Chapter I: Prologue: Spoken by MR. BUCKSTONE

The Author begs you’ll kind attention pay
While I explain the object of his play.
You have been taught, no doubt, by those professing
To understand the thing, that Love’s a blessing:
Well, _he_ intends to teach you the reverse--
That Love is not a blessing, but a curse!
But pray do not suppose it’s his intent
To do without this vital element--
His drama _would_ be in a pretty mess!
With quite as fair a prospect of success,
Might a dispensing chemist in his den
Endeavor to dispense with oxygen.
Too powerful an agent to pooh-pooh,
There will be Love enough I warrant you:
But as the aim of every play’s to show
That Love’s essential to all men below,
_He_ uses it to prove, to all who doubt it,
How well all men--but he--can do without it.
To prove his case (a poor one, I admit),
He begs that with him you will kindly flit
To a pure fairy-land that’s all his own,
Where mortal love is utterly unknown.
Whose beings, spotless as new-fallen snow,
Know nothing of the Wicked World below.
These gentle sons and daughters of the air,
Safe, in their eyrie, from temptation’s snare,
Have yet one little fault I must confess--
_An overweening sense of righteousness_.
As perfect silence, undisturbed for years,
Will breed at length a humming in the ears,
So from their very purity within
Arise the promptings of their only sin.
Forgive them! No? Perhaps you will relent
When you appreciate their punishment!

But prithee be not led too far away,
By the hack author of a mere stage-play:
It’s easy to affect this cynic tone,
But, let me ask you, had the world ne’er known
Such Love as you, and I, and he, must mean--
Pray where would you, or I, or he, have been?

THE WICKED WORLD.