He lived in a cave by the seas, He lived upon oysters and foes, But his list of forbidden degrees, An extensive morality shows; Geological evidence goes To prove he had never a pan, But he shaved with a shell when he chose,— ’Twas the manner of Primitive Man. He worshipp’d the rain and the breeze, He worshipp’d the river that flows, And the Dawn, and the Moon, and the trees, And bogies, and serpents, and crows; He buried his dead with their toes Tucked-up, an original plan, Till their knees came right under their nose,— ’Twas the manner of Primitive Man. His communal wives, at his ease, He would curb with occasional blows; Or his State had a queen, like the bees (As another philosopher trows): When he spoke, it was never in prose, But he sang in a strain that would scan, For (to doubt it, perchance, were morose) ’Twas the manner of Primitive Man! On the coasts that incessantly freeze, With his stones, and his bones, and his bows; On luxuriant tropical leas, Where the summer eternally glows, He is found, and his habits disclose (Let theology say what she can) That he lived in the long, long agos, ’Twas the manner of Primitive Man! From a status like that of the Crees, Our society’s fabric arose,— Develop’d, evolved, if you please, But deluded chronologists chose, In a fancied accordance with Mos es, 4000 B.C. for the span When he rushed on the world and its woes,— ’Twas the manner of Primitive Man! But the mild anthropologist,—_he’s_ Not _recent_ inclined to suppose Flints Palæolithic like these, Quaternary bones such as those! In Rhinoceros, Mammoth and Co.’s, First epoch, the Human began, Theologians all to expose,— ’Tis the _mission_ of Primitive Man. ENVOY. MAX, proudly your Aryans pose, But their rigs they undoubtedly ran, For, as every Darwinian knows, ’Twas the manner of Primitive Man! BALLADE OF AUTUMN. We built a castle in the air, In summer weather, you and I, The wind and sun were in your hair,— Gold hair against a sapphire sky: When Autumn came, with leaves that fly Before the storm, across the plain, You fled from me, with scarce a sigh— My Love returns no more again! The windy lights of Autumn flare: I watch the moonlit sails go by; I marvel how men toil and fare, The weary business that they ply! Their voyaging is vanity, And fairy gold is all their gain, And all the winds of winter cry, “My Love returns no more again!” Here, in my castle of Despair, I sit alone with memory; The wind-fed wolf has left his lair, To keep the outcast company. The brooding owl he hoots hard by, _The hare shall kindle on thy hearth-stane_, The Rhymer’s soothest prophecy,—{48} My Love returns no more again! ENVOY.