Fired with the soul to hail my country great, and write her honors endless to the world, full to the sun I wave the eager pen, invoking all the lightning of the gods. Descend on me, Olympian dews, descend! that this tired brain, where oft the new-born thought hath died unblossomed in the fainting soil, may catch fresh vigor from the grateful balm, and teem thrice glorious in a nobler youth. By all the fire that glows in Homer's song, to make all ages flame anew with Troy; by all the music stirred in Virgil's lay, to make AEneas ever march the world; by all the heav'nly fury of the theme, AEschylus-taken, picturing gods to men; by all the Art o'er nature raised sublime, and unto Xenophon revealed by night, to make Ten Thousand nobler in Retreat than thrice ten thousand by a Caesar led; by All that unto All hath been their All, I charge thee, oh, thou impulse of the gods! grand as the storm and chainless as the wind, descend on me! as lightning from the cloud descends to beacon what the storm makes dark. That I may write, in words of thunder born, such deeds as strengthen while they shake the world; that I may write, in lines to trumpets tuned, such acts as make men brothers to the gods; that I may write, in notes to mock the lute, such feats of cunning as lull Fate to sleep; that I may dip th' immortalizing pen in bright Pactolus' ever golden stream, and write, in language sweeter to the ear than Hymet's honey to soft Dion's lips, glories of arms to first make Nature crouch--then leap to something higher than herself! (If any man objects to that sort of thing, my boy, may he be whipped to death by the aged maidens of the Confederacy, and utterly perish _per flagellationem extremam_.) And now I feel the Homeric inspiration in all my veins as I dip the impatient quill into the Black Republican ink, and hasten to record the deathless honors recently reaped by the Mackerel Iron-plated Squadron in a deathless attack upon Fort Piano. You may remember, my boy, that the construction of a pier on Duck Lake by some shameless Confederacies, and the erection on the end thereof of Fort Piano, was first made known to our noble old sea-dog, Rear Admiral Head, whilst he sat on the quarter deck of his original iron-plated squadron fishing for bass, by the accidental knocking of the squadron against the end of the pier. His back being turned at the time, he had not noticed the building of the terrible fortification; and when the horrible jar of the collision caused him to look that way, he found six villanous horse-pistols so planted by the disrespectful Confederacies as to exactly command his fish-basket and box of bait. You may also remember my boy, how our glorious old Neptune subsequently caused the stanch "Secretary Welles" to run the blockade of the fort, to thoroughly test the invulnerability of the iron-clad principle; and how the result of that test satisfactorily proved the iron-clad principle to be entirely testaceous.