The body is drenched one dismal moment, the next one’s skin is as dry as starch. Its rains that chill us are most disgusting, and equally so are its gales that parch. What! kindle mortals to love and laughter by lauding the beastliest winds that blow? Arouse our fondness for wintry wetness, for choking dust or for blinding snow? No, no, your lips are eloquent, ALGERNON, set in Apollo’s own genuine arch; But neither the flame that fires your tropes, nor the fervour that setteth your figures aglow, Shall gammon us into the fatuous folly of making a god of the wind of March! _Punch._ March 17, 1888. ―――― LINES A LA SWINBURNE. I sing of the months of the whirligig years that are fading far out of sight and of sound and of motionless mind; Of the days without dreams and the dreams without days, and the days and the dreams and the dreams and the days grown silent and blind; Gone mad with the vigor of spring and the blush of the radish new blown in the meadows far kissed by the lips of the Sound: The maddest and gladdest and saddest and baddest and sweetest, completest and fleetest and neatest of days ever found. I sing of them often in words that are winding, in adjectives blinding, in dactyles and trochees with cunning combined, In lines that are long as a sentence of Evarts, in lines on the plan of the Washington Monument deftly designed; With wildering fancy of words and of musical syllables weighted with little of thought and with much less of rhyme, I cover ten pages a sitting with verse that has value in market, and readily getteth there every time.