You share, ’tis true, the rich man’s daily dole,
  But what you get you take by way of toll. 
  Vain to resist you—­vermifuge alone
  Has power to push you from your robber throne. 
  When to escape you he’s compelled to die
  Hey! presto!—­in the twinkling of an eye
  You vanish as a tapeworm, reappear
  As graveworm and resume your curst career. 
  As host no more, to satisfy your need
  He serves as dinner your unaltered greed. 
  O thrifty sycophant of wealth and fame,
  Son of servility and priest of shame,
  While naught your mad ambition can abate
  To lick the spittle of the rich and great;
  While still like smoke your eulogies arise
  To soot your heroes and inflame our eyes;
  While still with holy oil, like that which ran
  Down Aaron’s beard, you smear each famous man,
  I cannot choose but think it very odd
  It ne’er occurs to you to fawn on God.

FOR WOUNDS.

  O bear me, gods, to some enchanted isle
  Where woman’s tears can antidote her smile.

ELECTION DAY.

  Despots effete upon tottering thrones
  Unsteadily poised upon dead men’s bones,
  Walk up! walk up! the circus is free,
  And this wonderful spectacle you shall see: 
  Millions of voters who mostly are fools—­
  Demagogues’ dupes and candidates’ tools,
  Armies of uniformed mountebanks,
  And braying disciples of brainless cranks. 
  Many a week they’ve bellowed like beeves,
  Bitterly blackguarding, lying like thieves,
  Libeling freely the quick and the dead
  And painting the New Jerusalem red. 
  Tyrants monarchical—­emperors, kings,
  Princes and nobles and all such things—­
  Noblemen, gentlemen, step this way: 
  There’s nothing, the Devil excepted, to pay,
  And the freaks and curios here to be seen
  Are very uncommonly grand and serene.

  No more with vivacity they debate,
  Nor cheerfully crack the illogical pate;
  No longer, the dull understanding to aid,
  The stomach accepts the instructive blade,
  Nor the stubborn heart learns what is what
  From a revelation of rabbit-shot;
  And vilification’s flames—­behold! 
  Burn with a bickering faint and cold.

  Magnificent spectacle!—­every tongue
  Suddenly civil that yesterday rung
  (Like a clapper beating a brazen bell)
  Each fair reputation’s eternal knell;
  Hands no longer delivering blows,
  And noses, for counting, arrayed in rows.

  Walk up, gentlemen—­nothing to pay—­
  The Devil goes back to Hell to-day.

THE MILITIAMAN.

  “O warrior with the burnished arms—­
    With bullion cord and tassel—­
  Pray tell me of the lurid charms
  Of service and the fierce alarms: 
    The storming of the castle,
  The charge across the smoking field,
    The rifles’ busy rattle—­
  What thoughts inspire the men who wield
  The blade—­their gallant souls how steeled
    And fortified in battle.”