——Rushing along, leaving innumerable chimneys behind pouring out sempiternal smoke; the air filled with a perpetual clank of hammers, the crashing of enormous wheels, and jangling of colossal chains; every human being within sight being as black as a negro, and the gust from the shore giving the closest resemblance to a blast between the tropics. Our steamer played her part handsomely in this general effort to stifle the population, and threw columns of smoke, right and left, as she moved through the bends of the river, thick enough to have choked an army of coal-heavers. I am as little of a sentimentalist as any man; I have always pronounced Rousseau an impostor. I regretted that the pillory has been abolished in the days of the modern novelists of France; but I was nearly in a state of suffocation, and some allowance must be made for the wrath of asphyxia. As I looked on the fuliginous sky, and the cineritious earth, on the ember-coloured trees, and half vitrified villas, the whole calcined landscape, I involuntarily asked myself, what is the good of all this hammering, forging, and roasting alive? Is man to be made perfect in the manner of a Westphalia ham? or is it to be the crowning glory of a nation, that she is the great nail-maker to the civilized globe? Is her whole soul to be absorbed in the making of chain-cables and cotton-twist? Are all her aspirations to breathe only linsey-woolsey, Yorkshire broadcloth, and Birmingham buttons? Are the cheeks of her maids to grow pallid, for the sake of clothing the lower portion of a Hindoo mountaineer in flannel, and the forehead of an African savage in book-muslin? Or are our men, by nature the finest race in the world, to be crippled into the physiognomy and faculties of baboons, merely to make shawls for the Queen of Madagascar, or slippers for the great Mogul?

I was startled, by an universal run towards the head of the steamer. Men, women, children, lap-dogs, and all rushed forward, followed by an avalanche of bandboxes, which, heaped half chimney high, had heaved with a sudden lurch of the helm, and over-spread the deck with a chaos of caps, bonnets, and inferior appendages to the toilet. In the cloud of smoke above, around, and below, we had as nearly as possible run ashore upon the Isle of Dogs. The captain, as all the regular reports on occasions of disaster say, behaved in this extremity “with a coolness, a firmness, and a sagacity worthy of all admiration.” He had made nine hundred and ninety-nine voyages, to Margate before; it was therefore wholly impossible that he could have shot the head of his ship into the mud of the left bank of the Thames on his thousandth transit. The fact, however, seemed rather against the theory. But as I was not drowned, was not a shareholder in the vessel, and have an antipathy to courts-martial, I turned from the brawling of the present, to the bulletins of the past, and thought of Dog-land in its glory.

THE ISLE OF DOGS.

“On Linden when the sun was low.”

A cloud of smoke, which the wrath of Æolus poured upon our vessel, as a general contribution from all the forges along shore, here broke my reverie, by nearly suffocating the ship’s company. But the river in this quarter is as capricious as the fashions of a French milliner, or the loves of a figurante. We rounded a point of land, emerged into blue stream and bright sky, and left the whole Cyclopean region behind, ruddied with jets of flame, and shrouded with vapour, like a re-rehearsal of the great fire of London.

I had scarcely time to rejoice in the consciousness that I breathed once more, when my ear was caught by the sound of a song at the fore-part of the deck. The voice was of that peculiar kind, which once belonged to the stage coachman, (a race now belonging alone to history,)—strong without clearness; full without force; deep without profundity, and, as Sydney Smith says, “a great many other things without a great many other things;” or, as Dr. Parr would tell mankind,—“the product of nights of driving and days of indulgence; of facing the wintry storm, and enjoying the genial cup, the labours of the Jehu, and the luxuries of the Sybarite,”—it was to Moore’s melody,—

THE SONG OF THE MAIL-COACHMAN.

The romantic disappears from the world every day. Canals and docks now vulgarize this tract of the shore, and the whole scene will yet undergo the fate of Billingsgate. But it has a story as romantic as that of Romeo and Juliet; excepting the masquerade, the moonlight, and the nightingales of Verona.

The Isle flies from me, and I must give but the outline.

