Title:   Aurora Leigh

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Author:   Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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PDF Version:   1.2

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Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Page No 2

Table of Contents

Aurora Leigh.......................................................................................................................................................1

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.....................................................................................................................1

"First Book." ...........................................................................................................................................1

"Second Book."  .....................................................................................................................................25

"Third Book."  ........................................................................................................................................52

"Fourth Book."  ......................................................................................................................................78

"Fifth Book."  .......................................................................................................................................104

"Sixth Book." ......................................................................................................................................132

"Seventh Book."  ..................................................................................................................................159

"Eighth Book."  ....................................................................................................................................186

"Ninth Book." .....................................................................................................................................213

Aurora Leigh

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Page No 3

Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"First Book." 

"Second Book." 

"Third Book." 

"Fourth Book." 

"Fifth Book." 

"Sixth Book." 

"Seventh Book." 

"Eighth Book." 

"Ninth Book."  

"First Book."

OF writing many books there is no end; 

And I who have written much in prose and verse 

For others' uses, will write now for mine, 

Will write my story for my better self, 

As when you paint your portrait for a friend, 

Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it 

Long after he has ceased to love you, just 

To hold together what he was and is. 

I, writing thus, am still what men call young; 

I have not so far left the coasts of life 

To travel inland, that I cannot hear 

That murmur of the outer Infinite 

Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep 

When wondered at for smiling; not so far, 

But still I catch my mother at her post 

Beside the nurserydoor, with finger up, 

'Hush, hush here's too much noise!' while her sweet eyes 

Leap forward, taking part against her word 

In the child's riot. Still I sit and feel 

My father's slow hand, when she had left us both, 

Stroke out my childish curls across his knee; 

And hear Assunta's daily jest (she knew 

He liked it better than a better jest) 

Inquire how many golden scudi went 

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To make such ringlets. O my father's hand, 

Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily, 

Draw, press the child's head closer to thy knee! 

I'm still too young, too young to sit alone. 

I write. My mother was a Florentine, 

Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me 

When scarcely I was four years old; my life, 

A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp 

Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail; 

She could not bear the joy of giving life? 

The mother's rapture slew her. If her kiss 

Had left a longer weight upon my lips, 

It might have steadied the uneasy breath, 

And reconciled and fraternised my soul 

With the new order. As it was, indeed, 

I felt a motherwant about the world, 

And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb 

Left out at night, in shutting up the fold, 

As restless as a nestdeserted bird 

Grown chill through something being away, though what 

It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born 

To make my father sadder, and myself 

Not overjoyous, truly. Women know 

The way to rear up children, (to be just,) 

They know a simple, merry, tender knack 

Of tying sashes, fitting babyshoes, 

And stringing pretty words that make no sense, 

And kissing full sense into empty words; 

Which things are corals to cut life upon, 

Although such trifles: children learn by such, 

Love's holy earnest in a pretty play, 

And get not overearly solemnised, 

But seeing, as in a rosebush, Love's Divine, 

Which burns and hurts not,not a single bloom, 

Become aware and unafraid of Love. 

Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well 

?Mine did, I know,but still with heavier brains, 

And wills more consciously responsible, 

And not as wisely, since less foolishly; 

So mothers have God's licence to be missed. 

My father was an austere Englishman, 

Who, after a dry lifetime spent at home 

In collegelearning, law, and parish talk, 

Was flooded with a passion unaware, 

His whole provisioned and complacent past 

Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood 

In Florence, where he had come to spend a month 

And note the secret of Da Vinci's drains, 

He musing somewhat absently perhaps 

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Some English question . . whether men should pay 

The unpopular but necessary tax 

With left or right hand?in the alien sun 

In that great square of the Santissima, 

There drifted past him (scarcely marked enough 

To move his comfortable islandscorn,) 

A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm, 

The whiteveiled rosecrowned maidens holding up 

Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant 

To the blue luminous tremor of the air, 

And letting drop the white wax as they went 

To eat the bishop's wafer at the church; 

From which long trail of chanting priests and girls, 

A face flashed like a cymbal on his face, 

And shook with silent clangour brain and heart, 

Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus, 

He too received his sacramental gift 

With eucharistic meanings; for he loved. 

And thus beloved, she died. I've heard it said 

That but to see him in the first surprise 

Of widower and father, nursing me, 

Unmothered little child of four years old, 

His large man's hands afraid to touch my curls, 

As if the gold would tarnish,his grave lips 

Contriving such a miserable smile, 

As if he knew needs must, or I should die, 

And yet 'twas hard,would almost make the stones 

Cry out for pity. There's a verse he set 

In Santa Croce to her memory, 

'Weep for an infant too young to weep much 

When death removed this mother'?stops the mirth 

Today, on women's faces when they walk 

With rosy children hanging on their gowns, 

Under the cloister, to escape the sun 

That scorches in the piazza. After which, 

He left our Florence, and made haste to hide 

Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief, 

Among the mountains above Pelago; 

Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need 

Of mother nature more than others use, 

And Pan's white goats, with udders warm and full 

Of mystic contemplations, come to feed 

Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own? 

Such scholarscraps he talked, I've heard from friends, 

For even prosaic men, who wear grief long, 

Will get to wear it as a hat aside 

With a flower stuck in't. Father, then, and child, 

We lived among the mountains many years, 

God's silence on the outside of the house, 

And we, who did not speak too loud, within; 

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And old Assunta to make up the fire, 

Crossing herself whene'er a sudden flame 

Which lightened from the firewood, made alive 

That picture of my mother on the wall. 

The painter drew it after she was dead; 

And when the face was finished, throat and hands, 

Her cameriera carried him, in hate 

Of the Englishfashioned shroud, the last brocade 

She dressed in at the Pitti. 'He should paint 

No sadder thing than that, ' she swore, 'to wrong 

Her poor signora.' Therefore, very strange 

The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch 

For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up 

And gaze across them, half in terror, half 

In adoration, at the picture there, 

That swanlike supernatural white life, 

Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk 

Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power 

To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds: 

For hours I sate and stared. Asssunta's awe 

And my poor father's melancholy eyes 

Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts 

When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew 

In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously, 

Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed, 

Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful, 

Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque, 

With still that face . . . which did not therefore change, 

But kept the mystic level of all forms 

And fears and admirations; was by turn 

Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite, 

A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate, 

A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love, 

A still Medusa, with mild milky brows 

All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes 

Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon, 

Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords 

Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first 

Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked, 

And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean; 

Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile 

In her last kiss, upon the babymouth 

My father pushed down on the bed for that, 

Or, my dead mother, without smile or kiss, 

Buried at Florence. All which images, 

Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves 

Before my meditative childhood, . . as 

The incoherencies of change and death 

Are represented fully, mixed and merged, 

In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life. 

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And while I stared away my childish wits 

Upon my mother's picture, (ah, poor child!) 

My father, who through love had suddenly 

Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose 

From chinbands of the soul, like Lazarus, 

Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk 

Or grow anew familiar with the sun, 

Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived, 

But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims, 

Whom love had unmade from a common man 

But not completed to an uncommon man, 

My father taught me what he had learnt the best 

Before he died and left me,grief and love. 

And, seeing we had books among the hills, 

Strong words of counselling souls, confederate 

With vocal pines and waters,out of books 

He taught me all the ignorance of men, 

And how God laughs in heaven when any man 

Says, 'Here I'm learned; this, I understand; 

In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.' 

He sent the schools to school, demonstrating 

A fool will pass for such through one mistake, 

While a philosopher will pass for such, 

Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross 

And heaped up to a system. 

                  I am like, 

They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows 

Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth 

Of delicate features,paler, near as grave; 

But then my mother's smile breaks up the whole, 

And makes it better sometimes than itself. 

So, nine full years, our days were hid with God 

Among his mountains. I was just thirteen, 

Still growing like the plants from unseen roots 

In tonguetied Springs,and suddenly awoke 

To full life and its needs and agonies, 

With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside 

A stonedead father. Life, struck sharp on death, 

Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love?' 

'Love, my child, love, love!'?(then he had done with grief) 

'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, 

And none was left to love in all the world. 

There, ended childhood: what succeeded next 

I recollect as, after fevers, men 

Thread back the passage of delirium, 

Missing the turn still, baffled by the door; 

Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives; 

A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i' the flank 

With flame, that it should eat and end itself 

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Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last, 

I do remember clearly, how there came 

A stranger with authority, not right, 

(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up 

From old Assunta's neck; how, with a shriek, 

She let me go,while I, with ears too full 

Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word, 

In all a child's astonishment at grief 

Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned, 

My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned! 

The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy, 

Drawn backward from the shuddering steamerdeck, 

Like one in anger drawing back her skirts 

Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea 

Inexorably pushed between us both, 

And sweeping up the ship with my despair 

Threw us out as a pasture to the stars. 

Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep; 

Ten nights and days, without the common face 

Of any day or night; the moon and sun 

Cut off from the green reconciling earth, 

To starve into a blind ferocity 

And glare unnatural; the very sky 

(Dropping its bellnet down upon the sea 

As if no human heart should 'scape alive,) 

Bedraggled with the desolating salt, 

Until it seemed no more than holy heaven 

To which my father went. All new, and strange? 

The universe turned stranger, for a child. 

Then, land! then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs 

Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home 

Among those mean red houses through the fog? 

And when I heard my father's language first 

From alien lips which had no kiss for mine, 

I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept, 

And some one near me said the child was mad 

Through much seasickness. The train swept us on. 

Was this my father's England? the great isle? 

The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship 

Or verdure, field from field, as man from man; 

The skies themselves looked low and positive, 

As almost you could touch them with a hand, 

And dared to do it, they were so far off 

From God's celestial crystals; all things, blurred 

And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates 

Absorb the light here??not a hill or stone 

With heart to strike a radiant colour up 

Or active outline on the indifferent air! 

I think I see my father's sister stand 

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Upon the hallstep of her countryhouse 

To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm, 

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight 

As if for taming accidental thoughts 

From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey 

By frigid use of life, (she was not old, 

Although my father's elder by a year) 

A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines; 

A close mild mouth, a little soured about 

The ends, through speaking unrequited loves, 

Or peradventure niggardly halftruths; 

Eyes of no colour,once they might have smiled, 

But never, never have forgot themselves 

In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose 

Of perished summers, like a rose in a book, 

Kept more for ruth than pleasure,if past bloom, 

Past fading also. 

                She had lived we'll say, 

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, 

A quiet life, which was not life at all, 

(But that, she had not lived enough to know) 

Between the vicar and the county squires, 

The lordlieutenant looking down sometimes 

From the empyreal, to assure their souls 

Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss, 

The apothecary looked on once a year, 

To prove their soundness of humility. 

The poorclub exercised her Christian gifts 

Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats, 

Because we are of one flesh after all 

And need one flannel, (with a proper sense 

Of difference in the quality)?and still 

The bookclub guarded from your modern trick 

Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease, 

Preserved her intellectual. She had lived 

A sort of cagebird life, born in a cage, 

Accounting that to leap from perch to perch 

Was act and joy enough for any bird. 

Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live 

In thickets and eat berries! 

                  I, alas, 

A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage, 

And she was there to meet me. Very kind. 

Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed. 

She stood upon the steps to welcome me, 

Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck, 

Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool 

To draw the new light closer, catch and cling 

Less blindly. In my ears, my father's word 

Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells, 

'Love, love, my child, ' She, black there with my grief, 

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Page No 10

Might feel my love?she was his sister once? 

I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved. 

Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling, 

And drew me feebly through the hall, into 

The room she sate in. 

                  There, with some strange spasm 

Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands 

Imperiously, and held me at arm's length, 

And with two greysteel nakedbladed eyes 

Searched through my face,ay, stabbed it through and through, 

Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find 

A wicked murderer in my innocent face, 

If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath, 

She struggled for her ordinary calm, 

And missed it rather,told me not to shrink, 

As if she had told me not to lie or swear, 

'She loved my father, and would love me too 

As long as I deserved it.' Very kind. 

I understood her meaning afterward; 

She thought to find my mother in my face, 

And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt, 

Had loved my father truly, as she could, 

And hated, with the gall of gentle souls, 

My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away 

A wise man from wise courses, a good man 

From obvious duties, and, depriving her, 

His sister, of the household precedence, 

Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land, 

And made him mad, alike by life and death, 

In love and sorrow. She had pored for years 

What sort of woman could be suitable 

To her sort of hate, to entertain it with; 

And so, her very curiosity 

Became hate too, and all the idealism 

She ever used in life, was used for hate, 

Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last 

The love from which it grew, in strength and heat, 

And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense 

Of disputable virtue (say not, sin) 

When Christian doctrine was enforced at church. 

And thus my father's sister was to me 

My mother's hater. From that day, she did 

Her duty to me, (I appreciate it 

In her own word as spoken to herself) 

Her duty, in large measure, wellpressed out, 

But measured always. She was generous, bland, 

More courteous than was tender, gave me still 

The first place,as if fearful that God's saints 

Would look down suddenly and say, 'Herein 

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Page No 11

You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.' 

Alas, a mother never is afraid 

Of speaking angrily to any child, 

Since love, she knows, is justified of love. 

And I, I was a good child on the whole, 

A meek and manageable child. Why not? 

I did not live, to have the faults of life: 

There seemed more true life in my father's grave 

Than in all England. Since that threw me off 

Who fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say, 

Consigned me to his land) I only thought 

Of lying quiet there where I was thrown 

Like seaweed on the rocks, and suffer her 

To prick me to a pattern with her pin, 

Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf, 

And dry out from my drowned anatomy 

The last seasalt left in me. 

                  So it was. 

I broke the copious curls upon my head 

In braids, because she liked smooth ordered hair. 

I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words 

Which still at any stirring of the heart 

Came up to float across the English phrase, 

As lilies, (Bene . . or che ch'  ) because 

She liked my father's child to speak his tongue. 

I learnt the collects and the catechism, 

The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice, 

The Articles . . the Tracts against the times, 

(By no means Buonaventure's 'Prick of Love, ') 

And various popular synopses of 

Inhuman doctrines never taught by John, 

Because she liked instructed piety. 

I learnt my complement of classic French 

(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,) 

And German also, since she liked a range 

Of liberal education,tongues, not books. 

I learnt a little algebra, a little 

Of the mathematics,brushed with extreme flounce 

The circle of the sciences, because 

She misliked women who are frivolous. 

I learnt the royal genealogies 

Of Oviedo, the internal laws 

Of the Burmese Empire, . . by how many feet 

Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh, 

What navigable river joins itself 

To Lara, and what census of the year five 

Was taken at Klagenfurt,because she liked 

A general insight into useful facts. 

I learnt much music,such as would have been 

As quite impossible in Johnson's day 

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Page No 12

As still it might be wished?fine sleights of hand 

And unimagined fingering, shuffling off 

The hearer's soul through hurricanes of notes 

To a noisy Tophet; and I drew . . costumes 

From French engravings, nereids neatly draped, 

With smirks of simmering godship,I washed in 

From nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.) 

I danced the polka and Cellarius, 

Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax, 

Because she liked accomplishments in girls. 

I read a score of books on womanhood 

To prove, if women do not think at all, 

They may teach thinking, (to a maiden aunt 

Or else the author)?books demonstrating 

Their right of comprehending husband's talk 

When not too deep, and even of answering 

With pretty 'may it please you, ' or 'so it is, '? 

Their rapid insight and fine aptitude, 

Particular worth and general missionariness, 

As long as they keep quiet by the fire 

And never say 'no' when the world says 'ay, ' 

For that is fatal,their angelic reach 

Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn, 

And fatten household sinners?their, in brief, 

Potential faculty in everything 

Of abdicating power in it: she owned 

She liked a woman to be womanly, 

And English women, she thanked God and sighed, 

(Some people always sigh in thanking God) 

Were models to the universe. And last 

I learnt crossstitch, because she did not like 

To see me wear the night with empty hands, 

Adoing nothing. So, my shepherdess 

Was something after all, (the pastoral saints 

Be praised for't) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes 

To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks; 

Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat 

So strangely similar to the tortoiseshell 

Which slew the tragic poet. 

                  By the way, 

The works of women are symbolical. 

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, 

Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, 

To put on when you're weary?or a stool 

To tumble over and vex you . . 'curse that stool!' 

Or else at best, a cushion where you lean 

And sleep, and dream of something we are not, 

But would be for your sake. Alas, alas! 

This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid 

The worth of our work, perhaps. 

                      In looking down 

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Page No 13

Those years of education, (to return) 

I wondered if Brinvilliers suffered more 

In the water torture, . . flood succeeding flood 

To drench the incapable throat and split the veins . . 

Than I did. Certain of your feebler souls 

Go out in such a process; many pine 

To a sick, inodorous light; my own endured: 

I had relations in the Unseen, and drew 

The elemental nutriment and heat 

From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights, 

Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark, 

I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outside 

Of the inner life, with all its ample room 

For heart and lungs, for will and intellect, 

Inviolable by conventions. God, 

I thank thee for that grace of thine! 

                       At first, 

I felt no life which was not patience,did 

The thing she bade me, without heed to a thing 

Beyond it, sate in just the chair she placed, 

With back against the window, to exclude 

The sight of the great limetree on the lawn, 

Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods 

To bring the house a message,ay, and walked 

Demurely in her carpeted low rooms, 

As if I should not, harkening my own steps, 

Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books, 

Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh, 

Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors, 

And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup, 

(I blushed for joy at that!)?'The Italian child, 

For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways, 

Thrives ill in England; she is paler yet 

Than when we came the last time; she will die.' 

'Will die.' My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too, 

With sudden anger, and approaching me 

Said low between his teeth?'You're wicked now? 

You wish to die and leave the world adusk 

For others, with your naughty light blown out?' 

I looked into his face defyingly. 

He might have known, that, being what I was, 

'Twas natural to like to get away 

As far as dead folk can; and then indeed 

Some people make no trouble when they die. 

He turned and went abruptly, slammed the door 

And shut his dog out. 

                  Romney, Romney Leigh. 

I have not named my cousin hitherto, 

And yet I used him as a sort of friend; 

My elder by few years, but cold and shy 

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Page No 14

And absent . . tender when he thought of it, 

Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes, 

As well as early master of Leigh Hall, 

Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youth 

Repressing all its seasonable delights, 

And agonising with a ghastly sense 

Of universal hideous want and wrong 

To incriminate possession. When he came 

From college to the country, very oft 

He crossed the hills on visits to my aunt, 

With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses, 

A book in one hand,mere statistics, (if 

I chanced to lift the cover) count of all 

The goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell. 

Against God's separating judgmenthour. 

And she, she almost loved him,even allowed 

That sometimes he should seem to sigh my way; 

It made him easier to be pitiful, 

And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbed 

At whiles she let him shut my music up 

And push my needles down, and lead me out 

To see in that south angle of the house 

The figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock. 

On some light pretext. She would turn her head 

At other moments, go to fetch a thing, 

And leave me breath enough to speak with him, 

For his sake; it was simple. 

                  Sometimes too 

He would have saved me utterly, it seemed, 

He stood and looked so. 

                  Once, he stood so near 

He dropped a sudden hand upon my head 

Bent down on woman's work, as soft as rain? 

But then I rose and shook it off as fire, 

The stranger's touch that took my father's place, 

Yet dared seem soft. 

                  I used him for a friend 

Before I ever knew him for a friend. 

'Twas better, 'twas worse also, afterward: 

We came so close, we saw our differences 

Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh 

Was looking for the worms, I for the gods. 

A godlike nature his; the gods look down, 

Incurious of themselves; and certainly 

'Tis well I should remember, how, those days 

I was a worm too, and he looked on me. 

A little by his act perhaps, yet more 

By something in me, surely not my will, 

I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon, 

To whom life creeps back in the form of death 

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Page No 15

With a sense of separation, a blind pain 

Of blank obstruction, and a roar i' the ears 

Of visionary chariots which retreat 

As earth grows clearer . . slowly, by degrees, 

I woke, rose up . . where was I? in the world: 

For uses, therefore, I must count worth while. 

I had a little chamber in the house, 

As green as any privethedge a bird 

Might choose to build in, though the nest itself 

Could show but deadbrown sticks and straws; the walls 

Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight 

Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds 

Hung green about the window, which let in 

The outdoor world with all its greenery. 

You could not push your head out and escape 

A dash of dawndew from the honeysuckle, 

But so you were baptised into the grace 

And privilege of seeing. . . 

                  First, the lime, 

(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure, 

My morningdream was often hummed away 

By the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn, 

Which, after sweeping broadly round the house, 

Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream 

Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself 

Among the acacias, over which, you saw 

The irregular line of elms by the deep lane 

Which stopt the grounds and dammed the overflow 

Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight 

The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp 

Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales 

Could guess if lady's hall or tenant's lodge 

Ddispensed such odours,though his stick well crooked 

Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar 

Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms, 

And through their tops, you saw the folded hills 

Striped up and down with hedges, (burley oaks 

Projecting from the lines to show themselves) 

Thro' which my cousin Romney's chimneys smoked 

As still as when a silent mouth in frost 

Breathes?showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall; 

While far above, a jut of tableland, 

A promontory without water, stretched, 

You could not catch it if the days were thick, 

Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise 

The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve 

And use it for an anvil till he had filled 

The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts, 

And proved he need not rest so early;?then 

When all his setting trouble was resolved 

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Page No 16

Toa trance of passive glory, you might see 

In apparition on the golden sky 

(Alas, my Giotto's background!) the sheep run 

Along the fine clear outline, small as mice 

That run along a witch's scarlet thread. 

Not a grand nature. Not my chestnutwoods 

Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs 

To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps 

Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear 

In leaping through the palpitating pines, 

Like a white soul tossed out to eternity 

With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed 

My multitudinous mountains, sitting in 

The magic circle, with the mutual touch 

Electric, panting from their full deep hearts 

Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for 

Communion and commission. Italy 

Is one thing, England one. 

                  On English ground 

You understand the letter . . ere the fall, 

How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields 

Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegaylike; 

The hills are crumpled plains?the plains, parterres? 

The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped; 

And if you seek for any wilderness 

You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed 

And grown domestic like a barndoor fowl, 

Which does not awe you with its claws and beak, 

Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up, 

But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of 

Your eggs tomorrow at breakfast, in the pause 

Of finer meditation. 

                  Rather say 

A sweet familiar nature, stealing in 

As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand 

Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so 

Of presence and affection, excellent 

For inner uses, from the things without. 

