Your Dandy-Lion’s but a butterfly.
Most exquisitely languid; who soon tires
Of his own wings; who shows, but never uses,
Their vans; and ever finds the expense of motion,
Exhaustion of his moral! All’s not gold
That his wing carries ; and, ere many seasons,
He finds the keeping even of that a cost,
If not a care and canker. He soon rusts,
And the gay lacquer of his painted garments,
Will need more wit than haply was his portion,
To win his tailor’s ear most suitably
For a new suit. His life’s a very hard one,
In conflict with his tastes and appetites;
But, luckily, a short one.

In brief season,
You find him, as the tailors phrase it, seedy,
Spite of all lacquering; and growing oozy,
Subsiding from the garden to the swamp;,
Glad then to happen on discarded flowers,
In precincts, which, last season, were too common
For his so dainty palate. He’ll get back,
If fate and the east wind will suffer it,
To some poor spinster flower, upon the rock
Of her own fears and longings;, and be happy,
Simply to find a nest,, a housing shelter,
And plain short commons, and the waste coarse fare,
Which, when his wings were gay with virgin lacquer,
Had only moved his loathing! One short summer,
And the gay flutterer in the palace precincts,
Wriggling ‘mongst roses and lilies,, flies them all,
To dwell in cabbage and in kitchen garden;
Happy in refuge where one pot is boiling.

From: Russel’s Magazine. October 1859. Vol. 6.