TO A LADY WHO PRESENTED TO THE AUTHOR A LOCK OF HAIR BRAIDED WITH HIS OWN, AND APPOINTED A NIGHT IN DECEMBER TO MEET HIM IN THE GARDEN. [1]

  These locks, which fondly thus entwine,
  In firmer chains our hearts confine,
  Than all th’ unmeaning protestations
  Which swell with nonsense, love orations. 
  Our love is fix’d, I think we’ve prov’d it;
  Nor time, nor place, nor art have mov’d it;
  Then wherefore should we sigh and whine,
  With groundless jealousy repine;
  With silly whims, and fancies frantic,
  Merely to make our love romantic? 
  Why should you weep, like Lydia Languish,
  And fret with self-created anguish? 
  Or doom the lover you have chosen,
  On winter nights to sigh half frozen;
  In leafless shades, to sue for pardon,
  Only because the scene’s a garden? 
  For gardens seem, by one consent,
  (Since Shakespeare set the precedent;
  Since Juliet first declar’d her passion)
  To form the place of assignation. 
  Oh! would some modern muse inspire,
  And seat her by a sea-coal fire;
  Or had the bard at Christmas written,
  And laid the scene of love in Britain;
  He surely, in commiseration,
  Had chang’d the place of declaration. 
  In Italy, I’ve no objection,
  Warm nights are proper for reflection;
  But here our climate is so rigid,
  That love itself, is rather frigid: 
  Think on our chilly situation,
  And curb this rage for imitation. 
  Then let us meet, as oft we’ve done,
  Beneath the influence of the sun;
  Or, if at midnight I must meet you,
  Within your mansion let me greet you: 

  ‘There’, we can love for hours together,
  Much better, in such snowy weather,
  Than plac’d in all th’ Arcadian groves,
  That ever witness’d rural loves;
  ‘Then’, if my passion fail to please, [ii.]
  Next night I’ll be content to freeze;
  No more I’ll give a loose to laughter,
  But curse my fate, for ever after. [2]

[Footnote 1:  These lines are addressed to the same Mary referred to in the lines beginning, “This faint resemblance of thy charms.” (’Vide ante’, p. 32.)]

[Footnote 2:  In the above little piece the author has been accused by some ‘candid readers’ of introducing the name of a lady [Julia Leacroft] from whom he was some hundred miles distant at the time this was written; and poor Juliet, who has slept so long in “the tomb of all the Capulets,” has been converted, with a trifling alteration of her name, into an English damsel, walking in a garden of their own creation, during the month of ‘December’, in a village where the author never passed a winter.  Such has been the candour of some ingenious critics.  We would advise these ‘liberal’ commentators on taste and arbiters of decorum to read ‘Shakespeare’.

Having heard that a very severe and indelicate censure has been passed on the above poem, I beg leave to reply in a quotation from an admired work, ’Carr’s Stranger in France’.—­“As we were contemplating a painting on a large scale, in which, among other figures, is the uncovered whole length of a warrior, a prudish-looking lady, who seemed to have touched the age of desperation, after having attentively surveyed it through her glass, observed to her party that there was a great deal of indecorum in that picture.  Madame S. shrewdly whispered in my ear ‘that the indecorum was in the remark.’”—­[Ed. 1803, cap. xvi, p. 171.  Compare the note on verses addressed “To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics,” p. 213.]]

[Footnote i: 

  ‘Oh! let me in your chamber greet you.’

[4to]]

[Footnote ii: 

  ‘There if my passion’

[4to.  ’P. on V. Occasions]]