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Whom but Maud should I meet?

And she touch'd my hand with a smile so sweet

She made me divine amends

For a courtesy not return'd.

3.

And thus a delicate spark

Of glowing and growing light

Thro' the livelong hours of the dark

Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams,

Ready to burst in a colour'd flame;

Till at last when the morning came

In a cloud, it faded, and seems

But an ashen-gray delight.

4.

What if with her sunny hair,

And smile as sunny as cold,

She meant to weave me a snare

Of some coquettish deceit,

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That jewell'd mass of millinery,

That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull

Smelling of musk and of insolence,

Her brother, from whom I keep aloof.
Who wants the finer politic sense
To mask, tho' but in his own behoof,
With a glassy smile his brutal scorn-
What if he had told her yestermorn
How prettily for his own sweet sake
A face of tenderness might be feign'd,
And a moist mirage in desert eyes,

That so, when the rotten hustings shake

In another month to his brazen lies,

A wretched vote may be gain'd.

7.

For a raven ever croaks, at my side,

Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward,

Or thou wilt prove their tool.

Yea too, myself from myself I guard,

For often a man's own angry pride

Is cap

and bells for a fool.

8.

Perhaps the smile and tender tone
Came out of her pitying womanhood,

For am I not, am I not, here alone

So many a summer since she died,

My mother, who was so gentle and good?

Living alone in an empty house,

Here half-hid in the gleaming wood,

Where I hear the dead at midday moan,

And the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse,

And my own sad name in corners cried,

When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown

About its echoing chambers wide,

Till a morbid hate and horror have grown

Of a world in which I have hardly mixt,

And a morbid eating lichen fixt

On a heart half-turn'd to stone.

9.

O heart of stone, are you flesh, and caught
By that you swore to withstand ?

For what was it else within me wrought

But, I fear, the new strong wine of love,

That made my tongue so stammer and trip When I saw the treasured splendour, her hand,

Come sliding out of her sacred glove,

And the sunlight broke from her lip?

10.

I have play'd with her when a child ;

She remembers it now we meet.

Ah well, well, well, I may be beguiled

By some coquettish deceit.

Yet, if she were not a cheat,

If Maud were all that she seem'd,

And her smile had all that I dream'd,

Then the world were not so bitter

But a smile could make it sweet.

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