Short Poems

Your various Turns of Cross and Kind,
Calls an odd Practice to my Mind:
How Farmers politickly Vein,
Their Bacon Hogs with Fat and Lean;
They Feast them one Day, next they Fast,
And make them Excellent at last.

My Lord Anglois, who run from home,
To expose his ignorance at Rome,
There met a wag of different cast,
Who neither rode nor talk'd so fast;
And what you'll say was strange indeed,
Ask'd him for something new to read:
The wag, quite willing to content him,
Next morn the Tour of England sent him.

He that lies at the stock,
Shall have a gold rock;
He that lies at the wall,
Shall have a gold ball;
He that lies in the middle,
Shall have a gold fiddle.

The Artist muses at his ease,
Contented that his work is done,
And smiling—smiling!—as he sees
His crowd collecting, one by one.
Alas! his travail's but begun!
None, none can keep the years in line,
And what to Ninety-Eight is fun
May raise the gorge of Ninety-Nine!

As I gaed ower the Brig o' Perth
I met with George Bawhannan;
I took aff his head, and drank his bluid,
And left his body stannin'.

Though man through life so swiftly wends,
And o'er its journey runs his race;
Though rough, or smooth, or 'round the bends,
In distance putting fleetest friend:
Alas! there comes a halting place,
A place of rest—the journey's end!

Aulus gives nought, men say, though much he crave;
Yet I can tell to whom the pox he gave.

He fawns for more though he his thousands own:
Fortune gives some too much, enough to none.

Haply the summer grasses are
A relic of the warriors' dream.

With no other neighbour but the quiet night,
Here I live in the same old cottage;
And as raindrops brighten yellow leaves,
The lamp illumines my white head. . . .
Out of the world these many years,
I am ashamed to receive you here.
But you cannot come too often,
More than brother, lifelong friend.