PUNCH,
OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

Sweet odours, radiant colours, glittering light!

How swift a change from the dusk sodden night

Of London in mid-winter!

Titania here might revel as at home;

Fair forms are floating soft as Paphian foam,

Bright as an iceberg-splinter.

Dianas doubtless, yet their frost holds fire;

The snowiest bosom covers soft desire,

And these are snowy, verily.

As blanched—and bare—as Himalaya's peaks,

Light-vestured as a troop of dancing Greeks.

Waltz-measures ripple merrily.

Merrily? Yes; the music throbs with mirth,

Feet trip in time to it; yet what strange dearth

Of glee midst all these graces!

The quickening fire of spirit, passion, will,

Seems scarce to move these dancing forms or thrill

These irresponsive faces.

The Shadow smiled. "True, yet not true," he said.

"Good Form demands that men should look half dead,

And women semi-frozen.

Yet Nature lives beneath these modish masks

Somewhere, sometimes, with energy that tasks

Caste's rigid rule to cozen.

"Pygmalion's prayer breathed life into the stone,

But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone

And statuesque still bearing.

You'd say in her the marble must invade

The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed,

Such radiant raiment wearing.

"Whirled in the waltz's formal maze by one

Who might be a broad-cloth'd automaton,

For any show of pleasure,

She moves with drooping lids, and lips apart,

And scarce a flush to show that a young heart

Throbs to the pulsing measure."

"Men meet to moon, and women whirl to wed,

The cynic says. Is joy in life quite dead,

Gladness in concourse banished

From the parades of fashionable youth?

Have maiden tenderness and manly truth

From Vanity Fair quite vanished?"

"Soft!" sneered the Shadow. "Questionings like these

Sound gauche and gushing. Better far to freeze

To the right social zero,

Than stoop to zeal and frank display of zest,

Notes of the vulgar glories that invest

The housemaid-novel's hero.

"Nothing more useful than the surface-ice

Of stiff stolidity. Vigour, aye, and vice,

Therein find ready covert.

Wickedness here may lurk, or even wit.

Not to name happiness; but naught of it

Is obvious and overt.

"How bored they look, the slim stiff-collared boys!

Energy that is eager and enjoys

They may anon make show of

In some less honest haunt; here as in pain

They creak and crawl, devoid of that sans gêne

That virtue seems sworn foe of.

"Languidly circumvolving, lounging lank,

In scuffling circle or in mural rank,

Of misery mechanic

They look the wooden symbols; nought to show

That even well-starched linen's sheeny snow

Veils impulses volcanic.

"That straight-limb'd son of Anak circling there

Much like a whirling semaphore, strange care

His boyish forehead wrinkling?

The season's catch! His sire, is great in Soap,

His partner's mother yonder sits; with hope

Her watchful eyes are twinkling.

"The twirling twain are silent. Silence sits

Lord of the revel, incubus of wits

Arch palsier of prattle

Yet many a girl here mute's a chatterer sweet,

And many a youth in circles less discrete

Is an 'agreeable rattle.'

"Respectability's austere restraint

Rules them relentlessly; smiles forced and faint

And joyless facial spasms

Their meetings and their mutterings attend.

Jerky approximations quickly end

In void unvocal chasms.

"Yet still they circle, and yet still they loll.

A marionette wooing a wooden doll

Would look more animated

Than yonder pair, revolving interlaced,

Exchanging commonplaces leaden-paced,

Or repartees belated."

"Mammon by day and maundering at night

Oh, Shade!" I cried, "can furnish scant delight,

The Race for Wealth is rapid.

How can the feverish rush find true relief

In heartless intercourse, as bald as brief,

Amusement vain as vapid?"

"Amusement? Intercourse? They scarce exist."

The Shadow answered. "Some Bœotian mist

Society blinds and muddles.

True recreation in this joyless round?

The sea's bright changefulness as soon were found

In Pedlington's rain-puddles.

"The cliques and coteries know not how to mix.

A barrier more impassable than Styx

Is Philistine stupidity.

Were mutual amusement meeting's aim,

Mind must move maidenhood inert and tame,

Melt masculine rigidity.

"Concourse, not intercourse, is what you see:

To mix, and sympathise, and to be free,

Is the true sociality.

These meet, like marbles mingled in a bag,

And the net outcome, friend, is friction, fag,

Boredom, and sheer banality.

"The strongest symptom of quick life crops out

In watchful mutual mockery. Gibe and flout

In low asides flow freely.

Oh, bland elysium for the brave and fair,

Whose pleasures are the snigger and the stare,

Chill snub, and eye-glance steely!