Compassion for the man thus noble nerved The pity for herself she felt in him, To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save; At least, be worthy. That our soul may swim, We sink our heart down bubbling under wave. It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks. But, ah! confession of a woman’s breast: She eminent, she honoured of her sex! Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed, To veil them. None of women, save their vile, Plays traitor to an army in the field. The cries most vindicating most defile. How shall a cause to Nature be appealed, When, under pressure of their common foe, Her sisters shun the Mother and disown, On pain of his intolerable crow Above the fiction, built for him, o’erthrown? Irrational he is, irrational Must they be, though not Reason’s light shall wane In them with ever Nature at close call, Behind the fiction torturing to sustain; Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh: Whereat men dread their lofty structure’s quake Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply The crazy roar of peril, leonine For injured majesty. That sigh of dames Is rare and soon suppressed. Not they combine To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames Their lustier if not wilder: fixed are they, In elegancy scarce denoting ease; And do they breathe, it is not to betray The martyr in the caryatides. Yet here and there along the graceful row Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems, Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe May yield a trustier friend than woman seems, And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight Massed upon heads not utterly of stone: May stamp endurance by expounding fate. She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone; Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief, Frost-white. She gave his hearing sight to view The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf: Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through. No further sign of heart could he discern: The picture of her speech was winter sky; A headless figure folding a cleft urn, Where tears once at the overflow were dry. III So spake she her first utterance on the rack. It softened torment, in the funeral hues Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back To listen to herself, herself accuse Harshly as Love’s imperial cause allowed. She meant to grovel, and her lover praised So high o’er the condemnatory crowd, That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.