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[Founded upon a well-known tale from the pen of the late William Leggett, Esq.]




Old Ironsides at anchor lay,
In the harbor of Mahon;
A dead calm rested on the bay--...

Once there was a man who loved himself very much, and who permitted himself no rivals in that love. He thought his face and figure the handsomest in all the world. Anything in the shape of a mirror that could show him his own l...

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Impertinent, we tease and weary Heaven
With prayers which would insult mere mortals even.
'Twould seem that not a god in all the skies
From our affairs must ever turn his eyes,...

Oh the wife she tried to tell me that 'twas nothing but the thrumming
Of a wood-pecker a-rapping on the hollow of a tree;
And she thought that I was fooling when I said it was the drumming...

He's the man from Eldorado, and he's just arrived in town,
In moccasins and oily buckskin shirt.
He's gaunt as any Indian, and pretty nigh as brown;
He's greasy, and he smells of sweat and dirt....

I

This is the sunburnt bushman who
Came down from Goondiwindi, Q.

II

This is the Push from Waterloo
That spotted the sunburnt bushman who
Came down from Goondiwindi, Q.
...

It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town,
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down.
He loitered here, he loitered there, till he was like to drop,...

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from Old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses, he was worth a thousand pound,...

It was the Man from Waterloo,
When work in town was slack,
Who took the track as bushmen do,
And humped his swag out back.

He tramped for months without a bob,
For most the sheds were full,...

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,...

At a lonely cross where bye-roads met
I sat upon a gate;
I saw the sun decline and set,
And still was fain to wait.

A trotting boy passed up the way
And roused me from my thought;...

Who joins not with his restless race
To give Dame Fortune eager chase?
O, had I but some lofty perch,
From which to view the panting crowd
Of care-worn dreamers, poor and proud,...

Who does not run after Fortune?

I would I were in some spot whence I could watch the eager crowds rushing from kingdom to kingdom in their vain chase after the daughter of Chance!
...

("Il semblait grelotter.")

[XXXVI., December, 1837.]


He seemed to shiver, for the wind was keen.
'Twas a poor statue underneath a mass
Of leafless branches, with a blackened back...

(Poitevin)


The bold Marine comes back from war,
So kind:
The bold Marine comes back from war,
So kind:
With a raggety coat and a worn-out shoe.
"Now, poor Marine, say, whence come you,...

I found me in a great surging space,
At either end a door,
And I said: "What is this giddying place,
With no firm-fixed floor,
That I knew not of before?"
"It is Life," said a mask-clad face.
...

SCENE: A moonlit glade on a summer midnight


THE POET

What consummation of the toiling moon
O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet,
Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green,...

Who calleth? - Thy Father calleth,
Run, O Daughter, to wait on Him:
He Who chasteneth but for a season
Trims thy lamp that it burn not dim.

Who calleth? - Thy Master calleth,...

I.

If souls could sing to heaven's high King
As blackbirds pipe on earth,
How those delicious courts would ring
With gusts of lovely mirth!
What white-robed throng could lift a song...

"In Him we live, and move, and have our being."

The measureless gulfs of air are full of Thee:
Thou Art, and therefore hang the stars; they wait,
And swim, and shine in God who bade them be,...