Anticipatory Dirge on Professor Buckland, the Geologist. BY BISHOP SHUTTLEWORTH. “Mourn, Ammonites, mourn o’er his funeral urn,
Whose neck ye must grace no more;
Gneiss, Granite, and Slate!—he settled your date,
And his ye must now deplore.
Weep, Caverns, weep! with infiltering drip,
Your recesses he’ll cease to explore;
For mineral veins or organic remains
No Stratum again will he bore.
Oh! his wit shone like crystal!—his knowledge profound
From Gravel to Granite descended;
No Trap could deceive him, no Slip could confound,
Nor specimen, true or pretended.
He knew the birth-rock of each pebble so round,
And how far its tour had extended.
His eloquence rolled like the Deluge retiring,
Which Mastodon carcases floated;
To a subject obscure he gave charms so inspiring
Young and old on Geology doated.
He stood forth like an Outlier; his hearers admiring
In pencil each anecdote noted.
Where shall we our great professor inter,
That in peace may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre,
He’ll rise up and break the stones,
And examine each Stratum that lies around,
For he’s quite in his element underground.
If with mattock and spade his body we lay
In the common Alluvial soil;
He’ll start up and snatch those tools away
Of his own geological toil;
In a Stratum so young the professor disdains
That embedded should be his Organic Remains.
Then, exposed to the drip of some case-hard’ning spring,
His carcase let Stalactite cover;
And to Oxford the petrified sage let us bring,
When he is encrusted all over,
There, mid Mammoths and Crocodiles, high on a shelf,
Let him stand as a Monument raised to himself.” | When Professor Buckland’s grave was being dug in Islip churchyard, in August 1856, the men came unexpectedly upon the solid limestone rock, which they were obliged to blast with gunpowder. The coincidence of this fact with some of the verses in the above anticipatory dirge is somewhat remarkable. The following is by Jacob F. Henrici, and appeared originally in Scribner’ s Magazine for November 1879: A Microscopic Serenade. “Oh come, my love, and seek with me
A realm by grosser eye unseen,
Where fairy forms will welcome thee,
And dainty creatures hail thee queen.
In silent pools the tube I’ll ply,
Where green conferva-threads lie curled,
And proudly bring to thy bright eye
The trophies of the protist world.
We’ll rouse the stentor from his lair,
And gaze into the cyclops’ eye;
In chara and nitella hair
The protoplasmic stream descry,
For ever weaving to and fro
With faint molecular melody;
And curious rotifers I’ll show,
And graceful vorticellidÆ.
Where melicertÆ ply their craft
We’ll watch the playful water-bear,
And no envenomed hydra’s shaft
Shall mar our peaceful pleasure there;
But while we whisper love’s sweet tale
We’ll trace, with sympathetic art,
Within the embryonic snail
The growing rudimental heart.
Where rolls the volvox sphere of green,
And plastids move in Brownian dance—
If, wandering ’mid that gentle scene,
Two fond amoebÆ shall perchance
Be changed to one beneath our sight
By process of biocrasis,
We’ll recognise, with rare delight,
A type of our prospective bliss.
Oh dearer thou by far to me
In thy sweet maidenly estate
Than any seventy-fifth could be,
Of aperture however great!
Come, go with me, and we will stray
Through realm by grosser eye unseen,
Where protophytes shall homage pay,
And protozoa hail thee queen.” | The epitaph following was written by the learned and witty Dr. Charles Smith, author of the histories of Cork and Waterford. It was read at a meeting of the Dublin Medico-Philosophical Society on July 1, 1756, and is a very curious specimen of the “terminology of chemistry:” “Boyle Godfrey, Chymist and Doctor of Medicine. EPITAPHIUM CHEMICUM. Here lieth to digest, macerate, and amalgamate with clay,
In Balneo ArenÆ,
Stratum super stratum,
The Residuum, Terra Damnata, and Caput Mortuum,
Of Boyle Godfrey, Chimist,
And M.D.
A man who in this earthly Laboratory
Pursued various processes to obtain
Arcanum VitÆ,
Or the secret to Live;
Also Aurum VitÆ,
Or the art of getting, rather than making, Gold.
