Valentine, A Anon. 113

Virginia's kingly Plant Anon. 87

Virginia Tobacco Stanley Gregson 31

Warning, A Arthur Lovell 124

What I Like H.L. 131

Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, A James Russell Lowell 105

With Pipe and Book Richard Le Gallienne 1

With Pipe and Book at close of day,

Oh, what is sweeter, mortal, say?

It matters not what book on knee,

Old Izaak or the Odyssey,

It matters not meerschaum or clay.

And though one's eyes will dream astray,

And lips forget to sue or sway,

It is "enough to merely be,"

With Pipe and Book.

What though our modern skies be gray,

As bards aver, I will not pray

For "soothing Death" to succor me,

But ask this much, O Fate, of thee,

A little longer yet to stay

With Pipe and Book.

A poet's pipe am I,

And my Abyssinian tint

Is an unmistakable hint

That he lays me not often by.

When his soul is with grief o'erworn

I smoke like the cottage where

They are cooking the evening fare

For the laborer's return.

I enfold and cradle his soul

In the vapors moving and blue

That mount from my fiery mouth;

And there is power in my bowl

To charm his spirit and soothe,

And heal his weariness too.

In spite of my physician, who is, entre nous, a fogy,

And for every little pleasure has some pathologic bogy,

Who will bear with no small vices, and grows dismally prophetic

If I wander from the weary way of virtue dietetic;

In spite of dire forewarnings that my brains will all be scattered,

My memory extinguished, and my nervous system shattered,

That my hand will take to trembling, and my heart begin to flutter,

My digestion turn a rebel to my very bread and butter;

As I puff this mild Havana, and its ashes slowly lengthen,

I feel my courage gather and my resolution strengthen:

I will smoke, and I will praise you, my cigar, and I will light you

With tobacco-phobic pamphlets by the learnéd prigs who fight you!

Let him who has a mistress to her eyebrow write a sonnet,

Let the lover of a lily pen a languid ode upon it;

In such sentimental subjects I'm a Philistine and cynic,

And prefer the inspiration drawn from sources nicotinic.

So I sing of you, dear product of (I trust you are) Havana,

And if there's any question as to how my verses scan, a

Reason is my shyness in the Muses' aid invoking,

As, like other ancient maidens, they perchance object to smoking.

I have learnt with you the wisdom of contemplative quiescence,

While the world is in a ferment of unmeaning effervescence,

That its jar and rush and riot bring no good one-half so sterling

As your fleecy clouds of fragrance that are now about me curling.

So, let stocks go up or downward, and let politicians wrangle,

Let the parsons and philosophers grope in a wordy tangle,

Let those who want them scramble for their dignities or dollars,

Be millionnaires or magnates, or senators or scholars.

I will puff my mild Havana, and I quietly will query,

Whether, when the strife is over, and the combatants are weary,

Their gains will be more brilliant than its faint expiring flashes,

Or more solid than this panful of its dead and sober ashes.

The pipe came safe, and welcome, too,

As anything must be from you;

A meerschaum pure, 'twould float as light

As she the girls called Amphitrite.

Mixture divine of foam and clay,

From both it stole the best away:

Its foam is such as crowns the glow

Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot;

Its clay is but congested lymph

Jove chose to make some choicer nymph;

And here combined,—why, this must be

The birth of some enchanted sea,

Shaped to immortal form, the type

And very Venus of a pipe.

When high I heap it with the weed

From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed

Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore

And cast upon Virginia's shore,

I'll think,—So fill the fairer bowl

And wise alembic of thy soul,

With herbs far-sought that shall distil,

Not fumes to slacken thought and will,

But bracing essences that nerve

To wait, to dare, to strive, to serve.

When curls the smoke in eddies soft,

And hangs a shifting dream aloft,

That gives and takes, though chance-designed,

The impress of the dreamer's mind,

I'll think,—So let the vapors bred

By passion, in the heart or head,

Pass off and upward into space,

Waving farewells of tenderest grace,

Remembered in some happier time,

To blend their beauty with my rhyme.

While slowly o'er its candid bowl

The color deepens (as the soul

That burns in mortals leaves its trace

Of bale or beauty on the face),

I'll think,—So let the essence rare

Of years consuming make me fair;

So, 'gainst the ills of life profuse,

Steep me in some narcotic juice;

And if my soul must part with all

That whiteness which