SONG

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root;
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear Mermaids singing,—
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
Nowhere

Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two or three.

John Donne.

THE OUBIT

Ir was an hairy oubit, sae proud he crept alang,

A feckless hairy oubit, and merrily he sang:

"My Minnie bade me bide at home until I won my wings, I shew her soon my soul's aboon the warks o' creeping things."

Double Ballade of Primitive Man

This feckless hairy oubit cam' hirpling by the linn,

331

A swirl o' wind cam' doun the glen, and blew that oubit in.
Oh, when he took the water, the saumon fry they rose,
And tigg'd him a' to pieces sma', by head and tail and toes.

Tak' warning then, young poets a', by this poor oubit's shame;

Though Pegasus may nicher loud, keep Pegasus at hame.
O haud your hands frae inkhorns, though a' the Muses woo;
For critics lie, like saumon fry, to mak' their meals o' you.
Charles Kingsley.

DOUBLE BALLADE OF PRIMITIVE MAN

He lived in a cave by the seas,

He lived upon oysters and foes,
But his list of forbidden degrees
An extensive morality shows;
Geological evidence goes

To prove he had never a pan,

But he shaved with a shell when he chose,

'Twas the manner of Primitive Man.

He worshipp'd the rain and the breeze,
He worshipp'd the river that flows,

And the Dawn, and the Moon, and the trees
And bogies, and serpents, and crows;

He buried his dead with their toes

Tucked-up, an original plan,

Till their knees came right under their nose,—
'Twas the manner of Primitive Man.

His communal wives, at his ease,

He would curb with occasional blows
Or his State had a queen, like the bees
(As another philosopher trows):
When he spoke, it was never in prose,

But he sang in a strain that would scan,
For (to doubt it, perchance, were morose)
'Twas the manner of Primitive Man!

On the coasts that incessantly freeze,

With his stones, and his bones, and his bows, On luxuriant tropical leas,

Where the summer eternally glows, He is found, and his habits disclose (Let theology say what she can) That he lived in the long, long agos, 'Twas the manner of Primitive Man!

From a status like that of the Crees
Our society's fabric arose,-
Develop'd, evolved, if you please,
But deluded chronologists chose,
In a fancied accordance with Mos
es, 4000 B.C. for the span

When he rushed on the world and its woes,-
'Twas the manner of Primitive Man.

But the mild anthropologist-he's

Not recent inclined to suppose Flints Palæolithic like these, Quaternary bones such as those! In Rhinoceros, Mammoth and Co.'s First epoch the Human began Theologians all to expose,

'Tis the mission of Primitive Man.

ENVOY

Max, proudly your Aryans pose,

But their rigs they undoubtedly ran,

For, as every Darwinian knows,

'Twas the manner of Primitive Man!

Andrew Lang.

PHILLIS'S AGE

How old may Phillis be, you ask,

Whose beauty thus all hearts engages?

To answer is no easy task:

For she has really two ages.

Phillis's Age

Stiff in brocade, and pinch'd in stays,
Her patches, paint, and jewels on;
All day let envy view her face,
And Phillis is but twenty-one.

Paint, patches, jewels laid aside,
At night astronomers agree,
The evening has the day belied;
And Phillis is some forty-three.

333

Matthew Prior.

V

CYNICISM

GOOD AND BAD LUCK

GOOD LUCK is the gayest of all gay girls;
Long in one place she will not stay:
Back from your brow she strokes the curls,
Kisses you quick and flies away.

But Madame Bad Luck soberly comes
And stays-no fancy has she for flitting;

Snatches of true-love songs she hums,

And sits by your bed, and brings her knitting.

BANGKOLIDYE

"GIMME my scarlet tie,"

Says I.

"Gimme my brownest boots and hat,

Gimme a vest with a pattern fancy,

Gimme a gel with some style, like Nancy,

And then-well, it's gimes as I'll be at,
Seein' as its bangkolidye,"

Says I.

"May miss it, but we'll try,"

Nancy ran like a frightened 'en

Says I.

Hup the steps of the bloomin' styeshun.
Bookin'-orfus at last! Salvyeshun!

John Hay.