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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Third Book</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'TO-DAY thou girdest up thy loins thyself,<br>And goest where thou wouldest: presently<br>Others shall gird thee,' said the Lord, 'to go<br>Where thou would'st not.' He spoke to Peter thus,<br>To signify the death which he should die<br>When crucified head downwards.<br> If He spoke<br>To Peter then, He speaks to us the same;<br>The word suits many different martyrdoms,<br>And signifies a multiform of death,<br>Although we scarcely die apostles, we,<br>And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">For tis not in mere death that men die most;<br>And, after our first girding of the loins<br>In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,<br>To run up hill and meet the rising sun,<br>We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,<br>While others gird us with the violent bands<br>Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,<br>Reversing our straight nature, lifting up<br>Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,<br>Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.<br>Yet He can pluck us from the shameful cross.<br>God, set our feet low and our forehead high,<br>And show us how a man was made to walk!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed.<br>The room does very well; I have to write<br>Beyond the stroke of midnight. Get away;<br>Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,<br>Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them down<br>At once, as I must have them, to be sure,<br>Whether I bid you never bring me such<br>At such an hour, or bid you. No excuse.<br>You choose to bring them, as I choose perhaps<br>To throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed,<br>And dream, if possible, I am not cross.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,–<br>A mere, mere woman,–a mere flaccid nerve,-<br>A kerchief left out all night in the rain,<br>Turned soft so,–overtasked and overstrained<br>And overlived in this close London life!<br>And yet I should be stronger.<br> Never burn<br>Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare<br>With red seals from the table, saying each,<br>'Here's something that you know not.' Out alas,<br>'Tis scarcely that the world's more good and wise<br>Or even straighter and more consequent<br>Since yesterday at this time–yet, again,<br>If but one angel spoke from Ararat,<br>I should be very sorry not to hear:<br>So open all the letters! let me read.<br>Blanche Ord, the writer in the 'Lady's Fan,'<br>Requests my judgment on . . that, afterwards.<br>Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,<br>And signs, 'Elisha to you.' Pringle Sharpe<br>Presents his work on 'Social Conduct,' . . craves<br>A little money for his pressing debts . .<br>From me, who scarce have money for my needs,–<br>Art's fiery chariot which we journey in<br>Being apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,<br>Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!<br>Here's Rudgely knows it,–editor and scribe–<br>He's 'forced to marry where his heart is not,<br>Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.'<br>Ah,–lost it because no one picked it up!<br>That's really loss! (and passable impudence.)<br>My critic Hammond flatters prettily,<br>And wants another volume like the last.<br>My critic Belfair wants another book<br>Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?)<br>A striking book, yet not a startling book,<br>The public blames originalities.<br>(You must not pump spring-water unawares<br>Upon a gracious public, full of nerves–)<br>Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,<br>As easy reading as the dog-eared page<br>That's fingered by said public, fifty years,<br>Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,<br>And yet a revelation in some sort:<br>That's hard, my critic, Belfair! So–what next?<br>My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;<br>'Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,' says he,<br>'And do not prate so of humanities:'<br>Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.<br>My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,<br>Because a cheerful genius suits the times,<br>And all true poets laugh unquenchably<br>Like Shakspeare and the gods. That's very hard,<br>The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled<br>With such a needy heart on two pale lips,<br>We cry, 'Weep rather, Dante.' Poems are<br>Men, if true poems: and who dares exclaim<br>At any man's door, 'Here, 'tis probable<br>The thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,<br>And scared a sickly husband–what of that?<br>Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,<br>Because a cheerful genius suits the times–'?<br>None says so to the man,–and why indeed<br>Should any to the poem? A ninth seal;<br>The apocalypse is drawing to a close.<br>Ha,–this from Vincent Carrington,–'Dear friend,<br>I want good counsel. Will you lend me wings<br>To raise me to the subject, in a sketch<br>I'll bring to-morrow–may I? at eleven?<br>A poet's only born to turn to use;<br>So save you! for the world . . and Carrington.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh,<br>Beyond what's said of him in newspapers,<br>His phalansteries there, his speeches here,<br>His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?<br>He dropped me long ago; but no one drops<br>A golden apple–though, indeed, one day,<br>You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least,<br>You know Lord Howe, who sees him . . whom he sees,<br>And you see, and I hate to see,–for Howe<br>Stands high upon the brink of theories,<br>Observes the swimmers, and cries 'Very fine,'<br>But keeps dry linen equally,–unlike<br>That gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is,<br>Such sudden madness, seizing a young man,<br>To make earth over again,–while I'm content<br>To make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch.<br>A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot:<br>Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing Jove<br>Halfway, and burn him faster down; the face<br>And breasts upturned and straining, the loose locks<br>All glowing with the anticipated gold.<br>Or here's another on the self-same theme.<br>She lies here–flat upon her prison-floor,<br>The long hair swathed about her to the heel,<br>Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her through<br>The glittering haze of that prodigious rain,<br>Half blotted out of nature by a love<br>As heavy as fate. I'll bring you either sketch.<br>I think, myself, the second indicates<br>More passion. '<br> Surely. Self is put away,<br>And calm with abdication. She is Jove,<br>And no more Danae–greater thus. Perhaps<br>The painter symbolises unawares<br>Two states of the recipient artist-soul;<br>One, forward, personal, wanting reverence,<br>Because aspiring only. We'll be calm,<br>And know that, when indeed our Joves come down.<br>We all turn stiller than we have ever been.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Kind Vincent Carrington. I'll let him come.<br>He talks of Florence,–and may say a word<br>Of something as it chanced seven years ago,–<br>A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird,<br>In those green country walks, in that good time,<br>When certainly I was so miserable . .<br>I seem to have missed a blessing ever since.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The music soars within the little lark,<br>And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.<br>We do not make our places with our strains,–<br>Content, while they rise, to remain behind,<br>Alone on earth instead of so in heaven.<br>No matter–I bear on my broken tale.