You lie down to your shady slumber, And wake with a fly in your ear, And your damsel that walks in the morning Is shod like a mountaineer. True love is at home on a carpet, And mightily likes his ease And true love has an eye for a dinner, His foot's an invisible thing, N. P. WILLIS. Poetical Works. (G. Routledge and Sons.) FRIENDSHIP is constant in all other things, Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongues; Let every eye negotiate for itself, And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch, Against whose charms faith melteth into blood. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE. Much Ado about Nothing. LEARN, that if to thee the meaning Fewer eyes can ever front thee That are skilled to read thine own; And that if thy love's deep current LESS THAN IT BESTOWS. Poems; First Series. (Longmans.) DANGEROUS PLAYTHINGS. MAIDENS are fickle and hard to please, Butterflies dainty in plumage gay, Staying a moment to flirt and teaze, Waking a longing, and then away. Dangerous playthings for idle hours, Seeming so harmless, but oh! so deep, Armed with a legion of hidden pow'rs, Innocent only when fast asleep. Young men are selfish, and cold, and hard, Yet there are hearts which are all they seem, wwwwwwm LOVE'S LANGUAGE. THEIR little language the children Have, on the knee as they sit; And only those who love them Can find the key to it. The words thereof and the grammar Perplex the logician's art; But the heart goes straight with the meaning, So thou, my Love, hast a language SPORT not with love, if thou art wise; Rampant abroad, and flames a city! From love's luxurious pasture turn thee, Or those fair eyes that beam benign Shall grow a scorching flame to burn thee! JOHN STUART BLACKIE. Lyrical Poems. (D. Douglas, Edinburgh.) A GIRL'S LOVE-SONG. It was an April morning When my true love went out ; He wandered-he and no other- "A king is coming; look!" The brook said, laughing and leaping, Saw me, took me, crowned me, I knew that he had found me, I went where I was fated, Dumb with fear and surprise. A week and a day I waited, Before I saw his eyes. I gave him never a whisper For all the words he said; M. B. SMEDLEY. Poems. (Strahan.) SHE was fresh and she was fair, LOVE laid his sleepless head And his eyes with tears were red, And fear and sorrow and scorn And the world was merry with morn. And joy came up with the day And his eyes as the dawn grew bright, Poems and Ballads; Second Series. Only tell me what reply Is the best reply for Kitty? I am forty-more's the pity. Kitty nothing but a baby. I am wise and gravely witty; She's the dearest thing on earth, I am forty-more's the pity. She adores my pretty rhymes, Calls me "poet" when I write them; And she listens oftentimes Half an hour when I recite them. Let me scribble by the page Sonnet, ode, or lover's ditty; Seventeen is Kitty's age I am forty-more's the pity. HENRY S. LEIGH. (Gillott and Goosequill.) LOVE that asketh love again, Love, exacting nothing back, AUTHOR OF "JOHN HALIFAX, Thirty Years. (Macmillan.) TEMPORA MUTANTUR, NOS ET I ONCE believed those simple folk Of mere conventionality. I thought the light of maidens' eyes, Their smiles and all the rest, Were not mere baits to catch rich flies And landed interest. I once believed (which only shows I once believed that matrimony I once imagined (in my youth) I also fancied (but I own My verdure was delicious) That trampling young affections down Was positively vicious. I did not think the Greeks were rightBefore I worshipped MammonWho in declining marriage, write The accusative case γάμον. The past ideas agree but ill With our enlightened present; A man without finances? J. H. GIBBS. The Quadrilateral. (A volume of poems by three Oxford friends.) LOVE seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease. WILLIAM BLAKE. GIVE me back my heart, fair child; Be you warned: your own is brittle! In a momentary laughter, Stretched in long and dark repose With a sigh the moment after. "Hid it! dropt it on the moors! Lost it, and you cannot find it." My own heart I want, not yours: You have bound and must unbind it. Set it free then from your net, We will love, sweet--but not yet! Fling it from you :-we are strong : Love is trouble, love is folly: Love, that makes an old heart young, Makes a young heart melancholy. AUBREY DE Vere. THE LOVER'S DAY. GORSE-PLAINS that flower their gold into the streams Sea-floods that weave their blue and purple seams; Those lovers tire not when the sun is pale; They watch him as he piles his busy deck With golden treasure; as his sail expands; They see him sink; they gaze upon the wreck Through the still twilight of the silvery sands. One cloud is left to the deserted lands: The blue-set moon's cold-fleck. Poems, Miscellaneous and Sacred. (Burns and Oates.) They linger though the pageant hath gone by: The opal cloud is lit o'er sea and plain ; The moon is full of one day's memory, And tells the tale of Nature o'er again, Its glory mingled in the soul's refrain Under that lover's sky. THOMAS GORDON HAKE. Legends of the Morrow. (Chatto and Windus.) Your feet in the full-grown grasses A. C. SWINBURNE. Poems and Ballads; First Series. (Chatto and Windus.) LOVE'S STRESS. ABOUT my love, oh Love, why do I sing? Can'st thou by my weak words my great love know, Or can I hope that any words should show The exquisite interchange of June with Spring, That makes thy sweet soul the divine, strange thing Of which no man the memory lets go Once having known? What breath have I to blow The clarion with thy praises echoing? I sing not for thy sake, nor for men's sake- PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON. [From Time, by kind permission of Messrs. Kelly and Co.] As taking in mind as in feature, AN INTERLUDE. [EXTRACT.] IN the greenest growth of the Maytime, I rode where the woods were wet, Between the dawn and the daytime; The spring was glad that we met. WHITE ROSES. SHE sat by her open piano, Under lavish gold of her hair, And loosed the tide of her playing On the stillness of evening air: Like a spring-tide surging and spreading, In celestial strength and grace, From her magical floating fingers, And the peace of her white-rose face. Ah! what words for that saintly music, And the lawns, and the laurel shade. With a diamond spray breaking through, Now tenderly soft, and wondrous As the birth of the summer dew. Too brief was that glimpse of heaven, By that rapturous, melodied space, WILLIAM WILKINS. |