—My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the anniversaries come round. What’s the difficulty?—Why, they all want him to get up and make speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he doesn’t want to do. He is an old story, he says, and hates to show on these occasions. But they tease him, and coax him, and can’t do without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get their fingers on the _fontanelle_, (the Professor will tell you what this means,—he says the one at the top of the head always remains open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence. There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one’s garden and clutch up a handful of what grows there,—weeds and violets together,—not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. That’s his idea of a post-prandial performance. Look here, now. These verses I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots just in that way, the other day.—Beautiful entertainment,—names there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as familiarly as _and_ or _the_; entertainers known wherever good poetry and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted, modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will turn into the prose of common life. My friend, the Poet, says you must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed it nicely below, you wouldn’t see the roots, he says, and he likes to keep them, and a little of the soil clinging to them. This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our friend, the Poet:— A GOOD TIME GOING! BRAVE singer of the coming time, Sweet minstrel of the joyous present, Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme, The holly-leaf of Ayrshire’s peasant, Good-bye! Good-bye!—Our hearts and hands, Our lips in honest Saxon phrases, Cry, God be with him, till he stands His feet among the English daisies! ’Tis here we part;—for other eyes The busy deck, the flattering streamer, The dripping arms that plunge and rise, The waves in foam, the ship in tremor, The kerchiefs waving from the pier, The cloudy pillar gliding o’er him, The deep blue desert, lone and drear, With heaven above and home before him!