The Hybrids, An Epi-comic Satire

by An M. D.

In resolution one, you may perceive
What mighty amphitheatre we leave
To woman open; where complete success
Is guerdon sure to cunning and finesse.
Lest some its secret sense may fail to gain
Permit your humble servant to explain,
Nor deem the “modus operandi” vain.

A tale, for illustration good and fit,
Is somewhere told; I think, in holy writ.
A righteous man whose name in scripture rings
As king of concubines and other things,
A mighty temple builded, rich and costly,
With ornaments of gold and silver mostly.
To that Jehovah whom his race adored
The house was deeded, hoping ’twould afford
Free grazing in the pastures of the Lord,
The transit smooth o’er Jordan’s stormy billows,
And pardon gain for sundry peccadilloes.
For seven years, reported dry and dusty,
Thousands of men, with sinews strong and lusty,
Labored like beasts at timber, stone, and plaster
To rear its column, wall, and huge pilaster.
Yet tho’ no stick, or stone, or bolt, or rivet,
Did Solomon’s own labor give it,
(Or, if he did, no writer ever said it)
He cunningly contrived to gain the credit,
Of its erection. Thus, to work by proxy
Seems sanctioned by the highest orthodoxy.
And is procedure, if come-at-able,
With woman’s nature quite compatible;
Thereby, from labor we may gain exemption
And so inaugurate our great redemption,
When woman to her proper “sphere” promoted,
On husbands shoulders shall be raised and toted.
I hate this silly rant on “woman’s sphere!”
’Tis simply nauseous to lib’ral ear,
The very word’s disgustingly offensive
Suggesting bounds to woman’s plans extensive;
Implying still, whatever one’s pursuit is,
Existence wasted in a round of duties.
An Irish bull—a term chimerical!
She has no sphere—she’s hemispherical!

’Twere vain to iterate in word specific
The long complaint not gentle nor pacific
Of which the vixen’s fancy proved prolific.
For similes affecting or destructive
And wild hyperboles of scorn productive,
She gleaned the country o’er from snowy Maine
To verdant Alabama’s flow’ry plain:
Ransacked antiquity’s moth-eaten store,
And drained the fount of legendary lore
For intermittent precedents to prove
The inutility of human love.
She spawn’d forth words with vast facility
And talked with ceasely volubility,
Guiltless of reason or civility;
Affording thus a patent wool-dyed sample
Of teaching both by precept and example.
And yet this brawling of such heady creatures
Is not without some few redeeming features:
For, tho’ the utt’rance is a public curse
Suppression might induce condition worse.
Surplus vitality demanding vent
In rampant caracoling thus is spent;
And so perchance avoids a sad explosion,
By action too prevents as bad corrosion;
Since woman, made of matter much refined,
Is keen finesse and subtlety combined,
And greatly prone, as seen in state primeval,
To pioneer in taste of good and evil.
In proof consult what ev’ryone supposes
A veritable tale by holy Moses.

Now when this patient had been well delivered,
While yet the panting bosom thrill’d and quiver’d,
At once there rose greetings loud and long,
Commingled bass and treble, from that throng.
Then might you see advancing on that stage
A tott’ring form becrowned with snow of age,
On whom the thoughtful gazed with bated breath,
As one might gaze on wrinkled bride of death:
For, hoary hairs, colleagued with folly,
Must ever wake emotions melancholy.

But ah! when aged women takes to soaring,
And, motherhood forgetting, and ignoring
“The divinity that doth hedge” her round,
In strange and unbecoming walks is found,
Deserting sacred joys of hearth and home,
Delighting in forbidden paths to roam.
A gloom o’erhangs the soul, like fun’ral pall.
Still, not such horror fell on all
For, certes, loud and lengthened was the call
When saintly mother Katy Bantam rose
With “healing on her tongue,” corns on her toes,
And upward rubbed her venerable nose:
Then solemnly her spectacles adjusted
As if the nation had that moment “busted”.
A harmless old gray hen who took to crowing
With ne’er a comb or caudal feather showing,
Her spouse attained distinction in the nation
Expelling foxes from all public station,
When cheek by jowl he rode with freest rider
The rallying cry “log cabin and hard cider;”
(That reckless charge and wild triumphant yell
The sage of Lindenwald remembered well)
And after, much affected gallopading
On abolition hobby, “nigger-raiding;”
Which happening the crowd to please,
Made “hobbying” a family disease.
His dame for notoriety then itching
Was worried from propriety and stitching,
And, goaded by the mad’ning titilation,
Mistook the itch for heav’nly inspiration:
And, being crazed, despite advancing age
Began her missionary pilgrimage.
She vow’d a vow, if folks would only ask her
She’d travel post from Maine to Madagascar
To make a single speech: Hence, small persuasion
Procured her services on this occasion.