I could not be unthankful, I who was 

Entreated thus and holpen. In the room 

I speak of, ere the house was well awake, 

And also after it was well asleep, 

I sat alone, and drew the blessing in 

Of all that nature. With a gradual step, 

A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray, 

It came in softly, while the angels made 

A place for it beside me. The moon came, 

And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts 

The sun came, saying, 'Shall I lift this light 

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Page No 17

Against the limetree, and you will not look? 

I make the birds sing?listen! . . but, for you. 

God never hears your voice, excepting when 

You lie upon the bed at nights and weep.' 

Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up 

More slowly than I verily write now, 

But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide 

The window and my soul, and let the airs . 

And outdoor sights sweep gradual gospels in, 

Regenerating what I was. O Life, 

How oft we throw it off and think, 'Enough, 

Enough of life in so much! here's a cause 

For rupture; herein we must break with Life, 

Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged, 

Maimed, spoiled for aspiration; farewell Life!' 

?And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes 

And think all ended.?Then, Life calls to us, 

In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice, 

Above us, or below us, or around . . 

Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's, 

Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed 

So own our compensations than our griefs: 

Still, Life's voice! still, we make our peace with Life. 

And I, so young then, was not sullen. Soon 

I used to get up early, just to sit 

And watch the morning quicken in the grey, 

And hear the silence open like a flower, 

Leaf after leaf,and stroke with listless hand 

The woodbine through the window, till at last 

I came to do it with a sort of love, 

At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled, 

A melancholy smile, to catch myself 

Smiling for joy. 

             Capacity for joy 

Admits temptation. It seemed, next, worth while 

To dodge the sharp sword set against my life; 

To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house, 

As mute as any dream there, and escape 

As a soul from the body, out of doors, 

Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane, 

And wander on the hills an hour or two, 

Then back again before the house should stir. 

Or else I sat on in my chamber green, 

And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed 

My prayers without the vicar; read my books, 

Without considering whether they were fit 

To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good 

By being ungenerous, even to a book, 

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Page No 18

And calculating profits . . so much help 

By so much rending. It is rather when 

We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge 

Soulforward, headlong, into a book's profound, 

Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth? 

'Tis then we get the right good from a book. 

I read much. What my father taught before 

From many a volume, Love reemphasised 

Upon the selfsame pages: Theophrast 

Grew tender with the memory of his eyes, 

And ®lian made mine wet. The trick of Greek 

And Latin, he had taught me, as he would 

Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives 

If such he had known.?most like a shipwrecked man 

Who heaps his single platter with goats' cheese 

And scarlet berries; or like any man 

Who loves but one, and so gives all at once, 

Because he has it, rather than because 

He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave; 

And thus, as did the women formerly 

By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil 

Across the boy's audacious front, and swept 

With tuneful laughs the silverfretted rocks, 

He wrapt his little daughter in his large 

Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no. 

But, after I had read for memory, 

I read for hope. The path my father's foot 

Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off, 

(What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh 

And passed) alone I carried on, and set 

My childheart 'gainst the thorny underwood, 

To reach the grassy shelter of the trees. 

Ah, babe i' the wood, without a brotherbabe! 

My own selfpity, like the redbreast bird, 

Flies back to cover all that past with leaves. 

Sublimest danger, over which none weeps, 

When any young wayfaring soul goes forth 

Alone, unconscious of the perilous road, 

The daysun dazzling in his limpid eyes, 

To thrust his own way, he an alien, through 

The world of books! Ah, you! you think it fine, 

You clap hands?'A fair day!'?you cheer him on, 

As if the worst, could happen, were to rest 

Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold, 

Behold! the world of books is still the world; 

And worldlings in it are less merciful 

And more puissant. For the wicked there 

Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes, 

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Page No 19

Is edged from elemental fire to assail 

A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right 

By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong 

Because of weakness. Power is justified, 

Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown 

Covers bald foreheads. In the bookworld, true, 

There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings, 

That shake the ashes of the grave aside 

From their calm locks, and undiscomfited 

Look stedfast truths against Time's changing mask. 

True, many a prophet teaches in the roads; 

True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens 

Upon his own head in strong martyrdom, 

In order to light men a moment's space. 

But stay ! who judges??who distinguishes 

'Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight, 

And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin, 

To serve king David? who discerns at once 

The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow 

For Alaric as well as Charlemagne ? 

Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers 

From conjurors ? The child, there ? Would you leave 

That child to wander in a battlefield 

And push his innocent smile against the guns? 

Or even in the catacombs, . . his torch 

Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all 

The dark amutter round him ? not a child ! 

   I read books bad and good?some bad and good 

At once: good aims not always make good books; 

Welltempered spades turn up illsmelling soils 

In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove 

God's being so definitely, that man's doubt 

Grows selfdefined the other side the line, 

Made Atheist by suggestion; moral books, 

Exasperating to license; genial books, 

Discounting from the human dignity; 

And merry books, which set you weeping when 

The sun shines,ay, and melancholy books, 

Which make you laugh that any one should weep 

In this disjointed life, for one wrong more. 

The world of books is still the world, I write, 

And both worlds have God's providence, thank God, 

To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed, 

Among the breakers, some hard swimming through 

The deeps?I lost breath in my soul sometimes 

And cried 'God save me if there's any God.' 

But even so, God save me; and, being dashed 

From error on to error, every turn 

Still brought me nearer to the central truth. 

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Page No 20

I thought so. All this anguish in the thick 

Of men's opinions . . press and counterpress 

Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now 

Emergent . . all the best of it perhaps, 

But throws you back upon a noble trust 

And use of your own instinct,merely proves 

Pure reason stronger than bare inference 

At strongest. Try it,fix against heaven's wall 

Your scaling ladders of high logic?mount 

Step by step! Sight goes faster; that still ray 

Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell, 

And why, you know not?(did you eliminate, 

That such as you, indeed, should analyse?) 

Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God. 

The cygnet finds the water: but the man 

Is born in ignorance of his element, 

And feels out blind at first, disorganised 

By sin i' the blood,his spiritinsight dulled 

And crossed by his sensations. Presently 

We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; 

Then mark, be reverent, be obedient, 

For those dumb motions of imperfect life 

Are oracles of vital Deity 

Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 

'The soul's a clean white paper, ' rather say, 

A palimpsest, a prophets holograph 

Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's, 

The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on 

Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps 

Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, 

Some upstroke of an alpha and omega 

Expressing the old scripture. 

                  Books, books, books! 

I had found the secret of a garretroom 

Piled high with cases in my father's name; 

Piled high, packed large,where, creeping in and out 

Among the giant fossils of my past, 

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs 

Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there 

At this or that box, pulling through the gap, 

In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, 

The first book first. And how I felt it beat 

Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, 

An hour before the sun would let me read! 

My books! 

      At last, because the time was ripe, 

I chanced upon the poets. 

                  As the earth 

Plunges in fury, when the internal fires 

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Page No 21

Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat 

The marts and temples, the triumphal gates 

And towers of observation, clears herself 

To elemental freedom?thus, my soul, 

At poetry's divine first finger touch, 

Let go conventions and sprang up surprised, 

Convicted of the great eternities 

Before two worlds. 

                  What's this, Aurora Leigh, 

You write so of the poets, and not laugh? 

Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, 

Exaggerators of the sun and moon, 

And soothsayers in a teacup? 

                   I write so 

Of the only truthtellers, now left to God, 

The only speakers of essential truth, 

Posed to relative, comparative, 

And temporal truths; the only holders by 

His sunskirts, through conventional grey glooms; 

The only teachers who instruct mankind, 

From just a shadow on a charnel wall, 

To find man's veritable stature out, 

Erect, sublime,the measure of a man, 

And that's the measure of an angel, says 

The apostle. Ay, and while your common men 

Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, 

And dust the flaunty carpets of the world 

For kings to walk on, or our senators, 

The poet suddenly will catch them up 

With his voice like a thunder. . 'This is soul, 

This is life, this word is being said in heaven, 

Here's God down on us! what are you about? 

How all those workers start amid their work, 

Look round, look up, and feel, a moment's space, 

That carpetdusting, though a pretty trade, 

Is not the imperative labour after all. 

My own best poets, am I one with you, 

That thus I love you,or but one through love? 

Does all this smell of thyme about my feet 

Conclude my visit to your holy hill 

In personal presence, or but testify 

The rustling of your vesture through my dreams 

With influent odours? When my joy and pain, 

My thought and aspiration, like the stops 

Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb 

If not melodious, do you play on me, 

My pipers,and if, sooth, you did not blow, 

Would not sound come? or is the music mine, 

As a man's voice or breath is called his own, 

In breathed by the Lifebreather? There's a doubt 

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Page No 22

For cloudy seasons ! 

                  But the sun was high 

When first I felt my pulses set themselves 

For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence 

Of blood and brain swept outward upon words, 

As wind upon the alders blanching them 

By turning up their undernatures till 

They trembled in dilation. O delight 

And triumph of the poet,who would say 

A man's mere 'yes, ' a woman's common 'no, ' 

A little human hope of that or this, 

And says the word so that it burns you through 

With a special revelation, shakes the heart 

Of all the men and women in the world, 

As if one came back from the dead and spoke, 

With eyes too happy, a familiar thing 

Become divine i' the utterance! while for him 

The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy; 

The palpitating angel in his flesh 

Thrills inly with consenting fellowship 

To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves 

Outside of time. 

             O life, O poetry, 

   Which means life in life! cognisant of life 

Beyond this bloodbeat,passionate for truth 

Beyond these senses, ?poetry, my life, 

My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot 

From Zeus's thunder, who has ravished me 

Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs, 

And set me in the Olympian roar and round 

Of luminous faces, for a cupbearer, 

To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist 

For everlasting laughters,I, myself, 

Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes! 

How those gods look! 

                  Enough so, Ganymede. 

We shall not bear above a round or two? 

We drop the golden cup at Her 's foot 

And swoon back to the earth,and find ourselves 

Facedown among the pinecones, cold with dew, 

While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs, 

'What's come now to the youth?' Such ups and downs 

Have poets. 

        Am I such indeed? The name 

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen, 

Is what I dare not,though some royal blood 

Would seem to tingle in me now and then, 

With sense of power and ache,with imposthumes 

And manias usual to the race. Howbeit 

I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad, 

And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws; 

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Page No 23

The thing's too common. 

                  Many fervent souls 

Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel 

If steel had offered, in a restless heat 

Of doing something. Many tender souls 

Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread. 

As children, cowslips:?the more pains they take, 

The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids, 

Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse. 

Before they sit down under their own vine 

And live for use. Alas, near all the birds 

Will sing at dawn,and yet we do not take 

The chaffering swallow for the holy lark. 

In those days, though, I never analysed 

Myself even. All analysis comes late. 

You catch a sight of Nature, earliest, 

In full front sunface, and your eyelids wink 

And drop before the wonder of 't; you miss 

The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days, 

And wrote because I lived?unlicensed else: 

My heart beat in my brain. Life's violent flood 

Abolished bounds,and, which my neighbour's field, 

Which mine, what mattered ? It is so in youth. 

We play at leapfrog over the god Term; 

The love within us and the love without 

Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love, 

We scarce distinguish. So, with other power. 

Being acted on and acting seem the same: 

In that first onrush of life's chariotwheels, 

We know not if the forests move or we. 

And so, like most young poets, in a flush 

Of individual life, I poured myself 

Along the veins of others, and achieved 

Mere lifeless imitations of life verse, 

And made the living answer for the dead, 

Profaning nature. 'Touch not, do not taste, 

Nor handle, '?we're too legal, who write young: 

We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs, 

As if still ignorant of counterpoint; 

We call the Muse . . 'O Muse, benignant Muse !'? 

As if we had seen her purplebraided head . 

With the eyes in it start between the boughs 

As often as a stag's. What makebelieve, 

With so much earnest! what effete results, 

From virile efforts! what cold wiredrawn odes 

From such white heats! bucolics, where the cows 

Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud 

In lashing off the flies,didactics, driven 

Against the heels of what the master said; 

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Page No 24

And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps 

A babe might blow between two straining cheeks 

Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; 

And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, 

Like castoff nosegays picked up on the road, 

The worse for being warm: all these things, writ 

On happy mornings, with a morning heart, 

That leaps for love, is active for resolve, 

Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms 

Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. 

The wineskins, now and then, a little warped, 

Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. 

Spare the old bottles! spill not the new wine. 

By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped 

In gradual progress like another man, 

But, turning grandly on his central self, 

Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years 

And died, not young,(the life of a long life, 

Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear 

Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn 

For ever;) by that strong excepted soul, 

I count it strange, and hard to understand, 

That nearly all young poets should write old; 

That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen, 

And beardless Byron academical, 

And so with others. It may be, perhaps, 

Such have not settled long and deep enough 

In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,and still 

The memory mixes with the vision, spoils, 

And works it turbid. 

                  Or perhaps, again, 

In order to discover the MuseSphinx, 

The melancholy desert must sweep round, 

Behind you, as before.? 

                  For me, I wrote 

False poems, like the rest, and thought them true. 

Because myself was true in writing them. 

I, peradventure, have writ true ones since 

With less complacence. 

                  But I could not hide 

My quickening inner life from those at watch. 

They saw a light at a window now and then, 

They had not set there. Who had set it there? 

My father's sister started when she caught 

My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say 

I had no business with a sort of soul, 

But plainly she objected,and demurred, 

That souls were dangerous things to carry straight 

Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world. 

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Page No 25

She said sometimes, 'Aurora, have you done 

Your task this morning??have you read that book? 

And are you ready for the crochet here?'? 

As if she said, 'I know there's something wrong, 

I know I have not ground you down enough 

To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust 

For household uses and proprieties, 

Before the rain has got into my barn 

And set the grains asprouting. What, you're green 

With outdoor impudence? you almost grow?' 

To which I answered, 'Would she hear my task, 

And verify my abstract of the book? 

And should I sit down to the crochet work? 

Was such her pleasure?' . . Then I sate and teased 

The patient needle til it split the thread, 

Which oozed off from it in meandering lace 

From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad; 

My soul was singing at a work apart 

Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm 

As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight, 

In vortices of glory and blue air. 

And so, through forced work and spontaneous work, 

The inner life informed the outer life, 

Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms, 

Made cool the forehead with freshsprinkling dreams, 

And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin 

Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks, 

Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across 

My blue eyes greatening in the lookingglass, 

And said, 'We'll live, Aurora! we'll be strong. 

The dogs are on us?but we will not die.' 

Whoever lives true life, will love true love. 

I learnt to love that England. Very oft, 

Before the day was born, or otherwise 

Through secret windings of the afternoons, 

I threw my hunters off and plunged myself 

Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag 

Will take the waters, shivering with the fear 

And passion of the course. And when, at last 

Escaped,so many a green slope built on slope 

Betwixt me and the enemy's house behind, 

I dared to rest, or wander,like a rest 

Made sweeter for the step upon the grass, 

And view the ground's most gentle dimplement, 

(As if God's finger touched but did not press 

In making England!) such an up and down 

Of verdure,nothing too much up or down, 

A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky 

Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb; 

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Page No 26

Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises, 

Fed full of noises by invisible streams; 

And open pastures, where you scarcely tell 

White daisies from white dew,at intervals 

The mythic oaks and elmtrees standing out 

Selfpoised upon their prodigy of shade, 

I thought my father's land was worthy too 

Of being my Shakspeare's. 

                  Very oft alone, 

Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leave 

To walk the third with Romney and his friend 

The rising painter, Vincent Carrington, 

Whom men judge hardly, as beebonneted, 

Because he holds that, paint a body well, 

You paint a soul by implication, like 

The grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for if 

He said . . 'When I was last in Italy' . . 

It sounded as an instrument that's played 

Too far off for the tune?and yet it's fine 

To listen. 

      Often we walked only two, 

If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me. 

We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced; 

We were not lovers, nor even friends wellmatched? 

Say rather, scholars upon different tracks, 

And thinkers disagreed; he, overfull 

Of what is, and I, haply, overbold 

For what might be. 

                  But then the thrushes sang, 

And shook my pulses and the elms' new leaves, 

And then I turned, and held my finger up, 

And bade him mark that, howsoe'er the world 

Went ill, as he related, certainly 

The thrushes still sang in it.?At which word 

His brow would soften,and he bore with me 

In melancholy patience, not unkind, 

While, breaking into voluble ecstasy, 

I flattered all the beauteous country round, 

As poets use . . .the skies, the clouds, the fields, 

The happy violets hiding from the roads 

The primroses run down to, carrying gold, 

The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out 

Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths 

'Twixt dripping ashboughs,hedgerows all alive 

With birds and gnats and large white butterflies 

Which look as if the Mayflower had sought life 

And palpitated forth upon the wind, 

Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist, 

Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills, 

And cattle grazing in the watered vales, 

And cottagechimneys smoking from the woods, 

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Page No 27

And cottagegardens smelling everywhere, 

Confused with smell of orchards. 'See, ' I said, 

'And see! is God not with us on the earth? 

And shall we put Him down by aught we do? 

Who says there's nothing for the poor and vile 

Save poverty and wickedness? behold!' 

And ankledeep in English grass I leaped, 

And clapped my hands, and called all very fair. 

In the beginning when God called all good, 

Even then, was evil near us, it is writ. 

But we, indeed, who call things good and fair, 

The evil is upon us while we speak; 

Deliver us from evil, let us pray. 

[Next] 

"Second Book."

TIMES followed one another. Came a morn 

I stood upon the brink of twenty years, 

And looked before and after, as I stood 

Woman and artist,either incomplete, 

Both credulous of completion. There I held 

The whole creation in my little cup, 

And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank, 

'Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine 

And all these peoples.' 

                  I was glad, that day; 

The June was in me, with its multitudes 

Of nightingales all singing in the dark, 

And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split. 

I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God! 

So glad, I could not choose be very wise! 

And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull 

My childhood backward in a childish jest 

To see the face of't once more, and farewell! 

In which fantastic mood I bounded forth 

At early morning,would not wait so long 

As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings, 

But, brushing a green trail across the lawn 

With my gown in the dew, took will and way 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  25

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Page No 28

Among the acacias of the shrubberies, 

To fly my fancies in the open air 

And keep my birthday, till my aunt awoke 

To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on, 

As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves; 

'The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned 

Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone, 

And so with me it must be, unless I prove 

Unworthy of the grand adversity, 

And certainly I would not fail so much. 

What, therefore, if I crown myself today 

In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it, 

Before my brows be numb as Dante's own 

To all the tender pricking of such leaves? 

Such leaves? what leaves?' 

                  I pulled the branches down, 

To choose from. 

             'Not the bay! I choose no bay; 

The fates deny us if we are overbold: 

Nor myrtle?which means chiefly love; and love 

Is something awful which one dare not touch 

So early o' mornings. This verbena strains 

The point of passionate fragrance; and hard by, 

This guelder rose, at far too slight a beck 

Of the wind, will toss about her flowerapples. 

Ah?there's my choice,that ivy on the wall, 

That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow 

But thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves, 

Serrated like my vines, and half as green. 

I like such ivy; bold to leap a height 

'Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on graves 

As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too, 

(And that's not ill) when twisted round a comb.' 

Thus speaking to myself, half singing it, 

Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell 

To ring with once being touched, I drew a wreath 

Drenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow, 

And fastening it behind so, . . turning faced 

. . My public! Cousin Romney?with a mouth 

Twice graver than his eyes. 

                  I stood there fixed? 

My arms up, like the caryatid, sole 

Of some abolished temple, helplessly 

Persistent in a gesture which derides 

A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame, 

As if from flax, not stone. 

                  'Aurora Leigh, 

The earliest of Aurora's!' 

                  Hand stretched out 

I clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand, 

Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tide 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  26

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Page No 29

Had caught me at my pastime, writing down 

My foolish name too near upon the sea 

Which drowned me with a blush as foolish. 'You, 

My cousin!' 

          The smile died out in his eyes 

And dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight, 

For just a moment . . 'Here's a book, I found! 

No name writ on it?poems, by the form; 

Some Greek upon the margin,lady's Greek, 

Without the accents. Read it? Not a word. 

I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in't, 

Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits; 

I rather bring it to the witch.' 

                  'My book! 

You found it.' . . 

            'In the hollow by the stream, 

That beach leans down into?of which you said, 

The Oread in it has a Naiad's heart 

And pines for waters.' 

                  'Thank you.' 

                      'Rather you, 

My cousin! that I have seen you not too much 

A witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest, 

To be a woman also.' 

                  With a glance 

The smile rose in his eyes again, and touched 

The ivy on my forehead, light as air. 

I answered gravely, 'Poets needs must be 

Or men or women?more's the pity.' 

                       'Ah, 

But men, and still less women, happily, 

Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath, 

Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze 

Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles 

The clean white morning dresses.' 

                      'So you judge! 

Because I love the beautiful, I must 

Love pleasure chiefly, and be overcharged 

For ease and whiteness! Well?you know the world. 

And only miss your cousin; 'tis not much! 

But learn this: I would rather take my part 

With God's Dead, who afford to walk in white 

Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here, 

And gather up my feet from even a step, 

For fear to soil my gown in so much dust. 

I choose to walk at all risks.?Here, if heads 

That hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce, 

For my part, I choose headaches,and today's 

My birthday.' 

           'Dear Aurora, choose instead 

To cure such. You have balsams.' 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  27

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Page No 30

'I perceive! 

The headache is too noble for my sex. 

You think the heartache would sound decenter, 

Since that's the woman's special, proper ache, 

And altogether tolerable, except 

To a woman.' 

           Saying which, I loosed my wreath. 

And, swinging it beside me as I walked, 

Half petulant, half playful, as we walked, 

I sent a sidelong look to find his thought, 

As falcon set on falconer's finger may, 

With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye, 

Which means, 'You'll see?you'll see! I'll soon take flight? 

You shall not hinder.' He, as shaking out 

His hand and answering 'Fly then, ' did not speak, 

Except by such a gesture. Silently 

We paced, until, just coming into sight 

Of the housewindows, he abruptly caught 

At one end of the swinging wreath, and said 

'Aurora!' There I stopped short, breath and all. 

'Aurora, let's be serious, and throw by 

This game of head and heart. Life means, be sure, 

Both heart and head,both active, both complete, 

And both in earnest. Men and women make 

The world, as head and heart make human life. 

