Shapes of Clay

    To punish men for pillage?'
  A dame, tall, fair and stately, passed,
    Who many charms united;
  He thanked his stars his lot was cast
    Where sepulchers were whited.
  He saw a soldier stiff and stern,
    'Full of strange oaths' and toddy;
  But was unable to discern
    A wound upon his body.
  Ten square leagues of rolling ground
    To one great man belonging,
  Looked like one little grassy mound
    With worms beneath it thronging.
  A palace's well-carven stones,
    Where Dives dwelt contented,
  Seemed built throughout of human bones
    With human blood cemented.
  He watched the yellow shining thread
    A silk-worm was a-spinning;
  'That creature's coining gold.' he said,
    'To pay some girl for sinning.'
  His eyes were so untrained and dim
    All politics, religions,
  Arts, sciences, appeared to him
    But modes of plucking pigeons.
  And so he drew his final breath,
    And thought he saw with sorrow
  Some persons weeping for his death
    Who'd be all smiles to-morrow.

A NIGHTMARE.

  I dreamed that I was dead. The years went by:
  The world forgot that such a man as I
    Had ever lived and written: other names
  Were hailed with homage, in their turn to die.
  Out of my grave a giant beech upgrew.
  Its roots transpierced my body, through and through,
    My substance fed its growth. From many lands
  Men came in troops that giant tree to view.
  'T was sacred to my memory and fame—
  My monument. But Allen Forman came,
    Filled with the fervor of a new untruth,
  And carved upon the trunk his odious name!

A WET SEASON.

Horas non numero nisi serenas.
  The rain is fierce, it flogs the earth,
    And man's in danger.
  O that my mother at my birth
    Had borne a stranger!
  The flooded ground is all around.
    The depth uncommon.
  How blest I'd be if only she
    Had borne a salmon.
  If still denied the solar glow
    'T were bliss ecstatic
  To be amphibious—but O,
    To be aquatic!
  We're worms, men say, o' the dust, and they
    That faith are firm of.
  O, then, be just: show me some dust
    To be a worm of.
  The pines are chanting overhead
    A psalm uncheering.
  It's O, to have been for ages dead
      And hard of hearing!
  Restore, ye Pow'rs, the last bright hours
      The dial reckoned;
  'Twas in the time of Egypt's prime—
      Rameses II.

THE CONFEDERATE FLAGS.

  Tut-tut! give back the flags—how can you care
    You veterans and heroes?
  Why should you at a kind intention swear
    Like twenty Neroes?
  Suppose the act was not so overwise—
    Suppose it was illegal—