A MORALITY IN THE QUEEN ANNE MANNER.

“The Ancestor remote of Man,
Says D—w—n, is th’ Ascidian,
A scanty sort of water-beast
That, 90,000,000 years at least
Before Gorillas came to be,
Went swimming up and down the sea.
Their ancestors the pious praise,
And like to imitate their ways
How, then, does our first parent live,
What lesson has his life to give?
Th’ Ascidian tadpole, young and gay,
Doth Life with one bright eye survey,
His consciousness has easy play.
He’s sensitive to grief and pain,
Has tail, and spine, and bears a brain,
And everything that fits the state
Of creatures we call vertebrate.
But age comes on; with sudden shock
He sticks his head against a rock!
His tail drops off, his eye drops in,
His brain’s absorbed into his skin;
He does not move, nor feel, nor know
The tidal water’s ebb and flow,
But still abides, unstirred, alone,
A sucker sticking to a stone.
And we, his children, truly we
In youth are, like the Tadpole, free.
And where we would we blithely go,
Have brain and hearts, and feel and know.
Then Age comes on! To Habit we
Affix ourselves and are not free;
Th’ Ascidian’s rooted to a rock,
And we are bond-slaves of the clock;
Our rock is Medicine—Letters—Law,
From these our heads we cannot draw:
Our loves drop off, our hearts drop in,
And daily thicker grows our skin.
We scarcely live, we scarcely know
The wide world’s moving ebb and flow,
The clanging currents ring and shock,
But we are rooted to the rock.
And thus at ending of his span,
Blind, deaf, and indolent, does Man
Revert to the Ascidian.”
—St. James’s Gazette (July 1880).

A Geological Madrigal.

“I have found out a gift for my fair;
I know where the fossils abound,
Where the footprints of Aves declare
The birds that once walked on the ground;
Oh, come, and—in technical speech—
We’ll walk this Devonian shore,
Or on some Silurian beach
We’ll wander, my love, evermore.
I will show thee the sinuous track
By the slow-moving Annelid made,
Or the Trilobite that, farther back,
In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid;
Thou shalt see in his Jurassic tomb,
The Plesiosaurus embalmed;
In his Oolitic prime and his bloom
Iguanodon safe and unharmed!
You wished—I remember it well,
And I loved you the more for that wish—
For a perfect cystedian shell
And a whole holocephalic fish.
And oh, if Earth’s strata contains
In its lowest Silurian drift,
Or palæozoic remains
The same—’tis your lover’s free gift.
Then come, love, and never say nay,
But calm all your maidenly fears;
We’ll note, love, in one summer’s day
The record of millions of years;
And though the Darwinian plan
Your sensitive feelings may shock,
We’ll find the beginning of man—
Our fossil ancestors, in rock!”
—Bret Harte.

The Husband’s Complaint.

“Will she thy linen wash and hosen darn?”—Gay.

“I’m utterly sick of this hateful alliance
Which the ladies have formed with impractical Science!
They put out their washing to learn hydrostatics,
And give themselves airs for the sake of pneumatics.
They are knowing in muriate, and nitrate, and chlorine,
While the stains gather fast on the walls and the flooring—
And the jellies and pickles fall woefully short,
With their chemical use of the still and retort.
Our expenses increase (without drinking French wines),
For they keep no accounts, with their tangents and sines?—
And to make both ends meet they give little assistance,
With their accurate sense of the squares of the distance.
They can name every spot from Peru to El Arish,
Except just the bounds of their own native parish;
And they study the orbits of Venus and Saturn,
While their home is resigned to the thief and the slattern.
Chronology keeps back the dinner two hours,
The smoke-jack stands still while they learn motive powers;
Flies and shells swallow up all our everyday gains,
And our acres are mortgaged for fossil remains.
They cease to reflect with their talk of refraction—
They drive us from home by electric attraction—
And I’m sure, since they’ve bothered their heads with affinity
I’m repulsed every hour from my learned divinity.
When the poor stupid husband is weary and starving,
Anatomy leads them to give up the carving;
And we drudges the shoulder of mutton must buy,
While they study the line of the os humeri.
If we ’scape from our troubles to take a short nap,
We awake with a din about limestone and trap;
And the fire is extinguished past regeneration,
For the women were wrapt in the deep-coal formation.
’Tis an impious thing that the wives of the laymen
Should use Pagan words ’bout a pistil and stamen;
Let the heir break his head while they foster a Dahlia,
And the babe die of pap as they talk of mammalia.
The first son becomes half a fool in reality,
While the mother is watching his large ideality;
And the girl roars unchecked, quite a moral abortion,
For we trust her benevolence, order, and caution.
I sigh for the good times of sewing and spinning,
Ere this new tree of knowledge had set them a sinning;
The women are mad, and they’ll build female colleges,—
So here’s to plain English!—a plague on their ’ologies!”

Homœopathic Soup.

“Take a robin’s leg
(Mind! the drumstick merely),
Put it in a tub
Filled with water nearly;
Set it out of doors,
In a place that’s shady,
Let it stand a week
(Three days if for a lady).
Drop a spoonful of it
In a five-pail kettle,
Which may be made of tin
Or any baser metal;
Fill the kettle up,
Set it on a boiling,
Strain the liquor well,
To prevent its oiling;
One atom add of salt,
For the thickening one rice kernel,
And use to light the fire
The Homœopathic Journal.
Let the liquor boil
Half an hour or longer
(If ’tis for a man,
Of course you’ll make it stronger).
Should you now desire
That the soup be flavoury,
Stir it once around
With a stalk of Savory.
When the broth is made,
Nothing can excel it:
Then three times a day
Let the patient smell it.
If he chance to die,
Say ’twas Nature did it;
If he chance to live,
Give the soup the credit.”