Work man, work woman, since there's work to do 

In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart, 

And thought can never do the work of love! 

But work for ends, I mean for uses; not 

For such sleek fringes (do you call them ends? 

Still less God's glory) as we sew ourselves 

Upon the velvet of those baldaquins 

Held 'twixt us and the sun. That book of yours, 

I have not read a page of; but I toss 

A rose up?it falls calyx down, you see! . . 

The chances are that, being a woman, young, 

And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, . . 

You write as well . . and ill . . upon the whole, 

As other women. If as well, what then? 

If even a little better, . . still what then? 

We want the Best in art now, or no art. 

The time is done for facile settings up 

Of minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there; 

The polytheists have gone out in God, 

That unity of Bests. No best, no God! 

And so with art, we say. Give art's divine, 

Direct, indubitable, real as grief, 

Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselves 

Divine by overcoming with mere hope 

And most prosaic patience. You, you are young 

Aurora Leigh

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Page No 31

As Eve with nature's daybreak on her face; 

But this same world you are come to, dearest coz, 

Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreaths 

To hang upon her ruins,and forgets 

To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back 

Those savage, hungry dogs that hunt her down 

To the empty grave of Christ. The world's hard pressed; 

The sweat of labour in the early curse 

Has (turning acrid in six thousand years) 

Become the sweat of torture. Who has time, 

An hour's time . . think! . . to sit upon a bank 

And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands! 

When Egypt's slain, I say, let Miriam sing! 

Before . . where's Moses?' 

                  'Ah?exactly that 

Where's Moses??is a Moses to be found?? 

You'll sink him vainly in the bulrushes, 

While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede, 

Such sounding brass has done some actual good, 

(The application in a woman's hand, 

If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,) 

In colonising beehives.' 

                  'There it is! 

You play beside a deathbed like a child, 

Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place 

To teach the living. None of all these things, 

Can women understand. You generalise, 

Oh, nothing! not even grief! Your quickbreathed hearts, 

So sympathetic to the personal pang, 

Close on each separate knifestroke, yielding up 

A whole life at each wound; incapable 

Of deepening, widening a large lap of life 

To hold the worldfull woe. The human race 

To you means, such a child, or such a man, 

You saw one morning waiting in the cold, 

Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up 

A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes 

Will write of factories and of slaves, as if 

Your father were a negro, and your son 

A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you, 

All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise 

Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard 

To general suffering. Here's the world half blind 

With intellectual light, half brutalised 

With civilization, having caught the plague 

In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west 

Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain 

And sin too! . . does one woman of you all, 

(You who weep easily) grow pale to see 

This tiger shake his cage??does one of you 

Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  29

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Page No 32

And pine and die, because of the great sum 

Of universal anguish??Show me a tear 

Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, 

Because the world is mad? You cannot count, 

That you should weep for this account, not you! 

You weep for what you know. A redhaired child 

Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, 

Though but so little as with a fingertip, 

Will set you weeping! but a million sick . . 

You could as soon weep for the rule of three, 

Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world 

Uncomprehended by you must remain 

Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are, 

Mere women, personal and passionate, 

You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives. 

Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! 

We get no Christ from you,and verily 

We shall not get a poet, in my mind.' 

'With which conclusion you conclude' . . 

                          'But this? 

That you, Aurora, with the large live brow 

And steady eyelids, cannot condescend 

To play at art, as children play at swords, 

To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired 

Because true action is impossible. 

You never can be satisfied with praise 

Which men give women when they judge a book 

Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work, 

Expressing the comparative respect 

Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 

'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! 

'What delicate discernment . . almost thought! 

'The book does honour to the sex, we hold. 

'Among our female authors we make room 

'For this fair writer, and congratulate 

'The country that produces in these times 

'Such women, competent to . . spell.'' 

                       'Stop there!' 

I answered?burning through his thread of talk 

With a quick flame of emotion, 'You have read 

My soul, if not my book, and argue well 

I would not condescend . . we will not say 

To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end 

Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use 

Of holy art and golden life. I am young, 

And peradventure weak?you tell me so? 

Through being a woman. And, for all the rest, 

Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance 

At fairs on tightrope, till the babies dropped 

Their gingerbread for joy,than shift the types 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  30

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Page No 33

For tolerable verse, intolerable 

To men who act and suffer. Better far, 

Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, 

Than a sublime art frivolously.' 

                    'You, 

Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes, 

And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are young 

Aurora, you and I. The world . . look round . . 

The world, we're come to late, is swollen hard 

With perished generations and their sins: 

The civiliser's spade grinds horribly 

On dead men's bones, and cannot turn up soil 

That's otherwise than fetid. All success 

Proves partial failure; all advance implies 

What's left behind; all triumph, something crushed 

At the chariotwheels; all government, some wrong: 

And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich, 

Who agonise together, rich and poor, 

Under and over, in the social spasm 

And crisis of the ages. Here's an age, 

That makes its own vocation! here, we have stepped 

Across the bounds of time! here's nought to see, 

But just the rich man and just Lazarus, 

And both in torments; with a mediate gulph, 

Though not a hint of Abraham's bosom. Who, 

Being man and human, can stand calmly by 

And view these things, and never tease his soul 

For some great cure? No physic for this grief, 

In all the earth and heavens too?' 

                     'You believe 

In God, for your part??ay? That He who makes, 

Can make good things from ill things, best from worst, 

As men plant tulips upon dunghills when 

They wish them finest?' 

                  'True. A deathheat is 

The same as lifeheat, to be accurate; 

And in all nature is no death at all, 

As men account of death, as long as God 

Stands witnessing for life perpetually, ' 

By being just God. That's abstract truth, I know, 

Philosophy, or sympathy with God: 

But I, I sympathise with man, not God, 

I think I was a man for chiefly this; 

And when I stand beside a dying bed, 

It's death to me. Observe,it had not much 

Consoled the race of mastodons to know 

Before they went to fossil, that anon 

Their place should quicken with the elephant 

They were not elephants but mastodons: 

And I, a man, as men are now, and not 

As men may be hereafter, feel with men 

Aurora Leigh

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Page No 34

In the agonising present.' 

                  'Is it so, ' 

I said, 'my cousin? is the world so bad, 

While I hear nothing of it through the trees? 

The world was always evil,but so bad?' 

'So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is grey 

With poring over the long sum of ill; 

So much for vice, so much for discontent, 

So much for the necessities of power, 

So much for the connivances of fear, 

Coherent in statistical despairs 

With such a total of distracted life, . . 

To see it down in figures on a page, 

Plain, silent, clear . . as God sees through the earth 

The sense of all the graves! . . . that's terrible 

For one who is not God, and cannot right 

The wrong he looks on. May I choose indeed 

But vow away my years, my means, my aims, 

Among the helpers, if there's any help 

In such a social strait? The common blood 

That swings along my veins, is strong enough 

To draw me to this duty.' 

                  Then I spoke. 

'I have not stood long on the strand of life, 

And these salt waters have had scarcely time 

To creep so high up as to wet my feet. 

I cannot judge these tides?I shall, perhaps. 

A woman's always younger than a man 

At equal years, because she is disallowed 

Maturing by the outdoor sun and air, 

And kept in longclothes past the age to walk. 

Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise! 

You think a woman ripens as a peach, 

In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now; 

I'm young in age, and younger still, I think, 

As a woman. But a child may say amen 

To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes; 

And I, incapable to loose the knot 

Of social questions, can approve, applaud 

August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot 

Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims. 

Accept my reverence.' 

                  There he glowed on me 

With all his face and eyes. 'No other help?' 

Said he?'no more than so?' 

                  'What help?' I asked. 

'You'd scorn my help,as Nature's self, you say, 

Has scorned to put her music in my mouth, 

Because a woman's. Do you now turn round 

And ask for what a woman cannot give?' 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  32

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Page No 35

'For what she only can, I turn and ask, ' 

He answered, catching up my hands in his, 

And dropping on me from his higheaved brow 

The full weight of his soul, 'I ask for love, 

And that, she can; for life in fellowship 

Through bitter duties?that, I know she can; 

For wifehood . . will she?' 

                  'Now, ' I said, 'may God 

Be witness 'twixt us two!' and with the word, 

Meseemed I floated into a sudden light 

Above his stature, 'am I proved too weak 

To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear 

Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think, 

Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought? 

Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can, 

Yet competent to love, like HIM?' 

                     I paused: 

Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will 

That turns upon the sea. 'It's always so! 

Anything does for a wife.' 

                  'Aurora, dear, 

And dearly honoured' . . he pressed in at once 

With eager utterance, 'you translate me ill. 

I do not contradict my thought of you 

Which is most reverent, with another thought 

Found less so. If your sex is weak for art, 

(And I who said so, did but honour you 

By using truth in courtship) it is strong 

For life and duty. Place your fecund heart 

In mine, and let us blossom for the world 

That wants love's colour in the grey of time. 

With all my talk I can but set you where 

You look down coldly on the arenaheaps 

Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct! 

The JudgmentAngel scarce would find his way 

Through such a heap of generalised distress, 

To the individual man with lips and eyes? 

Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down, 

And, hand in hand, we'll go where yours shall touch 

These victims, one by one! till one by one, 

The formless, nameless trunk of every man 

Shall seem to wear a head, with hair you know, 

And every woman catch your mother's face 

To melt you into passion.' 

                  'I am a girl, ' 

I answered slowly; 'you do well to name 

My mother's face. Though far too early, alas, 

God's hand did interpose 'twixt it and me, 

I know so much of love, as used to shine 

In that face and another. Just so much; 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  33

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Page No 36

No more indeed at all. I have not seen 

So much love since, I pray you pardon me, 

As answers even to make a marriage with, 

In this cold land of England. What you love, 

Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: 

You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir, 

A wife to help your ends . . in her no end! 

Your cause is noble, your ends excellent, 

But I, being most unworthy of these and that, 

Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.' 

'Farewell, Aurora, you reject me thus?' 

He said. 

     'Why, sir, you are married long ago. 

You have a wife already whom you love, 

Your social theory. Bless you both, I say. 

For my part, I am scarcely meek enough 

To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse. 

Do I look a Hagar, think you?' 

                   'So, you jest!' 

'Nay so, I speak in earnest, ' I replied. 

'You treat of marriage too much like, at least, 

A chief apostle; you would bear with you 

A wife . . a sister . . shall we speak it out? 

A sister of charity.' 

                  'Then, must it be 

Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong 

In hope and in illusion, when I took 

The woman to be nobler than the man, 

Yourself the noblest woman,in the use 

And comprehension of what love is,love, 

That generates the likeness of itself 

Through all heroic duties? so far wrong 

In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love, 

'Come, human creature, love and work with me, '? 

Instead of, 'Lady, thou art wondrous fair, 

'And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse 

'Will follow at the lighting of the eyes, 

'And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep 

'Turn round and love me, or I die of love.'' 

With quiet indignation I broke in. 

'You misconceive the question like a man, 

Who sees a woman as the complement 

Of his sex merely. You forget too much 

That every creature, female as the male, 

Stands single in responsible act and thought 

As also in birth and death. Whoever says 

To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me, ' 

Will get fair answers, if the work and love 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  34

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Page No 37

Being good themselves, are good for her?the best 

She was born for. Women of a softer mood, 

Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life, 

Will sometimes only hear the first word, love, 

And catch up with it any kind of work, 

Indifferent, so that dear love go with it: 

I do not blame such women, though, for love, 

They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make 

Too frequently heaven's saints. But me, your work 

Is not the best for,nor your love the best, 

Nor able to commend the kind of work 

For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir, 

To be overbold in speaking of myself, 

I, too, have my vocation,work to do, 

The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed 

My father's face for theirs,and though your world 

Were twice as wretched as you represent 

Most serious work, most necessary work, 

As any of the economists'. Reform, 

Make trade a Christian possibility, 

And individual right no general wrong; 

Wipe out earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine, 

And leave one green, for men to play at bowls; 

With innings for them all! . . what then, indeed, 

If mortals were not greater by the head 

Than any of their prosperities? what then, 

Unless the artist keep up open roads 

Betwixt the seen and unseen,bursting through 

The best of your conventions with his best 

The unspeakable, imaginable best 

God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond 

Both speech and imagination? A starved man 

Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir, 

The beautiful for barley.?And, even so, 

I hold you will not compass your poor ends 

Of barleyfeeding and material ease, 

Without a poet's individualism 

To work your universal. It takes a soul, 

To move a body: it takes a highsouled man, 

To move the masses . . even to a cleaner stye: 

It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off 

The dust of the actual.?ah, your Fouriers failed, 

Because not poets enough to understand 

That life develops from within.?For me, 

Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say, 

Of work like this! . . perhaps a woman's soul 

Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire, 

And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir; 

And if I fail . . why, burn me up my straw 

Like other false works?I'll not ask for grace, 

Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  35

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Page No 38

Who love my art, would never wish it lower 

To suit my stature. I may love my art, 

You'll grant that even a woman may love art, 

Seeing that to waste true love on anything, 

Is womanly, past question.' 

                  I retain 

The very last word which I said, that day, 

As you the creaking of the door, years past, 

Which let upon you such disabling news 

You ever after have been graver. He, 

His eyes, the motions in his silent mouth, 

Were fiery points on which my words were caught, 

Transfixed for ever in my memory 

For his sake, not their own. And yet I know 

I did not love him . . nor he me . . that's sure . . 

And what I said, is unrepented of, 

As truth is always. Yet . . a princely man! 

If hard to me, heroic for himself! 

He bears down on me through the slanting years, 

The stronger for the distance. If he had loved, 

Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, . . 

I might have been a common woman now, 

And happier, less known and less left alone; 

Perhaps a better woman after all, 

With chubby children hanging on my neck 

To keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vines 

That bear such fruit are proud to stoop with it. 

The palm stands upright in a realm of sand. 

And I, who spoke the truth then, stand upright, 

Still worthy of having spoken out the truth, 

By being content I spoke it, though it set 

Him there, me here.?O woman's vile remorse, 

To hanker after a mere name, a show, 

A supposition, a potential love! 

Does every man who names love in our lives, 

Become a power for that? is love's true thing 

So much best to us, that what personates love 

Is next best? A potential love, forsooth! 

We are not so vile. No, no?he cleaves, I think, 

This man, this image, . . chiefly for the wrong 

And shock he gave my life, in finding me 

Precisely where the devil of my youth 

Had set me, on those mountainpeaks of hope 

All glittering with the dawndew, all erect 

And famished for the morning,saying, while 

I looked for empire and much tribute, 'Come, 

I have some worthy work for thee below. 

Come, sweep my barns, and keep my hospitals, 

And I will pay thee with a current coin 

Which men give women.' 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  36

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Page No 39

As we spoke, the grass 

Was trod in haste beside us, and my aunt, 

With smile distorted by the sun,face, voice, 

As much at issue with the summerday 

As if you brought a candle out of doors, 

Broke in with, 'Romney, here! My child, entreat 

Your cousin to the house, and have your talk, 

If girls must talk upon their birthdays. Come.' 

He answered for me calmly, with pale lips 

That seemed to motion for a smile in vain. 

'The talk is ended, madam, where we stand. 

Your brother's daughter has dismissed me here; 

And all my answer can be better said 

Beneath the trees, than wrong by such a word 

Your house's hospitalities. Farewell.' 

With that he vanished. I could hear his heel 

Ring bluntly in the lane, as down he leapt 

The short way, from us.?Then, a measured speech 

Withdrew me. 'What means this, Aurora Leigh? 

My brother's daughter has dismissed my guests?' 

The lion in me felt the keeper's voice, 

Through all its quivering dewlaps: I was quelled 

Before her,meekened to the child she knew: 

I prayed her pardon, said, 'I had little thought 

To give dismissal to a guest of hers, 

In letting go a friend of mine, who came 

To take me into service as a wife, 

No more than that, indeed.' 

                  'No more, no more? 

Pray heaven, ' she answered, 'that I was not mad. 

I could not mean to tell her to her face 

That Romney Leigh had asked me for a wife, 

And I refused him?' 

                  'Did he ask?' I said; 

'I think he rather stooped to take me up 

For certain uses which he found to do 

For something called a wife. He never asked.' 

'What stuff!' she answered; 'are they queens, these girls? 

They must have mantles, stitched with twenty silks, 

Spread out upon the ground, before they'll step 

One footstep for the noblest lover born.' 

'But I am born, ' I said with firmness, 'I, 

To walk another way than his, dear aunt.' 

'You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen months 

Will walk as well as you, ' she cried in haste, 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  37

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Page No 40

'Without a steadying finger. Why, you child, 

God help you, you are groping in the dark, 

For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps, 

That you, sole offspring of an opulent man, 

Are rich and free to choose a way to walk? 

You think, and it's a reasonable thought, 

That I besides, being well to do in life, 

Will leave my handful in my niece's hand 

When death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray, 

Pray, child,albeit I know you love me not, 

As if you loved me, that I may not die! 

For when I die and leave you, out you go, 

(Unless I make room for you in my grave) 

Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother's lamb, 

(Ah heaven,that pains!)?without a right to crop 

A single blade of grass beneath these trees, 

Or cast a lamb's small shadow on the lawn, 

Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here's 

The fruit you planted in your foreign loves! 

Ay, there's the fruit he planted! never look 

Astonished at me with your mother's eyes, 

For it was they, who set you where you are, 

An undowered orphan. Child, your father's choice 

Of that said mother, disinherited 

His daughter, his and hers. Men do not think 

Of sons and daughters, when they fall in love, 

So much more than of sisters; otherwise, 

He would have paused to ponder what he did, 

And shrunk before that clause in the entail 

Excluding offspring by a foreign wife 

(The clause set up a hundred years ago 

By a Leigh who wedded a French dancinggirl 

And had his heart danced over in return) 

But this man shrunk at nothing, never thought 

Of you, Aurora, any more than me? 

Your mother must have been a pretty thing, 

For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns, 

To make a good man, which my brother was, 

Unchary of the duties to his house; 

But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane, 

Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wrote 

Directly on your birth, to Italy, 

'I ask your baby daughter for my son 

In whom the entail now merges by the law. 

Betroth her to us out of love, instead 

Of colder reasons, and she shall not lose 

By love or law from henceforth'?so he wrote; 

A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane. 

Remember how he drew you to his knee 

The year you came here, just before he died, 

And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks, 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  38

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Page No 41

And wished them redder,you remember Vane? 

And now his son who represents our house 

And holds the fiefs and manors in his place, 

To whom reverts my pittance when I die, 

(Except a few books and a pair of shawls) 

The boy is generous like him, and prepared 

To carry out his kindest word and thought 

To you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young man 

Is Romney Leigh; although the sun of youth 

Has shone too straight upon his brain, I know, 

And fevered him with dreams of doing good 

To goodfornothing people. But a wife 

Will put all right, and stroke his temples cool 

With healthy touches' . . 

                  I broke in at that. 

I could not lift my heavy heart to breathe 

Till then, but then I raised it, and it fell 

In broken words like these?'No need to wait. 

The dream of doing good to . . me, at least, 

Is ended, without waiting for a wife 

To cool the fever for him. We've escaped 

That danger . . thank Heaven for it.' 

                      You, ' she cried, 

'Have got a fever. What, I talk and talk 

An hour long to you,I instruct you how 

You cannot eat or drink or stand or sit 

Or even die, like any decent wretch 

In all this unroofed and unfurnished world, 

Without your cousin,and you still maintain 

There's room 'twixt him and you, for flirting fans 

And running knots in eyebrows! You must have 

A pattern lover sighing on his knee: 

You do not count enough a noble heart, 

Above bookpatterns, which this very morn 

Unclosed itself, in two dear fathers' names, 

To embrace your orphaned life! fie, fie! But stay 

I write a word, and counteract this sin.' 

She would have turned to leave me, but I clung. 

'O sweet my father's sister, hear my word 

Before you write yours. Cousin Vane did well, 

And Romney well,and I well too, 

In casting back with all my strength and will 

The good they meant me. O my God, my God! 

God meant me good, too, when he hindered me 

From saying 'yes' this morning. If you write 

A word, it shall be 'no.' I say no, no! 

I tie up 'no' upon His altarhorns 

Quite out of reach of perjury! At least 

My soul is not a pauper; I can live 

At least my soul's life, without alms from men,

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  39

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Page No 42

And if it must be in heaven instead of earth, 

Let heaven look to it,I am not afraid.' 

She seized my hands with both hers, strained them fast 

And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyes 

Right through me, body and heart. 'Yet, foolish Sweet, 

You love this man. I have watched you when he came 

And when he went, and when we've talked of him: 

I am not old for nothing; I can tell 

The weathersigns of love?you love this man.' 

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, 

Half wishing they were dead to save the shame. 

The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; 

They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, 

And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? 

Who's sorry for a gnat . . or girl? 

                      I blushed. 

I feel the brand upon my forehead now 

Strike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feel 

The felon's iron, say, and scorn the mark 

Of what they are not. Most illogical 

Irrational nature of our womanhood, 

That blushes one way, feels another way, 

And prays, perhaps, another! After all, 

We cannot be the equal of the male, 

Who rules his blood a little. 

                  For although 

I blushed indeed, as if I loved the man, 

And her incisive smile, accrediting 

That treason of false witness in my blush, 

Did bow me downward like a swathe of grass 

Below its level that struck me,I attest 

The conscious skies and all their daily suns, 

I think I loved him not . . nor then, nor since . . 

Nor ever. Do we love the schoolmaster, 

Being busy in the woods? much less, being poor, 

The overseer of the parish? Do we keep 

Our love, to pay our debts with? 

                     White and cold 

I grew next moment. As my blood recoiled 

From that imputed ignominy, I made 

My heart great with it. Then, at last I spoke, 

Spoke veritable words, but passionate, 

Too passionate perhaps . . ground up with sobs 

To shapeless endings. She let fall my hands, 

And took her smile off, in sedate disgust, 

As peradventure she had touched a snake, 

A dead snake, mind! and, turning round, replied 

'We'll leave Italian manners, if you please. 

I think you had an English father, child, 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  40

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Page No 43

And ought to find it possible to speak 

A quiet 'yes' or 'no, ' like English girls, 

Without convulsions. In another month 

We'll take another answer . . no, or yes.' 

With that she left me in the gardenwalk. 

I had a father! yes, but long ago? 

