This, from the same place and about the same date, is addressed by
way of thanks to a friend at Cambridge, the late Mr. A. G. Dew-Smith,
who had sent him a present of a box of cigarettes. Mr. Dew-Smith, a
man of fine artistic tastes and mechanical genius, with a silken,
somewhat foreign, urbanity of bearing, was the original, so far as
concerns manner and way of speech, of Attwater in the _Ebb-Tide_.
[_Hotel Belvedere, Davos, November 1880_].
Figure me to yourself, I pray--
A man of my peculiar cut--
Apart from dancing and deray,[29]
Into an Alpine valley shut;
Shut in a kind of damned Hotel,
Discountenanced by God and man;
The food?--Sir, you would do as well
To cram your belly full of bran.
The company? Alas, the day
That I should dwell with such a crew,
With devil anything to say,
Nor any one to say it to!
The place? Although they call it Platz,
I will be bold and state my view;
It's not a place at all--and that's
The bottom verity, my Dew.
There are, as I will not deny,
Innumerable inns; a road;
Several Alps indifferent high;
The snow's inviolable abode;
Eleven English parsons, all
Entirely inoffensive; four
True human beings--what I call
Human--the deuce a cipher more;
A climate of surprising worth;
Innumerable dogs that bark;
Some air, some weather, and some earth;
A native race--God save the mark!--
A race that works, yet cannot work,
Yodels, but cannot yodel right,
Such as, unhelp'd, with rusty dirk,
I vow that I could wholly smite.
A river[30] that from morn to night
Down all the valley plays the fool;
Not once she pauses in her flight,
Nor knows the comfort of a pool;
But still keeps up, by straight or bend,
The selfsame pace she hath begun--
Still hurry, hurry, to the end--
Good God, is that the way to run?
If I a river were, I hope
That I should better realise
The opportunities and scope
Of that romantic enterprise.
I should not ape the merely strange,
But aim besides at the divine;
And continuity and change
I still should labour to combine.
Here should I gallop down the race,
Here charge the sterling[31] like a bull;
There, as a man might wipe his face,
Lie, pleased and panting, in a pool.
But what, my Dew, in idle mood,
What prate I, minding not my debt?
What do I talk of bad or good?
The best is still a cigarette.
Me whether evil fate assault,
Or smiling providences crown--
Whether on high the eternal vault
Be blue, or crash with thunder down--
I judge the best, whate'er befall,
Is still to sit on one's behind,
And, having duly moistened all,
Smoke with an unperturbed mind.