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If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

For the gay beams of lightsome day

Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey....

Yet there can be no doubt that he himself had never seen the Abbey by moonlight! He further tells his readers that they can

Home returning, soothly swear

Was never scene so sad and fair.

They, having seen it, can “soothly” (i.e., truthfully) swear to its beauty, which was more than he himself could!

Calverley’s last line is from Sydney Smith’s “Recipe for a Salad”:

Oh, herbaceous treat!

’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;

Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,

And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl;

Serenely full the epicure would say,

“Fate cannot harm me—I have dined to-day.”

This again is an adaptation of Dryden’s “Imitation of Horace” (Book III, Ode 29):

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call to-day his own;

He who, secure within, can say,

To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d to-day.

We may live without poetry, music and art;