Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe,
Master, nay, monarch, in his proper sphere,
Though to belles-lettres he pretended not,
Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what;
And having bards, philosophers and such
To eat his dinner, put the finest touch
His art could teach, those learned mouths to fill
With the best proofs of gustatory skill;
And finding wisdom plenty at his board,
Wit, science, learning, all his guests had stored,
By way of contrast, ventured to produce,
To please their palates, an inviting goose.
Better it were the company should starve
Than hands unskilled that goose attempt to carve;
None but the master artist shall assail
The bird that turns the mightiest surgeon pale.
One voice arises from the banquet hall,—
The landlord answers to the pleading call;
Of stature tall, sublime of port he stands,
His blade and trident gleaming in his hands;
Beneath his glance the strong-knit joints relax
As the weak knees before the headsman's axe.
And Landlord Porter lifts his glittering knife
As some stout warrior armed for bloody strife;
All eyes are on him; some in whispers ask—
What man is he who dares this dangerous task?
When, lo! the triumph of consummate art,
With scarce a touch the creature drops apart!
As when the baby in his nurse's lap
Spills on the carpet a dissected map.
Then the calm sage, the monarch of the lyre,
Critics and men of science all admire,
And one whose wisdom I will not impeach,
Lively, not churlish, somewhat free of speech,
Speaks thus: "Say, master, what of worth is left
In birds like this, of breast and legs bereft?"
And Landlord Porter, with uplifted eyes,
Smiles on the simple querist, and replies—
"When from a goose you've taken legs and breast,
Wipe lips, thank God, and leave the poor the rest!"
Kind friends, sweet friends, I hold it hardly fair
With that same bird your minstrel to compare,
Yet in a certain likeness we agree—
No wrong to him, and no offence to me;
I take him for the moral he has lent,
My partner—to a limited extent.
When the stern landlord, whom we all obey,
Has carved from life its seventh great slice away,
Is the poor fragment left in blank collapse
A pauper remnant of unvalued scraps?
I care not much what Solomon has said,
Before his time to nobler pleasures dead;
Poor man! he needed half a hundred lives
With such a babbling wilderness of wives!
But is there nothing that may well employ
Life's winter months—no sunny hour of joy?
While o'er the fields the howling tempests rage,
The prisoned linnet warbles in his cage;
When chill November through the forest blows
The greenhouse shelters the untroubled rose,
Round the high trellis creeping tendrils twine,
And the ripe clusters fill with blameless wine,
We make the vine forget the winter's cold,
But how shall age forget it's growing old?
Though doing right is better than deceit,
Time is a trickster it is fair to cheat;
The honest watches ticking in your fobs
Tell every minute how the rascal robs.
To clip his forelock and his scythe to hide,
To lay his hour-glass gently on its side,
To slip the cards he marked upon the shelf,
And deal him others you have marked yourself,
If not a virtue, cannot be a sin,
For the old rogue is sure at last to win.
What does he leave when life is well-nigh spent
To lap its evening in a calm content?
Art, Letters, Science, these at least befriend
Our day's brief remnant to its peaceful end—
Peaceful for him who shows the setting sun
A record worthy of his Lord's "well done!"