from Canto XIII

1

I now mean to be serious;—it is time,
     Since laughter now-a-days is deemed too serious.
A jest at Vice by Virtue’s called a crime,
     And critically held as deleterious:
Besides, the sad’s a source of the sublime,
     Although when long a little apt to weary us;
And therefore shall my lay soar high and solemn
As an old temple dwindled to a column.

2

The Lady Adeline Amundeville
     (‘Tis an old Norman name, and to be found
In pedigrees by those who wander still
     Along the last fields of that Gothic ground)—
Was high-born, wealthy by her father’s will,
     And beauteous, even where beauties most abound,
In Britain—which of course true patriots find
The goodliest soil of Body and of Mind.

3

I’ll not gainsay them; it is not my cue;
     I leave them to their taste, no doubt the best:
An eye’s an eye, and whether black or blue,
     Is no great matter, so ‘tis in request:
‘Tis nonsense to dispute about a hue—
     The kindest may be taken as a test.
The fair sex should be always fair, and no man,
Till thirty, should perceive there’s a plain woman.

4

And after that serene and somewhat dull
     Epoch, that awkward corner turned for days
More quiet, when our Moon’s no more at full,
    We may presume to criticise or praise;
Because indifference begins to lull
     Our passions, and we walk in Wisdom’s ways;
Also because the figure and the face
Hint, that ‘tis time to give the younger place.

5

I know that some would fain postpone this era,
    Reluctant as all placemen to resign
Their post; but their’s is merely a chimera,
    For they have passed life’s equinoctial line:
But then they have their claret and madeira
     To irrigate the dryness of decline;
And County Meetings and the Parliament,
And debt, and what not, for their solace sent.

6

And is there not Religion, and Reform,
     Peace, War, the taxes, and what’s called the “Nation”?
The struggle to be Pilots in a storm?
     The landed and the monied speculation?
The joys of mutual hate, to keep them warm,
     Instead of love, that mere hallucination?
Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

7

Rough Johnson, the great moralist, professed,
     Right honestly, “he liked an honest hater”—
The only truth that yet has been confest
     Within these latest thousand years or later.
Perhaps the fine old fellow spoke in jest:—
     For my part, I am but a mere spectator,
And gaze where’er the palace or the hovel is,
Much in the mode of Goethe’s Mephistopheles;

8

But neither love nor hate in much excess;
     Though ‘twas not once so. If I sneer sometimes,
It is because I cannot well do less,
     And now and then it also suits my rhymes.
I should be very willing to redress
     Men’s wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes,
Had not Cervantes in that too true tale
Of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

9

Of all tales ‘tis the saddest—and more sad,
     Because it makes us smile: his hero’s right,
And still pursues the right;—to curb the bad,
     His only object, and ‘gainst odds to fight,
His guerdon: ‘tis his virtue makes him mad!
     But his adventures form a sorry sight;—
A sorrier still is the great moral taught
By that real Epic unto all who have thought.

10

Redressing injury, revenging wrong,
    To aid the damsel and destroy the caitiff;
Opposing singly the united strong,
     From foreign yoke to free the helpless native;—
Alas! Must noblest views, like an old song,
     Be for mere Fancy’s sport a theme creative?
A jest, a riddle, Fame through thin and thick sought?
And Socrates himself but Wisdom’s Quixote?