Where all the syllables that end in ed,
Like old dragoons, have cuts across the head;—
Essays so dark Champollion might despair
To guess what mummy of a thought was there,
Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase,
Looks like a Zebra in a parson's chaise. …
Mesmeric pamphlets, which to facts appeal,
Each fact as slippery as a fresh0caught eel; &c., &c.[1]
There is pleasant and piquant raillery in the stanzas to "My Aunt," who, mediæval as she is, good soul! still "strains the aching clasp that binds her virgin zone:"
I know it hurts her,—though she looks as cheerful as she can;
Her waist is ampler than her life, for life is but a span.
My aunt! my poor deluded aunt! her hair is almost grey:
Why will she train that winter curl in such a spring-like way?
How can she lay her glasses down, and say she reads as well,
When, through a double convex lens, she just makes out to spell?
Que de jolis vers, et de spiriiuelles malices!
And so again in "The Parting Word," which maliciously predicts, stage by stage, in gradual but rapid succession, the feelings of a shallow-hearted damosel after parting with her most devoted—from tearing of jetty locks and waking with inflamed eyes, to complacent audience of a new swain, three weeks after date. We like Dr. Holmes better in this style of graceful banter than when he essays the more broadly comic—as in "The Spectre Pig," or "The Stethoscope Song." The lines "On Lending a Punch-bowl" are already widely-known and highly-esteemed by British readers — and of others which deserve to be so, let us add those entitled "Nux Postcœnatica," "The Music-grinders," "The Dorchester Giant," and "Daily Trials,"—which chronicles the acoustic afflictions of a sensitive man, beginning at daybreak with yelping pug-dog's Memnonian sun-ode, closing at night with the lonely caterwaul,
Tart solo, sour duet, and general squall,
of feline miscreants, and including during the day the accumulated eloquence of women's tongues, "like polar needles, ever on the jar," and drum-beating children, and peripatetic hurdy-gurdies, and child-crying bell-men—an ascending series of torments, a sorites of woes!
On the whole, here we have, in the words of a French critic, "un poëte d'élite et qui comte: c'est une nature individuelle très-fine et très-marquée"—one to whom we owe "des vers gracieux et aimables, vifs et légers, d'une gaieté nuancée de sentiment" And one that we hope to meet again and again.
- ↑ Terpsichore.
