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me no joys of wedlock born;

Sing me no songs of Hymen;

Its brightest roses hide a thorn,

Or faces oft belie men.

Befooled that maidens may be wives—

Beggared that wives may dress well—

Such the sad tale of husbands’ lives

I’ve gleaned beneath Sir Cresswell.

No: since with feelings frail as ours

Love is but life’s bare duty,

In fancy let me cull the flowers

Before the shrine of beauty!

Be but, beside my lonely hearth,

A bowl of choice Virginian

To lift the senses far from earth,

And lull on dreamiest pinion;—

Lured by its weird and witching charms

No damosel so rude is,

But nestles to my happy arms

With the last batch from Mudie’s.

I dream the poet’s dream of bliss,

The cream of prose I sip too;

The sweetest cheeks are mine to kiss

That lover e’er put lip to.

Unknown belovëd of my heart,

Fair queen of my ideal!

I thank thine author for the art

That frames thee warm and real.

That suffers, without let or blame,

A poor unclaimed affection

To flirt round some fictitious flame

Some model of perfection.

So years ago an evening breeze

Would bid soft thoughts waylay me,

And set me by the twilight seas

With faithless cousin Amy:

I seemed to feel the whispering air

That came with briny gushes,

Uncurling locks of starry hair

And fanning tell-tale blushes.

Or face to face I worshipped Maud,

The beautiful, the peerless;

I won her from her “babefaced lord,”

All willing and all tearless.

The grace of pure Evangeline,

By heart I used to know it;

Woo’d Browning’s gentle Geraldine,

And every pet of poet.

And still, though age asserts its need

Of more prosaic Circes,

And craves a fuller-flavoured weed,

And don’t care much for verses,

Still Ethel, Laura, Charlotte touch

My cup with honied breathings,

’Tis mine to quaff my fill from such

Sweet W. M. T. things.

The great Antonio makes me free

Of all his pen produces;

Grahams and Luftons win for me

Their Madelines and Lucies.

Each new sensationist I skim,

Whose thrilling plots prevent your

Forgetting life’s a wayward whim,

And love a risky venture.

The fastest heroine daren’t deny

My right to lord it o’er her,

From Melville’s wild Kate Coventry

To Braddon’s quaint Aurora.

And so the sum runs up: and so

Not if I sang for ages

Could I pay half the debt I owe

My favourites for their pages.

Yet dull their portraiture had seemed,

The visions so delicious

Had never but for thee been dreamed,

My pipe, my pride, my precious!

Beneath thy subtle alchemy

Glow thought and scene and diction,

And blossoms of reality

Burst from the buds of fiction.

Who never fondled to his own

Thine amber lip for kisses,

Thine incense who has never known

Has never known what this is,

To feel the goddess of a book,

The darling of a fable

Make sunshine with a loving look

Around a loveless table.

But I have royal Harry’s choice

Without his ugly axes,

Unvexed by sound of jealous voice,

Or temper-trying taxes;

And, while I am the happy man

Such vivid fancies figure me,

I need not tremble at the ban

That disallows polygamy.

No bills I dread at Christmas-tides,

No fees that croup or coughs bring,

For fancy dresses all my brides,

And nurses all my offspring;

And on my free unruffled brow

No harsh prophetic sorrow,

Amid the careless calm of Now

Writes the dire word To-morrow.

Could I but teach some friends of mine,

Whom o’er their fates I’ve heard sigh,

How bright the star of love can shine

From out a cloud of “bird’s-eye!” R. A. B.