Sees in its treadmill's fruitless jog a heavenward Jacob's-ladder, Shouts, Lo, the Shining Heights are reached! One moment more aspire! Trots into cramps its poor, dear legs, gets never an inch the higher, And, like the others, ends with pipe and mug beside the fire.

There, 'tween each doze, it whiffs and sips and watches with a sneer The green recruits that trudge and sweat where it had swinked whilere, And sighs to think this soon spent zeal should be in simple truth The only interval between old Fogy hood and Youth: "Well," thus it muses, "well, what odds? "Tis not for us to warn ; "T will be the same when we are dead, and was ere we were born; Without the Treadmill, too, how grind our store of winter's corn? Had we no stock, nor twelve per cent. received from Treadmill shares, We might... but these poor devils at last will get our easy-chairs. High aims and hopes have great rewards, they, too, serene and snug, Shall one day have their soothing pipe and their enlivening mug; From Adam, empty-handed Youth hath always heard the hum

Of Good Times Coming, and will hear until the last day come; Young ears hear forward, old ones back,

and, while the earth rolls on, Full-handed Eld shall hear recede the steps of Good Times Gone; Ah what a cackle we set up whene'er an egg was laid! Cack-cack-cack-cackle! rang around, the scratch for worms was stayed, Cut-cut-ca-dah-cut! from this egg the coming cock shall stalk!

The great New Era dawns, the age of
Deeds and not of Talk!
And every stupid hen of us hugged close
his egg of chalk.

I feel life stir within, each day with greater strength, When, lo, the chick! from former chicks he differed not a jot, But grew and crew and scratched and went, like those before, to pot!" So muse the dim Emeriti, and, mournful though it be,

I must confess a kindred thought hath sometimes come to me,

Make

but the public laugh, be sure 't will take you to be somebody; 'T will wrench its button from your clutch, my densely earnest glum body;

'Tis good, this noble earnestness, good in its place, but why

Make great Achilles' shield the pan to bake a penny pie?

Why, when we have a kitchen-range, insist that we shall stop, And bore clear down to central fires to broil our daily chop? Excalibur and Durandart are swords of price, but then

Why draw them sternly when you wish to trim your nails or pen ? Small gulf between the ape and man; you bridge it with your staff; But it will be impassable until the ape can laugh;

No, no, be common now and then, be sensible, be funny,

And, as Siberians bait their traps for bears with pots of honey, From which, ere they'll withdraw their snouts, they'll suffer many a clublick,

Look how the dead leaves melt their way down through deep-drifted

There is a moral here, you see; if you would preach, you must

Steep all your truths in sunshine would you have them pierce the crust; Brave Jeremiah, you are grand and terrible, a sign

And wonder, but were never quite a popular divine;

Fancy the figure you would cut among the nuts and wine!

I, on occasion, too, could preach, but hold it wi-er far

To give the public sermons it will take with its cigar,

And morals fugitive, and vague as are these smoke-wreaths light

In which.. I trace. . . a.

ioned any where;

'T is not a statue, grumbles John; nay, if you come to that,

We

think of Hyde Park Corner, and concede you beat us flat With your equestrian statue to a Nose and a Cocked-hat;

But 't is not a cathedral; well, e'en that we will allow,

Both statues and cathedrals are anachronistic now;

Your minsters, coz, the monuments of men who conquered you, You'd sell a bargain, if we'd take the deans and chapters too; mortal men build nowadays, as always heretofore,

No;

Good

temples to the gods which they in very truth adore;

The

shepherds of this Broker Age, with all their willing flocks,

Although they bow to stones no more, do bend the knee to stocks,

let me

And

see - bless me! 't is out of sight.

There are some goodish things at sea; for instance, one can feel

A grandeur in the silent man forever at the wheel,

That bit of two-legged intellect, that particle of drill,

Who the huge floundering hulk inspires

with reason, brain, and will, And makes the ship, though skies are black and headwinds whistle loud, Obey her conscience there which feels the loadstar through the cloud; And when by lusty western gales the full-sailed barque is hurled Towards the great moon which, setting on the silent underworld, Rounds luridly up to look on ours, and shoots a broadening line, Of palpitant light from crest to crest across the ridgy brine,

Then from the bows look back and feel a thrill that never stales, In that full-bosomed, swan-white pomp of onward-yearning sails; Ah, when dear cousin Bull laments that you can't make a poem, Take him aboard a clipper-ship, Jonathan, and show him

young

A work of art that in its grace and gran deur may compare

If

churches can't be beautiful though crowded, floor and gallery, people worship preacher, and if preacher worship salary;

'Tis well to look things in the face, the god o' the modern universe, Hermes, cares naught for halls of art and libraries of puny verse, If they don't sell, he notes them thus upon his ledgersay, per Contra to a loss of so much stone, best Russia duck and paper; And, after all, about this Art men talk a deal of fudge,

Each

The

Yet

nation has its path marked out, from which it must not budge; Romans had as little art as Noah in his ark,

somehow on this globe contrived to make an epic mark;

Religion, painting, sculpture, song, - for these they ran up jolly ticks With Greece and Egypt, but they were great artists in their politics, And if we make no minsters, John, nor epics, yet the Fates

Are

The

not entirely deaf to men who can build ships and states;

arts are never pioneers, but men have strength and health

Who, called on suddenly, can improvise a commonwealth,

Nay, can more easily go on and frame them by the dozen,

Than you can make a dinner-speech, dear sympathizing cousin : And, though our restless Jonathan have not your graver bent, sure he Does represent this hand-to-mouth, pert, rapid, nineteenth century; This is the Age of Scramble; men move faster than they did When they pried up the imperial Past's deep-dusted coffin-lid, Searching for scrolls of precedent; the

wire-leashed lightning now Replaces Delphos - men don't leave the steamer for the scow;

What public, were they new to-day, would ever stop to read The Iliad, the Shanameh, or the Nibelungenlied?

Their public 's gone, the artist Greek, the lettered Shah, the hairy Graf Folio and plesiosaur sleep well; we weary o'er a paragraph;

The mind moves planet-like no more, it fizzes, cracks, and bustles; From end to end with journals dry the land o'ershadowed rustles,

As with dead leaves a winter-beech, and, with their breath-roused jars Amused, we care not if they hide the eternal skies and stars;

Down to the general level of the Board of Brokers sinking,

The Age takes in the newspapers, or, to say sooth unshrinking, newspapers take in the Age, and stocks do all the thinking.

The