_K._ “Come now, I believe you have some particular water person in your mind, for you are getting satirical. It is well we are nearly home. What I can’t understand is, why all the four complexions have so much that is disagreeable in them. In which class would Böhme put really good and noble people?” “They might come into any one of the four classes. You must remember that according to Böhme the temperament is an outer material atmosphere surrounding the soul, and of necessity partly evil, because it is material; the pure soul has to work through it, and conquer it, according to Böhme.” SKETCHES. (_In a Garden_.) A LADY.—A POET. THE LADY. I. SIR POET, ere you crossed the lawn (If it was wrong to watch you, pardon) Behind this weeping birch withdrawn, I watched you saunter round the garden. I saw you bend beside the phlox; Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle, Review my well-ranged hollyhocks, Smile at the fountain’s slender spurtle; II. You paused beneath the cherry-tree, Where my marauder thrush was singing, Peered at the bee-hives curiously, And narrowly escaped a stinging; And then—you see I watched—you passed Down the espalier walk that reaches Out to the western wall, and last Dropped on the seat before the peaches. III. What was your thought? You waited long. Sublime or graceful,—grave,—satiric? A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song? A tender Tennysonian lyric? Tell me. That garden-seat shall be, So long as speech renown disperses, Illustrious as the spot where he— The gifted Blank—composed his verses. THE POET. IV. Madam,—whose uncensorious eye Grows gracious over certain pages. Wherein the Jester’s maxims lie, It may be, thicker than the Sage’s I hear but to obey, and could Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you, Some verse as whimsical as Hood,— As gay as Praed,—should answer to you. V. But, though the common voice proclaims Our only serious vocation Confined to giving nothings names, And dreams a “local habitation;” Believe me, there are tuneless days, When neither marble, brass, nor vellum, Would profit much by any lays That haunt the poet’s cerebellum. VI. More empty things, I fear, than rhymes, More idle things than songs, absorb it; The “finely-frenzied” eye, at times, Reposes mildly in its orbit; And, painful truth, at times, to him, Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive, “A primrose by a river’s brim” Is absolutely unsuggestive. VII.