Conclusion
So closed our tale, of which I give you allThe random scheme as wildly as it rose:The words are mostly mine; for when we ceasedThere came a minute’s pause, and Walter said,‘I wish she had not yielded!’ then to me,‘What, if you drest it up poetically?’So prayed the men, the women: I gave assent:Yet how to bind the scattered scheme of sevenTogether in one sheaf? What style could suit?The men required that I should give throughoutThe sort of mock-heroic gigantesque,With which we bantered little Lilia first:The women—and perhaps they felt their power,For something in the ballads which they sang,Or in their silent influence as they sat,Had ever seemed to wrestle with burlesque,And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close—They hated banter, wished for something real,A gallant fight, a noble princess—whyNot make her true-heroic—true-sublime?Or all, they said, as earnest as the close?Which yet with such a framework scarce could be.Then rose a little feud betwixt the two,Betwixt the mockers and the realists:And I, betwixt them both, to please them both,And yet to give the story as it rose,I moved as in a strange diagonal,And maybe neither pleased myself nor them.
But Lilia pleased me, for she took no partIn our dispute: the sequel of the taleHad touched her; and she sat, she plucked the grass,She flung it from her, thinking: last, she fixtA showery glance upon her aunt, and said,‘You—tell us what we are’ who might have told,For she was crammed with theories out of books,But that there rose a shout: the gates were closedAt sunset, and the crowd were swarming now,To take their leave, about the garden rails.
So I and some went out to these: we climbedThe slope to Vivian-place, and turning sawThe happy valleys, half in light, and halfFar-shadowing from the west, a land of peace;Gray halls alone among their massive groves;Trim hamlets; here and there a rustic towerHalf-lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat;The shimmering glimpses of a stream; the seas;A red sail, or a white; and far beyond,Imagined more than seen, the skirts of France.
‘Look there, a garden!’ said my college friend,The Tory member’s elder son, ‘and there!God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled—Some sense of duty, something of a faith,Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,Some patient force to change them when we will,Some civic manhood firm against the crowd—But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,The little boys begin to shoot and stab,A kingdom topples over with a shriekLike an old woman, and down rolls the worldIn mock heroics stranger than our own;Revolts, republics, revolutions, mostNo graver than a schoolboys’ barring out;Too comic for the serious things they are,Too solemn for the comic touches in them,Like our wild Princess with as wise a dreamAs some of theirs—God bless the narrow seas!I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad.’
‘Have patience,’ I replied, ‘ourselves are fullOf social wrong; and maybe wildest dreamsAre but the needful preludes of the truth:For me, the genial day, the happy crowd,The sport half-science, fill me with a faith.This fine old world of ours is but a childYet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it timeTo learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides.’
In such discourse we gained the garden rails,And there we saw Sir Walter where he stood,Before a tower of crimson holly-hoaks,Among six boys, head under head, and lookedNo little lily-handed Baronet he,A great broad-shouldered genial Englishman,A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,A raiser of huge melons and of pine,A patron of some thirty charities,A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none;Fair-haired and redder than a windy morn;Now shaking hands with him, now him, of thoseThat stood the nearest—now addressed to speech—Who spoke few words and pithy, such as closedWelcome, farewell, and welcome for the yearTo follow: a shout rose again, and madeThe long line of the approaching rookery swerveFrom the elms, and shook the branches of the deerFrom slope to slope through distant ferns, and rangBeyond the bourn of sunset; O, a shoutMore joyful than the city-roar that hailsPremier or king! Why should not these great SirsGive up their parks some dozen times a yearTo let the people breathe? So thrice they cried,I likewise, and in groups they streamed away.
But we went back to the Abbey, and sat on,So much the gathering darkness charmed: we satBut spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie,Perchance upon the future man: the wallsBlackened about us, bats wheeled, and owls whooped,And gradually the powers of the night,That range above the region of the wind,Deepening the courts of twilight broke them upThrough all the silent spaces of the worlds,Beyond all thought into the Heaven of Heavens.
Last little Lilia, rising quietly,Disrobed the glimmering statue of Sir RalphFrom those rich silks, and home well-pleased we went.