‘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.—Bowling-greens 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 mark,—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.’ 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 sick room. 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 St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone, Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit, 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 cheek-bones, kerchief torn, Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth, Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out, By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,— ‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog You’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,