Many years intervene, yet I'm free to maintain That I doted on Chanfrau, McWade, and Frank Frayne; Tom Stivers, the local, declared for a truth That Mayo as Hamlet was better than Booth: While in rôles that were thrillin', involving much killin', Jim Wallick loomed up our ideal of a villain; Mrs. Bowers, Alvin Joslin, Frank Aiken,--they all Earned their titles to fame in Corinthian Hall.
But Time, as begrudging the glory that fell On the spot I revere and remember so well, Spent his spite on the timbers, the plaster, and paint, And breathed on them all his morbiferous taint; So the trappings of gold and the gear manifold Got gangrened with rust and rheumatic with mould, And we saw dank decay and oblivion fall, Like vapors of night, on Corinthian Hall.
When the gas is ablaze in the opry at night, And the music goes floating on billows of light, Why, I often regret that I'm grown to a man, And I pine to be back where my mission began, And I'm fain to recall Reminiscences all That come with the thought of Corinthian Hall,-- To hear and to see what delighted me then, And to revel in raptures of boyhood again.
Though Corinthian Hall is a tumble-down place, Which some finical folks have pronounced a disgrace, There is one young old boy, quite as worthy as they, Who, aweary of art as expounded to-day, Would surrender what gold He's amassed to behold A tithe of the wonderful doings of old, A glimpse of the glories that used to enthrall Our _crême de la crême_ in Corinthian Hall.
I'VE travelled in heaps of countries, and studied all kinds of art, Till there isn't a critic or connoisseur who's properly deemed so smart; And I'm free to say that the grand results of my explorations show That somehow paint gets redder the farther out West I go.
I've sipped the voluptuous sherbet that the Orientals serve, And I've felt the glow of red Bordeaux tingling each separate nerve; I've sampled your classic Massic under an arbor green, And I've reeked with song a whole night long over a brown poteen.
The stalwart brew of the land o' cakes, the schnapps of the frugal Dutch, The much-praised wine of the distant Rhine, and the beer praised overmuch, The ale of dear old London, and the port of Southern climes,-- All, _ad infin._, have I taken in a hundred thousand times.