The Eustace Diamonds

down, but a little way beneath the garden gate, to a spot on which a knob of rock cropped out from the scanty herbage of the incipient cliff. Fifty yards lower the real rocks began; and, though the real rocks were not very rocky, not precipitous or even bold, and were partially covered with salt-fed mosses down almost to the sea, nevertheless they justified her in talking about her rockbound shore. The shore was hers⁠—for her life, and it was rockbound. This knob she had espied from her windows;⁠—and, indeed, had been thinking of it for the last week, as a place appropriate to solitude and Shelley. She had stood on it before, and had stretched her arms with enthusiasm towards the just-visible mountains of Arran. On that occasion the weather, perhaps, had been cool; but now a blazing sun was overhead, and when she had been seated half a minute, and Queen Mab had been withdrawn from her pocket, she found that it would not do. It would not do, even with the canopy she could make for herself with her parasol. So she stood up and looked about herself for shade;⁠—for shade in some spot in which she could still look out upon “her dear wide ocean, with its glittering smile.” For it was thus that she would talk about the mouth of the Clyde. Shelter near her there was none. The scrubby trees lay nearly half a mile to the right⁠—and up the hill, too. She had once clambered down to the actual shore, and might do so again. But she doubted that there would be shelter even there; and the clambering up on that former occasion had been a nuisance, and would be a worse nuisance now. Thinking of all this, and feeling the sun keenly, she gradually retraced her steps to the garden within the moat, and seated herself, Shelley in hand, within the summerhouse. The bench was narrow, hard, and broken; and there were some snails which discomposed her;⁠—but, nevertheless, she would make the best of it. Her darling Queen Mab must be read without the coarse, inappropriate, everyday surroundings of a drawing-room; and it was now manifest to her that, unless she could get up much earlier in the morning, or come out to her reading after sunset, the knob of rock would not avail her.

She began her reading, resolved that she would enjoy her poetry in spite of the narrow seat. She had often talked of Queen Mab, and perhaps she thought she had read it. This, however, was in truth her first attempt at that work. “How wonderful is Death! Death and his brother, Sleep!” Then she half-closed the volume, and thought that she enjoyed the idea. Death⁠—and his brother Sleep! She did not know why they should be more wonderful than Action, or Life, or Thought;⁠—but the words were of a nature which would enable her to remember them, and they would be good for quoting. “Sudden arose Ianthe’s soul; it stood all-beautiful in naked purity.” The name of Ianthe suited her exactly. And the antithesis conveyed to her mind by naked purity struck her strongly, and she determined to learn the passage by heart. Eight or nine lines were printed separately, like a stanza, and the labour would not be great, and the task, when done, would be complete. “Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace, Each stain of earthliness Had passed away, it reassumed Its native dignity, and stood Immortal amid ruin.” Which was instinct with beauty⁠—the stain or the soul, she did not stop to inquire, and may be excused for not understanding. “Ah,”⁠—she exclaimed to herself, “how true it is; how one feels it; how it comes home to one!⁠—‘Sudden arose Ianthe’s soul!’ ” And then she walked about the garden, repeating the words to herself, and almost forgetting the heat. “ ‘Each stain of earthliness had passed away.’ Ha;⁠—yes. They will pass away, and become instinct with beauty and grace.” A dim idea came upon her that when this happy time should arrive, no one would claim her necklace from her, and that the man at the stables would not be so disagreeably punctual in sending in his bill. “ ‘All-beautiful in naked purity!’ ” What a tawdry world was this, in which clothes and food and houses are necessary! How perfectly that boy-poet had understood it all! “ ‘Immortal amid ruin!’ ” She liked the idea of the ruin almost as well as that of the immortality, and the stains quite as well as the purity. As immortality must come, and as stains were instinct with grace, why be afraid of ruin? But then, if people go wrong⁠—at least women⁠—they are not asked out anywhere! “ ‘Sudden arose Ianthe’s soul; it stood all-beautiful⁠—’ ” And so the piece was learned, and Lizzie felt that she had devoted her hour to poetry in a quite rapturous manner. At any rate she had a bit to quote; and though in truth she did not understand the exact bearing of the image, she had so studied her gestures, and so modulated her voice, that she knew that she could be effective. She did not then care to carry her reading further, but returned with the volume into the house. Though the passage about Ianthe’s soul comes very early in the work, she was now quite familiar with the poem, and when, in after days, she spoke of it as a thing of beauty that she had made her own by long study, she actually did not know that she was lying. As she grew older, however, she quickly became wiser, and was aware that in learning one passage of a poem it is expedient to select one in the middle, or at the end. The world is so cruelly observant nowadays, that even men and women who have not themselves read their Queen Mab will know from what part of the poem a morsel is extracted, and will not give you credit