Famous Single Poems
of "Aux Italiens," which had also a pleasant foreign flavor: the grand monde, Paris, the opera, the Emperor looking grave (or perhaps only bored), Eugénie with a tear in her eye, while the tenor sang, "Non ti scordar di me!" Editors of Queries and Answers were kept busy explaining the meaning of that phrase, and many editions found it expedient to carry a translation in a footnote. Jasmine (or what passed for it) became a favorite perfume.
Then there was "The Portrait," with its cheap dramatics, for all the world like a novel by Hall Caine or Marie Corelli; with its confrontation across the body of the dead woman, and the priest's face in the locket at her throat. Even Madame la Duchesse de Chevreuse, it will be remembered, found a certain piquancy in the thought of damning an abbé; how irresistible, then, must this situation have been to the simple hearts of the 'eighties and 'nineties! So when a sadly sentimental poem called "There Is No Death," credited to Bulwer, began going the rounds of the poetry columns, everybody accepted it as his without question, and it gradually found its way over his name into the most serious collections.
To be sure, it could not have been found in any volume of Bulwer's poems, had any one thought to look, and it lacks completely Bulwer's sophisticated manner. Also a fellow named
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