘And you, my cousin?’—‘I,’ he said,—‘you ask?You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds,And fain would know the end of everything,Of cousins, therefore, with the rest. For me,Aurora, I’ve my work; you know my work;And, having missed this year some personal hope,I must beware the rather that I missNo reasonable duty. While you singYour happy pastorals of the meads and trees,Bethink you that I go to impress and proveOn stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf,Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself,And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice,To make it vocal. While you ask of menYour audience, I may get their leave perhapsFor hungry orphans to say audibly‘We’re hungry, see,’—for beaten and bullied wivesTo hold their unweaned babies up in sight,Whom orphanage would better; and for allTo speak and claim their portion ... by no meansOf the soil, ... but of the sweat in tilling it,—Since this is now-a-days turned privilege,To have only God’s curse on us, and not man’s.Such work I have for doing, elbow-deepIn social problems,—as you tie your rhymes,To draw my uses to cohere with needs,And bring the uneven world back to its round;Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at leastTo smoother issues, some abysmal cracksAnd feuds of earth, intestine heats have madeTo keep men separate,—using sorry shiftsOf hospitals, almshouses, infant schools,And other practical stuff of partial good,You lovers of the beautiful and whole,Despise by system.’‘Idespise? The scornIs yours, my cousin. Poets become such,Through scorning nothing. You decry them forThe good of beauty, sung and taught by them,While they respect your practical partial goodAs being a part of beauty’s self. Adieu!When God helps all the workers for his world,The singers shall have help of Him, not last.’

He smiled as men smile when they will not speakBecause of something bitter in the thought;And still I feel his melancholy eyesLook judgment on me. It is seven years since:I know not if ’twas pity or ’twas scornHas made them so far-reaching: judge it yeWho have had to do with pity more than love.And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,To other ways, from equal men. But so,Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,And, in between us, rushed the torrent-worldTo blanch our faces like divided rocks,And bar for ever mutual sight and touchExcept through swirl of spray and all that roar.

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