Poems of James Russell Lowell Part 50

Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own, Can't you let neighbor Emerson's orchards alone?

Besides, 'tis no use, you'll not find e'en a core,-- ---- has picked up all the windfalls before.

They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch 'em, His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch 'em; When they send him a dishfull, and ask him to try 'em, He never suspects how the sly rogues came by 'em; He wonders why 'tis there are none such his trees on, And thinks 'em the best he has tasted this season.

"Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream, And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe, With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o'er him, And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, With a snug room at Plato's, when night comes, to walk to, And people from morning till midnight to talk to, And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening;-- So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening, For his highest conceit of a happiest state is Where they'd live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis; And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better-- Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter; He seems piling words, but there's royal dust hid In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid.

While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper, If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper; Yet his fingers itch for 'em from morning till night, And he thinks he does wrong if he don't always write; In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.

"Close behind him is Brownson, his mouth very full With attempting to gulp a Gregorian bull; Who contrives, spite of that, to pour out as he goes A stream of transparent and forcible prose; He s.h.i.+fts quite about, then proceeds to expound That 'tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns round, And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind, That the weather-c.o.c.k rules and not follows the wind; Proving first, then as deftly confuting each side, With no doctrine pleased that's not somewhere denied, He lays the denier away on the shelf, And then--down beside him lies gravely himself.

He's the Salt River boatman, who always stands willing To convey friend or foe without charging a s.h.i.+lling, And so fond of the trip that, when leisure's to spare, He'll row himself up, if he can't get a fare.

The worst of it is, that his logic's so strong, That of two sides he commonly chooses the wrong; If there _is_ only one, why, he'll split it in two, And first pummel this half, then that, black and blue.

That white 's white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow.

He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,-- When it reaches your lips there's naught left to believe But a few silly- (syllo-, I mean,) -gisms that squat 'em Like tadpoles, o'erjoyed with the mud at the bottom.

"There is Willis, so _natty_ and jaunty and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em; Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose, Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!

His prose had a natural grace of its own, And enough of it, too, if he'd let it alone; But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired, And is forced to forgive where he might have admired; Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced, It runs like a stream with a musical waste, And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;-- 'Tis not deep as a river, but who'd have it deep?

In a country where scarcely a village is found That has not its author sublime and profound, For some one to be slightly shoal is a duty, And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty.

His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error, And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror; 'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice,-- 'Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz; It is Nature herself, and there's something in that, Since most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.

No volume I know to read under a tree, More truly delicious than his A l' Abri, With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book, Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook; With June coming softly your shoulder to look over, Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over, And Nature to criticise still as you read,-- The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.

"He's so innate a c.o.c.kney, that had he been born Where plain bare-skin 's the only full-dress that is worn, He'd have given his own such an air that you'd say 'T had been made by a tailor to lounge in Broadway.

His nature's a gla.s.s of champagne with the foam on 't, As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont; So his best things are done in the flush of the moment, If he wait, all is spoiled; he may stir it and shake it, But, the fixed air once gone, he can never re-make it.

He might be a marvel of easy delightfulness, If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness; And he ought to let Scripture alone--'t is self-slaughter, For n.o.body likes inspiration-and-water.

He'd have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid, Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid, His wit running up as Canary ran down,-- The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.

"Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban,-- (The Church of Socinus, I mean)--his opinions Being So-(ultra)-cinian, they shocked the Socinians; They believed--faith I'm puzzled--I think I may call Their belief a believing in nothing at all, Or something of that sort; I know they all went For a general union of total dissent: He went a step farther; without cough or hem, He frankly avowed he believed not in them; And, before he could be jumbled up or prevented From their orthodox kind of dissent he dissented.

There was heresy here, you perceive, for the right Of privately judging means simply that light Has been granted to _me_, for deciding on _you_, And in happier times, before Atheism grew, The deed contained clauses for cooking you too.

Now at Xerxes and Knut we all laugh, yet our foot With the same wave is wet that mocked Xerxes and Knut; And we all entertain a sincere private notion, That our _Thus far!_ will have a great weight with the ocean.

'Twas so with our liberal Christians: they bore With sincerest conviction their chairs to the sh.o.r.e; They brandished their worn theological birches, Bade natural progress keep out of the Churches, And expected the lines they had drawn to prevail With the fast-rising tide to keep out of their pale; They had formerly dammed the Pontifical See, And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.; But he turned up his nose at their murmuring and shamming, And cared (shall I say?) not a d-- for their damming; So they first read him out of their church, and next minute Turned round and declared he had never been in it.

