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SAINT ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES

_A Tale of Salt Lake City_

With A Bibliographical Note

By Robert Buchanan

_First Cheap Edition_

London

1896



TO OLD DAN CHAUCER.


                   Maypole dance and Whitsun ale,

                   Sports of peasants in the dale,

                   Harvest mirth and junketting,

                   Fireside play and kiss-in-ring,

                   Ancient fun and wit and ease, --

                   Gone are one and all of these;

                   All the pleasant pastime planned

                   In the green old Mother-land:

                   Gone are these and gone the time

                   Of the breezy English rhyme,

                   Sung to make men glad and wise

                   By great Bards with twinkling eyes:

                   Gone the tale and gone the song

                   Sound as nut-brown ale and strong,

                   Freshening the sultry sense

                   Out of idle impotence,

                   Sowing features dull or bright

                   With deep dimples of delight!


                   Thro' the Motherland I went

                   Seeking these, half indolent:

                   Up and down, saw them not:

                   Only found them, half forgot.

                   Buried in long-darken'd nooks

                   With thy barrels of old books,

                   Where the light and love and mirth

                   Of the morning days of earth

                   Sleeps, like light of sunken suns

                   Brooding deep in cob-webb'd tuns!

                   Everywhere I found instead,

                   Hanging her dejected head,

                   Barbing shafts of bitter wit,

                   The pale Modern Spirit sit--

                   While her shadow, great as Gog's

                   Cast upon the island fogs,

                   In the midst of all things dim

                   Loom'd, gigantically grim.

                   Honest Chaucer, thee I greet

                   In a verse with blithesomefeet.

                   And ino