Aylmer’s Field
Dust are our frames; and gilded dust, our pride
Looks only for a moment whole and sound;
Like that long-buried body of the king,
Found lying with his urns and ornaments,
Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,
Slipt into ashes and was found no more.
Here is a story which in rougher shape
Came from a grizzled cripple, whom I saw
Sunning himself in a waste field alone—
Old, and a mine of memories—who had served,
Long since, a bygone Rector of the place,
And been himself a part of what he told.
Sir Aaylmer Aylmer that almighty man,
The county God—in whose capacious hall,
Hung with a hundred shields, the family tree
Sprang from the midriff of a prostrate king—
Whose blazing wyvern weathercock’d the spire,
Stood from his walls and wing’d his entry-gates
And swang besides on many a windy sign—
Whose eyes from under a pyramidal head
Saw from his windows nothing save his own—
What lovelier of his own had he than her,
His only child, his Edith, whom he loved
As heiress and not heir regretfully?
But ‘he that marries her marries her name’
This fiat somewhat soothed himself and wife,
His wife a faded beauty of the Baths,
Insipid as the Queen upon a card;
Her all of thought and bearing hardly more
Than his own shadow in a sickly sun.
A land of hops and poppy-mingled corn,
Little about it stirring save a brook!
A sleepy land where under the same wheel
The same old rut would deepen year by year;
Where almost all the village had one name;
Where Aylmer follow’d Aylmer at the Hall
And Averill Averill at the Rectory
Thrice over; so that Rectory and Hall,
Bound in an immemorial intimacy,
Were open to each other; tho’ to dream
That Love could bind them closer well had made
The hoar hair of the Baronet bristle up
With horror, worse than had he heard his priest
Preach an inverted scripture, sons of men
Daughters of God; so sleepy was the land.
And might not Averill, had he will’d it so,
Somewhere beneath his own low range of roofs,
Have also set his many-shielded tree?
There was an Aylmer-Averill marriage once,
When the red rose was redder than itself,
And York’s white rose as red as Lancaster’s,
With wounded peace which each had prick’d to death.
‘Not proven’ Averill said, or laughingly
‘Some other race of Averills’—prov’n or no,
What cared he? what, if other or the same?
He lean’d not on his fathers but himself.
But Leolin, his brother, living oft
With Averill, and a year or two before
Call’d to the bar, but ever call’d away
By one low voice to one dear neighborhood,
Would often, in his walks with Edith, claim
A distant kinship to the gracious blood
That shook the heart of Edith hearing him.
Sanguine he was: a but less vivid hue
Than of that islet in the chestnut-bloom
Flamed his cheek; and eager eyes, that still
Took joyful note of all things joyful, beam’d,
Beneath a manelike mass of rolling gold,
Their best and brightest, when they dwelt on hers.
Edith, whose pensive beauty, perfect else,
But subject to the season or the mood,
Shone like a mystic star between the less
And greater glory varying to and fro,
We know not wherefore; bounteously made,
And yet so finely, that a troublous touch
Thinn’d, or would seem to thin her in a day,
A joyous to dilate, as toward the light.
And these had been together from the first.
Leolin’s first nurse was, five years after, hers:
So much the boy foreran; but when his date
Doubled her own, for want of playmates, he
(Since Averill was a decad and a half
His elder, and their parents underground)
Had tost his ball and flown his kite, and roll’d
His hoop to pleasure Edith, with her dipt
Against the rush of the air in the prone swing,
Made blossom-ball or daisy-chain, arranged
Her garden, sow’d her name and kept it green
In living letters, told her fairy-tales,
Show’d here the fairy footings on the grass,
The little dells of cowslip, fairy palms,
The petty marestail forest, fairy pines,
Or from the tiny pitted target blew
What look’d a flight of fairy arrows aim’d
All at one mark, all hitting: make-believes
For Edith and himself: or else he forged,
But that was later, boyish histories
Of battle, bold adventure, dungeon, wreck,
Flights, terrors, sudden rescues, and true love
Crown’d after trial; sketches rude and faint,
But where a passion yet unborn perhaps
Lay hidden as the music of the moon
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale.
And thus together, save for college-times
Or Temple-eaten terms, a couple, fair
As ever painter painted, poet sang,
Or Heav’n in lavish bounty moulded, grew.
