ICHABOD: A MONODY

Now is the time when everything is glad,

Their vernal greenery the fields renew,

Each feathered songster chants with livelier tone,

And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue,

And all is gay and cheerful:— I alone

Am singularly sad;

Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content

Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise:

Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise:

And all is grief, and disillusionment.

For He, who did in everything surpass

Our common world,— the Good, the Truly Great,

The Working Man, who shamed with standards high

Our obscurantists unregenerate,—

Is not,’ twould seem, better than you, or I,

Or any other ass:

The vision’ s faded, as a snowflake melts;

Fallen is that idol from his high renown:

He hath waxed fat, and kicked, and tumbled down,

And we must seek ensamples somewhere else!

Where is it, Comrades! in this direful day —

That noble zeal for academic lore,

That reverence due for discipline, in which

He used to shine conspicuously o’ er

The Brainless Athlete and the Idle Rich?

O, does he now display

That ample breadth of calm impartial view,

That sober judgment and that balanced mind,

Which we were taught that we should always find,

O R — - skin College, domiciled in you?

I have a Pupil: when his mental food

Fails ( as it will ) his appetite to sate,

What! does that patient much-enduring elf

Proclaim a strike? set pickets at my gate?

Boycott my lectures? give them for himself?

( Full oft I wish he would:)

Nay — when he finds those lectures dull and flat,

He asks no other: new ones might be worse:

Too well he knows that Cosmos’ ordered course

Meant him to hear, and me to talk like that.

Also I own I’ m disappointed by

Your friends and patrons, British Working Man!

For they, methought, were champions of the Cause,

Fighters for Freedom, foremost in the van,

Not servile scruplers, bound by rules and laws,

Not men who dealt in dry

Respectable traditions: leaders true,

No timid Moderates, who would define

Too strict a boundary’ twixt Mine and Thine,

Potential martyrs, heart and soul with you:—

’ Twas all illusion: they would feed you with

Mere talks on Temperance: when your spirit’ s wings

Would soar to Sociology alone,

Whereby will come that blessed state of things

When none has property to call his own,

They give you — Adam Smith...

These too are fall’ n: ah me, that I should live

To hear our brightest Radicals and best

By angry Labour in such terms addressed

As might apply to a Conservative!

To this conclusion I perforce must come,

’ Twere best we parted: seeing that we,’ twould seem,

Haply have no appreciation of

Your high ambitions and your aims supreme,

Nor can we hope that you should greatly love

Our mental pabulum:

Depart, O Comrades! to some happier sphere

Where you can still be nobly on the make,

And mine, or plumb, or brew, or butch, or bake,—

Best to depart, and leave us mouldering here!

Yea, if ye scorn our learning overmuch,

Misguided sons of horny-handed toil!

Yet discontented with your lowly lot

Still pine to burn the sad nocturnal oil

’ Mid academic culture, or’ mid what

Describes itself as such —

Go elsewhere, O my brothers! only go

To Bath, to Birmingham — where’ er the Don

Teaches the sacred art of Getting On,——

— It is not far from here to Jericho.