Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
She, to HimThomas Hardy (18401928)
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;
And judgement, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellences I once enshrined,
And you are irk’d that they have wither’d so;
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same—
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!—
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim
The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?
Some other’s feature, accent, thought like mine,
Will carry you back to what I used to say,
And bring some memory of your love’s decline.
And yield a sigh to me—as ample due,
Not as the tittle of a debt unpaid
To one who could resign her all to you—
That your thin thought, in two small words convey’d,
Was no such fleeting phantom-thought to me,
But the Whole Life wherein my part was play’d;
And you amid its fitful masquerade
A Thought—as I in yours but seem to be.