TO THAT FEARLESS AMERICAN CITIZEN AND STERLING PUBLIC OFFICIAL, CHARLES S. WHITMAN, DISTRICT ATTORNEY FOR THE BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN, IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, THIS BOOK IS ADMIRINGLY DEDICATED. E. H. B.

"What has man done here? How atone, Great God, for this which man has done? And for the body and soul which by Man's pitiless doom must now comply With lifelong hell, what lullaby Of sweet forgetful second birth Remains? All dark. No sign on earth What measure of God's rest endows The Many mansions of His house.

"If but a woman's heart might see Such erring heart unerringly For once! But that can never be.

"Like a rose shut in a book In which pure women may not look, For its base pages claim control To crush the flower within the soul; Where through each dead roseleaf that clings, Pale as transparent psyche-wings, To the vile text, are traced such things As might make lady's cheek indeed More than a living rose to read; So nought save foolish foulness may Watch with hard eyes the sure decay; And so the lifeblood of this rose, Puddled with shameful knowledge flows Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose; Yet still it keeps such faded show Of when 'twas gathered long ago, That the crushed petals' lovely grain, The sweetness of the sanguine stain, Seen of a woman's eyes must make Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache, Love roses better for its sake:— Only that this can never be:— Even so unto her sex is she!

"Yet, Jenny, looking long at you, The woman almost fades from view. A cipher of man's changeless sum Of lust, past, present, and to come, Is left. A riddle that one shrinks To challenge from the scornful sphinx.

"Like a toad within a stone Seated while Time crumbles on; Which sits there since the earth was curs'd For Man's transgression at the first; Which, living through all centuries, Not once has seen the sun arise; Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, The earth's whole summers have not warmed; Which always—whitherso the stone Be flung—sits there, deaf, blind, alone;— Aye, and shall not be driven out 'Till that which shuts him round about Break at the very Master's stroke, And the dust thereof vanished as smoke, And the seed of Man vanished as dust:— Even so within this world is Lust!"

—From "Jenny," by Dante Gabriel Rosetti.