"I intend to put it into verse, strike me ugly if I don't!" cried the young officer; "and perhaps the signora will allow me to copy it into her Album?"
"Oh! I must read it first," said Isabella, laughing. "But since you speak of my Album, I must show you the additions I have received to its treasures."
"This is really a beautiful landscape," observed Captain Dapper, as he turned over the leaves of the book which the beautiful Italian presented to him. "The water flowing over the wheel of the mill is quite natural, strike me! And—may I never know what fair woman's smiles are again, if those trees don't seem actually to be growing out of the paper!"
"Thuperb?" ejaculated Sir Cherry Bounce. "The wiver litewally wollth along in the picthure. The cowth and the theepe are walking in the gween fieldth. Pway who might have been the artitht of thith mathleth producthion?"
"That is a secret," said the signora. "And now read these lines."
"Read them yourself, Bella," said the count. "No one can do justice to them but you."
Isabella accordingly read the following stanzas in a tone of voice that added a new charm to the words themselves:—
LONDON.
'Twas midnight—and the beam of Cynthia shone
In company with many a lovely star,
Steeping in silver the huge Babylon
Whose countless habitations stretch afar,
Plain, valley, hill, and river's bank upon,
And in whose mighty heart all interests jar!—
O sovereign city of a thousand towers,
What vice is cradled in thy princely bowers!
If thou would'st view fair London-town aright,
Survey her from the bridge of Waterloo;
And let the hour be at the morning's light,
When the sun's earliest rays have struggled through
The star-bespangled curtain of the night,
And when Aurora's locks are moist with dew:
Then take thy stand upon that bridge, and see
London awake in all her majesty!