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It happened a spider within did crawl, And spun him a web of ample size, Wherein there chanced one day to fall A couple of very imprudent flies.

The first was a bottle-fly, big and blue, The second was smaller, and thin and long;

So there was a concert between the two, Like an octave flute and a tavern gong.

Now being from Paris but recently,

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This fine young man would show his skill;

And so they gave him, his hand to try,

A hospital patient extremely ill.

Some said that his liver was short of bile,
And some that his heart was over size,
While some kept arguing, all the while,
He was crammed with tubercles up to his
eyes.

This fine young man then up stepped he,
And all the doctors made a pause;
Said he, The man must die, you see,
By the fifty-seventh of Louis's laws.

But since the case is a desperate one,
To explore his chest it may be well;
For if he should die and it were not done,
You know the autopsy would not tell.

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So fast their little hearts did bound,
The frightened insects buzzed the more;
So over all their chests he found

The rûle sifflant and the râle sonore.

He shook his head. There's grave dis

ease,

I greatly fear you all must die; A slight post-mortem, if you please, Surviving friends would gratify.

The six young damsels wept aloud, Which so prevailed on six young men

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The keen debaters, trained to brawls and strife,

Who fire one shot, and finish with the knife,

Tried him but once, and, cowering in their shame,

Ground their hacked blades to strike at

meaner game. The lordly chief, his party's central stay, Whose lightest word a hundred votes obey, Found a new listener seated at his side, Looked in his eye, and felt himself defied,

1 Originally called 'The Disappointed Statesman.' See the notes on Emerson's' Webster,' p. 61, and Whittier's 'Ichabod,' p. 282.

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1 See the notes on Whittier's The Last Walk in Autumn,' p. 292, and on Emerson's Written in Naples,' p. 60, and compare a recent sonnet on the Hudson by Mr. George S. Hellman:

Where in its old historic splendor stands
The home of England's far-famed Parliament,
And waters of the Thames in calm content
At England's fame flow slowly o'er their sands;
And where the Rhine past vine-entwined lands
Courses in castled beauty, there I went ;
And far to Southern rivers, flower-besprent ;
And to the icy streams of Northern strands.
Then mine own native shores I trod once more,
And, gazing on thy waters' majesty,

The memory, O Hudson, came to me

Of one who went to seek the wide world o'er

For Love, but found it not. Then home turned he
And saw his mother waiting at the door.

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TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND
THE seed that wasteful autumn cast
To waver on its stormy blast,
Long o'er the wintry desert tost,
Its living germ has never lost.
Dropped by the weary tempest's wing,
It feels the kindling ray of spring,
And, starting from its dream of death,
Pours on the air its perfumed breath.

So, parted by the rolling flood,
The love that springs from common blood
Needs but a single sunlit hour

Of mingling smiles to bud and flower;
Unharmed its slumbering life has flown,
From shore to shore, from zone to zone,
Where summer's falling roses stain
The tepid waves of Pontchartrain,
Or where the lichen creeps below
Katahdin's wreaths of whirling snow.

Though fiery sun and stiffening cold
May change the fair ancestral mould,
No winter chills, no summer drains
The life-blood drawn from English veins,
Still bearing wheresoe'er it flows
The love that with its fountain rose,
Unchanged by space, unwronged by time,
From age to age, from clime to clime!

(1861.)

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