That the smoothfaced snubnosed rogue would leap from his counter and till,

And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home.

14

What! am I1 raging alone as my father raged in his mood?

Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die

Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood

On a horror of shatter'd limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?

15

Would there be sorrow for me? there was love in the passionate shriek,

Love for the silent thing that had made false haste to the grave

Wrapt in a cloak, as I saw him, and thought he would rise and speak

And rave at the lie and the liar, ah God, as he used to rave.

16

I am sick of the Hall and the hill, I am sick of the moor and the main.

Why should I stay? can a sweeter chance ever come to me here?

1 What! am I, etc.] This stanza and the two that follow are not in 1st edition.

O, having the nerves of motion as well as the nerves of pain,

Were it not wise if I fled from the place and the pit and the fear?

17

There are workmen up at the Hall: they are coming back from abroad;

The dark old place will be gilt by the touch of a millionnaire:

I have heard, I know not whence, of the singular beauty of Maud;

I play'd with the girl when a child; she promised then to be fair.

18

Maud with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,

Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,

Maud with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes,

Maud the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all,—

19

What is she now? My dreams are bad. She may bring me a curse.

No, there is fatter game on the moor; she will let me alone.

Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man be the worse.

I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his own.

II

LONG have I sigh'd for a calm: God grant I may find it at last!

It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt,

But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past,

Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her where is the fault?

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless,1 icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been

For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of the rose,

Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose,

From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.

1 Faultily faultless.] Cp. Idylls ("Lancelot and Elaine"), where Guinevere says:

He is all fault who hath no fault at all."

ay

III

her

her

ere

to

had

fect

pe,

na

east

here

COLD and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek,

Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd,

Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek,

Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;

Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong

Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before

Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,

Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long

Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear

it no more,

But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,

Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,

Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave,

Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found

The shining daffodil dead, and Orion1 low in his

grave.

1 Shining daffodil... Orion.] This indicates that the vernal equinox was already past. The peculiar dreariness of a wet spring day accords well with the speaker's mood, and prepares the mind for the contrast in the beautiful stanzas which follow. From this point there is a crescendo movement of hopefulness and brightness suited to the progress of spring into summer and the increasing buoyancy of the speaker's spirits.