A Song of Impossibilities

When little fishes learn to speak,

Or poets not to feign;

When Dr. Geldart construes Greek,
I may be yours again!

When Pole and Thornton honour cheques,

Or Mr. Const a rogue;

When Jericho's in Middlesex,

Or minuets in vogue;

When Highgate goes to Devonport,

Or fashion to Guildhall;

When argument is heard at Court,
Or Mr. Wynn at all;

When Sydney Smith forgets to jest,
Or farmers to complain;

When kings that are are not the best,
I may be yours again!

When peers from telling money shrink,
Or monks from telling lies;
When hydrogen begins to sink,

Or Grecian scrip to rise;

When German poets cease to dream,

Americans to guess;

When Freedom sheds her holy beam
On Negroes, and the Press;
When there is any fear of Rome,
Or any hope of Spain;

When Ireland is a happy home,

I may be yours again!

When you can cancel what has been,

Or alter what must be,

Or bring once more that vanished scene,
Those withered joys to me;

When you can tune the broken lute,
Or deck the blighted wreath,

Or rear the garden's richest fruit,
Upon a blasted heath;

When you can lure the wolf at bay

Back to his shattered chain,

To-day may then be yesterday

I may be yours again!

329

Winthrop Mackworth Praed.

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

It 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.