A CITY FLOWER

"Il y a des fleurs animées.”

-POLITE COLLOQUIALISM.

To and fro in the City I go,

Tired of the ceaseless ebb and flow,
Sick of the crowded mart;

Tired of the din and rattle of wheels,
Sick of the dust as one who feels

The dust is over his heart.

And again and again, as the sunlight wanes,
I think of the lights in the leafy lanes,
With the bits of blue between ;

And when about Rimmel's the perfumes play,
I smell no vapours of "Ess Bouquet,"
But violets hid in the green;

And I love how I love-the plants that fill
The pots on my dust-dry window-sill,-

A sensitive sickly crop,

But a flower that charms me more, I think, Than cowslip, or crocus, or rose, or pink, Blooms-in a milliner's shop.

Hazel eyes that wickedly peep,
Flash, abash, and suddenly sleep
Under the lids drawn in;

Ripple of hair that rioteth out,
Mouth with a half-born smile and a pout,
And a baby breadth of chin;
Hands that light as the lighting bird,

On the bloom-bent bough, and the bough is stirred
With a delicate ecstasy;
Fingers tipped with a roseate flush,
Flicking and flirting a feathery brush
Over the papery bonnetry;—
Till the gauzy rose begins to glow,
And the gauzy hyacinths break and blow,
And the dusty grape grows red;
And the flaunting grasses seem to say,
"Do we look like ornaments-tell us, we pray-
Fit for a lady's head?"

And the butterfly wakes to a wiry life,
Like an elderly gentleman taking a wife,
Knowing he must be gay;

And all the bonnets nid-noddle about,
Like chattering chaperons set at a rout,
Quarrelling over their play.

How can I otherwise choose than look
At the beautiful face like a beautiful book,
And learn a tiny part?

So I feel somehow that every day
Some flake of the dust is brushed away
That had settled over my heart.

INCOGNITA

INCOGNITA

UST for a space that I met her—

JUST I

It began when she feared it would wet her,
That tiniest spurtle of rain:

So we tucked a great rug in the sashes,
And carefully padded the pane;
And I sorrow in sackcloth and ashes,
Longing to do it again!

Then it grew when she begged me to reach her

A dressing-case under the seat;

She was "really so tiny a creature,

That she needed a stool for her feet!"
Which was promptly arranged to her order
With a care that was even minute,
And a glimpse of an open-work border,
of the fairyest boot.

And a glance

Then it drooped, and revived at some hovels— "Were they houses for men or for pigs?" Then it shifted to muscular novels,

With a little digression on prigs :

She thought "Wives and Daughters" "so jolly"; "Had I read it?" She knew when I had, Like the rest, I should dote upon Molly"; And "poor Mrs. Gaskell-how sad!"

"Like Browning?" "But so-so." His proof lay
Too deep for her frivolous mood,
That preferred your mere metrical soufflé
To the stronger poetical food;

Yet at times he was good-" as a tonic":
Was Tennyson writing just now?
And was this new poet Byronic

And clever, and naughty, or how?

Then we trifled with concerts and croquêt,
Then she daintily dusted her face;
Then she sprinkled herself with "Ess Bouquet,"
Fished out from the foregoing case;
And we chattered of Gassier and Grisi,
And voted Aunt Sally a bore;
Discussed if the tight rope were easy,
Or Chopin much harder than Spohr.

And oh the odd things that she quoted,
With the prettiest possible look,
And the price of two buns that she noted
In the prettiest possible book;

While her talk like a musical rillet

Flashed on with the hours that flew;
And the carriage, her smile seemed to fill it
With just enough summer-for Two.

Till at last in her corner, peeping
From a nest of rugs and of furs,
With the white shut eyelids sleeping
On those dangerous looks of hers,

INCOGNITA

She seemed like a snow-drop breaking,
Not wholly alive nor dead,

But with one blind impulse making

To the sounds of the spring overhead;

And I watched in the lamplight's swerving
The shade of the down-dropt lid,
And the lip-line's delicate curving,
Where a slumbering smile lay hid,
Till I longed that, rather than sever,
The train should shriek into space,
And carry us onward-for ever,-
Me and that beautiful face.

But she suddenly woke in a fidget,

With fears she was "nearly at home," And talk of a certain Aunt Bridget,

Whom I mentally wished-well, at Rome; Got out at the very next station,

Looking back with a merry Bon Soir;

Adding, too, to my utter vexation,
A surplus, unkind Au Revoir.

So left me to muse on her graces,

To doze and to muse, till I dreamed That we sailed through the sunniest places In a glorified galley, it seemed;

But the cabin was made of a carriage,

And the ocean was Eau-de-Cologne, And we split on a rock labelled MARRIAGE, And I woke,-as cold as a stone.