IV.
39 lines✦
atal in force, yet gentle in will,Defeats, from her, are tender pacts,For, like the kindly lodestone, stillShe’s drawn herself by what she attracts. THESVIOLETS: I I went not to the Dean’s unbid :I would not have my mystery,From her so delicately hid,The guess of gossips at their tea.A long, long week, and not once there,Had made my spirit sick and faint,And lack-love, foul as love is fair,Perverted all things to complaint.How vain the world had grown to be!How mean all people and their ways,How ignorant their sympathy,And how impertinent their praise ;What they for virtuousness esteem’d,How far removed from heavenly right ;What pettiness their trouble seem’d,How undelightful their delight ;To my necessity how strangeThe sunshine and the song of birds ;How dull the clouds’ continual change,How foolishly content the herds ;How unaccountable the lawWhich bade me sit in blindness here,While she, the sun by which I saw,Shed splendour in an idle sphere!And then I kiss’d her stolen glove,And sigh’d to reckon and define 1e modes of martyrdom in love, _ And how far each one might be mine. I thought how love, whose vast estate’ Is earth and air and sun and sea,Encounters oft the beggar’s fate,-— Despised on score of poverty ;How Heaven, inscrutable in this,
✦