The daughter of the old Baron de Bouvraye, one of the followers of William the Norman, and lord of the country for leagues along the northern shore of the Thames, was the court beauty of the time. With the Norman dignity of form, she had the Saxon beauty of countenance; for the Baron had wedded a Saxon heiress. The charms of the Lady Blanche de Bouvraye, were the theme of the whole race of troubadours; and the most popular poem of Guido de Spezzia was written on the incident of her dropping her wimple at a court ball. It was said that she had a thousand lovers; but it is certain, that suitors crowded from every part of Christendom to claim her hand—a number probably not diminished by the knowledge that she was to succeed to the immense possessions of the barony.

But, to the sorrow of some, the indignation of others, and the astonishment of all, the Lady Blanche laughed at the idea of love. William, not accustomed to have his orders disputed, commanded the beautiful heiress to fall in love with some one or other at a moment’s delay. But she laughed at the herald who bore the command, and bade him tell his master, that though armies might be commanded, and crowns conquered, Blanche de Bouvraye would be neither. William was indignant, and ordered the herald to prison for a month, and to be fed on bread and water, for the audacity of bringing back such an answer. But the lady was unchanged. The Baron remonstrated, and demanded whether she was prepared to see his line extinguished, and his lands go to strangers. She laughed and said, that as the former could not be while she lived, and the latter could take place only after she was dead, she saw no reason why she should concern herself on the subject. The abbess of the famous convent of the Celestines, near the ford of the river Rom, where the town of Romford has since grown up, was sent to argue with her. But her answer was the question, “Why had not the abbess herself married?” Her father confessor was next sent to her. But she sportively asked him, “Where were his wife and children?”—a question which, though put in all innocence, so perplexed the good father, that, not desiring to be the penitent instead of the confessor, he returned with all possible speed to his convent.

Yet the Lady Blanche’s eye often exhibited the signs of weeping, and her cheek grew pale. All was a problem, until a handsome youth, the son of a knight on the Kentish shore, was seen one night touching a theorbo under her window, and singing one of the Tuscan love songs, which the troubadours had brought into England.

This was enough for the suspicions of the Baron. The young minstrel was seized, and sent to join the Crusaders then embarking for the Holy Land; and the lady was consigned to the Baron’s castle in Normandy. As Shakspeare said four hundred years after, The course of true love never does run smooth.
It would take the pen and song of ten troubadours to tell the adventures of the lady and the youth. In the fashion of the age, they had each consulted an astrologer, and each had been told the same fortune, that they should constantly meet, but be constantly separated, and finally be happy.

In Normandy, the Baron’s castle and the lady had fallen together into the hands of the troops who had rebelled against William, when a band of the crusaders on the march, commanded by her lover, rescued her. The lady was next ordered to take up her abode in a convent in Lombardy, of which her father’s sister was the abbess. The vessel in which she embarked was driven up the Mediterranean by a storm, and wrecked on the shore where the army of the crusaders was encamped. Thus the lovers met again. By the Baron’s order, the lady returned once more to Europe; but when in sight of the Italian coast, the felucca was captured by an Algerine, and, to her astonishment, she found in the pirate’s vessel her lover, who had been wounded and taken prisoner in battle with the Saracens, and sold into slavery. Again they were separated; the lady was ransomed by her father; and the lovers seemed to have parted for ever.

But the stars were true. The lover broke his Moorish chains, and the first sight which the lady saw on her landing at Ancona, was the fugitive kneeling at her feet.

I hasten on. As the vessel in which they sailed up the Thames approached the baronial castle, they saw a black flag waving from the battlements, and heard the funeral bell toll from the abbey of the Celestines. The Baron had been laid in the vault of the abbey on that day. Their hopes were now certainty: but the lady mourned for her father; and the laws of the church forbade the marriage for a year and a day. Yet, this new separation was soothed by the constant visits of her lover, who crossed the river daily to bask in the smiles of his betrothed, who looked more beautiful than ever.

The eve of the wedding-day arrived; and fate seemed now to be disarmed of the power of dividing the faithful pair; when, as the lover was passing through a dark grove to return to the Kentish shore for the last time, he was struck by an arrow shot from a thicket, fainted, and saw no more.

The morning dawned, the vassals were in array, the bride was in her silk and velvet drapery, the bride’s maids had their flower-baskets in their hands, the joy-bells pealed, a hundred horsemen were drawn up before the castle gates,—all was pomp, joy, and impatience,—but no bridegroom came.

