These verses are something in the old style, but not the worse for that:
not that I mean to call them good: but I am sure they would not have been
better, if dressed up in the newest Montgomery fashion, for which I
cannot say I have much love. If they are fitted for your paper, you are
welcome to them. I send them to you, because I find only in your paper a
love of our old literature, which is almost monstrous in the eyes of
modern ladies and gentlemen. My verses are certainly not in the present
fashion; but, I must own, though there may not be the same merit in the
thoughts, I think the style much better: and this with no credit to
myself, but to the merry old writers of more manly times.
Your humble servant,
EPSILON.
'Tis a dull sight
To see the year dying,
When winter winds
Set the yellow wood sighing:
Sighing, oh! sighing.
When such a time cometh,
I do retire
Into an old room
Beside a bright fire:
Oh, pile a bright fire!
And there I sit
Reading old things,
Of knights and lorn damsels,
While the wind sings--
Oh, drearily sings!
I never look out
Nor attend to the blast;
For all to be seen
Is the leaves falling fast:
Falling, falling!
But close at the hearth,
Like a cricket, sit I,
Reading of summer
And chivalry--
Gallant chivalry!
Then with an old friend
I talk of our youth--
How 'twas gladsome, but often
Foolish, forsooth:
But gladsome, gladsome!
Or to get merry
We sing some old rhyme,
That made the wood ring again
In summer time--
Sweet summer time!
Then go we to smoking,
Silent and snug:
Nought passes between us,
Save a brown jug--
Sometimes!
And sometimes a tear
Will rise in each eye,
Seeing the two old friends
So merrily--
So merrily!
And ere to bed
Go we, go we,
Down on the ashes
We kneel on the knee,
Praying together!
Thus, then, live I,
Till, 'mid all the gloom,
By heaven! the bold sun
Is with me in the room.
Shining, shining!
Then the clouds part,
Swallows soaring between;
The spring is alive,
And the meadows are green!
I jump up, like mad,
Break the old pipe in twain,
And away to the meadows,
The meadows again!
I had very little hesitation, from internal evidence alone, in
identifying these verses with those which FitzGerald had written, as he
said, when a lad, or little more than a lad, and sent to the Athenaeum,
but all question has been set at rest by the discovery of a copy in a
common-place book belonging to the late Archdeacon Allen, with the
heading 'E. F. G.,' and the date 'Naseby, Spring, 1831.' This copy
differs slightly from those in the Year Book and in the Athenaeum, and in
place of the tenth stanza it has,
So winter passeth
Like a long sleep
From falling autumn
To primrose-peep.
But although at this time he appears to have written nothing more himself
he was not unmindful of what was done by others, for in May 1831 he
writes to Allen, 'I have bought A. Tennyson's poems. How good Mariana
is!' And again a year later, after a night-ride on the coach to London,
'I forgot to tell you that when I came up in the mail, and fell a dozing
in the morning, the sights of the pages in crimson and the funerals which
the Lady of Shalott saw and wove, floated before me: really, the poem has
taken lodging in my poor head.'
The correspondence will now for the most part tell its own story, and
with it all that is to be told of FitzGerald's life.
In October and November 1831 he was for three weeks in town with
Thackeray, and in the following summer was thinking of joining him at
Havre when he wrote to his friend Allen.
[SOUTHAMPTON]
_July_ 31, _Tuesday_ [1832.]