Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/206

Being present also in the unkissed lips,
And eyes undried because there’s none to ask
The reason they grew moist.
To sit alone,
And think, for comfort, how, that very night,
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face
With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,
Are reading haply from some page of ours,
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,
When such a stanza, level to their mood,
Seems floating their own thoughts out—‘so I feel
For thee,’—‘And I, for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is!’—how, that night.
A father, issuing from the misty roads
Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth
And happy children, having caught up first
The youngest there until it shrunk and shrieked
To feel the cold chin prick its dimple through
With winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lap
Of the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lids
To hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)
Our book and cry, . . ‘Ah you, you care for rhymes;
So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,
When April comes to let you! I’ve been told
They are not idle as so many are,
But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:
It’s yours, the book: I’ll write your name in it,—
That so you may not lose, however lost
In poet’s lore and charming reverie,
The thought of how your father thought of you