Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved,
And girdled her with music. Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall

He shall not blind his soul with clay.'

Said Ida, tremulously, 'so all unlike —

'But I,'

It seems you love to cheat yourself with words :
This mother is your model. I have heard

Of your strange doubts: they well might be: I seem A mockery to my own self. Never, Prince;

You cannot love me.'

'Nay but thee' I said

'From yearlong poring on thy pictured eyes,

Ere seen I loved, and loved thee seen, and saw

Thee woman thro' the crust of iron moods

That mask'd thee from men's reverence up, and forced
Sweet love on pranks of saucy boyhood: now,

Giv'n back to life, to life indeed, thro' thee,
Indeed I love the new day comes, the light
Dearer for night, as dearer thou for faults
Lived over lift thine eyes; my doubts are dead,
My haunting sense of hollow shows: the change,
This truthful change in thee has kill'd it. Dear,
Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine,
Like yonder morning on the blind half-world;
Approach and fear not; breathe upon my brows;
In that fine air I tremble, all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
Is morn to more, and all the rich to-come
Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning weeds. Forgive me,

I waste my heart in signs: let be. My bride,
My wife, my life. O we will walk this world,
Yoked in all exercise of noble end,

And so thro' those dark gates across the wild
That no man knows. Indeed I love thee: come,
Yield thyself up: my hopes and thine are one :
Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;
Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.'

CONCLUSION.

O closed our tale, of which I give you all The random scheme as wildly as it rose: The words are mostly mine; for when we ceased There came a minute's pause, and Walter said, 'I wish she had not yielded!' then to me, 'What, if you drest it up poetically!'

So pray'd the men, the women: I gave assent:
Yet how to bind the scatter'd scheme of seven
Together in one sheaf? What style could suit?
The men required that I should give throughout
The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque,

With which we banter'd little Lilia first :
The women and perhaps they felt their power,
For something in the ballads which they sang,
Or in their silent influence as they sat,

Had ever seem'd to wrestle with burlesque,
And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close —
They hated banter, wish'd for something real,
A gallant fight, a noble princess — why
Not make her true-heroic true-sublime?
Or all, they said, as earnest as the close?
Which yet with such a framework scarce could be.
Then rose a little feud betwixt the two,
Betwixt the mockers and the realists:

And I, betwixt them both, to please them both,
And yet to give the story as it rose,

I moved as in a strange diagonal,

And maybe neither pleased myself nor them.

But Lilia pleased me, for she took no part

In our dispute: the sequel of the tale

Had touch'd her; and she sat, she pluck'd the grass, She flung it from her, thinking: last, she fixt

A showery glance upon her aunt, and said,

'You tell us what we are' who might have told,
For she was cramm'd with theories out of books,
But that there rose a shout: the gates were closed
At sunset, and the crowd were swarming now,
To take their leave, about the garden rails.

So I and some went out to these: we climb'd
The slope to Vivian-place, and turning saw
The happy valleys, half in light, and half
Far-shadowing from the west, a land of peace;
Gray halls alone among the massive groves;
Trim hamlets; here and there a rustic tower
Half-lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat;
The shimmering glimpses of a stream; the seas;
A red sail, or a white; and far beyond,

Imagined more than seen, the skirts of France.

'Look there, a garden!' said my college friend,
The Tory member's elder son 'and there!
God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,
A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled
Some sense of duty, something of a faith,

Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
Some patient force to change them when we will,
Some civic manhood firm against the crowd -
But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,
The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,

The little boys begin to shoot and stab,
A kingdom topples over with a shriek

Like an old woman, and down rolls the world
In mock heroics stranger than our own;
Revolts, republics, revolutions, most

No graver than a schoolboys' barring out;
Too comic for the solemn things they are,
Too solemn for the comic touches in them,
Like our wild Princess with as wise a dream
As some of theirs - God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad.'

'Have patience,' I replied, 'ourselves are full Of social wrong; and maybe wildest dreams Are but the needful preludes of the truth : For me, the genial day, the happy crowd, The sport half-science, fill me with a faith. This fine old world of ours is but a child Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides.'

In such discourse we gain'd the garden rails,
And there we saw Sir Walter where he stood,
Before a tower of crimson holly-oaks,
Among six boys, head under head, and look'd
No little lily-handed Baronet he,

A great broad-shoulder'd genial Englishman,
A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none ;
Fair-hair'd and redder than a windy morn;

Now shaking hands with him, now him, of those