My beauties were no longer things But horrors to be wept! Ah! why did knowledge ope my eyes? What grave defects and wants are mine; Thrice happy time! - Art's early days! When great Rembrandt but little seemed, A FAIRY TALE. ON Hounslow heath- and close beside the road, And built like Mr. Birkbeck's, all of wood; On which it used to wander to and fro, Because its master ne'er maintained a rider, But made his business travel for itself, And then retired - if one may call it so. Perchance, the very race and constant riot Of his now sedentary caravan; Perchance, he loved the ground because 't was common, And so he might impale a strip of soil, That furnished, by his toil, Some dusty greens, for him and his old woman; But, tired of always looking at the coaches, The same to come,- when they had seen them one day! And, used to brisker life, both man and wife Began to suffer N U E's approaches, And feel retirement like a long wet Sunday,- And being ripened in the seventh stage, The childhood of old age, Began, as other children have begun,— Or Paley ethical, or learned Porson,- But chiefly fairy tales they loved to con, Reading, and wept Over the White Cat, in their wooden cottage. They read, of course, their childish faith grew stronger She saw the flight of Fairyland's fly-wagons, In puddle ponds, and took old crows for dragons,- As the old man sat a feeding Beside his open street-and-parlor door, Proclaimed a drove of beasts was coming by the way. Long-horned, and short, of many a different breed. With some of those unquiet black dwarf devils, Or Firth of Forth; Looking half wild with joy to leave the North,— Only in some enthusiastic moment,- Kicked out a passage through the beastly rabble; Backed his beef-steaks against the wooden gable, Right o'er the page Wherein the sage Just then was spelling some romantic fable. The old man, half a scholar, half a dunce, Could not peruse who could? two tales at once; And being huffed At what he knew was none of Riquet's Tuft, But most unluckily enclosed a morsel And bolting off with speed, increased by pain, Just then, by fortune's whimsical decree, At last, conceive her, rising from the ground, And looking round Where rest was to be found, There was no house no villa there no nothing! No house! The change was quite amazing; Explained the horrid mystery; and raising "Well! this is Fairy Work! I'll bet a farden. Little Prince Silverwings has ketched me up, And set me down in some one else's garden! THE TURTLES. A FABLE. "The rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle." ONE day, it was before a civic dinner, - BYRON. Two London Aldermen, no matter which,-Cordwainer, Girdler, Pattern-maker, Skinner,But both were florid, corpulent, and rich, And both right fond of festive demolition, Set forth upon a secret expedition. Yet not, as might be fancied from the token, To Pudding Lane, Pie Corner, or the Street Or, bound on voyages, secure a berth Jostled and jostling, through the mud, Down narrow streets and crooked lanes they dived, |