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,<br>I took a chamber up three flights of stairs<br>Not far from being as steep as some larks climb,<br>And, in a certain house in Kensington,<br>Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work<br>In this world,–'tis the best you get at all;<br>For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts<br>Than men in benediction. God says, 'Sweat<br>For foreheads;' men say 'crowns;' and so we are crowned,<br>Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel<br>Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work; get work;<br>Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So, happy and unafraid of solitude,<br>I worked the short days out,–and watched the sun<br>On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,<br>Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass,<br>With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,<br>In which the blood of wretches pent inside<br>Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,–<br>Push out through fog with his dilated disk,<br>And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots<br>With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw<br>Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,<br>Involve the passive city, strangle it<br>Alive, and draw it off into the void,<br>Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge<br>Had wiped out London,–or as noon and night<br>Had clapped together and utterly struck out<br>The intermediate time, undoing themselves<br>In the act. Your city poets see such things,<br>Not despicable. Mountains of the south,<br>When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,<br>They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,<br>Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,<br>Descending Sinai; on Parnassus mount,<br>You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,<br>Except in fable and figure: forests chant<br>Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.<br>But sit in London, at the day's decline,<br>And view the city perish in the mist<br>Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,–<br>The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,<br>Sucked down and choked to silence–then, surprised<br>By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,<br>You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,<br>And you and Israel's other singing girls,<br>Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I worked with patience which means almost power<br>I did some excellent things indifferently,<br>Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,<br>The latter loudest. And by such a time<br>That I myself had set them down as sins<br>Scarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week,<br>Arrived some letter through the sedulous post,<br>Like these I've read, and yet dissimilar,<br>With pretty maiden seals,–initials twined<br>Of lilies, or a heart marked Emily,<br>(Convicting Emily of being all heart);<br>Or rarer tokens from young bachelors,<br>Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,<br>Suppose, they had been just plucked of) and a snatch<br>From Horace, 'Collegisse juvat,' set<br>Upon the first page. Many a letter signed<br>Or unsigned, showing the writers at eighteen<br>Had lived too long, though every muse should help<br>The daylight, holding candles,–compliments,<br>To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with me<br>No more than coins from Moscow circulate<br>At Paris. Would ten rubles buy a tag<br>Of ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou?<br>I smiled that all this youth should love me,–sighed<br>That such a love could scarcely raise them up<br>To love what was more worthy than myself;<br>Then sighed again, again, less generously,<br>To think the very love they lavished so,<br>Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not,<br>And he . . my cousin Romney . . did not write.<br>I felt the silent finger of his scorn<br>Prick every bubble of my frivolous fame<br>As my breath blew it, and resolve it back<br>To the air it came from. Oh, I justified<br>The measure he had taken of my height:<br>The thing was plain–he was not wrong a line;<br>I played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword,<br>Amused the lads and maidens.<br> Came a sigh<br>Deep, hoarse with resolution,–I would work<br>To better ends, or play in earnest. 'Heavens,<br>I think I should be almost popular<br>If this went on!'–I ripped my verses up,<br>And found no blood upon the rapier's point:<br>The heart in them was just an embryo's heart,<br>Which never yet had beat, that it should die:<br>Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;<br>Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,<br>Like those hot fire-seeds of creation held<br>In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown;<br>But I–I was not Juno even! my hand<br>Was shut in weak convulsion, woman's ill,<br>And when I yearned to loose a finger–lo,<br>The nerve revolted. 'Tis the same even now:<br>This hand may never, haply, open large,<br>Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred,<br>To prove the power not else than by the pain.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">It burns, it burnt–my whole life burnt with it,<br>And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashed<br>My steps out through the slow and difficult road.<br>I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs,<br>The season's books in drear significance<br>Of morals, dropping round me. Lively books?<br>The ash has livelier verdure than the yew;<br>And yet the yew's green longer, and alone<br>Found worthy of the holy Christmas time.<br>We'll plant more yews if possible, albeit<br>We plant the graveyards with them.<br> Day and night<br>I worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed up<br>Both watch and slumber with long lines of life<br>Which did not suit their season. The rose fell<br>From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous<br>Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse<br>Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist<br>Like a shot bird. Youth's stern, set face to face<br>With youth's ideal: and when people came<br>And said, 'You work too much, you are looking ill,'<br>I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,<br>And thought I should be better soon perhaps<br>For those ill looks. Observe–' I,' means in youth<br>Just I . . the conscious and eternal soul<br>With all its ends,–and not the outside life,<br>The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,<br>The so much liver, lung, integument,<br>Which make the sum of 'I' hereafter, when<br>World-talkers talk of doing well or ill.<br>I prosper, if I gain a step, although<br>A nail then pierced my foot: although my brain<br>Embracing any truth, froze paralysed,<br>I prosper. I but change my instrument;<br>I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,<br>And catch the mattock up.<br> I worked on, on.<br>Through all the bristling fence of nights and days<br>Which hedges time in from the eternities,<br>I struggled, . . never stopped to note the stakes<br>Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil<br>Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:<br>I had to live, that therefore I might work.<br>And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,<br>To work with one hand for the booksellers,<br>While working with the other for myself<br>And art. You swim with feet as well as hands<br>Or make small way. I apprehended this,–<br>In England, no one lives by verse that lives;<br>And, apprehending, I resolved by prose<br>To make a space to sphere my living verse.