FOOTNOTES:

"So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,This Duke would fain know he was, without being it."

It was a renaissance in full blast! All the "thoroughly worn-out" usages were revived:

"The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."

The "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its origins; and the Duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs and length, all speed, no strength:

"They should have set him on red Berold,Mad with pride, like fire to manage! . . .With the red eye slow consuming in fire,And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!"

Thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. He preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty Berold"; he drank "weak French wine for strong Cotnar" . . . anything in the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations.

"Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:And out of a convent, at the word,Came the lady in time of spring.—Oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!"

Spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo:

"And so we saw the lady arrive;My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!She was the smallest lady alive,Made in a piece of Nature's madness,Too small, almost, for the life and gladnessThat over-filled her."

She rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle, where the Duke awaited her.

"Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,Straight at the castle, that's best indeedTo look at from outside the walls"

—and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and thralls," as of course they were styled. She gave our huntsman a look of gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked Max, who rode on her other hand, thename of every bird that flew past: "Was that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?"

Thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the Italian duchess—but sheisthe same!), the little lady rode forward:

"When suddenly appeared the Duke."

She sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. But the Duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." The sick tall yellow Duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky sullied by a chill wind,

"The lady's face stopped its play,As if her first hair had grown grey;For such things must begin some one day."

But the brave spirit survived. In a day or two she was well again, as if she could not believe that God did not mean her to be content and glad in His sight. "So, smiling as at first went she." She was filled to the brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman—and this huntsman, who hashada beloved wife, knows what he is saying.

"She was active, stirring, all fire—Could not rest, could not tire—To a stone she might have given life! . . .And here was plenty to be done,And she that could do it, great or small,She was to do nothing at all."

For the castle was crammed with retainers, and the Duke's plan permitted a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and out of it:

"To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seenAt the proper place, in the proper minute,And die away the life between."

The little Duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the Italian girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. It was amusing enough (the old huntsman remembers)—but for the grief that followed after. For she did not submit easily. Having broken the rules, she would find fault with them! She would advise and criticise, and "being a fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. But "the wise" only smiled. It was as if a little mechanical toy should be contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantlymakeit. Thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic, for like the Duke at Ferrara, this Duke (and his mother) did not choose to stoop.Hewould merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's claws."

"So the little lady grew silent and thin,Paling and ever paling."

Then all smiles stopped together. . . And the Duke, perceiving, said to himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way to deal with it.

Like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a little more than he can stand—but, unlike the envoy, he can express himself. The old man soothes him down: "Don't swear, friend!" and goes on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many a year,

"And the Duke's self . . . you shall hear."

"Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,A drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice,"

it chanced that the Duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season (he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"), found that a hunting party was indicated:

"Always provided, old books showed the way of it!"

Poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters. The serfs and thralls were duly dressed up,

"And oh, the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!"

But when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots" had subsided, the Duke turned his attention to the Duchess's part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly announced that he had discovered her function. An old book stated it:

"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,And with water to wash the hands of her liegeIn a clean ewer with a fair toweling,Let her preside at the disemboweling."

All was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed—and only then, on the day before the party, was the Duke's pleasure signified to his lady.

And the little Duchess—paler and paler every day—said she would not go! Her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their long lashes, as if too weary even forhimto light them; and she duly acknowledged his forethought for her,

"But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,Of the weight by day and the watch by night,And much wrong now that used to be right;"

and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling."

But everything was arranged! The Duke was nettled. Still she persisted: it was hardly the time . . .

The huntsman knew what took place that day in the Duchess's room, because Jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside on the balcony, and since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, the casement that Jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep through also.

Well, the Duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a smile that partook of the awful," turned the Duchess over to his mother to learn her duty, and hear the truth. She learned it all, she heard it all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her whiskers," passed out, and the Duke, who had waited to hear the lecture, passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like Nero or Saladin—at any rate, he showed a very stiff back.

However, next day the company mustered. The weather was execrable—fog that you might cut with an axe; and the Duke rode out "in a perfect sulkiness." But suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the courtyard arch, he saw a troop of Gipsies on their march, coming with the annual gifts to the castle. For every year, in this North land, the Gipsies come to give "presents" to the Dukes—presents for which an equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming.

And marvellous the "presents" are! These Gipsies can do anything with the earth, the ore,the sand. Snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a swivel, bells for the sheep . . . all these are good, but what they can do with sand!

"Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,As if in pure water you dropped and let dieA bruised black-blooded mulberry."

And then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads distinct inside."

These are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the castle from the valley. So they trooped this morning; and when they reached the fosse, all stopped but one:

"The oldest Gipsy then above ground."

This witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew her well. Every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit—yet here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no use now but to gather brine."

