’Twas a Venerable Person, whom I
met one Sunday morning,
All appareled as a prophet of a melancholy
sect;
And in a jeremaid of objurgatory warning
He lifted up his jodel to the following
effect:
O ye sanguinary statesmen, intermit your
verbal tussles
O ye editors and orators, consent to hear
my lay!
And a little while the digital and maxillary
muscles
And attend to what a Venerable Person
has to say.
Cease your writing, cease your shouting,
cease your wild unearthly lying;
Cease to bandy such expressions as are
never, never found
In the letter of a lover; cease “exposing”
and “replying”—
Let there be abated fury and a decrement
of sound.
For to-morrow will be Monday and the fifth
day of November—
Only day of opportunity before the final
rush.
Carpe diem! go conciliate each
person who’s a member
Of the other party—do
it while you can without a blush.
“Lo! the time is close upon you
when the madness of the season
Having howled itself to silence,
like a Minnesota ’clone,
Will at last be superseded by the still,
small voice of reason,
When the whelpage of your
folly you would willingly disown.
“Ah, ’tis mournful to consider
what remorses will be thronging,
With a consciousness of having
been so ghastly indiscreet,
When by accident untoward two ex-gentlemen
belonging
To the opposite political
denominations meet!
“Yes, ’tis melancholy, truly,
to forecast the fierce, unruly
Supersurging of their blushes,
like the flushes upon high
When Aurora Borealis lights her circumpolar
palace
And in customary manner sets
her banner in the sky.
“Each will think: ’This
falsifier knows that I too am a liar.
Curse him for a son of Satan, all unholily
compound!
Curse my leader for another! Curse
that pelican, my mother!
Would to God that I when little in my
victual had been drowned!’”
Then that Venerable Person went away without
returning
And, the madness of the season having
also taken flight,
All the people soon were blushing like
the skies to crimson burning
When Aurora Borealis fires her premises
by night.
