"Now, hear another." And the woods rang with his clear, sonorous accents as he declaimed, a little too scanningly, perhaps—too much like an enthusiastic boy:
"Love lurks upon my lady's lip,
His bow is figured there;
Within her eyes his arrows sleep;
His fetters are—her hair!"
"I call that nothing but a bundle of conceits, Major Favraud, mostly of the days of Charles II., of Rochester himself—" interrupting him as I in turn was interrupted.
"But hear further," and he proceeded to the end of that marvelous ebullition of foam and fervor, such as celebrated the birth of Aphrodite herself perchance in the old Greek time; and which, despite my perverse intentions, stirred me as if I had quaffed a draught of pink champagne. Is it not, indeed, all couleur de rose? Hear this bit of melody, my reader, sitting in supreme judgment, and perhaps contempt, on your throne apart:
"'Upon her cheek the crimson ray
By changes comes and goes,
As rosy-hued Aurora's play
Along the polar snows;
Gay as the insect-bird that sips
From scented flowers the dew—
Pure as the snowy swan that dips
Its wings in waters blue;
Sweet thoughts are mirrored on her face,
Like clouds on the calm sea,
And every motion is a grace,
Each word a melody!'"
"Yes, that is true poetry, I acknowledge, Major Favraud," I exclaimed, not at all humbled by conviction, though a little annoyed at the pointed manner in which he gave (looking in my face as he did so) these concluding lines:
"Say from what fair and sunny shore,
Fair wanderer, dost thou rove,
Lest what I only should adore
I heedless think to love?"
"The character of Pinckney's genius," I rejoined, "is, I think, essentially like that of Praed, the last literary phase with me—for I am geological in my poetry, and take it in strata. But I am more generous to your Southern bard than you are to our glorious Longfellow! I don't call that imitation, but coincidence, the oneness of genius! I do not even insinuate plagiarism." My manner, cool and careless, steadied his own.
"You are right: our 'Shortfellow' was incapable of any thing of the sort. Peace be to his ashes! With all his nerve and vim, he died of melancholy, I believe. As good an end as any, however, and certainly highly respectable. But you know what Wordsworth says in his 'School-master'—
"'If there is one that may bemoan
His kindred laid in earth,
The household hearts that were his own,
It is the man of mirth.'"