<br>I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,<br>And weekly papers, holding up my name<br>To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use<br>Of the editorial 'we' in a review,<br>As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,<br>And swept it grandly through the open doors<br>As if one could not pass through doors at all<br>Save so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,<br>Carved many an article on cherry-stones<br>To suit light readers,–something in the lines<br>Revealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,<br>But that, I'll never vouch for. What you do<br>For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,<br>Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,–<br>Much less in Nephelococcygia,<br>As mine was, peradventure.<br> Having bread<br>For just so many days, just breathing room<br>For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked<br>My veritable work. And as the soul<br>Which grows within a child, makes the child grow,–<br>Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,<br>Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,<br>And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes<br>The summer foliage out in a green flame–<br>So life, in deepening with me, deepened all<br>The course I took, the work I did. Indeed,<br>The academic law convinced of sin;<br>The critics cried out on the falling off<br>Regretting the first manner. But I felt<br>My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show<br>It lived, it also–certes incomplete,<br>Disordered with all Adam in the blood,<br>But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,<br>Still organised by, and implying life.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A lady called upon me on such a day.<br>She had the low voice of your English dames,<br>Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note<br>To catch attention,–and their quiet mood,<br>As if they lived too high above the earth<br>For that to put them out in anything:<br>So gentle, because verily so proud;<br>So wary and afeared of hurting you,<br>By no means that you are not really vile,<br>But that they would not touch you with their foot<br>To push you to your place; so self-possessed<br>Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes<br>An effort in their presence to speak truth:<br>You know the sort of woman,–brilliant stuff,<br>And out of nature. 'Lady Waldemar.'<br>She said her name quite simply, as if it meant<br>Not much indeed, but something,–took my hands,<br>And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,<br>And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.<br>'Is this,' she said, 'the Muse?'<br> 'No sibyl even,'<br>I answered, 'since she fails to guess the cause<br>Which taxed you with this visit, madam.'<br> 'Good,'<br>She said, 'I like to be sincere at once;<br>Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,<br>The visit might have taxed me. As it is,<br>You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,<br>My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,<br>It comforts me entirely for your fame,<br>As well as for the trouble of my ascent<br>To this Olympus. '<br> There, a silver laugh<br>Ran rippling through her quickened little breaths<br>The steep stair somewhat justified.<br> 'But still<br>Your ladyship has left me curious why<br>You dared the risk of finding the said Muse?'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'Ah,–keep me, notwithstanding, to the point<br>Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyes<br>As awful as in stockings, after all,<br>I wonder, that you'd have my business out<br>Before I breathe–exact the epic plunge<br>In spite of gasps? Well, naturally you think<br>I've come here, as the lion-hunters go<br>To deserts, to secure you, with a trap<br>For exhibition in my drawing-rooms<br>On zoologic soirées? Not in the least.<br>Roar softly at me; I am frivolous,<br>I dare say; I have played at lions, too<br>Like other women of my class,–but now<br>I meet my lion simply as Androcles<br>Met his . . when at his mercy.'<br> So, she bent<br>Her head, as queens may mock,–then lifting up<br>Her eyelids with a real grave queenly look,<br>Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself,<br>'I think you have a cousin:–Romney Leigh.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'You bring a word from him? '–my eyes leapt up<br>To the very height of hers,– 'a word from him? '</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'I bring a word about him, actually.<br>But first,'–she pressed me with her urgent eyes–<br>'You do not love him,–you?'<br> 'You're frank at least<br>In putting questions, madam,' I replied.<br>'I love my cousin cousinly–no more.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'I guessed as much. I'm ready to be frank<br>In answering also, if you'll question me,<br>Or even with something less. You stand outside,<br>You artist women, of the common sex;<br>You share not with us, and exceed us so<br>Perhaps by what you're mulcted in, your hearts<br>Being starved to make your heads: so run the old<br>Traditions of you. I can therefore speak,<br>Without the natural shame which creatures feel<br>When speaking on their level, to their like.<br>There's many a papist she, would rather die<br>Than own to her maid she put a ribbon on<br>To catch the indifferent eye of such a man,–<br>Who yet would count adulteries on her beads<br>At holy Mary's shrine, and never blush;<br>Because the saints are so far off, we lose<br>All modesty before them. Thus, to-day.<br>'Tis I, love Romney Leigh.'<br> 'Forbear,' I cried.<br>'If here's no muse, still less is any saint;<br>Nor even a friend, that Lady Waldemar<br>Should make confessions' . .<br> 'That's unkindly said.<br>If no friend, what forbids to make a friend<br>To join to our confession ere we have done?<br>I love your cousin. If it seems unwise<br>To say so, it's still foolisher (we're frank)<br>To feel so. My first husband left me young,<br>And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,<br>To keep my booth in May-fair with the rest<br>To happy issues. There are marquises<br>Would serve seven years to call me wife, I know:<br>And, after seven, I might consider it,<br>For there's some comfort in a marquisate<br>When all's said,–yes, but after the seven years;<br>I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip,<br>So like a Leigh! so like him!–Pardon me,<br>I am well aware I do not derogate<br>In loving Romney Leigh. The name is good,<br>The means are excellent; but the man, the man–<br>Heaven help us both,–I am near as mad as he<br>In loving such an one.'<br> She slowly wrung<br>Her heavy ringlets till they touched her smile,<br>As reasonably sorry for herself;<br>And thus continued,–<br> 'Of a truth, Miss Leigh,<br>I have not, without a struggle, come to this.<br>I took a master in the German tongue,<br>I gamed a little, went to Paris twice;<br>But, after all, this love! . . . you eat of love,<br>And do as vile a thing as if you ate<br>Of garlic–which, whatever else you eat,<br>Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peach<br>Reminds you of your onion! Am I coarse?<br>Well, love's coarse, nature's coarse–ah there's the rub!<br>We fair fine ladies, who park out our lives<br>From common sheep-paths, cannot help the crows<br>From flying over,–we're as natural still<br>As Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectly<br>In Lyons' velvet,–we are not, for that,<br>Lay-figures, like you! we have hearts within,<br>Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,<br>As ready for distracted ends and acts<br>As any distressed sempstress of them all<br>That Romney groans and toils for. We catch love<br>And other fevers, in the vulgar way.<br>Love will not be outwitted by our wit,<br>Nor outrun by our equipages:–mine<br>Persisted, spite of efforts. All my cards<br>Turned up but Romney Leigh; my German stopped<br>At germane Wertherism; my Paris rounds<br>Returned me from the Champs Elysées just<br>A ghost, and sighing like Dido's. I came home<br>Uncured,–convicted rather to myself<br>Of being in love . . in love! That's coarse you'll say<br>I'm talking garlic.'