George Eliot

“ And where great Song is, there my life shall be."
Thus glorying as a god beneficent,
Forth from his solitary joy he went
To bless mankind. It was at evening,
When shadows lengthen from each westward thing,
When imminence of change makes sense more fine
And light seems holier in its grand decline.
The fruit-trees wore their studded coronal,
Earth and her children were at festival,
Glowing as with one heart and one consent—
Thought, love, trees, rocks, in sweet warm radiance blent.
The tribe of Cain was resting on the ground,
The various ages wreathed in one broad round. ”

“ Strong passion's daring sees not aught to dare:
The frost-locked starkness of his frame low-bent,
His voice's penury of tones long spent,
He felt not; all his being leaped in flame
To meet his kindred as they onward came
Slackening and wheeling toward the temple's face:
He rushed before them to the glittering space.
And, with a strength that was but strong desire,
Cried, "I am Jubal, I! ... I made the lyre!" ”

“ That naught but Earth's destruction can destroy.
Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone:
'T was but in giving that thou couldst atone
For too much wealth amid their poverty."
The words seemed melting into symphony.
The wings upbore him, and the gazing song
Was floating him the heavenly space along,
Where mighty harmonies all gently fell
Through veiling vastness, like the far-off bell,
Till, ever onward through the choral blue,
He heard more faintly and more faintly knew,
Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,
The All-creating Presence for his grave. ”

“ The ancient lyre. And now in ignorant eyes
No sign remained of Jubal, Lamech's son,
That mortal frame wherein was first begun
The immortal life of song. His withered brow
Pressed over eyes that held no lightning now,
His locks streamed whiteness on the hurrying air,
The unresting soul had worn itself quite bare
Of beauteous token, as the outworn might
Of oaks slow dying, gaunt in summer's light.
His full deep voice toward thinnest treble ran:
He was the rune-writ story of a man. ”

“ After that fair and true we cannot grasp;
As patriots who seem to die in vain
Make liberty more sacred by their pangs.
Presentiment of better things on earth
Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls
To admiration, self-renouncing love,
Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one,—
Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night
We hear the roll and dash of waves that break
Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,
Which rises to the level of the cliff
Because the wide Atlantic rolls behind,
Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs. ”

“ Came Jubal with his lyre: there 'mid the throng,
Where the blank space was, poured a solemn song,
Touching his lyre to full harmonic throb
And measured pulse, with cadences that sob,
Exult and cry, and search the inmost deep
Where the dark sources of new passion sleep.
Joy took the air, and took each breathing soul,
Embracing them in one entrancéd whole,
Yet thrilled each varying frame to various ends,
As Spring new-waking through the creature sends
Or rage or tenderness; more plenteous life
Here breeding dread, and there a fiercer strife. ”

“ Toward which the urgent sap in life's great tree
Is pressing—seen in puny blossoms now.
But in the world's great morrows to expand
With broadest petal and with deepest glow.
Yet, see the patched and plodding citizen
Waiting upon the pavement with the throng
While some victorious world-hero makes
Triumphal entry, and the peal of shouts
And flash of faces 'neath uplifted hats
Run like a storm of joy along the streets!
He says, "God bless him!" almost with a sob,
As the great hero passes; he is glad
The world holds mighty men and mighty deeds ”

“ Its conscious opposite: the angel turned
His murky gaze aloof and inly said:
"An angel this, deathless to angel's stroke."
But Moses felt the subtly nearing dark:
"Who art thou? and what wilt thou?" Zamaël then:
"I am God's reaper; through the fields of life
I gather ripened and unripened souls
Both willing and unwilling. And I come
Now to reap thee." But Moses cried.
Firm as a seer who waits the trusted sign:
"Reap thou the fruitless plant and common herb—
Not him who from the womb was sanctified
To teach the law of purity and love." ”

“ Beat to the heavenly tune of seraphim
⁠Whose only joy in having is, to impart:
⁠⁠Till thou, poor Self—despite thy ire,
⁠⁠⁠Wrestling 'gainst my mingled share,
⁠⁠Thy faults, hard falls, and vain desire
⁠⁠⁠Still to be what others were—
⁠⁠⁠⁠Filled, o'erflowed with tenderness
⁠⁠⁠⁠Seeming more as thou wert less,
⁠⁠⁠⁠Knew me through that anguish past
⁠⁠⁠⁠As a fellowship more vast.
Self.
Yea, I embrace thee, changeful Life!
⁠Far-sent, unchosen mate!
Self and thou, no more at strife,
⁠Shall wed in hallowed state.
Willing spousals now shall prove
Life is justified by love. ”

