Modern Love: XLIX

By George Meredith 1828–1909 George Meredith

He found her by the ocean’s moaning verge,

Nor any wicked change in her discerned;

And she believed his old love had returned,

Which was her exultation, and her scourge.

She took his hand, and walked with him, and seemed

The wife he sought, though shadow-like and dry.

She had one terror, lest her heart should sigh,

And tell her loudly that she no longer dreamed.

She dared not say, ‘This is my breast: look in.’

But there’s a strength to help the desperate weak.

That night he learned how silence best can speak

The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin.

About the middle of the night her call

Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed.

‘Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!’ she said.

Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all.

Biography

George Meredith was a major Victorian novelist whose career developed in conjunction with an era of great change in English literature during the second half of the nineteenth century. While his early novels largely conformed to Victorian literary conventions, his later novels demonstrated a concern with character psychology, modern social problems, and the development of the novel form that has led to his being considered an . . .

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