Parted from her - betray'd her cause and mineWhere shall I breathe? why kept ye not your

faith?

O base and bad! what comfort? none for me!' To whom remorseful Cyril, Yet I pray ✓ Take comfort; live, dear lady, for your child!' At which she lifted up her voice and cried :

more

'Ah me, my babe, my blossom, ah, my child, My one sweet child, whom I shall see no ! For now will cruel Ida keep her back; And either she will die from want of care, Or sicken with ill-usage, when they say The child is hers for every little fault,

The child is hers; and they will beat my girl
Remembering her mother-O my flower!
Or they will take her, they will make her hard,

And she will pass me by in after-life

With some cold reverence worse than were she

dead.

Ill mother that I was to leave her there,

To lag behind, scared by the cry they made,
The horror of the shame among them all.
But I will go and sit beside the doors,
And make a wild petition night and day,
Until they hate to hear me like a wind
Wailing for ever, till they open to me,
And lay my little blossom at my feet,
My babe, my sweet Aglaïa, my one child;

And I will take her up and go my way,
And satisfy my soul with kissing her.

Ah! what might that man not deserve of me Who gave me back my child?' 'Be comforted,' Said Cyril, 'you shall have it; ' but again

She veil'd her brows, and prone she sank, and so, Like tender things that being caught feign death, Spoke not, nor stirr❜d.

By this a murmur ran

Thro' all the camp, and inward raced the scouts With rumor of Prince Arac hard at hand.

We left her by the woman, and without

Found the gray kings at parle; and 'Look you,'

cried

My father, that our compact be fulfill'd.

You have spoilt this child; she laughs at you and

man;

She wrongs herself, her sex, and me, and him.
But red-faced war has rods of steel and fire ;
She yields, or war.'

Then Gama turn'd to me:

We fear, indeed, you spent a stormy time

With our strange girl; and yet they say that still You love her. Give us, then, your mind at large : How say you, war or not?

'Not war, if possible,

O king,' I said, 'lest from the abuse of war,

The desecrated shrine, the trampled year,

The smouldering homestead, and the household

flower

A smoke go up thro' which I loom to her
Three times a monster. Now she lightens scorn
At him that mars her plan, but then would hate
And every voice she talk'd with ratify it,

And every face she look'd on justify it —
The general foe. More soluble is this knot
By gentleness than war. I want her love.

What were I nigher this altho' we dash'd

Your cities into shards with catapults?

She would not love-or brought her chain'd, a

slave,

The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord?

Not ever would she love, but brooding turn
The book of scorn, till all my flitting chance
Were caught within the record of her wrongs
And crush'd to death; and rather, Sire, than this
I would the old god of war himself were dead,
Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills,

Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,
Or like an old-world mammoth bulk'd in ice,
Not to be molten out.'

And roughly spake

My father: Tut, you know them not, the girls. Boy, when I hear you prate I almost think

Look you, sir!

That idiot legend credible. Look

Man is the hunter; woman is his

game.

The sleek and shining creatures of the chase,
We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;

They love us for it, and we ride them down. Wheedling and siding with them! Out! for

shame!

Boy, there's no rose that 's half so dear to them
As he that does the thing they dare not do,
Breathing and sounding beauteous battle, comes
With the air of the trumpet round him, and leaps in
Among the women, snares them by the score
Flatter'd and fluster'd, wins, tho' dash'd with death
He reddens what he kisses. Thus I won
Your mother, a good mother, a good wife,
Worth winning; but this firebrand - gentleness
To such as her! if Cyril spake her true,
To catch a dragon in a cherry net,
To trip a tigress with a gossamer,

Were wisdom to it.'

Yea, but, Sire,' I cried,

'Wild natures need wise curbs. The soldier?

No!

What dares not Ida do that she should prize
The soldier? I beheld her, when she rose
The yesternight, and storming in extremes
Stood for her cause, and flung defiance down
Gagelike to man, and had not shunn'd the death,
No, not the soldier's; yet I hold her, king,
True woman; but clash them all in one,

you

That have as many differences as we.
The violet varies from the lily as far

As oak from elm. One loves the soldier, one

The silken priest of peace, one this, one that,
And some unworthily; their sinless faith,
A maiden moon that sparkles on a sty,
Glorifying clown and satyr; whence they need
More breadth of culture. Is not Ida right?
They worth it? truer to the law within?
Severer in the logic of a life?

Twice as magnetic to sweet influences

Of earth and heaven? and she of whom you speak,
My mother, looks as whole as some serene
Creation minted in the golden moods

Of sovereign artists; not a thought, a touch,
But pure as lines of green that streak the white
Of the first snowdrop's inner leaves; I say,
Not like the piebald miscellany, man,
Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire,
But whole and one; and take them all-in-all,
Were we ourselves but half as good, as kind,
As truthful, much that Ida claims as right
Had ne'er been mooted, but as frankly theirs
As dues of Nature. To our point; not war,

Lest I lose all.'

Said Gama.

'Nay, nay, you spake but sense,'
'We remember love ourself

In our sweet youth; we did not rate him then
This red-hot iron to be shaped with blows.
You talk almost like Ida; she can talk ;
And there is something in it as you say:
But

you talk kindlier; we esteem you for it.