Alchemist like,
All his labour and propition,
As Mercury in the fire, evaporated in fumo.
When he dissolved to his first principles,
He departed as poor
As the last drops of an alembic;
For riches are not poured
On the Adepts of this world.
Thus,
Not Solar in his purse,
Neither Lunar in his disposition,
Nor Jovial in his temperament;
Being of Saturnine habit,
Venereal conflicts had left him,
And Martial ones he disliked.
With nothing saline in his composition,
All Salts but two were his Nostrums.
The Attic he did not know,
And that of the Earth he thought not Essential;
But, perhaps, his had lost its savour.
Though fond of news, he carefully avoided
The fermentation, effervescence,
And decupilation of this life.
Full seventy years his exalted essence
Was hermetically sealed in its terrene matrass;
But the radical moisture being exhausted,
The Elixir VitÆ spent,
Inspissated and exsiccated to a cuticle,
He could not suspend longer in his vehicle,
But precipitated gradatim
Per companum
To his original dust.
May that light, brighter than Bolognian Phosphorus,
Preserve him from the Incineration and Concremation
Of the Athanor, Empyreuma, and Reverberatory
Furnace of the other world,
Depurate him, like Tartarus Regeneratus,
From the Foeces and Scoria of this;
Highly rectify and volatilize
His Etherial Spirit,
Bring it over the helm of the Retort of this Globe,
Place in a proper Recipient,
Or Crystalline Orb,
Among the elect of the Flowers of Benjamin,
Never to be saturated
Till the general Resuscitation,
Deflagration, and Calcination of all Things,
When all the reguline parts
Of his comminuted substance
Shall be again concentrated,
Revivified, alcoholized,
And imbibe its pristine Archeses;
Undergo a new transmutation,
Eternal fixation,
And combination of its former Aura;
Be coated over and decorated in robes more fair
Than the majestie of Bismuth,
More sparkling than Cinnabar,
Or Aurum Mosaicum.
And being found Proof Spirit,
Then to be exalted and sublimed together
Into the Concave Dome
Of the highest Aludel in Paradise.” | To Clara Morchella Deliciosa. (A MYCOLOGICAL SERENADE.) By Mr. A. Stephen Wilson, North Kinmundy, Aberdeenshire, and
read at a meeting of the Cryptogamic Society at Glasgow in 1880. “Oh, lovely Clara, hie with me
Where Cryptogams in beauty spore,
Corticiums creep on trunk and tree,
And fairy rings their curves restore;
Mycelia there pervade the ground,
And many a painted pileus rear,
Agarics rend their veils around
The ranal overture to hear.
Where gay PezizÆ flaunt their hues,
A microscopic store we’ll glean,
To sketch with camera the views
In which the ascus may be seen.
Beneath our millemetric gaze
Sporidia’s length will stand revealed,
And eyes like thine will trace the maze
In each hymenium concealed.
Æstivum tubers we shall dig,
Like SuidÆ in Fagian shade,
And many a SphÆria-sheltering twig
Will in our vascula be laid.
For hard Sclerotia we shall peer,
In barks and brassicaceous leaves,
And trace their progress through the year,
Like Bobbies on the track of thieves.
While sages deem Solanum sent
To succour Homo’s hungry maw,
We’ll prize it for development
Of swelling Peronospora.
We’ll mount the Myxogastre’s threads
To watch Plasmodium’s vital flow,
While Capillitia lift their heads
Generic mysteries to show.
I’ll bring thee where the Chantarelles
Inspire a mycologic theme,
Where Phallus in the shadow smells,
And scarlet Amanita gleam;
And lead thee where M’Moorlan’s rye
Is waving black with ergot spurs,
And many a Trichobasian dye
Gives worth to corn and prickly burs.
And when the beetle calls us home,
We’ll gather on our lingering way
The violaceous Inolome
And russet Alutacea,
The brown Boletus edulis
Our fishing baskets soon will fill—
We’ll dine on fungi fried in bliss,
Nor dread the peck of butcher’s bill.” | To the Pliocene Skull. (A GEOLOGICAL ADDRESS.) “‘Speak, O man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil!
