SEVENTH BOOK.

SEVENTH BOOK.

‘Thewoman’s motive? shall we daub ourselvesWith finding roots for nettles? ’tis soft clayAnd easily explored. She had the means,The monies, by the lady’s liberal grace,In trust for that Australian scheme and me,Which so, that she might clutch with both her hands,And chink to her naughty uses undisturbed,She served me (after all it was not strange;’Twas only what my mother would have done)A motherly, unmerciful, good turn.‘Well, after. There are nettles everywhere,But smooth green grasses are more common still;The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud;A miller’s wife at Clichy took me inAnd spent her pity on me,—made me calmAnd merely very reasonably sad.She found me a servant’s place in Paris whereI tried to take the cast-off life again,And stood as quiet as a beaten assWho, having fallen through overloads, stands upTo let them charge him with another pack.‘A few months, so. My mistress, young and light,Was easy with me, less for kindness thanBecause she led, herself, an easy timeBetwixt her lover and her looking-glass,Scarce knowing which way she was praised the most.She felt so pretty and so pleased all dayShe could not take the trouble to be cross,But, sometimes, as I stooped to tie her shoe,Would tap me softly with her slender foot,Still restless with the last night’s dancing in’t,And say, ‘Fie, pale-face! are you English girlsAll grave and silent? mass-book still, and Lent?And first-communion colours on your cheeks,Worn past the time for’t? little fool, be gay!’At which she vanished, like a fairy, throughA gap of silver laughter.‘Came an hourWhen all went otherwise. She did not speak,But clenched her brows, and clipped me with her eyesAs if a viper with a pair of tongs,Too far for any touch, yet near enoughTo view the writhing creature,—then at last;‘Stand still there, in the holy Virgin’s name,Thou Marian; thou’rt no reputable girl,Although sufficient dull for twenty saints!I think thou mock’st me and my house,’ she said;‘Confess, thou’lt be a mother in a month,Thou mask of saintship.’‘Could I answer her?The light broke in so: it meantthatthen,that?I had not thought of that, in all my thoughts,—Through all the cold, numb aching of my brow,Through all the heaving of impatient lifeWhich threw me on death at intervals,—through allThe upbreak of the fountains of my heartThe rains had swelled too large: it could meanthat?Did God make mothers out of victims, then,And set such pure amens to hideous deeds?Why not? He overblows an ugly graveWith violets which blossom in the spring.AndIcould be a mother in a month!I hope it was not wicked to be glad.I lifted up my voice and wept, and laughed,To heaven, not her, until it tore my throat.‘Confess, confess!’ what was there to confess,Except man’s cruelty, except my wrong?Except this anguish, or this ecstasy?This shame, or glory? The light woman thereWas small to take it in: an acorn-cupWould take the sea in sooner.‘Good,’ she cried;Unmarried and a mother, and she laughs!These unchaste girls are always impudent.Get out, intriguer! leave my house, and trot:I wonder you should look me in the face,With such a filthy secret.’‘Then I rolledMy scanty bundle up, and went my way,Washed white with weeping, shuddering head and footWith blind hysteric passion, staggering forthBeyond those doors. ’Twas natural, of course,She should not ask me where I meant to sleep;I might sleep well beneath the heavy Seine,Like others of my sort; the bed was laidFor us. But any woman, womanly,Had thought of him who should be in a month,The sinless babe that should be in a month,And if by chance he might be warmer housedThan underneath such dreary, dripping eaves.’I broke on Marian there. ‘Yet she herself,A wife, I think, had scandals of her own,A lover, not her husband.’‘Ay,’ she said,‘But gold and meal are measured otherwise;I learnt so much at school,’ said Marian Erle.‘O crooked world,’ I cried, ‘ridiculousIf not so lamentable! It’s the wayWith these light women of a thrifty vice,My Marian,—always hard upon the rentIn any sister’s virtue! while they keepTheir chastity so darned with perfidy,That, though a rag itself, it looks as wellAcross a street, in balcony or coach,As any stronger stuff might. For my part,I’d rather take the wind-side of the stewsThan touch such women with my finger-end!They top the poor street-walker by their lie,And look the better for being so much worse:The devil’s most devilish when respectable.But you, dear, and your story.’‘All the restIs here,’ she said, and signed upon the child.‘I found a mistress-sempstress who was kindAnd let me sew in peace among her girls;And what was better than to draw the threadsAll day and half the night, for him, and him?And so I lived for him, and so he lives,And so I know, by this time, God lives too.’She smiled beyond the sun, and ended so,And all my soul rose up to take her partAgainst the world’s successes, virtues, fames.‘Come with me, sweetest sister,’ I returned,‘And sit within my house, and do me goodFrom henceforth, thou and thine! ye are my ownFrom henceforth. I am lonely in the world,And thou art lonely, and the child is halfAn orphan. Come,—and, henceforth, thou and IBeing still together, will not miss a friend,Nor he a father, since two mothers shallMake that up to him. I am journeying south,And, in my Tuscan home I’ll find a niche,And set thee there, my saint, the child and thee,And burn the lights of love before thy face,And ever at thy sweet look cross myselfFrom mixing with the world’s prosperities;That so, in gravity and holy calm,We two may live on toward the truer life.’She looked me in the face and answered not,Nor signed she was unworthy, nor gave thanks,But took the sleeping child and held it outTo meet my kiss, as if requiting meAnd trusting me at once. And thus, at once,I carried him and her to where I lived;She’s there now, in the little room, asleep,I hear the soft child-breathing through the door;And all three of us, at to-morrow’s break,Pass onward, homeward, to our Italy.Oh, Romney Leigh, I have your debts to pay,And I’ll be just and pay them.But yourself!To pay your debts is scarcely difficult;To buy your life is nearly impossible,Being sold away to Lamia. My head aches;I cannot see my road along this dark;Nor can I creep and grope, as fits the dark,For these foot-catching robes of womanhood:A man might walk a little ... but I!—He lovesThe Lamia-woman,—and I, write to himWhat stops his marriage, and destroys his peace,—Or what, perhaps, shall simply trouble him,Until she only need to touch his sleeveWith just a finger’s tremulous white flame,Saying, ‘Ah,—Aurora Leigh! a pretty tale,A very pretty poet! I can guessThe motive’—then, to catch his eyes in hers,And vow she does not wonder,—and they twoTo break in laughter, as the sea alongA melancholy coast, and float up higher,In such a laugh, their fatal weeds of love!Ay, fatal, ay. And who shall answer meFate has not hurried tides; and if to-nightMy letter would not be a night too late,—An arrow shot into a man that’s dead,To prove a vain intention? Would I showThe new wife vile, to make the husband mad?No, Lamia! shut the shutters, bar the doorsFrom every glimmer on thy serpent-skin!I will not let thy hideous secret outTo agonise the man I love—I meanThe friend I love ... as friends love.It is strange,To-day while Marian told her story, likeTo absorb most listeners, how I listened chiefTo a voice not hers, nor yet that enemy’s,Nor God’s in wrath, ... but one that mixed with mineLong years ago, among the garden-trees,And said tome, tometoo, ‘Be my wife,Aurora!’ It is strange, with what a swellOf yearning passion, as snow of ghostsMight beat against the impervious doors of heaven,I thought, ‘Now, if I had been a woman, suchAs God made women, to save men by love,—By just my love I might have saved this man,And made a nobler poem for the worldThan all I have failed in.’ But I failed besidesIn this; and now he’s lost! through me alone!And, by my only fault, his empty houseSucks in, at this same hour, a wind from hellTo keep his hearth cold, make his casements creakFor ever to the tune of plague and sin—O Romney, O my Romney, O my friend!My cousin and friend! my helper, when I would,My love, that might be! mine!Why, how one weepsWhen one’s too weary! Were a witness by,He’d say some folly ... that I loved the man,Who knows?... and make me laugh again for scorn.At strongest, women are as weak in flesh,As men, at weakest, vilest, are in soul:So, hard for women to keep pace with men!As well give up at once, sit down at once,And weep as I do. Tears, tears!why, we weep?’Tis worth enquiry?—That we’ve shamed a life,Or lost a love, or missed a world, perhaps?By no means. Simply, that we’ve walked too far,Or talked too much, or felt the wind i’ the east,—And so we weep, as if both body and soulBroke up in water—this way.Poor mixed ragsForsooth we’re made of, like those other dollsThat lean with pretty faces into fairs.It seems as if I had a man in me,Despising such a woman.Yet indeed,To see a wrong or suffering moves us allTo undo it, though we should undo ourselves;Ay, all the more, that we undo ourselves;That’s womanly, past doubt, and not ill-moved.A natural movement, therefore, on my part,To fill the chair up of my cousin’s wife,And save him from a devil’s company!We’re all so,—made so—’tis our woman’s tradeTo suffer torment for another’s ease.The world’s male chivalry has perished out,But women are knights-errant to the last;And, if Cervantes had been greater still,He had made his Don a Donna.So it clears,And so we rain our skies blue.Put awayThis weakness. If, as I have just now said,A man’s within me,—let him act himself,Ignoring the poor conscious trouble of bloodThat’s called the woman merely. I will writePlain words to England,—if too late, too late,—If ill-accounted, then accounted ill;We’ll trust the heavens with something.‘Dear Lord Howe,You’ll find a story on another leafThat’s Marian Erle’s,—what noble friend of yoursShe trusted once, through what flagitious meansTo what disastrous ends;—the story’s true.I found her wandering on the Paris quays,A babe upon her breast,—unnaturalUnseasonable outcast on such snowsUnthawed to this time. I will tax in thisYour friendship, friend,—if that convicted SheBe not his wife yet, to denounce the factsTo himself,—but, otherwise, to let them passOn tip-toe like escaping murderers,And tell my cousin, merely—Marian lives,Is found, and finds her home with such a friend,Myself, Aurora. Which good news, ‘She’s found,’Will help to make him merry in his love:I send it, tell him, for my marriage gift,As good as orange-water for the nerves,Or perfumed gloves for headaches,—though awareThat he, except of love, is scarcely sick;I mean the new love this time, ... since last year.Such quick forgetting on the part of men!Is any shrewder trick upon the cardsTo enrich them? pray instruct me how it’s done.First, clubs,—and while you look at clubs, it’s spades;That’s prodigy. The lightning strikes a man,And when we think to find him dead and charred ...Why, there he is on a sudden, playing pipesBeneath the splintered elm-tree! Crime and shameAnd all their hoggery trample your smooth world,Nor leave more foot-marks than Apollo’s kine,Whose hoofs were muffled by the thieving godIn tamarisk-leaves and myrtle. I’m so sad,So weary and sad to-night, I’m somewhat sour,—Forgive me. To be blue and shrew at once,Exceeds all toleration except yours;But yours, I know, is infinite. Farewell.To-morrow we take train for Italy.Speak gently of me to your gracious wife,As one, however far, shall yet be nearIn loving wishes to your house.’I sign.And now I’ll loose my heart upon a page,This—‘Lady Waldemar, I’m very gladI never liked you; which you knew so well,You spared me, in your turn, to like me much.Your liking surely had done worse for meThan has your loathing, though the last appearsSufficiently unscrupulous to hurt,And not afraid of judgment. Now, there’s spaceBetween our faces,—I stand off, as ifI judged a stranger’s portrait and pronouncedIndifferently the type was good or bad:What matter to me that the lines are false,I ask you? Did I ever ink my lipsBy drawing your name through them as a friend’s,Or touch your hands as lovers do? thank GodI never did: and, since you’re proved so vile,Ay, vile, I say,—we’ll show it presently,—I’m not obliged to nurse my friend in you,Or wash out my own blots, in counting yours,Or even excuse myself to honest soulsWho seek to touch my lip or clasp my palm,—‘Alas, but Lady Waldemar came first!’‘’Tis true, by this time, you may near me soThat you’re my cousin’s wife. You’ve gambled deepAs Lucifer, and won the morning-starIn that case,—and the noble house of LeighMust henceforth with its good roof shelter you:I cannot speak and burn you up betweenThose rafters, I who am born a Leigh,—nor speakAnd pierce your breast through Romney’s, I who liveHis friend and cousin!—so, you are safe. You twoMust grow together like the tares and wheatTill God’s great fire.—But make the best of time.‘And hide this letter! let it speak no moreThan I shall, how you tricked poor Marian Erle,And set her own love digging her own graveWithin her green hope’s pretty garden-ground;Ay, sent her forth with some one of your sortTo a wicked house in France,—from which she fledWith curses in her eyes and ears and throat,Her whole soul choked with curses,—mad, in short,And madly scouring up and down for weeksThe foreign hedgeless country, lone and lost,—So innocent, male-fiends might slink withinRemote hell-corners, seeing her so defiled!‘But you,—you are a woman and more bold.To do you justice, you’d not shrink to face ...We’ll say, the unfledged life in the other room,Which, treading down God’s corn, you trod in sightOf all the dogs, in reach of all the guns,—Ay, Marian’s babe, her poor unfathered child,Her yearling babe!—you’d face him when he wakesAnd opens up his wonderful blue eyes:You’d meet them and not wink perhaps, nor fearGod’s triumph in them and supreme revenge,So, righting His creation’s balance-scale(You pulled as low as Tophet) to the topOf most celestial innocence! For meWho am not as bold, I own those infant eyesHave set me praying.‘While they look at heaven,No need of protestation in my wordsAgainst the place you’ve made them! let them look!They’ll do your business with the heavens, be sure:I spare you common curses.‘Ponder this.If haply you’re the wife of Romney Leigh,(For which inheritance beyond your birthYou sold that poisonous porridge called your soul)I charge you, be his faithful and true wife!Keep warm his hearth and clean his board, and, whenHe speaks, be quick with your obedience;Still grind your paltry wants and low desiresTo dust beneath his heel; though, even thus,The ground must hurt him,—it was writ of old,‘Ye shall not yoke together ox and ass,’The nobler and ignobler. Ay, but youShall do your part as well as such ill thingsCan do aught good. You shall not vex him,—mark,You shall not vex him, ... jar him when he’s sad,Or cross him when he’s eager. UnderstandTo trick him with apparent sympathies,Nor let him see thee in the face too nearAnd unlearn thy sweet seeming. Pay the priceOf lies, by being constrained to lie on still;’Tis easy for thy sort: a million moreWill scarcely damn thee deeper.‘Doing which,You are very safe from Marian and myself:We’ll breathe as softly as the infant here,And stir no dangerous embers. Fail a point,And show our Romney wounded, ill-content,Tormented in his home, ... we open mouth,And such a noise will follow, the last trump’sWill scarcely seem more dreadful, even to you;You’ll have no pipers after: Romney will(I know him) push you forth as none of his,All other men declaring it well done;While women, even the worst, your like, will drawTheir skirts back, not to brush you in the street;And so I warn you. I’m ... Aurora Leigh.’The letter written, I felt satisfied.The ashes, smouldering in me, were thrown outBy handfuls from me: I had writ my heartAnd wept my tears, and now was cool and calm;And, going straightway to the neighbouring room,I lifted up the curtains of the bedWhere Marian Erle, the babe upon her arm,Both faces leaned together like a pairOf folded innocences, self-complete,Each smiling from the other, smiled and slept.There seemed no sin, no shame, no wrath, no grief.I felt, she too, had spoken words that night,But softer certainly, and said to God,—Who laughs in heaven perhaps, that such as IShould make ado for such as she.—‘Defiled’I wrote? ‘defiled’ I thought her? Stoop,Stoop lower, Aurora! get the angels’ leaveTo creep in somewhere, humbly, on your knees,Within this round of sequestration whiteIn which they have wrapt earth’s foundlings, heaven’s elect!The next day, we took train to ItalyAnd fled on southward in the roar of steam.The marriage-bells of Romney must be loud,To sound so clear through all! I was not well;And truly, though the truth is like a jest,I could not choose but fancy, half the way,I stood alone i’ the belfry, fifty bellsOf naked iron, mad with merriment,(As one who laughs and cannot stop himself)All clanking at me, in me, over me,Until I shrieked a shriek I could not hear,And swooned with noise,—but still, along my swoon,Was ’ware the baffled changes backward rang,Prepared, at each emerging sense, to beatAnd crash it out with clangour. I was weak;I struggled for the posture of my soulIn upright consciousness of place and time,But evermore, ’twixt waking and asleep,Slipped somehow, staggered, caught at Marian’s eyesA moment, (it is very good for strengthTo know that some one needs you to be strong)And so recovered what I called myself,For that time.I just knew it when we sweptAbove the old roofs of Dijon. Lyons droppedA spark into the night, half trodden outUnseen. But presently the winding RhoneWashed out the moonlight large along his banks,Which strained their yielding curves out clear and cleanTo hold it,—shadow of town and castle blurredUpon the hurrying river. Such an airBlew thence upon the forehead,—half an airAnd half a water,—that I leaned and looked;Then, turning back on Marian, smiled to markThat she looked only on her child, who slept,His face towards the moon too.So we passedThe liberal open country and the close,And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedgeBy great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,And lets it in at once: the train swept inAthrob with effort, trembling with resolve,The fierce denouncing whistle wailing onAnd dying off smothered in the shuddering dark,While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressedAs other Titans, underneath the pileAnd nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!—Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wideRich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,(As if they entertained i’ the name of France)While, down their straining sides, streamed manifestA soil as red as Charlemagne’s knightly blood,To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,‘Marseilles!’ And lo, the city of Marseilles,With all her ships behind her, and beyond,The scimitar of ever-shining sea,For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!That night we spent between the purple heavenAnd purple water: I think Marian slept;But I, as a dog a-watch for his master’s foot,Who cannot sleep or eat before he hears,I sate upon the deck and watched all night,And listened through the stars for Italy.Those marriage-bells I spoke of, sounded far,As some child’s go-cart in the street beneathTo a dying man who will not pass the day,And knows it, holding by a hand he loves.I, too, sate quiet, satisfied with death,Sate silent: I could hear my own soul speak,And had my friend,—for Nature comes sometimesAnd says, ‘I am ambassador for God.’I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,One straining past another along the shore,The way of grand dull Odyssean ghostsAthirst to drink the cool blue wine of seasAnd stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peakThey stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian beltOf intense sea betwixt them and the ship,Down all their sides the misty olive-woodsDissolving in the weak congenial moon,And still disclosing some brown convent-towerThat seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—Or many a little lighted village, droptLike a fallen star, upon so high a point,You wonder what can keep it in its placeFrom sliding headlong with the waterfallsWhich drop and powder all the myrtle-grovesWith spray of silver. Thus my ItalyWas stealing on us. Genoa broke with day;The Doria’s long pale palace striking out,From green hills in advance of the white town,A marble finger dominant to ships,Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.But then I did not think, ‘my Italy,’I thought, ‘my father!’ O my father’s house,Without his presence!—Places are too muchOr else too little, for immortal man;Too little, when love’s May o’ergrows the ground,—Too much, when that luxuriant wealth of greenIs rustling to our ankles in dead leaves.’Tis only good to be, or here or there,Because we had a dream on such a stone,Or this or that,—but, once beings wholly waked,And come back to the stone without the dream,We trip upon’t,—alas! and hurt ourselves;Or else it falls on us and grinds us flat,The heaviest grave-stone on this burying earth.—But while I stood and mused, a quiet touchFell light upon my arm, and, turning round,A pair of moistened eyes convicted mine.‘What, Marian! is the babe astir so soon?’‘He sleeps,’ she answered; ‘I have crept up thrice,And seen you sitting, standing, still at watch.I thought it did you good till now, but now’ ...‘But now,’ I said, ‘you leave the child alone.’‘Andyou’realone,’ she answered,—and she lookedAs if I, too, were something. Sweet the helpOf one we have helped! Thanks, Marian, for that help.I found a house, at Florence, on the hillOf Bellosguardo. ’Tis a tower that keepsA post of double-observation o’erThe valley of Arno (holding as a handThe outspread city) straight toward FiesoleAnd Mount Morello and the setting sun,—The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,Which sunrise fills as full as crystal cupsWine-filled, and red to the brim because it’s red.No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseenBy dwellers at my villa: morn and eveWere magnified before us in the pureIllimitable space and pause of sky,Intense as angels’ garments blanched with God,Less blue than radiant. From the outer wallOf the garden, dropped the mystic floating greyOf olive-trees, (with interruptions greenFrom maize and vine) until ’twas caught and tornOn that abrupt black line of cypressesWhich signed the way to Florence. BeautifulThe city lay along the ample vale,Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;The river trailing like a silver cordThrough all, and curling loosely, both beforeAnd after, over the whole stretch of landSown whitely up and down its opposite slopes,With farms and villas.Many weeks had passed,No word was granted.—Last, a letter cameFrom Vincent Carrington:—‘My dear Miss Leigh,You’ve been as silent as a poet should,When any other man is sure to speak.If sick, if vexed, if dumb, a silver-pieceWill split a man’s tongue,—straight he speaks and says,‘Received that cheque.’ But you!... I send you fundsTo Paris, and you make no sign at all.Remember I’m responsible and waitA sign of you, Miss Leigh.‘Meantime your bookIs eloquent as if you were not dumb;And common critics, ordinarily deafTo such fine meanings, and, like deaf men, lothTo seem deaf, answering chance-wise, yes or no,‘It must be,’ or ‘it must not,’ (most pronouncedWhen least convinced) pronounce for once aright:You’d think they really heard,—and so they do ...The burr of three or four who really hearAnd praise your book aright: Fame’s smallest trumpIs a great ear-trumpet for the deaf as posts,No other being effective. Fear not, friend;We think, here, you have written a good book,And you, a woman! It was in you—yes,I felt ’twas in you: yet I doubted halfIf that od-force of German ReichenbachWhich still from female finger-tips burns blue,Could strike out, as our masculine white heats,To quicken a man. Forgive me. All my heartIs quick with yours, since, just a fortnight since,I read your book and loved it.‘Will you loveMy wife, too? Here’s my secret, I might keepA month more from you! but I yield it upBecause I know you’ll write the sooner for’t,—Most women (of your height even) counting loveLife’s only serious business. Who’s my wifeThat shall be in a month? you ask? nor guess?Remember what a pair of topaz eyesYou once detected, turned against the wall,That morning, in my London painting-room;The face half-sketched, and slurred; the eyes alone!But you ... you caught them up with yours, and said‘Kate Ward’s eyes, surely.’—Now, I own the truth,I had thrown them there to keep them safe from Jove;They would so naughtily find out their wayTo both the heads of both my Danaës,Where just it made me mad to look at them.Such eyes! I could not paint or think of eyesBut those,—and so I flung them into paintAnd turned them to the wall’s care. Ay, but nowI’ve let them out, my Kate’s! I’ve painted her,(I’ll change my style, and leave mythologies)The whole sweet face; it looks upon my soulLike a face on water, to beget itself.A half-length portrait, in a hanging cloakLike one you wore once; ’tis a little frayed;I pressed, too, for the nude harmonious arm—But she ... she’d have her way, and have her cloak;She said she could be like you only so,And would not miss the fortune. Ah, my friend,You’ll write and say she shall not miss your loveThrough meeting mine? in faith, she would not change:She has your books by heart, more than my words,And quotes you up against me till I’m pushedWhere, three months since, her eyes were! nay, in fact,Nought satisfied her but to make me paintYour last book folded in her dimpled hands,Instead of my brown palette, as I wished,(And, grant me, the presentment had been newer)She’d grant me nothing: I’ve compounded forThe naming of the wedding-day next month,And gladly too. ’Tis pretty, to remarkHow women can love women of your sort,And tie their hearts with love-knots to your feet,Grow insolent about you against men,And put us down by putting up the lip,As if a man,—therearesuch, let us own,Who write not ill,—remains a man, poor wretch,While you——! Write far worse than Aurora Leigh,And there’ll be women who believe of you(Besides my Kate) that if you walked on sandYou would not leave a foot-print.‘Are you putTo wonder by my marriage, like poor Leigh?‘Kate Ward!’ he said. ‘Kate Ward!’ he said anew.‘I thought ...’ he said, and stopped,—‘I did not think....’And then he dropped to silence.‘Ah, he’s changed.I had not seen him, you’re aware, for long,But went of course. I have not touched on thisThrough all this letter,—conscious of your heart,And writing lightlier for the heavy fact,As clocks are voluble with lead.‘How weak,To say I’m sorry. Dear Leigh, dearest Leigh!In those old days of Shropshire,—pardon me,—When he and you fought many a field of goldOn what you should do, or you should not do,Make bread or verses, (it just came to that)I thought you’d one day draw a silken peaceThrough a golden ring. I thought so. Foolishly,The event proved,—for you went more oppositeTo each other, month by month, and year by year,Until this happened. God knows best, we say,But hoarsely. When the fever took him first,Just after I had writ to you in France,They tell me Lady Waldemar mixed drinksAnd counted grains, like any salaried nurse,Excepting that she wept too. Then Lord Howe,You’re right about Lord Howe! Lord Howe’s a trump;And yet, with such in his hand, a man like LeighMay lose, ashedoes. There’s an end to all,—Yes, even this letter, though the second sheetMay find you doubtful. Write a word for Kate:Even now she reads my letters like a wife,And, if she sees her name, I’ll see her smile,And share the luck. So, bless you, friend of two!I will not ask you what your feeling isAt Florence, with my pictures. I can hearYour heart a-flutter over the snow-hills;And, just to pace the Pitti with you once,I’d give a half-hour of to-morrow’s walkWith Kate ... I think so. Vincent Carrington.’The noon was hot; the air scorched like the sun,And was shut out. The closed persiani threwTheir long-scored shadows on my villa-floor,And interlined the golden atmosphereStraight, still,—across the pictures on the wall,The statuette on the console, (of young LoveAnd Psyche made one marble by a kiss)The low couch where I leaned, the table near,The vase of lilies, Marian pulled last night,(Each green leaf and each white leaf ruled in blackAs if for writing some new text of fate)And the open letter, rested on my knee,—But there, the lines swerved, trembled, though I sateUntroubled ... plainly, ... reading it againAnd three times. Well, he’s married; that is clear.No wonder that he’s married, nor much moreThat Vincent’s therefore, ‘sorry.’ Why, of course,The lady nursed him when he was not well,Mixed drinks,—unless nepenthe was the drink,’Twas scarce worth telling. But a man in loveWill see the whole sex in his mistress’ hood,The prettier for its lining of fair rose;Although he catches back, and says at last,‘I’m sorry.’ Sorry. Lady WaldemarAt prettiest, under the said hood, preservedFrom such a light as I could hold to her faceTo flare its ugly wrinkles out to shame,—Is scarce a wife for Romney, as friends judge,Aurora Leigh, or Vincent Carrington,—That’s plain. And if he’s ‘conscious of my heart’ ...Perhaps it’s natural, though the phrase is strong;(One’s apt to use strong phrases, being in love)And even that stuff of ‘fields of gold,’ ‘gold rings,’And what he ‘thought,’ poor Vincent! what he ‘thought,’May never mean enough to ruffle me.—Why, this room stifles. Better burn than choke;Best have air, air, although it comes with fire,Throw open blinds and windows to the noonAnd take a blister on my brow insteadOf this dead weight! best, perfectly be stunnedBy those insufferable cicale, sickAnd hoarse with rapture of the summer-heat,That sing like poets, till their hearts break, ... singTill men say, ‘It’s too tedious.’Books succeed,And lives fail. Do I feel it so, at last?Kate loves a worn-out cloak for being like mine,While I live self-despised for being myself,And yearn toward some one else, who yearns awayFrom what he is, in his turn. Strain a stepFor ever, yet gain no step? Are we such,We cannot, with our admirations even,Our tip-toe aspirations, touch a thingThat’s higher than we? is all a dismal flat,And God alone above each,—as the sunO’er level lagunes, to make them shine and stink,—Laying stress upon us with immediate flame,While we respond with our miasmal fog,And call it mounting higher, because we growMore highly fatal?Tush, Aurora Leigh!You wear your sackcloth looped in Cæsar’s way,And brag your failings as mankind’s. Be still.Thereiswhat’s higher, in this very world,Than you can live, or catch at. Stand aside,And look at others—instance little Kate!She’ll make a perfect wife for Carrington.She always has been looking round the earthFor something good and green to alight uponAnd nestle into, with those soft-winged eyesSubsiding now beneath his manly hand’Twixt trembling lids of inexpressive joy:I will not scorn her, after all, too much,That so much she should love me. A wise manCan pluck a leaf, and find a lecture in ’t;And I, too, ... God has made me,—I’ve a heartThat’s capable of worship, love, and loss;We say the same of Shakspeare’s. I’ll be meek,And learn to reverence, even this poor myself.The book, too—pass it. ‘A good book,’ says he,‘And you a woman.’ I had laughed at that,But long since. I’m a woman,—it is true;Alas, and woe to us, when we feel it most!Then, least care have we for the crowns and goals,And compliments on writing our good books.The book has some truth in it, I believe:And truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.I know we talk our Phædons to the endThrough all the dismal faces that we make,O’er-wrinkled with dishonouring agonyFrom any mortal drug. I have written truth,And I a woman; feebly, partially,Inaptly in presentation, Romney’ll add,Because a woman. For the truth itself,That’s neither man’s nor woman’s, but just God’s;None else has reason to be proud of truth:Himself will see it sifted, disenthralled,And kept upon the height and in the light,As far as, and no farther, than ’tis truth;For,—now He has left off calling firmamentsAnd strata, flowers and creatures, very good,—He says it still of truth, which is His own.Truth, so far, in my book;—the truth which drawsThrough all things upwards; that a twofold worldMust go to a perfect cosmos. Natural thingsAnd spiritual,—who separates those twoIn art, in morals, or the social drift,Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,Is wrong, in short, at all points. We divideThis apple of life, and cut it through the pips,—The perfect round which fitted Venus’ handHas perished utterly as if we ateBoth halves. Without the spiritual, observe,The natural’s impossible;—no form,No motion! Without sensuous, spiritualIs inappreciable;—no beauty or power!And in this twofold sphere the twofold man(And still the artist is intensely a man)Holds firmly by the natural, to reachThe spiritual beyond it,—fixes stillThe type with mortal vision, to pierce through,With eyes immortal, to the antetypeSome call the ideal,—better called the real,And certain to be called so presentlyWhen things shall have their names. Look long enoughOn any peasant’s face here, coarse and lined,You’ll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay,As perfect-featured as he yearns at RomeFrom marble pale with beauty; then persist,And, if your apprehension’s competent,You’ll find some fairer angel at his back,As much exceeding him, as he the boor,And pushing him with empyreal disdainFor ever out of sight. Ay, CarringtonIs glad of such a creed! an artist must,Who paints a tree, a leaf, a common stone,With just his hand, and finds it suddenlyA-piece with and conterminous to his soul.Why else do these things move him, leaf or stone?The bird’s not moved, that pecks at a spring-shoot;Nor yet the horse, before a quarry, a-graze:But man, the two-fold creature, apprehendsThe two-fold manner, in and outwardly,And nothing in the world comes single to him,A mere itself,—cup, column, or candlestick,All patterns of what shall be in the Mount;The whole temporal show related royally,And built up to eterne significanceThrough the open arms of God. ‘There’s nothing greatNor small,’ has said a poet of our day,(Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eveAnd not be thrown out by the matin’s bell)And truly, I reiterate, ... nothing’s small!No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim:And,—glancing on my own thin, veinéd wrist,—In such a little tremour of the bloodThe whole strong clamour of a vehement soulDoth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God:But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,And daub their natural faces unawareMore and more, from the first similitude.Truth, so far, in my book! a truth which drawsFrom all things upwards. I, Aurora, stillHave felt it hound me through the wastes of lifeAs Jove did Io: and, until that HandShall overtake me wholly, and, on my head,Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down,It must be. Art’s the witness of what IsBehind this show. If this world’s show were all,Then imitation would be all in Art;There, Jove’s hand gripes us!