[2] Upon this expression Mr. Reade justly remarks: "This is a foolish and inapplicable phrase. Free trade is free buying and selling, not free stealing."
A man should live in a garret, I think, And have few friends, and be poorly clad, With an old hat stopping the wind in the chink, To keep the Goddess constant and glad.
Of old, when I walked on a rugged way, And gave much work for but little bread, The Goddess dwelt with me night and day, Sat at my table, haunted my bed.
The narrow, mean attic, I see it now!-- Its window o'erlooking the city's tiles, The sunset's fires, and the clouds of snow, And the river wandering miles and miles.
Just one picture hung in the room, The saddest story that Art can tell,-- Dante and Virgil in lurid gloom Watching the Lovers float through Hell.
Wretched enough was I sometimes, Pinched, and harassed with vain desires; But thicker than clover sprung the rhymes As I dwelt like a sparrow among the spires.
Midnight filled my slumbers with song; Music haunted my dreams by day: Now I listen and wait and long, But the Delphian airs have died away!
I wonder and wonder how it befell: Suddenly I had friends in crowds; I bade the house-tops a long farewell; "Good by," I cried, "to the stars and clouds!
"But thou, rare soul, that hast dwelt with me, Spirit of Poesy! thou divine Breath of the morning, thou shalt be, Goddess! for ever and ever mine."
And the woman I loved was now my bride, And the house I wanted was my own; I turned to the Goddess satisfied,-- But the Goddess had somehow flown!
Flown, and I fear she will never return! I'm much too sleek and happy for her, Whose lovers must hunger, and waste, and burn, Ere the beautiful heathen heart will stir!
I call,--but she does not stoop to my cry; I wait,--but she lingers, and ah! so long! It was not so in the years gone by, When she touched my lips with chrism of song.
I swear I will get me a garret again, And let the wee wife see the sunset's fires, And lure the Goddess, by vigil and pain, Up with the sparrows among the spires!
For a man should live in a garret aloof, And have few friends, and be poorly clad, With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof, To keep the Goddess constant and glad!
Early on the morning of the 13th of September, 1855, a most fantastic and picturesque procession--in which the formal and arrogant simplicities of a nice Western civilization, and the grotesque and insolent ostentations of a crude Oriental barbarism, with all the splendid riddles of its far-fetched type-and-symbolry, were blended in a rich bizarreness--formed in the main street of the western suburb of "the Immortal City" of Amarapoora, and moved toward the palace of "him who reigns over the kingdoms of Thunaparanta, Tampadépa, and all the great umbrella-bearing chiefs of the Eastern countries,"--the Lord of Earth and Water, King of the Rising Sun, Lord of the Sacred White Elephant and of all white elephants, Master of the Celestial Weapon, and Great Chief of Life and Righteousness,--called, "for short," Mendoon-men, King of Ava. An imposing deputation of Woons and other grandees, with their respective "tails," were escorting the newly arrived Envoy of the Governor-General of India, and his suite, from their Residency on the south shore of the lake Toung-ah-mah-Eing below the city, to the Hall of the Throne of the Golden Foot, there to have audience of that great, glorious, and most excellent Majesty, whose dominions are bounded only by the imagination--and here and there a British customhouse; and whose excursions of dreadful power are stayed only by the forbearing fiat of Boodh--and now and then some British bayonets.