“ Close fronting the old knitter, and they talked
With sweet antiphony of young and old.
Agatha.
You like our valley, lady? I am glad
You thought it well to come again. But rest —
The walk is long from Master Michael's inn.
Countess Linda.
Yes, but no walk is prettier.
Agatha.
⁠⁠⁠It is true:
There lacks no blessing here, the waters all
Have virtues like the garments of the Lord,
And heal much sickness; then, the crops and cows
Flourish past speaking, and the garden flowers,
Pink, blue, and purple, 't is a joy to see
How they yield honey for the singing bees. ”

“ I still hesitate to say suffered irreparably, because I still think the orbit of a genius like George Eliot's incalculable. With such a noble ambition, and such immense resources, one may do almost anything. Thus, though I confess I now think it improbable that George Eliot will ever exhibit in a poem the true simplicity of the singer, and compel her readers to admit that her music is better than her speech, I hesitate, or well-nigh hesitate, in saying even so much as that. It is very pathetic that a noble ambition should come so near its mark and yet fail. ”

“ The parting cuckoo toward a fresh spring-time.
The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers,
The wondrous watery rings that died too soon,
The echoes of the quarry, the still hours
With white robe sweeping on the shadeless noon,
⁠Were but my growing self, are part of me,
⁠My present Past, my root of piety.
VII.
Those long days measured by my little feet
Had chronicles which yield me many a text;
Where irony still finds an image meet
Of full-grown judgments in this world perplext. ”

“ And knoweth naught save the blue heaven that swims.
"Jubal," the face said, "I am thy loved Past,
The soul that makes thee one from first to last.
I am the angel of thy life and death,
Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath. ”

“ Such Tubal-Cain. But Jubal had a frame
Fashioned to finer senses, which became
A yearning for some hidden soul of things,
Some outward touch complete on inner springs
That vaguely moving bred a lonely pain,
A want that did but stronger grow with gain
Of all good else, as spirits might be sad
For lack of speech to tell us they are glad. ”

“ And grew from strength to strength through centuries;
Saw infant trees fill out their giant limbs,
And heard a thousand times the sweet bird's marriage hymns.
In Cain's young city none had heard of Death
Save him, the founder; and it was his faith
That here, away from harsh Jehovah's law,
Man was immortal, since no halt or flaw
In Cain's own frame betrayed six hundred years,
But dark as pines that autumn never sears
His locks thronged backward as he ran, his frame
Rose like the orbéd sun each morn the same,
Lake-mirrored to his gaze ”

“ Earth will hold
No stupid brutes, no cheerful queernesses,
No naïve cunning, grave absurdity.
Wart-pigs with tender and parental grunts,
Wombats much flattened as to their contour,
Perhaps from too much crushing in the ark,
But taking meekly that fatality;
The serious cranes, unstung by ridicule;
Long-headed, short-legged, solemn-looking curs,
(Wise, silent critics of a flippant age) ;
The silly straddling foals, the weak-brained geese
Hissing fallaciously at sound of wheels—
All these rude products will have disappeared
Along with every faulty human type. ”

“ He prayed, as kings do when they give
⁠Their all with royal will,
⁠Holding born kingship still.
To rob the living they refuse,
One death or other he must choose,
⁠Either the watery pall
⁠Or wounds and burial. ”

“ In the soft white — thus Gabriel draws the soul.
"Go bring the soul of Moses unto me !"
And the awe-stricken angel answered, "Lord,
How shall I dare to take his life who lives
Sole of his kind, not to be likened once
In all the generations of the earth ? "
Then God called Michaël, him of pensive brow,
Snow-vest and flaming sword, who knows and acts:
"Go bring the spirit of Moses unto me!"
But Michaël with such grief as angels feel,
Loving the mortals whom they succor, pled:
"Almighty, spare me; it was I who taught
Thy servant Moses ”

“ Where lay firm stepping-stones, or call to mind
"This thing I like my sister may not do,
For she is little, and I must be kind."
Thus boyish Will the nobler mastery learned
Where inward vision over impulse reigns,
Widening its life with separate life discerned,
A Like unlike, a Self that self restrains. ”

