Proud with humility’s pride, spoiling a passage from Keats)––

Vainly your voice on the ears of impregnable Laureate-makers,

Rang as the sinuous sea rings on a petrified coast;

Vainly your voice with a subtle and slightly indelicate largess,

Broke on an obdurate world hymning the advent of Me;

When from the ‘commune of air,’ from ‘the exquisite fabric of Silence,’

I, a superior orb, burst into exquisite print!

What shall we say for your greeting, O good horticultural Alfred!

Royalty’s darling and pride, crown of the Salisbury Press?

Now when the negligent Public, in search of a subject for dinner,

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Asks for the names of your books, Lord! what a boom there will be!

Hoarse in Penbryn are the howlings that rise for the hope of the Cymri;

Over her Algernon’s head Putney composes a dirge;

Edwin anathematises politely in various lingos;

Davidson ruminates hard over a Ballad of Hell;

Fondly Le Gallienne fancies how pretty the Delphian laurels

Would have appeared on his own hairy and passionate poll;

I, imperturbably careless, untainted of jealousy’s jaundice,

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