THE HEPTALOGIA; OR, THE SEVEN AGAINST SENSE. A CAP WITH SEVEN BELLS.
I. The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell.
II. John Jones.
III. The Poet and the Woodlouse.
IV. The Person of the House (Idyl CCCLXVI.)
V. Last Words of a Seventh-rate Poet.
VI. Sonnet for a Picture.
VII. Nephelidia.
All these poems display wonderful power and choice of language, with a perfect mastery of the most difficult forms of metre, such as only a practised poet could achieve.
The Nineteenth Century for May, 1880, contained another of the Laureate's vague rhapsodical poems, entitled De Profundis, of which all the meaning was as well expressed in the following parody as in the original:—
"Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep,
From that great deep before our world begins;
Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore.
Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep,
With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy."
The Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant, by Mr. W. S. Gilbert, which was produced at the Savoy Theatre, on January 5th, 1884, though a humorous adaptation of Tennyson's Princess, is not strictly a burlesque, and is styled by the author "A Respectful Operatic Per-version" of the Laureate's poem. It is altered from an earlier piece by Mr. Gilbert on the same theme. Almost the only passage which can be considered an actual parody of Tennyson's diction is the speech of the Princess Ida to the Neophytes, which is modelled on the Lady Psyche's harangue in the original poem:—
"Women of Adamant, fair Neophytes—
Who thirst for such instruction as we give,
Attend, while I unfold a parable.
The elephant is mightier than Man,
Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant
Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead).
And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's,
As Woman's brain to man's—(that's rule of three)
Conquers the foolish giant of the woods,
As woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man!
In mathematics, woman leads the way—
The narrow-minded pedant still believes
That two and two make four! Why we can prove,
We women-household drudges as we are—
That two and two make five—or three—or seven;
Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands!
Diplomacy! The wiliest diplomate
Is absolutely helpless in our hands,
He wheedles monarchs—woman wheedles him!
Logic? Why, tyrant Man himself admits
It's waste of time to argue with a woman!
Then we excel in social qualities:
Though Man professes that he holds our sex
In utter scorn, I venture to believe
He'd rather spend the day with one of you
Than with five hundred of his fellow-men!
In all things we excel! Believing this,
A hundred maidens here have sworn to place
Their feet upon his neck. If we succeed,
We'll treat him better than he treated us:
But if we fail, why then let hope fail too!
Let no one care a penny how she looks—
Let red be worn with yellow—blue with green—
Crimson with scarlet—violet with blue!
Let all your things misfit, and you yourselves,
At inconvenient moments come undone!
Let hair-pins lose their virtue; let the hook
Disdain the fascination of the eye—
The bashful button modestly evade
The soft embraces of the button-hole!
Let old associations all dissolve,
Let Swan secede from Edgar—Gask from Gask—
Sewell from Cross—Lewis from Allenby!
In other words, let Chaos come again!
A large number of miscellaneous parodies remain to be noticed, a few of the best will be given in full; of the remainder it will be sufficient to indicate the works in which they occur, as they are readily accessible.