The Princess | Page 8

to look on noble forms?Makes noble through the sensuous organism?That which is higher. O lift your natures up:?Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,?Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:?Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,?The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite?And slander, die. Better not be at all?Than not be noble. Leave us: you may go:?Today the Lady Psyche will harangue?The fresh arrivals of the week before;?For they press in from all the provinces,?And fill the hive.'
She spoke, and bowing waved?Dismissal: back again we crost the court?To Lady Psyche's: as we entered in,?There sat along the forms, like morning doves?That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch,?A patient range of pupils; she herself?Erect behind a desk of satin-wood,?A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed,?And on the hither side, or so she looked,?Of twenty summers. At her left, a child,?In shining draperies, headed like a star,?Her maiden babe, a double April old,?Agla?a slept. We sat: the Lady glanced:?Then Florian, but not livelier than the dame?That whispered 'Asses' ears', among the sedge,?'My sister.' 'Comely, too, by all that's fair,'?Said Cyril. 'Oh hush, hush!' and she began.
'This world was once a fluid haze of light,?Till toward the centre set the starry tides,?And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast?The planets: then the monster, then the man;?Tattooed or woaded, winter-clad in skins,?Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate;?As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here?Among the lowest.'
Thereupon she took?A bird's-eye-view of all the ungracious past;?Glanced at the legendary Amazon?As emblematic of a nobler age;?Appraised the Lycian custom, spoke of those?That lay at wine with Lar and Lucumo;?Ran down the Persian, Grecian, Roman lines?Of empire, and the woman's state in each,?How far from just; till warming with her theme?She fulmined out her scorn of laws Salique?And little-footed China, touched on Mahomet?With much contempt, and came to chivalry:?When some respect, however slight, was paid?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 ripened earlier, and her life?Was longer; and albeit their glorious names?Were fewer, scattered stars, yet since in truth?The highest is the measure of the man,?And not the Kaffir, 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, last not least, she who had left her place,?And bowed 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?Who 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 beckoned 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 the slackened 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 answered. '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 answered, 'who could think?The softer Adams of your Academe,?O sister, Sirens though 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! my vow?Binds me to speak, and O that iron will,?That 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