XV.
They shot through the great cathedral door;
Like mallards they traversed ocean:
And gazing below, on its boiling floor,
I mark’d a horrid commotion.
XVI.
Down a forest’s long alleys they spun like tops:
It seem’d that for ages and ages,
Thro’ the Book of Life bereft of stops,
They waltz’d continuous pages.
XVII.
And ages after, scarce awake,
And my blood with the fever fretting,
I stood alone by a forest-lake,
Whose shadows the moon were netting.
XVIII.
Lilies, golden and white, by the curls
Of their broad flat leaves hung swaying.
A wreath of languid twining girls
Stream’d upward, long locks disarraying.
XIX.
Their cheeks had the satin frost-glow of the moon;
Their eyes the fire of Sirius.
They circled, and droned a monotonous tune,
Abandon’d to love delirious.
XX.
Like lengths of convolvulus torn from the hedge,
And trailing the highway over,
The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge,
And call’d for a lover, a lover!
XXI.
I sank, I rose through seas of eyes,
In odorous swathes delicious:
They fann’d me with impetuous sighs,
They bit me with kisses vicious.
XXII.
My ears were spell’d, my neck was coil’d,
And I with their fury was glowing,
When the marbly waters bubbled and boil’d
At a watery noise of crowing.
XXIII.
They dragg’d me low and low to the lake;
Their kisses more stormily shower’d;
On the emerald brink, in the white moon’s wake,
An earthly damsel cower’d.
XXIV.
Fresh heart-sobs shook her knitted hands
Beneath a tiny suckling,
As one by one of the doleful bands
Dived like a fairy duckling.
XXV.
And now my turn had come—O me!
What wisdom was mine that second!
I dropp’d on the adorer’s knee;
To that sweet figure I beckon’d.
XXVI.
Save me! save me! for now I know
The powers that nature gave me,
And the value of honest love I know:—
My village lily! save me!
XXVII.
Come ’twixt me and the sisterhood,
While the passion-born phantoms are fleeing!
Oh, he that is true to flesh and blood
Is true to his own being!
XXVIII.
And he that is false to flesh and blood,
Is false to the star within him:
And the mad and hungry sisterhood
All under the tides shall win him!
XXIX.
My village lily! save me! save!
For strength is with the holy:—
Already I shudder’d to feel the wave,
As I kept sinking slowly:—
XXX.
I felt the cold wave and the under-tug
Of the Brides, when—starting and shrinking—
Lo, Adrian tilts the water-jug!
And Bruges with morn is blinking.
XXXI.
Merrily sparkles sunny prime
On gabled peak and arbour:
Merrily rattles belfry-chime
The song of Sevilla’s Barber.
George Meredith.
SKETCHES AT BRIGHTON.
By the Author of “Heliondè,” “The Memoirs of a Stomach,” &c.
NO. I.—AQUA MARINA.