STUDY first Propriety, for she is indeed the pole-star
Which shall guide the artless maiden through the mazes of Vanity
Fair;
Nay, she is the golden chain which holdeth together Society,
The lamp by whose light young Psyche shall approach unblamed her
Eros.
Verily, Truth is as Eve, which was ashamed, being naked;
Wherefore doth Propriety dress her with the fair foliage of
artifice;
And when she is drest, behold, she knoweth not herself again!
I walked in the forest, and above me stood the yew--
Stood like a slumbering giant, shrouded in impenetrable shade;
Then I pass’d into the citizen’s garden, and marked a tree clipt
into shape
(The giant’s locks had been shorn by the Delilah-shears of
Decorum),
And I said, “Surely Nature is goodly; but how much goodlier is
Art!”
I heard the wild notes of the lark floating far over the blue sky,
And my foolish heart went after him, and, lo! I blessed him as he
rose.
Foolish! for far better is the trained boudoir bullfinch,
Which pipeth the semblance of a tune, and mechanically draweth up
the water;
And the reinless steed of the desert, though his neck be clothed
with thunder,
Must yield to him that danceth and “moveth in the circles” at
Astley’s.
For verily, O my daughter, the world is a masquerade,
And God made thee one thing, that thou mightest make thyself
another.
A maiden’s heart is as champagne, ever aspiring and struggling
upward,
And it needed that its motions be checked by the silvered cork of
Propriety;
He that can afford the price, his be the precious treasure;
Let him drink deeply of its sweetness, nor grumble if it tasteth
of the cork.
_Charles Stuart Calverley._