She sidled up to the Duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual acknowledgment. But the Duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her; in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. At last she said in her "level whine," that as well as to bringthe presents, she had come to pay her duty to "the new Duchess, the youthful beauty." As she said that, an idea came to the Duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face. Supposing he setthisold woman to teach her, as the other had failed? What could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his fortunate Duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone? He turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the Gipsy's ear. The huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude of the "new Duchess." And the Gipsy listened submissively. Her mouth tightened, her brow brightened—it was as if she were promising to give the lady a thorough frightening. The Duke just showed her a purse—and then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower," that she might wile away an hour for her:

"Whose mind and body craved exertion,And yet shrank from all better diversion."

And then the Duke rode off.

Now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can simply accept and understandit—leaving the rest to the "Browningites," of whom Browning declared thathewas not.

The huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him—a little distrustful of her since that interview with the Duke—saw something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. She looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily, no stooping nor hobbling—above all, no cringing! She was wholly changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen. But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from their places—as a snail's horns come out after rain. . . . He accepted all this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and took the Gipsy to Jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door.

"And Jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one,For since last night, by the same token,Not a single word had the lady spoken."

The two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the weather."

Jacynth never could tell him afterwardshowshe came to fall soundly asleep all of a sudden. But she did so fall asleep, and so remained the whole time through. He, on the balcony, was following the hunt across the open country—for in those days he had a falcon eye—when, all in a moment, his ear was arrested by

"Was it singing, or was it saying,Or a strange musical instrument playing?"

It came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain, and—first—saw Jacynth "in a rosy sleep along the floor with her head against the door." And in the middle of the room, on the seat of state,

"Was a queen—the Gipsy woman late!"

She was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. That old woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining. She was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion—and the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's face.

"For it was life her eyes were drinking . . .Life's pure fire, received without shrinking,Into the heart and breast whose heavingTold you no single drop they were leaving."

The life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose over each shoulder,

"And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,Moving to the mystic measure,Bounding as the bosom bounded."

He stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." But all at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion:

"And I kept time to the wondrous chime,Making out words and prose and rhyme,Till it seemed that the music furledIts wings like a task fulfilled, and droppedFrom under the words it first had propped."

He could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"—and the Gipsy said:

"And so at last we find my tribe,And so I set thee in the midst . . .I trace them the vein and the other veinThat meet on thy brow and part again,Making our rapid mystic mark;And I bid my people prove and probeEach eye's profound and glorious globeTill they detect the kindred sparkIn those depths so dear and dark . . .And on that round young cheek of thineI make them recognise the tinge . . .For so I prove thee, to one and all,Fit, when my people ope their breast,To see the sign, and hear the call,And take the vow, and stand the testWhich adds one more child to the rest—When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,And the world is left outside."

There would be probation (said the Gipsy), and many trials for the lady if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it:

"So, trial after trial past,Wilt thou fall at the very lastBreathless, half in tranceWith the thrill of the great deliverance,Into our arms for evermore;And thou shalt know, those arms once curledAbout thee, what we knew before,How love is the only good in the world.Henceforth be loved as heart can love,Or brain devise, or hand approve!Stand up, look below,It is our life at thy feet we throwTo step with into light and joy;Not a power of life but we employTo satisfy thy nature's want."

The Gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will do more than the world has done"—and the tribewill at least approach that end with this beloved woman. She says nothow—whether by one man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or byhergiving "her wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway. . . .

"I foresee and I could foretellThy future portion, sure and well;But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,Let them say what thou shalt do!"

But whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with their blame, their praise:

"Our shame to feel, our pride to show,Glad, angry—but indifferent, no!"

And so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old age—will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul" . . . and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be like the ending of a dream, when

"Death, with the might of his sunbeam,Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes."

With that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. The music began again, the words grew indistinguishable . . . with a snap the charm broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised afresh that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the ground, and hurriedround to the portal. . . . In another minute he would have entered:

"When the door opened, and more than mortalStood, with a face where to my mind centredAll beauties I ever saw or shall see,The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.She was so different, happy and beautiful,I felt at once that all was best" . . .

And he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. But there was, in fact, no commanding. Looking on the beauty that had invested her, "the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she wanted—like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild creature's bidding was. . . . He went before her to the stable; she followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last—sunk back into her former self,

"Like a blade sent home to its scabbard."

He saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little Duchess to the castle—the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile from her. And he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and knew that he would do anything in the world for her. But when he began to saddle his own nag ("of Berold's begetting")—not meaning to be obtrusive—she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of the head. . . .Well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the Gipsy behind her—and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready whenever God should please that she needed him. . . . And she looked down

"With a look, a look that placed a crown on me,"

and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand . . . not a purse! If it had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone home, kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned himself—but it was not a purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each other in a convent:

"This, see, which at my breast I wear,Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment)And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.And then—and then—to cut short—this is idle,These are feelings it is not good to foster.I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,And the palfrey bounded—and so we lost her."

