The very sea seemed altered, and the shore; So that he sat "consuming in a dream,' Until there came the question, "Is she gone?" Then, in a dream, beside the "Dragon" door, The smith saw travellers standing in the sun; Then came the horn again, and three or four Looked idly at him from the roof, but One,— A Child within,-suffused with sudden shame, Thrust forth a hand, and called to him by name. Thus the coach vanished from his sight, but he Limped back with bitter pleasure in his pain; He was not all forgotten-could it be? And yet the knowledge made the memory vain; And then he felt a pressure in his throat, What then might come of silent misery, What new resolvings then might intervene, I know not. Only, with the morning sky, The goat stood tethered on the "Dragon' green, And those who, wondering, questioned thereupon, Found the hut empty,-for the man was gone. A STORY FROM A DICTIONARY "Sic visum Veneri: cui placet impares Formas atque animos sub juga aënea HOR. i. 33. "LOVE mocks us all "—as Horace said of old: From sheer perversity, that arch-offender Still yokes unequally the hot and cold, The short and tall, the hardened and the tender; He bids a Socrates espouse a scold, And makes a Hercules forget his gender : Sic visum Veneri! Lest samples fail, I add a fresh one from the page of BAYLE. It was in Athens that the thing occurred, The studious murmur of its learned school;— Nay, 'tis one favoured of Minerva's bird Who plays therein the hero (or the fool) With a Megarian, who must then have been A maid, and beautiful, and just eighteen. I shan't describe her. Beauty is the same The type is still that witching One who came, 'Tis but to shift accessories and frame, And this our heroine in a trice would be, Save that she wore a peplum and a chiton, Like any modern on the beach at Brighton. Stay, I forget! Of course the sequel shows Who nowadays descant on "Woman's Mission," Or tread instead that "primrose path "" to know. ledge, There were no curates in that sunny Greece, To shake the centres of domestic peace ;) The "object" here was mildly prepossessing, His ways were primitive; and as to dressing, Sic visum Veneri !—The thing is clear. Her friends were furious, her lovers nettled; Twas much as though the Lady Vere de Vere On some hedge-schoolmaster her heart had settled. Unheard! Intolerable!—a lumbering steer To plod the upland with a mare high-mettled!They would, no doubt, with far more pleasure hand her To curled Euphorion or Anaximander. And so they used due discipline, of course, Confinement (solitary), and bread and water; Being, they fancied, but a bloodless thing; Or else too well forewarned of that commotion Which poets feign inseparable from Spring To suffer danger from a school-girl notion; Also they hoped that she might find her king, On close inspection, clumsy and Boeotian :This was acute enough, and yet, between us, I think they thought too little about Venus. 1 "Unwisely," surely. But 'tis well to mention |