Twenty-One Days in India, or, the Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.; and, the Teapot SeriesAberigh-Mackay, George
General
Twenty-One Days in India, or, the Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.; and, the Teapot Series
Aberigh-Mackay, George
India -- Description and travel; India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947; India -- Social life and customs
"Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers."
Blue-eyed girls have bound his dear head with garlands of the amorous
rosemary. The echoes of sea-caves would have chanted requiems until
time should be no more. Embalmed in darkness the nightingale would
nightly for ever pour forth her soul in profuse strains of
inconsolable ecstasy; by day the dove should moan in the flickering
shade until the sun should cease to roll on his fiery path:--
"Where through groves deep and high,
Sounds the far billow,
Where early violets die under the willow.
There, through the summer day,
Cool streams are laving;
There, while the tempests sway,
Scarce are boughs waving;
There thy rest should'st thou take,
Parted for ever,
Never again to wake: never, O never!"
With tender hand we would have traced on his memorial urn some
valediction--not without hope--of love and friendship.
It was otherwise. He was buried during a dust-storm in a loathsome
Indian cemetery. No friend stood by the grave. A hard priest
reluctantly pattered an abbreviated service: and people whispered that
it was not well with the Collector's soul. He is now forgotten.
But, dear friend, thy memory blossoms in my heart for ever, thy merry
laugh will still sound in my ear:--
"Abiding with me till I sail
To seek thee on the mystic deeps,
And this electric force, that keeps
A thousand pulses dancing, fail."
No. XXXVIII
THE GRYPHON'S ANABASIS
[March 29, 1880.]
For some days the moustaches had been assuming a fiercer curl; more
and more troopers had been added to the escort; the Lord whispered in
the unreluctant ear softer and softer nothings; the scarlet runners
bowed lower and lower; and it was rumoured that the Lord had given the
Gryphon a pot of his own club-mutton hair-grease. It would be a halo.
This development of glory must have a limit: a feeling got abroad that
the Gryphon must go.
The Commander-in-Chief would come up to him bathed in smiles and say
nothing; at other times with tears in his eyes he would swear with far
resounding, multitudinous oaths to accompany the Gryphon. One day
Wolseley's pocket-book and a tooth-brush would be packed in tin; next
day they would be unpacked. The vacillation was awful; it amounted to
an agony; it involved all the circles; the newspapers were profoundly
moved.
The Gryphon starts. Editors forget their proofs; Baboos forget Moses;
mothers forget their cicisbeos. The mind of Calcutta is turned upon
the Gryphon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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