At length the mournful tidings were brought, that his boat had waited for him in vain on the evening before, and that his plume and mantle, dabbled with blood, had been found on the sands. All now was agony. The bank, the grove, the river, were searched by hundreds of eager eyes and hands, but all in vain. The bride cast aside her jewels, and vowed to live and die a maid. The castle was a house of mourning; the vassals returned to their homes: all was stooping of heads, wringing of hands, and gloomy lamentation.

But, as the castle bell tolled midnight, a loud barking was heard at the gate. It was opened; and the favourite wolf-hound of the bridegroom rushed in, making wild bounds, running to and fro, and dragging the guard by their mantles to go forth. They followed; and he sprung before them to the door of a hut in a swampy thicket a league from the castle.

On bursting open the door, they found a man in bed, desperately torn, and dying from his wounds. At the sight, the noble hound flew on him; but the dying man called for a confessor, and declared that he had discharged the arrow by which the murder was committed, that he had dug a grave for the dead, and that the dog had torn him in the act. The next demand was, where the body had been laid. The dying man was carried on the pikes of the guard to the spot; the grave was opened; the body was taken up; and, to the astonishment of all, it was found still with traces of life. The knight was carried to the castle, restored, wedded, and became the lord of all the broad acres lying between the Thames and the Epping hills.

He had been waylaid by one of his countless rivals, who had employed a serf to make him the mark for a cloth-yard shaft, and who, like the Irish felon of celebrated memory, “saved his life by dying in jail.” The dog was, by all the laws of chivalry, an universal favourite while living; and when dead, was buried under a marble monument in the Isle; also giving his name to the territory; which was more than was done for his master; and hence the title of the Isle of Dogs. Is it not all written in Giraldus Cambrensis?

——Enter Limehouse Reach.—The sea-breeze comes “wooingly,” as we wind by the long serpent beach; the Pool is left behind, and we see at last the surface of the river. Hitherto it has been only a magnified Fleet-ditch. The Thames, for the river of a grave people, is one of the most frolicsome streams in the world. From London Bridge to the ocean, it makes as many turns as a hard-run fox, and shoots round so many points of the shore, that vessels a few miles off seem to be like ropemakers working in parallel lines, or the dancers in a quadrille, or Mr. Green’s balloon running a race with his son’s (the old story of DÆdalus and Icarus renewed in the 19th century); or those extravaganzas of the Arabian Nights, in which fairy ships are holding a regatta among meadows strewn with crysolites and emeralds, for primroses and the grass-green turf.

But what new city is this, rising on the right? What ranges of enormous penthouses, covering enormous ships on the stocks! what sentinels parading! what tiers of warehouses! what boats rushing to and fro! what life, tumult, activity, and clank of hammers again? This is Deptford.

“Deep forde,” says old Holinshed, “alsoe called the Goldene Strande, from the colour of its brighte sandes, the whiche verilie do shine like new golde under the crystalle waters of the Ravensbourne, which here floweth to old Father Thamis, even as a younge daughtere doth lovinglie fly to the embrace of her aged parente.”

But Deptford has other claims on posterity. Here it was that Peter the Great came, to learn the art of building the fleets that were to cover the Euxine and make the Crescent grow pale. At this moment I closed my eyes, and lived in the penultimate year of the 17th century. The scene had totally changed. The crowds, the ships, the tumult, all were gone; I saw an open shore, with a few wooden dwellings on the edge of the water, and a single ship in the act of building. A group of ship carpenters were standing in the foreground, gazing at the uncouth fierceness with which a tall wild figure among them was driving bolts into the keel. He wore a common workman’s coat and cap; but there was a boldness in his figure, and a force in his movement, which showed a superior order of man. His countenance was stern and repulsive, but stately; there was even a touch of insanity in the writhings of the mouth and the wildness of the eye; but it did not require the star on the cloak, which was flung on the ground beside him, nor the massive signet ring on his hand, to attest his rank. I saw there the most kingly of barbarians, and the most barbarian of kings. There I saw Peter, the lord of the desert, of the Tartar, and of the polar world.

While I was listening, in fancy, to the Song of the Steppe, which this magnificent operative was shouting, rather than singing, in the rude joy of his work, I was roused by a cry of “Deptford!—Any one for Deptford? Ease her; stop her!”

I sprang from the bench on which I had been reclining, and the world burst upon me again.