<br> Coldly I replied.<br>'Apologise for atheism, not love!<br>For, me, I do believe in love, and God.<br>I know my cousin: Lady Waldemar<br>I know not: yet I say as much as this–<br>Whoever loves him, let her not excuse<br>But cleanse herself; that, loving such a man,<br>She may not do it with such unworthy love<br>He cannot stoop and take it.'<br> 'That is said<br>Austerely, like a youthful prophetess,<br>Who knits her brows across her pretty eyes<br>To keep them back from following the grey flight<br>Of doves between the temple-columns. Dear,<br>Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.<br>I'm a mere woman–the more weak perhaps<br>Through being so proud; you're better; as for him,<br>He's best. Indeed he builds his goodness up<br>So high, it topples down to the other side,<br>And makes a sort of badness; there's the worst<br>I have to say against your cousin's best!<br>And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,<br>For his sake, if not mine.'<br> 'I own myself<br>Incredulous of confidence like this<br>Availing him or you.'<br> 'I, worthy of him?<br>In your sense I am not so–let it pass.<br>And yet I save him if I marry him;<br>Let that pass too.'<br> 'Pass, pass, we play police<br>Upon my cousin's life, to indicate<br>What may or may not pass?' I cried. 'He knows<br>what's worthy of him; the choice remains with him;<br>And what he chooses, act or wife, I think<br>I shall not call unworthy, I, for one.'<br>'Tis somewhat rashly said,' she answered slow.<br>Now let's talk reason, though we talk of love.<br>Your cousin Romney Leigh's a monster! there,<br>The word's out fairly; let me prove the fact.<br>We'll take, say, that most perfect of antiques,<br>They call the Genius of the Vatican,<br>Which seems too beauteous to endure itself<br>In this mixed world, and fasten it for once<br>Upon the torso of the Drunken Fawn,<br>(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,)<br>Instead of Buonarroti's mask: what then?<br>We show the sort of monster Romney is,<br>With god-like virtue and heroic aims<br>Subjoined to limping possibilities<br>Of mismade human nature. Grant the man<br>Twice godlike, twice heroic,–still he limps,<br>And here's the point we come to.'<br> 'Pardon me,<br>But, Lady Waldemar, the point's the thing<br>We never come to.'<br> 'Caustic, insolent<br>At need! I like you'–(there, she took my hands)<br>'And now my lioness, help Androcles,<br>For all your roaring. Help me! for myself<br>I would not say so–but for him. He limps<br>So certainly, he'll fall into the pit<br>A week hence,–so I lose him–so he is lost!<br>And when he's fairly married, he a Leigh,<br>To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth,<br>Starved out in London, till her coarse-grained hands<br>Are whiter than her morals,–you, for one,<br>May call his choice most worthy.'<br> 'Married! lost!<br>He, . . . Romney!'<br> 'Ah, you're moved at last,' she said.<br>'These monsters, set out in the open sun,<br>Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who think<br>Awry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he?<br>And who but you can wonder? He has been mad,<br>The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man,<br>He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen's wits,<br>With equal scorn of triangles and wine,<br>And took no honours, yet was honourable.<br>They'll tell you he lost count of Homer's ships<br>In Melbourne's poor-bills, Ashley's factory bills,–<br>Ignored the Aspasia we all dared to praise,<br>For other women, dear, we could not name<br>Because we're decent. Well, he had some right<br>On his side probably; men always have,<br>Who go absurdly wrong. The living boor<br>Who brews your ale, exceeds in vital worth<br>Dead Caesar who 'stops bungholes' in the cask;<br>And also, to do good is excellent,<br>For persons of his income, even to boors:<br>I sympathise with all such things. But he<br>Went mad upon them . . madder and more mad,<br>From college times to these,–as, going down hill,<br>The faster still, the farther! you must know<br>Your Leigh by heart; he has sown his black young curls<br>With bleaching cares of half a million men<br>Already. If you do not starve, or sin,<br>You're nothing to him. Pay the income-tax,<br>And break your heart upon't . . . he'll scarce be touched;<br>But come upon the parish, qualified<br>For the parish stocks, and Romney will be there<br>To call you brother, sister, or perhaps<br>A tenderer name still. Had I any chance<br>With Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar,<br>And never committed felony?'<br> 'You speak<br>Too bitterly,' I said, 'for the literal truth.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'The truth is bitter. Here's a man who looks<br>For ever on the ground! you must be low;<br>Or else a pictured ceiling overhead,<br>Good painting thrown away. For me, I've done<br>What women may, (we're somewhat limited,<br>We modest women) but I've done my best.<br>–How men are perjured when they swear our eyes<br>Have meaning in them! they're just blue or brown,–<br>They just can drop their lids a little. In fact,<br>Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through,<br>Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc<br>With various other of his socialists;<br>And if I had been a fathom less in love,<br>Had cured myself with gaping. As it was,<br>I quoted from them prettily enough,<br>Perhaps, to make them sound half rational<br>To a saner man than he, whene'er we talked,<br>(For which I dodged occasion)–learnt by heart<br>His speeches in the Commons and elsewhere<br>Upon the social question; heaped reports<br>Of wicked women and penitentiaries,<br>On all my tables, with a place for Sue;<br>And gave my name to swell subscription-lists<br>Toward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven,<br>And other possible ends. All things I did,<br>Except the impossible . . such as wearing gowns<br>Provided by the Ten Hours' movement! there,<br>I stopped–we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile,<br>Unmoved as the Indian tortoise 'neath the world<br>Let all that noise go on upon his back;<br>He would not disconcert or throw me out;<br>'Twas well to see a woman of my class<br>With such a dawn of conscience. For the heart,<br>Made firewood for his sake, and flaming up<br>To his very face . . he warmed his feet at it:<br>But deigned to let my carriage stop him short<br>In park or street,–he leaning on the door<br>With news of the committee which sate last<br>On pickpockets at suck.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"> 'You jest–you jest.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'As martyrs jest, dear (if you read their lives),<br>Upon the axe which kills them. When all's done<br>By me, . . for him–you'll ask him presently<br>The color of my hair–he cannot tell,<br>Or answers 'dark' at random,–while, be sure,<br>He's absolute on the figure, five or ten,<br>Of my last subscription. Is it bearable,<br>And I a woman?'<br> 'Is it reparable,<br>Though I were a man?'<br> 'I know not. That's to prove.<br>But, first, this shameful marriage?'<br> 'Ay?' I cried.<br>'Then really there's a marriage.'<br> 'Yesterday<br>I held him fast upon it. 'Mister Leigh,'<br>Said I, 'shut up a thing, it makes more noise.<br>'The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I've known<br>'Yours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so:<br>'You feel I'm not the woman of the world<br>'The world thinks; you have borne with me before<br>'And used me in your noble work, our work,<br>'And now you shall not cast me off because<br>'You're at the difficult point, the join. 