And I think it won't come back till we restore the Pterodactyl, or
revive the late Queen Anne:
We have grown in mental stature, and we Go Direct to Nature, in these
days of stress and strife,
And the hero of a novel in a palace or a hovel is intolerably True to
Life:--

Not an infant learns to toddle but EFFICIENCY'S his model, which he
still pursues with rage,
In a manner inconsistent with the methods dim and distant of that
mid-Victorian age:
For that atmosphere Elysian it has faded from our vision and has gone
where the old tales go,
And I really don't know whether I regret altogether--but the simple
fact is so.

MAKERS OF HISTORY

Minstrels! who your choicest notes
Keep for men who row in boats,
Mark with what exalted mien
Comes the Hero of the Scene!
He, amid the festal swarm,
Fashion's glass and mould of form,
How in shape and how in features
Far surpassing other creatures,
How incomparable to
Common things like me and you!
He in whose transcendent state
All the ages culminate--
Could we ever keep him thus,
How delightful 'twere for us!
Could he, 'mid the admiring throng,
Ever beauteous, ever young,
Still abide for ever pent
In his true environment,
Wear that aureole still which now
Decks his high victorious brow!
Out, alas! that Fortune can't
Ever give us what we want!
HE must quit this vernal stage:
HE must sink to middle age
(E'en the Poet's soaring wit
Scarcely can envisage it):
Go with men of common clay
In to business every day:
Be perhaps a Brewer, or
Haply a Solicitor,--
None the fact to notice that
Haloes once adorned his hat:
Ay! the ways of Fate are odd:
Men are mortal . . . Ichabod . . .

* * * * *

Yet shall stay by stream and tree
Something still of what was He,--
Plainly put, his More or Less
Immaterial Consciousness,--
Very fine and very large,
Floating o'er his College barge:
Always while the world continues
Bards shall sing his thews and sinews,--
Here he rowed and here he ran,
Being rather more than man;--
Thus as ages onward go
Still he'll great and greater grow,
Larger still in prose or rhyme
Looming down the aisles of time,
Till he sit, sublime and vast,
'Mid the Giants of the Past,
Men who lived in days of old
(Ch-tty, W