THIRD BOOK.

THIRD BOOK.

‘To-daythou girdest up thy loins thyself,And goest where thou wouldest: presentlyOthers shall gird thee,’ said the Lord, ‘to goWhere thou would’st not.’ He spoke to Peter thus,To signify the death which he should dieWhen crucified head downwards.If He spokeTo Peter then, He speaks to us the same;The word suits many different martyrdoms,And signifies a multiform of death,Although we scarcely die apostles, we,And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth.For ’tis not in mere death that men die most;And, after our first girding of the loinsIn youth’s fine linen and fair broidery,To run up hill and meet the rising sun,We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,While others gird us with the violent bandsOf social figments, feints, and formalisms,Reversing our straight nature, lifting upOur base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross.God, set our feet low and our forehead high,And show us how a man was made to walk!Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed.The room does very well; I have to writeBeyond the stroke of midnight. Get away;Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them downAt once, as I must have them, to be sure,Whether I bid you never bring me suchAt such an hour, or bid you. No excuse.You choose to bring them, as I choose perhapsTo throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed,And dream, if possible, I am not cross.Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,—A mere, mere woman,—a mere flaccid nerve,—A kerchief left out all night in the rain,Turned soft so,—overtasked and overstrainedAnd overlived in this close London life!And yet I should be stronger.Never burnYour letters, poor Aurora! for they stareWith red seals from the table, saying each,‘Here’s something that you know not.’ Out alas,’Tis scarcely that the world’s more good and wiseOr even straighter and more consequentSince yesterday at this time—yet, again,If but one angel spoke from Ararat,I should be very sorry not to hear:So open all the letters! let me read.Blanche Ord, the writer in the ‘Lady’s Fan,’Requests my judgment on ... that, afterwards.Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,And signs, ‘Elisha to you.’ Pringle SharpePresents his work on ‘Social Conduct,’ ... cravesA little money for his pressing debts ...From me, who scarce have money for my needs,—Art’s fiery chariot which we journey inBeing apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!Here’s Rudgely knows it,—editor and scribe—He’s ‘forced to marry where his heart is not,Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.’Ah,—— lost it because no one picked it up!That’s really loss! (and passable impudence.)My critic Hammond flatters prettily,And wants another volume like the last.My critic Belfair wants another bookEntirely different, which will sell, (and live?)A striking book, yet not a startling book,The public blames originalities,(You must not pump spring-water unawaresUpon a gracious public, full of nerves—)Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,As easy reading as the dog-eared pageThat’s fingered by said public, fifty years,Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,And yet a revelation in some sort:That’s hard, my critic Belfair! So—what next?My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;‘Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,’ says he,‘And do not prate so of humanities:’Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,Because a cheerful genius suits the times,And all true poets laugh unquenchablyLike Shakspeare and the gods. That’s very hard.The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiledWith such a needy heart on two pale lips,We cry, ‘Weep rather, Dante.’ Poems areMen, if true poems: and who dares exclaimAt any man’s door, ’Here, ’tis probableThe thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,And scared a sickly husband—what of that?Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,Because a cheerful genius suits the times—’?None says so to the man,—and why indeedShould any to the poem? A ninth seal;The apocalypse is drawing to a close.Ha,—this from Vincent Carrington,—‘Dear friend,I want good counsel. Will you lend me wingsTo raise me to the subject, in a sketchI’ll bring to-morrow—may I? at eleven?A poet’s only born to turn to use;So save you! for the world ... and Carrington.’‘(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh,Beyond what’s said of him in newspapers,His phalansteries there, his speeches here,His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?He droppedmelong ago; but no one dropsA golden apple—though indeed, one day,You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least,You know Lord Howe, who sees him ... whom he sees,Andyousee, and I hate to see,—for HoweStands high upon the brink of theories,Observes the swimmers, and cries ‘Very fine,’But keeps dry linen equally,—unlikeThat gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is,Such sudden madness seizing a young man,To make earth over again,—while I’m contentTo make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch.A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot;Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing JoveHalfway, and burn him faster down; the faceAnd breasts upturned and straining, the loose locksAll glowing with the anticipated gold.Or here’s another on the self-same theme.She lies here—flat upon her prison-floor,The long hair swathed about her to the heel,Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her throughThe glittering haze of that prodigious rain,Half blotted out of nature by a loveAs heavy as fate. I’ll bring you either sketch.I think, myself, the second indicatesMore passion.’Surely. Self is put away,And calm with abdication. She is Jove,And no more Danae—greater thus. PerhapsThe painter symbolises unawaresTwo states of the recipient artist-soul;One, forward, personal, wanting reverence,Because aspiring only. We’ll be calm,And know that, when indeed our Joves come down,We all turn stiller than we have ever been.Kind Vincent Carrington. I’ll let him come.He talks of Florence,—and may say a wordOf something as it chanced seven years ago,—A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird,In those green country walks, in that good time,When certainly I was so miserable ...I seem to have missed a blessing ever since.The music soars within the little lark,And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.We do not make our places with our strains,—Content, while they rise, to remain behind,Alone on earth instead of so in heaven.No matter—I bear on my broken tale.When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,I took a chamber up three flights of stairsNot far from being as steep as some larks climb,And, in a certain house in Kensington,Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to workIn this world,—’tis the best you get at all;For God, in cursing, gives us better giftsThan men in benediction. God says, ‘SweatFor foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned,—Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steelWhich snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work;Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.So, happy and unafraid of solitude,I worked the short days out,—and watched the sunOn lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,Like some Druidic idol’s fiery brass,With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,In which the blood of wretches pent insideSeemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,—Push out through fog with his dilated disk,And startle the slant roofs and chimney-potsWith splashes of fierce colour. Or I sawFog only, the great tawny weltering fog,Involve the passive city, strangle itAlive, and draw it off into the void,Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a spungeHad wiped out London,—or as noon and nightHad clapped together and utterly struck outThe intermediate time, undoing themselvesIn the act. Your city poets see such things,Not despicable. Mountains of the south,When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,Descending Sinai: on Parnassus mount,You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,Except in fable and figure: forests chantTheir anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.But sit in London, at the day’s decline,And view the city perish in the mistLike Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,—The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprisedBy a sudden sense of vision and of tune,You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,And you and Israel’s other singing girls,Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.I worked with patience which means almost power.I did some excellent things indifferently,Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,The latter loudest. And by such a timeThat I myself had set them down as sinsScarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week,Arrived some letter through the sedulous post,Like these I’ve read, and yet dissimilar,With pretty maiden seals,—initials twinedOf lilies, or a heart markedEmily,(Convicting Emily of being all heart);Or rarer tokens from young bachelors,Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,Suppose, they had just been plucked of) and a snatchFrom Horace, ‘Collegisse juvat,’ setUpon the first page. Many a letter signedOr unsigned, showing the writers at eighteenHad lived too long, though every muse should helpThe daylight, holding candles,—compliments,To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with meNo more than coins from Moscow circulateAt Paris. Would ten roubles buy a tagOf ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou?I smiled that all this youth should love me,—sighedThat such a love could scarcely raise them upTo love what was more worthy than myself;Then sighed again, again, less generously,To think the very love they lavished so,Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not,And he ... my cousin Romney ... did not write.I felt the silent finger of his scornPrick every bubble of my frivolous fameAs my breath blew it, and resolve it backTo the air it came from. Oh, I justifiedThe measure he had taken of my height:The thing was plain—he was not wrong a line;I played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword,Amused the lads and maidens.Came a sighDeep, hoarse with resolution,—I would workTo better ends, or play in earnest. ‘Heavens,I think I should be almost popularIf this went on!’—I ripped my verses up,And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart,Which never yet had beat, that it should die;Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,Like those hot fire-seeds of creation heldIn Jove’s clenched palm before the worlds were sown,—But I—I was not Juno even! my handWas shut in weak convulsion, woman’s ill,And when I yearned to loose a finger—lo,The nerve revolted. ’Tis the same even now:This hand may never, haply, open large,Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred,To prove the power not else than by the pain.It burns, it burnt—my whole life burnt with it,And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashedMy steps out through the slow and difficult road.I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs,The season’s books in drear significanceOf morals, dropping round me. Lively books?The ash has livelier verdure than the yew;And yet the yew’s green longer, and aloneFound worthy of the holy Christmas time.We’ll plant more yews if possible, albeitWe plant the graveyards with them.Day and nightI worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed upBoth watch and slumber with long lines of lifeWhich did not suit their season. The rose fellFrom either cheek, my eyes globed luminousThrough orbits of blue shadow, and my pulseWould shudder along the purple-veined wristLike a shot bird. Youth’s stern, set face to faceWith youth’s ideal: and when people cameAnd said, ‘You work too much, you are looking ill,’I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,And thought I should be better soon perhapsFor those ill looks. Observe—‘I,’ means in youthJustI... the conscious and eternal soulWith all its ends,—and not the outside life,The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,The so much liver, lung, integument,Which make the sum of ‘I’ hereafter, whenWorld-talkers talk of doing well or ill.Iprosper, if I gain a step, althoughA nail then pierced my foot: although my brainEmbracing any truth, froze paralysed,Iprosper. I but change my instrument;I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,And catch the mattock up.I worked on, on.Through all the bristling fence of nights and daysWhich hedges time in from the eternities,I struggled, ... never stopped to note the stakesWhich hurt me in my course. The midnight oilWould stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:I had to live, that therefore I might work,And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,To work with one hand for the booksellers,While working with the other for myselfAnd art. You swim with feet as well as hands,Or make small way. I apprehended this,—In England, no one lives by verse that lives;And, apprehending, I resolved by proseTo make a space to sphere my living verse.I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,And weekly papers, holding up my nameTo keep it from the mud. I learnt the useOf the editorial ‘we’ in a review,As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,And swept it grandly through the open doorsAs if one could not pass through doors at allSave so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,Carved many an article on cherry-stonesTo suit light readers,—something in the linesRevealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,But that, I’ll never vouch for. What you doFor bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,—Much less in Nephelococcygia,As mine was, peradventure.Having breadFor just so many days, just breathing roomFor body and verse, I stood up straight and workedMy veritable work. And as the soulWhich grows within a child, makes the child grow,—Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikesThe summer foliage out in a green flame—So life, in deepening with me, deepened allThe course I took, the work I did. Indeed,The academic law convinced of sin;The critics cried out on the falling off,Regretting the first manner. But I feltMy heart’s life throbbing in my verse to showIt lived, it also—certes incomplete,Disordered with all Adam in the blood,But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,Still organised by, and implying life.A lady called upon me on such a day.She had the low voice of your English dames,Unused, it seems, to need rise half a noteTo catch attention,—and their quiet mood,As if they lived too high above the earthFor that to put them out in anything:So gentle, because verily so proud;So wary and afeared of hurting you,By no means that you are not really vile,But that they would not touch you with their footTo push you to your place; so self-possessedYet gracious and conciliating, it takesAn effort in their presence to speak truth:You know the sort of woman,—brilliant stuff,And out of nature. ‘Lady Waldemar,’She said her name quite simply, as if it meantNot much indeed, but something,—took my hands,And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.‘Is this,’ she said, ‘the Muse?’‘No sybil even,’I answered, ‘since she fails to guess the causeWhich taxed you with this visit, madam.’‘Good,’She said, ‘I like to be sincere at once;Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,The visit might have taxed me. As it is,You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,It comforts me entirely for your fame,As well as for the trouble of my ascentTo this Olympus.’There, a silver laughRan rippling through her quickened little breathsThe steep stair somewhat justified.‘But stillYour ladyship has left me curious whyYou dared the risk of finding the said Muse?’‘Ah,—keep me, notwithstanding, to the point,Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyesAs awful as in stockings, after all,I wonder, that you’d have my business outBefore I breathe—exact the epic plungeIn spite of gasps? Well, naturally you thinkI’ve come here, as the lion-hunters goTo deserts, to secure you, with a trap,For exhibition in my drawing-roomsOn zoologic soirées? Not in the least.Roar softly at me; I am frivolous,I dare say; I have played at lions, too,Like other women of my class,—but nowI meet my lion simply as AndroclesMet his ... when at his mercy.’So, she bentHer head, as queens may mock,—then lifting upHer eyelids with a real grave queenly look,Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself,—‘I think you have a cousin:—Romney Leigh.’‘You bring a word fromhim?’—my eyes leapt upTo the very height of hers,—‘a word fromhim?’‘I bring a word about him, actually.But first,’—she pressed me with her urgent eyes—‘You do not love him,—you?’‘You’re frank at leastIn putting questions, madam,’ I replied.‘I love my cousin cousinly—no more.’‘I guessed as much. I’m ready to be frankIn answering also, if you’ll question me,Or even with something less. You stand outside,You artist women, of the common sex;You share not with us, and exceed us soPerhaps by what you’re mulcted in, your heartsBeing starved to make your heads: so run the oldTraditions of you. I can therefore speak,Without the natural shame which creatures feelWhen speaking on their level, to their like.There’s many a papist she, would rather dieThan own to her maid she put a ribbon onTo catch the indifferent eye of such a man,—Who yet would count adulteries on her beadsAt holy Mary’s shrine, and never blush;Because the saints are so far off, we loseAll modesty before them. Thus, today.’TisI, love Romney Leigh.’‘Forbear,’ I cried.‘If here’s no Muse, still less is any saint;Nor even a friend, that Lady WaldemarShould make confessions’....‘That’s unkindly said.If no friend, what forbids to make a friendTo join to our confession ere we have done?I love your cousin. If it seems unwiseTo say so, it’s still foolisher (we’re frank)To feel so. My first husband left me young,And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,To keep my booth in May-fair with the restTo happy issues. There are marquisesWould serve seven years to call me wife, I know:And, after seven, I might consider it,For there’s some comfort in a marquisateWhen all’s said,—yes, but after the seven years;I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip,So like a Leigh! so like him!—Pardon me,I am well aware I do not derogateIn loving Romney Leigh. The name is good,The means are excellent; but the man, the man—Heaven help us both,—I am near as mad as he,In loving such an one.’She slowly swungHer heavy ringlets till they touched her smile,As reasonably sorry for herself;And thus continued,—‘Of a truth, Miss Leigh,I have not, without struggle, come to this.I took a master in the German tongue,I gamed a little, went to Paris twice;But, after all, this love!... you eat of love,And do as vile a thing as if you ateOf garlic—which, whatever else you eat,Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peachReminds you of your onion. Am I coarse?Well, love’s coarse, nature’s coarse—ah, there’s the rub!We fair fine ladies, who park out our livesFrom common sheep-paths, cannot help the crowsFrom flying over,—we’re as natural stillAs Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectlyIn Lyons’ velvet,—we are not, for that,Lay-figures, look you! we have hearts within,Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,As ready for distracted ends and actsAs any distressed sempstress of them allThat Romney groans and toils for. We catch loveAnd other fevers, in the vulgar way.Love will not be outwitted by our wit,Nor outrun by our equipages:—minePersisted, spite of efforts. All my cardsTurned up but Romney Leigh; my German stoppedAt germane Wertherism; my Paris roundsReturned me from the Champs Elysées justA ghost, and sighing like Dido’s. I came homeUncured,—convicted rather to myselfOf being in love ... in love! That’s coarse you’ll say.I’m talking garlic.’Coldly I replied.‘Apologise for atheism, not love!For me, I do believe in love, and God.I know my cousin: Lady WaldemarI know not: yet I say as much as this—Whoever loves him, let her not excuseBut cleanse herself, that, loving such a man,She may not do it with such unworthy loveHe cannot stoop and take it.’‘That is saidAusterely, like a youthful prophetess,Who knits her brows across her pretty eyesTo keep them back from following the grey flightOf doves between the temple-columns. Dear,Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.I’m a mere woman,—the more weak perhapsThrough being so proud; you’re better; as for him,He’s best. Indeed he builds his goodness upSo high, it topples down to the other side,And makes a sort of badness; there’s the worstI have to say against your cousin’s best!And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,For his sake, if not mine.’‘I own myselfIncredulous of confidence like thisAvailing him or you.’‘I, worthy of him?In your sense I am not so—let it pass.And yet I save him if I marry him;Let that pass too.’‘Pass, pass! we play policeUpon my cousin’s life, to indicateWhat may or may not pass?’ I cried. ‘He knowsWhat’s worthy of him; the choice remains withhim;And what he chooses, act or wife, I thinkI shall not call unworthy, I, for one.’‘’Tis somewhat rashly said,’ she answered slow.‘Now let’s talk reason, though we talk of love.Your cousin Romney Leigh’s a monster! there,The word’s out fairly; let me prove the fact.We’ll take, say, that most perfect of antiques,They call the Genius of the Vatican,Which seems too beauteous to endure itselfIn this mixed world, and fasten it for onceUpon the torso of the Drunken Fawn,(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,)Instead of Buonarroti’s mask: what then?We show the sort of monster Romney is,With god-like virtues and heroic aimsSubjoined to limping possibilitiesOf mismade human nature. Grant the manTwice god-like, twice heroic,—still he limps,And here’s the point we come to.’‘Pardon me,But, Lady Waldemar, the point’s the thingWe never come to.’‘Caustic, insolentAt need! I like you’—(there, she took my hands)‘And now my lioness, help Androcles,For all your roaring. Help me! for myselfI would not say so—but for him. He limpsSo certainly, he’ll fall into the pitA week hence,—so I lose him—so he is lost!And when he’s fairly married, he a Leigh,To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth,Starved out in London, till her coarse-grained handsAre whiter than her morals,—you, for one,May call his choice most worthy.’‘Married! lost!He, ... Romney!’‘Ah, you’re moved at last,’ she said.‘These monsters, set out in the open sun,Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who thinkAwry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he?And who but you can wonder? He has been mad,The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man,He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen’s wits,With equal scorn of triangles and wine,And took no honours, yet was honourable.They’ll tell you he lost count of Homer’s shipsIn Melbourne’s poor-bills, Ashley’s factory bills,—Ignored the Aspasia we all dare to praise,For other women, dear, we could not nameBecause we’re decent. Well, he had some rightOn his side probably; men always have,Who go absurdly wrong. The living boorWho brews your ale, exceeds in vital worthDead Cæsar who ‘stops bungholes’ in the cask;And also, to do good is excellent,For persons of his income, even to boors:I sympathise with all such things. But heWent mad upon them ... madder and more mad,From college times to these,—as, going down hill,The faster still, the farther! you must knowYour Leigh by heart: he has sown his black young curlsWith bleaching cares of half a million menAlready. If you do not starve, or sin,You’re nothing to him. Pay the income-tax,And break your heart upon’t ... he’ll scarce be touched;But come upon the parish, qualifiedFor the parish stocks, and Romney will be thereTo call you brother, sister, or perhapsA tenderer name still. Had I any chanceWith Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar,And never committed felony?’‘You speakToo bitterly,’ I said, ‘for the literal truth.’‘The truth is bitter. Here’s a man who looksFor ever on the ground! you must be lowOr else a pictured ceiling overhead,Good painting thrown away. For me, I’ve doneWhat women may, (we’re somewhat limited,We modest women) but I’ve done my best.—How men are perjured when they swear our eyesHave meaning in them! they’re just blue or brown,—They just can drop their lids a little. In fact,Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through,Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc,With various others of his socialists;And if I had been a fathom less in love,Had cured myself with gaping. As it was,I quoted from them prettily enough,Perhaps, to make them sound half rationalTo a saner man than he, whene’er we talked,(For which I dodged occasion)—learnt by heartHis speeches in the Commons and elsewhereUpon the social question; heaped reportsOf wicked women and penitentiaries,On all my tables, with a place for Sue;And gave my name to swell subscription-listsToward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven,And other possible ends. All things I did,Except the impossible ... such as wearing gownsProvided by the Ten Hours’ movement! there,I stopped—we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile,Unmoved as the Indian tortoise ’neath the world,Let all that noise go on upon his back:He would not disconcert or throw me out;’Twas well to see a woman of my classWith such a dawn of conscience. For the heart,Made firewood for his sake, and flaming upTo his very face ... he warmed his feet at it;But deigned to let my carriage stop him shortIn park or street,—he leaning on the door,With news of the committee which sate lastOn pickpockets at suck.’‘You jest—you jest.’‘As martyrs jest, dear, (if you’ve read their lives)Upon the axe which kills them. When all’s doneBy me, ... for him—you’ll ask him presentlyThe colour of my hair—he cannot tell,Or answers ‘dark’ at random,—while, be sure,He’s absolute on the figure, five or ten,Of my last subscription. Is it bearable,And I a woman?’‘Is it reparable,ThoughIwere a man?’‘I know not. That’s to prove.But, first, this shameful marriage.’‘Ay?’ I cried,‘Then really there’s a marriage?’‘YesterdayI held him fast upon it. ‘Mister Leigh,’Said I, ‘shut up a thing, it makes more noise.The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I’ve knownYours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so:You feel I’m not the woman of the worldThe world thinks; you have borne with me before,And used me in your noble work, our work,And now you shall not cast me off becauseYou’re at the difficult point, thejoin. ’Tis trueEven I can scarce admit the cogencyOf such a marriage ... where you do not love,(Except the class) yet marry and throw your nameDown to the gutter, for a fire-escapeTo future generations! it’s sublime,A great example,—a true GenesisOf the opening social era. But take heed;This virtuous act must have a patent weight,Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell,Interpret it, and set in the light,And do not muffle it in a winter-cloakAs a vulgar bit of shame,—as if, at best,A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushedA Howard should know it.’ Then, I pressed him more—‘He would not choose,’ I said, ‘that even his kin, ...Aurora Leigh, even ... should conceive his actLess sacrifice, more appetite.’ At whichHe grew so pale, dear, ... to the lips, I knewI had touched him. ‘Do you know her,’ he enquired,‘My cousin Aurora?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and lied,(But truly we all know you by your books)And so I offered to come straight to you,Explain the subject, justify the cause,And take you with me to St. Margaret’s CourtTo see this miracle, this Marian Erle,This drover’s daughter (she’s not pretty, he swears)Upon whose finger, exquisitely prickedBy a hundred needles, we’re to hang the tie’Twixt class and class in England,—thus, indeed,By such a presence, yours and mine, to liftThe match up from the doubtful place. At onceHe thanked me, sighing ... murmured to himself,‘She’ll do it perhaps; she’s noble,’—thanked me twice,And promised, as my guerdon, to put offHis marriage for a month.’I answered then.‘I understand your drift imperfectly.You wish to lead me to my cousin’s betrothed,To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her handIf feeble, thus to justify his match.So be it then. But how this serves your ends,And how the strange confession of your loveServes this, I have to learn—I cannot see.’She knit her restless forehead. ‘Then, despite,Aurora, that most radiant morning name,You’re dull as any London afternoon.I wanted time,—and gained it,—wantedyou,And gain you! You will come and see the girl,In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearlAnd pride of all your lofty race of LeighsIs destined to solution. AuthorisedBy sight and knowledge, then, you’ll speak your mind,And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way,He’ll wrong the people and posterity(Say such a thing is bad for you and me,And you fail utterly,) by concluding thusAn execrable marriage. Break it up,Disroot it—peradventure, presently,We’ll plant a better fortune in its place.Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me lessFor saying the thing I should not. Well I knowI should not. I have kept, as others have,The iron rule of womanly reserveIn lip and life, till now: I wept a weekBefore I came here.’—Ending, she was pale;The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous.This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck,And, only by the foam upon the bit,You saw she champed against it.Then I rose.‘I love love! truth’s no cleaner thing than love.I comprehend a love so fiery hotIt burns its natural veil of august shame,And stands sublimely in the nude, as chasteAs Medicean Venus. But I know,A love that burns through veils, will burn through masks,And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!Nay—go to the opera! your love’s curable.’‘I love and lie?’ she said—‘I lie, forsooth?’And beat her taper foot upon the floor,And smiled against the shoe,—‘You’re hard, Miss Leigh,Unversed in current phrases.—Bowling-greensOf poets are fresher than the world’s highways;Forgive me that I rashly blew the dustWhich dims our hedges even, in your eyes,And vexed you so much. You find, probably,No evil in this marriage,—rather goodOf innocence, to pastoralise in song:You’ll give the bond your signature, perhaps,Beneath the lady’s mark,—indifferentThat Romney chose a wife, could write her name,In witnessing he loved her.’‘Loved!’ I cried;‘Who tells you that he wants a wife to love?He gets a horse to use, not love, I think:There’s work for wives as well,—and after, straw,When men are liberal. For myself, you errSupposing power in me to break this match.I could not do it, to save Romney’s life;And would not, to save mine.’‘You take it so,’She said; ‘farewell then. Write your books in peace,As far as may be for some secret stirNow obvious to me,—for, most obviously,In coming hither I mistook the way.’Whereat she touched my hand, and bent her head,And floated from me like a silent cloudThat leaves the sense of thunder.I drew breathAs hard as in a sick room. After allThis woman breaks her social system upFor love, so counted—the love possibleTo such,—and lilies are still lilies, pulledBy smutty hands, though spotted from their white;And thus she is better, haply, of her kind,Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams,And crosses out the spontaneitiesOf all his individual, personal life,With formal universals. As if manWere set upon a high stool at a desk,To keep God’s books for Him, in red and black,And feel by millions! What, if even GodWere chiefly God by living out HimselfTo an individualism of the Infinite,Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing upThe golden spray of multitudinous worldsIn measure to the proclive weight and rushOf His inner nature,—the spontaneous loveStill proof and outflow of spontaneous life?Then live, Aurora!Two hours afterward,Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone,Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,Whose wasted right hand gambled ’gainst his leftWith an old brass button, in a blot of sun,Jeered weakly at me as I passed acrossThe uneven pavement; while a woman, rougedUpon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,—‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dogYou’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!We cover up our face from doing good,As if it were our purse! What brings you here,My lady? is’t to find my gentlemanWho visits his tame pigeon in the eaves?Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,And turn your whiteness dead-blue.’ I looked up;I think I could have walked through hell that day,And never flinched. ‘The dear Christ comfort you,’I said, ‘you must have been most miserableTo be so cruel,’—and I emptied outMy purse upon the stones: when, as I had castThe last charm in the cauldron, the whole courtWent boiling, bubbling up, from all its doorsAnd windows, with a hideous wail of laughsAnd roar of oaths, and blows perhaps ... I passedToo quickly for distinguishing ... and pushedA little side-door hanging on a hinge,And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbedThe long, steep, narrow stair ’twixt broken railAnd mildewed wall that let the plaster dropTo startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up!So high lived Romney’s bride. I paused at lastBefore a low door in the roof, and knocked;There came an answer like a hurried dove—‘So soon? can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?’And as I entered, an ineffable faceMet mine upon the threshold. ‘Oh, not you,Not you!’ ... the dropping of the voice implied,‘Then, if not you, for me not any one.’I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands,And said, ‘I am his cousin,—Romney Leigh’s;And here I’m come to see my cousin too.’She touched me with her face and with her voice,This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers,From such rough roots? the people, under there,Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so ... faugh!Yet have such daughters?No wise beautifulWas Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown,But could look either, like a mist that changedAccording to being shone on more or less.The hair, too, ran its opulence of curlsIn doubt ’twixt dark and bright, nor left you clearTo name the colour. Too much hair perhaps(I’ll name a fault here) for so small a head,Which seemed to droop on that side and on this,As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight,Though not a breath should trouble it. Again,The dimple in the cheek had better goneWith redder, fuller rounds: and somewhat largeThe mouth was, though the milky little teethDissolved it to so infantine a smile!For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too,But ’twas as if remembering they had wept,And knowing they should, some day, weep again.We talked. She told me all her story out,Which I’ll re-tell with fuller utterance,As coloured and confirmed in aftertimesBy others, and herself too. Marian ErleWas born upon the ledge of Malvern HillTo eastward, in a hut, built up at nightTo evade the landlord’s eye, of mud and turf,Still liable, if once he looked that way,To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot,Like any other anthill. Born, I say;God sent her to his world, commissioned right,Her human testimonials fully signed,Not scant in soul—complete in lineaments;But others had to swindle her a placeTo wail in when she had come. No place for her,By man’s law! born an outlaw, was this babe.Her first cry in our strange and strangling air,When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,Was wrong against the social code,—forced wrong.What business had the baby to cry there?I tell her story and grow passionate.She, Marian, did not tell it so, but usedMeek words that made no wonder of herselfFor being so sad a creature. ‘Mister LeighConsidered truly that such things should change.Theywill, in heaven—but meantime, on the earth,There’s none can like a nettle as a pink,Except himself. We’re nettles, some of us,And give offence by the act of springing up;And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,The hoes, of course, are on us.’ So she said.Her father earned his life by random jobsDespised by steadier workmen—keeping swineOn commons, picking hops, or hurrying onThe harvest at wet seasons,—or, at need,Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a droveOf startled horses plunged into the mistBelow the mountain-road, and sowed the windWith wandering neighings. In between the gapsOf such irregular work, he drank and slept,And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,She could not buy more drink. At which she turned,(The worm) and beat her baby in revengeFor her own broken heart. There’s not a crimeBut takes its proper change out still in crime,If once rung on the counter of this world;Let sinners look to it.Yet the outcast child,For whom the very mother’s face forewentThe mother’s special patience, lived and grew;Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,With that pathetic vacillating rollOf the infant body on the uncertain feet,(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon)At which most women’s arms unclose at onceWith irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,This babe would steal off from the mother’s chair,And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,Would find some keyhole toward the secresyOf Heaven’s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out—Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,She had never heard of angels,—but to gazeShe knew not why, to see she knew not what,A-hungering outward from the barren earthFor something like a joy. She liked, she said,To dazzle black her sight against the sky,For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;She learnt God that way, and was beat for itWhenever she went home,—yet came again,As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,This skyey father and mother both in one,Instructed her and civilised her moreThan even the Sunday-school did afterward,To which a lady sent her to learn booksAnd sit upon a long bench in a rowWith other children. Well, she laughed sometimesTo see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts;But ofter she was sorrowful with noise,And wondered if their mothers beat them hard,That ever they should laugh so. There was oneShe loved indeed,—Rose Bell, a seven years’ child,So pretty and clever, who read syllablesWhen Marian was at letters;shewould laughAt nothing—hold your finger up, she laughed,Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouthTo hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster.And Rose’s pelting glee, as frank as rainOn cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,To see another merry whom she loved.She whispered once (the children side by side,With mutual arms entwined about their necks)‘Your mother lets you laugh so?’ ‘Ay,’ said Rose,‘She lets me. She was dug into the groundSix years since, I being but a yearling wean.Such mothers let us play and lose our time,And never scold nor beat us! don’t you wishYou had one like that?’ There, Marian breaking offLooked suddenly in my face. ‘Poor Rose,’ said she,‘I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.I’d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,—Poor Rose, poor Rose!’ said Marian.She resumed.It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-schoolWhat God was, what he wanted from us all,And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,To go straight home and hear her father pullThe Name down on us from the thunder-shelf,Then drink away his soul into the darkFrom seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,Were God and heaven reversed to her: the moreShe knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong;Her price paid down for knowledge, was to knowThe vileness of her kindred: through her heart,Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth,They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, ’tis hardTo learn you have a father up in heavenBy a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,Still worse than orphaned: ’tis too heavy a grief,The having to thank God for such a joy!And so passed Marian’s life from year to year.Her parents took her with them when they tramped,Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,And once went farther and saw Manchester,And once the sea, that blue end of the world,That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,—And twice a prison,—back at intervals,Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,And stronger sometimes, holding out their handsTo pull you from the vile flats up to them;And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back,As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,They certainly felt bettered unawaresEmerging from the social smut of townsTo wipe their feet clean on the mountain-turf.In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,Endured and learned. The people on the roadsWould stop and ask her how her eyes outgrewHer cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birdsIn all that hair; and then they lifted her,The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,The butcher’s boy on horseback. Often, too,The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the headWith absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,And asked if peradventure she could read;And when she answered ‘ay,’ would toss her downSome stray odd volume from his heavy pack,A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,Or half a play of Shakspeare’s, torn across:(She had to guess the bottom of a pageBy just the top sometimes,—as difficult,As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!)Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’sSmall gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones.’Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,And oft the jangling influence jarred the childLike looking at a sunset full of graceThrough a pothouse window while the drunken oathsWent on behind her; but she weeded outHer book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,(First tore them small, that none should find a word)And made a nosegay of the sweet and goodTo fold within her breast, and pore uponAt broken moments of the noontide glare,When leave was given her to untie her cloakAnd rest upon the dusty roadside bankFrom the highway’s dust. Or oft, the journey done,Some city friend would lead her by the handTo hear a lecture at an institute:And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,To no book-learning,—she was ignorantOf authors,—not in earshot of the thingsOut-spoken o’er the heads of common men,By men who are uncommon,—but withinThe cadenced hum of such, and capableOf catching from the fringes of the windSome fragmentary phrases, here and there,Of that fine music,—which, being carried inTo her soul, had reproduced itself afreshIn finer motions of the lips and lids.She said, in speaking of it, ‘If a flowerWere thrown you out of heaven at intervals,You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up,—And so with her.’ She counted me her years,TillIfelt old; and then she counted meHer sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.She told me she was almost glad and calmOn such and such a season; sate and sewed,With no one to break up her crystal thoughts;While rhymes from lovely poems span aroundTheir ringing circles of ecstatic tune,Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,And smile into the hedges and the clouds,And tremble if one shook her from her fitBy any blow, or word even. Out-door jobsWent ill with her; and household quiet work,She was not born to. Had they kept the north,They might have had their pennyworth out of her,Like other parents, in the factories;(Your children work for you, not you for them,Or else they better had been choked with airThe first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,Was nothing to be done with such a child,But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hoseNot ill, and was not dull at needlework;And all the country people gave her penceFor darning stockings past their natural age,And patching petticoats from old to new,And other light work done for thrifty wives.One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day—Her mother had been badly beat, and feltThe bruises sore about her wretched soul,(That must have been): she came in suddenly,And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hairUpon her, like a sudden waterfall,And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,Outside the hut they lived in. When the childCould clear her blinded face from all that streamOf tresses ... there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes,That seemed as they would swallow her alive,Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,Saying hard between her teeth—‘Why wench, why wench,The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good;He means to set you up, and comfort us.Be mannerly at least.’ The child turned round,And looked up piteous in the mother’s face,(Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not wantAnother devil to damn, than such a look) ...‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven,‘God, free me from my mother,’ she shrieked out,‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with forceAs passionate as fear, she tore her handsLike lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,Away from both—away, if possible,As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell,She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had castThe voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fearWas running in her feet and killing the ground;The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,The green fields melted, wayside trees fell backTo make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed,Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,—The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,So sucked her forward, forward, while her heartKept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so bigIt seemed to fill her body; then it burst,And overflowed the world and swamped the light,‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle—She had dropped, she had fainted.When the sense returned,The night had passed—not life’s night. She was ’wareOf heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,The driver shouting to the lazy teamThat swung their rankling bells against her brain;While, through the waggon’s coverture and chinks,The cruel yellow morning pecked at herAlive or dead, upon the straw inside,—At which her soul ached back into the darkAnd prayed, ‘no more of that.’ A waggonerHad found her in a ditch beneath the moon,As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.At first he thought her dead; but when he had wipedThe mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,And laid her in his waggon in the straw,And so conveyed her to the distant townTo which his business called himself, and leftThat heap of misery at the hospital.She stirred;—the place seemed new and strange as death.The white strait bed, with others strait and white,Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,And quiet people walking in and outWith wonderful low voices and soft steps,And apparitional equal care for each,Astonished her with order, silence, law:And when a gentle hand held out a cup,She took it, as you do at sacrament,Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed,To so much love as makes the form of loveAnd courtesy of manners. Delicate drinksAnd rare white bread, to which some dying eyesWere turned in observation. O my God,How sick we must be, ere we make men just!I think it frets the saints in heaven to seeHow many desolate creatures on the earthHave learnt the simple dues of fellowshipAnd social comfort, in a hospital,As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,And wished, at intervals of growing sense,She might be sicker yet, if sickness madeThe world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;For now she understood, (as such things were)How sickness ended very oft in heaven,Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,Would lose no moment of the blessed time.She lay and seethed in fever many weeks,But youth was strong and overcame the test;Revolted soul and flesh were reconciledAnd fetched back to the necessary dayAnd daylight duties. She could creep aboutThe long bare rooms, and stare out drearilyFrom any narrow window on the street,Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,Said coldly to her, as an enemy,‘She had leave to go next week, being well enough,’While only her heart ached. ‘Go next week,’ thought she,‘Next week! how would it be with her next week,Let out into that terrible street aloneAmong the pushing people, ... to go ... where?’One day, the last before the dreaded last,Among the convalescents, like herselfPrepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,And heard half absently the women talk,How one was famished for her baby’s cheeks—‘The little wretch would know her! a year old,And lively, like his father!’ one was keenTo get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;And one was tender for her dear goodmanWho had missed her sorely,—and one, querulous ...‘Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had daredTo talk about her as already dead,’—And one was proud ... ‘and if her sweetheart LukeHad left her for a ruddier face than hers,(The gossip would be seen through at a glance)Sweet riddance of such sweethearts—let him hang!’Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.’And while they talked, and Marian felt the worseFor having missed the worst of all their wrongs,A visitor was ushered through the wardsAnd paused among the talkers. ‘When he looked,It was as if he spoke, and when he spokeHe sang perhaps,’ said Marian; ‘could she tell?She only knew’ (so much she had chronicled,As seraphs might, the making of the sun)‘That he who came and spake, was Romney Leigh,And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.’And when it was her turn to have the faceUpon her,—all those buzzing pallid lipsBeing satisfied with comfort—when he changedTo Marian, saying ‘Andyou? you’re going, where?’—She, moveless as a worm beneath a stoneWhich some one’s stumbling foot has spurned aside,Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,And breaking into sobs cried, ‘Where I go?None asked me till this moment. Can I sayWhereIgo? when it has not seemed worth whileTo God himself, who thinks of every one,To think of me, and fix where I shall go?’‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lostYour father and your mother?’‘Both,’ she said,‘Both lost! my father was burnt up with ginOr ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.My mother sold me to a man last month,And so my mother’s lost, ’tis manifest.And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,As if I had caught sight of the fires of hellThrough some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)It seems I shall be lost too, presently,And so we end, all three of us.’‘Poor child!’He said,—with such a pity in his voice,It soothed her more than her own tears,—‘poor child!’Tis simple that betrayal by mother’s loveShould bring despair of God’s too. Yet be taught;He’s better to us than many mothers are,And children cannot wander beyond reachOf the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold!And if you weep still, weep where John was laidWhile Jesus loved him.’‘She could say the words,’She told me, ‘exactly as he uttered themA year back, ... since, in any doubt or dark,They came out like the stars, and shone on herWith just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;The ministers in church might say the same;Buthe, he made the church with what he spoke,—The difference was the miracle,’ said she.Then catching up her smile to ravishment,She added quickly, ‘I repeat his words,But not his tones: can any one repeatThe music of an organ, out of church?And when he said ‘poor child,’ I shut my eyesTo feel how tenderly his voice broke through,As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feetTo let out the rich medicative nard.’She told me how he had raised and rescued herWith reverent pity, as, in touching grief,He touched the wounds of Christ,—and made her feelMore self-respecting. Hope, he called, beliefIn God,—work, worship ... therefore let us pray!And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,And keep it stainless from her mother’s face,He sent her to a famous sempstress-houseFar off in London, there to work and hope.With that, they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,But not of Romney. He had good to doTo others: through the days and through the nights,She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,And wondered, while, along the tawny light,She struck the new thread into her needle’s eye,How people, without mothers on the hills,Could choose the town to live in!—then she drewThe stitch, and mused how Romney’s face would look,And if ’twere likely he’d remember hers,When they two had their meeting after death.

