“So,
carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time,—see my own
five saints!”
or these—
“Thus, all my life,
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
—Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine——”
once more—
“One cannot judge
Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying....
Now it is over, and no danger more ...
To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past——”
Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first “thrill of dawn’s suffusion through her dark,” the “light of the unborn face sent long before:” or those unique lines of the starved soul’s Spring (ll. 1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one—
“A whole long
fortnight; in a life like mine
A fortnight filled
with bliss is long and much.
All women are
not mothers of a boy....
I never realised
God’s birth before—
How he grew likest
God in being born.
This time I felt
like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little
on my breast like hers.”
When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words—
“God stooping
shows sufficient of His light
For us i’
the dark to rise by. And I rise——”
who does not realise that to life’s end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?
But the two succeeding “books” are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections—the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of “Caponsacchi” and “Pompilia.” In the next “book” Innocent XII. is revealed. All this section has a lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. It must be read from first to last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water mark of modern blank-verse:—
“For the main
criminal I have no hope
Except in such
a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples
once, a night so dark
I could have scarce
conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky
or sea or world at all:
But the night’s
black was burst through by a blaze—
Thunder struck
blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole
length of mountain visible:
There lay the
city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost
disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth
be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see,
one instant, and be saved.”