_You_ with the elders? Yes, ’tis true, But in no sadly literal sense, With elders and coevals too, Whose verb admits no preterite tense. Master alike in speech and song Of fame’s great antiseptic--Style, You with the classic few belong Who tempered wisdom with a smile. Outlive us all! Who else like you Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff, And make us with the pen we knew Deathless at least in epitaph? WOLLASTON, _August 29, 1884_. IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYÁM. These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread. Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue, When Contemplation tells her pensive beads Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new. Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you! The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel, Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl, Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl. ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON’S “OLD WORLD IDYLLS.” I. At length arrived, your book I take To read in for the author’s sake; Too gray for new sensations grown, Can charm to Art or Nature known This torpor from my senses shake? Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake? Is a thrush gurgling from the brake? Has Spring, on all the breezes blown, At length arrived? Long may you live such songs to make, And I to listen while you wake, With skill of late disused, each tone Of the _Lesboum barbiton_, At mastery, through long finger-ache, At length arrived. II. As I read on, what changes steal O’er me and through, from head to heel? A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside, My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,-- Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele! Down vistas long of clipt _charmille_ Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel; Tabor and pipe the dancers guide As I read on. While in and out the verses wheel The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal, Lithe ankles that to music glide, But chastely and by chance descried; Art? Nature? Which do I most feel As I read on? TO C. F. BRADFORD ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE. The pipe came safe, and welcome too, As anything must be from you; A meerschaum pure, ’twould float as light As she the girls call Amphitrite. Mixture divine of foam and clay, From both it stole the best away: Its foam is such as crowns the glow Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot; Its clay is but congested lymph Jove chose to make some choicer nymph; And here combined,--why, this must be The birth of some enchanted sea, Shaped to immortal form, the type And very Venus of a pipe.