The Poetical Works of Walter C. Smith :: :: University of Virginia Library

At “Prinkle's Establishment,
On principles strictly religious,
For finishing girls,” I spent
A year in a manner egregious;
'Twas a school of the calender kind,
Meant to put a fine gloss on the mind.

It was there I met Hilda Dalguise,
And thought her enchantingly fair,
With drops of blue heaven for her eyes,
And bands of sunbeams for her hair,
And the form of a dainty, round dove
Just made for soft touches of love.

I was not of the gushing-girl sort;
My soul with ambition was fired,
My tongue something sharp at retort,
And the people were few I admired:
And I know I detested a saint
More than gambling and poweder and paint.

Yet I once had a fit of devotion,
And worked in the Sunday school,
And whipt up a frothy emotion,
And prayed, and behaved like a fool;
Till my eyes were opened to see
I was growing a small Pharisee.

181

But with Hilda I felt I could sit
All the day, just stroking her hair,
Now to smile at her sweet lack of wit,
Now to kiss her, for love, anywhere,
To pat her soft hand, or be near
The pink, pearly shell of her ear.

Sweet-breath'd as a baby, her mind
Smelt all of the mother's milk still—
Infant prayers, childish hymns, and the blind,
Pretty faiths they are fain to instil;
And she seemed, in her white, fluffy dress,
Like a bird I must stroke and caress.

I pitied the beautiful child,
Knowing life as I thought that I did,
With her pure soul as yet undefiled,
Always doing the thing she was bid,
And believing all hearts were as true
As the one little heart that she knew.

I was just a year older than she,
But twenty years older in thought:
She hardly knew more than the bee
That wots where the honey is got,
Nor dreams that the great purple bell
Has poison hid in it as well.

Yet now I'm not sure that I knew
So very much more than she did:
There's an instinct for all that is true,
And for all by wise Nature forbid,
Which is deeper than such wit as then
I had gathered of life and of men.

I was young, and I thought myself old;
A fool, and conceited me wise;
I ran my crude thoughts in a mould
That shaped the crude thoughts into lies
With a kind of Byronic belief
In a world full of baseness and grief.

How much I have lived since then!
What rubs I have gotten and given!
Some whine for their childhood again,
Some pine for the quiet of heaven:
But my tent, I have no mind to strike it;
'Tis a nice, wicked world, and I like it.

Old Prinkle I took for a prude,
With her hands in her black thread-mits,
Chap-fingered, and painfully good,
Yet half-scared out of her wits;
And at first I could not make out
What troubled a soul so devout.

'Twas not the mere burden of care
For a score of commonplace girls,
Whose manners and dresses and hair,
Their finger-nails, teeth, and their curls,
With their morals and dinners and laughter,
'Twas her calling in life to look after.

But parents and guardians then wanted,
For girls at a “Finishing School,”
The old wine of Faith well decanted
Into flasks which must also be full
Of the world, and of woman's ambition
To better her single condition.

So she had to be worldly-wise,
And train us for “marrying well”;
And she had to put on a disguise,
And warn us of Death, too, and Hell;
For the earthly young soul must be given
At least a top-dressing of Heaven.

'Twas against the grain, I admit,
For she'd fain have been honest and true
She had neither much culture nor wit,
She was simply a woman that knew
About womanly ways and things,
Such as colours and dresses and rings.

182

A good soul, kindly and just,
But timid, and living in ways
She would never have chosen, but must,
If she meant to live out all her days
In the highly respectable station
Of finishing sound education.

Not a person to train the young mind,
For she was not at all intellectual,
And oft her religion would find
All its efforts were quite ineffectual
To fix her stray thoughts on devotion,
Or show the least touch of emotion.

Thus, when sermon was over at noon
On Sunday, she'd question us on it;
But her speech would wander off soon
To a ribbon, a gown, or a bonnet—
Or anything pretty or new
She had seen in the minister's pew.

She used to bubble and bell
About ladylike manners and ways,
In soft purling accents that well
Suggested her own brighter days;
Then sighed and looked timid about,
As if sure that she should be found out.

And the terror that haunted her so
Was fear of the Governess, Lane,
Who was dismal and dreary as snow
When it thaws in the drizzle of rain,
And sharp-eyed, and wanted the school,
And held our dear Prinkle a fool.

Lane had laws for all that we did,
And for every hour of the day;
This and that we were strictly forbid,
So and so we were always to say;
And we lived, like nuns in their cells,
'Mid an hourly ringing of bells.