—For we stand here, we,If genuine artists, witnessing for God’sComplete, consummate, undivided work:—That not a natural flower can grow on earth,Without a flower upon the spiritual side,Substantial, archetypal, all a-glowWith blossoming causes,—not so far away,That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,May not catch something of the bloom and breath,—Too vaguely apprehended, though indeedStill apprehended, consciously or not,And still transferred to picture, music, verse,For thrilling audient and beholding soulsBy signs and touches which are known to souls,—How known, they know not,—why, they cannot find,So straight call out on genius, say, ‘A manProduced this,’—when much rather they should say,‘’Tis insight, and he saw this.’Thus is ArtSelf-magnified in magnifying a truthWhich, fully recognised, would change the worldAnd shift its morals. If a man could feel,Not one day, in the artist’s ecstasy,But every day, feast, fast, or working-day,The spiritual significance burn throughThe hieroglyphic of material shows,Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings,And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree,And even his very body as a man,—Which now he counts so vile, that all the townsMake offal of their daughters for its useOn summer-nights, when God is sad in heavenTo think what goes on in his recreant worldHe made quite other; while that moon He madeTo shine there, at the first love’s covenant,Shines still, convictive as a marriage-ringBefore adulterous eyes.How sure it is,That, if we say a true word, instantlyWe feel ’tis God’s, not ours, and pass it onAs bread at sacrament, we taste and passNor handle for a moment, as indeedWe dared to set up any claim to such!And I—my poem;—let my readers talk;I’m closer to it—I can speak as well:I’ll say, with Romney, that the book is weak,The range uneven, the points of sight obscure,The music interrupted.Let us go.The end of woman (or of man, I think)Is not a book. Alas, the best of booksIs but a word in Art, which soon grows cramped,Stiff, dubious-statured with the weight of years,And drops an accent or digamma downSome cranny of unfathomable time,Beyond the critic’s reaching. Art itself,We’ve called the higher life, still must feel the soulLive past it. For more’s felt than is perceived,And more’s perceived than can be interpreted,And Love strikes higher with his lambent flameThan Art can pile the faggots.Is it so?When Jove’s hand meets us with composing touch,And when, at last, we are hushed and satisfied,—Then, Io does not call it truth, but love?Well, well! my father was an Englishman:My mother’s blood in me is not so strongThat I should bear this stress of Tuscan noonAnd keep my wits. The town, there, seems to seetheIn this Medæan boil-pot of the sun,And all the patient hills are bubbling roundAs if a prick would leave them flat. Does heavenKeep far off, not to set us in a blaze?Not so,—let drag your fiery fringes, heaven,And burn us up to quiet! Ah, we knowToo much here, not to know what’s best for peace;We have too much light here, not to want more fireTo purify and end us. We talk, talk,Conclude upon divine philosophies,And get the thanks of men for hopeful books;Whereat we take our own life up, and ... pshaw!Unless we piece it with another’s life,(A yard of silk to carry out our lawn)As well suppose my little handkerchiefWould cover Samminiato, church and all,If out I threw it past the cypresses,As, in this ragged, narrow life of mine,Contain my own conclusions.But at leastWe’ll shut up the persiani, and sit down,And when my head’s done aching, in the cool,Write just a word to Kate and Carrington.May joy be with them! she has chosen well,And he not ill.I should be glad, I think,Except for Romney. Hadhemarried Kate,I surely, surely, should be very glad.This Florence sits upon me easily,With native air and tongue. My graves are calm,And do not too much hurt me. Marian’s good,Gentle and loving,—lets me hold the child,Or drags him up the hills to find me flowersAnd fill those vases, ere I’m quite awake,—The grandiose red tulips, which grow wild,Or else my purple lilies, Dante blewTo a larger bubble with his prophet-breath;Or one of those tall flowering reeds which standIn Arno like a sheaf of sceptres, leftBy some remote dynasty of dead gods,To suck the stream for ages and get green,And blossom wheresoe’er a hand divineHad warmed the place with ichor. Such I’ve foundAt early morning, laid across my bed,And woke up pelted with a childish laughWhich even Marian’s low precipitous ‘hush’Had vainly interposed to put away,—While I, with shut eyes, smile and motion forThe dewy kiss that’s very sure to comeFrom mouth and cheeks, the whole child’s face at onceDissolved on mine,—as if a nosegay burstIts string with the weight of roses overblown,And dropt upon me. Surely I should be glad.The little creature almost loves me now,And calls my name ... ‘Alola,’ stripping offThers like thorns, to make it smooth enoughTo take between his dainty, milk-fed lips,God love him! I should certainly be glad,Except, God help me, that I’m sorrowful,Because of Romney.Romney, Romney! Well,This grows absurd!—too like a tune that runsI’ the head, and forces all things in the world,Wind, rain, the creaking gnat or stuttering fly,To sing itself and vex you;—yet perhapsA paltry tune you never fairly liked,Some ‘I’d be a butterfly,’ or ‘C’est l’amour:’We’re made so,—not such tyrants to ourselves,We are not slaves to nature. Some of usAre turned, too, overmuch like some poor verseWith a trick of ritournelle: the same thing goesAnd comes back ever.Vincent CarringtonIs ‘sorry,’ and I’m sorry; buthe’s strongTo mount from sorrow to his heaven of love,And when he says at moments, ‘Poor, poor Leigh,Who’ll never call his own, so true a heart,So fair a face even,’—he must quickly loseThe pain of pity in the blush he has madeBy his very pitying eyes. The snow, for him,Has fallen in May, and finds the whole earth warm,And melts at the first touch of the green grass.But Romney,—he has chosen, after all.I think he had as excellent a sunTo see by, as most others, and perhapsHas scarce seen really worse than some of us,When all’s said. Let him pass. I’m not too muchA woman, not to be a man for once,And bury all my Dead like Alaric,Depositing the treasures of my soulIn this drained water-course, and, letting flowThe river of life again, with commerce-shipsAnd pleasure-barges, full of silks and songs.Blow, winds, and help us.Ah, we mock ourselvesWith talking of the winds! perhaps as muchWith other resolutions. How it weighs,This hot, sick air! and how I covet hereThe Dead’s provision on the river’s couch,With silver curtains drawn on tinkling rings!Or else their rest in quiet crypts,—laid byFrom heat and noise!—from those cicale, say,And this more vexing heart-beat.So it is:We covet for the soul, the body’s part,To die and rot. Even so, Aurora, endsOur aspiration, who bespoke our placeSo far in the east. The occidental flatsHad fed us fatter, therefore? we have climbedWhere herbage ends? we want the beast’s part now,And tire of the angel’s?—Men define a man,The creature who stands front-ward to the stars,The creature who looks inward to himself,The tool-wright, laughing creature. ’Tis enough:We’ll say instead, the inconsequent creature, man,—For that’s his specialty. What creature elseConceives the circle, and then walks the square?Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good?You think the bee makes honey half a year,To loathe the comb in winter, and desireThe little ant’s food rather? But a man—Note men!—they are but women after all,As women are but Auroras!—there are menBorn tender, apt to pale at a trodden worm,Who paint for pastime, in their favourite dream,Spruce auto-vestments flowered with crocus-flames:There are, too, who believe in hell, and lie:There are, who waste their souls in working outLife’s problem on these sands betwixt two tides,And end,—‘Now give us the beast’s part, in death.’Alas, long-suffering and most patient God,Thou need’st be surelier God to bear with usThan even to have made us! thou, aspire, aspireFrom henceforth for me! thou who hast, thyself,Endured this fleshhood, knowing how, as a soakedAnd sucking vesture, it would drag us downAnd choke us in the melancholy Deep,Sustain me, that, with thee, I walk these waves,Resisting!—breathe me upward, thou for meAspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life,—That no truth henceforth seem indifferent,No way to truth laborious, and no life,Not even this life I live, intolerable!The days went by. I took up the old daysWith all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled,—Like some lost book we dropt in the long grassOn such a happy summer-afternoonWhen last we read it with a loving friend,And find in autumn, when the friend is gone,The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late,And stare at, as at something wonderfulFor sorrow,—thinking how two hands, before,Had held up what is left to only one,And how we smiled when such a vehement nailImpressed the tiny dint here, which presentsThis verse in fire for ever! TenderlyAnd mournfully I lived. I knew the birdsAnd insects,—which look fathered by the flowersAnd emulous of their hues: I recognisedThe moths, with that great overpoise of wingsWhich makes a mystery of them how at allThey can stop flying: butterflies, that bearUpon their blue wings such red embers round,They seem to scorch the blue air into holesEach flight they take: and fire-flies, that suspireIn short soft lapses of transported flameAcross the tingling Dark, while overheadThe constant and inviolable starsOutburn those lights-of-love: melodious owls,(If music had but one note and was sad,’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirlOf bats, that seem to follow in the airSome grand circumference of a shadowy domeTo which we are blind: and then, the nightingales,Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,(When walking in the town) and carry itSo high into the bowery almond-trees,We tremble and are afraid, and feel as ifThe golden flood of moonlight unawareDissolved the pillars of the steady earthAnd made it less substantial. And I knewThe harmless opal snakes, and large-mouthed frogs,(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud,Will flatter you and take you for a stone,And flash familiarly about your feetWith such prodigious eyes in such small heads!—I knew them, though they had somewhat dwindled fromMy childish imagery,—and kept in mindHow last I sate among them equally,In fellowship and mateship, as a childWill bear him still toward insect, beast, and bird,Before the Adam in him has foregoneAll privilege of Eden,—making friendsAnd talk, with such a bird or such a goat,And buying many a two-inch-wide rush-cageTo let out the caged cricket on a tree,Saying, ‘Oh, my dear grillino, were you cramped?And are you happy with the ilex-leaves?And do you love me who have let you go?Sayyesin singing, and I’ll understand.’But now the creatures all seemed farther off,No longer mine, nor like me; onlythere,A gulph between us. I could yearn indeed,Like other rich men, for a drop of dewTo cool this heat,—a drop of the early dew,The irrecoverable child-innocence(Before the heart took fire and withered life)When childhood might pair equally with birds;But now ... the birds were grown too proud for us!Alas, the very sun forbids the dew.And I, I had come back to an empty nest,Which every bird’s too wise for. How I heardMy father’s step on that deserted ground,His voice along that silence, as he toldThe names of bird and insect, tree and flower,And all the presentations of the starsAcross Valdarno, interposing still‘My child,’ ‘my child.’ When fathers say ‘my child,’’Tis easier to conceive the universe,And life’s transitions down the steps of law.I rode once to the little mountain-houseAs fast as if to find my father there,But, when in sight of’t, within fifty yards,I dropped my horse’s bridle on his neckAnd paused upon his flank. The house’s frontWas cased with lingots of ripe Indian cornIn tesselated order, and deviceOf golden patterns: not a stone of wallUncovered,—not an inch of room to growA vine-leaf. The old porch had disappeared;And, in the open doorway, sate a girlAt plaiting straws,—her black hair strained awayTo a scarlet kerchief caught beneath her chinIn Tuscan fashion,—her full ebon eyes,Which looked too heavy to be lifted so,Still dropt and lifted toward the mulberry-treeOn which the lads were busy with their stavesIn shout and laughter, stripping all the boughsAs bare as winter, of those summer leavesMy father had not changed for all the silkIn which the ugly silkworms hide themselves.Enough. My horse recoiled before my heart—I turned the rein abruptly. Back we wentAs fast, to Florence.That was trial enoughOf graves. I would not visit, if I could,My father’s, or my mother’s any more,To see if stone-cutter or lichen beatSo early in the race, or throw my flowers,Which could not out-smell heaven, or sweeten earth.They live too far above, that I should lookSo far below to find them: let me thinkThat rather they are visiting my grave,This life here, (undeveloped yet to life)And that they drop upon me, now and then,For token or for solace, some small weedLeast odorous of the growths of paradise,To spare such pungent scents as kill with joy.My old Assunta, too, was dead, was dead—O land of all men’s past! for me alone,It would not mix its tenses. I was past,It seemed, like others,—only not in heaven.And, many a Tuscan eve, I wandered downThe cypress alley, like a restless ghostThat tries its feeble ineffectual breathUpon its own charred funeral-brands put outToo soon,—where, black and stiff, stood up the treesAgainst the broad vermilion of the skies.Such skies!—all clouds abolished in a sweepOf God’s skirt, with a dazzle to ghosts and men,As down I went, saluting on the bridgeThe hem of such, before ’twas caught awayBeyond the peaks of Lucca. Underneath,The river, just escaping from the weightOf that intolerable glory, ranIn acquiescent shadow murmurously:And up, beside it, streamed the festa-folkWith fellow-murmurs from their feet and fans,(Withissimoandinoand sweet poiseOf vowels in their pleasant scandalous talk)Returning from the grand-duke’s dairy-farmBefore the trees grew dangerous at eight,(For, ‘trust no tree by moonlight,’ Tuscans say)To eat their ice at Doni’s tenderly,—Each lovely lady close to a cavalierWho holds her dear fan while she feeds her smileOn meditative spoonfuls of vanille,He breathing hot protesting vows of love,Enough to thaw her cream, and scorch his beard.’Twas little matter. I could pass them byIndifferently, not fearing to be known.No danger of being wrecked upon a friend,And forced to take an iceberg for an isle!The very English, here, must wait to learnTo hang the cobweb of their gossip outAnd catch a fly. I’m happy. It’s sublime,This perfect solitude of foreign lands!To be, as if you had not been till then,And were then, simply that you chose to be:To spring up, not be brought forth from the ground,Like grasshoppers at Athens, and skip thriceBefore a woman makes a pounce on youAnd plants you in her hair!—possess, yourself,A new world all alive with creatures new,New sun, new moon, new flowers, new people—ah,And be possessed by none of them! no rightIn one, to call your name, enquire your where,Or what you think of Mister Some-one’s book,Or Mister Other’s marriage, or decease,Or how’s the headache which you had last week,Or why you look so pale still, since it’s gone?—Such most surprising riddance of one’s lifeComes next one’s death; it’s disembodimentWithout the pang. I marvel, people chooseTo stand stock-still like fakirs, till the mossGrows on them, and they cry out, self-admired,‘How verdant and how virtuous!’ Well, I’m glad:Or should be, if grown foreign to myselfAs surely as to others.Musing so,I walked the narrow unrecognising streets,Where many a palace-front peers gloomilyThrough stony vizors iron-barred, (preparedAlike, should foe or lover pass that way,For guest or victim) and came wandering outUpon the churches with mild open doorsAnd plaintive wail of vespers, where a few,Those chiefly women, sprinkled round in blotsUpon the dusky pavement, knelt and prayedToward the altar’s silver glory. Oft a ray(I liked to sit and watch) would tremble out,Just touch some face more lifted, more in need,Of course a woman’s—while I dreamed a taleTo fit its fortunes. There was one who lookedAs if the earth had suddenly grown too largeFor such a little humpbacked thing as she;The pitiful black kerchief round her neckSole proof she had had a mother. One, again,Looked sick for love,—seemed praying some soft saintTo put more virtue in the new fine scarfShe spent a fortnight’s meals on, yesterday,That cruel Gigi might return his eyesFrom Giuliana. There was one, so old,So old, to kneel grew easier than to stand,—So solitary, she accepts at lastOur Lady for her gossip, and frets onAgainst the sinful world which goes its roundsIn marrying and being married, just the sameAs when ’twas almost good and had the right,(Her Gian alive, and she herself eighteen).And yet, now even, if Madonna willed,She’d win a tern in Thursday’s lottery,And better all things. Did she dream for nought,That, boiling cabbage for the fast-day’s soup,It smelt like blessed entrails? such a dreamFor nought? would sweetest Mary cheat her so,And lose that certain candle, straight and whiteAs any fair grand-duchess in her teens,Winch otherwise should flare here in a week?Benigna sis, thou beauteous Queen of heaven!I sate there musing, and imaginingSuch utterance from such faces: poor blind soulsThat writhed toward heaven along the devil’s trail,—Who knows, I thought, but He may stretch his handAnd pick them up? ’tis written in the Book,He heareth the young ravens when they cry;And yet they cry for carrion.—O my God,—And we, who make excuses for the rest,We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,And dropped my head upon the pavement too,And prayed, since I was foolish in desireLike other creatures, craving offal-food,That He would stop his ears to what I said,And only listen to the run and beatOf this poor, passionate, helpless blood—And thenI lay, and spoke not. But He heard in heaven.So many Tuscan evenings passed the same!I could not lose a sunset on the bridge,And would not miss a vigil in the church,And liked to mingle with the out-door crowdSo strange and gay and ignorant of my face,For men you know not, are as good as trees.And only once, at the Santissima,I almost chanced upon a man I knew,Sir Blaise Delorme. He saw me certainly,And somewhat hurried, as he crossed himself,The smoothness of the action,—then half bowed,But only half, and merely to my shade,I slipped so quick behind the porphyry plinth,And left him dubious if ’twas really I,Or peradventure Satan’s usual trickTo keep a mounting saint uncanonised.But I was safe for that time, and he too;The argent angels in the altar-flareAbsorbed his soul, next moment. The good man!In England we were scarce acquaintances,That here in Florence he should keep my thoughtBeyond the image on his eye, which cameAnd went: and yet his thought disturbed my life:For, after that, I oftener sate at homeOn evenings, watching how they fined themselvesWith gradual conscience to a perfect night,Until the moon, diminished to a curve,Lay out there, like a sickle for His handWho cometh down at last to reap the earth.At such times, ended seemed my trade of verse;I feared to jingle bells upon my robeBefore the four-faced silent cherubim:With God so near me, could I sing of God?I did not write, nor read, nor even think,But sate absorbed amid the quickening glooms,Most like some passive broken lump of saltDropt in by chance to a bowl of œnomel,To spoil the drink a little, and lose itself,Dissolving slowly, slowly, until lost.

