It was thus I reeled! I told you that her hand had many suitors But she smiles them down imperially, as Venus did the waves;· And with such a gracious coldness, that they cannot press their futures

On the present of her courtesy, which yieldingly enslaves.

And this morning, as I sat alone within the inner chamber, With the great saloon beyond it lost in pleasant thought serene, For I had been reading Camoens

that poem you remember, Which his lady's eyes are praised in,

as the sweetest ever seen;

And the book lay open, and my thought flew from it, taking from it

A vibration and impulsion to an end beyond its own,

As the branch of a green osier, when a child would overcome it, Springs up freely from his clasping and goes swinging in the sun.

As I mused I heard a murmur, — it grew deep as it grew longerSpeakers using earnest language,

"Lady Geraldine, you would!" And I heard a voice that pleaded ever on, in accents stronger, As a sense of reason gave it power to make its rhetoric good

Well I knew that voice, it was an earl's, of soul that matched his station

Soul completed into lordship,-might and right read on his brow:

And be cautious lest the common air should injure or distrain.

For the rest, accomplished, upright,

ay, and standing by his order With a bearing not ungraceful; fond of art, and letters too;

Just a good man made a proud man, as the sandy rocks that border A wild coast, by circumstances, in a regnant ebb and flow.

Thus I knew that voice, -I heard it and I could not help the hearkening:

In the room I stood up blindly, and my burning heart within Seemed to seethe and fuse my senses, till they ran on all sides dark

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There, I maddened! her words stung me! Life swept through me into fever,

And my soul sprang up astonished; sprang full-statured in an hour: Know you what it is when anguish, with apocalyptic NEVER, To a Pythian height dilates you,

and despair sublimes to power?

From my brain the soul-wings budded!-waved a flame about my body, Whence conventions coiled to ashes:

I felt self-drawn out, as man, From amalgamate false natures; and I saw the skies grow ruddy With the deepening feet of angels, and I knew what spirits can.

He had left her, - peradventure, when my footstep proved my coming, But for her, she half arose, then sat - grew scarlet and grew pale: Oh she trembled!-'tis so always with a worldly man or woman In the presence of true spirits,- what else can they do but quail?

Oh, she fluttered like a tame bird, in among its forest brothers Far too strong for it! then drooping, bowed her face upon her hands, And I spake out wildly, fiercely, brutal truths of her and others! I, she planted in the desert, swathed her, windlike, with my sands.

We are fools to your deductions, in these figments of heart-closing!

We are traitors to your causes, in these sympathies defiled!

But for me,

-you now are conscious why, my friend, I write this letter,

How my life is read all backward, and the charm of life undone! I shall leave her house at dawn; —I would to-night, if I were bet

ter;And I charge my soul to hold my

body strengthened for the sun.

When the sun has dyed the oriel, I depart with no last gazes,

No weak moanings-one word only left in writing for her hands, Out of reach of all derision, and some unavailing praises, To make front against this anguish in the far and foreign lands.

Blame me not, I would not squander

life in grief;-I am abstemious: I but nurse my spirit's falcon, that its wings may soar again: