The brethren from their station scurvy,
Where they hung dangling topsy turvy,
With horror view the black costume,
And each persumes his hour is come! 
Then softly to themselves ’gan mutter
The warning words their dame did utter;
Yet not so softly, but with ease
Were overheard by Hercules. 
Quoth Cacus—­“This is he she spoke of,
Which we so often made a joke of.” 
“I see,” said the other, “thank our sin for’t,
’Tis BLACK BACK sure enough—­we’re in for ’t.”

His Godship who, for all his brag
Of roughness, was at heart a wag,
At his new name was tickled finely,
And fell a laughing most divinely. 
Quoth he, “I’ll tell this jest in heaven—­
The musty rogues shall be forgiven.” 
So in a twinkling did uncase them,
On mother earth once more to place them—­
The varlets, glad to be unhamper’d,
Made each a leg—­then fairly scamper’d.

THE PARTING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET

From the Latin of Palingenius, in the Zodiacus Vitae

(1832)

But now time warns (my mission at an end)
That to Jove’s starry court I re-ascend;
From whose high battlements I take delight
To scan your earth, diminish’d to the sight,
Pendant, and round, and, as an apple, small;
Self-propt, self-balanced, and secure from fall
By her own weight:  and how with liquid robe
Blue ocean girdles round her tiny globe,
While lesser Nereus, gliding like a snake,
Betwixt her hands his flexile course doth take,
Shrunk to a rivulet; and how the Po,
The mighty Ganges, Tanais, Ister, show
No bigger than a ditch which rains have swell’d. 
Old Nilus’ seven proud mouths I late beheld,
And mock’d the watery puddles.  Hosts steel-clad
Ofttimes I thence behold; and how the sad
Peoples are punish’d by the fault of kings,
Which from the purple fiend Ambition springs. 
Forgetful of mortality, they live
In hot strife for possessions fugitive,
At which the angels grieve.  Sometimes I trace
Of fountains, rivers, seas, the change of place;
By ever shifting course, and Time’s unrest,
The vale exalted, and the mount deprest
To an inglorious valley; plough-shares going
Where tall trees rear’d their tops; and fresh trees growing
In antique pastures.  Cities lose their site. 
Old things wax new.  O what a rare delight
To him, who from this vantage can survey
At once stern Afric, and soft Asia,
With Europe’s cultured plains; and in their turns
Their scatter’d tribes:  those whom the hot Crab burns,
The tawny Ethiops; Orient Indians;
Getulians; ever-wandering Scythians;
Swift Tartar hordes; Cilicians rapacious,
And Parthians with back-bended bow pugnacious;
Sabeans incense-bringing, men of Thrace,
Italian, Spaniard, Gaul, and that rough race
Of Britons, rigid as their native colds;
With all the rest the circling sun beholds! 
But clouds, and elemental mists, deny
These visions blest to any fleshly eye.