FullReads

When those who criticised it were invited themselves to treat the same theme in more worthy fashion, they willingly enough agreed, and the results here subjoined were spread upon the minutes of the club.

With a lady-like air of reserve tempered by self-respect, Mrs. Felicia Hemans presented her version:

The Marcel waves dash’d high
Where the puffs and frizzes crossed;
And just above a roguish eye
A little curl was tossed.

And that little curl hung down
O’er a brow like a holy saint;
Her goodness was beyond renown,
And yet–there was a taint.

Ay, call it deadly sin,
The temper that she had;
But that Little Girl just gloried in
Freedom to be real bad!

Robert Browning gave the subject much thought and responded at length:

Who will may hear the poet’s story told.
His story? Who believes me shall behold
The Little Girl, tricked out with ringolet,
Or fringe, or pompadour, or what you will,
Switch, bang, rat, puff–odzooks, man! I know not
What women call the hanks o’ hair they wear!
But that same curl, beau-catcher, love-lock, frizz.
(Perchance hot-ironed–perchance ’twas bandolined;
Mayhap those rubber squirmers gave it shape–
I wot not.) But that corkscrew of a curl
Hung plumb, true, straight, accurate, at mid-brow,
Nor swerved a hair’s breadth to the right or left.
Aught of her other tresses none may know.
Now go we straitly on. And undertake
To sound the humor of the Little Girl.
Ha! what’s the note? Hark here. When she was good,
She was seraphic; hypersuperfine.
So good she made the saints seem scalawags;
An angel child; a paramaragon.
Halt! Turn! When she elected to be bad,
Black fails to paint the depths of ignomin,
The fearsome sins, the crimes unspeakable,
The deep abysses of her evilment.
Hist! Tell ‘t wi’ bated breath! One day she let
A rosy tongue-tip from red lips peep forth!
Can viciousness cap that? Horrid’s the word.
Yet there she is. There is that Little Girl,
Her goodness and her badness, side by side,
Like bacon, streak o’ fat and streak o’ lean.
Ah, Fatalist, she must be ever so.

Mr. E.A. Poe declared that he wrote his lines without any trouble at all, as he used to know the Little Girl personally:

‘Twas not very many years ago,
At Seahurst-By-The-Sea,
A little girl had a little curl–
Her name was Annabel Lee.
And right in the middle of Annabel’s brow
That curl would always be.

She was so good, oh, she was so good
At Seahurst-By-The-Sea!
She was good with a goodness more than good,
Was beautiful Annabel Lee,
With such goodness the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her of me.
But her badness was stronger by far than the good,
Like many far older than she,
Like many far wiser than she;
And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever the good from the bad
In the soul of Annabel Lee,
The beautiful Annabel Lee.

Then Mr. Stevenson went out into his own garden and plucked this:

In winter, I go up at night
And curl that curl by candle-light;
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to curl it twice a day.

When I am good, I seem to be
As good as peaches on the tree;
But when I’m bad I’ve awful ways,
I’m horrid, everybody says.

And does it not seem hard to you,
I have to choose between the two?
When I’m not happy, good and glad,
I have to be so awful bad!