Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/207

In riding from the town.’
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love,
While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?
At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,
Means simply love. It was a man said that.
And then there’s love and love: the love of all
(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)
Is but a small thing to the love of one.
You bid a hungry child be satisfied
With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,
He says he’s hungry,—he would rather have
That little barley-cake you keep from him
While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;
(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)
We’re hungry.
Hungry! but it’s pitiful
To wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbs
Because we’re hungry. Who, in all this world,
(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,
And learn what good is by its opposite)
Has never hungered? Woe to him who has found
The meal enough: if Ugolino’s full,
His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:
For here satiety proves penury
More utterly irremediable. And since
We needs must hunger,—better, for man’s love,
Than God’s truth! better, for companions sweet,
Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,
Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.