“You are assured,” you sadly say
  (If in this most considerate way
    To treat my suit your will is),
  That I shall “quickly find as fair
  Some new Neaera’s tangled hair—­
    Some easier Amaryllis.” 
  I cannot promise to be cold
  If smiles are kind as yours of old
    On lips of later beauties;
  Nor can I, if I would, forget
  The homage that is Nature’s debt,
    While man has social duties;
  But if you ask shall I prefer
    To you I honour so,
  A somewhat visionary Her,
    I answer truly—­No.

  You fear, you frankly add, “to find
  In me too late the altered mind
    That altering Time estranges.” 
  To this I make response that we
  (As physiologists agree)
    Must have septennial changes;
  This is a thing beyond control,
  And it were best upon the whole
    To try and find out whether
  We could not, by some means, arrange
  This not-to-be-avoided change
    So as to change together: 
  But had you asked me to allow
    That you could ever grow
  Less amiable than you are now,—­
    Emphatically—­No.

  But—­to be serious—­if you care
  To know how I shall really bear
    This much-discussed rejection,
  I answer you.  As feeling men
  Behave, in best romances, when
     You outrage their affection;—­
  With that gesticulatory woe,
  By which, as melodramas show,
    Despair is indicated;
  Enforced by all the liquid grief
  Which hugest pocket-handkerchief
     Has ever simulated;
  And when, arrived so far, you say
     In tragic accents, “Go,”
  Then, Lydia, then ...  I still shall stay,
     And firmly answer—­No.

MARK’S BABY [Sidenote:  Mark Twain]

“Mark, one day, was found at home, in his library, dandling upon his knee, with every appearance of fond ‘parientness,’ the young Twain—­so young as not yet to be able to ‘walk upright and make bargains.’  Mrs. Twain, on showing the visitor into the sanctum, and finding her spouse thus engaged, said: 

“‘Now, Mark, you know you love that baby—­don’t you?’

“‘Well,’ replied Mark, in his slow, drawling kind of way, ‘I—­can’t—­exactly—­say—­I—­love it,—­but—­I—­respect—­it!’”

THE WISDOM OF G.K.C.
[Sidenote:  G.K.  Chesterton]

Jesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.  But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine.  He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad.  “Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why.  Drink, for you know not when you go nor where.  Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top.  Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for.  Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.”  So he stands offering us the cup in his hands.  And in the high altar