What I viewed there once, what I view again

Where the physic bottles stand

On the table's edge, is a suburb lane,

With a wall to my bedside hand.

3.

That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry

O'er the garden-wall is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?

4.

To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;

And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"

Is the house o'er-topping all.

What right had a lounger up their lane?

But, by creeping very close,

With the good wall's help, their eyes might strain And stretch themselves to Oes,

8.

Yet never catch her and me together,

As she left the attic, there,

By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether,"

And stole from stair to stair,

9.

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir used to meet :
How sad and bad and mad it was
But then, how it was sweet!

RESPECTABILITY.

I.

DEAR, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim "I know you both,
Have recognized your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!"
How many precious months and years

Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?

Ere we dared wander, nights like this,

Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine,

And feel the Boulevart break again

To warmth and light and bliss?

3.

I know the world proscribes not love;

Allows my finger to caress

Your lips' contour and downiness, Provided it supply a glove.

The world's good word! — the Institute!
Guizot receives Montalembert !

Eh? Down the court three lampions flare:
Put forward your best foot!

HOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD.

I.

OH, to be in England now that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows

And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray's edge —
That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over
Lest should think he never could recapture
you

The first fine careless rapture !

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

And will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower

- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

St. 3. Guizot: François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, French statesman and historian, b. 1787, d. 1874. Montalembert: Charles Forbes René, Comte de Montalembert, French statesman, orator, and political writer, b. 1810, d. 1870. Guizot receives Montalembert: i.e., on purely conventional grounds.