Kneel,—at a respectful distance,—as they kneeled to her, and try
With judicious hand to put a ball into that ball-less eye:
Till a stiffness seize thy elbows, and the general public wake—
Then return, and, clear of conscience, walk into thy well-earned steak.
Ere yet “knowledge for the million”
Came out “neatly bound in boards;”
When like Care upon a pillion
Matrons rode behind their lords:
Rarely, save to hear the Rector,
Forth did younger ladies roam;
Making pies, and brewing nectar
From the gooseberry-trees at home.
They’d not dreamed of Pan or Vevay;
Ne’er should into blossom burst
At the ball or at the levée;
Never come, in fact, my first:
Nor illumine cards by dozens
With some labyrinthine text,
Nor work smoking-caps for cousins
Who were pounding at my next.
Now have skirts, and minds, grown ampler;
Now not all they seek to do
Is create upon a sampler
Beasts which Buffon never knew:
But their venturous muslins rustle
O’er the cragstone and the snow,
Or at home their biceps muscle
Grows by practising the bow.
Worthier they those dames who, fable
Says, rode “palfreys” to the war
With gigantic Thanes, whose “sable
Destriers caracoled” before;
Smiled, as—springing from the war-horse
As men spring in modern ‘cirques’—
They plunged, ponderous as a four-horse
Coach, among the vanished Turks:—
In the good times when the jester
Asked the monarch how he was,
And the landlady addrest her
Guests as ‘gossip’ or as ‘coz’;
When the Templar said, “Gramercy,”
Or, “’Twas shrewdly thrust, i’ fegs,”
To Sir Halbert or Sir Percy
As they knocked him off his legs:
And, by way of mild reminders
That he needed coin, the Knight
Day by day extracted grinders
From the howling Israelite:
And my whole in merry Sherwood
Sent, with preterhuman luck,
Missiles—not of steel but firwood—
Thro’ the two-mile-distant buck.
Evening threw soberer hue
Over the blue sky, and the few
Poplars that grew just in the view
Of the hall of Sir Hugo de Wynkle:
“Answer me true,” pleaded Sir Hugh,
(Striving to woo no matter who,)
“What shall I do, Lady, for you?
’Twill be done, ere your eye may twinkle.
Shall I borrow the wand of a Moorish enchanter,
And bid a decanter contain the Levant, or
The brass from the face of a Mormonite ranter?
Shall I go for the mule of the Spanish Infantar—
(That r, for the sake of the line, we must grant her,)—
And race with the foul fiend, and beat in a canter,
Like that first of equestrians Tam o’ Shanter?
I talk not mere banter—say not that I can’t, or
By this my first—(a Virginia planter
Sold it me to kill rats)—I will die instanter.”
The Lady bended her ivory neck, and
Whispered mournfully, “Go for—my second.”
She said, and the red from Sir Hugh’s cheek fled,
And “Nay,” did he say, as he stalked away
The fiercest of injured men:
“Twice have I humbled my haughty soul,
And on bended knee I have pressed my whole—
But I never will press it again!”