Must a game be played for the sake of pelf?
Where a button goes, 'twere an epigram
To offer the stamp of the very Guelph.
The true has no value beyond the sham :
As well the counter as coin, I submit,
When your table's a hat, and your prize, a dram.
Stake your counter as boldly every whit,
Venture as truly, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play !—is my principle.
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life's set prize, be it what it will!
The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
You of the virtue, (we issue join),
How strive you? De te, fabula!
BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY.
No more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk.
A final glass for me, though: cool, i'faith!
We ought to have our Abbey back, you see.
It's different, preaching in basilicas,
And doing duty in some masterpiece
Like this of brother Pugin's, bless his heart!
I doubt if they're half baked, those chalk rosettes,
Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere;
It's just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh?
These hot long ceremonies of our church
Cost us a little-oh, they pay the price,
You take me amply pay it! Now, we'll talk.
So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.
No deprecation,-nay, I beg you, sir!
Beside 'tis our engagement: don't you know,
I promised, if you'd watch a dinner out,
We'd see truth dawn together?-truth that peeps
Over the glass's edge when dinner's done,
And body gets its sop and holds its noise
And leaves soul free a little. Now's the time-
'Tis break of day! You do despise me then.
And if I say,
"despise me," never fear-
I know you do not in a certain sense-
Not in my arm-chair for example: here,
I well imagine you respect my place
(Status, entourage, worldly circumstance)
Quite to its value-very much indeed
—Are up to the protesting eyes of you
In pride at being seated here for once-
You'll turn it to such capital account!
When somebody, through years and years to come, Hints of the bishop,-names me—that's enough— "Blougram? I knew him "—(into it you slide)
'Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,
All alone, we two-he's a clever man—
And after dinner,-why, the wine you know,—
Oh, there was wine, and good!-what with the
'Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!
He's no bad fellow, Blougram-he had seen
Something of mine he relished-some review—-
He's quite above their humbug in his heart,
Half-said as much, indeed-the thing's his trade-
I warrant, Blougram's sceptical at times—
How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!"
Che che, my dear sir, as we say at Rome,
Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take;
You have had your turn and spoken your home
The hand's mine now, and here you follow suit.
Thus much conceded, still the first fact stays-
You do despise me; your ideal of life
Is not the bishop's-you would not be I—
You would like better to be Goethe, now,
Or Buonaparte-or, bless me, lower still,
Count D'Orsay,—so you did what you preferred,
Spoke as you thought, and, as you cannot help,
Believed or disbelieved, no matter what,
So long as on that point, whate'er it was,
You loosed your mind, were whole and sole yourself. -That, my ideal never can include,
Upon that element of truth and worth
Never be based! for say they make me Pope
(They can't-suppose it for our argument),
Why, there I'm at my tether's end-I've reached
My height, and not a height which pleases you:
An unbelieving Pope won't do, you say.
It's like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor played Death on a stage
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world,
Then, going in the tire-room afterward
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly
The moment he had shut the closet door
By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now?
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!
So, drawing comfortable breath again,
You weigh and find, whatever more or less
I boast of my ideal realized
Is nothing in the balance when opposed
To your ideal, your grand simple life
Of which you will not realize one jot.
I am much, you are nothing; you would be all,
I would be merely much-you beat me there.
No, friend, you do not beat me; hearken why. The common problem, yours, mine, every one's,
Is not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be--but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means—a very different thing!
No abstract intellectual plan of life
Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws,
But one, a man, who is man and nothing more, May lead within a world which (by your leave) Is Rome or London-not Fool's-paradise. Embellish Rome, idealize away,
Make Paradise of London if you can,
You're welcome, nay, you're wise.
We mortals cross the ocean of this world
Each in his average cabin of a life-
The best's not big, the worst yields elbow-room.
Now for our six months' voyage-how prepare?
You come on shipboard with a landsman's list
Of things he calls convenient-so they are!
An India screen is pretty furniture,
A piano-forte is a fine resource,
All Balzac's novels occupy one shelf,
The new edition fifty volumes long;
And little Greek books, with the funny type
They get up well at Leipsic, fill the next-
Go on! slabbed marble, what a bath it makes !
And Parma's pride, the Jerome, let us add!
'Twere pleasant could Correggio's fleeting glow
Hang full in face of one where'er one roams,
Since he more than the others brings with him
Italy's self,-the marvellous Modenese !
Yet 'twas not on your list before, perhaps.
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