Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta/To Miss Edith M. Thomas

Your Pegasus, Edith, is hitched to a star, While mine drags along a Sixth Avenue car; Yours bears you away to the far empyrean, Mine carries me down through the quarters plebeian. Now, soaring aloft, you stop at Antares, Call it home, that 's the place for Penates and Lares; Or back to old Greece with her heroes and gods, You get up a flirtation in sonnets and odes. (Though they hailed from Olympus, that classical spot,         These "old parties," confess, were a pretty bad lot.) Then with dear Mother Nature you make very free To fathom her secrets of bird, flower, and tree; To live with her ever on intimate terms, A freedom on your part, she always confirms, Although so exclusive she is with the rest of us, Never giving her password or key to the best of us. But you have them both, and can seek at your pleasure Her most secret haunts, her most precious treasure; And she calls you in accents as winning and mild, As some fond old grandmother calls a pet child. The round of my Pegasus lies through the town; He travels and travels, now up, and now down; I pull on the strap, and he willingly stops, And leaves me to visit the markets and shops. (My car, you perceive, is the bobtail variety         So little admired by the press and society.) But wherever we go he signally fails To lift me above the street levels and rails. So you see that our steeds are not matched for a race, And with all best endeavors can never keep pace.