And more and more, the maiden woman-grown,
He wasted hours with Averill; there, when first
The tented winter-field was broken up
Into that phalanx of the summer spears
That soon should wear the garland; there again
When burr and bine were gather’d; lastly there
At Christmas; ever welcome at the Hall,
On whose dull sameness his full tide of youth
Broke with a phosphorescence cheering even
My lady; and the Baronet yet had laid
No bar between them: dull and self-involved,
Tall and erect, but bending from his height
With half-allowing smiles for all the world,
And mighty courteous in the main—his pride
Lay deeper than to wear it as his ring—
He, like an Aylmer in his Aylmerism,
Would care no more for Leolin’s walking with her
Than for his old Newfoundland’s, when they ran
To loose him at the stables, for he rose
Twofooted at the limit of his chain,
Roaring to make a third: and how should Love,
Whom the cross-lightnings of four chance-met eyes
Flash into fiery life from nothing, follow
Such dear familiarities of dawn?
Seldom, but when he does, Master of all.
So these young hearts not knowing that they loved,
Not she at least, nor conscious of a bar
Between them, nor by plight or broken ring
Bound, but an immemorial intimacy,
Wander’d at will, but oft accompanied
By Averill: his, a brother’s love, that hung
With wings of brooding shelter o’er her peace,
Might have been other, save for Leolin’s—
Who knows? but so they wander’d, hour by hour
Gather’d the blossom that rebloom’d, and drank
The magic cup that fill’d itself anew.
A whisper half reveal’d her to herself.
For out beyond her lodges, where the brook
Vocal, with here and there a silence, ran
By sallowy rims, arose the laborers’ homes,
A frequent haunt of Edith, on low knolls
That dimpling died into each other, huts
At random scatter’d, each a nest in bloom.
Her art, her hand, her counsel all had wrought
About them: here was one that, summer-blanch’d,
Was parcel-bearded with the traveller’s-joy
In Autumn, parcel ivy-clad; and here
The warm-blue breathings of a hidden hearth
Broke from a bower of vine and honeysuckle:
One look’d all rosetree, and another wore
A close-set robe of jasmine sown with stars:
This had a rosy sea of gillyflowers
About it; this, a milky-way on earth,
Like visions in the Northern dreamer’s heavens,
A lily-avenue climbing to the doors;
One, almost to the martin-haunted eaves
A summer burial deep in hollyhocks;
Each, its own charm; and Edith’s everywhere;
And Edith ever visitant with him,
He but less loved than Edith, of her poor:
For she—so lowly-lovely and so loving,
Queenly responsive when the loyal hand
Rose from the clay it work’d in as she past,
Not sowing hedgerow texts and passing by,
Nor dealing goodly counsel from a height
That makes the lowest hate it, but a voice
Of comfort and an open hand of help,
A splendid presence flattering the poor roofs
Revered as theirs, but kindlier than themselves
To ailing wife or wailing infancy
Or old bedridden palsy,—was adored;
He, loved for her and for himself.A grasp
Having the warmth and muscle of the heart,
A childly way with children, and a laugh
Ringing like proved golden coinage true,
Were no false passport to that easy realm,
Where once with Leolin at her side the girl,
Nursing a child, and turning to the warmth
The tender pink five-beaded baby-soles,
Heard the good mother softly whisper ‘Bless,
God bless ’em; marriages are made in Heaven.’
A flash of semi-jealousy clear’d it to her.
My Lady’s Indian kinsman unannounced
With half a score of swarthy faces came.
His own, tho’ keen and bold and soldierly,
Sear’d by the close ecliptic, was not fair;
Fairer his talk, a tongue that ruled the hour,
Tho’ seeming boastful: so when first he dash’d
Into the chronicle of a deedful day,
Sir Aylmer half forgot his lazy smile
Of patron ‘Good! my lady’s kinsman! good!’
My lady with her fingers interlock’d,
And rotatory thumbs on silken knees,
Call’d all her vital spirits into each ear
To listen: unawares they flitted off,
Busying themselves about the flowerage
That stood from our a stiff brocade in which,
The meteor of a splendid season, she,
Once with this kinsman, ah so long ago,
Stept thro’ the stately minuet of those days:
But Edith’s eager fancy hurried with him
Snatch’d thro’ the perilous passes of his life:
Till Leolin ever watchful of her eye
Hated him with a momentary hate.
Wife-hunting, as the rumor ran, was he:
I know not, for he spoke not, only shower’d
His oriental gifts on everyone
And most on Edith: like a storm he came,
And shook the house, and like a storm he went.
