Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/287

 And twinkled if she moved, heard Merlin coming, And smiled as if to make herself believe Her joy was all a triumph; yet her blood Confessed a tingling of more wonderment Than all her five and twenty worldly years Of waiting for this triumph could remember; And when she knew and felt the slower tread Of his unseen advance among the shadows To the small haven of uncertain light That held her in it as a torch-lit shoal Might hold a smooth red fish, her listening skin Responded with a creeping underneath it, And a crinkling that was incident alike To darkness, love, and mice. When he was there, She looked up at him in a whirl of mirth And wonder, as in childhood she had gazed Wide-eyed on royal mountebanks who made So brief a shift of the impossible That kings and queens would laugh and shake themselves; Then rising slowly on her little feet, Like a slim creature lifted, she thrust out Her two small hands as if to push him back Whereon he seizeoT them. "Go away," she said; "I never saw you in my life before." "You say the truth," he answered ; "when I met Myself an hour ago, my words were yours. God made the man you see for you to like, If possible. If otherwise, turn down These two prodigious and remorseless thumbs And leave your lions to annihilate him." "I have no other lion than yourself," She said; "and since you cannot eat yourself, Pray do a lonely woman, who is, you say, More like a tree than any other thing