Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,
An hour's time.. think!.. to sit upon a bank
And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands!,
When Egypt's slain, I say, let Miriam sing!-
Before . . where's Moses?'

'Ah-exactly that

Where's Moses?-is a Moses to be found?-
You'll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,

While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,
Such sounding brass has done some actual good,
(The application in a woman's hand,

If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)
In colonising beehives.'

'There it is!

You play beside a death-bed like a child,

Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place

To teach the living. None of all these things,
Can women understand. You generalise,

Oh, nothing!-not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,

So sympathetic to the personal pang,

Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up
A whole life at each wound; incapable
Of deepening, widening a large lap of life
To hold the world-full woe. The human race
To you means, such a child, or such a man,
You saw one morning waiting in the cold,
Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up
A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes
Will write of factories and of slaves, as if
Your father were a negro, and your son
A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,—
All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise
Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard

To general suffering. Here's the world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalised
With civilization, having caught the plague
In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west
Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain
And sin too!.. does one woman of you all,
(You who weep easily) grow pale to see
This tiger shake his cage?-does one of you
Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls
And pine and die, because of the great sum
Of universal anguish ?-Show me a tear
Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours,
Because the world is mad? You cannot count,
That you should weep for this account, not you!
You weep for what you know. A red-haired chil
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping! but a million sick..
You could as soon weep for the rule of three,
Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world
Uncomprehended by you must remain
Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are,

Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives.
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,—and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.'

'With which conclusion you conclude'.

'But this

That you, Aurora, with the large live brow
And steady eyelids, cannot condescend
To play at art, as children play at swords,
To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired

Because true action is impossible.

You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work, Expressing the comparative respect

Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! 'What delicate discernment. . almost thought! 'The book does honour to the sex, we hold. เ Among our female authors we make room 'For this fair writer, and congratulate 'The country that produces in these times 'Such women, competent to . . spell.''

'Stop there!'
I answered-burning through his thread of talk
With a quick flame of emotion,-' You have read
My soul, if not my book, and argue well
I would not condescend. . we will not say
To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end
Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use
Of holy art and golden life. I am young,
And peradventure weak—you tell me so—
Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,
Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance
At fairs on tight rope, till the babies dropped
Their gingerbread for joy,—than shift the types
For tolerable verse, intolerable

To men who act and suffer. Better far,
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,
Than a sublime art frivolously.'

'You,

Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes, And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are young Aurora, you and I. The world . . look round..

The world, we're come to late, is swollen hard
With perished generations and their sins:
The civiliser's spade grinds horribly

On dead men's bones, and cannot turn up soil
That's otherwise than fetid. All success

Proves partial failure; all advance implies
What's left behind; all triumph, something crushed
At the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong:
And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich,
Who agonise together, rich and poor,
Under and over, in the social spasm

And crisis of the ages. Here's an age,

That makes its own vocation! here, we have stepped
Across the bounds of time! here's nought to see,
But just the rich man and just Lazarus,
And both in torments; with a mediate gulph,
Though not a hint of Abraham's bosom. Who,
Being man and human, can stand calmly by
And view these things, and never tease his soul
For some great cure? No physic for this grief,
In all the earth and heavens too?'

'You believe

In God, for your part?-ay? that He who makes, Can make good things from ill things, best from worst, As men plant tulips upon dunghills when

They wish them finest ?'

'True. A death-heat is

The same as life-heat, to be accurate;

And in all nature is no death at all,

As men account of death, as long as God
Stands witnessing for life perpetually,'

By being just God. That's abstract truth, I know,
Philosophy, or sympathy with God:

But I, I sympathise with man, not God,

I think I was a man for chiefly this;
And when I stand beside a dying bed,

It's death to me. Observe,-it had not much. Consoled the race of mastodons to know เค

Before they went to fossil, that anon

Their place should quicken with the elephant
They were not elephants but mastodons :
And I, a man, as men are now, and not
As men may be hereafter, feel with men
In the agonising present.'

'Is it so,'

I said, 'my cousin? is the world so bad,
While I hear nothing of it through the trees?
The world was always evil,—but so bad?'

'So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is grey
With poring over the long sum of ill;
So much for vice, so much for discontent,
So much for the necessities of power,
So much for the connivances of fear,-
Coherent in statistical despairs

With such a total of distracted life, .

To see it down in figures on a page;

Plain, silent, clear. . as God sees through the earth
The sense of all the graves! ... that's terrible
For one who is not God, and cannot right
The wrong he looks on. May I choose indeed
But vow away my years, my means, my aims,
Among the helpers, if there's any help
In such a social strait? The common blood
That swings along my veins, is strong enough
To draw me to this duty.'

Then I spoke.

'I have not stood long on the strand of life,