‘To-daythou girdest up thy loins thyself,And goest where thou wouldest: presentlyOthers shall gird thee,’ said the Lord, ‘to goWhere thou would’st not.’ He spoke to Peter thus,To signify the death which he should dieWhen crucified head downwards.If He spokeTo Peter then, He speaks to us the same;The word suits many different martyrdoms,And signifies a multiform of death,Although we scarcely die apostles, we,And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth.For ’tis not in mere death that men die most;And, after our first girding of the loinsIn youth’s fine linen and fair broidery,To run up hill and meet the rising sun,We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,While others gird us with the violent bandsOf social figments, feints, and formalisms,Reversing our straight nature, lifting upOur base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross.God, set our feet low and our forehead high,And show us how a man was made to walk!Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed.The room does very well; I have to writeBeyond the stroke of midnight. Get away;Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them downAt once, as I must have them, to be sure,Whether I bid you never bring me suchAt such an hour, or bid you. No excuse.You choose to bring them, as I choose perhapsTo throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed,And dream, if possible, I am not cross.Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,—A mere, mere woman,—a mere flaccid nerve,—A kerchief left out all night in the rain,Turned soft so,—overtasked and overstrainedAnd overlived in this close London life!And yet I should be stronger.Never burnYour letters, poor Aurora! for they stareWith red seals from the table, saying each,‘Here’s something that you know not.’ Out alas,’Tis scarcely that the world’s more good and wiseOr even straighter and more consequentSince yesterday at this time—yet, again,If but one angel spoke from Ararat,I should be very sorry not to hear:So open all the letters! let me read.Blanche Ord, the writer in the ‘Lady’s Fan,’Requests my judgment on ... that, afterwards.Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,And signs, ‘Elisha to you.’ Pringle SharpePresents his work on ‘Social Conduct,’ ... cravesA little money for his pressing debts ...From me, who scarce have money for my needs,—Art’s fiery chariot which we journey inBeing apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!Here’s Rudgely knows it,—editor and scribe—He’s ‘forced to marry where his heart is not,Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.’Ah,—— lost it because no one picked it up!That’s really loss! (and passable impudence.)My critic Hammond flatters prettily,And wants another volume like the last.My critic Belfair wants another bookEntirely different, which will sell, (and live?)A striking book, yet not a startling book,The public blames originalities,(You must not pump spring-water unawaresUpon a gracious public, full of nerves—)Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,As easy reading as the dog-eared pageThat’s fingered by said public, fifty years,Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,And yet a revelation in some sort:That’s hard, my critic Belfair! So—what next?My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;‘Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,’ says he,‘And do not prate so of humanities:’Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,Because a cheerful genius suits the times,And all true poets laugh unquenchablyLike Shakspeare and the gods. That’s very hard.The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiledWith such a needy heart on two pale lips,We cry, ‘Weep rather, Dante.’ Poems areMen, if true poems: and who dares exclaimAt any man’s door, ’Here, ’tis probableThe thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,And scared a sickly husband—what of that?Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,Because a cheerful genius suits the times—’?None says so to the man,—and why indeedShould any to the poem? A ninth seal;The apocalypse is drawing to a close.Ha,—this from Vincent Carrington,—‘Dear friend,I want good counsel. Will you lend me wingsTo raise me to the subject, in a sketchI’ll bring to-morrow—may I? at eleven?A poet’s only born to turn to use;So save you! for the world ... and Carrington.’‘(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh,Beyond what’s said of him in newspapers,His phalansteries there, his speeches here,His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?He droppedmelong ago; but no one dropsA golden apple—though indeed, one day,You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least,You know Lord Howe, who sees him ... whom he sees,Andyousee, and I hate to see,—for HoweStands high upon the brink of theories,Observes the swimmers, and cries ‘Very fine,’But keeps dry linen equally,—unlikeThat gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is,Such sudden madness seizing a young man,To make earth over again,—while I’m contentTo make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch.A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot;Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing JoveHalfway, and burn him faster down; the faceAnd breasts upturned and straining, the loose locksAll glowing with the anticipated gold.Or here’s another on the self-same theme.She lies here—flat upon her prison-floor,The long hair swathed about her to the heel,Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her throughThe glittering haze of that prodigious rain,Half blotted out of nature by a loveAs heavy as fate. I’ll bring you either sketch.I think, myself, the second indicatesMore passion.’Surely. Self is put away,And calm with abdication. She is Jove,And no more Danae—greater thus. PerhapsThe painter symbolises unawaresTwo states of the recipient artist-soul;One, forward, personal, wanting reverence,Because aspiring only. We’ll be calm,And know that, when indeed our Joves come down,We all turn stiller than we have ever been.Kind Vincent Carrington. I’ll let him come.He talks of Florence,—and may say a wordOf something as it chanced seven years ago,—A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird,In those green country walks, in that good time,When certainly I was so miserable ...I seem to have missed a blessing ever since.The music soars within the little lark,And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.We do not make our places with our strains,—Content, while they rise, to remain behind,Alone on earth instead of so in heaven.No matter—I bear on my broken tale.When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,I took a chamber up three flights of stairsNot far from being as steep as some larks climb,And, in a certain house in Kensington,Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to workIn this world,—’tis the best you get at all;For God, in cursing, gives us better giftsThan men in benediction. God says, ‘SweatFor foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned,—Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steelWhich snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work;Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.So, happy and unafraid of solitude,I worked the short days out,—and watched the sunOn lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,Like some Druidic idol’s fiery brass,With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,In which the blood of wretches pent insideSeemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,—Push out through fog with his dilated disk,And startle the slant roofs and chimney-potsWith splashes of fierce colour. Or I sawFog only, the great tawny weltering fog,Involve the passive city, strangle itAlive, and draw it off into the void,Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a spungeHad wiped out London,—or as noon and nightHad clapped together and utterly struck outThe intermediate time, undoing themselvesIn the act. Your city poets see such things,Not despicable. Mountains of the south,When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,Descending Sinai: on Parnassus mount,You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,Except in fable and figure: forests chantTheir anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.But sit in London, at the day’s decline,And view the city perish in the mistLike Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,—The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprisedBy a sudden sense of vision and of tune,You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,And you and Israel’s other singing girls,Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.I worked with patience which means almost power.I did some excellent things indifferently,Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,The latter loudest. And by such a timeThat I myself had set them down as sinsScarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week,Arrived some letter through the sedulous post,Like these I’ve read, and yet dissimilar,With pretty maiden seals,—initials twinedOf lilies, or a heart markedEmily,(Convicting Emily of being all heart);Or rarer tokens from young bachelors,Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,Suppose, they had just been plucked of) and a snatchFrom Horace, ‘Collegisse juvat,’ setUpon the first page. Many a letter signedOr unsigned, showing the writers at eighteenHad lived too long, though every muse should helpThe daylight, holding candles,—compliments,To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with meNo more than coins from Moscow circulateAt Paris. Would ten roubles buy a tagOf ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou?I smiled that all this youth should love me,—sighedThat such a love could scarcely raise them upTo love what was more worthy than myself;Then sighed again, again, less generously,To think the very love they lavished so,Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not,And he ... my cousin Romney ... did not write.I felt the silent finger of his scornPrick every bubble of my frivolous fameAs my breath blew it, and resolve it backTo the air it came from. Oh, I justifiedThe measure he had taken of my height:The thing was plain—he was not wrong a line;I played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword,Amused the lads and maidens.Came a sighDeep, hoarse with resolution,—I would workTo better ends, or play in earnest. ‘Heavens,I think I should be almost popularIf this went on!’—I ripped my verses up,And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart,Which never yet had beat, that it should die;Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,Like those hot fire-seeds of creation heldIn Jove’s clenched palm before the worlds were sown,—But I—I was not Juno even! my handWas shut in weak convulsion, woman’s ill,And when I yearned to loose a finger—lo,The nerve revolted. ’Tis the same even now:This hand may never, haply, open large,Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred,To prove the power not else than by the pain.It burns, it burnt—my whole life burnt with it,And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashedMy steps out through the slow and difficult road.I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs,The season’s books in drear significanceOf morals, dropping round me. Lively books?The ash has livelier verdure than the yew;And yet the yew’s green longer, and aloneFound worthy of the holy Christmas time.We’ll plant more yews if possible, albeitWe plant the graveyards with them.Day and nightI worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed upBoth watch and slumber with long lines of lifeWhich did not suit their season. The rose fellFrom either cheek, my eyes globed luminousThrough orbits of blue shadow, and my pulseWould shudder along the purple-veined wristLike a shot bird. Youth’s stern, set face to faceWith youth’s ideal: and when people cameAnd said, ‘You work too much, you are looking ill,’I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,And thought I should be better soon perhapsFor those ill looks. Observe—‘I,’ means in youthJustI... the conscious and eternal soulWith all its ends,—and not the outside life,The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,The so much liver, lung, integument,Which make the sum of ‘I’ hereafter, whenWorld-talkers talk of doing well or ill.Iprosper, if I gain a step, althoughA nail then pierced my foot: although my brainEmbracing any truth, froze paralysed,Iprosper. I but change my instrument;I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,And catch the mattock up.I worked on, on.Through all the bristling fence of nights and daysWhich hedges time in from the eternities,I struggled, ... never stopped to note the stakesWhich hurt me in my course. The midnight oilWould stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:I had to live, that therefore I might work,And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,To work with one hand for the booksellers,While working with the other for myselfAnd art. You swim with feet as well as hands,Or make small way. I apprehended this,—In England, no one lives by verse that lives;And, apprehending, I resolved by proseTo make a space to sphere my living verse.I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,And weekly papers, holding up my nameTo keep it from the mud. I learnt the useOf the editorial ‘we’ in a review,As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,And swept it grandly through the open doorsAs if one could not pass through doors at allSave so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,Carved many an article on cherry-stonesTo suit light readers,—something in the linesRevealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,But that, I’ll never vouch for. What you doFor bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,—Much less in Nephelococcygia,As mine was, peradventure.Having breadFor just so many days, just breathing roomFor body and verse, I stood up straight and workedMy veritable work. And as the soulWhich grows within a child, makes the child grow,—Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikesThe summer foliage out in a green flame—So life, in deepening with me, deepened allThe course I took, the work I did. Indeed,The academic law convinced of sin;The critics cried out on the falling off,Regretting the first manner. But I feltMy heart’s life throbbing in my verse to showIt lived, it also—certes incomplete,Disordered with all Adam in the blood,But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,Still organised by, and implying life.A lady called upon me on such a day.She had the low voice of your English dames,Unused, it seems, to need rise half a noteTo catch attention,—and their quiet mood,As if they lived too high above the earthFor that to put them out in anything:So gentle, because verily so proud;So wary and afeared of hurting you,By no means that you are not really vile,But that they would not touch you with their footTo push you to your place; so self-possessedYet gracious and conciliating, it takesAn effort in their presence to speak truth:You know the sort of woman,—brilliant stuff,And out of nature. ‘Lady Waldemar,’She said her name quite simply, as if it meantNot much indeed, but something,—took my hands,And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.‘Is this,’ she said, ‘the Muse?’‘No sybil even,’I answered, ‘since she fails to guess the causeWhich taxed you with this visit, madam.’‘Good,’She said, ‘I like to be sincere at once;Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,The visit might have taxed me. As it is,You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,It comforts me entirely for your fame,As well as for the trouble of my ascentTo this Olympus.’There, a silver laughRan rippling through her quickened little breathsThe steep stair somewhat justified.‘But stillYour ladyship has left me curious whyYou dared the risk of finding the said Muse?’‘Ah,—keep me, notwithstanding, to the point,Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyesAs awful as in stockings, after all,I wonder, that you’d have my business outBefore I breathe—exact the epic plungeIn spite of gasps? Well, naturally you thinkI’ve come here, as the lion-hunters goTo deserts, to secure you, with a trap,For exhibition in my drawing-roomsOn zoologic soirées? Not in the least.Roar softly at me; I am frivolous,I dare say; I have played at lions, too,Like other women of my class,—but nowI meet my lion simply as AndroclesMet his ... when at his mercy.’So, she bentHer head, as queens may mock,—then lifting upHer eyelids with a real grave queenly look,Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself,—‘I think you have a cousin:—Romney Leigh.’‘You bring a word fromhim?’—my eyes leapt upTo the very height of hers,—‘a word fromhim?’‘I bring a word about him, actually.But first,’—she pressed me with her urgent eyes—‘You do not love him,—you?’‘You’re frank at leastIn putting questions, madam,’ I replied.‘I love my cousin cousinly—no more.’‘I guessed as much. I’m ready to be frankIn answering also, if you’ll question me,Or even with something less. You stand outside,You artist women, of the common sex;You share not with us, and exceed us soPerhaps by what you’re mulcted in, your heartsBeing starved to make your heads: so run the oldTraditions of you. I can therefore speak,Without the natural shame which creatures feelWhen speaking on their level, to their like.There’s many a papist she, would rather dieThan own to her maid she put a ribbon onTo catch the indifferent eye of such a man,—Who yet would count adulteries on her beadsAt holy Mary’s shrine, and never blush;Because the saints are so far off, we loseAll modesty before them. Thus, today.’TisI, love Romney Leigh.’‘Forbear,’ I cried.‘If here’s no Muse, still less is any saint;Nor even a friend, that Lady WaldemarShould make confessions’....‘That’s unkindly said.If no friend, what forbids to make a friendTo join to our confession ere we have done?I love your cousin. If it seems unwiseTo say so, it’s still foolisher (we’re frank)To feel so. My first husband left me young,And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,To keep my booth in May-fair with the restTo happy issues. There are marquisesWould serve seven years to call me wife, I know:And, after seven, I might consider it,For there’s some comfort in a marquisateWhen all’s said,—yes, but after the seven years;I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip,So like a Leigh! so like him!—Pardon me,I am well aware I do not derogateIn loving Romney Leigh. The name is good,The means are excellent; but the man, the man—Heaven help us both,—I am near as mad as he,In loving such an one.’She slowly swungHer heavy ringlets till they touched her smile,As reasonably sorry for herself;And thus continued,—‘Of a truth, Miss Leigh,I have not, without struggle, come to this.I took a master in the German tongue,I gamed a little, went to Paris twice;But, after all, this love!... you eat of love,And do as vile a thing as if you ateOf garlic—which, whatever else you eat,Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peachReminds you of your onion. Am I coarse?Well, love’s coarse, nature’s coarse—ah, there’s the rub!We fair fine ladies, who park out our livesFrom common sheep-paths, cannot help the crowsFrom flying over,—we’re as natural stillAs Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectlyIn Lyons’ velvet,—we are not, for that,Lay-figures, look you! we have hearts within,Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,As ready for distracted ends and actsAs any distressed sempstress of them allThat Romney groans and toils for. We catch loveAnd other fevers, in the vulgar way.Love will not be outwitted by our wit,Nor outrun by our equipages:—minePersisted, spite of efforts. All my cardsTurned up but Romney Leigh; my German stoppedAt germane Wertherism; my Paris roundsReturned me from the Champs Elysées justA ghost, and sighing like Dido’s. I came homeUncured,—convicted rather to myselfOf being in love ... in love! That’s coarse you’ll say.I’m talking garlic.’Coldly I replied.‘Apologise for atheism, not love!For me, I do believe in love, and God.I know my cousin: Lady WaldemarI know not: yet I say as much as this—Whoever loves him, let her not excuseBut cleanse herself, that, loving such a man,She may not do it with such unworthy loveHe cannot stoop and take it.’‘That is saidAusterely, like a youthful prophetess,Who knits her brows across her pretty eyesTo keep them back from following the grey flightOf doves between the temple-columns. Dear,Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.I’m a mere woman,—the more weak perhapsThrough being so proud; you’re better; as for him,He’s best. Indeed he builds his goodness upSo high, it topples down to the other side,And makes a sort of badness; there’s the worstI have to say against your cousin’s best!And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,For his sake, if not mine.’‘I own myselfIncredulous of confidence like thisAvailing him or you.’‘I, worthy of him?In your sense I am not so—let it pass.And yet I save him if I marry him;Let that pass too.’‘Pass, pass! we play policeUpon my cousin’s life, to indicateWhat may or may not pass?’ I cried. ‘He knowsWhat’s worthy of him; the choice remains withhim;And what he chooses, act or wife, I thinkI shall not call unworthy, I, for one.’‘’Tis somewhat rashly said,’ she answered slow.‘Now let’s talk reason, though we talk of love.Your cousin Romney Leigh’s a monster! there,The word’s out fairly; let me prove the fact.We’ll take, say, that most perfect of antiques,They call the Genius of the Vatican,Which seems too beauteous to endure itselfIn this mixed world, and fasten it for onceUpon the torso of the Drunken Fawn,(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,)Instead of Buonarroti’s mask: what then?We show the sort of monster Romney is,With god-like virtues and heroic aimsSubjoined to limping possibilitiesOf mismade human nature. Grant the manTwice god-like, twice heroic,—still he limps,And here’s the point we come to.’‘Pardon me,But, Lady Waldemar, the point’s the thingWe never come to.’‘Caustic, insolentAt need! I like you’—(there, she took my hands)‘And now my lioness, help Androcles,For all your roaring. Help me! for myselfI would not say so—but for him. He limpsSo certainly, he’ll fall into the pitA week hence,—so I lose him—so he is lost!And when he’s fairly married, he a Leigh,To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth,Starved out in London, till her coarse-grained handsAre whiter than her morals,—you, for one,May call his choice most worthy.’‘Married! lost!He, ... Romney!’‘Ah, you’re moved at last,’ she said.‘These monsters, set out in the open sun,Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who thinkAwry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he?And who but you can wonder? He has been mad,The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man,He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen’s wits,With equal scorn of triangles and wine,And took no honours, yet was honourable.They’ll tell you he lost count of Homer’s shipsIn Melbourne’s poor-bills, Ashley’s factory bills,—Ignored the Aspasia we all dare to praise,For other women, dear, we could not nameBecause we’re decent. Well, he had some rightOn his side probably; men always have,Who go absurdly wrong. The living boorWho brews your ale, exceeds in vital worthDead Cæsar who ‘stops bungholes’ in the cask;And also, to do good is excellent,For persons of his income, even to boors:I sympathise with all such things. But heWent mad upon them ... madder and more mad,From college times to these,—as, going down hill,The faster still, the farther! you must knowYour Leigh by heart: he has sown his black young curlsWith bleaching cares of half a million menAlready. If you do not starve, or sin,You’re nothing to him. Pay the income-tax,And break your heart upon’t ... he’ll scarce be touched;But come upon the parish, qualifiedFor the parish stocks, and Romney will be thereTo call you brother, sister, or perhapsA tenderer name still. Had I any chanceWith Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar,And never committed felony?’‘You speakToo bitterly,’ I said, ‘for the literal truth.’‘The truth is bitter. Here’s a man who looksFor ever on the ground! you must be lowOr else a pictured ceiling overhead,Good painting thrown away. For me, I’ve doneWhat women may, (we’re somewhat limited,We modest women) but I’ve done my best.—How men are perjured when they swear our eyesHave meaning in them! they’re just blue or brown,—They just can drop their lids a little. In fact,Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through,Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc,With various others of his socialists;And if I had been a fathom less in love,Had cured myself with gaping. As it was,I quoted from them prettily enough,Perhaps, to make them sound half rationalTo a saner man than he, whene’er we talked,(For which I dodged occasion)—learnt by heartHis speeches in the Commons and elsewhereUpon the social question; heaped reportsOf wicked women and penitentiaries,On all my tables, with a place for Sue;And gave my name to swell subscription-listsToward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven,And other possible ends. All things I did,Except the impossible ... such as wearing gownsProvided by the Ten Hours’ movement! there,I stopped—we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile,Unmoved as the Indian tortoise ’neath the world,Let all that noise go on upon his back:He would not disconcert or throw me out;’Twas well to see a woman of my classWith such a dawn of conscience. For the heart,Made firewood for his sake, and flaming upTo his very face ... he warmed his feet at it;But deigned to let my carriage stop him shortIn park or street,—he leaning on the door,With news of the committee which sate lastOn pickpockets at suck.’‘You jest—you jest.’‘As martyrs jest, dear, (if you’ve read their lives)Upon the axe which kills them. When all’s doneBy me, ... for him—you’ll ask him presentlyThe colour of my hair—he cannot tell,Or answers ‘dark’ at random,—while, be sure,He’s absolute on the figure, five or ten,Of my last subscription. Is it bearable,And I a woman?’‘Is it reparable,ThoughIwere a man?’‘I know not. That’s to prove.But, first, this shameful marriage.’‘Ay?’ I cried,‘Then really there’s a marriage?’