‘Thewoman’s motive? shall we daub ourselvesWith finding roots for nettles? ’tis soft clayAnd easily explored. She had the means,The monies, by the lady’s liberal grace,In trust for that Australian scheme and me,Which so, that she might clutch with both her hands,And chink to her naughty uses undisturbed,She served me (after all it was not strange;’Twas only what my mother would have done)A motherly, unmerciful, good turn.‘Well, after. There are nettles everywhere,But smooth green grasses are more common still;The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud;A miller’s wife at Clichy took me inAnd spent her pity on me,—made me calmAnd merely very reasonably sad.She found me a servant’s place in Paris whereI tried to take the cast-off life again,And stood as quiet as a beaten assWho, having fallen through overloads, stands upTo let them charge him with another pack.‘A few months, so. My mistress, young and light,Was easy with me, less for kindness thanBecause she led, herself, an easy timeBetwixt her lover and her looking-glass,Scarce knowing which way she was praised the most.She felt so pretty and so pleased all dayShe could not take the trouble to be cross,But, sometimes, as I stooped to tie her shoe,Would tap me softly with her slender foot,Still restless with the last night’s dancing in’t,And say, ‘Fie, pale-face! are you English girlsAll grave and silent? mass-book still, and Lent?And first-communion colours on your cheeks,Worn past the time for’t? little fool, be gay!’At which she vanished, like a fairy, throughA gap of silver laughter.‘Came an hourWhen all went otherwise. She did not speak,But clenched her brows, and clipped me with her eyesAs if a viper with a pair of tongs,Too far for any touch, yet near enoughTo view the writhing creature,—then at last;‘Stand still there, in the holy Virgin’s name,Thou Marian; thou’rt no reputable girl,Although sufficient dull for twenty saints!I think thou mock’st me and my house,’ she said;‘Confess, thou’lt be a mother in a month,Thou mask of saintship.’‘Could I answer her?The light broke in so: it meantthatthen,that?I had not thought of that, in all my thoughts,—Through all the cold, numb aching of my brow,Through all the heaving of impatient lifeWhich threw me on death at intervals,—through allThe upbreak of the fountains of my heartThe rains had swelled too large: it could meanthat?Did God make mothers out of victims, then,And set such pure amens to hideous deeds?Why not? He overblows an ugly graveWith violets which blossom in the spring.AndIcould be a mother in a month!I hope it was not wicked to be glad.I lifted up my voice and wept, and laughed,To heaven, not her, until it tore my throat.‘Confess, confess!’ what was there to confess,Except man’s cruelty, except my wrong?Except this anguish, or this ecstasy?This shame, or glory? The light woman thereWas small to take it in: an acorn-cupWould take the sea in sooner.‘Good,’ she cried;Unmarried and a mother, and she laughs!These unchaste girls are always impudent.Get out, intriguer! leave my house, and trot:I wonder you should look me in the face,With such a filthy secret.’‘Then I rolledMy scanty bundle up, and went my way,Washed white with weeping, shuddering head and footWith blind hysteric passion, staggering forthBeyond those doors. ’Twas natural, of course,She should not ask me where I meant to sleep;I might sleep well beneath the heavy Seine,Like others of my sort; the bed was laidFor us. But any woman, womanly,Had thought of him who should be in a month,The sinless babe that should be in a month,And if by chance he might be warmer housedThan underneath such dreary, dripping eaves.’I broke on Marian there. ‘Yet she herself,A wife, I think, had scandals of her own,A lover, not her husband.’‘Ay,’ she said,‘But gold and meal are measured otherwise;I learnt so much at school,’ said Marian Erle.‘O crooked world,’ I cried, ‘ridiculousIf not so lamentable! It’s the wayWith these light women of a thrifty vice,My Marian,—always hard upon the rentIn any sister’s virtue! while they keepTheir chastity so darned with perfidy,That, though a rag itself, it looks as wellAcross a street, in balcony or coach,As any stronger stuff might. For my part,I’d rather take the wind-side of the stewsThan touch such women with my finger-end!They top the poor street-walker by their lie,And look the better for being so much worse:The devil’s most devilish when respectable.But you, dear, and your story.’‘All the restIs here,’ she said, and signed upon the child.‘I found a mistress-sempstress who was kindAnd let me sew in peace among her girls;And what was better than to draw the threadsAll day and half the night, for him, and him?And so I lived for him, and so he lives,And so I know, by this time, God lives too.’She smiled beyond the sun, and ended so,And all my soul rose up to take her partAgainst the world’s successes, virtues, fames.‘Come with me, sweetest sister,’ I returned,‘And sit within my house, and do me goodFrom henceforth, thou and thine! ye are my ownFrom henceforth. I am lonely in the world,And thou art lonely, and the child is halfAn orphan. Come,—and, henceforth, thou and IBeing still together, will not miss a friend,Nor he a father, since two mothers shallMake that up to him. I am journeying south,And, in my Tuscan home I’ll find a niche,And set thee there, my saint, the child and thee,And burn the lights of love before thy face,And ever at thy sweet look cross myselfFrom mixing with the world’s prosperities;That so, in gravity and holy calm,We two may live on toward the truer life.’She looked me in the face and answered not,Nor signed she was unworthy, nor gave thanks,But took the sleeping child and held it outTo meet my kiss, as if requiting meAnd trusting me at once. And thus, at once,I carried him and her to where I lived;She’s there now, in the little room, asleep,I hear the soft child-breathing through the door;And all three of us, at to-morrow’s break,Pass onward, homeward, to our Italy.Oh, Romney Leigh, I have your debts to pay,And I’ll be just and pay them.But yourself!To pay your debts is scarcely difficult;To buy your life is nearly impossible,Being sold away to Lamia. My head aches;I cannot see my road along this dark;Nor can I creep and grope, as fits the dark,For these foot-catching robes of womanhood:A man might walk a little ... but I!—He lovesThe Lamia-woman,—and I, write to himWhat stops his marriage, and destroys his peace,—Or what, perhaps, shall simply trouble him,Until she only need to touch his sleeveWith just a finger’s tremulous white flame,Saying, ‘Ah,—Aurora Leigh! a pretty tale,A very pretty poet! I can guessThe motive’—then, to catch his eyes in hers,And vow she does not wonder,—and they twoTo break in laughter, as the sea alongA melancholy coast, and float up higher,In such a laugh, their fatal weeds of love!Ay, fatal, ay. And who shall answer meFate has not hurried tides; and if to-nightMy letter would not be a night too late,—An arrow shot into a man that’s dead,To prove a vain intention? Would I showThe new wife vile, to make the husband mad?No, Lamia! shut the shutters, bar the doorsFrom every glimmer on thy serpent-skin!I will not let thy hideous secret outTo agonise the man I love—I meanThe friend I love ... as friends love.It is strange,To-day while Marian told her story, likeTo absorb most listeners, how I listened chiefTo a voice not hers, nor yet that enemy’s,Nor God’s in wrath, ... but one that mixed with mineLong years ago, among the garden-trees,And said tome, tometoo, ‘Be my wife,Aurora!’ It is strange, with what a swellOf yearning passion, as snow of ghostsMight beat against the impervious doors of heaven,I thought, ‘Now, if I had been a woman, suchAs God made women, to save men by love,—By just my love I might have saved this man,And made a nobler poem for the worldThan all I have failed in.’ But I failed besidesIn this; and now he’s lost! through me alone!And, by my only fault, his empty houseSucks in, at this same hour, a wind from hellTo keep his hearth cold, make his casements creakFor ever to the tune of plague and sin—O Romney, O my Romney, O my friend!My cousin and friend! my helper, when I would,My love, that might be! mine!Why, how one weepsWhen one’s too weary! Were a witness by,He’d say some folly ... that I loved the man,Who knows?... and make me laugh again for scorn.At strongest, women are as weak in flesh,As men, at weakest, vilest, are in soul:So, hard for women to keep pace with men!As well give up at once, sit down at once,And weep as I do. Tears, tears!why, we weep?’Tis worth enquiry?—That we’ve shamed a life,Or lost a love, or missed a world, perhaps?By no means. Simply, that we’ve walked too far,Or talked too much, or felt the wind i’ the east,—And so we weep, as if both body and soulBroke up in water—this way.Poor mixed ragsForsooth we’re made of, like those other dollsThat lean with pretty faces into fairs.It seems as if I had a man in me,Despising such a woman.Yet indeed,To see a wrong or suffering moves us allTo undo it, though we should undo ourselves;Ay, all the more, that we undo ourselves;That’s womanly, past doubt, and not ill-moved.A natural movement, therefore, on my part,To fill the chair up of my cousin’s wife,And save him from a devil’s company!We’re all so,—made so—’tis our woman’s tradeTo suffer torment for another’s ease.The world’s male chivalry has perished out,But women are knights-errant to the last;And, if Cervantes had been greater still,He had made his Don a Donna.So it clears,And so we rain our skies blue.Put awayThis weakness. If, as I have just now said,A man’s within me,—let him act himself,Ignoring the poor conscious trouble of bloodThat’s called the woman merely. I will writePlain words to England,—if too late, too late,—If ill-accounted, then accounted ill;We’ll trust the heavens with something.‘Dear Lord Howe,You’ll find a story on another leafThat’s Marian Erle’s,—what noble friend of yoursShe trusted once, through what flagitious meansTo what disastrous ends;—the story’s true.I found her wandering on the Paris quays,A babe upon her breast,—unnaturalUnseasonable outcast on such snowsUnthawed to this time. I will tax in thisYour friendship, friend,—if that convicted SheBe not his wife yet, to denounce the factsTo himself,—but, otherwise, to let them passOn tip-toe like escaping murderers,And tell my cousin, merely—Marian lives,Is found, and finds her home with such a friend,Myself, Aurora. Which good news, ‘She’s found,’Will help to make him merry in his love:I send it, tell him, for my marriage gift,As good as orange-water for the nerves,Or perfumed gloves for headaches,—though awareThat he, except of love, is scarcely sick;I mean the new love this time, ... since last year.Such quick forgetting on the part of men!Is any shrewder trick upon the cardsTo enrich them? pray instruct me how it’s done.First, clubs,—and while you look at clubs, it’s spades;That’s prodigy. The lightning strikes a man,And when we think to find him dead and charred ...Why, there he is on a sudden, playing pipesBeneath the splintered elm-tree! Crime and shameAnd all their hoggery trample your smooth world,Nor leave more foot-marks than Apollo’s kine,Whose hoofs were muffled by the thieving godIn tamarisk-leaves and myrtle. I’m so sad,So weary and sad to-night, I’m somewhat sour,—Forgive me. To be blue and shrew at once,Exceeds all toleration except yours;But yours, I know, is infinite. Farewell.To-morrow we take train for Italy.Speak gently of me to your gracious wife,As one, however far, shall yet be nearIn loving wishes to your house.’I sign.And now I’ll loose my heart upon a page,This—‘Lady Waldemar, I’m very gladI never liked you; which you knew so well,You spared me, in your turn, to like me much.Your liking surely had done worse for meThan has your loathing, though the last appearsSufficiently unscrupulous to hurt,And not afraid of judgment. Now, there’s spaceBetween our faces,—I stand off, as ifI judged a stranger’s portrait and pronouncedIndifferently the type was good or bad:What matter to me that the lines are false,I ask you? Did I ever ink my lipsBy drawing your name through them as a friend’s,Or touch your hands as lovers do? thank GodI never did: and, since you’re proved so vile,Ay, vile, I say,—we’ll show it presently,—I’m not obliged to nurse my friend in you,Or wash out my own blots, in counting yours,Or even excuse myself to honest soulsWho seek to touch my lip or clasp my palm,—‘Alas, but Lady Waldemar came first!’‘’Tis true, by this time, you may near me soThat you’re my cousin’s wife. You’ve gambled deepAs Lucifer, and won the morning-starIn that case,—and the noble house of LeighMust henceforth with its good roof shelter you:I cannot speak and burn you up betweenThose rafters, I who am born a Leigh,—nor speakAnd pierce your breast through Romney’s, I who liveHis friend and cousin!—so, you are safe. You twoMust grow together like the tares and wheatTill God’s great fire.—But make the best of time.‘And hide this letter! let it speak no moreThan I shall, how you tricked poor Marian Erle,And set her own love digging her own graveWithin her green hope’s pretty garden-ground;Ay, sent her forth with some one of your sortTo a wicked house in France,—from which she fledWith curses in her eyes and ears and throat,Her whole soul choked with curses,—mad, in short,And madly scouring up and down for weeksThe foreign hedgeless country, lone and lost,—So innocent, male-fiends might slink withinRemote hell-corners, seeing her so defiled!‘But you,—you are a woman and more bold.To do you justice, you’d not shrink to face ...We’ll say, the unfledged life in the other room,Which, treading down God’s corn, you trod in sightOf all the dogs, in reach of all the guns,—Ay, Marian’s babe, her poor unfathered child,Her yearling babe!—you’d face him when he wakesAnd opens up his wonderful blue eyes:You’d meet them and not wink perhaps, nor fearGod’s triumph in them and supreme revenge,So, righting His creation’s balance-scale(You pulled as low as Tophet) to the topOf most celestial innocence! For meWho am not as bold, I own those infant eyesHave set me praying.‘While they look at heaven,No need of protestation in my wordsAgainst the place you’ve made them! let them look!They’ll do your business with the heavens, be sure:I spare you common curses.‘Ponder this.If haply you’re the wife of Romney Leigh,(For which inheritance beyond your birthYou sold that poisonous porridge called your soul)I charge you, be his faithful and true wife!Keep warm his hearth and clean his board, and, whenHe speaks, be quick with your obedience;Still grind your paltry wants and low desiresTo dust beneath his heel; though, even thus,The ground must hurt him,—it was writ of old,‘Ye shall not yoke together ox and ass,’The nobler and ignobler. Ay, but youShall do your part as well as such ill thingsCan do aught good. You shall not vex him,—mark,You shall not vex him, ... jar him when he’s sad,Or cross him when he’s eager. UnderstandTo trick him with apparent sympathies,Nor let him see thee in the face too nearAnd unlearn thy sweet seeming. Pay the priceOf lies, by being constrained to lie on still;’Tis easy for thy sort: a million moreWill scarcely damn thee deeper.‘Doing which,You are very safe from Marian and myself:We’ll breathe as softly as the infant here,And stir no dangerous embers. Fail a point,And show our Romney wounded, ill-content,Tormented in his home, ... we open mouth,And such a noise will follow, the last trump’sWill scarcely seem more dreadful, even to you;You’ll have no pipers after: Romney will(I know him) push you forth as none of his,All other men declaring it well done;While women, even the worst, your like, will drawTheir skirts back, not to brush you in the street;And so I warn you. I’m ... Aurora Leigh.’The letter written, I felt satisfied.The ashes, smouldering in me, were thrown outBy handfuls from me: I had writ my heartAnd wept my tears, and now was cool and calm;And, going straightway to the neighbouring room,I lifted up the curtains of the bedWhere Marian Erle, the babe upon her arm,Both faces leaned together like a pairOf folded innocences, self-complete,Each smiling from the other, smiled and slept.There seemed no sin, no shame, no wrath, no grief.I felt, she too, had spoken words that night,But softer certainly, and said to God,—Who laughs in heaven perhaps, that such as IShould make ado for such as she.—‘Defiled’I wrote? ‘defiled’ I thought her? Stoop,Stoop lower, Aurora! get the angels’ leaveTo creep in somewhere, humbly, on your knees,Within this round of sequestration whiteIn which they have wrapt earth’s foundlings, heaven’s elect!The next day, we took train to ItalyAnd fled on southward in the roar of steam.The marriage-bells of Romney must be loud,To sound so clear through all! I was not well;And truly, though the truth is like a jest,I could not choose but fancy, half the way,I stood alone i’ the belfry, fifty bellsOf naked iron, mad with merriment,(As one who laughs and cannot stop himself)All clanking at me, in me, over me,Until I shrieked a shriek I could not hear,And swooned with noise,—but still, along my swoon,Was ’ware the baffled changes backward rang,Prepared, at each emerging sense, to beatAnd crash it out with clangour. I was weak;I struggled for the posture of my soulIn upright consciousness of place and time,But evermore, ’twixt waking and asleep,Slipped somehow, staggered, caught at Marian’s eyesA moment, (it is very good for strengthTo know that some one needs you to be strong)And so recovered what I called myself,For that time.I just knew it when we sweptAbove the old roofs of Dijon. Lyons droppedA spark into the night, half trodden outUnseen. But presently the winding RhoneWashed out the moonlight large along his banks,Which strained their yielding curves out clear and cleanTo hold it,—shadow of town and castle blurredUpon the hurrying river. Such an airBlew thence upon the forehead,—half an airAnd half a water,—that I leaned and looked;Then, turning back on Marian, smiled to markThat she looked only on her child, who slept,His face towards the moon too.So we passedThe liberal open country and the close,And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedgeBy great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,And lets it in at once: the train swept inAthrob with effort, trembling with resolve,The fierce denouncing whistle wailing onAnd dying off smothered in the shuddering dark,While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressedAs other Titans, underneath the pileAnd nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!—Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wideRich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,(As if they entertained i’ the name of France)While, down their straining sides, streamed manifestA soil as red as Charlemagne’s knightly blood,To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,‘Marseilles!’ And lo, the city of Marseilles,With all her ships behind her, and beyond,The scimitar of ever-shining sea,For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!That night we spent between the purple heavenAnd purple water: I think Marian slept;But I, as a dog a-watch for his master’s foot,Who cannot sleep or eat before he hears,I sate upon the deck and watched all night,And listened through the stars for Italy.Those marriage-bells I spoke of, sounded far,As some child’s go-cart in the street beneathTo a dying man who will not pass the day,And knows it, holding by a hand he loves.I, too, sate quiet, satisfied with death,Sate silent: I could hear my own soul speak,And had my friend,—for Nature comes sometimesAnd says, ‘I am ambassador for God.’I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,One straining past another along the shore,The way of grand dull Odyssean ghostsAthirst to drink the cool blue wine of seasAnd stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peakThey stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian beltOf intense sea betwixt them and the ship,Down all their sides the misty olive-woodsDissolving in the weak congenial moon,And still disclosing some brown convent-towerThat seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—Or many a little lighted village, droptLike a fallen star, upon so high a point,You wonder what can keep it in its placeFrom sliding headlong with the waterfallsWhich drop and powder all the myrtle-grovesWith spray of silver. Thus my ItalyWas stealing on us. Genoa broke with day;The Doria’s long pale palace striking out,From green hills in advance of the white town,A marble finger dominant to ships,Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.But then I did not think, ‘my Italy,’I thought, ‘my father!’ O my father’s house,Without his presence!—Places are too muchOr else too little, for immortal man;Too little, when love’s May o’ergrows the ground,—Too much, when that luxuriant wealth of greenIs rustling to our ankles in dead leaves.’Tis only good to be, or here or there,Because we had a dream on such a stone,Or this or that,—but, once beings wholly waked,And come back to the stone without the dream,We trip upon’t,—alas! and hurt ourselves;Or else it falls on us and grinds us flat,The heaviest grave-stone on this burying earth.—But while I stood and mused, a quiet touchFell light upon my arm, and, turning round,A pair of moistened eyes convicted mine.‘What, Marian! is the babe astir so soon?’‘He sleeps,’ she answered; ‘I have crept up thrice,And seen you sitting, standing, still at watch.I thought it did you good till now, but now’ ...‘But now,’ I said, ‘you leave the child alone.’‘Andyou’realone,’ she answered,—and she lookedAs if I, too, were something. Sweet the helpOf one we have helped! Thanks, Marian, for that help.I found a house, at Florence, on the hillOf Bellosguardo. ’Tis a tower that keepsA post of double-observation o’erThe valley of Arno (holding as a handThe outspread city) straight toward FiesoleAnd Mount Morello and the setting sun,—The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,Which sunrise fills as full as crystal cupsWine-filled, and red to the brim because it’s red.No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseenBy dwellers at my villa: morn and eveWere magnified before us in the pureIllimitable space and pause of sky,Intense as angels’ garments blanched with God,Less blue than radiant. From the outer wallOf the garden, dropped the mystic floating greyOf olive-trees, (with interruptions greenFrom maize and vine) until ’twas caught and tornOn that abrupt black line of cypressesWhich signed the way to Florence. BeautifulThe city lay along the ample vale,Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;The river trailing like a silver cordThrough all, and curling loosely, both beforeAnd after, over the whole stretch of landSown whitely up and down its opposite slopes,With farms and villas.Many weeks had passed,No word was granted.—Last, a letter cameFrom Vincent Carrington:—‘My dear Miss Leigh,You’ve been as silent as a poet should,When any other man is sure to speak.If sick, if vexed, if dumb, a silver-pieceWill split a man’s tongue,—straight he speaks and says,‘Received that cheque.’ But you!... I send you fundsTo Paris, and you make no sign at all.Remember I’m responsible and waitA sign of you, Miss Leigh.‘Meantime your bookIs eloquent as if you were not dumb;And common critics, ordinarily deafTo such fine meanings, and, like deaf men, lothTo seem deaf, answering chance-wise, yes or no,‘It must be,’ or ‘it must not,’ (most pronouncedWhen least convinced) pronounce for once aright:You’d think they really heard,—and so they do ...The burr of three or four who really hearAnd praise your book aright: Fame’s smallest trumpIs a great ear-trumpet for the deaf as posts,No other being effective. Fear not, friend;We think, here, you have written a good book,And you, a woman! It was in you—yes,I felt ’twas in you: yet I doubted halfIf that od-force of German ReichenbachWhich still from female finger-tips burns blue,Could strike out, as our masculine white heats,To quicken a man. Forgive me. All my heartIs quick with yours, since, just a fortnight since,I read your book and loved it.‘Will you loveMy wife, too? Here’s my secret, I might keepA month more from you! but I yield it upBecause I know you’ll write the sooner for’t,—Most women (of your height even) counting loveLife’s only serious business. Who’s my wifeThat shall be in a month? you ask? nor guess?Remember what a pair of topaz eyesYou once detected, turned against the wall,That morning, in my London painting-room;The face half-sketched, and slurred; the eyes alone!But you ... you caught them up with yours, and said‘Kate Ward’s eyes, surely.’—Now, I own the truth,I had thrown them there to keep them safe from Jove;They would so naughtily find out their wayTo both the heads of both my Danaës,Where just it made me mad to look at them.Such eyes! I could not paint or think of eyesBut those,—and so I flung them into paintAnd turned them to the wall’s care. Ay, but nowI’ve let them out, my Kate’s! I’ve painted her,(I’ll change my style, and leave mythologies)The whole sweet face; it looks upon my soulLike a face on water, to beget itself.A half-length portrait, in a hanging cloakLike one you wore once; ’tis a little frayed;I pressed, too, for the nude harmonious arm—But she ... she’d have her way, and have her cloak;She said she could be like you only so,And would not miss the fortune. Ah, my friend,You’ll write and say she shall not miss your loveThrough meeting mine? in faith, she would not change:She has your books by heart, more than my words,And quotes you up against me till I’m pushedWhere, three months since, her eyes were! nay, in fact,Nought satisfied her but to make me paintYour last book folded in her dimpled hands,Instead of my brown palette, as I wished,(And, grant me, the presentment had been newer)She’d grant me nothing: I’ve compounded forThe naming of the wedding-day next month,And gladly too. ’Tis pretty, to remarkHow women can love women of your sort,And tie their hearts with love-knots to your feet,Grow insolent about you against men,And put us down by putting up the lip,As if a man,—therearesuch, let us own,Who write not ill,—remains a man, poor wretch,While you——! Write far worse than Aurora Leigh,And there’ll be women who believe of you(Besides my Kate) that if you walked on sandYou would not leave a foot-print.‘Are you putTo wonder by my marriage, like poor Leigh?‘Kate Ward!’ he said. ‘Kate Ward!’ he said anew.‘I thought ...’ he said, and stopped,—‘I did not think....’And then he dropped to silence.‘Ah, he’s changed.I had not seen him, you’re aware, for long,But went of course. I have not touched on thisThrough all this letter,—conscious of your heart,And writing lightlier for the heavy fact,As clocks are voluble with lead.