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Ended he had not, but she brook’d no more:
Long since her heart had beat remorselessly,
Her crampt-up sorrow pain’d her, and a sense
Of meanness in her unresisting life.
Then their eyes vext her; for on entering
He had cast the curtains of their seat aside–
Black velvet of the costliest–she herself
Had seen to that: fain had she closed them now,
Yet dared not stir to do it, only near’d
Her husband inch by inch, but when she laid,
Wifelike, her hand in one of his, he veil’d
His face with the other, and at once, as falls
A creeper when the prop is broken, fell
The woman shrieking at his feet, and swoon’d.
Then her own people bore along the nave
Her pendent hands, and narrow meagre face
Seam’d with the shallow cares of fifty years:
And here the Lord of all the landscape round
Ev’n to its last horizon, and of all
Who peer’d at him so keenly, follow’d out
Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle
Reel’d, as a footsore ox in crowded ways
Stumbling across the market to his death,
Unpitied; for he groped as blind, and seem’d
Always about to fall, grasping the pews
And oaken finials till he touch’d the door;
Yet to the lychgate, where his chariot stood,
Strode from the porch, tall and erect again.

But nevermore did either pass the gate
Save under pall with bearers. In one month,
Thro’ weary and yet wearier hours,
The childless mother went to seek her child;
And when he felt the silence of his house
About him, and the change and not the change,
And those fixt eyes of painted ancestors
Staring for ever from their gilded walls
On him their last descendant, his own head
Began to droop, to fall; the man became
Imbecile; his one word was `desolate’;
Dead for two years before his death was he;
But when the second Christmas came, escaped
His keepers, and the silence which he felt,
To find a deeper in the narrow gloom
By wife and child; nor wanted at his end
The dark retinue reverencing death
At golden thresholds; nor from tender hearts,
And those who sorrow’d o’er a vanish’d race,
Pity, the violet on the tyrant’s grave.
Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,
And the broad woodland parcell’d into farms;
And where the two contrived their daughter’s good,
Lies the hawk’s cast, the mole has made his run,
The hedgehog underneath the plaintain bores,
The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,
The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there
Follows the mouse, and all is open field.