SPRING. A NEW VERSION. Ham. "The air bites shrewdly-it is very cold. HAMLET "COME, gentle Spring! ethereal mildness come! Oh! Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason, How couldst thou thus poor human nature hum? There's no such season. The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name! Her praises, then, let hardy poets sing, And be her tuneful laureates and upholders, Who do not feel as if they had a Spring Pour'd down their shoulders! Let others eulogize her floral shows, From me they cannot win a single stanza, I know her blooms are in full blow-and so's The Influenza. Her cowslips, stocks, and lilies of the vale, Her honey-blossoms that you hear the bees at, Fair is the vernal quarter of the year! And fair its early buddings and its blowingsBut just suppose Consumption's seeds appear With other sowings! For me, I find, when eastern winds are high, Nor can, like Iron-Chested Chubb, defy Smitten by breezes from the land of plague, I limp in agony,-I wheeze and cough; What wonder if in May itself I lack A peg for laudatory verse to hang on?— Spring mild and gentle !-yes, a Spring-heeled Jack To those he sprang on. In short, whatever panegyrics lie In fulsome odes too many to be cited, The tenderness of Spring is all my eye, And that is blighted! THE FLOWER. ALONE, across a foreign plain, This lovely Isle beyond the sea, Its leafy woods, its shady vales, When lo! he starts, with glad surprise, Home-joys come rushing o'er him, For "modest, wee, and crimson-tipp'd," He spies the flower before him! With eager haste he stoops him down, He murmurs, "Lawk-a-daisy!" THE SEA-SPELL. "Cauld, cauld, he lies beneath the deep." Old Scotch Ballad. Ir was a jolly mariner! The tallest man of three, He loosed his sail against the wind, And turn'd his boat to sea: The ink-black sky told every eye, A storm was soon to be! But still that jolly-mariner Took in no reef at all, A thing, as gossip-nurses know, His hat was new, or, newly glazed, His jacket, like a mariner's, True blue as e'er was spun ; |