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.

bring me a curse.

She may

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 myself, and the Devil may

pipe to his own.

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

Faultily

be seen)

null,

faultless, icily regular, splendidly

faultless,

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 sensi

tive nose,

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

III.

COLD and clear-cut face, why come you so crueliy

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 Orion low in his

grave.