But the ban was too small or the man was too big, For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig; (He don't look like a man who would _stay_ treated shabbily, Sophroniscus' son's head o'er the features of Rabelais;)-- He bangs and bethwacks them,--their backs he salutes With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots; His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced, And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Ca.s.s, Zerduscht, Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan, Cush, Pitt, (not the bottomless, _that_ he's no faith in,) Pan, Pillic.o.c.k, Shakspeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson, Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson, Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Monis, Musaeus, Muretus, _hem_,-- Scorpionis, Maccabee, Maccaboy, Mac--Mac--ah! Machiavelli, Condorcet, Count d'Orsay, Conder, Say, Ganganelli, Orion, O'Connell, the Chevalier D'O, (See the Memoirs of Sully) t? p??, the great toe Of the statue of Jupiter, now made to pa.s.s For that of Jew Peter by good Romish bra.s.s,-- (You may add for yourselves, for I find it a bore, All the names you have ever, or not, heard before, And when you've done that--why, invent a few more.) His hearers can't tell you on Sunday beforehand, If in that day's discourse they'll be Bibled or Koraned, For he's seized the idea (by his martyrdom fired,) That all men (not orthodox) _may be_ inspired; Yet tho' wisdom profane with his creed he may weave in, He makes it quite clear what he _doesn't_ believe in, While some, who decry him, think all Kingdom Come Is a sort of a, kind of a, species of Hum, Of which, as it were, so to speak, not a crumb Would be left, if we didn't keep carefully mum, And, to make a clean breast, that 'tis perfectly plain That _all_ kinds of wisdom are somewhat profane; Now P.'s creed than this may be lighter or darker, But in one thing, 'tis clear, he has faith, namely--Parker; And this is what makes him the crowd-drawing preacher, There's a background of G.o.d to each hard-working feature, Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest: There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest, If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least, His gestures all downright and same, if you will, As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill, But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke, Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak, You forget the man wholly, you're thankful to meet With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street, And to hear, you're not over-particular whence, Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense.

"There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified, Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.

He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation, (There's no doubt that he stands in supreme iceolation,) Your topmost Parna.s.sus he may set his heel on, But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,-- He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on: Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em, But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm; If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul, Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.

"He is very nice reading in summer, but _inter_ _Nos_, we don't want _extra_ freezing in winter; Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is, When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.

But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in him, He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him; And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is, Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities,-- To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?

No, to old Berks.h.i.+re's hills, with their limestone and granite.

If you're one who _in loco_ (add _foco_ here) _desipis_, You will get of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece; But you'd get deeper down if you came as a precipice, And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain, If you only could palm yourself off for a mountain.

Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning, Some scholar who's hourly expecting his learning, Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth Is worth near as much as your whole tuneful herd's worth.

No, don't be absurd, he's an excellent Bryant; But, my friends, you'll endanger the life of your client, By attempting to stretch him up into a giant: If you choose to compare him, I think there are two per- sons fit for a parallel--Thomson and Cowper;[C]

I don't mean exactly,--there's something of each, There's T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach; Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness, And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,-- A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on The heart which strives vainly to burst off a b.u.t.ton,-- A brain which, without being slow or mechanic, Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic; He's a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten, And the advantage that Wordsworth before him has written.

[Footnote C: To demonstrate quickly and easily how per- -versely absurd 'tis to sound this name _Cowper_, As people in general call him named _super_, I just add that he rhymes it himself with horse-trooper.]

"But, my dear little bardlings, don't p.r.i.c.k up your ears, Nor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers; If I call him an iceberg, I don't mean to say There is nothing in that which is grand, in its way; He is almost the one of your poets that knows How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose; If he sometimes fall short, he is too wise to mar His thought's modest fulness by going too far; 'Twould be well if your authors should all make a trial Of what virtue there is in severe self-denial, And measure their writings by Hesiod's staff, Which teaches that all have less value than half.

"There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing; And his failures arise, (though perhaps he don't know it,) From the very same cause that has made him a poet,-- A fervor of mind which knows no separation 'Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration, As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing If 'twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing; Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, While, borne with the rush of the metre along, The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, Content with the whirl and delirium of song; Then his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes, And he's p.r.o.ne to repeat his own lyrics sometimes, Not his best, though, for those are struck off at white-heats When the heart in his breast like a trip-hammer beats, And can ne'er be repeated again any more Than they could have been carefully plotted before: Like old what's-his-name there at the battle of Hastings, (Who, however, gave more than mere rhythmical bastings,) Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights For reform and whatever they call human rights, Both singing and striking in front of the war And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor; _Anne haec_, one exclaims, on beholding his knocks, _Vestis filii tui_, O, leather-clad Fox?

