2. Who shall call me ungentle, unfair, And curving a contumelious lip, Gorgonised me from head to foot With a stony British stare. 3. Why sits he here in his father's chair? Shall I believe him ashamed to be seen? Scarcely, now, would I call him a cheat; For then, perhaps, as a child of deceit, She might by a true descent be untrue; And Maud is as true as Maud is sweet: Tho' I fancy her sweetness only due To the sweeter blood by the other side; Her mother has been a thing complete, However she came to be so allied. And fair without, faithful within, Maud to him is nothing akin: Some peculiar mystic grace Made her only the child of her mother, And heap'd the whole inherited sin On that huge scapegoat of the race, All, all upon the brother. 4. Peace, angry spirit, and let him be! Has not his sister smiled on me? XIV. 1. MAUD has a garden of roses And lilies fair on a lawn; There she walks in her state And tends upon bed and bower; And thither I climb'd at dawn And stood by her garden-gate; A lion ramps at the top, He is claspt by a passion-flower. 2. Maud's own little oak-room (Which Maud, like a precious stone Set in the heart of the carven gloom, Lights with herself, when alone She sits by her music and books, And her brother lingers late With a roystering company) looks Upon Maud's own garden gate: And I thought as I stood, if a hand, as white On the hasp of the window, and my Delight Had a sudden desire, like a glorious ghost, to glide Like a beam of the seventh Heaven, down to my side, There were but a step to be made. 3. The fancy flatter'd my mind, And again seem'd overbold; Now I thought that she cared for me, Now I thought she was kind Only because she was cold. |