THROWN AWAY.

LINNET had perched on a myrtle spray
To idle its time in its own sweet way;
Innocent thing-defiant of capture-

Chirping a melody mad with rapture. Oaks and ashes and elm-trees heard, Nodding applause to the chanting bird; The longer it sang the richer the plaudits Paid by its woodland Court of Audits.

Still as the melody sank or swelled

It seemed that Nature her breathing held.
On a rose's petal a dewdrop glistened;

The dewdrop lingered, the wild rose listened.
Even the rivulet gliding past

Perhaps for the moment flowed less fast;

And the only lukewarm panegyric

Was that of the bard who writes this lyric.

106

THROWN AWAY.

For I am a Cockney, all in the dark

As to the linnet and as to the lark.

The oak and the ash and the elm-tree never

One from another can I dissever.

The song of the singer and all the glee
That it cast around were lost on me.
Less dear the notes of a woodland birdie
Than even a town-played hurdy-gurdy.

SUBLIMELY UNCONSCIOUS.

O the flowers of earth, to the stars above,

To the sounding seas I have breathed my

love.

I have hymned it morning and noon and night,

In poesy fit for a Bedlamite.

I have sung of my love to my Broadwood's grand;

I have brooded upon it across the Strand

Yet, bold as I am, I should hardly dare

To speak of my love to my lady fair.

The flowers were kind and the stars polite,
And the deep seas pitied my hopeless plight.
The verses I wrote were weak in rhyme ;
But they brought me joy for a brief, brief time.
My grand with my sorrows would oft condole,
And the Strand was dear to my Cockney soul.
I melted my listeners everywhere ;—
But could I have melted my lady fair?

108

SUBLIMELY UNCONSCIOUS.

The flowers can fade, and the stars grow dim,
And the seas bring peril to life and limb;
And versification is oft a bore,

Unless for a guinea a line or more.

The pitch of my Broadwood's grand runs down. There are prettier walks than the Strand in town. So, altogether, I scarcely care

To risk the "No" of my lady fair.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER.

IDDY girls, you may laugh at your Grandpapa

now,

And enjoy putting pins in his chair;

Doubled up is this figure and furrowed this brow,
Very scant are these teeth and this hair.
You may speak of me still in your soft pretty way
As the quaintest old image unhung;

But a fond recollection survives my decay-
I was very good-looking when young.

Half a century does make a sort of a kind
Of a difference, mark you, my dears;
And the brief way to reckon my age up, I find,
Is in tens or in dozens of years.

I must be about eighty or so, by the clock;
But my mind is a little unstrung,

And my talent for counting has come to a block;—
I was brilliant at figures when young.