There is the story of the Flight of the Duchess; and it seems to me to need no "explanation" at all. The Gipsy can be anyone or anything we like thatsavesus; the Duke and his mother anyone or anything that crushes love.

"Love is the only good in the world."

And the love (though itmaybe)neednot be the love of man for woman, and woman for man; but simply love. The quick warm impulse which made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home, and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the name of every bird—the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere" . . . what was all this but love? The tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. And love was neither given nor accepted from her. Worse, it was scorned; it was not "fitting." All she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing, nothing else—

"And die away the life between."

And then came the time when, like Pompilia, she had "something she must care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! Not even when she pleaded the hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for the coming child. And then the long, spiteful lecture. . . . That night, even to Jacynth, not a word could she utter. Here was a world without love, a world that did not want her—andshewas here, and she must stay, until, until . . . Whichwould the coming child be—herself again, orhimagain? Scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening.

And then Love walked in upon her. She was "of their tribe"—they wanted her; they wanted all she was. Just what she was; she would not have to change; they wanted her. They liked her eyes, and the colour on her cheek—they likedher. Her eyes might look at them, and "speak true," for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes.

It is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! It is the self-realisation of a nature that can love. And this is but one way of telling the great tale. Browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his ears of "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!"—and to all of us, the Gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for nourishment of heart and soul. But we need not follow only them to compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." We need but know, as the little Duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it.Sheplaced the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love.

"And so at last we find my tribe,And so I set thee in the midst . . .Henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . .It is our life at thy feet we throwTo step with into light and joy."

The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage—needed swift decision—needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . And that she heard aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives not, we know from the old huntsman:

"For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;So they made no search and small inquiry";

and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.

Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn adorer. He had stayed at the castle:

"I must see this fellow his sad life through—He is our Duke, after all,And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";

—but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear the last news of her:

"And when that's told me, what's remaining?"

For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard for his explaining, and so hehopes to find a snug corner under some hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer be cast before swine that can't value them. "Amen."

But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there—just as one likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.

And is it not good to think that almost immediately afterThe Flight of the Duchesswas published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted woman whomhesnatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill to read those lines of silenced prophecy:

"I foresee and I could foretellThy future portion, sure and well:But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,Let them say what thou shalt do!"

[166:1]The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded" (says Vernon Lee, in herStudies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy) "in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."

The Lover

Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life—the thing which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general outlook—more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his passion for humanityashumanity. It gives him but moderate joy to trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let us take them for granted—let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches—a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in expression of our subtlest inward life. Manwas, for him, the proper study of mankind; of all greatpoets, he was the most "social," and that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit—differing there from Byron, almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature." Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook; and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.

In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for flabbiness—there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker ways. AfterPauline—rejected utterance of his green-sickness—the wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up, "as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeeddo allfor us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted, but noclaimshall be formulated on either side. This is the true faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more axiomatically than Browning ever said it:

"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"

—but Browning's whole existence announced thataxiom, and triumphantly proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such washismarriage, and such it must have been, for never was man declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!) conduct—what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far hinders it—when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for Browning, lay in loving greatly.

Thus, for example, it is notable that, exceptThe LaboratoryandFifine at the Fair, none of his poems of men and women turns upon jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (inFifine), even the departure from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be (she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be deep and true as well as brilliant.

For Browning,howlove comes is not important. It may be by the high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our dearest memory.

"What is he buzzing in my ears?'Now that I come to die,Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'Ah, reverend sir, not I!"

And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man "used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again—the "suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it were, with the bottles on the bedside table.

"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,There watched for me, one June,A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,My poor mind's out of tune."

Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,'"

"And stole from stair to stair,And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!We loved, Sir—used to meet:How sad and mad and bad it was—But then, how it was sweet!"

"And stole from stair to stair,

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!We loved, Sir—used to meet:How sad and mad and bad it was—But then, how it was sweet!"

They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other "confession"—if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life: that is all.

InConfessions, the story is done; the man is dying. InLove among the Ruins, we have almost the greatmoment itself. The lover, alone, is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of "a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace," a wall with a hundred gates—its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:

"And such glory and perfection, see, of grassNever was"

—as here,

"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woeLong ago;Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shameStruck them tame;And that glory and that shame alike, the goldBought and sold."

Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows

"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hairWaits me thereIn the turret whence the charioteers caught soulFor the goal,When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumbTill I come."

That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its temples and colonnades,

"All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts—and thenAll the men!When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,Either handOn my shoulder, give her eyes the first embraceOf my face,Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speechEach on each."

A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a thousand chariots in reserve—all gold, of course. . . .

"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!Earth's returnsFor whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.Shut them inWith their triumphs and their glories and the rest!Love is best!"

But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all; we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us, even from our love. The day is long and we must work init; but we can meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand at the other side of the bay:

"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;Three fields to cross till a farm appears;A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratchAnd blue spurt of a lighted match,And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

Yes—we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.

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