I played the other day at Whist,

My partner was a comely maiden,

Her eyes so blue, her pretty wrist

With bracelets and with bangles laden,

She wore about ten thousand pounds,

Each finger had its priceless jewel,

She was, in fact, ablaze—but zounds!

Her play, indeed, was "something cruel."

I called for trumps, and called in vain,

At intervals I dared to mention

How much her conduct caused me pain,

Yet paid she not the least attention.

I very nearly tore my hair,

I begged of her to play discreetly,

But no—the tricks I planned with care

Without exception failed completely.

Jewels, I have no doubt, are grand,

But even they are sometimes cloying.

I found at length her splendid hand

(Of shapely fingers) most annoying.

When next I'm playing, I confess

I'd like a girl (and may I get her!)

Who shows her hands a little less,

And plays her cards a little better.

Oh, London is a pleasant place to live the whole year through,

I love it 'neath November's pall, or Summer's rarest blue,

When leafy planes to city courts still tell the tale of June,

Or when the homely fog brings out the lamplighter at noon.

I thought to go away this year, and yet in town I am.

I have not been to Hampstead Heath, much less to Amsterdam;

And now December's here again I do not feel the loss,

Though all the summer I've not been four miles from Charing Cross.

'Twas pleasant in the office when we'd gather in a bunch,

A social, dreamy sort of day, with lots of time for lunch.

How commerce flagged September through, at 90, Pinching Lane,

Till bronzed and bluff the chief returned, and trade revived again.

Why talk of Andalusia's bulls, of Rocky-Mountain bears,

Of Tyrolean alpenstocks—though not of Alpen shares;

Of seaside haunts where fashion drives with coronetted panels,

Or briny nooks, when all you need is pipes, and books, and flannels.

Of orange-groves, and cloister'd courts, of fountains, and of pines,

Black shadows at whose edge the sun intolerably shines,

Of tumbled mountain heights, like waves on some Titanic sea,

Caught by an age of ice at once, and fix'd eternally.

Of quiet river-villages, which woods and waters frame,

Lull'd in the lap of loveliness to the music of their name;

Of fallow-fields, of sheltered farms, of moorland and of mere:

Let others roam—I stay at home, and find their beauties here.

Not when the sun on London town incongruously smiles,

On the news-boys, and the traffic, and the advertisers' wiles;

But when the solar orb has ceased to mark the flight of time,

And three yards off is nothingness—indefinite, sublime,—

Then in the City's teeming streets each soul can get its share,

Its concentrated essence of the high romance of air,

Whose cloudy symbols KEATS beheld, and yearn'd to jot them down,

But anybody nowadays can swallow them in town.

There are, who, fain to dry the tear, and soothe the choking throat,

Would burn those tokens of the hearth that fondly o'er us float;

They cannot trace amid the gloom each dainty spire and whorl,

But smoke, to the true poet's eye, is never out of curl.

The sardine in his oily den, his little house of tin,

Headless and heedless there he lies, no move of tail or fin,

Yet full as beauteous, I ween, that press'd and prison'd fish,

As when in sunny seas he swam unbroken to the dish.

A unit in the vasty world of waters far away,

We could nor taste his toothsome form, nor watch his merry play,

But, prison'd thus, to fancy's eye, he brings his native seas,

The olive-groves of Southern France—perchance the Pyrenees.

The brown sails of the fishing-boats, the lithe sea-season'd crew,

The spray that shakes the sunlight off beneath the breezy blue,

The netted horde that shames the light with their refulgent sheen—

Such charm the gods who dwell on high have given the chill sardine.

So when we find long leagues of smoke compacted in the air,

'Tis not the philosophic part to murmur or to swear,

But patiently unravelling, the threads will soon appear,

In cottage hearths, and burning weeds, and misty woodland sere.

The day is fading, all the West with sunset's glow is bright,

And island clouds of crimson float in depths of emerald light,

Like circles on a rippled lake the tints spread up the sky,

Till, mingling with the purple shade, they touch night's shore, and die.

Down where the beech-trees, nearly bare, spread o'er the red-leaf'd hill,

Where yet late-lingerers patter down, altho' the wind is still,

The cottage smoke climbs thinly up, and shades the black-boled trees,

And hangs upon the misty air as blue as summer seas.

'Tis this, in other guise, that wraps the town in sombre pall,

While like two endless funerals the lines of traffic crawl,

And from the abysmal vagueness where flows the turbid stream

Like madden'd nightmares neighing, the steamers hoarsely scream.

The Arab