“Deptford—any one for Deptford?” cried the captain, standing on the paddle-box. None answered the call, but a whole fleet of wherries came skimming along the surge, and threw a crowd of fresh passengers, with trunks and carpet-bags numberless, on board. The traveller of taste always feels himself instinctively drawn to one object out of the thousand, and my observation was fixed on one foreign-featured female, who sat in her wherry wrapt up in an envelope of furs and possessing a pair of most lustrous eyes.

A sallow Italian, who stood near me, looking over the side of the vessel, exclaimed, “Fanni Pellmello,” and the agility with which she sprang up the steps was worthy of the name of that most celebrated daughter of “the muse who presides over dancing,” as the opera critics have told us several million times.

The sallow Italian was passed with a smile of recognition, which put him in good spirits at once. Nothing vivifies the tongue of a foreigner like the memory of the Coulisses, and he over-flowed upon me with the history of this terrestrial Terpsichore. It happened that he was in Rome at the time of that memorable levee at which Fanny, in all her captivations, paid her obeisance at the Vatican; an event which notoriously cost a whole coterie of princesses the bursting of their stay-laces, through sheer envy, and on whose gossip the haut ton of the “Eternal City” have subsisted ever since.

The Italian, in his rapture, and with the vision of the danseuse still shining before him at the poop, began to improvise the presentation. All the world is aware that Italian prose slides into rhyme of itself,—that all subjects turn to verse in the mind of the Italian, and that, when once on his Pegasus, he gallops up hill and down, snatches at every topic in his way, has no mercy on antiquity, and would introduce King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, dancing a quadrille with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.

THE PRESENTATION.

——But the Thames, like the world, is full of changes. As the steamer ran close in under the right shore, I observed a small creek, as overgrown with sedge, as silent and as lonely as if it had been hid in a corner of Hudson’s Bay. It was once called Julius CÆsar’s bath, from the tradition, that when marching at the head of the Tenth Legion, on a visit to Cleopatra, then resident in Kent! he ordered his whole brigade to wash the dust from their visages preparatory to appearing before her majesty and her maids of honour. But this was the age of romance. An unwashed age followed, and the classical name gave way to the exigencies of things. The creek was called the “Condemned Hole,” and was made the place for impounding vessels caught in the act of smuggling, which were there secured, like other malefactors, in chains. It may not unnaturally be concluded, that the spot was unpopular to the tribe of gallant fellows, who had only followed the example of Greek, Saxon, Dane, and Norman; and who saw the beloved companions of many a daring day and joyous night (for if the sailor loves his ship, the smuggler adores her) laid up under sentence of firewood. By that curious propensity, which makes the fox so often fix his burrow beside the kennel, the surrounding shore was the favourite residence of the smuggler; and many a broad-shouldered hero, with a visage bronzed by the tropic sun, and a heart that would face a lion, a fire-ship, or any thing but his wife in a rage, was seen there taking his sulky rounds, and biting his thumb (the approved style of insult in those days) at the customhouse officers, who kept their uneasy watch on board. With some the ruling passion was so strong, that they insisted on being buried as near as possible to the spot, and a little churchyard was thence established, full of epitaphs of departed gallantry and desperate adventure—a sort of Buccaneer Valhalla, with occasional sculptures and effigies of the sleepers below.

Among those the name of Jack Bradwell lived longest. The others exemplified what Horace said of the injustice of fame, they “wanted a poet” to immortalize them; but Jack took that office on himself, and gave the world an esquisse of his career, in the following rough specimen of the Deptford muse of 1632:—

EPITAPH.

But the march of mind is fatal to sentiment. A few years ago all vestiges of Jack were swept away. A neighbouring tanner had taken a liking to the spot, purchased it, planted his pits in it, and carried off Jack’s monument for a chimney-piece!

——But what hills are those edging the horizon, green, soft, and sunny. I hear a burst of sonorous bells—

No; Milton’s bells are monastic; the solemn clang of some huge cathedral, calling the brethren to vespers, and filling the air with the melancholy pomp of the antique cloister.—These are gay, glad, tumultuous, a clang of joy. It is the Queen’s accession. Flags are flying on every ship and steeple, and I hear a distant cannonade. The guns of Woolwich are firing in honour of the day.

And what palace is looming on my right? Greenwich Hospital. A faÇade worthy of Greece; ranges of Corinthian columns; vast courts expanding in front; groves and green hills in the rear; and on the esplanade, a whole battalion of one-legged or one-armed heroes, formed in line, and, as we arrive, giving three cheers to the “glory” of her Majesty.

