Will the crown reward you, say,
When the fairy gold is fled?

Daphne was a maid unwise--
Shun the laurel, seek the rose;
Azure, lovely in the skies,
Shines less gracious in the hose!

Don't you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to _bas-bleus_, if not
indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date? Editors will think so,
I fear. Besides, I don't like "Fairy gold _that cannot stay_." If
_Fairy Gold_ were a _horse_, it would be all very well to write that it
"cannot stay." 'Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songs of the
_salon_.

This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you whom
the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy. You kindly
ask my opinion on _vers de societe_ in general. Well, I think them a
very difficult sort of thing to write well, as one may infer from this,
that the ancients, our masters, could hardly write them at all. In Greek
poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece which can be called a
model--the AEolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of
the ivory distaff. It was a present, you remember, to the wife of his
friend Nicias, the physician of Miletus. The Greeks of that age kept
their women in almost Oriental reserve. One may doubt whether Nicias
would have liked it if Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fan
or a jewel. But there is safety in a spinning instrument, and all the
compliments to the lady, "the dainty-ankled Theugenis," turn on her
skill, and industry, and housewifery. So Louis XIV., no mean authority,
called this piece of _vers de societe_ "a model of honourable gallantry."