Clamors loud
I heard, and curses deep enough to swim in;
And, pointing at me, one said: "Let's put him in."
Then each turned on me with an evil look,
As in my ragged shroud I stood and shook.
"Nay, good Posterity," I cried, "forbear!
If that's a jail I fain would be remaining
Outside, for truly I should little care
To catch my death of cold. I'm just regaining
The life lost long ago by my disdaining
To take precautions against draughts like those
That, haply, penetrate that cracked and splitting
Old structure." Then an aged wight arose
From a chair of state in which he had been sitting,
And with preliminary coughing, spitting
And wheezing, said: "'T is not a jail, we're sure,
Whate'er it may have been when it was newer.
"'T was found two centuries ago, o'ergrown
With brush and ivy, all undoored, ungated;
And in restoring it we found a stone
Set here and there in the dilapidated
And crumbling frieze, inscribed, in antiquated
Big characters, with certain uncouth names,
Which we conclude were borne of old by awful
Rapscallions guilty of all sinful games—
Vagrants engaged in purposes unlawful,
And orators less sensible than jawful.
So each ten years we add to the long row
A name, the most unworthy that we know."
"But why," I asked, "put me in?" He replied:
"You look it"—and the judgment pained me greatly;
Right gladly would I then and there have died,
But that I'd risen from the grave so lately.
But on examining that solemn, stately
Old ruin I remarked: "My friend, you err—
The truth of this is just what I expected.
This building in its time made quite a stir.
I lived (was famous, too) when 't was erected.
The names here first inscribed were much respected.
This is the Hall of Fame, or I'm a stork,
And this goat pasture once was called New York."
OMNES VANITAS.
Alas for ambition's possessor!
Alas for the famous and proud!
The Isle of Manhattan's best dresser
Is wearing a hand-me-down shroud.
The world has forgotten his glory;
The wagoner sings on his wain,
And Chauncey Depew tells a story,
And jackasses laugh in the lane.
ASPIRATION.
No man can truthfully say that he would not like to
be President.—William C. Whitney.
Lo! the wild rabbit, happy in the pride
Of qualities to meaner beasts denied,
Surveys the ass with reverence and fear,
Adoring his superior length of ear,
And says: "No living creature, lean or fat,
But wishes in his heart to be like That!"
DEMOCRACY.
Let slaves and subjects with unvaried psalms
Before their sovereign execute salaams;
The freeman scorns one idol to adore—
Tom, Dick and Harry and himself are four.
THE NEW "ULALUME."
The skies they were ashen and sober,
The leaves they were crisped and sere,—
" " " withering " "
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,—
" " down " " dark tarn " "
In the misty mid region of Weir,—
" " ghoul-haunted woodland " "
CONSOLATION.
Little's the good to sit and grieve
Because the serpent tempted Eve.
Better to wipe your eyes and take
A club and go out and kill a snake.
What do you gain by cursing Nick
For playing her such a scurvy trick?
Better go out and some villain find
Who serves the devil, and beat him blind.
But if you prefer, as I suspect,
To philosophize, why, then, reflect:
If the cunning rascal upon the limb
Hadn't tempted her she'd have tempted him.
FATE.
Alas, alas, for the tourist's guide!—
He turned from the beaten trail aside,
Wandered bewildered, lay down and died.
O grim is the Irony of Fate:
It switches the man of low estate
And loosens the dogs upon the great.
It lights the fireman to roast the cook;
The fisherman squirms upon the hook,
And the flirt is slain with a tender look.
The undertaker it overtakes;
It saddles the cavalier, and makes
The haughtiest butcher into steaks.
Assist me, gods, to balk the decree!
Nothing I'll do and nothing I'll be,
In order that nothing be done to me.
PHILOSOPHER BIMM.
Republicans think Jonas Bimm
A Democrat gone mad,
And Democrats consider him
Republican and bad.
The Tough reviles him as a Dude
And gives it him right hot;
The Dude condemns his crassitude
And calls him sans culottes.
