A Billet-Doux.

BY A COUNTRY SCHOOLMASTER, CHIDDINGLY, SUSSEX.

“Accept, dear Miss, this article of mine,
(For what’s indefinite, who can define?)
My case is singular, my house is rural,
Wilt thou, indeed, consent to make it plural?
Something, I feel, pervades my system through,
I can’t describe, yet substantively true.
Thy form so feminine, thy mind reflective,
Where all’s possessive good, and nought objective,
I’m positive none can compare with thee
In wit and worth’s superlative degree.
First person, then, indicative but prove,
Let thy soft passive voice exclaim, ‘I love!’
Active, in cheerful mood, no longer neuter,
I’ll leave my cares, both present, past, and future.
But ah! what torture must I undergo
Till I obtain that little ‘Yes’ or ‘No!’
Spare me the negative—to save compunction,
Oh, let my preposition meet conjunction.
What could excite such pleasing recollection,
At hearing thee pronounce this interjection,
‘I will be thine! thy joys and griefs to share,
Till Heaven shall please to point a period there’!”
—Family Friend (1849).

Cumulative verse—in which one newspaper gives a few lines, and other papers follow it up—like that which follows, is very common in American newspapers, which, however profound or dense, invariably have a corner for this kind of thing. It has been said that the reason why no purely comic paper, like Punch or Fun, succeeds in the United States, is because all their papers have a “funny” department.

The Arab and his Donkey.

An Arab came to the river side,
With a donkey bearing an obelisk;
But he would not try to ford the tide,
For he had too good an *.
—Boston Globe.
So he camped all night by the river side,
And remained till the tide had ceased to swell,
For he knew should the donkey from life subside,
He never would find its ||.
—Salem Sunbeam.
When the morning dawned, and the tide was out,
The pair crossed over ’neath Allah’s protection;
And the Arab was happy, we have no doubt,
For he had the best donkey in all that §.
—Somerville Journal.
You are wrong, they were drowned in crossing over,
Though the donkey was bravest of all his race;
He luxuriates now in horse-heaven clover,
And his master has gone to the Prophet’s em
—Elevated Railway Journal.
These assinine poets deserved to be “blowed,”
Their rhymes being faulty and frothy and beery;
What really befell the ass and its load
Will ever remain a desolate ?.
—Paper and Print.
Our Yankee friends, with all their ——
For once, we guess, their mark have missed;
And with poetry Paper and Print is rash
In damming its flow with its editor’s
In parable and moral leave a between, [Space]
For reflection, or your wits fall out of joint;
The “Arab,” ye see, is a printing machine,
And the donkey is he who can’t see the
—British and Colonial Printer.

An Ohio poet thus sings of the beginning of man:

Evolution.

“O sing a song of phosphates,
Fibrine in a line,
Four and twenty follicles
In the van of time.
When the phosphorescence
Evoluted brain,
Superstition ended,
Man began to reign.”