Among the gifts he left her (possibly
He flow’d and ebb’d uncertain, to return
When others had been tested) there was one,
A dagger, in rich sheath with jewels on it
Sprinkled about in gold that branch’d itself
Fine as ice-ferns on January panes
Made by a breath.I know not whence at first,
Nor of what race, the work; but as he told
The story, storming a hill-fort of thieves
He got it; for their captain after fight,
His comrades having fought their last below,
Was climbing up the valley; at whom he shot:
Down from the beetling crag to which he clung
Tumbled the tawny rascal at his feet,
This dagger with him, which when now admired
By Edith whom his pleasure was to please,
At once the costly Sahib yielded it to her.
And Leolin, coming after he was gone,
Tost over all her presents petulantly:
And when she show’d the wealthy scabbard, saying
‘Look what a lovely piece of workmanship!’
Slight was his answer ‘Well—I care not for it:’
Then playing with the blade he prick’d his hand,
‘A gracious gift to give a lady, this!’
‘But would it be more gracious’ ask’d the girl
‘Were I to give this gift of his to one
That is no lady?’‘Gracious?No’ said he.
‘Me?—but I cared not for it.O pardon me,
I seem to be ungraciousness itself.’
‘Take it’ she added sweetly ‘tho’ his gift;
For I am more ungracious ev’n than you,
I care not for it either;’ and he said
‘Why then I love it:’ but Sir Aylmer past,
And neither loved nor liked the thing he heard.
The next day came a neighbor.Blues and reds
They talk’d of: blues were sure of it, he thought:
Then of the latest fox—where started—kill’d
In such a bottom: ‘Peter had the brush,
My Peter, first:’ and did Sir Aylmer know
That great pock-pitten fellow had been caught?
Then made his pleasure echo, hand to hand,
And rolling as it were the substance of it
Between his palms a moment up and down—
‘The birds were warm, the birds were warm upon him;
We have him now:’ and had Sir Aylmer heard—
Nay, but he must—the land was ringing of it—
This blacksmith-border marriage—one they knew—
Raw from the nursery—who could trust a child?
That cursed France with her egalities!
And did Sir Aylmer (deferentially
With nearing chair and lower’d accent) think—
For people talk’d—that it was wholly wise
To let that handsome fellow Averill walk
So freely with his daughter? people talk’d—
The boy might get a notion into him;
The girl might be entangled ere she knew.
Sir Aylmer Aylmer slowly stiffening spoke:
‘The girl and boy, Sir, know their differences!’
‘Good’ said his friend ‘but watch!’ and he ‘enough,
More than enough, Sir!I can guard my own.’
They parted, and Sir Aylmer Aylmer watch’d.
Pale, for on her the thunders of the house
Had fallen first, was Edith that same night;
Pale as the Jeptha’s daughter, a rough piece
Of early rigid color, under which
Withdrawing by the counter door to that
Which Leolin open’d, she cast back upon him
A piteous glance, and vanish’d.He, as one
Caught in a burst of unexpected storm,
And pelted with outrageous epithets,
Turning beheld the Powers of the House
On either side the hearth, indignant; her,
Cooling her false cheek with a featherfan,
Him glaring, by his own stale devil spurr’d,
And, like a beast hard-ridden, breathing hard.
‘Ungenerous, dishonorable, base,
Presumptuous! trusted as he was with her,
The sole succeeder to their wealth, their lands,
The last remaining pillar of their house,
The one transmitter of their ancient name,
Their child.’ ‘Our child!’ ‘Our heiress!’ ‘Ours!’ for still,
Like echoes from beyond a hollow, came
Her sicklier iteration.Last he said
‘Boy, mark me! for your fortunes are to make.
I swear you shall not make them out of mine.
Now inasmuch as you have practised on her,
Perplext her, made her half forget herself,
Swerve from her duty to herself and us—
Things in an Aylmer deem’d impossible,
Far as we track ourselves—I say that this,—
Else I withdraw favor and countenance
From you and yours for ever—shall you do.
Sir, when you see her—but you shall not see her—
No, you shall write, and not to her, but me:
And you shall say that having spoken with me,
And after look’d into yourself, you find
That you meant nothing—as indeed you know
That you meant nothing.Such as match as this!
