Page:Captain Craig; a book of poems.djvu/46

32 If you did not like Don César de Bazan, However, there are comedies in reach That have the fashion always. For example:—

"At the time when there was not enough of laurel On Parnassus to feed quite the Boston market, An admirable poet undertook With earnest fingers to graft asphodels And old world cypress-plumes on apple-boughs; And at the end of his experiments, Like Johann Kepler, he brought forth a book. The book was not sublime, but from its hard And uncommutative perversity Of words there came, like jewels out of sand, Six measured songs too beautiful to die. So I take that self-repudiating name 'Perversity' and throw it like a spleen To the last and farthest of Thalia's kennels— Though I who shape no songs of any sort, I who have made no music, thrilled no canvas,— I who have added nothing to the world The world would reckon save long-squandered wit— Might with half-pardonable reverence Beguile my faith, maybe, to the forlorn Extent of some sequestered murmuring