Primal pioneer of pliocene formation,
Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum
Of volcanic tufa!
‘Older than the beasts, the oldest PalÆotherium;
Older than the trees, the oldest Cryptogami;
Older than the hills, those infantile eruptions
Of earth’s epidermis!
‘Eo—Mio—Plio—whatso’er the “cene” was
That those vacant sockets filled with awe and wonder,—
Whether shores Devonian or Silurian beaches,—
Tell us thy strange story!
‘Or has the professor slightly antedated
By some thousand years thy advent on this planet,
Giving thee an air that’s somewhat better fitted
For cold-blooded creatures?
‘Wert thou true spectator of that mighty forest
When above thy head the stately Sigillaria
Reared its columned trunks in that remote and distant
Carboniferous epoch?
‘Tell us of that scene,—the dim and watery woodland,
Songless, silent, hushed, with never bird or insect,
Veiled with spreading fronds and screened with tall club-mosses,
Lycopodiacea,—
‘When beside thee walked the solemn Plesiosaurus,
And around thee crept the festive Ichthyosaurus,
While from time to time above thee flew and circled
Cheerful Pterodactyls.
‘Tell us of thy food,—those half-marine refections,
Crinoids on the shell and Brachiopods au naturel,—
Cuttlefish to which the pieuvre of Victor Hugo
Seems a periwinkle.
‘Speak, thou awful vestige of the earth’s creation,—
Solitary fragment of remains organic!
Tell the wondrous secret of thy past existence,—
Speak! thou oldest primate!’
Even as I gazed, a thrill of the maxilla,
And a lateral movement of the condyloid process,
With post-pliocene sounds of healthy mastication,
Ground the teeth together.
And, from that imperfect dental exhibition,
Stained with express juices of the weed Nicotian,
Came these hollow accents, blent with softer murmurs
Of expectoration:
‘Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted
Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County,
But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces
Home to old Missouri!’”
—Bret Harte. | The following verses are from “Notes and Queries,” and evidently refer to a case of “breach of promise”: Knox Ward, King-at-Arms, disarmed at Law. “Ye fair injured nymphs, and ye beaus who deceive ’em,
Who with passion engage, and without reason leave ’em,
Draw near and attend how the Hero I sing
Was foiled by a Girl, though at Arms he was King.
Crest, mottoes, supporters, and bearings knew he,
And deeply was studied in old pedigree.
He would sit a whole evening, and, not without rapture,
Tell who begat who to the end of the Chapter.
In forming his tables nought grieved him so sorely
That the man died Coelebs, or else sine prole.
At last, having traced other families down,
He began to have thoughts of increasing his own.
A Damsel he chose, not too slow of belief,
And fain would be deemed her admirer in chief.
He blazoned his suit, and the sum of his tale
Was his field and her field joined party per pale.
In different style, to tie faster the noose,
He next would attack her in soft billet doux.
His argent and sable were laid aside quite,
Plain English he wrote, and in plain black and white.
Against such atchievements what beauty could fence?
Or who would have thought it was all but pretence?—
His pain to relieve, and fulfil his desire,
The lady agreed to join hands with the squire.
The squire, in a fret that the jest went so far,
Considered with speed how to put in a bar.
His words bound not him, since hers did not confine her:
And that is plain law, because Miss is a minor.
Miss briskly replied that the law was too hard,
If she, who’s a minor, may not be a ward.
In law then confiding, she took it upon her,
By justice to mend those foul breaches of honour.
She handled him so that few would, I warrant,
Have been in his coat on so sleeveless an errant.
She made him give bond for stamped argent and or,
And sabled his shield with gules blazoned before.
Ye heralds produce, from the time of the Normans,
In all your Records such a base non-performance;
Or if without instance the case is we touch on,
Let this be set down as a blot in his scutcheon.” | Lament of an Unfortunate Druggist, A Member of the Pharmaceutical Society, whose matrimonial
speculations have been disappointed. “You that have charge of wedded love, take heed
To keep the vessel which contains it air-tight;
So that no oxygen may enter there!
