Among my books—what rest is there
From wasting woes! what balm for care!
If ills appall or clouds hang low,
And drooping, dim the fleeting show,
I revel still in visions rare.
At will I breathe the classic air,
The wanderings of Ulysses share;
Or see the plume of Bayard flow
Among my books.
Whatever face the world may wear—
If Lillian has no smile to spare,
For others let her beauty blow,
Such favors I can well forego;
Perchance forget the frowning fair
Among my books.
A RUINED LIBRARY.
Walter Herries Pollock. Written for the present collection.
"Imperious Cæsar dead and turn'd to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away."
Here the live thought of buried Cæsar's brain
Has served a lazy slut to lay the train
That lights a dunce's fire. Here Homer's seen
All torn or crumpled in the pettish spleen
Of some spoilt urchin. Here a leaf from Glanvil
Is reft to mark a place in 'On the Anvil.'
Here, too, a heavy-blotted Shakspere's page
Holds up an inky mirror to the age;
Here looking round you're but too sure to see a
Heart-breaking wreck from the 'Via Jacobæa;'
Here some rare pamphlet, long a-missing, lurks
In an odd volume of 'Lord Bacon's Works;'
Here may you find a Stillingfleet or Blair
Usurp the binding of a lost Voltaire;
And here a tattered Boyle doth gape ungently
Upon a damp-disfigured 'Life of Bentley.'
Here half a Rabelais jostles for position
The quarter of a 'Spanish Inquisition;'
Here Young's 'Night Thoughts' lie mixed with Swinburne's 'Ballads'
'Mid scraps of works on Poisons and on Salads;
And here a rent and gilt-edged Sterne doth lack a ray
Of sun that falls upon a bulging Thackeray;
Here—but the tale's too sad at length to tell
How a book-heaven's been turned to a book-hell.
MY BOOKS.
Bryan Waller Procter. From 'An Autobiographical
(Barry Cornwall.) Fragment.' 1877.
All round the room my silent servants wait,—
My friends in every season, bright and dim;
Angels and seraphim
Come down and murmur to me, sweet and low,
And spirits of the skies all come and go
Early and late;
All from the old world's divine and distant date,
From the sublimer few,
Down to the poet who but yester-eve
Sang sweet and made us grieve,
All come, assembling here in order due.
And here I dwell with Poesy, my mate,
With Erato and all her vernal sighs,
Great Clio with her victories elate,
Or pale Urania's deep and starry eyes.
O friends, whom chance and change can never harm,
Whom Death the tyrant cannot doom to die,
Within whose folding soft eternal charm
I love to lie,
And meditate upon your verse that flows,
And fertilizes whereso'er it goes,
Whether....