The Princess

   Ask me no more:  the moon may draw the sea;
      The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape
      With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
   But O too fond, when have I answered thee?
                          Ask me no more.

   Ask me no more:  what answer should I give?
      I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:
      Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!
   Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;
                          Ask me no more.

   Ask me no more:  thy fate and mine are sealed:
      I strove against the stream and all in vain:
      Let the great river take me to the main:
   No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;
                          Ask me no more.

   So was their sanctuary violated,
   So their fair college turned to hospital;
   At first with all confusion:  by and by
   Sweet order lived again with other laws:
   A kindlier influence reigned; and everywhere
   Low voices with the ministering hand
   Hung round the sick:  the maidens came, they talked,
   They sang, they read:  till she not fair began
   To gather light, and she that was, became
   Her former beauty treble; and to and fro
   With books, with flowers, with Angel offices,
   Like creatures native unto gracious act,
   And in their own clear element, they moved.

        But sadness on the soul of Ida fell,
   And hatred of her weakness, blent with shame.
   Old studies failed; seldom she spoke:  but oft
   Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for hours
   On that disastrous leaguer, swarms of men
   Darkening her female field:  void was her use,
   And she as one that climbs a peak to gaze
   O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
   Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,
   Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,
   And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,
   And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
   Expunge the world:  so fared she gazing there;
   So blackened all her world in secret, blank
   And waste it seemed and vain; till down she came,
   And found fair peace once more among the sick.

        And twilight dawned; and morn by morn the lark
   Shot up and shrilled in flickering gyres, but I
   Lay silent in the muffled cage of life:
   And twilight gloomed; and broader-grown the bowers
   Drew the great night into themselves, and Heaven,
   Star after Star, arose and fell; but I,
   Deeper than those weird doubts could reach me, lay
   Quite sundered from the moving Universe,
   Nor knew what eye was on me, nor the hand
   That nursed me, more than infants in their sleep.

        But Psyche tended Florian:  with her oft,
   Melissa came; for Blanche had gone, but left
   Her child among us, willing she should keep
   Court-favour:  here and there the small bright head,
   A light of healing, glanced about the couch,
   Or through the parted silks the tender face
   Peeped, shining in upon the wounded man
   With blush and smile, a medicine in themselves
   To wile the length from languorous hours, and draw
   The sting from pain; nor seemed it strange that soon
   He rose up whole, and those fair charities
   Joined at her side; nor stranger seemed that hears
   So gentle, so employed, should close in love,
   Than when two dewdrops on the petals shake
   To the same sweet air, and tremble deeper down,
   And slip at once all-fragrant into one.

        Less prosperously the second suit obtained
   At first with Psyche.  Not though Blanche had sworn
   That after that dark night among the fields
   She needs must wed him for her own good name;
        Not though he built upon the babe restored;
   Nor though she liked him, yielded she, but feared
   To incense the Head once more; till on a day
   When Cyril pleaded, Ida came behind
   Seen but of Psyche:  on her foot she hung
   A moment, and she heard, at which her face
   A little flushed, and she past on; but each
   Assumed from thence a half-consent involved
   In stillness, plighted troth, and were at peace.

        Nor only these:  Love in the sacred halls
   Held carnival at will, and flying struck
   With showers of random sweet on maid and man.
   Nor did her father cease to press my claim,
   Nor did mine own, now reconciled; nor yet
   Did those twin-brothers, risen again and whole;
   Nor Arac, satiate with his victory.

        But I lay still, and with me oft she sat:
   Then came a change; for sometimes I would catch
   Her hand in wild delirium, gripe it hard,
   And fling it like a viper off, and shriek
   'You are not Ida;' clasp it once again,
   And call her Ida, though I knew her not,
   And call her sweet, as if in irony,
   And call her hard and cold which seemed a truth:
   And still she feared that I should lose my mind,
   And often she believed that I should die:
   Till out of long frustration of her care,
   And pensive tendance in the all-weary noons,
   And watches in the dead, the dark, when clocks
   Throbbed thunder through the palace floors, or called
   On flying Time from all their silver tongues—
   And out of memories of her kindlier days,
   And sidelong glances at my father's grief,
   And at the happy lovers heart in heart—
   And out of hauntings of my spoken love,
   And lonely listenings to my muttered dream,
   And often feeling of the helpless hands,
   And wordless broodings on the wasted cheek—
   From all a closer interest flourished up,
   Tenderness touch by touch, and last, to these,
   Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears
   By some cold morning glacier; frail at first
   And feeble, all unconscious of itself,
   But such as gathered colour day by day.