Derided as an Anglophile
By Anglophobes, forsooth,
As Anglophobe he feels, the while,
The Anglophilic tooth.
The Churchman calls him Atheist;
The Atheists, rough-shod,
Have ridden o'er him long and hissed
"The wretch believes in God!"
The Saints whom clergymen we call
Would kill him if they could;
The Sinners (scientists and all)
Complain that he is good.
All men deplore the difference
Between themselves and him,
And all devise expedients
For paining Jonas Bimm.
I too, with wild demoniac glee,
Would put out both his eyes;
For Mr. Bimm appears to me
Insufferably wise!
REMINDED.
Beneath my window twilight made
Familiar mysteries of shade.
Faint voices from the darkening down
Were calling vaguely to the town.
Intent upon a low, far gleam
That burned upon the world's extreme,
I sat, with short reprieve from grief,
And turned the volume, leaf by leaf,
Wherein a hand, long dead, had wrought
A million miracles of thought.
My fingers carelessly unclung
The lettered pages, and among
Them wandered witless, nor divined
The wealth in which, poor fools, they mined.
The soul that should have led their quest
Was dreaming in the level west,
Where a tall tower, stark and still,
Uplifted on a distant hill,
Stood lone and passionless to claim
Its guardian star's returning flame.
I know not how my dream was broke,
But suddenly my spirit woke
Filled with a foolish fear to look
Upon the hand that clove the book,
Significantly pointing; next
I bent attentive to the text,
And read—and as I read grew old—
The mindless words: "Poor Tom's a-cold!"
Ah me! to what a subtle touch
The brimming cup resigns its clutch
Upon the wine. Dear God, is 't writ
That hearts their overburden bear
Of bitterness though thou permit
The pranks of Chance, alurk in nooks,
And striking coward blows from books,
And dead hands reaching everywhere?
SALVINI IN AMERICA.
Come, gentlemen—your gold.
Thanks: welcome to the show.
To hear a story told
In words you do not know.
Now, great Salvini, rise
And thunder through your tears,
Aha! friends, let your eyes
Interpret to your ears.
Gods! 't is a goodly game.
Observe his stride—how grand!
When legs like his declaim
Who can misunderstand?
See how that arm goes round.
It says, as plain as day:
"I love," "The lost is found,"
"Well met, sir," or, "Away!"
And mark the drawing down
Of brows. How accurate
The language of that frown:
Pain, gentlemen—or hate.
Those of the critic trade
Swear it is all as clear
As if his tongue were made
To fit an English ear.
Hear that Italian phrase!
Greek to your sense, 't is true;
But shrug, expression, gaze—
Well, they are Grecian too.
But it is Art! God wot
Its tongue to all is known.
Faith! he to whom 't were not
Would better hold his own.
Shakespeare says act and word
Must match together true.
From what you've seen and heard,
How can you doubt they do?
Enchanting drama! Mark
The crowd "from pit to dome",
One box alone is dark—
The prompter stays at home.
Stupendous artist! You
Are lord of joy and woe:
We thrill if you say "Boo,"
And thrill if you say "Bo."
ANOTHER WAY.
I lay in silence, dead. A woman came
And laid a rose upon my breast and said:
"May God be merciful." She spoke my name,
And added: "It is strange to think him dead.
"He loved me well enough, but 't was his way
To speak it lightly." Then, beneath her breath:
"Besides"—I knew what further she would say,
But then a footfall broke my dream of death.
To-day the words are mine. I lay the rose
Upon her breast, and speak her name and deem
It strange indeed that she is dead. God knows
I had more pleasure in the other dream.
ART.
For Gladstone's portrait five thousand pounds
Were paid, 't is said, to Sir John Millais.
I cannot help thinking that such fine pay
Transcended reason's uttermost bounds.
For it seems to me uncommonly queer
That a painted British stateman's price
Exceeds the established value thrice
Of a living statesman over here.
AN ENEMY TO LAW AND ORDER.
A is defrauded of his land by B,
Who's driven from the premises by C.
D buys the place with coin of plundered E.
