THE CROSS OF MY SLIPS

My stumbling blocks are barely steady, but they stumble on and on, and my conscience is in the end a wreck! - Something I have lost - which, perhaps, was never really mine, Yet with crystal-beads scattered in the trenches of my eyes I have endured and sympathized! Like secret compliments in sweet and flattering words, I poured with hopeless romance my proud and

of whom I always foolishly thought: I must be the only one, and my heart, seeing that her mischievous and eager kisses were too much for another, in modesty broke in pieces! In a heaven of faces I would have sought and found Honesty's allies, And at last I myself got a candy and a coke peach For my cobbled isle of cobbled bum!

- Oh, but I would have liked an eternal and sure support: a refuge for the homeless soul in hiding: the beautifully shining, mischievous pools of eyes, to find comfort and self-confidence in the laughing meteor-eyes, so that I would not have been shocked myself: man without a companion is himself an orphaned hermit, a lonely islander! - He, too, peered into the bottomless wells of my heart, and saw a timid and trembling child, longing for a woman's hand to cuddle, to rock him to sleep at night and drive him from his room.

the dread ghosts and goblins of his nightmares!