Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/195

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AURORA LEIGH.
This strikes me.—if the public whom we know,Could catch me at such admissions, I should passFor being right modest. Yet how proud we are,In daring to look down upon ourselves!
The critics say that epics have died outWith Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—I'll not believe it. I could never dreamAs Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineerWho travelled higher than he was born to live,And showed sometimes the goitre in his throatDiscoursing of an image seen through fog,)That Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high.They were but men!—his Helen's hair turned greyLike any plain Miss Smith's, who wears a front:And Hector's infant blubbered at a plumeAs yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.All men are possible heroes: every age,Heroic in proportions, double-faced,Looks backward and before, expects a mornAnd claims an epos.Ay, but every ageAppears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!The thinkers scout it, and the poets aboundWho scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;An age of patches for old gabardines;An age of mere transition, meaning nought,
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