And your nobles wear their ermine

on the outside, or walk blackly In the presence of the social law, as most ignoble men.

"Let the poets dream such dreaming! Madam, in these British Islands,

'Tis the substance that wanes ever, 'tis the symbol that exceeds; Soon we shall have nought but symbol! and for statues like this

Silence, Shall accept the rose's image, — in

another case, the weed's."

"Not so quickly!" she retorted,

"I confess where'er you go, you Find for things, names;-shows for actions, and pure gold for honor clear; But when all is run to symbol in the Social, I will throw you The world's book which now reads dryly, and sit down with Silence here."

Half in playfulness she spoke, I thought, and half in indignation;

Friends who listened laughed her words off while her lovers deemed her fair;

A fair woman— flushed with feeling, in her noble-lighted station

Near the statue's white reposing,

and both bathed in sunny air!

With the trees round, not so distant but you heard their vernal

And thus, morning after morning, spite of vows and spite of sor

row,

Did I follow at her drawing, while the week-days passed along; Just to feed the swans this noontide,

or to see the fawns to-morrow, Or to teach the hill-side echo some sweet Tuscan in a song.

Ay, for sometimes on the hill-side, while we sat down in the gowans,

With the forest green behind us, and its shadow cast before; And the river running under; and across it from the rowans A brown partridge whirring near us, till we felt the air it bore,

There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems Made by Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;

Read the pastoral parts of Spenser, or the subtle interflowings Found in Petrarch's sonnets.-here's the book the leaf is folded down!

Or at times a modern volume, Wordsworth's

thoughted idyl,

solemn

Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted revery, ·

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep down the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

Or at times I read there. hoarsely, some new poem of my making,

Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth,For the echo in you breaks upon the

words which you are speaking, And the chariot-wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them forth.

After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging

A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast,

And she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought them, And had sympathies so rapid, open, free as bird on branch, Just as ready to fly east as west, whichever way besought them, In the birchen wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange.

In her utmost rightness there is truth, - and often she speaks lightly, Has a grace in being gay, which even mournful souls approve, For the root of some grave earnest thought is under-struck so rightly,

As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.

So of men, and so of letters, -books are men of higher stature, And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear: So, of mankind in the abstract, which grows slowly into nature, Yet will lift the cry of "progress," as it trod from sphere to sphere.

And her custom was to praise me when I said, "The Age culls simples,

With a broad clown's back turned broadly to the glory of the

stars

We are gods by our own reck'ning,and may well shut up the temples,

And wield on, amid the incensesteam, the thunder of our cars.

"For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, With, at every mile run faster. "O the wondrous, wondrous age!'

Little thinking if we work our SOULS as nobly as our iron, Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.

66

Why, what is this patient entrance into nature's deep resources, But the child's most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?

When we drive out from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses,

Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?

As I loved pure inspirations, - loved the graces, loved the virtues, In a Love content with writing his own name on desert sands.

Or at least I thought so purely!— thought no idiot Hope was raising Any crown to crown Love's silence,silent Love that sat alone, Out, alas! the stag is like me, - he,

that tries to go on grazing With the great deep gun-wound in his neck, then reels with sudden moan.

It was thus I reeled! I told you that her hand had many suitors But she smiles them down imperially, as Venus did the waves; — And with such a gracious coldness, that they cannot press their futures

On the present of her courtesy, which yieldingly enslaves.

And this morning, as I sat alone within the inner chamber, With the great saloon beyond it lost in pleasant thought serene, For I had been reading Camoens

that poem you remember, Which his lady's eyes are praised in, as the sweetest ever seen;

And the book lay open, and my thought flew from it, taking from it

A vibration and impulsion to an end beyond its own,

As the branch of a green osier, when a child would overcome it, Springs up freely from his clasping and goes swinging in the sun.

As I mused I heard a murmur, — it grew deep as it grew longerSpeakers using earnest language,

"Lady Geraldine, you would!' And I heard a voice that pleaded ever on, in accents stronger, As a sense of reason gave it power to make its rhetoric good.

་

What he said again, I know not. It is likely that his trouble

Worked his pride up to the surface,

for she answered in slow

scorn, "And your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry, shall be noble, Ay, and wealthy. I shall never blush to think how he was born."

There, I maddened! her words stung me! Life swept through me into fever,

And my soul sprang up astonished; sprang full-statured in an hour: Know you what it is when anguish, with apocalyptic NEVER, To a Pythian height dilates you,

and despair sublimes to power?

From my brain the soul-wings budded!-waved a flame about my body, Whence conventions coiled to ashes:

I felt self-drawn out, as man, From amalgamate false natures; and I saw the skies grow ruddy With the deepening feet of angels, and I knew what spirits can.