DE ANIMABUS BRUTORUM. No doubt 'twere heresy, or something worse Than aught that priests call worthy of damnation, Should I maintain, though in a sportive verse, That bird or fish can e'er attain salvation; Yet some have held that they are all possess'd, Such doctrine broach'd Antonio Margerita, A learned Spaniard, mighty metaphysical. To him the butterfly had seem'd a Lytta,— His wasp-stung wits were grown so quaint and phthisical; To him the sweetest song of Philomel Had talk'd of nothing in the world but hell. Heaven save us all from such a horrid dream! Nor let the love of heaven,-of heaven, forsooth!- If all the lives that throng the air and earth, If, ceasing once, they do not even sleep, Yet are they not to loving Nature lost; Melts in the morning ray, and leaves no stain; Nor shall they all in their oblivion lie, Nor lack the life, though vain that life may be, Which breathes in strains that wasting time defy : A poet's song can memorise a flea; The subtle fancy of deep-witted Donne, And once that strenuous insect leap'd by chance Upon the white breast of a Gallic dame; Forthwith the wits of universal France Vied to consign the happy flea to fame! Pasquier, the gravest joker of his age, The Teian bard, so skittish and so hoary, The bloodless songster drunk with balmy dew, That sad old wag, that Peter Pindar hight, Telling how once a creature without wings The insect empress, and her clustering throng Their stings bequeathed to wicked Mandeville; Wealthy as Tyre their homes, the more their sorrow, Like Tyre despoiled, and smothered like Gomorrah. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and be wise!" So said the amorous king that wrote of hyssop, You know the rest. Nothing that creeps or flies Reads half so good a lesson in all Æsop. Great Johnson has berhymed the words; I swear, He'd better far have left them as they were. No question you have heard of Virgil's gnat, If Homer did not, some one did, I'm sure; The deep bass croak, and shriller treble squeak? And Aristophanes no title lacks To his BREKEKEKEX KOAX KOAX. But thou dark dweller of the central rock, Spawned ere avenging waves the hills o'erflowed, Survivor of full many an earthquake's shock, Like antique virtue, hated upon earth, Or trampled under foot, like modest worth,— VOL. II. S Time was (or else our ancestors were liars) That thou to mystic verse wert not unknown, When witches danced around Tartarean fires, To screech of owls and mandrake's fatal groan; For thou could'st drain the marrow, mad the brains, Or foulest passion breed in chastest veins. Most poets are great wanderers by night, And love the moon, though sons of Phoebus call'd; And well we ken the small scarce-moving light Of the she, wingless, amorous emerald, Unlike her kindred of the glowing zone, That star the dark groves of the tropic even, Is it to soothe our sorrow, or deride, That these bright insects leave both flower and tree, And swarm upon the new-heaped earth beside The pit designed for dead mortality? |