Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/208

Well, well! they say we’re envious, we who rhyme;
But I, because I am a woman, perhaps,
And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.
I never envied Graham his breadth of style,
Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,
(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)
Such delicate perspectives of full life;
Nor Belmore, for the unity of aim
To which he cuts his cedarn poems, fine
As sketchers do their pencils; not Mark Gage,
For that caressing colour and trancing tone
Whereby you’re swept away and melted in
The sensual element, which, with a back wave,
Restores you to the level of pure souls
And leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,
For native gifts or popular applause,
I’ve envied; but for this,—that when, by chance,
Says some one,—‘There goes Belmore, a great man!
He leaves clean work behind him, and requires
No sweeper up of the chips,’ . . a girl I know,
Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,
Smiles unawares, as if a guardian saint
Smiled in her:—for this, too,—that Gage comes home
And lays his last book’s prodigal review
Upon his mother’s knees, where, years ago,
He had laid his childish spelling-book and learned
To chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,
As young birds must. ‘Well done,’ she murmured then,
She will not say it now more wonderingly;
And yet the last ‘Well done’ will touch him more,