Here a gentleman present, who had in his attic
More pepper than brains, shrieked, ’The man’s a fanatic,
I’m a capital tailor with warm tar and feathers,
And will make him a suit that’ll serve in all weathers; 1140
But we’ll argue the point first, I’m willing to reason ’t,
Palaver before condemnation’s but decent: 
So, through my humble person, Humanity begs
Of the friends of true freedom a loan of bad eggs.’ 
But Apollo let one such a look of his show forth
As when [Greek:  aeie nukti eoikios], and so forth,
And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way,
But, as he was going, gained courage to say,—­
’At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels,
I am as strongly opposed to ‘t as any one else.’ 1150
’Ay, no doubt, but whenever I’ve happened to meet
With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,’
Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us,
’The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss
Is only in taking a great busy nation
For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.—­
But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to? 
She has such a penchant for bothering me too! 
She always keeps asking if I don’t observe a
Particular likeness ’twixt her and Minerva; 1160
She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;—­
She’s been travelling now, and will be worse than ever;
One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she’d be
Of all that’s worth mentioning over the sea,
For a woman must surely see well, if she try,
The whole of whose being’s a capital I: 
She will take an old notion, and make it her own,
By saying it o’er in her Sibylline tone,
Or persuade you ’tis something tremendously deep,
By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; 1170
And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,
When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. 
There is one thing she owns in her own single right,
It is native and genuine—­namely, her spite;
Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows
A censer of vanity ‘neath her own nose.’

Here Miranda came up, and said, ’Phoebus! you know
That the Infinite Soul has its infinite woe,
As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl,
Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul; 1180
I myself introduced, I myself, I alone,
To my Land’s better life authors solely my own,
Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken,
Whose works sound a depth by Life’s quiet unshaken,
Such as Shakespeare, for instance, the Bible, and Bacon,
Not to mention my own works; Time’s nadir is fleet,
And, as for myself, I’m quite out of conceit’—­