’Twas the Eagle god who brought the drink from the blue, and gave mortals the brew that’s the fountain of song. {108a} Next, who gave men their laws? and what reason or cause the young brave overawes when in need of a squaw, Till he thinks it a shame to wed one of his name, and his conduct you blame if he thus breaks the law? For you still hold it wrong if a _lubra_ {108b} belong to the self-same _kobong_ {108c} that is Father of you, To take _her_ as a bride to your ebony side; nay, you give her a wide berth; quite right of you, too. For her father, you know, is _your_ father, the Crow, and no blessing but woe from the wedding would spring. Well, these rules they were made in the wattle-gum shade, and were strictly obeyed, when the Crow was the King. {108d} Thus on Earth’s little ball to the Birds you owe all, yet your gratitude’s small for the favours they’ve done, And their feathers you pill, and you eat them at will, yes, you plunder and kill the bright birds one by one; There’s a price on their head, and the Dodo is dead, and the Moa has fled from the sight of the sun! MAN AND THE ASCIDIAN. A MORALITY. “THE Ancestor remote of Man,” Says Darwin, “is th’ Ascidian,” A scanty sort of water-beast That, ninety million years at least Before Gorillas came to be, Went swimming up and down the sea. Their ancestors the pious praise, And like to imitate their ways; How, then, does our first parent live, What lesson has his life to give? Th’ Ascidian tadpole, young and gay, Doth Life with one bright eye survey, His consciousness has easy play. He’s sensitive to grief and pain, Has tail, and spine, and bears a brain, And everything that fits the state Of creatures we call vertebrate. But age comes on; with sudden shock He sticks his head against a rock! His tail drops off, his eye drops in, His brain’s absorbed into his skin; He does not move, nor feel, nor know The tidal water’s ebb and flow, But still abides, unstirred, alone, A sucker sticking to a stone. And we, his children, truly we In youth are, like the Tadpole, free. And where we would we blithely go, Have brains and hearts, and feel and know. Then Age comes on! To Habit we Affix ourselves and are not free; Th’ Ascidian’s rooted to a rock, And we are bond-slaves of the clock; Our rocks are Medicine—Letters—Law, From these our heads we cannot draw: Our loves drop off, our hearts drop in, And daily thicker grows our skin. Ah, scarce we live, we scarcely know The wide world’s moving ebb and flow, The clanging currents ring and shock, But we are rooted to the rock. And thus at ending of his span, Blind, deaf, and indolent, does Man Revert to the Ascidian. BALLADE OF THE PRIMITIVE JEST.