SIXTH BOOK.

SIXTH BOOK.

TheEnglish have a scornful insular wayOf calling the French light. The levityIs in the judgment only, which yet stands;For say a foolish thing but oft enough,(And here’s the secret of a hundred creeds,—Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,By re-iteration chiefly) the same thingShall pass at last for absolutely wise,And not with fools exclusively. And so,We say the French are light, as if we saidThe cat mews, or the milch-cow gives us milk:Say rather, cats are milked, and milch-cows mew;For what is lightness but inconsequence,Vague fluctuation ’twixt effect and cause,Compelled by neither? Is a bullet light,That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eyeWinks, and the heart beats one, to flatten itselfTo a wafer on the white speck on a wallA hundred paces off? Even so direct,So sternly undivertible of aim,Is this French people.All, idealistsToo absolute and earnest, with them allThe idea of a knife cuts real flesh;And still, devouring the safe intervalWhich Nature placed between the thought and act,With those too fiery and impatient souls,They threaten conflagration to the worldAnd rush with most unscrupulous logic onImpossible practice. Set your oratorsTo blow upon them with loud windy mouthsThrough watchword phrases, jest or sentiment,Which drive our burley brutal English mobsLike so much chaff, whichever way they blow,—This light French people will not thus be driven.They turn indeed; but then they turn uponSome central pivot of their thought and choice,And veer out by the force of holding fast.—That’s hard to understand, for EnglishmenUnused to abstract questions, and untrainedTo trace the involutions, valve by valve,In each orbed bulb-root of a general truth,And mark what subtly fine integumentDivides opposed compartments. Freedom’s selfComes concrete to us, to be understood,Fixed in a feudal form incarnatelyTo suit our ways of thought and reverence,The special form, with us, being still the thing.With us, I say, though I’m of ItalyBy mother’s birth and grave, by father’s graveAnd memory; let it be,—a poet’s heartCan swell to a pair of nationalities,However ill-lodged in a woman’s breast.And so I am strong to love this noble France,This poet of the nations, who dreams onAnd wails on (while the household goes to wreck)For ever, after some ideal good,—Some equal poise of sex, some unvowed loveInviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood,Some wealth, that leaves none poor and finds none tired,Some freedom of the many, that respectsThe wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams!Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake:And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,Erected for the building of a church,To build instead, a brothel ... or a prison—May God save France!However she have sighedHer great soul up into a great man’s face,To flush his temples out so gloriouslyThat few dare carp at Cæsar for being bald,What then?—this Cæsar represents, not reigns,And is no despot, though twice absolute;This Head has all the people for a heart;This purple’s lined with the democracy,—Now let him see to it! for a rent withinMust leave irreparable rags without.A serious riddle: find such anywhereExcept in France; and when it’s found in France,Be sure to read it rightly. So, I musedUp and down, up and down, the terraced streets,The glittering boulevards, the white colonnadesOf fair fantastic Paris who wears boughsLike plumes, as if man made them,—tossing upHer fountains in the sunshine from the squares,As dice i’ the game of beauty, sure to win;Or as she blew the down-balls of her dreams,And only waited for their falling back,To breathe up more, and count her festive hours.The city swims in verdure, beautifulAs Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts,As plums in ladies’ laps, who start and laugh:What miles of streets that run on after trees,Still carrying the necessary shops,Those open caskets, with the jewels seen!And trade is art, and art’s philosophy,In Paris. There’s a silk, for instance, there,As worth an artist’s study for the folds,As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults;Art’s here too artful,—conscious as a maid,Who leans to mark her shadow on the wallUntil she lose a ’vantage in her step.Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk:The artists also, are idealists,Too absolute for nature, logicalTo austerity in the application ofThe special theory: not a soul contentTo paint a crooked pollard and an ass,As the English will, because they find it so,And like it somehow.—Ah, the old TuileriesIs pulling its high cap down on its eyes,Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazedBy the apparition of a new fair faceIn those devouring mirrors. Through the grate,Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees,From every street and alley of the town,By the ghosts perhaps, that blow too bleak this wayA-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes;I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play outBefore the next change comes.—And, farther on,What statues, poised upon their columns fine,As if to stand a moment were a feat,Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-roomFor a nation that runs fast,—ay, runs againstThe dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows,Which grin at progress in an epigram.I walked the day out, listening to the chinkOf the first Napoleon’s dry bones, as they layIn his second grave beneath the golden domeThat caps all Paris like a bubble. ‘ShallThese dry bones live,’ thought Louis Philippe once,And lived to know. Herein is argumentFor kings and politicians, but still moreFor poets, who bear buckets to the well,Of ampler draught.These crowds are very goodFor meditation, (when we are very strong)Though love of beauty makes us timorous,And draws us backward from the coarse town-sightsTo count the daisies upon dappled fields,And hear the streams bleat on among the hillsIn innocent and indolent repose;While still with silken elegiac thoughtsWe wind out from us the distracting world,And die into the chrysalis of a man,And leave the best that may, to come of us,In some brown moth. Be, rather, bold, and bearTo look into the swarthiest face of things,For God’s sake who has made them.Seven days’ work;The last day shutting ’twixt its dawn and eve,The whole work bettered, of the previous six!Since God collected and resumed in manThe firmaments, the strata, and the lights,Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect,—all their trainsOf various life caught back upon His arm,Reorganised, and constitutedMAN,The microcosm, the adding up of works;Within whose fluttering nostrils, then, at last,Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed,As some strong winner at the foot-race sighsTouching the goal.Humanity is great;And, if I would not rather pore uponAn ounce of common, ugly, human dust,An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow,Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,Than track old Nilus to his silver roots,And wait on all the changes of the moonAmong the mountain-peaks of Thessaly,(Until her magic crystal round itselfFor many a witch to see in)—set it downAs weakness,—strength by no means. How is this,That men of science, osteologistsAnd surgeons, beat some poets, in respectFor nature,—count nought common or unclean,Spend raptures upon perfect specimensOf indurated veins, distorted joints,Or beautiful new cases of curved spine;While we, we are shocked at nature’s falling off,We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains,We will not, when she sneezes, look at her,Not even to say ‘God bless her’? That’s our wrong;For that, she will not trust us often withHer larger sense of beauty and desire,But tethers us to a lily or a roseAnd bids us diet on the dew inside,—Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy(Who stares unseen against our absent eyes,And wonders at the gods that we must be,To pass so careless for the oranges!)Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-worldTo this world, undisparaged, undespoiled,And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)Contains, himself, both flowers and firmamentsAnd surging seas and aspectable stars,And all that we would push him out of sightIn order to see nearer. Let us prayGod’s grace to keep God’s image in repute;That so, the poet and philanthropist,(Even I and Romney) may stand side by side,Because we both stand face to face with menContemplating the people in the rough,—Yet each so follow a vocation,—hisAnd mine.I walked on, musing with myselfOn life and art, and whether, after all,A larger metaphysics might not helpOur physics, a completer poetryAdjust our daily life and vulgar wants,More fully than the special outside plans,Phalansteries, material institutes,The civil conscriptions and lay monasteriesPreferred by modern thinkers, as they thoughtThe bread of man indeed made all his life,And washing seven times in the ‘People’s Baths’Were sovereign for a people’s leprosy,—Still leaving out the essential prophet’s wordThat comes in power. On which, we thunder down,We prophets, poets,—Virtue’s in theword!The maker burnt the darkness up with His,To inaugurate the use of vocal life;And, plant a poet’s word even, deep enoughIn any man’s breast, looking presentlyFor offshoots, you have done more for the man,Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coatAnd warmed his Sunday potage at your fire.Yet Romney leaves me....God! what face is that?O Romney, O Marian!Walking on the quaysAnd pulling thoughts to pieces leisurely,As if I caught at grasses in a field,And bit them slow between my absent lips,And shred them with my hands....What face is that?What a face, what a look, what a likeness! Full on mineThe sudden blow of it came down, till allMy blood swam, my eyes dazzled. Then I sprang—It was as if a meditative manWere dreaming out a summer afternoonAnd watching gnats a-prick upon a pond,When something floats up suddenly, out there,Turns over ... a dead face, known once alive—So old, so new! It would be dreadful nowTo lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.He plunges—ha! he has lost it in the splash.I plunged—I tore the crowd up, either side,And rushed on,—forward, forward ... after her.Her? whom?A woman sauntered slow, in front,Munching an apple,—she left off amazedAs if I had snatched it: that’s not she, at least.A man walked arm-linked with a lady veiled,Both heads dropped closer than the need of talk:They started; he forgot her with his face,And she, herself,—and clung to him as ifMy look were fatal. Such a stream of folk,And all with cares and business of their own!I ran the whole quay down against their eyes;No Marian; nowhere Marian. Almost, now,I could call Marian, Marian, with the shriekOf desperate creatures calling for the Dead.Where is she, was she? was she anywhere?I stood still, breathless, gazing, straining outIn every uncertain distance, till, at last,A gentleman abstracted as myselfCame full against me, then resolved the clashIn voluble excuses,—obviouslySome learned member of the InstituteUpon his way there, walking, for his health,While meditating on the last ‘Discourse;’Pinching the empty air ’twixt finger and thumb,From which the snuff being ousted by that shock,Defiled his snow-white waistcoat, duly prickedAt the button-hole with honourable red;‘Madame, your pardon,’—there, he swerved from meA metre, as confounded as he had heardThat Dumas would be chosen to fill upThe next chair vacant, by his ‘menin us.’Since when was genius found respectable?It passes in its place, indeed,—which meansThe seventh floor back, or else the hospital:Revolving pistols are ingenious things,But prudent men (Academicians are)Scarce keep them in the cupboard, next the prunes.And so, abandoned to a bitter mirth,I loitered to my inn. O world, O world,O jurists, rhymers, dreamers, what you please,We play a weary game of hide-and-seek!We shape a figure of our fantasy,Call nothing something, and run after itAnd lose it, lose ourselves too in the search;Till, clash against us, comes a somebodyWho also has lost something and is lost,Philosopher against philanthropist,Academician against poet, manAgainst woman, against the living, the dead,—Then home, with a bad headache and worse jest!To change the water for my heliotropesAnd yellow roses. Paris has such flowers.But England, also. ’Twas a yellow rose,By that south window of the little house,My cousin Romney gathered with his handOn all my birthdays for me, save the last;And then I shook the tree too rough, too rough,For roses to stay after.Now, my maps.I must not linger here from ItalyTill the last nightingale is tired of song,And the last fire-fly dies off in the maize.My soul’s in haste to leap into the sunAnd scorch and seethe itself to a finer mood,Which here, in this chill north, is apt to standToo stiffly in former moulds.That-face persists.It floats up, it turns over in my mind,As like to Marian, as one dead is likeThe same alive. In very deed a faceAnd not a fancy, though it vanished so;The small fair face between the darks of hair,I used to liken, when I saw her first,To a point of moonlit, water down a well:The low brow, the frank space between the eyes,Which always had the brown pathetic lookOf a dumb creature who had been beaten once,And never since was easy with the world.Ah, ah—now I remember perfectlyThose eyes, to-day,—how overlarge they seemed,As if some patient passionate despair(Like a coal dropt and forgot on tapestry,Which slowly burns a widening circle out)Had burnt them larger, larger. And those eyesTo-day, I do remember, saw me too,As I saw them, with conscious lids astrainIn recognition. Now, a fantasy,A simple shade or image of the brain,Is merely passive, does not retro-act,Is seen, but sees not.’Twas a real face,Perhaps a real Marian.Which being so,I ought to write to Romney, ‘Marian’s here.Be comforted for Marian.’My pen fell,My hands struck sharp together, as hands doWhich hold at nothing. Can I write tohimA half truth? can I keep my own soul blindTo the other half, ... the worse? What are our souls,If still, to run on straight a sober paceNor start at every pebble or dead leaf,They must wear blinkers, ignore facts, suppressSix tenths of the road? Confront the truth, my soul!And oh, as truly as that was Marian’s face,The arms of that same Marian clasped a thing... Not hid so well beneath the scanty shawl,I cannot name it now for what it was.A child. Small business has a cast-awayLike Marian, with that crown of prosperous wives,At which the gentlest she grows arrogantAnd says, ‘my child.’ Who’ll find an emerald ringOn a beggar’s middle finger, and requireMore testimony to convict a thief?A child’s too costly for so mere a wretch;She filched it somewhere; and it means, with her,Instead of honour, blessing, ... merely shame.I cannot write to Romney, ‘Here she is,Here’s Marian found! I’ll set you on her track:I saw her here, in Paris, ... and her child.She put away your love two years ago,But, plainly, not to starve. You suffered then;And, now that you’ve forgot her utterlyAs any last year’s annual, in whose placeYou’ve planted a thick flowering evergreen,I choose, being kind, to write and tell you thisTo make you wholly easy—she’s not dead,But only ... damned.’Stop there: I go too fast;I’m cruel like the rest,—in haste to takeThe first stir in the arras for a rat,And set my barking, biting thoughts upon’t.—A child! what then? Suppose a neighbour’s sickAnd asked her, ‘Marian, carry out my childIn this Spring air,’—I punish her for that?Or say, the child should hold her round the neckFor good child-reasons, that he liked it soAnd would not leave her—she had winning ways—I brand her therefore, that she took the child?Not so.I will not write to Romney Leigh.For now he’s happy,—and she may indeedBe guilty,—and the knowledge of her faultWould draggle his smooth time. But I, whose daysAre not so fine they cannot bear the rain,And who, moreover, having seen her face,Must see it again, ...willsee it, by my hopesOf one day seeing heaven too. The policeShall track her, hound her, ferret their own soil;We’ll dig this Paris to its catacombsBut certainly we’ll find her, have her out,And save her, if she will or will not—childOr no child,—if a child, then one to save!The long weeks passed on without consequence.As easy find a footstep on the sandThe morning after spring-tide, as the traceOf Marian’s feet between the incessant surfsOf this live flood. She may have moved this way,—But so the star-fish does, and crosses outThe dent of her small shoe. The foiled policeRenounced me; ‘Could they find a girl and child,No other signalment but girl and child?No data shown, but noticeable eyesAnd hair in masses, low upon the brow,As if it were an iron crown and pressed?Friends heighten, and suppose they specify:Why, girls with hair and eyes, are everywhereIn Paris; they had turned me up in vainNo Marian Erle indeed, but certainlyMathildes, Justines, Victoires, ... or, if I soughtThe English, Betsies, Saras, by the score.They might as well go out into the fieldsTo find a speckled bean, that’s somehow specked,And somewhere in the pod.’—They left me so.ShallIleave Marian? have I dreamed a dream?—I thank God I have found her! I must say‘Thank God,’ for finding her, although ’tis trueI find the world more sad and wicked for’t.But she—I’ll write about her, presently;My hand’s a-tremble as I had just caught upMy heart to write with, in the place of it.At least you’d take these letters to be writAt sea, in storm!—wait now....A simple chanceDid all. I could not sleep last night, and, tiredOf turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,Went out at early morning, when the airIs delicate with some last starry touch,To wander through the Market-place of Flowers(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sureAt worst, that there were roses in the world.So, wandering, musing, with the artist’s eye,That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowdOf young vivacious and black-braided headsDipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,Among the nosegays, cheapening this and thatIn such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,—My heart leapt in me, startled by a voiceThat slowly, faintly, with long breaths that markedThe interval between the wish and word,Inquired in stranger’s French, ‘Wouldthatbe much,That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?’—‘So much?Too much for me, then!’ turning the face roundSo close upon me, that I felt the sighIt turned with.‘Marian, Marian!’—face to face—‘Marian! I find you. Shall I let you go?’I held her two slight wrists with both my hands;‘Ah Marian, Marian, can I let you go?’—She fluttered from me like a cyclamen,As white, which, taken in a sudden wind,Beats on against the palisade.—‘Let pass,’She said at last. ‘I will not,’ I replied;‘I lost my sister Marian many days,And sought her ever in my walks and prayers,And, now I find her ... do we throw awayThe bread we worked and prayed for,—crumble itAnd drop it, ... to do even so by theeWhom still I’ve hungered after more than bread,My sister Marian?—can I hurt thee, dear?Then why distrust me? Never tremble so.Come with me rather, where we’ll talk and live,And none shall vex us. I’ve a home for youAnd me and no one else’....She shook her head.‘A home for you and me and no one elseIll-suits one of us: I prefer to such,A roof of grass on which a flower might spring,Less costly to me than the cheapest here;And yet I could not, at this hour, affordA like home, even. That you offer yours,I thank you. You are good as heaven itself—As good as one I knew before.... Farewell.’I loosed her hands.—‘Inhisname, no farewell!’(She stood as if I held her.) ‘For his sake,For his sake, Romney’s! by the good he meant,Ay, always! by the love he pressed for once,—And by the grief, reproach, abandonment,He took in change’....‘He, Romney! who grievedhim?Who had the heart for’t? what reproach touchedhim?Be merciful,—speak quickly.’‘Therefore come,’I answered with authority,—‘I thinkWe dare to speak such things, and name such names,In the open squares of Paris!’Not a wordShe said, but, in a gentle humbled way,(As one who had forgot herself in grief)Turned round and followed closely where I went,As if I led her by a narrow plank,Across devouring waters, step by step,—And so in silence we walked on a mile.And then she stopped: her face was white as wax.‘We go much farther?’‘You are ill,’ I asked,‘Or tired?’She looked the whiter for her smile.‘There’s one at home,’ she said, ‘has need of meBy this time,—and I must not let him wait.’‘Not even,’ I asked, ‘to hear of Romney Leigh?’‘Not even,’ she said, ‘to hear of Mister Leigh.’‘In that case,’ I resumed, ‘I go with you,And we can talk the same thing there as here.None waits for me: I have my day to spend.’Her lips moved in a spasm without a sound,—But then she spoke. ‘It shall be as you please;And better so—’tis shorter seen than told.And though you will not find me worth your pains,Thateven, may be worth some pains to know,For one as good as you are.’Then she ledThe way, and I, as by a narrow plankAcross devouring waters, followed her,Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath,And holding her with eyes that would not slip;And so, without a word, we walked a mile,And so, another mile, without a word.Until the peopled streets being all dismissed,House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock,The market-gardens thickened, and the longWhite walls beyond, like spiders’ outside threads,Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fieldsThrough half-built habitations and half-dugFoundations,—intervals of trenchant chalk,That bite betwixt the grassy uneven turfsWhere goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths)Stood perched on edges of the cellarageWhich should be, staring as about to leapTo find their coming Bacchus. All the placeSeemed less a cultivation than a waste:Men work here, only,—scarce begin to live:All’s sad, the country struggling with the town,Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man’s fist,That beats its wings and tries to get away,And cannot choose be satisfied so soonTo hop through court-yards with its right foot tied,The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight!We stopped beside a house too high and slimTo stand there by itself, but waiting tillFive others, two on this side, three on that,Should grow up from the sullen second floorThey pause at now, to build it to a row.The upper windows partly were unglazedMeantime,—a meagre, unripe house: a lineOf rigid poplars elbowed it behind,And, just in front, beyond the lime and bricksThat wronged the grass between it and the road,A great acacia, with its slender trunkAnd overpoise of multitudinous leaves,(In which a hundred fields might spill their dewAnd intense verdure, yet find room enough)Stood, reconciling all the place with green.I followed up the stair upon her step.She hurried upward, shot across a face,A woman’s on the landing,—‘How now, now!Is no one to have holidays but you?You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think,And Julie waiting for your betters here?Why if he had waked, he might have waked, for me.’—Just murmuring an excusing word she passedAnd shut the rest out with the chamber-door,Myself shut in beside her.’Twas a roomScarce larger than a grave, and near as bare;Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room:A mouse could find no sort of shelter in’t,Much less a greater secret; curtainless,—The window fixed you with its torturing eye,Defying you to take a step apart,If peradventure you would hide a thing.I saw the whole room, I and Marian thereAlone.Alone? She threw her bonnet off,Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time,Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruiseMore calmly and more carefully than so,—Nor would you find within, a rosier flushedPomegranate—There he lay, upon his back,The yearling creature, warm and moist with lifeTo the bottom of his dimples,—to the endsOf the lovely tumbled curls about his face;For since he had been covered over-muchTo keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeksWere hot and scarlet as the first live roseThe shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into,The faster for his love. And love was hereAs instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;The little naked feet drawn up the wayOf nestled birdlings; everything so softAnd tender,—to the little holdfast hands,Which, closing on a finger into sleep,Had kept the mould of’t.While we stood there dumb,—For oh, that it should take such innocenceTo prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,And, staring out at us with all their blue,As half perplexed between the angelhoodHe had been away to visit in his sleep,And our most mortal presence,—graduallyHe saw his mother’s face, accepting itIn change for heaven itself, with such a smileAs might have well been learnt there,—never moved,But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,So happy (half with her and half with heaven)He could not have the trouble to be stirred,But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:As red and still indeed as any rose,That blows in all the silence of its leaves,Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)In that extremity of love, ’twill passFor agony or rapture, seeing that loveIncludes the whole of nature, rounding itTo love ... no more,—since more can never beThan just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,And drowning in the transport of the sight,Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,And drawing from his countenance to hersA fainter red, as if she watched a flameAnd stood in it a-glow. ‘How beautiful,’Said she.I answered, trying to be cold.(Must sin have compensations, was my thought,As if it were a holy thing like grief?And is a woman to be fooled asideFrom putting vice down, with that woman’s toy,A baby?)—— ‘Ay! the child is well enough,’I answered. ‘If his mother’s palms are clean,They need be glad, of course, in clasping such:But if not,—I would rather lay my hand,Were I she,—on God’s brazen altar-barsRed-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,Than touch the sacred curls of such a child.’She plunged her fingers in his clustering locks,As one who would not be afraid of fire;And then, with indrawn steady utterance, said,—‘My lamb, my lamb! although, through such as thou,The most unclean got courage and approachTo God, once,—now they cannot, even with men,Find grace enough for pity and gentle words.’‘My Marian,’ I made answer, grave and sad,‘The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,Was still a thief. And if a woman steals(Through God’s own barrier-hedges of true love,Which fence out licence in securing love)A child like this, that smiles so in her face,She is no mother, but a kidnapper,And he’s a dismal orphan ... not a son;Whom all her kisses cannot feed so fullHe will not miss hereafter a pure homeTo live in, a pure heart to lean against,A pure good mother’s name and memoryTo hope by, when the world grows thick and bad,And he feels out for virtue.’