"Oh, false and fickle Nelly Gray!

I know why you refuse :—
Though I've no feet-some other man
Is standing in my shoes!

"I wish I ne'er had seen your face;
But, now, a long farewell!

For you will be my death;-alas!
You will not be my Nell!"

Now when he went from Nelly Gray,
His heart so heavy got―
And life was such a burthen grown,
It made him take a knot!

So round his melancholy neck,
A rope he did entwine,
And, for his second time in life,
Enlisted in the Line!

One end he tied around a beam,
And then removed his pegs,
And, as his legs were off, of course,
He soon was off his legs!

And there he hung, till he was dead
As any nail in town,—

For, though distress had cut him up,
It could not cut him down!

A dozen men sat on his corpse,

To find out why he died-

And they buried Ben in four cross-roads, With a stake in his inside!

BIANCA'S DREAM.

A VENETIAN STORY.

I.

BIANCA!-fair Bianca !—who could dwell
With safety on her dark and hazel gaze,
Nor find there lurk'd in it a witching spell,

Fatal to balmy nights and blessed days? The peaceful breath that made the bosom swell, She turn'd to gas, and set it in a blaze; Each eye of hers had Love's Eupyrion in it, That he could light his link at in a minute.

II.

So that, wherever in her charms she shone,
A thousand breasts were kindled into flame;
Maidens who cursed her looks forgot their own,
And beaux were turn'd to flambeaux where

she came;

All hearts indeed were conquer'd but her own,
Which none could ever temper down or tame:
In short, to take our haberdasher's hints,
She might have written over it,—“ From

Flints."

III.

She was, in truth, the wonder of her sex,

At least in Venice-where with eyes of brown, Tenderly languid, ladies seldom vex

An amorous gentle with a needless frown; Where gondolas convey guitars by pecks,

And love at casements climbeth up and down, Whom for his tricks and custom in that kind, Some have considered a Venetian blind.

IV.

Howbeit, this difference was quickly taught, Amongst more youths who had this cruel jailor, To hapless Julio—all in vain he sought

With each new moon his hatter and his tailor; In vain the richest padusoy he bought,

And went in bran new beaver to assail herAs if to show that Love had made him smart All over-and not merely round his heart.

V.

In vain he labour'd thro' the sylvan park
Bianca haunted in-that where she came,
Her learned eyes in wandering might mark
The twisted cipher of her maiden name,
Wholesomely going thro' a course of bark:

No one was touch'd or troubled by his flame, Except the Dryads, those old maids that grow In trees,—like wooden dolls in embryo.

VI.

In vain complaining elegies he writ,

And taught his tuneful instrument to grieve, And sang in quavers how his heart was split, Constant beneath her lattice with each eve; She mock'd his wooing with her wicked wit,

And slash'd his suit so that it match'd his sleeve, Till he grew silent at the vesper star, And quite despairing, hamstring'd his guitar.

VII.

Bianca's heart was coldly frosted o'er

With snows unmelting—an eternal sheet, But his was red within him, like the core Of old Vesuvius, with perpetual heat; And oft he long'd internally to pour

His flames and glowing lava at her feet,. But when his burnings he began to spout, She stopp'd his mouth, and put the crater out.

VIII.

Meanwhile he wasted in the eyes of men,
So thin, he seem'd a sort of skeleton-key
Suspended at death's door-so pale-and then
He turn'd as nervous as an aspen tree;
The life of man is three-score years and ten,
But he was perishing at twenty-three,
For people truly said, as grief grew stronger,
"It could not shorten his poor
life—much longer."