And, are you Nature’s weakling instrument,
Your fortune may be such as prompts a laugh
Among good fellows; or the fire she lent
May burn into your soul an epitaph.
III
He was a man whose instincts all inclined
To virtue, when the path of virtue led
Through pleasant places; venial, but too kind
To wrong a woman, and too poor to wed.
She, weak and all too generously dowered
By Nature with the warmth of womanhood,—
Her Tree of Life was wantonly deflowered
Ere she had learned the evil and the good.
She joined the outcast sisterhood who play
The loveless parts of love that they may live,
And feigned the passion that had ebbed away,
And sold what she was born on earth to give.
See love, that once like crystal springs welled up
In cloisters of the hills without a stain,
Here served as from a common drinking cup
Held at a city fountain by a chain!
Chance brought these two together, and they played
At lover’s parts, while each the falsehood guessed:
She read old Brute Desire’s masquerade,
He knew that ’twas his gold that she caressed.
His heart was touched with less of scorn than ruth
For her and for her sisters; soon he paid
Not with gold only, but with dreams of youth,
And half his former faith in man and maid.
Soon was her brief career of folly run;
And, beauty fading, left her poor indeed;
Nor, of her hundred lovers, was there one
To help her in the hour of pain and need.