Poetry

the Cal. Acad.
And now the question is of more
Importance than it was before:
Shall vacancies among us be
To idiots threw open free?”

Fleet Strother

What! you were born, you animated doll,
Within the shadow of the Capitol?
’Twas always thought (and history so assures
Its trusting readers) it was reared in yours.

Reciprocity

The night was dark, the way was steep:
I scarcely, for fatigue, could creep.

“Fatigue, begone!” I cried. Not so;
It tarried and would not bego.

At length the last wan glimmer died,
Of hope that lit up my inside.

I let go all, and thought to sink
Back, headlong, from the mountain’s brink.

But ere I fell my startled eyes
Beheld a wonder in the skies.

I grasped again a friendly tree,
To stay me till I more could see.

(When shows are free that men admire
’Tis most unthrifty to expire.)

Seven clustered planets rose as one;
Their light was like another sun!

Straight upward to the zenith they,
Without defection, held their way.

Then paused, revealing with their light
A massive building on the height.

Before my very eyes its face
It reared; my feet were at its base.

And well I knew that I had clomb
To Lick’s renowned memorial dome,

Where Holden’s mammoth tube betrays
The stellar gambols to his gaze.

With lifted brow and heart elate
I entered by the stranger’s gate.

Smit with a reverential awe,
The great man’s figure there I saw.

He sat bolt upright in a chair⁠—
Legs crossed, arms folded and head bare.

No king that I had ever seen
(Nor surely any jack nor queen)

Had ever on a golden throne
With such a gracious aspect shone.

The giant telescope, reversed,
Seemed diving from the sky head first!

Its broader end remained at rest
Within two yards of Holden’s breast.

“O mighty scientist,” I cried,
“Let me beneath this dome abide.

“The night is bad, and o’er your roof
Seven crazy planets are aloof.

“The trails are terrors to my shanks;
I dread the planetary pranks!”

He deigned no word, but gave the nod.
That sign of an assenting god.

Meantime the telescope’s great eye
With splendor smote him, hip and thigh.

It seethed him in a lambent light,
Sharp, searching, glorious and white!

“Illustrious man,” I said again,
“This mystery I pray explain.

“Why is the glass reversed, and why
Are you in session ’neath its eye?

“ ’Tis little that I know of stars,
And Venus is to me as Mars;

“But, pardon me, I know aright
How gentlemen should pass the night.”

That great professor smiled, and O,
The smile was light and cold as snow!

“Know, then,” he said “that what you view
Is payment of a debt long due.

“For years I’ve watched the planets roll,
And mapped the stars from pole to pole.

“ ’Tis true I once, the people say,
Charted the lights of San Jose,

“But, generally speaking, I
Can tell the valley from the sky.

“Those planets up in Heaven’s high cope
I long have studied through the ’scope.

“Fair play’s a jewel, and to-night
Their observation I invite.

“I turn the tube and, as you see,
Permit them now to study Me.”

Next morn as on my way I sped,
“I’ve seen a just, good man,” I said.

Californian Summer Pictures

The Foot-Hill Resort

Assembled in the parlor
Of the place of last resort,
The smiler and the snarler
And the guests of every sort⁠—
The elocution chap
With rhetoric on tap;
The mimic and the funny dog;
The social sponge; the money-hog;
Vulgarian and dude;
And the prude;
The adiposing dame
With pimply face aflame;
The kitten-playful virgin
Of a half-a-hundred years;
The solemn-looking sturgeon
Of a firm of auctioneers;
The widower flirtatious;
The widow all too gracious;
The man with a proboscis and a sepulcher beneath.
One assassin picks his banjo, and another one his teeth.

The In-Coming Climate

Now o’ nights the ocean breeze
Makes the patient flinch,
For that zephyr bears a sneeze
In every cubic inch.
Lo! the admiring population
Chorusing in sternutation
A catarrhal acclamation!

A Long-Felt Want

Dimly apparent, through the gloom
Of Market-street’s opaque simoom,
A queue of people, parti-sexed,
Awaiting the command of “Next!”
A sidewalk booth, a dingy sign:
“Teeth dusted nice⁠—five cents a shine.”

To the Happy Hunting Grounds

Wide windy reaches of high stubble field;
A long gray road, bordered with dusty pines;
A wagon moving in a “cloud by day.”
Two city sportsmen with a dove between,
Breast-high upon a fence and fast asleep⁠—
A solitary dove, the only dove
In twenty counties, and it sick, or else
It were not there. Two guns that fire as one,
With thunder simultaneous and loud;
Two shattered human wrecks of blood and bone!
And later, in the gloaming, comes a man⁠—
The worthy local coroner is he,
Renowned all thereabout, and popular
With many a remain. All tenderly
Compiling in a game-bag the remains,
He glides into the gloom and fades from sight.
The dove, cured of its ailment by the shock,
Has flown, meantime, on pinions strong and fleet,
To die of age in some far foreign land.

Slander

Fitch:

“All vices you’ve exhausted, friend;
So all the papers say.”

Pickering:

“Ah, what vile calumnies are penned!⁠—
’Tis just the other way.”

James L. Flood

As oft it happens in the youth of day
That mists obscure the sun’s imperfect ray,
Who, as he’s mounting to the dome’s extreme,
Smites and dispels them with a steeper beam,
So you the vapors that begirt your birth
Consumed, and manifested all your worth.
But still one early vice obstructs the light
And sullies all the visible and bright
Display of mind and character. You write.

Three Candidates for Senator

To sleek your way to the goal of your hope,
O plausible Mr. Perkins,
You’ll need ten tons of the softest soap
And butter a thousand firkins.
The soap you could put to a better use
In washing your hands of ambition
Ere the butter’s used for cooking your goose
To a beautiful brown condition.

---

“The Railroad can’t run Stanford.” That is so⁠—
The tail can’t curl the pig; but then, you know,
Inside the vegetable-garden’s pale
The pig will eat more cabbage than the tail.

---

Gods! what a sight! Astride McClure’s broad back
Estee jogs round the Senatorial track,
The crowd all undecided, as they pass,
Whether to cheer the man or cheer the ass.
They stop: the man to lower his feet is seen,
And the tired beast, withdrawing from between,
Mounts, as they start again, the biped’s neck,
And scarce the crowd can say which one’s on deck.

A Growler

Judge Shafter, you’re an aged man, I know,
And learned too,