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SIBRANDUS SCHAFNABURGENSIS.

BY ROBERT BROWNING.

PLAGUE take all

your pedants, say I!

He who wrote what I hold in my hand, Centuries back was so good as to die,

Leaving this rubbish to cumber the land; This, that was a book in its time,

Printed on paper and bound in leather, Last month in the white of a matin-prime Just when the birds sang all together,

Into the garden I brought it to read,
And under the arbute and laurustine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
From title-page to closing line.

Chapter on chapter did I count,

As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge; Added up the mortal amount;

And then proceeded to my revenge.

Yonder's a plum-tree with a crevice

An owl would build in, were he but sage; For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis

In a castle of the middle age,

Joins to a lip of

gum, pure amber;

When he'd be private, there might he

spend

Hours alone in his lady's chamber :
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.

Splash, went he, as under he ducked,
-I knew at the bottom rain-drippings

stagnate;

Next a handful of blossoms I plucked

To bury him with, my bookshelf's

magnate;

Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf,

Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis ; Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.

Now, this morning, betwixt the moss

And gum

A spider had

that locked our friend in limbo, spun his web across,

And sat in the midst with arms akimbo :

So, I took pity, for learning's sake,

And, de profundis, accentibus lætis, Cantate! quoth I, as I got a rake,

And up I fished his delectable treatise.

Here you have it, dry in the sun,

With all the binding all of a blister,

And great blue spots where the ink has run,

And reddish streaks that wink and glister O'er the page so beautifully yellow:

Oh, well have the droppings played their

How did he like it when the live creatures

Tickled aud toused and browsed him all

over,

And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,

Came in, each one, for his right of trover? When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face

Made of her eggs the stately deposit,

And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface

As tiled in the top of his black wife's closet?

All that life and fun and romping,

All that frisking and twisting and coupling,

While slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping

And clasps were cracking and covers

suppling!

As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play-house at Paris, Vienna or
Munich,

Fastened him into a front-row box,

And danced off the ballet with trousers

and tunic.