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THE AESTHETES.

  The lily cranks, the lily cranks,     The loppy, loony lasses!   They multiply in rising ranks   To execute their solemn pranks,     They moon along in masses.   Blow, sweet lily, in the shade! O,   Sunflower decorate the dado!   The maiden ass, the maiden ass,     The tall and tailless jenny!   In limp attire as green as grass,   She stands, a monumental brass,     The one of one too many.   Blow, sweet lily, in the shade! O,   Sunflower decorate the dado!

JULY FOURTH.

  God said: "Let there be noise." The dawning fire   Of Independence gilded every spire.

WITH MINE OWN PETARD.

  Time was the local poets sang their songs   Beneath their breath in terror of the thongs   I snapped about their shins. Though mild the stroke   Bards, like the conies, are "a feeble folk,"   Fearing all noises but the one they make   Themselves—at which all other mortals quake.   Now from their cracked and disobedient throats,   Like rats from sewers scampering, their notes   Pour forth to move, where'er the season serves,   If not our legs to dance, at least our nerves;   As once a ram's-horn solo maddened all   The sober-minded stones in Jerich's wall.   A year's exemption from the critic's curse   Mends the bard's courage but impairs his verse.   Thus poolside frogs, when croaking in the night,   Are frayed to silence by a meteor's flight,   Or by the sudden plashing of a stone   From some adjacent cottage garden thrown,   But straight renew the song with double din   Whene'er the light goes out or man goes in.   Shall I with arms unbraced (my casque unlatched,   My falchion pawned, my buckler, too, attached)   Resume the cuishes and the broad cuirass,   Accomplishing my body all in brass,   And arm in battle royal to oppose   A village poet singing through the nose,   Or strolling troubadour his lyre who strums   With clumsy hand whose fingers all are thumbs?   No, let them rhyme; I fought them once before   And stilled their songs—but, Satan! how they swore!—   Cuffed them upon the mouth whene'er their throats   They cleared for action with their sweetest notes;   Twisted their ears (they'd oft tormented mine)   And damned them roundly all along the line;   Clubbed the whole crew from the Parnassian slopes,   A wreck of broken heads and broken hopes!   What gained I so? I feathered every curse   Launched at the village bards with lilting verse.   The town approved and christened me (to show its   High admiration) Chief of Local Poets!

CONSTANCY.

  Dull were the days and sober,     The mountains were brown and bare,   For the season was sad October     And a dirge was in the air.   The mated starlings flew over     To the isles of the southern sea.   She wept for her warrior lover—     Wept and exclaimed: "Ah, me!   "Long years have I mourned my darling     In his battle-bed at rest;   And it's O, to be a starling,     With a mate to share my nest!"   The angels pitied her sorrow,     Restoring her warrior's life;   And he came to her arms on the morrow     To claim her and take her to wife.   An aged lover—a portly,     Bald lover, a trifle too stiff,   With manners that would have been courtly,     And would have been graceful, if—   If the angels had only restored him     Without the additional years   That had passed since the enemy bored him     To death with their long, sharp spears.   As it was, he bored her, and she rambled     Away with her father's young groom,   And the old lover smiled as he ambled     Contentedly back to the tomb.

SIRES AND SONS.

  Wild wanton Luxury lays waste the land   With difficulty tilled by Thrift's hard hand!   Then dies the State!—and, in its carcass found,   The millionaires, all maggot-like, abound.   Alas! was it for this that Warren died,   And Arnold sold himself to t' other side,   Stark piled at Bennington his British dead,   And Gates at Camden, Lee at Monmouth, fled?—   For this that Perry did the foeman fleece,   And Hull surrender to preserve the peace?   Degenerate countrymen, renounce, I pray,   The slothful ease, the luxury, the gay   And gallant trappings of this idle life,   And be more fit for one another's wife.

A CHALLENGE.

  A bull imprisoned in a stall   Broke boldly the confining wall,   And found himself, when out of bounds,   Within a washerwoman's grounds.   Where, hanging on a line to dry,   A crimson skirt inflamed his eye.   With bellowings that woke the dead,   He bent his formidable head,   With pointed horns and gnarly forehead;   Then, planting firm his shoulders horrid,   Began, with rage made half insane,   To paw the arid earth amain,   Flinging the dust upon his flanks   In desolating clouds and banks,   The while his eyes' uneasy white   Betrayed his doubt what foe the bright   Red tent concealed, perchance, from sight.   The garment, which, all undismayed,   Had never paled a single shade,   Now found a tongue—a dangling sock,   Left carelessly inside the smock:   "I must insist, my gracious liege,   That you'll be pleased to raise the siege:   My colors I will never strike.   I know your sex—you're all alike.   Some small experience I've had—   You're not the first I've driven mad."

TWO SHOWS.

  The showman (blessing in a thousand shapes!)   Parades a "School of Educated Apes!"   Small education's needed, I opine,   Or native wit, to make a monkey shine;   The brute exhibited has naught to do   But ape the larger apes who come to view—   The hoodlum with his horrible grimace,   Long upper lip and furtive, shuffling pace,   Significant reminders of the time   When hunters, not policemen, made him climb;   The lady loafer with her draggling "trail,"   That free translation of an ancient tail;   The sand-lot quadrumane in hairy suit,   Whose heels are thumbs perverted by the boot;   The painted actress throwing down the gage   To elder artists of the sylvan stage,   Proving that in the time of Noah's flood   Two ape-skins held her whole profession's blood;   The critic waiting, like a hungry pup,   To write the school—perhaps to eat it—up,   As chance or luck occasion may reveal   To earn a dollar or maraud a meal.   To view the school of apes these creatures go,   Unconscious that themselves are half the show.   These, if the simian his course but trim   To copy them as they have copied him,   Will call him "educated." Of a verity   There's much to learn by study of posterity.