‘How weak,To say I’m sorry. Dear Leigh, dearest Leigh!In those old days of Shropshire,—pardon me,—When he and you fought many a field of goldOn what you should do, or you should not do,Make bread or verses, (it just came to that)I thought you’d one day draw a silken peaceThrough a golden ring. I thought so. Foolishly,The event proved,—for you went more oppositeTo each other, month by month, and year by year,Until this happened. God knows best, we say,But hoarsely. When the fever took him first,Just after I had writ to you in France,They tell me Lady Waldemar mixed drinksAnd counted grains, like any salaried nurse,Excepting that she wept too. Then Lord Howe,You’re right about Lord Howe! Lord Howe’s a trump;And yet, with such in his hand, a man like LeighMay lose, ashedoes. There’s an end to all,—Yes, even this letter, though the second sheetMay find you doubtful. Write a word for Kate:Even now she reads my letters like a wife,And, if she sees her name, I’ll see her smile,And share the luck. So, bless you, friend of two!I will not ask you what your feeling isAt Florence, with my pictures. I can hearYour heart a-flutter over the snow-hills;And, just to pace the Pitti with you once,I’d give a half-hour of to-morrow’s walkWith Kate ... I think so. Vincent Carrington.’The noon was hot; the air scorched like the sun,And was shut out. The closed persiani threwTheir long-scored shadows on my villa-floor,And interlined the golden atmosphereStraight, still,—across the pictures on the wall,The statuette on the console, (of young LoveAnd Psyche made one marble by a kiss)The low couch where I leaned, the table near,The vase of lilies, Marian pulled last night,(Each green leaf and each white leaf ruled in blackAs if for writing some new text of fate)And the open letter, rested on my knee,—But there, the lines swerved, trembled, though I sateUntroubled ... plainly, ... reading it againAnd three times. Well, he’s married; that is clear.No wonder that he’s married, nor much moreThat Vincent’s therefore, ‘sorry.’ Why, of course,The lady nursed him when he was not well,Mixed drinks,—unless nepenthe was the drink,’Twas scarce worth telling. But a man in loveWill see the whole sex in his mistress’ hood,The prettier for its lining of fair rose;Although he catches back, and says at last,‘I’m sorry.’ Sorry. Lady WaldemarAt prettiest, under the said hood, preservedFrom such a light as I could hold to her faceTo flare its ugly wrinkles out to shame,—Is scarce a wife for Romney, as friends judge,Aurora Leigh, or Vincent Carrington,—That’s plain. And if he’s ‘conscious of my heart’ ...Perhaps it’s natural, though the phrase is strong;(One’s apt to use strong phrases, being in love)And even that stuff of ‘fields of gold,’ ‘gold rings,’And what he ‘thought,’ poor Vincent! what he ‘thought,’May never mean enough to ruffle me.—Why, this room stifles. Better burn than choke;Best have air, air, although it comes with fire,Throw open blinds and windows to the noonAnd take a blister on my brow insteadOf this dead weight! best, perfectly be stunnedBy those insufferable cicale, sickAnd hoarse with rapture of the summer-heat,That sing like poets, till their hearts break, ... singTill men say, ‘It’s too tedious.’Books succeed,And lives fail. Do I feel it so, at last?Kate loves a worn-out cloak for being like mine,While I live self-despised for being myself,And yearn toward some one else, who yearns awayFrom what he is, in his turn. Strain a stepFor ever, yet gain no step? Are we such,We cannot, with our admirations even,Our tip-toe aspirations, touch a thingThat’s higher than we? is all a dismal flat,And God alone above each,—as the sunO’er level lagunes, to make them shine and stink,—Laying stress upon us with immediate flame,While we respond with our miasmal fog,And call it mounting higher, because we growMore highly fatal?Tush, Aurora Leigh!You wear your sackcloth looped in Cæsar’s way,And brag your failings as mankind’s. Be still.Thereiswhat’s higher, in this very world,Than you can live, or catch at. Stand aside,And look at others—instance little Kate!She’ll make a perfect wife for Carrington.She always has been looking round the earthFor something good and green to alight uponAnd nestle into, with those soft-winged eyesSubsiding now beneath his manly hand’Twixt trembling lids of inexpressive joy:I will not scorn her, after all, too much,That so much she should love me. A wise manCan pluck a leaf, and find a lecture in ’t;And I, too, ... God has made me,—I’ve a heartThat’s capable of worship, love, and loss;We say the same of Shakspeare’s. I’ll be meek,And learn to reverence, even this poor myself.The book, too—pass it. ‘A good book,’ says he,‘And you a woman.’ I had laughed at that,But long since. I’m a woman,—it is true;Alas, and woe to us, when we feel it most!Then, least care have we for the crowns and goals,And compliments on writing our good books.The book has some truth in it, I believe:And truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.I know we talk our Phædons to the endThrough all the dismal faces that we make,O’er-wrinkled with dishonouring agonyFrom any mortal drug. I have written truth,And I a woman; feebly, partially,Inaptly in presentation, Romney’ll add,Because a woman. For the truth itself,That’s neither man’s nor woman’s, but just God’s;None else has reason to be proud of truth:Himself will see it sifted, disenthralled,And kept upon the height and in the light,As far as, and no farther, than ’tis truth;For,—now He has left off calling firmamentsAnd strata, flowers and creatures, very good,—He says it still of truth, which is His own.Truth, so far, in my book;—the truth which drawsThrough all things upwards; that a twofold worldMust go to a perfect cosmos. Natural thingsAnd spiritual,—who separates those twoIn art, in morals, or the social drift,Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,Is wrong, in short, at all points. We divideThis apple of life, and cut it through the pips,—The perfect round which fitted Venus’ handHas perished utterly as if we ateBoth halves. Without the spiritual, observe,The natural’s impossible;—no form,No motion! Without sensuous, spiritualIs inappreciable;—no beauty or power!And in this twofold sphere the twofold man(And still the artist is intensely a man)Holds firmly by the natural, to reachThe spiritual beyond it,—fixes stillThe type with mortal vision, to pierce through,With eyes immortal, to the antetypeSome call the ideal,—better called the real,And certain to be called so presentlyWhen things shall have their names. Look long enoughOn any peasant’s face here, coarse and lined,You’ll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay,As perfect-featured as he yearns at RomeFrom marble pale with beauty; then persist,And, if your apprehension’s competent,You’ll find some fairer angel at his back,As much exceeding him, as he the boor,And pushing him with empyreal disdainFor ever out of sight. Ay, CarringtonIs glad of such a creed! an artist must,Who paints a tree, a leaf, a common stone,With just his hand, and finds it suddenlyA-piece with and conterminous to his soul.Why else do these things move him, leaf or stone?The bird’s not moved, that pecks at a spring-shoot;Nor yet the horse, before a quarry, a-graze:But man, the two-fold creature, apprehendsThe two-fold manner, in and outwardly,And nothing in the world comes single to him,A mere itself,—cup, column, or candlestick,All patterns of what shall be in the Mount;The whole temporal show related royally,And built up to eterne significanceThrough the open arms of God. ‘There’s nothing greatNor small,’ has said a poet of our day,(Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eveAnd not be thrown out by the matin’s bell)And truly, I reiterate, ... nothing’s small!No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim:And,—glancing on my own thin, veinéd wrist,—In such a little tremour of the bloodThe whole strong clamour of a vehement soulDoth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God:But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,And daub their natural faces unawareMore and more, from the first similitude.Truth, so far, in my book! a truth which drawsFrom all things upwards. I, Aurora, stillHave felt it hound me through the wastes of lifeAs Jove did Io: and, until that HandShall overtake me wholly, and, on my head,Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down,It must be. Art’s the witness of what IsBehind this show. If this world’s show were all,Then imitation would be all in Art;There, Jove’s hand gripes us!—For we stand here, we,If genuine artists, witnessing for God’sComplete, consummate, undivided work:—That not a natural flower can grow on earth,Without a flower upon the spiritual side,Substantial, archetypal, all a-glowWith blossoming causes,—not so far away,That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,May not catch something of the bloom and breath,—Too vaguely apprehended, though indeedStill apprehended, consciously or not,And still transferred to picture, music, verse,For thrilling audient and beholding soulsBy signs and touches which are known to souls,—How known, they know not,—why, they cannot find,So straight call out on genius, say, ‘A manProduced this,’—when much rather they should say,‘’Tis insight, and he saw this.’Thus is ArtSelf-magnified in magnifying a truthWhich, fully recognised, would change the worldAnd shift its morals. If a man could feel,Not one day, in the artist’s ecstasy,But every day, feast, fast, or working-day,The spiritual significance burn throughThe hieroglyphic of material shows,Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings,And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree,And even his very body as a man,—Which now he counts so vile, that all the townsMake offal of their daughters for its useOn summer-nights, when God is sad in heavenTo think what goes on in his recreant worldHe made quite other; while that moon He madeTo shine there, at the first love’s covenant,Shines still, convictive as a marriage-ringBefore adulterous eyes.How sure it is,That, if we say a true word, instantlyWe feel ’tis God’s, not ours, and pass it onAs bread at sacrament, we taste and passNor handle for a moment, as indeedWe dared to set up any claim to such!And I—my poem;—let my readers talk;I’m closer to it—I can speak as well:I’ll say, with Romney, that the book is weak,The range uneven, the points of sight obscure,The music interrupted.Let us go.The end of woman (or of man, I think)Is not a book. Alas, the best of booksIs but a word in Art, which soon grows cramped,Stiff, dubious-statured with the weight of years,And drops an accent or digamma downSome cranny of unfathomable time,Beyond the critic’s reaching. Art itself,We’ve called the higher life, still must feel the soulLive past it. For more’s felt than is perceived,And more’s perceived than can be interpreted,And Love strikes higher with his lambent flameThan Art can pile the faggots.Is it so?When Jove’s hand meets us with composing touch,And when, at last, we are hushed and satisfied,—Then, Io does not call it truth, but love?Well, well! my father was an Englishman:My mother’s blood in me is not so strongThat I should bear this stress of Tuscan noonAnd keep my wits. The town, there, seems to seetheIn this Medæan boil-pot of the sun,And all the patient hills are bubbling roundAs if a prick would leave them flat. Does heavenKeep far off, not to set us in a blaze?Not so,—let drag your fiery fringes, heaven,And burn us up to quiet! Ah, we knowToo much here, not to know what’s best for peace;We have too much light here, not to want more fireTo purify and end us. We talk, talk,Conclude upon divine philosophies,And get the thanks of men for hopeful books;Whereat we take our own life up, and ... pshaw!Unless we piece it with another’s life,(A yard of silk to carry out our lawn)As well suppose my little handkerchiefWould cover Samminiato, church and all,If out I threw it past the cypresses,As, in this ragged, narrow life of mine,Contain my own conclusions.But at leastWe’ll shut up the persiani, and sit down,And when my head’s done aching, in the cool,Write just a word to Kate and Carrington.May joy be with them! she has chosen well,And he not ill.I should be glad, I think,Except for Romney. Hadhemarried Kate,I surely, surely, should be very glad.This Florence sits upon me easily,With native air and tongue. My graves are calm,And do not too much hurt me. Marian’s good,Gentle and loving,—lets me hold the child,Or drags him up the hills to find me flowersAnd fill those vases, ere I’m quite awake,—The grandiose red tulips, which grow wild,Or else my purple lilies, Dante blewTo a larger bubble with his prophet-breath;Or one of those tall flowering reeds which standIn Arno like a sheaf of sceptres, leftBy some remote dynasty of dead gods,To suck the stream for ages and get green,And blossom wheresoe’er a hand divineHad warmed the place with ichor. Such I’ve foundAt early morning, laid across my bed,And woke up pelted with a childish laughWhich even Marian’s low precipitous ‘hush’Had vainly interposed to put away,—While I, with shut eyes, smile and motion forThe dewy kiss that’s very sure to comeFrom mouth and cheeks, the whole child’s face at onceDissolved on mine,—as if a nosegay burstIts string with the weight of roses overblown,And dropt upon me. Surely I should be glad.The little creature almost loves me now,And calls my name ... ‘Alola,’ stripping offThers like thorns, to make it smooth enoughTo take between his dainty, milk-fed lips,God love him! I should certainly be glad,Except, God help me, that I’m sorrowful,Because of Romney.Romney, Romney! Well,This grows absurd!—too like a tune that runsI’ the head, and forces all things in the world,Wind, rain, the creaking gnat or stuttering fly,To sing itself and vex you;—yet perhapsA paltry tune you never fairly liked,Some ‘I’d be a butterfly,’ or ‘C’est l’amour:’We’re made so,—not such tyrants to ourselves,We are not slaves to nature. Some of usAre turned, too, overmuch like some poor verseWith a trick of ritournelle: the same thing goesAnd comes back ever.Vincent CarringtonIs ‘sorry,’ and I’m sorry; buthe’s strongTo mount from sorrow to his heaven of love,And when he says at moments, ‘Poor, poor Leigh,Who’ll never call his own, so true a heart,So fair a face even,’—he must quickly loseThe pain of pity in the blush he has madeBy his very pitying eyes. The snow, for him,Has fallen in May, and finds the whole earth warm,And melts at the first touch of the green grass.But Romney,—he has chosen, after all.I think he had as excellent a sunTo see by, as most others, and perhapsHas scarce seen really worse than some of us,When all’s said. Let him pass. I’m not too muchA woman, not to be a man for once,And bury all my Dead like Alaric,Depositing the treasures of my soulIn this drained water-course, and, letting flowThe river of life again, with commerce-shipsAnd pleasure-barges, full of silks and songs.Blow, winds, and help us.Ah, we mock ourselvesWith talking of the winds! perhaps as muchWith other resolutions. How it weighs,This hot, sick air! and how I covet hereThe Dead’s provision on the river’s couch,With silver curtains drawn on tinkling rings!Or else their rest in quiet crypts,—laid byFrom heat and noise!—from those cicale, say,And this more vexing heart-beat.So it is:We covet for the soul, the body’s part,To die and rot. Even so, Aurora, endsOur aspiration, who bespoke our placeSo far in the east. The occidental flatsHad fed us fatter, therefore? we have climbedWhere herbage ends? we want the beast’s part now,And tire of the angel’s?—Men define a man,The creature who stands front-ward to the stars,The creature who looks inward to himself,The tool-wright, laughing creature. ’Tis enough:We’ll say instead, the inconsequent creature, man,—For that’s his specialty. What creature elseConceives the circle, and then walks the square?Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good?You think the bee makes honey half a year,To loathe the comb in winter, and desireThe little ant’s food rather? But a man—Note men!—they are but women after all,As women are but Auroras!—there are menBorn tender, apt to pale at a trodden worm,Who paint for pastime, in their favourite dream,Spruce auto-vestments flowered with crocus-flames:There are, too, who believe in hell, and lie:There are, who waste their souls in working outLife’s problem on these sands betwixt two tides,And end,—‘Now give us the beast’s part, in death.’Alas, long-suffering and most patient God,Thou need’st be surelier God to bear with usThan even to have made us! thou, aspire, aspireFrom henceforth for me! thou who hast, thyself,Endured this fleshhood, knowing how, as a soakedAnd sucking vesture, it would drag us downAnd choke us in the melancholy Deep,Sustain me, that, with thee, I walk these waves,Resisting!—breathe me upward, thou for meAspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life,—That no truth henceforth seem indifferent,No way to truth laborious, and no life,Not even this life I live, intolerable!The days went by. I took up the old daysWith all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled,—Like some lost book we dropt in the long grassOn such a happy summer-afternoonWhen last we read it with a loving friend,And find in autumn, when the friend is gone,The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late,And stare at, as at something wonderfulFor sorrow,—thinking how two hands, before,Had held up what is left to only one,And how we smiled when such a vehement nailImpressed the tiny dint here, which presentsThis verse in fire for ever! TenderlyAnd mournfully I lived. I knew the birdsAnd insects,—which look fathered by the flowersAnd emulous of their hues: I recognisedThe moths, with that great overpoise of wingsWhich makes a mystery of them how at allThey can stop flying: butterflies, that bearUpon their blue wings such red embers round,They seem to scorch the blue air into holesEach flight they take: and fire-flies, that suspireIn short soft lapses of transported flameAcross the tingling Dark, while overheadThe constant and inviolable starsOutburn those lights-of-love: melodious owls,(If music had but one note and was sad,’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirlOf bats, that seem to follow in the airSome grand circumference of a shadowy domeTo which we are blind: and then, the nightingales,Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,(When walking in the town) and carry itSo high into the bowery almond-trees,We tremble and are afraid, and feel as ifThe golden flood of moonlight unawareDissolved the pillars of the steady earthAnd made it less substantial. And I knewThe harmless opal snakes, and large-mouthed frogs,(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud,Will flatter you and take you for a stone,And flash familiarly about your feetWith such prodigious eyes in such small heads!—I knew them, though they had somewhat dwindled fromMy childish imagery,—and kept in mindHow last I sate among them equally,In fellowship and mateship, as a childWill bear him still toward insect, beast, and bird,Before the Adam in him has foregoneAll privilege of Eden,—making friendsAnd talk, with such a bird or such a goat,And buying many a two-inch-wide rush-cageTo let out the caged cricket on a tree,Saying, ‘Oh, my dear grillino, were you cramped?And are you happy with the ilex-leaves?And do you love me who have let you go?Sayyesin singing, and I’ll understand.’But now the creatures all seemed farther off,No longer mine, nor like me; onlythere,A gulph between us. I could yearn indeed,Like other rich men, for a drop of dewTo cool this heat,—a drop of the early dew,The irrecoverable child-innocence(Before the heart took fire and withered life)When childhood might pair equally with birds;But now ... the birds were grown too proud for us!Alas, the very sun forbids the dew.And I, I had come back to an empty nest,Which every bird’s too wise for. How I heardMy father’s step on that deserted ground,His voice along that silence, as he toldThe names of bird and insect, tree and flower,And all the presentations of the starsAcross Valdarno, interposing still‘My child,’ ‘my child.’ When fathers say ‘my child,’’Tis easier to conceive the universe,And life’s transitions down the steps of law.I rode once to the little mountain-houseAs fast as if to find my father there,But, when in sight of’t, within fifty yards,I dropped my horse’s bridle on his neckAnd paused upon his flank. The house’s frontWas cased with lingots of ripe Indian cornIn tesselated order, and deviceOf golden patterns: not a stone of wallUncovered,—not an inch of room to growA vine-leaf. The old porch had disappeared;And, in the open doorway, sate a girlAt plaiting straws,—her black hair strained awayTo a scarlet kerchief caught beneath her chinIn Tuscan fashion,—her full ebon eyes,Which looked too heavy to be lifted so,Still dropt and lifted toward the mulberry-treeOn which the lads were busy with their stavesIn shout and laughter, stripping all the boughsAs bare as winter, of those summer leavesMy father had not changed for all the silkIn which the ugly silkworms hide themselves.Enough. My horse recoiled before my heart—I turned the rein abruptly. Back we wentAs fast, to Florence.That was trial enoughOf graves. I would not visit, if I could,My father’s, or my mother’s any more,To see if stone-cutter or lichen beatSo early in the race, or throw my flowers,Which could not out-smell heaven, or sweeten earth.They live too far above, that I should lookSo far below to find them: let me thinkThat rather they are visiting my grave,This life here, (undeveloped yet to life)And that they drop upon me, now and then,For token or for solace, some small weedLeast odorous of the growths of paradise,To spare such pungent scents as kill with joy.My old Assunta, too, was dead, was dead—O land of all men’s past! for me alone,It would not mix its tenses. I was past,It seemed, like others,—only not in heaven.And, many a Tuscan eve, I wandered downThe cypress alley, like a restless ghostThat tries its feeble ineffectual breathUpon its own charred funeral-brands put outToo soon,—where, black and stiff, stood up the treesAgainst the broad vermilion of the skies.Such skies!—all clouds abolished in a sweepOf God’s skirt, with a dazzle to ghosts and men,As down I went, saluting on the bridgeThe hem of such, before ’twas caught awayBeyond the peaks of Lucca. Underneath,The river, just escaping from the weightOf that intolerable glory, ranIn acquiescent shadow murmurously:And up, beside it, streamed the festa-folkWith fellow-murmurs from their feet and fans,(Withissimoandinoand sweet poiseOf vowels in their pleasant scandalous talk)Returning from the grand-duke’s dairy-farmBefore the trees grew dangerous at eight,(For, ‘trust no tree by moonlight,’ Tuscans say)To eat their ice at Doni’s tenderly,—Each lovely lady close to a cavalierWho holds her dear fan while she feeds her smileOn meditative spoonfuls of vanille,He breathing hot protesting vows of love,Enough to thaw her cream, and scorch his beard.’Twas little matter. I could pass them byIndifferently, not fearing to be known.No danger of being wrecked upon a friend,And forced to take an iceberg for an isle!The very English, here, must wait to learnTo hang the cobweb of their gossip outAnd catch a fly. I’m happy. It’s sublime,This perfect solitude of foreign lands!To be, as if you had not been till then,And were then, simply that you chose to be:To spring up, not be brought forth from the ground,Like grasshoppers at Athens, and skip thriceBefore a woman makes a pounce on youAnd plants you in her hair!—possess, yourself,A new world all alive with creatures new,New sun, new moon, new flowers, new people—ah,And be possessed by none of them! no rightIn one, to call your name, enquire your where,Or what you think of Mister Some-one’s book,Or Mister Other’s marriage, or decease,Or how’s the headache which you had last week,Or why you look so pale still, since it’s gone?—Such most surprising riddance of one’s lifeComes next one’s death; it’s disembodimentWithout the pang. I marvel, people chooseTo stand stock-still like fakirs, till the mossGrows on them, and they cry out, self-admired,‘How verdant and how virtuous!’ Well, I’m glad:Or should be, if grown foreign to myselfAs surely as to others.Musing so,I walked the narrow unrecognising streets,Where many a palace-front peers gloomilyThrough stony vizors iron-barred, (preparedAlike, should foe or lover pass that way,For guest or victim) and came wandering outUpon the churches with mild open doorsAnd plaintive wail of vespers, where a few,Those chiefly women, sprinkled round in blotsUpon the dusky pavement, knelt and prayedToward the altar’s silver glory. Oft a ray(I liked to sit and watch) would tremble out,Just touch some face more lifted, more in need,Of course a woman’s—while I dreamed a taleTo fit its fortunes. There was one who lookedAs if the earth had suddenly grown too largeFor such a little humpbacked thing as she;The pitiful black kerchief round her neckSole proof she had had a mother. One, again,Looked sick for love,—seemed praying some soft saintTo put more virtue in the new fine scarfShe spent a fortnight’s meals on, yesterday,That cruel Gigi might return his eyesFrom Giuliana. There was one, so old,So old, to kneel grew easier than to stand,—So solitary, she accepts at lastOur Lady for her gossip, and frets onAgainst the sinful world which goes its roundsIn marrying and being married, just the sameAs when ’twas almost good and had the right,(Her Gian alive, and she herself eighteen).And yet, now even, if Madonna willed,She’d win a tern in Thursday’s lottery,And better all things. Did she dream for nought,That, boiling cabbage for the fast-day’s soup,It smelt like blessed entrails? such a dreamFor nought? would sweetest Mary cheat her so,And lose that certain candle, straight and whiteAs any fair grand-duchess in her teens,Winch otherwise should flare here in a week?Benigna sis, thou beauteous Queen of heaven!I sate there musing, and imaginingSuch utterance from such faces: poor blind soulsThat writhed toward heaven along the devil’s trail,—Who knows, I thought, but He may stretch his handAnd pick them up? ’tis written in the Book,He heareth the young ravens when they cry;And yet they cry for carrion.—O my God,—And we, who make excuses for the rest,We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,And dropped my head upon the pavement too,And prayed, since I was foolish in desireLike other creatures, craving offal-food,That He would stop his ears to what I said,And only listen to the run and beatOf this poor, passionate, helpless blood—And thenI lay, and spoke not. But He heard in heaven.So many Tuscan evenings passed the same!I could not lose a sunset on the bridge,And would not miss a vigil in the church,And liked to mingle with the out-door crowdSo strange and gay and ignorant of my face,For men you know not, are as good as trees.And only once, at the Santissima,I almost chanced upon a man I knew,Sir Blaise Delorme. He saw me certainly,And somewhat hurried, as he crossed himself,The smoothness of the action,—then half bowed,But only half, and merely to my shade,I slipped so quick behind the porphyry plinth,And left him dubious if ’twas really I,Or peradventure Satan’s usual trickTo keep a mounting saint uncanonised.But I was safe for that time, and he too;The argent angels in the altar-flareAbsorbed his soul, next moment. The good man!In England we were scarce acquaintances,That here in Florence he should keep my thoughtBeyond the image on his eye, which cameAnd went: and yet his thought disturbed my life:For, after that, I oftener sate at homeOn evenings, watching how they fined themselvesWith gradual conscience to a perfect night,Until the moon, diminished to a curve,Lay out there, like a sickle for His handWho cometh down at last to reap the earth.At such times, ended seemed my trade of verse;I feared to jingle bells upon my robeBefore the four-faced silent cherubim:With God so near me, could I sing of God?I did not write, nor read, nor even think,But sate absorbed amid the quickening glooms,Most like some passive broken lump of saltDropt in by chance to a bowl of œnomel,To spoil the drink a little, and lose itself,Dissolving slowly, slowly, until lost.

