What “your intentions are?”—One way or other
It seems the virgin’s heart expects your hand:
And between pity for her case and yours,
You’ll add to Matrimony’s list of cures.
LXI
I’ve known a dozen weddings made even thus,
And some of them high names: I have also known
Young men who—though they hated to discuss
Pretensions which they never dreamed to have shown—
Yet neither frightened by a female fuss,
Nor by mustachios moved, were let alone,
And lived, as did the broken-hearted fair,
In happier plight than if they formed a pair.
LXII
There’s also nightly, to the uninitiated,
A peril—not indeed like Love or Marriage,
But not the less for this to be depreciated:
It is—I meant and mean not to disparage
The show of Virtue even in the vitiated—
It adds an outward grace unto their carriage—
But to denounce the amphibious sort of harlot,
Couleur de rose, who’s neither white nor scarlet.
LXIII
Such is your cold coquette, who can’t say “No,”
And won’t say “Yes,” and keeps you on and off-ing
On a lee-shore, till it begins to blow—
Then sees your heart wrecked, with an inward scoffing.
This works a world of sentimental woe,965
And sends new Werters yearly to their coffin;
But yet is merely innocent flirtation,
Not quite adultery, but adulteration.
LXIV
“Ye gods, I grow a talker!”966 Let us prate.
The next of perils, though I place it sternest,
Is when, without regard to Church or State,
A wife makes or takes love in upright earnest.
Abroad, such things decide few women’s fate—
(Such, early Traveller! is the truth thou learnest)—
But in old England, when a young bride errs,
Poor thing! Eve’s was a trifling case to hers.
LXV
For ’tis a low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit
Country, where a young couple of the same ages967
Can’t form a friendship, but the world o’erawes it.
Then there’s the vulgar trick of those d⸺d damages!
A verdict—grievous foe to those who cause it!—
Forms a sad climax to romantic homages;
Besides those soothing speeches of the pleaders,
And evidences which regale all readers.
LXVI
But they who blunder thus are raw beginners;
A little genial sprinkling of hypocrisy
Has saved the fame of thousand splendid sinners,
The loveliest oligarchs of our Gynocracy;968
You may see such at all the balls and dinners,
Among the proudest of our aristocracy,
So gentle, charming, charitable, chaste—
And all by having tact as well as taste.
LXVII
Juan, who did not stand in the predicament
Of a mere novice, had one safeguard more;
For he was sick—no, ’twas not the word sick I meant—
But he had seen so much good love before,
That he was not in heart so very weak;—I meant
But thus much, and no sneer against the shore
Of white cliffs, white necks, blue eyes, bluer stockings—
Tithes, taxes, duns—and doors with double knockings.969
LXVIII
But coming young from lands and scenes romantic,
Where lives, not lawsuits, must be risked for Passion
And Passion’s self must have a spice of frantic,
Into a country where ’tis half a fashion,
Seemed to him half commercial, half pedantic,
Howe’er he might esteem this moral nation:
Besides (alas! his taste—forgive and pity!)
At first he did not think the women pretty.
LXIX
I say at first—for he found out at last,
But by degrees, that they were fairer far
Than the more glowing dames whose lot is cast
Beneath the influence of the Eastern Star.
A further proof we should not judge in haste;
Yet inexperience could not be his bar
To taste:—the truth is, if men would confess,
That novelties please less than they impress.
LXX
Though travelled, I have never had the luck to
Trace up those shuffling negroes, Nile or Niger,
To that impracticable place Timbuktu,
Where Geography finds no one to oblige her
With such a chart as may be safely stuck to—
For Europe ploughs in Afric like “bos piger:”970
But if I had been at Timbuktu, there
No doubt I should be told that black is fair.971972
LXXI
It is. I will not swear that black is white,
But I suspect in fact that white is black,
And the whole matter rests upon eye-sight:—
Ask a blind man, the best judge. You’ll attack
Perhaps this new position—but I’m right;
Or if I’m wrong, I’ll not be ta’en aback:—
He hath no morn nor night, but all is dark
Within—and what seest thou? A dubious spark!
LXXII
But I’m relapsing into Metaphysics,
That labyrinth, whose clue is of the same
Construction as your cures for hectic phthisics,
Those bright moths fluttering round a dying flame:
And this reflection brings me to plain Physics,
And to the beauties of a foreign dame,
Compared with those of our pure pearls of price,
Those polar summers, all Sun, and some ice.973974
LXXIII
Or say they are like virtuous mermaids, whose
Beginnings are fair faces, ends mere fishes;—
Not that there’s not a quantity of those
Who have a due respect for their own wishes.
Like Russians rushing from hot baths to snows975
Are they, at bottom virtuous even when vicious:
They warm into a scrape, but keep of course,
As a reserve, a plunge into remorse.
LXXIV
But this has nought to do with their outsides.
I said that Juan did not think them pretty
At the first blush; for a fair Briton hides
Half her attractions—probably from pity—
And rather calmly into the heart glides,
Than storms it as a foe would take a city;
But once there (if you doubt this, prithee try)976
She keeps it for you like a true ally.
LXXV
She cannot step as does an Arab barb,977
Or Andalusian girl from mass returning,
Nor wear as gracefully as Gauls her garb,
Nor in her eye Ausonia’s glance is burning;
Her voice, though sweet, is not so fit to warb—
le those bravuras (which I still am learning
To like, though I have been seven years in Italy,
And
