“Chasing mastodons through marshes upon stilts of light ratan, Hunting spiders with a shotgun and mosquitoes with an axe, Plucking peanuts ready roasted from the branches of the oak, Waking echoes in the forest with our hymns of blessed bosh, We roamed—my love and I. By the margin of the fountain spouting thick with clabbered milk, Under spreading boughs of bass-wood all alive with cooing toads, Loafing listlessly on bowlders of octagonal design, Standing gracefully inverted with our toes together knit, We loved—my love and I.” Hippopopotamus comforts his heart Biting half—moons out of strawberry tart. Epitaph on George Francis Train (Inscribed on a Pork-barrel.) Beneath this casket rots unknown A Thing that merits not a stone, Save that by passing urchin cast; Whose fame and virtues we express By transient urn of emptiness, With apt inscription (to its past Relating—and to his): “Prime Mess.” No honour had this infidel, That doth not appertain, as well, To haltered caitiff on the drop; No wit that would not likewise pass For wisdom in the famished ass Who breaks his neck a weed to crop, When tethered in the luscious grass. And now, thank God, his hateful name Shall never rescued be from shame, Though seas of venal ink be shed; No sophistry shall reconcile With sympathy for Erin’s Isle, Or sorrow for her patriot dead, The weeping of this crocodile. Life’s incongruity is past, And dirt to dirt is seen at last, The worm of worm afoul doth fall. The sexton tolls his solemn bell For scoundrel dead and gone to—well, It matters not, it can’t recall This convict from his final cell. Jerusalem, Old and New Didymus Dunkleton Doty Don John Is a parson of high degree; He holds forth of Sundays to marvelling crowds Who wonder how vice can still be When smitten so stoutly by Didymus Don— Disciple of Calvin is he. But sinners still laugh at his talk of the New Jerusalem—ha-ha, te-he! And biting their thumbs at the doughty Don John— This parson of high degree— They think of the streets of a village they know, Where horses still sink to the knee, Contrasting its muck with the pavement of gold That’s laid in the other citee. They think of the sign that still swings, uneffaced By winds from the salt, salt sea, Which tells where he trafficked in tipple, of yore— Don Dunkleton Johnny, D. D. Didymus Dunkleton Doty Don John Still plays on his fiddle-D. D., His lambkins still bleat in full psalmody sweet, And the devil still pitches the key. Communing with Nature