Leaves from my Scrap Book [pp. 314-316]

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.
golden." He has written some pretty verses upon a
lock of this golden hair. He speaks of each thread as,
" meandering in pellucid gold."
I forget the lines. This was the color beloved by a
thousand poets; and one was found who forgot in contemplating the rare masses that, stained with it, lay upon the brow of Lucrecia Borgia, the "dark and unbridled passions which led her to the bed of one brother
and to the murder of another-and which have doomed
her to "an immortality of evil repute."
Anacreon preferred auburn hair.
"Deepening inwardly, a dun;
Sparkling golden next the sun,"
conveys nearly the same idea with that expressed in
Jonson's " Gold upon a ground of black."
I have two or three more verses upon hair, which I
recollect to have seen in an old Englishl poem. They are
descriptive of "Hero the nun of Venus-the lady belov..
ed of Leander." These are the lines-three in number,
- Come listen to the tale of Hero young,
Whom pale.pollo courted for her hair,
and offered as a dower his burning throne."
We often meet with double tastes. Tasso loved two
Leonoras. Leonora D'Este had a fair skin. The other
was a brunette.
" Bruna sei tu ma bella
qual virgini viola."
It is difficult to decide between the rival colors of the
eye. This difficulty is set forth in a little poem called
the "Dilemma," which I find in an old number of the
New England Magazine.
"I had a vision in my dreams,
I saw a row of twenty beams;
From every beam a rope was hung,
In every rope a lover swung.
I asked the hue of every eye
That bade each luckless lover die
Ten livid lips said heavenly blue
And ten accused the darker hue."
Before ending this "scrap" I will quote some sentences
written by a friend of my ow n long ago —a very eccentric man, and indeed a melancholy one. He had been
crossed in love, and could rarely speak or write without recurring to the origin of his unhappiness. He had
a great many faults, but he is dead now, and has been
so for many years; I am not anxious to say any more
about them. The paragraph which I copy from his
manuscript, is a portion of a flighty book, the aim or
meaning of which I could never discover. It owes its
fanciful extravagance, I rather think, to the influence of
opium upon the author's nerves. After pointing out the
numerous particulars in which "nature imitates our women," he proceeds to observe after the following fashion,
"In the hair, nature is most an imitator. The cascade
caressing the precipice with the threads of its silver
locks, which the teeth of the granite comb have frizled,
and which the winds play at gambol with, is only a
copy. So with the vine on the rock —the great vine
whose metallic tendrils I have looked on and wondered
at when the sunshine spanned them with a cloven halo.
So with the drooping moss —the Barba Espagna, with
its drapery of gold held by threads of spun alabaster,
hanging in hard festoons from the tree beside the Lagoon
and sighing when its hues die with the sunlight. And
so with the boughs of our weeping trees. 0, but are
not these last most beautiful? Place your ear to the
soft grass-blades on the brink of a valley brook, and
listen to the monotone of the willow's stirred ringlets,
and watch them as the wind lifts them from the eddy
beneath to float, bejewelled by adhering globules. And
then look upon them as with the abating wind they
sink lower and lower, leaving their cool rain upon your
cheek. See them trail in the pebbly waters and conjure
up in each detached leaf an Elfin barque laden with its
rare boatmen and tiny beauties. Hear the tinkle of
the little bells and the tlhrieks of the wrecked mariners,
as they cling to the hair of the willow (as Zal clung
to the locks of his mistress) and splash the brook into
foamn. And now they leap to the backs of their skipper
steeds, and ply the spur of the thistle seed, and gallop
off for the green shiore, wringing their hands and bewailing the ill fate of their holiday trim. Such marvellous fancies, if you are fanciful, will prick your brain
until the drowsy sough of the tree-hair and the renewed
trickle of the raining spray lend your eyes sleep and
call forth the dream spirit, as the fly from its cocoon,
and give it the wings of wilder vagary to flutter away
withal —whither? JIine would return to my wanderings by Goluon with her whose tomb in the valley of
sweet waters often pillows my head."
Alas for my poor fiiend Bob! He died of a broken
heart —that is to say mediately. He died im-mediately
of hard drinking. Napoleon remembered the Seine on
his death-bed and asked to be buried upon its sunniest
bank; Bob remembered Goluon when his great temples
had the death-damp upon them. His vision had failed
him; his nose had become peaked; his body, like a
jaded and worn hack, had fallen under the spirit, which
like a stout horseman had long kept it to its paces; but
the little abiding place of memory had not been destroyed, and poor Bob muttered at times of a dead lady
with fair hair —of a valley of sweet waters —of a grave
with two willows above it —of pleasant Goluon —
and died with an unuttered prayer upon his lips, and
with a strong desire at his heart. The prayer was, that
I, his friend, would bury him between the two willows
-on the evening bank of Goluon-side by side with
Betty Manning his old sweetheart. Poor Bob! May
God take kind care of his soul!
V.
"I much lament that nevermore to me
Can come fleet pulse, bright heart, and frolic mood;
I much lament that nevermore may be
My tame step light, my wan cheek berry-hued."
In the lines just quoted, the poet (old Philip Allen, a
Welshman) strikes the proper key. When we have
ceased to derive pleasure from that which once afforded
it to us, we should regard the change as in ourselves.
The grass of the hill is as green as it ever was, but the
step once "light" has become "tame." Tie bird sings
as sweetly as ever, but the "bright heart" into which
the "honey drops of his constant song" once fell, has
been dimmed and darkened by human passions. The
berry-clusters are still in the fringe of the thicket, but
the palate has no longer any relish for them. We have
changed. Yet we are apt to believe the change any
where rather than in ourselves. Indeed we are for the
most part like Launcelot in the play.
Gobbo.-" Lord worshipped might he be! What a beard hast
thou got l Thou hast more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my
thill horse, has on his tail.
Launcelot.-"It would seem then that Dobbin's tail grows
backward. I am sure that he had more hair on his tail than I
had on my face when I last saw him."
It was the chin of Launcelot that had undergone the
change, and not the tail of his father Gobbo's thill horse
Dobbin.
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