“This book here, that lay open when I came in unaware,
Is not the first—I thought so!—but the last of many a stair
Of easy fall. Such only could have led you to his lair.
“These drugs, at first, had scarcely strength to move your virgin blood;
They slowly rose in action, till they wrought it to a flood,
Fit for their giver’s purpose, who—who turn’d it into mud!”
The lover then leaves Lilian to her own meditations, and commences to rant and rave against her seducer in good set terms, of which the following is a specimen:—
“Pardon, Heaven! that I doubted whether there was any hell.
Oh! but now I do believe it! Firmly, firmly! I foretell
Of one that shall rank high there: he’s a scoffer, and must dwell
“Where worms are—ever gnawing scoffers’ hearts into belief;
Where weepings, gnashings, wailings, thirstings, groanings, ghastly grief,
For ever and for ever pay the price of pleasures brief;
“Where Gallios, who while living knew but cared for none of these,
Now amazed with shame, would gladly, might it God (Fate there) appease,
Watch and pray a million cycles for a single moment’s ease.”
After having thus breathed his passion, in a diatribe which beats in abomination any slang that was ever ranted out of a tub by a mountebank saint, he harps back upon the prodigious attractiveness of his mistress, in the following pathetic, though not very consistent terms—
“Ah but had you known my Lilian! (a sweet name?) Indeed, indeed,
I doted on my Lilian. None can praise her half her meed.
Perfect in soul; too gentle—others’ need she made her need;
“Quite passionless, but ever bounteous-minded even to waste;
Much tenderness in talking; very urgent, yet no haste;
And chastity—to laud it would have seem’d almost unchaste.
“Graced highly, too, with knowledge; versed in tongues; a queen of dance;
An artist at her playing; a most touching utterance
In song; her lips’ mild music could make sweet the clack of France.”