and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we shall have for supper--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet! Sancho in such a situation once fixed on cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be disparaged. Then, in the intervals of pictured scenery and Shandean contemplation, to catch the preparation and the stir in the kitchen (getting ready for the gentlemen in the parlour). _Procul, O procul este profani!_ These hours are sacred to silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts hereafter. A GARDEN IDYLL [Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_] A LADY A POET THE LADY Sir Poet, ere you crossed the lawn (If it was wrong to watch you, pardon), Behind this weeping birch withdrawn, I watched you saunter round the garden. I saw you bend beside the phlox, Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle, Review my well-ranged hollyhocks Smile at the fountain's slender spurtle; You paused beneath the cherry-tree, Where my marauder thrush was singing, Peered at the bee-hives curiously, And narrowly escaped a stinging; And then--you see, I watched--you passed Down the espalier walk that reaches Out to the western wall, and last, Dropped on the seat before the peaches. What was your thought? You waited long. Sublime or graceful,--grave,--satiric? A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song? A tender Tennysonian lyric? Tell me. That garden-seat shall be, So long as speech renown disperses, Illustrious as the spot where he-- The gifted Blank--composed his verses. THE POET [Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_] Madam,--whose uncensorious eye Grows gracious over certain pages, Wherein the Jester's maxims lie, It may be, thicker than the Sage's-- I hear but to obey, and could Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you, Some verse as whimsical as Hood,-- As gay as Praed,--should answer to you. But, though the common voice proclaims Our only serious vocation Confined to giving nothings names And dreams a "local habitation"; Believe me, there are tuneless days, When neither marble, brass, nor vellum, Would profit much by any lays That haunt the poet's cerebellum. More empty things, I fear, than rhymes, More idle things than songs, absorb it; The "finely frenzied" eye, at times, Reposes mildly in its orbit; And--painful truth--at times, to him, Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive, "A primrose by a river's brim" Is absolutely unsuggestive. The fickle Muse! As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer; A goddess, yet a woman still, She flies the more that we pursue her; In short, with worst as well as best, Five months in six, your hapless poet Is just as prosy as the rest, But cannot comfortably show it.