O Love! what an absurdity thou art, How heedless of proportion, whole or part! Time, place, occasion, what are they to thee? Thou playest the wanton with Solemnity, The prince with Poverty, the rogue with Worth, The fool with all the Wisdoms of the Earth. Thou art a leveller, more renowned than Death, For he, when in his rage he stops our breath, Leaves us at least the harvest of our years, The right to be heroic in our tears. But thou dost only mock. Thou art a king Dealing with slaves, who waits no questioning, But gives--to this a province and a crown, To that a beggar's staff and spangled gown; And when some weep their undeserved disgrace, Plucks at their cheeks and smites them in the face. Thou hast no reverence, no respect for right. Virtue to thee is a lewd appetite, Remorse a pastime, modesty a lure, And love, the malady, love's only cure. Griselda, in her love at thirty-three, Was the supreme fool of felicity. Reason and she had taken separate roads, A spectacle of mirth for men and gods. And the world laughed--discreetly in its sleeves-- At her poor artless shifts and make-believes. For it was true, true to the very text, This whispered thing that had my soul perplexed, Manton was her beloved--by what art, What mute equation of the human heart, What blind jibe of dame Fortune, who shall say? The road of passion is no king's highway, Mapped out with finger-posts for all to see, But each soul journeys on it separately, And only those who have walked its mazes through Remember on what paths the wild flowers grew. Ay, who shall say? Nor had the truth been sung, Save for the incontinence of Manton's tongue, Wagging in argument on certain themes, With boast of craft in pleasure's stratagems. "For Love" ('twas thus he made his parable In cynic phrase, as hero of his tale, One evening when the others were abed, And we two sat on smoking, head to head, Discoursing in that tone of men scarce friends, Who prate philosophy to candle ends), "Love, though its laws have not as yet been written By any Balzac for our modern Britain, And though perhaps there is no strategy Youth can quite count upon or argue by, Is none the less an art, with some few rules Wise men observe, who would outrun the fools. Now, for myself" (here Manton spread his hands With professorial wave in white wrist-bands) "I hold it as a maxim always wise In making love to deal with contraries. Colours, books tell us, to be strongly blent, Need opposite colours for their complement, And so too women whose ill-reasoning mind Requires some contradiction to be kind."