sledge and shovel in hand,
Like elder Sons of Giant Despair,
A couple of Cyclops make a stand,
And fiercely hammering here and there,
Keep at bay the Powers of Air--
But desperation is all in vain!--
They faint--they choke,
For the sulphurous smoke
Is poisoning heart, and lung, and brain,
They reel, they sink, they gasp, they smother.
One for a moment survives his brother,
Then rolls a corpse across the other!

Halloo! Halloo!
And Hullabaloo!
There is only one more thing to do--
And seized by beak, and talon, and claw,
Bony hand, and hairy paw,
Yea, crooked horn, and tusky jaw,
The four huge Bodies are haul'd and shoven
Each after each in the roaring oven!

* * * * *

That Eisen Hutte is standing still,
Go to the Hartz whenever you will,
And there it is beside a hill,
And a rapid stream that turns many a mill;
The self-same Forge,--you'll know it at sight--
Casting upward, day and night,
Flames of red, and yellow, and white!

Ay, half a mile from the mountain gorge,
There it is, the famous Forge,
With its Furnace,--the same that blazed of yore,--
Hugely fed with fuel and ore;
But ever since that tremendous Revel,
Whatever Iron is melted therein,--
As Travellers know who have been to Berlin--
Is all _as black as the Devil_!

THE UNIVERSITY FEUD.[45]

"A plague o' both the houses!"--MERCUTIO.

[Footnote 45: "The Row at the Oxford Arms" (to quote its alternative
title) is a squib on the contest at Oxford, in 1841-42, for the
Professorship of Poetry. The candidates, it will be remembered, were
Isaac Williams and Mr. (afterwards Archdeacon) Garbett. The struggle
was the more intense that it was openly acknowledged to be a trial of
strength between the adherents of the "Oxford Movement" and the
Evangelical Party.]

As latterly I chanced to pass
A Public House, from which, alas!
The Arms of Oxford dangle!
My ear was startled by a din,
That made me tremble in my skin,
A dreadful hubbub from within,
Of voices in a wrangle--

Voices loud, and voices high,
With now and then a party-cry,
Such as used in times gone by
To scare the British border;
When foes from North and South of Tweed--
Neighbors--and of Christian creed--
Met in hate to fight and bleed,
Upsetting Social Order.

Surprised, I turn'd me to the crowd,
Attracted by that tumult loud,
And ask'd a gazer, beetle-brow'd,
The cause of such disquiet.
When lo! the s