Found the gray kings at parle: and 'Look to it,' cried

My father, that our compact is performed:

You have spoilt this girl; she laughs at you and man :

She shall not legislate for Nature, king,

But yields, or war.'

Then Gama turn'd to me:

'We fear, indeed, you spent a stormy time
With our strange child: and yet they say that still
You love her. Give us, then, your mind at large:
How say you, war or not?'

'Not war, if possible,

O king,' I said, 'lest from the abuse of war,

A smoke go up thro' which I loom to her

Three times a monster: now she lightens scorn

At the enemy of her plan, but then would hate

(And every voice she talk'd with ratify it,
And every face she look'd on justify it)
The general foe. More soluble is this knot,
Like almost all the rest if men were wise,
By gentleness than war. I want her love.

What were I nigher this, altho' we dash'd
Your cities into shards with catapults,

And dusted down your domes with mangonels;

She would not love;

or brought her chain'd, a slave,

The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord,

Not ever would she love; but brooding turn
The book of scorn, till all my little chance
Were caught within the record of her wrongs,
And crush'd to death and rather, Sire, than this

I would the old God of war himself were dead,
Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills,
Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,

Or like an old-world mammoth bulk'd in ice,

Not to be molten out.'

And roughly spake

My father, Tut, you know them not, the girls :
They prize hard knocks and to be won by force.
Boy, there's no rose that's half so dear to them
As he that does the thing they dare not do,

Breathing and sounding beauteous battle, comes

With the air of the trumpet round him, and leaps in

Among the women, snares them by the score

Flattered and fluster'd, wins, tho' dash'd with death

He reddens what he kisses: thus I won

Your mother, a good mother, a good wife,
Worth winning; but this firebrand-gentleness
To such as her! if Cyril spake her true,
To catch a dragon in a cherry net,

To trip a tigress with a gossamer,

Were wisdom to it.'

'Yea, but Sire,' I cried,

Wild natures need wise curbs. The soldier? No:

What dares not Ida do that she should prize

The soldier? I beheld her, when she rose

The yesternight, and storming in extremes

Stood for her cause, and flung defiance down

Gagelike to man, and had not shunn'd the death,

No, not the soldier's: yet I hold her, king,

True woman: but you clash them all in one,
That have as many differences as we.

The violet varies from the lily as far

As oak from elm: one loves the soldier, one
The silken priest of peace, one this, one that,
And some unworthily; their sinless faith,
A maiden moon that sparkles on a sty,
Glorifying clown and satyr; whence they need
More breadth of culture: is not Ida right?

They worth it? truer to the law within?

Severer in the logic of a life?

Twice as magnetic to sweet influences

Of Earth and Heaven? and she of whom you speak,

My mother, looks as whole as some serene

Creation minted in the golden moods

Of sovereign artists; not a thought, a touch,

But pure as lines of green that streak the white

Of the first snowdrop's inner leaves; I say,
Not like strong bursts of sample among men,
But all one piece: and take them all-in-all,
Were we ourselves but half as good, as kind,
As truthful, much that Ida claims as right
Had ne'er been mooted, but as easily theirs
As dues of Nature. To our point: not war:
Lest I lose all.'

'Nay, nay, you spake but sense,'

Said Gama. We remember love ourselves

In our sweet youth: we did not rate him then
This red-hot iron to be shaped with blows.

You talk almost like Ida: she can talk;

And there is something in it as you say:
But

you

talk kindlier: we esteem you for it.

He seems a gracious and a gallant prince,
I would he had our daughter: for the rest
Our own detention, why the causes weigh'd,
Fatherly fears you used us courteously-