And when the idea is the thinnest, new burst from the void of the infinite nothing, the zenith of space where the nebulous ether is pregnant with cobwebs of fancy bestrewn with the dew-drops of slush, I build up long lines such as never a poet, who was not a crank on the subject of versification, built up for the purpose of drowning a suffering public with torrents of stupid and meaningless gibbering gush. If the wind and the sunlight of April and August had made of the past and hereafter a single adorable season whose life was a rapture of love and of laughter for all of the maidens and lads, I’d write you a poem with lines like the city of Rome, and with rhymes on beholders and shoulders; on measure and pleasure; on closes and roses; on sterile, imperil; remember, September; and hither and thither and whither; on slacken and bracken; on season and reason; defrauded, applauded; on dwindled, rekindled; on giving and living; on slumbers and numbers; beholden and golden; on glory and story and Morey; on wizard and gizzard and blizzard; on Blaine and on Maine; and each rhyme would be stuck on the end of a line just like this one I’m writing; and oh, and heyday, and yea, marry, they’d run about eight to the page, and they’d collar the scads. TRICOTRIN. _Harper’s Monthly Magazine_, June, 1888. ――――:o:―――― In _Pictures at Play_ (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1888), a picture by J. W. Waterhouse, A.R.A., is supposed to sing the following parody of the “Masque of Queen Bersabe”:―― I am the Lady of Shalott, And if you say you love me not, I shall reply, I wis, That Bastien-Lepage has been Much marked of Waterhouse, I ween, And the result is――this! The A.R.A. who painted me Is young and popular, and free To gratify his whim; Where on a couch of pain I lay, He came and called me up one day, And bade me follow him. In strange attire he vestured me, Yea, in the silks of Liberty, He set me thus afloat; He bade me seem to have the shakes, And ope my mouth as one that takes A high and hopeless note. And painting merely what he saw, According to the last-found law Of values and of tones, He made me, much to my amaze, A thing whereon the public gaze, And mock me for the nones. I am the Lady of Shalott And if you tell me I am _not_, I say but this one thing: That here be “Values” rare and quaint, A goodly “quality of paint,” And “workmanlike hand-ling.” I am the Lady of Shalott, And, though you recognize me not, Denied it may not be That I am of the things right good, Albeit scantly understood, In this Acadamee. ――――:o:―――― STROPHES FROM A SONG AFTER MOONRISE. _Strophe I._