Since the time when your childhood gave tenderest token
Of the virtues and graces that make up your dower,
The chain was linked round me no more to be broken,
My allegiance has never once swerved for an hour!

I saw you whirl by, never thinking or dreaming
I saw you, the loveliest demoiselle there;

I watched the rich diamond-spray brilliantly gleaming
And sparkling amid the dark bands of your hair.
In a ball-room, romance, as one justly supposes,

Is quite out of place, still I was so bold

As to wish those dark tresses enwreathed with white roses,
The simple white blossoms you loved well of old.

I suppose your lace drapery is of the rarest,

And the broiders that deck it of fabulous worth,
Yet, ma mignonne, I think that I held you the fairest
In your plain country dress with its loveable dearth
Of costly emblazons and ornament golden,

And I worshipped you more in that sweet, simple guise,
When from under the round hat, in days dear and olden,
Flashed forth the soft light of those exquisite eyes!

For you have unchangingly been my one vision
Of happiness seen through the vista of time;
Belgravian flaneurs may smile in derision,

I care not as long as you see this poor rhyme.

May I say with what hope and what joy I shall cherish
The dream of a future shared, darling, with you?
That dream-that reality never need perish

If but to yourself, love, you only be true.

ARTISTS' NOTES FROM CHOICE PICTURES.
Wilkie's 'Village Holiday.'

A GOOD picture, like good wine,

mellows by keeping. Within limits, of course. You may keep your wine or your picture till it has acquired a priceless value for the connoisseur, but be utterly distasteful to the uninitiated. The Village Festival is of the kind that keeps well. It is more than half a century old, yet it has as grateful a flavour, its native unexaggerated raciness is as much relished, and its popularity as universal as when it came fresh from the easel.

Though he had been three years occupied upon it, Wilkie was not twenty-six when he gave to the picture the last finishing touches, and sent it forth to win the applause or face the censure of the critics and the public. It achieved a success which might be called surprising as

the work of so young a man, had not the young man, three or four years before, secured the foremost place in his chosen line.

Wilkie has left in his journals a fuller record of the progress of this than of any other of his pictures. Commencing with the first entry, August 3rd, 1808, when, being too ill to keep an appointment, he writes-To amuse myself, began to make a blot of the Public-House Door, the subject I intend to paint next;' he registers, with dry particularity, his daily doings, till he brought it almost to completion. We read how, wishing to give an air of quiet rusticity to the scene, he called on Haydon one fine May morning, and they went together to Paddington to look after a publichouse that might do for the picture,'