"If scant his service at the kirk,

He paters heard and aves

THE misspelt scrawl, upon the wall

birk,

From blackbird and from mavis; The cowering mouse, poor unroofed thing,

In ashes packed (ironic fact!)
Lies eighteen centuries uneffaced,
While many a page of bard and sage,
Deemed once mankind's immortal gain,

Lost from Time's ark, leaves no more mark

Than a keel's furrow through the main.

O Chance and Change! our buzz's range

Is scarcely wider than a fly's;
Then let us play at fame to-day,
To-morrow be unknown and wise;
And while the fair beg locks of hair,
And autographs, and Lord knows what,
Quick! let us scratch our moment's
match,

Make our brief blaze, and be forgot!

Too pressed to wait, upon her slate
Fame writes a name or two in doubt;
Scarce written, these no longer please,
And her own finger rubs them out:
It may ensue, fair girl that you
Years hence this yellowing leaf may

see,

And put to task, your memory ask
In vain, "This Lowell, who was he?"

AT THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER,

As if the dull brain that you vented your spite on

Could be got, like an ox, by mere pok ing, to Brighton.

They say it is wholesome to rise with the

sun,

And I dare say it may be if not overdone;

(I think it was Thomson who made the remark

'T was an excellent thing in its way for a lark ;)

But to rise after dinner and look down the meeting

On a distant (as Gray calls it) prospect of Eating,

With a stomach half full and a cerebrum hollow

As the tortoise-shell ere it was strung for Apollo,

Under contract to raise anerithmon gelasma

With rhymes so hard hunted they gasp with the asthma,

And jokes not much younger than Jethro's phylacteries,

when possest

By a stirring, impertinent devil of yeast. "You must rise," says the leaven. "I

can't," says the dough; "Just examine my bumps and you'll see it's no go."

"But you must," the tormentor insists, t is all right;

You must rise when I bid you, and, what's more, be light."

"T is a dreadful oppression, this making men speak

What they're sure to be sorry for all the next week;

Some poor stick requesting, like Aaron's, to bud

Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood,

characterize.

I've a notion, I think, of a good dinner speech,

Tripping light as a sandpiper over the beach,

Swerving this way and that as the wave of the moment

Washes out its slight trace with a dash of whim's foam on 't, And leaving on memory's rim just a sense Something graceful had gone by, a live present tense;

Not poetry,-no, not quite that, but as good,

A kind of winged prose that could fly if it would.

'Tis a time for gay fancies as fleeting and vain

As the whisper of foam-beads on freshpoured champagne, Since dinners were not perhaps strictly designed

For manoeuvering the heavy dragoons of the mind.

When I hear your set speeches that start with a pop, Then wander and maunder, too feeble to stop,

not frown