Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/275

‘Bespeak me mildly, keep me a cheerful house,
‘With servants, brooches, all the flowers I liked,
‘And pretty dresses, silk the whole year round’ . .
At which I stopped her,—‘This for me. And now
‘For him.’—She murmured,—truth grew difficult;
She owned, ‘’Twas plain a man like Romney Leigh
‘Required a wife more level to himself.
‘If day by day he had to bend his height
‘To pick up sympathies, opinions, thoughts,
‘And interchange the common talk of life
‘Which helps a man to live as well as talk,
‘His days were heavily taxed. Who buys a staff
‘To fit the hand, that reaches but the knee?
‘He’d feel it bitter to be forced to miss
‘The perfect joy of married suited pairs,
‘Who, bursting through the separating hedge
‘Of personal dues with that sweet eglantine
‘Of equal love, keep saying, ’So we think,
‘‘It strikes us,—that’s our fancy.’’—When I asked
If earnest will, devoted love, employed
In youth like mine, would fail to raise me up,—
As two strong arms will always raise a child
To a fruit hung overhead? she sighed and sighed . .
‘That could not be,’ she feared. ‘You take a pink,
‘You dig about its roots and water it,
‘And so improve it to a garden-pink,
‘But will not change it to a heliotrope,
‘The kind remains. And then, the harder truth—
‘This Romney Leigh, so rash to leap a pale,
‘So bold for conscience, quick for martyrdom,