My perfect wife, my Leonor, Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes, mine too, Whom else could I dare look backward for, With whom beside should I dare pursue The path grey heads abhor?
For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them; Youth, flowery all the way, there stops-- Not they; age threatens and they contemn, Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops, One inch from our life's safe hem!
With me, youth led--I will speak now, No longer watch you as you sit Reading by fire-light, that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it Mutely--my heart knows how--
When, if I think but deep enough, You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme; And you, too, find without a rebuff The response your soul seeks many a time Piercing its fine flesh-stuff--
We really should think highly of the powers of any interpreter who could "pierce" the obscurity of such "stuff" as this. One extract more and we have done. A gold medal in the department of Hermeneutical Science to the ingenious individual, who, after any length of study, can succeed in unriddling this tremendous passage from "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," the organist:--
First you deliver your phrase --Nothing propound, that I see, Fit in itself for much blame or much praise-- Answered no less, where no answer needs be: Off start the Two on their ways!
Straight must a Third interpose, Volunteer needlessly help-- In strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in his nose, So the cry's open, the kennel's a-yelp, Argument's hot to the close!
One disertates, he is candid-- Two must dicept,--has distinguished! Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did: Four protests, Five makes a dart at the thing wished-- Back to One, goes the case bandied!
One says his say with a difference-- More of expounding, explaining! All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociferance-- Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining-- Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence.
One is incisive, corrosive-- Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant-- Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive-- Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant-- Five ... O Danaides, O Sieve!
Now, they ply axes and crowbars-- Now they prick pins at a tissue Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue? Where is our gain at the Two-bars?