Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 056.djvu/344

338 "Another calm so perfect I should think is only shed

On good men dying gently, who recall a life well led,

Till they cannot tell, for sweetness, if they be alive or dead.

“I’ll stop here. You already have, I think, divined the rest.

There’s a prophetic moisture in your eyes:—yet, tears being blest

And delicate nutrition, apt to cease, too much suppress’d,

“I’ll go on; but less for your sake than my own:—my skin is hot,

And there’s an arid pricking in my veins; their currents clot:

Tears sometimes soothe such fever, where the letting of blood will not.”

At length his eyes are opened, and the whole truth flashes upon him, on overhearing an acquaintance ask Winton whether his suit with Lilian has been successful. Upon this he writes out his opinion of the lady’s behaviour, presents it to her, and watches her while she peruses it, occupying himself at intervals as follows:—

“I turn’d a volume, waiting her full leisure to reply,

The book was one which Winton had ask’d me to read, and I

Had stopp’d halfway for horror, lest my soul should putrify.”

When Lilian has finished the perusal of the document, she endeavours at first to stand on the defensive,—

“She stood at bay, depending on that crutch made like a stilt,

The impudent vulgarity wherewith women outstare guilt.”

But she finally succumbs under the influence of the following refined vituperation:—

“Don’t speak! You would not have me unacquainted with what led

To this result? No! listen, and let me relate what bred

Thy tears and cheapen’d chasteness—(we may talk now as if wed.)

“This book here, that lay open when I came in unaware,

Is not the first—I thought so!—but the last of many a stair

Of easy fall. Such only could have led you to his lair.

“These drugs, at first, had scarcely strength to move your virgin blood;

They slowly rose in action, till they wrought it to a flood,

Fit for their giver’s purpose, who—who turn’d it into mud!”

The lover then leaves Lilian to her own meditations, and commences to rant and rave against her seducer in good set terms, of which the following is a specimen:—

“Pardon, Heaven! that I doubted whether there was any hell.

Oh! but now I do believe it! Firmly, firmly! I foretell

Of one that shall rank high there: he’s a scoffer, and must dwell

“Where worms are—ever gnawing scoffers’ hearts into belief;

Where weepings, gnashings, wailings, thirstings, groanings, ghastly grief,

For ever and for ever pay the price of pleasures brief;

“Where Gallios, who while living knew but cared for none of these,

Now amazed with shame, would gladly, might it God (Fate there) appease,

Watch and pray a million cycles for a single moment’s ease.”

After having thus breathed his passion, in a diatribe which beats in abomination any slang that was ever ranted out of a tub by a mountebank saint, he harps back upon the prodigious attractiveness of his mistress, in the following pathetic, though not very consistent terms—

“Ah but had you known my Lilian! (a sweet name?) Indeed, indeed,

I doted on my Lilian. None can praise her half her meed.

Perfect in soul; too gentle—others’ need she made her need;

“Quite passionless, but ever bounteous-minded even to waste;

Much tenderness in talking; very urgent, yet no haste;

And chastity—to laud it would have seem’d almost unchaste.