‘Ah you, you care for rhymes; So here be rhymes to pore on under trees, When April comes to let you! I’ve been told They are not idle as so many are, But set hearts beating pure as well as fast: It’s yours, the book; I’ll write your name in it,— That so you may not lose, however lost In poet’s lore and charming reverie, The thought of how your father thought of _you_ In riding from the town.’ To have our books Appraised by love, associated with love, While _we_ sit loveless! is it hard, you think? At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said, Means simply love. It was a man said that. And then, there’s love and love: the love of all (To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,) Is but a small thing to the love of one. You bid a hungry child be satisfied With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay, He says he’s hungry,—he would rather have That little barley-cake you keep from him While reckoning up his harvests. So with us; (Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!) We’re hungry. Hungry! but it’s pitiful To wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbs Because we’re hungry. Who, in all this world, (Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast, And learn what good is by its opposite) Has never hungered? Woe to him who has found The meal enough! if Ugolino’s full, His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing: For here satiety proves penury More utterly irremediable. And since We needs must hunger,—better, for man’s love, Than God’s truth! better, for companions sweet, Than great convictions! let us bear our weights, Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls. Well, well! they say we’re envious, we who rhyme; But I, because I am a woman perhaps, And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying. I never envied Graham his breadth of style, Which gives you, with a random smutch or two, (Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch) Such delicate perspectives of full life; Nor Belmore, for the unity of aim To which he cuts his cedarn poems, fine As sketchers do their pencils; nor Mark Gage, For that caressing colour and trancing tone Whereby you’re swept away and melted in The sensual element, which, with a back wave, Restores you to the level of pure souls And leaves you with Plotinus. None of these, For native gifts or popular applause, I’ve envied; but for this,—that when, by chance, Says some one,—‘There goes Belmore, a great man! He leaves clean work behind him, and requires No sweeper up of the chips,’ ... a girl I know, Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes, Smiles unaware, as if a guardian saint Smiled in her:—for this, too,—that Gage comes home And lays his last book’s prodigal review Upon his mother’s knees, where, years ago,