Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/162

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AURORA LEIGH.
153
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,Then helps to sugar her bohea at nightWith her reputation. I have known good wives,As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar's;And good, good mothers, who would use a childTo better an intrigue; good friends, beside.(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neckAnd sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to doBy sleeping infants. And we all have knownGood critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes;Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state;Good patriots, who for a theory, risked a causeGood kings, who disembowelled for a tax;Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,And damned the general world for standing up.—Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
How bitterly I speak,—how certainlyThe innocent white milk in us is turned,By much persistent shining of the sun!Shake up the sweetest in us long enoughWith men, it drips to foolish curd, too sourTo feed the most untender of Christ's lambs.
I should have thought . . a woman of the worldLike her I'm meaning,—centre to herself,Who has wheeled on her own pivot half a lifeIn isolated self-love and self-will,As a windmill seen at distance radiating
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