'Tis true<br>'Even if I can scarce admit the cogency<br>'Of such a marriage . . where you do not love<br>'(Except the class), yet marry and throw your name<br>'Down to the gutter, for a fire-escape<br>'To future generation! it's sublime,<br>'A great example,–a true Genesis<br>'Of the opening social era. But take heed;<br>'This virtuous act must have a patent weight,<br>'Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell,<br>'Interpret it, and set it in the light,<br>'And do not muffle it in a winter-cloak<br>'As a vulgar bit of shame,–as if, at best,<br>'A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushed<br>'A Howard should know it.' Then, I pressed him more–<br>'He would not choose,' I said, 'that even his kin, . .<br>'Aurora Leigh, even . . should conceive his act<br>'Less sacrifice, more appetite.' At which<br>He grew so pale, dear, . . to the lips, I knew<br>I had touched him. 'Do you know her,' he inquired,<br>'My cousin Aurora?' 'Yes,' I said, and lied<br>(But truly we all know you by your books),<br>And so I offered to come straight to you,<br>Explain the subject, justify the cause,<br>And take you with me to Saint Margaret's Court<br>To see this miracle, this Marian Erle,<br>This drover's daughter (she's not pretty, he swears),<br>Upon whose finger, exquisitely pricked<br>By a hundred needles, we're to hang the tie<br>'Twixt class and class in England,–thus indeed<br>By such a presence, yours and mine, to lift<br>The match up from the doubtful place. At once<br>He thanked me, sighing, . . murmured to himself<br>'She'll do it perhaps; she's noble,'–thanked me, twice,<br>And promised, as my guerdon, to put off<br>His marriage for a month.'<br> I answered then.<br>'I understand your drift imperfectly.<br>You wish to lead me to my cousin's betrothed,<br>To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her hand<br>If feeble, thus to justify his match.<br>So be it then. But how this serves your ends,<br>And how the strange confession of your love<br>Serves this, I have to learn–I cannot see.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">She knit her restless forehead. 'Then, despite,<br>Aurora, that most radiant morning name,<br>You're dull as any London afternoon.<br>I wanted time,–and gained it,–wanted you,<br>And gain you! You will come and see the girl<br>In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearl<br>And pride of all your lofty race of Leighs<br>Is destined to solution. Authorised<br>By sight and knowledge, then, you'll speak your mind,<br>And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way,<br>He'll wrong the people and posterity<br>(Say such a thing is bad for you and me,<br>And you fail utterly), by concluding thus<br>An execrable marriage. Break it up.<br>Disroot it–peradventure, presently,<br>We'll plant a better fortune in its place.<br>Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me less<br>For saying the thing I should not. Well I know<br>I should not. I have kept, as others have,<br>The iron rule of womanly reserve<br>In lip and life, till now: I wept a week<br>Before I came here.'–Ending, she was pale;<br>The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous.<br>This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck,<br>And, only by the foam upon the bit,<br>You saw she champed against it.<br> Then I rose.<br>'I love love: truth's no cleaner thing than love.<br>I comprehend a love so fiery hot<br>It burns its natural veil of august shame,<br>And stands sublimely in the nude, as chaste<br>As Medicean Venus. But I know,<br>A love that burns through veils will burn through masks<br>And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!<br>Nay–go to the opera! your love's curable.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'I love and lie!' she said–'I lie, forsooth?'<br>And beat her taper foot upon the floor,<br>And smiled against the shoe,–'You're hard, Miss Leigh,<br>Unversed in current phrases.–Bowling-greens<br>Of poets are fresher than the world's highways:<br>Forgive me that I rashly blew the dust<br>Which dims our hedges even, in your eyes,<br>And vexed you so much. You find, probably,<br>No evil in this marriage,–rather good<br>Of innocence, to pastoralise in song:<br>You'll give the bond your signature, perhaps,<br>Beneath the lady's work,–indifferent<br>That Romney chose a wife, could write her name,<br>In witnessing he loved her.'<br> 'Loved!' I cried;<br>'Who tells you that he wants a wife to love?<br>He gets a horse to use, not love, I think:<br>There's work for wives as well,–and after, straw,<br>When men are liberal. For myself, you err<br>Supposing power in me to break this match.<br>I could not do it, to save Romney's life,<br>And would not, to save mine.'<br> 'You take it so,'<br>She said, 'farewell then. Write your books in peace,<br>As far as may be for some secret stir<br>Now obvious to me,–for, most obviously,<br>In coming hither I mistook the way.'<br>Whereat she touched my hand and bent her head,<br>And floated from me like a silent cloud<br>That leaves the sense of thunder.<br> I drew breath,<br>As hard as in a sick-room. After all,<br>This woman breaks her social system up<br>For love, so counted–the love possible<br>To such,–and lilies are still lilies, pulled<br>By smutty hands, though spotted from their white;<br>And thus she is better, haply, of her kind,<br>Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams,<br>And crosses out the spontaneities<br>Of all his individual, personal life<br>With formal universals. As if man<br>Were set upon a high stool at a desk,<br>To keep God's books for Him, in red and black,<br>And feel by millions! What, if even God<br>Were chiefly God by living out Himself<br>To an individualism of the Infinite,<br>Eterne, intense, profuse,–still throwing up<br>The golden spray of multitudinous worlds<br>In measure to the proclive weight and rush<br>Of his inner nature,–the spontaneous love<br>Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?<br>Then live, Aurora!<br> Two hours afterward,<br>Within Saint Margaret's Court I stood alone,<br>Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,<br>Whose wasted right hand gambled 'gainst his left<br>With an old brass button, in a blot of sun,<br>Jeered weakly at me as I passed across<br>The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged<br>Upon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,<br>Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,<br>Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,<br>By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,–<br>'Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog<br>You'll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,<br>Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!<br>We cover up our face from doing good,<br>As if it were our purse! What brings you here,<br>My lady? is't to find my gentleman<br>Who visits his tame pigeon in the eaves?<br>Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,<br>And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,<br>And turn your whiteness dead-blue.' I looked up;<br>I think I could have walked through hell that day,<br>And never flinched. 'The dear Christ comfort you,'<br>I said, 'you must have been most miserable<br>To be so cruel,'–and I emptied out<br>My purse upon the stones: when, as I had cast<br>The last charm in the cauldron, the whole court<br>Went boiling, bubbling up, from all its doors<br>And windows, with a hideous wail of laughs<br>And roar of oaths, and blows perhaps . . I passed<br>Too quickly for distinguishing . . and pushed<br>A little side-door hanging on a hinge,<br>And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbed<br>The long, steep, narrow stair 'twixt broken rail<br>And mildewed wall that let the plaster drop<br>To startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up!<br>So high lived Romney's bride. I paused at last<br>Before a low door in the roof, and knocked;<br>There came an answer like a hurried dove–<br>'So soon! can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?'