"Invention 's seventh heaven" the bard Has written-but my case Persuades me that the creature dwells In quite another place. Sniffing the lamp, the ancients thought But works of art are works indeed, Yet painting pictures some folks think Is merely play and fun ; That what is on an easel set Must easily be done. But, zounds! if they could sit in this Uneasy easy-chair, They'd very soon be glad enough To cut the Camel's hair. Oh! who can tell the pang it is Till, mad at last to find I am THE LOGICIANS. AN ILLUSTRATION. Metaphysics were a large field in which to exercise the weapons logic had put into their hands."-SCRIBLERUS. SEE here two cavillers, Would-be unravellers Of abstruse theory and questions mystical. In tête-à-tête, And deep debate, Wrangling according to forms syllogistical. Glowing and ruddy The light streams in upon their deep brown study, But still his meditative eye looks dull And muddy, For he is gazing inwardly, like Plato And things about, His eye is blind as that of a potato : In fact, logicians ; See but by syllogisms-taste and smell By propositions; And never let the common dray-horse senses How wise his brow! how eloquent his nose ' How gravely double is his chin, that shows His scornful lip forestals the confutation! O this is he that wisely with a major And minor proves a greengage is no gauger!- That cheese of sage will make no mite the sager. And cork'd an abstract conjuror in a bottle! And for mock turtle only supp'd sensations! O this is he that palpably decided, With grave and mathematical precision, How often atoms may be subdivided By long division; O this is he that show'd I is not I, And frisking in some other person's entity :- The other is a shrewd severer wight, A logical knight-errant, That wrangled ever-morning, noon, and night, From night to morn: he had no wife apparent But Barbara Celárent ! Woe unto him he caught in a dilemma, He took the luckless wight, and gave with them a And dangerous as he, in verbal duel! And for art logical his name was greater Look how they sit together! Two bitter desperate antagonists, Licking each other with their tongues, like fists, Merely to settle whether This world of ours had ever a beginning Whether created, Vaguely undated, Or Time had any finger in its spinning : Lets fall A written paper through the open casement. "O foolish wits! (thus runs the document) For your enjoyment as this verdant earth. Go eat and drink, and give your hearts to mirth, For vainly ye contend; Before you can decide about its birth, The world will have an end !" AS IT FELL UPON A DAY. , I WONDER that Wwritten a sonnet, or ballad, on a girl that had broken her pitcher. There are in the subject the poignant heart's anguish for sympathy and description ;-and the brittleness of jars and joys, with the abrupt loss of the watery fruits(the pumpkins as it were) of her labors, for a moral. In such childish accidents there is a world of woe;—the fall of earthenware is to babes, as, to elder contemplations, the Fall of Man. the Ami des Enfans, has never I have often been tempted myself to indite a didactic ode to that urchin in Hogarth, with the ruined pie-dish. What a lusty agony is wringing him—so that all for pity he could die;—and then, there is the instantaneous falling-on of the Beggar Girl, to lick up the fragments-expressively hinting how universally want and hunger are abounding in this miserable world-and ready gaping at every turn, for such windfalls and stray Godsends. But, hark!--what a shrill, feline cry startleth the wide Aldgate! Oh! what's befallen Bessy Brown, |