‘Oh,’ she smiledWith bitter patience, ‘the child takes his chance,—Not much worse off in being fatherlessThan I was, fathered. He will say, belike,His mother was the saddest creature born;He’ll say his mother lived so contraryTo joy, that even the kindest, seeing her,Grew sometimes almost cruel: he’ll not sayShe flew contrarious in the face of GodWith bat-wings of her vices. Stole my child,—My flower of earth, my only flower on earth,My sweet, ray beauty!’ ... Up she snatched the child,And, breaking on him in a storm of tears,Drew out her long sobs from their shivering roots,Until he took it for a game, and stretchedHis feet, and flapped his eager arms like wings,And crowed and gurgled through his infant laugh:‘Mine, mine,’ she said; ‘I have as sure a rightAs any glad proud mother in the world,Who sets her darling down to cut his teethUpon her church-ring. If she talks of law,I talk of law! I claim my mother-duesBy law,—the law which now is paramount;The common law, by which the poor and weakAre trodden underfoot by vicious men,And loathed for ever after by the good.Let pass! I did not filch ... I found the child.’‘You found him, Marian?’‘Ay, I found him whereI found my curse,—in the gutter, with my shame!What have you, any of you, to say to that,Who all are happy, and sit safe and high,And never spoke before to arraign my rightTo grief itself? What, what, ... being beaten downBy hoofs of maddened oxen into a ditch,Half-dead, whole mangled ... when a girl, at last,Breathes, sees ... and finds there, bedded in her flesh,Because of the overcoming shock perhaps,Some coin of price!... and when a good man comes(That’s God! the best men are not quite as good)And says, ‘I dropped the coin there: take it, you,And keep it,—it shall pay you for the loss,’—You all put up your finger—‘See the thief!Observe that precious thing she has come to filch!How bad those girls are!’ Oh, my flower, my pet,I dare forget I have you in my arms,And fly off to be angry with the world,And fright you, hurt you with my tempers, tillYou double up your lip? Ah, that indeedIs bad: a naughty mother!’‘You mistake,’I interrupted; ‘if I loved you not,I should not, Marian, certainly be here.’‘Alas,’ she said, ‘you are so very good;And yet I wish, indeed, you had never comeTo make me sob until I vex the child.It is not wholesome for these pleasure-platsTo be so early watered by our brine.And then, who knows? he may not like me nowAs well, perhaps, as ere he saw me fret,—One’s ugly fretting! he has eyes the sameAs angels, but he cannot see as deep,And so I’ve kept for ever in his sightA sort of smile to please him,—as you placeA green thing from the garden in a cup,To make believe it grows there. Look, my sweet,My cowslip-ball! we’ve done with that cross face,And here’s the face come back you used to like.Ah, ah! he laughs! he likes me. Ah, Miss Leigh,You’re great and pure; but were you purer still,—As if you had walked, we’ll say, no otherwhereThan up and down the new Jerusalem,And held your trailing lutestring up yourselfFrom brushing the twelve stones, for fear of someSmall speck as little as a needle-prick,White stitched on white,—the child would keep tome,Would choose his poor lost Marian, like me best,And, though you stretched your arms, cry back and cling,As we do, when God says it’s time to dieAnd bids us go up higher. Leave us, then;We two are happy. Doeshepush me off?He’s satisfied with me, as I with him.’‘So soft to one, so hard to others! Nay,’I cried, more angry that she melted me,‘We make henceforth a cushion of our faultsTo sit and practise easy virtues on?I thought a child was given to sanctifyA woman,—set her in the sight of allThe clear-eyed Heavens, a chosen ministerTo do their business and lead spirits upThe difficult blue heights. A woman lives,Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and goodThrough being a mother?... then she’s none! althoughShe damps her baby’s cheeks by kissing them,As we kill roses.’‘Kill! O Christ,’ she said,And turned her wild sad face from side to sideWith most despairing wonder in it—‘What,What have you in your souls against me then,All of you? am I wicked, do you think?God knows me, trusts me with the child! but you,You think me really wicked?’‘Complaisant,’I answered softly, ‘to a wrong you’ve done,Because of certain profits,—which is wrongBeyond the first wrong, Marian. When you leftThe pure place and the noble heart, to takeThe hand of a seducer’....‘Whom? whose hand?I took the hand of’....Springing up erect,And lifting up the child at full arm’s length,As if to bear him like an oriflammeUnconquerable to armies of reproach,—‘Byhim’ she said, ‘my child’s head and its curls,By those blue eyes no woman born could dareA perjury on, I make my mother’s oath,That if I left that Heart, to lighten it,The blood of mine was still, except for grief!No cleaner maid than I was, took a stepTo a sadder end,—no matron-mother nowLooks backward to her early maidenhoodThrough chaster pulses. I speak steadily:And if I lie so, ... if, being fouled in willAnd paltered with in soul by devil’s lust,I dared to bid this angel take my part, ...Would God sit quiet, let us think, in heaven,Nor strike me dumb with thunder? Yet I speak:He clears me therefore. What, ‘seduced’’s your word?Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,Seduce it into carrion? So with me.I was not ever, as you say, seduced,But simply, murdered.’There she paused, and sighed,With such a sigh as drops from agonyTo exhaustion,—sighing while she let the babeSlide down upon her bosom from her arms,And all her face’s light fell after him,Like a torch quenched in falling. Down she sank,And sate upon the bedside with the child.But I, convicted, broken utterly,With woman’s passion clung about her waist,And kissed her hair and eyes,—‘I have been wrong,Sweet Marian’ ... (weeping in a tender rage)‘Sweet holy Marian! And now, Marian, now,I’ll use your oath although my lips are hard,And by the child, my Marian, by the child,I’ll swear his mother shall be innocentBefore my conscience, as in the open BookOf Him who reads for judgement. Innocent,My sister! let the night be ne’er so dark,The moon is surely somewhere in the sky;So surely is your whiteness to be foundThrough all dark facts. But pardon, pardon me,And smile a little, Marian,—for the child,If not for me, my sister.’The poor lipJust motioned for the smile and let it go:And then, with scarce a stirring of the mouth,As if a statue spoke that could not breathe,But spoke on calm between its marble lips,—‘I’m glad, I’m very glad you clear me so.I should be sorry that you set me downWith harlots, or with even a better nameWhich misbecomes his mother. For the rest,I am not on a level with your love,Nor ever was, you know,—but now am worse,Because that world of yours has dealt with meAs when the hard sea bites and chews a stoneAnd changes the first form of it. I’ve markedA shore of pebbles bitten to one shapeFrom all the various life of madrepores;And so, that little stone, called Marian Erle,Picked up and dropped by you and another friend,Was ground and tortured by the incessant seaAnd bruised from what she was,—changed! death’s a change,And she, I said, was murdered; Marian’s dead.What can you do with people when they are dead,But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go,Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,But go by all means,—and permit the grassTo keep its green feud up ’twixt them and you?Then leave me,—let me rest. I’m dead, I say.And if, to save the child from death as well,The mother in me has survived the rest,Why, that’s God’s miracle you must not tax,—I’m not less dead for that: I’m nothing moreBut just a mother. Only for the child,I’m warm, and cold, and hungry, and afraid,And smell the flowers a little, and see the sun,And speak still, and am silent,—just for him!I pray you therefore to mistake me not,And treat me, haply, as I were alive;For though you ran a pin into my soul,I think it would not hurt nor trouble me.Here’s proof, dear lady,—in the market-placeBut now, you promised me to say a wordAbout ... a friend, who once, long years ago,Took God’s place toward me, when He draws and lovesAnd does not thunder, ... whom at last I left,As all of us leave God. You thought perhaps,I seemed to care for hearing of that friend?Now, judge me! we have sate here half-an-hourAnd talked together of the child and me,And I not asked as much as, ‘What’s the thingYou had to tell me of the friend ... the friend?’He’s sad, I think you said,—he’s sick perhaps?It’s nought to Marian if he’s sad or sick.Another would have crawled beside your footAnd prayed your words out. Why, a beast, a dog,A starved cat, if he had fed it once with milk,Would show less hardness. But I’m dead, you see,And that explains it.’Poor, poor thing, she spokeAnd shook her head, as white and calm as frostOn days too cold for raining any more,But still with such a face, so much alive,I could not choose but take it on my armAnd stroke the placid patience of its cheeks,—Then told my story out, of Romney Leigh,How, having lost her, sought her, missed her still,He, broken-hearted for himself and her,Had drawn the curtains of the world awhileAs if he had done with morning. There I stopped,For when she gasped, and pressed me with her eyes,‘And now ... how is it with him? tell me now,’—I felt the shame of compensated grief,And chose my words with scruple—slowly steppedUpon the slippery stones set here and thereAcross the sliding water. ‘Certainly,As evening empties morning into night,Another morning takes the evening upWith healthful, providential interchange;And, though he thought still of her,’—‘Yes, she knew,She understood: she had supposed, indeed,That, as one stops a hole upon a flute,At which a new note comes and shapes the tune,Excluding her would bring a worthier in,And, long ere this, that Lady WaldemarHe loved so’ ...‘Loved,’ I started,—‘loved her so!Now tell me’ ...‘I will tell you,’ she replied:‘But since we’re taking oaths, you’ll promise firstThat he, in England, he, shall never learnIn what a dreadful trap his creature here,Round whose unworthy neck he had meant to tieThe honourable ribbon of his name,Fell unaware, and came to butchery:Because,—I know him,—as he takes to heartThe grief of every stranger, he’s not likeTo banish mine as far as I should chooseIn wishing him most happy. Now he leavesTo think of me, perverse, who went my way,Unkind, and left him,—but if once he knew ...Ah, then, the sharp nail of my cruel wrongWould fasten me for ever in his sight,Like some poor curious bird, through each spread wingNailed high up over a fierce hunter’s fire,To spoil the dinner of all tenderer folkCome in by chance. Nay, since your Marian’s dead,You shall not hang her up, but dig a holeAnd bury her in silence! ring no bells.’I answered gaily, though my whole voice wept;‘We’ll ring the joy-bells, not the funeral-bells,Because we have her back, dead or alive.’She never answered that, but shook her head;Then low and calm, as one who, safe in heaven,Shall tell a story of his lower life,Unmoved by shame or anger,—so she spoke.She told me she had loved upon her knees,As others pray, more perfectly absorbedIn the act and aspiration. She felt his,For just his uses, not her own at all,His stool, to sit on, or put up his foot,His cup, to fill with wine or vinegar,Whichever drink might please him at the chance,For that should please her always: let him writeHis name upon her ... it seemed natural;It was most precious, standing on his shelf,To wait until he chose to lift his hand.Well, well,—I saw her then, and must have seenHow bright her life went, floating on her love,Like wicks the housewives send afloat on oil,Which feeds them to a flame that lasts the night.To do good seemed so much his business,That, having done it, she was fain to think,Must fill up his capacity for joy.At first she never mooted with herselfIfhewas happy, since he made her so,Or ifheloved her, being so much beloved:Who thinks of asking if the sun is light,Observing that it lightens? who’s so bold,To question God of His felicity?Still less. And thus she took for granted first,What first of all she should have put to proof,And sinned against him so, but only so.‘What could you hope,’ she said, ‘of such as she?You take a kid you like, and turn it outIn some fair garden; though the creature’s fondAnd gentle, it will leap upon the bedsAnd break your tulips, bite your tender trees:The wonder would be if such innocenceSpoiled less. A garden is no place for kids.’And, by degrees, when he who had chosen her,Brought in his courteous and benignant friendsTo spend their goodness on her, which she tookSo very gladly, as a part of his,—By slow degrees, it broke on her slow sense,That she, too, in that Eden of delightWas out of place, and, like the silly kid,Still did most mischief where she meant most love.A thought enough to make a woman mad,(No beast in this, but she may well go mad)That, saying ‘I am thine to love and use,’May blow the plague in her protesting breathTo the very man for whom she claims to die,—That, clinging round his neck, she pulls him downAnd drowns him,—and that, lavishing her soul,She hales perdition on him. ‘So, being mad,’Said Marian ...‘Ah—who stirred such thoughts, you ask?Whose fault it was, that she should have such thoughts?None’s fault, none’s fault. The light comes, and we see:But if it were not truly for our eyes,There would be nothing seen, for all the light;And so with Marian. If she saw at last,The sense was in her,—Lady WaldemarHad spoken all in vain else.’‘O my heart,O prophet in my heart,’ I cried aloud,‘Then Lady Waldemar spoke!’‘Didshe speak,’Mused Marian softly—‘or did she only sign?Or did she put a word into her faceAnd look, and so impress you with the word?Or leave it in the foldings of her gown,Like rosemary smells, a movement will shake outWhen no one’s conscious? who shall say, or guess?One thing alone was certain,—from the dayThe gracious lady paid a visit first,She, Marian, saw things different,—felt distrustOf all that sheltering roof of circumstanceHer hopes were building into with clay nests:Her heart was restless, pacing up and downAnd fluttering, like dumb creatures before storms,Not knowing wherefore she was ill at ease.’‘And still the lady came,’ said Marian Erle,‘Much oftener thanheknew it, Mister Leigh.She bade me never tell him that she had come,She liked to love me better than he knew,So very kind was Lady Waldemar:And every time she brought with her more light,And every light made sorrow clearer ... Well,Ah, well! we cannot give her blame for that;’Twould be the same thing if an angel came,Whose right should prove our wrong. And every timeThe lady came, she looked more beautiful,And spoke more like a flute among green trees,Until at last, as one, whose heart being sadOn hearing lovely music, suddenlyDissolves in weeping, I brake out in tearsBefore her ... asked her counsel ... ‘had I erredIn being too happy? would she set me straight?For she, being wise and good and born aboveThe flats I had never climbed from, could perceiveIf such as I, might grow upon the hills;And whether such poor herb sufficed to grow,For Romney Leigh to break his fast upon ’t,—Or would he pine on such, or haply starve?’She wrapt me in her generous arms at once,And let me dream a moment how it feelsTo have a real mother, like some girls:But when I looked, her face was younger ... ay,Youth’s too bright not to be a little hard,And beauty keeps itself still uppermost,That’s true!—Though Lady Waldemar was kind,She hurt me, hurt, as if the morning-sunShould smite us on the eyelids when we sleep,And wake us up with headache. Ay, and soonWas light enough to make my heart ache too:She told me truths I asked for ... ’twas my fault ...‘That Romney could not love me, if he would,As men call loving; there are bloods that flowTogether, like some rivers, and not mix,Through contraries of nature. He indeedWas set to wed me, to espouse my class,Act out a rash opinion,—and, once wed,So just a man and gentle, could not chooseBut make my life as smooth as marriage-ring,Bespeak me mildly, keep me a cheerful house,With servants, broaches, all the flowers I liked,And pretty dresses, silk the whole year round’ ...At which I stopped her,—‘This for me. And now‘Forhim.’—She murmured,—truth grew difficult;She owned, ‘’Twas plain a man like Romney LeighRequired a wife more level to himself.If day by day he had to bend his heightTo pick up sympathies, opinions, thoughts,And interchange the common talk of lifeWhich helps a man to live as well as talk,His days were heavily taxed. Who buys a staffTo fit the hand, that reaches but the knee?He’d feel it bitter to be forced to missThe perfect joy of married suited pairs,Who, bursting through the separating hedgeOf personal dues with that sweet eglantineOf equal love, keep saying, ‘Sowethink,It strikesus,—that’sourfancy.’‘—When I askedIf earnest will, devoted love, employedIn youth like mine, would fail to raise me up,—As two strong arms will always raise a childTo a fruit hung overhead? she sighed and sighed ...‘That could not be,’ she feared. ‘You take a pink,You dig about its roots and water it,And so improve it to a garden-pink,But will not change it to a heliotrope,The kind remains. And then, the harder truth—This Romney Leigh, so rash to leap a pale,So bold for conscience, quick for martyrdom,Would suffer steadily and never flinch,But suffer surely and keenly, when his classTurned shoulder on him for a shameful match,And set him up as nine-pin in their talk,To bowl him down with jestings.’—There, she paused;And when I used the pause in doubting thatWe wronged him after all in what we feared—‘Suppose such things should never touch him, moreIn his high conscience, (if the things should be,)Than, when the queen sits in an upper room,The horses in the street can spatter her!’—A moment, hope came,—but the lady closedThat door and nicked the lock, and shut it out,Observing wisely that, ‘the tender heartWhich made him over-soft to a lower class,Could scarcely fail to make him sensitive‘To a higher,—how they thought, and what they felt.’‘Alas, alas,’ said Marian, rocking slowThe pretty baby who was near asleep,The eyelids creeping over the blue balls,—‘She made it clear, too clear—I saw the whole!And yet who knows if I had seen my wayStraight out of it, by looking, though ’twas clear,Unless the generous lady, ’ware of this,Had set her own house all a-fire for me,To light me forwards? Leaning on my faceHer heavy agate eyes which crushed my will,She told me tenderly, (as when men comeTo a bedside to tell people they must die)‘She knew of knowledge,—ay, of knowledge, knew,That Romney Leigh had lovedherformerly;Andshelovedhim, she might say, now the chanceWas past ... but that, of course, he never guessed,—For something came between them ... something thinAs a cobweb ... catching every fly of doubtTo hold it buzzing at the window-paneAnd help to dim the daylight. Ah, man’s prideOr woman’s—which is greatest? most averseTo brushing cobwebs? Well, but she and heRemained fast friends; it seemed not more than so,Because he had bound his hands and could not stir:An honourable man, if somewhat rash;And she, not even for Romney, would she spillA blot ... as little even as a tear ...Upon his marriage-contract,—not to gainA better joy for two than came by that!For, though I stood between her heart and heaven,She loved me wholly.’Did I laugh or curse?I think I sate there silent, hearing all,Ay, hearing double,—Marian’s tale, at once,And Romney’s marriage-vow, ‘I’ll keep tothee,’Which means that woman-serpent. Is it timeFor church now?‘Lady Waldemar spoke more,’Continued Marian, ‘but, as when a soulWill pass out through the sweetness of a songBeyond it, voyaging the uphill road,—Even so, mine wandered from the things I heard,To those I suffered. It was afterwardI shaped the resolution to the act.For many hours we talked. What need to talk?The fate was clear and close; it touched my eyes;But still the generous lady tried to keepThe case afloat, and would not let it go,And argued, struggled upon Marian’s side,Which was not Romney’s! though she little knewWhat ugly monster would take up the end,—What griping death within the drowning deathWas ready to complete my sum of death.’I thought,—Perhaps he’s sliding now the ringUpon that woman’s finger....She went on:‘The lady, failing to prevail her way,Upgathered my torn wishes from the ground,And pieced them with her strong benevolence;And, as I thought I could breathe freer airAway from England, going without pause,Without farewell,—just breaking with a jerkThe blossomed offshoot from my thorny life,—She promised kindly to provide the means,With instant passage to the coloniesAnd full protection,—‘would commit me straight‘To one who once had been her waiting-maidAnd had the customs of the world, intentOn changing England for AustraliaHerself, to carry out her fortune so.’For which I thanked the Lady Waldemar,As men upon their death-beds thank last friendsWho lay the pillow straight: it is not much,And yet ’tis all of which they are capable,This lying smoothly in a bed to die.And so, ’twas fixed;—and so, from day to day,The woman named, came in to visit me.’Just then, the girl stopped speaking,—sate erect,And stared at me as if I had been a ghost,(Perhaps I looked as white as any ghost)With large-eyed horror. ‘Does God make,’ she said,‘All sorts of creatures, really, do you think?Or is it that the Devil slavers themSo excellently, that we come to doubtWho’s strongest, He who makes, or he who mars?I never liked the woman’s face, or voice,Or ways: it made me blush to look at her;It made me tremble if she touched my hand;And when she spoke a fondling word, I shrank,As if one hated me, who had power to hurt;And, every time she came, my veins ran cold,As somebody were walking on my grave.At last I spoke to Lady Waldemar:‘Could such an one be good to trust?’ I asked.Whereat the lady stroked my cheek and laughedHer silver-laugh—(one must be born to laugh,To put such music in it) ‘Foolish girl,‘Your scattered wits are gathering wool beyondThe sheep-walk reaches!—leave the thing to me.’And therefore, half in trust, and half in scornThat I had heart still for another fearIn such a safe despair, I left the thing.‘The rest is short. I was obedient:I wrote my letter which deliveredhimFrom Marian, to his own prosperities,And followed that bad guide. The lady?—hush,—I never blame the lady. Ladies whoSit high, however willing to look down,Will scarce see lower than their dainty feet:And Lady Waldemar saw less than I,With what a Devil’s daughter I went forthThe swine’s road, headlong over a precipice,In such a curl of hell-foam caught and choked,No shriek of soul in anguish could pierce throughTo fetch some help. They say there’s help in heavenFor all such cries. But if one cries from hell ...What then?—the heavens are deaf upon that side.‘A woman ... hear me,—let me make it plain,—A woman ... not a monster ... both her breastsMade right to suckle babes ... she took me off,A woman also, young and ignorant,And heavy with my grief, my two poor eyesNear washed away with weeping, till the trees,The blessed unaccustomed trees and fields,Ran either side the train, like stranger dogsUnworthy of any notice,—took me off,So dull, so blind, and only half alive,Not seeing by what road, nor by what ship,Nor toward what place, nor to what end of all.—Men carry a corpse thus,—past the doorway, pastThe garden-gate, the children’s playground, upThe green lane,—then they leave it in the pit,To sleep and find corruption, cheek to cheekWith him who stinks since Friday.‘But suppose;To go down with one’s soul into the grave,—To go down half dead, half alive, I say,And wake up with corruption, ... cheek to cheekWith him who stinks since Friday! There it is,And that’s the horror of ’t, Miss Leigh.‘You feel?You understand?—no, do not look at me,But understand. The blank, blind, weary wayWhich led ... where’er it led ... away, at least;The shifted ship ... to Sydney or to France ...Still bound, wherever else, to another land;The swooning sickness on the dismal sea,The foreign shore, the shameful house, the night,The feeble blood, the heavy-headed grief, ...No need to bring their damnable drugged cup,And yet they brought it! Hell’s so prodigalOf devil’s gifts ... hunts liberally in packs,Will kill no poor small creature of the wildsBut fifty red wide throats must smoke at it,—AsHISat me ... when waking up at last ...I told you that I waked up in the grave.‘Enough so!—it is plain enough so. True,We wretches cannot tell out all our wrong,Without offence to decent happy folk.I know that we must scrupulously hintWith half-words, delicate reserves, the thingWhich no one scrupled we should feel in full.Let pass the rest, then; only leave my oathUpon this sleeping child,—man’s violence,Not man’s seduction, made me what I am,As lost as ... I toldhimI should be lost;When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves?That’s fatal!—And you call it being lost,That down came next day’s noon and caught me thereHalf gibbering and half raving on the floor,And wondering what had happened up in heaven,That suns should dare to shine when God himselfWas certainly abolished.‘I was mad,—How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.I think they let me go, when I was mad,They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys mightA mad dog which they had tortured. Up and downI went by road and village, over tractsOf open foreign country, large and strange,Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-linesLike fingers of some ghastly skeleton HandThrough sunlight and through moonlight evermorePushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,And resolute to get me, slow and sure;While every roadside Christ upon his crossHung reddening through his gory wounds at me,And shook his nails in anger, and came downTo follow a mile after, wading upThe low vines and green wheat, crying ‘Take the girl!‘She’s none of mine from henceforth,’ Then, I knew,(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest)The charitable peasants gave me breadAnd leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied,At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;A woman has been strangled with less weight:I threw it in a ditch to keep it cleanAnd ease my breath a little, when none looked;I did not need such safeguards:—brutal menStopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seenMy face,—I must have had an awful look.And so I lived: the weeks passed on,—I lived.’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again,But, this time, in a dream, and hunted roundBy some prodigious Dream-fear at my backWhich ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,And there I sate, one evening, by the road,I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,Facing a sunset low upon the flats,As if it were the finish of all time,—The great red stone upon my sepulchre,Which angels were too weak to roll away.

