renown disperses, Illustrious as the spot where he—  The gifted Blank—composed his verses.

p. 93

The Poet. IV.

The Poet

Madam,—whose uncensorious eye Grows gracious over certain pages. Wherein the Jester’s maxims lie, It may be, thicker than the Sage’s I hear but to obey, and could Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you, Some verse as whimsical as Hood,—  As gay as Praed,—should answer to you.

V.

But, though the common voice proclaims Our only serious vocation Confined to giving nothings names, And dreams a “local habitation;” Believe me, there are tuneless days, When neither marble, brass, nor vellum, Would profit much by any lays That haunt the poet’s cerebellum.

VI.

More empty things, I fear, than rhymes, More idle things than songs, absorb it; The “finely-frenzied” eye, at times, Reposes mildly in its orbit; p. 94And, painful truth, at times, to him, Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive, “A primrose by a river’s brim”  Is absolutely unsuggestive.

p. 94

VII.

The fickle Muse! As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer; A goddess, yet a woman still, She flies the more that we pursue her; In short, with worst as well as best, Five months in six, your hapless poet Is just as prosy as the rest, But cannot comfortably show it.

VIII.

You thought, no doubt, the garden-scent Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation Of love that came and love that went,—  Some fragrance of a lost flirtation, Born when the cuckoo changes song, Dead ere the apple’s red is on it, That should have been an epic long, Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet.

IX.

Or else you thought,—the murmuring noon, He turns it to a lyric sweeter, With birds that gossip in the tune, And windy bough-swing in the metre; Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms, Round singing mouths, and chanted charms, And mediæval orchard 

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