We never did any great wrong,
Such as schoolboys would do on a hint;
And therefore she had to be strong
On the tithing of anise and mint;
And taught us to wet our hard pillows
At the lightest of light peccadilloes.

Oh, the old-maiden morals we had,
So scrupulous, prim, and demure!
What the decalogue never forbade
Our consciences could not endure:
But life was so low-pitched and sad,
It was quite a relief to be bad.

Then, the wearisome lessons!—the proper,
Dull prose that we read every day,
Which felt as if boiled in a copper
To take all the flavour away!
And the colourless paragraphs writ
Without reason or fancy or wit!

Yet the poems were worse; they were so
Lack-a-daisical pretty-sublime,
Spurting upward in little jets d'eau
To fall with a musical chime;
And we mouthed the sweet verses, Good Heavens!
How we mouthed, all at sixes and sevens!

Then the darning and hemming and stitching,
The broidery and the brocade,
The Berlin-wool figures bewitching,
And the wonderful trees that we made,
Like green triangles in bloom
Stuck hard on the stick of a broom!

And the scales that we practised for hours,
Till we hated the sight of the keys!
And the evenings when, ranged out like flowers,
We had our æsthetical teas,
With music, charades, and advices,
While the parents had biscuits and ices!

183

French was taught by a starved refugee
Who had hurled at all tyrants defiance;
And a student, who stormed like the sea,
Administered globules of science
Well wrapt up in texts to make sure
That the bane should have always its cure.

And thus we were “finished” at last
On principles strictly religious,
Made ready “to come out” and cast
Our lines in the ocean prodigious;
And begin the true business of life,
To find some one in want of a wife.

I do not blame Prinkle the least—
She did what they asked her to do;
They did not wish knowledge increased
Of the wise and the right and the true;
But they would have a gloss of devotion
On girls who had not a notion,

Except just to marry and dress,
And to see to their cooks and their dinners,
And live on in soft idleness,
And on Sunday to call themselves sinners,
And be mothers, ere long, of more fools
To be sent to more “Finishing schools.”

They were all odious girls, except Hilda;
And she was a saint, and a pest
To Julia, Maria, Matilda,
Amelia, Joan, and the rest;
For her conscience was sure to forbid
Many things that we all of us did.

I never liked saints, as a rule,
Always flapping their texts in your face,
With warnings of sorrow and dule
To be dree'd in that sulphurous place;
Meanwhile they do no good in this,
As they strain at their glamour of bliss.

But Hilda you could not help loving—
She was not too prosily pious;
And often our ways disapproving,
Yet she always stood faithfully by us;
And did not pretend to condemn
Earthly things, while she coveted them.

She was not at all clever, except
That she warbled a song like a bird;
You'd have sat through a whole night, and wept
In a trance of delight, as you heard
The thrill of that exquisite strain,
Like the nightingale's lyrical pain.

Why do I dwell on all this,
Recalling those tender, low notes?
And why would I give for one kiss
Of her lips all my long-treasured thoughts?
Pshaw! who ever yet understood
The why of each whimsical mood?

Besides, it's not true; it is only
A waft of old sentiment blown
O'er my mind, as I sit rather lonely
Recalling the days that are gone;
But now is far better than then,
For I live in the thoughts of great men.

When I left old Prinkle's I said,
“Life is good, and I'll seek my good in it;
'Twill go hard if my hand and my head
Cannot work for success there, and win it;
But I have not much beauty to boast,
I shall ne'er be a “belle” or a “toast.”

So I felt as I turned from my glass,
Having looked at the brown little features;
The eyes and the forehead might pass,
For they were an intelligent creature's;
But the mouth had a sneer rather bitter,
When a young-lady simper were fitter.

184

But my brains I could trust to for thinking,
My fingers were clever to write,
And thus when my heart was half sinking,
It rose again higher in might;
And I vowed that I would not be sold
For treasures of silver and gold.

I do not affect to despise
The riches that make a full life,
With pictures and books and fair eyes,
Beaming on you, of mistress or wife;
Were I man, I would purchase, of course,
A mansion, a maid, and a horse.

But it's not the same thing to be sold,
And, perhaps, to be laid on the shelf,
As it is to have and to hold
These chattels and goods for yourself;
And, besides, I was tired of the way
Men talked, who had nothing to say.

So I gave up the young-lady life,
The novels, the calls, and the moping,
And the hope to be somebody's wife,
And the cherished girl-dream of eloping,
Or doing some thing that would ring
Unlike the dull commonplace thing.