TheEnglish have a scornful insular wayOf calling the French light. The levityIs in the judgment only, which yet stands;For say a foolish thing but oft enough,(And here’s the secret of a hundred creeds,—Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,By re-iteration chiefly) the same thingShall pass at last for absolutely wise,And not with fools exclusively. And so,We say the French are light, as if we saidThe cat mews, or the milch-cow gives us milk:Say rather, cats are milked, and milch-cows mew;For what is lightness but inconsequence,Vague fluctuation ’twixt effect and cause,Compelled by neither? Is a bullet light,That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eyeWinks, and the heart beats one, to flatten itselfTo a wafer on the white speck on a wallA hundred paces off? Even so direct,So sternly undivertible of aim,Is this French people.All, idealistsToo absolute and earnest, with them allThe idea of a knife cuts real flesh;And still, devouring the safe intervalWhich Nature placed between the thought and act,With those too fiery and impatient souls,They threaten conflagration to the worldAnd rush with most unscrupulous logic onImpossible practice. Set your oratorsTo blow upon them with loud windy mouthsThrough watchword phrases, jest or sentiment,Which drive our burley brutal English mobsLike so much chaff, whichever way they blow,—This light French people will not thus be driven.They turn indeed; but then they turn uponSome central pivot of their thought and choice,And veer out by the force of holding fast.—That’s hard to understand, for EnglishmenUnused to abstract questions, and untrainedTo trace the involutions, valve by valve,In each orbed bulb-root of a general truth,And mark what subtly fine integumentDivides opposed compartments. Freedom’s selfComes concrete to us, to be understood,Fixed in a feudal form incarnatelyTo suit our ways of thought and reverence,The special form, with us, being still the thing.With us, I say, though I’m of ItalyBy mother’s birth and grave, by father’s graveAnd memory; let it be,—a poet’s heartCan swell to a pair of nationalities,However ill-lodged in a woman’s breast.And so I am strong to love this noble France,This poet of the nations, who dreams onAnd wails on (while the household goes to wreck)For ever, after some ideal good,—Some equal poise of sex, some unvowed loveInviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood,Some wealth, that leaves none poor and finds none tired,Some freedom of the many, that respectsThe wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams!Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake:And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,Erected for the building of a church,To build instead, a brothel ... or a prison—May God save France!However she have sighedHer great soul up into a great man’s face,To flush his temples out so gloriouslyThat few dare carp at Cæsar for being bald,What then?—this Cæsar represents, not reigns,And is no despot, though twice absolute;This Head has all the people for a heart;This purple’s lined with the democracy,—Now let him see to it! for a rent withinMust leave irreparable rags without.A serious riddle: find such anywhereExcept in France; and when it’s found in France,Be sure to read it rightly. So, I musedUp and down, up and down, the terraced streets,The glittering boulevards, the white colonnadesOf fair fantastic Paris who wears boughsLike plumes, as if man made them,—tossing upHer fountains in the sunshine from the squares,As dice i’ the game of beauty, sure to win;Or as she blew the down-balls of her dreams,And only waited for their falling back,To breathe up more, and count her festive hours.The city swims in verdure, beautifulAs Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts,As plums in ladies’ laps, who start and laugh:What miles of streets that run on after trees,Still carrying the necessary shops,Those open caskets, with the jewels seen!And trade is art, and art’s philosophy,In Paris. There’s a silk, for instance, there,As worth an artist’s study for the folds,As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults;Art’s here too artful,—conscious as a maid,Who leans to mark her shadow on the wallUntil she lose a ’vantage in her step.Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk:The artists also, are idealists,Too absolute for nature, logicalTo austerity in the application ofThe special theory: not a soul contentTo paint a crooked pollard and an ass,As the English will, because they find it so,And like it somehow.—Ah, the old TuileriesIs pulling its high cap down on its eyes,Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazedBy the apparition of a new fair faceIn those devouring mirrors. Through the grate,Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees,From every street and alley of the town,By the ghosts perhaps, that blow too bleak this wayA-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes;I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play outBefore the next change comes.—And, farther on,What statues, poised upon their columns fine,As if to stand a moment were a feat,Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-roomFor a nation that runs fast,—ay, runs againstThe dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows,Which grin at progress in an epigram.I walked the day out, listening to the chinkOf the first Napoleon’s dry bones, as they layIn his second grave beneath the golden domeThat caps all Paris like a bubble. ‘ShallThese dry bones live,’ thought Louis Philippe once,And lived to know. Herein is argumentFor kings and politicians, but still moreFor poets, who bear buckets to the well,Of ampler draught.These crowds are very goodFor meditation, (when we are very strong)Though love of beauty makes us timorous,And draws us backward from the coarse town-sightsTo count the daisies upon dappled fields,And hear the streams bleat on among the hillsIn innocent and indolent repose;While still with silken elegiac thoughtsWe wind out from us the distracting world,And die into the chrysalis of a man,And leave the best that may, to come of us,In some brown moth. Be, rather, bold, and bearTo look into the swarthiest face of things,For God’s sake who has made them.Seven days’ work;The last day shutting ’twixt its dawn and eve,The whole work bettered, of the previous six!Since God collected and resumed in manThe firmaments, the strata, and the lights,Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect,—all their trainsOf various life caught back upon His arm,Reorganised, and constitutedMAN,The microcosm, the adding up of works;Within whose fluttering nostrils, then, at last,Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed,As some strong winner at the foot-race sighsTouching the goal.Humanity is great;And, if I would not rather pore uponAn ounce of common, ugly, human dust,An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow,Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,Than track old Nilus to his silver roots,And wait on all the changes of the moonAmong the mountain-peaks of Thessaly,(Until her magic crystal round itselfFor many a witch to see in)—set it downAs weakness,—strength by no means. How is this,That men of science, osteologistsAnd surgeons, beat some poets, in respectFor nature,—count nought common or unclean,Spend raptures upon perfect specimensOf indurated veins, distorted joints,Or beautiful new cases of curved spine;While we, we are shocked at nature’s falling off,We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains,We will not, when she sneezes, look at her,Not even to say ‘God bless her’? That’s our wrong;For that, she will not trust us often withHer larger sense of beauty and desire,But tethers us to a lily or a roseAnd bids us diet on the dew inside,—Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy(Who stares unseen against our absent eyes,And wonders at the gods that we must be,To pass so careless for the oranges!)Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-worldTo this world, undisparaged, undespoiled,And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)Contains, himself, both flowers and firmamentsAnd surging seas and aspectable stars,And all that we would push him out of sightIn order to see nearer. Let us prayGod’s grace to keep God’s image in repute;That so, the poet and philanthropist,(Even I and Romney) may stand side by side,Because we both stand face to face with menContemplating the people in the rough,—Yet each so follow a vocation,—hisAnd mine.I walked on, musing with myselfOn life and art, and whether, after all,A larger metaphysics might not helpOur physics, a completer poetryAdjust our daily life and vulgar wants,More fully than the special outside plans,Phalansteries, material institutes,The civil conscriptions and lay monasteriesPreferred by modern thinkers, as they thoughtThe bread of man indeed made all his life,And washing seven times in the ‘People’s Baths’Were sovereign for a people’s leprosy,—Still leaving out the essential prophet’s wordThat comes in power. On which, we thunder down,We prophets, poets,—Virtue’s in theword!The maker burnt the darkness up with His,To inaugurate the use of vocal life;And, plant a poet’s word even, deep enoughIn any man’s breast, looking presentlyFor offshoots, you have done more for the man,Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coatAnd warmed his Sunday potage at your fire.Yet Romney leaves me....God! what face is that?O Romney, O Marian!Walking on the quaysAnd pulling thoughts to pieces leisurely,As if I caught at grasses in a field,And bit them slow between my absent lips,And shred them with my hands....What face is that?What a face, what a look, what a likeness! Full on mineThe sudden blow of it came down, till allMy blood swam, my eyes dazzled. Then I sprang—It was as if a meditative manWere dreaming out a summer afternoonAnd watching gnats a-prick upon a pond,When something floats up suddenly, out there,Turns over ... a dead face, known once alive—So old, so new! It would be dreadful nowTo lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.He plunges—ha! he has lost it in the splash.I plunged—I tore the crowd up, either side,And rushed on,—forward, forward ... after her.Her? whom?A woman sauntered slow, in front,Munching an apple,—she left off amazedAs if I had snatched it: that’s not she, at least.A man walked arm-linked with a lady veiled,Both heads dropped closer than the need of talk:They started; he forgot her with his face,And she, herself,—and clung to him as ifMy look were fatal. Such a stream of folk,And all with cares and business of their own!I ran the whole quay down against their eyes;No Marian; nowhere Marian. Almost, now,I could call Marian, Marian, with the shriekOf desperate creatures calling for the Dead.Where is she, was she? was she anywhere?I stood still, breathless, gazing, straining outIn every uncertain distance, till, at last,A gentleman abstracted as myselfCame full against me, then resolved the clashIn voluble excuses,—obviouslySome learned member of the InstituteUpon his way there, walking, for his health,While meditating on the last ‘Discourse;’Pinching the empty air ’twixt finger and thumb,From which the snuff being ousted by that shock,Defiled his snow-white waistcoat, duly prickedAt the button-hole with honourable red;‘Madame, your pardon,’—there, he swerved from meA metre, as confounded as he had heardThat Dumas would be chosen to fill upThe next chair vacant, by his ‘menin us.’Since when was genius found respectable?It passes in its place, indeed,—which meansThe seventh floor back, or else the hospital:Revolving pistols are ingenious things,But prudent men (Academicians are)Scarce keep them in the cupboard, next the prunes.And so, abandoned to a bitter mirth,I loitered to my inn. O world, O world,O jurists, rhymers, dreamers, what you please,We play a weary game of hide-and-seek!We shape a figure of our fantasy,Call nothing something, and run after itAnd lose it, lose ourselves too in the search;Till, clash against us, comes a somebodyWho also has lost something and is lost,Philosopher against philanthropist,Academician against poet, manAgainst woman, against the living, the dead,—Then home, with a bad headache and worse jest!To change the water for my heliotropesAnd yellow roses. Paris has such flowers.But England, also. ’Twas a yellow rose,By that south window of the little house,My cousin Romney gathered with his handOn all my birthdays for me, save the last;And then I shook the tree too rough, too rough,For roses to stay after.Now, my maps.I must not linger here from ItalyTill the last nightingale is tired of song,And the last fire-fly dies off in the maize.My soul’s in haste to leap into the sunAnd scorch and seethe itself to a finer mood,Which here, in this chill north, is apt to standToo stiffly in former moulds.That-face persists.It floats up, it turns over in my mind,As like to Marian, as one dead is likeThe same alive. In very deed a faceAnd not a fancy, though it vanished so;The small fair face between the darks of hair,I used to liken, when I saw her first,To a point of moonlit, water down a well:The low brow, the frank space between the eyes,Which always had the brown pathetic lookOf a dumb creature who had been beaten once,And never since was easy with the world.Ah, ah—now I remember perfectlyThose eyes, to-day,—how overlarge they seemed,As if some patient passionate despair(Like a coal dropt and forgot on tapestry,Which slowly burns a widening circle out)Had burnt them larger, larger. And those eyesTo-day, I do remember, saw me too,As I saw them, with conscious lids astrainIn recognition. Now, a fantasy,A simple shade or image of the brain,Is merely passive, does not retro-act,Is seen, but sees not.’Twas a real face,Perhaps a real Marian.Which being so,I ought to write to Romney, ‘Marian’s here.Be comforted for Marian.’My pen fell,My hands struck sharp together, as hands doWhich hold at nothing. Can I write tohimA half truth? can I keep my own soul blindTo the other half, ... the worse? What are our souls,If still, to run on straight a sober paceNor start at every pebble or dead leaf,They must wear blinkers, ignore facts, suppressSix tenths of the road? Confront the truth, my soul!And oh, as truly as that was Marian’s face,The arms of that same Marian clasped a thing... Not hid so well beneath the scanty shawl,I cannot name it now for what it was.A child. Small business has a cast-awayLike Marian, with that crown of prosperous wives,At which the gentlest she grows arrogantAnd says, ‘my child.’ Who’ll find an emerald ringOn a beggar’s middle finger, and requireMore testimony to convict a thief?A child’s too costly for so mere a wretch;She filched it somewhere; and it means, with her,Instead of honour, blessing, ... merely shame.I cannot write to Romney, ‘Here she is,Here’s Marian found! I’ll set you on her track:I saw her here, in Paris, ... and her child.She put away your love two years ago,But, plainly, not to starve. You suffered then;And, now that you’ve forgot her utterlyAs any last year’s annual, in whose placeYou’ve planted a thick flowering evergreen,I choose, being kind, to write and tell you thisTo make you wholly easy—she’s not dead,But only ... damned.’Stop there: I go too fast;I’m cruel like the rest,—in haste to takeThe first stir in the arras for a rat,And set my barking, biting thoughts upon’t.—A child! what then? Suppose a neighbour’s sickAnd asked her, ‘Marian, carry out my childIn this Spring air,’—I punish her for that?Or say, the child should hold her round the neckFor good child-reasons, that he liked it soAnd would not leave her—she had winning ways—I brand her therefore, that she took the child?Not so.I will not write to Romney Leigh.For now he’s happy,—and she may indeedBe guilty,—and the knowledge of her faultWould draggle his smooth time. But I, whose daysAre not so fine they cannot bear the rain,And who, moreover, having seen her face,Must see it again, ...willsee it, by my hopesOf one day seeing heaven too. The policeShall track her, hound her, ferret their own soil;We’ll dig this Paris to its catacombsBut certainly we’ll find her, have her out,And save her, if she will or will not—childOr no child,—if a child, then one to save!The long weeks passed on without consequence.As easy find a footstep on the sandThe morning after spring-tide, as the traceOf Marian’s feet between the incessant surfsOf this live flood. She may have moved this way,—But so the star-fish does, and crosses outThe dent of her small shoe. The foiled policeRenounced me; ‘Could they find a girl and child,No other signalment but girl and child?No data shown, but noticeable eyesAnd hair in masses, low upon the brow,As if it were an iron crown and pressed?Friends heighten, and suppose they specify:Why, girls with hair and eyes, are everywhereIn Paris; they had turned me up in vainNo Marian Erle indeed, but certainlyMathildes, Justines, Victoires, ... or, if I soughtThe English, Betsies, Saras, by the score.They might as well go out into the fieldsTo find a speckled bean, that’s somehow specked,And somewhere in the pod.’—They left me so.ShallIleave Marian? have I dreamed a dream?—I thank God I have found her! I must say‘Thank God,’ for finding her, although ’tis trueI find the world more sad and wicked for’t.But she—I’ll write about her, presently;My hand’s a-tremble as I had just caught upMy heart to write with, in the place of it.At least you’d take these letters to be writAt sea, in storm!—wait now....A simple chanceDid all. I could not sleep last night, and, tiredOf turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,Went out at early morning, when the airIs delicate with some last starry touch,To wander through the Market-place of Flowers(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sureAt worst, that there were roses in the world.So, wandering, musing, with the artist’s eye,That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowdOf young vivacious and black-braided headsDipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,Among the nosegays, cheapening this and thatIn such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,—My heart leapt in me, startled by a voiceThat slowly, faintly, with long breaths that markedThe interval between the wish and word,Inquired in stranger’s French, ‘Wouldthatbe much,That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?’—‘So much?Too much for me, then!’ turning the face roundSo close upon me, that I felt the sighIt turned with.‘Marian, Marian!’—face to face—‘Marian! I find you. Shall I let you go?’I held her two slight wrists with both my hands;‘Ah Marian, Marian, can I let you go?’—She fluttered from me like a cyclamen,As white, which, taken in a sudden wind,Beats on against the palisade.—‘Let pass,’She said at last. ‘I will not,’ I replied;‘I lost my sister Marian many days,And sought her ever in my walks and prayers,And, now I find her ... do we throw awayThe bread we worked and prayed for,—crumble itAnd drop it, ... to do even so by theeWhom still I’ve hungered after more than bread,My sister Marian?—can I hurt thee, dear?Then why distrust me? Never tremble so.Come with me rather, where we’ll talk and live,And none shall vex us. I’ve a home for youAnd me and no one else’....She shook her head.‘A home for you and me and no one elseIll-suits one of us: I prefer to such,A roof of grass on which a flower might spring,Less costly to me than the cheapest here;And yet I could not, at this hour, affordA like home, even. That you offer yours,I thank you. You are good as heaven itself—As good as one I knew before.... Farewell.’I loosed her hands.—‘Inhisname, no farewell!’(She stood as if I held her.) ‘For his sake,For his sake, Romney’s! by the good he meant,Ay, always! by the love he pressed for once,—And by the grief, reproach, abandonment,He took in change’....‘He, Romney! who grievedhim?Who had the heart for’t? what reproach touchedhim?Be merciful,—speak quickly.’‘Therefore come,’I answered with authority,—‘I thinkWe dare to speak such things, and name such names,In the open squares of Paris!’Not a wordShe said, but, in a gentle humbled way,(As one who had forgot herself in grief)Turned round and followed closely where I went,As if I led her by a narrow plank,Across devouring waters, step by step,—And so in silence we walked on a mile.And then she stopped: her face was white as wax.‘We go much farther?’‘You are ill,’ I asked,‘Or tired?’She looked the whiter for her smile.‘There’s one at home,’ she said, ‘has need of meBy this time,—and I must not let him wait.’‘Not even,’ I asked, ‘to hear of Romney Leigh?’‘Not even,’ she said, ‘to hear of Mister Leigh.’‘In that case,’ I resumed, ‘I go with you,And we can talk the same thing there as here.None waits for me: I have my day to spend.’Her lips moved in a spasm without a sound,—But then she spoke. ‘It shall be as you please;And better so—’tis shorter seen than told.And though you will not find me worth your pains,Thateven, may be worth some pains to know,For one as good as you are.’Then she ledThe way, and I, as by a narrow plankAcross devouring waters, followed her,Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath,And holding her with eyes that would not slip;And so, without a word, we walked a mile,And so, another mile, without a word.Until the peopled streets being all dismissed,House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock,The market-gardens thickened, and the longWhite walls beyond, like spiders’ outside threads,Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fieldsThrough half-built habitations and half-dugFoundations,—intervals of trenchant chalk,That bite betwixt the grassy uneven turfsWhere goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths)Stood perched on edges of the cellarageWhich should be, staring as about to leapTo find their coming Bacchus. All the placeSeemed less a cultivation than a waste:Men work here, only,—scarce begin to live:All’s sad, the country struggling with the town,Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man’s fist,That beats its wings and tries to get away,And cannot choose be satisfied so soonTo hop through court-yards with its right foot tied,The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight!We stopped beside a house too high and slimTo stand there by itself, but waiting tillFive others, two on this side, three on that,Should grow up from the sullen second floorThey pause at now, to build it to a row.The upper windows partly were unglazedMeantime,—a meagre, unripe house: a lineOf rigid poplars elbowed it behind,And, just in front, beyond the lime and bricksThat wronged the grass between it and the road,A great acacia, with its slender trunkAnd overpoise of multitudinous leaves,(In which a hundred fields might spill their dewAnd intense verdure, yet find room enough)Stood, reconciling all the place with green.I followed up the stair upon her step.She hurried upward, shot across a face,A woman’s on the landing,—‘How now, now!Is no one to have holidays but you?You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think,And Julie waiting for your betters here?Why if he had waked, he might have waked, for me.’—Just murmuring an excusing word she passedAnd shut the rest out with the chamber-door,Myself shut in beside her.’Twas a roomScarce larger than a grave, and near as bare;Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room:A mouse could find no sort of shelter in’t,Much less a greater secret; curtainless,—The window fixed you with its torturing eye,Defying you to take a step apart,If peradventure you would hide a thing.I saw the whole room, I and Marian thereAlone.Alone? She threw her bonnet off,Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time,Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruiseMore calmly and more carefully than so,—Nor would you find within, a rosier flushedPomegranate—There he lay, upon his back,The yearling creature, warm and moist with lifeTo the bottom of his dimples,—to the endsOf the lovely tumbled curls about his face;For since he had been covered over-muchTo keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeksWere hot and scarlet as the first live roseThe shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into,The faster for his love. And love was hereAs instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;The little naked feet drawn up the wayOf nestled birdlings; everything so softAnd tender,—to the little holdfast hands,Which, closing on a finger into sleep,Had kept the mould of’t.While we stood there dumb,—For oh, that it should take such innocenceTo prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,And, staring out at us with all their blue,As half perplexed between the angelhoodHe had been away to visit in his sleep,And our most mortal presence,—graduallyHe saw his mother’s face, accepting itIn change for heaven itself, with such a smileAs might have well been learnt there,—never moved,But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,So happy (half with her and half with heaven)He could not have the trouble to be stirred,But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:As red and still indeed as any rose,That blows in all the silence of its leaves,Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)In that extremity of love, ’twill passFor agony or rapture, seeing that loveIncludes the whole of nature, rounding itTo love ... no more,—since more can never beThan just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,And drowning in the transport of the sight,Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,And drawing from his countenance to hersA fainter red, as if she watched a flameAnd stood in it a-glow. ‘How beautiful,’Said she.I answered, trying to be cold.(Must sin have compensations, was my thought,As if it were a holy thing like grief?And is a woman to be fooled asideFrom putting vice down, with that woman’s toy,A baby?)—— ‘Ay! the child is well enough,’I answered. ‘If his mother’s palms are clean,They need be glad, of course, in clasping such:But if not,—I would rather lay my hand,Were I she,—on God’s brazen altar-barsRed-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,Than touch the sacred curls of such a child.’She plunged her fingers in his clustering locks,As one who would not be afraid of fire;And then, with indrawn steady utterance, said,—‘My lamb, my lamb! although, through such as thou,The most unclean got courage and approachTo God, once,—now they cannot, even with men,Find grace enough for pity and gentle words.’‘My Marian,’ I made answer, grave and sad,‘The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,Was still a thief. And if a woman steals(Through God’s own barrier-hedges of true love,Which fence out licence in securing love)A child like this, that smiles so in her face,She is no mother, but a kidnapper,And he’s a dismal orphan ... not a son;Whom all her kisses cannot feed so fullHe will not miss hereafter a pure homeTo live in, a pure heart to lean against,A pure good mother’s name and memoryTo hope by, when the world grows thick and bad,And he feels out for virtue.’