The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes — Complete. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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       On hissing Folly's gas-exhaling brood,

       The pun, the fun, the moral, and the joke,

       The hit, the thrust, the pugilistic poke—

       Small space for these, so pressed by niggard Time,

       Like that false matron, known to nursery rhyme—

       Insidious Morey—scarce her tale begun,

       Ere listening infants weep the story done.

      Oh, had we room to rip the mighty bags

       That Time, the harlequin, has stuffed with rags!

       Grant us one moment to unloose the strings,

       While the old graybeard shuts his leather wings.

       But what a heap of motley trash appears

       Crammed in the bundles of successive years!

       As the lost rustic on some festal day

       Stares through the concourse in its vast array—

       Where in one cake a throng of faces runs,

       All stuck together like a sheet of buns—

       And throws the bait of some unheeded name,

       Or shoots a wink with most uncertain aim,

       So roams my vision, wandering over all,

       And strives to choose, but knows not where to fall.

      Skins of flayed authors, husks of dead reviews,

       The turn-coat's clothes, the office-seeker's shoes,

       Scraps from cold feasts, where conversation runs

       Through mouldy toasts to oxidated puns,

       And grating songs a listening crowd endures,

       Rasped from the throats of bellowing amateurs;

       Sermons, whose writers played such dangerous tricks

       Their own heresiarchs called them heretics,

       (Strange that one term such distant poles should link,

       The Priestleyan's copper and the Puseyan's zinc);

       Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs

       A blindfold minuet over addled eggs,

       Where all the syllables that end in ed,

       Like old dragoons, have cuts across the head;

       Essays so dark Champollion might despair

       To guess what mummy of a thought was there,

       Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase,

       Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise;

       Lectures that cut our dinners down to roots,

       Or prove (by monkeys) men should stick to fruits—

       Delusive error, as at trifling charge

       Professor Gripes will certify at large;

       Mesmeric pamphlets, which to facts appeal,

       Each fact as slippery as a fresh-caught eel;

       And figured heads, whose hieroglyphs invite

       To wandering knaves that discount fools at sight:

       Such things as these, with heaps of unpaid bills,

       And candy puffs and homoeopathic pills,

       And ancient bell-crowns with contracted rim,

       And bonnets hideous with expanded brim,

       And coats whose memory turns the sartor pale,

       Their sequels tapering like a lizard's tale—

       How might we spread them to the smiling day,

       And toss them, fluttering like the new-mown hay,

       To laughter's light or sorrow's pitying shower,

       Were these brief minutes lengthened to an hour.

      The narrow moments fit like Sunday shoes—

       How vast the heap, how quickly must we choose!

       A few small scraps from out his mountain mass

       We snatch in haste, and let the vagrant pass.

       This shrunken CRUST that Cerberus could not bite,

       Stamped (in one corner) "Pickwick copyright,"

       Kneaded by youngsters, raised by flattery's yeast,

       Was once a loaf, and helped to make a feast.

       He for whose sake the glittering show appears

       Has sown the world with laughter and with tears,

       And they whose welcome wets the bumper's brim

       Have wit and wisdom—for they all quote him.

       So, many a tongue the evening hour prolongs

       With spangled speeches—let alone the songs;

       Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh,

       And weak teetotals warm to half and half,

       And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes,

       Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens,

       And wits stand ready for impromptu claps,

       With loaded barrels and percussion caps,

       And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys,

       Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze;

       While the great Feasted views with silent glee

       His scattered limbs in Yankee fricassee.

      Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays

       The pleasing game of interchanging praise.

       Self-love, grimalkin of the human heart,

       Is ever pliant to the master's art;

       Soothed with a word, she peacefully withdraws

       And sheathes in velvet her obnoxious claws,

       And thrills the hand that smooths her glossy fur

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