Ezra is gone and his large-hearted kind, The landlords of the hospitable mind; Good Warriner of Springfield was the last;

An inn is now a vision of the past; One yet-surviving host my mind recalls,

You'll find him if you go to Trenton Falls."

THE ORIGIN OF DIDACTIC POETRY.

WHEN wise Minerva still was young

And just the least romantic, Soon after from Jove's head she flung That preternatural antic, 'Tis said, to keep from idleness

Or flirting, those twin curses, She spent her leisure, more or less, In writing po, no, verses.

How nice they were! to rhyme with far A kind star did not tarry;

The metre, too, was regular

As schoolboy's dot and carry;
And full they were of pious plums,
So extra-super-moral,
For sucking Virtue's tender gums
Most tooth enticing coral.

-

Excuse me !" snatched his stick, and so Plunged down the gladdened ether.

With the next gap, Mars said, "For me
Don't wait, - naught could be finer,
But I'm engaged at half past three,
A fight in Asia Minor!

Then Venus lisped, "I'm sorely tried,
These duty-calls are vip'rous;
But I must go; I have a bride
To see about in Cyprus."

Then Bacchus, -"I must say good bye,
Although my peace it jeopards;

I meet a man at four, to try

A well-broke pair of leopards.” His words woke Hermes. "Ah!" he said, "I so love moral theses!" Then winked at Hebe, who turned red, And smoothed her apron's creases.

Proud Pallas sighed, "It will not do; Against the Muse I've sinned, oh!' And her torn rhymes sent flying through Olympus's back window.

Then, packing up a peplus clean,

She took the shortest path thence,
And opered, with a mind serene,
A Sunday-school in Athens.

The verses? Some in ocean swilled,
Killed every fish that bit to 'em ;
Some Galen caught, and, when distilled,
Found morphine the residuum;
But some that rotted on the earth
Sprang up again in copies.
And gave two strong narcotics birth,
Didactic verse and poppies.

Years after, when a poet asked

The Goddess's opinion,

As one whose soul its wings had tasked
In Art's clear-aired dominion,
"Discriminate," she said, “betimes;
The Muse is unforgiving;
Put all your beauty in your rhymes,
Your morals in your living."

ters,

They're all from the dead to the dead!

You seem taking time for reflection,

jam,

As you spell in each faded direction

An ominous ending in dam.

Camels or whales where none there be !
O happy days, when men received
From sire to son what all believed,
And left the other world in bliss,
Too busy with bedevilling this!

Beset by doubts of every breed
In the last bastion of my creed,
With shot and shell for Sabbath-chime,
I watch the storming-party climb,
Panting (their prey in easy reach),
To pour triumphant through the breach
In walls that shed like snowflakes tous
Of missiles from old-fashioned guns,
But crumble 'neath the storm that pours
All day and night from bigger bores.
There, as I hopeless watch and wait
The last life-crushing coil of Fate,
Despair finds solace in the praise
Of those serene dawn-rosy days
Ere microscopes had made us heirs
To large estates of doubts and snares,
By proving that the title-deeds,

Once all-sufficient for men's needs, Are palimpsests that scarce disguise The tracings of still earlier lies, Themselves as surely written o'er An older fib erased before.

So from these days I fly to those
That in the landlocked Past repose,
Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes
From bloom - flushed boughs untimely

flakes;

Where morning's eyes see strange,

nothing

No crude perplexity of change,
And morrows trip along their ways
Secure as happy yesterdays.

Then there were rulers who could trace
Through heroes up to gods their race,
Pledged to fair fame and noble use
By veins from Odin filled or Zeus,
And under bonds to keep divine
The praise of a celestial line.

Then priests could pile the altar's sods, With whom gods spake as they with gods,

And everywhere from haunted earth
Broke springs of wonder, that had birth
In depths divine beyond the ken
And fatal scrutiny of men;

Then hills and groves and streams and

seas

Thrilled with immortal presences,
Not too ethereal for the scope
Of human passion's dream or hope.

Now Pan at last is surely dead,
And King No-Credit reigns instead,
Whose officers, morosely strict,
Poor Fancy's tenantry evict,
Chase the last Genius from the door,
And nothing dances any more.
Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do,
Drumming the Old One's own tattoo,
And, if the oracles are dumb,
Have we not mediums? Why be glum?

Fly thither? Why, the very air
Is full of hindrance and despair!
Fly thither? But I cannot fly;
My doubts enmesh me if I try, -
Each lilliputian, but, combined,
Potent a giant's limbs to bind.
This world and that are growing dark;
A huge interrogation mark,
The Devil's crook episcopal,
Still borne before him since the Fall,
Blackens with its ill-omened sign

Still when the Northlights shake their spears?

