Canto The Thirteenth.[653]

I.

I now mean to be serious;--it is time, Since Laughter now-a-days is deemed too serious; A jest at Vice by Virtue's called a crime, And critically held as deleterious: Besides, the sad's a source of the sublime, Although, when long, a little apt to weary us; And therefore shall my lay soar high and solemn, As an old temple dwindled to a column.

II.

The Lady Adeline Amundeville ('T is an old Norman name, and to be found In pedigrees, by those who wander still Along the last fields of that Gothic ground) Was high-born, wealthy by her father's will, And beauteous, even where beauties most abound, In Britain--which, of course, true patriots find The goodliest soil of Body and of Mind.

III.

I'll not gainsay them; it is not my cue; I'll leave them to their taste, no doubt the best; An eye's an eye, and whether black or blue, Is no great matter, so 't is in request; 'T is nonsense to dispute about a hue-- The kindest may be taken as a test. The fair sex should be always fair; and no man, Till thirty, should perceive there's a plain woman.

IV.

And after that serene and somewhat dull Epoch, that awkward corner turned for days More quiet, when our moon's no more at full, We may presume to criticise or praise; Because Indifference begins to lull Our passions, and we walk in Wisdom's ways; Also because the figure and the face Hint, that 't is time to give the younger place.

V.

I know that some would fain postpone this era, Reluctant as all placemen to resign Their post; but theirs is merely a chimera, For they have passed Life's equinoctial line: But then they have their claret and Madeira, To irrigate the dryness of decline; And County meetings, and the Parliament, And debt--and what not, for their solace sent.

VI.

And is there not Religion, and Reform, Peace, War, the taxes, and what's called the "Nation"? The struggle to be pilots in a storm? The landed and the monied speculation? The joys of mutual hate to keep them warm, Instead of Love, that mere hallucination? Now Hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

VII.

Rough Johnson, the great moralist, professed, Right honestly, "he liked an honest hater!"-- The only truth that yet has been confessed Within these latest thousand years or later. Perhaps the fine old fellow spoke in jest:-- For my part, I am but a mere spectator, And gaze where'er the palace or the hovel is, Much in the mode of Goethe's Mephistopheles;

VIII.

But neither love nor hate in much excess; Though 't was not once so. If I sneer sometimes, It is because I cannot well do less, And now and then it also suits my rhymes. I should be very willing to redress Men's wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, Had not Cervantes, in that too true tale Of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.