The Inn Album by Robert Browning — Read

"That oblong book 's the Album; hand it here! / Exactly! page on page of gratitude / For breakfast, dinner, supper, and the view! / I praise these poets, they leave margin-space; / Each stanza seems to gather skirts around, / And primly, trimly, keep the foot's confine, / Modest and maidlike; lubber prose o'ersprawls / And straddling stops the path from left to right. / Since I want space to do my cipher-work, / Which poem spares a corner? What comes first? / '_Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot! _' / (Open the window, we burn daylight, boy! ) / Or see -- succincter beauty, brief and bold -- ' / _If a fellow can dine On rump-steaks and port wine,_ / _He needs not despair Of dining well here_' -- / '_Here! _' I myself could find a better rhyme! / That bard 's a Browning; he neglects the form: / But ah, the sense, ye gods, the weighty sense! / Still, I prefer this classic. Ay, throw wide! / I 'll quench the bits of candle yet unburnt. / A minute's fresh air, then to cipher-work! / Three little columns hold the whole account: / _Ecarté_, after which Blind Hookey, then / Cutting-the-Pack, five hundred pounds the cut. / 'T is easy reckoning: I have lost, I think."

Two personages occupy this room / Shabby-genteel, that 's parlor to the inn / Perched on a view-commanding eminence; / -- Inn which may be a veritable house / Where somebody once lived and pleased good taste / Till tourists found his coigne of vantage out, / And fingered blunt the individual mark, / And vulgarized things comfortably smooth. / On a sprig-pattern-papered wall there brays / Complaint to sky Sir Edwin's dripping stag; / His couchant coast-guard creature corresponds; / They face the Huguenot and Light o' the World. / Grim o'er the mirror on the mantelpiece, / Varnished and coffined, _Salmo ferox_ glares, / -- Possibly at the List of Wines which, framed / And glazed, hangs somewhat prominent on peg.