secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.
Photography Extraordinary
The Milk-and-Water School Alas! she would not hear my prayer!
Yet it were rash to tear my hair;
Disfigured, I should be less fair.
She was unwise, I may say blind;
Once she was lovingly inclined;
Some circumstance has changed her mind.
The Strong-Minded or Matter-of-Fact School
Well! so my offer was no go!
She might do worse, I told her so;
She was a fool to answer “No.”
However, things are as they stood;
Nor would I have her if I could,
For there are plenty more as good.
The Spasmodic or German School
Firebrands and daggers! hope hath fled!
To atoms dash the doubly dead!
My brain is fire—my heart is lead!
Her soul is flint, and what am I?
Scorch’d by her fierce, relentless eye,
Nothingness is my destiny!
Lays of Mystery, Imagination, and Humour
No.1: The Palace of Humbug
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls.
Faint odours of departed cheese,
Blown on the dank, unwholesome breeze,
Awoke the never-ending sneeze.
Strange pictures decked the arras drear,
Strange characters of woe and fear,
The humbugs of the social sphere.
One showed a vain and noisy prig,
That shouted empty words and big
At him that nodded in a wig.
And one, a dotard grim and gray,
Who wasteth childhood’s happy day
In work more profitless than play.
Whose icy breast no pity warms,
Whose little victims sit in swarms,
And slowly sob on lower forms.
And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,
Where flowers are growing wild and rank,
Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.
All birds of evil omen there
Flood with rich Notes the tainted air,
The witless wanderer to snare.
The fatal Notes neglected fall,
No creature heeds the treacherous call,
For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.
The wandering phantom broke and fled,
Straightway I saw within my head
A vision of a ghostly bed,
Where lay two worn decrepit men,
The fictions of a lawyer’s pen,
Who never more might breathe again.
The serving-man of Richard Roe
Wept, inarticulate with woe:
She wept, that waited on John Doe.
“Oh rouse,” I urged, “the waning sense
With tales of tangled evidence,
Of suit, demurrer, and defence.”
“Vain,” she replied, “such mockeries:
For morbid fancies, such as these,
No suits can suit, no plea can please.”
And bending o’er that man of straw,
She cried in grief and sudden awe,
Not inappropriately, “Law!”
The well-remembered voice he knew,
He smiled, he faintly muttered “Sue!”
(Her very name was legal too.)
The night was fled, the dawn was nigh:
A hurricane went raving by,
And swept the Vision from mine eye.
Vanished that dim and ghostly bed,
(The hangings, tape; the tape was red:)
’Tis o’er, and Doe and Roe are dead!
Oh, yet my spirit inly crawls,
What time it shudderingly recalls
That horrid dream of marble halls!
Oxford, 1855.
The