I leave the chroniclers to tell, that this noble establishment was founded by William the Dutchman, of freedom-loving and French-hating memory; that the call for public munificence was answered, as such calls always are, by England; and that at this hour it pensions nearly forty thousand as brave veterans as any in the world.

What magnitude of benevolence was ever equal to this regal and national benefaction? In what form could public gratitude have ever been more nobly displayed? Or by what means, uniting the highest charity to the most just recompense, could comfort have been more proudly administered to the declining days of the British seaman. In the long course of a hundred and fifty years, what thousands, and tens of thousands, must have been rescued, by this illustrious benevolence, from the unhappiness of neglected old age! To what multitudes of brave old hearts must it have given comfort in their distant cottages, and what high recollections must the sight of its memorials and trophies revive in the men who fought under Rodney and Howe, St. Vincent and Nelson! Those are the true evidences of national greatness. Those walls are our witnesses to posterity, that their fathers had not lived in vain. The shield of the country thrown over the sailor and the soldier, against the chances of the world in his old age, is the emblem of a grander supremacy than ever was gained by even its irresistible spear.

——But the steamer has made a dash to the opposite bank, and we glide along the skirts of a small peninsula, marked by a slender stone pillar, where the border of Essex begins.

At this spot, a couple of hundred years ago, a mayor of London had been hanged; for what reason, Elkanah Settle, the city laureate, does not aver, further than that “wise people differed much on the subject,”—some imagining that it was for bigamy; others, that it was for having, at a great banquet given to the king by the corporation of spectacle-makers, mistaken the royal purse for his own; but the chief report being, “that he was hanged for the bad dinners which he gave to the common-councilmen.” The laureate proceeds to say, that at this spot, whenever the mayor of London went down with the Companies in their visitation of the boundaries, the barges all made a solemn stop. The mayor, (he was not yet a lord,) with all the aldermen, knelt on the deck, and the chief chaplain, taking off his cap, repeated this admonition:—

The various corporate bodies chanted the last line with unanimous devotion; the mayor and aldermen then rose from their knees, and the whole pageant moved on to Blackwall to Dine.

Who has not heard of Blackwall? more fashionable for three months in the year than Almacks itself for the same perishable period; fuller than Bond Street, and with as many charming taverns as Regent Street contains “Ruination shops,” (so called by Lady J. the most riante wit of the day,) those shops where one can purchase every thing that nobody wants, and that few can pay for. Emporiums, as they name themselves, brilliant collections of all that is dazzling and delightful, from a filigree tooth-pick, up to a service of plate for a royal visitation.

Blackwall is a little city of taverns, built by white-bait, as the islands in the South Sea are built by the coral insect. The scenery is a marsh, backed by the waters of a stagnant canal, and lined with whitewashed warehouses. It is in fact a transfer of Wapping, half-a-dozen miles down the Thames. But Blackwall disdains the picturesque; it scorns exterior charms, and devotes itself to the solid merits of the table, and to dressing white-bait with a perfection unrivalled, and unrivalable in the circumference of the terrestrial globe.

Blackwall deserves to be made immortal, and I gave it a passport to posterity, in an Ode.

ODE TO BLACKWALL.

——Stopped for five minutes at the handsome pier, waiting for the arrival of the railway passengers from London. The scene was animated; the pier crowded with porters, pie-men, wandering minstrels, and that ingenious race, who read “moral lessons” to country gentlemen with their breeches’ pockets open, and negligent of their handkerchiefs.

——Stepped on shore, and, tempted by the attractions of one of the taverns, ordered a bottle of claret, on the principle of the parliamentary machines for cleansing the smoke-conveying orifices of our drawing-rooms. The inconceivable quantity of fuliginous material, which I had swallowed in my transit down the river, would have stifled the voice of a prima donna. The claret gave me the sense of a recovered faculty, and as I inhaled, with that cool feeling of enjoyment which salutes the man of London with a consciousness that sea-breezes are in existence, I had leisure to glance along a vista of superb saloons, which would have better suited a Pasha of Bagdad, than the payers of the income tax in the dingiest and mightiest city of the known world.

