To ask for the cream, when himself | Ah, Fate, should I live to be nonagen spilt the milk?" No fairer new moon's crescent. Would she but treat us poets so, So from our winter free us, With what fumes of fame was each con- And set our slow old sap aflow fident pate full! How rates of insurance should rise on That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys, To sprout in fresh ideas! III. Alas, think I, what worth or parts Have brought me here competing, To speak what starts in myriad hearts Himself had loved a theme like this; With Burns's memory beating! Must I be its entomber? No pen save his but 's sure to miss IV. For the goose of To-day still is Mem- As I sat musing what to say, ory's swan. VII. And yet who would change the old dream for new treasure? Make not youth's sourest grapes the best wine of our life? Need he reckon his date by the Almanac's measure Who is twenty life-long in the eyes of his wife? And how my verse to number, Some elf in play passed by that way, And sank my lids in slumber; And on my sleep a vision stole, Which I will put in metre, Of Burns's soul at the wicket-hole Where sits the good Saint Peter. V The saint, methought, had left his post That day to Holy Willie, Who swore, In brunstane, will he, nill he ; And preferrin' aqua vita!" XI. "If scant his service at the kirk, He paters heard and aves THE misspelt scrawl, upon the wall From choirs that lurk in hedge and By some Pompeian idler traced, birk, From blackbird and from mavis; The cowering mou-e, poor unroofed thing, In ashes packed (ironic fact!) Lost from Time's ark, leaves no more | As if the dull brain that you vented mark Than a keel's furrow through the main. O Chance and Change! our buzz's range Is scarcely wider than a fly's; Make our brief blaze, and be forgot! Too pressed to wait, upon her slate sce, And put to task, your memory ask AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 1866, IN ACKNOWLEDGING A TOAST TO THE SMITH PROFESSOR. I RISE, Mr. Chairman, as both of us know, With the impromptu I promised you three weeks ago, Dragged up to my doom by your might and my mane, To do what I vowed I'd do never again; And I feel like your good honest dough when possest By a stirring, impertinent devil of yeast. "You must rise," says the leaven. “I can't," says the dough; "Just examine my bumps and you'll see it's no go." "But you must," the tormentor insists, t is all right; You must rise when I bid you, and, what's more, be light." "T is a dreadful oppression, this making men speak What they're sure to be sorry for all the next week; Some poor stick requesting, like Aaron's, to bud Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood, your spite on Could be got, like an ox, by mere poking, to Brighton. They say it is wholesome to rise with the |