Sing me a drawing-room song, darling! Sing as you sang of yore, Lisping of love that is strong, darling! Strong as a big barn-door; Let the true knight be bold, darling! Let him arrive too late; Stick in a bower of gold, darling! Stick in a golden gate. Sing me a drawing-room song, darling! Bear on the angels' wings Children that know no wrong, darling! Little cherubic things! Sing of their sunny hair, darling! Get them to die in June; Wake, if you can, on the stair, darling! Echoes of tiny shoon. Sing me a drawing-room song, darling! Sentiment may be false, Yet it will worry along, darling! Set to a tum-tum valse; See that the verses are few, darling! Keep to the rule of three; That will be better for you, darling! Certainly better for me. 9. ELEGI MUSARUM. (AFTER W. W.) [To Mr. St. Loe Strachey.] Dawn of the year that emerges, a fine and ebullient Phœnix, Forth from the cinders of Self, out of the ash of the Past; Year that discovers my Muse in the thick of purpureal sonnets, Slating diplomacy's sloth, blushing for 'Abdul the d----d'; Year that in guise of a herald declaring the close of the tourney Clears the redoubtable lists hot with the Battle of Bays; Binds on the brows of the Tory, the highly respectable Austin, Laurels that Phœbus of old wore on the top of his tuft; Leaving the locks of the hydra, of Bodley the numerous-headed, Clean as the chin of a boy, bare as a babe in a bath; Year that--I see in the vista the principal verb of the sentence Loom as a deeply-desired bride that is late at the post-- Year that has painfully tickled the lachrymal nerves of the Muses, Giving Another the gift due to Respectfully Theirs;-- _Hinc illæ lacrimæ!_ Ah, reader! I grossly misled you; See, it was false; there is no principal verb after all! His likewise is the anguish, who followed with soft serenading Me as the tremulous tide tracks the meandering moon; Climbing as Romeo clomb, peradventure by help of a flower-pot, Where in her balconied bower lay, inexpressibly coy, Juliet, not as the others, supinely, insanely erotic, Pallid and yellow of hue, very degenerate souls, Rioting round with the rapture of palpitant ichorous ardour, But an immaculate maid, 'one,' you may say, 'of the best'! His, I repeat, is the anguish--my journalist, eulogist critic, Strachey, the generous judge, Saintly unlimited Loe!