I should like—­on my soul, I should like—­to remember—­but somehow I
    can’t—­
If the lady whose love has reduced me to this was the niece or the aunt.  But whichever it was, I feel sure, when I published my lays of last year (You remember their title—­The Tramp—­only seven-and-sixpence—­not dear), I sent her a copy (perhaps her tears fell on the title-page—­yes—­ I should like to imagine she wept)—­and the Bride of Bulgaria (MS.) I forwarded with it.  The lyrics, no doubt, she found bitter—­and sweet; But the Bride she rejected, you know, with expressions I will not repeat.  Well—­she did no more than all publishers did.  Though my prospects were
    marred,
I can pity and pardon them.  Blindness, mere blindness!  And yet it was hard.  For a poet, Bill, is a blossom—­a bird—­a billow—­a breeze—­ A kind of creature that moves among men as a wind among trees.  And a bard who is also the pet of patricians and dowagers doubly can Express his contempt for canaille in his fables where beasts are
    republican. 
Yet with all my disdainful forgiveness for men so deficient in ton I cannot but feel it was cruel—­I cannot but think it was wrong.  I with the heat of my heart still burning against all bars As the fire of the dawn, so to speak, in the blanched blank brows of
    the stars—­
I with my tremulous lips made pale by musical breath—­ I with the shade in my eyes that was left by the kisses of Death—­ (For Death came near me in youth, and touched my face with his face, And put in my lips the songs that belong to a desolate place—­ Desolate truly, my heart and my lips, till her kiss filled them up!) I with my soul like wine poured out with my flesh for the cup—­ It was hard for me—­it was hard—­Bill, Bill, you great owl, was it not?  For the day creeps in like a Fate:  and I think my grand passion is rot:  And I dreamily seem to perceive, by the light of a life’s dream done, The lotion at six, and the mixture at ten, and the draught before one.

  Yes—­I feel rather better.  Man’s life is a mull, at the best;
And the patent perturbator pills are like bullets of lead in my chest.  When a man’s whole spirit is like the lost Pleiad, a blown-out star, Is there comfort in Holloway, Bill? is there hope of salvation in Parr?  True, most things work to their end—­and an end that the shroud overlaps.  Under lace, under silk, under gold, sir, the skirt of a winding-sheet
    flaps—­
Which explains, if you think of it, Bill, why I can’t, though my soul
    thereon broodeth,
Quite make out if I loved Lady Tamar as much as I loved Lady Judith.  Yet her dress was of violet velvet, her hair was hyacinth-hued, And her ankles—­no matter.  A face where the music of every mood Was touched by the tremulous fingers of passionate feeling, and made Strange melodies, scornful, but sweeter than strings whereon sorrow has
    played
To enrapture the hearing of mirth when his garland of blossom and green Turns to lead on the anguished