‘Thewoman’s motive? shall we daub ourselvesWith finding roots for nettles? ’tis soft clayAnd easily explored. She had the means,The monies, by the lady’s liberal grace,In trust for that Australian scheme and me,Which so, that she might clutch with both her hands,And chink to her naughty uses undisturbed,She served me (after all it was not strange;’Twas only what my mother would have done)A motherly, unmerciful, good turn.

‘Well, after. There are nettles everywhere,But smooth green grasses are more common still;The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud;A miller’s wife at Clichy took me inAnd spent her pity on me,—made me calmAnd merely very reasonably sad.She found me a servant’s place in Paris whereI tried to take the cast-off life again,And stood as quiet as a beaten assWho, having fallen through overloads, stands upTo let them charge him with another pack.

‘A few months, so. My mistress, young and light,Was easy with me, less for kindness thanBecause she led, herself, an easy timeBetwixt her lover and her looking-glass,Scarce knowing which way she was praised the most.She felt so pretty and so pleased all dayShe could not take the trouble to be cross,But, sometimes, as I stooped to tie her shoe,Would tap me softly with her slender foot,Still restless with the last night’s dancing in’t,And say, ‘Fie, pale-face! are you English girlsAll grave and silent? mass-book still, and Lent?And first-communion colours on your cheeks,Worn past the time for’t? little fool, be gay!’At which she vanished, like a fairy, throughA gap of silver laughter.‘Came an hourWhen all went otherwise. She did not speak,But clenched her brows, and clipped me with her eyesAs if a viper with a pair of tongs,Too far for any touch, yet near enoughTo view the writhing creature,—then at last;‘Stand still there, in the holy Virgin’s name,Thou Marian; thou’rt no reputable girl,Although sufficient dull for twenty saints!I think thou mock’st me and my house,’ she said;‘Confess, thou’lt be a mother in a month,Thou mask of saintship.’‘Could I answer her?The light broke in so: it meantthatthen,that?I had not thought of that, in all my thoughts,—Through all the cold, numb aching of my brow,Through all the heaving of impatient lifeWhich threw me on death at intervals,—through allThe upbreak of the fountains of my heartThe rains had swelled too large: it could meanthat?Did God make mothers out of victims, then,And set such pure amens to hideous deeds?Why not? He overblows an ugly graveWith violets which blossom in the spring.AndIcould be a mother in a month!I hope it was not wicked to be glad.I lifted up my voice and wept, and laughed,To heaven, not her, until it tore my throat.‘Confess, confess!’ what was there to confess,Except man’s cruelty, except my wrong?Except this anguish, or this ecstasy?This shame, or glory? The light woman thereWas small to take it in: an acorn-cupWould take the sea in sooner.‘Good,’ she cried;Unmarried and a mother, and she laughs!These unchaste girls are always impudent.Get out, intriguer! leave my house, and trot:I wonder you should look me in the face,With such a filthy secret.’‘Then I rolledMy scanty bundle up, and went my way,Washed white with weeping, shuddering head and footWith blind hysteric passion, staggering forthBeyond those doors. ’Twas natural, of course,She should not ask me where I meant to sleep;I might sleep well beneath the heavy Seine,Like others of my sort; the bed was laidFor us. But any woman, womanly,Had thought of him who should be in a month,The sinless babe that should be in a month,And if by chance he might be warmer housedThan underneath such dreary, dripping eaves.’

I broke on Marian there. ‘Yet she herself,A wife, I think, had scandals of her own,A lover, not her husband.’‘Ay,’ she said,‘But gold and meal are measured otherwise;I learnt so much at school,’ said Marian Erle.

‘O crooked world,’ I cried, ‘ridiculousIf not so lamentable! It’s the wayWith these light women of a thrifty vice,My Marian,—always hard upon the rentIn any sister’s virtue! while they keepTheir chastity so darned with perfidy,That, though a rag itself, it looks as wellAcross a street, in balcony or coach,As any stronger stuff might. For my part,I’d rather take the wind-side of the stewsThan touch such women with my finger-end!They top the poor street-walker by their lie,And look the better for being so much worse:The devil’s most devilish when respectable.But you, dear, and your story.’‘All the restIs here,’ she said, and signed upon the child.‘I found a mistress-sempstress who was kindAnd let me sew in peace among her girls;And what was better than to draw the threadsAll day and half the night, for him, and him?And so I lived for him, and so he lives,And so I know, by this time, God lives too.’

She smiled beyond the sun, and ended so,And all my soul rose up to take her partAgainst the world’s successes, virtues, fames.‘Come with me, sweetest sister,’ I returned,‘And sit within my house, and do me goodFrom henceforth, thou and thine! ye are my ownFrom henceforth. I am lonely in the world,And thou art lonely, and the child is halfAn orphan. Come,—and, henceforth, thou and IBeing still together, will not miss a friend,Nor he a father, since two mothers shallMake that up to him. I am journeying south,And, in my Tuscan home I’ll find a niche,And set thee there, my saint, the child and thee,And burn the lights of love before thy face,And ever at thy sweet look cross myselfFrom mixing with the world’s prosperities;That so, in gravity and holy calm,We two may live on toward the truer life.’

She looked me in the face and answered not,Nor signed she was unworthy, nor gave thanks,But took the sleeping child and held it outTo meet my kiss, as if requiting meAnd trusting me at once. And thus, at once,I carried him and her to where I lived;She’s there now, in the little room, asleep,I hear the soft child-breathing through the door;And all three of us, at to-morrow’s break,Pass onward, homeward, to our Italy.Oh, Romney Leigh, I have your debts to pay,And I’ll be just and pay them.But yourself!To pay your debts is scarcely difficult;To buy your life is nearly impossible,Being sold away to Lamia. My head aches;I cannot see my road along this dark;Nor can I creep and grope, as fits the dark,For these foot-catching robes of womanhood:A man might walk a little ... but I!—He lovesThe Lamia-woman,—and I, write to himWhat stops his marriage, and destroys his peace,—Or what, perhaps, shall simply trouble him,Until she only need to touch his sleeveWith just a finger’s tremulous white flame,Saying, ‘Ah,—Aurora Leigh! a pretty tale,A very pretty poet! I can guessThe motive’—then, to catch his eyes in hers,And vow she does not wonder,—and they twoTo break in laughter, as the sea alongA melancholy coast, and float up higher,In such a laugh, their fatal weeds of love!Ay, fatal, ay. And who shall answer meFate has not hurried tides; and if to-nightMy letter would not be a night too late,—An arrow shot into a man that’s dead,To prove a vain intention? Would I showThe new wife vile, to make the husband mad?No, Lamia! shut the shutters, bar the doorsFrom every glimmer on thy serpent-skin!I will not let thy hideous secret outTo agonise the man I love—I meanThe friend I love ... as friends love.It is strange,To-day while Marian told her story, likeTo absorb most listeners, how I listened chiefTo a voice not hers, nor yet that enemy’s,Nor God’s in wrath, ... but one that mixed with mineLong years ago, among the garden-trees,And said tome, tometoo, ‘Be my wife,Aurora!’ It is strange, with what a swellOf yearning passion, as snow of ghostsMight beat against the impervious doors of heaven,I thought, ‘Now, if I had been a woman, suchAs God made women, to save men by love,—By just my love I might have saved this man,And made a nobler poem for the worldThan all I have failed in.’ But I failed besidesIn this; and now he’s lost! through me alone!And, by my only fault, his empty houseSucks in, at this same hour, a wind from hellTo keep his hearth cold, make his casements creakFor ever to the tune of plague and sin—O Romney, O my Romney, O my friend!My cousin and friend! my helper, when I would,My love, that might be! mine!Why, how one weepsWhen one’s too weary! Were a witness by,He’d say some folly ... that I loved the man,Who knows?... and make me laugh again for scorn.At strongest, women are as weak in flesh,As men, at weakest, vilest, are in soul:So, hard for women to keep pace with men!As well give up at once, sit down at once,And weep as I do. Tears, tears!why, we weep?’Tis worth enquiry?—That we’ve shamed a life,Or lost a love, or missed a world, perhaps?By no means. Simply, that we’ve walked too far,Or talked too much, or felt the wind i’ the east,—And so we weep, as if both body and soulBroke up in water—this way.Poor mixed ragsForsooth we’re made of, like those other dollsThat lean with pretty faces into fairs.It seems as if I had a man in me,Despising such a woman.Yet indeed,To see a wrong or suffering moves us allTo undo it, though we should undo ourselves;Ay, all the more, that we undo ourselves;That’s womanly, past doubt, and not ill-moved.A natural movement, therefore, on my part,To fill the chair up of my cousin’s wife,And save him from a devil’s company!We’re all so,—made so—’tis our woman’s tradeTo suffer torment for another’s ease.The world’s male chivalry has perished out,But women are knights-errant to the last;And, if Cervantes had been greater still,He had made his Don a Donna.So it clears,And so we rain our skies blue.Put awayThis weakness. If, as I have just now said,A man’s within me,—let him act himself,Ignoring the poor conscious trouble of bloodThat’s called the woman merely. I will writePlain words to England,—if too late, too late,—If ill-accounted, then accounted ill;We’ll trust the heavens with something.‘Dear Lord Howe,You’ll find a story on another leafThat’s Marian Erle’s,—what noble friend of yoursShe trusted once, through what flagitious meansTo what disastrous ends;—the story’s true.I found her wandering on the Paris quays,A babe upon her breast,—unnaturalUnseasonable outcast on such snowsUnthawed to this time. I will tax in thisYour friendship, friend,—if that convicted SheBe not his wife yet, to denounce the factsTo himself,—but, otherwise, to let them passOn tip-toe like escaping murderers,And tell my cousin, merely—Marian lives,Is found, and finds her home with such a friend,Myself, Aurora. Which good news, ‘She’s found,’Will help to make him merry in his love:I send it, tell him, for my marriage gift,As good as orange-water for the nerves,Or perfumed gloves for headaches,—though awareThat he, except of love, is scarcely sick;I mean the new love this time, ... since last year.Such quick forgetting on the part of men!Is any shrewder trick upon the cardsTo enrich them? pray instruct me how it’s done.First, clubs,—and while you look at clubs, it’s spades;That’s prodigy. The lightning strikes a man,And when we think to find him dead and charred ...Why, there he is on a sudden, playing pipesBeneath the splintered elm-tree! Crime and shameAnd all their hoggery trample your smooth world,Nor leave more foot-marks than Apollo’s kine,Whose hoofs were muffled by the thieving godIn tamarisk-leaves and myrtle. I’m so sad,So weary and sad to-night, I’m somewhat sour,—Forgive me. To be blue and shrew at once,Exceeds all toleration except yours;But yours, I know, is infinite. Farewell.To-morrow we take train for Italy.Speak gently of me to your gracious wife,As one, however far, shall yet be nearIn loving wishes to your house.’I sign.And now I’ll loose my heart upon a page,This—‘Lady Waldemar, I’m very gladI never liked you; which you knew so well,You spared me, in your turn, to like me much.Your liking surely had done worse for meThan has your loathing, though the last appearsSufficiently unscrupulous to hurt,And not afraid of judgment. Now, there’s spaceBetween our faces,—I stand off, as ifI judged a stranger’s portrait and pronouncedIndifferently the type was good or bad:What matter to me that the lines are false,I ask you? Did I ever ink my lipsBy drawing your name through them as a friend’s,Or touch your hands as lovers do? thank GodI never did: and, since you’re proved so vile,Ay, vile, I say,—we’ll show it presently,—I’m not obliged to nurse my friend in you,Or wash out my own blots, in counting yours,Or even excuse myself to honest soulsWho seek to touch my lip or clasp my palm,—‘Alas, but Lady Waldemar came first!’‘’Tis true, by this time, you may near me soThat you’re my cousin’s wife. You’ve gambled deepAs Lucifer, and won the morning-starIn that case,—and the noble house of LeighMust henceforth with its good roof shelter you:I cannot speak and burn you up betweenThose rafters, I who am born a Leigh,—nor speakAnd pierce your breast through Romney’s, I who liveHis friend and cousin!—so, you are safe. You twoMust grow together like the tares and wheatTill God’s great fire.—But make the best of time.

‘And hide this letter! let it speak no moreThan I shall, how you tricked poor Marian Erle,And set her own love digging her own graveWithin her green hope’s pretty garden-ground;Ay, sent her forth with some one of your sortTo a wicked house in France,—from which she fledWith curses in her eyes and ears and throat,Her whole soul choked with curses,—mad, in short,And madly scouring up and down for weeksThe foreign hedgeless country, lone and lost,—So innocent, male-fiends might slink withinRemote hell-corners, seeing her so defiled!

