Classic Poem

From Brooklyn heights a Hessian doctor came,
Not great his skill, nor greater much his fame;
Fair Science never called the wretch her son,
And Art disdained the stupid man to own; —
Can you admire that Science was so coy,
Or Art refused his genius to employ! —
Do men with brutes an equal dullness share,
Or cuts yon' grovelling mole the midway air —
In polar worlds can Eden's blossoms blow,
Do trees of God in barren deserts grow.
Are loaded vines to Etna's summit known,
Or swells the peach beneath the frozen zone —
Yet still he put his genius to the rack;
And, as you may suppose, was owned a quack .
He on his charge the healing work begun
With antimonial mixtures; by the tun,
Ten minutes was the time he deigned to stay,
The time of grace allotted once a day, —
He drenched us well with bitter draughts, 'tis true,
Nostrums from hell, and cortex from Peru —
Some with his pills he sent to Pluto's reign,
And some he blistered with his flies of Spain;
His Tartar doses walked their deadly round,
Till the lean patient at the potion frowned,
And swore that hemlock, death, or what you will,
Were nonsense to the drugs that stuffed his bill. —
On those refusing, he bestowed a kick,
Or menaced vengeance with a walking stick; —
Here, uncontrouled, he exercised his trade,
And grew experienced by the deaths he made,
By frequent blows we from his cane endured
He killed at least as many as he cured,
On our lost comrades built his future fame,
And scattered fate, where'er his footsteps came.
Some did not bend, submissive to his skill,
And swore he mingled poison with his pill,
But we acquit him by a fair confession,
He was no Myrmidon — he was a Hessian —
Although a beast, he had some sense of sin
Or else the Lord knows where we now had been;
No doubt, in that far country sent to range
Where never prisoner meets with an exchange —
No centries stand, to guard the midnight posts,
Nor seal down hatch-ways on a crowd of ghosts.
Knave though he was, yet candour must confess
Not chief physician was this man of Hesse —
One master o'er the murdering tribe was placed,
By him the rest were honoured or disgraced;
Once, and but once, by some strange fortune led
He came to see the dying and the dead —
He came — but anger so deformed his eye,
And such a faulcheon glittered on his thigh,
And such a gloom his visage darkened o'er,
And two such pistols in his hands he bore!
That, by the gods! — with such a load of steel,
He came, we thought, to murder, not to heal —
Rage in his heart, and mischief in his head,
He gloomed destruction, and had smote us dead,
Had he so dared — but fear with-held his hand —
He came — blasphemed — and turned again to land.