Lest (like as in a keg of elder wine,
The which, when made, thy careless hand forgot
To bung securely down) full soon, alas!
Acetous fermentation supervene
And winter find thee wineless, and, instead
Of wine, afford thee nought but vinegar.
Thus hath it been with me: there was a time
When neither rosemary nor jessamine,
Cloves or verbena, marÉchale, resedÉ,
Or e’en great Otto’s self, were more delicious
Unto my nose, than Betsy to mine eyes;
And, in our days of courtship, I have thought
That my career through life, with her, would be
Bright as my own show-bottles; but, ah me!
It was a vision’d scene. From what she was
To what she is, is as the pearliness
Of Creta PrÆp. compared with Antim. Nig.
There was a time she was all Almond-mixture
(A bland emulsion; I can recommend it
To him who hath a cold), but now, woe! woe!
She is a fierce and foaming combination
Of turpentine with vitriolic oil.
Oh! name not Sulphur, when you speak of her,
For she is Brimstone’s very incarnation,
She is the Bitter-apple of my life,
The ScillÆ oxymel of my existence,
That knows no sweets with her.
What shall I do?—where fly?—What Hellebore
Can ease the madness that distracts my brain!
What aromatic vinegar restore
The drooping memory of brighter days!
They bid me seek relief in Prussic acid;
They tell me Arsenic holds a mighty power
To put to flight each ill and care of life:
They mention Opium, too; they say its essence,
Called Battley’s Sedative, can steep the soul
Chin-deep in blest imaginings; till grief
Changed by its chemic agency, becomes
One lump of blessed Saccharum;—these things
They tell to me—me, who for twelve long years
Have triturated drugs for a subsistence,
From seven i’ th’ morn until the midnight hour.
I have no faith in physic’s agency
E’en when most ‘genuine,’ for I have seen
And analysed its nature, and I know
That Humbug is its Active Principle,
Its ultimate and Elemental Basis.
What then is left? No more to Fate I’ll bend:
I will rush into chops! and Stout shall be—my end!!”
—Punch (1844.) | Ode to “Davies’ Analytical” “Charming chaos, glorious puddle,
Ethics opaque, book of bliss;
Through thy platitudes I waddle,
O thou subtle synthesis!
To thy soft consideration,
Give I talents, give I time;
Though ‘perpetual occultation’
Shuts me from thy balmy clime.
As unto the sea-tossed trader,
Is the guiding Polar Star;
Thou’rt my ‘zenith’ and my ‘nadir,’
Still ‘so near and yet so far.’
Sancho never loved his gravies
As I love thy sunny face;
Sheep-bound master-piece of Davies,
Benefactor of his race!
Man nor god, not even ‘ox-eyed
Juno,’ could me from thee part;
My ‘enthymeme,’ my sweet ‘protoxide,’
Thou’rt the ‘zeugma’ of my heart.
When were built the rocks azoic,
Sat’st thou on the granite hill;
And with constancy heroic,
To me thou art azoic still.
My ‘syzygy,’ I’ll ne’er leave thee,
Thou shalt ne’er from me escheat;
I will cherish thee, believe me,
Pythagorean obsolete.
Bless me in the midnight watches,
Ever by my pillow keep
Ruler, chalk, and black-board scratches,
Lovely nightmare, while I sleep.
Be ‘co-ordinate’ for ever,
For ever my ‘abscissa’ be;
The Fates can overwhelm me never,
Whilst thou art in ‘perigee.’” | Man and the Ascidian. A MORALITY IN THE QUEEN ANNE MANNER. “The Ancestor remote of Man,
Says D—w—n, is th’ Ascidian,
A scanty sort of water-beast
That, 90,000,000 years at least
Before Gorillas came to be,
Went swimming up and down the sea.
Their ancestors the pious praise,
And like to imitate their ways
How, then, does our first parent live,
What lesson has his life to give?
Th’ Ascidian tadpole, young and gay,
Doth Life with one bright eye survey,
His consciousness has easy play.
