s a maze, and creation a haze, then each queer social
craze--there are many!--
Gets your wits in a spool, and there isn't a fool for your thoughts
would advance you a penny.

You can't sleep a wink, so the question of Drink, though you timidly
shrink from it, harries you.
Your wit's in a whirl, as you think, if some girl with a _penchant_ for
you, ups and marries you.
And ties you for life to the thing called a Wife,--that figment, that
fraud, that illusion,
Where, _what_ will you be? And you can't find a key to the epoch's
chaotic confusion.
It seems Local Option is sure of adoption, and what a tyrannic majority
May "opt" for one day, you're unable to say, and in vain you appeal to
Authority.
The Law of the Land is a labyrinth grand, which you can't understand,
nor can anyone,
And _that_ is a thought, with delirium fraught, an appalling, if 'tis
not a penny one.

Now Law, the Old Antic, seems utterly frantic, absurdly romantic and
maundering;
And Cool Common Sense has gone dotty and dense, in dim deserts of
Sentiment wandering.
Now Reason and Right, hydrocephalous quite, are both Della-Cruscan and
drivelling,
Life (barring the fun) like "The Mulberry One," seems a mixture of
diddling and snivelling.
There's LAWSON who jaws on the Abstinence Cause on, and would lay his
claws on the Nation,
And put sudden stopper on all that's improper (as _he_ thinks) without
compensation;
And then there's Sir EDWARD, who, when he goes bedward, must have _his_
reflections nightmarish!
It seems, from such rigs, that our biggest Big Wigs are scarcest to
govern a parish.
MCDOUGALL again, is agog to restrain all that gives _his_ soul pain--it's
a squeamish one!--
He thinks he's a stayer as Jabberwock-slayer, mere Angry Boy he, _not_ a
Beamish One!
These Oracles windy do raise such a shindy, and kick such a doose of a
dust up,
One would think without _them_ we were wrong stern and stem, and the whole
of creation would bust up.
But verily why men should _new_ worship Hymen,--who, just as unshackled as
Cupid,--
(See decision _Re_ JACKSON), take burdens their backs on, I can_not_
conceive. It seems stupid
Beyond all expression to have a "possession" whose "ownness" there's
desperate doubt of,
And which (if she's _nous_) you can't keep _in_