University of Virginia Library

I own, I like this easy talking,
A kind of Opera sleep-walking;
Just made for lazy brains like mine!
Let wits and sages strive to shine.
My loveliest of all lovely things
Is woman, angel without wings;
Yet if there's horror beyond human,
To me 'tis philosophic woman.
Although you ate your primal steaks
Among the honest Oxford Greeks,
Or suck'd your dose of British port
Where Euclid holds by Cam his Court;
Or in Ierne's “Silent Sister”
Spunged on the vintner and the pistor.
Ierne! theme of many a line,
That never trickled from the Nine;
Ierne, land of bulls and cows,
Of many an English widow's spouse,
Of proud and patriot absentees,
Of rich reversionary fees,
Of old rebellion's glowing embers!
Of just one hundred virtuous Members,
As sapient as the dames that bore them,
As modest as their sires before them;
All dumb—of which I'm no regretter,
(The less that's sometimes said the better.)
Yet, when a good thing's in the wind,
No man will think them deaf or blind;
Not but I know they hate a job,
Though such might fill a patriot's fob;
Not but I know, in all their garrets
They'd scorn to act the treasury parrots;
Or crowd upon a special night,
To stand the drill “eyes left or right,”
Or make the rather thicker calls,
In Whitehall when a peerage falls:
Yet no twelve men on earth would find
Those patriots either deaf or blind!
Ierne, true Romance's spot,
Alike by Heaven and Earth forgot!
Thy people gayest of the gay,
Where every ribbon breeds a fray!
Thy soil the richest of the rich,
Where famine huts in every ditch!
Holy dominion of the Pope!
Ruled by the musket and the rope!
Pure gem of the Atlantic flood,
With every field, a field of blood!