Chapter LXIX

This note, so sent,
Was—would you guess it?—Edith’s. What she wrote,
Weighs love against all liking to this hour.
All thrill’d with hope, yet trembling for my fate,
I spell’d out all her tale:—“Her sire—his aims—
And her fulfilment of them—her success—
Earth seem’d a kingdom prostrate at her feet,
And she, a queen; alas, but, like a queen,
Was doom’d to hold a throne where rivals came,
To spy her weakness out, and wrest away
A power that could be kept by power alone.—
How sad for woman when her hopes were based
On practice that must all her heart conceal,
That must be conquering ever or be crush’d!
At first her love for art had kept her up,—
And for success, and for a sister dear,
Who shared her earnings, who, while cheer’d the crowds,
At last, had died, and left her all alone.
And, after that, her soul had loathed applause,
Had found her nature so belied, misjudged,
Her life the embodiment of hollow sound,
And all surroundings echoing back but sound,
Chill admiration in the place of love,
Her friends but flatterers, and herself unknown.

“With this, her world had grown so hard, so parch’d,
Without one source affording sympathy—
She took no credit to herself for aught;
The weakest sigh that could have heaved a breast,
A dying breast, had crack’d so dry a crust—
She rose, one morn, and swore to free her soul,
Let pent-up love in softening currents flow
Till something human, ay, and heavenly, too,
Were nurtured by the wish from which it sprang.

“She could not work now for herself alone;
For she had learn’d that all life’s purposes
Are held like lenses that a soul may use
To gather in heaven’s light and flash it round
Upon its world illumin’d; or, not so,—
If turn’d on self,—to but inflame and dim
Its own self-centered vision. So she now
One only purpose knew,—to pledge her gifts
To those who most might need them; and she came,
With all she was or hoped she yet might be,
Her gifts of nature and her skill in art,
To work for us, whose aims were plann’d so well,
To further all men to their furthest goals,
And lift the low and lost.”