Concerning verses in Rhymes à la Mode, visitors to St. Andrews may be warned not to visit St. Leonard’s Chapel, described in the second stanza of Almae Matres. In the writer’s youth, and even in middle age,
He loitered idly where the tall
Fresh-budded mountain-ashes blow
Within its desecrated wall.
The once beautiful ruins carpeted with grass and wild flowers have been doubly desecrated by persons, academic persons, having authority and a plentiful lack of taste. The slim mountain-ashes, fair as the young palm-tree that Odysseus saw beside the shrine of Apollo in Delos, have been cut down by the academic persons to whom power is given. The grass and flowers have been rooted up. Hideous little wooden fences enclose the grave slabs: a roof of a massive kind has been dumped down on the old walls, and the windows, once so graceful in their airy lines, have been glazed in a horrible manner, while the ugly iron gate precludes entrance to a shrine which is now a black and dismal dungeon.
“Oh, be that roof as lead to lead
Above the dull Restorer’s head,
A Minstrel’s malison is said!”
Notes explanatory are added to the Rhymes, and their information, however valuable, need not here be repeated.
BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA
| Tout |
par | Soullas |
A BALLADE OF XXXII BALLADES.
Friend, when you bear a care-dulled eye,
And brow perplexed with things of weight,
And fain would bid some charm untie
The bonds that hold you all too strait,
Behold a solace to your fate,
Wrapped in this cover’s china blue;
These ballades fresh and delicate,
This dainty troop of Thirty-two!
The mind, unwearied, longs to fly
And commune with the wise and great;
But that same ether, rare and high,
Which glorifies its worthy mate,
To breath forspent is disparate:
Laughing and light and airy-new
These come to tickle the dull pate,
This dainty troop of Thirty-two.