I bend, indeed, but never break. 
  Thus far, I own, the hurricane
  Has beat your sturdy back in vain;
  But wait the end.”  Just at the word,
  The tempest’s hollow voice was heard. 
  The North sent forth her fiercest child,
  Dark, jagged, pitiless, and wild. 
  The Oak, erect, endured the blow;
  The Reed bow’d gracefully and low. 
  But, gathering up its strength once more,
  In greater fury than before,
  The savage blast o’erthrew, at last,
  That proud, old, sky-encircled head,
  Whose feet entwined the empire of the dead!

  The Bat and the Two Weasels

  A blundering Bat once stuck her head
  Into a wakeful Weasel’s bed;
  Whereat the mistress of the house,
    A deadly foe of rats and mice,
    Was making ready in a trice
  To eat the stranger as a mouse. 
  “What! do you dare,” she said, “to creep in
  The very bed I sometimes sleep in,
  Now, after all the provocation
  I’ve suffered from your thievish nation? 
  It’s plain to see you are a mouse,
  That gnawing pest of every house,
  Your special aim to do the cheese ill. 
  Ay, that you are, or I’m no Weasel.” 
    “I beg your pardon,” said the Bat;
    “My kind is very far from that. 
  What!  I a mouse!  Who told you such a lie? 
    Why, ma’am, I am a bird;
    And, if you doubt my word,
  Just see the wings with which I fly. 
  Long live the mice that cleave the sky!”
    These reasons had so fair a show,
    The Weasel let the creature go.

  By some strange fancy led,
  The same wise blunderhead,
  But two or three days later,
    Had chosen for her rest
    Another Weasel’s nest,
  This last, of birds a special hater. 
  New peril brought this step absurd: 
    Without a moment’s thought or puzzle,
    Dame Weasel, oped her peaked muzzle
  To eat th’ intruder as a bird. 
    “Hold! do not wrong me,” cried the Bat;
    “I’m truly no such thing as that. 
  Your eyesight strange conclusions gathers. 
  What makes a bird, I pray?  Its feathers. 
    I’m cousin of the mice and rats. 
    Great Jupiter confound the cats!”
  The Bat, by such adroit replying,
  Twice saved herself from dying.

And many a human stranger Thus turns his coat in danger; And sings, as suits, where’er he goes, “God save the king!”—­or “save his foes!”

  The Dove and the Ant

  A Dove came to a brook to drink,
  When, leaning o’er its crumbling brink,
  An Ant fell in, and vainly tried,
  In this, to her, an ocean tide,
  To reach the land; whereat the Dove,
  With every living thing in love,
  Was prompt a spire of grass to throw her,
  By which the Ant regained the shore.