of severity.--Aesop, Jr., in America. Robert C. Sands A MONODY Made on the Late Mr. Samuel Patch, by an Aadmirer of the Bathos By water he shall die and take his end.--Shakespeare Toll for Sam Patch! Sam Patch, who jumps no more, This or the world to come. Sam Patch is dead! The vulgar pathway to the unknown shore Of dark futurity, he would not tread. No friends stood sorrowing round his dying bed; Nor with decorous woe, sedately stepp'd Behind his corpse, and tears by retail shed-- The mighty river, as it onward swept, In one great wholesale sob, his body drowned and kept. Toll for Sam Patch! he scorned the common way That leads to fame, up heights of rough ascent, And having heard Pope and Longinus say That some great men had risen by falls, he went And jumped, where wild Passaic's waves had rent The antique rocks--the air free passage gave-- And graciously the liquid element Upbore him, like some sea-god on its wave; And all the people said that Sam was very brave. Fame, the clear spirit that doth to heaven upraise, Let Sam to dive into what Byron calls The hell of waters. For the sake of praise, He wooed the bathos down great waterfalls; The dizzy precipice, which the eye appals Of travelers for pleasure, Samuel found Pleasant as are to women lighted halls, Crammed full of fools and fiddles; to the sound Of the eternal roar, he timed his desperate bound. Sam was a fool. But the large world of such Has thousands--better taught, alike absurd, And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much, Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard. Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferred The kindly element, to which he gave Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard That it was now his winding sheet and grave, Nor sung, 'twixt tears and smiles, our requiem for the brave. He soon got drunk with rum and with renown, As many others in high places do-- Whose fall is like Sam's last--for down and down, By one mad impulse driven, they flounder through The gulf that keeps the future from our view, And then are found not. May they rest in peace! We heave the sigh to human frailty due-- And shall not Sam have his? The muse shall cease To keep the heroic roll, which she began in Greece-- With demigods who went to the Black Sea For wool (and if the best accounts be straight, Came back, in Negro phraseology, With the same wool each upon his pate), In which she chronicled the deathless fate Of him who jumped into the perilous ditch Left by Rome's street commissioners, in a state Which made it dangerous, and by jumping which He made himself renowned and the contractors rich--