صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني
[graphic][merged small][merged small]

So shall the fairy-train by glow-worm light
With rainbow tints thy folding pennons fret,
Thy scaly breast in deeper azure dight,

Thy burnish'd armour speck with glossier jet.

With viewless fingers weave thy wintry tent,
And line with gossamer thy pendant cell,
Safe in the rift of some lone ruin pent

Where ivy shelters from the storm-wind fell.

Blest if like thee I cropt with heedless spoil
The gifts of youth and pleasure in their bloom,
Doom'd for no coming winter's want to toil,
Fit for the spring that waits beyond the tomb.

THE DANCING BEAR.

RECOMMENDED TO THE ADVOCATES FOR THE SLAVE TRADE.

RARE music! I would rather hear cat-courtship
Under my bed-room window in the night,

Than this scraped cat-gut's screak. Rare dancing too!
Alas, poor bruin! how he foots the pole

And waddles round it with unwieldy steps

Swaying from side to side!—The dancing master
Hath had as profitless a pupil in thee

As when he would have tortured my poor toes

To minuet grace, and made them move like clock-work
In musical obedience. Bruin! bruin!

Thou art but a clumsy biped!—and the mob
With noisy merriment mock his heavy pace,
And laugh to see him led by the nose,-themselves
Led by the nose, embruted, and in the eye
Of reason from their nature's purposes

As miserably perverted.

Bruin-bear,

Now could I sonnetize thy piteous plight,
And prove how much my sympathetic heart
Even for the miseries of a beast can feel,

In fourteen lines of sensibility.

But we are told all things were made for man,
And I'll be sworn there's not a fellow here
Who would not swear 'twere hanging blasphemy
To doubt that truth. Therefore as thou wert born,
Bruin! for man, and man makes nothing of thee
In any other way, most logically

It follows, that thou must be born to dance,
That that great snout of thine was form'd on purpose
To hold a ring, and that thy fat was given thee
Only to make pomatum !

To demur
Were heresy. And politicians say,
(Wise men who in the scale of reason give
No foolish feelings weight,) that thou art here
Far happier than thy brother bears who roam
O'er trackless snows for food; that being born
Inferior to thy leader, unto him

Rightly belongs dominion; that the compact
Was made between ye, when thy clumsy feet
First fell into the snare, and he gave up
His right to kill, conditioning thy life
Should thenceforth be his property :-besides,
"Tis wholesome for thy morals to be brought
From savage climes into a civilized state,
Into the decencies of Christendom.-
Bear! bear! it passes in the parliament
For excellent logic this! what if we say
How barbarously man abuses power,
Talk of thy baiting, it will be replied,
Thy welfare is thy owner's interest,
But wert thou baited it would injure thee,
Therefore thou art not baited. For seven years
Hear it, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!
For seven long years this precious syllogism
Has baffled justice and humanity!

« السابقةمتابعة »