Yet, while the dewy breath of spring And spreads and fans each emerald wing Had I one look like thine, To meet me when the morning beam Unseals these lids of mine! That bids my heart run wild How oft beyond the dashing seas, Amidst those royal bowers, Where danced the lilacs in the breeze, And swung the chestnut-flowers, Whose morning task is done, Called in some truant's tone; Smiles on us in the morning bloom Of one that loves us still. Sweet image! I have done thee wrong Must bear my tears away. Yet, in thy memory shouldst thou keep Till years have taught thine eyes to weep, While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings, | Ye healers of men, for a moment decline ; line; While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go, The old roundabout road, to the regions below. You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens, And whose head is an ant-hill of units and tens; Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill. Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feels, With the burs on his legs, and the grass at his heels! No dodger behind, his bandannas to share, No constable grumbling, "You must n't walk there!" In yonder green meadow, to memory dear, He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear; The dew-drops hang round him on blossoms and shoots, He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots. Take a whiff from our fields, and your There stands the old school-house, hard excellent wives by the old church; Will declare it's all nonsense insuring That tree at its side had the flavor of your lives. birch; And leave "the old lady, that never tells | By the side of yon river he weeps and To sleep with her handkerchief over her The boots fill with water, as if they were pumps, eyes. Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his | And I thought, like Dr. Faustus, of the bed, emptiness of art, With a glow in his heart and a cold in How we take a fragment for the whole, his head. and call the whole a part, 'T is past, — he is dreaming, I see him When I heard a heavy footstep that was loud enough for two, again; And a man of forty entered, exclaiming, "How d'ye do?" He was not a ghost, my visitor, but solid flesh and bone; He wore a Palo Alto hat, his weight was twenty stone; (It's odd how hats expand their brims as riper years invade, As if when life had reached its noon, it wanted them for shade !) at noth Not so, I said, WAS sitting with my microscope, upon my parlor rug, With a very heavy quarto and a very lively bug; The true bug had been organized with only two antennæ, A man that wrongs his manliness by That ever knocked their sinciputs in laughing like a boy? And suspect the azure blossom that un- Were round one great mahogany, I'd stretching on their beds beat those fine old folks folds upon a shoot, As if wisdom's old potato could not With twenty dishes, twenty fools, and flourish at its root? twenty clever jokes! It's a very fine reflection, when you 're Why, if Columbus should be there, the etching out a smile company would beg On a copperplate of faces that would He'd show that little trick of his of stretch at least a mile, That, what with sneers from enemies, and cheapening shrugs of friends, It will cost you all the earnings that a month of labor lends ! balancing the egg! Milton to Stilton would give in, and And Roger Bacon be a bore, and Francis And as for all the "patronage" of all That squint their little narrow eyes at Do leave them to your prosier friends, I tell you what, philosopher, if all the And yet, among my native shades, belongest heads side my nursing mother, Where every stranger seems a friend, | With a stuffing of praise, and a basting of wit, and every friend a brother, I feel the old convivial glow (unaided) You may twitch at your collar, and wrino'er me stealing, kle your brow, The warm, champagny, old-particular, But you 're up on your legs, and you're brandy-punchy feeling. in for it now. O think of your friends, they are waiting to hear Those jokes that are thought so remarkably queer; And all the Jack Horners of metrical buns Are prying and fingering to pick out the puns. Those thoughts which, like chickens, will always thrive best When reared by the heat of the natural nest, Will perish if hatched from their embryo dream In the mist and the glow of convivial steam. O pardon me, then, if I meekly retire, From a tutor in seed to a freshman in If the fiz does not follow the primitive The fish called the FLOUNDER, perhaps you may know, Poor victim, prepared for his classical Has one side for use and another for spit, show; |