‘Oh,’ she smiledWith bitter patience, ‘the child takes his chance,—Not much worse off in being fatherlessThan I was, fathered. He will say, belike,His mother was the saddest creature born;He’ll say his mother lived so contraryTo joy, that even the kindest, seeing her,Grew sometimes almost cruel: he’ll not sayShe flew contrarious in the face of GodWith bat-wings of her vices. Stole my child,—My flower of earth, my only flower on earth,My sweet, ray beauty!’ ... Up she snatched the child,And, breaking on him in a storm of tears,Drew out her long sobs from their shivering roots,Until he took it for a game, and stretchedHis feet, and flapped his eager arms like wings,And crowed and gurgled through his infant laugh:‘Mine, mine,’ she said; ‘I have as sure a rightAs any glad proud mother in the world,Who sets her darling down to cut his teethUpon her church-ring. If she talks of law,I talk of law! I claim my mother-duesBy law,—the law which now is paramount;The common law, by which the poor and weakAre trodden underfoot by vicious men,And loathed for ever after by the good.Let pass! I did not filch ... I found the child.’‘You found him, Marian?’‘Ay, I found him whereI found my curse,—in the gutter, with my shame!What have you, any of you, to say to that,Who all are happy, and sit safe and high,And never spoke before to arraign my rightTo grief itself? What, what, ... being beaten downBy hoofs of maddened oxen into a ditch,Half-dead, whole mangled ... when a girl, at last,Breathes, sees ... and finds there, bedded in her flesh,Because of the overcoming shock perhaps,Some coin of price!... and when a good man comes(That’s God! the best men are not quite as good)And says, ‘I dropped the coin there: take it, you,And keep it,—it shall pay you for the loss,’—You all put up your finger—‘See the thief!Observe that precious thing she has come to filch!How bad those girls are!’ Oh, my flower, my pet,I dare forget I have you in my arms,And fly off to be angry with the world,And fright you, hurt you with my tempers, tillYou double up your lip? Ah, that indeedIs bad: a naughty mother!’‘You mistake,’I interrupted; ‘if I loved you not,I should not, Marian, certainly be here.’‘Alas,’ she said, ‘you are so very good;And yet I wish, indeed, you had never comeTo make me sob until I vex the child.It is not wholesome for these pleasure-platsTo be so early watered by our brine.And then, who knows? he may not like me nowAs well, perhaps, as ere he saw me fret,—One’s ugly fretting! he has eyes the sameAs angels, but he cannot see as deep,And so I’ve kept for ever in his sightA sort of smile to please him,—as you placeA green thing from the garden in a cup,To make believe it grows there. Look, my sweet,My cowslip-ball! we’ve done with that cross face,And here’s the face come back you used to like.Ah, ah! he laughs! he likes me. Ah, Miss Leigh,You’re great and pure; but were you purer still,—As if you had walked, we’ll say, no otherwhereThan up and down the new Jerusalem,And held your trailing lutestring up yourselfFrom brushing the twelve stones, for fear of someSmall speck as little as a needle-prick,White stitched on white,—the child would keep tome,Would choose his poor lost Marian, like me best,And, though you stretched your arms, cry back and cling,As we do, when God says it’s time to dieAnd bids us go up higher. Leave us, then;We two are happy. Doeshepush me off?He’s satisfied with me, as I with him.’‘So soft to one, so hard to others! Nay,’I cried, more angry that she melted me,‘We make henceforth a cushion of our faultsTo sit and practise easy virtues on?I thought a child was given to sanctifyA woman,—set her in the sight of allThe clear-eyed Heavens, a chosen ministerTo do their business and lead spirits upThe difficult blue heights. A woman lives,Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and goodThrough being a mother?... then she’s none! althoughShe damps her baby’s cheeks by kissing them,As we kill roses.’‘Kill! O Christ,’ she said,And turned her wild sad face from side to sideWith most despairing wonder in it—‘What,What have you in your souls against me then,All of you? am I wicked, do you think?God knows me, trusts me with the child! but you,You think me really wicked?’‘Complaisant,’I answered softly, ‘to a wrong you’ve done,Because of certain profits,—which is wrongBeyond the first wrong, Marian. When you leftThe pure place and the noble heart, to takeThe hand of a seducer’....‘Whom? whose hand?I took the hand of’....Springing up erect,And lifting up the child at full arm’s length,As if to bear him like an oriflammeUnconquerable to armies of reproach,—‘Byhim’ she said, ‘my child’s head and its curls,By those blue eyes no woman born could dareA perjury on, I make my mother’s oath,That if I left that Heart, to lighten it,The blood of mine was still, except for grief!No cleaner maid than I was, took a stepTo a sadder end,—no matron-mother nowLooks backward to her early maidenhoodThrough chaster pulses. I speak steadily:And if I lie so, ... if, being fouled in willAnd paltered with in soul by devil’s lust,I dared to bid this angel take my part, ...Would God sit quiet, let us think, in heaven,Nor strike me dumb with thunder? Yet I speak:He clears me therefore. What, ‘seduced’’s your word?Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,Seduce it into carrion? So with me.I was not ever, as you say, seduced,But simply, murdered.’There she paused, and sighed,With such a sigh as drops from agonyTo exhaustion,—sighing while she let the babeSlide down upon her bosom from her arms,And all her face’s light fell after him,Like a torch quenched in falling. Down she sank,And sate upon the bedside with the child.But I, convicted, broken utterly,With woman’s passion clung about her waist,And kissed her hair and eyes,—‘I have been wrong,Sweet Marian’ ... (weeping in a tender rage)‘Sweet holy Marian! And now, Marian, now,I’ll use your oath although my lips are hard,And by the child, my Marian, by the child,I’ll swear his mother shall be innocentBefore my conscience, as in the open BookOf Him who reads for judgement. Innocent,My sister! let the night be ne’er so dark,The moon is surely somewhere in the sky;So surely is your whiteness to be foundThrough all dark facts. But pardon, pardon me,And smile a little, Marian,—for the child,If not for me, my sister.’The poor lipJust motioned for the smile and let it go:And then, with scarce a stirring of the mouth,As if a statue spoke that could not breathe,But spoke on calm between its marble lips,—‘I’m glad, I’m very glad you clear me so.I should be sorry that you set me downWith harlots, or with even a better nameWhich misbecomes his mother. For the rest,I am not on a level with your love,Nor ever was, you know,—but now am worse,Because that world of yours has dealt with meAs when the hard sea bites and chews a stoneAnd changes the first form of it. I’ve markedA shore of pebbles bitten to one shapeFrom all the various life of madrepores;And so, that little stone, called Marian Erle,Picked up and dropped by you and another friend,Was ground and tortured by the incessant seaAnd bruised from what she was,—changed! death’s a change,And she, I said, was murdered; Marian’s dead.What can you do with people when they are dead,But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go,Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,But go by all means,—and permit the grassTo keep its green feud up ’twixt them and you?Then leave me,—let me rest. I’m dead, I say.And if, to save the child from death as well,The mother in me has survived the rest,Why, that’s God’s miracle you must not tax,—I’m not less dead for that: I’m nothing moreBut just a mother. Only for the child,I’m warm, and cold, and hungry, and afraid,And smell the flowers a little, and see the sun,And speak still, and am silent,—just for him!I pray you therefore to mistake me not,And treat me, haply, as I were alive;For though you ran a pin into my soul,I think it would not hurt nor trouble me.Here’s proof, dear lady,—in the market-placeBut now, you promised me to say a wordAbout ... a friend, who once, long years ago,Took God’s place toward me, when He draws and lovesAnd does not thunder, ... whom at last I left,As all of us leave God. You thought perhaps,I seemed to care for hearing of that friend?Now, judge me! we have sate here half-an-hourAnd talked together of the child and me,And I not asked as much as, ‘What’s the thingYou had to tell me of the friend ... the friend?’He’s sad, I think you said,—he’s sick perhaps?It’s nought to Marian if he’s sad or sick.Another would have crawled beside your footAnd prayed your words out. Why, a beast, a dog,A starved cat, if he had fed it once with milk,Would show less hardness. But I’m dead, you see,And that explains it.’Poor, poor thing, she spokeAnd shook her head, as white and calm as frostOn days too cold for raining any more,But still with such a face, so much alive,I could not choose but take it on my armAnd stroke the placid patience of its cheeks,—Then told my story out, of Romney Leigh,How, having lost her, sought her, missed her still,He, broken-hearted for himself and her,Had drawn the curtains of the world awhileAs if he had done with morning. There I stopped,For when she gasped, and pressed me with her eyes,‘And now ... how is it with him? tell me now,’—I felt the shame of compensated grief,And chose my words with scruple—slowly steppedUpon the slippery stones set here and thereAcross the sliding water. ‘Certainly,As evening empties morning into night,Another morning takes the evening upWith healthful, providential interchange;And, though he thought still of her,’—‘Yes, she knew,She understood: she had supposed, indeed,That, as one stops a hole upon a flute,At which a new note comes and shapes the tune,Excluding her would bring a worthier in,And, long ere this, that Lady WaldemarHe loved so’ ...‘Loved,’ I started,—‘loved her so!Now tell me’ ...‘I will tell you,’ she replied:‘But since we’re taking oaths, you’ll promise firstThat he, in England, he, shall never learnIn what a dreadful trap his creature here,Round whose unworthy neck he had meant to tieThe honourable ribbon of his name,Fell unaware, and came to butchery:Because,—I know him,—as he takes to heartThe grief of every stranger, he’s not likeTo banish mine as far as I should chooseIn wishing him most happy. Now he leavesTo think of me, perverse, who went my way,Unkind, and left him,—but if once he knew ...Ah, then, the sharp nail of my cruel wrongWould fasten me for ever in his sight,Like some poor curious bird, through each spread wingNailed high up over a fierce hunter’s fire,To spoil the dinner of all tenderer folkCome in by chance. Nay, since your Marian’s dead,You shall not hang her up, but dig a holeAnd bury her in silence! ring no bells.’I answered gaily, though my whole voice wept;‘We’ll ring the joy-bells, not the funeral-bells,Because we have her back, dead or alive.’She never answered that, but shook her head;Then low and calm, as one who, safe in heaven,Shall tell a story of his lower life,Unmoved by shame or anger,—so she spoke.She told me she had loved upon her knees,As others pray, more perfectly absorbedIn the act and aspiration. She felt his,For just his uses, not her own at all,His stool, to sit on, or put up his foot,His cup, to fill with wine or vinegar,Whichever drink might please him at the chance,For that should please her always: let him writeHis name upon her ... it seemed natural;It was most precious, standing on his shelf,To wait until he chose to lift his hand.Well, well,—I saw her then, and must have seenHow bright her life went, floating on her love,Like wicks the housewives send afloat on oil,Which feeds them to a flame that lasts the night.To do good seemed so much his business,That, having done it, she was fain to think,Must fill up his capacity for joy.At first she never mooted with herselfIfhewas happy, since he made her so,Or ifheloved her, being so much beloved:Who thinks of asking if the sun is light,Observing that it lightens? who’s so bold,To question God of His felicity?Still less. And thus she took for granted first,What first of all she should have put to proof,And sinned against him so, but only so.‘What could you hope,’ she said, ‘of such as she?You take a kid you like, and turn it outIn some fair garden; though the creature’s fondAnd gentle, it will leap upon the bedsAnd break your tulips, bite your tender trees:The wonder would be if such innocenceSpoiled less. A garden is no place for kids.’And, by degrees, when he who had chosen her,Brought in his courteous and benignant friendsTo spend their goodness on her, which she tookSo very gladly, as a part of his,—By slow degrees, it broke on her slow sense,That she, too, in that Eden of delightWas out of place, and, like the silly kid,Still did most mischief where she meant most love.A thought enough to make a woman mad,(No beast in this, but she may well go mad)That, saying ‘I am thine to love and use,’May blow the plague in her protesting breathTo the very man for whom she claims to die,—That, clinging round his neck, she pulls him downAnd drowns him,—and that, lavishing her soul,She hales perdition on him. ‘So, being mad,’Said Marian ...‘Ah—who stirred such thoughts, you ask?Whose fault it was, that she should have such thoughts?None’s fault, none’s fault. The light comes, and we see:But if it were not truly for our eyes,There would be nothing seen, for all the light;And so with Marian. If she saw at last,The sense was in her,—Lady WaldemarHad spoken all in vain else.’‘O my heart,O prophet in my heart,’ I cried aloud,‘Then Lady Waldemar spoke!’‘Didshe speak,’Mused Marian softly—‘or did she only sign?Or did she put a word into her faceAnd look, and so impress you with the word?Or leave it in the foldings of her gown,Like rosemary smells, a movement will shake outWhen no one’s conscious? who shall say, or guess?One thing alone was certain,—from the dayThe gracious lady paid a visit first,She, Marian, saw things different,—felt distrustOf all that sheltering roof of circumstanceHer hopes were building into with clay nests:Her heart was restless, pacing up and downAnd fluttering, like dumb creatures before storms,Not knowing wherefore she was ill at ease.’‘And still the lady came,’ said Marian Erle,‘Much oftener thanheknew it, Mister Leigh.She bade me never tell him that she had come,She liked to love me better than he knew,So very kind was Lady Waldemar:And every time she brought with her more light,And every light made sorrow clearer ... Well,Ah, well! we cannot give her blame for that;’Twould be the same thing if an angel came,Whose right should prove our wrong. And every timeThe lady came, she looked more beautiful,And spoke more like a flute among green trees,Until at last, as one, whose heart being sadOn hearing lovely music, suddenlyDissolves in weeping, I brake out in tearsBefore her ... asked her counsel ... ‘had I erredIn being too happy? would she set me straight?For she, being wise and good and born aboveThe flats I had never climbed from, could perceiveIf such as I, might grow upon the hills;And whether such poor herb sufficed to grow,For Romney Leigh to break his fast upon ’t,—Or would he pine on such, or haply starve?’She wrapt me in her generous arms at once,And let me dream a moment how it feelsTo have a real mother, like some girls:But when I looked, her face was younger ... ay,Youth’s too bright not to be a little hard,And beauty keeps itself still uppermost,That’s true!—Though Lady Waldemar was kind,She hurt me, hurt, as if the morning-sunShould smite us on the eyelids when we sleep,And wake us up with headache. Ay, and soonWas light enough to make my heart ache too:She told me truths I asked for ... ’twas my fault ...‘That Romney could not love me, if he would,As men call loving; there are bloods that flowTogether, like some rivers, and not mix,Through contraries of nature. He indeedWas set to wed me, to espouse my class,Act out a rash opinion,—and, once wed,So just a man and gentle, could not chooseBut make my life as smooth as marriage-ring,Bespeak me mildly, keep me a cheerful house,With servants, broaches, all the flowers I liked,And pretty dresses, silk the whole year round’ ...At which I stopped her,—‘This for me. And now‘Forhim.’—She murmured,—truth grew difficult;She owned, ‘’Twas plain a man like Romney LeighRequired a wife more level to himself.If day by day he had to bend his heightTo pick up sympathies, opinions, thoughts,And interchange the common talk of lifeWhich helps a man to live as well as talk,His days were heavily taxed. Who buys a staffTo fit the hand, that reaches but the knee?He’d feel it bitter to be forced to missThe perfect joy of married suited pairs,Who, bursting through the separating hedgeOf personal dues with that sweet eglantineOf equal love, keep saying, ‘Sowethink,It strikesus,—that’sourfancy.’‘—When I askedIf earnest will, devoted love, employedIn youth like mine, would fail to raise me up,—As two strong arms will always raise a childTo a fruit hung overhead? she sighed and sighed ...‘That could not be,’ she feared. ‘You take a pink,You dig about its roots and water it,And so improve it to a garden-pink,But will not change it to a heliotrope,The kind remains. And then, the harder truth—This Romney Leigh, so rash to leap a pale,So bold for conscience, quick for martyrdom,Would suffer steadily and never flinch,But suffer surely and keenly, when his classTurned shoulder on him for a shameful match,And set him up as nine-pin in their talk,To bowl him down with jestings.’—There, she paused;And when I used the pause in doubting thatWe wronged him after all in what we feared—‘Suppose such things should never touch him, moreIn his high conscience, (if the things should be,)Than, when the queen sits in an upper room,The horses in the street can spatter her!’—A moment, hope came,—but the lady closedThat door and nicked the lock, and shut it out,Observing wisely that, ‘the tender heartWhich made him over-soft to a lower class,Could scarcely fail to make him sensitive‘To a higher,—how they thought, and what they felt.’‘Alas, alas,’ said Marian, rocking slowThe pretty baby who was near asleep,The eyelids creeping over the blue balls,—‘She made it clear, too clear—I saw the whole!And yet who knows if I had seen my wayStraight out of it, by looking, though ’twas clear,Unless the generous lady, ’ware of this,Had set her own house all a-fire for me,To light me forwards? Leaning on my faceHer heavy agate eyes which crushed my will,She told me tenderly, (as when men comeTo a bedside to tell people they must die)‘She knew of knowledge,—ay, of knowledge, knew,That Romney Leigh had lovedherformerly;Andshelovedhim, she might say, now the chanceWas past ... but that, of course, he never guessed,—For something came between them ... something thinAs a cobweb ... catching every fly of doubtTo hold it buzzing at the window-paneAnd help to dim the daylight. Ah, man’s prideOr woman’s—which is greatest? most averseTo brushing cobwebs? Well, but she and heRemained fast friends; it seemed not more than so,Because he had bound his hands and could not stir:An honourable man, if somewhat rash;And she, not even for Romney, would she spillA blot ... as little even as a tear ...Upon his marriage-contract,—not to gainA better joy for two than came by that!For, though I stood between her heart and heaven,She loved me wholly.’Did I laugh or curse?I think I sate there silent, hearing all,Ay, hearing double,—Marian’s tale, at once,And Romney’s marriage-vow, ‘I’ll keep tothee,’Which means that woman-serpent. Is it timeFor church now?‘Lady Waldemar spoke more,’Continued Marian, ‘but, as when a soulWill pass out through the sweetness of a songBeyond it, voyaging the uphill road,—Even so, mine wandered from the things I heard,To those I suffered. It was afterwardI shaped the resolution to the act.For many hours we talked. What need to talk?The fate was clear and close; it touched my eyes;But still the generous lady tried to keepThe case afloat, and would not let it go,And argued, struggled upon Marian’s side,Which was not Romney’s! though she little knewWhat ugly monster would take up the end,—What griping death within the drowning deathWas ready to complete my sum of death.’I thought,—Perhaps he’s sliding now the ringUpon that woman’s finger....She went on:‘The lady, failing to prevail her way,Upgathered my torn wishes from the ground,And pieced them with her strong benevolence;And, as I thought I could breathe freer airAway from England, going without pause,Without farewell,—just breaking with a jerkThe blossomed offshoot from my thorny life,—She promised kindly to provide the means,With instant passage to the coloniesAnd full protection,—‘would commit me straight‘To one who once had been her waiting-maidAnd had the customs of the world, intentOn changing England for AustraliaHerself, to carry out her fortune so.’For which I thanked the Lady Waldemar,As men upon their death-beds thank last friendsWho lay the pillow straight: it is not much,And yet ’tis all of which they are capable,This lying smoothly in a bed to die.And so, ’twas fixed;—and so, from day to day,The woman named, came in to visit me.’Just then, the girl stopped speaking,—sate erect,And stared at me as if I had been a ghost,(Perhaps I looked as white as any ghost)With large-eyed horror. ‘Does God make,’ she said,‘All sorts of creatures, really, do you think?Or is it that the Devil slavers themSo excellently, that we come to doubtWho’s strongest, He who makes, or he who mars?I never liked the woman’s face, or voice,Or ways: it made me blush to look at her;It made me tremble if she touched my hand;And when she spoke a fondling word, I shrank,As if one hated me, who had power to hurt;And, every time she came, my veins ran cold,As somebody were walking on my grave.At last I spoke to Lady Waldemar:‘Could such an one be good to trust?’ I asked.Whereat the lady stroked my cheek and laughedHer silver-laugh—(one must be born to laugh,To put such music in it) ‘Foolish girl,‘Your scattered wits are gathering wool beyondThe sheep-walk reaches!—leave the thing to me.’And therefore, half in trust, and half in scornThat I had heart still for another fearIn such a safe despair, I left the thing.‘The rest is short. I was obedient:I wrote my letter which deliveredhimFrom Marian, to his own prosperities,And followed that bad guide. The lady?—hush,—I never blame the lady. Ladies whoSit high, however willing to look down,Will scarce see lower than their dainty feet:And Lady Waldemar saw less than I,With what a Devil’s daughter I went forthThe swine’s road, headlong over a precipice,In such a curl of hell-foam caught and choked,No shriek of soul in anguish could pierce throughTo fetch some help. They say there’s help in heavenFor all such cries. But if one cries from hell ...What then?—the heavens are deaf upon that side.‘A woman ... hear me,—let me make it plain,—A woman ... not a monster ... both her breastsMade right to suckle babes ... she took me off,A woman also, young and ignorant,And heavy with my grief, my two poor eyesNear washed away with weeping, till the trees,The blessed unaccustomed trees and fields,Ran either side the train, like stranger dogsUnworthy of any notice,—took me off,So dull, so blind, and only half alive,Not seeing by what road, nor by what ship,Nor toward what place, nor to what end of all.—Men carry a corpse thus,—past the doorway, pastThe garden-gate, the children’s playground, upThe green lane,—then they leave it in the pit,To sleep and find corruption, cheek to cheekWith him who stinks since Friday.‘But suppose;To go down with one’s soul into the grave,—To go down half dead, half alive, I say,And wake up with corruption, ... cheek to cheekWith him who stinks since Friday! There it is,And that’s the horror of ’t, Miss Leigh.‘You feel?You understand?—no, do not look at me,But understand. The blank, blind, weary wayWhich led ... where’er it led ... away, at least;The shifted ship ... to Sydney or to France ...Still bound, wherever else, to another land;The swooning sickness on the dismal sea,The foreign shore, the shameful house, the night,The feeble blood, the heavy-headed grief, ...No need to bring their damnable drugged cup,And yet they brought it! Hell’s so prodigalOf devil’s gifts ... hunts liberally in packs,Will kill no poor small creature of the wildsBut fifty red wide throats must smoke at it,—AsHISat me ... when waking up at last ...I told you that I waked up in the grave.‘Enough so!—it is plain enough so. True,We wretches cannot tell out all our wrong,Without offence to decent happy folk.I know that we must scrupulously hintWith half-words, delicate reserves, the thingWhich no one scrupled we should feel in full.Let pass the rest, then; only leave my oathUpon this sleeping child,—man’s violence,Not man’s seduction, made me what I am,As lost as ... I toldhimI should be lost;When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves?That’s fatal!—And you call it being lost,That down came next day’s noon and caught me thereHalf gibbering and half raving on the floor,And wondering what had happened up in heaven,That suns should dare to shine when God himselfWas certainly abolished.‘I was mad,—How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.I think they let me go, when I was mad,They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys mightA mad dog which they had tortured. Up and downI went by road and village, over tractsOf open foreign country, large and strange,Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-linesLike fingers of some ghastly skeleton HandThrough sunlight and through moonlight evermorePushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,And resolute to get me, slow and sure;While every roadside Christ upon his crossHung reddening through his gory wounds at me,And shook his nails in anger, and came downTo follow a mile after, wading upThe low vines and green wheat, crying ‘Take the girl!‘She’s none of mine from henceforth,’ Then, I knew,(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest)The charitable peasants gave me breadAnd leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied,At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;A woman has been strangled with less weight:I threw it in a ditch to keep it cleanAnd ease my breath a little, when none looked;I did not need such safeguards:—brutal menStopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seenMy face,—I must have had an awful look.And so I lived: the weeks passed on,—I lived.’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again,But, this time, in a dream, and hunted roundBy some prodigious Dream-fear at my backWhich ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,And there I sate, one evening, by the road,I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,Facing a sunset low upon the flats,As if it were the finish of all time,—The great red stone upon my sepulchre,Which angels were too weak to roll away.

