Falling is the snow, Every frosty flake Making the round world Like a wedding-cake. What is't makes the snow? Is it frost? No, no! Petals of the rose That in the heaven grows, Thrown by angels down, In Elysian play, Make the snow, I say, To produce a crown For the bridal day. * * * * * _Rival Rhymes, in Honour of Burns_, 1859. * * * * * MAUD, AND OTHER POEMS. By A. T. (D.C.L.) SONG. Chirrup, chirp, chirp, chirp twitter, Warble, flutter, and fly away; Dicky birds, chickey birds--quick, ye bird, Shut it up, cut it up, die away. Maud is going to sing! Maud with the voice like lute strings, (To which the sole species of string I know of that rhymes is boot-strings). Still, you may stop, if you please; Roar as a chorus sonorous, Robin, bob in at ease; Tom-tit, prompt it for us. Rose or thistle in, whistlin', (What a beast is her brother!) Maud has sung from her tongue rung; Echo it out, From each shoot shout, From each root rout-- "She'll oblige us with another." * * * * * Midsummer Madness, A SOLILOQUY. I am a hearthrug-- Yes, a rug-- Though I cannot describe myself as snug; Yet I know that for me they paid a price For a Turkey carpet that would suffice (But we live in an age of rascal vice). Why was I ever woven, For a clumsy lout, with a wooden leg, To come with his endless Peg! Peg! Peg! Peg! With a wooden leg, Till countless holes I'm drove in. ("Drove," I have said, and it should be "driven" A hearthrug's blunders should be forgiven, For wretched scribblers have exercised Such endless bosh and clamour, So improvidently have improvised, That they've utterly ungrammaticised Our ungrammatical grammar). And the coals Burn holes, Or make spots like moles, And my lily-white tints, as black as your hat turn, And the housemaid (a matricide, will-forging slattern), Rolls The rolls From the plate, in shoals, When they're put to warm in front of the coals; And no one with me condoles, For the butter stains on my beautiful pattern. But the coals and rolls, and sometimes soles, Dropp'd from the frying-pan out of the fire, Are nothing to raise my indignant ire, Like the Peg! Peg! Of that horrible man with the wooden leg. This moral spread from me, Sing it, ring it, yelp it-- Never a hearth-rug be, That is if you can help it. * * * * * AN EXTRACT (NOT) FROM TENNYSON'S "MAUD."