He’s sensitive to grief and pain,
Has tail, and spine, and bears a brain,
And everything that fits the state
Of creatures we call vertebrate.
But age comes on; with sudden shock
He sticks his head against a rock!
His tail drops off, his eye drops in,
His brain’s absorbed into his skin;
He does not move, nor feel, nor know
The tidal water’s ebb and flow,
But still abides, unstirred, alone,
A sucker sticking to a stone.
And we, his children, truly we
In youth are, like the Tadpole, free.
And where we would we blithely go,
Have brain and hearts, and feel and know.
Then Age comes on! To Habit we
Affix ourselves and are not free;
Th’ Ascidian’s rooted to a rock,
And we are bond-slaves of the clock;
Our rock is Medicine—Letters—Law,
From these our heads we cannot draw:
Our loves drop off, our hearts drop in,
And daily thicker grows our skin.
We scarcely live, we scarcely know
The wide world’s moving ebb and flow,
The clanging currents ring and shock,
But we are rooted to the rock.
And thus at ending of his span,
Blind, deaf, and indolent, does Man
Revert to the Ascidian.”
—St. James’s Gazette (July 1880). | A Geological Madrigal. “I have found out a gift for my fair;
I know where the fossils abound,
Where the footprints of Aves declare
The birds that once walked on the ground;
Oh, come, and—in technical speech—
We’ll walk this Devonian shore,
Or on some Silurian beach
We’ll wander, my love, evermore.
I will show thee the sinuous track
By the slow-moving Annelid made,
Or the Trilobite that, farther back,
In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid;
Thou shalt see in his Jurassic tomb,
The Plesiosaurus embalmed;
In his Oolitic prime and his bloom
Iguanodon safe and unharmed!
You wished—I remember it well,
And I loved you the more for that wish—
For a perfect cystedian shell
And a whole holocephalic fish.
And oh, if Earth’s strata contains
In its lowest Silurian drift,
Or palÆozoic remains
The same—’tis your lover’s free gift.
Then come, love, and never say nay,
But calm all your maidenly fears;
We’ll note, love, in one summer’s day
The record of millions of years;
And though the Darwinian plan
Your sensitive feelings may shock,
We’ll find the beginning of man—
Our fossil ancestors, in rock!”
—Bret Harte. |
The Husband’s Complaint. “Will she thy linen wash and hosen darn?”—Gay. “I’m utterly sick of this hateful alliance
Which the ladies have formed with impractical Science!
They put out their washing to learn hydrostatics,
And give themselves airs for the sake of pneumatics.
They are knowing in muriate, and nitrate, and chlorine,
While the stains gather fast on the walls and the flooring—
And the jellies and pickles fall woefully short,
With their chemical use of the still and retort.
Our expenses increase (without drinking French wines),
For they keep no accounts, with their tangents and sines?—
And to make both ends meet they give little assistance,
With their accurate sense of the squares of the distance.
They can name every spot from Peru to El Arish,
Except just the bounds of their own native parish;
And they study the orbits of Venus and Saturn,
While their home is resigned to the thief and the slattern.
Chronology keeps back the dinner two hours,
The smoke-jack stands still while they learn motive powers;
Flies and shells swallow up all our everyday gains,
And our acres are mortgaged for fossil remains.
They cease to reflect with their talk of refraction—
They drive us from home by electric attraction—
And I’m sure, since they’ve bothered their heads with affinity
I’m repulsed every hour from my learned divinity.
When the poor stupid husband is weary and starving,
Anatomy leads them to give up the carving;
And we drudges the shoulder of mutton must buy,
While they study the line of the os humeri.
If we ’scape from our troubles to take a short nap,
We awake with a din about limestone and trap;
And the fire is extinguished past regeneration,
For the women were wrapt in the deep-coal formation.
’Tis an impious thing that the wives of the laymen
Should use Pagan words ’bout a pistil and stamen;
Let the heir break his head while they foster a Dahlia,
And the babe die of pap as they talk of mammalia.
The first son becomes half a fool in reality,
While the mother is watching his large ideality;
And the girl roars unchecked, quite a moral abortion,
For we trust her benevolence, order, and caution.
I sigh for the good times of sewing and spinning,
Ere this new tree of knowledge had set them a sinning;
The women are mad, and they’ll build female colleges,—
So here’s to plain English!—a plague on their ’ologies!” | Homoeopathic Soup. “Take a robin’s leg
(Mind! the drumstick merely),
Put it in a tub
Filled with water nearly;
Set it out of doors,
In a place that’s shady,
Let it stand a week
(Three days if for a lady).
Drop a spoonful of it
In a five-pail kettle,
Which may be made of tin
Or any baser metal;
Fill the kettle up,
Set it on a boiling,
Strain the liquor well,
To prevent its oiling;
One atom add of salt,
For the thickening one rice kernel,
And use to light the fire
The Homoeopathic Journal.
Let the liquor boil
Half an hour or longer
(If ’tis for a man,
Of course you’ll make it stronger).
Should you now desire
That the soup be flavoury,
Stir it once around
With a stalk of Savory.
When the broth is made,
Nothing can excel it:
Then three times a day
Let the patient smell it.
If he chance to die,
Say ’twas Nature did it;
If he chance to live,
Give the soup the credit.” |
A Billet-Doux. BY A COUNTRY SCHOOLMASTER, CHIDDINGLY, SUSSEX. “Accept, dear Miss, this article of mine,
(For what’s indefinite, who can define?)
My case is singular, my house is rural,
Wilt thou, indeed, consent to make it plural?
Something, I feel, pervades my system through,
I can’t describe, yet substantively true.
Thy form so feminine, thy mind reflective,
Where all’s possessive good, and nought objective,
I’m positive none can compare with thee
In wit and worth’s superlative degree.
First person, then, indicative but prove,
Let thy soft passive voice exclaim, ‘I love!’
Active, in cheerful mood, no longer neuter,
I’ll leave my cares, both present, past, and future.
But ah! what torture must I undergo
Till I obtain that little ‘Yes’ or ‘No!’
Spare me the negative—to save compunction,
Oh, let my preposition meet conjunction.
What could excite such pleasing recollection,
At hearing thee pronounce this interjection,
‘I will be thine! thy joys and griefs to share,
Till Heaven shall please to point a period there’!”
—Family Friend (1849). | Cumulative verse—in which one newspaper gives a few lines, and other papers follow it up—like that which follows, is very common in American newspapers, which, however profound or dense, invariably have a corner for this kind of thing. It has been said that the reason why no purely comic paper, like Punch or Fun, succeeds in the United States, is because all their papers have a “funny” department. The Arab and his Donkey. An Arab came to the river side,
With a donkey bearing an obelisk;
But he would not try to ford the tide,
For he had too good an *.
—Boston Globe.
So he camped all night by the river side,
And remained till the tide had ceased to swell,
For he knew should the donkey from life subside,
He never would find its "".
—Salem Sunbeam.
When the morning dawned, and the tide was out,
The pair crossed over ’neath Allah’s protection;
And the Arab was happy, we have no doubt,
For he had the best donkey in all that §.
—Somerville Journal.
You are wrong, they were drowned in crossing over,
Though the donkey was bravest of all his race;
He luxuriates now in horse-heaven clover,
And his master has gone to the Prophet’s em[Symbol]
—Elevated Railway Journal.
These assinine poets deserved to be “blowed,”
Their rhymes being faulty and frothy and beery;
What really befell the ass and its load
Will ever remain a desolate ?.
—Paper and Print.
Our Yankee friends, with all their ——
For once, we guess, their mark have missed;
And with poetry Paper and Print is rash
In damming its flow with its editor’s [Symbol]
In parable and moral leave a [Symbol] between,[Space]
For reflection, or your wits fall out of joint;
The “Arab,” ye see, is a printing machine,
And the donkey is he who can’t see the [Symbol]
—British and Colonial Printer. | An Ohio poet thus sings of the beginning of man: Evolution. “O sing a song of phosphates,
Fibrine in a line,
Four and twenty follicles
In the van of time.
When the phosphorescence
Evoluted brain,
Superstition ended,
Man began to reign.” |
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