TheEnglish have a scornful insular wayOf calling the French light. The levityIs in the judgment only, which yet stands;For say a foolish thing but oft enough,(And here’s the secret of a hundred creeds,—Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,By re-iteration chiefly) the same thingShall pass at last for absolutely wise,And not with fools exclusively. And so,We say the French are light, as if we saidThe cat mews, or the milch-cow gives us milk:Say rather, cats are milked, and milch-cows mew;For what is lightness but inconsequence,Vague fluctuation ’twixt effect and cause,Compelled by neither? Is a bullet light,That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eyeWinks, and the heart beats one, to flatten itselfTo a wafer on the white speck on a wallA hundred paces off? Even so direct,So sternly undivertible of aim,Is this French people.All, idealistsToo absolute and earnest, with them allThe idea of a knife cuts real flesh;And still, devouring the safe intervalWhich Nature placed between the thought and act,With those too fiery and impatient souls,They threaten conflagration to the worldAnd rush with most unscrupulous logic onImpossible practice. Set your oratorsTo blow upon them with loud windy mouthsThrough watchword phrases, jest or sentiment,Which drive our burley brutal English mobsLike so much chaff, whichever way they blow,—This light French people will not thus be driven.They turn indeed; but then they turn uponSome central pivot of their thought and choice,And veer out by the force of holding fast.—That’s hard to understand, for EnglishmenUnused to abstract questions, and untrainedTo trace the involutions, valve by valve,In each orbed bulb-root of a general truth,And mark what subtly fine integumentDivides opposed compartments. Freedom’s selfComes concrete to us, to be understood,Fixed in a feudal form incarnatelyTo suit our ways of thought and reverence,The special form, with us, being still the thing.With us, I say, though I’m of ItalyBy mother’s birth and grave, by father’s graveAnd memory; let it be,—a poet’s heartCan swell to a pair of nationalities,However ill-lodged in a woman’s breast.

