<h2><SPAN name="page32"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>FIRST LOVE.</h2>
<p class="poetry">O <span class="smcap">my</span> earliest love,
who, ere I number’d<br/>
Ten sweet summers, made my bosom thrill!<br/>
Will a swallow—or a swift, or some bird—<br/>
Fly to her and say, I love her still?</p>
<p class="poetry">Say my life’s a desert drear and arid,<br/>
To its one green spot I aye recur:<br/>
Never, never—although three times married—<br/>
Have I cared a jot for aught but her.</p>
<p class="poetry">No, mine own! though early forced to leave
you,<br/>
Still my heart was there where first we met;<br/>
In those “Lodgings with an ample sea-view,”<br/>
Which were, forty years ago, “To
Let.”</p>
<p class="poetry"><SPAN name="page33"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
33</span>There I saw her first, our landlord’s oldest<br/>
Little daughter. On a thing so fair<br/>
Thou, O Sun,—who (so they say) beholdest<br/>
Everything,—hast gazed, I tell thee,
ne’er.</p>
<p class="poetry">There she sat—so near me, yet remoter<br/>
Than a star—a blue-eyed bashful imp:<br/>
On her lap she held a happy bloater,<br/>
’Twixt her lips a yet more happy shrimp.</p>
<p class="poetry">And I loved her, and our troth we plighted<br/>
On the morrow by the shingly shore:<br/>
In a fortnight to be disunited<br/>
By a bitter fate for evermore.</p>
<p class="poetry">O my own, my beautiful, my blue eyed!<br/>
To be young once more, and bite my thumb<br/>
At the world and all its cares with you, I’d<br/>
Give no inconsiderable sum.</p>
<p class="poetry"><SPAN name="page34"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
34</span>Hand in hand we tramp’d the golden seaweed,<br/>
Soon as o’er the gray cliff peep’d the
dawn:<br/>
Side by side, when came the hour for tea, we’d<br/>
Crunch the mottled shrimp and hairy
prawn:—</p>
<p class="poetry">Has she wedded some gigantic shrimper,<br/>
That sweet mite with whom I loved to play?<br/>
Is she girt with babes that whine and whimper,<br/>
That bright being who was always gay?</p>
<p class="poetry">Yes—she has at least a dozen wee
things!<br/>
Yes—I see her darning corduroys,<br/>
Scouring floors, and setting out the tea-things,<br/>
For a howling herd of hungry boys,</p>
<p class="poetry">In a home that reeks of tar and sperm-oil!<br/>
But at intervals she thinks, I know,<br/>
Of those days which we, afar from turmoil,<br/>
Spent together forty years ago.</p>
<p class="poetry"><SPAN name="page35"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
35</span>O my earliest love, still unforgotten,<br/>
With your downcast eyes of dreamy blue!<br/>
Never, somehow, could I seem to cotton<br/>
To another as I did to you!</p>
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