He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand—
Better wert thou dead before me, though I slew thee with my hand!
Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace,
Rolled in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.
Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social ties that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from Nature's honest rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool."
With a lover's fancy he would seek comfort in persuading himself that his love was dead, but quickly spurns from him this idea. Every line which follows this—the picture of the repentant wife, and the drunken husband, "hunting in his dreams," the child that roots out regret, the mother grown into the matron schooling this child, a daughter, into the world's philosophy—all is masterly. Not less so the portraiture of the age:—
"What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?