OH, but the heavenly grammar did I hold

Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn

gold!

So should her deathless beauty take no wrong,

Praised in her own great kindred's fit and cognate tongue.

Or if that language yet with us abode

Which Adam in the garden talked with God !

But our untempered speech descends-poor heirs !

Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's bricklayers:

Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit,

Strong but to damn, not mémorise, a spirit !

A cheek, a lip, a limb, a bosom, they

Move with light ease in speech of working-day;

And women we do use to praise even so.

But here the gates we burst, and to the tempie go.

Their praise were her dispraise; who dare, who dare,

Adulate the seraphim for their burning hair?

How, if with them I dared, here éhould I dare it?

How praise the woman, who but know the spirit ?

How praise the colour of her eyes, uncaught

While they were coloured with her varying thought ?

How her mouth's shape, who only use to know

What tender shape her speech will fit it to ?

Or her lips' redness, when their joinèd veil

Song's fervid hand has parted tiÙ it wore them pale?

If I would praise her soul (temerarious if !)

All must be mystery and hieroglyph.

Heaven, which not of t is prodigai of its more

To singers, in their song too great before;

By which the hierarch of large poesyîs

Restrained to his one sacred bénéfice;

Only for her the salutary awe

Relaxes and stern canon of its law;

To her alone concèdes, pluralities,

In her alone to reconcile agrées

The Muse, the Grâces, and the Charities;

To her, who can the trust so well conduct,

To her it gives the use, to us the usufruct.

What of the dear administras then may

I utter, though I spoke her own carved perfect way?

What of her daily gracious converse known,

Whose heavenly despotism must needs dethrone

And subj ugate all sweetness but its own ?

Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word,

And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird.

What of her silence, that outsweetens speech?

What of her thoughts, high marks for mine own

thoughts to reach?

Yet (Chaucer's antique sentence so to turn),

Most gladly will she teach, and gladly learn;

And teaching her, by her enchanting art,

The master threefold learns for all he can impart.

Now all is said, and all being said,-aye me !

There yet remains unsaid the very She.

Nay, to conclude (so to conclude I dare),

If of her virtues you evade the snare,

Then for her faults you 'll fall in love with her.

Alas and I have spoken of her Muse-

Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews !

Learn, the wise cherubini from harps of gold

Seduce a trepidating music manifold;

But the superior seraphim do know

None other music but to flame and glow.

So she first lighted on our frosty earth,

A sad musician, of cherubic birth,

Playing to alien ears-which did not prize

The uncomprehended music of the skies-

The exiled airs of her far Paradise.

But soon from her own harpings taking fire,

In love and light her melodies expire.

Now Heaven affords her, for her silenced hymn,

A double portion of the seraphim.

At the rich odours from her heart that rise,

My soul remembers its lost Paradise,

And antenatal gales blow from Heaven's shores of spice;

I grow essential all, uncloaking me

From this encumbering virility,

And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry:

And parting from her, in me linger on

Vague snatches of Uranian antiphon.

How to the petty prison could she shrink

Of femineity?-Nay, but I think

In a dear courtesy her spirit would

Woman assume, for grace to womanhood.

Or, votaress to the virgin Sanctitude

Of reticent withdrawal's sweet, courted pale,

She took the cloistral flesh, the sexual veü,

Of her sad, aboriginal sisterhood;

The habit of cloistral flesh which founding Eve indued.

Thus do I know her: but for what men call

Beauty-the loveliness corporeal,

Its most just praise a thing unproper were

To singer or to listener, me or her.

She wears that body but as one indues

A robe, half careless, for it is the use;

Although her soul and it so fair agree,

We sure may, unattaint of heresy,

Conceit it might the soul's begetter be.

Yet I have felt what terrore may consort

In women's cheeks, the Grâces' soft resort;

M y hand hath shook at gentle hands' access,

And trembled at the waving of a tress;

My blood known panie fear, and fled dismayed,

Where ladies' eyes have set their ambuscade.

The rustie of a robe hath been to me

The very rattle of love's musketry;

Although my heart hath beat the loud advance,

The immortai could we cease to contemplate,

The mortai part suggests its every trait. '

God laid His fingere on the ivories

Of her pure members as on smoothèd keys,

And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies.

I '11 speak a little proudly:-I disdain

To count the beauty worth my wish or gain,

Which the dull daily fool can covet or obtain.

I do conf ess the fairness of the spoil,

But from such rivalry it takes a soil.

For her I '11 proudlier speak:-how could it be

That I should praise the gilding on thé psaltery?

'Tis not for her to hold that prize a prize, »

Or praise much praise, though proudest in its wise,

To which even hopes of merely women rise.

Such strife would to the vanquished laurels yield,

Against her suffered to have lost a field.

Herself must with herself be sole compeer,

Unless the people^of her distant sphère

Some gold migration send to melodise the year.

I have recoiled before a challenging glance,

Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance.

And from it all, this knowfedge have I got,-

The whole that others have, is less than they have not;

All which makes other women noted fair,

Unnoted would remain and overshone in her.

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,

Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,

As birds see not the casement for the sky?

And, as 'tis check they prove its presence by,

I know not of her body till I find

My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.

Hers is the face whence all should copied be,

Did God make replicas of such as she;

Its presence felt by what it does abate,

Because the soul shines through tempered and mitigate:

Where-as a figure labouring at night

Beside the body of a splendid light-

Dark Time works hidden by its luminousness;

And every line he labours to impress

Turns added beauty, like the veins that run

Athwart a leaf which hangs against the sun.

There regent Melancholy wide controls;

There Earth- and- Heaven-Love play for aureoles;

There Sweetness out of Sadness breaks at fits,

Like bubbles on dark water, or as flits

A sudden Silver fin through its deep infinites ;

There amorousThought has sucked pale Fancy's breath,

And Tenderness sits looking toward the lands of death;

There Feeling stills her breathing with her hand,

And Dream from Melancholy part wrests the wand ;

And on this lady's heart, looked you so deep

Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep:

Upon the heavy blossom of her lips

Hangs the bee Musing; nigh, her lids éclipse

Each half-occulted star beneath that lies;

And in the contemplation of those eyes,

Passionless passion, wild tranquillities.