If all the seas were dried up, what would Neptune say? I really haven’t an ocean (a notion).
Why must a Yankee speculator be very subject to water on the brain? Because he has always an ocean (a notion) in his head.
The night was dark, the night was damp;
St. Bruno read by his lonely lamp:
The Fiend dropped in to make a call,
As he posted away to a fancy ball;
And “Can’t I find,” said the Father of Lies,
“Some present a saint may not despise?”
Wine he brought him, such as yet
Was ne’er on Pontiff’s table set:
Weary and faint was the holy man,
But he crossed with a cross the tempter’s can,
And saw, ere my first to his parched lip came,
That it was red with liquid flame.
Jewels he showed him—many a gem
Fit for a Sultan’s diadem:
Dazzled, I trow, was the anchorite;
But he told his beads with all his might;
And instead of my second so rich and rare,
A pinch of worthless dust lay there.
A lady at last he handed in,
With a bright black eye and a fair white skin;
The stern ascetic flung, ’tis said,
A ponderous missal at her head;
She vanished away; and what a smell
Of my whole, she left in the hermit’s cell!
Brim-stone.
Why is a man looking for the philosopher’s stone like Neptune? Because he’s a sea-king what never was!
Who do they speak of as the most delicately modest young man that ever lived? The young man who, when bathing at Long Branch, swam out to sea and drowned himself because he saw two ladies coming!