68
A POET’S DAUGHTER.
“But what if hers are rank and power,
Armies her train, a throne her bower,
A kingdom’s gold her marriage-dower,
Broad seas and lands?
What if from bannered hall and tower
A queen commands?”
A queen? Earth’s regal moons have set.
Where perished Marie Antoinette?
Where’s Bordeaux’s mother? Where the jet-
Black Haytian dame?
And Lusitania’s coronet?
And Angoulême?
Empires to-day are upside down,
The castfe kneels before the town,
The monarch fears a printer’s frown
A brickbat’s range;
Give me, in preference to a crown,
Five shillings change.
“But she who asks, though first among
The good, the beautiful, the young,
The birthright of a spell more strong
Than these hath brought her;
She is your kinswoman in song,
A Poet’s daughter.”
