Once formed the contrivance we now shall explain;
But whether by magic’s or alchemy’s powers
We know not; indeed, ’tis no business of ours.
Perhaps it was only by patience and care,
At last, that he brought his invention to bear.
In youth ‘twas projected, but years stole away,
And ere ’twas complete he was wrinkled and gray;
But success is secure, unless energy fails;
And at length he produced the Philosopher’s Scales.
“What were they?” you ask. You shall presently see;
These scales were not made to weigh sugar and tea.
Oh no; for such properties wondrous had they,
That qualities, feelings, and thoughts they could weigh,
Together with articles small or immense,
From mountains or planets to atoms of sense.
Naught was there so bulky but there it would lay,
And naught so ethereal but there it would stay,
And naught so reluctant but in it must go:
All which some examples more clearly will show.
The first thing he weighed was the head of Voltaire,
Which retained all the wit that had ever been there;
As a weight, he threw in the torn scrap of a leaf
Containing the prayer of the penitent thief;
When the skull rose aloft with so sudden a spell
That it bounced like a ball on the roof of the cell.
One time he put in Alexander the Great,
With the garment that Dorcas had made, for a weight;
And though clad in armor from sandals to crown,
The hero rose up and the garment went down.
A long row of almshouses, amply endowed
By a well-esteemed Pharisee, busy and proud,
Next loaded one scale; while the other was pressed
By those mites the poor widow dropped into the chest:
Up flew the endowment, not weighing an ounce,
And down, down the farthing-worth came with a bounce.
Again, he performed an experiment rare;
A monk, with austerities bleeding and bare,
Climbed into his scale; in the other was laid
The heart of our Howard, now partly decayed;
When he found, with surprise, that the whole of his brother
Weighed less, by some pounds, than this bit of the other.
By further experiments (no matter how)
He found that ten chariots weighed less than one plough;
A sword with gilt trappings rose up in the scale,
Though balanced by only a ten-penny nail;
A shield and a helmet, a buckler and spear,
Weighed less than a widow’s uncrystallized tear.
A lord and a lady went up at full sail,
When a bee chanced to light on the opposite scale;
Ten doctors, ten lawyers, two courtiers, one earl,
Ten counsellors’ wigs, full of powder and curl,
All heaped in one balance and swinging from thence,
Weighed less than a few grains of candor and sense;
A first-water diamond, with brilliants begirt,
Than one good potato just washed from the dirt;
Yet not mountains of silver and gold could suffice
One pearl to outweigh,—’twas the Pearl of Great Price.
Last of all, the whole world was bowled in at the grate,
With the soul of a beggar to serve for a weight,
When the former sprang up with so strong a rebuff
That it made a vast rent and escaped at the roof!
When balanced in air, it ascended on high,
And sailed up aloft, a balloon in the sky;
While the scale with the soul in’t so mightily fell
That it jerked the philosopher out of his cell.
MORAL.
Dear reader, if e’er self-deception prevails,
We pray you to try The Philosopher’s Scales:
But if they are lost in the ruins around,
Perhaps a good substitute thus may be found:—
Let judgment and conscience in circles be cut,
To which strings of thought may be carefully put:
Let these be made even with caution extreme,
And impartiality use for a beam:
Then bring those good actions which pride overrates,
And tear up your motives to serve for the weights.
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
(1877—1949)
BORN IN LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, Towne lived in Manhattan where, in spite of only one year at City College, he became one of the city’s top magazine editors. At various times he edited The Designer, The Smart Set, McClure’s and Harper’s Bazaar. He played the clergyman in Life with Father, a Broadway success, in 1940-1941.
Towne wrote several novels—Tinsel was the best received—several plays and many books of nonfiction. His poems were collected in numerous books and in Selected Poems (1925). The poem that follows is the only one for which he is remembered.
The Best Road of All
I like a road that leads away to prospects white and fair,
A road that is an ordered road, like a nun’s evening prayer;
But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where.
You come upon it suddenly—you cannot seek it out;
It’s like a secret still unheard and never noised about;
But when you see it, gone at once is every lurking doubt.
It winds beside some rushing stream where aspens lightly quiver;
It follows many a broken field by many a shining river;
It seems to lead you on and on, forever and forever.
You tramp along its dusty way beneath the shadowy trees,
And hear beside you chattering birds or happy booming bees,
And all around you golden sounds, the green leaves’ litanies.
