Premiers Amours.

Old Loves and old dreams,--     "Requiescant in pace."     How strange now it seems,--     "Old" Loves and "old" dreams!     Yet we once wrote you reams     Maude, Alice, and Gracie!     Old Loves and old dreams,--     "Requiescant in pace."     When I called at the "Hollies" to-day,     In the room with the cedar-wood presses,     Aunt Deb. was just folding away     What she calls her "memorial dresses."     She'd the frock that she wore at fifteen,--     Short-waisted, of course--my abhorrence;     She'd "the loveliest"--something in "een"     That she wears in her portrait by Lawrence;     She'd the "jelick" she used--"as a Greek," (!)     She'd the habit she got her bad fall in;     She had e'en the blue moir antique     That she opened Squire Grasshopper's ball in:--     New and old they were all of them there:--     Sleek velvet and bombazine stately,--     She had hung them each over a chair     To the "paniers" she's taken to lately     (Which she showed me, I think, by mistake).     And I conned o'er the forms and the fashions,     Till the faded old shapes seemed to wake     All the ghosts of my passed-away "passions;"--     From the days of love's youthfullest dream,     When the height of my shooting idea     Was to burn, like a young Polypheme,     For a somewhat mature Galatea.     There was Lucy, who "tiffed" with her first,     And who threw me as soon as her third came;     There was Norah, whose cut was the worst,     For she told me to wait till my "berd" came;     Pale Blanche, who subsisted on salts;     Blonde Bertha, who doted on Schiller;     Poor Amy, who taught me to waltz;     Plain Ann, that I wooed for the "siller;"--     All danced round my head in a ring,     Like "The Zephyrs" that somebody painted,     All shapes of the feminine thing--     Shy, scornful, seductive, and sainted,--     To my Wife, in the days she was young....     "How, Sir," says that lady, disgusted,     "Do you dare to include ME among     Your loves that have faded and rusted?"     "Not at all!"--I benignly retort.     (I was just the least bit in a temper!)     "Those, alas! were the fugitive sort,     But you are my--eadem semper!"     Full stop,--and a Sermon. Yet think,--     There was surely good ground for a quarrel,--     She had checked me when just on the brink     Of--I feel--a remarkable MORAL.