Convention, since to look on noble forms
Makes noble through the sensuous organism
That which is higher. O, lift your natures up:
Embrace our aims; work out your freedom. Girls
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip, and spite,
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble. Leave us: you may go:
To-day the Lady Psyche will harangue
The fresh arrivals of the week before;
For they press in from all the provinces,
And fill the hive."

She spoke, and, bowing, waved
Dismissal; back again we crost the court
To Lady Psyche's: as we entered in,

There sat along the forms, like morning doves
That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch,
A patient range of pupils; she herself
Erect behind a desk of satin-wood,

A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed,
And on the hither side, or so she looked,
Of twenty summers. At her left, a child,
In shining draperies, headed like a star,
Her maiden babe, a double April old,
Aglaïa slept. We sat: the Lady glanced:
Then Florian, but no livelier than the dame
That whispered "Asses ears among the sedge,
"My sister." "Comely too by all that's fair,"
Said Cyril.
O, hush, hush!” and she began.

"This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man; Tattooed or woaded, winter-clad in skins, Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate; As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here Among the lowest."

1

Thereupon she took

A bird's-eye-view of all the ungracious past;
Glanced at the legendary Amazon
As emblematic of a nobler age;

Appraised the Lycian custom, spoke of those
That lay at wine with Lar and Lucumo;
Ran down the Persian, Grecian, Roman lines
Of empire, and the woman's state in each,
How far from just: till warming with her theme,
She fulmined out her scorn of laws Salique
And little-footed China, touched on Mahomet
With much contempt, and came to chivalry:
When some respect, however slight, was paid
To woman, superstition all awry:

However, then commenced the dawn: a beam
Had slanted forward, falling in a land

Of promise; fruit would follow. Deep, indeed,
Their debt of thanks to her who first had dared
To leap the rotten pales of prejudice,

Disyoke their necks from custom, and assert

None lordlier than themselves but that which made Woman and man. She had founded; they must build:

Here might they learn whatever men were taught: Let them not fear: some said their heads were less: Some men's were small; not they the least of men; For often fineness compensated size:

Besides, the brain was like the hand, and grew
With using: thence the man's, if more was more;
He took advantage of his strength to be

First in the field: some ages had been lost;
But woman ripened earlier, and her life
Was longer; and albeit their glorious names
Were fewer, scattered stars, yet since in truth
The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Caffre, Hottentot, Malay,
Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,
But Homer, Plato, Verulam; even so
With woman and in arts of government,

Elizabeth and others; arts of war,

The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace,
Sappho and others vied with any man:
And, last not least, she who had left her place,
And bowed her state to them, that they might grow
To use and power on this Oasis, lapt

In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight
Of ancient influence and scorn.

At last

She rose upon a wind of prophecy,
Dilating on the future; "everywhere

Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,

Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind:
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:

And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth
Should bear a double growth of those rare souls,
Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the
world."

She ended here, and beckoned us: the rest
Parted; and, glowing full-faced welcome, she
Began to address us, and was moving on
In gratulation, till as when a boat

Tacks, and the slackened sail flaps, all her voice
Faltering and fluttering in her throat, she cried,
"My brother!" "Well, my sister." O," she

said,

"What do you here? and in this dress? and these?
Why, who are these? a wolf within the fold!
A pack of wolves! the Lord be gracious to me!
A plot, a plot, a plot to ruin all !"

"No plot, no plot," he answered. "Wretched boy,
How saw you not the inscription on the gate,
LET NO MAN ENTER IN ON PAIN OF DEATH?"
"And if I had," he answered," who could think

The softer Adams of your Academe,
O, sister, Sirens though they be, were such
As chanted on the blanching bones of men?
"But you will find it otherwise," she said.
"You jest; ill jesting with edge-tools! My vow
Binds me to speak, and O, that iron will,
That axe-like edge unturnable, our Head,
The Princess." "Well, then, Psyche, take my life.
And nail me like a weasel on a grange
For warning: bury me beside the gate,
And cut this epitaph above my bones;
Here lies a brother by a sister slain,
All for the common good of womankind.”
"Let me die, too," said Cyril, "having seen
And heard the Lady Psyche."

I struck in:

"Albeit so masked, Madam, I love the truth;
Receive it; and in me behold the Prince
Your countryman, affianced years ago
To the Lady Ida: here, for here she was,
And thus (what other way was left) I came."
"O Sir, oh Prince, I have no country; none;
If any, this; but none. Whate'er I was
Disrooted, what I am is grafted here.

Affianced, Sir? love-whispers may not breathe
Within this vestal limit, and how should I,
Who am not mine, say, live: the thunderbolt
Hangs silent; but prepare: I speak; it falls."
"Yet pause," I said; "for that inscription there,
I think no more of deadly lurks therein,
Than in a clapper clapping in a garth,

To scare the fowl from fruit: if more there be,
If more and acted on, what follows? war;
Your own work marred; for this your Academe,
Whichever side be Victor, in the halloo
Will topple to the trumpet down, and pass
With all fair theories only made to gild

A stormless summer." "Let the Princess judge

Of that," she said: "farewell, Sir-and to you.
I shudder at the sequel, but I go."

"Are you that Lady Psyche," I rejoined,
"The fifth in line from that old Florian,
Yet hangs his portrait in my father's hall
(The gaunt old Baron with his beetle brow
Sun-shaded in the heat of dusty fights)
As he bestrode my Grandsire, when he fell,
And all else fled: we point to it, and we say,
The loyal warmth of Florian is not cold,
But branches current yet in kindred veins."
"Are you that Psyche," Florian added, "she
With whom I sang about the morning hills,
Flung ball, flew kite, and raced the purple fly,
And snared the squirrel of the glen? are you
That Psyche, wont to bind my throbbing brow,
To smooth my pillow, mix the foaming draught
Of fever, tell me pleasant tales, and read
My sickness down to happy dreams? are you
That brother-sister Psyche, both in one?
You were that Psyche, but what are you now?"
"You are that Psyche," Cyril said, "for whom
I would be that forever which I seem,
Woman, if I might sit beside your feet,
And glean your scattered sapience."

Then once more,

"Are you that Lady Psyche," I began,
"That on her bridal morn before she past
From all her old companions, when the king
Kissed her pale cheek, declared that ancient ties
Would still be dear beyond the southern hills ;
That were there any of our people there
In want or peril, there was one to hear

And help them? look! for such are these and I.”
"Are you that Psyche," Florian asked, "to whom,
In gentler days, your arrow-wounded fawn
Came flying while you sat beside the well?