“ White petals on the pathway slept.
⁠⁠⁠O pure-eyed bride!
⁠⁠⁠O tender pride!
Two faces o'er a cradle bent:
Two hands above the head were locked:
These pressed each other while they rocked,
Those watched a life that love had sent. ”

“ Besides the want of spontaneity and simplicity in the verse, there are other points which make us feel, with whatever reluctance to admit the thing we undoubtingly see, that in "The Spanish Gypsy" something is wanting, and in that something everything that endears a poem as a poem. The writing has the diffuseness of literature rather than the condensation of poetry; and, admirable as some of it is, we wish it away: at the lowest, we say to ourselves, if a poet had had to utter this, our pleasure would have been perfect ”

“ And men still handling them in peace and war
Catch foul disease, that comes as appetite,
And lurks and clings as withering, damning blight.
But Tubal-Cain wot not of treachery,
Nor greedy lust, nor any ill to be,
Save the one ill of sinking into naught,
Banished from action and act-shaping thought.
He was the sire of swift-transforming skill,
Which arms for conquest man's ambitious will ”

“ Patching and mending, turning o'er the hay,
Holding sick children—there is always work;
And they are very good—the neighbors are:
Weigh not our bits of work with weight and scale,
But glad themselves with giving us good shares
Of meat and drink; and in the big farmhouse
When cloth comes home from weaving, the good wife
Cuts me a piece—this very gown—and says:
"Here, Agatha, you old maid, you have time
To pray for Hans who is gone soldiering:
The saints might help him, and they have much to do,
'T were well they were besought to think of him." ”

“ How fine are the shades or gradations of quality in this respect, can be little understood by those who have not, by instinct or otherwise, fed, so to speak, on verse. For example, we all know that Wordsworth often wrote, in the printed form of verse, the most utterly detestable prose. Yet he could and did produce most exquisite verse. Again, a living poet of the school of Wordsworth, Mr. Henry Taylor, barely, or little better than barely, enables us to say of him that verse is his right-hand and prose his left. Still, after some little demur, we are able to say it; and we call him a poet. ”

“ Invisible Will wrought clear in sculptured sound,
The thought-begotten daughter of the voice,
Thrilled on their listening sense : "He has no tomb.
He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law." ”

“ His will creative, like the pale soft clay.
Each day he wrought and better than he planned,
Shape breeding shape beneath his restless hand.
(The soul without still helps the soul within,
And its deft magic ends what we begin.) ”

“ The sailors eyed the bags and thought;
"The gold is good, the man is naught-
⁠And who shall track the wave
⁠That opens for his grave?"
With brawny arms and cruel eyes
They press around him where he lies
⁠In sleep beside his lyre. ”

“ A clinging flavor penetrates my life —
My onion is imperfectness: I cleave
To nature's blunders, evanescent types
Which sages banish from Utopia.
"Not worship beauty?" say you. Patience, friend!
I worship in the temple with the rest;
But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook
For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves
Who stitched and hammered for the weary man
In days of old. ”

“ And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.
⁠So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man. ”

“ Old Villanico.
SWEET evenings come and go, love,
They came and went of yore:
This evening of our life, love,
⁠Shall go and come no more.
When we have passed away, love,
All things will keep their name ”

“ Between their lives and that dread power which slew
Their neighbor at their side. The chapel bell
Will melt to gentlest music ere it reach
That cottage on the slope, whose garden gate
Has caught the rose-tree boughs and stands ajar ”

“ The monks are gone, their shadows fall no more
Tall-frocked and cowled athwart the evening fields
At milking-time; their silent corridors
Are turned to homes of bare-armed, aproned men,
Who toil for wife and. children. ”

“ What right has anybody to make a poem longer than one expected? The next thing that strikes one is,—at all events, the next thing that struck me was, as I very hastily turned over the book,—that the fine largo of the author's manner, continued through so many pages, was a very little burdensome in its effect. ”

“ Close fronting the old knitter."
She smiling bends and lets her girdle down
For ladder to the soul that cannot trust
In life which outlasts burial. Agatha
Sat at her knitting, aged, upright, slim. ”

“ Is it not strange, and almost pathetic, that an uncultivated peasant could sing, and touch us with music, as no speech could; and yet that a highly cultivated mind like George Eliot's should almost overwhelm our judgment by the richness and volume of what it pours forth in the name of song ”

“ Where you have friends you should not go to inns. ”