"That A's an Anarchist!" says F to G.
TO ONE ACROSS THE WAY.
When at your window radiant you've stood
I've sometimes thought—forgive me if I've erred—
That some slight thought of me perhaps has stirred
Your heart to beat less gently than it should.
I know you beautiful; that you are good
I hope—or fear—I cannot choose the word,
Nor rightly suit it to the thought. I've heard
Reason at love's dictation never could.
Blindly to this dilemma so I grope,
As one whose every pathway has a snare:
If you are minded in the saintly fashion
Of your pure face my passion's without hope;
If not, alas! I equally despair,
For what to me were hope without the passion?
THE DEBTOR ABROAD.
Grief for an absent lover, husband, friend,
Is barely felt before it comes to end:
A score of early consolations serve
To modify its mouth's dejected curve.
But woes of creditors when debtors flee
Forever swell the separating sea.
When standing on an alien shore you mark
The steady course of some intrepid bark,
How sweet to think a tear for you abides,
Not all unuseful, in the wave she rides!—
That sighs for you commingle in the gale
Beneficently bellying her sail!
FORESIGHT.
An "actors' cemetery"! Sure
The devil never tires
Of planning places to procure
The sticks to feed his fires.
A FAIR DIVISION.
Another Irish landlord gone to grass,
Slain by the bullets of the tenant class!
Pray, good agrarians, what wrong requires
Such foul redress? Between you and the squires
All Ireland's parted with an even hand—
For you have all the ire, they all the land.
GENESIS.
God said: "Let there be Man," and from the clay
Adam came forth and, thoughtful, walked away.
The matrix whence his body was obtained,
An empty, man-shaped cavity, remained
All unregarded from that early time
Till in a recent storm it filled with slime.
Now Satan, envying the Master's power
To make the meat himself could but devour,
Strolled to the place and, standing by the pool,
Exerted all his will to make a fool.
A miracle!—from out that ancient hole
Rose Morehouse, lacking nothing but a soul.
"To give him that I've not the power divine,"
Said Satan, sadly, "but I'll lend him mine."
He breathed it into him, a vapor black,
And to this day has never got it back.
LIBERTY.
"'Let there be Liberty!' God said, and, lo!
The red skies all were luminous. The glow
Struck first Columbia's kindling mountain peaks
One hundred and eleven years ago!"
So sang a patriot whom once I saw
Descending Bunker's holy hill. With awe
I noted that he shone with sacred light,
Like Moses with the tables of the Law.
One hundred and eleven years? O small
And paltry period compared with all
The tide of centuries that flowed and ebbed
To etch Yosemite's divided wall!
Ah, Liberty, they sing you always young
Whose harps are in your adoration strung
(Each swears you are his countrywoman, too,
And speak no language but his mother tongue).
And truly, lass, although with shout and horn
Man has all-hailed you from creation's morn,
I cannot think you old—I think, indeed,
You are by twenty centuries unborn.
1886.
THE PASSING OF "BOSS" SHEPHERD.
The sullen church-bell's intermittent moan,
The dirge's melancholy monotone,
The measured march, the drooping flags, attest
A great man's progress to his place of rest.
Along broad avenues himself decreed
To serve his fellow men's disputed need—
Past parks he raped away from robbers' thrift
And gave to poverty, wherein to lift
Its voice to curse the giver and the gift—
Past noble structures that he reared for men
To meet in and revile him, tongue and pen,
Draws the long retinue of death to show
The fit credentials of a proper woe.
"Boss" Shepherd, you are dead. Your hand no more
Throws largess to the mobs that ramp and roar
For blood of benefactors who disdain
Their purity of purpose to explain,
Their righteous motive and their scorn of gain.
Your period of dream—'twas but a breath—
Is closed in the indifference of death.
Sealed in your silences, to you alike
If hands are lifted to applaud or strike.
No more to your dull, inattentive ear
Praise of to-day than curse of yesteryear.
From the same lips the honied phrases fall
That still are bitter from cascades of gall.
