LAWRENCE. Yes. But the Pipe FRANK. The Pipe is what we care for, JACK. Well, in this case, I scarcely need explain, Judgment of mine were indiscreet, and therefore,— Peace to you both. The Pipe I shall retain. A GARDEN IDYLL. A LADY. A POET. THE LADY. IR POET, ere you crossed the lawn STR (If it was wrong to watch you, pardon,) Behind this weeping birch withdrawn, I watched you saunter round the garden. I saw you bend beside the phlox, Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle, Review my well-ranged hollyhocks, Smile at the fountain's slender spurtle; You paused beneath the cherry-tree, Where my marauder thrush was singing, Peered at the bee-hives curiously, And narrowly escaped a stinging; And then-you see I watched-you passed Down the espalier walk that reaches Out to the western wall, and last Dropped on the seat before the peaches. What was your thought? You waited long. Sublime or graceful,-grave,-satiric? A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song? THE POET. Madam,-whose uncensorious eye It may be, thicker than the Sage's— Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you, Some verse as whimsical as Hood, As gay as Praed,-should answer to you. But, though the common voice proclaims 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. More empty things, I fear, than rhymes, Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive, "A primrose by a river's brim" Is absolutely unsuggestive. The fickle Muse! As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer ; She flies the more that we pursue her; But cannot comfortably show it. You thought, no doubt, the garden-scent H Or else you thought,-the murmuring noon, And windy bough-swing in the metre ; Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms, Round singing mouths, and chanted charms, And mediæval orchard blossoms, Quite à la mode. Alas for prose!— My vagrant fancies only rambled Back to the red-walled Rectory close, When first my graceless boyhood gamboled, Climbed on the dial, teased the fish, And chased the kitten round the beeches, Till widening instincts made me wish Three peaches. Not the Graces three I would not look, yet went to see; The Laws of Property beset them; The conflict made my reason reel, And, half-abstractedly, I ate them;— |