And so I am strong to love this noble France,This poet of the nations, who dreams onAnd wails on (while the household goes to wreck)For ever, after some ideal good,—Some equal poise of sex, some unvowed loveInviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood,Some wealth, that leaves none poor and finds none tired,Some freedom of the many, that respectsThe wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams!Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake:And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,Erected for the building of a church,To build instead, a brothel ... or a prison—May God save France!However she have sighedHer great soul up into a great man’s face,To flush his temples out so gloriouslyThat few dare carp at Cæsar for being bald,What then?—this Cæsar represents, not reigns,And is no despot, though twice absolute;This Head has all the people for a heart;This purple’s lined with the democracy,—Now let him see to it! for a rent withinMust leave irreparable rags without.

A serious riddle: find such anywhereExcept in France; and when it’s found in France,Be sure to read it rightly. So, I musedUp and down, up and down, the terraced streets,The glittering boulevards, the white colonnadesOf fair fantastic Paris who wears boughsLike plumes, as if man made them,—tossing upHer fountains in the sunshine from the squares,As dice i’ the game of beauty, sure to win;Or as she blew the down-balls of her dreams,And only waited for their falling back,To breathe up more, and count her festive hours.

The city swims in verdure, beautifulAs Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts,As plums in ladies’ laps, who start and laugh:What miles of streets that run on after trees,Still carrying the necessary shops,Those open caskets, with the jewels seen!And trade is art, and art’s philosophy,In Paris. There’s a silk, for instance, there,As worth an artist’s study for the folds,As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults;Art’s here too artful,—conscious as a maid,Who leans to mark her shadow on the wallUntil she lose a ’vantage in her step.Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk:The artists also, are idealists,Too absolute for nature, logicalTo austerity in the application ofThe special theory: not a soul contentTo paint a crooked pollard and an ass,As the English will, because they find it so,And like it somehow.—Ah, the old TuileriesIs pulling its high cap down on its eyes,Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazedBy the apparition of a new fair faceIn those devouring mirrors. Through the grate,Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees,From every street and alley of the town,By the ghosts perhaps, that blow too bleak this wayA-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes;I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play outBefore the next change comes.—And, farther on,What statues, poised upon their columns fine,As if to stand a moment were a feat,Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-roomFor a nation that runs fast,—ay, runs againstThe dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows,Which grin at progress in an epigram.

I walked the day out, listening to the chinkOf the first Napoleon’s dry bones, as they layIn his second grave beneath the golden domeThat caps all Paris like a bubble. ‘ShallThese dry bones live,’ thought Louis Philippe once,And lived to know. Herein is argumentFor kings and politicians, but still moreFor poets, who bear buckets to the well,Of ampler draught.These crowds are very goodFor meditation, (when we are very strong)Though love of beauty makes us timorous,And draws us backward from the coarse town-sightsTo count the daisies upon dappled fields,And hear the streams bleat on among the hillsIn innocent and indolent repose;While still with silken elegiac thoughtsWe wind out from us the distracting world,And die into the chrysalis of a man,And leave the best that may, to come of us,In some brown moth. Be, rather, bold, and bearTo look into the swarthiest face of things,For God’s sake who has made them.

Seven days’ work;The last day shutting ’twixt its dawn and eve,The whole work bettered, of the previous six!Since God collected and resumed in manThe firmaments, the strata, and the lights,Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect,—all their trainsOf various life caught back upon His arm,Reorganised, and constitutedMAN,The microcosm, the adding up of works;Within whose fluttering nostrils, then, at last,Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed,As some strong winner at the foot-race sighsTouching the goal.Humanity is great;And, if I would not rather pore uponAn ounce of common, ugly, human dust,An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow,Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,Than track old Nilus to his silver roots,And wait on all the changes of the moonAmong the mountain-peaks of Thessaly,(Until her magic crystal round itselfFor many a witch to see in)—set it downAs weakness,—strength by no means. How is this,That men of science, osteologistsAnd surgeons, beat some poets, in respectFor nature,—count nought common or unclean,Spend raptures upon perfect specimensOf indurated veins, distorted joints,Or beautiful new cases of curved spine;While we, we are shocked at nature’s falling off,We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains,We will not, when she sneezes, look at her,Not even to say ‘God bless her’? That’s our wrong;For that, she will not trust us often withHer larger sense of beauty and desire,But tethers us to a lily or a roseAnd bids us diet on the dew inside,—Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy(Who stares unseen against our absent eyes,And wonders at the gods that we must be,To pass so careless for the oranges!)Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-worldTo this world, undisparaged, undespoiled,And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)Contains, himself, both flowers and firmamentsAnd surging seas and aspectable stars,And all that we would push him out of sightIn order to see nearer. Let us prayGod’s grace to keep God’s image in repute;That so, the poet and philanthropist,(Even I and Romney) may stand side by side,Because we both stand face to face with menContemplating the people in the rough,—Yet each so follow a vocation,—hisAnd mine.I walked on, musing with myselfOn life and art, and whether, after all,A larger metaphysics might not helpOur physics, a completer poetryAdjust our daily life and vulgar wants,More fully than the special outside plans,Phalansteries, material institutes,The civil conscriptions and lay monasteriesPreferred by modern thinkers, as they thoughtThe bread of man indeed made all his life,And washing seven times in the ‘People’s Baths’Were sovereign for a people’s leprosy,—Still leaving out the essential prophet’s wordThat comes in power. On which, we thunder down,We prophets, poets,—Virtue’s in theword!The maker burnt the darkness up with His,To inaugurate the use of vocal life;And, plant a poet’s word even, deep enoughIn any man’s breast, looking presentlyFor offshoots, you have done more for the man,Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coatAnd warmed his Sunday potage at your fire.Yet Romney leaves me....God! what face is that?O Romney, O Marian!Walking on the quaysAnd pulling thoughts to pieces leisurely,As if I caught at grasses in a field,And bit them slow between my absent lips,And shred them with my hands....What face is that?What a face, what a look, what a likeness! Full on mineThe sudden blow of it came down, till allMy blood swam, my eyes dazzled. Then I sprang—

It was as if a meditative manWere dreaming out a summer afternoonAnd watching gnats a-prick upon a pond,When something floats up suddenly, out there,Turns over ... a dead face, known once alive—So old, so new! It would be dreadful nowTo lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.He plunges—ha! he has lost it in the splash.

I plunged—I tore the crowd up, either side,And rushed on,—forward, forward ... after her.Her? whom?A woman sauntered slow, in front,Munching an apple,—she left off amazedAs if I had snatched it: that’s not she, at least.A man walked arm-linked with a lady veiled,Both heads dropped closer than the need of talk:They started; he forgot her with his face,And she, herself,—and clung to him as ifMy look were fatal. Such a stream of folk,And all with cares and business of their own!I ran the whole quay down against their eyes;No Marian; nowhere Marian. Almost, now,I could call Marian, Marian, with the shriekOf desperate creatures calling for the Dead.Where is she, was she? was she anywhere?I stood still, breathless, gazing, straining outIn every uncertain distance, till, at last,A gentleman abstracted as myselfCame full against me, then resolved the clashIn voluble excuses,—obviouslySome learned member of the InstituteUpon his way there, walking, for his health,While meditating on the last ‘Discourse;’Pinching the empty air ’twixt finger and thumb,From which the snuff being ousted by that shock,Defiled his snow-white waistcoat, duly prickedAt the button-hole with honourable red;‘Madame, your pardon,’—there, he swerved from meA metre, as confounded as he had heardThat Dumas would be chosen to fill upThe next chair vacant, by his ‘menin us.’Since when was genius found respectable?It passes in its place, indeed,—which meansThe seventh floor back, or else the hospital:Revolving pistols are ingenious things,But prudent men (Academicians are)Scarce keep them in the cupboard, next the prunes.

And so, abandoned to a bitter mirth,I loitered to my inn. O world, O world,O jurists, rhymers, dreamers, what you please,We play a weary game of hide-and-seek!We shape a figure of our fantasy,Call nothing something, and run after itAnd lose it, lose ourselves too in the search;Till, clash against us, comes a somebodyWho also has lost something and is lost,Philosopher against philanthropist,Academician against poet, manAgainst woman, against the living, the dead,—Then home, with a bad headache and worse jest!

To change the water for my heliotropesAnd yellow roses. Paris has such flowers.But England, also. ’Twas a yellow rose,By that south window of the little house,My cousin Romney gathered with his handOn all my birthdays for me, save the last;And then I shook the tree too rough, too rough,For roses to stay after.Now, my maps.I must not linger here from ItalyTill the last nightingale is tired of song,And the last fire-fly dies off in the maize.My soul’s in haste to leap into the sunAnd scorch and seethe itself to a finer mood,Which here, in this chill north, is apt to standToo stiffly in former moulds.That-face persists.It floats up, it turns over in my mind,As like to Marian, as one dead is likeThe same alive. In very deed a faceAnd not a fancy, though it vanished so;The small fair face between the darks of hair,I used to liken, when I saw her first,To a point of moonlit, water down a well:The low brow, the frank space between the eyes,Which always had the brown pathetic lookOf a dumb creature who had been beaten once,And never since was easy with the world.Ah, ah—now I remember perfectlyThose eyes, to-day,—how overlarge they seemed,As if some patient passionate despair(Like a coal dropt and forgot on tapestry,Which slowly burns a widening circle out)Had burnt them larger, larger. And those eyesTo-day, I do remember, saw me too,As I saw them, with conscious lids astrainIn recognition. Now, a fantasy,A simple shade or image of the brain,Is merely passive, does not retro-act,Is seen, but sees not.’Twas a real face,Perhaps a real Marian.Which being so,I ought to write to Romney, ‘Marian’s here.Be comforted for Marian.’My pen fell,My hands struck sharp together, as hands doWhich hold at nothing. Can I write tohimA half truth? can I keep my own soul blindTo the other half, ... the worse? What are our souls,If still, to run on straight a sober paceNor start at every pebble or dead leaf,They must wear blinkers, ignore facts, suppressSix tenths of the road? Confront the truth, my soul!And oh, as truly as that was Marian’s face,The arms of that same Marian clasped a thing... Not hid so well beneath the scanty shawl,I cannot name it now for what it was.

