(And every voice she talk'd with ratify it, What were I nigher this altho' we dash'd Your cities into shards with catapults, 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, 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. Boy, when I hear you prate I almost think I That idiot legend credible. Look you, Sir! The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, They love us for it, and we ride them down. 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 Flatter'd 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, 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 As oak from elm: one loves the soldier, one 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 Of sovereign artists; not a thought, a touch, Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire, '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: 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 You did but come as goblins in the night, Nor in the furrow broke the plowman's head, Nor burnt the grange, nor buss'd the milking-maid, I know not what-and ours shall see us friends. Foursquare to opposition.' Here he reach'd |