One jot of their pure conquest put to hire, The implacable republic will require; With clamor, in the glare and gaze of

noon,

Or subtly, coming as a thief at night,
But surely, very surely, slow or soon
That insult deep we deeply will requite. 210
Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity!
For save we let the island men go free,
Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts
Will curse us from the lamentable coasts
Where walk the frustrate dead.

The cup of trembling shall be drained quite,

Eaten the sour bread of astonishment, With ashes of the hearth shall be made white

Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent; Then on your guiltier head

220

Shall our intolerable self-disdain
Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;
For manifest in that disastrous light
We shall discern the right

And do it, tardily.-O ye who lead,
Take heed!

Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.

The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1900.

I'll foot it home, to try and make believe I'm sober. After this I stick to beer, And drop the circus when the sane folks leave.

A man's a fool to look at things too near: They look back, and begin to cut up queer.

1 This metaphor of the ship of society, continually recurrent in poetry, is elaborated in great detail, with the striking omission of the folk in the hold, by Edward Rowland Sill, in a letter of February 25, 1862. See the "Life and Work" of Sill by W. B. Parker, pp. 47, 48not published until 1915.

2 This theme, which frequently appears in sober literature, is discussed in a strikingly parallel passage by Mark Twain in one of his hours of smiling seriousness. See his "Life," by Albert Bigelow Paine, pp. 1357-1363.