<br>And, as I entered, an ineffable face<br>Met mine upon the threshold. 'Oh, not you,<br>Not you!' . . the dropping of the voice implied;<br>'Then, if not you, for me not any one.'<br>I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands,<br>And said 'I am his cousin,–Romney Leigh's;<br>And here I'm come to see my cousin too.'<br>She touched me with her face and with her voice,<br>This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers<br>From such rough roots? The people, under there,<br>Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so . . . faugh!<br>Yet have such daughters!<br> Nowise beautiful<br>Was Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown,<br>But could look either, like a mist that changed<br>According to being shone on more or less:<br>The hair, too, ran its opulence of curls<br>In doubt 'twixt dark and bright, nor left you clear<br>To name the color. Too much hair perhaps<br>(I'll name a fault here) for so small a head,<br>Which seemed to droop on that side and on this,<br>As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight,<br>Though not a breath should trouble it. Again,<br>The dimple in the cheek had better gone<br>With redder, fuller rounds; and somewhat large<br>The mouth was, though the milky little teeth<br>Dissolved it to so infantile a smile!<br>For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too,<br>But 'twas as if remembering they had wept,<br>And knowing they should, some day, weep again.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">We talked. She told me all her story out,<br>Which I'll re-tell with fuller utterance,<br>As coloured and confirmed in aftertimes<br>By others, and herself too. Marian Erle<br>Was born upon the ledge of Malvern Hill,<br>To eastward, in a hut, built up at night,<br>To evade the landlord's eye, of mud and turf,<br>Still liable, if once he looked that way,<br>To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot,<br>Like any other anthill. Born, I say;<br>God sent her to his world, commissioned right,<br>Her human testimonials fully signed,<br>Not scant in soul–complete in lineaments;<br>But others had to swindle her a place<br>To wail in when she had come. No place for her,<br>By man's law! born an outlaw, was this babe;<br>Her first cry in our strange and strangling air,<br>When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,<br>Was wrong against the social code,–forced wrong.<br>What business had the baby to cry there?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I tell her story and grow passionate.<br>She, Marian, did not tell it so, but used<br>Meek words that made no wonder of herself<br>For being so sad a creature. 'Mister Leigh<br>Considered truly that such things should change.<br>They will, in heaven–but meantime, on the earth,<br>There's none can like a nettle as a pink,<br>Except himself. We're nettles, some of us,<br>And give offence by the act of springing up;<br>And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,<br>The hoes, of course, are on us.' So she said.<br>Her father earned his life by random jobs<br>Despised by steadier workmen–keeping swine<br>On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on<br>The harvest at wet seasons,–or, at need,<br>Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove<br>Of startled horses plunged into the mist<br>Below the mountain-road, and sowed the wind<br>With wandering neighings. In between the gaps<br>Of such irregular work, he drank and slept,<br>And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,<br>She could not buy more drink. At which she turned,<br>(The worm), and beat her baby in revenge<br>For her own broken heart. There's not a crime<br>But takes its proper change out still in crime<br>If once rung on the counter of this world:<br>Let sinners look to it.<br> Yet the outcast child,<br>For whom the very mother's face forewent<br>The mother's special patience, lived and grew;<br>Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,<br>With that pathetic vacillating roll<br>Of the infant body on the uncertain feet,<br>(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon)<br>At which most women's arms unclose at once<br>With irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,<br>This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,<br>This babe would steal off from the mother's chair,<br>And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,<br>Would find some keyhole toward the secrecy<br>Of Heaven's high blue, and, nestling down, peer out–<br>Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,<br>She had never heard of angels, but to gaze<br>She knew not why, to see she knew not what,<br>A-hungering outward from the barren earth<br>For something like a joy. She liked, she said,<br>To dazzle black her sight against the sky,<br>For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,<br>And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;<br>She learnt God that way, and was beat for it<br>Whenever she went home,–yet came again,<br>As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,<br>Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,<br>This skyey father and mother both in one,<br>Instructed her and civilised her more<br>Than even the Sunday-school did afterward,<br>To which a lady sent her to learn books<br>And sit upon a long bench in a row<br>With other children. Well, she laughed sometimes<br>To see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts;<br>But ofter she was sorrowful with noise,<br>And wondered if their mothers beat them hard<br>That ever they should laugh so. There was one<br>She loved indeed,–Rose Bell, a seven years' child,<br>So pretty and clever, who read syllables<br>When Marian was at letters; she would laugh<br>At nothing–hold your finger up, she laughed,<br>Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouth<br>To hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster.<br>And Rose's pelting glee, as frank as rain<br>On cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,<br>To see another merry whom she loved.<br>She whispered once (the children side by side,<br>With mutual arms entwined about their necks)<br>'Your mother lets you laugh so?' 'Ay,' said Rose,<br>'She lets me. She was dug into the ground<br>Six years since, I being but a yearling wean.<br>Such mothers let us play and lose our time,<br>And never scold nor beat us! Don't you wish<br>You had one like that?' There, Marian, breaking off<br>Looked suddenly in my face. 'Poor Rose,' said she,<br>'I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.<br>I'd pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,–<br>Poor Rose, poor Rose!' said Marian.<br> She resumed.<br>It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-school<br>What God was, what he wanted from us all,<br>And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,<br>To go straight home and hear her father pull<br>The name down on us from the thunder-shelf,<br>Then drink away his soul into the dark<br>From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,<br>Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more<br>She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong:<br>Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know<br>The vileness of her kindred: through her heart,<br>Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth<br>They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, 'tis hard<br>To learn you have a father up in heaven<br>By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,<br>Still worse than orphaned: 'tis too heavy a grief,<br>The having to thank God for such a joy!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And so passed Marian's life from year to year.