To woman, superstition all awry :

However then commenced the dawn: a beam

Had slanted forward, falling in a land

Of promise; fruit would follow. Deep, indeed,

Their debt of thanks to her who first had dared

To leap the rotten pales of prejudice,

Disyoke their necks from custom, and assert

None lordlier than themselves but that which made Woman and man. She had founded; they must build: Here might they learn whatever men were taught:

Let them not fear: some said their heads were less :

Some men's were small; not they the least of men; For often fineness compensated size:

Besides the brain was like the hand, and grew

With using; thence the man's, if more was more ;

He took advantage of his strength to be

First in the field: some ages had been lost;
But woman ripen'd earlier, and her life

Was longer; and albeit their glorious names
Were fewer, scatter'd stars, yet since in truth

The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Caffre, Hottentot, Malay,

Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,

But Homer, Plato, Verulam; even so

With woman and in arts of government,

Elizabeth and others; arts of war,

The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace,
Sappho and others vied with any man:

And she, tho' last not least, who had left her place,

And bow'd her state to them, that they might grow

To use and power on this Oasis, lapt

In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight

Of ancient influence and scorn.'

At last

She rose upon a wind of prophecy,

Dilating on the future; everywhere

Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,

Two in the tangled business of the world,

Two in the liberal offices of life,

Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss

Of science, and the secrets of the mind:

Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:

And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth Should bear a double growth of those rare souls, Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.'

She ended here, and beckon'd us: the rest Parted; and, glowing full-faced welcome, she

Began to address us, and was moving on

In gratulation, till as when a boat

Tacks, and her slacken'd sail flaps, all her voice
Faltering and fluttering in her throat, she cried,
'My brother!' 'Well, my sister.' 'O,' she said,
'What do you here? and in this dress? and these?
Why who are these? a wolf within the fold!

A pack of wolves! the Lord be gracious to me!
A plot, a plot, a plot to ruin all !'

'No plot, no plot,' he answer'd.

Wretched boy,

How saw you not the inscription on the gate,

LET NO MAN ENTER IN ON PAIN OF DEATH?'

'And if I had,' he answer'd, 'who could think

The softer Adams of your Academe,

O sister, Sirens tho' they be, were such

As chanted on the blanching bones of men?' 'But

you will find it otherwise,' she said.

'You jest: ill jesting with edge-tools! I am bound

To tell her. O, she has an iron will,

An axelike edge unturnable, our Head,

The Princess.' 'Well then, Psyche, take my life,

And nail me like a weasel on a grange

For warning: bury me beside the gate,
And cut this epitaph above my bones;
Here lies a brother by a sister slain,
All for the common good of womankind.'
'Let me die too,' said Cyril, 'having seen

And heard the Lady Psyche.'

I struck in:

'Albeit so mask'd, Madam, I love the truth;

Receive it; and in me behold the Prince
Your countryman, affianced years ago
To the Lady Ida: here, for here she was,
And thus (what other way was left) I came.'
'O Sir, O Prince, I have no country; none;
If any, this; but none.

Whate'er I was

Disrooted, what I am is grafted here.

Affianced, Sir? love-whispers may not breathe
Within this vestal limit, and how should I,
Who am not mine, say, live: the thunderbolt
Hangs silent; but prepare: I speak; it falls.'
'Yet pause;' I said, ' for that inscription there,
I think no more of deadly lurks therein,

Than in a clapper clapping in a garth,

To scare the fowl from fruit: if more there be,

If more and acted on, what follows? war;

Your own work marr'd: for this your Academe,

Whichever side be Victor, in the halloo

Will topple to the trumpet down, and pass

With all fair theories only made to gild