480 Inviolable by conventions. God, I thank thee for that grace of thine!
At first
I felt no life which was not patience,?did
The thing she bade me, without heed to a thing
Beyond it, sat in just the chair she placed,
485 With back against the window, to exclude The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,3
Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods
To bring the house a message,?ay, and walked
Demurely in her carpeted low rooms,
490 As if I should not, harkening my own steps, Misdoubt0 I was alive. I read her books, doubt Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,
Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,
And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup
495 (I blushed for joy at that),?'The Italian child,
For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,
Thrives ill in England: she is paler yet
Than when we came the last time; she will die.'
From Book 2
[AURORA'S ASPIRATIONS]4 Times followed one another. Came a morn
I stood upon the brink of twenty years,
And looked before and after, as I stood
2. Marie Marguerite, Marquise de Brinvilliers, a vehicle of a realization that Nature never deserts celebrated criminal who was beheaded in 1676, the wise and pure even when they seem to be cut was tortured by having water forced down her off from her most beautiful vistas. throat. 4. Stifled by her aunt's oppressive conventionality, 3. Cf. Coleridge's 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Aurora has found three sources of comfort and Prison' (1800), in which the lime tree becomes the
.
1098 / ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Woman and artist,?either incomplete,
Both credulous of completion. There I held
The whole creation in my little cup,
And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank
'Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,
And all these peoples.'
I was glad, that day;
The June was in me, with its multitudes
Of nightingales all singing in the dark,
And rosebuds reddening where the calyx' split.
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!
So glad, I could not choose be very wise!
And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull
My childhood backward in a childish jest
To see the face oft once more, and farewell!
In which fantastic mood I bounded forth
At early morning,?would not wait so long
As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,
But, brushing a green trail across the lawn
With my gown in the dew, took will and away
Among the acacias of the shrubberies,
To fly my fancies in the open air
And keep0 my birthday, till my aunt awoke observe
To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on
