oneysuckle, heaped for who can reach.
Now, I don't boast: it's bad style, and beside,
The feat proves easier than it looks: I plucked
Full many a flower unnamed in that bouquet
(Mostly of peonies and poppies, though!)
Good nature sticks into my button-hole.
Therefore it was with nose in want of snuff
Rather than Ess or Psidium, that I chanced
On what--so far from '_rosebud beauty_'.... Well--
She's dead: at least you never heard her name;
She was no courtly creature, had nor birth
Nor breeding--mere fine-lady-breeding; but
Oh, such a wonder of a woman! Grand
As a Greek statue! Stick fine clothes on that,
Style that a Duchess or a Queen,--you know,
Artists would make an outcry: all the more,
That she had just a statue's sleepy grace
Which broods o'er its own beauty. Nay, her fault
(Don't laugh!) was just perfection: for suppose
Only the little flaw, and I had peeped
Inside it, learned what soul inside was like.
At Rome some tourist raised the grit beneath
A Venus' forehead with his whittling-knife--
I wish,--now,--I had played that brute, brought blood
To surface from the depths I fancied chalk!
As it was, her mere face surprised so much
That I stopped short there, struck on heap, as stares
The cockney stranger at a certain bust
With drooped eyes,--she's the thing I have in mind,--
Down at my Brother's. All sufficient prize--
Such outside! Now,--confound me for a prig!--
Who cares? I'll make a clean breast once for all!
Beside, you've heard the gossip. My life long
I've been a woman-liker,--liking means
Loving and so on. There's a lengthy list
By this time I shall have to answer for--
So say the good folk: and they don't guess half--
For the worst is, let once collecting-itch
Possess you, and, with perspicacity,
Keeps growing such a greediness that theft
Follows at no long distance,--there's the fact!
I knew that on my Leporello-list
Might figure this, that, and the other name
Of feminine desirability,
But if I happened to desire inscribe,
Along with these, the only Beautiful--
Here was the unique specimen to snatch
Or now or never. 'Beautiful' I said--
'Beautiful' say in cold blood,--boiling then
To tune of '_Haste, secure whate'er the cost
This rarity, die in the act, be damned,
So you complete collection