Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table, (I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable, Though I might have lugged in an allusion to He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it, in it. Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I've been spinning; I've got back at last to my story's beginning: Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress, As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries, Or as those puzzling specimens, which, in old histories, We read of his verses-the Oracles, namely,(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely, For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk, They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk, And so dull that the men who retailed them outdoors Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,)— First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is Would induce a moustache, for you know he's imberbis ; Then he shuddered to think how his youthful posi tion Was assailed by the age of his son the physician; At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately, And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly; "Mehercle! I'd make such proceedings felonious, Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius ? Look well to your seat, 'tis like taking an airing You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance, When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,—— Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?" -Here the laurel-leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne. "O, weep with me, Daphne," he sighed, "for you know it's A terrible thing to be pestered with poets! But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good, She never will cry till she's out of the wood! What wouldn't I give if I never had known of her? "Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over; If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over, I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher, And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her. One needs something tangible, though to begin on A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on ; What boots all your grist? it can never be ground Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round, (Or, if 'tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor, And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore, Or lug in some stuff about water so dreamily,"- There's a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his Whole garden, from one end to t'other, with lilies; A very good plan, were it not for satiety, One longs for a weed here and there, for variety ; Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes." Now there happened to be among Phoebus's followers, A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers, For reading new books is like eating new bread, ply on, Who stretch the new boots Earth's unwilling to try on, Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on, Whose hair's in the mortar of every new Zion, Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one, Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on, Who hunt, if they e'er hunt at all, with the lion, (Though they hunt lions also, whenever they spy one,) Who contrive to make every good fortune a wry one, And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on, Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters, Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters; Far happier than many a literary hack, He bore only paper-mill rags on his back; (For it makes a vast difference which side the mill One expends on the paper his labor and skill ;) So, when his soul waited a new transmigration, And Destiny balanced 'twixt this and that station, Not having much time to expend upon bothers, Remembering he'd had some connexion with authors, And considering his four legs had grown paralytic, She set him on two, and he came forth a critic. Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took In any amusement but tearing a book; For him there was no intermediate stage, But a boy he could never be rightly defined; From the womb he came gravely, a little old man ; Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy, He never was known to unbend or to revel once In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once; He was just one of those who excite the benevolence Of your old prigs who sound the soul's depths with a ledger, And are on the look out for some young men to edger -cate," as they call it, who won't be too costly, And who'll afterward take to the ministry mostly; Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious, Always keep on good terms with each materfamilias Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year; Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions, Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions. In this way our hero got safely to college, Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge; A reading-machine, always wound up and going, He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing, |