THE HOUSEMAID.
"Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide."
Alone she sits, with air resigned
She watches by the window-blind:
Poor girl! No doubt
The pilgrims here despise thy lot:
Thou canst not stir—because 'tis not
Thy Sunday out.
To play a game of hide and seek
With dust and cobwebs all the week,
Small pleasure yields:
O dear, how nice it is to drop
One's scrubbing-brush, one's pail and mop—
And scour the fields!
Poor Bodies some such Sundays know;
They seldom come. How soon they go!
But Souls can roam.
And, lapt in visions airy-sweet,
She sees in this too doleful street
Her own loved Home!
The road is now no road. She pranks
A brawling stream with thymy banks;
In Fancy's realm
This post sustains no lamp—aloof
It spreads above her parents' roof
A gracious elm.
How often has she valued there
A father's aid—a mother's care:—
She now has neither:
And yet—such work in dreams is done,
She still may sit and smile with one
More dear than either.
The poor can love through woe and pain,
Although their homely speech is fain
To halt in fetters:
They feel as much, and do far more
Than those, at times of meaner ore,
Miscalled their Betters.
Sometimes, on summer afternoons
Of sundry sunny Mays and Junes—
Meet Sunday weather,
I pass her window by design,
And wish her Sunday out and mine
Might fall together.
For sweet it were my lot to dower
With one brief joy, one white-robed flower;
And prude, or preacher,
Could hardly deem it much amiss
To lay one on the path of this
Forlorn young creature.
Yet if her thought on wooing runs—
And if her swain and she are ones
Who fancy strolling,
She'd like my nonsense less than his,
And so it's better as it is—
And that's consoling.
Her dwelling is unknown to fame—
Perchance she's fair—perchance her name
Is Car, or Kitty;
She may be Jane—she might be plain—
For need the object of one's strain
Be always pretty?