BROWN OCTOBER ALE
HOW many ringing songs there are that celebrate the wine, and other goods behind the bar, as being wondrous fine! How many choruses exalt the brown October ale, which puts a fellow’s wits at fault, and lands him in the jail! A hundred poets wasted ink, and ruined good quill pens, describing all the joys of drink in gilded boozing kens. But all those joys are hollow fakes which wisdom can’t indorse; they’re soon converted into aches and sorrow and remorse. The man who drains the brimming glass in haunts of light and song, next morning knows that he’s an ass, with ears twelve inches long. An aching head, a pile of debts, a taste that’s green and stale, that’s what the merry fellow gets from brown October ale. Untimely graves and weeping wives and orphans shedding brine; this sort of thing the world derives from bright and sparkling wine. The prison cell, the scaffold near; such features may be blamed on wholesome keg and bottled beer, which made one city famed. Oh, sing of mud or axle grease, but chant no fairy tale, of that disturber of the peace, the brown October ale!
DELIVER US
FROM all the woe and sorrow that bloody warfare brings, when monarchs start to borrow some grief from other kings, from dreadful scenes of slaughter, and dead men by the cord, from blood that flows like water, deliver us, O Lord! From fear and melancholy that every death list gives, from all the pompous folly in which an army lives, from all the strife stupendous, that brings no sane reward, but only loss tremendous, deliver us, O Lord! From seeing friend and neighbor in tools of death arrayed, deserting useful labor to wield the thirsty blade; from seeing plowshares lying all rusty on the sward, where men and boys are dying, deliver us, O Lord! From seeing foreign legions invade our peaceful shore, and turn these smiling regions to scenes of death and gore, from all the desolation the gods of war accord to every fighting nation, deliver us, O Lord!
DOING ONE’S BEST
ONE sweetly solemn thought comes to me every night; I at my task have wrought, and tried to do it right. No doubt my work is punk, my efforts are a jest; however poor my junk, it represents my best. If you, at close of day, when sounds the quitting bell, that truthfully can say, you’re doing pretty well. Some beat you galley west, and bear away the prize, but you have done your best—in that the honor lies. And, having done your best, your conscience doesn’t hurt; serene you go to rest, in your long muslin shirt. And at the close of life, when you have said good-bye to cousin, aunt and wife, and all the children nigh, you’ll face the river cold that flows to islands blest, with courage high and bold, if you have done your best. No craven fears you’ll know, no terrors fierce and sharp, but like a prince you’ll go, to draw your crown and harp. So, then, whate’er the field in which you do your stunt, whatever tool you wield to earn your share of blunt, toil on with eager zest, nor falter in that plan; the one who does his best is God’s blue-ribbon man.