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The heroes of old,

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My own particular place, I always say.
I used to wonder, when I stood scarce high
As the bed here, what the marble lion
meant,

With half his body rushing from the wall,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's Eating the figure of a prostrate man—

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(To the right, it is, of entry by the door) — An ominous sign to one baptized like me, Married, and to be buried there, I hope. And they should add, to have my life complete,

--

He is a boy and Gaetan by name-
Gaetano, for a reason, if the friar
Don Celestine will ask this grace for me
Of Curate Ottoboni: he it was

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Baptized me: he remembers my whole life As I do his gray hair.

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How happy those are who know how to write!

Such could write what their son should read in time,

Had they a whole day to live out like me.
Also my name is not a common name,
"Pompilia," and may help to keep apart
A little the thing I am from what girls are.
But then how far away, how hard to find
Will anything about me have become,
Even if the boy bethink himself and ask!
No father that ever knew at all,
Nor ever had
no, never had, I say!
That is the truth,

-nor any mother left,

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Out of the little two weeks that she lived,
Fit for such memory as might assist:
As good too as no family, no name,
Not even poor old Pietro's name, nor hers,
Poor kind unwise Violante, since it seems
They must not be my parents any more.
That is why something put it in my head 99
To call the boy "Gaetano " no old name
For sorrow's sake; I looked up to the sky
And took a new saint to begin anew.
One who has only been made saint - how
long?

Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints

grow, Tired out by this time, saints!

- see my own five

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Should in a husband have a husband now, Find nothing, this time, but was what it seemed,

All truth and no confusion any more. I know she meant all good to me, all pain To herself, since how could it be aught but pain

To give me up, so, from her very breast, The wilding flower-tree-branch that, all those years,

She had got used to feel for and find fixed? She meant well: has it been so ill i' the main? 340

That is but fair to ask: one cannot judge Of what has been the ill or well of life, The day that one is dying, — sorrows change

Into not altogether sorrow-like;

I do see strangeness but scarce misery,
Now it is over, and no danger more.
My child is safe; there seems not so much

pain.

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