Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/418

 Of Aryan dairymen, who did not blush

To call their milkmaid and their daughter one—

Helplessly gazing at the Milky Way,

Nor dreaming of the astral cocoa-nuts

Quite at the service of posterity.

'T is to be feared, though, that the duller boys,

Much given to anachronisms and nuts

(Elias has confessed boys will be boys),

May write a jockey for a centaur, think

Europa's suitor was an Irish bull,

Æsop a journalist who wrote up Fox,

And Bruin a chief swindler upon 'Change.

Boys will be boys, but dogs will all be moral,

With longer alimentary canals

Suited to diet vegetarian.

The uglier breeds will fade from memory,

Or, being palæontological,

Live but as portraits in large learned books,

Distasteful to the feelings of an age

Nourished on purest beauty. Earth will hold

No stupid brutes, no cheerful queernesses,

No naïve cunning, grave absurdity.

Wart-pigs with tender and parental grunts,

Wombats much flattened as to their contour,

Perhaps from too much crushing in the ark,

But taking meekly that fatality;

The serious cranes, unstung by ridicule;

Long-headed, short-legged, solemn-looking curs,

(Wise, silent critics of a flippant age);

The silly straddling foals, the weak-brained geese

Hissing fallaciously at sound of wheels—

All these rude products will have disappeared

Along with every faulty human type.

By dint of diet vegetarian

All will be harmony of hue and line,