What of her?— How could she know me when a mask I wore? Was not her sister pleased, when pleasing me? Did Edith not please me, when pleasing her? And so for Alice only seem’d her care; And Alice was a fair and flippant naught, An empty echo only of my love. The sweetness of the family all had gone To fill the elder Edith. Then alas, Too late, I learn’d my error. How I chafed, Kept back from midnight strolls for sake of Alice! And jogg’d from tête-a-têtes to give her place! Then with her left, inspired alone to wish To be like her a dunce; and thus to be Like her, in some way, Edith’s all-in-all. XXII. Nor could I hint this truth to Edith; nay. Unselfish, all ethereal in her thought, A disembodied soul had held less moods Touch’d through the senses. One had sooner snared With tatter’d nets of tow a wind of spring, Or with his own breath warm’d the wintry air. Her love’s regard in no way could be reach’d. At times, I would essay philosophy, Or try to freight her fancy’s wings with facts. Like merest sand, flung off a nervous bird, My pleas were shaken back. She “There,” would cry; “Some everlasting everybody’s law Applied again to me! Nay, nay, this world Would grind one’s very soul to common dust!” XXIII. “And what else are we?” turn’d I once to ask; “Would God we all could free ourselves from laws; But half our lives we spend in learning them; And half in learning how to love them then. And but in souls that learn life’s laws by heart, Has wisdom, so it seems, a sway complete.” “’Tis thus with earthly wisdom,” she rejoin’d; “But earth is ruled by folly,—idiot child Of freedom fetter’d. You may live the slave; But I choose freedom!” And, as then she left, “You lawless,” thought I, “will you always prove The water Undine of my wilderness, All maddening, with strange metamorphoses, My faint love thirsting to refresh itself?”— XXIV. Oft while I this would moot, she changed, and seem’d A fount of laughter now that sprang within, O’er-rill’d her lips and rippled round her guise, The very train’s hem shaken by the flow. “Nay, nay, but I shall trust you yet,” I thought; “And still believe you good, and hold it true That maids, like minnows, rarely show themselves Till, caught and drawn from out the open sea, They frisk in safety in some household pond!” Like this, my moods moved on,—life’s usual way, The mainspring sped by balanced contraries, And every pulse, whose beating proves we live, Anon with deathlike voids alternating. One hour, my faith in her was like the sun, The next, my doubt was lightless as the night. All prefaced fitly that which you shall hear. XXV.