   Last I woke sane, but well-nigh close to death
   For weakness:  it was evening:  silent light
   Slept on the painted walls, wherein were wrought
   Two grand designs; for on one side arose
   The women up in wild revolt, and stormed
   At the Oppian Law.  Titanic shapes, they crammed
   The forum, and half-crushed among the rest
   A dwarf-like Cato cowered.  On the other side
   Hortensia spoke against the tax; behind,
   A train of dames:  by axe and eagle sat,
   With all their foreheads drawn in Roman scowls,
   And half the wolf's-milk curdled in their veins,
   The fierce triumvirs; and before them paused
   Hortensia pleading:  angry was her face.

        I saw the forms:  I knew not where I was:
   They did but look like hollow shows; nor more
   Sweet Ida:  palm to palm she sat:  the dew
   Dwelt in her eyes, and softer all her shape
   And rounder seemed:  I moved:  I sighed:  a touch
   Came round my wrist, and tears upon my hand:
   Then all for languor and self-pity ran
   Mine down my face, and with what life I had,
   And like a flower that cannot all unfold,
   So drenched it is with tempest, to the sun,
   Yet, as it may, turns toward him, I on her
   Fixt my faint eyes, and uttered whisperingly:

        'If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream,
   I would but ask you to fulfil yourself:
   But if you be that Ida whom I knew,
   I ask you nothing:  only, if a dream,
   Sweet dream, be perfect.  I shall die tonight.
   Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.'

        I could no more, but lay like one in trance,
   That hears his burial talked of by his friends,
   And cannot speak, nor move, nor make one sign,
   But lies and dreads his doom.  She turned; she paused;
   She stooped; and out of languor leapt a cry;
   Leapt fiery Passion from the brinks of death;
   And I believed that in the living world
   My spirit closed with Ida's at the lips;
   Till back I fell, and from mine arms she rose
   Glowing all over noble shame; and all
   Her falser self slipt from her like a robe,
   And left her woman, lovelier in her mood
   Than in her mould that other, when she came
   From barren deeps to conquer all with love;
   And down the streaming crystal dropt; and she
   Far-fleeted by the purple island-sides,
   Naked, a double light in air and wave,
   To meet her Graces, where they decked her out
   For worship without end; nor end of mine,
   Stateliest, for thee! but mute she glided forth,
   Nor glanced behind her, and I sank and slept,
   Filled through and through with Love, a happy sleep.

        Deep in the night I woke:  she, near me, held
   A volume of the Poets of her land:
   There to herself, all in low tones, she read.

      'Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
   Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
   Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
   The fire-fly wakens:  wake thou with me.

      Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
   And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

      Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
   And all thy heart lies open unto me.

      Now lies the silent meteor on, and leaves
   A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

      Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
   And slips into the bosom of the lake:
   So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
   Into my bosom and be lost in me.'

   I heard her turn the page; she found a small
   Sweet Idyl, and once more, as low, she read:

      'Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
   What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)
   In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
   But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
   To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,
   To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
   And come, for love is of the valley, come,
   For love is of the valley, come thou down
   And find him; by the happy threshold, he,
   Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
   Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
   Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk
   With Death and Morning on the silver horns,
   Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,
   Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice,
   That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls
   To roll the torrent out of dusky doors:
   But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
   To find him in the valley; let the wild
   Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave
   The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
   Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
   That like a broken purpose waste in air:
   So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
   Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
   Arise to thee; the children call, and I
   Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
   Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
   Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
   The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
   And murmuring of innumerable bees.'

   So she low-toned; while with shut eyes I lay
   Listening; then looked.  Pale was the perfect face;
   The bosom with long sighs laboured; and meek
   Seemed the full lips, and mild the luminous eyes,
   And the voice trembled and the hand.  She said
   Brokenly, that she knew it, she had failed
   In sweet humility; had failed in all;
   That all her labour was but as a block
   Left in the quarry; but she still were loth,
   She still were loth to yield herself to one
   That wholly scorned to help their equal rights
   Against the sons of men, and barbarous laws.
   She prayed me not to judge their cause from her
   That wronged it, sought far less for truth than power
   In knowledge:  something wild within her breast,
   A greater than all knowledge, beat her down.
   And she had nursed me there from week to week:
   Much had she learnt in little time.  In part
   It was ill counsel had misled the girl
   To vex true hearts:  yet was she but a girl—
   'Ah fool, and made myself a Queen of farce!
   When comes another such? never, I think,
   Till the Sun drop, dead, from the signs.'
                                            Her voice
   choked, and her forehead sank upon her hands,
   And her great heart through all the faultful Past
   Went sorrowing in a pause I dared not break;
   Till notice of a change in the dark world
   Was lispt about the acacias, and a bird,
   That early woke to feed her little ones,
   Sent from a dewy breast a cry for light:
   She moved, and at her feet the volume fell.

