There's never a delicate nurseling of the year But our huge London hails it, and delights To wear it on her breast or at her ear,
Her days to colour and make sweet her nights
Crocus and daffodil and violet,
Pink, primrose, valley-li...
Army Reserve; a worshipper of Bobs,
With whom he stripped the smock from Candahar;
Neat as his mount, that neatest among cobs;
Whenever pageants pass, or meetings are,
His beat lies knee-high through a dust of story— A dust of terror and torture, grief and crime;
Ghosts that are England's wonder, and shame, and glory Throng where he walks, an antic of old time;
A sense of long immedicable tears Were ev...
He's called The General from the brazen craft And dash with which he sneaks a bit of road And all its fares; challenged, or chafed, or chaffed,
Back-answers of the newest he'll explode;
He reins his horses with an air; he treats With sco...
Though, if you ask her name, she says "Elise," Being plain Elizabeth, e'en let it pass,
And own that, if her aspirates take their ease,
She ever makes a point, in washing glass,
Handling the engine, turning taps for tots,
So went our boys when Edward Sixth, the King,
Chartered Christ's Hospital, and died
And so Full fifteen generations in a string Of heirs to his bequest have had to go
Thus Camden showed, and Barnes, and Stillingfleet,
The first enters wearing the neon
Of virtue
Ceaselessly firing all-purpose
At everyone
Time, the old humourist, has a trick to-day Of moving landmarks and of levelling down,
Till into Town the Suburbs edge their way,
And in the Suburbs you may scent the Town
With Mount Street thus approaching Muswell Hill,
An ill March noon; the flagstones gray with dust;
An all-round east wind volleying straws and grit;
St
Martin's Steps, where every venomous gust Lingers to buffet, or sneap, the passing cit;
Who says Drum-Major says a man of mould,
Shaking the meek earth with tremendous tread,
And pacing still, a triumph to behold,
Of his own spine at least two yards ahead
'Liza's old man's perhaps a little shady, 'Liza's old woman's prone to booze and cring;
But 'Liza deems herself a perfect lady,
And proves it in her feathers and her fringe
For 'Liza has a bloke her heart to cheer,