Ignored our journals all too gladly,
And in her native tongue, I fear,
Could barely make her meaning clear;
And so she turned for love's discussion
To French. . . . There's nothing I can do!
A lady's love, I say to you,
Has never been expressed in Russian;
Our mighty tongue, God only knows,
Has still not mastered postal prose.
27
Some would that ladies be required
To read in Russian. Dread command!
Why, I can picture theminspired,
I ask you now to tell me truly,
You poets who have sinned unduly:
Have not those creatures you adore,
Those objects of your verse . . . and more,
Been weak at Russian conversation?
And have they not, the charming fools,
Distorted sweetly all the rules
Of usage and pronunciation;
While yet a foreign language slips
With native glibness from their lips?
28
God spare me from the apparition,
On leaving some delightful ball,
Of bonneted Academician
Or scholar in a yellow shawl!
I find a faultless Russian style
Like crimson lips without a smile,
Mistakes in grammar charm the mind.
Perhaps (if fate should prove unkind!)
This generation's younger beauties,
Responding to our journals' call,
With grammar may delight us all,
And verses will be common duties.
But what care I for all they do?
To former ways I'll still be true.
29
A careless drawl, a tiny stutter,
Some imprecision of the tongue
Can still produce a lovely flutter
Within this breast no longer young;
I lack the strength for true repentance,
And Gallicisms in a sentence
Seem sweet as youthful sins remote,
Or verse that Bogdanvich* wrote.
But that will do. My beauty's letter
