some morning lawn
With silken knot,
Perchance, ere night, for Church and King 'twas drawn--
Perchance 'twas not!

Who knows--or cares? To-day, 'mid foils and gloves
Its hilt depends,
Flanked by the favours of forgotten loves,--
Remembered friends;--

And oft its legend lends, in hours of stress,
A word to aid;
Or like a warning comes, in puffed success,
Its broken blade.

THE POET'S SEAT.

AN IDYLL OF THE SUBURBS.

"_Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes
Angulus_ Ridet."
--Hor. ii. 6.

It was an elm-tree root of yore,
With lordly trunk, before they lopped it,
And weighty, said those five who bore
Its bulk across the lawn, and dropped it
Not once or twice, before it lay.
With two young pear-trees to protect it,
Safe where the Poet hoped some day
The curious pilgrim would inspect it.

He saw him with his Poet's eye,
The stately Maori, turned from etching
The ruin of St. Paul's, to try
Some object better worth the sketching:--
He saw him, and it nerved his strength
What time he hacked and hewed and scraped it,
Until the monster grew at length
The Master-piece to which he shaped it.

To wit--a goodly garden seat,
And fit alike for Shah or Sophy,
With shelf for cigarettes complete,
And one, but lower down, for coffee;
He planted pansies 'round its foot,--
"Pansies for thoughts!" and rose and arum;
The Motto (that he meant to put)
Was "_Ille angulus terrarum._"

But "Oh! the change" (as Milton sings)--
"The heavy change!" When May departed,
When June with its "delightful things"
Had come and gone, the rough bark started,--
Began to lose its sylvan brown,
Grew parched, and powdery, and spotted;
And, though the Poet nailed it down,
It still flapped up, and dropped, and rotted.

Nor was this all. 'Twas next the scene
Of vague (and viscous) vegetations;
Queer fissures gaped, with oozings green,
And moist, unsavoury exhalations,--
Faint wafts of wood decayed and sick,
Till, where he meant to carve his Motto,
Strange leathery fungi sprouted thick,
And made it like an oyster grotto.

Briefly, it grew a seat of scorn,
Bare,--shameless,--till, for fresh disaster,
From end