Each morning the post brings you autograph letters; You'll answer them promptly--an hour isn't much For the honour of sharing a page with your betters, With magistrates, members of Congress, and such.
Of course you're delighted to serve the committees That come with requests from the country all round; You would grace the occasion with poems and ditties When they've got a new school-house, or poor-house, or pound.
With a hymn for the saints, and a song for the sinners, You go and are welcome wherever you please; You're a privileged guest at all manner of dinners; You've a seat on the platform among the grandees.
At length your mere presence becomes a sensation; Your cup of enjoyment is filled to its brim With the pleasure Horatian of digitmonstration, As the whisper runs round of "That's he!" or "That's him!"
But, remember, O dealer in phrases sonorous, So daintily chosen, so tunefully matched, Though you soar with the wings of the cherubim o'er us, The ovum was human from which you were hatched.
No will of your own, with its puny compulsion, Can summon the spirit that quickens the lyre; It comes, if at all, like the sibyl's convulsion, And touches the brain with a finger of fire.
So, perhaps, after all, it's as well to be quiet, If you've nothing you think is worth saying in prose, As to furnish a meal of their cannibal diet To the critics, by publishing, as you propose.
But it's all of no use, and I'm sorry I've written; I shall see your thin volume some day on my shelf; For the rhyming tarantula surely has bitten, And music must cure you, so pipe it yourself.
I wrote some lines once on a time In wondrous merry mood, And thought, as usual, men would say They were exceeding good.
They were so queer, so very queer, I laughed as I would die; Albeit, in the general way, A sober man am I.
I called my servant, and he came; How kind it was of him, To mind a slender man like me, He of the mighty limb!
"These to the printer," I exclaimed, And, in my humorous way, I added (as a trifling jest), "There'll be the devil to pay."
He took the paper, and I watched, And saw him peep within; At the first line he read, his face Was all upon a grin.
He read the next, the grin grew broad, And shot from ear to ear; He read the third, a chuckling noise I now began to hear.