COURAGE in your own."

Courage, comrades, this is certain,
All is for the best--
There are lights behind the curtain--
Gentiles, let us rest.
As the smoke-rack veers to seaward,
From "the ancient clay",
With its moral drifting leeward,
Ends the wanderer's lay.

Borrow'd Plumes

[A Preface and a Piracy]

Prologue

Of borrow'd plumes I take the sin,
My extracts will apply
To some few silly songs which in
These pages scatter'd lie.

The words are Edgar Allan Poe's,
As any man may see,
But what a POE-t wrote in prose,
Shall make blank verse for me.

These trifles are collected and republished chiefly with a
view to their redemption from the many improvements to which
they have been subjected while going at random the rounds of
the Press. I am naturally anxious that what I have written
should circulate as I wrote it, if it circulate at all. * *
* * * * In defence of my own taste, nevertheless, it is
incumbent upon me to say that I think nothing in this volume
of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself.
E. A. P.

(See Preface to Poe's Poetical Works.)

Epilogue

And now that my theft stands detected,
The first of my extracts may call
To some of the rhymes here collected
Your notice, the second to all.

Ah! friend, you may shake your head sadly,
Yet this much you'll say for my verse,
I've written of old something badly,
But written anew something worse.

Pastor Cum
[Translation from Horace]

When he, that shepherd false, 'neath Phrygian sails,
Carried his hostess Helen o'er the seas,
In fitful slumber Nereus hush'd the gales,
That he might sing their future destinies.
A curse to your ancestral home you take
With her, whom Greece, with many a soldier bold
Shall seek again, in concert sworn to break
Your nuptial ties and Priam's kingdom old.
Alas! what sweat from man and horse must flow,
What devastation to the Trojan realm
You carry, even now doth Pallas show
Her wrath, preparing buckler, car, and helm.
In vain, secure in Aphrodite's care,
You comb your locks, and on the girlish lyre
Select the strains most pleasant to the fair;
In vain, on couch reclining, you desire
To shun the darts that threaten, and the thrust