All human governments must take the chance And hazard of sedition. O, wretch! to pledge your manhood in advance To blind submission. It may be wrong, it may be right, to rise In warlike insurrection: The loyalty that fools so dearly prize May mean subjection. Be loyal to your country, yes--but how If tyrants hold dominion? The South believed they did; can't you allow For that opinion? He who will never rise though rulers plods His liberties despising How is he manlier than the _sans culottes_ Who's always rising? Give back the foolish flags whose bearers fell Too valiant to forsake them. Is it presumptuous, this counsel? Well, I helped to take them. HAEC FABULA DOCET. A rat who'd gorged a box of bane And suffered an internal pain, Came from his hole to die (the label Required it if the rat were able) And found outside his habitat A limpid stream. Of bane and rat 'T was all unconscious; in the sun It ran and prattled just for fun. Keen to allay his inward throes, The beast immersed his filthy nose And drank--then, bloated by the stream, And filled with superheated steam, Exploded with a rascal smell, Remarking, as his fragments fell Astonished in the brook: "I'm thinking This water's damned unwholesome drinking!" EXONERATION. When men at candidacy don't connive, From that suspicion if their friends would free 'em, The teeth and nails with which they did not strive Should be exhibited in a museum. AZRAEL. The moon in the field of the keel-plowed main Was watching the growing tide: A luminous peasant was driving his wain, And he offered my soul a ride. But I nourished a sorrow uncommonly tall, And I fixed him fast with mine eye. "O, peasant," I sang with a dying fall, "Go leave me to sing and die." The water was weltering round my feet, As prone on the beach they lay. I chanted my death-song loud and sweet; "Kioodle, ioodle, iay!" Then I heard the swish of erecting ears Which caught that enchanted strain. The ocean was swollen with storms of tears That fell from the shining swain. "O, poet," leapt he to the soaken sand, "That ravishing song would make The devil a saint." He held out his hand And solemnly added: "Shake." We shook. "I crave a victim, you see," He said--"you came hither to die." The Angel of Death, 't was he! 't was he! And the victim he crove was I! 'T was I, Fred Emerson Brooks, the bard; And he knocked me on the head. O Lord! I thought it exceedingly hard, For I didn't want to be dead. "You'll sing no worser for that," said he, And he drove with my soul away, O, death-song singers, be warned by me, Kioodle, ioodle, iay! AGAIN. Well, I've met her again--at the Mission. She'd told me to see her no more; It was not a command--a petition; I'd granted it once before.