‘YesterdayI held him fast upon it. ‘Mister Leigh,’Said I, ‘shut up a thing, it makes more noise.The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I’ve knownYours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so:You feel I’m not the woman of the worldThe world thinks; you have borne with me before,And used me in your noble work, our work,And now you shall not cast me off becauseYou’re at the difficult point, thejoin. ’Tis trueEven I can scarce admit the cogencyOf such a marriage ... where you do not love,(Except the class) yet marry and throw your nameDown to the gutter, for a fire-escapeTo future generations! it’s sublime,A great example,—a true GenesisOf the opening social era. But take heed;This virtuous act must have a patent weight,Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell,Interpret it, and set in the light,And do not muffle it in a winter-cloakAs a vulgar bit of shame,—as if, at best,A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushedA Howard should know it.’ Then, I pressed him more—‘He would not choose,’ I said, ‘that even his kin, ...Aurora Leigh, even ... should conceive his actLess sacrifice, more appetite.’ At whichHe grew so pale, dear, ... to the lips, I knewI had touched him. ‘Do you know her,’ he enquired,‘My cousin Aurora?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and lied,(But truly we all know you by your books)And so I offered to come straight to you,Explain the subject, justify the cause,And take you with me to St. Margaret’s CourtTo see this miracle, this Marian Erle,This drover’s daughter (she’s not pretty, he swears)Upon whose finger, exquisitely prickedBy a hundred needles, we’re to hang the tie’Twixt class and class in England,—thus, indeed,By such a presence, yours and mine, to liftThe match up from the doubtful place. At onceHe thanked me, sighing ... murmured to himself,‘She’ll do it perhaps; she’s noble,’—thanked me twice,And promised, as my guerdon, to put offHis marriage for a month.’I answered then.‘I understand your drift imperfectly.You wish to lead me to my cousin’s betrothed,To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her handIf feeble, thus to justify his match.So be it then. But how this serves your ends,And how the strange confession of your loveServes this, I have to learn—I cannot see.’She knit her restless forehead. ‘Then, despite,Aurora, that most radiant morning name,You’re dull as any London afternoon.I wanted time,—and gained it,—wantedyou,And gain you! You will come and see the girl,In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearlAnd pride of all your lofty race of LeighsIs destined to solution. AuthorisedBy sight and knowledge, then, you’ll speak your mind,And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way,He’ll wrong the people and posterity(Say such a thing is bad for you and me,And you fail utterly,) by concluding thusAn execrable marriage. Break it up,Disroot it—peradventure, presently,We’ll plant a better fortune in its place.Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me lessFor saying the thing I should not. Well I knowI should not. I have kept, as others have,The iron rule of womanly reserveIn lip and life, till now: I wept a weekBefore I came here.’—Ending, she was pale;The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous.This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck,And, only by the foam upon the bit,You saw she champed against it.Then I rose.‘I love love! truth’s no cleaner thing than love.I comprehend a love so fiery hotIt burns its natural veil of august shame,And stands sublimely in the nude, as chasteAs Medicean Venus. But I know,A love that burns through veils, will burn through masks,And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!Nay—go to the opera! your love’s curable.’‘I love and lie?’ she said—‘I lie, forsooth?’And beat her taper foot upon the floor,And smiled against the shoe,—‘You’re hard, Miss Leigh,Unversed in current phrases.—Bowling-greensOf poets are fresher than the world’s highways;Forgive me that I rashly blew the dustWhich dims our hedges even, in your eyes,And vexed you so much. You find, probably,No evil in this marriage,—rather goodOf innocence, to pastoralise in song:You’ll give the bond your signature, perhaps,Beneath the lady’s mark,—indifferentThat Romney chose a wife, could write her name,In witnessing he loved her.’‘Loved!’ I cried;‘Who tells you that he wants a wife to love?He gets a horse to use, not love, I think:There’s work for wives as well,—and after, straw,When men are liberal. For myself, you errSupposing power in me to break this match.I could not do it, to save Romney’s life;And would not, to save mine.’‘You take it so,’She said; ‘farewell then. Write your books in peace,As far as may be for some secret stirNow obvious to me,—for, most obviously,In coming hither I mistook the way.’Whereat she touched my hand, and bent her head,And floated from me like a silent cloudThat leaves the sense of thunder.I drew breathAs hard as in a sick room. After allThis woman breaks her social system upFor love, so counted—the love possibleTo such,—and lilies are still lilies, pulledBy smutty hands, though spotted from their white;And thus she is better, haply, of her kind,Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams,And crosses out the spontaneitiesOf all his individual, personal life,With formal universals. As if manWere set upon a high stool at a desk,To keep God’s books for Him, in red and black,And feel by millions! What, if even GodWere chiefly God by living out HimselfTo an individualism of the Infinite,Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing upThe golden spray of multitudinous worldsIn measure to the proclive weight and rushOf His inner nature,—the spontaneous loveStill proof and outflow of spontaneous life?Then live, Aurora!Two hours afterward,Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone,Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,Whose wasted right hand gambled ’gainst his leftWith an old brass button, in a blot of sun,Jeered weakly at me as I passed acrossThe uneven pavement; while a woman, rougedUpon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,—‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dogYou’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!We cover up our face from doing good,As if it were our purse! What brings you here,My lady? is’t to find my gentlemanWho visits his tame pigeon in the eaves?Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,And turn your whiteness dead-blue.’ I looked up;I think I could have walked through hell that day,And never flinched. ‘The dear Christ comfort you,’I said, ‘you must have been most miserableTo be so cruel,’—and I emptied outMy purse upon the stones: when, as I had castThe last charm in the cauldron, the whole courtWent boiling, bubbling up, from all its doorsAnd windows, with a hideous wail of laughsAnd roar of oaths, and blows perhaps ... I passedToo quickly for distinguishing ... and pushedA little side-door hanging on a hinge,And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbedThe long, steep, narrow stair ’twixt broken railAnd mildewed wall that let the plaster dropTo startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up!So high lived Romney’s bride. I paused at lastBefore a low door in the roof, and knocked;There came an answer like a hurried dove—‘So soon? can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?’And as I entered, an ineffable faceMet mine upon the threshold. ‘Oh, not you,Not you!’ ... the dropping of the voice implied,‘Then, if not you, for me not any one.’I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands,And said, ‘I am his cousin,—Romney Leigh’s;And here I’m come to see my cousin too.’She touched me with her face and with her voice,This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers,From such rough roots? the people, under there,Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so ... faugh!Yet have such daughters?No wise beautifulWas Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown,But could look either, like a mist that changedAccording to being shone on more or less.The hair, too, ran its opulence of curlsIn doubt ’twixt dark and bright, nor left you clearTo name the colour. Too much hair perhaps(I’ll name a fault here) for so small a head,Which seemed to droop on that side and on this,As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight,Though not a breath should trouble it. Again,The dimple in the cheek had better goneWith redder, fuller rounds: and somewhat largeThe mouth was, though the milky little teethDissolved it to so infantine a smile!For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too,But ’twas as if remembering they had wept,And knowing they should, some day, weep again.We talked. She told me all her story out,Which I’ll re-tell with fuller utterance,As coloured and confirmed in aftertimesBy others, and herself too. Marian ErleWas born upon the ledge of Malvern HillTo eastward, in a hut, built up at nightTo evade the landlord’s eye, of mud and turf,Still liable, if once he looked that way,To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot,Like any other anthill. Born, I say;God sent her to his world, commissioned right,Her human testimonials fully signed,Not scant in soul—complete in lineaments;But others had to swindle her a placeTo wail in when she had come. No place for her,By man’s law! born an outlaw, was this babe.Her first cry in our strange and strangling air,When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,Was wrong against the social code,—forced wrong.What business had the baby to cry there?I tell her story and grow passionate.She, Marian, did not tell it so, but usedMeek words that made no wonder of herselfFor being so sad a creature. ‘Mister LeighConsidered truly that such things should change.Theywill, in heaven—but meantime, on the earth,There’s none can like a nettle as a pink,Except himself. We’re nettles, some of us,And give offence by the act of springing up;And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,The hoes, of course, are on us.’ So she said.Her father earned his life by random jobsDespised by steadier workmen—keeping swineOn commons, picking hops, or hurrying onThe harvest at wet seasons,—or, at need,Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a droveOf startled horses plunged into the mistBelow the mountain-road, and sowed the windWith wandering neighings. In between the gapsOf such irregular work, he drank and slept,And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,She could not buy more drink. At which she turned,(The worm) and beat her baby in revengeFor her own broken heart. There’s not a crimeBut takes its proper change out still in crime,If once rung on the counter of this world;Let sinners look to it.Yet the outcast child,For whom the very mother’s face forewentThe mother’s special patience, lived and grew;Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,With that pathetic vacillating rollOf the infant body on the uncertain feet,(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon)At which most women’s arms unclose at onceWith irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,This babe would steal off from the mother’s chair,And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,Would find some keyhole toward the secresyOf Heaven’s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out—Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,She had never heard of angels,—but to gazeShe knew not why, to see she knew not what,A-hungering outward from the barren earthFor something like a joy. She liked, she said,To dazzle black her sight against the sky,For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;She learnt God that way, and was beat for itWhenever she went home,—yet came again,As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,This skyey father and mother both in one,Instructed her and civilised her moreThan even the Sunday-school did afterward,To which a lady sent her to learn booksAnd sit upon a long bench in a rowWith other children. Well, she laughed sometimesTo see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts;But ofter she was sorrowful with noise,And wondered if their mothers beat them hard,That ever they should laugh so. There was oneShe loved indeed,—Rose Bell, a seven years’ child,So pretty and clever, who read syllablesWhen Marian was at letters;shewould laughAt nothing—hold your finger up, she laughed,Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouthTo hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster.And Rose’s pelting glee, as frank as rainOn cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,To see another merry whom she loved.She whispered once (the children side by side,With mutual arms entwined about their necks)‘Your mother lets you laugh so?’ ‘Ay,’ said Rose,‘She lets me. She was dug into the groundSix years since, I being but a yearling wean.Such mothers let us play and lose our time,And never scold nor beat us! don’t you wishYou had one like that?’ There, Marian breaking offLooked suddenly in my face. ‘Poor Rose,’ said she,‘I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.I’d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,—Poor Rose, poor Rose!’ said Marian.She resumed.It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-schoolWhat God was, what he wanted from us all,And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,To go straight home and hear her father pullThe Name down on us from the thunder-shelf,Then drink away his soul into the darkFrom seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,Were God and heaven reversed to her: the moreShe knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong;Her price paid down for knowledge, was to knowThe vileness of her kindred: through her heart,Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth,They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, ’tis hardTo learn you have a father up in heavenBy a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,Still worse than orphaned: ’tis too heavy a grief,The having to thank God for such a joy!And so passed Marian’s life from year to year.Her parents took her with them when they tramped,Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,And once went farther and saw Manchester,And once the sea, that blue end of the world,That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,—And twice a prison,—back at intervals,Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,And stronger sometimes, holding out their handsTo pull you from the vile flats up to them;And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back,As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,They certainly felt bettered unawaresEmerging from the social smut of townsTo wipe their feet clean on the mountain-turf.In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,Endured and learned. The people on the roadsWould stop and ask her how her eyes outgrewHer cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birdsIn all that hair; and then they lifted her,The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,The butcher’s boy on horseback. Often, too,The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the headWith absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,And asked if peradventure she could read;And when she answered ‘ay,’ would toss her downSome stray odd volume from his heavy pack,A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,Or half a play of Shakspeare’s, torn across:(She had to guess the bottom of a pageBy just the top sometimes,—as difficult,As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!)Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’sSmall gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones.’Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,And oft the jangling influence jarred the childLike looking at a sunset full of graceThrough a pothouse window while the drunken oathsWent on behind her; but she weeded outHer book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,(First tore them small, that none should find a word)And made a nosegay of the sweet and goodTo fold within her breast, and pore uponAt broken moments of the noontide glare,When leave was given her to untie her cloakAnd rest upon the dusty roadside bankFrom the highway’s dust. Or oft, the journey done,Some city friend would lead her by the handTo hear a lecture at an institute:And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,To no book-learning,—she was ignorantOf authors,—not in earshot of the thingsOut-spoken o’er the heads of common men,By men who are uncommon,—but withinThe cadenced hum of such, and capableOf catching from the fringes of the windSome fragmentary phrases, here and there,Of that fine music,—which, being carried inTo her soul, had reproduced itself afreshIn finer motions of the lips and lids.She said, in speaking of it, ‘If a flowerWere thrown you out of heaven at intervals,You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up,—And so with her.’ She counted me her years,TillIfelt old; and then she counted meHer sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.She told me she was almost glad and calmOn such and such a season; sate and sewed,With no one to break up her crystal thoughts;While rhymes from lovely poems span aroundTheir ringing circles of ecstatic tune,Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,And smile into the hedges and the clouds,And tremble if one shook her from her fitBy any blow, or word even. Out-door jobsWent ill with her; and household quiet work,She was not born to. Had they kept the north,They might have had their pennyworth out of her,Like other parents, in the factories;(Your children work for you, not you for them,Or else they better had been choked with airThe first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,Was nothing to be done with such a child,But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hoseNot ill, and was not dull at needlework;And all the country people gave her penceFor darning stockings past their natural age,And patching petticoats from old to new,And other light work done for thrifty wives.One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day—Her mother had been badly beat, and feltThe bruises sore about her wretched soul,(That must have been): she came in suddenly,And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hairUpon her, like a sudden waterfall,And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,Outside the hut they lived in. When the childCould clear her blinded face from all that streamOf tresses ... there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes,That seemed as they would swallow her alive,Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,Saying hard between her teeth—‘Why wench, why wench,The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good;He means to set you up, and comfort us.Be mannerly at least.’ The child turned round,And looked up piteous in the mother’s face,(Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not wantAnother devil to damn, than such a look) ...‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven,‘God, free me from my mother,’ she shrieked out,‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with forceAs passionate as fear, she tore her handsLike lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,Away from both—away, if possible,As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell,She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had castThe voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fearWas running in her feet and killing the ground;The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,The green fields melted, wayside trees fell backTo make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed,Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,—The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,So sucked her forward, forward, while her heartKept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so bigIt seemed to fill her body; then it burst,And overflowed the world and swamped the light,‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle—She had dropped, she had fainted.When the sense returned,The night had passed—not life’s night. She was ’wareOf heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,The driver shouting to the lazy teamThat swung their rankling bells against her brain;While, through the waggon’s coverture and chinks,The cruel yellow morning pecked at herAlive or dead, upon the straw inside,—At which her soul ached back into the darkAnd prayed, ‘no more of that.’ A waggonerHad found her in a ditch beneath the moon,As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.At first he thought her dead; but when he had wipedThe mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,And laid her in his waggon in the straw,And so conveyed her to the distant townTo which his business called himself, and leftThat heap of misery at the hospital.She stirred;—the place seemed new and strange as death.The white strait bed, with others strait and white,Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,And quiet people walking in and outWith wonderful low voices and soft steps,And apparitional equal care for each,Astonished her with order, silence, law:And when a gentle hand held out a cup,She took it, as you do at sacrament,Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed,To so much love as makes the form of loveAnd courtesy of manners. Delicate drinksAnd rare white bread, to which some dying eyesWere turned in observation. O my God,How sick we must be, ere we make men just!I think it frets the saints in heaven to seeHow many desolate creatures on the earthHave learnt the simple dues of fellowshipAnd social comfort, in a hospital,As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,And wished, at intervals of growing sense,She might be sicker yet, if sickness madeThe world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;For now she understood, (as such things were)How sickness ended very oft in heaven,Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,Would lose no moment of the blessed time.She lay and seethed in fever many weeks,But youth was strong and overcame the test;Revolted soul and flesh were reconciledAnd fetched back to the necessary dayAnd daylight duties. She could creep aboutThe long bare rooms, and stare out drearilyFrom any narrow window on the street,Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,Said coldly to her, as an enemy,‘She had leave to go next week, being well enough,’While only her heart ached. ‘Go next week,’ thought she,‘Next week! how would it be with her next week,Let out into that terrible street aloneAmong the pushing people, ... to go ... where?’One day, the last before the dreaded last,Among the convalescents, like herselfPrepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,And heard half absently the women talk,How one was famished for her baby’s cheeks—‘The little wretch would know her! a year old,And lively, like his father!’ one was keenTo get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;And one was tender for her dear goodmanWho had missed her sorely,—and one, querulous ...‘Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had daredTo talk about her as already dead,’—And one was proud ... ‘and if her sweetheart LukeHad left her for a ruddier face than hers,(The gossip would be seen through at a glance)Sweet riddance of such sweethearts—let him hang!’Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.’And while they talked, and Marian felt the worseFor having missed the worst of all their wrongs,A visitor was ushered through the wardsAnd paused among the talkers. ‘When he looked,It was as if he spoke, and when he spokeHe sang perhaps,’ said Marian; ‘could she tell?She only knew’ (so much she had chronicled,As seraphs might, the making of the sun)‘That he who came and spake, was Romney Leigh,And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.’And when it was her turn to have the faceUpon her,—all those buzzing pallid lipsBeing satisfied with comfort—when he changedTo Marian, saying ‘Andyou? you’re going, where?’—She, moveless as a worm beneath a stoneWhich some one’s stumbling foot has spurned aside,Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,And breaking into sobs cried, ‘Where I go?None asked me till this moment. Can I sayWhereIgo? when it has not seemed worth whileTo God himself, who thinks of every one,To think of me, and fix where I shall go?’‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lostYour father and your mother?’‘Both,’ she said,‘Both lost! my father was burnt up with ginOr ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.My mother sold me to a man last month,And so my mother’s lost, ’tis manifest.And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,As if I had caught sight of the fires of hellThrough some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)It seems I shall be lost too, presently,And so we end, all three of us.’‘Poor child!’He said,—with such a pity in his voice,It soothed her more than her own tears,—‘poor child!’Tis simple that betrayal by mother’s loveShould bring despair of God’s too. Yet be taught;He’s better to us than many mothers are,And children cannot wander beyond reachOf the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold!And if you weep still, weep where John was laidWhile Jesus loved him.’‘She could say the words,’She told me, ‘exactly as he uttered themA year back, ... since, in any doubt or dark,They came out like the stars, and shone on herWith just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;The ministers in church might say the same;Buthe, he made the church with what he spoke,—The difference was the miracle,’ said she.Then catching up her smile to ravishment,She added quickly, ‘I repeat his words,But not his tones: can any one repeatThe music of an organ, out of church?And when he said ‘poor child,’ I shut my eyesTo feel how tenderly his voice broke through,As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feetTo let out the rich medicative nard.’She told me how he had raised and rescued herWith reverent pity, as, in touching grief,He touched the wounds of Christ,—and made her feelMore self-respecting. Hope, he called, beliefIn God,—work, worship ... therefore let us pray!And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,And keep it stainless from her mother’s face,He sent her to a famous sempstress-houseFar off in London, there to work and hope.With that, they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,But not of Romney. He had good to doTo others: through the days and through the nights,She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,And wondered, while, along the tawny light,She struck the new thread into her needle’s eye,How people, without mothers on the hills,Could choose the town to live in!—then she drewThe stitch, and mused how Romney’s face would look,And if ’twere likely he’d remember hers,When they two had their meeting after death.