And here’s a hedge and there’s a cot; and then, strange, sudden turns—
A dip, a rise, a little glimpse where the red sunset burns;
A bit of sky at evening time, the scent of hidden ferns.
A winding road, a loitering road, the finger mark of God,
Traced when the Maker of the world leaned over ways untrod.
See! Here He smiled His glowing smile, and lo, the goldenrod!
I like a road that wanders straight; the king’s highway is fair,
And lovely are the sheltered lanes that take you here and there;
But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where.
JOHN TOWNSEND TROWBRIDGE
(1827-1916)
BORN IN OGDEN, New York, Townsend was a self-educated journalist and writer who settled in the Boston area after serving as an editor on several periodicals. He became famous for his novels for boys, some forty of them, many appearing first in The Youth’s Companion and Our Young Folks under the pseudonym Paul Crayton. Trowbridge also was a prolific writer of verse, his Collected Poems appearing in 1903.
No one reads Trowbridge’s fiction today, and his only remembered poem is “Darius Green and His Flying-Machine.” It first ran in Our Young Folks (March 1867). A special book edition, illustrated by Wallace Goldsmith, was published in 1910 with a brief foreword by R. L. S. (Robert Louis Stevenson?).
The poem also was included in The Vagabonds and Other Poems (1869). The title poem was the most famous of all Trowbridge’s poems in his day. It is a fourteen-stanza ballad about an alcoholic beggar who drifts along the roads with a fiddle and his dog Roger. The man playing the fiddle and his dog performing tricks, the two vagabonds are able barely to get by on food, booze and a place to sleep. He recalls his happier days and a lost love, and longs for death.
Hayward Cirker has called my attention to the similarity of the endings of this poem and “Casey at the Bat.” “It is paradoxical,” he writes, “that American society, so driven and ob
sessed by success, would enjoy two poems that end with abject failure.”
Darius Green and His Flying-Machine
If ever there lived a Yankee lad,
Wise or otherwise, good or bad,
Who, seeing the birds fly, did n’t jump
With flapping arms from stake or stump,
Or, spreading the tail
Of his coat for a sail,
Take a soaring leap from post or rail,
And wonder why
He could n’t fly,
And flap and flutter and wish and try,—
If ever you knew a country dunce
Who did n’t try that as often as once,
All I can say is, that ’s a sign
He never would do for a hero of mine.
An aspiring genius was D. Green:
The son of a farmer,—age fourteen;
His body was long and lank and lean,—
Just right for flying, as will be seen;
He had two eyes, each bright as a bean,
And a freckled nose that grew between,
A little awry,—for I must mention
That he had riveted his attention
Upon his wonderful invention,
Twisting his tongue as he twisted the strings,
Working his face as he worked the wings,
And with every turn of gimlet and screw
Turning and screwing his mouth round
Till his nose seemed bent
To catch the scent,
Around some corner, of new-baked pies,
And his wrinkled cheeks and his squinting eyes
Grew puckered into a queer grimace,
That made him look very droll in the face,
And also very wise.
And wise he must have been, to do more
Than ever a genius did before,
Excepting Daedalus of yore
And his son Icarus, who wore
Upon their backs
Those wings of wax
He had read of in the old almanacs.
Darius was clearly of the opinion,
That the air is also man’s dominion,
And that, with paddle or fin or pinion,
We soon or late
Shall navigate
The azure as now we sail the sea.
The thing looks simple enough to me;
And if you doubt it,
Hear how Darius reasoned about it.
“Birds can fly,
An’ why can’t I?
Must we give in,”
Says he with a grin,
“ ’T the bluebird an’ phoebe
Are smarter’n we be?
Jest fold our hands an’ see the swaller,
An’ blackbird an’ catbird beat us holler?
Doos the leetle chatterin’, sassy wren,
No bigger’n my thumb, know more than men?
Jest show me that!
Er prove ’t the bat
Hez got more brains than’s in my hat,
An’ I ’ll back down, an’ not till then!”
He argued further: “Ner I can’t see
What ’s th’ use o’ wings to a bumble-bee,
Fer to git a livin’ with, more ’n to me;—
Ain’t my business
Important ’s his’n is?
“That Icarus
Was a silly cuss,—
Him an’ his daddy Dædalus.
They might ’a’ knowed wings made o’ wax
Would n’t stan’ sun-heat an’ hard whacks.
I’ll make mine o’ luther,
Er suthin’ er other.”