Impossible, prodigious!’These were words,
As meted by his measure of himself,
Arguing boundless forbearance: after which,
And Leolin’s horror-stricken answer, ‘I
So foul a traitor to myself and her,
Never oh never,’ for about as long
As the wind-hover hangs in the balance, paused
Sir Aylmer reddening from the storm within,
Then broke all bonds of courtesy, and crying
‘Boy, should I find you by my doors again,
My men shall lash you from the like a dog;
Hence!’ with a sudden execration drove
The footstool from before him, and arose;
So, stammering ‘scoundrel’ out of teeth that ground
As in a dreadful dream, while Leolin still
Retreated half-aghast, the fierce old man
Follow’d, and under his own lintel stood
Storming with lifted hands, a hoary face
Meet for the reverence of the hearth, but now,
Beneath a pale and unimpassion’d moon,
Vext with unworthy madness, and deform’d.
Slowly and conscious of the rageful eye
That watch’d him, till he heard the ponderous door
Close, crashing with long echoes thro’ the land,
Went Leolin; then, his passions all in flood
And masters of his motion, furiously
Down thro’ the bright lawns to his brother’s ran,
And foam’d away his heart at Averill’s ear:
Whom Averill solaced as he might, amazed:
The man was his, had been his father’s, friend:
He must have seen, himself had seen it long;
He must have known, himself had known: besides,
He never yet had set his daughter forth
Here in the woman-markets of the west,
Where our Caucasians let themselves be sold.
Some one, he thought, had slander’d Leolin to him.
‘Brother, for I have loved you more as a son
Than brother, let me tell you: I myself—
What is their pretty saying? jilted is it?
Jilted I was: I say it for your peace.
Pain’d, and, as bearing in myself the shame
The woman should have borne, humiliated,
I lived for years a stunted sunless life;
Till after our good parents past away
Watching your growth, I seem’d again to grow.
Leolin, I almost sin in envying you:
The very whitest lamb in all my fold
Loves you: I know her: the worst thought she has
Is whiter even than her pretty hand:
She must prove true: for, brother, where two fight
The strongest wins, and truth and love are strength,
And you are happy: let her parents be.’
But Leolin cried out the more upon them—
Insolent, brainless, heartless! heiress, wealth,
Their wealth, their heiress! wealth enough was theirs
For twenty matches.Were he lord of this,
Why, twenty boys and girls should marry on it,
And forty blest ones bless him, and himself
Be wealthy still, ay wealthier.He believed
This filthy marriage-hindering Mammon made
The harlot of the cities: nature crost
Was mother of the foul adulteries
That saturate soul with body.Name, too! name,
Their ancient name! they might be proud; its worth
Was being Edith’s.Ah, how pale she had look’d
Darling, to-night! they must have rated her
Beyond all tolerance.These old pheasant-lords,
These partridge-breeders of a thousand years,
Who had mildew’d in their thousands, doing nothing
Since Egbert—why, the greater their disgrace!
Fall back upon a name! rest, rot in that!
Not keep it noble, make it nobler? fools,
With such a vantage-ground for nobleness!
He had known a man, a quintessence of man,
The life of all—who madly loved—and he,
Thwarted by one of these old father-fools,
Had rioted his life out, and made an end.
He would not do it! her sweet face and faith
Held him from that: but he had powers, he knew it:
Back would he to his studies, make a name,
Name, fortune too: the world should ring of him
To shame these mouldy Aylmers in their graves:
Chancellor, or what is greatest would he be—
‘O brother, I am grieved to learn your grief—
Give me my fling, and let me say my say.’
At which, like one that sees his own excess,
And easily forgives it as his own,
He laugh’d; and then was mute; but presently
Wept like a storm: and honest Averill seeing
How low his brother’s mood had fallen, fetch’d
His richest beeswing from a binn reserved
For banquets, praised the waning red, and told
The vintage—when this Aylmer came of age—
Then drank and past it; till at length the two,
Tho’ Leolin flamed and fell again, agreed
That much allowance must be made for men.
After an angry dream this kindlier glow
Faded with morning, but his purpose held.
Yet once by night again the lovers met,
A perilous meeting under the tall pines
That darken’d all the northward of her Hall.
Him, to her meek and modest bosom prest
In agony, she promised that no force,
Persuasion, no, nor death could alter her:
He, passionately hopefuller, would go,
Labor for his own Edith, and return
In such a sunlight of prosperity
He should not be rejected.‘Write to me!
