With minute moss, weed, wild-flower—made alive
By worm, and fly, and foot of the free bird?
Your Highness,—healthy minds let bygones be,
Leave old crimes to grow young and virtuous-like
I’ the sun and air; so time treats ugly deeds: (240)
They take the natural blessing of all change.
There was the joy o’ the husband silly-sooth,
The softening of the wife’s old wicked heart,
Virtues to right and left, profusely paid
If so they might compensate the saved sin.
And then the sudden existence, dewy-dear,
O’ the rose above the dungheap, the pure child
As good as new created, since withdrawn
From the horror of the pre-appointed lot
With the unknown father and the mother known (250)
Too well,—some fourteen years of squalid youth,
And then libertinage, disease, the grave—
Hell in life here, hereafter life in hell:
Look at that horror and this soft repose!
Why, moralist, the sin has saved a soul!
Then, even the palpable grievance to the heirs—
’Faith, this was no frank setting hand to throat
And robbing a man, but … Excellency, by your leave,
How did you get that marvel of a gem,
The sapphire with the Graces grand and Greek? (260)
The story is, stooping to pick a stone
From the pathway through a vineyard—no-man’s-land—
To pelt a sparrow with, you chanced on this:
Why, now, do those five clowns o’ the family
O’ the vinedresser digest their porridge worse
That not one keeps it in his goatskin pouch
To do flints’-service with the tinder-box?
Don’t cheat me, don’t cheat you, don’t cheat a friend!
But are you so hard on who jostles just
A stranger with no natural sort of claim (270)
To the havings and the holdings (here’s the point)
Unless by misadventure, and defect
Of that which ought to be—nay, which there’s none
Would dare so much as wish to profit by—
Since who dares put in just so many words
“May Pietro fail to have a child, please God!
“So shall his house and goods belong to me,
“The sooner that his heart will pine betimes?”
Well then, God don’t please, nor his heart shall pine!
Because he has a child at last, you see, (280)
Or selfsame thing as though a child it were,
He thinks, whose sole concern it is to think:
If he accepts it why should you demur?
The proper process of unsinning sin
Is to begin well-doing somehow else.
Pietro,—remember, with no sin at all
I’ the substitution,—why, this gift of God
Flung in his lap from over Paradise
Steadied him in a moment, set him straight (290)
On the good path he had been straying from.
Henceforward no more wilfulness and waste,
Cuppings, carousings,—these a sponge wiped out.
All sort of self-denial was easy now
For the child’s sake, the chatelaine to be,
Who must want much and might want who knows what?
And so, the debts were paid, habits reformed,
Expense curtailed, the dowry set to grow.
As for the wife,—I said, hers the whole sin:
So, hers the exemplary penance. ’Twas a text (300)
Whereon folk preached and praised, the district through:
“Oh, make us happy and you make us good!
“It all comes of God giving her a child:
“Such graces follow God’s best earthly gift!”
By the home-thrust—“There’s a lie at base of all.”
Why, thou exact Prince, is it a pearl or no,
Yon globe upon the Principessa’s neck?
That great round glory of pellucid stuff,
A fish secreted round glory of pellucid grit! (310)
Do you call it worthless for the worthless core?
(She don’t, who well knows what she changed for it!)
So, to our brace of burgesses again!
You see so far i’ the story, who was right,
Who wrong, who neither, don’t you? What, you don’t?
Eh? Well, admit there’s somewhat dark i’ the case,
Let’s on—the rest shall clear, I promise you.
Leap over a dozen years: you find, these passed,
An old good easy creditable sire,
A careful housewife’s beaming bustling face, (320)
Both wrapped up in the love of their one child,
The strange tall pale beautiful creature grown
Lily-like out o’ the cleft i’ the sun-smit rock
To bow its white miraculous birth of buds
I’ the way of wandering Joseph and his spouse,—
So painters fancy: here it was a fact.
And this their lily,—could they but transplant
And set in vase to stand by Solomon’s porch
’Twixt lion and lion!—this Pompilia of theirs,
Could they see worthily married, well bestowed (330)
In house and home! And why despair of this
With Rome to choose from, save the topmost rank?
Themselves would help the choice with heart and soul,
Throw their late savings in a common heap
Should go with the dowry, to be followed in time
By the heritage legitimately hers:
And when such paragon was found and fixed,
Why, they might chant their “Nunc dimittas” straight.
Exorbitant for the suitor they should seek, (340)
And social class to choose among, these cits.
Yet there’s a latitude: exceptional white
Amid the general brown o’ the species, lurks
A burgess nearly an aristocrat,
Legitimately in reach: look out for him!
What banker, merchant, has seen better days,
What second-rate painter a-pushing up,
Poet a-slipping down, shall bid the best
For this young beauty with the thumping purse?
Alack, had it been but one of such as these (350)
So like
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