Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/359

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HIS LIFE, POEMS AND SPEECHES
319

Here might haply seem Scamander's stream,
Or in rhapsodic dream where the waveless gleam
And my native Simois rolls.

O Pilot! there is a peril dread
Where the ignis fatuus lured,
And the wolf unfed and the copperhead
With the poisonous growth hung over head
Like a Damocletian sword!

But bon voyage, and no longer enlarge
On the terrors above defined.
We'll rout the band with Prospero's wand
And banish them (in our mind);
With carbolic hand disinfect the land
Nor leave a germ behind.

So in birchen boat, a bark of his own,
On that lake of somber hue.
Or on life's broad stream, wherever blown,
J. B. is quite able—so lave him alone —
To paddle his own canoe.

H. Moto.

He received a more dainty compliment from far-away South America, about the same time. The charming love poem "Jacqueminots," has been set to music by two or three American composers. It had the honor of translation into the Spanish language by a Buenos Ayres author, who introduced it under the title "Yankee Poetry" as follows:

A North-American resident in Buenos Ayres has translated into Spanish verse a poetical composition already published in one of our dailies, but accredited to one of the most popular weekly newspapers in the United States, the Pilot of Boston. The circumstance of a stranger's so easily overcoming the great difficulties of rendering this English poem, beautifully and musically, into the Spanish idiom, united to the great merit of the original composition, whose author holds high rank in the literary world of North America, induces us to transfer it to our columns.

Poeias Yankee.—Un norte-americano residente en Buenos Aires ha traducido en verso espanol una composicion poetica publicada hace