Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract, Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act? Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How; Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now. Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone, And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone? Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel? If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel. For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, PETER NIMMO: Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O! In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and appearance:— Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate, Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton, To and from that everlasting College-gate, With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button? Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the vicinity, and meditating his own future:— Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast: Here was he (words of import strange),—_He_ here! Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest: But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear. Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has come, and on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the sight of the little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the donkey canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His transition from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the third part sings of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the fourth part he is the poor mendicant Peter who has become the Wandering Jew of the University, and whose mode of living is a problem:— Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil, This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man; He spins not, neither does he toil; Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman. Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part of the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we must hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:— At midnight hour did Peter come; Right well I knew his tap and tread; With smiles I placed two pints of rum Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.