To-day e’en dithyrambics he’s prepared for!

We poets must be born, cries every judge;

But prose-folks, now and then, like Strasburg geese,

Gorge themselves so inhumanly obese

On rhyming balderdash and rhythmic fudge,

That, when cleaned out, their very souls are thick

With lyric lard and greasy rhetoric.

[To Lind.

Your praise, however, I shall not forget;

We’ll sweep the lyre henceforward in duet.