“Bottles to right of them,
Bottles to left of them,
Bottles in front of them,
Fizzled and sundered;
Ent’ring with shout and yell,
Boldly they drank and well,
They caught the Tartar then;
Oh, what a perfect sell!
Sold—the half hundred!
Grinned all the dentals bare,
Swung all their caps in air,
Uncorking bottles there,
Watching the Freshmen, while
Every one wondered;
Plunged in tobacco smoke,
With many a desperate stroke,
Dozens of bottles broke;
Then they came back, but not,
Not the half hundred!”
Lest from this merry squib, which doubtless celebrated some college prank, wrong conclusions should be drawn, I hasten to say that in college James Garfield neither drank nor smoked.
The next poem is rather long, but it possesses interest as a serious production of one whose name has become a household word. It is entitled
“MEMORY.
“’Tis beauteous night; the
stars look brightly down
Upon the earth, decked in her robe of
snow.
No light gleams at the window save my
own,
Which gives its cheer to midnight and
to me.
And now with noiseless step sweet Memory
comes,
And leads me gently through her twilight
realms.
What poet’s tuneful lyre has ever
sung,
Or delicatest pencil e’er portrayed
The enchanted, shadowy land where Memory
dwells?
It has its valleys, cheerless, lone, and
drear,
Dark-shaded by the lonely cypress tree.
And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathed
In heaven’s own blue. Upon
its craggy cliffs,
Robed in the dreamy light of distant years,
Are clustered joys serene of other days;
Upon its gently sloping hillside’s
bank
The weeping-willows o’er the sacred
dust
Of dear departed ones; and yet in that
land,
Where’er our footsteps fall upon
the shore,
They that were sleeping rise from out
the dust
Of death’s long, silent years, and
round us stand,
As erst they did before the prison tomb
Received their clay within its voiceless
halls.
“The heavens that bend above that
land are hung
With clouds of various hues; some dark
and chill,
Surcharged with sorrow, cast their sombre
shade
Upon the sunny, joyous land below;
Others are floating through the dreamy
air,
White as the falling snow, their margins
tinged
With gold and crimson hues; their shadows
fall
Upon the flowery meads and sunny slopes,
Soft as the shadows of an angel’s
wing.
When the rough battle of the day is done,
And evening’s peace falls gently
on the heart,
I bound away across the noisy years,
Unto the utmost verge of Memory’s
land,
Where earth and sky in dreamy distance
meet,
And Memory dim with dark oblivion joins;
Where woke the first remembered sounds
that fell
Upon the ear in childhood’s early