What harm if men who burn the midnight-oil,
Weary of frame, and worn and wan of feature,
Seek once a week their spirits to assoil,
And snatch a glimpse of "Animated Nature?"
Better it were if, in his best of suits,
The artisan, who goes to work on Monday,
Should spend a leisure-hour among the brutes,
Than make a beast of his own self on Sunday—
But what is your opinion, Mrs. Grundy?
Why, zounds! what raised so Protestant a fuss
(Omit the zounds! for which I make apology)
But that the Papists, like some Fellows, thus
Had somehow mixed up Deus with their Theology?
Is Brahma's Bull—a Hindoo god at home—
A Papal Bull to be tied up till Monday?—
Or Leo, like his namesake, Pope of Rome,
That there is such a dread of them on Sunday—
But what is your opinion, Mrs. Grundy?
Spirit of Kant! have we not had enough
To make Religion sad, and sour, and snubbish,
But Saints Zoological must cant their stuff,
As vessels cant their ballast-rattling rubbish!
Once let the sect, triumphant to their text,
Shut Nero up from Saturday till Monday,
And sure as fate they will deny us next
To see the Dandelions on a Sunday—
But what is your opinion, Mrs, Grundy?
ODE TO RAE WILSON, ESQUIRE
[Footnote: Who had, in one of his books, characterized some of Hood's
verses as "profaneness and ribaldry.">[
THOMAS HOOD.
"Close, close your eyes with holy dread,
And weave a circle round him thrice;
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise!"—Coleridge.
"It's very hard them kind of men
Won't let a body be."—Old Ballad.
A wanderer, Wilson, from my native land,
Remote, O Rae, from godliness and thee,
Where rolls between us the eternal sea,
Besides some furlongs of a foreign sand—
Beyond the broadest Scotch of London Wall;
Beyond the loudest Saint that has a call;
Across the wavy waste between us stretched,
A friendly missive warns me of a stricture,
Wherein my likeness you have darkly etched,
And though I have not seen the shadow sketched,
Thus I remark prophetic on the picture.
I guess the features:—in a line to paint
Their moral ugliness, I'm not a saint,
Not one of those self-constituted saints,
Quacks—not physicians—in the cure of souls,
Censors who sniff out moral taints,
And call the devil over his own coals—
Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God,
Who write down judgments with a pen hard-nibbed:
Ushers of Beelzebub's Black Rod,
Commending sinners not to ice thick-ribbed,
But endless flames, to scorch them like flax—
Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribbed
The impression of St. Peter's keys in wax!
Of such a character no single trace
Exists, I know, in my fictitious face;
There wants a certain cast about the eye;
A certain lifting of the nose's tip;
A certain curling of the nether lip,
In scorn of all that is, beneath the sky;
In brief, it is an aspect deleterious,
A face decidedly not serious,
A face profane, that would not do at all
To make a face at Exeter Hall—
That Hall where bigots rant, and cant, and pray,
And laud each other face to face,
Till every farthing-candle RAY
Conceives itself a great gas-light of grace!
Well!—be the graceless lineaments confest
I do enjoy this bounteous beauteous earth;
And dote upon a jest
"Within the limits of becoming mirth;"—
No solemn sanctimonious face I pull,
Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious—
Nor study in my sanctum supercilious
To frame a Sabbath Bill or forge a Bull,
I pray for grace—repent each sinful act—
Peruse, but underneath the rose, my Bible;
And love my neighbor, far too well, in fact,
To call and twit him with a godly tract
That's turned by application to a libel.
My heart ferments not with the bigot's leaven,
All creeds I view with toleration thorough,
And have a horror of regarding heaven
As any body's rotten borough.