LINES TO BLUMINE.
When day gives place to sweeter night,
And twinkling stars come out on high,
Like sentinels in armor bright,
To watch amid the ebon sky;
High in the north thine eye will see
That lonely star, whose steady beam
Shall look into thy heart, and be
The phantom of thy troubled dream.
I love thee not: though once thy heart
Beat in warm answer to my own;
Like strangers we shall meet and part,
And I shall tread my way alone.
Brooklyn, L. I. Hans Von Spiegel.
EPISTLE TO THE EDITOR.
Dear Knick: Were’t not for reverence due
From such as I to such as you,
I really could not choose but swear
To think that e’en a millionaire,
With piles enough of brick and stone
To make a city of his own,
And broad domains in simple fee,
Or held in pledge as mortgagee,
And scrip whose outspread folds would cover
His native Hesse-Darmstadt over;
Should have withal the hard assurance
To hold a Son of Song in durance.
Why, as I lately sauntered out
To see what Gotham was about,
Just below Niblo’s, west southwest,
In a prosaic street at best,
I chanced upon a lodge so small,
So Lilliputian-like in all,
That Argus, hundred-eyed albeit,
Might pass a hundred times, nor see it.
Agog to see what manikin
Had shrined his household gods therein,
With step as light as tip-toe fairy’s
I stole right in among the Lares.
There in the cosiest of nooks,
Up to his very eyes in books,
Sat a lone wight, nor stout nor lean,
Nor old nor young, but just between,
Poring along the figured columns
Of those most unmelodious volumes,
Intently as if there and then
He conned the fate of gods and men.
Methought that brow so full and fair
Was formed the poet’s wreath to wear;
And as those eyes of azure hue,
One moment lifted, met my view,
Gay worlds of starry thoughts appeared
In their blue depths serenely sphered.
Just then the voice of one unseen,
All redolent of Hippocrene,
Stole forth so sweetly on the air,
I felt the Muse indeed was there,
And feel how much her words divine
Must lose, interpreted by mine.
For shame, it said, Fitz-Greene, for shame!
To yield thee to inglorious thrall,
And leave the trophy of thy fame
Without its crowning capital!
The sculptor, bard, as well may trust
To shape a form for glory’s shrine,
If, ceasing with the breathing bust.
He leave unwrought the brow divine.
How oft the lavish Muse has grieved.
O’er hopes thy early years inspired,
And sighed that he who much received,
Forgot that much would be required.
But not too late, if heeded yet,
The voice that chides thy mute repose,
And bids thee pay at last the debt
Thy genius to Parnassus owes.
’Tis not enough that pride may urge
Thy claims to memory’s grateful lore,
And boast, as rapt from Lethe’s surge,
The Suliote and the Tuscarore.
Nay, bard, thy own land’s mighty dead
Deserve a nobler hymn from thee,
Than bravest of the brave that bled
At Laspi or Thermopylæ.
Remember, then, thy young renown,
Thy country’s dead, thy muse’s sigh;
And bid thy vigorous manhood crown
What youthful genius reared so high!
Still to his task the bard applied,
Unrecked, unheeded all beside;
And as he closed his balance-sheet,
I heard his murmuring lips repeat:
‘Three hundred thousand, city rents,
Item a hundred, seven per cents,
Add cash, another hundred, say
From bonds and notes paid off this day,
And eke from drafts at sight for dues
Just credited to land accrues,
Whose rental stretches on and on
From Aroostook to Oregon;
Total, a semi-million clear
Income received for one short year!’
Aladdin’s wealth scarce mounted faster
At its spring-tide than thine, Herr Astor.
W. P. P.