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Of what is, and I, haply, overbold

For what might be.

But then the thrushes sang,
And shook my pulses and the elms' new leaves;
At which I turned, and held my finger up,
And bade him mark that, howsoe'er the world
Went ill, as he related, certainly

The thrushes still sang in it. At the word
His brow would soften,-and he bore with me
In melancholy patience, not unkind,

While breaking into voluble ecstasy

I flattered all the beauteous country round,
As poets use, the skies, the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold;
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
'Twixt dripping ash-boughs,-hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies,
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind;

Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards. 'See,' I said,
'And see! is God not with us on the earth?
And shall we put him down by aught we do?
Who says there's nothing for the poor and vile
Save poverty and wickedness? behold!'
And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped
And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

A SIMILE

Every age,

Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned

By those who have not lived past it. We'll supposs Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed,

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To some colossal statue of a man.

The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity

Up there, in fact, had travelled five miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,-hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down

To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus
With times we live in,-evermore too great
To be apprehended near.

MARIAN'S CHILD.

There he lay upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples, to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered over-much

To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd's heart-blood ebbed away into
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant; in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked,
The little naked feet, drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft
And tender, to the tiny holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of 't.

While we stood there dumb,

For oh, that it should take such innocence

To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb,

The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,

And, staring out at us w th all their blue,

As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence, gradually
He saw his mother's face, accepting it

In change for heaven itself with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there,-never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,

So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said?
As red and still indeed as any rose,

That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content in blowing to fulfil its life.

THE JOURNEY SOUTH.

I just knew it when we swept

Above the old roofs of Dijon: Lyons dropped
A spark into the night, half trodden out

Unseen. But presently the winding Rhone

Washed out the moonlight large along his banks,

Which strained their yielding curves out clear and clean
To hold it, shadow of town and castle blurred
Upon the hurrying river. Such an air
Blew thence upon the forehead,-half an air
And half a water,-that I leaned and looked,
Then, turning back on Marian, smiled to mark
That she looked only on her child, who slept,
His face toward the moon too.

So we passed

The liberal open country and the close,

And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge

By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,

Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,

And lets it in at once: the train swept in

Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve,

The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on

And dying off smothered in the shuddering dark, While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed

As other Titans underneath the pile

And nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,
To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!

-Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,
Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wide
Rich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,
(As if they entertained i' the name of France)
While, down their straining sides, streamed manifest
A soil as red as Charlemagne's knightly blood,
To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,
'Marseilles !' And lo, the city of Marseilles,
With all her ships behind her, and beyond,
The scimitar of ever-shining sea

For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts,
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas

And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak
They stood: I watched, beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,

And still disclosing some brown convent-tower
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,

Or many a little lighted village, dropt
Like a fallen star upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which powder all the

With spray of silver.

Was stealing on us.

myrtle and orange groves
Thus my Italy

Genoa broke with day,

The Doria's long pale palace striking out,

From green hills in advance of the white town,

A marble finger dominant to ships

Seen glimmering through the uncertain gray of dawn.

EMILY BRONTË.

[EMILY BRONTE was born at Hartshead-cum Clifton, near Leeds, in 1819, and lived at the parsonage at Haworth from 1820 to her death. The monotony of this existence was broken only by a brief attempt to be a governess and by a short stay at Brussels in 1842, all exile from home being excessively painful and hurtful to her. She died of consumption at Haworth on the 19th of December, 1848. She published, in conjunction with her sisters, Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, in 1846, and, alone, the novel of Wuthering Heights in 1847.

Not even the unstinted praise of three great and very dissimilar poets has given to Emily Brontë her due rank in popular esteem. Her work is not universally acceptable, even to imaginative readers; her personality is almost repulsive to many who have schooled themselves to endure the vehemence of genius but not its ominous self-restraint. Most people were afraid of Emily Brontë's 'whitening face and set mouth' when she was alive, and even now that she is dead her memory seems to inspire more terror than affection. Against an instinctive repugnance it is in vain to reason, and in discussing her poetical quality we must assume that her power has at least been felt and not disliked by the reader, since 'you must love her, ere to you she should seem worthy to be loved.' Those who have come under the spell of her genius will expect no apology for her intellectual rebellion, her stoic harshness of purpose, her more than manlike strength. She was a native blossom of those dreary and fascinating moorlands of which Charlotte has given, in a few brilliant phrases, so perfect a description, and like the acrid heaths and gentians that flourish in the peat, to transplant her was to kill her. Her actions, like her writings, were strange, but consistent in their strangeness. Even the dreadful incident of her death, which occurred as she stood upright in the little parlour at Haworth, refusing to go to bed, but just leaning one hand upon

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