A child. Small business has a cast-awayLike Marian, with that crown of prosperous wives,At which the gentlest she grows arrogantAnd says, ‘my child.’ Who’ll find an emerald ringOn a beggar’s middle finger, and requireMore testimony to convict a thief?A child’s too costly for so mere a wretch;She filched it somewhere; and it means, with her,Instead of honour, blessing, ... merely shame.I cannot write to Romney, ‘Here she is,Here’s Marian found! I’ll set you on her track:I saw her here, in Paris, ... and her child.She put away your love two years ago,But, plainly, not to starve. You suffered then;And, now that you’ve forgot her utterlyAs any last year’s annual, in whose placeYou’ve planted a thick flowering evergreen,I choose, being kind, to write and tell you thisTo make you wholly easy—she’s not dead,But only ... damned.’Stop there: I go too fast;I’m cruel like the rest,—in haste to takeThe first stir in the arras for a rat,And set my barking, biting thoughts upon’t.—A child! what then? Suppose a neighbour’s sickAnd asked her, ‘Marian, carry out my childIn this Spring air,’—I punish her for that?Or say, the child should hold her round the neckFor good child-reasons, that he liked it soAnd would not leave her—she had winning ways—I brand her therefore, that she took the child?Not so.I will not write to Romney Leigh.For now he’s happy,—and she may indeedBe guilty,—and the knowledge of her faultWould draggle his smooth time. But I, whose daysAre not so fine they cannot bear the rain,And who, moreover, having seen her face,Must see it again, ...willsee it, by my hopesOf one day seeing heaven too. The policeShall track her, hound her, ferret their own soil;We’ll dig this Paris to its catacombsBut certainly we’ll find her, have her out,And save her, if she will or will not—childOr no child,—if a child, then one to save!

The long weeks passed on without consequence.As easy find a footstep on the sandThe morning after spring-tide, as the traceOf Marian’s feet between the incessant surfsOf this live flood. She may have moved this way,—But so the star-fish does, and crosses outThe dent of her small shoe. The foiled policeRenounced me; ‘Could they find a girl and child,No other signalment but girl and child?No data shown, but noticeable eyesAnd hair in masses, low upon the brow,As if it were an iron crown and pressed?Friends heighten, and suppose they specify:Why, girls with hair and eyes, are everywhereIn Paris; they had turned me up in vainNo Marian Erle indeed, but certainlyMathildes, Justines, Victoires, ... or, if I soughtThe English, Betsies, Saras, by the score.They might as well go out into the fieldsTo find a speckled bean, that’s somehow specked,And somewhere in the pod.’—They left me so.ShallIleave Marian? have I dreamed a dream?—I thank God I have found her! I must say‘Thank God,’ for finding her, although ’tis trueI find the world more sad and wicked for’t.But she—I’ll write about her, presently;My hand’s a-tremble as I had just caught upMy heart to write with, in the place of it.At least you’d take these letters to be writAt sea, in storm!—wait now....A simple chanceDid all. I could not sleep last night, and, tiredOf turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,Went out at early morning, when the airIs delicate with some last starry touch,To wander through the Market-place of Flowers(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sureAt worst, that there were roses in the world.So, wandering, musing, with the artist’s eye,That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowdOf young vivacious and black-braided headsDipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,Among the nosegays, cheapening this and thatIn such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,—My heart leapt in me, startled by a voiceThat slowly, faintly, with long breaths that markedThe interval between the wish and word,Inquired in stranger’s French, ‘Wouldthatbe much,That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?’—‘So much?Too much for me, then!’ turning the face roundSo close upon me, that I felt the sighIt turned with.‘Marian, Marian!’—face to face—‘Marian! I find you. Shall I let you go?’I held her two slight wrists with both my hands;‘Ah Marian, Marian, can I let you go?’—She fluttered from me like a cyclamen,As white, which, taken in a sudden wind,Beats on against the palisade.—‘Let pass,’She said at last. ‘I will not,’ I replied;‘I lost my sister Marian many days,And sought her ever in my walks and prayers,And, now I find her ... do we throw awayThe bread we worked and prayed for,—crumble itAnd drop it, ... to do even so by theeWhom still I’ve hungered after more than bread,My sister Marian?—can I hurt thee, dear?Then why distrust me? Never tremble so.Come with me rather, where we’ll talk and live,And none shall vex us. I’ve a home for youAnd me and no one else’....She shook her head.‘A home for you and me and no one elseIll-suits one of us: I prefer to such,A roof of grass on which a flower might spring,Less costly to me than the cheapest here;And yet I could not, at this hour, affordA like home, even. That you offer yours,I thank you. You are good as heaven itself—As good as one I knew before.... Farewell.’I loosed her hands.—‘Inhisname, no farewell!’(She stood as if I held her.) ‘For his sake,For his sake, Romney’s! by the good he meant,Ay, always! by the love he pressed for once,—And by the grief, reproach, abandonment,He took in change’....‘He, Romney! who grievedhim?Who had the heart for’t? what reproach touchedhim?Be merciful,—speak quickly.’‘Therefore come,’I answered with authority,—‘I thinkWe dare to speak such things, and name such names,In the open squares of Paris!’Not a wordShe said, but, in a gentle humbled way,(As one who had forgot herself in grief)Turned round and followed closely where I went,As if I led her by a narrow plank,Across devouring waters, step by step,—And so in silence we walked on a mile.

And then she stopped: her face was white as wax.‘We go much farther?’‘You are ill,’ I asked,‘Or tired?’She looked the whiter for her smile.‘There’s one at home,’ she said, ‘has need of meBy this time,—and I must not let him wait.’

‘Not even,’ I asked, ‘to hear of Romney Leigh?’‘Not even,’ she said, ‘to hear of Mister Leigh.’

‘In that case,’ I resumed, ‘I go with you,And we can talk the same thing there as here.None waits for me: I have my day to spend.’

Her lips moved in a spasm without a sound,—But then she spoke. ‘It shall be as you please;And better so—’tis shorter seen than told.And though you will not find me worth your pains,Thateven, may be worth some pains to know,For one as good as you are.’Then she ledThe way, and I, as by a narrow plankAcross devouring waters, followed her,Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath,And holding her with eyes that would not slip;And so, without a word, we walked a mile,And so, another mile, without a word.

Until the peopled streets being all dismissed,House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock,The market-gardens thickened, and the longWhite walls beyond, like spiders’ outside threads,Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fieldsThrough half-built habitations and half-dugFoundations,—intervals of trenchant chalk,That bite betwixt the grassy uneven turfsWhere goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths)Stood perched on edges of the cellarageWhich should be, staring as about to leapTo find their coming Bacchus. All the placeSeemed less a cultivation than a waste:Men work here, only,—scarce begin to live:All’s sad, the country struggling with the town,Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man’s fist,That beats its wings and tries to get away,And cannot choose be satisfied so soonTo hop through court-yards with its right foot tied,The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight!

We stopped beside a house too high and slimTo stand there by itself, but waiting tillFive others, two on this side, three on that,Should grow up from the sullen second floorThey pause at now, to build it to a row.The upper windows partly were unglazedMeantime,—a meagre, unripe house: a lineOf rigid poplars elbowed it behind,And, just in front, beyond the lime and bricksThat wronged the grass between it and the road,A great acacia, with its slender trunkAnd overpoise of multitudinous leaves,(In which a hundred fields might spill their dewAnd intense verdure, yet find room enough)Stood, reconciling all the place with green.

I followed up the stair upon her step.She hurried upward, shot across a face,A woman’s on the landing,—‘How now, now!Is no one to have holidays but you?You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think,And Julie waiting for your betters here?Why if he had waked, he might have waked, for me.’—Just murmuring an excusing word she passedAnd shut the rest out with the chamber-door,Myself shut in beside her.’Twas a roomScarce larger than a grave, and near as bare;Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room:A mouse could find no sort of shelter in’t,Much less a greater secret; curtainless,—The window fixed you with its torturing eye,Defying you to take a step apart,If peradventure you would hide a thing.I saw the whole room, I and Marian thereAlone.Alone? She threw her bonnet off,Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time,Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruiseMore calmly and more carefully than so,—Nor would you find within, a rosier flushedPomegranate—There he lay, upon his back,The yearling creature, warm and moist with lifeTo the bottom of his dimples,—to the endsOf the lovely tumbled curls about his face;For since he had been covered over-muchTo keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeksWere hot and scarlet as the first live roseThe shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into,The faster for his love. And love was hereAs instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;The little naked feet drawn up the wayOf nestled birdlings; everything so softAnd tender,—to the little holdfast hands,Which, closing on a finger into sleep,Had kept the mould of’t.While we stood there dumb,—For oh, that it should take such innocenceTo prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,And, staring out at us with all their blue,As half perplexed between the angelhoodHe had been away to visit in his sleep,And our most mortal presence,—graduallyHe saw his mother’s face, accepting itIn change for heaven itself, with such a smileAs might have well been learnt there,—never moved,But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,So happy (half with her and half with heaven)He could not have the trouble to be stirred,But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:As red and still indeed as any rose,That blows in all the silence of its leaves,Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.

She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)In that extremity of love, ’twill passFor agony or rapture, seeing that loveIncludes the whole of nature, rounding itTo love ... no more,—since more can never beThan just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,And drowning in the transport of the sight,Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,And drawing from his countenance to hersA fainter red, as if she watched a flameAnd stood in it a-glow. ‘How beautiful,’Said she.I answered, trying to be cold.(Must sin have compensations, was my thought,As if it were a holy thing like grief?And is a woman to be fooled asideFrom putting vice down, with that woman’s toy,A baby?)—— ‘Ay! the child is well enough,’I answered. ‘If his mother’s palms are clean,They need be glad, of course, in clasping such:But if not,—I would rather lay my hand,Were I she,—on God’s brazen altar-barsRed-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,Than touch the sacred curls of such a child.’

She plunged her fingers in his clustering locks,As one who would not be afraid of fire;And then, with indrawn steady utterance, said,—‘My lamb, my lamb! although, through such as thou,The most unclean got courage and approachTo God, once,—now they cannot, even with men,Find grace enough for pity and gentle words.’

‘My Marian,’ I made answer, grave and sad,‘The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,Was still a thief. And if a woman steals(Through God’s own barrier-hedges of true love,Which fence out licence in securing love)A child like this, that smiles so in her face,She is no mother, but a kidnapper,And he’s a dismal orphan ... not a son;Whom all her kisses cannot feed so fullHe will not miss hereafter a pure homeTo live in, a pure heart to lean against,A pure good mother’s name and memoryTo hope by, when the world grows thick and bad,And he feels out for virtue.’‘Oh,’ she smiledWith bitter patience, ‘the child takes his chance,—Not much worse off in being fatherlessThan I was, fathered. He will say, belike,His mother was the saddest creature born;He’ll say his mother lived so contraryTo joy, that even the kindest, seeing her,Grew sometimes almost cruel: he’ll not sayShe flew contrarious in the face of GodWith bat-wings of her vices. Stole my child,—My flower of earth, my only flower on earth,My sweet, ray beauty!’ ... Up she snatched the child,And, breaking on him in a storm of tears,Drew out her long sobs from their shivering roots,Until he took it for a game, and stretchedHis feet, and flapped his eager arms like wings,And crowed and gurgled through his infant laugh:‘Mine, mine,’ she said; ‘I have as sure a rightAs any glad proud mother in the world,Who sets her darling down to cut his teethUpon her church-ring. If she talks of law,I talk of law! I claim my mother-duesBy law,—the law which now is paramount;The common law, by which the poor and weakAre trodden underfoot by vicious men,And loathed for ever after by the good.Let pass! I did not filch ... I found the child.’

‘You found him, Marian?’‘Ay, I found him whereI found my curse,—in the gutter, with my shame!What have you, any of you, to say to that,Who all are happy, and sit safe and high,And never spoke before to arraign my rightTo grief itself? What, what, ... being beaten downBy hoofs of maddened oxen into a ditch,Half-dead, whole mangled ... when a girl, at last,Breathes, sees ... and finds there, bedded in her flesh,Because of the overcoming shock perhaps,Some coin of price!... and when a good man comes(That’s God! the best men are not quite as good)And says, ‘I dropped the coin there: take it, you,And keep it,—it shall pay you for the loss,’—You all put up your finger—‘See the thief!Observe that precious thing she has come to filch!How bad those girls are!’ Oh, my flower, my pet,I dare forget I have you in my arms,And fly off to be angry with the world,And fright you, hurt you with my tempers, tillYou double up your lip? Ah, that indeedIs bad: a naughty mother!’‘You mistake,’I interrupted; ‘if I loved you not,I should not, Marian, certainly be here.’

‘Alas,’ she said, ‘you are so very good;And yet I wish, indeed, you had never comeTo make me sob until I vex the child.It is not wholesome for these pleasure-platsTo be so early watered by our brine.And then, who knows? he may not like me nowAs well, perhaps, as ere he saw me fret,—One’s ugly fretting! he has eyes the sameAs angels, but he cannot see as deep,And so I’ve kept for ever in his sightA sort of smile to please him,—as you placeA green thing from the garden in a cup,To make believe it grows there. Look, my sweet,My cowslip-ball! we’ve done with that cross face,And here’s the face come back you used to like.Ah, ah! he laughs! he likes me. Ah, Miss Leigh,You’re great and pure; but were you purer still,—As if you had walked, we’ll say, no otherwhereThan up and down the new Jerusalem,And held your trailing lutestring up yourselfFrom brushing the twelve stones, for fear of someSmall speck as little as a needle-prick,White stitched on white,—the child would keep tome,Would choose his poor lost Marian, like me best,And, though you stretched your arms, cry back and cling,As we do, when God says it’s time to dieAnd bids us go up higher. Leave us, then;We two are happy. Doeshepush me off?He’s satisfied with me, as I with him.’

‘So soft to one, so hard to others! Nay,’I cried, more angry that she melted me,‘We make henceforth a cushion of our faultsTo sit and practise easy virtues on?I thought a child was given to sanctifyA woman,—set her in the sight of allThe clear-eyed Heavens, a chosen ministerTo do their business and lead spirits upThe difficult blue heights. A woman lives,Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and goodThrough being a mother?... then she’s none! althoughShe damps her baby’s cheeks by kissing them,As we kill roses.’‘Kill! O Christ,’ she said,And turned her wild sad face from side to sideWith most despairing wonder in it—‘What,What have you in your souls against me then,All of you? am I wicked, do you think?God knows me, trusts me with the child! but you,You think me really wicked?’‘Complaisant,’I answered softly, ‘to a wrong you’ve done,Because of certain profits,—which is wrongBeyond the first wrong, Marian. When you leftThe pure place and the noble heart, to takeThe hand of a seducer’....‘Whom? whose hand?I took the hand of’....Springing up erect,And lifting up the child at full arm’s length,As if to bear him like an oriflammeUnconquerable to armies of reproach,—‘Byhim’ she said, ‘my child’s head and its curls,By those blue eyes no woman born could dareA perjury on, I make my mother’s oath,That if I left that Heart, to lighten it,The blood of mine was still, except for grief!No cleaner maid than I was, took a stepTo a sadder end,—no matron-mother nowLooks backward to her early maidenhoodThrough chaster pulses. I speak steadily:And if I lie so, ... if, being fouled in willAnd paltered with in soul by devil’s lust,I dared to bid this angel take my part, ...Would God sit quiet, let us think, in heaven,Nor strike me dumb with thunder? Yet I speak:He clears me therefore. What, ‘seduced’’s your word?Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,Seduce it into carrion? So with me.I was not ever, as you say, seduced,But simply, murdered.’There she paused, and sighed,With such a sigh as drops from agonyTo exhaustion,—sighing while she let the babeSlide down upon her bosom from her arms,And all her face’s light fell after him,Like a torch quenched in falling. Down she sank,And sate upon the bedside with the child.

