Shapes of Clay

  And attend to what a Venerable Person has to say.
  Cease your writing, cease your shouting, cease your wild unearthly lying;
  Cease to bandy such expressions as are never, never found
  In the letter of a lover; cease 'exposing' and 'replying'—
  Let there be abated fury and a decrement of sound.
  For to-morrow will be Monday and the fifth day of November—
  Only day of opportunity before the final rush.
  Carpe diem! go conciliate each person who's a member
    Of the other party—do it while you can without a blush.
  'Lo! the time is close upon you when the madness of the season
    Having howled itself to silence, like a Minnesota 'clone,
  Will at last be superseded by the still, small voice of reason,
    When the whelpage of your folly you would willingly disown.
  'Ah, 'tis mournful to consider what remorses will be thronging,
    With a consciousness of having been so ghastly indiscreet,
  When by accident untoward two ex-gentlemen belonging
    To the opposite political denominations meet!
  'Yes, 'tis melancholy, truly, to forecast the fierce, unruly
    Supersurging of their blushes, like the flushes upon high
  When Aurora Borealis lights her circumpolar palace
    And in customary manner sets her banner in the sky.
  'Each will think: 'This falsifier knows that I too am a liar.
  Curse him for a son of Satan, all unholily compound!
  Curse my leader for another! Curse that pelican, my mother!
  Would to God that I when little in my victual had been drowned!''
  Then that Venerable Person went away without returning
  And, the madness of the season having also taken flight,
  All the people soon were blushing like the skies to crimson burning
  When Aurora Borealis fires her premises by night.

NOVUM ORGANUM.

  In Bacon see the culminating prime
  Of Anglo-Saxon intellect and crime.
  He dies and Nature, settling his affairs,
  Parts his endowments among us, his heirs:
  To every one a pinch of brain for seed,
  And, to develop it, a pinch of greed.
  Each thrifty heir, to make the gift suffice,
  Buries the talent to manure the vice.

GEOTHEOS.

As sweet as the look of a lover
Saluting the eyes of a maid,
That blossom to blue as the maid
Is ablush to the glances above her,
The sunshine is gilding the glade
And lifting the lark out of shade.
Sing therefore high praises, and therefore
Sing songs that are ancient as gold,
Of Earth in her garments of gold;
Nor ask of their meaning, nor wherefore
They charm as of yore, for behold!
The Earth is as fair as of old.
Sing songs of the pride of the mountains,
And songs of the strength of the seas,
And the fountains that fall to the seas
From the hands of the hills, and the fountains
That shine in the temples of trees,
In valleys of roses and bees.
Sing songs that are dreamy and tender,
Of slender Arabian palms,
And shadows that circle the palms,
Where caravans, veiled from the splendor,
Are kneeling in blossoms and balms,
In islands of infinite calms.
Barbaric, O Man, was thy runing
When mountains were stained as with wine
By the dawning of Time, and as wine
Were the seas, yet its echoes are crooning,
Achant in the gusty pine
And the pulse of the poet's line.

YORICK.

  Hard by an excavated street one sat
  In solitary session on the sand;
  And ever and anon he spake and spat
  And spake again—a yellow skull in hand,
  To which that retrospective Pioneer