After Mrs. Browning in the Gloaming
IN the gloaming to be roaming, where the crested waves are foaming,
And the shy mermaidens combing locks that ripple to their feet;
When the gloaming is, I never made the ghost of an endeavor
To discover—but whatever were the hour, it would be sweet.
“To their feet,” I say, for Leech’s sketch indisputably teaches
That the mermaids of our beaches do not end in ugly tails,
Nor have homes among the corals; but are shod with neat balmorals,
An arrangement no one quarrels with, as many might with scales.
Sweet to roam beneath a shady cliff, of course with some young lady,
Lalage, Nærea, Haidee, or Elaine, or Mary Ann:
Love, you dear delusive dream, you! Very sweet your victims deem you,
When, heard only by the seamew, they talk all the stuff one can.
Sweet to haste, a licensed lover, to Miss Pinkerton, the glover;
Having managed to discover what is dear Nærea’s “size”:
P’raps to touch that wrist so slender, as your tiny gift you tender,
And to read you’re no offender, in those laughing hazel eyes.
Then to hear her call you “Harry,” when she makes you fetch and carry—
O young men about to marry, what a blessed thing it is!
To be photograph’d—together—cased in pretty Russia leather—
Hear her gravely doubting whether they have spoilt your honest phiz!
Then to bring your plighted fair one first a ring—a rich and rare one—
Next a bracelet, if she’ll wear one, and a heap of things beside;
And serenely bending o’er her, to inquire if it would bore her
To say when her own adorer may aspire to call her bride!
Then, the days of courtship over, with your WIFE to start for Dover
Or Dieppe—and live in clover evermore, what e’er befalls;
For I’ve read in many a novel that, unless they’ve souls that grovel
Folks prefer in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls.
To sit, happy married lovers; Phillis trifling with a plover’s
Egg, while Corydon uncovers with a grace the Sally Lunn,
Or dissects the lucky pheasant—that, I think, were passing pleasant,
As I sit alone at present, dreaming darkly of a Dun.
C. S. Calverley.
Gwendoline
’TWAS not the brown of chestnut boughs
That shadowed her so finely;
It was the hair that swept her brows,
And framed her face divinely;
Her tawny hair, her purple eyes,
The spirit was ensphered in,
That took you with such swift surprise,
Provided you had peered in.
Her velvet foot amid the moss
And on the daisies patted,
As, querulous with sense of loss,
It tore the herbage matted.
“And come he early, come he late,”
She saith, “it will undo me;
The sharp fore-speeded shaft of fate
Already quivers through me.
“When I beheld his red-roan steed,
I knew what aim impelled it.
And that dim scarf of silver brede,
I guessed for whom he held it.
I recked not, while he flaunted by,
Of Love’s relentless vi’lence
Yet o’er me crashed the summer sky,
In thunders of blue silence.
“His hoof-prints crumbled down the dale,
But left behind their lava;
What should have been my woman’s mail
Grew jellied as guava.
I looked him proud, but ’neath my pride
I felt a boneless tremor;
He was the Beér, I descried,
And I was but the Seemer!
“Ah, how to be what then I seemed,
And bid him seem that is so!
We always tangle threads we dreamed,
And contravene our bliss so,
I see the red-roan steed again!
He looks as something sought he;
Why, hoity-toity!—he is fain,
So I’ll be cold and haughty!”
Bayard Taylor.