Science hath answers twain, I 've heard ; Choose which you will, nor hope a third;

Whichever box the truth be stowed in,
There's not a sliver left of Odin.
Either he was a pinchbrowed thing,
With scarcely wit a stone to fling,
A creature both in size and shape
Nearer than we are to the apе,

Who hung sublime with brat and spouse
By tail prehensile from the boughs,
And, happier than his maimed descend-
ants,

The culture curtailed independents,
Could pluck his cherries with both paws,
And stuff with both his big-boned jaws;
Or else the core his name enveloped
Was from a solar myth developed,
Which, hunted to its primal shoot,
Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root,
Thereby to instant death explaining
The little poetry remaining.

Try it with Zeus, 't is just the same;
The thing evades, we hug a name;
Nay, scarcely that, perhaps a vapor
Born of some atmospheric caper.
All Lempriere's fables blur together
In cloudy symbols of the weather,
And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas
But to illustrate such hypotheses.
With years enough behind his back,
Lincoln will take the selfsame track,
And prove, hulled fairly to the cob,

mere vagary of Old Prob.
Give the right man a solar myth,
And he'll confute the sun therewith.

They make things admirably plain, But one hard question will remain :

Whose shop shall furnish you another?
One that will wash, I mean, and wear,
And wrap us warmly from despair?
While they are clearing up our puzzles,
And clapping prophylactic muzzles
On the Actæon's hounds that suiff
Our devious track through But and If,
Would they 'd explain away the Devil
And other facts that won't keep level,
But rise beneath our feet or fail,
A reeling ship's deck in a gale!
God vanished long ago, iwis,

A mere subjective synthesis;

Our dear and admirable Huxley
Cannot explain to me why ducks lay,
Or rather, how into their eggs
Blunder potential wings and legs
With will to move them and decide
Whether in air or lymph to glide.
Who gets a hair's-breadth on by showing
That Something Else set all agoing?
Farther and farther back we push
From Moses and his burning bush ;
Cry," Art Thou there?" Above, below,
All Nature mutters yes and no!
'T is the old answer: we 're agreed
Being from Being must proceed,
Life be Life's source. I might as well
Obey the meeting-house's bell.
And listen while Old Hundred pours

Who want one that conviction carries,
Last make of London or of Paris.
He gone,
I felt a moment's spasm,
But calmed myself with Protoplasm,
A finer name, and, what is more,
As enigmatic as before;

Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease
Minds caught in the Symplegades
Of soul and sense, life's two conditions,
Each baffled with its own omniscience.
The men who labor to revise
Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise,
And print it without foolish qualms
Instead of God in David's psalms:
Noll had been more effective far
Could he have shouted at Dunbar,
"Rise, Protoplasm!" No dourest Scot
Had waited for another shot.

And yet I frankly must confess
A secret unforgivinguess,

And shudder at the saving chrism
Whose best New Birth is Pessimism;
My soul I mean the bit of phosphorus,
That fills the place of what that was for

us

Can't bid its inward bores defiance
With the new nursery-tales of science.
What profits me, though doubt by
doubt,

As nail by nail, be driven out,
When every new one, like the last,
Still holds my coffin-lid as fast?
Would I find thought a moment's truce,
Give me the young world's Mother
Goose

With life and joy in every limb,
The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!

From old and young. I hear it yet,
Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,
While the gray minister, with face
Radiant, let loose his noble bass.
If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll
Waked all the echoes of the soul,
And in it many a life found wings
To soar away from sordid things.
Church gone and singers too, the song
Sings to me voiceless all night long,
Till my soul beckons me afar,
Glowing and trembling like a star.
Will any scientific touch

With my worn strings achieve as much?

I don't object, not I, to know
My sires were monkeys, if 't was so;
I touch my ear's collusive tip
And own the poor-relationship.
That apes of various shapes and sizes
Contained their germs that all the prizes
Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win
May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin.
Who knows but from our loins may
spring

(Long hence) some winged sweetthroated thing

As much superior to us
As we to Cynocephalus ?

This is consoling, but, alas,
It wipes no dimness from the glass
Where I am flattening my poor nose,
In hope to see beyond my toes.
Though I accept my pedigree,
Yet where, pray tell me, is the key
That should unlock a private door
To the Great Mystery, such no more?
Each offers his, but one nor all

Are much persuasive with the wall
That rises now, as long ago,
Between I wonder and I know,
Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep
At the veiled Isis in its keep.
Where is no door, I but produce
My key to find it of no use.
Yet better keep it, after all,
Since Nature 's economical,

And who can tell but some fine day
(If it occur to her) she may,
In her good-will to you and me,
Make door and lock to match the key?

An officer cashiered, a civil servant (No matter though his piety were fer vent)

Disgracefully dismissed, and through the land

Each bore for life a stigma from the brand

Whose far-heard hiss made others more

averse

To take the facile step from bad to

worse.

The Ten Commandments had a meaning then

Felt in their bones by least considerate