We note the shame; you in your depth of dark
The red-writ testimony cannot mark
On every honest cheek; your senses all
Locked, incommunicado, in your pall,
Know not who sit and blush, who stand and bawl.
"Seven Grecian cities claim great Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his
bread."
So sang, as if the thought had been his own,
An unknown bard, improving on a known.
"Neglected genius!"—that is sad indeed,
But malice better would ignore than heed,
And Shepherd's soul, we rightly may suspect,
Prayed often for the mercy of neglect
When hardly did he dare to leave his door
Without a guard behind him and before
To save him from the gentlemen that now
In cheap and easy reparation bow
Their corrigible heads above his corse
To counterfeit a grief that's half remorse.
The pageant passes and the exile sleeps,
And well his tongue the solemn secret keeps
Of the great peace he found afar, until,
Death's writ of extradition to fulfill,
They brought him, helpless, from that friendly zone
To be a show and pastime in his own—
A final opportunity to those
Who fling with equal aim the stone and rose;
That at the living till his soul is freed,
This at the body to conceal the deed!
Lone on his hill he's lying to await
What added honors may befit his state—
The monument, the statue, or the arch
(Where knaves may come to weep and dupes to march)
Builded by clowns to brutalize the scenes
His genius beautified. To get the means,
His newly good traducers all are dunned
For contributions to the conscience fund.
If each subscribe (and pay) one cent 'twill rear
A structure taller than their tallest ear.
Washington, May 4, 1903.
TO MAUDE.
Not as two errant spheres together grind
With monstrous ruin in the vast of space,
Destruction born of that malign embrace,
Their hapless peoples all to death consigned—
Not so when our intangible worlds of mind,
Even mine and yours, each with its spirit race
Of beings shadowy in form and face,
Shall drift together on some blessed wind.
No, in that marriage of gloom and light
All miracles of beauty shall be wrought,
Attesting a diviner faith than man's;
For all my sad-eyed daughters of the night
Shall smile on your sweet seraphim of thought,
Nor any jealous god forbid the banns.
THE BIRTH OF VIRTUE.
When, long ago, the young world circling flew
Through wider reaches of a richer blue,
New-eyed, the men and maids saw, manifest,
The thoughts untold in one another's breast:
Each wish displayed, and every passion learned—
A look revealed them as a look discerned.
But sating Time with clouds o'ercast their eyes;
Desire was hidden, and the lips framed lies.
A goddess then, emerging from the dust,
Fair Virtue rose, the daughter of Distrust.
STONEMAN IN HEAVEN.
The Seraphs came to Christ, and said: "Behold!
The man, presumptuous and overbold,
Who boasted that his mercy could excel
Thine own, is dead and on his way to Hell."
Gravely the Saviour asked: "What did he do
To make his impious assertion true?"
"He was a Governor, releasing all
The vilest felons ever held in thrall.
No other mortal, since the dawn of time,
Has ever pardoned such a mass of crime!"
Christ smiled benignly on the Seraphim:
"Yet I am victor, for I pardon him."
THE SCURRIL PRESS.
TOM JONESMITH (loquitur): I've slept right through
The night—a rather clever thing to do.
How soundly women sleep (looks at his wife.)
They're all alike. The sweetest thing in life
Is woman when she lies with folded tongue,
Its toil completed and its day-song sung.
(Thump) That's the morning paper. What a bore
That it should be delivered at the door.
There ought to be some expeditious way
To get it to one. By this long delay
The fizz gets off the news (a rap is heard).
That's Jane, the housemaid; she's an early bird;
She's brought it to the bedroom door, good soul.
(Gets up and takes it in.) Upon the whole
The system's not so bad a one. What's here?
Gad, if they've not got after—listen dear
(To sleeping wife)—young Gastrotheos! Well,
If Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell
She'll shriek again—with laughter—seeing how
They treated Gast. with her. Yet I'll allow
'T is right if he goes dining at The Pup
With Mrs. Thing.
WIFE (briskly, waking up):
With her? The hussy! Yes, it serves him right.
