By water he shall die and take his end.—Shakespeare
Toll for Sam Patch! Sam Patch, who jumps no more,
This or the world to come. Sam Patch is dead!
The vulgar pathway to the unknown shore
Of dark futurity, he would not tread.
No friends stood sorrowing round his dying bed;
Nor with decorous woe, sedately stepp'd
Behind his corpse, and tears by retail shed—
The mighty river, as it onward swept,
In one great wholesale sob, his body drowned and kept.
Toll for Sam Patch! he scorned the common way
That leads to fame, up heights of rough ascent,
And having heard Pope and Longinus say
That some great men had risen by falls, he went
And jumped, where wild Passaic's waves had rent
The antique rocks—the air free passage gave—
And graciously the liquid element
Upbore him, like some sea-god on its wave;
And all the people said that Sam was very brave.
Fame, the clear spirit that doth to heaven upraise,
Let Sam to dive into what Byron calls
The hell of waters. For the sake of praise,
He wooed the bathos down great waterfalls;
The dizzy precipice, which the eye appals
Of travelers for pleasure, Samuel found
Pleasant as are to women lighted halls,
Crammed full of fools and fiddles; to the sound
Of the eternal roar, he timed his desperate bound.
Sam was a fool. But the large world of such
Has thousands—better taught, alike absurd,
And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much,
Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard.
Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferred
The kindly element, to which he gave
Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard
That it was now his winding sheet and grave,
Nor sung, 'twixt tears and smiles, our requiem for the brave.
He soon got drunk with rum and with renown,
As many others in high places do—
Whose fall is like Sam's last—for down and down,
By one mad impulse driven, they flounder through
The gulf that keeps the future from our view,
And then are found not. May they rest in peace!
We heave the sigh to human frailty due—
And shall not Sam have his? The muse shall cease
To keep the heroic roll, which she began in Greece—
With demigods who went to the Black Sea
For wool (and if the best accounts be straight,
Came back, in Negro phraseology,
With the same wool each upon his pate),
In which she chronicled the deathless fate
Of him who jumped into the perilous ditch
Left by Rome's street commissioners, in a state
Which made it dangerous, and by jumping which
He made himself renowned and the contractors rich—
I say the muse shall quite forget to sound
The chord whose music is undying, if
She do not strike it when Sam Patch is drowned.
Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff
The Lesbian Sappho leapt from in a miff,
To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead
Because the wax did not continue stiff;
And, had he minded what his father said,
He had not given a name unto his watery bed.
And Helle's case was all an accident,
As everybody knows. Why sing of these?
Nor would I rank with Sam that man who went
Down into Aetna's womb—Empedocles,
I think he called himself. Themselves to please,
Or else unwillingly, they made their springs;
For glory in the abstract, Sam made his,
To prove to all men, commons, lords, and kings,
That "some things may be done, as well as other things."
I will not be fatigued, by citing more
Who jump'd of old, by hazard or design,
Nor plague the weary ghosts of boyish lore,
Vulcan, Apollo, Phaeton—in fine
All Tooke's Pantheon. Yet they grew divine
By their long tumbles; and if we can match
Their hierarchy, shall we not entwine
One wreath? Who ever came "up to the scratch,"
And for so little, jumped so bravely as Sam Patch?