They loved me, and because I love their child
They hate me: there is war between us, dear,
Which breaks all bonds but ours; we must remain
Sacred to one another.’So they talk’d,
Poor children, for their comfort: the wind blew;
The rain of heaven, and their own bitter tears,
Tears, and the careless rain of heaven, mixt
Upon their faces, as they kiss’d each other
In darkness, and above them roar’d the pine.
So Leolin went; and as we task ourselves
To learn a language known but smatteringly
In phrases here and there at random, toil’d
Mastering the lawless science of our law,
That codeless myriad of precedent,
That wilderness of single instances,
Thro’ which a few, by wit or fortune led,
May beat a pathway out to wealth and fame.
The jests, that flash’d about the pleader’s room,
Lightning of the hour, the pun, the scurrilous tale,—
Old scandals buried now seven decads deep
In other scandals that have lived and died,
And left the living scandal that shall die—
Were dead to him already; bent as he was
To make disproof of scorn, and strong in hopes,
And prodigal of all brain-labor he,
Charier of sleep, and wine and exercise,
Except when for a breathing-while at eve,
Some niggard fraction of an hour, he ran
Beside the river-bank: and then indeed
Harder the times were, and the hands of power
Were bloodier, and the according hearts of men
Seem’d harder too; but the soft river-breeze,
Which fann’d the gardens of that rival rose
Yet fragrant in a heart remembering
His former talks with Edith, on him breathed
Far purelier in his rushings to and fro,
After his books, to flush his blood with air,
Then to his books again.My lady’s cousin,
Half-sickening of his pension’d afternoon,
Drove in upon the student once or twice,
Ran a Malayan muck against the times,
Had golden hopes for France and all mankind,
Answer’d all queries touching those at home
With a heaved shoulder and a saucy smile,
And fain had haled him out into the world,
And air’d him there: his nearer friend would say
‘Screw not the chord too sharply lest it snap.’
Then left alone he pluck’d her dagger forth
From where his worldless heart had kept it warm,
Kissing his vows upon it like a knight.
And wrinkled benchers often talk’d of him
Approvingly, and prophesied his rise:
For heart, I think, help’d head: her letters too,
Tho’ far between, and coming fitfully
Like broken music, written as she found
Or made occasion, being strictly watch’d,
Charm’d him thro’ every labyrinth till he saw
An end, a hope, a light breaking upon him.
But they that cast her spirit into flesh,
Her worldy-wise begetters, plagued themselves
To sell her, those good parents, for her good.
Whatever eldest-born of rank or wealth
Might lie within their compass, him they lured
Into their net made pleasant by the baits
Of gold and beauty, wooing him to woo.
So month by month the noise about their doors,
And distant blaze of those dull banquets, made
The nightly wirer of their innocent hare
Falter before he took it.All in vain.
Sullen, defiant, pitying, wroth, return’d
Leolin’s rejected rivals from their suit
So often, that the folly taking wings
Slipt o’er those lazy limits down the wind
With rumor, and became in other fields
A mockery to the yeomen over ale,
And laughter to their lords: but those at home,
As hunters round a hunted creature draw
The cordon close and closer toward the death,
Narrow’d her goings out and comings in;
Forbad her first the house of Averill,
Then closed her access to the wealthiest farms,
Last from her own home-circle of the poor
They barr’d her: yet she bore it: yet her cheek
Kept color: wondrous! but, O mystery!
What amulet drew her down to that old oak,
So old, that twenty years before, a part
Falling had let appear the brand of John—
Once grovelike, each huge arm a tree, but now
The broken base of a black tower, a cave
Of touchwood, with a single flourishing spray.
There the manorial lord too curiously
Raking in that millenial touchwood-dust
Found for himself a bitter treasure-trove;
Burst his own wyvern on the seal, and read
Writhing a letter from his child, for which
Came at the moment Leolin’s emissary,
A crippled lad, and coming turn’d to fly,
But scared with threats of jail and halter gave
To him that fluster’d his poor parish wits
The letter which he brought, and swore besides
To play their go-between as heretofore
Nor let them know themselves betray’d, and then,
Soul-stricken at their kindness to him, went
Hating his own lean heart and miserable.
