Page:The college beautiful, and other poems.djvu/36

I conned the rocks with an anxious eye,
A student meek and docile,
When a distant whisper floated by,
"Oh, come and be a fossil!"

Farewell the Cenozoic Age,
With all its toiling daughters!
Wise Time turned back his yellow page;
I swam in ancient waters.

And first I met in the aching void
The solemn Eozoon,
And only the stem of the salt Crinoid
Vibrated to my moan.

"I'm lonely in the world," I cried,
And shouted o'er and o'er,
But not a Rhizopod replied
From the silent Protozoa.

The Graptolite and the Trilobite
To a gladder temper won me,
But oh, for the Orthoceretite,
And the smile he smiled upon me!

"Thou Brachiopod, art mollusk or worm?"
I asked with a mixed sensation,
But I fled from the frivolous Placoderm,
Nor lingered for conversation.