I said, Men are stronger than we,
Though our minds be as subtle as theirs;
For they train the high Reason to see,
While we put on fantastical airs,
And are fain to look silly, although
Our folly has cunning below.

But I would be true to my sex,
Would learn with the boldest to think,
Would grapple with things that perplex,
Would stand on the verge and the brink
Where the seen and the unseen are met,
There to gather what truth I could get.

I had “finished” my education,
But I found it was now to begin;
For formless and void as creation,
With the wan, diffuse light breaking in
On the first day of darkness, I knew
Neither what nor how I should do.

So I read from morning till night,
Brows knit, and with resolute brain,
Till darkness turned slowly to light;
Yet it came with an aching pain,
For I passed not a word or a jot,
Till it gave up its treasure of thought.

Yet vague and unguided, I missed
The right path among many ways,
And found myself folded in mist
Of a dim metaphysical haze,
Till I went up to town, and began
The true science-study of man.

Then the first thing I learnt was, to know
I had everything yet to learn—
To begin with the taproots that grow
In the life we can faintly discern,
And trace from the great mother-earth
The growth of our thought and our worth.

It was to an uncle I went,
A learned physician in town,
Whose evenings of leisure were spent
In converse with men of renown,
Who joined in a happy alliance
Of politics, letters, and science.

They talked of the small and the great,
They spoke of the near and the far,
They searched the dim secrets of Fate,
They traced through the fire-mist and star
The growth of the marvellous Whole,
And birth of the mind and the soul.

185

They asked for no God to explain,
They asked but slow shaping of time
To account for the thought in the brain,
And the conscience of duty and crime,
And the rich, varied life of the creature,
With its changes of organ and feature.

What a world of high wonder was this,
Growing all out of atoms in motion!
Crowned at length with the glory and bliss
Of life in the earth and the ocean!
And all by the pure force of law,
Without error or failure or flaw!

So I turned to hard study of science—
I had tasted it mixed up with creed,
But I broke up that foolish alliance,
Seeking truth, and the truth does not need
Poor safeguards of faith to secure
That the heart shall be humble and pure.

Truth only is good for the soul,
Truth only is safe to pursue,
And Truth will her secrets unroll
But to him who is fearless and true,
And will search out the fact with his test,
And bow where the reason is best.

I had the clear courage of truth,
And plunged into Häckel at once;
The way was not easy and smooth
As they make ways in England and France:
But then it was thorough, and that
Was the end I was fain to be at.

How I toiled now that I had the key,
And gathered up fact and example!
How the world opened up unto me
As knowledge grew lucid and ample!
I hewed through the jungle a way
From the dark into clearness of day.

All realms of dear nature I sought,
Far and near, both the vast and minute,
What from depths of the sea had been brought,
What had lain in the rocks at the root
Of the hills, and the dead and alive
From the lair and the nest and the hive.

Girls called with their mothers to see
The treasures my patience had stored,
And talked with a simper to me
Of the wonderful works of the Lord,
And the beautiful butterfly wings,
And the fishes and insects and “things.”

They knew not the thoughts that I thought,
They dreamed not the visions I saw,
They wist not that, still as I wrought
In the footsteps of infinite law,
Their creeds seemed as vanishing cloud
Which had wrapped the dead mind in a shroud.

How I laughed at their priests, now I knew
The high priests of nature serene,
Who sought but the clear and the true,
And the law which for ever hath been,
And scorned every meaningless phrase
Where a lie lay, perdue, in a haze.

I thought how they spent their rich lives,
Sweeping heaven for lost links in the stars,
Or brooding o'er bees in their hives,
Or watching the ants in their wars,
Or peering with keen microscope
Where the vibriole whirls in the drop,

Or freezing through chill Arctic winters,
Ice-bound in the Polar sea,
Or daring wild beasts and adventures
For a tropical bird or a tree;

186

While the vicar grows wheezy and fat,
And the minister sleek as a cat.

The apostles and martyrs, I said,
Of our new modern world are these;
They have struggled and suffered and bled,
They have sought neither honour nor ease,
But they lead the great march in the van
Of progress and freedom for man.

Facts, ordered and tested with skill,
They gather, which surely declare
The law which all beings fulfil,
And how through all ages they fare
From the cell to the organ, and soar
Ever up from the less to the more.

How my bosom swelled high as I rose
To the height of that formative thought,
And saw the dim fire-mist disclose
The worlds when as yet they were not,
And the life which was one day to flower
From its subtle and manifold power.