<br>Her parents took her with them when they tramped,<br>Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,<br>And once went farther and saw Manchester,<br>And once the sea, that blue end of the world,<br>That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,–<br>And twice a prison, back at intervals,<br>Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,<br>And stronger sometimes, holding out their hands<br>To pull you from the vile flats up to them;<br>And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back,<br>As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,<br>They certainly felt bettered unawares<br>Emerging from the social smut of towns<br>To wipe their feet clean on the mountain turf.<br>In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,<br>Endured and learned. The people on the roads<br>Would stop and ask her how her eyes outgrew<br>Her cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birds<br>In all that hair; and then they lifted her,<br>The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,<br>The butcher's boy on horseback. Often, too,<br>The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the head<br>With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,<br>And asked if peradventure she could read:<br>And when she answered 'ay,' would toss her down<br>Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack,<br>A Thomson's Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,<br>Or half a play of Shakespeare's, torn across:<br>(She had to guess the bottom of a page<br>By just the top sometimes,–as difficult,<br>As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!),<br>Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth's<br>Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,<br>From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,<br>From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones.<br>'Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,<br>And oft the jangling influence jarred the child<br>Like looking at a sunset full of grace<br>Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths<br>Went on behind her; but she weeded out<br>Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,<br>(First tore them small, that none should find a word),<br>And made a nosegay of the sweet and good<br>To fold within her breast, and pore upon<br>At broken moments of the noontide glare,<br>When leave was given her to untie her cloak<br>And rest upon the dusty roadside bank<br>From the highway's dust. Or oft, the journey done,<br>Some city friend would lead her by the hand<br>To hear a lecture at an institute.<br>And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,<br>To no book-learning,–she was ignorant<br>Of authors,–not in earshot of the things<br>Out-spoken o'er the heads of common men,<br>By men who are uncommon,–but within<br>The cadenced hum of such, and capable<br>Of catching from the fringes of the wind<br>Some fragmentary phrases, here and there,<br>Of that fine music,–which, being carried in<br>To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh<br>In finer motions of the lips and lids.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">She said, in speaking of it, 'If a flower<br>Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,<br>You'd soon attain to a trick of looking up,–<br>And so with her.' She counted me her years,<br>Till I felt old; and then she counted me<br>Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.<br>She told me she was almost glad and calm<br>On such and such a season; sate and sewed,<br>With no one to break up her crystal thoughts:<br>While rhymes from lovely poems span around<br>Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune,<br>Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.<br>Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,<br>Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,<br>And smile into the hedges and the clouds,<br>And tremble if one shook her from her fit<br>By any blow, or word even. Out-door jobs<br>Went ill with her; and household quiet work<br>She was not born to. Had they kept the north,<br>They might have had their pennyworth out of her<br>Like other parents, in the factories;<br>(Your children work for you, not you for them,<br>Or else they better had been choked with air<br>The first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,<br>Was nothing to be done with such a child,<br>But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose<br>Not ill, and was not dull at needlework;<br>And all the country people gave her pence<br>For darning stockings past their natural age,<br>And patching petticoats from old to new,<br>And other light work done for thrifty wives.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">One day, said Marian–the sun shone that day–<br>Her mother had been badly beat, and felt<br>The bruises sore about her wretched soul<br>(That must have been): she came in suddenly,<br>And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,<br>Her daughter's headgear comb, let down the hair<br>Upon her, like a sudden waterfall,<br>Then drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,<br>Outside the hut they lived in. When the child<br>Could clear her blinded face from all that stream<br>Of tresses . . there, a man stood, with beasts' eyes<br>That seemed as they would swallow her alive,<br>Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,–<br>With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,<br>He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,<br>Saying hard between her teeth–'Why wench, why wench,<br>The squire speaks to you now–the squire's too good,<br>He means to set you up and comfort us.<br>Be mannerly at least.' The child turned round<br>And looked up piteous in the mother's face<br>(Be sure that mother's death-bed will not want<br>Another devil to damn, than such a look),<br>'Oh, mother!' then, with desperate glance to heaven,<br>'Good, free me from my mother,' she shrieked out,<br>'These mothers are too dreadful.' And, with force<br>As passionate as fear, she tore her hands,<br>Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,<br>And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,<br>Away from both–away, if possible,<br>As far as God,–away! They yelled at her,<br>As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell;<br>She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,<br>Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast<br>The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear<br>Was running in her feet and killing the ground;<br>The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,<br>The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back<br>To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed;<br>Trees, fields, turned on her and ran after her;<br>She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,<br>Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,<br>Could run no more, yet somehow went as fast,–<br>The horizon, red, 'twixt steeples in the east<br>So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart<br>Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big<br>It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,<br>And overflowed the world and swamped the light,<br>'And now I am dead and safe,' thought Marian Erle–<br>She had dropped, she had fainted.<br> When the sense returned,<br>The night had passed–not life's night. She was 'ware<br>Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,<br>The driver shouting to the lazy team<br>That swung their rankling bells against her brain,<br>While, through the waggon's coverture and chinks,<br>The cruel yellow morning pecked at her<br>Alive or dead, upon the straw inside,–<br>At which her soul ached back into the dark<br>And prayed, 'no more of that.' A waggoner<br>Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon,<br>As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.<br>At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped<br>The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,<br>And laid her in his waggon in the straw,<br>And so conveyed her to the distant town<br>To which his business called himself, and left<br>That heap of misery at the hospital.