xvii.

Of a "Predestined" Husband.

Colony! fain to display thy games on length of thy town-bridge!

There, too, ready to dance, though fearing the shaking of crazy

Logs of the Bridgelet propt on pier-piles newly renewèd,

Lest supine all sink deep-merged in the marish's hollow,

So may the bridge hold good when builded after thy pleasure 5

Where Salisúbulus' rites with solemn function are sacred,

As thou (Colony!) grant me boon of mightiest laughter.

Certain a townsman mine I'd lief see thrown from thy gangway

Hurlèd head over heels precipitous whelmed in the quagmire,

Where the lake and the boglands are most rotten and stinking, 10

Deepest and lividest lie, the swallow of hollow voracious.

Witless surely the wight whose sense is less than of boy-babe

Two-year-old and a-sleep on trembling forearm of father.

He though wedded to girl in greenest bloom of her youth-tide,

(Bride-wife daintier bred than ever was delicate kidlet, 15

Worthier diligent watch than grape-bunch blackest and ripest)

Suffers her sport as she please nor rates her even at hair's worth,

Nowise 'stirring himself, but lying log-like as alder

Felled and o'er floating the fosse of safe Ligurian woodsman,

Feeling withal, as though such spouse he never had own'd; 20

So this marvel o' mine sees naught, and nothing can hear he,

What he himself, an he be or not be, wholly unknowing.

Now would I willingly pitch such wight head first fro' thy bridge,

Better a-sudden t'arouse that numskull's stolid old senses,

Or in the sluggish mud his soul supine to deposit 25

Even as she-mule casts iron shoe where quagmire is stiffest.