Page 48 - Poetry-Romance

She quoted Burns’s “Wounded Hare,”
And certain burning lines of Blake’s,
And Ruskin on the fowls of air,
And Coleridge on the water-snakes.
At Emerson’s “Forbearance” he
Began to feel his will benumbed;
At Browning’s “Donald” utterly
His soul surrendered and succumbed.

“Oh, gentlest of all gentle girls,”
He thought, “beneath the blessed sun!”
He saw her lashes hung with pearls,
And swore to give away his gun.
She smiled to find her point was gained,
And went, with happy parting words
(He subsequently ascertained),
To trim her hat with humming-birds.

— Helen Gray Cone (Century Magazine, 1885)

The Fair Physiologist and
the Bachelor of Medicine:
A Lay of the Nineteenth Century

“On tell me, gentle maid,” he cries,
“Whence flows that falling tear,
Why all-suffused those glist’ning eyes?
The cause I fain would hear.”
“The cause” she says, with downcast eye,
“Unless my mem’ry fail, is
Intensified activity
In the Glandula Lachrymalis.”

“But oh, methinks that from your breast
There heaves a gentle sigh,
Refusing, too, to be repressed;

~ 46 ~