FROM A RHYMED LESSON 1 Yes, dear Enchantress,-wandering far and long, In realms unperfumed by the breath of song, Where flowers ill-flavored shed their sweets around, And bitterest roots invade the ungenial ground, Whose gems are crystals from the Epsom mine, Whose vineyards flow with antimonial wine, Whose gates admit no mirthful feature in, Save one gaunt mocker, the Sardonic grin, Whose pangs are real, not the woes of rhyme That blue-eyed misses warble out of time; 10 Truant, not recreant to thy sacred claim, Older by reckoning, but in heart the same, Freed for a moment from the chains of toil, I tread once more thy consecrated soil; Here at thy feet my old allegiance own, Thy subject still, and loyal to thy throne! My dazzled glance explores the crowded hall; Alas, how vain to hope the smiles of all! This poem was delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, October 14, 1846. Faint though the music of her fetters be. It lends one charm,-her lips are ever free! Think not I come, in manhood's fiery noon, To steal his laurels from the stage buffoon; His sword of lath the harlequin may wield; Behold the star upon my lifted shield! Say, shall my arms, in other conflicts taught To swing aloft the ponderous mace of thought, Lift, in obedience to a school-girl's law, Mirth's tinsel wand or laughter's tickling straw? Say, shall I wound with satire's rankling spear The pure, warm hearts that bid me welcome here? No! while I wander through the land of dreams, To strive with great and play with trifling themes, Let some kind meaning fill the varied line. You have your judgment; will you trust to mine? 70 When legislators keep the law, When banks dispense with bolts and locks, When berries-whortle, rasp and strawGrow bigger downwards through the box, 1 From the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, where it is introduced by: "I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven't." The Second Adventists were active and numerous in Boston in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Their prominent church building has since become notorious as a cheap variety show house. When lawyers take what they would give, And doctors give what they would take, When city fathers eat to live, Save when they fast for conscience' sake, When one that hath a horse on sale That holds the iron on the hoof,- 20 When in the usual place for rips Our gloves are stitched with special care, And guarded well the whalebone tips Where first umbrellas need repair,When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot The power of suction to resist, And claret-bottles harbor not Such dimples as would hold your fist, When publishers no longer steal, And pay for what they stole before,- 30 Till then let Cumming blaze away, Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 1857. THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS 1 This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,— The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings 1 From the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. "If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise you will find a figure of one of these shells and a section of it. The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?" |