Thenceforward oft from out a despot dream
Panting he woke, and oft as early as dawn
Aroused the black republic on his elms,
Sweeping the frothfly from the fescue, brush’d
Thro’ the dim meadow toward his treasure-trove,
Seized it, took home, and to my lady, who made
A downward crescent of her minion mouth,
Listless in all despondence, read; and tore,
As if the living passion symbol’d there
Were living nerves to feel the rent; and burnt,
Now chafing at his own great self defied,
Now striking on huge stumbling-blocks of scorn
In babyisms, and dear diminutives
Scatter’d all over the vocabulary
Of such a love as like a chidden babe,
After much wailing, hush’d itself at last
Hopeless of answer: then tho’ Averill wrote
And bad him with good heart sustain himself—
All would be well—the lover heeded not,
But passionately restless came and went,
And rustling once at night about the place,
There by a keeper shot at, slightly hurt,
Raging return’d: nor was it well for her
Kept to the garden now, and grove of pines,
Watch’d even there; and one was set to watch
The watcher, and Sir Aylmer watch’d them all,
Yet bitterer from his readings: once indeed,
Warm’d with his wines, or taking pride in her,
She look’d so sweet, he kiss’d her tenderly
Not knowing what possess’d him: that one kiss
Was Leolin’s one strong rival upon earth;
Seconded, for my lady follow’d suit,
Seem’d hope’s returning rose: and then ensued
A Martin’s summer of his faded love,
Or ordeal by kindness; after this
He seldom crost his child without a sneer;
The mother flow’d in shallower acrimonies:
Never one kindly smile, one kindly word:
So that the gentle creature shut from all
Her charitable use, and face to face
With twenty months of silence, slowly lost
Nor greatly cared to lose, her hold on life.
Last, some low fever ranging round to spy
The weakness of a people or a house,
Like flies that haunt a wound, or deer, or men,
Or almost all that is, hurting the hurt—
Save Christ as we believe him—found the girl
And flung her down upon a couch of fire,
Where careless of the household faces near,
And crying upon the name of Leolin,
She, and with her the race of Aylmer, past.
Star to star vibrates light: may soul to soul
Strike thro’ a finer element of her own?
So,—from afar,—touch as at once? or why
That night, that moment, when she named his name,
Did the keen shriek ‘yes love, yes Edith, yes,’
Shrill, till the comrade of his chambers woke,
And came upon him half-arisen from sleep,
With a weird bright eye, sweating and trembling,
His hair as it were crackling into flames,
His body half flung forward in pursuit,
And his long arms stretch’d as to grasp a flyer:
Nor knew he wherefore he had made the cry;
And being much befool’d and idioted
By the rough amity of the other, sank
As into sleep again.The second day,
My lady’s Indian kinsman rushing in,
A breaker of the bitter news from home,
Found a dead man, a letter edged with death
Beside him, and the dagger which himself
Gave Edith, reddn’d with no bandit’s blood:
‘From Edith’ was engraven on the blade.
Then Averill went and gazed upon his death.
And when he came again, his flock believed—
Beholding how the years which are not Time’s
Had blasted him—that many thousand days
Were clipt by horror from his term of life.
Yet the sad mother, for the second death
Scarce touch’d her thro’ that nearness of the first,
And being used to find her pastor texts,
Sent to the harrow’d brother, praying him
To speak before the people of her child,
And fixt the Sabbath.Darkly that day rose:
Autumn’s mock sunshine of the faded woods
Was all the life of it; for hard on these,
A breathless burthen of low-folded heavens
Stifled and chill’d at once: but every roof
Sent out a listener: many too had known
Edith among the hamlets round, and since
The parents’ harshness and the hapless loves
And double death were widely murmur’d, left
Their own gray tower, or plain-faced tabernacle,
To hear him; all in mourning these, and those
With blots of it about them, ribbon, glove
Or kerchief; while the church,—one night, except
For greenish glimmerings thro’ the lancets,—made
Still paler the pale head of him, who tower’d
Above them, with his hopes in either grave.
Long o’er his bent brows linger’d Averill,
His face magnetic to the hand from which
Livid he pluck’d it forth, and labor’d thro’
His brief prayer-prelude, gave the verse ‘Behold,
Your house is left unto you desolate!’
But lapsed into so long a pause again
As half amazed half frighted all his flock:
Then from his height and loneliness of grief
Bore down in flood, and dash’d his angry heart
Against the desolations of the world.
Never since our bad earth became one sea,
Which rolling o’er the palaces of the proud,
And all but those who knew the living God—
Eight that were left to make a purer world—
When since had flood, fire, earthquake, thunder wrought
Such waste and havoc as the idolatries,
Which from the low light of mortality
Shot up their shadows to the Heaven of Heavens,
And worshipt their own darkness as the Highest?
