Iii

Next year I went and spent a week, And certainly had learnt to speak; My chains I forcibly had broke, And now too much indeed I spoke. A mother sick and seldom seen A grief for many months had been, Their father too was feebler, years Were heavy, and there had been fears Some months ago; and he was vexed With party heats and all perplexed With an upheaving modern change To him and his old wisdom strange. The daughters all were there, not one Had yet to other duties run, Their father, people used to say, Frightened the wooers all away;— As vines around an ancient stem, They clung and clustered upon him, Him loved and tended; above all, Emilia, ever at his call. But I was—intellectual; I talked in high superior tone Of things the girls had never known, Far wiser to have let alone; Things which the father knew in short By country clerical report; I talked of much I thought I knew, Used all my college wit anew, A little on my fancy drew; Religion, politics, O me! No subject great enough could be. In vain, more weak in spirit grown, At times he tried to put me down. I own it was the want, in part, Of any discipline of heart. It was, now hard at work again, The busy argufying brain Of the prize schoolboy; but, indeed, Much more, if right the thing I read, It was the instinctive wish to try And, above all things, not be shy. Alas! it did not do at all; Ill went the visit, ill the ball; Each hour I felt myself grow worse, With every effort more perverse. I tried to change; too hard, indeed, I tried, and never could succeed. Out of sheer spite an extra day I stayed; but when I went away, Alas, the farewells were not warm, The kissing was the merest form; Emilia was distraite and sad, And everything was bad as bad.

O had some happy chance fall’n out, To turn the thing just round about, In time at least to give anew The old affectionate adieu! A little thing, a word, a jest, A laugh, had set us all at rest; But nothing came. I went away, And could have really cried that day, So vexed, for I had meant so well, Yet everything so ill befell, And why and how I could not tell.

Our wounds in youth soon close and heal, Or seem to close; young people feel, And suffer greatly, I believe, But then they can’t profess to grieve: Their pleasures occupy them more, And they have so much time before. At twenty life appeared to me A sort of vague infinity; And though of changes still I heard, Real changes had not yet occurred: And all things were, or would be, well, And nothing irremediable. The youth for his degree that reads Beyond it nothing knows or needs; Nor till ’tis over wakes to see The busy world’s reality.

One visit brief I made again In autumn next but one, and then All better found. With Mary Gwen I talked, a schoolgirl just about To leave this winter and come out. Patty and Lydia were away, And a strange sort of distance lay Betwixt me and Emilia. She sought me less, and I was shy. And yet this time I think that I More subtly felt, more saw, more knew The beauty into which she grew; More understood the meanings now Of the still eyes and rounded brow, And could, perhaps, have told you how The intellect that crowns our race To more than beauty in her face Was changed. But I confuse from hence The later and the earlier sense.