352 The Poets Beasts, 



" I would rather hear cat-courtship 

 Under my bedroom window " 



is the worst that Southey can say of odious sounds. Nor 

 is it easy to imagine any disturbance of slumber more exas- 

 perating than the melancholy love-makings of cats when 

 they foregather immoderately on the garden wall and pro- 

 long their woeful canticles into the hours of dawn — the 

 dismal soliloquy uttered 



" From the depths of a divine despair " 



that by-and-by becomes a gruesome dialogue, in which the 

 two voices rise in unison, from the expression of a profound 

 longing, cavernous and sepulchral, up and up and up 

 through the scale of sharpening grief to the utmost peaks of 

 anguish, and then in a frenzied climax the two hearts break 

 as one in a piercing discord of mutual appeal. 



Is all over ? Are the two cats lying dead ? Did their 

 great hearts burst their little bodies in that last unspeakable 

 moment of tender despair ? Not a bit of it. Listen. They 

 are beginning again, exactly where they began before, at 

 the "Z?^ profundis" and they will climb up the keys in 

 precisely the same abominable crescendo of misery, and when 

 they can no longer restrain the pent-up torrent of their tor- 

 tured affections they will mingle their voices in one wild 

 shattering yell of pity for themselves. 



Yet though the householder empties the phials of his 

 wrath — and, if of a choleric soul, also all the movable 

 trifles about the bedroom that may seem to an exasperated 

 imagination suitable for throwing — upon the wretches for 

 their nocturnal ululations, there comes with daylight a 

 milder frame of mind. The tranquil spectacle of pussy 

 snugly curled up in front of the fire routs all suspicions as 

 to its having had any share in the outrageous frolics that 

 broke the slumbers of the household, and causes the dis- 

 turbances of over-night to be placed to the discredit of the 



