It was an idle dream; but thou,
The worshipped one, wert there,
With thy dark clear eyes and beaming brow,
White neck and floating hair;
And oh, I had an honest heart,
And a house of Portland stone;
And thou wert dear, as still thou art,
And more than dear, my own!
Oh bitterness!—the morning broke
Alike for boor and bard;
And thou wert married when I woke,
And all the rest was marred:
And toil and trouble, noise and steam,
Came back with the coming ray;
And, if I thought the dead could dream,
I’d hang myself to-day!
MARRIAGE CHIMES.
——“Go together,
You precious winners all.”
—Winter’s Tale.
Fair Lady, ere you put to sea,
You and your mate together,
I meant to hail you lovingly,
And wish you pleasant weather.
I took my fiddle from the shelf,
But vain was all my labour;
For still I thought about myself,
And not about my neighbour.
Safe from the perils of the war,
Nor killed, nor hurt, nor missing—
Since many things in common are
Between campaigns and kissing—
Ungrazed by glance, unbound by ring,
Love’s carte and tierce I’ve parried,
While half my friends are marrying,
And half—good lack!—are married.
’Tis strange—but I have passed alive
Where darts and deaths were plenty,
Until I find my twenty-five
As lonely as my twenty:
And many lips have sadly sighed—
Which were not made for sighing,
And many hearts have darkly died—
Which never dreamed of dying.
Some victims fluttered like a fly,
Some languished like a lily;
Some told their tale in poetry,
And some in Piccadilly:
Some yielded to a Spanish hat,
Some to a Turkish sandal;
Hosts suffered from an entrechat
And one or two from Handel.
Good Sterling said no dame should come
To be the queen of his bourn,
But one who only prized her home,
Her spinning wheel, and Gisborne:
And Mrs. Sterling says odd things
With most sublime effront’ry;
Gives lectures on elliptic springs,
And follows hounds ’cross country.
Sir Roger had a Briton’s pride
In freedom, plough, and furrow;—
No fortune hath Sir Roger’s bride,
Except a rotten borough;
Gustavus longed for truth and crumbs,
Contentment and a cottage;—
His Laura brings a pair of plums
To boil the poor man’s pottage.