Bill, I feel far from quite right--if not further: already the pill Seems, if I may say so, to bubble inside me. A poet's heart, Bill, Is a sort of a thing that is made of the tenderest young bloom on a fruit. You may pass me the mixture at once, if you please--and I'll thank you to boot For that poem--and then for the julep. This really is damnable stuff! (Not the poem, of course.) Do you snivel, old friend? well, it's nasty enough, But I think I can stand it--I think so--ay, Bill, and I could were it worse. But I'll tell you a thing that I can't and I won't. 'Tis the old, old curse-- The gall of the gold-fruited Eden, the lure of the angels that fell. 'Tis the core of the fruit snake-spotted in the hush of the shadows of hell, Where a lost man sits with his head drawn down, and a weight on his eyes. You know what I mean, Bill--the tender and delicate mother of lies, Woman, the devil's first cousin--no doubt by the female side. The breath of her mouth still moves in my hair, and I know that she lied, And I feel her, Bill, sir, inside me--she operates there like a drug. Were it better to live like a beetle, to wear the cast clothes of a slug, Be the louse in the locks of the hangman, the mote in the eye of the bat, Than to live and believe in a woman, who must one day grow aged and fat? You must see it's preposterous, Bill, sir. And yet, how the thought of it clings! I have lived out my time--I have prigged lots of verse--I have kissed (ah, that stings!) Lips that swore I had cribbed every line that I wrote on them--cribbed-- honour bright! Then I loathed her; but now I forgive her; perhaps after all she was right. Yet I swear it was shameful--unwomanly, Bill, sir--to say that I fibbed. Why, the poems were mine, for I bought them in print. Cribbed? of course they were cribbed. Yet I wouldn't say, cribbed from the French--Lady Bathsheba thought it was vulgar-- But picked up on the banks of the Don, from the lips of a highly intelligent Bulgar. I'm aware, Bill, that's out of all metre--I can't help it--I'm none of your sort Who set metres, by Jove, above morals--not exactly. They don't go to Court-- As I mentioned one night to that cowslip-faced pet, Lady Rahab Redrabbit (Whom the Marquis calls Drabby for short). Well, I say, if you want a thing, grab it-- That's what I did, at least, when I took that _danseuse_ to a swell _cabaret_, Where expense was no consideration. A poet, you see, now and then must be gay. (I declined to give more, I remember, than fifty centeems to the waiter; For I asked him if that was enough; and the jackanapes answered-- _Peut-etre_. Ah, it isn't in you to draw up a _menu_ such as ours was, though humble: When I told Lady Shoreditch, she thought it a regular _grand tout ensemble_.) She danced the heart out of my body--I can see in the glare of the lights, I can see her again as I saw her that evening, in spangles and tights.