Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.

The surface was attentive to receive,
The secret underneath enfolded fast.

She had the step of the unconquered, brave,
Not arrogant; and if the vessel's mast

Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.
Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls,

With something of a wavering line unspelt.
They hold the look whose tenderness condoles

For what the sister in the look has dealt
Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones

A woman's honeyed amorous outvied,
As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans

Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide
Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill

Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.
Those voices are not magic of the will

To strike love's wound, but of love's wound give sound,
Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.

They waft to the moist tropics after storm,
When out of passion spent thick incense steams,

And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.
Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint

Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring
Of melody clasped motion in restraint:

The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.
With such endowments armed was she and decked

To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind;
Surpassing many a giant intellect,

The marvel of that cradled infant mind.
It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe;

Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed;
And promised in fair feminine to grow

A Sage's match and mate, more heavenly orbed.
II

Across his path the spouseless Lady cast
Her shadow, and the man that thing became.

His youth uprising called his age the Past.
This was the strong grey head of laurelled name,

And in his bosom an inverted Sage
Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.

But who while veins run blood shall know the page
Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?

Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud,
Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in

To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed,
Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin

Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs
Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;

They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs
For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!

Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,
The legends of her mission to beguile?

Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth
He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;

And not on her soft lips was it descried.
She stepped her way benevolently grave:

Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,
By tossing victim to the courtier knave,

Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.
Rather 'twas humbleness in being pursued,

As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.
Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?

All wisdom's armoury this man could wield;
And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased

Traverse her woman's curtain and poor shield,
For new example of a world diseased;

Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;
A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;

Yet she most surely to this man stood fair:
He worshipped like the young enthusiast,

Named simpleton or poet. Did he read
Right through, and with the voice she held reserved

Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?
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 desperatecraving, 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.