"You shall judge for yourself," said Lady Mabel. "But the grandiloquence of the epistle, worthy of Captain Don Alonzo Melendez himself, calls not for reading, but recitation. Do you sit here as critic, while I take my stand in the middle of the room, and give it utterance with all the elocution and pathos I can muster. You must know that this epistle I hold in my hand, is addressed to me by no less a personage than the river-god of the Guadiana, who, contrary to all my notions of mythology, proves to be a gentleman, and not a lady." And, in a slightly mock-heroic tone, she began to recite it:
Maiden, the sunshine of thine eye,
Flashing my joyous waves along,
The magic of thy soul-lit smile,
Have waked my murmuring voice to song.
Winding through Hispania's mountains,
Watering her sunburnt plains,
I, from earliest time, have gladdened
Dwellers on these wide domains.
I have watched succeeding races,
Peopling my fertile strand,
Marked each varying lovely model,
Moulded by Nature's plastic hand.
Striving still to reach perfection,
Ruthless, she broke each beauteous mould;
Some blemish still deformed her creature,
Some alloy still defiled her gold.
The Iberian girl has often bathed,
Her limbs in my delighted flood,
And no Acteon came to startle
This very Dian of the wood.
The stately Roman maid has loitered,
Pensive, upon my flowering shore,
Shedding some pearly drops to think,
Italia she may see no more.
While gazing on my placid face,
She meditates her distant home;
And rears, as upon Tiber's banks,
The towers of imperial Rome.
The blue-eyed daughter of the Goth,
Fresh from her northern forest-home,
In rude nobility of race,
Foreshadowed her who now has come.
The loveliest offspring of the Moor
Beside my moon-lit current sat;
And, sighing, sung her hopeless love,
In strains, that I remember yet.
The Christian knight, in captive chains,
The conqueror of her heart has proved;
His own, in far Castilian bower,
He bears her blandishments unmoved.
Thus Nature tried her 'prentice hand,
Become, at last, an artist true;
In inspiration's happiest mood,
She tried again, and moulded you.
Maiden, from my crystal surface,
May thy image never fade;
Longing, longing, to embrace thee,
I, alas! embrace a shade.
Fainter glows each beauteous image,
Thy beauty vanishing before;
I will clasp thy lovely shadow,
Fate will grant to me no more.
If the verses were not very good, L'Isle was ready to acknowledge it; but, in fact, he had not the fear of criticism before his eyes; for when did lady ever criticise verses made in her praise? But he had reckoned without his host. Though Lady Mabel recited them exceedingly well, in a way that showed that she must have read them over many times, and dwelt upon them, there was an under-current of ridicule running through her tones and action—for she had personified the river-god—and when she was done, she criticised them with merciless irony.
"This is no timid rhymster," she exclaimed, "but a true poet of the Spanish school: No figure is too bold for him. A mere versifier would have likened a lady's eyes to earthly diamonds or heavenly stars; the blessed sun itself is not too bright for our poet's purpose.—My timid fancy dared not follow his soaring wing; to me at the first glance, the 'stately Roman maid' was building her mimic Rome on the banks of the Guadiana with solid stone and tough cement, and I saddened at the sight of her labors. To come down to the mechanism of the verse," she continued, "besides a false rhyme or two, the measure halts a little.—But we must not forget that the river-god is taking a poetical stroll in the shackles of a foreign tongue. In this case we have good assurance that the poet has never been out of his own country, and to the eye of a foreigner 'flood' and 'wood' and 'home' and 'come' are perfect rhymes. We must deal gently with the poet while 'trying his 'prentice hand,' hoping better things when he shall 'become an artist true;' and when we remember that to the national taste sublimity is represented by bombast, artifice takes the place of nature, and sense is sacrificed to sound, the love of the ore rotundo demanding mouth-filling words at any price, we cannot fail to discover the genuine Spanish beauties of the piece. I only wonder that in his chronological picture of the races he should omit to display the Phoenician, Jewish and Gipsy maidens to our admiring eyes."
"Heyday!" exclaimed Colonel Bradshawe, who now came in with Major Warren, while she was still standing in the middle of the floor, with the paper raised in her hand, "Is this a rehearsal? Are we to have private theatricals, with Lady Mabel for first and sole actress? With songs interspersed for her as prima donna? Pray let me come in as one of the dramatis personæ."
"It is no play!" said Lady Mabel, much confused. "I have just been throwing away my powers of elocution in an attempt to make Colonel L'Isle perceive the beauties of a piece of model poetry, moulded in the purest Spanish taste. I thought him gifted with some poetic feeling, but he shows not the slightest sense of its peculiar merits."
L'Isle, though much out of countenance, had kept his seat through the recitation, but now got up looking little pleased with it.
"Try me," said Major Warren. "You may be more successful in finding a critic."
"I never suspected you of any critical acumen," said Lady Mabel; "and so could not be disappointed."
"Do not overlook me," said Bradshawe. "Poetry is the expression of natural feeling, in a state of exaltation. Now, I am always in an exalted state of feeling in your company, and may be just now a very capable judge."