And he said to himself, as he tinkered and planned:
“But I ain’t goin’ to show my hand
To nummies that never can understand
The fust idee that ’s big an’ grand.
They ’d ‘a’ laft an’ made fun
O’ Creation itself afore ’t was done!”
So he kept his secret from all the rest,
Safely buttoned within his vest;
And in the loft above the shed
But vainly they mounted each other’s backs,
And poked through knot-holes and pried through cracks;
With wood from the pile and straw from the stacks
He plugged the knot-holes and calked the cracks;
And a bucket of water, which one would think
He had brought up into the loft to drink
When he chanced to be dry,
Stood always nigh,
For Darius was sly!
And whenever at work he happened to spy
At chink or crevice a blinking eye,
He let a dipper of water fly.
“Take that! an’ ef ever ye git a peep,
Guess ye ’ll ketch a weasel asleep!”
And he sings as he locks
His big strong box:—
SONG
“The weasel’s head is small an’ trim,
An’ he is leetle an’ long an’ slim,
An’ quick of motion an’ nimble of limb,
An’ ef yeou ’ll be
Advised by me,
Keep wide awake when ye ’re ketchin’ him!”
So day after day
He stitched and tinkered and hammered away,
Till at last’t was done,—
The greatest invention under the sun!
“An’ now,” says Darius, “hooray fer some fun!”
’T was the Fourth of July,
And the weather was dry,
And not a cloud was on all the sky,
Save a few light fleeces, which here and there,
Half mist, half air,
Like foam on the ocean went floating by:
Just as lovely a morning as ever was seen
For a nice little trip in a flying-machine.
Thought cunning Darius: “Now I sha n’t go
Along ‘ith the fellers to see the show.
I ’ll say I ’ve got sich a terrible cough!
An’ then, when the folks ’ave all gone off,
I ’ll hev full swing
Fer to try the thing
An’ practyse a leetle on the wing.”
“Ain’t goin’ to see the celebration?”
Says Brother Nate. “No; botheration!
I ’ve got sich a cold—a toothache—I—
My gracious!—feel ’s though I should fly!”
Said Jotham, “ ‘Sho!
Guess ye better go.”
But Darius said, “No!
Should n’t wonder‘f yeou might see me, though,
’Long ‘bout noon, ef I git red
O’ this jumpin’, thumpin’ pain ’n my head!”
For all the while to himself he said:—
”I tell ye what!
I ’ll fly a few times around the lot,
To see how ’t seems, then soon ’s I ’ve got
The hang o’ the thing, ez likely ’s not,
I ’ll astonish the nation,
An’ all creation,
By flyin’ over the celebration!
Over their heads I ’ll sail like an eagle;
I ’ll balance myself on my wings like a sea-gull;
I’ll dance on the chimbleys; I ’ll stan’ on the steeple;
I ’ll flop up to winders an’ scare the people!
I ’ll light on the libbe’ty-pole, an’ crow;
An’ I ’ll say to the gawpin’ fools below,
‘What world ’s this ’ere
That I ’ve come near?’
Fer I ’ll make ‘em b’lieve I’m a chap f’m the moon!
An’ I ’ll try a race ’ith their ol’ bulloon.”
He crept from his bed;
And, seeing the others were gone, he said,
“I ’m a gittin’ over the cold ’n my head.”
And away he sped,
To open the wonderful box in the shed.
His brothers had walked but a little way
; When Jotham to Nathan chanced to say,
“What on airth is he up to, hey?”
“Don’o’,—the’ ’s suthin’ er other to pay,
Er he would n’t ‘a’ stayed to hum to-day.”
Says Burke, “His toothache ’s all in his eye!
He never ’d miss a Fo‘th-o’-July,
Ef he hed n’t got some machine to try.”
Then Sol, the little one, spoke: “By darn!
Le’s hurry back an’ hide ’n the barn,
An’ pay him fer tellin’ us that yarn!”
“Agreed!” Through the orchard they creep back,
Along by the fences, behind the stack,
And one by one, through a hole in the wall,
In under the dusty barn they crawl,
Dressed in their Sunday garments all;
And a very astonishing sight was that,
When each in his cobwebbed coat and hat
Came up through the floor like an ancient rat.
And there they hid;
And Reuben slid
The fastenings back, and the door undid.
“Keep dark! said he,
While I squint an’ see what the’ is to see.”
As knights of old put on their mail,—
From head to foot
An iron suit,
Iron jacket and iron boot,
Iron breeches, and on the head
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 18