The fickle Muse! As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer; A goddess, yet a woman still, She flies the more that we pursue her; In short, with worst as well as best, Five months in six, your hapless poet Is just as prosy as the rest, But cannot comfortably show it. VIII. You thought, no doubt, the garden-scent Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation Of love that came and love that went,— Some fragrance of a lost flirtation, Born when the cuckoo changes song, Dead ere the apple’s red is on it, That should have been an epic long, Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet. IX. Or else you thought,—the murmuring noon, He turns it to a lyric sweeter, With birds that gossip in the tune, And windy bough-swing in the metre; Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms, Round singing mouths, and chanted charms, And mediæval orchard blossoms,— X. Quite _à la mode_. Alas! for prose,— My vagrant fancies only rambled Back to the red-walled Rectory close, Where first my graceless boyhood gambolled, Climbed on the dial, teased the fish, And chased the kitten round the beeches, Till widening instincts made me wish For certain slowly-ripening peaches. XI. Three peaches. Not the Graces three Had more equality of beauty: I would not look, yet went to see; I wrestled with Desire and Duty; I felt the pangs of those who feel The Laws of Property beset them; The conflict made my reason reel, And, half-abstractedly, I ate them;— XII. Or Two of them. Forthwith Despair— More keen than one of these was rotten— Moved me to seek some forest lair Where I might hide and dwell forgotten, Attired in skins, by berries stained, Absolved from brushes and ablution;— But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained, Fate gave me up to execution. XIII. I saw it all but now. The grin That gnarled old Gardener Sandy’s features; My father, scholar-like and thin, Unroused, the tenderest of creatures; I saw—ah me—I saw again My dear and deprecating mother; And then, remembering the cane, Regretted—THAT I’D LEFT THE OTHER. THINGS GONE BY.