How long it seemed that moment! Oh, how far, 

How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saints 

When once gone from us! We may call against 

The lighted windows of thy fair Juneheaven 

Where all the souls are happy,and not one, 

Not even my father, look from work or play 

To ask, 'Who is it that cries after us, 

Below there, in the dusk?' Yet formerly 

He turned his face upon me quick enough, 

If I said 'father.' Now I might cry loud; 

The little lark reached higher with his song 

Than I with crying. Oh, alone, alone, 

Not troubling any in heaven, nor any on earth, 

I stood there in the garden, and looked up 

The deaf blue sky that brings the roses out 

On such June mornings. 

                  You who keep account 

Of crisis and transition in this life, 

Set down the first time Nature says plain 'no' 

To some 'yes' in you, and walks over you 

In gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all begin 

By singing with the birds, and running fast 

With Junedays, hand in hand: but once, for all, 

The birds must sing against us, and the sun 

Strike down upon us like a friend's sword caught 

By an enemy to slay us, while we read 

The dear name on the blade which bites at us! 

That's bitter and convincing: after that 

We seldom doubt that something in the large 

Smooth order of creation, though no more 

Than haply a man's footstep, has gone wrong. 

Some tears fell down my cheeks, and then I smiled, 

As those smile who have no face in the world 

To smile back to them. I had lost a friend 

In Romney Leigh; the thing was sure?a friend, 

Who had looked at me most gently now and then, 

And spoken of my favourite books . . 'our books' . . 

With such a voice! Well, voice and look were now 

More utterly shut out from me, I felt, 

Than even my father's. Romney now was turned 

To a benefactor, to a generous man, 

Who had tied himself to marry . . me, instead 

Of such a woman, with low timorous lids 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  41

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Page No 44

He lifted with a sudden word one day, 

And left, perhaps, for my sake.?Ah, selftied 

By a contract,male Iphigenia, bound 

At a fatal Aulis, for the winds to change, 

(But loose him?they'll not change;) he well might seem 

A little cold and dominant in love! 

He had a right to be dogmatical, 

This poor, good Romney. Love, to him, was made 

A simple lawclause. If I married him, 

I would not dare to call my soul my own, 

Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought 

And every heartbeat down there in the bill, 

Not one found honestly deductible 

From any use that pleased him! He might cut 

My body into coins to give away 

Among his other paupers; change my sons, 

While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babes 

Or piteous foundlings; might unquestioned set 

My right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools, 

My left hand washing in the Public Baths, 

What time my angel of the Ideal stretched 

Both his to me in vain! I could not claim 

The poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal. 

And take so much as pity, from myself. 

Farewell, good Romney! if I loved you even, 

I could but ill afford to let you be 

So generous to me. Farewell, friend, since friend 

Betwixt us two, forsooth, must be a word 

So heavily overladen. And, since help 

Must come to me from those who love me not, 

Farewell, all helpers?I must help myself, 

And am alone from henceforth.?Then I stooped, 

And lifted the soiled garland from the ground, 

And set it on my head as bitterly 

As when the Spanish king did crown the bones 

Of his dead love. So be it. I preserve 

That crown still,in the drawer there! 'twas the first; 

The rest are like it;?those Olympian crowns, 

We run for, till we lose sight of the sun 

In the dust of the racing chariots! 

                     After that, 

Before the evening fell, I had a note 

Which ran, 'Aurora, sweet Chaldean, you read 

My meaning backward like your eastern books, 

While I am from the west, dear. Read me now 

A little plainer. Did you hate me quite 

But yesterday? I loved you for my part; 

I love you. If I spoke untenderly 

This morning, my beloved, pardon it; 

And comprehend me that I loved you so, 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  42

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Page No 45

I set you on the level of my soul, 

And overwashed you with the bitter brine 

Of some habitual thoughts. Henceforth, my flower, 

Be planted out of reach of any such, 

And lean the side you please, with all your leaves! 

Write woman's verses and dream woman's dreams; 

But let me feel your perfume in my home, 

To make my sabbath after workingdays; 

Bloom out your youth beside me,be my wife.' 

I wrote in answer?'We, Chaldeans, discern 

Still farther than we read. I know your heart 

And shut it like the holy book it is, 

Reserved for mildeyed saints to pore upon 

Betwixt their prayers at vespers. Well, you're right, 

I did not surely hate you yesterday; 

And yet I do not love you enough today 

To wed you, cousin Romney. Take this word, 

And let it stop you as a generous man 

From speaking farther. You may tease, indeed, 

And blow about my feelings, or my leaves, 

And here's my aunt will help you with east winds, 

And break a stalk, perhaps, tormenting me; 

But certain flowers grow near as deep as trees, 

And, cousin, you'll not move my root, not you, 

With all your confluent storms. Then let me grow 

Within my wayside hedge, and pass your way! 

This flower has never as much to say to you 

As the antique tomb which said to travellers, 'Pause, 

'Siste, viator.'' Ending thus, I signed. 

The next week passed in silence, so the next, 

And several after: Romney did not come, 

Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on, 

As if my heart were kept beneath a glass, 

And everybody stood, all eyes and ears, 

To see and hear it tick. I could not sit, 

Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down, 

Nor sew on steadily, nor drop a stitch 

And a sigh with it, but I felt her looks 

Still cleaving to me, like the sucking asp 

To Cleopatra's breast, persistently 

Through the intermittent pantings. Being observed, 

When observation is not sympathy, 

Is just being tortured. If she said a word, 

A 'thank you, ' or an 'if it please you, dear.' 

She meant a commination, or, at best, 

An exorcism against the devildom 

Which plainly held me. So with all the house. 

Susannah could not stand and twist my hair, 

Without such glancing at the lookingglass 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  43

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Page No 46

To see my face there, that she missed the plait: 

And John,I never sent my plate for soup, 

Or did not send it, but the foolish John 

Resolved the problem, 'twixt his napkined thumbs, 

Of what was signified by taking soup 

Or choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped in 

On morning visits, feeling a joint wrong, 

Smiled admonition, sate uneasily, 

And talked with measured, emphasised reserve, 

Of parish news, like doctors to the sick, 

When not called in,as if, with leave to speak, 

They might say something. Nay, the very dog 

Would watch me from his sunpatch on the floor, 

In alternation with the large black fly 

Not yet in reach of snapping. So I lived. 

A Roman died so: smeared with honey, teased 

By insects, stared to torture by the noon: 

And many patient souls 'neath English roofs 

Have died like Romans. I, in looking back, 

Wish only, now, I had borne the plague of all 

With meeker spirits than were rife in Rome. 

For, on the sixth week, the dead sea broke up, 

Dashed suddenly through beneath the heel of Him 

Who stands upon the sea and earth, and swears 

Time shall be nevermore. The clock struck nine 

That morning, too,no lark was out of tune; 

The hidden farms among the hills, breathed straight 

Their smoke toward heaven; the limetrees scarcely stirred 

Beneath the blue weight of the cloudless sky, 

Though still the July air came floating through 

The woodbine at my window, in and out, 

With touches of the outdoor countrynews 

For a bending forehead. There I sate, and wished 

That morningtruce of God would last till eve, 

Or longer. 'Sleep, ' I thought, 'late sleepers,sleep, 

And spare me yet the burden of your eyes.' 

Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriek 

Tore upwards from the bottom of the house. 

Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks, 

The still house seemed to shriek itself alive, 

And shudder through its passages and stairs 

With slam of doors and clash of bells.?I sprang, 

I stood up in the middle of the room, 

And there confronted at my chamberdoor, 

A white face,shivering, ineffectual lips. 

'Come, come, ' they tried to utter, and I went; 

As if a ghost had drawn me at the point 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  44

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Page No 47

Of a fiery finger through the uneven dark, 

I went with reeling footsteps down the stair. 

Nor asked a question. 

                  There she sate, my aunt, 

Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed, 

Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bed 

For that night's sleeping . . yet slept well. My God 

The dumb derision of that grey, peaked face 

Concluded something grave against the sun, 

Which filled the chamber with its July burst 

When Susan drew the curtains, ignorant 

Of who sate openeyed behind her. There, 

She sate . . it sate . . we said 'she' yesterday . . 

And held a letter with unbroken seal, 

As Susan gave it to her hand last night: 

All night she had held it. If its news referred 

To duchies or to dunghills, not an inch 

She'd budge, 'twas obvious, for such worthless odds: 

Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburned 

Their spheric limitations, swallowing up 

Like wax the azure spaces, could they force 

Those open eyes to wink once. What last sight 

Had left them blank and flat so,drawing out 

The faculty of vision from the roots, 

As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind? 

Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me? 

That dogged me up and down the hours and days, 

A beaten, breathless, miserable soul? 

And did I pray, a half hour back, but so, 

To escape the burden of those eyes . . those eyes? 

'Sleep late' I said.? 

                  Why now, indeed, they sleep. 

God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, 

And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, 

A gauntlet with a gift in't. Every wish 

Is like a prayer . . With God. 

                  I had my wish, 

To read and meditate the thing I would, 

To fashion all my life upon my thought, 

And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, none 

Could disapprove me, vex me, hamper me. 

Full groundroom, in this desert newly made, 

For Babylon or Balbec,when the breath, 

Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns! 

The heir came over on the funeral day, 

And we two cousins met before the dead, 

With two pale faces. Was it death or life 

That moved us? When the will was read and done, 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  45

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Page No 48

The official guest and witnesses withdrawn, 

We rose up in a silence almost hard, 

And looked at one another. Then I said, 

'Farewell, my cousin.' 

But he touched, just touched 

My hatstrings tied for going, (at the door 

The carriage stood to take me) and said low, 

His voice a little unsteady through his smile, 

'Siste, viator.' 

            'Is there time, ' I asked, 

'In these last days of railroads, to stop short 

Like C¾sar's chariot (weighing half a ton) 

On the Appian road for morals?' 

                    'There is time, ' 

He answered grave, 'for necessary words, 

Inclusive, trust me, of no epitaph 

On man or act, my cousin. We have read 

A will, which gives you all the personal goods 

And funded monies of your aunt.' 

                     'I thank 

Her memory for it. With three hundred pounds 

We buy in England even, clear standingroom 

To stand and work in. Only two hours since, 

I fancied I was poor.' 

                  'And cousin, still 

You're richer than you fancy. The will says, 

Three hundred pounds, and any other sum 

Of which the said testatrix dies possessed. 

I say she died possessed of other sums.' 

'Dear Romney, need we chronicle the pence? 

I'm richer than I thought?that's evident. 

Enough so.' 

           'Listen rather. You've to do 

With business and a cousin, ' he resumed, 

'And both, I fear, need patience. Here's the fact. 

The other sum (there is another sum, 

Unspecified in any will which dates 

After possession, yet bequeathed as much 

And clearly as those said three hundred pounds) 

Is thirty thousand. You will have it paid 

When? . . where? My duty troubles you with words.' 

He struck the iron when the bar was hot; 

No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks. 

'Pause there! I thank you. You are delicate 

In glosing gifts;?but I, who share your blood, 

Am rather made for giving, like yourself, 

Than taking, like your pensioners. Farewell.' 

He stopped me with a gesture of calm pride. 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  46

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Page No 49

'A Leigh, ' he said, 'gives largesse and gives love, 

But gloses neither: if a Leigh could glose, 

He would not do it, moreover, to a Leigh, 

With blood trained up along nine centuries 

To hound and hate a lie, from eyes like yours. 

And now we'll make the rest as clear; your aunt 

Possessed these monies.' 

                  'You'll make it clear, 

My cousin, as the honour of us both, 

Or one of us speaks vainly?that's not I. 

My aunt possessed this sum,inherited 

From whom, and when? bring documents, prove dates.' 

'Why now indeed you throw your bonnet off. 

As if you had time left for a logarithm! 

The faith's the want. Dear cousin, give me faith, 

And you shall walk this road with silken shoes, 

As clean as any lady of our house 

Supposed the proudest. Oh, I comprehend 

The whole position from your point of sight. 

I oust you from your father's halls and lands, 

And make you poor by getting rich?that's law; 

Considering which, in common circumstance, 

You would not scruple to accept from me 

Some compensation, some sufficiency 

Of income?that were justice; but, alas, 

I love you . . that's mere nature! you reject 

My love . . that's nature also;?and at once, 

You cannot, from a suitor disallowed, 

A hand thrown back as mine is, into yours 

Receive a doit, a farthing, . . not for the world! 

That's etiquette with women, obviously 

Exceeding claim of nature, law, and right, 

Unanswerable to all. I grant, you see, 

The case as you conceive it,leave you room 

To sweep your ample skirts of womanhood; 

While, standing humbly squeezed against the wall, 

I own myself excluded from being just, 

Restrained from paying indubitable debts, 

Because denied from giving you my soul? 

That's my fortune! I submit to it 

As if, in some more reasonable age, 

'Twould not be less inevitable. Enough. 

You'll trust me, cousin, as a gentleman, 

To keep your honour, as you count it, pure, 

Your scruples (just as if I thought them wise) 

Safe and inviolate from gifts of mine.' 

I answered mild but earnest. 'I believe 

In no one's honour which another keeps, 

Nor man's nor woman's. As I keep, myself, 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  47

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Page No 50

My truth and my religion, I depute 

No father, though I had one this side death, 

Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you, 

Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh, 

To keep my honour pure. You face, today, 

A man who wants instruction, mark me, not 

A woman who wants protection. As to a man, 

Show manhood, speak out plainly, be precise 

With facts and dates. My aunt inherited 

This sum, you say?' 

                  'I said she died possessed 

Of this, dear cousin.' 

                  'Not by heritage. 

Thank you: we're getting to the facts at last. 

Perhaps she played at commerce with a ship 

Which came in heavy with Australian gold? 

Or touched a lottery with her fingerend, 

Which tumbled on a sudden into her lap 

Some old Rhine tower or principality? 

Perhaps she had to do with a marine 

Subtransatlantic railroad, which prepays 

As well as presupposes? or perhaps 

Some stale ancestral debt was afterpaid 

By a hundred years, and took her by surprise?? 

You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.' 

'You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride, 

The truth is not afraid of hurting you. 

You'll find no cause, in all your scruples, why 

Your aunt should cavil at a deed of gift 

'Twixt her and me.' 

                  'I thought so?ah ! a gift.' 

'You naturally thought so, ' he resumed. 

'A very natural gift.' 

                  'A gift, a gift! 

Her individual life being stranded high 

Above all want, approaching opulence, 

Too haughty was she to accept a gift 

Without some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see, 

A gift intended plainly for her heirs, 

And so accepted . . if accepted . . ah, 

Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps, 

Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you, 

If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?' 

He answered gently, 'Need you tremble and pant 

Like a netted lioness? is't my fault, mine, 

That you're a grand wild creature of the woods, 

And hate the stall built for you? Any way, 

Though triply netted, need you glare at me? 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  48

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Page No 51

I do not hold the cords of such a net, 

You're free from me, Aurora!' 

                   'Now may God 

Deliver me from this strait! This gift of yours 

Was tendered . . when ? accepted . . when ?' I asked. 

'A month . . a fortnight since ? Six weeks ago 

It was not tendered. By a word she dropped, 

I know it was not tendered nor received. 

When was it ? bring your dates.' 

                    'What matters when? 

A halfhour ere she died, or a halfyear, 

Secured the gift, maintains the heritage 

Inviolable with law. As easy pluck 

The golden stars from heaven's embroidered stole, 

To pin them on the grey side of this earth, 

As make you poor again, thank God.' 

                       'Not poor 

Nor clean again from henceforth, you thank God? 

Well, sir?I ask you . . I insist at need . . 

Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.' 

'The day before her deathday, ' he replied, 

'The gift was in her hands. We'll find that deed, 

And certify that date to you.' 

                  As one 

Who has climbed a mountainheight and carried up 

His own heart climbing, panting in his throat 

With the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last, 

Looks back in triumph?so I stood and looked: 

'Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the top 

Of this steep question, and may rest, I think. 

But first, I pray you pardon, that the shock 

And surge of natural feeling and event 

Had made me oblivious of acquainting you 

That this, this letter . . unread, mark,still sealed, 

Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand: 

That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address, 

Which could not find her though you wrote it clear.? 

I know your writing, Romney,recognise 

The openhearted A, the liberal sweep 

Of the G. Now listen,let us understand; 

You will not find that famous deed of gift, 

Unless you find it in the letter here, 

Which, not being mine, I give you back.?Refuse 

To take the letter? well then?you and I, 

As writer and as heiress, open it 

Together, by your leave.?Exactly so: 

The words in which the noble offering's made, 

Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own, 

The proudest and most delicate heart alive, 

Distracted from the measure of the gift 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  49

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Page No 52

By such a grace in giving, might accept 

Your largesse without thinking any more 

Of the burthen of it, than King Solomon 

Considered, when he wore his holy ring 

Charactered over with the ineffable spell, 

How many carats of fine gold made up 

Its moneyvalue. So, Leigh gives to Leigh? 

Or rather, might have given, observe! for that's 

The point we come to. Here's a proof of gift, 

But here's no proof, sir, of acceptancy, 

But rather, disproof. Death's black dust, being blown, 

Infiltrated through every secret fold 

Of this sealed letter by a puff of fate, 

Dried up for ever the freshwritten ink, 

Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace, 

And left these fragments.' 

                  As I spoke, I tore 

The paper up and down, and down and up 

And crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands, 

As forestleaves, stripped suddenly and rapt 

By a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again, 

Drop slow, and strew the melancholy ground 

Before the amazed hills . . why, so, indeed, 

I'm writing like a poet, somewhat large 

In the type of the image,and exaggerate 

A small thing with a great thing, topping it! 

But then I'm thinking how his eyes looked . . his 

With what despondent and surprised reproach! 

I think the tears were in them as he looked? 

I think the manly mouth just trembled. Then 

He broke the silence. 

                  'I may ask, perhaps, 

Although no stranger . . only Romney Leigh, 

Which means still less . . than Vincent Carrington . . 

Your plans in going hence, and where you go. 

This cannot be a secret.' 

                  'All my life 

Is open to you, cousin. I go hence 

To London, to the gatheringplace of souls, 

To live mine straight out, vocally, in books; 

Harmoniously for others, if indeed 

A woman's soul, like man's, be wide enough 

To carry the whole octave (that's to prove) 

Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself. 

Pray God be with me, Romney.' 

                     'Ah, poor child, 

Who fight against the mother's 'tiring hand, 

And choose the headsman's! May God change his world 

For your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven, 

And juster than I have found you!' 

                      But I paused. 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  50

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Page No 53

'And you, my cousin?'? 

                  'I, ' he said, 'you ask? 

You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds, 

And fain would know the end of everything, 

Of cousins, therefore, with the rest. 

For me, Aurora, I've my work; you know my work; 

And having missed this year some personal hope, 

I must beware the rather that I miss 

No reasonable duty. While you sing 

Your happy pastorals of the meads and trees, 

Bethink you that I go to impress and prove 

On stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf, 

Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself, 

And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice, 

To make it vocal. While you ask of men 

Your audience, I may get their leave perhaps 

For hungry orphans to say audibly 

'We're hungry, see, '?for beaten and bullied wives 

To hold their unweaned babies up in sight, 

Whom orphanage would better; and for all 

To speak and claim their portion . . by no means 

Of the soil, . . but of the sweat in tilling it, 

Since this is nowadays turned privilege, 

To have only God's curse on us, and not man's 

Such work I have for doing, elbowdeep 

In social problems,as you tie your rhymes, 

To draw my uses to cohere with needs, 

And bring the uneven world back to its round; 

Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at least 

To smoother issues, some abysmal cracks 

And feuds of earth, intestine heats have made 

To keep men separate,using sorry shifts 

Of hospitals, almshouses, infant schools, 

And other practical stuff of partial good, 

You lovers of the beautiful and whole, 

Despise by system.' 

                'I despise? The scorn 

Is yours, my cousin. Poets become such, 

Through scorning nothing. You decry them for 

The good of beauty, sung and taught by them, 

While they respect your practical partial good 

As being a part of beauty's self. Adieu! 

When God helps all the workers for his world, 

The singers shall have help of Him, not last.' 

He smiled as men smile when they will not speak 

Because of something bitter in the thought; 

And still I feel his melancholy eyes 

Look judgment on me. It is seven years since: 

I know not if 'twas pity or 'twas scorn 

Has made them so farreaching: judge it ye 

Aurora Leigh

"Second Book."  51

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Page No 54

Who have had to do with pity more than love, 

And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then, 

To other ways, from equal men. But so, 

Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I, 

And, in between us, rushed the torrentworld 

To blanch our faces like divided rocks, 

And bar for ever mutual sight and touch 

Except through swirl of spray and all that roar. 

[Next] 

"Third Book."

'TODAY thou girdest up thy loins thyself, 

And goest where thou wouldest: presently 

Others shall gird thee, ' said the Lord, 'to go 

Where thou would'st not.' He spoke to Peter thus, 

To signify the death which he should die 

When crucified head downwards. 

                     If He spoke 

To Peter then, He speaks to us the same; 

The word suits many different martyrdoms, 

And signifies a multiform of death, 

Although we scarcely die apostles, we, 

And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth. 

For tis not in mere death that men die most; 

And, after our first girding of the loins 

In youth's fine linen and fair broidery, 

To run up hill and meet the rising sun, 

We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool, 

While others gird us with the violent bands 

Of social figments, feints, and formalisms, 

Reversing our straight nature, lifting up 

Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts, 

Head downward on the crosssticks of the world. 

Yet He can pluck us from the shameful cross. 

God, set our feet low and our forehead high, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  52

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Page No 55

And show us how a man was made to walk! 

Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed. 

The room does very well; I have to write 

Beyond the stroke of midnight. Get away; 

Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room, 

Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them down 

At once, as I must have them, to be sure, 

Whether I bid you never bring me such 

At such an hour, or bid you. No excuse. 

You choose to bring them, as I choose perhaps 

To throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed, 

And dream, if possible, I am not cross. 

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow, 

A mere, mere woman,a mere flaccid nerve, 

A kerchief left out all night in the rain, 

Turned soft so,overtasked and overstrained 

And overlived in this close London life! 

And yet I should be stronger. 

                   Never burn 

Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare 

With red seals from the table, saying each, 

'Here's something that you know not.' Out alas, 

'Tis scarcely that the world's more good and wise 

Or even straighter and more consequent 

Since yesterday at this time?yet, again, 

If but one angel spoke from Ararat, 

I should be very sorry not to hear: 

So open all the letters! let me read. 