        'Blame not thyself too much,' I said, 'nor blame
   Too much the sons of men and barbarous laws;
   These were the rough ways of the world till now.
   Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know
   The woman's cause is man's:  they rise or sink
   Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free:
   For she that out of Lethe scales with man
   The shining steps of Nature, shares with man
   His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,
   Stays all the fair young planet in her hands—
   If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
   How shall men grow? but work no more alone!
   Our place is much:  as far as in us lies
   We two will serve them both in aiding her—
   Will clear away the parasitic forms
   That seem to keep her up but drag her down—
   Will leave her space to burgeon out of all
   Within her—let her make herself her own
   To give or keep, to live and learn and be
   All that not harms distinctive womanhood.
   For woman is not undevelopt man,
   But diverse:  could we make her as the man,
   Sweet Love were slain:  his dearest bond is this,
   Not like to like, but like in difference.
   Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
   The man be more of woman, she of man;
   He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
   Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
   She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
   Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
   Till at the last she set herself to man,
   Like perfect music unto noble words;
   And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
   Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,
   Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
   Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
   Distinct in individualities,
   But like each other even as those who love.
   Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:
   Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:
   Then springs the crowning race of humankind.
   May these things be!'
                        Sighing she spoke 'I fear
   They will not.'
                  'Dear, but let us type them now
   In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest
   Of equal; seeing either sex alone
   Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
   Nor equal, nor unequal:  each fulfils
   Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
   Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,
   The single pure and perfect animal,
   The two-celled heart beating, with one full stroke,
   Life.'
         And again sighing she spoke:  'A dream
   That once was mine! what woman taught you this?'

        'Alone,' I said, 'from earlier than I know,
   Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world,
   I loved the woman:  he, that doth not, lives
   A drowning life, besotted in sweet self,
   Or pines in sad experience worse than death,
   Or keeps his winged affections clipt with crime:
   Yet was there one through whom I loved her, one
   Not learnèd, save in gracious household ways,
   Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
   No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
   In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
   Interpreter between the Gods and men,
   Who looked all native to her place, and yet
   On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
   Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
   Swayed 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 though he trip and fall
   He shall not blind his soul with clay.'
                                          'But I,'
   Said Ida, tremulously, 'so all unlike—
   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 through the crust of iron moods
   That masked thee from men's reverence up, and forced
   Sweet love on pranks of saucy boyhood:  now,
   Given back to life, to life indeed, through 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 killed 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 through 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.'

   So 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 prayed the men, the women:  I gave assent:
   Yet how to bind the scattered 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 bantered 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 seemed to wrestle with burlesque,
   And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close—
   They hated banter, wished 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 touched her; and she sat, she plucked 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 crammed 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 climbed
   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 their 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 serious 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 gained the garden rails,
   And there we saw Sir Walter where he stood,
   Before a tower of crimson holly-hoaks,
   Among six boys, head under head, and looked
   No little lily-handed Baronet he,
   A great broad-shouldered 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-haired and redder than a windy morn;
   Now shaking hands with him, now him, of those
   That stood the nearest—now addressed to speech—
   Who spoke few words and pithy, such as closed
   Welcome, farewell, and welcome for the year
   To follow:  a shout rose again, and made
   The long line of the approaching rookery swerve
   From the elms, and shook the branches of the deer
   From slope to slope through distant ferns, and rang
   Beyond the bourn of sunset; O, a shout
   More joyful than the city-roar that hails
   Premier or king!  Why should not these great Sirs
   Give up their parks some dozen times a year
   To let the people breathe?  So thrice they cried,
   I likewise, and in groups they streamed away.

        But we went back to the Abbey, and sat on,
   So much the gathering darkness charmed:  we sat
   But spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie,
   Perchance upon the future man:  the walls
   Blackened about us, bats wheeled, and owls whooped,
   And gradually the powers of the night,
   That range above the region of the wind,
   Deepening the courts of twilight broke them up
   Through all the silent spaces of the worlds,
   Beyond all thought into the Heaven of Heavens.

        Last little Lilia, rising quietly,
   Disrobed the glimmering statue of Sir Ralph
   From those rich silks, and home well-pleased we went.