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ODE TO THE WEST WIND.

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves; oh hear!

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee; tameless, and swift, and proud.

V.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

PERCY BYSSE SHELLEY.

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There have been merry times at Michaelmas-who would believe it? Yet there have been merry times at Michaelmas. Mayors and aldermen were then elected, and made their bows to each other; and be sure there were merry doings

QUEEN BESS AND THE GOOSE.

455

Stubble

when mayors and aldermen were in the case. geese, like the aldermen, were now in prime condition; but being the weaker, according to the proverb, went to the wall, and thence to the kitchen and twirled upon the spit. It was a jolly day in old Mother Church; she ordered everybody that could get it to eat a goose in honour of St. Michael and all the angels. So in church and corporation, in abbey and town-hall, in farm and cottage, there was an universal eating of fat geese; and nobody that I ever heard of complained of the injunction. Queen Elizabeth was eating her goose at the time that the news of the defeat of the Spanish Armada was brought to her, and no doubt she thought the Spaniards great and very green geese for having come there, and that they would be much greater if they ever came there again. Ever after Queen Bess most assiduously ate her goose at Michaelmas, and, probably, with Spanish chesnuts as people on the continent do now; or, if she did not, she would not have repented it if she had, for it is a princely addition. Queen Bess ate her goose all the more assiduously because it was an old saying that, if you ate your goose at Michaelmas, you would have plenty of money all the year round-a prescription that, if its efficacy were at all proportioned to its agreeableness, people would be geese, indeed, not to comply with. How, indeed, could any one desire a pleasanter way of replenishing a purse? Queen Bess was always dreadfully in want of money; and as this came to be seen, and not the less to be felt by those who had the taxes to pay, and as no more Armadas came to be defeated, people lost all faith in eating roast goose except the comfortable faith that Robert Southey had when he addressed one in a sonnet, and asking the goose where it could have been so bravely fed, and receiving no answer, added himself:

But this I know, that thou art very fine,

Seasoned with sage, with onions, and port wine.

Jolly times then, it is clear, there have been at Michaelmas. Into these, except in the City of London, there has been made a dreadful inroad by the Municipal Corporation Reform Act, which forbade all eating of Michaelmas goose in a corporate capacity. Driven out of convents and

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corporations, yet I imagine roast goose at Michaelmas finds a welcome reception in many a farm, gentlemen's and other private houses. Roast pigs no longer run about with oranges in their mouths, crying, Come, eat me!" but stubble geese really do seem to meet you at every turn, and cackle out invitingly that pathetic request. At markets and poulterers they crowd upon you; in lanes and on commons they nibble at your heels, and hiss to inform you that they are fat and foolish, and beg you to introduce them to a sage. They stand in flocks at stubble-field gates and look imploringly; everywhere you are called on to note that they are no longer green but have grown grey and corpulent, and have but one earthly desire left, and that is-to be done brown! There is no resisting this. The Michaelmas goose will find a warm reception wherever it goes to the end of the world.

But I fear me much that there are many houses where this portly visitor finds the door too narrow to get in. Some way, Catholicism having so long gone out of fashion in England, we have forgotten many of its sensible customs. Michaelmas has ceased to be anything of a holiday except to landlords. A holiday! mercy on us! why, it is a rentday! All might lighten their purses, but that is a process with thousands which does not lighten the heart. It is quarter-day

At length the jolly time begins,

"Come, neighbours, we must wag."

The money chinks, down drop their chins,
Each lugging out his bag.

Out upon Michaelmas for a holiday-why it is only a landlord's holiday! Then landlords are the jolly fellows in these Protestant times, that glean the stubbles, and catch all the fat geese. We are the geese to be plucked, and perhaps get a roasting. Oh! you lucky fellows that can keep holiday at Michaelmas ! Heaven send us all to be landlords as soon as possible, and fill our purses the whole year round by devouring stubble geese-alias farmers. At Michaelmas, the landlord is plucking geese all day long, and the deuce a bit does he weary of it. If you pay quarterly, you pay at Michaelmas; if you pay but once

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a year, you pay still at Michaelmas. Then is the time for plucking and roasting. It is a solemn, sober, dreary, melancholy sort of time is Michaelmas, for everybody but landlords. There is laughter to be sure, but the laughter is the landlord's. You may tell it by the sound, without seeing whence it comes from. It is a thick, mellow, fatsided sort of laughter. It is not a tenant's laughter, nor anything like it. There are geese roasting in plenty, but they are roasting in landlords' kitchens.

And yet there have been jolly times, and Protestant times too, even at Michaelmas. Nothing in this degenerating world has degenerated so much as Michaelmas. Landlords once had bowels. They knew how unpleasant is the operation of drawing a tooth-and they did their best to make it toothsome. They gilded the pill-they sweetened the physic-they roasted stubble-geese for their tenants as well as for themselves.

Nobody now-a-days, if their fathers had not told them, could have any idea how easily Michaelmas once was made to go over. It once was a gay day, spite of its being a pay day. I remember when a boy how merry were our rent nights. The supper-table at my father's was set out in a large, old-fashioned dining-room, and in came one bright face after another, as if the thing money, had not brought it there. We six lads were allowed to sit up on these nights later than usual, and to sit down with the whole rustic group. Never did any hours flow more magically than those. There were assembled the wits, the humourists, the historians, the rural patriarchs of the neighbourhood; and the whole country round, its doings, and its character, and traditions, passed in review. At one end of the table sate the stately form of the landlord, radiant with the mirth of the present, and remembrance of the past; at the other, the mild and maternal glance of one of the best and noblest of women, who, thought, felt and lived for every creature within the reach of her untiring sympathies. What knowledge of humble life have I gleaned at these times. How entirely in memory do they seem to have belonged to some better and more patriarchal age. How cold and ormal do we seem now to have grown. Landlord and tenant lo not know each other. Our acquaintance is with agents.

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