Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/242

Rh The special theory; not a soul content To paint a crooked pollard and an ass, As the English will, because they find it so, And like it somehow.—Ah, the old Tuileries Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes, Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed By the apparition of a new fair face In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate, Within the gardens, what a heap of babes, Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees, From every street and alley of the town, By the ghosts perhaps that blow too bleak this way A-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes, I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play out Before the next change comes.—And further on, What statues, posed upon their columns fine, As if to stand a moment were a feat, Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-room For a nation that funs fast,—ay, runs against The dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows, Which grin at progress in an epigram.

I walked the day out, listening to the chink Of the first Napoleon’s dry bones, as they lay In his second grave beneath the golden dome That caps all Paris like a bubble. ‘Shall These dry bones live,’ thought Louis Philippe once, And lived to know. Herein is argument For kings and politicians, but still more For poets, who bear buckets to the well,