Wild wanton Luxury lays waste the land With difficulty tilled by Thrift's hard hand! Then dies the State!--and, in its carcass found, The millionaires, all maggot-like, abound. Alas! was it for this that Warren died, And Arnold sold himself to t' other side, Stark piled at Bennington his British dead, And Gates at Camden, Lee at Monmouth, fled?-- For this that Perry did the foeman fleece, And Hull surrender to preserve the peace? Degenerate countrymen, renounce, I pray, The slothful ease, the luxury, the gay And gallant trappings of this idle life, And be more fit for one another's wife. A CHALLENGE. A bull imprisoned in a stall Broke boldly the confining wall, And found himself, when out of bounds, Within a washerwoman's grounds. Where, hanging on a line to dry, A crimson skirt inflamed his eye. With bellowings that woke the dead, He bent his formidable head, With pointed horns and gnarly forehead; Then, planting firm his shoulders horrid, Began, with rage made half insane, To paw the arid earth amain, Flinging the dust upon his flanks In desolating clouds and banks, The while his eyes' uneasy white Betrayed his doubt what foe the bright Red tent concealed, perchance, from sight. The garment, which, all undismayed, Had never paled a single shade, Now found a tongue--a dangling sock, Left carelessly inside the smock: "I must insist, my gracious liege, That you'll be pleased to raise the siege: My colors I will never strike. I know your sex--you're all alike. Some small experience I've had-- You're not the first I've driven mad." TWO SHOWS. The showman (blessing in a thousand shapes!) Parades a "School of Educated Apes!" Small education's needed, I opine, Or native wit, to make a monkey shine; The brute exhibited has naught to do But ape the larger apes who come to view-- The hoodlum with his horrible grimace, Long upper lip and furtive, shuffling pace, Significant reminders of the time When hunters, not policemen, made him climb; The lady loafer with her draggling "trail," That free translation of an ancient tail; The sand-lot quadrumane in hairy suit, Whose heels are thumbs perverted by the boot; The painted actress throwing down the gage To elder artists of the sylvan stage, Proving that in the time of Noah's flood Two ape-skins held her whole profession's blood; The critic waiting, like a hungry pup, To write the school--perhaps to eat it--up, As chance or luck occasion may reveal To earn a dollar or maraud a meal. To view the school of apes these creatures go, Unconscious that themselves are half the show. These, if the simian his course but trim To copy them as they have copied him, Will call him "educated." Of a verity There's much to learn by study of posterity. A POET'S HOPE.