Beneath her window, veiled from eye,
They nightly took their stand;
On birthdays supplemented by
The Covent Garden band.
And little Ellen, all alone,
Enraptured sat above,
And thought how blest she was to own
The wealth of Powles’s love.
I often, often wonder what
Poor Ellen saw in him;
For calculated he was not
To please a woman’s whim.
He wasn’t good, despite the air
An M.B. waistcoat gives;
Indeed, his dearest friends declare
No greater humbug lives.
No kind of virtue decked this priest,
He’d nothing to allure;
He wasn’t handsome in the least,—
He wasn’t even poor.
No—he was cursed with acres fat
(A Christian’s direst ban),
And gold—yet, notwithstanding that,
Poor Ellen loved the man.
As unlike Bernard as could be
Was poor old Aaron Wood
(Disgraceful Bernard’s curate he):
He was extremely good.
A Bayard in his moral pluck
Without reproach or fear,
A quiet venerable duck
With fifty pounds a year.
No fault had he—no fad, except
A tendency to strum,
In mode at which you would have wept,
A dull harmonium.
He had no gold with which to hire
The minstrels who could best
Convey a notion of the fire
That raged within his breast.