Page 59 - Poetry-Romance

In just a week they ebbed so fast
That when her second sonnet,
“Lay not my hand in thine again,”
Had praises heaped upon it,

Lorinda proved all suitors slack,
Her eyes they all were blind to;
As to detention of her hand,
That no one seemed inclined to.

With sore regret and wonderment,
Lorinda now rehearses
Those telling lines she lately sang
The key to love’s reverses:

“O specious Fancy! how you lie
For sake of being famous!
You’ve made my lovers think you fact,
And lost me even Amos!”

The maid wrote chiefly after this
Of battles, heroes, minsters,
Until the hour of thirty struck
Her name among the spinsters.

Now she begins of love again,
And sings alone from feeling;
Those rhythmic edicts of her youth
That Fancy gave repealing.

So that her latest poems are,
—And critics say, much stronger, —
“The heart, though dead, can live again,”
And “Clasp my hand yet longer!”

— Charlotte Fiske Bates (Century Magazine, 1887)

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