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furnish you with rhymes if you will make lines for them

Here now:

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He at length good-humoredly complied, and filled up the

measure as follows:

To a form that is faultless, a face that must-please,

Is added a restless desire to-tease;

0, how my hard fate I should ever be-moan,

Could I but believe she'd be bone of my-bone!

Mr. Bogart, a young man of Albany, who died in 1826, at the age of twenty-one, displayed astonishing facility in impromptu writing.

It was good-naturedly hinted on one occasion that his "impromptus" were prepared beforehand, and he was asked if he would submit to the application of a test of his poetic abilities. He promptly acceded, and a most difficult one was immediately proposed.

Among his intimate friends were Col. J. B. Van Schaick and Charles Fenno Hoffman, both of whom were present. Said Van Schaick, taking up a copy of Byron, "The name of Lydia Kane" (a lady distinguished for her beauty and cleverness, who died a few years ago, but who was then just blushing into womanhood) "has in it the same number of letters as a stanza of Childe Harold has lines: write them down in a column." They were so written by Bogart, Hoffman, and himself. "Now," he continued, "I will open the poem at random; and for the ends of the lines in Miss Lydia's Acrostic shall be used the words ending those of the verse on which my finger may rest." The stanza thus selected was this:—

And must they fall, the young, the proud, the brave,

To swell one bloated chief's unwholesome reign?.
No step between submission and a grave?

The rise of rapine and the fall of Spain?

And doth the Power that man adores ordain

Their doom, nor heed the suppliant's appeal?

Is all that desperate valor acts in vain?

And counsel sage, and patriotic zeal,

The veteran's skill, youth's fire, and manhood's heart of steel?

The following stanza was composed by Bogart within the succeeding ten minutes, the period fixed in a wager,-finished before his companions had reached a fourth line, and read to them as here presented :*

Lovely and loved, o'er the unconquered
Your charms resistless, matchless girl, shall
Dear as the mother holds her infant's
In Love's own region, warm, romantic
A nd should your fate to court your steps
Kings would in vain to regal pomp
A nd lordly bishops kneel to you in

N or valor's fire, law's power, nor churchman's
Endure 'gainst love's (time's up!) untarnished

brave

reign!

grave
Spain !

ordain,

appeal,

vain,

zeal

steel.

The French also amuse themselves with bouts rimés retournés, in which the rhymes are taken from some piece of poetry, but the order in which they occur is reversed. The following example is from the album of a Parisian lady of literary celebrity, the widow of one of the Crimean heroes. The original poem is by Alfred de Musset, the retournés by Marshal Pelissier, who improvised it at the lady's request. In the translation which ensues, the reversed rhymes are carefully preserved.

BY DE MUSSET.

Quand la fugitive espérance
Nous pousse le coude en passant,

Puis à tire d'ailes s'élance

Et se retourne en souriant,

Où va l'homme? où son coeur l'appelle;
L'hirondelle sait le zéphir,

Et moins légère est l'hirondelle
Que l'homme qui suit son désir.

Ah! fugitive enchanteresse,
Sais-tu seulement ton chemin ?
Faut-il donc que le vieux destin
Ait une si jeune maîtresse !

BY PELISSIER, DUC DE MALAKOFF.

Four chanter la jeune maîtresse

Que Musset donne au vieux destin,

The truth of this circumstance was confirmed by Mr. Hoffman in the course of a conversation upon that and similar topics several years afterward.

J'ai trop parcouru de chemin
Sans atteindre l'enchanteresse;
Toujours vers cet ancien désir
J'ai tendu comme l'hirondelle,
Mais sans le secours du zéphir
Qui la porte où son cœur l'appelle.
Adieu, fantôme souriant,
Vers qui la jeunesse s'élance,
La raison me crie en passant;
Le souvenir vaut l'espérance.

TRANSLATION.

When Hope, a fugitive, retreating
Elbows us, as away she flies,
Then swift returns, another greeting
To offer us with laughing eyes.

Man goeth when his heart is speaking,
The swallows through the zephyrs dart,
And man, who's every fancy seeking,
Hath yet a more inconstant heart.
Enchantress, fugitive, coquetting!
Know'st thou then true, alone, thy way?
Hath then stern Fate, so old and gray,
So young a mistress never fretting?

REVERSED RHYMES.

To sing the mistress, never fretting,
Musset gives Fate, so old and gray,
Too long I've travelled on my way,
And ne'er attained her dear coquetting.
To find that longing of the heart,
I've been, like yonder swallow, seeking,
Yet could not through the zephyrs dart,
Nor reach the wish the heart is speaking.

Adieu then, shade, with laughing eyes,

Towards whom youth ever sends its greeting;
Better, cries Reason, as she flies,

Remembrance now, than Hope retreating.

Among the eccentricities of literature may be classed Rhopalic verses, which begin with a monosyllable and gradually increase the length of each successive word. The name was suggested by the shape of Hercules' club, péralov. Sometimes they run from the butt to the handle of the club. Take as an example of each,

Rem tibi confeci, doctissime, dulcisonoram.
Vectigalibus armamenta referre jubet Rex.

Emblematic Poetry.

A pair of scissors and a comb in verse.-BEN Jonson.

On their fair standards by the wind displayed,

Eggs, altars, wings, pipes, axes, were portrayed.—Scribleriad.

THE quaint conceit of making verses assume grotesque shapes and devices, expressive of the theme selected by the writer, appears to have been most fashionable during the seventeenth century. Writers tortured their brains in order to torture their verses into all sorts of fantastic forms, from a flowerpot to an obelisk, from a pin to a pyramid. Hearts and fans and knots were chosen for love-songs; wineglasses, bottles, and casks for Bacchanalian songs; pulpits, altars, and monuments for religious verses and epitaphs. Tom Nash, according to Disraeli, says of Gabriel Harvey, that "he had writ verses in all kinds in form of a pair of gloves, a pair of spectacles, a pair of pot-hooks, &c." Puttenham, in his Art of Poesie, gives several odd specimens of poems in the form of lozenges, pillars, triangles, &c. Butler says of Benlowes, "the excellently learned," who was much renowned for his literary freaks, "As for temples and pyramids in poetry, he has outdone all men that way; for he has made a grid-iron and a frying-pan in verse, that, besides the likeness in shape, the very tone and sound of the words did perfectly represent the noise made by these utensils! When he was a captain, he made all the furniture of his horse, from the bit to the crupper, the beaten poetry, every verse being fitted to the proportion of the thing, with a moral allusion to the sense of the thing: as the bridle of moderation, the saddle of content, and the crupper of constancy; so that the same thing was the epigram and emblem, even as a mule is both horse and ass." Mr. Alger tells us that the Oriental poets are fond of arranging their poems in the form of drums, swords, circles, crescents, trees, &c., and that the Alexandrian rhetoricians used to amuse themselves by writing their satires and invectives in the shape of an axe or a

spear. He gives the following erotic triplet, composed by a Hindu poct, the first line representing a bow, the second its string, the third an arrow aimed at the heart of the object of his passion:

O lovely maid, thou art

One kiss I send, to pierce, like fire, thy too reluctant heart.

the fairest slave in all God's mart!

Those charms to win, with all my empire I would gladly part

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