Then, in a dream, beside the "Dragon" door, The smith saw travellers standing in the sun; Then came the horn again, and three or four Looked idly at him from the roof, but One,-- A Child within,--suffused with sudden shame, Thrust forth a hand, and called to him by name. Thus the coach vanished from his sight, but he Limped back with bitter pleasure in his pain; He was not all forgotten--could it be? And yet the knowledge made the memory vain; And then--he felt a pressure in his throat, So, for that night, forgot to milk his goat. What then might come of silent misery, What new resolvings then might intervene, I know not. Only, with the morning sky, The goat stood tethered on the "Dragon" green, And those who, wondering, questioned thereupon, Found the hut empty,--for the man was gone. A STORY FROM A DICTIONARY. "Sic visum Veneri: cui placet impares Formas atque animos sub juga aenea Saevo mittere cum joco." --Hor. i. 33. "Love mocks us all"--as Horace said of old: From sheer perversity, that arch-offender Still yokes unequally the hot and cold, The short and tall, the hardened and the tender; He bids a Socrates espouse a scold, And makes a Hercules forget his gender:-- _Sic visum Veneri!_ Lest samples fail, I add a fresh one from the page of BAYLE. It was in Athens that the thing occurred, In the last days of Alexander's rule, While yet in Grove or Portico was heard The studious murmur of its learned school;-- Nay, 'tis one favoured of Minerva's bird Who plays therein the hero (or the fool) With a Megarian, who must then have been A maid, and beautiful, and just eighteen. I shan't describe her. Beauty is the same In Anno Domini as erst B.C.; The type is still that witching One who came, Between the furrows, from the bitter sea; 'Tis but to shift accessories and frame, And this our heroine in a trice would be, Save that she wore a _peplum_ and a _chiton_, Like any modern on the beach at Brighton. Stay, I forget! Of course the sequel shows She had some qualities of disposition, To which, in general, her sex are foes,-- As strange proclivities to erudition, And lore unfeminine, reserved for those Who now-a-days descant on "Woman's Mission," Or tread instead that "primrose path" to knowledge, That milder Academe--the Girton College. The truth is, she admired ... a learned man. There were no curates in that sunny Greece, For whom the mind emotional could plan Fine-art habiliments in gold and fleece; (This was ere chasuble or cope began To shake the centres of domestic peace;) So that "admiring," such as maids give way to, Turned to the ranks of Zeno and of Plato.