Baudelaire wrote:—
"Come, beauty, rest upon my loving heart,
But cease thy paws' sharp-nailed play,
And let me peer into those eyes that dart
Mixed agate and metallic ray."
* * * * *
"Grave scholars and mad lovers all admire
And love, and each alike, at his full tide
Those suave and puissant cats, the fireside's pride,
Who like the sedentary life and glow of fire."
Goldsmith also wrote of the kitten:—
"Around in sympathetic mirth
Its tricks the kitten tries:
The cricket chirrups in the hearth,
The crackling fagot flies."
Does this not suggest a charming glimpse of the poet's English home?
Keats was evidently not acquainted with the best and sleekest pet cat, and his "Sonnet to a Cat" does not indicate that he fully appreciated their higher qualities.
Mr. Whittier, our good Quaker poet, while not attempting an elaborate sonnet or stilted elegiac, shows a most appreciative spirit in the lines he wrote for a little girl who asked him one day, with tears in her eyes, to write an epitaph for her lost Bathsheba.
"Bathsheba: To whom none ever said scat,
No worthier cat
Ever sat on a mat
Or caught a rat:
Requies-cat."
Clinton Scollard, however, has given us an epitaph that many sympathizing admirers would gladly inscribe on the tombstones of their lost pets, if it were only the popular fashion to put tombstones over their graves. This is Mr. Scollard's tribute, the best ever written:—