A SOUL-RENDING COUPLET.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3005, 11 February 1881, Page 4

A SOUL-RENDING COUPLET.

It is my pleasing duty (says a contemporary) to inform the public at large that at least one compositor has done the Btate some service. He was tho means of causing one of our most gifted crow-poets of the female persuasion to shuffle off this mortal coil. And here is the way it happened. Sappho was a gushing young singer at 49, and had never had a beau but one, and he was scarcely one, as he happened to be a tailor. Luckily for himself, however, he died, and then Sappho banged her gridiron, and inked her fingers, and read Martin Tupper, and lived on fried bread and boiled mutton to encourage what she called the divine afflatus, but which there is every reason to suspect was simply wind. Her last poem, De Profundus or the Blasted Heart, was sent to the Australian, and contained the following soulrending couplet, in which the rapturous joy of her early love is thus described :—

"My life was thick with sorrow-clouds, and sadness filled each day, But joy ! the right man quickly camo, and parted all away. " Lovely, isn't ifc ; and in bow many an aching heart would not these cheering lines have touched a sympathetic chord. Alas! for the bardess. Her trouble was given to a teetotal compositor. And here's the way ifc went before the world :—

" My life was sick with sorrow-clouds, and sadness filled each day. "But Joe, the night man, quickly came, and carted all away. " Verdict—Found Drowned.