Can that be thy son, in the battle's mid din, Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in To the brain of the tough old Goliah of sin, With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?

"All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard, Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave When to look but a protest in silence was brave; All honor and praise to the women and men Who spoke out for the dumb and the down-trodden then!

I need not to name them, already for each I see History preparing the statue and niche; They were harsh, but shall _you_ be so shocked at hard words Who have beaten your pruning-hooks up into swords, Whose rewards and hurrahs men are surer to gain By the reaping of men and of women than grain?

Why should _you_ stand aghast at their fierce wordy war, if You scalp one another for Bank or for Tariff?

Your calling them cut-throats and knaves all day long Don't prove that the use of hard language is wrong; While the World's heart beats quicker to think of such men As signed Tyranny's doom with a b.l.o.o.d.y steel-pen, While on Fourth-of-Julys beardless orators fright one With hints at Harmodius and Aristogeiton, You need not look shy at your sisters and brothers Who stab with sharp words for the freedom of others;-- No, a wreath, twine a wreath for the loyal and true Who, for the sake of the many, dared stand with the few, Not of blood-spattered laurel for enemies braved, But of broad, peaceful oak-leaves for citizens saved!

"Here comes Dana, abstractedly loitering along Involved in a paulo-post-future of song, Who'll be going to write what'll never be written Till the Muse, ere he thinks of it, gives him the mitten,-- Who is so well aware of how things should be done, That his own works displease him before they're begun,-- Who so well all that makes up good poetry knows That the best of his poems is written in prose; All saddled and bridled stood Pegasus waiting, He was booted and spurred, but he loitered debating, In a very grave question his soul was immersed,-- Which foot in the stirrup he ought to put first; And, while this point and that he judicially dwelt on, He, somehow or other, had written Paul Felton, Whose beauties or faults, whichsoever you see there, You'll allow only genius could hit upon either.

That he once was the Idle Man none will deplore, But I fear he will never be anything more; The ocean of song heaves and glitters before him, The depth and the vastness and longing sweep o'er him, He knows every breaker and shoal on the chart, He has the Coast Pilot and so on by heart, Yet he spends his whole life, like the man in the fable, In learning to swim on his library-table.

"There swaggers John Neal, who has wasted in Maine The sinews and chords of his pugilist brain, Who might have been poet, but that, in its stead, he Preferred to believe that he was so already; Too hasty to wait till Art's ripe fruit should drop, He must pelt down an unripe and colicky crop; Who took to the law, and had this sterling plea for it, It required him to quarrel, and paid him a fee for it; A man who's made less than he might have, because He always has thought himself more than he was,-- Who, with very good natural gifts as a bard, Broke the strings of his lyre out by striking too hard, And cracked half the notes of a truly fine voice, Because song drew less instant attention than noise.

Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough, And that all beyond that is just bother and stuff.

No vain man matures, he makes too much new wood; His blooms are too thick for the fruit to be good; 'Tis the modest man ripens, 'tis he that achieves, Just what's needed of suns.h.i.+ne and shade he receives; Grapes, to mellow, require the cool dark of their leaves; Neal wants balance; he throws his mind always too far, Whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star; He has so much muscle, and loves so to show it, That he strips himself naked to prove he's a poet, And, to show he could leap Art's wide ditch, if he tried, Jumps clean o'er it, and into the hedge t'other side.

He has strength, but there's nothing about him in keeping; One gets surelier onward by walking than leaping; He has used his own sinews himself to distress, And had done vastly more had he done vastly less; In letters, too soon is as bad as too late, Could he only have waited he might have been great, But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist, And muddied the stream ere he took his first taste.

"There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare That you hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; 'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood, Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,-- He's a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck; When nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, So, to fill out her model, a little she spared From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared, And she could not have hit a more excellent plan For making him fully and perfectly man.

The success of her scheme gave her so much delight, That she tried it again, shortly after, in Dwight; Only, while she was kneading and shaping the clay, She sang to her work in her sweet childish way, And found, when she'd put the last touch to his soul, That the music had somehow got mixed with the whole.

"Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so; If a person prefer that description of praise, Why, a coronet's certainly cheaper than bays; But he need take no pains to convince us he's not (As his enemies say) the American Scott.

Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud That one of his novels of which he's most proud, And I'd lay any bet that, without ever quitting Their box, they'd be all, to a man, for acquitting.