‘Gash thyself, priest, and honor thy brute Baal,
And to thy worst self sacrifice thyself,
For with thy worst self hast thou clothed thy God.’
Then came a Lord in no wise like to Baal.
The babe shall lead the lion.Surely now
The wilderness shall blossom as the rose.
Crown thyself, worm, and worship thine own lusts!—
No coarse and blockish God of acreage
Stands at thy gate for thee to grovel to—
Thy God is far diffused in noble groves
And princely halls, and farms, and flowing lawns,
And heaps of living gold that daily grow,
And title-scrolls and gorgeous heraldries.
In such a shape dost thou behold thy God.
Thou wilt not gash thy flesh for him; for thine
Fares richly, in fine linen, not a hair
Ruffled upon the scarfskin, even while
The deathless ruler of thy dying house
Is wounded to the death that cannot die;
And tho’ thou numberest with the followers
Of One who cried ‘leave all and follow me.’
Thee therefore with His light about thy feet,
Thee with His message ringing in thine ears,
Thee shall thy brother man, the Lord from Heaven,
Born of a village girl, carpenter’s son,
Wonderful, Prince of peace, the Mighty God,
Count the more base idolater of the two;
Crueller: as not passing thro’ the fire
Bodies, but souls—thy children’s—thro’ the smoke,
The blight of low desires—darkening thine own
To thine own likeness; or if one of these,
Thy better born unhappily from thee,
Should, as by miracle, grow straight and fair—
Friends, I was bid to speak of such a one
By those who most have cause to sorrow for her—
Fairer than Rachel by the palmy well,
Fairer than Ruth among the fields of corn,
Fair as the Angel that said ‘hail’ she seem’d,
Who entering fill’d the house with sudden light.
For so mine own was brighten’d: where indeed
The roof so lowly but that beam of Heaven
Dawn’d sometime thro’ the doorway? whose the babe
Too ragged to be fondled on her lap,
Warm’d at her bosom?The poor child of shame,
The common care whom no one cared for, leapt
To greet her, wasting his forgotten heart,
As with the mother he had never known,
In gambols; for her fresh and innocent eyes
Had such a star of morning in their blue,
That all neglected places of the field
Broke into nature’s music when they saw her.
Low was her voice, but won mysterious way
Thro’ the seal’d ear to which a louder one
Was all but silence—free of alms her hand—
The hand that robed your cottage-walls with flowers
Has often toil’d to clothe your little ones;
How often placed upon the sick man’s brow
Cool’d it, or laid his feverous pillow smooth!
Had you one sorrow and she shared it not?
One burthen and she would not lighten it?
One spiritual doubt she did not soothe?
Or when some heat of difference sparkled out,
How sweetly would she glide between your wraths,
And steal you from each other! for she walk’d
Wearing the light yoke of that Lord of love,
Who still’d the rolling wave of Galilee!
And one—of him I was not bid to speak—
Was always with her, whom you also knew.
Him too you loved, for he was worthy love.
And these had been together from the first;
They might have been together till the last.
Friends, this frail bark of ours, when sorely tried,
May wreck itself without the pilot’s guilt,
Without the captain’s knowledge: hope with me.
Whose shame is that, if he went hence with shame?
Nor mine the fault, if losing both of these
I cry to vacant chairs and widow’d walls,
“My house is left unto me desolate.”
While thus he spoke, his hearers wept; but some,
Sons of the glebe, with other frowns than those
That knit themselves for summer shadow, scowl’d
At their great lord.He, when it seem’d he saw
No pale sheet-lightnings from afar, but fork’d
Of the near storm, and aiming at his head,
Sat anger-charm’d from sorrow, soldierlike,
Erect: but when the preacher’s cadence flow’d
Softening thro’ all the gentle attributes
Of his lost child, the wife, who watch’d his face,
Paled at a sudden twitch of his iron mouth;
And ‘O pray God that he hold up’ she thought
‘Or surely I shall shame myself and him.’
‘Nor yours the blame—for who beside your hearths
Can take her place—if echoing me you cry
“Our house is left unto us desolate?”
But thou, O thou that killest, hadst thou known,
O thou that stonest, hadst thou understood
The things belonging to thy peace and ours!
Is there no prophet but the voice that calls
Doom upon kings, or in the waste ‘Repent’?