Blanche Ord, the writer in the 'Lady's Fan, ' 

Requests my judgment on . . that, afterwards. 

Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak, 

And signs, 'Elisha to you.' Pringle Sharpe 

Presents his work on 'Social Conduct, ' . . craves 

A little money for his pressing debts . . 

From me, who scarce have money for my needs, 

Art's fiery chariot which we journey in 

Being apt to singe our singingrobes to holes, 

Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward! 

Here's Rudgely knows it,editor and scribe? 

He's 'forced to marry where his heart is not, 

Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.' 

Ah,lost it because no one picked it up! 

That's really loss! (and passable impudence.) 

My critic Hammond flatters prettily, 

And wants another volume like the last. 

My critic Belfair wants another book 

Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?) 

A striking book, yet not a startling book, 

The public blames originalities. 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  53

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Page No 56

(You must not pump springwater unawares 

Upon a gracious public, full of nerves?) 

Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox, 

As easy reading as the dogeared page 

That's fingered by said public, fifty years, 

Since first taught spelling by its grandmother, 

And yet a revelation in some sort: 

That's hard, my critic, Belfair! So?what next? 

My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts; 

'Call a man, John, a woman, Joan, ' says he, 

'And do not prate so of humanities:' 

Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes. 

My critic Jobson recommends more mirth, 

Because a cheerful genius suits the times, 

And all true poets laugh unquenchably 

Like Shakspeare and the gods. That's very hard, 

The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled 

With such a needy heart on two pale lips, 

We cry, 'Weep rather, Dante.' Poems are 

Men, if true poems: and who dares exclaim 

At any man's door, 'Here, 'tis probable 

The thunder fell last week, and killed a wife, 

And scared a sickly husband?what of that? 

Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands, 

Because a cheerful genius suits the times?'? 

None says so to the man,and why indeed 

Should any to the poem ? A ninth seal; 

The apocalypse is drawing to a close. 

Ha,this from Vincent Carrington, 'Dear friend, 

I want good counsel. Will you lend me wings 

To raise me to the subject, in a sketch 

I'll bring tomorrow?may I? at eleven? 

A poet's only born to turn to use; 

So save you! for the world . . and Carrington.' 

'(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh, 

Beyond what's said of him in newspapers, 

His phalansteries there, his speeches here, 

His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere ? 

He dropped me long ago; but no one drops 

A golden apple?though, indeed, one day, 

You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least, 

You know Lord Howe, who sees him . . whom he sees, 

And you see, and I hate to see,for Howe 

Stands high upon the brink of theories, 

Observes the swimmers, and cries 'Very fine, ' 

But keeps dry linen equally,unlike 

That gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is, 

Such sudden madness, seizing a young man, 

To make earth over again,while I'm content 

To make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch. 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  54

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Page No 57

A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot: 

Both arms aflame to meet her wishing Jove 

Halfway, and burn him faster down; the face 

And breasts upturned and straining, the loose locks 

All glowing with the anticipated gold. 

Or here's another on the selfsame theme. 

She lies here?flat upon her prisonfloor, 

The long hair swathed about her to the heel, 

Like wet seaweed. You dimly see her through 

The glittering haze of that prodigious rain, 

Half blotted out of nature by a love 

As heavy as fate. I'll bring you either sketch. 

I think, myself, the second indicates 

More passion. ' 

             Surely. Self is put away, 

And calm with abdication. She is Jove, 

And no more Danae?greater thus. Perhaps 

The painter symbolises unawares 

Two states of the recipient artistsoul; 

One, forward, personal, wanting reverence, 

Because aspiring only. We'll be calm, 

And know that, when indeed our Joves come down. 

We all turn stiller than we have ever been. 

Kind Vincent Carrington. I'll let him come. 

He talks of Florence,and may say a word 

Of something as it chanced seven years ago, 

A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird, 

In those green country walks, in that good time, 

When certainly I was so miserable . . 

I seem to have missed a blessing ever since. 

The music soars within the little lark, 

And the lark soars. It is not thus with men. 

We do not make our places with our strains, 

Content, while they rise, to remain behind, 

Alone on earth instead of so in heaven. 

No matter?I bear on my broken tale. 

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus, 

I took a chamber up three flights of stairs 

Not far from being as steep as some larks climb, 

And, in a certain house in Kensington, 

Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work 

In this world, 'tis the best you get at all; 

For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts 

Than men in benediction. God says, 'Sweat 

For foreheads;' men say 'crowns;' and so we are crowned, 

Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel 

Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work; get work; 

Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get. 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  55

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Page No 58

So, happy and unafraid of solitude, 

I worked the short days out,and watched the sun 

On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons, 

Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass, 

With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat, 

In which the blood of wretches pent inside 

Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air, 

Push out through fog with his dilated disk, 

And startle the slant roofs and chimneypots 

With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw 

Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog, 

Involve the passive city, strangle it 

Alive, and draw it off into the void, 

Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge 

Had wiped out London,or as noon and night 

Had clapped together and utterly struck out 

The intermediate time, undoing themselves 

In the act. Your city poets see such things, 

Not despicable. Mountains of the south, 

When, drunk and mad with elemental wines, 

They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare, 

Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings, 

Descending Sinai; on Parnassus mount, 

You take a mule to climb, and not a muse, 

Except in fable and figure: forests chant 

Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb. 

But sit in London, at the day's decline, 

And view the city perish in the mist 

Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea, 

The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host, 

Sucked down and choked to silence?then, surprised 

By a sudden sense of vision and of tune, 

You feel as conquerors though you did not fight, 

And you and Israel's other singing girls, 

Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose. 

I worked with patience which means almost power 

I did some excellent things indifferently, 

Some bad things excellently. Both were praised, 

The latter loudest. And by such a time 

That I myself had set them down as sins 

Scarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week, 

Arrived some letter through the sedulous post, 

Like these I've read, and yet dissimilar, 

With pretty maiden seals,initials twined 

Of lilies, or a heart marked Emily, 

(Convicting Emily of being all heart); 

Or rarer tokens from young bachelors, 

Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill, 

Suppose, they had been just plucked of) and a snatch 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  56

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Page No 59

From Horace, 'Collegisse juvat, ' set 

Upon the first page. Many a letter signed 

Or unsigned, showing the writers at eighteen 

Had lived too long, though every muse should help 

The daylight, holding candles,compliments, 

To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with me 

No more than coins from Moscow circulate 

At Paris. Would ten rubles buy a tag 

Of ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou? 

I smiled that all this youth should love me,sighed 

That such a love could scarcely raise them up 

To love what was more worthy than myself; 

Then sighed again, again, less generously, 

To think the very love they lavished so, 

Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not, 

And he . . my cousin Romney . . did not write. 

I felt the silent finger of his scorn 

Prick every bubble of my frivolous fame 

As my breath blew it, and resolve it back 

To the air it came from. Oh, I justified 

The measure he had taken of my height: 

The thing was plain?he was not wrong a line; 

I played at art, made thrusts with a toysword, 

Amused the lads and maidens. 

                   Came a sigh 

Deep, hoarse with resolution,I would work 

To better ends, or play in earnest. 'Heavens, 

I think I should be almost popular 

If this went on !'?I ripped my verses up, 

And found no blood upon the rapier's point: 

The heart in them was just an embryo's heart, 

Which never yet had beat, that it should die: 

Just gasps of makebelieve galvanic life; 

Mere tones, inorganised to any tune. 

And yet I felt it in me where it burnt, 

Like those hot fireseeds of creation held 

In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown; 

But I?I was not Juno even! my hand 

Was shut in weak convulsion, woman's ill, 

And when I yearned to loose a finger?lo, 

The nerve revolted. 'Tis the same even now: 

This hand may never, haply, open large, 

Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred, 

To prove the power not else than by the pain. 

It burns, it burnt?my whole life burnt with it, 

And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashed 

My steps out through the slow and difficult road. 

I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs, 

The season's books in drear significance 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  57

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Page No 60

Of morals, dropping round me. Lively books? 

The ash has livelier verdure than the yew; 

And yet the yew's green longer, and alone 

Found worthy of the holy Christmas time. 

We'll plant more yews if possible, albeit 

We plant the graveyards with them. 

                     Day and night 

I worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed up 

Both watch and slumber with long lines of life 

Which did not suit their season. The rose fell 

From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous 

Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse 

Would shudder along the purpleveined wrist 

Like a shot bird. Youth's stern, set face to face 

With youth's ideal: and when people came 

And said, 'You work too much, you are looking ill, ' 

I smiled for pity of them who pitied me, 

And thought I should be better soon perhaps 

For those ill looks. Observe?' I, ' means in youth 

Just I . . the conscious and eternal soul 

With all its ends,and not the outside life, 

The parcelman, the doublet of the flesh, 

The so much liver, lung, integument, 

Which make the sum of 'I' hereafter, when 

Worldtalkers talk of doing well or ill. 

I prosper, if I gain a step, although 

A nail then pierced my foot: although my brain 

Embracing any truth, froze paralysed, 

I prosper. I but change my instrument; 

I break the spade off, digging deep for gold, 

And catch the mattock up. 

                  I worked on, on. 

Through all the bristling fence of nights and days 

Which hedges time in from the eternities, 

I struggled, . . never stopped to note the stakes 

Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil 

Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs: 

I had to live, that therefore I might work. 

And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life, 

To work with one hand for the booksellers, 

While working with the other for myself 

And art. You swim with feet as well as hands 

Or make small way. I apprehended this, 

In England, no one lives by verse that lives; 

And, apprehending, I resolved by prose 

To make a space to sphere my living verse. 

I wrote for cyclop¾dias, magazines, 

And weekly papers, holding up my name 

To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use 

Of the editorial 'we' in a review, 

As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  58

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Page No 61

And swept it grandly through the open doors 

As if one could not pass through doors at all 

Save so encumbered. I wrote tales beside, 

Carved many an article on cherrystones 

To suit light readers,something in the lines 

Revealing, it was said, the mallethand, 

But that, I'll never vouch for. What you do 

For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes, 

Although you have a vineyard in Champagne, 

Much less in Nephelococcygia, 

As mine was, peradventure. 

                  Having bread 

For just so many days, just breathing room 

For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked 

My veritable work. And as the soul 

Which grows within a child, makes the child grow, 

Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God, 

Careering through a tree, dilates the bark, 

And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes 

The summer foliage out in a green flame? 

So life, in deepening with me, deepened all 

The course I took, the work I did. Indeed, 

The academic law convinced of sin; 

The critics cried out on the falling off 

Regretting the first manner. But I felt 

My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show 

It lived, it also?certes incomplete, 

Disordered with all Adam in the blood, 

But even its very tumours, warts, and wens, 

Still organised by, and implying life. 

A lady called upon me on such a day. 

She had the low voice of your English dames, 

Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note 

To catch attention,and their quiet mood, 

As if they lived too high above the earth 

For that to put them out in anything: 

So gentle, because verily so proud; 

So wary and afeared of hurting you, 

By no means that you are not really vile, 

But that they would not touch you with their foot 

To push you to your place; so selfpossessed 

Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes 

An effort in their presence to speak truth: 

You know the sort of woman,brilliant stuff, 

And out of nature. 'Lady Waldemar.' 

She said her name quite simply, as if it meant 

Not much indeed, but something,took my hands, 

And smiled, as if her smile could help my case, 

And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt. 

'Is this, ' she said, 'the Muse?' 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  59

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Page No 62

'No sibyl even, ' 

I answered, 'since she fails to guess the cause 

Which taxed you with this visit, madam.' 

                         'Good, ' 

She said, 'I like to be sincere at once; 

Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse, 

The visit might have taxed me. As it is, 

You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes, 

My fair Aurora, in a frank good way, 

It comforts me entirely for your fame, 

As well as for the trouble of my ascent 

To this Olympus. ' 

                There, a silver laugh 

Ran rippling through her quickened little breaths 

The steep stair somewhat justified. 

                      'But still 

Your ladyship has left me curious why 

You dared the risk of finding the said Muse?' 

'Ah,keep me, notwithstanding, to the point 

Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyes 

As awful as in stockings, after all, 

I wonder, that you'd have my business out 

Before I breathe?exact the epic plunge 

In spite of gasps? Well, naturally you think 

I've come here, as the lionhunters go 

To deserts, to secure you, with a trap 

For exhibition in my drawingrooms 

On zoologic soir es? Not in the least. 

Roar softly at me; I am frivolous, 

I dare say; I have played at lions, too 

Like other women of my class,but now 

I meet my lion simply as Androcles 

Met his . . when at his mercy.' 

                    So, she bent 

Her head, as queens may mock,then lifting up 

Her eyelids with a real grave queenly look, 

Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself, 

'I think you have a cousin:?Romney Leigh.' 

'You bring a word from him? '?my eyes leapt up 

To the very height of hers, 'a word from him? ' 

'I bring a word about him, actually. 

But first, '?she pressed me with her urgent eyes? 

'You do not love him,you?' 

                  'You're frank at least 

In putting questions, madam, ' I replied. 

'I love my cousin cousinly?no more.' 

'I guessed as much. I'm ready to be frank 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  60

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Page No 63

In answering also, if you'll question me, 

Or even with something less. You stand outside, 

You artist women, of the common sex; 

You share not with us, and exceed us so 

Perhaps by what you're mulcted in, your hearts 

Being starved to make your heads: so run the old 

Traditions of you. I can therefore speak, 

Without the natural shame which creatures feel 

When speaking on their level, to their like. 

There's many a papist she, would rather die 

Than own to her maid she put a ribbon on 

To catch the indifferent eye of such a man, 

Who yet would count adulteries on her beads 

At holy Mary's shrine, and never blush; 

Because the saints are so far off, we lose 

All modesty before them. Thus, today. 

'Tis I, love Romney Leigh.' 

                  'Forbear, ' I cried. 

'If here's no muse, still less is any saint; 

Nor even a friend, that Lady Waldemar 

Should make confessions' . . 

                  'That's unkindly said. 

If no friend, what forbids to make a friend 

To join to our confession ere we have done? 

I love your cousin. If it seems unwise 

To say so, it's still foolisher (we're frank) 

To feel so. My first husband left me young, 

And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough, 

To keep my booth in Mayfair with the rest 

To happy issues. There are marquises 

Would serve seven years to call me wife, I know: 

And, after seven, I might consider it, 

For there's some comfort in a marquisate 

When all's said,yes, but after the seven years; 

I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip, 

So like a Leigh! so like him! Pardon me, 

I am well aware I do not derogate 

In loving Romney Leigh. The name is good, 

The means are excellent; but the man, the man? 

Heaven help us both,I am near as mad as he 

In loving such an one.' 

                  She slowly wrung 

Her heavy ringlets till they touched her smile, 

As reasonably sorry for herself; 

And thus continued, 

                  'Of a truth, Miss Leigh, 

I have not, without a struggle, come to this. 

I took a master in the German tongue, 

I gamed a little, went to Paris twice; 

But, after all, this love! . . . you eat of love, 

And do as vile a thing as if you ate 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  61

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Of garlic?which, whatever else you eat, 

Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peach 

Reminds you of your onion! Am I coarse? 

Well, love's coarse, nature's coarse?ah there's the rub! 

We fair fine ladies, who park out our lives 

From common sheeppaths, cannot help the crows 

From flying over,we're as natural still 

As Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectly 

In Lyons' velvet,we are not, for that, 

Layfigures, like you! we have hearts within, 

Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts, 

As ready for distracted ends and acts 

As any distressed sempstress of them all 

That Romney groans and toils for. We catch love 

And other fevers, in the vulgar way. 

Love will not be outwitted by our wit, 

Nor outrun by our equipages:?mine 

Persisted, spite of efforts. All my cards 

Turned up but Romney Leigh; my German stopped 

At germane Wertherism; my Paris rounds 

Returned me from the Champs Elys es just 

A ghost, and sighing like Dido's. I came home 

Uncured,convicted rather to myself 

Of being in love . . in love! That's coarse you'll say 

I'm talking garlic.' 

                  Coldly I replied. 

'Apologise for atheism, not love! 

For, me, I do believe in love, and God. 

I know my cousin: Lady Waldemar 

I know not: yet I say as much as this? 

Whoever loves him, let her not excuse 

But cleanse herself; that, loving such a man, 

She may not do it with such unworthy love 

He cannot stoop and take it.' 

                  'That is said 

Austerely, like a youthful prophetess, 

Who knits her brows across her pretty eyes 

To keep them back from following the grey flight 

Of doves between the templecolumns. Dear, 

Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends. 

I'm a mere woman?the more weak perhaps 

Through being so proud; you're better; as for him, 

He's best. Indeed he builds his goodness up 

So high, it topples down to the other side, 

And makes a sort of badness; there's the worst 

I have to say against your cousin's best! 

And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst, 

For his sake, if not mine.' 

                  'I own myself 

Incredulous of confidence like this 

Availing him or you.' 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  62

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Page No 65

'I, worthy of him ? 

In your sense I am not so?let it pass. 

And yet I save him if I marry him; 

Let that pass too.' 

                  'Pass, pass, we play police 

Upon my cousin's life, to indicate 

What may or may not pass?' I cried. 'He knows 

what's worthy of him; the choice remains with him; 

And what he chooses, act or wife, I think 

I shall not call unworthy, I, for one.' 

'Tis somewhat rashly said, ' she answered slow. 

Now let's talk reason, though we talk of love. 

Your cousin Romney Leigh's a monster! there, 

The word's out fairly; let me prove the fact. 

We'll take, say, that most perfect of antiques, 

They call the Genius of the Vatican, 

Which seems too beauteous to endure itself 

In this mixed world, and fasten it for once 

Upon the torso of the Drunken Fawn, 

(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,) 

Instead of Buonarroti's mask: what then? 

We show the sort of monster Romney is, 

With godlike virtue and heroic aims 

Subjoined to limping possibilities 

Of mismade human nature. Grant the man 

Twice godlike, twice heroic,still he limps, 

And here's the point we come to.' 

                      'Pardon me, 

But, Lady Waldemar, the point's the thing 

We never come to.' 

                  'Caustic, insolent 

At need! I like you'?(there, she took my hands) 

'And now my lioness, help Androcles, 

For all your roaring. Help me! for myself 

I would not say so?but for him. He limps 

So certainly, he'll fall into the pit 

A week hence,so I lose him?so he is lost! 

And when he's fairly married, he a Leigh, 

To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth, 

Starved out in London, till her coarsegrained hands 

Are whiter than her morals,you, for one, 

May call his choice most worthy.' 

                      'Married! lost! 

He, . . . Romney!' 

           'Ah, you're moved at last, ' she said. 

'These monsters, set out in the open sun, 

Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who think 

Awry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he? 

And who but you can wonder? He has been mad, 

The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man, 

He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen's wits, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  63

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Page No 66

With equal scorn of triangles and wine, 

And took no honours, yet was honourable. 

They'll tell you he lost count of Homer's ships 

In Melbourne's poorbills, Ashley's factory bills, 

Ignored the Aspasia we all dared to praise, 

For other women, dear, we could not name 

Because we're decent. Well, he had some right 

On his side probably; men always have, 

Who go absurdly wrong. The living boor 

Who brews your ale, exceeds in vital worth 

Dead Caesar who 'stops bungholes' in the cask; 

And also, to do good is excellent, 

For persons of his income, even to boors: 

I sympathise with all such things. But he 

Went mad upon them . . madder and more mad, 

From college times to these,as, going down hill, 

The faster still, the farther! you must know 

Your Leigh by heart; he has sown his black young curls 

With bleaching cares of half a million men 

Already. If you do not starve, or sin, 

You're nothing to him. Pay the incometax, 

And break your heart upon't . . . he'll scarce be touched; 

But come upon the parish, qualified 

For the parish stocks, and Romney will be there 

To call you brother, sister, or perhaps 

A tenderer name still. Had I any chance 

With Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar, 

And never committed felony?' 

                  'You speak 

Too bitterly, ' I said, 'for the literal truth.' 

'The truth is bitter. Here's a man who looks 

For ever on the ground! you must be low; 

Or else a pictured ceiling overhead, 

Good painting thrown away. For me, I've done 

What women may, (we're somewhat limited, 

We modest women) but I've done my best. 

?How men are perjured when they swear our eyes 

Have meaning in them! they're just blue or brown, 

They just can drop their lids a little. In fact, 

Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through, 

Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc 

With various other of his socialists; 

And if I had been a fathom less in love, 

Had cured myself with gaping. As it was, 

I quoted from them prettily enough, 

Perhaps, to make them sound half rational 

To a saner man than he, whene'er we talked, 

(For which I dodged occasion)?learnt by heart 

His speeches in the Commons and elsewhere 

Upon the social question; heaped reports 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  64

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Of wicked women and penitentiaries, 

On all my tables, with a place for Sue; 

And gave my name to swell subscriptionlists 

Toward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven, 

And other possible ends. All things I did, 

Except the impossible . . such as wearing gowns 

Provided by the Ten Hours' movement! there, 

I stopped?we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile, 

Unmoved as the Indian tortoise 'neath the world 

Let all that noise go on upon his back; 

He would not disconcert or throw me out; 

'Twas well to see a woman of my class 

With such a dawn of conscience. For the heart, 

Made firewood for his sake, and flaming up 

To his very face . . he warmed his feet at it: 

But deigned to let my carriage stop him short 

In park or street,he leaning on the door 

With news of the committee which sate last 

On pickpockets at suck.' 

             'You jest?you jest.' 

'As martyrs jest, dear (if you read their lives), 

Upon the axe which kills them. When all's done 

By me, . . for him?you'll ask him presently 

The color of my hair?he cannot tell, 

Or answers 'dark' at random,while, be sure, 

He's absolute on the figure, five or ten, 

Of my last subscription. Is it bearable, 

And I a woman?' 

          'Is it reparable, 

Though I were a man?' 

          'I know not. That's to prove. 

But, first, this shameful marriage?' 

                'Ay?' I cried. 

'Then really there's a marriage.' 

                'Yesterday 

I held him fast upon it. 'Mister Leigh, ' 

Said I, 'shut up a thing, it makes more noise. 

