Thread back the passage of delirium,
Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;

Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;

A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i' the flank
With flame, that it should eat and end itself
Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,
I do remember clearly, how there came
A stranger with authority, not right,

(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up
From old Assunta's neck; how, with a shriek,
She let me go,-while I, with ears too full
Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word,
In all a child's astonishment at grief

Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,
My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!
The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,

Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck, Like one in anger drawing back her skirts

Which suppliants catch at.

Then the bitter sea

Inexorably pushed between us both,

And sweeping up the ship with my despair
Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.
Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;
Ten nights and days, without the common face
Of any day or night; the moon and sun
Cut off from the green reconciling earth,
To starve into a blind ferocity
And glare unnatural; the very sky
(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea
As if no human heart should 'scape alive,)
Bedraggled with the desolating salt,
Until it seemed no more than holy heaven

To which my father went. All new, and strange

The universe turned stranger, for a child.

Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home Among those mean red houses through the fog? And when I heard my father's language first From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,

I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.
Was this my father's England? the great isle?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man;
The skies themselves looked low and positive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it, they were so far off
From God's celestial crystals; all things, blurred
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here?-not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indifferent air!

I think I see my father's sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house

To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts

From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life, (she was not old,
Although my father's elder by a year)
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves.
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;

Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smile 1,
But never, never have forgot themselves

In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,
Past fading also.

She had lived we'll say,

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all,
(But that, she had not lived enough to know,
Between the vicar and the county squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyreal, to assure their souls
Against chance vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,
The apothecary looked on once a year,
Το prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel, (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality)-and still
The book-club guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!

I, alas,

A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her

cage,

And she was there to meet me. Very kind.

Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.

She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck, –
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly. In my ears, my father's word
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,

'Love, love, my child,' She, black there with my grief,

Might feel my love-she was his sister once-
I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved.
Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And drew me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in.

There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm's length,
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face,-ay, stabbed it through
and through,

Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find

A wicked murderer in my innocent face,

If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm,

And missed it rather, told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear,-
She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it.' Very kind.

I understood her meaning afterward;
She thought to find my mother in my face,
And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,
Had loved my father truly, as she could,
And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,
My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away

A wise man from wise courses, a good man
From obvious duties, and, depriving her,
His sister, of the household precedence,

Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,
And made him mal, alike by life and death,
She had pored for years

In love and sorrow.

What sort of woman could be suitable

To her sort of hate, to entertain it with;
And so, her very curiosity

Became hate too, and all the idealism
She ever used in life, was used for hate,

Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last

The love from which it grew, in strength and heat, And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense Of disputable virtue (say not, sin)

When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.

And thus my father's sister was to me

My mother's hater. From that day, she did
Her duty to me, (1 appreciate it

In her own word as spoken to herself)

Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,
But measured always. She was generous, bland,
More courteous than was tender, gave me still

The first place, as if fearful that God's saints

Would look down suddenly and say, 'Herein
You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.'
Alas, a mother never is afraid

Of speaking angrily to any child,

Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

And I, I was a good child on the whole,
A meek and manageable child. Why not?
I did not live, to have the faults of life: