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. Out-door 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 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, And 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 beast’s 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 death-bed will not want Another devil to damn, than such a look) ... ‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven, ‘God, 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,