Page:Poems - volume 1 - EBBrowning (1844).pdf/249

 Whereby lies a marble Silence, sleeping! (Lough the sculptor wrought her) So asleep, she is forgetting to say Hush!—a fancy quaint.

"Mark how heavy white her eyelids I not a dream between them lingers! And the left hand's index droppeth from the lips upon the cheek: And the right hand,—with the symbol rose held slack within the fingers,— Has fallen backward in the basin—yet this Silence will not speak!

"That the essential meaning growing, may exceed the special symbol, Is the thought, as I conceive it: it applies more high and low,— Your true noblemen will often, through right nobleness, grow humble, And assert an inward honour, by denying outward show."