Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/609

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They shot through the great cathedral door;

Like mallards they traversed ocean:

And gazing below, on its boiling floor,

I mark’d a horrid commotion.

Down a forest’s long alleys they spun like tops:

It seem’d that for ages and ages,

Thro’ the Book of Life bereft of stops,

They waltz’d continuous pages.

And ages after, scarce awake,

And my blood with the fever fretting,

I stood alone by a forest-lake,

Whose shadows the moon were netting.

Lilies, golden and white, by the curls

Of their broad flat leaves hung swaying.

A wreath of languid twining girls

Stream’d upward, long locks disarraying.

Their cheeks had the satin frost-glow of the moon;

Their eyes the fire of Sirius.

They circled, and droned a monotonous tune,

Abandon’d to love delirious.

Like lengths of convolvulus torn from the hedge,

And trailing the highway over,

The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge,

And call’d for a lover, a lover!

I sank, I rose through seas of eyes,

In odorous swathes delicious:

They fann’d me with impetuous sighs,

They bit me with kisses vicious.

My ears were spell’d, my neck was coil’d,

And I with their fury was glowing,

When the marbly waters bubbled and boil’d

At a watery noise of crowing.

They dragg’d me low and low to the lake;

Their kisses more stormily shower’d;

On the emerald brink, in the white moon’s wake,

An earthly damsel cower’d.

Fresh heart-sobs shook her knitted hands

Beneath a tiny suckling,

As one by one of the doleful bands

Dived like a fairy duckling.

And now my turn had come—O me!

What wisdom was mine that second!

I dropp’d on the adorer’s knee;

To that sweet figure I beckon’d.

Save me! save me! for now I know

The powers that nature gave me,

And the value of honest love I know:—

My village lily! save me!

Come ’twixt me and the sisterhood,

While the passion-born phantoms are fleeing!

Oh, he that is true to flesh and blood

Is true to his own being!

And he that is false to flesh and blood,

Is false to the star within him:

And the mad and hungry sisterhood

All under the tides shall win him!

My village lily! save me! save!

For strength is with the holy:—

Already I shudder’d to feel the wave,

As I kept sinking slowly:—

I felt the cold wave and the under-tug

Of the Brides, when—starting and shrinking—

Lo, Adrian tilts the water-jug!

And Bruges with morn is blinking.

Merrily sparkles sunny prime

On gabled peak and arbour:

Merrily rattles belfry-chime

The song of Sevilla’s Barber.

in hand, I, Robert Horatio Green, of Blotting Paper Buildings, Temple, stand on the railway platform at Brighton, and the great question requiring an immediate solution is, “Where shall I take up my abode—in lodgings, or at an hotel?” Comfort says, “Mine ease at mine inn,” while economy declares for a sitting room and bed-room, including all extras, except boot-cleaning, kitchen fire, parlour fire, gas in the passage, washing of house linen, use of cruets, and the option of playing upon a spinet of four and a half octaves, for the small charge of 30s. per week. But then the awful presence of the lodging-letter! Her acid, sharp features; her perfect respectability; her rectitude of purpose and honesty of conduct announced to you before you have been in the house five minutes; the number of colonels, majors, and captains, who have preceded you, and never had any cause for complaint, or a grumble of any kind; the confidential assurance that she was not in the habit of letting lodgings, as though the falsehood were not apparent in every item of the furniture! The curtains bob short, refusing to be drawn more than half-way across the rattling windows; the easy chair—lucus à non lucendo—stuffed with pebbles from the beach, or with old cork-screws from the marine store shop near at hand; the sofa, hard as a plank, and creaking with infirmities, to say nothing of the sharp pieces of stubbly horse-hair which run, goodness knows where; the carpet, lately cleaned with ox-gall, and smelling accordingly; the eternal chiffonnier, suggestive of stiff, formal old maids, with their locks, what there is left of them, for ever in disorder; the rickety chairs, the shaky table, the round, convex mirror, reflecting objects like a glance into