No! mine was a joke for the ages;
Full of intricate meaning and pith;
A feast for your scholars and sages—
How it would have rejoiced Sidney Smith!
’Tis such thoughts that ennoble a mortal;
And, singing him out from the herd,
Fling wide immortality’s portal—
But what was the word?
Ah me! ’tis a bootless endeavour.
As the flight of a bird of the air
Is the flight of a joke—you will never
See the same one again, you may swear.
’Twas my firstborn, and O how I prized it!
My darling, my treasure, my own!
This brain and none other devised it—
And now it has flown.
ON THE BEACH.
LINES BY A PRIVATE TUTOR.
When the young Augustus Edward
Has reluctantly gone bedward
(He’s the urchin I am privileged to teach),
From my left-hand waistcoat pocket
I extract a batter’d locket
And I commune with it, walking on the beach.
I had often yearn’d for something
That would love me, e’en a dumb thing;
But such happiness seem’d always out of reach:
Little boys are off like arrows
With their little spades and barrows,
When they see me bearing down upon the beach;
And although I’m rather handsome,
Tiny babes, when I would dance ’em
On my arm, set up so horrible a screech
That I pitch them to their nurses
With (I fear me) mutter’d curses,
And resume my lucubrations on the beach.
And the rabbits won’t come nigh me,
And the gulls observe and fly me,
And I doubt, upon my honour, if a leech
Would stick on me as on others,
And I know if I had brothers
They would cut me when we met upon the beach.
So at last I bought this trinket.
For (although I love to think it)
’Twasn’t given me, with a pretty little speech:
No! I bought it of a pedlar,
Brown and wizen’d as a medlar,
Who was hawking odds and ends about the beach.
But I’ve managed, very nearly,
To believe that I was dearly
Loved by Somebody, who (blushing like a peach)
Flung it o’er me saying, “Wear it
For my sake”—and I declare, it
Seldom strikes me that I bought it on the beach.
I can see myself revealing
Unsuspected depths of feeling,
As, in tones that half upbraid and half beseech,
I aver with what delight I
Would give anything—my right eye—
For a souvenir of our stroll upon the beach.