The man who stirreth him upon the mountains, Or in the valleys, under open sky,
Needs not the aid of curious instrument
To warn him how time passes; no, he beareth
In his own breast a faithful monitor,
Which duly indicates the hour of noon :
Yea, more especially if he should labour,
And labour by the day, he is most certain
To hit the hour of noon before the time;
For the delightful intertwined ideas
Of noon and dinner, in the labourer's mind,
Like man and wife, are never to be parted.
And why is this? To say the man is hungry
Is to say nothing, or at best, no more
Than that he longs for something unpossessed-
A common case; and wherefore longeth he?
A question this, important and abstruse;
But, peradventure, it may be resolved
In some such way as this: we may behold
In the outward world no vacuum—all is full
Of life and matter, multiform and mixed,
Sentient and senseless-and may hence conclude
That, in the little world of man, the region
Called in the pugilists' vocabulary
Bread basket, (term significant and neat,)
Escheweth mightily all emptiness.
And further, we may readily perceive, Within us and without us, all is motion: One spirit of activity pervades
With pauseless energy all forms of being,
And analogically may infer
That the prime agent in the aforesaid basket,
The gastric fluid, hateth idleness;
And finding nothing wherewithal to work,
Like famished tiger, falls upon its keeper,
And suffereth not the honest man to rest
"Till he hath got his dinner ;-I'll get mine.
OR, A PAGE FROM MY PORT FOLIO.
Doubtless, we are a great and glorious people, Free, moral, wise, religious, and what not; Enjoying heartily, with other comforts, Opinions most respectful of ourselves.
Yes, doubtless, we are great, and every hour Becoming greater, like a vast mushroom. Towns rise, as if by magic, in the forest,
And where, of late, a troop of tuneful wolves Howled their wild wood-notes to the midnight moon, Caper the hopeful youth, and fiddles squeak.
Our virtuous and enlightened population
Rolls onward like a deluge, scattering wide,
With much commendable, unsparing zeal,
The tawny, two legg'd, and inferior vermin,
To dens obscure, and deserts far remote,
To trapper and to squatter yet unknown.
Yes, doubtless, we're a wise, a moral people. Ask ye for proof? and can ye not perceive The scent of whiskey float on every gale?
Others may boast their floods of milk and honey,
Ours may be called a whiskey-streaming land.
As flows life's current through the human frame
In countless rills meandering, so does whiskey
Flow through our country; but a copious tide,
Resembling more a torrent than a rill-
Marking its troubled and tumultuous course,
By poverty and crime, disease and death.
We kill the nations off to get the soil,
The soil produces grain, the grain the whiskey,
The whiskey ruin, both to soul and body;
And thus we travel the delightful round :
And modern Solomons, who rule the nation,
Wisely decline to tax the precious fluid,
Lest haply they might check the growth of grain,
And raise a frown upon a voter's brow.
Yes, doubtless, we're a free, a Christian people,
Holding this truth to be self-evident,
That all men are by Heaven created equal,
Endowed alike with right to liberty.
Doubt ye the fact? and have ye ne'er beheld
Upon our public ways, a group of beings,
Aye, human beings, with immortal souls,
Driven to the market, like a flock to slaughter,
Chained, sold, lashed, mangled, at the sound discretion
Of worthies, doubtless, of superior nature,
Because enveloped in a paler skin;
The dearest ties the heart can know dissevered,-
The parent parted from her infant treasure,
The fainting maiden from her lover torn,
And doomed to toil and slavery for ever.
Yes, doubtless, we're a moral, Christian people. God hath commanded, thou shalt do no murder; He, at whose bidding all things rose from nothing, And, at whose frown, would sink again to nought. And lo! forth crawls the important duellist,
An evanescent worm, a thing of dust,
And dares his wrath, and tramples on his law.
The curse of Cain is on him—his right hand,
His soul, encrimsoned with a brother's blood,
A friend a boon companion-one with whom,
A few short hours before, he had united,
Perhaps in scenes of folly and of crime:
What then? he mingles with congenial Christians,
Calls himself one, no doubt, and stands prepared
To enact the self-same Christian part again.
Will human laws deter him? Human laws
Were surely not designed for men of honour:
A starving wretch, in the pursuit of plunder,
Commits a murder, and he shall be hanged;
Not so your man of honour-he
may kill,
Arrange deliberately his mode of murder,
Become an adept by industrious practice,
And boast of his expertness at the trade;
He shall
go free he is a man of honour-
And laws, and those who ought to guard them, sleep.
O yes, no doubt—we are a Christian people.
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