Quoth he, “Gentle SARAH HOGGINS,”
Speaking in seductive tones,
“You must wed no HODGE or SCROGGINS,
But espouse your own J. JONES.”
Oh! he was an artful party,
And that marriage was a crime.
He’d a wife alive and hearty,
Though she’d left him
for a time.
The above discovery has, of course, led to doubts regarding other Tennysonian heroines. Was Lady CLARA VERE DE VERE, for example, as black as the poet has painted her? Perish the thought! Here are a couple of specimen stanzas for an amended version:—
Lady CLARA VERE DE VERE,
I vow that you were not a
flirt,
The daughter of a hundred Earls
Would not a single creature
hurt.
“Kind hearts are more than coronets,”
What abject twaddle, on my
word;
And then the joke is in the end,—
We know they made the bard
a Lord.
The tale of how young LAURENCE died,
In some audacious print began;
The fact is that he took to drink,
He always was that sort of
man.
And as for ALFRED, why, of course
You snubbed him; but was that
a crime,
That he should go and call you names,
And print his atrabilious
rhyme?
Then, again, was the Amy of Locksley Hall quite as shallow-hearted and so forth as the angry rhymester declares? It will probably turn out that she was not. Hence the verses should run in this fashion:—
And I said, “My Cousin AMY, speak
the truth, my heart to ease.
Shall it be by banns or license?”
And she whispered, “Which you please.”
Love took up the glass of Time and waved
it gaily in the air,
Married life was sweet at Number Twenty-Six in Camden Square.
AMY faithless! Bless your heart, Sir, that was not the case at all:
It was pure imagination that I wrote in Locksley Hall.
[Illustration: George (about to enjoy the first new-laid Egg from the recently set-up Fowl-house). “WHY—CONF—THEY’VE BOILED THE PORCELAIN NEST-EGG!”]
This process will doubtless have to be applied to many of the poems, but we must leave the congenial task to the Laureate.
* * * * *
A SONNET OF VAIN DESIRE.
AFTER THE HOLIDAYS.
As when th’ industrious windmill
vainly yearns
To pause, and scratch its
swallow-haunted head,
Yet at the wind’s relentless urging
turns
Its flying arms in wild appeal
outspread;
So am I vex’d by vain desire, that
burns
These barren places whence
the hair hath fled,
To wander far amid the woodland ferns,
Where dewdrops shine along
the gossamer thread;
Where its own sunlight on the reddening
leaf
Sleeps, when soft mists have
swathed the sunless tree,
Or where the innumerous billows merrily
dance;
Yet must I busily dissemble grief
Whirl’d in the pitiless round of
circumstance,
Rigid with trained respectability.