He planted pansies 'round its foot,

"Pansies for thoughts!" and rose and arum ; The Motto (that he meant to put)

Was "Ille angulus terrarum.”

But "Oh! the change" (as Milton sings)"The heavy change!" When May departed, When June with its "delightful things"

Had come and gone, the rough bark started,Began to lose its sylvan brown,

Grew parched, and powdery, and spotted; And, though the Poet nailed it down,

It still flapped up, and dropped, and rotted.

Nor was this all. 'Twas next the scene
Of vague (and viscous) vegetations;
Queer fissures gaped, with oozings green,
And moist, unsavoury exhalations,—
Faint wafts of wood decayed and sick,
Till, where he meant to carve his Motto,
Strange leathery fungi sprouted thick,
And made it like an oyster grotto.

Briefly, it grew a seat of scorn,

Bare, shameless,-till, for fresh disaster,

From end to end, one April morn,

'Twas riddled like a pepper caster,

Drilled like a vellum of old time;

And musing on this final mystery,

The Poet left off scribbling rhyme,

And took to studying Natural History.

THE POET'S SEAT

This was the turning of the tide;

His five-act play is still unwritten; The dreams that now his soul divide

Are more of Lubbock than of Lytton; "Ballades" are "verses vain" to him

Whose first ambition is to lecture (So much is man the sport of whim!) On "Insects and their Architecture."

THE LOST ELIXIR

"One drop of rudy human blood puts more life into the veins of a poem than all the dlsive aurum potabile' that can be distilled out of the choicest library.”—LOWELL.

AH, yes, that "drop of human blood!”—
We had it once, may be,

When our young song's impetuous flood
First poured its ecstasy;

But now the shrunk poetic vein
Yields not that priceless drop again.

We toil, as toiled we not of old;
Our patient hands distil
The shining spheres of chemic gold
With hard-won, fruitless skill;
But that red drop still seems to be
Beyond our utmost alchemy.

Perchance, but most in later age,
Time's after-gift, a tear,

Will strike a pathos on the page

Beyond all art sincere;

But that "one drop of human blood"

Has gone with life's first leaf and bud.

MEMORIAL VERSES