PUGILIST OR STATESMAN.
Thousands of our own boys, who to-day are spearing frogs, or bathing in the rivers of their native land and parading on the shingly beach with no clothes on to speak of, are left to chose between such a career of usefulness and greatness of brow, and the humdrum life of a bilious student and pale, sad congressman. Will you rise to the proud pinnacle of fame as a pugilist, boys, or will you plug along as a sorrowing, overworked statesman? Now, in the spring-time of your lives, choose between the two, and abide the consequences.
CHESTNUT-BURR NYE AS A CRITIC AND NYE AS A POET.
POETIC CHESTNUTS
The Poet of the Greeley Eye—The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher—A Mournful Stanza—Poems by Nye—Apostrophe to an Orphan Mule—Ode to Spring—The Picnic Snoozeds Lament—Ode to the Cucumber—Apostrophe to Oscar Wilde—An Adjustable Campaign Song—The Beautiful Snow.
A new and dazzling literary star has risen above the horizon, and is just about to shoot athwart the starry vault of poesy. How wisely are all things ordered, and how promptly does the new star begin to beam, upon the decline of the old.
Hardly had the sweet singer of Michigan commenced to wane and to flicker, when, rising above the western hills, the glad light of the rising star is seen, and adown the canyons and gulches of the Rocky mountains comes the melodious cadences of the poet of the Greeley Eye.
Couched in the rough terms of the West, robed in the untutored language of the Michael Angelo slang of the miner and the cowboy, the poet at first twitters a little on a bough far up the canyon, gradually waking the echoes, until the song is taken up and handed back by every rock and crag along the rugged ramparts of the mighty mountain barrier.
Listen to the opening stanza of "The Dying Cowboy and the Preacher:"
So, old gospel shark, they tell me I must die;
That the wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut,
Well, I will "pass in my checks" without a whimper or a cry,
And die as I have lived—"a hard nut."
This is no time-worn simile, no hackneyed illustration or bald-headed decrepit comparison, but a new, fresh illustration that appeals to the Western character, and lifts the very soul out of the kinks, as it were.
Wheels of life's wagon have rolled into their last rut.
Ah! how true to nature and yet how grand. How broad and sweeping. How melodious and yet how real. None but the true poet would have thought to compare the close of life to the sudden and unfortunate chuck of the off hind wheel of a lumber wagon into a rut.
In fancy we can see it all. We hear the low, sad kerplunk of the wheel, the loud burst of earnest, logical profanity, and then all is still.
Now and then the swish of a mule's tail through the air, or the sigh of the rawhide as it shimmers and hurtles through the silent air, and then a calm falls upon the scene. Anon, the driver bangs the mule that is ostensibly pulling his daylights out, but who is, in fact, humping up like an angle worm, without nulling a pound.
Then the poet comes to the close of the cowboy's career in this style:
"Do I repent?
"No—of nothing present or past;
"So skip, old preach, on gospel pap I won't be fed;
"My breath comes hard; I—am going—but—I—am game to the—last."
And reckless of the future, as the present, the cowboy was dead.
If we could write poetry like that, do you think we would plod along the dreary pathway of the journalist? Do you suppose that if we had the heaven-born gift of song to such a degree, that we could take hold of the hearts of millions and warble two or three little ditties like that, or write an elegy before breakfast, or construct an ionic, anapestic twitter like the foregoing, that we would carry in our own coal, and trim our own lamps, and wear a shirt two weeks at a time?
No, sir. We would hie us away to Europe or Salt Lake, and let our hair grow long, and we would write some obituary truck that would make people disgusted with life, and they would sigh for death that they might leave their insurance and their obituaries to their survivors.