JONESMITH (continuing to "seek the light"):
What's this about old Impycu? That's good!
Grip—that's the funny man—says Impy should
Be used as a decoy in shooting tramps.
I knew old Impy when he had the "stamps"
To buy us all out, and he wasn't then
So bad a chap to have about. Grip's pen
Is just a tickler!—and the world, no doubt,
Is better with it than it was without.
What? thirteen ladies—Jumping Jove! we know
Them nearly all!—who gamble at a low
And very shocking game of cards called "draw"!
O cracky, how they'll squirm! ha-ha! haw-haw!
Let's see what else (wife snores). Well, I'll be blest!
A woman doesn't understand a jest.
Hello! What, what? the scurvy wretch proceeds
To take a fling at me, condemn him! (reads):
Tom Jonesmith—my name's Thomas, vulgar cad!—Of
the new Shavings Bank—the man's gone mad!
That's libelous; I'll have him up for that—Has
had his corns cut. Devil take the rat!
What business is 't of his, I'd like to know?
He didn't have to cut them. Gods! what low
And scurril things our papers have become!
You skim their contents and you get but scum.
Here, Mary, (waking wife) I've been attacked
In this vile sheet. By Jove, it is a fact!
WIFE (reading it): How wicked! Who do you
Suppose 't was wrote it?
JONESMITH: Who? why, who
But Grip, the so-called funny man—he wrote
Me up because I'd not discount his note.
(Blushes like sunset at the hideous lie—
He'll think of one that's better by and by—
Throws down the paper on the floor, and treads
A lively measure on it—kicks the shreds
And patches all about the room, and still
Performs his jig with unabated will.)
WIFE (warbling sweetly, like an Elfland horn):
Dear, do be careful of that second corn.
STANLEY.
Noting some great man's composition vile:
A head of wisdom and a heart of guile,
A will to conquer and a soul to dare,
Joined to the manners of a dancing bear,
Fools unaccustomed to the wide survey
Of various Nature's compensating sway,
Untaught to separate the wheat and chaff,
To praise the one and at the other laugh,
Yearn all in vain and impotently seek
Some flawless hero upon whom to wreak
The sycophantic worship of the weak.
Not so the wise, from superstition free,
Who find small pleasure in the bended knee;
Quick to discriminate 'twixt good and bad,
And willing in the king to find the cad—
No reason seen why genius and conceit,
The power to dazzle and the will to cheat,
The love of daring and the love of gin,
Should not dwell, peaceful, in a single skin.
To such, great Stanley, you're a hero still,
Despite your cradling in a tub for swill.
Your peasant manners can't efface the mark
Of light you drew across the Land of Dark.
In you the extremes of character are wed,
To serve the quick and villify the dead.
Hero and clown! O, man of many sides,
The Muse of Truth adores you and derides,
And sheds, impartial, the revealing ray
Upon your head of gold and feet of clay.
ONE OF THE UNFAIR SEX.
She stood at the ticket-seller's
Serenely removing her glove,
While hundreds of strugglers and yellers,
And some that were good at a shove,
Were clustered behind her like bats in
a cave and unwilling to speak their love.
At night she still stood at that window
Endeavoring her money to reach;
The crowds right and left, how they sinned—O,
How dreadfully sinned in their speech!
Ten miles either way they extended
their lines, the historians teach.
She stands there to-day—legislation
Has failed to remove her. The trains
No longer pull up at that station;
And over the ghastly remains
Of the army that waited and died of
old age fall the snows and the rains.
THE LORD'S PRAYER ON A COIN.
Upon this quarter-eagle's leveled face,
The Lord's Prayer, legibly inscribed, I trace.
"Our Father which"—the pronoun there is funny,
And shows the scribe to have addressed the money—
"Which art in Heaven"—an error this, no doubt:
The preposition should be stricken out.
Needless to quote; I only have designed
To praise the frankness of the pious mind
Which thought it natural and right to join,
With rare significancy, prayer and coin.
A LACKING FACTOR.
