I followed up the stair upon her step. She hurried upward, shot across a face, A woman’s on the landing,—‘How now, now! Is no one to have holidays but you? You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think, And Julie waiting for your betters here? Why if he had waked, he might have waked, for me.’ —Just murmuring an excusing word she passed And shut the rest out with the chamber-door, Myself shut in beside her. ’Twas a room Scarce larger than a grave, and near as bare; Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room: A mouse could find no sort of shelter in’t, Much less a greater secret; curtainless,— The window fixed you with its torturing eye, Defying you to take a step apart, If peradventure you would hide a thing. I saw the whole room, I and Marian there Alone. Alone? She threw her bonnet off, Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time, Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away: You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise More calmly and more carefully than so,— Nor would you find within, a rosier flushed Pomegranate— There he lay, upon his back, The yearling creature, warm and moist with life To the bottom of his dimples,—to the ends Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face; For since he had been covered over-much To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose The shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into, The faster for his love. And love was here As instant! in the pretty baby-mouth, Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked; The little naked feet drawn up the way Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft And tender,—to the little holdfast hands, Which, closing on a finger into sleep, Had kept the mould of’t. While we stood there dumb,— For oh, that it should take such innocence To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb; The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide, And, staring out at us with all their blue, As half perplexed between the angelhood He had been away to visit in his sleep, And our most mortal presence,—gradually He saw his mother’s face, accepting it In change for heaven itself, with such a smile As might have well been learnt there,—never moved, But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy, So happy (half with her and half with heaven) He could not have the trouble to be stirred, But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said: As red and still indeed as any rose, That blows in all the silence of its leaves, Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.