My Virtual Reading Room

Originally posted by levkonoe at Kojima Koukei

"All we ask is to be let alone"

As vonce I valked by a dismal swamp,
There sot an old Cove in the dark and damp,
And at everybody as passed that road
A stick or a stone this Old Cove throwed.
And venever he flung his stick or his stone,
He'd set up a song of "Let me alone".

"Let me alone, for I loves to shy
These bits of things at the passers-by;
Let me alone, for I've got your tin,
And lots of other traps snugly in;
Let me alone--I am rigging a boat
To grab votever you've got afloat;
In a veek or so I expects to come
And turn you out of your ouse and ome;
I'm a quiet Old Cove," says he, with a groan;
"All I axes, is, Let me alone."
( Just then came along, on the self-same vay, / Another Old Cove, and began for to say-- )

A Vision of January 4th

Lying on my couch a night or two ago,
I had a solemn vision of penitential woe;
Of that great time of fasting and of humiliation
Proposed by pious James unto our sinful nation.

All the stores were closed, the whole length of Broadway,
As on that great occasion, the Prince's procession day,
And the solemn chimes of Trinity through the air began to swim,
Tolling the grand Old Hundred and Luther's Judgment Hymn.

Ah, soon the great procession moved slowly from the Park;
'Twas headed by the Mayor, and brought up by men of mark,
Barefooted marched through mingled mud and snow;
Girdled with rope, and ashes-strewn, and clad in weeds of woe.

There were some Republican leaders, feeling very blue indeed,
That their party, after hard fighting, had the ill luck to succeed;
They were all for "conciliation," "concession," and "compromises;"
Hungry to eat their own words and back out of their own devices.

( Read more... )