 | Young Arthur |  |
VARIATION I.
Woman and Foundlings.
Leave we the cottage, and the happy pairPleas'd with their foundling, till time better fit
To dole its destiny,—What parents those
Of Chiron-form, half human, and half brute,
In nature neither—for the Hyena, fierce,
Forgets not that she bore her young ones—What
Parents are those who to the sport of chance
Can leave their offspring? judge they from themselves
Of others? if they do, can they have hope
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To soften the effect of their gaunt sin,
By taking charge of what their shame deserts?
Should they not rather fancy that this charge
Would, like the sear'd and solitary leaf,
Be driven away, and in the waste be lost?
Curse on the father who could thus destroy
The offspring's right! mother it could not be.—
We have of mothers heard of such a cast;—
She who to Savage (Genius' hapless son)
Prov'd less a mother than the scorpion to
Its deadly progeny; and two or three
Of ancient name (but for oblivion fit)
Of equal infamy; but, O 'tis rare;
More rare than comet sweeping in its course;
Than wealth to bards; than modesty to wits;
To braggarts valour; or to quacks true skill.
Woman was form'd by Heaven—as one affirm'd
Of England's women, and with very pith
Of point, and poesy, and taste, and truth,—
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Good-nature so unnatural a deed
Perform? or nerve play with a kind accord
Twitted by such a circumstance of woe?
Such women have been, though for angels meant;
So they have angels been who now are devils;
But still th' angelic choir out-number those,
Aye, infinitely, whom wild Dante erst,
And the sublimer, glorious, Milton sung
Ejected Paradise—Beshrew the thought!
Women? I've met me your philosophers,
Cold-blooded, musty, rogues, who only read
The abstract characters of nature's book;
As reptiles, leaving light and heaven's fair view,
Burrow them under stones; I've met me these,
Aye, and some others, whose distempered minds
Smarted with disappointment; and, again,
Others who, taking sensual for sense,
Have grown besotted from deep-drugg'd potations;
And more, it were but waste of time to name,
Who have belied and vilified the sex.
O, 'tis right shameful! nay, tis treason to
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Of all heaven's marvels in this sphere of ours,
There shines no grace which can that sex outshine:
Is life a flower? then woman is the dew,
Which moistens, softens, feeds it, and so forth:
Is life an hive? then woman is the honey:
Is life a day? then woman is the sun:
Is life a night? then woman is the moon;
Not the arch'd, fickle, Luna; but the full,
Who throws her mild beams on the desart waste,
Causing the wandering pilgrim to look up
To heaven, with gratitude to him who gave
That beauteous lamp to light him on his way.
Is ought for softness, sweetness, gentleness;
Is ought for sympathy, for hope, for love,
For rapture; exquisite, by heav'n proportion'd?
Then woman is the essence of those sweets;
Those heaven-born delicacies; and the soul
Of all that nourishes the social joy.
Adam, sir, was a wise man, though a weak one;
He found all nature body without soul
For that it wanted woman—she was form'd,
And he was blest—by woman, true, he fell;
And woman bears the odium of that fall;
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Who knew his danger; and yet, not in joy,
But in delirium, rapt, he, in the gift,
Lost sight of his first homage to the giver.
Love is not frenzy; no!—the genial sun
Is no volcano to destroy this earth.
Woman was form'd for love, not adoration;
Though sonneteers, unread in common sense,
Adore their Delias, Daphnes, and the rest;
That adoration is an idle doating,
Which clogs by its excess, and puts the sex
But on a par with sweetmeats, which the child
Devours at once, with appetite and eyes;
Then sickens, wastes, and sinks beneath the poison:
For all excess is poison.—Talk we of women
We talk of that which seems proposed for paradise:
The wily Mussulman, whose Koran rules
The crescent's hemisphere, knew well this feeling,
And form'd his Houri but to practise on't;
And so succeeded with the sensual herd;
For on the Houri's credit rests his Koran.
Talk we of women? then we talk of love;—
Effects for ever on their causes wait,
Love waits on woman.—Whip me all the tribe
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(Exhibited for that rank fools may gaze,
While wise men turn aside with scorn and pity)
Talk about love as 'twere a coxcomb's toy;
Others, who prate of it as 'twere a drench,
A low, base, brutal—pah! I needs must blush
To think such idiots and such recreants mar
The chequered catalogue of our creation;
O! these are gnats, or spiders, in our way,
Who sting us while we scorn 'em; and who lurk,
To dart on thoughtlessness; and only crawl
O'er sweetest flowers, engend'ring, from the source
Whence the Hyblean chemist draws his sweets,
Excessive poison.
| Young Arthur | |