"You acted unwisely," I cried, "as you see
By the outcome." He calmly eyed me:
"When choosing the course of my action," said he,
"I had not the outcome to guide me."
THE ROYAL JESTER.
Once on a time, so ancient poets sing,
There reigned in Godknowswhere a certain king.
So great a monarch ne'er before was seen:
He was a hero, even to his queen,
In whose respect he held so high a place
That none was higher,—nay, not even the ace.
He was so just his Parliament declared
Those subjects happy whom his laws had spared;
So wise that none of the debating throng
Had ever lived to prove him in the wrong;
So good that Crime his anger never feared,
And Beauty boldly plucked him by the beard;
So brave that if his army got a beating
None dared to face him when he was retreating.
This monarch kept a Fool to make his mirth,
And loved him tenderly despite his worth.
Prompted by what caprice I cannot say,
He called the Fool before the throne one day
And to that jester seriously said:
"I'll abdicate, and you shall reign instead,
While I, attired in motley, will make sport
To entertain your Majesty and Court."
'T was done and the Fool governed. He decreed
The time of harvest and the time of seed;
Ordered the rains and made the weather clear,
And had a famine every second year;
Altered the calendar to suit his freak,
Ordaining six whole holidays a week;
Religious creeds and sacred books prepared;
Made war when angry and made peace when scared.
New taxes he inspired; new laws he made;
Drowned those who broke them, who observed them, flayed,
In short, he ruled so well that all who'd not
Been starved, decapitated, hanged or shot
Made the whole country with his praises ring,
Declaring he was every inch a king;
And the High Priest averred 't was very odd
If one so competent were not a god.
Meantime, his master, now in motley clad,
Wore such a visage, woeful, wan and sad,
That some condoled with him as with a brother
Who, having lost a wife, had got another.
Others, mistaking his profession, often
Approached him to be measured for a coffin.
For years this highborn jester never broke
The silence—he was pondering a joke.
At last, one day, in cap-and-bells arrayed,
He strode into the Council and displayed
A long, bright smile, that glittered in the gloom
Like a gilt epithet within a tomb.
Posing his bauble like a leader's staff,
To give the signal when (and why) to laugh,
He brought it down with peremptory stroke
And simultaneously cracked his joke!
I can't repeat it, friends. I ne'er could school
Myself to quote from any other fool:
A jest, if it were worse than mine, would start
My tears; if better, it would break my heart.
So, if you please, I'll hold you but to state
That royal Jester's melancholy fate.
The insulted nation, so the story goes,
Rose as one man—the very dead arose,
Springing indignant from the riven tomb,
And babes unborn leapt swearing from the womb!
All to the Council Chamber clamoring went,
By rage distracted and on vengeance bent.
In that vast hall, in due disorder laid,
The tools of legislation were displayed,
And the wild populace, its wrath to sate,
Seized them and heaved them at the Jester's pate.
Mountains of writing paper; pools and seas
Of ink, awaiting, to become decrees,
Royal approval—and the same in stacks
Lay ready for attachment, backed with wax;
Pens to make laws, erasers to amend them;
With mucilage convenient to extend them;
Scissors for limiting their application,
And acids to repeal all legislation—
These, flung as missiles till the air was dense,
Were most offensive weapons of offense,
And by their aid the Fool was nigh destroyed.
They ne'er had been so harmlessly employed.
Whelmed underneath a load of legal cap,
His mouth egurgitating ink on tap,
His eyelids mucilaginously sealed,
His fertile head by scissors made to yield
Abundant harvestage of ears, his pelt,
In every wrinkle and on every welt,
Quickset with pencil-points from feet to gills
And thickly studded with a pride of quills,
The royal Jester in the dreadful strife
Was made (in short) an editor for life!
An idle tale, and yet a moral lurks
In this as plainly as in greater works.
I shall not give it birth: one moral here
Would die of loneliness within a year.
A CAREER IN LETTERS.
When Liberverm resigned the chair
Of This or That in college, where
For two decades he'd gorged his brain
With more than it could well contain,
In order to relieve the stress
He took to writing for the press.
