For what is good, except what friend and foe Seem quite unanimous in thinking so, The stocks and bonds which, in our age of loans, Replace the stupid pagan’s stocks and stones? With choker white, wherein no cynic eye Dares see idealized a hempen tie, At parish-meetings he conducts in prayer, And pays for missions to be sent elsewhere; On ’Change respected, to his friends endeared, Add but a Sunday-school-class, he’s revered, And his too early tomb will not be dumb To point a moral for our youth to come. 1872. IN THE HALF-WAY HOUSE. I. At twenty we fancied the blest Middle Ages A spirited cross of romantic and grand, All templars and minstrels and ladies and pages, And love and adventure in Outre-Mer land; But ah, where the youth dreamed of building a minster, The man takes a pew and sits reckoning his pelf, And the Graces wear fronts, the Muse thins to a spinster, When Middle-Age stares from one’s glass at oneself! II. Do you twit me with days when I had an Ideal, And saw the sear future through spectacles green? Then find me some charm, while I look round and see all These fat friends of forty, shall keep me nineteen; Should we go on pining for chaplets of laurel Who’ve paid a perruquier for mending our thatch, Or, our feet swathed in baize, with our Fate pick a quarrel, If, instead of cheap bay-leaves, she sent a dear scratch? III. We called it our Eden, that small patent-baker, When life was half moonshine and half Mary Jane; But the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker!-- Did Adam have duns and slip down a back-lane? Nay, after the Fall did the modiste keep coming With last styles of fig-leaf to Madam Eve’s bower? Did Jubal, or whoever taught the girls thrumming, Make the patriarchs deaf at a dollar the hour? IV. As I think what I was, I sigh _Desunt nonnulla_! Years are creditors Sheridan’s self could not bilk; But then, as my boy says, “What right has a fullah To ask for the cream, when himself spilt the milk?” Perhaps when you’re older, my lad, you’ll discover The secret with which Auld Lang Syne there is gilt,-- Superstition of old man, maid, poet, and lover,-- That cream rises thickest on milk that was spilt! V. We sailed for the moon, but, in sad disillusion, Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast, And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion ’Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past. Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals, He’s a genius or fool whom ye cheat at two-score, And the man whose boy-promise was likened to Pascal’s Is thankful at forty they don’t call him bore! VI.