'The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I've known 

'Yours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so: 

'You feel I'm not the woman of the world 

'The world thinks; you have borne with me before 

'And used me in your noble work, our work, 

'And now you shall not cast me off because 

'You're at the difficult point, the join. 'Tis true 

'Even if I can scarce admit the cogency 

'Of such a marriage . . where you do not love 

'(Except the class), yet marry and throw your name 

'Down to the gutter, for a fireescape 

'To future generation! it's sublime, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  65

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'A great example,a true Genesis 

'Of the opening social era. But take heed; 

'This virtuous act must have a patent weight, 

'Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell, 

'Interpret it, and set it in the light, 

'And do not muffle it in a wintercloak 

'As a vulgar bit of shame,as if, at best, 

'A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushed 

'A Howard should know it.' Then, I pressed him more? 

'He would not choose, ' I said, 'that even his kin, . . 

'Aurora Leigh, even . . should conceive his act 

'Less sacrifice, more appetite.' At which 

He grew so pale, dear, . . to the lips, I knew 

I had touched him. 'Do you know her, ' he inquired, 

'My cousin Aurora?' 'Yes, ' I said, and lied 

(But truly we all know you by your books), 

And so I offered to come straight to you, 

Explain the subject, justify the cause, 

And take you with me to Saint Margaret's Court 

To see this miracle, this Marian Erle, 

This drover's daughter (she's not pretty, he swears), 

Upon whose finger, exquisitely pricked 

By a hundred needles, we're to hang the tie 

'Twixt class and class in England,thus indeed 

By such a presence, yours and mine, to lift 

The match up from the doubtful place. At once 

He thanked me, sighing, . . murmured to himself 

'She'll do it perhaps; she's noble, '?thanked me, twice, 

And promised, as my guerdon, to put off 

His marriage for a month.' 

             I answered then. 

'I understand your drift imperfectly. 

You wish to lead me to my cousin's betrothed, 

To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her hand 

If feeble, thus to justify his match. 

So be it then. But how this serves your ends, 

And how the strange confession of your love 

Serves this, I have to learn?I cannot see.' 

She knit her restless forehead. 'Then, despite, 

Aurora, that most radiant morning name, 

You're dull as any London afternoon. 

I wanted time,and gained it,wanted you, 

And gain you! You will come and see the girl 

In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearl 

And pride of all your lofty race of Leighs 

Is destined to solution. Authorised 

By sight and knowledge, then, you'll speak your mind, 

And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way, 

He'll wrong the people and posterity 

(Say such a thing is bad for you and me, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  66

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Page No 69

And you fail utterly), by concluding thus 

An execrable marriage. Break it up. 

Disroot it?peradventure, presently, 

We'll plant a better fortune in its place. 

Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me less 

For saying the thing I should not. Well I know 

I should not. I have kept, as others have, 

The iron rule of womanly reserve 

In lip and life, till now: I wept a week 

Before I came here.'?Ending, she was pale; 

The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous. 

This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck, 

And, only by the foam upon the bit, 

You saw she champed against it. 

                  Then I rose. 

'I love love: truth's no cleaner thing than love. 

I comprehend a love so fiery hot 

It burns its natural veil of august shame, 

And stands sublimely in the nude, as chaste 

As Medicean Venus. But I know, 

A love that burns through veils will burn through masks 

And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie! 

Nay?go to the opera! your love's curable.' 

'I love and lie!' she said?'I lie, forsooth?' 

And beat her taper foot upon the floor, 

And smiled against the shoe, 'You're hard, Miss Leigh, 

Unversed in current phrases.?Bowlinggreens 

Of poets are fresher than the world's highways: 

Forgive me that I rashly blew the dust 

Which dims our hedges even, in your eyes, 

And vexed you so much. You find, probably, 

No evil in this marriage,rather good 

Of innocence, to pastoralise in song: 

You'll give the bond your signature, perhaps, 

Beneath the lady's work,indifferent 

That Romney chose a wife, could write her name, 

In witnessing he loved her.' 

                'Loved!' I cried; 

'Who tells you that he wants a wife to love? 

He gets a horse to use, not love, I think: 

There's work for wives as well,and after, straw, 

When men are liberal. For myself, you err 

Supposing power in me to break this match. 

I could not do it, to save Romney's life, 

And would not, to save mine.' 

                  'You take it so, ' 

She said, 'farewell then. Write your books in peace, 

As far as may be for some secret stir 

Now obvious to me,for, most obviously, 

In coming hither I mistook the way.' 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  67

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Whereat she touched my hand and bent her head, 

And floated from me like a silent cloud 

That leaves the sense of thunder. 

                I drew breath, 

As hard as in a sickroom. After all, 

This woman breaks her social system up 

For love, so counted?the love possible 

To such,and lilies are still lilies, pulled 

By smutty hands, though spotted from their white; 

And thus she is better, haply, of her kind, 

Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams, 

And crosses out the spontaneities 

Of all his individual, personal life 

With formal universals. As if man 

Were set upon a high stool at a desk, 

To keep God's books for Him, in red and black, 

And feel by millions! What, if even God 

Were chiefly God by living out Himself 

To an individualism of the Infinite, 

Eterne, intense, profuse,still throwing up 

The golden spray of multitudinous worlds 

In measure to the proclive weight and rush 

Of his inner nature,the spontaneous love 

Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life? 

Then live, Aurora! 

          Two hours afterward, 

Within Saint Margaret's Court I stood alone, 

Closeveiled. A sick child, from an aguefit, 

Whose wasted right hand gambled 'gainst his left 

With an old brass button, in a blot of sun, 

Jeered weakly at me as I passed across 

The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged 

Upon the angular cheekbones, kerchief torn, 

Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth, 

Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out, 

By turns some bedrid creature and myself, 

'Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog 

You'll be tomorrow. What, we pick our way, 

Fine madam, with those damnable small feet! 

We cover up our face from doing good, 

As if it were our purse! What brings you here, 

My lady? is't to find my gentleman 

Who visits his tame pigeon in the eaves? 

Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms, 

And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all, 

And turn your whiteness deadblue.' I looked up; 

I think I could have walked through hell that day, 

And never flinched. 'The dear Christ comfort you, ' 

I said, 'you must have been most miserable 

To be so cruel, '?and I emptied out 

My purse upon the stones: when, as I had cast 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  68

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The last charm in the cauldron, the whole court 

Went boiling, bubbling up, from all its doors 

And windows, with a hideous wail of laughs 

And roar of oaths, and blows perhaps . . I passed 

Too quickly for distinguishing . . and pushed 

A little sidedoor hanging on a hinge, 

And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbed 

The long, steep, narrow stair 'twixt broken rail 

And mildewed wall that let the plaster drop 

To startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up! 

So high lived Romney's bride. I paused at last 

Before a low door in the roof, and knocked; 

There came an answer like a hurried dove? 

'So soon! can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?' 

And, as I entered, an ineffable face 

Met mine upon the threshold. 'Oh, not you, 

Not you!' . . the dropping of the voice implied; 

'Then, if not you, for me not any one.' 

I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands, 

And said 'I am his cousin,Romney Leigh's; 

And here I'm come to see my cousin too.' 

She touched me with her face and with her voice, 

This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers 

From such rough roots? The people, under there, 

Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so . . . faugh! 

Yet have such daughters! 

              Nowise beautiful 

Was Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown, 

But could look either, like a mist that changed 

According to being shone on more or less: 

The hair, too, ran its opulence of curls 

In doubt 'twixt dark and bright, nor left you clear 

To name the color. Too much hair perhaps 

(I'll name a fault here) for so small a head, 

Which seemed to droop on that side and on this, 

As a fullblown rose uneasy with its weight, 

Though not a breath should trouble it. Again, 

The dimple in the cheek had better gone 

With redder, fuller rounds; and somewhat large 

The mouth was, though the milky little teeth 

Dissolved it to so infantile a smile! 

For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too, 

But 'twas as if remembering they had wept, 

And knowing they should, some day, weep again. 

We talked. She told me all her story out, 

Which I'll retell with fuller utterance, 

As coloured and confirmed in aftertimes 

By others, and herself too. Marian Erle 

Was born upon the ledge of Malvern Hill, 

To eastward, in a hut, built up at night, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  69

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To evade the landlord's eye, of mud and turf, 

Still liable, if once he looked that way, 

To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot, 

Like any other anthill. Born, I say; 

God sent her to his world, commissioned right, 

Her human testimonials fully signed, 

Not scant in soul?complete in lineaments; 

But others had to swindle her a place 

To wail in when she had come. No place for her, 

By man's law! born an outlaw, was this babe; 

Her first cry in our strange and strangling air, 

When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb, 

Was wrong against the social code,forced wrong. 

What business had the baby to cry there? 

I tell her story and grow passionate. 

She, Marian, did not tell it so, but used 

Meek words that made no wonder of herself 

For being so sad a creature. 'Mister Leigh 

Considered truly that such things should change. 

They will, in heaven?but meantime, on the earth, 

There's none can like a nettle as a pink, 

Except himself. We're nettles, some of us, 

And give offence by the act of springing up; 

And, if we leave the damp side of the wall, 

The hoes, of course, are on us.' So she said. 

Her father earned his life by random jobs 

Despised by steadier workmen?keeping swine 

On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on 

The harvest at wet seasons,or, at need, 

Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove 

Of startled horses plunged into the mist 

Below the mountainroad, and sowed the wind 

With wandering neighings. In between the gaps 

Of such irregular work, he drank and slept, 

And cursed his wife because, the pence being out, 

She could not buy more drink. At which she turned, 

(The worm), and beat her baby in revenge 

For her own broken heart. There's not a crime 

But takes its proper change out still in crime 

If once rung on the counter of this world: 

Let sinners look to it. 

             Yet the outcast child, 

For whom the very mother's face forewent 

The mother's special patience, lived and grew; 

Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone, 

With that pathetic vacillating roll 

Of the infant body on the uncertain feet, 

(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon) 

At which most women's arms unclose at once 

With irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  70

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Page No 73

This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold, 

This babe would steal off from the mother's chair, 

And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse, 

Would find some keyhole toward the secrecy 

Of Heaven's high blue, and, nestling down, peer out? 

Oh, not to catch the angels at their games, 

She had never heard of angels, but to gaze 

She knew not why, to see she knew not what, 

Ahungering outward from the barren earth 

For something like a joy. She liked, she said, 

To dazzle black her sight against the sky, 

For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down, 

And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss; 

She learnt God that way, and was beat for it 

Whenever she went home,yet came again, 

As surely as the trapped hare, getting free, 

Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said, 

This skyey father and mother both in one, 

Instructed her and civilised her more 

Than even the Sundayschool did afterward, 

To which a lady sent her to learn books 

And sit upon a long bench in a row 

With other children. Well, she laughed sometimes 

To see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts; 

But ofter she was sorrowful with noise, 

And wondered if their mothers beat them hard 

That ever they should laugh so. There was one 

She loved indeed,Rose Bell, a seven years' child, 

So pretty and clever, who read syllables 

When Marian was at letters; she would laugh 

At nothing?hold your finger up, she laughed, 

Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouth 

To hide her makemirth from the schoolmaster. 

And Rose's pelting glee, as frank as rain 

On cherryblossoms, brightened Marian too, 

To see another merry whom she loved. 

She whispered once (the children side by side, 

With mutual arms entwined about their necks) 

'Your mother lets you laugh so?' 'Ay, ' said Rose, 

'She lets me. She was dug into the ground 

Six years since, I being but a yearling wean. 

Such mothers let us play and lose our time, 

And never scold nor beat us! Don't you wish 

You had one like that?' There, Marian, breaking off 

Looked suddenly in my face. 'Poor Rose, ' said she, 

'I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street. 

I'd pour out half my blood to stop that laugh, 

Poor Rose, poor Rose!' said Marian. 

                  She resumed. 

It tried her, when she had learnt at Sundayschool 

What God was, what he wanted from us all, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  71

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And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ, 

To go straight home and hear her father pull 

The name down on us from the thundershelf, 

Then drink away his soul into the dark 

From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home, 

Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more 

She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong: 

Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know 

The vileness of her kindred: through her heart, 

Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth 

They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, 'tis hard 

To learn you have a father up in heaven 

By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth, 

Still worse than orphaned: 'tis too heavy a grief, 

The having to thank God for such a joy! 

And so passed Marian's life from year to year. 

Her parents took her with them when they tramped, 

Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs, 

And once went farther and saw Manchester, 

And once the sea, that blue end of the world, 

That fair scrollfinis of a wicked book, 

And twice a prison, back at intervals, 

Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven, 

And stronger sometimes, holding out their hands 

To pull you from the vile flats up to them; 

And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back, 

As sheep do, simply that they knew the way, 

They certainly felt bettered unawares 

Emerging from the social smut of towns 

To wipe their feet clean on the mountain turf. 

In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned, 

Endured and learned. The people on the roads 

Would stop and ask her how her eyes outgrew 

Her cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birds 

In all that hair; and then they lifted her, 

The miller in his cart, a mile or twain, 

The butcher's boy on horseback. Often, too, 

The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the head 

With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed, 

And asked if peradventure she could read: 

And when she answered 'ay, ' would toss her down 

Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack, 

A Thomson's Seasons, mulcted of the Spring, 

Or half a play of Shakespeare's, torn across: 

(She had to guess the bottom of a page 

By just the top sometimes,as difficult, 

As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!), 

Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth's 

Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books, 

From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost, 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  72

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Page No 75

From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones. 

'Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct, 

And oft the jangling influence jarred the child 

Like looking at a sunset full of grace 

Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths 

Went on behind her; but she weeded out 

Her bookleaves, threw away the leaves that hurt, 

(First tore them small, that none should find a word), 

And made a nosegay of the sweet and good 

To fold within her breast, and pore upon 

At broken moments of the noontide glare, 

When leave was given her to untie her cloak 

And rest upon the dusty roadside bank 

From the highway's dust. Or oft, the journey done, 

Some city friend would lead her by the hand 

To hear a lecture at an institute. 

And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours, 

To no booklearning,she was ignorant 

Of authors,not in earshot of the things 

Outspoken o'er the heads of common men, 

By men who are uncommon,but within 

The cadenced hum of such, and capable 

Of catching from the fringes of the wind 

Some fragmentary phrases, here and there, 

Of that fine music,which, being carried in 

To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh 

In finer motions of the lips and lids. 

She said, in speaking of it, 'If a flower 

Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals, 

You'd soon attain to a trick of looking up, 

And so with her.' She counted me her years, 

Till I felt old; and then she counted me 

Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed. 

She told me she was almost glad and calm 

On such and such a season; sate and sewed, 

With no one to break up her crystal thoughts: 

While rhymes from lovely poems span around 

Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune, 

Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour. 

Her parents called her a strange, sickly child, 

Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare, 

And smile into the hedges and the clouds, 

And tremble if one shook her from her fit 

By any blow, or word even. Outdoor jobs 

Went ill with her; and household quiet work 

She was not born to. Had they kept the north, 

They might have had their pennyworth out of her 

Like other parents, in the factories; 

(Your children work for you, not you for them, 

Or else they better had been choked with air 

Aurora Leigh

"Third Book."  73

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The first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life, 

Was nothing to be done with such a child, 

But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose 

Not ill, and was not dull at needlework; 

And all the country people gave her pence 

For darning stockings past their natural age, 

And patching petticoats from old to new, 

And other light work done for thrifty wives. 

One day, said Marian?the sun shone that day? 

Her mother had been badly beat, and felt 

The bruises sore about her wretched soul 

(That must have been): she came in suddenly, 

And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage, 

Her daughter's headgear comb, let down the hair 

Upon her, like a sudden waterfall, 

Then drew her drenched and passive, by the arm, 

Outside the hut they lived in. When the child 

Could clear her blinded face from all that stream 

Of tresses . . there, a man stood, with beasts' eyes 

That seemed as they would swallow her alive, 

Complete in body and spirit, hair and all, 

With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek, 

He breathed so near. The mother held her tight, 

Saying hard between her teeth?'Why wench, why wench, 

The squire speaks to you now?the squire's too good, 

He means to set you up and comfort us. 

Be mannerly at least.' The child turned round 

And looked up piteous in the mother's face 

(Be sure that mother's deathbed will not want 

Another devil to damn, than such a look), 

'Oh, mother!' then, with desperate glance to heaven, 

'Good, free me from my mother, ' she shrieked out, 

'These mothers are too dreadful.' And, with force 

As passionate as fear, she tore her hands, 

Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his, 

And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep, 

Away from both?away, if possible, 

As far as God,away! They yelled at her, 

As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell; 

She felt her name hiss after her from the hills, 

Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast 

The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear 

Was running in her feet and killing the ground; 

The white roads curled as if she burnt them up, 

The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back 

To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed; 

Trees, fields, turned on her and ran after her; 

She heard the quick pants of the hills behind, 

Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet, 

Could run no more, yet somehow went as fast, 

Aurora Leigh

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The horizon, red, 'twixt steeples in the east 

So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart 

Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big 

It seemed to fill her body; then it burst, 

And overflowed the world and swamped the light, 

'And now I am dead and safe, ' thought Marian Erle? 

She had dropped, she had fainted. 

                When the sense returned, 

The night had passed?not life's night. She was 'ware 

Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels, 

The driver shouting to the lazy team 

That swung their rankling bells against her brain, 

While, through the waggon's coverture and chinks, 

The cruel yellow morning pecked at her 

Alive or dead, upon the straw inside, 

At which her soul ached back into the dark 

And prayed, 'no more of that.' A waggoner 

Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon, 

As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood. 

At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped 

The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up, 

And laid her in his waggon in the straw, 

And so conveyed her to the distant town 

To which his business called himself, and left 

That heap of misery at the hospital. 

She stirred;?the place seemed new and strange as death. 

The white strait bed, with others strait and white, 

Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths, 

And quiet people walking in and out 

With wonderful low voices and soft steps, 

And apparitional equal care for each, 

Astonished her with order, silence, law: 

And when a gentle hand held out a cup, 

She took it, as you do at sacrament, 

Half awed, half melted,not being used, indeed, 

To so much love as makes the form of love 

And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks 

And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes 

Were turned in observation. O my God, 

How sick we must be, ere we make men just! 

I think it frets the saints in heaven to see 

How many Desolate creatures on the earth 

Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship 

And social comfort, in a hospital, 

As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced, 

And wished, at intervals of growing sense, 

She might be sicker yet, if sickness made 

The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed, 

And all her waketime quiet as a sleep; 

For now she understood, (as such things were) 

Aurora Leigh

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How sickness ended very oft in heaven, 

Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick, 

And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids, 

And, folding up her hands as flowers at night, 

Would lose no moment of the blessed time. 

She lay and seethed in fever many weeks; 

But youth was strong and overcame the test; 

Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled 

And fetched back to the necessary day 

And daylight duties. She could creep about 

The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily 

From any narrow window on the street, 

Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend, 

Said coldly to her, as an enemy, 

'She had leave to go next week, being well enough, ' 

While only her heart ached. 'Go next week, ' thought she, 

'Next week! how would it be with her next week, 

Let out into that terrible street alone 

Among the pushing people, . . to go . . where?' 

One day, the last before the dreaded last, 

Among the convalescents, like herself 

Prepared to go next morning, she sate dumb, 

And heard half absently the women talk, 

How one was famished for her baby's cheeks? 

'The little wretch would know her! a year old, 

And lively, like his father!' one was keen 

To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths; 

And one was tender for her dear goodman 

Who had missed her sorely,and one, querulous . . 

'Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had dared 

To talk about her as already dead, '? 

And one was proud . . 'and if her sweetheart Luke 

Had left her for a ruddier face than hers, 

(The gossip would be seen through at a glance) 

Sweet riddance of such sweethearts?let him hang! 

'Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.' 

And while they talked, and Marian felt the worse 

For having missed the worst of all their wrongs, 

A visitor was ushered through the wards 

And paused among the talkers. 'When he looked, 

It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke 

He sang perhaps, ' said Marian; 'could she tell? 

She only knew' (so much she had chronicled, 

As seraphs might, the making of the sun) 

'That he who came and spake was Romney Leigh, 

And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.' 

And when it was her turn to have the face 

Upon her,all those buzzing pallid lips 

Aurora Leigh

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Being satisfied with comfort?when he changed 

To Marian, saying, 'And you? You're going, where?'? 

She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone 

Which some one's stumbling foot has spurned aside, 

Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light, 

And breaking into sobs cried, 'Where I go? 

None asked me till this moment. Can I say 

Where I go? When it has not seemed worth while 

To God himself, who thinks of every one, 

To think of me, and fix where I shall go?' 

'So young, ' he gently asked her, 'you have lost 

Your father and your mother?' 

                   'Both' she said, 

'Both lost! My father was burnt up with gin 

Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost. 

My mother sold me to a man last month, 

And so my mother's lost, 'tis manifest. 

And I, who fled from her for miles and miles, 

As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell 

Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir) 

It seems I shall be lost too, presently, 

And so we end, all three of us.' 

                  'Poor child!' 

He said,with such a pity in his voice, 

It soothed her more than her own tears, 'poor child! 

'Tis simple that betrayal by mother's love 

Should bring despair of God's too. Yet be taught 

He's better to us than many mothers are, 

And children cannot wander beyond reach 

Of the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold' 

And if you weep still, weep where John was laid 

While Jesus loved him.' 

                  'She could say the words, ' 

She told me, 'exactly as he uttered them 

A year back, . . since in any doubt or dark, 

They came out like the stars, and shone on her 

With just their comfort. Common words, perhaps; 

The ministers in church might say the same; 

But he, he made the church with what he spoke, 

The difference was the miracle, ' said she. 

Then catching up her smile to ravishment, 

She added quickly, 'I repeat his words, 

But not his tones: can any one repeat 

The music of an organ, out of church? 

And when he said 'poor child, ' I shut my eyes 

To feel how tenderly his voice broke through, 

As the ointmentbox broke on the Holy feet 

To let out the rich medicative nard.' 

Aurora Leigh

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She told me how he had raised and rescued her 

With reverent pity, as, in touching grief, 

He touched the wounds of Christ,and made her feel 

More selfrespecting. Hope, he called, belief 

In God,work, worship . . therefore let us pray! 

And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism, 

And keep it stainless from her mother's face, 

He sent her to a famous sempstresshouse 

Far off in London, there to work and hope. 

With that they parted. She kept sight of Heaven, 

But not of Romney. He had good to do 

To others: through the days and through the nights, 

She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes, 

And wondered, while, along the tawny light, 

She struck the new thread into her needle's eye, 

How people without mothers on the hills, 

Could choose the town to live in! then she drew 

The stitch, and mused how Romney's face would look, 

And if 'twere likely he'd remember hers, 

When they two had their meeting after death. 