‘To-daythou girdest up thy loins thyself,And goest where thou wouldest: presentlyOthers shall gird thee,’ said the Lord, ‘to goWhere thou would’st not.’ He spoke to Peter thus,To signify the death which he should dieWhen crucified head downwards.If He spokeTo Peter then, He speaks to us the same;The word suits many different martyrdoms,And signifies a multiform of death,Although we scarcely die apostles, we,And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth.

For ’tis not in mere death that men die most;And, after our first girding of the loinsIn youth’s fine linen and fair broidery,To run up hill and meet the rising sun,We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,While others gird us with the violent bandsOf social figments, feints, and formalisms,Reversing our straight nature, lifting upOur base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.

Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross.God, set our feet low and our forehead high,And show us how a man was made to walk!

Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed.The room does very well; I have to writeBeyond the stroke of midnight. Get away;Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them downAt once, as I must have them, to be sure,Whether I bid you never bring me suchAt such an hour, or bid you. No excuse.You choose to bring them, as I choose perhapsTo throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed,And dream, if possible, I am not cross.

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,—A mere, mere woman,—a mere flaccid nerve,—A kerchief left out all night in the rain,Turned soft so,—overtasked and overstrainedAnd overlived in this close London life!And yet I should be stronger.Never burnYour letters, poor Aurora! for they stareWith red seals from the table, saying each,‘Here’s something that you know not.’ Out alas,’Tis scarcely that the world’s more good and wiseOr even straighter and more consequentSince yesterday at this time—yet, again,If but one angel spoke from Ararat,I should be very sorry not to hear:So open all the letters! let me read.Blanche Ord, the writer in the ‘Lady’s Fan,’Requests my judgment on ... that, afterwards.Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,And signs, ‘Elisha to you.’ Pringle SharpePresents his work on ‘Social Conduct,’ ... cravesA little money for his pressing debts ...From me, who scarce have money for my needs,—Art’s fiery chariot which we journey inBeing apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!Here’s Rudgely knows it,—editor and scribe—He’s ‘forced to marry where his heart is not,Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.’Ah,—— lost it because no one picked it up!That’s really loss! (and passable impudence.)My critic Hammond flatters prettily,And wants another volume like the last.My critic Belfair wants another bookEntirely different, which will sell, (and live?)A striking book, yet not a startling book,The public blames originalities,(You must not pump spring-water unawaresUpon a gracious public, full of nerves—)Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,As easy reading as the dog-eared pageThat’s fingered by said public, fifty years,Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,And yet a revelation in some sort:That’s hard, my critic Belfair! So—what next?My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;‘Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,’ says he,‘And do not prate so of humanities:’Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,Because a cheerful genius suits the times,And all true poets laugh unquenchablyLike Shakspeare and the gods. That’s very hard.The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiledWith such a needy heart on two pale lips,We cry, ‘Weep rather, Dante.’ Poems areMen, if true poems: and who dares exclaimAt any man’s door, ’Here, ’tis probableThe thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,And scared a sickly husband—what of that?Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,Because a cheerful genius suits the times—’?None says so to the man,—and why indeedShould any to the poem? A ninth seal;The apocalypse is drawing to a close.Ha,—this from Vincent Carrington,—‘Dear friend,I want good counsel. Will you lend me wingsTo raise me to the subject, in a sketchI’ll bring to-morrow—may I? at eleven?A poet’s only born to turn to use;So save you! for the world ... and Carrington.’‘(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh,Beyond what’s said of him in newspapers,His phalansteries there, his speeches here,His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?He droppedmelong ago; but no one dropsA golden apple—though indeed, one day,You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least,You know Lord Howe, who sees him ... whom he sees,Andyousee, and I hate to see,—for HoweStands high upon the brink of theories,Observes the swimmers, and cries ‘Very fine,’But keeps dry linen equally,—unlikeThat gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is,Such sudden madness seizing a young man,To make earth over again,—while I’m contentTo make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch.A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot;Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing JoveHalfway, and burn him faster down; the faceAnd breasts upturned and straining, the loose locksAll glowing with the anticipated gold.Or here’s another on the self-same theme.She lies here—flat upon her prison-floor,The long hair swathed about her to the heel,Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her throughThe glittering haze of that prodigious rain,Half blotted out of nature by a loveAs heavy as fate. I’ll bring you either sketch.I think, myself, the second indicatesMore passion.’Surely. Self is put away,And calm with abdication. She is Jove,And no more Danae—greater thus. PerhapsThe painter symbolises unawaresTwo states of the recipient artist-soul;One, forward, personal, wanting reverence,Because aspiring only. We’ll be calm,And know that, when indeed our Joves come down,We all turn stiller than we have ever been.

Kind Vincent Carrington. I’ll let him come.He talks of Florence,—and may say a wordOf something as it chanced seven years ago,—A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird,In those green country walks, in that good time,When certainly I was so miserable ...I seem to have missed a blessing ever since.

The music soars within the little lark,And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.We do not make our places with our strains,—Content, while they rise, to remain behind,Alone on earth instead of so in heaven.No matter—I bear on my broken tale.

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,I took a chamber up three flights of stairsNot far from being as steep as some larks climb,And, in a certain house in Kensington,Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to workIn this world,—’tis the best you get at all;For God, in cursing, gives us better giftsThan men in benediction. God says, ‘SweatFor foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned,—Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steelWhich snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work;Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.

So, happy and unafraid of solitude,I worked the short days out,—and watched the sunOn lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,Like some Druidic idol’s fiery brass,With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,In which the blood of wretches pent insideSeemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,—Push out through fog with his dilated disk,And startle the slant roofs and chimney-potsWith splashes of fierce colour. Or I sawFog only, the great tawny weltering fog,Involve the passive city, strangle itAlive, and draw it off into the void,Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a spungeHad wiped out London,—or as noon and nightHad clapped together and utterly struck outThe intermediate time, undoing themselvesIn the act. Your city poets see such things,Not despicable. Mountains of the south,When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,Descending Sinai: on Parnassus mount,You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,Except in fable and figure: forests chantTheir anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.But sit in London, at the day’s decline,And view the city perish in the mistLike Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,—The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprisedBy a sudden sense of vision and of tune,You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,And you and Israel’s other singing girls,Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.

I worked with patience which means almost power.I did some excellent things indifferently,Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,The latter loudest. And by such a timeThat I myself had set them down as sinsScarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week,Arrived some letter through the sedulous post,Like these I’ve read, and yet dissimilar,With pretty maiden seals,—initials twinedOf lilies, or a heart markedEmily,(Convicting Emily of being all heart);Or rarer tokens from young bachelors,Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,Suppose, they had just been plucked of) and a snatchFrom Horace, ‘Collegisse juvat,’ setUpon the first page. Many a letter signedOr unsigned, showing the writers at eighteenHad lived too long, though every muse should helpThe daylight, holding candles,—compliments,To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with meNo more than coins from Moscow circulateAt Paris. Would ten roubles buy a tagOf ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou?I smiled that all this youth should love me,—sighedThat such a love could scarcely raise them upTo love what was more worthy than myself;Then sighed again, again, less generously,To think the very love they lavished so,Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not,And he ... my cousin Romney ... did not write.I felt the silent finger of his scornPrick every bubble of my frivolous fameAs my breath blew it, and resolve it backTo the air it came from. Oh, I justifiedThe measure he had taken of my height:The thing was plain—he was not wrong a line;I played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword,Amused the lads and maidens.Came a sighDeep, hoarse with resolution,—I would workTo better ends, or play in earnest. ‘Heavens,I think I should be almost popularIf this went on!’—I ripped my verses up,And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart,Which never yet had beat, that it should die;Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.

And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,Like those hot fire-seeds of creation heldIn Jove’s clenched palm before the worlds were sown,—But I—I was not Juno even! my handWas shut in weak convulsion, woman’s ill,And when I yearned to loose a finger—lo,The nerve revolted. ’Tis the same even now:This hand may never, haply, open large,Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred,To prove the power not else than by the pain.

It burns, it burnt—my whole life burnt with it,And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashedMy steps out through the slow and difficult road.I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs,The season’s books in drear significanceOf morals, dropping round me. Lively books?The ash has livelier verdure than the yew;And yet the yew’s green longer, and aloneFound worthy of the holy Christmas time.We’ll plant more yews if possible, albeitWe plant the graveyards with them.Day and nightI worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed upBoth watch and slumber with long lines of lifeWhich did not suit their season. The rose fellFrom either cheek, my eyes globed luminousThrough orbits of blue shadow, and my pulseWould shudder along the purple-veined wristLike a shot bird. Youth’s stern, set face to faceWith youth’s ideal: and when people cameAnd said, ‘You work too much, you are looking ill,’I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,And thought I should be better soon perhapsFor those ill looks. Observe—‘I,’ means in youthJustI... the conscious and eternal soulWith all its ends,—and not the outside life,The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,The so much liver, lung, integument,Which make the sum of ‘I’ hereafter, whenWorld-talkers talk of doing well or ill.Iprosper, if I gain a step, althoughA nail then pierced my foot: although my brainEmbracing any truth, froze paralysed,Iprosper. I but change my instrument;I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,And catch the mattock up.I worked on, on.Through all the bristling fence of nights and daysWhich hedges time in from the eternities,I struggled, ... never stopped to note the stakesWhich hurt me in my course. The midnight oilWould stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:I had to live, that therefore I might work,And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,To work with one hand for the booksellers,While working with the other for myselfAnd art. You swim with feet as well as hands,Or make small way. I apprehended this,—In England, no one lives by verse that lives;And, apprehending, I resolved by proseTo make a space to sphere my living verse.I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,And weekly papers, holding up my nameTo keep it from the mud. I learnt the useOf the editorial ‘we’ in a review,As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,And swept it grandly through the open doorsAs if one could not pass through doors at allSave so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,Carved many an article on cherry-stonesTo suit light readers,—something in the linesRevealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,But that, I’ll never vouch for. What you doFor bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,—Much less in Nephelococcygia,As mine was, peradventure.Having breadFor just so many days, just breathing roomFor body and verse, I stood up straight and workedMy veritable work. And as the soulWhich grows within a child, makes the child grow,—Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikesThe summer foliage out in a green flame—So life, in deepening with me, deepened allThe course I took, the work I did. Indeed,The academic law convinced of sin;The critics cried out on the falling off,Regretting the first manner. But I feltMy heart’s life throbbing in my verse to showIt lived, it also—certes incomplete,Disordered with all Adam in the blood,But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,Still organised by, and implying life.

