Lady love! Lady love!
Welcome me home!"
The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fashions, and
that the butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the
fashion of a time simpler and less pedantic than our own. On the
whole, minor poetry for minor poetry, this artless singer, piping
his native drawing-room notes, gave a great deal of perfectly
harmless, if highly uncultivated, enjoyment.
It must not be fancied that Mr. Bayly had only one string to his
bow--or, rather, to his lyre. He wrote a great deal, to be sure,
about the passion of love, which Count Tolstoi thinks we make too
much of. He did not dream that the affairs of the heart should be
regulated by the State--by the Permanent Secretary of the Marriage
Office. That is what we are coming to, of course, unless the
enthusiasts of "free love" and "go away as you please" failed with
their little programme. No doubt there would be poetry if the State
regulated or left wholly unregulated the affections of the future.
Mr. Bayly, living in other times, among other manners, piped of the
hard tyranny of a mother:
"We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.
He came, I could not breathe, for his eye was upon me.
He spoke, his words were cold, and his smile was unaltered,
I knew how much he felt, for his deep-toned voice faltered.
I wore my bridal robe, and I rivalled its whiteness;
Bright gems were in my hair,--how I hated their brightness!
He called me by my name as the bride of another.
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