Is not our own child on the narrow way,
Who down to those that saunter in the broad
Cries ‘come up hither,’ as a prophet to us?
Is there no stoning save with flint and rock?
Yes, as the dead we weep for testify—
No desolation but by sword and fire?
Yes, as your moanings witness, and myself
Am lonelier, darker, earthlier for my loss.
Give me your prayers, for he is past your prayers,
Not past the living fount of pity in Heaven.
But I that thought myself long-suffering, meek,
Exceeding “poor in spirit”—how the words
Have twisted back upon themselves, and mean
Vileness, we are grown so proud—I wish’d my voice
A rushing tempest of the wrath of God
To blow these sacrifices thro’ the world—
Sent like the twelve-divided concubine
To inflame the tribes: but there—out yonder—earth
Lightens from her own central Hell—O there
The red fruit of an old idolatry—
The heads of chiefs and princes fall so fast,
They cling together in the ghastly sack—
The land all shambles—naked marriages
Flash from the bridge, and ever-murder’d France,
By shores that darken with the gathering wolf,
Runs in a river of blood to the sick sea.
Is this a time to madden madness then?
Was this a time for these to flaunt their pride?
May Pharaoh’s darkness, folds as dense as those
Which hid the Holiest from the people’s eyes
Ere the great death, shroud this great sin from all:
Doubtless our narrow world must canvass it:
O rather pray for those and pity them,
Who thro’ their own desire accomplish’d bring
Their own gray hairs with sorrow to the grave—
Who broke the bond which they desired to break,
Which else had link’d their race with times to come—
Who wove coarse webs to snare her purity,
Grossly contriving their dear daughter’s good—
Poor souls, and knew not what they did, but sat
Ignorant, devising their own daughter’s death!
May not that earthly chastisement suffice?
Have not our love and reverence left them bare?
Will not another take their heritage?
Will there be children’s laughter in their hall
For ever and for ever, or one stone
Left on another, or is it a light thing
That I their guest, their host, their ancient friend,
I made by these the last of all my race
Must cry to these the last of theirs, as cried
Christ ere His agony to those that swore
Not by the temple but the gold, and made
Their own traditions God, and slew the Lord,
And left their memories a world’s curse—”Behold,
Your house is left unto you desolate?”’
Ended he had not, but she brook’d no more:
Long since her heart had beat remorselessly,
Her crampt-up sorrow pain’d her, and a sense
Of meanness in her unresisting life.
Then their eyes vext her; for on entering
He had cast the curtains of their seat aside—
Black velvet of the costliest—she herself
Had seen to that: fain had she closed them now,
Yet dared not stir to do it, only near’d
Her husband inch by inch, but when she laid,
Wifelike, her hand in one of his, he veil’d
His face with the other, and at once, as falls
A creeper when the prop is broken, fell
The woman shrieking at his feet, and swoon’d.
Then her own people bore along the nave
Her pendent hands, and narrow meagre face
Seam’d with the shallow cares of fifty years:
And here the Lord of all the landscape round
Ev’n to its last horizon, and of all
Who peer’d at him so keenly, follow’d out
Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle
Reel’d, as a footsore ox in crowded ways
Stumbling across the market to his death,
Unpitied; for he groped as blind, and seem’d
Always about to fall, grasping the pews
And oaken finials till he touch’d the door;
Yet to the lychgate, where his chariot stood,
Strode from the porch, tall and erect again.
But nevermore did either pass the gate
Save under pall with bearers. In one month,
Thro’ weary and yet wearier hours,
The childless mother went to seek her child;
And when he felt the silence of his house
About him, and the change and not the change,
And those fixt eyes of painted ancestors
Staring for ever from their gilded walls
On him their last descendant, his own head
Began to droop, to fall; the man became
Imbecile; his one word was ‘desolate’;
Dead for two years before his death was he;
But when the second Christmas came, escaped
His keepers, and the silence which he felt,
To find a deeper in the narrow gloom
By wife and child; nor wanted at his end
The dark retinue reverencing death
At golden thresholds; nor from tender hearts,
And those who sorrow’d o’er a vanish’d race,
Pity, the violet on the tyrant’s grave.
Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,
And the broad woodland parcell’d into farms;
And where the two contrived their daughter’s good,
Lies the hawk’s cast, the mole has made his run,
The hedgehog underneath the plaintain bores,
The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,
The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there
Follows the mouse, and all is open field.
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