Fare thee well, if years efface
From thy heart love's burning trace,
Keep, O keep that hallowed seat
From the tread of vulgar feet;
If the blue lips of the sea
Wait with icy kiss for me,
Let not thine forget that vow,
Sealed how often, love, as now!
In his Mechanism in Thought and Morals, Doctor Holmes reveals one of the secrets of humorous writing. "The poet," he says, "sits down to his desk with an odd conceit in his brain; and presently his eyes filled with tears, his thought slides into the minor key, and his heart is full of sad and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his work, saying—
"'To-night I would have tears;' and before he rises from his table he has written a burlesque, such as he might think fit to send to one of the comic papers, if these were not so commonly cemeteries of hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs of wit and humor. These strange hysterics of the intelligence which make us pass from weeping to laughter, and from laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to every impressible nature; and all this is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely self-evolved by a hidden, organic process, as are the changing moods of the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a dictation ab extra; and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of his inspiration."
Of Doctor Holmes' inimitable vers d'occasion we select the following:
At the reception given to Harriet Beecher Stowe on her seventieth birthday, at Governor Claflin's beautiful summer residence in Newtonville, Doctor Holmes read the following witty and characteristic poem:
If every tongue that speaks her praise
For whom I shape my tinkling phrase
Were summoned to the table,
The vocal chorus that would meet
Of mingling accents harsh or sweet
From every land and tribe would beat
The polyglots of Babel.
Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane,
Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine,
Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi,
High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too,
The Russian serf, the Polish Jew,
Arab, Armenian and Mantchoo
Would shout, "We know the lady."
Know her! Who knows not Uncle Tom
And her he learned his gospel from
Has never heard of Moses;
Full well the brave black hand we know
That gave to freedom's grasp the hoe
That killed the weed that used to grow
Among the Southern roses.
When Archimedes, long ago,
Spoke out so grandly "dos pou sto,—
Give me a place to stand on,
I'll move your planet for you, now,"
He little dreamed or fancied how
The sto at last should find its pou
For woman's faith to land on.