There rest the foamy lip, the bloodshot eye,
The noble brow o'er which some heart doth weep,
Whose only elegy--the buried sigh.
There kneels the friend and comrade who would die
Beside the form he loved, alas, so well,
Now in his last expiring agony,
When every breath is as a funeral knell,
And the soul bleeds with thoughts that Friendship cannot tell.

XXII.

The last long clasp, the hushed and trembling kiss,
The mother weeping at her beauty's side,
And Death's last look and stiffening clutch--is this,
Is _this_ the outcome of a nation's pride?
There lie the clammy corpses far and wide,
And locks bedabbled and the princely cheek,
Son, father, brother, husband, side by side--
Oh, such a tale of horror who can speak!
Together heaped the dead and dying, strong and weak.

XXIII.

But to our text, my friends, as parsons say,
This is soliloquy, I quite neglect
My tale, from which I've wandered far away,
But what, from such as I, can you expect?
I wished your kind attention to direct
Some stanzas back--I think 'twas eight or nine--
To Music's wondrous power you'll recollect,
But somehow left my subject line by line,
To which no doubt you'll say I should myself confine.

XXIV.

I am no minstrel, and I'd have you know it,
Altho' that is the title of these pages,
Nor do I yet pretend to be a poet,
Those things that should be kept in wire cages,
That move to Colney Hatch by easy stages,
And keep good company upon the road,
Consisting of some dozen or two sages,
Who, like our tins of dynamite, explode,
And really are most dangerous things to be abroad.

XXV.

Now Pater surely something had in view,
Beyond his time he stayed so many days,
Of this his daughters evidently knew
And all their expectations were ablaze;
But their excitement soon became a craze
Since he had made a grand resolve--in short
He had--and be it spoken to his praise--
The villa, furnished, with its meadows bought;
With much rejoicing this intelligence was fraught.

XXVI.

Arrangements had been made. The early train
He took to town to settle matters there,
Intending shortly to return again
If all his town arrangements turned out fair.
He'd travelled up on three occasions ere
His wife's idea had met with his consent,
No doubt about some business affair
O'er which in town a day or two he'd spent,
Now for the self-same reason there he pitched his tent.

XXVII.

He did not tarry long but home did fly,
His daughters we