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AURORA LEIGH.
165
Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They'd have, in fact, to travel ten miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them;
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso—hand that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus
With times we live in—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.
Through being beheld too close, is ill discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They'd have, in fact, to travel ten miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them;
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso—hand that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus
With times we live in—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.
And, here, a truth but little recognized:—
The best men, doing their best,
Know peradventure least of what they do:
Men usefullest i' the world, are simply used.
Know peradventure least of what they do:
Men usefullest i' the world, are simply used.
But enough! A few lines here and there from Aurora Leigh cannot portray what the poem is. It is a veritable "autobiography"; a true record of the inner life—that truest life—of a great and good woman, and no one can expect to find so correct a portraiture of Mrs. Browning in any book as they will in this poem; they must read it as the true memoir of which our volume and any others which may be written about her, are only the corollary.
Aurora Leigh was finished in England, whither the Brownings came on a visit during the summer of 1856. They were the guests of John Kenyon, at least during a portion of their stay, the last pages of the poem having been completed at his town house. Whilst in
