Unless I have that soul-harp to myself, And wake it to what melody I please. —— So wrote the Lady Imogen—the child Of Poetry and Passion—all her frame So lightly, exquisitely shaped, we dreamed ’Twas fashioned to the echo of some song— The fairest, airiest creature ever made— Flower-like in her fragility and grace, Childlike in sweet impetuous tenderness, Yet with a nature proud, profound, and pure, As a rapt sybil’s. O’er her soul had passed The wild simoom of wo, but to awake From that Eolian lyre the loveliest tones Of mournful music, passionately sad. Not thus her love the haughty Ida breathed: In her ideal beauty calm and high, O’er the patrician paleness of her cheek, Came, seldom, and how softly! the faint blush Of irrepressible tenderness. —— Your course has been a conqueror’s through life; You have been followed, flattered and caressed; Soul after soul has laid upon your shrine Its first, fresh, dewy bloom of love for incense: The minstrel-girl has tuned for you her lute, And set her life to music for your sake; The opera-belle, with blush unwonted, starts At your name’s casual mention, and forgets, For one strange moment, fashion’s cold repose; The village maiden’s conscious heart beats time To your entrancing melody of verse, And, from that hour, of your belovéd image Makes a life-idol. And you know it all, And smile, half-pleased, and half in scorn, to know. But you have never known, nor shall you now, Who, ’mid the throng you sometimes meet, receives Your careless recognition with a thrill, At her adoring heart, worth all that homage! You see not, ’neath her half-disdainful smile, The passionate tears it is put on to hide; You dream not what a wild sigh dies away In her laugh’s joyous trill; you cannot guess— You, who see only with your outer sense,— A warped, chilled sense, that wrongs you every hour— You cannot guess, when her cold hand you take, That _a soul_ trembles in that light, calm clasp! You speak to her, with your world tone; ah, not With the home cadence of confiding love! And she replies: a few, low, formal words Are all she dares, nay deigns, return; and so You part, for months, again. Yet in that brief, Oasis hour of her desert life, She has quaffed eagerly the enchanted spring, The sun-lit wave of thought in your rich mind; And passes on her weary pilgrimage Refreshed, and with a renovated strength. And this has been for years. She was a child— A school-girl—when the echo of your lyre First came to her, with music on its wings, And her soul drank from it the life of life. Then, in a festive scene, you claimed her hand For the gay dance, and, in its intervals, Spoke soothingly and gently, for you saw