A lady called upon me on such a day.She had the low voice of your English dames,Unused, it seems, to need rise half a noteTo catch attention,—and their quiet mood,As if they lived too high above the earthFor that to put them out in anything:So gentle, because verily so proud;So wary and afeared of hurting you,By no means that you are not really vile,But that they would not touch you with their footTo push you to your place; so self-possessedYet gracious and conciliating, it takesAn effort in their presence to speak truth:You know the sort of woman,—brilliant stuff,And out of nature. ‘Lady Waldemar,’She said her name quite simply, as if it meantNot much indeed, but something,—took my hands,And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.‘Is this,’ she said, ‘the Muse?’‘No sybil even,’I answered, ‘since she fails to guess the causeWhich taxed you with this visit, madam.’‘Good,’She said, ‘I like to be sincere at once;Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,The visit might have taxed me. As it is,You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,It comforts me entirely for your fame,As well as for the trouble of my ascentTo this Olympus.’There, a silver laughRan rippling through her quickened little breathsThe steep stair somewhat justified.‘But stillYour ladyship has left me curious whyYou dared the risk of finding the said Muse?’

‘Ah,—keep me, notwithstanding, to the point,Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyesAs awful as in stockings, after all,I wonder, that you’d have my business outBefore I breathe—exact the epic plungeIn spite of gasps? Well, naturally you thinkI’ve come here, as the lion-hunters goTo deserts, to secure you, with a trap,For exhibition in my drawing-roomsOn zoologic soirées? Not in the least.Roar softly at me; I am frivolous,I dare say; I have played at lions, too,Like other women of my class,—but nowI meet my lion simply as AndroclesMet his ... when at his mercy.’So, she bentHer head, as queens may mock,—then lifting upHer eyelids with a real grave queenly look,Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself,—‘I think you have a cousin:—Romney Leigh.’

‘You bring a word fromhim?’—my eyes leapt upTo the very height of hers,—‘a word fromhim?’

‘I bring a word about him, actually.But first,’—she pressed me with her urgent eyes—‘You do not love him,—you?’‘You’re frank at leastIn putting questions, madam,’ I replied.‘I love my cousin cousinly—no more.’

‘I guessed as much. I’m ready to be frankIn answering also, if you’ll question me,Or even with something less. You stand outside,You artist women, of the common sex;You share not with us, and exceed us soPerhaps by what you’re mulcted in, your heartsBeing starved to make your heads: so run the oldTraditions of you. I can therefore speak,Without the natural shame which creatures feelWhen speaking on their level, to their like.There’s many a papist she, would rather dieThan own to her maid she put a ribbon onTo catch the indifferent eye of such a man,—Who yet would count adulteries on her beadsAt holy Mary’s shrine, and never blush;Because the saints are so far off, we loseAll modesty before them. Thus, today.’TisI, love Romney Leigh.’‘Forbear,’ I cried.‘If here’s no Muse, still less is any saint;Nor even a friend, that Lady WaldemarShould make confessions’....‘That’s unkindly said.If no friend, what forbids to make a friendTo join to our confession ere we have done?I love your cousin. If it seems unwiseTo say so, it’s still foolisher (we’re frank)To feel so. My first husband left me young,And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,To keep my booth in May-fair with the restTo happy issues. There are marquisesWould serve seven years to call me wife, I know:And, after seven, I might consider it,For there’s some comfort in a marquisateWhen all’s said,—yes, but after the seven years;I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip,So like a Leigh! so like him!—Pardon me,I am well aware I do not derogateIn loving Romney Leigh. The name is good,The means are excellent; but the man, the man—Heaven help us both,—I am near as mad as he,In loving such an one.’She slowly swungHer heavy ringlets till they touched her smile,As reasonably sorry for herself;And thus continued,—‘Of a truth, Miss Leigh,I have not, without struggle, come to this.I took a master in the German tongue,I gamed a little, went to Paris twice;But, after all, this love!... you eat of love,And do as vile a thing as if you ateOf garlic—which, whatever else you eat,Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peachReminds you of your onion. Am I coarse?Well, love’s coarse, nature’s coarse—ah, there’s the rub!We fair fine ladies, who park out our livesFrom common sheep-paths, cannot help the crowsFrom flying over,—we’re as natural stillAs Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectlyIn Lyons’ velvet,—we are not, for that,Lay-figures, look you! we have hearts within,Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,As ready for distracted ends and actsAs any distressed sempstress of them allThat Romney groans and toils for. We catch loveAnd other fevers, in the vulgar way.Love will not be outwitted by our wit,Nor outrun by our equipages:—minePersisted, spite of efforts. All my cardsTurned up but Romney Leigh; my German stoppedAt germane Wertherism; my Paris roundsReturned me from the Champs Elysées justA ghost, and sighing like Dido’s. I came homeUncured,—convicted rather to myselfOf being in love ... in love! That’s coarse you’ll say.I’m talking garlic.’Coldly I replied.‘Apologise for atheism, not love!For me, I do believe in love, and God.I know my cousin: Lady WaldemarI know not: yet I say as much as this—Whoever loves him, let her not excuseBut cleanse herself, that, loving such a man,She may not do it with such unworthy loveHe cannot stoop and take it.’‘That is saidAusterely, like a youthful prophetess,Who knits her brows across her pretty eyesTo keep them back from following the grey flightOf doves between the temple-columns. Dear,Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.I’m a mere woman,—the more weak perhapsThrough being so proud; you’re better; as for him,He’s best. Indeed he builds his goodness upSo high, it topples down to the other side,And makes a sort of badness; there’s the worstI have to say against your cousin’s best!And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,For his sake, if not mine.’‘I own myselfIncredulous of confidence like thisAvailing him or you.’‘I, worthy of him?In your sense I am not so—let it pass.And yet I save him if I marry him;Let that pass too.’‘Pass, pass! we play policeUpon my cousin’s life, to indicateWhat may or may not pass?’ I cried. ‘He knowsWhat’s worthy of him; the choice remains withhim;And what he chooses, act or wife, I thinkI shall not call unworthy, I, for one.’

‘’Tis somewhat rashly said,’ she answered slow.‘Now let’s talk reason, though we talk of love.Your cousin Romney Leigh’s a monster! there,The word’s out fairly; let me prove the fact.We’ll take, say, that most perfect of antiques,They call the Genius of the Vatican,Which seems too beauteous to endure itselfIn this mixed world, and fasten it for onceUpon the torso of the Drunken Fawn,(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,)Instead of Buonarroti’s mask: what then?We show the sort of monster Romney is,With god-like virtues and heroic aimsSubjoined to limping possibilitiesOf mismade human nature. Grant the manTwice god-like, twice heroic,—still he limps,And here’s the point we come to.’‘Pardon me,But, Lady Waldemar, the point’s the thingWe never come to.’‘Caustic, insolentAt need! I like you’—(there, she took my hands)‘And now my lioness, help Androcles,For all your roaring. Help me! for myselfI would not say so—but for him. He limpsSo certainly, he’ll fall into the pitA week hence,—so I lose him—so he is lost!And when he’s fairly married, he a Leigh,To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth,Starved out in London, till her coarse-grained handsAre whiter than her morals,—you, for one,May call his choice most worthy.’‘Married! lost!He, ... Romney!’‘Ah, you’re moved at last,’ she said.‘These monsters, set out in the open sun,Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who thinkAwry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he?And who but you can wonder? He has been mad,The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man,He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen’s wits,With equal scorn of triangles and wine,And took no honours, yet was honourable.They’ll tell you he lost count of Homer’s shipsIn Melbourne’s poor-bills, Ashley’s factory bills,—Ignored the Aspasia we all dare to praise,For other women, dear, we could not nameBecause we’re decent. Well, he had some rightOn his side probably; men always have,Who go absurdly wrong. The living boorWho brews your ale, exceeds in vital worthDead Cæsar who ‘stops bungholes’ in the cask;And also, to do good is excellent,For persons of his income, even to boors:I sympathise with all such things. But heWent mad upon them ... madder and more mad,From college times to these,—as, going down hill,The faster still, the farther! you must knowYour Leigh by heart: he has sown his black young curlsWith bleaching cares of half a million menAlready. If you do not starve, or sin,You’re nothing to him. Pay the income-tax,And break your heart upon’t ... he’ll scarce be touched;But come upon the parish, qualifiedFor the parish stocks, and Romney will be thereTo call you brother, sister, or perhapsA tenderer name still. Had I any chanceWith Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar,And never committed felony?’‘You speakToo bitterly,’ I said, ‘for the literal truth.’

‘The truth is bitter. Here’s a man who looksFor ever on the ground! you must be lowOr else a pictured ceiling overhead,Good painting thrown away. For me, I’ve doneWhat women may, (we’re somewhat limited,We modest women) but I’ve done my best.—How men are perjured when they swear our eyesHave meaning in them! they’re just blue or brown,—They just can drop their lids a little. In fact,Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through,Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc,With various others of his socialists;And if I had been a fathom less in love,Had cured myself with gaping. As it was,I quoted from them prettily enough,Perhaps, to make them sound half rationalTo a saner man than he, whene’er we talked,(For which I dodged occasion)—learnt by heartHis speeches in the Commons and elsewhereUpon the social question; heaped reportsOf wicked women and penitentiaries,On all my tables, with a place for Sue;And gave my name to swell subscription-listsToward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven,And other possible ends. All things I did,Except the impossible ... such as wearing gownsProvided by the Ten Hours’ movement! there,I stopped—we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile,Unmoved as the Indian tortoise ’neath the world,Let all that noise go on upon his back:He would not disconcert or throw me out;’Twas well to see a woman of my classWith such a dawn of conscience. For the heart,Made firewood for his sake, and flaming upTo his very face ... he warmed his feet at it;But deigned to let my carriage stop him shortIn park or street,—he leaning on the door,With news of the committee which sate lastOn pickpockets at suck.’

‘You jest—you jest.’

‘As martyrs jest, dear, (if you’ve read their lives)Upon the axe which kills them. When all’s doneBy me, ... for him—you’ll ask him presentlyThe colour of my hair—he cannot tell,Or answers ‘dark’ at random,—while, be sure,He’s absolute on the figure, five or ten,Of my last subscription. Is it bearable,And I a woman?’‘Is it reparable,ThoughIwere a man?’‘I know not. That’s to prove.But, first, this shameful marriage.’‘Ay?’ I cried,‘Then really there’s a marriage?’‘YesterdayI held him fast upon it. ‘Mister Leigh,’Said I, ‘shut up a thing, it makes more noise.The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I’ve knownYours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so:You feel I’m not the woman of the worldThe world thinks; you have borne with me before,And used me in your noble work, our work,And now you shall not cast me off becauseYou’re at the difficult point, thejoin. ’Tis trueEven I can scarce admit the cogencyOf such a marriage ... where you do not love,(Except the class) yet marry and throw your nameDown to the gutter, for a fire-escapeTo future generations! it’s sublime,A great example,—a true GenesisOf the opening social era. But take heed;This virtuous act must have a patent weight,Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell,Interpret it, and set in the light,And do not muffle it in a winter-cloakAs a vulgar bit of shame,—as if, at best,A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushedA Howard should know it.’ Then, I pressed him more—‘He would not choose,’ I said, ‘that even his kin, ...Aurora Leigh, even ... should conceive his actLess sacrifice, more appetite.’ At whichHe grew so pale, dear, ... to the lips, I knewI had touched him. ‘Do you know her,’ he enquired,‘My cousin Aurora?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and lied,(But truly we all know you by your books)And so I offered to come straight to you,Explain the subject, justify the cause,And take you with me to St. Margaret’s CourtTo see this miracle, this Marian Erle,This drover’s daughter (she’s not pretty, he swears)Upon whose finger, exquisitely prickedBy a hundred needles, we’re to hang the tie’Twixt class and class in England,—thus, indeed,By such a presence, yours and mine, to liftThe match up from the doubtful place. At onceHe thanked me, sighing ... murmured to himself,‘She’ll do it perhaps; she’s noble,’—thanked me twice,And promised, as my guerdon, to put offHis marriage for a month.’I answered then.‘I understand your drift imperfectly.You wish to lead me to my cousin’s betrothed,To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her handIf feeble, thus to justify his match.So be it then. But how this serves your ends,And how the strange confession of your loveServes this, I have to learn—I cannot see.’

She knit her restless forehead. ‘Then, despite,Aurora, that most radiant morning name,You’re dull as any London afternoon.I wanted time,—and gained it,—wantedyou,And gain you! You will come and see the girl,In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearlAnd pride of all your lofty race of LeighsIs destined to solution. AuthorisedBy sight and knowledge, then, you’ll speak your mind,And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way,He’ll wrong the people and posterity(Say such a thing is bad for you and me,And you fail utterly,) by concluding thusAn execrable marriage. Break it up,Disroot it—peradventure, presently,We’ll plant a better fortune in its place.Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me lessFor saying the thing I should not. Well I knowI should not. I have kept, as others have,The iron rule of womanly reserveIn lip and life, till now: I wept a weekBefore I came here.’—Ending, she was pale;The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous.This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck,And, only by the foam upon the bit,You saw she champed against it.Then I rose.‘I love love! truth’s no cleaner thing than love.I comprehend a love so fiery hotIt burns its natural veil of august shame,And stands sublimely in the nude, as chasteAs Medicean Venus. But I know,A love that burns through veils, will burn through masks,And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!Nay—go to the opera! your love’s curable.’