Then Pondronummus said, "I'll help
This mine of talent to devel'p;"
And straightway bought with coin and credit
The Thundergust for him to edit.
The great man seized the pen and ink
And wrote so hard he couldn't think;
Ideas grew beneath his fist
And flew like falcons from his wrist.
His pen shot sparks all kinds of ways
Till all the rivers were ablaze,
And where the coruscations fell
Men uttered words I dare not spell.
Eftsoons with corrugated brow,
Wet towels bound about his pow,
Locked legs and failing appetite,
He thought so hard he couldn't write.
His soaring fancies, chickenwise,
Came home to roost and wouldn't rise.
With dimmer light and milder heat
His goose-quill staggered o'er the sheet,
Then dragged, then stopped; the finish came—
He couldn't even write his name.
The Thundergust in three short weeks
Had risen, roared, and split its cheeks.
Said Pondronummus, "How unjust!
The storm I raised has laid my dust!"
When, Moneybagger, you have aught
Invested in a vein of thought,
Be sure you've purchased not, instead,
That salted claim, a bookworm's head.
THE FOLLOWING PAIR.
O very remarkable mortal,
What food is engaging your jaws
And staining with amber their portal?
"It's 'baccy I chaws."
And why do you sway in your walking,
To right and left many degrees,
And hitch up your trousers when talking?
"I follers the seas."
Great indolent shark in the rollers,
Is "'baccy," too, one of your faults?—
You, too, display maculate molars.
"I dines upon salts."
Strange diet!—intestinal pain it
Is commonly given to nip.
And how can you ever obtain it?
"I follers the ship."
POLITICAL ECONOMY.
"I beg you to note," said a Man to a Goose,
As he plucked from her bosom the plumage all loose,
"That pillows and cushions of feathers and beds
As warm as maids' hearts and as soft as their heads,
Increase of life's comforts the general sum—
Which raises the standard of living." "Come, come,"
The Goose said, impatiently, "tell me or cease,
How that is of any advantage to geese."
"What, what!" said the man—"you are very obtuse!
Consumption no profit to those who produce?
No good to accrue to Supply from a grand
Progressive expansion, all round, of Demand?
Luxurious habits no benefit bring
To those who purvey the luxurious thing?
Consider, I pray you, my friend, how the growth
Of luxury promises—" "Promises," quoth
The sufferer, "what?—to what course is it pledged
To pay me for being so often defledged?"
"Accustomed"—this notion the plucker expressed
As he ripped out a handful of down from her breast—
"To one kind of luxury, people soon yearn
For others and ever for others in turn;
And the man who to-night on your feathers will rest,
His mutton or bacon or beef to digest,
His hunger to-morrow will wish to assuage
By dining on goose with a dressing of sage."
VANISHED AT COCK-CROW.
"I've found the secret of your charm," I said,
Expounding with complacency my guess.
Alas! the charm, even as I named it, fled,
For all its secret was unconsciousness.
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
I reckon that ye never knew,
That dandy slugger, Tom Carew,
He had a touch as light an' free
As that of any honey-bee;
But where it lit there wasn't much
To jestify another touch.
O, what a Sunday-school it was
To watch him puttin' up his paws
An' roominate upon their heft—
Particular his holy left!
Tom was my style—that's all I say;
Some others may be equal gay.
What's come of him? Dunno, I'm sure—
He's dead—which make his fate obscure.
I only started in to clear
One vital p'int in his career,
Which is to say—afore he died
He soiled his erming mighty snide.
Ye see he took to politics
And learnt them statesmen-fellers' tricks;
Pulled wires, wore stovepipe hats, used scent,
Just like he was the President;
Went to the Legislator; spoke
Right out agin the British yoke—
But that was right. He let his hair
Grow long to qualify for Mayor,
An' once or twice he poked his snoot
In Congress like a low galoot!
It had to come—no gent can hope
To wrastle God agin the rope.
Tom went from bad to wuss.
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