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Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

MY AUNT.

My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt!
Long years have o'er her flown;
Yet still she strains the aching clasp
That binds her virgin zone;

I know it hurts her, though she looks
As cheerful as she can;

Her waist is ampler than her life,
For life is but a span.

My aunt! my poor deluded aunt!
Her hair is almost gray;

Why will she train that winter curl
In such a spring-like way?

How can she lay her glasses down,
And say she reads as well,

When, through a double convex lens,
She just makes out to spell?

Her father-grandpapa! forgive

This erring lip its smiles

Vowed she should make the finest girl

Within a hundred miles;

He sent her to a stylish school;

"Twas in her thirteenth June; And with her, as the rules required, "Two towels and a spoon."

They braced my aunt against a board,

To make her straight and tall;

They laced her up, they starved her down, To make her light and small;

They pinched her feet, they singed her hair, They screwed it up with pins;

O never mortal suffered more

In penance for her sins.

So, when my precious aunt was done,
My grandsire brought her back;
(By daylight, lest some rabid youth
Might follow on the track;)

"Ah!" said my grandsire, as he shook
Some powder in his pan,

“What could this lovely creature do
Against a desperate man?"

Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche,
Nor bandit cavalcade,

Tore from the trembling father's arms
His all-accomplished maid.

For her how happy had it been!

And Heaven had spared to me
To see one sad, ungathered rose
On my ancestral tree.

Eleven years later we find Dr. Holmes occupying the distinguished position of Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard./

Holmes, more properly perhaps than any other American poet, may be styled the Postprandial Poet, not a few of his verses having been delivered on occasions of medical, literary, alumnal, or social feasts. Of this sort are Terpsichore, The Stethoscope Song, A Modest Request, and many others. We quote

THE STETHOSCOPE SONG.

THERE was a young man in Boston town,
He bought him a Stethoscope nice and new,
All mounted and finished and polished down,
With an ivory cap and a stopper too.

It happened a spider within did crawl,
And spun a web of ample size,
Wherein there chanced one day to fall
A couple of very imprudent flies.

The first was a bottle-fly, big and blue,

The second was smaller, and thin and long;

So there was a concert between the two,
Like an octave flute and a tavern gong.

Now being from Paris recently,

This fine young man would show his skill;
And so they gave him, his hand to try,
A hospital patient extremely ill.

Some said that his liver was short of bile,
And some that his heart was over size,
While some kept arguing all the while

He was crammed with tubercles up to his eyes.

This fine young man then up stepped he,
And all the doctors made a pause;
Said he,-The man must die, you see,
By the fifty-seventh of Louis's laws.

But since the case is a desperate one,

To explore his chest it may be well;
For if he should die and it were not done,
You know the autopsy would not tell.

Then out his stethoscope he took,

And on it placed his curious ear;

Mon Dieu! said he, with a knowing look,
Why here is a sound that's mighty queer!

The bourdonnement is very clear,

Amphoric buzzing, as I'm alive!

Five doctors took their turn to hear;
Amphoric buzzing, said all the five.

There's empyema beyond a doubt;
We'll plunge a trocar in his side.-
The diagnosis was made out,

They tapped the patient; so he died.

Now such as hate new-fashioned toys
Began to look extremely glum;

They said that rattles were made for boys
And vowed that his buzzing was all a hum.

There was an old lady had long been sick,

And what was the matter none did know:

Her pulse was slow, though her tongue was quick; To her this knowing youth must go.

So there the nice old lady sat,

With phials and boxes all in a row;

She asked the young doctor what he was at,
To thump her and tumble her ruffles so.

Now, when the stethoscope came out,
The flies began to buz and whiz-
Oho! the matter is clear, no doubt;
An aneurism there plainly is.

The bruit de rape and the bruit de scie
And the bruit de diable are all combined;
How happy Bouillaud would be

If he a case like this could find!

Now, when the neighboring doctors found
A case so rare had been descried,
They every day her ribs did pound
In squads of twenty; so she died.

Then six young damsels, slight and frail,
Received this kind young doctor's cares;
They all were getting slim and pale,

And short of breath on mounting stairs.

They all made rhymes with "sighs" and "skies,"
And loathed their puddings and buttered rolls,

And dieted, much to their friends' surprise,
On pickles and pencils and chalk and coals.

So fast their little hearts did bound,
The frightened insects buzzed the more,
So over all their chests he found

The rale siflant, and rale sonore.

He shook his head;-there's grave disease,-
I greatl, fear you all must die;
A slight post-mortem, if you please,
Surviving friends would gratify.

The six young damsels wept aloud,
Which so prevailed on six young men,
That each his honest love avowed,
Whereat they all got well again.

This poor young man was all aghast;
The price of stethoscopes came down;
And so he was reduced at last

To practice in a country town.

The doctors being very sore,

A stethoscope they did devise,

That had a rammer to clear the bore,
With a knob at the end to kill the flies.

Now use your ears, all you that can,

But don't forget to mind your eyes,

Or you may be cheated, like this young man,
By a couple of silly, abnormal flies.

Urania: a Rhymed Lesson was delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association in 1846. In 1852, Dr. Holmes appeared before the public in a course of Lectures on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, in which he manifested a preference for the bold and sparkling poets, the Scotts and Byrons, as contrasted with the quiet and thoughtful, the Wordsworths./

Our author began writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, the year in which that magazine was started. His articles were entitled The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. These were begun as opinions and observations, wittily expressed, on conversational topics of the day; but they gradually assumed a dramatic form, and their characters grew into the warm personages of a novel./

A second series soon followed, called, this time, The Pro · fessor of the Breakfast Table, which preserved rather a more sober, pathetic, and theological tone than the first. Next in order of time appeared The Professor's Story, or Elsie Venner: a Romance of Destiny./

In this work Dr Holmes ventured in a new field of

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