She is like a fish in water; she can handle reins and racket;
From head to toe and finger-tips she’s thoroughly alive;
When she goes promenading in a most distracting jacket,
The rustle round her feet suggests how laundresses may thrive.
She can dare the wind and sunshine in the most bravado manner,
And after hours of sailing she has merely cheeks of rose;
Old Sol himself seems smitten and at most will only tan her,
Though to everybody else he gives a danger-signal nose.
She’s a trifle sentimental, and she’s fond of admiration,
And she sometimes flirts a little in the season’s giddy whirl;
But win her if you can, sir, she may prove your life’s salvation,
For an angel masquerading oft is she, the summer girl.
“THE BEAUTIFUL BLUE DANUBE.”
[With “Blue Danube Waltz” as musical accompaniment.]
HEY drift down the hall together,
He smiles in her lifted eyes;
Like waves of that mighty river,
The strains of the “Danube” rise.
They float on its rhythmic measure,
Like leaves on a summer stream;
And here, in this scene of pleasure,
I bury my sweet, dead dream.
Through the cloud of her dusky tresses,
Like a star shines out her face;
And the form his strong arm presses,
Is sylph-like in its grace.
As a leaf on the bounding river
Is lost on the seething sea,
I know that forever and ever
My dream is lost to me.
And still the viols are playing
That grand old wordless rhyme;
And still those two are swaying
In perfect tune and time.
If the great bassoons that mutter,
If the clarionets that blow,
Were given a voice to utter
The secret things they know,
Would the lists of the slain who slumber
On the Danube’s battle-plains
The unknown hosts outnumber
Who die, ’neath the “Danube’s” strains?
Those fall where cannons rattle,
’Mid the rain of shot and shell;
But these, in a fiercer battle,
Find death in the music’s swell.