But perhaps, for a nutshell's content of whimsical Lockerian humour, the
gem which will occur to most is the delightful reminiscence of infancy:

"I recollect a nurse call'd Ann,
Who carried me about the grass,
And one fine day a fine young man
Came up, and kiss'd the pretty Lass:
She did not make the least objection!
Thinks I. 'Aha!
When I can talk I'll tell Mamma.'
--And that's my earliest recollection."

(Locker's "mottoes," of which this is one, often contain his most
characteristic lines.) Praed could no more have written that, or the
lines "To my Grandmother," than Locker could have written "The Vicar."
Both poets have other strings. Praed's more serious vein could win a
contemporary reputation: but he would not have been remembered for this
alone, after eighty years. In "At Her Window," which Mr Coulson Kernahan
rightly calls "one of the most beautiful love-songs of the century,"
Locker is no longer ironical, but rises to the heights of real passion:

"Beating Heart! we come again
Where my Love reposes:
This is Mabel's window-pane:
These are Mabel's roses.

. . . . .

Mabel will be deck'd anon,
Zoned in bride's apparel;
Happy zone! Oh hark to yon
Passion-shaken carol!
Sing thy song, thou tranced thrush,
Pipe thy best, thy clearest;--
Hush, her lattice moves, O hush--
_Dearest Mabel_!--_dearest_" . . .

"I once tried," says Locker in "My Confidences," "to write like Praed."
The effort was not wholly successful: Locker is weakest where his manner
is most Praedian; and the poet, either realising this, or moulded by the
temper of his time, appears to have altered most of the obviously
imitative passages. Thus in "Tempora Mutantur" the last stanza runs, in
1857:

"What brought this wanderer here, and why
Was Pamela away?
It might be she had found her grave
Or he had found her gay";

but the antithetical pun is excised in the 1893 edition, where the lines
are:

"The pilgrim sees an empty chair
Where Pamela once sat:
It may be she had found her grave,
It might be worse than that."

So in "Bramble-Rise"

"My bank of early violets
Is now a bank of savings"

("you mark the paronomasia, play 'pon words"?) does not continue to
please the taste of the pun-despising _fin-de-siecle_ public or of Locker
himself: the corresponding