UR Prince a little change would seek,
To town a short adieu he bids;
In Paris spends his Whitsun week,
And takes “the missus and the kids.”
At Dover on the deck he stands
(See ad.—“The shortest of sea routes”),
And hies him o’er to Calais sands
In tourist tweed and untanned boots.
The cares of State no longer vex,
From Fashion’s whirl he steps aside,
And takes a trip, our future Rex,
And with him goes his silver bride.
They take their boys and girls to see
The show no sceptred hand salutes,
And start, from princely trammels free,
In tourist tweeds and untanned boots.
Prince! standing in the blazing light
That beats upon a modern throne,
’Tis not in royal robes bedight,
I ween, your happiest hours are known.
The white stones on your road of life
Mark where you pluck sweet leisure’s fruits,
And with your boys and girls and wife
Go trips in tweeds and untanned boots.
A Sunday Song.
STOOD and I shivered last Sunday night
Till I bade them set the fire alight,
Then I sat with my feet on the fender bar,
And I told them to bring me the whisky jar.
I filled me a glass, and I held it high
As I glared at the gray and the gloomy sky,
And I sang to a sad funereal tune
The doleful dirge of an English June.
“O gruesome herald of Whitsun week,”
I cried as I gazed on the prospect bleak,
“The blazing heat of our one hot day
Has fried us up and has passed away;
And the weary summer of blights and chills
Has come to us big with its thousand ills,
And the lips of the lovers are blue who spoon
In Regent’s Park in our English June.”
A red nose pressed to the window-pane,
The swirling dust and the threatening rain,
A blue-black blight in the raw rough air,
A cut-throat climate and dull despair;
A tear for the days that will come no more,
A dose of physic at twelve and four.
And that is my Sunday afternoon
In the Arctic arms of an English June.