Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen

They gathered every evidence
That might remove a doubt:
They wrote a postcard in his name,
And partly scratched it out.

Till, when his guilt was clear as day,
With all formality
They doomed the traitor to be drowned,
And threw him in the sea.

The flashing sunset, as he sank,
Made every scale a gem;
And, turning with a graceful bow,
He kissed his fin to them.

MORAL

I am, I think I have remarked,
Terrifically old,
(The second Ice-age was a farce,
The first was rather cold.)

A friend of mine, a trilobite
Had gathered in his youth,
When trilobites were trilobites,
This all-important truth.

We aged ones play solemn parts —
Sire – guardian – uncle – king.
Affection is the salt of life,
Kindness a noble thing.

The old alone may comprehend
A sense in my decree;
But – if you find a fish on land,
Oh throw it in the sea.

ON THE DISASTROUS SPREAD OF ÆSTHETICISM IN ALL CLASSES

Impetuously I sprang from bed,
Long before lunch was up,
That I might drain the dizzy dew
From day's first golden cup.

In swift devouring ecstacy
Each toil in turn was done;
I had done lying on the lawn
Three minutes after one.

For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars;
I formed my uncle's character,
Decreasing his cigars.

But could my kind engross me? No!
Stern Art – what sons escape her?
Soon I was drawing Gladstone's nose
On scraps of blotting paper.

Then on – to play one-fingered tunes
Upon my aunt's piano.
In short, I have a headlong soul,
I much resemble Hanno.

(Forgive the entrance of the not
Too cogent Carthaginian.
It may have been to make a rhyme;
I lean to that opinion).

Then my great work of book research
Till dusk I took in hand —
The forming of a final, sound
Opinion on The Strand.

But when I quenched the midnight oil,
And closed The Referee,
Whose thirty volumes folio
I take to bed with me,

I had a rather funny dream,
Intense, that is, and mystic;
I dreamed that, with one leap and yell,
The world became artistic.

The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
Declined to open shops —
And Cooks recorded frames of mind
In sad and subtle chops.

The stars were weary of routine:
The trees in the plantation
Were growing every fruit at once,
In search of a sensation.

The moon went for a moonlight stroll,
And tried to be a bard,
And gazed enraptured at itself:
I left it trying hard.

The sea had nothing but a mood