Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/108

From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous
Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse
Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist
Like a shot bird. Youth’s stern, set face to face
With youth’s ideal: and when people came
And said, ‘You work too much, you are looking ill,’
I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,
And thought I should be better soon perhaps
For those ill looks. Observe—‘I,’ means in youth
Just I . . the conscious and eternal soul
With all its ends,—and not the outside life,
The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,
The so much liver, lung, integument,
Which make the sum of ‘I’ hereafter, when
World-talkers talk of doing well or ill.
I prosper, if I gain a step, although
A nail then pierced my foot: although my brain
Embracing any truth, froze paralysed,
I prosper. I but change my instrument;
I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,
And catch the mattock up.
I worked on, on.
Through all the bristling fence of nights and days
Which hedges time in from the eternities,
I struggled, . . never stopped to note the stakes
Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil
Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:
I had to live, that therefore I might work,
And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,

To work with one hand for the booksellers,