[Next] 

"Fourth Book."

THEY met still sooner. 'Twas a year from thence 

When Lucy Gresham, the sick semptress girl, 

Who sewed by Marian's chair so still and quick, 

And leant her head upon the back to cough 

More freely when, the mistress turning round, 

The others took occasion to laugh out, 

Gave up a last. Among the workers, spoke 

A bold girl with black eyebrows and red lips, 

'You know the news? Who's dying, do you think? 

Our Lucy Gresham. I expected it 

As little as Nell Hart's wedding. Blush not, Nell, 

Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks; 

And, some day, there'll be found a man to dote 

On red curls.?Lucy Gresham swooned last night, 

Dropped sudden in the street while going home; 

And now the baker says, who took her up 

And laid her by her grandmother in bed, 

He'll give her a week to die in. Pass the silk. 

Aurora Leigh

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Let's hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach, 

For otherwise they'll starve before they die, 

That funny pair of bedfellows! Miss Bell, 

I'll thank you for the scissors. The old crone 

Is paralytic?that's the reason why 

Our Lucy's thread went faster than her breath, 

Which went too quick, we all know. Marian Erle! 

Why, Marian Erle, you're not the fool to cry? 

Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar's new dress, 

You piece of pity!' 

                Marian rose up straight, 

And, breaking through the talk and through the work, 

Went outward, in the face of their surprise, 

To Lucy's home, to nurse her back to life 

Or down to death. She knew by such an act, 

All place and grace were forfeit in the house, 

Whose mistress would supply the missing hand 

With necessary, not inhuman haste, 

And take no blame. But pity, too, had dues: 

She could not leave a solitary soul 

To founder in the dark, while she sate still 

And lavished stitches on a lady's hem 

As if no other work were paramount. 

'Why, God, ' thought Marian, 'has a missing hand 

This moment; Lucy wants a drink, perhaps. 

Let others miss me! never miss me, God!' 

So Marian sat by Lucy's bed, content 

With duty, and was strong, for recompense, 

To hold the lamp of human love armhigh 

To catch the deathstrained eyes and comfort them, 

Until the angels, on the luminous side 

Of death, had got theirs ready. And she said, 

When Lucy thanked her sometimes, called her kind, 

It touched her strangely. 'Marian Erle called kind! 

What, Marian, beaten and sold, who could not die! 

'Tis verily good fortune to be kind. 

Ah, you, ' she said, 'who are born to such a grace, 

Be sorry for the unlicensed class, the poor, 

Reduced to think the best good fortune means 

That others, simply, should be kind to them.' 

From sleep to sleep while Lucy slid away 

So gently, like a light upon a hill, 

Of which none names the moment when it goes, 

Though all see when 'tis gone,a man came in 

And stood beside the bed. The old idiot wretch 

Screamed feebly, like a baby overlain, 

'Sir, sir, you won't mistake me for the corpse? 

Don't look at me, sir! never bury me! 

Although I lie here, I'm alive as you, 

Aurora Leigh

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Except my legs and arms,I eat and drink, 

And understand,(that you're the gentleman 

Who fits the funerals up, Heaven speed you, sir,) 

And certainly I should be livelier still 

If Lucy here . . sir, Lucy is the corpse . . 

Had worked more properly to buy me wine: 

But Lucy, sir, was always slow at work, 

I shan't lose much by Lucy. Marian Erle, 

Speak up and show the gentleman the corpse.' 

And then a voice said, 'Marian Erle.' She rose; 

It was the hour for angels?there, stood hers! 

She scarcely marvelled to see Romney Leigh. 

As light November snows to empty nests, 

As grass to graves, as moss to mildewed stones, 

As July suns to ruins, through the rents, 

As ministering spirits to mourners, through a loss, 

As Heaven itself to men, through pangs of death, 

He came uncalled wherever grief had come. 

'And so, ' said Marian Erle, 'we meet anew, ' 

And added softly, 'so, we shall not part.' 

He was not angry that she had left the house 

Wherein he placed her. Well?she had feared it might 

Have vexed him. Also, when he found her set 

On keeping, though the dead was out of sight, 

That halfdead, halflive body left behind 

With cankerous heart and flesh,which took your best 

And cursed you for the little good it did, 

(Could any leave the bedrid wretch alone, 

So joyless, she was thankless even to God, 

Much less to you?) he did not say 'twas well 

Yet Marian thought he did not take it ill, 

Since day by day he came, and, every day, 

She felt within his utterance and his eyes 

A closer, tenderer presence of the soul, 

Until at last he said, 'We shall not part.' 

On that same day, was Marian's work complete: 

She had smoothed the empty bed, and swept the floor 

Of coffin sawdust, set the chairs anew 

The dead had ended gossip in, and stood 

In that poor room so cold and orderly, 

The doorkey in her hand, prepared to go 

As they had, howbeit not their way. He spoke. 

'Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all, 

And though men push and poke and paddle in't 

(As children play at fashioning dirtpies) 

And call their fancies by the name of facts, 

Assuming difference, lordship, privilege, 

When all's plain dirt,they come back to it at last; 

Aurora Leigh

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The first gravedigger proves it with a spade, 

And pats all even. Need we wait for this, 

You, Marian, and I, Romney?' 

                  She at that, 

Looked blindly in his face, as when one looks 

Through drying autumnrains to find the sky. 

He went on speaking. 

                  'Marian, I being born 

What men call noble, and you, issued from 

The noble people,though the tyrannous sword 

Which pierced Christ's heart, has cleft the world in twain 

'Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor, 

Shall we keep parted? Not so. Let us lean 

And strain together rather, each to each, 

Compress the red lips of this gaping wound, 

As far as two souls can,ay, lean and league, 

I, from my superabundance,from your want, 

You,joining in a protest 'gainst the wrong 

On both sides!'? 

             All the rest, he held her hand 

In speaking, which confused the sense of much; 

Her heart, against his words, beat out so thick 

They might as well be written on the dust 

Where some poor bird, escaping from hawk's beak, 

Has dropped, and beats its shuddering wings,the lines 

Are rubbed so,yet 'twas something like to this, 

?'That they two, standing at the two extremes 

Of social classes, had received one seal, 

Been dedicate and drawn beyond themselves 

To mercy and ministration,he, indeed, 

Through what he knew, and she, through what she felt, 

He, by man's conscience, she, by woman's heart, 

Relinquishing their several 'vantage posts 

Of wealthy case and honourable toil, 

To work with God at love. And, since God willed 

That, putting out his hand to touch this ark, 

He found a woman's hand there, he'd accept 

The sign too, hold the tender fingers fast, 

And say, 'My fellowworker, be my wife!' 

She told the tale with simple, rustic turns, 

Strong leaps of meaning in her sudden eyes 

That took the gaps of any imperfect phrase 

Of the unschooled speaker: I have rather writ 

The thing I understood so, than the thing 

I heard so. And I cannot render right 

Her quick gesticulation, wild yet soft, 

Selfstartled from the habitual mood she used, 

Half sad, half languid,like dumb creatures (now 

A rustling bird, and now a wandering deer, 

Or squirrel against the oakgloom flashing up 

Aurora Leigh

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His sidelong burnished head, in just her way 

Of savage spontaneity,) that stir 

Abruptly the green silence of the woods, 

And make it stranger, holier, more profound; 

As Nature's general heart confessed itself 

Of life, and then fell backward on repose. 

I kissed the lips that ended.?'So indeed 

He loves you, Marian?' 

                  'Loves me!' She looked up 

With a child's wonder when you ask him first 

Who made the sun?a puzzled blush, that grew, 

Then broke off in a rapid radiant smile 

Of sure solution. 'Loves me! he loves all, 

And me, of course. He had not asked me else 

To work with him for ever, and be his wife.' 

Her words reproved me. This perhaps was love? 

To have its hands too full of gifts to give, 

For putting out a hand to take a gift; 

To love so much, the perfect round of love 

Includes, in strictly conclusion, the being loved; 

As Edendew went up and fell again, 

Enough for watering Eden. Obviously 

She had not thought about his love at all: 

The cataracts of her soul had poured themselves 

And risen selfcrowned in rainbow; would she ask 

Who crowned her??it sufficed that she was crowned. 

With women of my class, 'tis otherwise: 

We haggle for the small change of our gold, 

And so much love, accord, for so much love, 

Rialtoprices. Are we therefore wrong? 

If marriage be a contract, look to it then, 

Contracting parties should be equal, just; 

Bit if, a simple fealty on one side, 

A mere religion,right to give, is all, 

And certain brides of Europe duly ask 

To mount the pile, as Indian widows do, 

The spices of their tender youth heaped up, 

The jewels of their gracious virtues worn, 

More gems, more glory,to consume entire 

For a living husband! as the man's alive, 

Not dead,the woman's duty, by so much, 

Advanced in England, beyond Hindostan. 

I sate there, musing, till she touched my hand 

With hers, as softly as a strange white bird 

She feared to startle in touching. 'You are kind. 

But are you, peradventure, vexed at heart 

Because your cousin takes me for a wife? 

I know I am not worthy?nay, in truth, 

I'm glad on't, since, for that, he chooses me. 

Aurora Leigh

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He likes the poor things of the world the best; 

I would not therefore, if I could, be rich, 

It pleasures him to stoop for buttercups; 

I would not be a rose upon the wall 

A queen might stop at, near the palacedoor, 

To say to a courtier, 'Pluck that rose for me, 

'It's prettier than the rest.' O Romeny Leigh! 

I'd rather far be trodden by his foot, 

Than like in a great queen's bosom' 

                      Out of breath 

She paused. 

        'Sweet Marian, do you disavow 

The roses with that face?' 

                  She dropt her head 

As if the wind had caught that flower of her, 

And bent it in the garden,then looked up 

With grave assurance. 'Well, you think me bold! 

But so we all are, when we're praying to God. 

And if I'm bold?yet, lady, credit me, 

That, since I know myself for what I am 

Much fitter for his handmaid than his wife, 

I'll prove the handmaid and the wife at once, 

Serve tenderly, and love obediently, 

And be a worthier mate, perhaps, than some 

Who are wooed in silk among their learned books; 

While I shall set myself to read his eyes, 

Till such grow plainer to me than the French 

To wisest ladies. Do you think I'll miss 

A letter, in the spelling of his mind?' 

No more than they do, when they sit and write 

Their flying words with flickering wildfowl tails, 

Nor ever pause to ask how many t s, 

Should that be a y or i ?they know't so well: 

I've seen them writing, when I brought a dress 

And waited,floating out their soft white hands 

On shining paper. But they're hard sometimes, 

For all those hands! we've used out many nights, 

And worn the yellow daylight into shreds 

Which flapped and shivered down our aching eyes 

Till night appeared more tolerable, just 

That pretty ladies might look beautiful, 

Who said at last . . 'You're lazy in that house! 

'You're slow in sending home the work,I count 

'I've waited near an hour for't.' Pardon me? 

I do not blame them, madam, nor misprize; 

They are fair and gracious; ay, but not like you, 

Since none but you has Mister Leigh's own blood 

Both noble and gentle,and without it . . well, 

They are fair, I said; so fair, it scarce seems strange 

That, flashing out in any lookingglass 

The wonder of their glorious brows and breasts, 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  83

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They are charmed so, they forget to look behind 

And mark how pale we've grown, we pitiful 

Remainders of the world. And so, perhaps, 

If Mister Leigh had chosen a wife from these, 

She might . . although he's better than her best, 

And dearly she would know it . . steal a thought 

Which should be all his, an eyeglance from his face, 

To plunge into the mirror opposite, 

In search of her own beauty's pearl: while I . . 

Ah, dearest lady, serge will outweigh silk 

For winterwear, when bodies feel acold, 

And I'll be a true wife to your cousin Leigh.' 

Before I answered, he was there himself. 

I think he had been standing in the room, 

And listened probably to half her talk, 

Arrested, turned to stone,as white as stone. 

Will tender sayings make men look so white? 

He loves her then profoundly. 

                  'You are here, 

Aurora? Here I meet you!'?We clasped hands. 

'Even so, dear Romney. Lady Waldemar 

Has sent me in haste to find a cousin of mine 

Who shall be.' 

             'Lady Waldemar is good.' 

'Here's one, at least, who is good, ' I sighed and touched 

Poor Marian's happy head, as, doglike, she 

Most passionately patient, waited on, 

Atremble for her turn of greeting words; 

'I've sat a full hour with your Marian Erle, 

And learnt the thing by heart,and, from my heart, 

Am therefore competent to give you thanks 

For such a cousin.' 

                  'You accept at last 

A gift from me, Aurora, without scorn? 

At last I please you?'?How his voice was changed! 

'You cannot please a woman against her will, 

And once you vexed me. Shall we speak of that? 

We'll say, then, you were noble in it all, 

And I not ignorant?let it pass. And now, 

You please me, Romney, when you please yourself; 

So, please you, be fanatical in love, 

And I'm well pleased. Ah, cousin! at the old hall, 

Among the gallery portraits of our Leighs, 

We shall not find a sweeter signory 

Than this pure forehead's.' 

                  Not a word he said. 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  84

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Page No 87

How arrogant men are! Even philanthropists, 

Who try to take a wife up in the way 

They put down a subscriptioncheque,if once 

She turns and says, 'I will not tax you so, 

Most charitable sir, '?feel ill at ease, 

As though she had wronged them somehow. I suppose 

We women should remember what we are, 

And not throw back an obolus inscribed 

With C¾sar's image, lightly. I resumed. 

'It strikes me, some of those sublime Vandykes 

Were not too proud, to make good saints in heaven; 

And, if so, then they're not too proud today 

To bow down (now the ruffs are off their necks) 

And own this good, true, noble Marian, . . yours, 

And mine, I'll say! For poets (bear the word) 

Halfpoets even, are still whole democrats, 

Oh, not that we're disloyal to the high, 

But loyal to the low, and cognisant 

Of the less scrutable majesties. For me, 

I comprehend your choice?I justify 

Your right in choosing.' 

                  'No, no, no' he sighed, 

With a sort of melancholy impatient scorn, 

As some grown man, who never had a child, 

Puts by some child who plays at being a man; 

?'You did not, do not, cannot comprehend 

My choice, my ends, my motives, nor myself: 

No matter now?we'll let it pass, you say. 

I thank you for your generous cousinship 

Which helps this present; I accept for her 

Your favourable thoughts. We're fallen on days, 

We two, who are not poets, when to wed 

Requires less mutual love than common love, 

For two together to bear out at once 

Upon the loveless many. Work in pairs, 

In galleycouplings or in marriagerings, 

The difference lies in the honour, not the work, 

And such we're bound to, I and she. But love, 

(You poets are benighted in this age; 

The hour's too late for catching even moths, 

You've gnats instead,) love! love's foolparadise 

Is out of date, like Adam's. Set a swan 

To swim the Trenton, rather than true love 

To float its fabulous plumage safely down 

The cataracts of this loud transitiontime, 

Whose roar, for ever, henceforth, in my ears, 

Must keep me deaf to music.' 

                  There, I turned 

And kissed poor Marian, out of discontent. 

The man had baffled, chafed me, till I flung 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  85

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Page No 88

For refuge to the woman,as, sometimes, 

Impatient of some crowded room's close smell, 

You throw a window open, and lean out 

To breathe a long breath, in the dewy night, 

And cool your angry forehead. She, at least, 

Was not built up, as walls are, brick by brick; 

Each fancy squared, each feeling ranged by line, 

The very heat of burning youth applied 

To indurate forms and systems! excellent bricks, 

A wellbuilt wall,which stops you on the road, 

And, into which, you cannot see an inch 

Although you beat your head against it?pshaw! 

'Adieu, ' I said, 'for this time, cousins both: 

And, cousin Romney, pardon me the word, 

Be happy! oh, in some esoteric sense 

Of course! I mean no harm in wishing well. 

Adieu, my Marian:?may she come to me, 

Dear Romney, and be married from my house? 

It is not part of your philosophy 

To keep your bird upon the blackthorn?' 

                         'Ay, ' 

He answered, 'but it is:?I take my wife 

Directly from the people,and she comes, 

As Austria's daughter to imperial France, 

Betwixt her eagles, blinking not her race, 

From Margaret's Court at garretheight, to meet 

And wed me at St. James's, nor put off 

Her gown of serge for that. The things we do, 

We do: we'll wear no mask, as if we blushed.' 

'Dear Romney, you're the poet, ' I replied, 

But felt my smile too mournful for my word, 

And turned and went. Ay, masks, I thought,beware 

Of tragic masks, we tie before the glass, 

Uplifted on the cothurn half a yard 

Above the natural stature! we would play 

Heroic parts to ourselves,and end, perhaps, 

As impotently as Athenian wives 

Who shrieked in fits at the Eumenides. 

His foot pursued me down the stair. 'At least, 

You'll suffer me to walk with you beyond 

These hideous streets, these graves, where men alive, 

Packed close with earthworms, burr unconsciously 

About the plague that slew them; let me go. 

The very women pelt their souls in mud 

At any woman who walks here alone. 

How came you here alone??you are ignorant.' 

We had a strange and melancholy walk: 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  86

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Page No 89

The night came drizzling downward in dark rain; 

And, as we walked, the colour of the time, 

The act, the presence, my hand upon his arm, 

His voice in my ear, and mine to my own sense, 

Appeared unnatural. We talked modern books, 

And daily papers; Spanish marriageschemes, 

And English climate?was't so cold last year? 

And will the wind change by tomorrow morn? 

Can Guizot stand? is London full? is trade 

Competitive? has Dickens turned his hinge 

Apinch upon the fingers of the great? 

And are potatoes to grow mythical 

Like moly? will the apple die out too? 

Which way is the wind tonight? southeast? due east? 

We talked on fast, while every common word 

Seemed tangled with the thunder at one end, 

And ready to pull down upon our heads 

A terror out of sight. And yet to pause 

Were surelier mortal: we tore greedily up 

All silence, all the innocent breathing points, 

As if, like pale conspirators in haste, 

We tore up papers where our signatures 

Imperilled us to an ugly shame or death. 

I cannot tell you why it was. 'Tis plain 

We had not loved nor hated: wherefore dread 

To spill gunpowder on ground safe from fire? 

Perhaps we had lived too closely, to diverge 

So absolutely: leave two clocks, they say, 

Wound up to different hours, upon one shelf, 

And slowly, through the interior wheels of each, 

The blind mechanic motion sets itself 

Athrob, to feel out for the mutual time. 

It was not so with us, indeed. While he 

Struck midnight, I kept striking six at dawn, 

While he marked judgment, I, redemptionday; 

And such exception to a general law, 

Imperious upon inert matter even, 

Might make us, each to either insecure, 

A beckoning mystery, or a troubling fear. 

I mind me, when we parted at the door, 

How strange his goodnight sounded,like goodnight 

Beside a deathbed, where the morrow's sun 

Is sure to come too late for more good days:? 

And all that night I thought . . 'Goodnight, ' said he. 

And so, a month passed. Let me set it down 

At once,I have been wrong, I have been wrong. 

We are wrong always, when we think too much 

Of what we think or are; albeit our thoughts 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  87

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Page No 90

Be verily bitter as selfsacrifice, 

We're no less selfish. If we sleep on rocks 

Or roses, sleeping past the hour of noon 

We're lazy. This I write against myself. 

I had done a duty in the visit paid 

To Marian, and was ready otherwise 

To give the witness of my presence and name 

Whenever she should marry.?Which, I thought 

Sufficed. I even had cast into the scale 

An overweight of justice toward the match; 

The Lady Waldemar had missed her tool, 

Had broken it in the lock as being too straight 

For a crooked purpose, while poor Marian Erle 

Missed nothing in my accents or my acts: 

I had not been ungenerous on the whole, 

Nor yet untender; so, enough. I felt 

Tired, overworked: this marriage somewhat jarred; 

Or, if it did not, all the bridal noise . . 

The pricking of the map of life with pins, 

In schemes of . . 'Here we'll go, ' and 'There we'll stay, ' 

And 'Everywhere we'll prosper in our love, ' 

Was scarce my business. Let them order it; 

Who else should care? I threw myself aside, 

As one who had done her work and shuts her eyes 

To rest the better. 

                I, who should have known, 

Forereckoned mischief! Where we disavow 

Being keeper to our brother, we're his Cain. 

I might have held that poor child to my heart 

A little longer! 'twould have hurt me much 

To have hastened by its beats the marriage day, 

And kept her safe meantime from tampering hands, 

Or, peradventure, traps? What drew me back 

From telling Romney plainly, the designs 

Of Lady Waldemar, as spoken out 

To me . . me? had I any right, ay, right, 

With womanly compassion and reserve 

To break the fall of woman's impudence?? 

To stand by calmly, knowing what I knew, 

And hear him call her good? 

                  Distrust that word. 

'There is none good save God, ' said Jesus Christ. 

If He once, in the first creationweek, 

Called creatures good,for ever afterward, 

The Devil only has done it, and his heirs. 

The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose; 

The world's grown dangerous. In the middle age, 

I think they called malignant fays and imps 

Good people. A good neighbour, even in this 

Is fatal sometimes,cuts your morning up 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  88

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Page No 91

To mincemeat of the very smallest talk, 

Then helps to sugar her bohea at night 

With her reputation. I have known good wives, 

As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar's; 

And good, good mothers, who would use a child 

To better an intrigue; good friends, beside. 

(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck 

And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do 

By sleeping infants. And we all have known 

Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; 

Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; 

Good patriots, who for a theory, risked a cause 

Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; 

Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; 

Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs, 

And damned the general world for standing up.? 

Now, may the good God pardon all good men! 

How bitterly I speak,how certainly 

The innocent white milk in us is turned, 

By much persistent shining of the sun! 

Shake up the sweetest in us long enough 

With men, it drips to foolish curd, too sour 

To feed the most untender of Christ's lambs. 

I should have thought . . .a woman of the world 

Like her I'm meaning,centre to herself, 

Who has wheeled on her own pivot half a life 

In isolated selflove and selfwill, 

As a windmill seen at distance radiating 

Its delicate white vans against the sky, 

So soft and soundless, simply beautiful, 

Seen nearer . . what a roar and tear it makes, 

How it grinds and bruises! . . if she loves at last, 

Her love's a readjustment of selflove, 

No more; a need felt of another's use 

To her one advantage,as the mill wants grain, 

The fire wants fuel, the very wolf wants prey; 

And none of these is more unscrupulous 

Than such a charming woman when she loves. 