What a poem of nature was there!
How it linked all being in one,
The tree and the bird in the air,
And the lichen that tints the grey stone,
And the coral that builds the wild reef,
With man and his glory and grief!

They tell of a Fall bringing thorns,
They talk of a Lost Paradise,
They prate of a devil with horns
Ever plotting some wicked device,
They will have it that death entered in,
When Eve ate the apple of sin.

But truth, searching out the old myths,
Sees growth evermore going on,
And, breaking old fetters like wyths,
Finds death when no sin could be done;
Not a lapse, but a law of survival,
Where the fittest treads down its weak rival.

Poor fools! we keep wrapping our minds
In the old tattered rags of the Jew,
And shiver and shake as fresh winds,
Cloud-driving, make larger our view;
And we draw our rags closer about,
Though the faith be as chill as the doubt.

But this is the truth that alone
Can save from the fever and fret,
That the high law changeth for none,
That it holds all enmeshed in its net,
And that life and death and endeavour
Ever have been, and shall be for ever.

And life is the fuller for each
Whose death makes it richer for all;
Immortal the race, bound to reach
Ever onward; but singly we fall
Into dim silent graves on the road,
As the weary soul lays down its load.

But the dim, silent graves by the way
Are the footprints of progress for man;
And we are not so selfish as they
Who only will die, if they can
Hope to knit up again from the dead
The old tangled hank of their thread.

A nobler faith ours; for we know
That the organs, dissolving for ever,
Shall paint the spring-flowers as they grow,
But we shall return again never;
And we grudge not the life that shall give
Larger life unto them that do live.

We work for the good of the whole;
We work, and the rest cometh soon;
We work with no fear for the soul;
We work in a light as of noon;

187

And the peace, by and by, shall be ours
Of the long drowsy grass and the flowers.

We have faith; we have passed from the mist
Of doubt and denial and fear
Into high and calm realms that are kissed
By the sunshine of certainty clear;
And the great thought of duty is freed
From the dross of a self-seeking creed.

Oh the gladness I had as this grew
Into clearness now day after day!
At first, I shrank back from the new,
Startling thoughts that it brought into play,
And the courage of truth that it needed,
And the loneliness as it proceeded.

But plunging, at length, in the tide,
I flung off the shivering fit
As the current swept stately and wide,
And I cast myself wholly on it;
And slowly the loneliness found
A gladsome life gathering round.

No shade of a drear world to come
Lay dismally now on my earth;
No fruitless regretting struck dumb
The laughter of light-hearted mirth;
I had conscience to prompt me, of course,
But never to sting with remorse.

The needle that points to the Pole
Does not prick the poor sailor who errs
As the big billows tumble and roll,
Or the long swell throbs and stirs;
But simply, by night and by day,
The needle just tells him the way.

Even so was I merry and glad
As I walked in the law and the light;
And so was I not very sad
When I wandered at times from the right;
And ever a needle was true,
And showed me the thing I should do.

I did not sin and repent,
And then fall a-sinning again,
As if conscience were properly meant
To keep up a blister of pain;
But I tried to walk in the truth,
And to lose not a joy of my youth.

They say that a vanishing creed
Makes the heart very weary and sad,
That its wounds must open and bleed,
That its ways must be evil and bad;
But I ne'er was in happier mood,
Nor so true to the right and the good.

Well; just then, I heard, by the way,
That Hilda was wedded, and wrote
A well-meaning letter to say
How it pleased me to think of her lot,
Reminding her, too, like a fool,
Of a promise she gave me at school.

I offered a visit, to share
In the joy of a life that I loved;
But I fancy she did not just care
To be kissed and “honeyed” and “doved”
Before me, but would be alone
Till the honeymoon sweetness was gone.

So she put me off for a year
With this and the other excuse,
Not one of them simple and clear,
But all of them shifty and loose;
And yet when she finally sent,
And asked me to visit, I went.

188

Then I dropt on a scene quite idyllic,
A nook of the old Paradise—
A rose-embowered cot on a hillock,
With a garden sunny and nice,
And my saint and her poet too yawning
At the commonplace life that was dawning.

I cannot describe; but I know
The country was not picturesque;
The granite lay barren below,
And a broad moor, as flat as my desk,
Stretched inwards, and down to the sea
There was hardly a bush or a tree.

But inside was pretty enough;
The rooms all so fresh and so sweet—
Not a jar, or a word that was rough,
Not a thing but was dainty and neat,
And Hilda so gentle and still,
Though the meek little fool had a will.

