FOR TAT.
O, heavenly powers! will wonders never
cease?—
Hair upon dogs and feathers upon geese!
The boys in mischief and the pigs in mire!
The drinking water wet! the coal on fire!
In meadows, rivulets surpassing fair,
Forever running, yet forever there!
A tail appended to the gray baboon!
A person coming out of a saloon!
Last, and of all most marvelous to see,
A female Yahoo flinging filth at me!
If ’twould but stick I’d bear
upon my coat
May Little’s proof that she is fit
to vote.
A DILEMMA.
Filled with a zeal to serve my fellow
men,
For years I criticised their
prose and verges:
Pointed out all their blunders of the
pen,
Their shallowness of thought and feeling;
then
Damned them up hill and down
with hearty curses!
They said: “That’s all
that he can do—just sneer,
And pull to pieces and be
analytic.
Why doesn’t he himself, eschewing
fear,
Publish a book or two, and so appear
As one who has the right to
be a critic?
“Let him who knows it all forbear
to tell
How little others know, but
show his learning.”
The public added: “Who has
written well
May censure freely”—quoting
Pope. I fell
Into the trap and books began
out-turning,—
Books by the score—fine prose
and poems fair,
And not a book of them but
was a terror,
They were so great and perfect; though
I swear
I tried right hard to work in, here and
there,
(My nature still forbade)
a fault or error.
’Tis true, some wretches, whom I’d
scratched, no doubt,
Professed to find—but
that’s a trifling matter.
Now, when the flood of noble books was
out
I raised o’er all that land a joyous
shout,
Till I was thought as mad
as any hatter!
(Why hatters all are mad, I cannot say.
’T were wrong in their
affliction to revile ’em,
But truly, you’ll confess ’tis
very sad
We wear the ugly things they make.
Begad,
They’d be less mischievous
in an asylum!)
“Consistency, thou art a”—well,
you’re paste!
When next I felt my demon
in possession,
And made the field of authorship a waste,
All said of me: “What execrable
taste,
To rail at others of his own
profession!”
Good Lord! where do the critic’s
rights begin
Who has of literature some
clear-cut notion,
And hears a voice from Heaven say:
“Pitch in”?
He finds himself—alas, poor
son of sin—
Between the devil and the
deep blue ocean!
METEMPSYCHOSIS.
Once with Christ he entered Salem,
Once in Moab bullied Balaam,
Once by Apuleius staged
He the pious much enraged.
And, again, his head, as beaver,
Topped the neck of Nick the Weaver.
Omar saw him (minus tether—
Free and wanton as the weather:
Knowing naught of bit or spur)
Stamping over Bahram-Gur.
Now, as Altgeld, see him joy
As Governor of Illinois!