She'll not be thwarted by an obstacle 

So trifling as . . her soul is, . . much less yours! 

Is God a consideration??she loves you, 

Not God; she will not flinch for him indeed: 

She did not for the Marchioness of Perth, 

When wanting tickets for the birthnight ball. 

She loves you, sir, with passion, to lunacy; 

She loves you like her diamonds . . almost. 

                          Well, 

A month passed so, and then the notice came; 

On such a day the marriage at the church. 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  89

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Page No 92

I was not backward. 

                  Half St. Giles in frieze 

Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold, 

And, after contract at the altar, pass 

To eat a marriagefeast on Hampstead Heath. 

Of course the people came in uncompelled, 

Lame, blind, and worse?sick, sorrowful, and worse, 

The humours of the peccant social wound 

All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico. 

Exasperating the unaccustomed air 

With hideous interfusion: you'd suppose 

A finished generation, dead of plague, 

Swept outward from their graves into the sun, 

The moil of death upon them. What a sight! 

A holiday of miserable men 

Is sadder than a burialday of kings. 

They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church 

In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight, 

The noble ladies stood up in their pews, 

Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate, 

Some simply curious, some just insolent, 

And some in wondering scorn, 'What next? what next?' 

These crushed their delicate roselips from the smile 

That misbecame them in a holy place, 

With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs; 

Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes 

And simultaneous shiver of moir  silk; 

While all the aisles, alive and black with heads, 

Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street, 

As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole 

With shuddering involutions, swaying slow 

From right to left, and then from left to right, 

In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest 

Of faces, rose upon you everywhere, 

From that crammed mass! you did not usually 

See faces like them in the open day: 

They hide in cellars, not to make you mad 

As Romney Leigh is.?Faces??O my God, 

We call those, faces? men's and women's . . ay, 

And children's;?babies, hanging like a rag 

Forgotten on their mother's neck,poor mouths. 

Wiped clean of mother's milk by mother's blow 

Before they are taught her cursing. Faces . . phew, 

We'll call them vices festering to despairs, 

Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not 

A fingertouch of God left whole on them; 

All ruined, lost?the countenance worn out 

As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts, 

The passions loose and draggling in the dirt 

To trip the foot up at the first free step! 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  90

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Page No 93

Those, faces! 'twas as if you had stirred up hell 

To heave its lowest dregfiends uppermost 

In fiery swirls of slime,such strangled fronts, 

Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly, 

To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood, 

And grind to devilish colors all your dreams 

Henceforth, . . though, haply, you should drop asleep 

By clink of silver waters, in a muse 

On Raffael's mild Madonna of the Bird. 

I've waked and slept through many nights and days 

Since then,but still that day will catch my breath 

Like a nightmare. There are fatal days, indeed, 

In which the fibrous years have taken root 

So deeply, that they quiver to their tops 

Whene'er you stir the dust of such a day. 

My cousin met me with his eyes and hand, 

And then, with just a word, . . that 'Marian Erle 

Was coming with her bridesmaids presently, ' 

Made haste to place me by the altarstair, 

Where he and other noble gentlemen 

And highborn ladies, waited for the bride. 

We waited. It was early: there was time 

For greeting, and the morning's compliment; 

And gradually a ripple of women's talk 

Arose and fell, and tossed about a spray 

Of English s s, soft as a silent hush, 

And, notwithstanding, quite as audible 

As louder phrases thrown out by the men. 

?'Yes really, if we've need to wait in church, 

We've need to talk there.'?'She? 'Tis Lady Ayr 

In blue?not purple! that's the dowager.' 

?'She looks as young.'?'She flirts as young, you mean! 

Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night, 

You'd call Miss Norris modest.'?' You again! 

I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six, 

Up still at ten: scarce time to change one's shoes. 

I feel as white and sulky as a ghost, 

So pray don't speak to me, Lord Belcher.'?'No, 

I'll look at you instead, and it's enough 

While you have that face.' 'In church, my lord! fie, fie!' 

?'Adair, you stayed for the Division?'?'Lost 

By one.' 'The devil it is! I'm sorry for't. 

And if I had not promised Mistress Grove' . . 

?'You might have kept your word to Liverpool.' 

'Constituents must remember, after all, 

We're mortal.'?'We remind them of it.'?'Hark, 

The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!' 

?'There? Dear, you are asleep still; don't you know 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  91

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Page No 94

The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white 

To show they're ready to be married.'?'Lower! 

The aunt is at your elbow.'?'Lady Maud, 

Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen 

This girl of Leigh's?' 'No,wait! 'twas Mrs. Brookes, 

Who told me Lady Waldemar told her? 

No, 'twasn't Mrs. Brookes.'?'She's pretty?'?'Who? 

Mrs.Brookes? Lady Waldemar?'?'How hot! 

Pray is't the law today we're not to breathe? 

You're treading on my shawl?I thank you, sir.' 

?'They say the bride's a mere child, who can't read, 

But knows the things she shouldn't, with wideawake 

Great eyes. I'd go through fire to look at her.' 

?'You do, I think.'?'and Lady Waldemar 

(You see her; sitting close to Romney Leigh; 

How beautiful she looks, a little flushed!) 

Has taken up the girl, and organised 

Leigh's folly. Should I have come here, you suppose, 

Except she'd asked me?'?'She'd have served him more 

By marrying him herself.' 

                  'Ah?there she comes, 

The bride, at last!' 

              'Indeed, no. Past eleven. 

She puts off her patched petticoat today 

And puts on Mayfair manners, so begins 

By setting us to wait.'?'Yes, yes, this Leigh 

Was always odd; it's in the blood, I think; 

His father's uncle's cousin's second son 

Was, was . . you understand me?and for him, 

He's stark! has turned quite lunatic upon 

This modern question of the poor?the poor: 

An excellent subject when you're moderate; 

You've seen Prince Albert's model lodginghouse? 

Does honour to his royal highness. Good: 

But would he stop his carriage in Cheapside 

To shake a common fellow by the fist 

Whose name was . . Shakspeare? no. We draw a line, 

And if we stand not by our order, we 

In England, we fall headlong. Here's a sight, 

A hideous sight, a most indecent sight, 

My wife would come, sir, or I had kept her back. 

By heaven, sir, when poor Damiens' trunk and limbs 

Were torn by horses, women of the court 

Stood by and stared, exactly as today 

On this dismembering of society, 

With pretty troubled faces.' 

                  'Now, at last. 

She comes now.' 

             'Where? who sees? you push me, sir, 

Beyond the point of what is mannerly. 

You're standing, madam, on my second flounce? 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  92

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Page No 95

I do beseech you.' 

              'No?it's not the bride. 

Halfpast eleven. How late! the bridegroom, mark, 

Gets anxious and goes out.' 

                  'And as I said . . 

These Leighs! our best blood running in the rut! 

It's something awful. We had pardoned him 

A simple misalliance, got up aside 

For a pair of skyblue eyes; our House of Lords 

Has winked at such things, and we've all been young. 

But here's an intermarriage reasoned out, 

A contract (carried boldly to the light, 

To challenge observation, pioneer 

Good acts by a great example) 'twixt the extremes 

Of martyrised society,on the left, 

The wellborn,on the right, the merest mob. 

To treat as equals! 'tis anarchical! 

It means more than it says?'tis damnable! 

Why, sir, we can't have even our coffee good, 

Unless we strain it.' 

                  'Here, Miss Leigh!' 

                        'Lord Howe, 

You're Romney's friend. What's all this waiting for?' 

'I cannot tell. The bride has lost her head 

(And way, perhaps!) to prove her sympathy 

With the bridegroom.' 

                  'What,you also, disapprove!' 

'Oh I approve of nothing in the world, ' 

He answered; 'not of you, still less of me, 

Nor even of Romney?though he's worth us both. 

We're all gone wrong. The tune in us is lost: 

And whistling in back alleys to the moon, 

Will never catch it.' 

                  Let me draw Lord Howe; 

A born aristocrat, bred radical, 

And educated socialist, who still 

Goes floating, on traditions of his kind, 

Across the theoretic flood from France, 

Though, like a drenched Noah on a rotten deck, 

Scarce safer for his place there. He, at least, 

Will never land on Ararat, he knows, 

To recommence the world on the old plan: 

Indeed, he thinks, said world had better end; 

He sympathises rather with the fish 

Outside, than with the drowned paired beasts within 

Who cannot couple again or multiply: 

And that's the sort of Noah he is, Lord Howe. 

He never could be anything complete, 

Except a loyal, upright gentleman, 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  93

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Page No 96

A liberal landlord, graceful dinerout, 

And entertainer more than hospitable, 

Whom authors dine with and forget the port. 

Whatever he believes, and it is much, 

But nowise certain . . now here and now there, . . 

He still has sympathies beyond his creed, 

Diverting him from action. In the House, 

No party counts upon him, and all praise: 

All like his books too, (for he has written books) 

Which, good to lie beside a bishop's chair, 

So oft outreach themselves with jets of fire 

At which the foremost of the progressists 

May warm audacious hands in passing by. 

?Of stature overtall, lounging for ease; 

Light hair, that seems to carry a wind in it, 

And eyes that, when they look on you, will lean 

Their whole weight half in indolence, and half 

In wishing you unmitigated good, 

Until you know not if to flinch from him 

Or thank him.?'Tis Lord Howe. 

                    'We're all gone wrong, ' 

Said he, 'and Romney, that dear friend of ours, 

Is nowise right. There's one true thing on earth; 

That's love! He takes it up, and dresses it, 

And acts a play with it, as Hamlet did, 

To show what cruel uncles we have been, 

And how we should be uneasy in our minds, 

While he, Prince Hamlet, weds a pretty maid 

(Who keeps us too long waiting, we'll confess) 

By symbol, to instruct us formally 

To fill the ditches up 'twixt class and class, 

And live together in phalansteries. 

What then??he's mad, our Hamlet! clap his play, 

And bind him.' 

            'Ah, Lord Howe, this spectacle 

Pulls stronger at us than the Dane's. See there! 

The crammed aisles heave and strain and steam with life? 

Dear Heaven, what life!' 

                  'Why, yes,a poet sees; 

Which makes him different from a common man. 

I, too, see somewhat, though I cannot sing; 

I should have been a poet, only that 

My mother took fright at the ugly world, 

And bore me tonguetied. If you'll grant me now 

That Romney gives us a fine actorpiece 

To make us merry on his marriagemorn, 

The fable's worse than Hamlet's, I'll concede 

The terrible people, old and poor and blind, 

Their eyes eat out with plague and poverty 

From seeing beautiful and cheerful sights, 

We'll liken to a brutalized King Lear, 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  94

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Page No 97

Led out,by no means to clear scores with wrongs? 

His wrongs are so far back, . . he has forgot; 

All's past like youth; but just to witness here 

A simple contract,he, upon his side, 

And Regan with her sister Goneril 

And all the dappled courtiers and courtfools, 

On their side. Not that any of these would say 

They're sorry, neither. What is done, is done. 

And violence is now turned privilege, 

As cream turns cheese, if buried long enough. 

What could such lovely ladies have to do 

With the old man there, in those illodorous rags, 

Except to keep the windside of him? Lear 

Is flat and quiet, as a decent grave; 

He does not curse his daughters in the least. 

Be these his daughters? Lear is thinking of 

His porridge chiefly . . is it getting cold 

At Hampstead? will the ale be served in pots? 

Poor Lear, poor daughters? Bravo, Romney's play?' 

A murmur and a movement drew around; 

A naked whisper touched us. Something wrong! 

What's wrong! That black crowd, as an overstrained 

Cord, quivered in vibrations, and I saw 

Was that his face I saw? . . his . . Romney Leigh's. 

Which tossed a sudden horror like a sponge 

Into all eyes,while himself stood white upon 

The topmost altarstair, and tried to speak, 

And failed, and lifted higher above his head 

A letter, . . as a man who drowns and gasps. 

'My brothers, bear with me! I am very weak. 

I meant but only good. Perhaps I meant 

Too proudly,and God snatched the circumstance 

And changed it therefore. There's no marriage?none 

She leaves me,she departs,she disappears, 

I lose her. Yet I never forced her 'ay' 

To have her 'no' so cast into my teeth 

In manner of an accusation, thus. 

My friends, you are all dismissed. Go, eat and drink 

According to the programme,and farewell !' 

He ended. There was silence in the church; 

We heard a baby sucking in its sleep 

At the farthest end of the aisle. Then spoke a man, 

'Now, look to it, coves, that all the beef and drink 

Be not filched from us like the other fun; 

For beer's spilt easier than a woman is! 

This gentry is not honest with the poor; 

They bring us up, to trick us.'?'Go it, Jim, ' 

A woman screamed back, 'I'm a tender soul; 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  95

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Page No 98

I never banged a child at two years old 

And drew blood from him, but I sobbed for it 

Next moment,and I've had a plague of seven. 

I'm tender; I've no stomach even for beef. 

Until I know about the girl that's lost, 

That's killed, mayhap. I did misdoubt, at first, 

The fine lord meant no good by her, or us. 

He, maybe, got the upper hand of her 

By holding up a weddingring, and then . . 

A choking finger on her throat, last night, 

And just a clever tale to keep us still, 

As she is, poor lost innocent. 'Disappear!' 

Who ever disappears except a ghost? 

And who believes a story of a ghost? 

I ask you,would a girl go off, instead 

Of staying to be married? a fine tale! 

A wicked man, I say, a wicked man! 

For my part I would rather starve on gin 

Than make my dinner on his beef and beer.'? 

At which a cry rose up?'We'll have our rights. 

We'll have the girl, the girl! Your ladies there 

Are married safely and smoothly every day, 

And she shall not drop through into a trap 

Because she's poor and of the people: shame! 

We'll have no tricks played off by gentlefolks; 

We'll see her righted. 

                  Through the rage and roar 

I heard the broken words which Romney flung 

Among the turbulent masses, from the ground 

He held still, with his masterful pale face? 

As huntsmen throw the ration to the pack, 

Who, falling on it headlong, dog on dog 

In heaps of fury, rend it, swallow it up 

With yelling hound jaws,his indignant words, 

His piteous words, his most pathetic words, 

Whereof I caught the meaning here and there 

By his gesture . . torn in morsels, yelled across, 

And so devoured. From end to end, the church 

Rocked round us like the sea in storm, and then 

Broke up like the earth in earthquake. Men cried out 

'Police!'?and women stood and shrieked for God, 

Or dropt and swooned; or, like a herd of deer, 

(For whom the black woods suddenly grow alive, 

Unleashing their wild shadows down the wind 

To hunt the creatures into corners, back 

And forward) madly fled, or blindly fell, 

Trod screeching underneath the feet of those 

Who fled and screeched. 

                  The last sight left to me 

Was Romney's terrible calm face above 

The tumult! the last sound was 'Pull him down!

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  96

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Page No 99

Strike?Kill him!' Stretching my unreasoning arms, 

As men in dreams, who vainly interpose 

'Twixt gods and their undoing, with a cry 

I struggled to precipitate myself 

Headforemost to the rescue of my soul 

In that white face, . . till some one caught me back, 

And so the world went out,I felt no more. 

What followed, was told after by Lord Howe, 

Who bore me senseless from the strangling crowd 

In church and street, and then returned alone 

To see the tumult quelled. The men of law 

Had fallen as thunder on a roaring fire, 

And made all silent,while the people's smoke 

Passed eddying slowly from the emptied aisles. 

Here's Marian's letter, which a ragged child 

Brought running, just as Romney at the porch 

Looked out expectant of the bride. He sent 

The letter to me by his friend Lord Howe 

Some two hours after, folded in a sheet 

On which his wellknown hand had left a word. 

Here's Marian's letter. 

                  'Noble friend, dear saint 

Be patient with me. Never think me vile, 

Who might tomorrow morning be your wife 

But that I loved you more than such a name. 

Farewell, my Romney. Let me write it once, 

My Romney. 

        ''Tis so pretty a coupled word, 

I have no heart to pluck it with a blot. 

We say 'My God' sometimes, upon our knees, 

Who is not therefore vexed: so bear with it . . 

And me. I know I'm foolish, weak, and vain; 

Yet most of all I'm angry with myself 

For losing your last footstep on the stair, 

The last time of your coming,yesterday! 

The very first time I lost step of yours, 

(Its sweetness comes the next to what you speak) 

But yesterday sobs took me by the throat, 

And cut me off from music. 

                  'Mister Leigh, 

You'll set me down as wrong in many things. 

You've praised me, sir, for truth,and now you'll learn 

I had not courage to be rightly true. 

I once began to tell you how she came, 

The woman . . and you stared upon the floor 

In one of your fixed thoughts . . which put me out 

For that day. After, some one spoke of me, 

So wisely, and of you, so tenderly, 

Persuading me to silence for your sake . . . 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  97

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Page No 100

Well, well! it seems this moment I was wrong 

In keeping back from telling you the truth: 

There might be truth betwixt us two, at least, 

If nothing else. And yet 'twas dangerous. 

Suppose a real angel came from heaven 

To live with men and women! he'd go mad, 

If no considerate hand should tie a blind 

Across his piercing eyes. 'Tis thus with you: 

You see us too much in your heavenly light; 

I always thought so, angel,and indeed 

There's danger that you beat yourself to death 

Against the edges of this alien world, 

In some divine and fluttering pity. 

                      'Yes 

It would be dreadful for a friend of yours, 

To see all England thrust you out of doors 

And mock you from the windows. You might say, 

Or think (that's worse), 'There's some one in the house 

I miss and love still.' Dreadful! 

                    'Very kind, 

I pray you mark, was Lady Waldemar. 

She came to see me nine times, rather ten? 

So beautiful, she hurts me like the day 

Let suddenly on sick eyes. 

                  'Most kind of all, 

Your cousin! ah, most like you! Ere you came 

She kissed me mouth to mouth: I felt her soul 

Dip through her serious lips in holy fire. 

God help me, but it made me arrogant; 

I almost told her that you would not lose 

By taking me to wife: though, ever since, 

I've pondered much a certain thing she asked . . 

'He love's you, Marian?' . . in a sort of mild 

Derisive sadness . . as a mother asks 

Her babe, 'You'll touch that star, you think?' 

                           'Farewell! 

I know I never touched it. 

                  'This is worst: 

Babes grow, and lose the hope of things above; 

A silver threepence sets them leaping high? 

But no more stars! mark that. 

                  'I've writ all night, 

And told you nothing. God, if I could die, 

And let this letter break off innocent 

Just here! But no?for your sake . . 

                     'Here's the last: 

I never could be happy as your wife, 

I never could be harmless as your friend, 

I never will look more into your face, 

Till God says, 'Look!' I charge you, seek me not, 

Nor vex yourself with lamentable thoughts 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  98

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Page No 101

That peradventure I have come to grief; 

Be sure I'm well, I'm merry, I'm at ease, 

But such a long way, long way, long way off, 

I think you'll find me sooner in my grave; 

And that's my choice, observe. For what remains, 

An overgenerous friend will care for me, 

And keep me happy . . happier . . 

                     'There's a blot! 

This ink runs thick . . we light girls lightly weep . . 

And keep me happier . . was the thing to say, . . 

Than as your wife I could be! O, my star, 

My saint, my soul! for surely you're my soul, 

Through whom God touched me! I am not so lost 

I cannot thank you for the good you did, 

The tears you stopped, which fell down bitterly, 

Like these?the times you made me weep for joy 

At hoping I should learn to write your notes 

And save the tiring of your eyes, at night; 

And most for that sweet thrice you kissed my lips 

And said 'Dear Marian.' 

                  ''Twould be hard to read, 

This letter, for a reader half as learn'd, 

But you'll be sure to master it, in spite 

Of ups and downs. My hand shakes, I am blind, 

I'm poor at writing, at the best,and yet 

I tried to make my g s the way you showed. 

Farewell?Christ love you.?Say 'Poor Marian' now.' 

Poor Marian! wanton Marian! was it so, 

Or so? For days, her touching, foolish lines 

We mused on with conjectural fantasy, 

As if some riddle of a summercloud 

On which some one tries unlike similitudes 

Of now a spotted Hydraskin cast off, 

And now a screen of carven ivory 

That shuts the heaven's conventual secrets up 

From mortals overbold. We sought the sense: 

She loved him so perhaps, (such words mean love,) 

That, worked on by some shrewd perfidious tongue, 

(And then I thought of Lady Waldemar) 

She left him, not to hurt him; or perhaps 

She loved one in her class,or did not love, 

But mused upon her wild bad tramping life, 

Until the free blood fluttered at her heart, 

And black bread eaten by the roadside hedge 

Seemed sweeter than being put to Romney's school 

Of philanthropical selfsacrifice, 

Irrevocably.?Girls are girls, beside, 

Thought I, and like a wedding by one rule. 

You seldom catch these birds, except with chaff: 

They feel it almost an immoral thing 

Aurora Leigh

"Fourth Book."  99

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Page No 102

To go out and be married in broad day, 

Unless some winning special flattery should 

Excuse them to themselves for't, . . 'No one parts 

Her hair with such a silver line as you, 

One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown!' 

Or else . . 'You bite your lip in such a way, 

It spoils me for the smiling of the rest'? 

And so on. Then a worthless gaud or two, 

To keep for love,a ribbon for the neck, 

Or some glass pin,they have their weight with girls. 

And Romney sought her many days and weeks: 

He sifted all the refuse of the town, 

Explored the trains, enquired among the ships, 

And felt the country through from end to end; 

No Marian! Though I hinted what I knew, 

A friend of his had reasons of her own 

For throwing back the match?he would not hear: 

The lady had been ailing ever since, 

The shock had harmed her. Something in his tone 

Repressed me; something in me shamed my doubt 

To a sigh, repressed too. He went on to say 

That, putting questions where his Marian lodged, 

He found she had received for visitors, 

Besides himself and Lady Waldemar 

And, that once, me?a dubious woman dressed 

Beyond us both. The rings upon her hands 

Had dazed the children when she threw them pence. 

'She wore her bonnet as the queen might hers, 

To show the crown, ' they said, 'a scarlet crown 

Of roses that had never been in bud.' 

When Romney told me that,for now and then 

He came to tell me how the search advanced, 

His voice dropped: I bent forward for the rest: 

The woman had been with her, it appeared, 

At first from week to week, then day by day,