My Library.
All round the room my silent servants wait,—
My friends in every season, bright and dim
Angels and seraphim
Come down and murmur to me, sweet and low,
And spirits of the skies all come and go
Early and late;
From the old world's divine and distant date,
From the sublimer few,
Down to the poet who but yester-eve
Sang sweet and made us grieve,
All come, assembling here in order due.
And here I dwell with Poesy, my mate,
With Erato and all her vernal sighs,
Great Clio with her victories elate,
Or pale Urania's deep and starry eyes.
Oh friends, whom chance or change can never harm,
Whom Death the tyrant cannot doom to die,
Within whose folding soft eternal charm
I love to lie,
And meditate upon your verse that flows,
And fertilizes wheresoe'er it goes.
Bryan Waller Procter.
Rational Madness.
A Song, for the Lover of Curious and Rare Books.
Come, boys, fill your glasses, and fill to the brim,
Here's the essence of humor, the soul, too, of whim!
Attend and receive (and sure 'tis no vapour)
A "hap' worth of wit on a pennyworth of paper."
Those joys which the Bibliomania affords
Are felt and acknowledged by Dukes and by Lords!
And the finest estate would be offer'd in vain
For an exemplar bound by the famed Roger Payne!
To a proverb goes madness with love hand in hand,
But our senses we yield to a double command;
The dear frenzy in both is first rous'd by fair looks,—
Here's our sweethearts, my boys! not forgetting our books!
Thus our time may we pass with rare books and rare friends,
Growing wiser and better, till life itself ends:
And may those who delight not in black-letter lore,
By some obsolete act be sent from our shore!
Ballade of True Wisdom.
While others are asking for beauty or fame,
Or praying to know that for which they should pray,
Or courting Queen Venus, that affable dame,
Or chasing the Muses the weary and grey,
The sage has found out a more excellent way—
To Pan and to Pallas his incense he showers,
And his humble petition puts up day by day,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
Inventors may bow to the God that is lame,
And crave from the fire on his stithy a ray;
Philosophers kneel to the God without name,
Like the people of Athens, agnostics are they;
The hunter a fawn to Diana will slay,
The maiden wild roses will wreathe for the Hours;
But the wise man will ask, ere libation he pay,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
Oh grant me a life without pleasure or blame
(As mortals count pleasure who rush through their day
With a speed to which that of the tempest is tame)
O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.