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">She stirred;–the place seemed new and strange as death.<br>The white strait bed, with others strait and white,<br>Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,<br>And quiet people walking in and out<br>With wonderful low voices and soft steps,<br>And apparitional equal care for each,<br>Astonished her with order, silence, law:<br>And when a gentle hand held out a cup,<br>She took it, as you do at sacrament,<br>Half awed, half melted,–not being used, indeed,<br>To so much love as makes the form of love<br>And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks<br>And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes<br>Were turned in observation. O my God,<br>How sick we must be, ere we make men just!<br>I think it frets the saints in heaven to see<br>How many Desolate creatures on the earth<br>Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship<br>And social comfort, in a hospital,<br>As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,<br>And wished, at intervals of growing sense,<br>She might be sicker yet, if sickness made<br>The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,<br>And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;<br>For now she understood, (as such things were)<br>How sickness ended very oft in heaven,<br>Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,<br>And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,<br>And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,<br>Would lose no moment of the blessed time.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">She lay and seethed in fever many weeks;<br>But youth was strong and overcame the test;<br>Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled<br>And fetched back to the necessary day<br>And daylight duties. She could creep about<br>The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily<br>From any narrow window on the street,<br>Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,<br>Said coldly to her, as an enemy,<br>'She had leave to go next week, being well enough,'<br>While only her heart ached. 'Go next week,' thought she,<br>'Next week! how would it be with her next week,<br>Let out into that terrible street alone<br>Among the pushing people, . . to go . . where?'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">One day, the last before the dreaded last,<br>Among the convalescents, like herself<br>Prepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,<br>And heard half absently the women talk,<br>How one was famished for her baby's cheeks–<br>'The little wretch would know her! a year old,<br>And lively, like his father!' one was keen<br>To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;<br>And one was tender for her dear goodman<br>Who had missed her sorely,–and one, querulous . .<br>'Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had dared<br>To talk about her as already dead,'–<br>And one was proud . . 'and if her sweetheart Luke<br>Had left her for a ruddier face than hers,<br>(The gossip would be seen through at a glance)<br>Sweet riddance of such sweethearts–let him hang!<br>'Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And while they talked, and Marian felt the worse<br>For having missed the worst of all their wrongs,<br>A visitor was ushered through the wards<br>And paused among the talkers. 'When he looked,<br>It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke<br>He sang perhaps,' said Marian; 'could she tell?<br>She only knew' (so much she had chronicled,<br>As seraphs might, the making of the sun)<br>'That he who came and spake was Romney Leigh,<br>And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.'<br>And when it was her turn to have the face<br>Upon her,–all those buzzing pallid lips<br>Being satisfied with comfort–when he changed<br>To Marian, saying, 'And you? You're going, where?'–<br>She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone<br>Which some one's stumbling foot has spurned aside,<br>Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,<br>And breaking into sobs cried, 'Where I go?<br>None asked me till this moment. Can I say<br>Where I go? When it has not seemed worth while<br>To God himself, who thinks of every one,<br>To think of me, and fix where I shall go?'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'So young,' he gently asked her, 'you have lost<br>Your father and your mother?'<br> 'Both' she said,<br>'Both lost! My father was burnt up with gin<br>Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.<br>My mother sold me to a man last month,<br>And so my mother's lost, 'tis manifest.<br>And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,<br>As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell<br>Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)<br>It seems I shall be lost too, presently,<br>And so we end, all three of us.'<br> 'Poor child!'<br>He said,–with such a pity in his voice,<br>It soothed her more than her own tears,–'poor child!<br>'Tis simple that betrayal by mother's love<br>Should bring despair of God's too. Yet be taught<br>He's better to us than many mothers are,<br>And children cannot wander beyond reach<br>Of the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold'<br>And if you weep still, weep where John was laid<br>While Jesus loved him.'<br> 'She could say the words,'<br>She told me, 'exactly as he uttered them<br>A year back, . . since in any doubt or dark,<br>They came out like the stars, and shone on her<br>With just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;<br>The ministers in church might say the same;<br>But he, he made the church with what he spoke,–<br>The difference was the miracle,' said she.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then catching up her smile to ravishment,<br>She added quickly, 'I repeat his words,<br>But not his tones: can any one repeat<br>The music of an organ, out of church?<br>And when he said 'poor child,' I shut my eyes<br>To feel how tenderly his voice broke through,<br>As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feet<br>To let out the rich medicative nard.'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">She told me how he had raised and rescued her<br>With reverent pity, as, in touching grief,<br>He touched the wounds of Christ,–and made her feel<br>More self-respecting. Hope, he called, belief<br>In God,–work, worship . . therefore let us pray!<br>And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,<br>And keep it stainless from her mother's face,<br>He sent her to a famous sempstress-house<br>Far off in London, there to work and hope.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116056" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">With that they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,<br>But not of Romney. He had good to do<br>To others: through the days and through the nights,<br>She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,<br>And wondered, while, along the tawny light,<br>She struck the new thread into her needle's eye,<br>How people without mothers on the hills,<br>Could choose the town to live in!–then she drew<br>The stitch, and mused how Romney's face would look,<br>And if 'twere likely he'd remember hers,<br>When they two had their meeting after death.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br/></a><a href="https://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="https://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Elizabeth+Barrett+Browning">Elizabeth Barrett Browning</a></strong> from <em><a href="https://sources.citatepedia.com/from.php?a=Elizabeth+Barrett+Browning&d=Aurora+Leigh">Aurora Leigh</a></em></div>

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