So when adorers all had screamed and shouted
She op’d her mouth and feebly spouted
Chaotic mumblings of senility,
Sad proofs of nacent imbecility.
It seemed she trusted thoughts would wax and strengthen
Unlike our forms, while ages grow and lengthen:
Or deemed a speech a kind of rubber fixture—
Perchance a marv’lous hom’opathic mixture,
Whose pow’r, ’tis boasted by the science makers,
Increases, spread o’er fifty thousand acres.
She dismal talked of terrible “upheaving”
Of systems and peoples, quite past believing.
“Upheaved” the church, “upheaved” the contract civil;
“Upheaved” poor man, but couldn’t eject the devil.
She catch-words droned—“oppressed,” “enslaved,” “humbled”
“Downtrodden,” sound and sense together jumbled:
As if, late motherhood developing
She soothed declining years enveloping
The public doll in shreds and filaments
Of Ethiop’s cast-off habiliments;
Or, if she’d stipulated in a barg’n
To fulminate a giv’n amount of jarg’n,
And muttered tales designed for terse and witty
Which ’stead of mirth excited only pity.
A legend ster’otyped she droned and drivelled
Of Brobdingnagian beldame lean and shrivelled
Who urged by passion wild, by love enraptured,
A Liliputian bridegroom sought and captured.
The groomsman too, it seems, was small and puny;
Likewise the priest quite “little for the money”
Which granny good esteemed so queer and funny
It must induce a general conviction,
Unto the tall belongeth jurisdiction.
This really seemed, amid the wild confusion
Of sense, the only possible conclusion.
No other ornament adorned her tale—
To find a moral, even priests must fail.
Abundance more, as previously requested
The good dame spoke—no doubt her “level-best” did,—
Then from her painful labor ceased and rested.

Of all this mighty concourse, hither borne
By various mood, just one came here to mourn.
A bachelor, in attitude forlorn,
Who sadly grieved that ever he was born,
With features smileless, haggard, grim, and pale,
Sat roosting on the semicircle’s rail
Which there enclosed the sacred altar in;
His elbow on his knee, on hand his chin.
When now there came a lulling in the roar
And none at present occupied the floor
He madly leaped to gain the speaker’s station,
In labor groaning with a young oration,
And wildly screamed this famous declamation.

“O woman, woman; foully fair,
Thou source of bliss and yet despair—
Thou pride of heav’n thou curse of hell,
Thou greatest woe on earth that fell
When mad Pandora op’d her box
And horrors issued forth in flocks—
Thou richest gift vouchsafed to man
When heav’n look’d down his wants to scan,—
Thou type of goodness, beauty, worth—
The tie that links our hearts to earth
With silken cords we scarcely feel
Yet strong as pond’rous bars of steel—
Thou ray of glory from on high,
Thou charmer, cheater, rib awry,
How oft for you I’ve madly cried!
How oft become a tempocide!
How often suffered, bled, and died!
Deceiver vile, yet fount of truth,
A Dian pure, a harlot Ruth,
O, why wast thou to mortals given?
To tempt to hell—to lure to heav’n!”

In agony he writhed at its conclusion,
And swoon’d amid the general confusion.

While red with flame the oven still was heated
Like hapless Daniel’s seven times repeated,
And self-elected cooks were fairly aching
To have a finger in this public baking,
Some sharp director of the frothy brewing,
Intent on shrewdest ways and means pursuing,
Espied a form whose locks, uncombed and matted,
Betokened hasty rising,—or belated,—
Involving toilet scanty and neglected:
Or, more belike, he cunningly affected
Some studied roughness in the coat and trouser,
To give “eclat” as leading “rabble rouser.”
Tho’ mingled with peculiarities
His mind a storehouse was of rarities,
Wherein dame nature wrought in broadest plan,
The full unstinted measure of a man.
Exuberant fancy pruned to limits fit
A yield profuse returned of golden wit;
While wisdom, logic, sense, and virtue rung
With eloquence spontaneous on his tongue.
One, briefly, who the happy art possessed
To do the thing another just professed.
Him they beset, with gen’ral acclamation,
To “throw himself” for their regeneration.
The time was trying, critical th’ occasion:
But finally he yielded to persuasion,
Tumbled his mane accordant with his custom,
And, while he wished their vanity would bust ’em,
Talked gingerly as dubious to trust ’em.
His speech, tho’ tough enough, and smooth and limber,
Had not that sturdy, manly, ringing “timbre,”
Which carpenters of old from stock selected,
When massive structures were to be erected.
He seemed gallant, who, minded to be civil,
Reduced himself to childish woman’s level;
And, so regarding their capacity,
Talked little sense with much vivacity.
As jugglers, when their trade they ply,
Of tinsel make display, to catch the eye,
And thus have “scope and verge” to cut their capers,
Beneath the very nose of stupid gapers.
He whiles like angry lion growled and grumbled,
While mutterings like distant thunder rumbled.
Anon, wit’s scintillations dazzled all,
Like sunlight sparkling on a waterfall.
With small regard for aught, for nothing stopping,
Rising he thus broke out like champagne popping.