Full of the wildfire of thy youth, Did’st never in plain truth, Plant whizzing Flowers in thy mother’s pots, Turning the garden into powder plots? Or give the cook, to fright her, Thy paper sausages well stuffed with nitre? Nay, wert thou never guilty, now, of dropping A lighted cracker by thy sister’s Dear, So that she could not hear The question he was popping?
Go on, Madame! Go on--be bright and busy While hoax’d Astronomers look up and stare From tall observatories, dumb and dizzy, To see a Squib in Cassiopeia’s Chair! A serpent wriggling into Charles’ Wain! A Roman Candle lighting the Great Bear! A rocket tangled in Diana’s train, And Cracker’s stuck in Berenice’s Hair!
There is a King of Fire--Thou shouldst be Queen! Methinks a good connexion might come from it; Could’st thou not make him, in the garden scene, Set out per Rocket and return per comet; Then give him a hot treat Of Pyrotechnicals to sit and sup, Lord! how the world would throng to see him eat. He swallowing fire, while thou dost throw it up.
One solitary night--true is the story, Watching those forms that Fancy will create Within the bright confusion of the grate, I saw a dazzling countenance of glory! Oh Dei gratias! That fiery facias ’Twas thine, Enchantress of the Surrey Grove; And ever since that night, In dark and bright, Thy face is _registered_ within my _stove_!
Long may that starry brow enjoy its rays; May no untimely _blow_ its doom forestall; But when old age prepares the friendly pall, When the last spark of all thy sparks decays, Then die lamented by good people all, Like Goldsmith’s _Madam Blaize_!
In one of your Annuals you have given insertion to “A Plan for Writing Blank Verse in Rhyme;” but as I have seen no regular long poem constructed on its principles, I suppose the scheme did not take with the literary world. Under these circumstances I feel encouraged to bring forward a novelty of my own, and I can only regret that such poets as Chaucer and Cottle, Spenser and Hayley, Milton and Pratt, Pope and Pye, Byron and Batterbee, should have died before it was invented.
The great difficulty in verse is avowedly the rhyme. Dean Swift says somewhere in his letters, “that a rhyme is as hard to find with him as a guinea,”--and we all know that guineas are proverbially scarce among poets. The merest versifier that ever attempted a Valentine must have met with this Orson, some untameable savage syllable that refused to chime in with society. For instance, what poetical Foxhunter--a contributor to the Sporting Magazine--has not drawn all the covers of Beynard Ceynard, Deynard, Feynard, Geynard, Heynard, Keynard, Leynard, Meynard, Neynard, Peynard, Queynard, to find a rhyme for Reynard? The spirit of the times is decidedly against Tithe; and I know of no tithe more oppressive than that poetical one, in heroic measure, which requires that every tenth syllable shall pay a sound in kind. How often the Poet goes up a line, only to be stopped at the end by an impracticable rhyme, like a bull in a blind alley! I have an ingenious medical friend, who might have been an eminent poet by this time, but the first line he wrote ended in ipecacuanha, and with all his physical and mental power, he has never yet been able to find a rhyme for it.