But I, convicted, broken utterly,With woman’s passion clung about her waist,And kissed her hair and eyes,—‘I have been wrong,Sweet Marian’ ... (weeping in a tender rage)‘Sweet holy Marian! And now, Marian, now,I’ll use your oath although my lips are hard,And by the child, my Marian, by the child,I’ll swear his mother shall be innocentBefore my conscience, as in the open BookOf Him who reads for judgement. Innocent,My sister! let the night be ne’er so dark,The moon is surely somewhere in the sky;So surely is your whiteness to be foundThrough all dark facts. But pardon, pardon me,And smile a little, Marian,—for the child,If not for me, my sister.’The poor lipJust motioned for the smile and let it go:And then, with scarce a stirring of the mouth,As if a statue spoke that could not breathe,But spoke on calm between its marble lips,—‘I’m glad, I’m very glad you clear me so.I should be sorry that you set me downWith harlots, or with even a better nameWhich misbecomes his mother. For the rest,I am not on a level with your love,Nor ever was, you know,—but now am worse,Because that world of yours has dealt with meAs when the hard sea bites and chews a stoneAnd changes the first form of it. I’ve markedA shore of pebbles bitten to one shapeFrom all the various life of madrepores;And so, that little stone, called Marian Erle,Picked up and dropped by you and another friend,Was ground and tortured by the incessant seaAnd bruised from what she was,—changed! death’s a change,And she, I said, was murdered; Marian’s dead.What can you do with people when they are dead,But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go,Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,But go by all means,—and permit the grassTo keep its green feud up ’twixt them and you?Then leave me,—let me rest. I’m dead, I say.And if, to save the child from death as well,The mother in me has survived the rest,Why, that’s God’s miracle you must not tax,—I’m not less dead for that: I’m nothing moreBut just a mother. Only for the child,I’m warm, and cold, and hungry, and afraid,And smell the flowers a little, and see the sun,And speak still, and am silent,—just for him!I pray you therefore to mistake me not,And treat me, haply, as I were alive;For though you ran a pin into my soul,I think it would not hurt nor trouble me.Here’s proof, dear lady,—in the market-placeBut now, you promised me to say a wordAbout ... a friend, who once, long years ago,Took God’s place toward me, when He draws and lovesAnd does not thunder, ... whom at last I left,As all of us leave God. You thought perhaps,I seemed to care for hearing of that friend?Now, judge me! we have sate here half-an-hourAnd talked together of the child and me,And I not asked as much as, ‘What’s the thingYou had to tell me of the friend ... the friend?’He’s sad, I think you said,—he’s sick perhaps?It’s nought to Marian if he’s sad or sick.Another would have crawled beside your footAnd prayed your words out. Why, a beast, a dog,A starved cat, if he had fed it once with milk,Would show less hardness. But I’m dead, you see,And that explains it.’Poor, poor thing, she spokeAnd shook her head, as white and calm as frostOn days too cold for raining any more,But still with such a face, so much alive,I could not choose but take it on my armAnd stroke the placid patience of its cheeks,—Then told my story out, of Romney Leigh,How, having lost her, sought her, missed her still,He, broken-hearted for himself and her,Had drawn the curtains of the world awhileAs if he had done with morning. There I stopped,For when she gasped, and pressed me with her eyes,‘And now ... how is it with him? tell me now,’—I felt the shame of compensated grief,And chose my words with scruple—slowly steppedUpon the slippery stones set here and thereAcross the sliding water. ‘Certainly,As evening empties morning into night,Another morning takes the evening upWith healthful, providential interchange;And, though he thought still of her,’—‘Yes, she knew,She understood: she had supposed, indeed,That, as one stops a hole upon a flute,At which a new note comes and shapes the tune,Excluding her would bring a worthier in,And, long ere this, that Lady WaldemarHe loved so’ ...‘Loved,’ I started,—‘loved her so!Now tell me’ ...‘I will tell you,’ she replied:‘But since we’re taking oaths, you’ll promise firstThat he, in England, he, shall never learnIn what a dreadful trap his creature here,Round whose unworthy neck he had meant to tieThe honourable ribbon of his name,Fell unaware, and came to butchery:Because,—I know him,—as he takes to heartThe grief of every stranger, he’s not likeTo banish mine as far as I should chooseIn wishing him most happy. Now he leavesTo think of me, perverse, who went my way,Unkind, and left him,—but if once he knew ...Ah, then, the sharp nail of my cruel wrongWould fasten me for ever in his sight,Like some poor curious bird, through each spread wingNailed high up over a fierce hunter’s fire,To spoil the dinner of all tenderer folkCome in by chance. Nay, since your Marian’s dead,You shall not hang her up, but dig a holeAnd bury her in silence! ring no bells.’

I answered gaily, though my whole voice wept;‘We’ll ring the joy-bells, not the funeral-bells,Because we have her back, dead or alive.’

She never answered that, but shook her head;Then low and calm, as one who, safe in heaven,Shall tell a story of his lower life,Unmoved by shame or anger,—so she spoke.She told me she had loved upon her knees,As others pray, more perfectly absorbedIn the act and aspiration. She felt his,For just his uses, not her own at all,His stool, to sit on, or put up his foot,His cup, to fill with wine or vinegar,Whichever drink might please him at the chance,For that should please her always: let him writeHis name upon her ... it seemed natural;It was most precious, standing on his shelf,To wait until he chose to lift his hand.Well, well,—I saw her then, and must have seenHow bright her life went, floating on her love,Like wicks the housewives send afloat on oil,Which feeds them to a flame that lasts the night.

To do good seemed so much his business,That, having done it, she was fain to think,Must fill up his capacity for joy.At first she never mooted with herselfIfhewas happy, since he made her so,Or ifheloved her, being so much beloved:Who thinks of asking if the sun is light,Observing that it lightens? who’s so bold,To question God of His felicity?Still less. And thus she took for granted first,What first of all she should have put to proof,And sinned against him so, but only so.‘What could you hope,’ she said, ‘of such as she?You take a kid you like, and turn it outIn some fair garden; though the creature’s fondAnd gentle, it will leap upon the bedsAnd break your tulips, bite your tender trees:The wonder would be if such innocenceSpoiled less. A garden is no place for kids.’

And, by degrees, when he who had chosen her,Brought in his courteous and benignant friendsTo spend their goodness on her, which she tookSo very gladly, as a part of his,—By slow degrees, it broke on her slow sense,That she, too, in that Eden of delightWas out of place, and, like the silly kid,Still did most mischief where she meant most love.A thought enough to make a woman mad,(No beast in this, but she may well go mad)That, saying ‘I am thine to love and use,’May blow the plague in her protesting breathTo the very man for whom she claims to die,—That, clinging round his neck, she pulls him downAnd drowns him,—and that, lavishing her soul,She hales perdition on him. ‘So, being mad,’Said Marian ...‘Ah—who stirred such thoughts, you ask?Whose fault it was, that she should have such thoughts?None’s fault, none’s fault. The light comes, and we see:But if it were not truly for our eyes,There would be nothing seen, for all the light;And so with Marian. If she saw at last,The sense was in her,—Lady WaldemarHad spoken all in vain else.’‘O my heart,O prophet in my heart,’ I cried aloud,‘Then Lady Waldemar spoke!’‘Didshe speak,’Mused Marian softly—‘or did she only sign?Or did she put a word into her faceAnd look, and so impress you with the word?Or leave it in the foldings of her gown,Like rosemary smells, a movement will shake outWhen no one’s conscious? who shall say, or guess?One thing alone was certain,—from the dayThe gracious lady paid a visit first,She, Marian, saw things different,—felt distrustOf all that sheltering roof of circumstanceHer hopes were building into with clay nests:Her heart was restless, pacing up and downAnd fluttering, like dumb creatures before storms,Not knowing wherefore she was ill at ease.’

‘And still the lady came,’ said Marian Erle,‘Much oftener thanheknew it, Mister Leigh.She bade me never tell him that she had come,She liked to love me better than he knew,So very kind was Lady Waldemar:And every time she brought with her more light,And every light made sorrow clearer ... Well,Ah, well! we cannot give her blame for that;’Twould be the same thing if an angel came,Whose right should prove our wrong. And every timeThe lady came, she looked more beautiful,And spoke more like a flute among green trees,Until at last, as one, whose heart being sadOn hearing lovely music, suddenlyDissolves in weeping, I brake out in tearsBefore her ... asked her counsel ... ‘had I erredIn being too happy? would she set me straight?For she, being wise and good and born aboveThe flats I had never climbed from, could perceiveIf such as I, might grow upon the hills;And whether such poor herb sufficed to grow,For Romney Leigh to break his fast upon ’t,—Or would he pine on such, or haply starve?’She wrapt me in her generous arms at once,And let me dream a moment how it feelsTo have a real mother, like some girls:But when I looked, her face was younger ... ay,Youth’s too bright not to be a little hard,And beauty keeps itself still uppermost,That’s true!—Though Lady Waldemar was kind,She hurt me, hurt, as if the morning-sunShould smite us on the eyelids when we sleep,And wake us up with headache. Ay, and soonWas light enough to make my heart ache too:She told me truths I asked for ... ’twas my fault ...‘That Romney could not love me, if he would,As men call loving; there are bloods that flowTogether, like some rivers, and not mix,Through contraries of nature. He indeedWas set to wed me, to espouse my class,Act out a rash opinion,—and, once wed,So just a man and gentle, could not chooseBut make my life as smooth as marriage-ring,Bespeak me mildly, keep me a cheerful house,With servants, broaches, all the flowers I liked,And pretty dresses, silk the whole year round’ ...At which I stopped her,—‘This for me. And now‘Forhim.’—She murmured,—truth grew difficult;She owned, ‘’Twas plain a man like Romney LeighRequired a wife more level to himself.If day by day he had to bend his heightTo pick up sympathies, opinions, thoughts,And interchange the common talk of lifeWhich helps a man to live as well as talk,His days were heavily taxed. Who buys a staffTo fit the hand, that reaches but the knee?He’d feel it bitter to be forced to missThe perfect joy of married suited pairs,Who, bursting through the separating hedgeOf personal dues with that sweet eglantineOf equal love, keep saying, ‘Sowethink,It strikesus,—that’sourfancy.’‘—When I askedIf earnest will, devoted love, employedIn youth like mine, would fail to raise me up,—As two strong arms will always raise a childTo a fruit hung overhead? she sighed and sighed ...‘That could not be,’ she feared. ‘You take a pink,You dig about its roots and water it,And so improve it to a garden-pink,But will not change it to a heliotrope,The kind remains. And then, the harder truth—This Romney Leigh, so rash to leap a pale,So bold for conscience, quick for martyrdom,Would suffer steadily and never flinch,But suffer surely and keenly, when his classTurned shoulder on him for a shameful match,And set him up as nine-pin in their talk,To bowl him down with jestings.’—There, she paused;And when I used the pause in doubting thatWe wronged him after all in what we feared—‘Suppose such things should never touch him, moreIn his high conscience, (if the things should be,)Than, when the queen sits in an upper room,The horses in the street can spatter her!’—A moment, hope came,—but the lady closedThat door and nicked the lock, and shut it out,Observing wisely that, ‘the tender heartWhich made him over-soft to a lower class,Could scarcely fail to make him sensitive‘To a higher,—how they thought, and what they felt.’

‘Alas, alas,’ said Marian, rocking slowThe pretty baby who was near asleep,The eyelids creeping over the blue balls,—‘She made it clear, too clear—I saw the whole!And yet who knows if I had seen my wayStraight out of it, by looking, though ’twas clear,Unless the generous lady, ’ware of this,Had set her own house all a-fire for me,To light me forwards? Leaning on my faceHer heavy agate eyes which crushed my will,She told me tenderly, (as when men comeTo a bedside to tell people they must die)‘She knew of knowledge,—ay, of knowledge, knew,That Romney Leigh had lovedherformerly;Andshelovedhim, she might say, now the chanceWas past ... but that, of course, he never guessed,—For something came between them ... something thinAs a cobweb ... catching every fly of doubtTo hold it buzzing at the window-paneAnd help to dim the daylight. Ah, man’s prideOr woman’s—which is greatest? most averseTo brushing cobwebs? Well, but she and heRemained fast friends; it seemed not more than so,Because he had bound his hands and could not stir:An honourable man, if somewhat rash;And she, not even for Romney, would she spillA blot ... as little even as a tear ...Upon his marriage-contract,—not to gainA better joy for two than came by that!For, though I stood between her heart and heaven,She loved me wholly.’Did I laugh or curse?I think I sate there silent, hearing all,Ay, hearing double,—Marian’s tale, at once,And Romney’s marriage-vow, ‘I’ll keep tothee,’Which means that woman-serpent. Is it timeFor church now?‘Lady Waldemar spoke more,’Continued Marian, ‘but, as when a soulWill pass out through the sweetness of a songBeyond it, voyaging the uphill road,—Even so, mine wandered from the things I heard,To those I suffered. It was afterwardI shaped the resolution to the act.For many hours we talked. What need to talk?The fate was clear and close; it touched my eyes;But still the generous lady tried to keepThe case afloat, and would not let it go,And argued, struggled upon Marian’s side,Which was not Romney’s! though she little knewWhat ugly monster would take up the end,—What griping death within the drowning deathWas ready to complete my sum of death.’

I thought,—Perhaps he’s sliding now the ringUpon that woman’s finger....She went on:‘The lady, failing to prevail her way,Upgathered my torn wishes from the ground,And pieced them with her strong benevolence;And, as I thought I could breathe freer airAway from England, going without pause,Without farewell,—just breaking with a jerkThe blossomed offshoot from my thorny life,—She promised kindly to provide the means,With instant passage to the coloniesAnd full protection,—‘would commit me straight‘To one who once had been her waiting-maidAnd had the customs of the world, intentOn changing England for AustraliaHerself, to carry out her fortune so.’For which I thanked the Lady Waldemar,As men upon their death-beds thank last friendsWho lay the pillow straight: it is not much,And yet ’tis all of which they are capable,This lying smoothly in a bed to die.And so, ’twas fixed;—and so, from day to day,The woman named, came in to visit me.’

Just then, the girl stopped speaking,—sate erect,And stared at me as if I had been a ghost,(Perhaps I looked as white as any ghost)With large-eyed horror. ‘Does God make,’ she said,‘All sorts of creatures, really, do you think?Or is it that the Devil slavers themSo excellently, that we come to doubtWho’s strongest, He who makes, or he who mars?I never liked the woman’s face, or voice,Or ways: it made me blush to look at her;It made me tremble if she touched my hand;And when she spoke a fondling word, I shrank,As if one hated me, who had power to hurt;And, every time she came, my veins ran cold,As somebody were walking on my grave.At last I spoke to Lady Waldemar:‘Could such an one be good to trust?’ I asked.Whereat the lady stroked my cheek and laughedHer silver-laugh—(one must be born to laugh,To put such music in it) ‘Foolish girl,‘Your scattered wits are gathering wool beyondThe sheep-walk reaches!—leave the thing to me.’And therefore, half in trust, and half in scornThat I had heart still for another fearIn such a safe despair, I left the thing.

‘The rest is short. I was obedient:I wrote my letter which deliveredhimFrom Marian, to his own prosperities,And followed that bad guide. The lady?—hush,—I never blame the lady. Ladies whoSit high, however willing to look down,Will scarce see lower than their dainty feet:And Lady Waldemar saw less than I,With what a Devil’s daughter I went forthThe swine’s road, headlong over a precipice,In such a curl of hell-foam caught and choked,No shriek of soul in anguish could pierce throughTo fetch some help. They say there’s help in heavenFor all such cries. But if one cries from hell ...What then?—the heavens are deaf upon that side.

‘A woman ... hear me,—let me make it plain,—A woman ... not a monster ... both her breastsMade right to suckle babes ... she took me off,A woman also, young and ignorant,And heavy with my grief, my two poor eyesNear washed away with weeping, till the trees,The blessed unaccustomed trees and fields,Ran either side the train, like stranger dogsUnworthy of any notice,—took me off,So dull, so blind, and only half alive,Not seeing by what road, nor by what ship,Nor toward what place, nor to what end of all.—Men carry a corpse thus,—past the doorway, pastThe garden-gate, the children’s playground, upThe green lane,—then they leave it in the pit,To sleep and find corruption, cheek to cheekWith him who stinks since Friday.‘But suppose;To go down with one’s soul into the grave,—To go down half dead, half alive, I say,And wake up with corruption, ... cheek to cheekWith him who stinks since Friday! There it is,And that’s the horror of ’t, Miss Leigh.‘You feel?You understand?—no, do not look at me,But understand. The blank, blind, weary wayWhich led ... where’er it led ... away, at least;The shifted ship ... to Sydney or to France ...Still bound, wherever else, to another land;The swooning sickness on the dismal sea,The foreign shore, the shameful house, the night,The feeble blood, the heavy-headed grief, ...No need to bring their damnable drugged cup,And yet they brought it! Hell’s so prodigalOf devil’s gifts ... hunts liberally in packs,Will kill no poor small creature of the wildsBut fifty red wide throats must smoke at it,—AsHISat me ... when waking up at last ...I told you that I waked up in the grave.

‘Enough so!—it is plain enough so. True,We wretches cannot tell out all our wrong,Without offence to decent happy folk.I know that we must scrupulously hintWith half-words, delicate reserves, the thingWhich no one scrupled we should feel in full.Let pass the rest, then; only leave my oathUpon this sleeping child,—man’s violence,Not man’s seduction, made me what I am,As lost as ... I toldhimI should be lost;When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves?That’s fatal!—And you call it being lost,That down came next day’s noon and caught me thereHalf gibbering and half raving on the floor,And wondering what had happened up in heaven,That suns should dare to shine when God himselfWas certainly abolished.‘I was mad,—How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.I think they let me go, when I was mad,They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys mightA mad dog which they had tortured. Up and downI went by road and village, over tractsOf open foreign country, large and strange,Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-linesLike fingers of some ghastly skeleton HandThrough sunlight and through moonlight evermorePushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,And resolute to get me, slow and sure;While every roadside Christ upon his crossHung reddening through his gory wounds at me,And shook his nails in anger, and came downTo follow a mile after, wading upThe low vines and green wheat, crying ‘Take the girl!‘She’s none of mine from henceforth,’ Then, I knew,(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest)The charitable peasants gave me breadAnd leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied,At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;A woman has been strangled with less weight:I threw it in a ditch to keep it cleanAnd ease my breath a little, when none looked;I did not need such safeguards:—brutal menStopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seenMy face,—I must have had an awful look.And so I lived: the weeks passed on,—I lived.’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again,But, this time, in a dream, and hunted roundBy some prodigious Dream-fear at my backWhich ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,And there I sate, one evening, by the road,I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,Facing a sunset low upon the flats,As if it were the finish of all time,—The great red stone upon my sepulchre,Which angels were too weak to roll away.

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