‘But you,—you are a woman and more bold.To do you justice, you’d not shrink to face ...We’ll say, the unfledged life in the other room,Which, treading down God’s corn, you trod in sightOf all the dogs, in reach of all the guns,—Ay, Marian’s babe, her poor unfathered child,Her yearling babe!—you’d face him when he wakesAnd opens up his wonderful blue eyes:You’d meet them and not wink perhaps, nor fearGod’s triumph in them and supreme revenge,So, righting His creation’s balance-scale(You pulled as low as Tophet) to the topOf most celestial innocence! For meWho am not as bold, I own those infant eyesHave set me praying.‘While they look at heaven,No need of protestation in my wordsAgainst the place you’ve made them! let them look!They’ll do your business with the heavens, be sure:I spare you common curses.‘Ponder this.If haply you’re the wife of Romney Leigh,(For which inheritance beyond your birthYou sold that poisonous porridge called your soul)I charge you, be his faithful and true wife!Keep warm his hearth and clean his board, and, whenHe speaks, be quick with your obedience;Still grind your paltry wants and low desiresTo dust beneath his heel; though, even thus,The ground must hurt him,—it was writ of old,‘Ye shall not yoke together ox and ass,’The nobler and ignobler. Ay, but youShall do your part as well as such ill thingsCan do aught good. You shall not vex him,—mark,You shall not vex him, ... jar him when he’s sad,Or cross him when he’s eager. UnderstandTo trick him with apparent sympathies,Nor let him see thee in the face too nearAnd unlearn thy sweet seeming. Pay the priceOf lies, by being constrained to lie on still;’Tis easy for thy sort: a million moreWill scarcely damn thee deeper.‘Doing which,You are very safe from Marian and myself:We’ll breathe as softly as the infant here,And stir no dangerous embers. Fail a point,And show our Romney wounded, ill-content,Tormented in his home, ... we open mouth,And such a noise will follow, the last trump’sWill scarcely seem more dreadful, even to you;You’ll have no pipers after: Romney will(I know him) push you forth as none of his,All other men declaring it well done;While women, even the worst, your like, will drawTheir skirts back, not to brush you in the street;And so I warn you. I’m ... Aurora Leigh.’

The letter written, I felt satisfied.The ashes, smouldering in me, were thrown outBy handfuls from me: I had writ my heartAnd wept my tears, and now was cool and calm;And, going straightway to the neighbouring room,I lifted up the curtains of the bedWhere Marian Erle, the babe upon her arm,Both faces leaned together like a pairOf folded innocences, self-complete,Each smiling from the other, smiled and slept.There seemed no sin, no shame, no wrath, no grief.I felt, she too, had spoken words that night,But softer certainly, and said to God,—Who laughs in heaven perhaps, that such as IShould make ado for such as she.—‘Defiled’I wrote? ‘defiled’ I thought her? Stoop,Stoop lower, Aurora! get the angels’ leaveTo creep in somewhere, humbly, on your knees,Within this round of sequestration whiteIn which they have wrapt earth’s foundlings, heaven’s elect!

The next day, we took train to ItalyAnd fled on southward in the roar of steam.The marriage-bells of Romney must be loud,To sound so clear through all! I was not well;And truly, though the truth is like a jest,I could not choose but fancy, half the way,I stood alone i’ the belfry, fifty bellsOf naked iron, mad with merriment,(As one who laughs and cannot stop himself)All clanking at me, in me, over me,Until I shrieked a shriek I could not hear,And swooned with noise,—but still, along my swoon,Was ’ware the baffled changes backward rang,Prepared, at each emerging sense, to beatAnd crash it out with clangour. I was weak;I struggled for the posture of my soulIn upright consciousness of place and time,But evermore, ’twixt waking and asleep,Slipped somehow, staggered, caught at Marian’s eyesA moment, (it is very good for strengthTo know that some one needs you to be strong)And so recovered what I called myself,For that time.I just knew it when we sweptAbove the old roofs of Dijon. Lyons droppedA spark into the night, half trodden outUnseen. But presently the winding RhoneWashed out the moonlight large along his banks,Which strained their yielding curves out clear and cleanTo hold it,—shadow of town and castle blurredUpon the hurrying river. Such an airBlew thence upon the forehead,—half an airAnd half a water,—that I leaned and looked;Then, turning back on Marian, smiled to markThat she looked only on her child, who slept,His face towards the moon too.So we passedThe liberal open country and the close,And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedgeBy great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,And lets it in at once: the train swept inAthrob with effort, trembling with resolve,The fierce denouncing whistle wailing onAnd dying off smothered in the shuddering dark,While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressedAs other Titans, underneath the pileAnd nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!—Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wideRich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,(As if they entertained i’ the name of France)While, down their straining sides, streamed manifestA soil as red as Charlemagne’s knightly blood,To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,‘Marseilles!’ And lo, the city of Marseilles,With all her ships behind her, and beyond,The scimitar of ever-shining sea,For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!

That night we spent between the purple heavenAnd purple water: I think Marian slept;But I, as a dog a-watch for his master’s foot,Who cannot sleep or eat before he hears,I sate upon the deck and watched all night,And listened through the stars for Italy.Those marriage-bells I spoke of, sounded far,As some child’s go-cart in the street beneathTo a dying man who will not pass the day,And knows it, holding by a hand he loves.I, too, sate quiet, satisfied with death,Sate silent: I could hear my own soul speak,And had my friend,—for Nature comes sometimesAnd says, ‘I am ambassador for God.’I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,One straining past another along the shore,The way of grand dull Odyssean ghostsAthirst to drink the cool blue wine of seasAnd stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peakThey stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian beltOf intense sea betwixt them and the ship,Down all their sides the misty olive-woodsDissolving in the weak congenial moon,And still disclosing some brown convent-towerThat seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—Or many a little lighted village, droptLike a fallen star, upon so high a point,You wonder what can keep it in its placeFrom sliding headlong with the waterfallsWhich drop and powder all the myrtle-grovesWith spray of silver. Thus my ItalyWas stealing on us. Genoa broke with day;The Doria’s long pale palace striking out,From green hills in advance of the white town,A marble finger dominant to ships,Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.

But then I did not think, ‘my Italy,’I thought, ‘my father!’ O my father’s house,Without his presence!—Places are too muchOr else too little, for immortal man;Too little, when love’s May o’ergrows the ground,—Too much, when that luxuriant wealth of greenIs rustling to our ankles in dead leaves.’Tis only good to be, or here or there,Because we had a dream on such a stone,Or this or that,—but, once beings wholly waked,And come back to the stone without the dream,We trip upon’t,—alas! and hurt ourselves;Or else it falls on us and grinds us flat,The heaviest grave-stone on this burying earth.—But while I stood and mused, a quiet touchFell light upon my arm, and, turning round,A pair of moistened eyes convicted mine.‘What, Marian! is the babe astir so soon?’‘He sleeps,’ she answered; ‘I have crept up thrice,And seen you sitting, standing, still at watch.I thought it did you good till now, but now’ ...‘But now,’ I said, ‘you leave the child alone.’‘Andyou’realone,’ she answered,—and she lookedAs if I, too, were something. Sweet the helpOf one we have helped! Thanks, Marian, for that help.

I found a house, at Florence, on the hillOf Bellosguardo. ’Tis a tower that keepsA post of double-observation o’erThe valley of Arno (holding as a handThe outspread city) straight toward FiesoleAnd Mount Morello and the setting sun,—The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,Which sunrise fills as full as crystal cupsWine-filled, and red to the brim because it’s red.No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseenBy dwellers at my villa: morn and eveWere magnified before us in the pureIllimitable space and pause of sky,Intense as angels’ garments blanched with God,Less blue than radiant. From the outer wallOf the garden, dropped the mystic floating greyOf olive-trees, (with interruptions greenFrom maize and vine) until ’twas caught and tornOn that abrupt black line of cypressesWhich signed the way to Florence. BeautifulThe city lay along the ample vale,Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;The river trailing like a silver cordThrough all, and curling loosely, both beforeAnd after, over the whole stretch of landSown whitely up and down its opposite slopes,With farms and villas.Many weeks had passed,No word was granted.—Last, a letter cameFrom Vincent Carrington:—‘My dear Miss Leigh,You’ve been as silent as a poet should,When any other man is sure to speak.If sick, if vexed, if dumb, a silver-pieceWill split a man’s tongue,—straight he speaks and says,‘Received that cheque.’ But you!... I send you fundsTo Paris, and you make no sign at all.Remember I’m responsible and waitA sign of you, Miss Leigh.‘Meantime your bookIs eloquent as if you were not dumb;And common critics, ordinarily deafTo such fine meanings, and, like deaf men, lothTo seem deaf, answering chance-wise, yes or no,‘It must be,’ or ‘it must not,’ (most pronouncedWhen least convinced) pronounce for once aright:You’d think they really heard,—and so they do ...The burr of three or four who really hearAnd praise your book aright: Fame’s smallest trumpIs a great ear-trumpet for the deaf as posts,No other being effective. Fear not, friend;We think, here, you have written a good book,And you, a woman! It was in you—yes,I felt ’twas in you: yet I doubted halfIf that od-force of German ReichenbachWhich still from female finger-tips burns blue,Could strike out, as our masculine white heats,To quicken a man. Forgive me. All my heartIs quick with yours, since, just a fortnight since,I read your book and loved it.‘Will you loveMy wife, too? Here’s my secret, I might keepA month more from you! but I yield it upBecause I know you’ll write the sooner for’t,—Most women (of your height even) counting loveLife’s only serious business. Who’s my wifeThat shall be in a month? you ask? nor guess?Remember what a pair of topaz eyesYou once detected, turned against the wall,That morning, in my London painting-room;The face half-sketched, and slurred; the eyes alone!But you ... you caught them up with yours, and said‘Kate Ward’s eyes, surely.’—Now, I own the truth,I had thrown them there to keep them safe from Jove;They would so naughtily find out their wayTo both the heads of both my Danaës,Where just it made me mad to look at them.Such eyes! I could not paint or think of eyesBut those,—and so I flung them into paintAnd turned them to the wall’s care. Ay, but nowI’ve let them out, my Kate’s! I’ve painted her,(I’ll change my style, and leave mythologies)The whole sweet face; it looks upon my soulLike a face on water, to beget itself.A half-length portrait, in a hanging cloakLike one you wore once; ’tis a little frayed;I pressed, too, for the nude harmonious arm—But she ... she’d have her way, and have her cloak;She said she could be like you only so,And would not miss the fortune. Ah, my friend,You’ll write and say she shall not miss your loveThrough meeting mine? in faith, she would not change:She has your books by heart, more than my words,And quotes you up against me till I’m pushedWhere, three months since, her eyes were! nay, in fact,Nought satisfied her but to make me paintYour last book folded in her dimpled hands,Instead of my brown palette, as I wished,(And, grant me, the presentment had been newer)She’d grant me nothing: I’ve compounded forThe naming of the wedding-day next month,And gladly too. ’Tis pretty, to remarkHow women can love women of your sort,And tie their hearts with love-knots to your feet,Grow insolent about you against men,And put us down by putting up the lip,As if a man,—therearesuch, let us own,Who write not ill,—remains a man, poor wretch,While you——! Write far worse than Aurora Leigh,And there’ll be women who believe of you(Besides my Kate) that if you walked on sandYou would not leave a foot-print.‘Are you putTo wonder by my marriage, like poor Leigh?‘Kate Ward!’ he said. ‘Kate Ward!’ he said anew.‘I thought ...’ he said, and stopped,—‘I did not think....’And then he dropped to silence.‘Ah, he’s changed.I had not seen him, you’re aware, for long,But went of course. I have not touched on thisThrough all this letter,—conscious of your heart,And writing lightlier for the heavy fact,As clocks are voluble with lead.‘How weak,To say I’m sorry. Dear Leigh, dearest Leigh!In those old days of Shropshire,—pardon me,—When he and you fought many a field of goldOn what you should do, or you should not do,Make bread or verses, (it just came to that)I thought you’d one day draw a silken peaceThrough a golden ring. I thought so. Foolishly,The event proved,—for you went more oppositeTo each other, month by month, and year by year,Until this happened. God knows best, we say,But hoarsely. When the fever took him first,Just after I had writ to you in France,They tell me Lady Waldemar mixed drinksAnd counted grains, like any salaried nurse,Excepting that she wept too. Then Lord Howe,You’re right about Lord Howe! Lord Howe’s a trump;And yet, with such in his hand, a man like LeighMay lose, ashedoes. There’s an end to all,—Yes, even this letter, though the second sheetMay find you doubtful. Write a word for Kate:Even now she reads my letters like a wife,And, if she sees her name, I’ll see her smile,And share the luck. So, bless you, friend of two!I will not ask you what your feeling isAt Florence, with my pictures. I can hearYour heart a-flutter over the snow-hills;And, just to pace the Pitti with you once,I’d give a half-hour of to-morrow’s walkWith Kate ... I think so. Vincent Carrington.’

The noon was hot; the air scorched like the sun,And was shut out. The closed persiani threwTheir long-scored shadows on my villa-floor,And interlined the golden atmosphereStraight, still,—across the pictures on the wall,The statuette on the console, (of young LoveAnd Psyche made one marble by a kiss)The low couch where I leaned, the table near,The vase of lilies, Marian pulled last night,(Each green leaf and each white leaf ruled in blackAs if for writing some new text of fate)And the open letter, rested on my knee,—But there, the lines swerved, trembled, though I sateUntroubled ... plainly, ... reading it againAnd three times. Well, he’s married; that is clear.No wonder that he’s married, nor much moreThat Vincent’s therefore, ‘sorry.’ Why, of course,The lady nursed him when he was not well,Mixed drinks,—unless nepenthe was the drink,’Twas scarce worth telling. But a man in loveWill see the whole sex in his mistress’ hood,The prettier for its lining of fair rose;Although he catches back, and says at last,‘I’m sorry.’ Sorry. Lady WaldemarAt prettiest, under the said hood, preservedFrom such a light as I could hold to her faceTo flare its ugly wrinkles out to shame,—Is scarce a wife for Romney, as friends judge,Aurora Leigh, or Vincent Carrington,—That’s plain. And if he’s ‘conscious of my heart’ ...Perhaps it’s natural, though the phrase is strong;(One’s apt to use strong phrases, being in love)And even that stuff of ‘fields of gold,’ ‘gold rings,’And what he ‘thought,’ poor Vincent! what he ‘thought,’May never mean enough to ruffle me.—Why, this room stifles. Better burn than choke;Best have air, air, although it comes with fire,Throw open blinds and windows to the noonAnd take a blister on my brow insteadOf this dead weight! best, perfectly be stunnedBy those insufferable cicale, sickAnd hoarse with rapture of the summer-heat,That sing like poets, till their hearts break, ... singTill men say, ‘It’s too tedious.’Books succeed,And lives fail. Do I feel it so, at last?Kate loves a worn-out cloak for being like mine,While I live self-despised for being myself,And yearn toward some one else, who yearns awayFrom what he is, in his turn. Strain a stepFor ever, yet gain no step? Are we such,We cannot, with our admirations even,Our tip-toe aspirations, touch a thingThat’s higher than we? is all a dismal flat,And God alone above each,—as the sunO’er level lagunes, to make them shine and stink,—Laying stress upon us with immediate flame,While we respond with our miasmal fog,And call it mounting higher, because we growMore highly fatal?Tush, Aurora Leigh!You wear your sackcloth looped in Cæsar’s way,And brag your failings as mankind’s. Be still.Thereiswhat’s higher, in this very world,Than you can live, or catch at. Stand aside,And look at others—instance little Kate!She’ll make a perfect wife for Carrington.She always has been looking round the earthFor something good and green to alight uponAnd nestle into, with those soft-winged eyesSubsiding now beneath his manly hand’Twixt trembling lids of inexpressive joy:I will not scorn her, after all, too much,That so much she should love me. A wise manCan pluck a leaf, and find a lecture in ’t;And I, too, ... God has made me,—I’ve a heartThat’s capable of worship, love, and loss;We say the same of Shakspeare’s. I’ll be meek,And learn to reverence, even this poor myself.

The book, too—pass it. ‘A good book,’ says he,‘And you a woman.’ I had laughed at that,But long since. I’m a woman,—it is true;Alas, and woe to us, when we feel it most!Then, least care have we for the crowns and goals,And compliments on writing our good books.

The book has some truth in it, I believe:And truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.I know we talk our Phædons to the endThrough all the dismal faces that we make,O’er-wrinkled with dishonouring agonyFrom any mortal drug. I have written truth,And I a woman; feebly, partially,Inaptly in presentation, Romney’ll add,Because a woman. For the truth itself,That’s neither man’s nor woman’s, but just God’s;None else has reason to be proud of truth:Himself will see it sifted, disenthralled,And kept upon the height and in the light,As far as, and no farther, than ’tis truth;For,—now He has left off calling firmamentsAnd strata, flowers and creatures, very good,—He says it still of truth, which is His own.

Truth, so far, in my book;—the truth which drawsThrough all things upwards; that a twofold worldMust go to a perfect cosmos. Natural thingsAnd spiritual,—who separates those twoIn art, in morals, or the social drift,Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,Is wrong, in short, at all points. We divideThis apple of life, and cut it through the pips,—The perfect round which fitted Venus’ handHas perished utterly as if we ateBoth halves. Without the spiritual, observe,The natural’s impossible;—no form,No motion! Without sensuous, spiritualIs inappreciable;—no beauty or power!And in this twofold sphere the twofold man(And still the artist is intensely a man)Holds firmly by the natural, to reachThe spiritual beyond it,—fixes stillThe type with mortal vision, to pierce through,With eyes immortal, to the antetypeSome call the ideal,—better called the real,And certain to be called so presentlyWhen things shall have their names. Look long enoughOn any peasant’s face here, coarse and lined,You’ll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay,As perfect-featured as he yearns at RomeFrom marble pale with beauty; then persist,And, if your apprehension’s competent,You’ll find some fairer angel at his back,As much exceeding him, as he the boor,And pushing him with empyreal disdainFor ever out of sight. Ay, CarringtonIs glad of such a creed! an artist must,Who paints a tree, a leaf, a common stone,With just his hand, and finds it suddenlyA-piece with and conterminous to his soul.Why else do these things move him, leaf or stone?The bird’s not moved, that pecks at a spring-shoot;Nor yet the horse, before a quarry, a-graze:But man, the two-fold creature, apprehendsThe two-fold manner, in and outwardly,And nothing in the world comes single to him,A mere itself,—cup, column, or candlestick,All patterns of what shall be in the Mount;The whole temporal show related royally,And built up to eterne significanceThrough the open arms of God. ‘There’s nothing greatNor small,’ has said a poet of our day,(Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eveAnd not be thrown out by the matin’s bell)And truly, I reiterate, ... nothing’s small!No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim:And,—glancing on my own thin, veinéd wrist,—In such a little tremour of the bloodThe whole strong clamour of a vehement soulDoth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God:But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,And daub their natural faces unawareMore and more, from the first similitude.