I did not much take to her now;
She seemed to be stunted in growth,—
A pale, sickly bloom on a bough,
A flat, tasteless thing in the mouth;
A chaste, cold, passionless ghost,
Weeping much for a babe she had lost.

I tried to cheer her a bit,
But she did not interest me;
She never did smack much of wit,
But now she was dull as the sea
When the east wind blows its grey haar,
As it moans on the sand and the bar.

It was always that baby, forsooth!
As if blossoms had never been nipt,
As if lambs never died in their youth,
As if no other babies had slipt
Away to the peace of the worm
From life, and its trouble and storm.

But her Poet was really a man;
Not a clinker only of rhymes,
But one who could thoughtfully scan
The world, and the men, and the times,
And see their meanings, and sing
The vision of life which they bring.

He was not the least of a saint;
But worked, with a patient might,
In the Artist's unconstraint,
With the Artist's frank delight
In the quaint and the unexpected
Moulds which his thought selected.

Still mooning in twilight dim,
His humour was just to croon
Any song that was pleasing to him,—
Fresh words to the old, old tune,
And his thought was but half-expressed
In the manner of mirthful jest.

He had ever a kindly touch
In his quips and tricks and mocks,
But playfully hinted much
Abhorred by the orthodox;
Yet he trifled, when he should have smote
With the sharp battle-axe of his thought.

He was vain too—he was a poet—
You hardly could flatter enough;
And you did not need to show it,
He could swallow the rankest stuff;
Though he laughed at himself as he did it,
Yet next time he did not forbid it.

He never was thorough or strong,
But fanciful only, and odd,
Never sure of the right and the wrong,
And he still would believe in a God,
And talked, with a vague kind of beauty,
Of the soul, and its hope and its duty.

189

But that is the way with most men;
They darenot much more than to doubt;
They dare not, one man out of ten,
To think their thought thoroughly out;
The practical plucks at their sleeve,
And they're frightened to shock and to grieve.

I played on his foible awhile;
And made myself useful to him,
Now giving a touch to his style,
Now setting his papers in trim,
Now glancing at nature to show it
In lights that are new to the poet.

But he never could cast off the shapes
Or shallow and silly romance—
The frost-work that dims, as it drapes,
Our window, and hides from our glance
The beauty of truth, and the story
Of life with its wonder and glory.

The poet will still be a child,
And will curtain the sun to his slumbers;
At the great chemic laws he half smiled,
And laughed at the rhythm of its numbers,
And joked at the glass or the knife
Detecting the secret of life.

Yet I liked him; but Hilda grew jealous—
She cared not for verse or for rhyme,
Except as the wind in the bellows,
That brightened her hearth for the time;
Yet she would have the whole of his heart,
And was touchy and sniffy and tart.

And one night he read us a ballad,
As we sat the work-table around,
Which his humour composed like a salad
Of any green stuff that it found
Cropping up on a fanciful soil,
And he mixed it with wit as with oil.

I am sure that I have it somewhere,
For I wrote it all down the next day:
Here it is; and a sorry affair
It is to have made such a fray:
Yet 'twas like him, it must be confessed
To make sentiment flower out of jest.

JUDAS ISCARIOT

The very Prince of Darkness
Came once to Heaven's gate,
Where Peter and the angels
Talk together as they wait;
And he brought with him a spirit
In a very dismal state.

Then Satan: “I'm in trouble,
And come here to get advice;
I've been going up and down there
Where you think we are not nice,
And they will not have this fellow
Among them at any price.

“I took him first to Lamech
And the bloody race of Cain,
But they rose in flat rebellion,
That so mean a rogue should gain
A place with gallant fellows
Who in simple wrath had slain.

“Then I thought of those wild Herods
With their burning diadem,
And their spirits, ever haunted
By the babes of Bethlehem:
But they would not have the traitor
Coming sneaking among them.

“After that I looked to Ahab,
And the panther Jezebel;
But she sprang up like a fury,
‘It were shame unspeakable
To lodge a half-hanged felon
Where a queen of men must dwell.’

190

“I'm afraid there's not a corner
Into which they'll let him in;
The common rogues are furious
To confound them with his sin,
And my people are excited,
And the place is full of din.”

Then Peter: “Traitor Judas,
Thou hearest what he says,
How the murderers and demons
Abhor thee and thy ways,
Thou betrayer of the Holy,
Who the Ancient is of Days.”

Then Judas answered meekly:
“Yea, Peter, they are right;
Cain and Lamech, Ahab, Herod,
They were godless men of might,
But not so vile as I am—
Oh they loathe me, and are right.

