I loved you, yet I lost you. Loved you,
. . . But I thought you gave
Your heart and soul away from me to slave
At statecraft. Since my right in you seemed lost,
I stung myself to teach you to your cost,
What you rejected could be prized beyond
Life, heaven, by the first fool I threw a fond
Look on, a fatal word to.
What forgiveness she received, what result her test attained, you may remember, or you may care to look up.
The idea is not foreign to our poet's other studies. He recurs to it in several places, notably in that ghastly piece, "The Inn Album," whose every character is mean, or weak, or vile. The villain, the old roué, the man-about-town, speaks:
What but sour
Suspected makes the sweetness doubly sweet?
And what stings love from faint to flamboyant,
But the fear-sprinkle? even horror helps:
Love's flame in me by such recited wrong,
Drenched, quenched, indeed? It burns the fiercelier thence
Not always so, not by any means always so. In the poem called "The Worst of It," we have, if not the same, a close adjoining facette of love's injury turned to our gaze, and weak human nature could scarce sound a higher note:
I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired.
Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad.
And you meant to have hated and despised—
Whereas you deceived me nor inquired.
·········
Be happy. Add but the other grace.
Be good. Why want what the angels vaunt?
I knew you once; but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass, nor turn my face.
Here you may take me to task, and claim that the laxity which I and the poet seem to admit for the one sex in Fifine comes with ill
