Excerpt
Sweet odours, radiant colours, glittering light!
How swift a change from the dusk sodden night
Of London in mid-winter!
Titania here might revel as at home;
Fair forms are floating soft as Paphian foam,
Bright as an iceberg-splinter.
Dianas doubtless, yet their frost holds fire;
The snowiest bosom covers soft desire,
And these are snowy, verily.
As blanched—and bare—as Himalaya's peaks,
Light-vestured as a troop of dancing Greeks.
Waltz-measures ripple merrily.
Merrily? Yes; the music throbs with mirth,
Feet trip in time to it; yet what strange dearth
Of glee midst all these graces!
The quickening fire of spirit, passion, will,
Seems scarce to move these dancing forms or thrill
These irresponsive faces.
The Shadow smiled. "True, yet not true," he said.
"Good Form demands that men should look half dead,
And women semi-frozen.
Yet Nature lives beneath these modish masks
Somewhere, sometimes, with energy that tasks
Caste's rigid rule to cozen.
"Pygmalion's prayer breathed life into the stone,
But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone
And statuesque still bearing.
You'd say in her the marble must invade
The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed,
Such radiant raiment wearing.
"Whirled in the waltz's formal maze by one
Who might be a broad-cloth'd automaton,
For any show of pleasure,
She moves with drooping lids, and lips apart,
And scarce a flush to show that a young heart
Throbs to the pulsing measure."
"Men meet to moon, and women whirl to wed,
The cynic says. Is joy in life quite dead,
Gladness in concourse banished
From the parades of fashionable youth?
Have maiden tenderness and manly truth
From Vanity Fair quite vanished?"
"Soft!" sneered the Shadow. "Questionings like these
Sound gauche and gushing. Better far to freeze
To the right social zero,
Than stoop to zeal and frank display of zest,
Notes of the vulgar glories that invest
The housemaid-novel's hero.
"Nothing more useful than the surface-ice
Of stiff stolidity. Vigour, aye, and vice,
Therein find ready covert.
Wickedness here may lurk, or even wit.
Not to name happiness; but naught of it
Is obvious and overt.
"How bored they look, the slim stiff-collared boys!
Energy that is eager and enjoys
They may anon make show of
In some less honest haunt; here as in pain
They creak and crawl, devoid of that sans gêne
That virtue seems sworn foe of.
"Languidly circumvolving, lounging lank,
In scuffling circle or in mural rank,
Of misery mechanic
They look the wooden symbols; nought to show
That even well-starched linen's sheeny snow
Veils impulses volcanic.
"That straight-limb'd son of Anak circling there
Much like a whirling semaphore, strange care
His boyish forehead wrinkling?
The season's catch! His sire, is great in Soap,
His partner's mother yonder sits; with hope
Her watchful eyes are twinkling.
"The twirling twain are silent. Silence sits
Lord of the revel, incubus of wits
Arch palsier of prattle
Yet many a girl here mute's a chatterer sweet,
And many a youth in circles less discrete
Is an 'agreeable rattle.'
"Respectability's austere restraint
Rules them relentlessly; smiles forced and faint
And joyless facial spasms
Their meetings and their mutterings attend....