referred your mere metrical _souffle_
To the stronger poetical food;
Yet at times he was good--"as a tonic:"
Was Tennyson writing just now?
And was this new poet Byronic,
And clever, and naughty, or how?

Then we trifled with concerts and croquet,
Then she daintily dusted her face;
Then she sprinkled herself with "Ess Bouquet,"
Fished out from the foregoing case;
And we chattered of Gassier and Grisi,
And voted Aunt Sally a bore;
Discussed if the tight rope were easy,
Or Chopin much harder than Spohr.

And oh! the odd things that she quoted,
With the prettiest possible look,
And the price of two buns that she noted
In the prettiest possible book;
While her talk like a musical rillet
Flashed on with the hours that flew,
And the carriage, her smile seemed to fill it
With just enough summer--for Two.

Till at last in her corner, peeping
From a nest of rugs and of furs,
With the white shut eyelids sleeping
On those dangerous looks of hers,
She seemed like a snow-drop breaking,
Not wholly alive nor dead,
But with one blind impulse making
To the sounds of the spring overhead;

And I watched in the lamplight's swerving
The shade of the down-dropt lid,
And the lip-line's delicate curving,
Where a slumbering smile lay hid,
Till I longed that, rather than sever,
The train should shriek into space,
And carry us onward--for ever,--
Me and that beautiful face.

But she suddenly woke in a fidget,
With fears she was "nearly at home,"
And talk of a certain Aunt Bridget,
Whom I mentally wished--well, at Rome;
Got out at the very next station,
Looking back with a merry _Bon Soir_,
Adding, too, to my utter vexation,
A surplus, unkind _Au Revoir_.

So left me to muse on her graces,
To dose and to muse, till I dreamed
That we sailed through the sunniest places
In a glorified galley, it seemed;
But the cabin was made of a carriage,
And the ocean was Eau-de-Cologne,
And we split on a rock labelled MARRIAGE,
And I woke,--as cold as a stone.

And that's how I lost her--a jewel,
_Incognita_--one in a crowd,
Nor prudent enough to be cruel,
Nor worldly enough to be proud.
It was just a shut lid and its lashes,
Just a few hours i