Aurora Leigh

There's more than passion goes to make a man Or book, which is a man too.

I am sad.

I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts And, feeling the hard marble first relent, Grow supple to the straining of his arms, And tingle through its cold to his burning lip, Supposed his senses mocked, supposed the toil Of stretching past the known and seen to reach The archetypal Beauty out of sight, Had made his heart beat fast enough for two, And with his own life dazed and blinded him!

What is art But life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up in a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres, It pushes toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the Infinite? Art's life--and where we live, we suffer and toil.'

TIMES followed one another. Came a morn I stood upon the brink of twenty years, And looked before and after, as I stood Woman and artist,–either incomplete, Both credulous of completion. There I held The whole creation in my little cup, And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank, 'Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine And all these peoples.'