With toil their pleasure;
He held some land, and dwelt thereon,--
Where, I forget,-the house is gone;
His Christian name, I think, was John,-
His surname, Leisure.
Reynolds has painted him, -a face
Filled with a fine, old-fashioned grace,
Fresh-colored, frank, with ne'er a trace
Of trouble shaded;
The eyes are blue, the hair is dressed
In plainest way, one hand is pressed
Deep in a flapped canary vest,
With buds brocaded.
He wears a brown old Brunswick coat,
With silver buttons,-round his throat,
A soft cravat;—in all you note
A strangeness, which, to us who shine
In shapely hats,-whose coats combine
All harmonies of hue and line,
Inspires compassion.
He lived so long ago, you see!
Men were untravelled then, but we,
Like Ariel, post o'er land and sea
With careless parting;
He found it quite enough for him
To smoke his pipe in "garden trim,"
And watch, about the fish tank's brim,
The swallows darting.
He liked the well-wheel's creaking tongue,He liked the thrush that stopped and sung,— He liked the drone of flies among
His netted peaches;
He liked to watch the sunlight fall
Athwart his ivied orchard wall;
Or pause to catch the cuckoo's call
Beyond the beeches.
A Gentleman of the Old School 1717
His were the times of Paint and Patch,
And yet no Ranelagh could match
The sober doves that round his thatch
Spread tails and sidled;
He liked their ruffling, puffed content;
For him their drowsy wheelings meant
More than a Mall of Beaux that bent,
Or Belles that bridled.
Not that, in truth, when life began
He shunned the flutter of the fan;
He too had maybe "pinked his man"
In Beauty's quarrel;
But now his "fervent youth" had flown
Where lost things go; and he was grown
As staid and slow-paced as his own
Old hunter, Sorrel.
Yet still he loved the chase, and held
That no composer's score excelled
The merry horn, when Sweetlip swelled
Its jovial riot;
But most his measured words of praise
Caressed the angler's easy ways,—
His idly meditative days,---
Not that his "meditating" rose
Beyond a sunny summer doze;
He never troubled his repose
With fruitless prying;
But held, as law for high and low,
What God withholds no man can know,
And smiled away enquiry so,
Without replying.
We read-alas, how much we read!-
The jumbled strifes of creed and creed
With endless controversies feed
Our groaning tables;
His books-and they sufficed him-were
Cotton's Montaigne, The Grave of Blair,
A "Walton"-much the worse for wear,
And Esop's Fables.
One more-The Bible. Not that he
Had searched its page as deep as we;
No sophistries could make him see
Its slender credit;
It may be that he could not count
The sires and sons to Jesse's fount,-
He liked the "Sermon on the Mount,"-
And more, he read it.
Once he had loved, but failed to wed,
A red-cheeked lass who long was dead;
His ways were far too slow, he said,
To quite forget her;
And still when time had turned him gray,
The earliest hawthorn buds in May
Would find his lingering feet astray,
Where first he met her.
"In Cœlo Quies" heads the stone
On Leisure's grave,-now little known,
A tangle of wild-rose has grown
So thick across it;
The "Benefactions" still declare
He left the clerk an elbow-chair,
And "12 Pence Yearly to Prepare
A Christmas Posset."
Lie softly, Leisure! Doubtless you,
With too serene a conscience drew
Your easy breath, and slumbered through
The gravest issue;
But we, to whom our age allows
Scarce space to wipe our weary brows,
Look down upon your narrow house,
Old friend, and miss you!
JUST for a space that I met her-
Just for a day in the train!
It began when she feared it would wet her,
That tiniest spurtle of rain:
So we tucked a great rug in the sashes,
And carefully padded the pane;
And I sorrow in sackcloth and ashes,
Longing to do it again!
Then it grew when she begged me to reach her
A dressing-case under the seat;
She was "really so tiny a creature,
That she needed a stool for her feet!"
Which was promptly arranged to her order
With a care that was even minute,
And a glimpse of an open-work border,
And a glance of the fairyest boot.
Then it drooped, and revived at some hovels-
"Were they houses for men or for pigs?"
Then it shifted to muscular novels,
With a little digression on prigs:
She thought "Wives and Daughters" "so jolly;"
"Had I read it?" She knew when I had,
Like the rest, I should dote upon "Molly;"
And "poor Mrs. Gaskell-how sad!"
"Like Browning?" "But so-so." His proof lay
Too deep for her frivolous mood,
That preferred your mere metrical soufflé
To the stronger poetical food;
Yet at times he was good-"as a tonic:"
Was Tennyson writing just now?
And was this new poet Byronic,
And clever, and naughty, or how?
Then we trifled with concerts and croquet,
Then she daintily dusted her face;
Then she sprinkled herself with "Ess Bouquet,"
Fished out from the foregoing case;
And we chattered of Gassier and Grisi,
And voted Aunt Sally a bore;
Discussed if the tight-rope were easy,
Or Chopin much harder than Spohr.
And oh! the odd things that she quoted,
With the prettiest possible look,
And the price of two buns that she noted
In the prettiest possible book;
While her talk like a musical rillet
Flashed on with the hours that flew,
And the carriage, her smile seemed to fill it
With just enough summer-for Two.
Till at last in her corner, peeping
From a nest of rugs and of furs,
With the white shut eyelids sleeping
On those dangerous looks of hers,
She seemed like a snow-drop breaking,
Not wholly alive nor dead,
But with one blind impulse making
To the sounds of the spring overhead;
And I watched, in the lamplight's swerving,
The shade of the down-dropped lid,
And the lip-line's delicate curving,
Where a slumbering smile lay hid,
Till I longed that, rather than sever,
The train should shriek into space,
And carry us onward-for ever,—
Me and that beautiful face.
But she suddenly woke in a fidget,
With fears she was "nearly at home,"
And talk of a certain Aunt Bridget,
Whom I mentally wished-well, at Rome;
Got out at the very next station,
Looking back with a merry Bon Soir,
Adding, too, to my utter vexation,
A surplus, unkind Au Revoir.
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