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.

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