Yet all was not devoted to the selfish principle. In a recess at the end of the vista was a small bust—a sort of votive offering to the “memory of Samuel Simpson, formerly a waiter in this tavern for the space of fifty years,” this bust having been “here placed by his grateful master, Thomas Hammersley.”

I am proud to have seen, and shall be prouder to rescue, the names of both those Blackwall worthies from oblivion. They have long slept without their fame; for the bust is dated A.D. 1714, the year which closed the existence of that illustrious queen, Anna, whose name, as Swift rather saucily observed, like her friendships, Both backward and forward was always the same.
An honour shared in succeeding ages only by the amiable Lord Glenelg.

But inscribed on the pedestal was an epitaph, which I transferred to my memoranda.

EPITAPH.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” saith Solomon; and as the late Lord Mayor said, “I am quite of Solomon’s opinion.” Here is Crabbe, fifty years before he was born. Here is his pomp and his particularity; his force and his facility; his pungency and his picturesque. Is the theory of transmigration true? and has the Blackwall tavern-keeper only reappeared in the Rutlandshire parson? Let the antiquarians settle it among them. I leave it to occupy the life of some future Ritson, to poison some future Stephens with his own ink; and to give the whole race of the Malones the shadow of an excuse for their existence in this world.

But, I hear the snort of the locomotive; I see the cloud of steam rushing towards the pier. The bell rings, the chaos of trunks and passengers is rolled on board. I follow, and Blackwall fades in the distance, as the poets say, “like a dream of departed joys.”

——Came in sight of a promontory, Purfleet, flanked by an immense row of dark-roofed ominous-looking buildings,—these are the gunpowder depÔts of the navy and army of the empire. I pretend to no exclusive poltroonery; but I must acknowledge that I highly approved of the speed which carried us past them. If they had blown up at the moment, in what region of the atmosphere should we have been, steamer and all, in five seconds after. Yet, how many things might have turned our whole cargo into gas and carbon at the instant? a flash of lightning; the wire of a Voltaic machine, apparently as harmless as a knitting needle in the hands of an old spinster; the spark of a peasant’s pipe; the scrape of a hob-nailed shoe! Within a hundred yards of us there lay, in “grim repose,” a hundred thousand barrels of gunpowder. We might have lighted them from the sparks of our funnel, and committed an involuntary suicide on the most comprehensive scale.

But we should not have perished unknown. As the maid, in Schiller’s famous Monologue, sings,—

If the magazine at Purfleet were to explode, the Thames would be routed out of its bed, and carried into Tunbridge Wells; Woolwich would be a cinder, Gravesend an ash-pit, Chatham a cemetery, Blackwall a nonentity, the Tunnel a tomb, and one half of the mighty metropolis itself but a recollection.

Yet human beings actually live at Purfleet! actually eat, drink, and sleep, with this volcano beside their pillows; Essex picnics are eaten within sight of this earth-shaker. Nay, balls have been given; and creatures, calling themselves rational, have danced quadrilles, with the salient temerity of the incurably insane. What a short-sighted and saltatory thing is human nature!

Among the changes produced by the new importation of passengers, it was my fate to be placed beside the Authoress; who did me the honour of thinking me worthy of her notice, and who rapidly admitted me into the most unbounded confidence, respecting the merits of her own performances, and the demerits of all the world of authorship besides. I listened with the most profound submission; only filling up the pauses, when she stopped to take breath; by a gesture of acquiescence, or that most valuable of all words, “Yes.” She “had met me,” in a hundred places, where I was not conscious of having ever been; and “recognised my style” in a hundred volumes which I had never read. In short, she was charmed with me; and confessed, after half an hour of the most uninterrupted eloquence on her side; that “though evidently cautious of giving an opinion,” I should thenceforth be ranked by her, among the most brilliant conversationalists of the day.

Must I acknowledge, that I forgot as expeditiously as I learned, and, excepting one recollection, all was a blank by dinner time.

But we had met once before, in a scene, which, on afterwards casually turning over some papers, I found recorded on those scraps of foolscap, and in those snatches of rhyme, which argue, I am afraid, a desultory mind. So be it. I disdain to plead “not guilty” to the charge of perfection. I make no attempt to exonerate myself of the cardinal virtues. I write poetry, because it is “better behaved” than prose; and in this feeling I give the history to a sympathizing world.

THE POET’S AUCTION.