‘I love and lie?’ she said—‘I lie, forsooth?’And beat her taper foot upon the floor,And smiled against the shoe,—‘You’re hard, Miss Leigh,Unversed in current phrases.—Bowling-greensOf poets are fresher than the world’s highways;Forgive me that I rashly blew the dustWhich dims our hedges even, in your eyes,And vexed you so much. You find, probably,No evil in this marriage,—rather goodOf innocence, to pastoralise in song:You’ll give the bond your signature, perhaps,Beneath the lady’s mark,—indifferentThat Romney chose a wife, could write her name,In witnessing he loved her.’‘Loved!’ I cried;‘Who tells you that he wants a wife to love?He gets a horse to use, not love, I think:There’s work for wives as well,—and after, straw,When men are liberal. For myself, you errSupposing power in me to break this match.I could not do it, to save Romney’s life;And would not, to save mine.’‘You take it so,’She said; ‘farewell then. Write your books in peace,As far as may be for some secret stirNow obvious to me,—for, most obviously,In coming hither I mistook the way.’Whereat she touched my hand, and bent her head,And floated from me like a silent cloudThat leaves the sense of thunder.I drew breathAs hard as in a sick room. After allThis woman breaks her social system upFor love, so counted—the love possibleTo such,—and lilies are still lilies, pulledBy smutty hands, though spotted from their white;And thus she is better, haply, of her kind,Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams,And crosses out the spontaneitiesOf all his individual, personal life,With formal universals. As if manWere set upon a high stool at a desk,To keep God’s books for Him, in red and black,And feel by millions! What, if even GodWere chiefly God by living out HimselfTo an individualism of the Infinite,Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing upThe golden spray of multitudinous worldsIn measure to the proclive weight and rushOf His inner nature,—the spontaneous loveStill proof and outflow of spontaneous life?Then live, Aurora!Two hours afterward,Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone,Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,Whose wasted right hand gambled ’gainst his leftWith an old brass button, in a blot of sun,Jeered weakly at me as I passed acrossThe uneven pavement; while a woman, rougedUpon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,—‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dogYou’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!We cover up our face from doing good,As if it were our purse! What brings you here,My lady? is’t to find my gentlemanWho visits his tame pigeon in the eaves?Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,And turn your whiteness dead-blue.’ I looked up;I think I could have walked through hell that day,And never flinched. ‘The dear Christ comfort you,’I said, ‘you must have been most miserableTo be so cruel,’—and I emptied outMy purse upon the stones: when, as I had castThe last charm in the cauldron, the whole courtWent boiling, bubbling up, from all its doorsAnd windows, with a hideous wail of laughsAnd roar of oaths, and blows perhaps ... I passedToo quickly for distinguishing ... and pushedA little side-door hanging on a hinge,And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbedThe long, steep, narrow stair ’twixt broken railAnd mildewed wall that let the plaster dropTo startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up!So high lived Romney’s bride. I paused at lastBefore a low door in the roof, and knocked;There came an answer like a hurried dove—‘So soon? can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?’And as I entered, an ineffable faceMet mine upon the threshold. ‘Oh, not you,Not you!’ ... the dropping of the voice implied,‘Then, if not you, for me not any one.’I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands,And said, ‘I am his cousin,—Romney Leigh’s;And here I’m come to see my cousin too.’She touched me with her face and with her voice,This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers,From such rough roots? the people, under there,Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so ... faugh!Yet have such daughters?No wise beautifulWas Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown,But could look either, like a mist that changedAccording to being shone on more or less.The hair, too, ran its opulence of curlsIn doubt ’twixt dark and bright, nor left you clearTo name the colour. Too much hair perhaps(I’ll name a fault here) for so small a head,Which seemed to droop on that side and on this,As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight,Though not a breath should trouble it. Again,The dimple in the cheek had better goneWith redder, fuller rounds: and somewhat largeThe mouth was, though the milky little teethDissolved it to so infantine a smile!For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too,But ’twas as if remembering they had wept,And knowing they should, some day, weep again.

We talked. She told me all her story out,Which I’ll re-tell with fuller utterance,As coloured and confirmed in aftertimesBy others, and herself too. Marian ErleWas born upon the ledge of Malvern HillTo eastward, in a hut, built up at nightTo evade the landlord’s eye, of mud and turf,Still liable, if once he looked that way,To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot,Like any other anthill. Born, I say;God sent her to his world, commissioned right,Her human testimonials fully signed,Not scant in soul—complete in lineaments;But others had to swindle her a placeTo wail in when she had come. No place for her,By man’s law! born an outlaw, was this babe.Her first cry in our strange and strangling air,When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,Was wrong against the social code,—forced wrong.What business had the baby to cry there?

I tell her story and grow passionate.She, Marian, did not tell it so, but usedMeek words that made no wonder of herselfFor being so sad a creature. ‘Mister LeighConsidered truly that such things should change.Theywill, in heaven—but meantime, on the earth,There’s none can like a nettle as a pink,Except himself. We’re nettles, some of us,And give offence by the act of springing up;And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,The hoes, of course, are on us.’ So she said.Her father earned his life by random jobsDespised by steadier workmen—keeping swineOn commons, picking hops, or hurrying onThe harvest at wet seasons,—or, at need,Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a droveOf startled horses plunged into the mistBelow the mountain-road, and sowed the windWith wandering neighings. In between the gapsOf such irregular work, he drank and slept,And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,She could not buy more drink. At which she turned,(The worm) and beat her baby in revengeFor her own broken heart. There’s not a crimeBut takes its proper change out still in crime,If once rung on the counter of this world;Let sinners look to it.Yet the outcast child,For whom the very mother’s face forewentThe mother’s special patience, lived and grew;Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,With that pathetic vacillating rollOf the infant body on the uncertain feet,(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon)At which most women’s arms unclose at onceWith irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,This babe would steal off from the mother’s chair,And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,Would find some keyhole toward the secresyOf Heaven’s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out—Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,She had never heard of angels,—but to gazeShe knew not why, to see she knew not what,A-hungering outward from the barren earthFor something like a joy. She liked, she said,To dazzle black her sight against the sky,For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;She learnt God that way, and was beat for itWhenever she went home,—yet came again,As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,This skyey father and mother both in one,Instructed her and civilised her moreThan even the Sunday-school did afterward,To which a lady sent her to learn booksAnd sit upon a long bench in a rowWith other children. Well, she laughed sometimesTo see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts;But ofter she was sorrowful with noise,And wondered if their mothers beat them hard,That ever they should laugh so. There was oneShe loved indeed,—Rose Bell, a seven years’ child,So pretty and clever, who read syllablesWhen Marian was at letters;shewould laughAt nothing—hold your finger up, she laughed,Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouthTo hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster.And Rose’s pelting glee, as frank as rainOn cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,To see another merry whom she loved.She whispered once (the children side by side,With mutual arms entwined about their necks)‘Your mother lets you laugh so?’ ‘Ay,’ said Rose,‘She lets me. She was dug into the groundSix years since, I being but a yearling wean.Such mothers let us play and lose our time,And never scold nor beat us! don’t you wishYou had one like that?’ There, Marian breaking offLooked suddenly in my face. ‘Poor Rose,’ said she,‘I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.I’d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,—Poor Rose, poor Rose!’ said Marian.She resumed.It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-schoolWhat God was, what he wanted from us all,And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,To go straight home and hear her father pullThe Name down on us from the thunder-shelf,Then drink away his soul into the darkFrom seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,Were God and heaven reversed to her: the moreShe knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong;Her price paid down for knowledge, was to knowThe vileness of her kindred: through her heart,Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth,They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, ’tis hardTo learn you have a father up in heavenBy a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,Still worse than orphaned: ’tis too heavy a grief,The having to thank God for such a joy!

And so passed Marian’s life from year to year.Her parents took her with them when they tramped,Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,And once went farther and saw Manchester,And once the sea, that blue end of the world,That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,—And twice a prison,—back at intervals,Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,And stronger sometimes, holding out their handsTo pull you from the vile flats up to them;And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back,As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,They certainly felt bettered unawaresEmerging from the social smut of townsTo wipe their feet clean on the mountain-turf.In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,Endured and learned. The people on the roadsWould stop and ask her how her eyes outgrewHer cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birdsIn all that hair; and then they lifted her,The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,The butcher’s boy on horseback. Often, too,The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the headWith absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,And asked if peradventure she could read;And when she answered ‘ay,’ would toss her downSome stray odd volume from his heavy pack,A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,Or half a play of Shakspeare’s, torn across:(She had to guess the bottom of a pageBy just the top sometimes,—as difficult,As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!)Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’sSmall gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones.’Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,And oft the jangling influence jarred the childLike looking at a sunset full of graceThrough a pothouse window while the drunken oathsWent on behind her; but she weeded outHer book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,(First tore them small, that none should find a word)And made a nosegay of the sweet and goodTo fold within her breast, and pore uponAt broken moments of the noontide glare,When leave was given her to untie her cloakAnd rest upon the dusty roadside bankFrom the highway’s dust. Or oft, the journey done,Some city friend would lead her by the handTo hear a lecture at an institute:And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,To no book-learning,—she was ignorantOf authors,—not in earshot of the thingsOut-spoken o’er the heads of common men,By men who are uncommon,—but withinThe cadenced hum of such, and capableOf catching from the fringes of the windSome fragmentary phrases, here and there,Of that fine music,—which, being carried inTo her soul, had reproduced itself afreshIn finer motions of the lips and lids.

She said, in speaking of it, ‘If a flowerWere thrown you out of heaven at intervals,You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up,—And so with her.’ She counted me her years,TillIfelt old; and then she counted meHer sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.She told me she was almost glad and calmOn such and such a season; sate and sewed,With no one to break up her crystal thoughts;While rhymes from lovely poems span aroundTheir ringing circles of ecstatic tune,Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,And smile into the hedges and the clouds,And tremble if one shook her from her fitBy any blow, or word even. Out-door jobsWent ill with her; and household quiet work,She was not born to. Had they kept the north,They might have had their pennyworth out of her,Like other parents, in the factories;(Your children work for you, not you for them,Or else they better had been choked with airThe first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,Was nothing to be done with such a child,But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hoseNot ill, and was not dull at needlework;And all the country people gave her penceFor darning stockings past their natural age,And patching petticoats from old to new,And other light work done for thrifty wives.

One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day—Her mother had been badly beat, and feltThe bruises sore about her wretched soul,(That must have been): she came in suddenly,And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hairUpon her, like a sudden waterfall,And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,Outside the hut they lived in. When the childCould clear her blinded face from all that streamOf tresses ... there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes,That seemed as they would swallow her alive,Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,Saying hard between her teeth—‘Why wench, why wench,The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good;He means to set you up, and comfort us.Be mannerly at least.’ The child turned round,And looked up piteous in the mother’s face,(Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not wantAnother devil to damn, than such a look) ...‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven,‘God, free me from my mother,’ she shrieked out,‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with forceAs passionate as fear, she tore her handsLike lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,Away from both—away, if possible,As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell,She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had castThe voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fearWas running in her feet and killing the ground;The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,The green fields melted, wayside trees fell backTo make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed,Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,—The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,So sucked her forward, forward, while her heartKept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so bigIt seemed to fill her body; then it burst,And overflowed the world and swamped the light,‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle—She had dropped, she had fainted.When the sense returned,The night had passed—not life’s night. She was ’wareOf heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,The driver shouting to the lazy teamThat swung their rankling bells against her brain;While, through the waggon’s coverture and chinks,The cruel yellow morning pecked at herAlive or dead, upon the straw inside,—At which her soul ached back into the darkAnd prayed, ‘no more of that.’ A waggonerHad found her in a ditch beneath the moon,As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.At first he thought her dead; but when he had wipedThe mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,And laid her in his waggon in the straw,And so conveyed her to the distant townTo which his business called himself, and leftThat heap of misery at the hospital.

She stirred;—the place seemed new and strange as death.The white strait bed, with others strait and white,Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,And quiet people walking in and outWith wonderful low voices and soft steps,And apparitional equal care for each,Astonished her with order, silence, law:And when a gentle hand held out a cup,She took it, as you do at sacrament,Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed,To so much love as makes the form of loveAnd courtesy of manners. Delicate drinksAnd rare white bread, to which some dying eyesWere turned in observation. O my God,How sick we must be, ere we make men just!I think it frets the saints in heaven to seeHow many desolate creatures on the earthHave learnt the simple dues of fellowshipAnd social comfort, in a hospital,As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,And wished, at intervals of growing sense,She might be sicker yet, if sickness madeThe world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;For now she understood, (as such things were)How sickness ended very oft in heaven,Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,Would lose no moment of the blessed time.

She lay and seethed in fever many weeks,But youth was strong and overcame the test;Revolted soul and flesh were reconciledAnd fetched back to the necessary dayAnd daylight duties. She could creep aboutThe long bare rooms, and stare out drearilyFrom any narrow window on the street,Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,Said coldly to her, as an enemy,‘She had leave to go next week, being well enough,’While only her heart ached. ‘Go next week,’ thought she,‘Next week! how would it be with her next week,Let out into that terrible street aloneAmong the pushing people, ... to go ... where?’

One day, the last before the dreaded last,Among the convalescents, like herselfPrepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,And heard half absently the women talk,How one was famished for her baby’s cheeks—‘The little wretch would know her! a year old,And lively, like his father!’ one was keenTo get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;And one was tender for her dear goodmanWho had missed her sorely,—and one, querulous ...‘Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had daredTo talk about her as already dead,’—And one was proud ... ‘and if her sweetheart LukeHad left her for a ruddier face than hers,(The gossip would be seen through at a glance)Sweet riddance of such sweethearts—let him hang!’Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.’

And while they talked, and Marian felt the worseFor having missed the worst of all their wrongs,A visitor was ushered through the wardsAnd paused among the talkers. ‘When he looked,It was as if he spoke, and when he spokeHe sang perhaps,’ said Marian; ‘could she tell?She only knew’ (so much she had chronicled,As seraphs might, the making of the sun)‘That he who came and spake, was Romney Leigh,And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.’And when it was her turn to have the faceUpon her,—all those buzzing pallid lipsBeing satisfied with comfort—when he changedTo Marian, saying ‘Andyou? you’re going, where?’—She, moveless as a worm beneath a stoneWhich some one’s stumbling foot has spurned aside,Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,And breaking into sobs cried, ‘Where I go?None asked me till this moment. Can I sayWhereIgo? when it has not seemed worth whileTo God himself, who thinks of every one,To think of me, and fix where I shall go?’

‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lostYour father and your mother?’‘Both,’ she said,‘Both lost! my father was burnt up with ginOr ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.My mother sold me to a man last month,And so my mother’s lost, ’tis manifest.And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,As if I had caught sight of the fires of hellThrough some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)It seems I shall be lost too, presently,And so we end, all three of us.’‘Poor child!’He said,—with such a pity in his voice,It soothed her more than her own tears,—‘poor child!’Tis simple that betrayal by mother’s loveShould bring despair of God’s too. Yet be taught;He’s better to us than many mothers are,And children cannot wander beyond reachOf the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold!And if you weep still, weep where John was laidWhile Jesus loved him.’‘She could say the words,’She told me, ‘exactly as he uttered themA year back, ... since, in any doubt or dark,They came out like the stars, and shone on herWith just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;The ministers in church might say the same;Buthe, he made the church with what he spoke,—The difference was the miracle,’ said she.

Then catching up her smile to ravishment,She added quickly, ‘I repeat his words,But not his tones: can any one repeatThe music of an organ, out of church?And when he said ‘poor child,’ I shut my eyesTo feel how tenderly his voice broke through,As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feetTo let out the rich medicative nard.’

She told me how he had raised and rescued herWith reverent pity, as, in touching grief,He touched the wounds of Christ,—and made her feelMore self-respecting. Hope, he called, beliefIn God,—work, worship ... therefore let us pray!And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,And keep it stainless from her mother’s face,He sent her to a famous sempstress-houseFar off in London, there to work and hope.

With that, they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,But not of Romney. He had good to doTo others: through the days and through the nights,She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,And wondered, while, along the tawny light,She struck the new thread into her needle’s eye,How people, without mothers on the hills,Could choose the town to live in!—then she drewThe stitch, and mused how Romney’s face would look,And if ’twere likely he’d remember hers,When they two had their meeting after death.

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