Truth, so far, in my book! a truth which drawsFrom all things upwards. I, Aurora, stillHave felt it hound me through the wastes of lifeAs Jove did Io: and, until that HandShall overtake me wholly, and, on my head,Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down,It must be. Art’s the witness of what IsBehind this show. If this world’s show were all,Then imitation would be all in Art;There, Jove’s hand gripes us!—For we stand here, we,If genuine artists, witnessing for God’sComplete, consummate, undivided work:—That not a natural flower can grow on earth,Without a flower upon the spiritual side,Substantial, archetypal, all a-glowWith blossoming causes,—not so far away,That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,May not catch something of the bloom and breath,—Too vaguely apprehended, though indeedStill apprehended, consciously or not,And still transferred to picture, music, verse,For thrilling audient and beholding soulsBy signs and touches which are known to souls,—How known, they know not,—why, they cannot find,So straight call out on genius, say, ‘A manProduced this,’—when much rather they should say,‘’Tis insight, and he saw this.’Thus is ArtSelf-magnified in magnifying a truthWhich, fully recognised, would change the worldAnd shift its morals. If a man could feel,Not one day, in the artist’s ecstasy,But every day, feast, fast, or working-day,The spiritual significance burn throughThe hieroglyphic of material shows,Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings,And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree,And even his very body as a man,—Which now he counts so vile, that all the townsMake offal of their daughters for its useOn summer-nights, when God is sad in heavenTo think what goes on in his recreant worldHe made quite other; while that moon He madeTo shine there, at the first love’s covenant,Shines still, convictive as a marriage-ringBefore adulterous eyes.How sure it is,That, if we say a true word, instantlyWe feel ’tis God’s, not ours, and pass it onAs bread at sacrament, we taste and passNor handle for a moment, as indeedWe dared to set up any claim to such!And I—my poem;—let my readers talk;I’m closer to it—I can speak as well:I’ll say, with Romney, that the book is weak,The range uneven, the points of sight obscure,The music interrupted.Let us go.The end of woman (or of man, I think)Is not a book. Alas, the best of booksIs but a word in Art, which soon grows cramped,Stiff, dubious-statured with the weight of years,And drops an accent or digamma downSome cranny of unfathomable time,Beyond the critic’s reaching. Art itself,We’ve called the higher life, still must feel the soulLive past it. For more’s felt than is perceived,And more’s perceived than can be interpreted,And Love strikes higher with his lambent flameThan Art can pile the faggots.Is it so?When Jove’s hand meets us with composing touch,And when, at last, we are hushed and satisfied,—Then, Io does not call it truth, but love?Well, well! my father was an Englishman:My mother’s blood in me is not so strongThat I should bear this stress of Tuscan noonAnd keep my wits. The town, there, seems to seetheIn this Medæan boil-pot of the sun,And all the patient hills are bubbling roundAs if a prick would leave them flat. Does heavenKeep far off, not to set us in a blaze?Not so,—let drag your fiery fringes, heaven,And burn us up to quiet! Ah, we knowToo much here, not to know what’s best for peace;We have too much light here, not to want more fireTo purify and end us. We talk, talk,Conclude upon divine philosophies,And get the thanks of men for hopeful books;Whereat we take our own life up, and ... pshaw!Unless we piece it with another’s life,(A yard of silk to carry out our lawn)As well suppose my little handkerchiefWould cover Samminiato, church and all,If out I threw it past the cypresses,As, in this ragged, narrow life of mine,Contain my own conclusions.But at leastWe’ll shut up the persiani, and sit down,And when my head’s done aching, in the cool,Write just a word to Kate and Carrington.May joy be with them! she has chosen well,And he not ill.I should be glad, I think,Except for Romney. Hadhemarried Kate,I surely, surely, should be very glad.This Florence sits upon me easily,With native air and tongue. My graves are calm,And do not too much hurt me. Marian’s good,Gentle and loving,—lets me hold the child,Or drags him up the hills to find me flowersAnd fill those vases, ere I’m quite awake,—The grandiose red tulips, which grow wild,Or else my purple lilies, Dante blewTo a larger bubble with his prophet-breath;Or one of those tall flowering reeds which standIn Arno like a sheaf of sceptres, leftBy some remote dynasty of dead gods,To suck the stream for ages and get green,And blossom wheresoe’er a hand divineHad warmed the place with ichor. Such I’ve foundAt early morning, laid across my bed,And woke up pelted with a childish laughWhich even Marian’s low precipitous ‘hush’Had vainly interposed to put away,—While I, with shut eyes, smile and motion forThe dewy kiss that’s very sure to comeFrom mouth and cheeks, the whole child’s face at onceDissolved on mine,—as if a nosegay burstIts string with the weight of roses overblown,And dropt upon me. Surely I should be glad.The little creature almost loves me now,And calls my name ... ‘Alola,’ stripping offThers like thorns, to make it smooth enoughTo take between his dainty, milk-fed lips,God love him! I should certainly be glad,Except, God help me, that I’m sorrowful,Because of Romney.Romney, Romney! Well,This grows absurd!—too like a tune that runsI’ the head, and forces all things in the world,Wind, rain, the creaking gnat or stuttering fly,To sing itself and vex you;—yet perhapsA paltry tune you never fairly liked,Some ‘I’d be a butterfly,’ or ‘C’est l’amour:’We’re made so,—not such tyrants to ourselves,We are not slaves to nature. Some of usAre turned, too, overmuch like some poor verseWith a trick of ritournelle: the same thing goesAnd comes back ever.Vincent CarringtonIs ‘sorry,’ and I’m sorry; buthe’s strongTo mount from sorrow to his heaven of love,And when he says at moments, ‘Poor, poor Leigh,Who’ll never call his own, so true a heart,So fair a face even,’—he must quickly loseThe pain of pity in the blush he has madeBy his very pitying eyes. The snow, for him,Has fallen in May, and finds the whole earth warm,And melts at the first touch of the green grass.

But Romney,—he has chosen, after all.I think he had as excellent a sunTo see by, as most others, and perhapsHas scarce seen really worse than some of us,When all’s said. Let him pass. I’m not too muchA woman, not to be a man for once,And bury all my Dead like Alaric,Depositing the treasures of my soulIn this drained water-course, and, letting flowThe river of life again, with commerce-shipsAnd pleasure-barges, full of silks and songs.Blow, winds, and help us.Ah, we mock ourselvesWith talking of the winds! perhaps as muchWith other resolutions. How it weighs,This hot, sick air! and how I covet hereThe Dead’s provision on the river’s couch,With silver curtains drawn on tinkling rings!Or else their rest in quiet crypts,—laid byFrom heat and noise!—from those cicale, say,And this more vexing heart-beat.So it is:We covet for the soul, the body’s part,To die and rot. Even so, Aurora, endsOur aspiration, who bespoke our placeSo far in the east. The occidental flatsHad fed us fatter, therefore? we have climbedWhere herbage ends? we want the beast’s part now,And tire of the angel’s?—Men define a man,The creature who stands front-ward to the stars,The creature who looks inward to himself,The tool-wright, laughing creature. ’Tis enough:We’ll say instead, the inconsequent creature, man,—For that’s his specialty. What creature elseConceives the circle, and then walks the square?Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good?You think the bee makes honey half a year,To loathe the comb in winter, and desireThe little ant’s food rather? But a man—Note men!—they are but women after all,As women are but Auroras!—there are menBorn tender, apt to pale at a trodden worm,Who paint for pastime, in their favourite dream,Spruce auto-vestments flowered with crocus-flames:There are, too, who believe in hell, and lie:There are, who waste their souls in working outLife’s problem on these sands betwixt two tides,And end,—‘Now give us the beast’s part, in death.’

Alas, long-suffering and most patient God,Thou need’st be surelier God to bear with usThan even to have made us! thou, aspire, aspireFrom henceforth for me! thou who hast, thyself,Endured this fleshhood, knowing how, as a soakedAnd sucking vesture, it would drag us downAnd choke us in the melancholy Deep,Sustain me, that, with thee, I walk these waves,Resisting!—breathe me upward, thou for meAspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life,—That no truth henceforth seem indifferent,No way to truth laborious, and no life,Not even this life I live, intolerable!The days went by. I took up the old daysWith all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled,—Like some lost book we dropt in the long grassOn such a happy summer-afternoonWhen last we read it with a loving friend,And find in autumn, when the friend is gone,The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late,And stare at, as at something wonderfulFor sorrow,—thinking how two hands, before,Had held up what is left to only one,And how we smiled when such a vehement nailImpressed the tiny dint here, which presentsThis verse in fire for ever! TenderlyAnd mournfully I lived. I knew the birdsAnd insects,—which look fathered by the flowersAnd emulous of their hues: I recognisedThe moths, with that great overpoise of wingsWhich makes a mystery of them how at allThey can stop flying: butterflies, that bearUpon their blue wings such red embers round,They seem to scorch the blue air into holesEach flight they take: and fire-flies, that suspireIn short soft lapses of transported flameAcross the tingling Dark, while overheadThe constant and inviolable starsOutburn those lights-of-love: melodious owls,(If music had but one note and was sad,’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirlOf bats, that seem to follow in the airSome grand circumference of a shadowy domeTo which we are blind: and then, the nightingales,Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,(When walking in the town) and carry itSo high into the bowery almond-trees,We tremble and are afraid, and feel as ifThe golden flood of moonlight unawareDissolved the pillars of the steady earthAnd made it less substantial. And I knewThe harmless opal snakes, and large-mouthed frogs,(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud,Will flatter you and take you for a stone,And flash familiarly about your feetWith such prodigious eyes in such small heads!—I knew them, though they had somewhat dwindled fromMy childish imagery,—and kept in mindHow last I sate among them equally,In fellowship and mateship, as a childWill bear him still toward insect, beast, and bird,Before the Adam in him has foregoneAll privilege of Eden,—making friendsAnd talk, with such a bird or such a goat,And buying many a two-inch-wide rush-cageTo let out the caged cricket on a tree,Saying, ‘Oh, my dear grillino, were you cramped?And are you happy with the ilex-leaves?And do you love me who have let you go?Sayyesin singing, and I’ll understand.’But now the creatures all seemed farther off,No longer mine, nor like me; onlythere,A gulph between us. I could yearn indeed,Like other rich men, for a drop of dewTo cool this heat,—a drop of the early dew,The irrecoverable child-innocence(Before the heart took fire and withered life)When childhood might pair equally with birds;But now ... the birds were grown too proud for us!Alas, the very sun forbids the dew.

And I, I had come back to an empty nest,Which every bird’s too wise for. How I heardMy father’s step on that deserted ground,His voice along that silence, as he toldThe names of bird and insect, tree and flower,And all the presentations of the starsAcross Valdarno, interposing still‘My child,’ ‘my child.’ When fathers say ‘my child,’’Tis easier to conceive the universe,And life’s transitions down the steps of law.

I rode once to the little mountain-houseAs fast as if to find my father there,But, when in sight of’t, within fifty yards,I dropped my horse’s bridle on his neckAnd paused upon his flank. The house’s frontWas cased with lingots of ripe Indian cornIn tesselated order, and deviceOf golden patterns: not a stone of wallUncovered,—not an inch of room to growA vine-leaf. The old porch had disappeared;And, in the open doorway, sate a girlAt plaiting straws,—her black hair strained awayTo a scarlet kerchief caught beneath her chinIn Tuscan fashion,—her full ebon eyes,Which looked too heavy to be lifted so,Still dropt and lifted toward the mulberry-treeOn which the lads were busy with their stavesIn shout and laughter, stripping all the boughsAs bare as winter, of those summer leavesMy father had not changed for all the silkIn which the ugly silkworms hide themselves.Enough. My horse recoiled before my heart—I turned the rein abruptly. Back we wentAs fast, to Florence.That was trial enoughOf graves. I would not visit, if I could,My father’s, or my mother’s any more,To see if stone-cutter or lichen beatSo early in the race, or throw my flowers,Which could not out-smell heaven, or sweeten earth.They live too far above, that I should lookSo far below to find them: let me thinkThat rather they are visiting my grave,This life here, (undeveloped yet to life)And that they drop upon me, now and then,For token or for solace, some small weedLeast odorous of the growths of paradise,To spare such pungent scents as kill with joy.My old Assunta, too, was dead, was dead—O land of all men’s past! for me alone,It would not mix its tenses. I was past,It seemed, like others,—only not in heaven.And, many a Tuscan eve, I wandered downThe cypress alley, like a restless ghostThat tries its feeble ineffectual breathUpon its own charred funeral-brands put outToo soon,—where, black and stiff, stood up the treesAgainst the broad vermilion of the skies.Such skies!—all clouds abolished in a sweepOf God’s skirt, with a dazzle to ghosts and men,As down I went, saluting on the bridgeThe hem of such, before ’twas caught awayBeyond the peaks of Lucca. Underneath,The river, just escaping from the weightOf that intolerable glory, ranIn acquiescent shadow murmurously:And up, beside it, streamed the festa-folkWith fellow-murmurs from their feet and fans,(Withissimoandinoand sweet poiseOf vowels in their pleasant scandalous talk)Returning from the grand-duke’s dairy-farmBefore the trees grew dangerous at eight,(For, ‘trust no tree by moonlight,’ Tuscans say)To eat their ice at Doni’s tenderly,—Each lovely lady close to a cavalierWho holds her dear fan while she feeds her smileOn meditative spoonfuls of vanille,He breathing hot protesting vows of love,Enough to thaw her cream, and scorch his beard.’Twas little matter. I could pass them byIndifferently, not fearing to be known.No danger of being wrecked upon a friend,And forced to take an iceberg for an isle!The very English, here, must wait to learnTo hang the cobweb of their gossip outAnd catch a fly. I’m happy. It’s sublime,This perfect solitude of foreign lands!To be, as if you had not been till then,And were then, simply that you chose to be:To spring up, not be brought forth from the ground,Like grasshoppers at Athens, and skip thriceBefore a woman makes a pounce on youAnd plants you in her hair!—possess, yourself,A new world all alive with creatures new,New sun, new moon, new flowers, new people—ah,And be possessed by none of them! no rightIn one, to call your name, enquire your where,Or what you think of Mister Some-one’s book,Or Mister Other’s marriage, or decease,Or how’s the headache which you had last week,Or why you look so pale still, since it’s gone?—Such most surprising riddance of one’s lifeComes next one’s death; it’s disembodimentWithout the pang. I marvel, people chooseTo stand stock-still like fakirs, till the mossGrows on them, and they cry out, self-admired,‘How verdant and how virtuous!’ Well, I’m glad:Or should be, if grown foreign to myselfAs surely as to others.Musing so,I walked the narrow unrecognising streets,Where many a palace-front peers gloomilyThrough stony vizors iron-barred, (preparedAlike, should foe or lover pass that way,For guest or victim) and came wandering outUpon the churches with mild open doorsAnd plaintive wail of vespers, where a few,Those chiefly women, sprinkled round in blotsUpon the dusky pavement, knelt and prayedToward the altar’s silver glory. Oft a ray(I liked to sit and watch) would tremble out,Just touch some face more lifted, more in need,Of course a woman’s—while I dreamed a taleTo fit its fortunes. There was one who lookedAs if the earth had suddenly grown too largeFor such a little humpbacked thing as she;The pitiful black kerchief round her neckSole proof she had had a mother. One, again,Looked sick for love,—seemed praying some soft saintTo put more virtue in the new fine scarfShe spent a fortnight’s meals on, yesterday,That cruel Gigi might return his eyesFrom Giuliana. There was one, so old,So old, to kneel grew easier than to stand,—So solitary, she accepts at lastOur Lady for her gossip, and frets onAgainst the sinful world which goes its roundsIn marrying and being married, just the sameAs when ’twas almost good and had the right,(Her Gian alive, and she herself eighteen).And yet, now even, if Madonna willed,She’d win a tern in Thursday’s lottery,And better all things. Did she dream for nought,That, boiling cabbage for the fast-day’s soup,It smelt like blessed entrails? such a dreamFor nought? would sweetest Mary cheat her so,And lose that certain candle, straight and whiteAs any fair grand-duchess in her teens,Winch otherwise should flare here in a week?Benigna sis, thou beauteous Queen of heaven!

I sate there musing, and imaginingSuch utterance from such faces: poor blind soulsThat writhed toward heaven along the devil’s trail,—Who knows, I thought, but He may stretch his handAnd pick them up? ’tis written in the Book,He heareth the young ravens when they cry;And yet they cry for carrion.—O my God,—And we, who make excuses for the rest,We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,And dropped my head upon the pavement too,And prayed, since I was foolish in desireLike other creatures, craving offal-food,That He would stop his ears to what I said,And only listen to the run and beatOf this poor, passionate, helpless blood—And thenI lay, and spoke not. But He heard in heaven.So many Tuscan evenings passed the same!I could not lose a sunset on the bridge,And would not miss a vigil in the church,And liked to mingle with the out-door crowdSo strange and gay and ignorant of my face,For men you know not, are as good as trees.And only once, at the Santissima,I almost chanced upon a man I knew,Sir Blaise Delorme. He saw me certainly,And somewhat hurried, as he crossed himself,The smoothness of the action,—then half bowed,But only half, and merely to my shade,I slipped so quick behind the porphyry plinth,And left him dubious if ’twas really I,Or peradventure Satan’s usual trickTo keep a mounting saint uncanonised.But I was safe for that time, and he too;The argent angels in the altar-flareAbsorbed his soul, next moment. The good man!In England we were scarce acquaintances,That here in Florence he should keep my thoughtBeyond the image on his eye, which cameAnd went: and yet his thought disturbed my life:For, after that, I oftener sate at homeOn evenings, watching how they fined themselvesWith gradual conscience to a perfect night,Until the moon, diminished to a curve,Lay out there, like a sickle for His handWho cometh down at last to reap the earth.At such times, ended seemed my trade of verse;I feared to jingle bells upon my robeBefore the four-faced silent cherubim:With God so near me, could I sing of God?I did not write, nor read, nor even think,But sate absorbed amid the quickening glooms,Most like some passive broken lump of saltDropt in by chance to a bowl of œnomel,To spoil the drink a little, and lose itself,Dissolving slowly, slowly, until lost.

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