Then we thrid God’s cowslips (as erst His heather) That endowed the wan grass with their golden blooms; And snapt—(it was perfectly charming weather)— Our fingers at Fate and her goddess-glooms: And Willie ’gan sing (O, his notes were fluty; Wafts fluttered them out to the white-wing’d sea)— Something made up of rhymes that have done much duty, Rhymes (better to put it) of “ancientry:” Bowers of flowers encounter’d showers In William’s carol—(O love my Willie!) Then he bade sorrow borrow from blithe to-morrow I quite forget what—say a daffodilly: A nest in a hollow, “with buds to follow,” I think occurred next in his nimble strain; And clay that was “kneaden” of course in Eden— A rhyme most novel, I do maintain: Mists, bones, the singer himself, love-stories, And all least furlable things got “furled;” Not with any design to conceal their “glories,” But simply and solely to rhyme with “world.” * * * O if billows and pillows and hours and flowers, And all the brave rhymes of an elder day, Could be furled together, this genial weather, And carted, or carried on “wafts” away, Nor ever again trotted out—ah me! How much fewer volumes of verse there’d be! THE COCK AND THE BULL. YOU see this pebble-stone? It’s a thing I bought Of a bit of a chit of a boy i’ the mid o’ the day— I like to dock the smaller parts-o’-speech, As we curtail the already cur-tail’d cur (You catch the paronomasia, play ’po’ words?) Did, rather, i’ the pre-Landseerian days. Well, to my muttons. I purchased the concern, And clapt it i’ my poke, having given for same By way o’ chop, swop, barter or exchange— ‘Chop’ was my snickering dandiprat’s own term— One shilling and fourpence, current coin o’ the realm. O-n-e one and f-o-u-r four Pence, one and fourpence—you are with me, sir?— What hour it skills not: ten or eleven o’ the clock, One day (and what a roaring day it was Go shop or sight-see—bar a spit o’ rain!) In February, eighteen sixty nine, Alexandrina Victoria, Fidei Hm—hm—how runs the jargon? being on throne. Such, sir, are all the facts, succinctly put, The basis or substratum—what you will— Of the impending eighty thousand lines. “Not much in ’em either,” quoth perhaps simple Hodge. But there’s a superstructure. Wait a bit.