He sat at the dinner table
With a discontented frown,
The potatoes and steak were underdone
And the bread was baked too brown;
The pie was too sour and the pudding too sweet,
And the roast was much too fat;
The soup so greasy, too, and salt,
'Twas hardly fit for the cat.

“I wish you could eat the bread and pie
I've seen my mother make,
They are something like, and 'twould do you good
Just to look at a loaf of her cake.”
Said the smiling wife, “I'll improve with age—
Just now I'm but a beginner;
But your mother has come to visit us,

Sometimes I sauntered from my lone abode
Down to the palace of the town waiwode.
Methinks I see him on his rich divan,
In crimson clad, a proud and lordly man.
An amber-headed pipe of costly wood
Adorned his hand: around kawasses stood.
A sable beard his gravity bespoke,
His measured words the silence rarely broke.
Beside him sat a boy of gentle mien,
In rich attire, in age about fifteen.
His red tarbush o'ertopped his jet black hair,
His cheeks were comely and his skin was fair.
His faultless form, in Grecian garments cloaked,

In thy Dutch veins thy Irish current ran,
A tempest in the phlegm of a canal;
Hibernian spirits made thee partisan,
De Witt milk tranquilized thee cosmical!
Wasted thy youth in faction's offices
Thy lofty mind thy scullions drove afar,
And, looking downward from thy banished star,
Thou saw'st an isthmian labor like to Suez
When Amrou slashed it with his scimeter:
Niagara's dam to Amsterdam to draw,
The Indian oceans through the lunar Nile
And to another Persia give access!
Letters and Physics are the stones of Law:
Thy inspiration makes an empire smile.

The Pea Patch Island gems the throat
Of Delaware, whose bosom, then,
Swells many a yarded ship and boat
Past ocean beaches of Port Penn,
Where came a tired boy to swim
In summer, by the still hotel,
And hid him in the sedgy rim,
Lest some disaster him befell.

A maiden came, her limbs to swathe;
Alone she walked into the bay.
The boy then ventured in to bathe
And close behind the damsel play.
She was so prim she spied not him,
Her form her clinging garments hid,
And, unrevealed each lengthened limb,
Her mild eye lifted scarce its lid.

Little Minqua girl on the Christine kill!
Go get your sisters five
And stand them here twixt the kill and the hill,
Till the boatswain pipes alive:
Then, whistle, my Jack! and fiddle, Mynheer!
Till the Minqua girl so neat,
Can not stand still for the little brown ear
That tells such tunes to her feet!
Then whistle, my Jack! and fiddle Mynheer!
And the brandy wine kag tip more!
The Minqua maid is my little brown deer—
The Swede man's happy ashore!

The Kalmar Nyckel's a right fine ship,
The Vogel Gripen's fast,

New lands will bring new poets. By the streams
Of far Australia poets will be heard,
Choosing their similes from strange-fledged bird,—
Writing love-sonnets where blue water gleams
By banks of flowers more gorgeous than our dreams!—
In South America, or Mexico,
Or where the Indian feathery palm-fronds grow,
Song will awake,—and search out untried themes.

New Beatrices in those far-off lands
Shall thrill new Dantes into song as large:
When songless is our old grey ocean's marge,
Sonnets shall watch the moon from far-off sands;

Backward Queen Beauty darts her maiden glances;
With lips that quiver as she glances back
The poet urges on the sweet attack,
With feet that flutter, and with heart that dances.
The distance all her loveliness enhances;
He sinks exhausted, footsteps growing slack,—
She waits him at some turning of the track,
Till once again hope's tremulous flood advances.

So goes it : but from time to time he seizes
Some cadence of the melody she sings,
And even that distant silver echo pleases
His spirit more than any earthly things,—

We sympathize by chance with one or two;
We bear the sorrows, maybe, of a friend;
But there our power of sympathy doth end,—
Its fountain we are forceless to renew.
A great man through the world his heart may send,
Nobly partake in many a purpose true,—
Yet silent agonies o'er some impend,—
Sorrows there are earth's greatest ne'er passed through.

The sympathy of human hearts may fail
After a time; our noblest is but pale
With partial sorrow,—Christ's sad eyes were dim
For every sufferer—this was his renown:

Was it sweet to have lived, I wonder,
In the days when the world was young?
When, parting the boughs in sunder,
In the forest the wood-nymph sung?
Was it sweet, in the woods' recesses,
To mark 'neath a moonlit sky
The glitter of Venus' tresses
As the queen and her train swept by?

She must have been grand and peerless,
Queen Venus, with Love in her train.
Then the eyes of the world were tearless:
Will they ever be tearless again?
Our woods and our groves are chilly,
The goddess is no more there:
'Mid our rocks and regions hilly

Tom Evan's the lad for hunting up songs,
Tom Evan to whom the best learning belongs;
Betwixt his two pasteboards he verses has got,
Sufficient to fill the whole country, I wot.