6
HOME PASTORALS.
Life still bears the stamp of its early struggle and labor,
Still is shorn of its color by pious Quaker repression,
Still is turbid with calm, or only swift in the shallows.
Gone are the olden cheer, the tavern-dance and the foxhunt,
Muster at trainings, buxom lasses that rode upon pillions,
Husking-parties and jovial home-comings after the wedding,
Gone, as they never had been!—and now, the serious people
Solemnly gather to hear some wordy itinerant speaker
Talking of Temperance, Peace, or the Right of Suffrage for Women.
Sport, that once like a boy was equally awkward and restless,
Sits with thumb in his mouth, while a petulant ethical bantling
Struts with his rod, and threatens our careless natural joyance.
Weary am I with all this preaching the force of example,
Painful duty to self, and painfuller still to one's neighbor,
Moral shibboleths, dinned in one's ears with slavering unction,
Till, for the sake of a change, profanity loses its terrors.
Still is shorn of its color by pious Quaker repression,
Still is turbid with calm, or only swift in the shallows.
Gone are the olden cheer, the tavern-dance and the foxhunt,
Muster at trainings, buxom lasses that rode upon pillions,
Husking-parties and jovial home-comings after the wedding,
Gone, as they never had been!—and now, the serious people
Solemnly gather to hear some wordy itinerant speaker
Talking of Temperance, Peace, or the Right of Suffrage for Women.
Sport, that once like a boy was equally awkward and restless,
Sits with thumb in his mouth, while a petulant ethical bantling
Struts with his rod, and threatens our careless natural joyance.
Weary am I with all this preaching the force of example,
Painful duty to self, and painfuller still to one's neighbor,
Moral shibboleths, dinned in one's ears with slavering unction,
Till, for the sake of a change, profanity loses its terrors.