He has drawn you one character, though, that is new, One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince, He has done naught but copy it ill ever since; His Indians, with proper respect be it said, Are just Natty b.u.mpo daubed over with red, And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat, Rigged up in duck pants and a sou'-wester hat, (Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found To have slipt the old fellow away underground.) All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks, The _derniere chemise_ of a man in a fix, (As a captain besieged, when his garrison's small, Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o'er the wall;) And the women he draws from one model don't vary, All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.

When a character's wanted, he goes to the task As a cooper would do in composing a cask; He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful, Just hoops them together as tight as is needful, And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he Has made at the most something wooden and empty.

"Don't suppose I would underrate Cooper's abilities, If I thought you'd do that, I should feel very ill at ease; The men who have given to _one_ character life And objective existence, are not very rife, You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers, Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers, And Natty won't go to oblivion quicker Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar.

"There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis, Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity, He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity.

Now he may overcharge his American pictures, But you'll grant there's a good deal of truth in his strictures; And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak, Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

"There are truths you Americans need to be told, And it never'll refute them to swagger and scold; John Bull, looking o'er the Atlantic, in choler At your aptness for trade, says you wors.h.i.+p the dollar; But to scorn such i-dollar-try's what very few do, And John goes to that church as often as you do.

No matter what John says, don't try to outcrow him, 'Tis enough to go quietly on and outgrow him; Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number one Displacing himself in the mind of his son, And detests the same faults in himself he'd neglected When he sees them again in his child's gla.s.s reflected; To love one another you're too like by half, If he is a bull, you 're a pretty stout calf, And tear your own pasture for naught but to show What a nice pair of horns you're beginning to grow.

"There are one or two things I should just like to hint, For you don't often get the truth told you in print.

The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders) Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders; Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves, You've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves; Tho' you brag of your New World, you don't half believe in it, And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it; Your G.o.ddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl, With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl, With eyes bold as Here's, and hair floating free, And full of the sun as the spray of the sea, Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing, Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing, Who can drive home the cows with a song through the gra.s.s, Keeps glancing aside into Europe's cracked gla.s.s, Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste; She loses her fresh country charm when she takes Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.

"You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought, With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught; Your literature suits its each whisper and motion To what will be thought of it over the ocean; The cast clothes of Europe your statesmans.h.i.+p tries And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-- Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood, To which the dull current in hers is but mud; Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails, In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she rails, And your sh.o.r.e will soon be in the nature of things Covered thick with gilt driftwood of runaway kings, Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif, Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.

O, my friends, thank your G.o.d, if you have one, that he 'Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea, Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines, By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs, Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age, As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page, Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, all things make new, To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true, Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks, And become my new race of more practical Greeks.-- Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't, Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot."

Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic More pepper than brains, shrieked--"The man's a fanatic, I'm a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers, And will make him a suit that'll serve in all weathers; But we'll argue the point first, I'm willing to reason't, Palaver before condemnation's but decent, So, through my humble person, Humanity begs Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs."

But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth As when ??e ???t? ??????, and so forth, And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, But, as he was going, gained courage to say,-- "At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to't as any one else."

"Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,"

Answered Phbus severely; then turning to us, "The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss Is only in taking a great busy nation For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.-- But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to?

She has such a penchant for bothering me too!

She always keeps asking if I don't observe a Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva; She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;-- She's been travelling now, and will be worse than ever; One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she'd be Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea, For a woman must surely see well, if she try, The whole of whose being's a capital I: She will take an old notion, and make it her own, By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone, Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep, By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it.

There is one thing she owns in her own single right, It is native and genuine--namely, her spite: Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows A censer of vanity 'neath her own nose."

Here Miranda came up, and said, "Phbus, you know That the infinite Soul has its infinite woe, As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl Since the day I was born, with the infinite Soul; I myself introduced, I myself, I alone, To my Land's better life authors solely my own, Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken, Whose works sound a depth by Life's quiet unshaken, Such as Shakspeare, for instance, the Bible, and Bacon, Not to mention my own works; Time's nadir is fleet, And, as for myself, I'm quite out of conceit"--

"Quite out of conceit! I'm enchanted to hear it,"

Cried Apollo aside, "Who'd have thought she was near it?

To be sure one is apt to exhaust those commodities He uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings, 'I'm as much out of salt as Miranda's own writings,'

(Which, as she in her own happy manner has said, Sound a depth, for 'tis one of the functions of lead.) She often has asked me if I could not find A place somewhere near me that suited her mind; I know but a single one vacant, which she, With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T.

And it would not imply any pause or cessation In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,-- She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses, And remain Tiring-woman for life to the Muses."