unavowed,
     Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin
     Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs
     Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;
     They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs
     For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent! 
     Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,
     The legends of her mission to beguile?

     Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth
     He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;
     And not on her soft lips was it descried. 
     She stepped her way benevolently grave: 
     Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,
     By tossing victim to the courtier knave,
     Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign. 
     Rather ’twas humbleness in being pursued,
     As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine. 
     Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed? 
     All wisdom’s armoury this man could wield;
     And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased
     Traverse her woman’s curtain and poor shield,
     For new example of a world diseased;
     Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;
     A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;
     Yet she most surely to this man stood fair: 
     He worshipped like the young enthusiast,
     Named simpleton or poet.  Did he read
     Right through, and with the voice she held reserved
     Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?

     Compassion for the man thus noble nerved
     The pity for herself she felt in him,
     To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save;
     At least, be worthy.  That our soul may swim,
     We sink our heart down bubbling under wave. 
     It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks. 
     But, ah! confession of a woman’s breast: 
     She eminent, she honoured of her sex! 
     Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed,
     To veil them.  None of women, save their vile,
     Plays traitor to an army in the field. 
     The cries most vindicating most defile. 
     How shall a cause to Nature be appealed,
     When, under pressure of their common foe,
     Her sisters shun the Mother and disown,
     On pain of his intolerable crow
     Above the fiction, built for him, o’erthrown? 
     Irrational he is, irrational
     Must they be, though not Reason’s light shall wane
     In them with ever Nature at close call,
     Behind the fiction torturing to sustain;
     Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make
     A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh: 
     Whereat men dread their lofty structure’s quake
     Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply
     The crazy roar of peril, leonine
     For injured majesty.  That sigh of dames
     Is rare and soon suppressed.  Not they combine
     To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames
     Their lustier if not