march:      The wondrous arch behind you fell, And left a chasm profound as hell:      You, in your capitol secured, A siege as long as Troy endured. 

      [Footnote 1: Naples, anciently called Parthenope, from the name of the siren who threw herself into the sea for grief at the departure of Ulysses, and was cast up and buried there.—Ovid, "Met.," xiv, 101.—W. E. B.]       [Footnote 2: Americus Vespuccius, the discoverer of America in 1497. See Hakluyts "Navigations, Voyages, etc.," vii, 161; viii, 449.—W. E. B.]       [Footnote 3: See Lucretius, "De Rer. Nat.," lib. i.—W. E. B.]       [Footnote 4: Bubo, the owl.—Dublin Edition.]       [Footnote 5: Taken prisoner by the Carthaginians in the first Punic war, and ultimately tortured to death. See the story in Cicero, "De Officiis,"      i, 13; Hor., "Carm.," iii, 5.—W. E. B.] 

  

  

       ON A PEN. 1724     

      In youth exalted high in air, Or bathing in the waters fair, Nature to form me took delight, And clad my body all in white. My person tall, and slender waist, On either side with fringes graced; Till me that tyrant man espied, And dragg'd me from my mother's side:      No wonder now I look so thin; The tyrant stript me to the skin:      My skin he flay'd, my hair he cropt:      At head and foot my body lopt:      And then, with heart more hard than stone, He pick'd my marrow from the bone. To vex me more, he took a freak To slit my tongue and make me speak:      But, that which wonderful appears, I speak to eyes, and not to ears. He oft employs me in disguise, And makes me tell a thousand lies:      To me he chiefly gives in trust To please his malice or his lust. From me no secret he can hide; I see his vanity and pride:      And my delight is to expose His follies to his greatest foes. All languages I can command, Yet not a word I understand. Without my aid, the best divine In learning would not know a line:      The lawyer must forget his pleading; The scholar could not show his reading. Nay; man my master is my slave; I give command to kill or save, Can grant ten thousand pounds a-year, And make a beggar's brat a peer. But, while I thus my life relate, I only hasten on my fate. My tongue is black, my mouth is furr'd, I hardly now can force a word. I die unpitied and forgot, And on some dunghill left to rot. 

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