“For her bonny face
And for her fair bodie.”
In 1825 (after being elected to the Athenæum) Mr. Bayly “at last found favour in the eyes of Miss Hayes.” He presented her with a little ruby heart, which she accepted, and they were married, and at first were well-to-do, Miss Hayes being the heiress of Benjamin Hayes, Esq., of Marble Hill, in county Cork. A friend of Mr. Bayly’s described him thus:
“I never have met on this chilling earth
So merry, so kind, so frank a youth,
In moments of pleasure a smile all mirth,
In moments of sorrow a heart of truth.
I have heard thee praised, I have seen thee led
By Fashion along her gay career;
While beautiful lips have often shed
Their flattering poison in thine ear.”
Yet he says that the poet was unspoiled. On his honeymoon, at Lord Ashdown’s, Mr. Bayly, flying from some fair sirens, retreated to a bower, and there wrote his world-famous “I’d be a Butterfly.”
“I’d be a butterfly, living a rover,
Dying when fair things are fading away.”
The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer’s heart was henceforth known as “Butterfly Bower.” He now wrote a novel, “The Aylmers,” which has gone where the old moons go, and he became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore Hook. The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses, which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies. One of them, Sold for a Song, succeeded very well. In the stage-coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little lever de rideau called Perfection; and it was lucky that he opened this vein, for his wife’s Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty-five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly minstrel, into the winter of human age.
Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapæstics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, “words for music” are almost invariably trash now, though the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and don’t know anything about it. But any one can see that words like Bayly’s are and have long been much more popular with musical people than words like Shelley’s, Keats’s, Shakespeare’s, Fletcher’s, Lovelace’s, or Carew’s. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at all events, the singing world doted on Bayly.
“She never blamed him—never,
But received him when he came
With a welcome sort of shiver,
And she tried to look the same.“But vainly she dissembled,
For whene’er she tried to smile,
A tear unbidden trembled
In her blue eye all the while.”
This was pleasant for “him”; but the point is that these are lines to an Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian air; but we may “swear, and save our oath,” that the singers preferred Bayly’s. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:
“When the eye of beauty closes,
When the weary are at rest,
When the shade the sunset throws is
But a vapour in the west;
When the moonlight tips the billow
With a wreath of silver foam,
And the whisper of the willow
Breaks the slumber of the gnome,—
Night may come, but sleep will linger,
When the spirit, all forlorn,
Shuts its ear against the singer,
And the rustle of the corn
Round the sad old mansion sobbing
Bids the wakeful maid recall
Who it was that caused the throbbing
Of her bosom at the ball.”