Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/20

Rh A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines; A close mild mouth, a little soured about The ends, through speaking unrequited loves, Or peradventure niggardly half-truths; Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled, But never, never have forgot themselves In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose Of perished summers, like a rose in a book, Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom, Past fading also. She had lived we’ll say, A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all, (But that, she had not lived enough to know) Between the vicar and the county squires, The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes From the empyreal, to assure their souls Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss, The apothecary looked on once a year, To prove their soundness of humility. The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats, Because we are of one flesh after all And need one flannel, (with a proper sense Of difference in the quality)—and still The book-club guarded from your modern trick Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease, Preserved her intellectual. She had lived A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage, Accounting that to leap from perch to perch