“Jezebel that slew the prophets,
Fawned not on the life she stole;
Ahab only smote the servants,
Not the Lord who bare our dole;
There should be a hell expressly
For my miserable soul.

“Let my name be named with horror,
Let my place be wrapt in gloom,
Let me even be hell's lone outcast,
With a solitary doom—
I that kissed Him, and betrayed Him
To the cross, and to the tomb.”

Then Satan: “There's the mischief,
He goes whining like a saint;
I could keep my people quiet,
But he'd have them penitent.
It's as bad as if a parson
Made their very hearts grow faint.”

But, as Peter looked on Judas,
Sunk in utter misery,
Lo! there rose before his vision,
A grey morning by the sea,
And a weary, broken spirit
On the shores of Galilee.

“Oh, once, too, I despairèd,
For my Lord I had denied,
And once my heart was breaking,
For I cursed Him, and I lied;
I did not slay myself, but yet
I wished that I had died.

“Leave thy burden with me, Satan,
He is not too bad for me;
He will get ‘his own place’ duly,
And it is not mine to be
A breaker of the bruisèd,
Or the judge of such as he.”

I praised it; but she gazed to heaven
As if he had sinned the great sin
Which is not atoned or forgiven,
And no touch of pity can win,
And nobody knows what it is,
But her soul sat and trembled for his.

She said, “It was jesting with sin,
And nothing but grief came of that;
Few may play with the devil, and win,
Whatever the game they are at;
And Heaven was not surely a place
For one who despaired of its grace.”

I said, “It was quaint and bizarre,
And its humour was what I liked best;
And I thought they were much on a par,
Who spoke, or in earnest or jest,
Of the souls of the bad or the just,
When their brains were a small pinch of dust.”

She fired up at that; “Did I mean
That the soul was all one as the brain?
Had I only a faith in the Seen,
With its animal pleasure and pain?—
Had I left the old paths, that were trod
By the saints, and the true men of God.”

191

I could not help smiling to see
Her look so bewildered and scared,
When her anger broke out upon me,
As if I had her husband ensnared
In some terrible plot to disown
All the gods that have ever been known.

“It was I made him mock and blaspheme—
I who knew no more than the cat!
And her life had been bright as a dream
Till I came with the dusk like a bat;
For I hated the name of the Lord,
Whom every true woman adored.

“I was impious, false, and cruel;
I could sit at her fire and sing;
I would fain rob her life of the jewel
She prized above everything;
Yet all that she might have forgiven,
But I mocked at her God up in heaven.”

Of course, he behaved like a man,
Tried to soothe her, and smooth matters down,
And then, backing out of it, ran
Away to some job of his own;
But he got me persuaded to stay
When I should have at once gone away.

That was weak, I confess; but the place
Was nice, and his humour was pleasant,
And there was such a light in his face,
Now and then, when his wife was not present,
That—well, I remained for a time,
Enduring her moods and his rhyme.

But her temper got worse every day;
She feared me, and her I despised;
And he still let her have her own way,
Only soothed her, and meekly advised;
So I left them, at last, in a trance
Of piety, love, and romance.

I hear that she blamed me because
I made myself useful to him;
But what could I do when she chose
To be distant and silent and prim!
In truth, she was never his mate,
Poor thing! she was only his Fate.

Of course, he was nothing to me;
He wanted a slave in his wife,
Who should worship him low on her knee,
And serve with the breath of her life;
And there's nothing I ever abhorred
Like a man for my Master and Lord.

My Master is science divine,
My Lord is the truth that I seek,
My service is Freedom, and mine
Was ne'er the poor heart of the meek:
I would lean upon none, for I live
On that which great Nature can give.

Poor Hilda! I give her my pity,
And I pity her husband still more;
He will rhyme away life in a ditty,
She will make of her soul a heartsore;
Religion will quarrel in time
With Romance—and he'll put it in rhyme:

And be comforted, too, as he reads
The tale of his sorrow and grief,
Binding up his poor heart while it bleeds,
With the balm of a smooth-rhyming leaf;
He will drop for his Hilda a tear,
And gloat o'er his verse for a year.

Now I think of it, somebody said,
That the crash had come some time ago;
She had either gone off, or was dead,
And a poem from that was to grow,
Which was certain to touch every heart
With its feeling of fine tragic Art.

192

If I had not that paper to write
On the dawning of mind in Molluscs,
And that other to set people right
On the subject of Molars and Tusks,
I think, I would like just to see
What he says about Hilda and me.