Suppose, for instance, upon Leipzig’s plain,
A soldier pillowed on a heap of slain,
In urgent want both of a priest and proctor;
When lo! there comes a man in green and red,
A featherless cocked-hat adorns his head,
In short a Saxon military doctor—
Would he, indeed, on the right treatment fix,
To cure a horrid gaping wound,
Made by a ball that weighed a pound,
If he well peppered it with number six?
Suppose a felon doomed to swing
Within a rope,
Might friends not hope
To cure him with a string?
Suppose his breath arrived at a full stop,
The shades of death in a black cloud before him,
Would a quintillionth dose of the New Drop
Restore him?
Fancy a man gone rabid from a bite,
Snapping to left and right,
And giving tongue like one of Sebright’s hounds,
Terrific sounds,
The pallid neighbourhood with horror cowing,
To hit the proper homœopathic mark;
Now, might not “the last taste in life” of bark,
Stop his bow-wow-ing?
Nay, with a well-known remedy to fit him,
Would he not mend, if with all proper care,
He took “a hair
Of the dog that bit him?”
Picture a man—we’ll say a Dutch Meinheer—
In evident emotion,
Bent o’er the bulwark of the Batavier,
Owning those symptoms queer—
Some feel in a Sick Transit o’er the ocean,
Can anything in life be more pathetic
Than when he turns to us his wretched face?—
But would it mend his case
To be decillionth-dosed
With something like the ghost
Of an emetic?
Lo! now a darkened room!
Look through the dreary gloom,
And see that coverlet of wildest form,
Tost like the billows in a storm,
Where ever and anon, with groans, emerges
A ghastly head!
While two impatient arms still beat the bed,
Like a strong swimmer’s struggling with the surges;
There Life and Death are on their battle-plain,
With many a mortal ecstasy of pain—
What shall support the body in its trial,
Cool the hot blood, wild dream, and parching skin,
And tame the raging malady within—
A sniff of Next-to-Nothing in a phial?
Oh! Doctor Hahnemann, if here I laugh,
And cry together, half and half,
Excuse me, ’tis a mood the subject brings,
To think, whilst I have crowed like chanticleer,
Perchance, from some dull eye the hopeless tear
Hath gushed, with my light levity at schism,
To mourn some Martyr of Empiricism!
Perchance, on thy own system, I have given
A pang superfluous to the pains of Sorrow,
Who weeps with Memory from morn till even;
Where comfort there is none to lend or borrow,
Sighing to one sad strain,
“She will not come again,
To-morrow, nor to-morrow, nor to-morrow!”
Doctor, forgive me, if I dare prescribe
A rule for thee thyself, and all thy tribe,
Inserting a few serious words by stealth;
Above all price of wealth
The Body’s Jewel,—not for minds profane,
Or hands, to tamper with in practice vain—
Like to a Woman’s Virtue is Man’s Health.
A heavenly gift within a holy shrine!
To be approached and touched with serious fear,
By hands made pure, and hearts of faith severe,
Even as the priesthood of the ONE divine!
But, zounds! each fellow with a suit of black,
And, strange to fame,
With a diploma’d name,
That carries two more letters pick-a-back,
With cane, and snuff-box, powdered wig, and block,
Invents his dose, as if it were a chrism,
And dares to treat our wondrous mechanism,
Familiar as the works of old Dutch clock;
Yet, how would common sense esteem the man,
Oh how, my unrelated German cousin,
Who having some such time-keeper on trial,
And finding it too fast, enforced the dial
To strike upon the Homœopathic plan
Of fourteen to the dozen?
Take my advice, ’tis given without a fee,
Drown, drown your book ten thousand fathoms deep
Like Prospero’s beneath the briny sea,
For spells of magic have all gone to sleep!
Leave no decillionth fragment of your works,
To help the interests of quacking Burkes;
Aid not in murdering even widow’s mites,—
And now forgive me for my candid zeal,
I had not said so much, but that I feel
Should you take ill what here my Muse indites,
An Ode-ling more will set you all to rights.