Three stanzas describe the woodbine and the myrtles outside the window, and the cushioned settee inside. Then:
Books I have of long ago
And to-day; I shall not know
Some, unless thou read them, so
Their excelling
Music needs thy voice’s flow:
Campion, with a noble ring
Of choice spirits; count this wing
Sacred! All the songs I sing
Welling, welling
From Elizabethan spring.
French, that corner of primrose!
Flaubert, Verlaine, with all those
Precious, little things in prose,
Bliss-compelling,
Howsoe’er the story goes:
All the Latins thou dost prize!
Cynthia’s lover by thee lies;
Note Catullus, type and size
Least repelling
To thy weariable eyes.
And for Greek! Too sluggishly
Thou dost toil; but Sappho, see!
And the dear Anthology
For thy spelling.
Come, it shall be well with thee.
It is clear from all the testimony that Katharine and Edith were extremely serious persons in those first years at Stoke Bishop, a fact which seems to have borne rather hard on the young men of their acquaintance. Thus, a member of their college, launching a small conversational craft with a light phrase, might have his barque swamped by the inquiry of one who really wanted to know: “Which do you truly think is the greater poem, the Iliad or the Odyssey?” It was an era when Higher Education and Women’s Rights and Anti-Vivisection were being indignantly championed, and when ‘æsthetic dress’ was being very consciously worn—;all by the same kind of people. Katharine and Edith were of that kind. They joined the debating society of the college and plunged into the questions of the moment. They spoke eloquently in favour of the suffrage for women, and were deeply interested in ethical matters. They were devotees of reason, and would subscribe to no creed. Katharine was a prime mover of the Anti-Vivisection Society in Clifton, and was its secretary till 1887. She was, too, in correspondence with Ruskin, was strongly influenced by him in moral and artistic questions, and was a companion of the Guild of St George—;though that was as far as she ever went in Ruskinian economics. Both of the friends adored pictures, worked at water-colour drawing, wore wonderful flowing garments in ‘art’ colours, and dressed their hair in a loose knot at the nape of the neck.
But more than all that, they were already dedicated to poetry, and sworn in fellowship. That was in secret, however. Student friends might guess, thrillingly, but no one had yet been told that Katharine had published in 1875 a volume of lyrics which she signed as Arran Leigh, nor that Edith had timidly produced for her fellow’s inspection, as the experiment of a girl of sixteen, several scenes of a powerful tragedy; nor that the two of them together were at that moment working on their Bellerophôn (with the accent, please), which they published in 1881, signed “Arran and Isla Leigh.” But such portentous facts kept them very grave; and their solemnity naturally provoked the mirth of the irreverent, especially of undergraduate friends down from Oxford, who knew something on their own account about æsthetic crazes and the leaders of them. Thus a certain Herbert Warren came down during one vacation and poked bracing fun at them. The story makes one suppose that he must have disliked the colour blue in women and the colour green in every one—;possibly because he was then in his own salad days. For when somebody mischievously asked him in Katharine’s presence, “Who are this æsthetic crowd?” he promptly replied, “They’re people as green as their dresses.”
But their women friends were more favourably impressed. To them the two eager girls who walked over the downs for lectures every morning were persons of a certain distinction who, despite careless hair and untidy feet, could be “perfectly fascinating.” Their manner of speech had been shaped by old books, and was a little archaic. Later it became a “mighty jargon,” understood only of the initiate. Their style of dress was daringly clinging and graceful in an age of ugly protuberances. And though these things might suggest a pose to the satirical, they were very attractive to the ingenuous, who saw them simply as the naïve signs they were of budding individuality. Their friendship, too, was clearly on the grand scale and in the romantic manner. They were, indeed, absorbed in each other to an extent which exasperated those who would have liked to engage the affections of one or the other in another direction. Yet they were companionable souls in a sympathetic circle, Katharine with abounding vitality and love of fun and keen joy in life, expansive and forthcoming despite an occasional haughtiness of manner; and Edith lighting up more slowly, to a rarer, finer, more delicate exaltation.
Yet, in spite of many friends and a genuine interest in affairs, one perceives that they constantly gave a sense of seclusion from life, of natures set a little way apart. It was an impression conveyed unwittingly, and in spite of themselves; and one is reminded by it of their sonnet called The Poet, written, I believe, about this time, but not published until 1907, in Wild Honey: