was made,

For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,

She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;

Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,

And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;

And, though 't was a step into which he had driven her,

He somehow or other had never forgiven her;

Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,

Something bitter to chew when he 'd play the Byronic,

And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over,

By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her. "My case is like Dido's," he sometimes remarked;

"When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked

In a laurel, as she thought-but (ah how Fate mocks!)

She has found it by this time a very bad box;

taking

Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it, You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it. Just conceive such a change place in one's mistress! What romance would be left?- who can flatter or kiss trees? And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue

With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,

Not to say that the thought would forever intrude

That you 've less chance to win her the more she is wood?

Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,

To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;

Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,

As they left me forever, each making its bough!

If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was right,

Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.'

('T was before he had made his intentions explicit),

Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,

To look as if artlessly twined in her hair, Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,

Like the day breaking through the long night of her tresses;

So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,

Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table

(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,

Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),

He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it,

As I shall at the, when they cut up my book in it.

Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I've been spinning,

I've got back at last to my story's beginning:

Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,

As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,

Or as those puzzling specimens, which, in old histories,

We read of his verses- the Oracles, namely, (I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely, For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,

They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk,

And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors

Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores, -)

First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is

Would induce a mustache, for you know he's imberbis ; Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position

Was assailed by the age of his son the physician;

At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately,

And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly;

"Mehercle! I'd make such proceeding felonious,

-

Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?

Look well to your seat, 't is like taking an airing

On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;

It leads one, 'tis true, through the primitive forest,

Grand natural features, - at, then, one

Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?"

Here the laurel-leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.

"O, weep with me, Daphne," he sighed, "for you know it's

A terrible thing to be pestered with poets!

But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,

She never will cry till she's out of the wood!

What would n't I give if I never had known of her?

'T were a kind of relief had I something to groan over:

If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,

I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,

And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her.

One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,

A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin

on;

What boots all your grist? it can never be ground

Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round

(Or, if 't is a water-mill, alter the metaphor,

And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore,

Or lug in some stuff about water "so dreamily,"

It is not a metaphor, though, 't is a simile):

A lily, perhaps, would set my mill a-going,

For just at this season, I think, they are blowing.

Here, somebody, fetch one, not very far hence

They're in bloom by the score, 't is but climbing a fence; There's a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his

Whole garden, from one end to t'other, with lilies;

A very good plan, were it not for satiety,

One longs for a weed here and there, for variety;

scion,

A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on,

Who stretch the new boots Earth's unwilling to try on, Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on,

Whose hair 's in the mortar of every new Zion,

Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one,

Who think slavery a crime tha we must not say fie on,

Who hunt, if they e'er hunt at all, with the lion

(Though they hunt lions also, wheneve they spy one),

Who contrive to make every good for

Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took

In any amusement but tearing a book; For him there was no intermediate stage From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age;

There were years when he did n't wear coat-tails behind,

But a boy he could never be rightly defined:

Like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span, From the womb he came gravely, a little old man ;

While other boys' trousers demanded the toil

Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil,

Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy,

He sat in the corner and read Viri Romæ.

He never was known to unbend or to revel once

In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once;

He was just one of those who excite the benevolence

And you put him at sea without compass or chart,

His blunders aspired to the rank of an

art;

For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him,

So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,

Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite,

New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet,

Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create

In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,

Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,

To compute their own judge, and assign him his place,

Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,

And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it,

Without the least malice, - his record

An event which I shudder to think about, seeing

That Man is a moral, accountable be ing

He meant well enough, but was still in the way,

As a dunce always is, let him be where he may

Indeed, they appear to come into existence

To impede other folks with their awkward assistance,

If you set up a dunce on the very North pole,

All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul,

He'd manage to get betwixt somebody's shins,

And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins,

To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice,

All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice ;

Or, if he found nobody else there to pother,

Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other,

For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

A terrible fellow to meet in society, Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea;

There he 'd sit at the table and stir in his sugar,

Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar;

Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights,

Of your time, --he's as fond as an Arab of dates:

You'll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way,

Of something you've seen in the course of the day;

And, just as you 're tapering out the conclusion,

You venture an' ill-fated classic allusion,

The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack!