_(By Mrs. E. B. Br--N--G.)_

A POET WRITES TO HIS FRIEND. Place--BEDLAM. Time--PROBABLY "SATURDAY NIGHT ABOUT TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING."

"Dear my friend, and fellow-student, I would lean my spirit o'er you;

"Down the purple of this chamber, tears should scarcely run at will." (!!!) Mrs. Browning's "Lady Geraldine's Courtship."

O Ho, Ha Ha, He He--Hum!!!! 0,

Charley, let me weep adown your

Manly bosom! o'er that chamber, tears

must surely run ad libi.--

I'm a victim! friend and pitcher!--done incontinently

brown--your

Poet is immensely diddled by a--but narrabo tibi:--

(There's a Lady, * who writes verses, in the true spas--

modic metre,--

Better writes she, certes, better than all women with--

out end:

Writes full darkly:--I defy all Bards alive or dead to

beat her

At a nubibustic stanza that no man can comprehend--

Her sublime afflatus had I, and her noble scorn of

rhyming,

I could write you something tallish--should make

Lindley Murray suffer,--

Would she "lean her spirit" o'er me, in this rhympho--

leptic climbing, **

I would paint My Courtship in a style would make

you stare, Old Buffer!)--

* I cannot forego this opportunity of paying my humble tribute of ad-- miration to the genius and accomplishments of Mrs. Barrett Browning, whose lamented death has occurred since the above effusion first appeared in print; and I do so the more readily as I fear lest lines which were written in mere gaité de cour may possibly have been construed into a serious attack upon works, the general and undoubted merits of which I should be the first to acknowledge.

** "Nymphs of mountain, not of valley, we are wont to call the muses-- "And in nympholeptic climbing, poets pass from mount to star." --Lady Geraldine's Courtship.

You know, Charley, 'where I saw my Marianne (first) in

Belgravia;

And (secundo) how I loved her, with more love than

kith and kin do:

(Tertio) how I won,--and wed her,--yestermorn; and

her behaviour

You shall hear in five words--last night she exodus'd