AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER, 1866, IN ACKNOWLEDGING A TOAST TO THE SMITH PROFESSOR. I rise, Mr. Chairman, as both of us know, With the impromptu I promised you three weeks ago, Dragged up to my doom by your might and my mane, To do what I vowed I’d do never again; And I feel like your good honest dough when possest By a stirring, impertinent devil of yeast. “You must rise,” says the leaven. “I can’t,” says the dough; “Just examine my bumps, and you’ll see it’s no go.” “But you must,” the tormentor insists, “'tis all right; You must rise when I bid you, and, what’s more, be light.” ’Tis a dreadful oppression, this making men speak What they ’re sure to be sorry for all the next week; This asking some poor stick, like Aaron’s, to bud Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood, As if the dull brain that you vented your spite on Could be got, like an ox, by mere poking, to Brighton. They say it is wholesome to rise with the sun, And I dare say it may be if not overdone; (I think it was Thomson who made the remark ’Twas an excellent thing in its way--for a lark;) But to rise after dinner and look down the meeting On a distant (as Gray calls it) prospect of Eating, With a stomach half full and a cerebrum hollow As the tortoise-shell ere it was strung for Apollo, Under contract to raise anerithmon gelasma With rhymes so hard hunted they gasp with the asthma, And jokes not much younger than Jethro’s phylacteries, Is something I leave you yourselves to characterize. I’ve a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech, Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach, Swerving this way and that as the wave of the moment Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim’s foam on ’t, And leaving on memory’s rim just a sense Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense; Not poetry,--no, not quite that, but as good, A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would. ’Tis a time for gay fancies as fleeting and vain As the whisper of foam-beads on fresh-poured champagne, Since dinners were not perhaps strictly designed For manœuvering the heavy dragoons of the mind. When I hear your set speeches that start with a pop, Then wander and maunder, too feeble to stop, With a vague apprehension from popular rumor There used to be something by mortals called humor, Beginning again when you thought they were done, Respectable, sensible, weighing a ton, And as near to the present occasions of men As a Fast Day discourse of the year eighteen ten, I--well, I sit still, and my sentiments smother, For am I not also a bore and a brother?