o a weary tune
("Such as that of my verses"? Get out!) in the face of a sick-souled moon.
The keen stars kindled and faded and fled, and the wind in my ears
Was the wail of a poet for failure--you needn't come snivelling tears
And spoiling the mixture, confound you, with dropping your tears into that!
I know I'm pathetic--I must be--and you soft-hearted and fat,
And I'm grateful of course for your kindness--there, don't come hugging
me, now--
But because a fellow's pathetic, you needn't low like a cow.

I should like--on my soul, I should like--to remember--but somehow I
can't--
If the lady whose love has reduced me to this was the niece or the aunt.
But whichever it was, I feel sure, when I published my lays of last year
(You remember their title--The Tramp--only seven-and-sixpence--not dear),
I sent her a copy (perhaps her tears fell on the title-page--yes--
I should like to imagine she wept)--and the Bride of Bulgaria (MS.)
I forwarded with it. The lyrics, no doubt, she found bitter--and sweet;
But the Bride she rejected, you know, with expressions I will not repeat.
Well--she did no more than all publishers did. Though my prospects were
marred,
I can pity and pardon them. Blindness, mere blindness! And yet it was hard.
For a poet, Bill, is a blossom--a bird--a billow--a breeze--
A kind of creature that moves among men as a wind among trees.
And a bard who is also the pet of patricians and dowagers doubly can
Express his contempt for canaille in his fables where beasts are
republican.
Yet with all my disdainful forgiveness for men so deficient in _ton_
I cannot but feel it was cruel--I cannot but think it was wrong.
I with the heat of my heart still burning against all bars
As the fire of the dawn, so to speak, in the blanched blank brows of
the stars--
I with my tremulous lips made pale by musical breath--
I with the shade in my eyes that was left by the kisses of Death--
(For Death came near me in youth, and touched my face with his face,
And put in my lips the songs that belong to a desolate place--
Desolate truly, my heart and my lips, till her kiss filled them up!)
I with my soul like wine poured out with my flesh for the cup--
It was hard for me--it was hard--Bill, Bill, you great owl, was it not?
For the day creeps in like a Fate: and I think my grand passion is rot:
And I dreamily seem to perceive, by the light of a life's dream done,
The lotion at six, and the mixture at ten, and th