almost up:  I perceive That my new-fangled brevity strikes you:  but don’t—­though the public
    will—­grieve. 
As it’s sometimes my whim to be vulgar, it’s sometimes my whim to be brief; As when once I observed, after Heine, that “she was a harlot, and I” (which
    is true) “was a thief.” 
(Though you hardly should cite this particular line, by the way, as an
    instance of absolute brevity: 
I’m aware, man, of that; so you needn’t disgrace yourself, sir, by such
    grossly mistimed and impertinent levity.)
I don’t like to break off, any more than you wish me to stop:  but my
    fate is
Not to vent half a million such rhymes without blockheads exclaiming—­

JAM SATIS.

Specimen from the speaker’s original poems.

Come into the orchard, Anne,
  For the dark owl, Night, has fled,
And Phosphor slumbers, as well as he can
  With a daffodil sky for a bed: 
And the musk of the roses perplexes a man,
  And the pimpernel muddles his head.

* * * * *

SONNET FOR A PICTURE

That nose is out of drawing.  With a gasp,
  She pants upon the passionate lips that ache
  With the red drain of her own mouth, and make
A monochord of colour.  Like an asp,
One lithe lock wriggles in his rutilant grasp. 
  Her bosom is an oven of myrrh, to bake
  Love’s white warm shewbread to a browner cake. 
The lock his fingers clench has burst its hasp. 
The legs are absolutely abominable. 
  Ah! what keen overgust of wild-eyed woes
  Flags in that bosom, flushes in that nose? 
Nay!  Death sets riddles for desire to spell,
  Responsive.  What red hem earth’s passion sews,
But may be ravenously unripped in hell?

* * * * *

NEPHELIDIA

From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus
    of nebulous noonshine,
  Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear
    of the flies as they float,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic
    miraculous moonshine,
  These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten
    with throbs through the throat? 
Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor’s appalled
    agitation,
  Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise
    of pride in the past;
Flushed with the famishing fullness of fever that reddens with radiance
    of rathe recreation,
  Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of
    the gloaming when ghosts go aghast? 
Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the
    temples of terror,
  Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with