THE MAD POET.
McDonald Clarke, commonly called the mad poet, died a few years ago in the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, New York. He wrote those oft-quoted lines,—
Now twilight lets her curtain down,
And pins it with a star.
In his wilder moments he set all rules at defiance, and mingled the startlingly sublime and the laughably ridiculous in the oddest confusion. He talks thus madly of Washington:—
Eternity—give him elbow room;
A spirit like his is large;
Earth, fence with artillery his tomb,
And fire a double charge
To the memory of America’s greatest man:
Match him, posterity, if you can.
In the following lines, he sketches, with a few bold touches, a well-known place, sometimes called a rum-hole:—
Ha! see where the wild-blazing grogshop appears,
As the red waves of wretchedness swell;
How it burns on the edge of tempestuous years,
The horrible light-house of hell!