The White Pilgrim and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The wretched world has had enough
Of snow and ice, and quantum suff,
Altogether,
Of floundering over field and park,
And shivering through the light and dark,
And vain petitions to the clerk
Of the weather.

I try to keep the cold at bay,
By storing brandy night and day
In my cupboard;
And every pretty girl I meet
Wants to avoid me in the street,
Because her nose is red, and feet
India-rubbered.

Man likes his skating for a bit,
But grows a little tired of it;
Si sic semper,
Although both amiable and mild,
And very gentle from a child,
It strikes me that I may get riled
In my temper.

182

Next must the times return again,
When on the wooden heads of men
Down there fell huge
Torrents of rain—the largest out,
As Yankees say—in fact, about
The worst recorded waterspout,
Called the Deluge?

Then did the globe, they say, become
A sort of large Aquarium,
And their senses
The finned and feathered tribes forsook;
The thrushes swam by hook or crook,
And all the little fishes took
All the fences.

If Father Thames should overflow
His banks for just a month or so?
And unsparing
Of Beauty's self, upset the King-ston
Waterworks, that lovely thing,
Or the fair bridge to ruin bring
Down at Charing!

Whom shall we call on to assuage
The Winter-God's resistless rage,
Even while foemen
Of savage race destroy the flower
Of England's youth, and all the power
Of Evil round us seems to lower?
Absit omen!

183

The good Sir Walter's moral ran,
How swift and sure from Folly man
Into Sin goes;
Kind Heaven, the cup of Reason mix,
And save us from the conjuring tricks,
And blood-and-thunder politics
Of the Jingoes!

February, 1879.