Anon my studious art for days
Kept making faces—happy phrase,
For faces such as mine!
Accomplish’d in the details then
I left the minor parts of men,
And drew the form divine.
Old gods and heroes—Trojan—Greek,
Figures—long after the antique,
Great Ajax justly fear’d;
Hectors of whom at night I dreamt,
And Nestor, fringed enough to tempt
Bird-nesters to his beard.
A Bacchus, leering on a bowl,
A Pallas, that outstar’d her owl,
A Vulcan—very lame;
A Dian stuck about with stars,
With my right hand I murder’d Mars—
(One Williams did the same.)
But tir’d of this dry work at last,
Crayon and chalk aside I cast,
And gave my brush a drink!
Dipping—“as when a painter dips
In gloom of earthquake and eclipse”—
That is—in Indian ink.
Oh then, what black Mont Blancs arose.
Crested with soot, and not with snows;
What clouds of dingy hue!
In spite of what the bard has penn’d,
I fear the distance did not “lend
Enchantment to the view.”
Not Radcliffe’s brush did e’er design
Black Forests, half so black as mine,
Or lakes so like a pall;
The Chinese cake dispers’d a ray
Of darkness, like the light of Day
And Martin over all.
Yet urchin pride sustain’d me still,
I gaz’d on all with right good-will,
And spread the dingy tint;
“No holy Luke helped me to paint.
The Devil surely, not a saint.
Had any finger in’t”.
But colours came!—like morning light,
With gorgeous hues displacing night,
Or spring’s enliven’d scene:
At once the sable shades withdrew;
My skies got very, very blue;
My trees extremely green.
And wash’d by my cosmetic brush,
How beauty’s cheek began to blush;
With locks of auburn stain—
(Not Goldsmith’s Auburn)—nut-brown hair,
That made her loveliest of the fair;
Not “loveliest of the plain!”
Her lips were of vermilion hue;
Love in her eyes, and Prussian blue,
Set all my heart in flame!—
A young Pygmalion, I adored
The maids I made—but time was stor’d
With evil—and it came!