"I love my Walter profoundly,-you, Maude, though you. faltered a week, For the sake of. what was it? an eyebrow? or, less still, a mole on a cheek? "And since, when all's said, you're too noble to stoop to the frivolous cant About crimes irresistible, virtues that swindle, betray and supplant, "I determined to prove to yourself that, whate'er you might dream or avow By illusion, you wanted precisely no more of me than you have now. "There! look me full in the face!-in the face. Understand, if you can, That the eyes of such women as I am, are clean as the palm of a man. Drop his hand, you insult him. Avoid us for fear we should cost you a scar You take us for harlots, I tell you, and not for the women we are. "You wronged me: but then I considered. there's Walter! And so at the end, I vowed that he should not be mulcted, by me, in the hand of a friend. "Have I hurt you indeed? We are quits then. Nay, friend of my Walter, be mine! Come, Dora, my darling, my angel, and help me to ask him to dine." BIANCA AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES. THE Cypress stood up like a church That night we felt our love would hold, Broad slopes until the hills grew strong : Upon the angle of its shade The cypress stood, self-balanced high; Most passionate earth or intense heaven. We paled with love, we shook with love, And love was awful in it all. The nightingales, the nightingales. O cold white moonlight of the north, Refresh these pulses, quench this hell! O coverture of death drawn forth Across this garden-chamber . . . well! In gloomy England, called the free . . I think I hear him, how he cried "My own soul's life" between their notes. Each man has but one soul supplied, And that's immortal. Though his throat's On fire with passion now, to her He can't say what to me he said! And yet he moves her, they aver. The nightingales sing through my head, He says to her what moves her most. I marvel how the birds can sing. To suck the fogs up. As content My native Florence! dear, foregone! I see across the Alpine ridge How the last feast-day of St. John Shot rockets from Carraia bridge. The luminous city, tall with fire, Trod deep down in that river of ours, While many a boat with lamp and choir Skimmed birdlike over glittering towers. I will not hear these nightingales. I seem to float, we seem to float A boat strikes flame into our boat And up that lady seems to rise As then she rose. A vision on us! The shock had flashed What a head, What leaping eyeballs!-beauty dashed Too bold to sin, too weak to die; Such women are so. As for me, I would we had drowned there, he and I, That moment, loving perfectly. Gold ringlets. . rarer in the south She had not reached him at my heart With her fine tongue, as snakes indeed Kill flies; nor had I, for my part, Yearned after, in my desperate need, And followed him as he did her To coasts left bitter by the tide, Whose very nightingales, elsewhere Delighting, torture and deride! For still they sing, the nightingales. A worthless woman! mere cold clay She lied and stole, I would not for her white and pink, God's nature which is love, intrude If she chose sin, some gentler guise She might have sinned in, so it seems : To die here with his hand in mine, |