Point Lace and Diamonds, published 1893, by George Augustus Baker (1849-1906).
Here’s a contemporary review in The Atlantic Monthly (Vol 36, Issue 213):
Mr. Baker has a cleverness which, without being too fine or deep, is pleasant; and his pretty book of society verses is one that you may read with a fair degree of “cheerfulness and refreshment.” Our fashionable life affords scope enough for the more amiable sort of light satire, and Mr. Baker is fortunately not a satirist who cares much to moralize his theme. He does not begin to exhaust his material; the situations he suggests or portrays are not the most unhackneyed, but then, he does them with dramatic skill, and he renders without unnecessary vulgarity the tone and talk of the kind of stylish girls whose souls are in their clothes…
Oh! he was a student of mystic lore;
And she was a soulful girl
All nerves and mind, of the cultured kind
The paragon, pride, and pearl.
They loved with a neo-Concordic love,
Woofed weirdly with wistful woe.
They sat in a glen, remote from men,
Their converse was high and low.
“What marvellous words of marvellous love,
Speak marvellous souls like these?”
I drew me nigh till their faintest sigh
Was heard with the greatest ease.
“’Oo’s ’ittle white lammy is ’oo?” breathed he;
“’Oors. ’Oo’s lovey-dovey is ’oo?”
“’Oors! ’Oors! Would ’oo k’y if dovey should die?”
“No’p!—tause ’ittle lammy’d die too.”
How truthful we poets! The “language of Love”
Is a phrase we employ full oft;
But whenever we do, we prefix thereto,
You’ve noticed, the adjective “soft.”
Thanks to Melissa Er-Raqabi for Post-Processing this book!