And the Captain begged, in his smoothest tones,
Miss Susan Brown to be Mistress Jones,—
Flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones,
Till death the union should sever;
For these are the words employed, of course,
Though Death is cheated, sometimes by Divorce;
A fact which gives an equivocal force
To that beautiful phrase, "for ever!"
And Susan sighed the conventional "Nay"
In such a bewitching, affirmative way,
The Captain perceived 'twas the feminine "Ay,"
And sealed it in such commotion,
That no "lip-service" that ever was paid
To the ear of a god, or the cheek of a maid,
Looked more like real devotion!
At the wedding party all the aristocracy of the circle in which the Browns and Joneses were acquainted came together, and Miss Susan—
To pique a group of laughing girls
Who stood admiring the Captain's curls,
She formed the resolution
To get a lock of her lover's hair,
In the gaze of the guests assembled there,
By some expedient, foul or fair,
Before the party's conclusion.
"Only a lock, dear Captain!—no more,
'A lock for Memory,' I implore!"
But Jones, the gayest of quizzers,
Replied, as he gave his eye a cock,
"'Tis a treacherous memory needs a lock,"
And dodg'd the envious scissors.
Alas! that Susan couldn't refrain,
In her zeal the precious lock to gain,
From laying her hand on the lion's mane!
To see the cruel mocking,
And hear the short, affected cough,
The general titter, and chuckle, and scoff,
When the Captain's Patent Wig came off,
Was really dreadfully shocking!
The Times, a poem read before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, in 1849, Carmen Lætum, recited last year at a meeting of the Alumni of Middlebury College, and New England Men, delivered before the literary societies of the New-York University a few weeks ago, are his other most elaborate productions, and they are all carefully finished and alike in their chief characteristics. His shorter pieces in a few instances have touches of sentiment, but this is not his forte; by the definition which limits poetry to rhythmical creations of beauty, Mr. Saxe can scarcely be called a poet of great excellence; his distinction is, that he is a wit, and that he has been eminently successful in giving to his wit a poetical expression.
As a judicious critic has said of him, "he unquestionably an artist, of a high order, in the narrow range which he has taken. His comical productions are beautifully finished. As they stand, they are terse, smooth, and fluent, and any one who has ever tried his hand at this species of composition, will readily appreciate the time, labor, and taste, which must have been expended, to jest so easily, in rhyme."