“But thou, Memorial of monastic gall!
What fancy sad or lightsome hast thou given?
Thy vision-scaring sounds alone recall
The prayer that trembles on a yawn to Heaven,
And this Dean’s gape, and that Dean’s nasal tone.”
Would not this be a fine subject for a wild ode?
St. Withold footed thrice the Oulds,
He met the nightmare and her nine foals;
He bade her alight and her troth plight,
And, “Aroynt thee, Witch!” he said.
I shall set about one when I am in a humour to abandon myself to all the diableries that ever met the eye of a Fuseli!
Le Grice has jumbled together all the quaint stupidity he ever wrote, amounting to about thirty pages, and published it in a book about the size and dimensions of children’s twopenny books. The dedication is pretty. He calls the publication “Tineum;”[87] for what reason or with what meaning would give Madame Sphinx a complete victory over Œdipus.
A wag has handed about, I hear, an obtuse angle of wit, under the name of “An Epigram.” ’Tis almost as bad as the subject.
“A tiny man of tiny wit
A tiny book has published.
But not alas! one tiny bit
His tiny fame established.”
TO BOWLES.[88]
My heart has thank’d thee, Bowles! for those soft strains,
That, on the still air floating, tremblingly
Woke in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy!
For hence, not callous to a Brother’s pains
Thro’ Youth’s gay prime and thornless paths I went;
And when the darker day of life began,
And I did roam, a thought-bewildered man!
Thy kindred Lays an healing solace lent,
Each lonely pang with dreamy joys combin’d,
And stole from vain Regret her scorpion stings;
While shadowy Pleasure, with mysterious wings,
Brooded the wavy and tumultuous mind,
Like that great Spirit, who with plastic sweep
Mov’d on the darkness of the formless Deep!
Of the following sonnet, the four last lines were written by Lamb, a man of uncommon genius. Have you seen his divine sonnet of “O! I could laugh to hear the winter winds,” etc.?