"Te quoque vatem dicunt pastores."VIRGIL.
O Maxwell, if by reasons strength
And studying of Babbage,
You have transformed yourself at length
Into a mental cabbage;
And if I've proved myself a lark
At morn and blushing even,
By soaring like a music-spark
Thro sapphire fields of Heaven,
Our diverse fates are now reversed
By strange metempsychosis,
Into a cabbage I have burst
And scorn poetic posies;
But you a lark with twinkling wings
Oer violet-banks are soaring;
Your voice the dewy rose-cloud rings
While Statics me are boring.
Yet cabbage as I willon earth
My roots I cannot anchor,
For at my mathematic birth
Was also born a canker!
It soon will gnaw my roots away-
But when I weigh a chnix
Ill freely soar to realms of day
An emerald cabbage-Phnix.
Then talk not of the Poll to me,
I hate, detest, and scorn it;
I am as earnest as a bee,
But savage as a hornet.
And if they pluck me I will drown
Each pedant in a sonnet,
And of their pluckings make a crown
With golden plumes upon it.
So if my cabbage growth be slow
I'll try to be a carrot,
Or still remain a larkbut know
I'll not be Poll, or Parrot.
Then if I fall beneath the mark,
Ill shout with accent savage,
"It is a lark to be a lark,
Tis green to be a cabbage"
