Ye fallen bricks! in Drury’s fire calcined, Since doom’d to slumber, couch’d upon the wind, Sweet was the hour, when, tempted by your freaks, Congenial trowels smooth’d your yellow cheeks. Float dulcet serenades upon the ear, Bends every atom from its ruddy sphere, Twinkles each eye, and, peeping from its veil, Marks in the adverse crowd its destined male. The oblong beauties clap their hands of grit, And brick-dust titterings on the breezes flit; Then down they rush in amatory race, Their dusty bridegrooms eager to embrace. Some choose old lovers, some decide for new, But each, when fix’d, is to her station true. Thus various bricks are made, as tastes invite— The red, the grey, the dingy, or the white. Perhaps some half-baked rover, frank and free, To alien beauty bends the lawless knee, But of unhallow’d fascinations sick, Soon quite his Cyprian for his married brick; The Dido atom calls and scolds in vain, No crisp Æneas soothes the widow’s pain. So in Cheapside, what time Aurora peeps, A mingled noise of dustmen, milk, and sweeps Falls on the housemaid’s ear: amazed she stands, Then opes the door with cinder-sabled hands, And “Matches” calls. The dustman, bubbled flat, Thinks ’tis for him and doffs his fan-tail’d hat; The milkman, whom her second cries assail, With sudden sink unyokes the clinking pail; Now louder grown, by turns she screams and weeps— Alas! her screaming only brings the sweeps. Sweeps but put out—she wants to raise a flame, And calls for matches, but ’tis still the same. Atoms and housemaids! mark the moral true— If once ye go astray, no _match_ for you! As atoms in one mass united mix, So bricks attraction feel for kindred bricks; Some in the cellar view, perchance, on high, Fair chimney chums on beds of mortar lie; Enamour’d of the sympathetic clod, Leaps the red bridegroom to the labourer’s hod: And up the ladder bears the workman, taught To think he bears the bricks—mistaken thought! A proof behold! if near the top they find The nymphs or broken-corner’d or unkind, Back to the base, “resulting with a bound,” {79} They bear their bleeding carriers to the ground! So legends tell along the lofty hill Paced the twin heroes, gallant Jack and Jill; On trudged the Gemini to reach the rail That shields the well’s top from the expectant pail, When, ah! Jack falls; and, rolling in the rear, Jill feels the attraction of his kindred sphere; Head over heels begins his toppling track, Throws sympathetic somersets with Jack, And at the mountain’s base bobs plump against him, whack!