Modesty restrains me from mentioning the author of this glittering example of pure idealism:
The colonel lay dying. An angel appeared. This man of great family and titles he cheered, “Fear not, to a better place you will be borne,” The colonel’s reply was—“To Hell with reform!”
After a certain assistant district attorney, noted for his verboseness, had made his closing argument, the jury convicted the composer of this couplet. He seems to resent it:
To call them twelve trees would be nothing unkind; They were crooked and green; they were swayed by the wind.
To an assistant district attorney who proved nothing but his own desire for notoriety and his ability to make a noise and keep the Court of Appeals busy. Those who heard him sum up the first important case he ever had, and the one on which rests his reputation (for brutality and unfairness), may remember and see the application to a certain part of his closing address:
He persecutes the charming “Bell,” His “brazen tongue” has now full “swing,” With clamorous lies he “told” this “knell,” Produce, produce, produce the—“ring.”
In him a great philanthropist we see, The friend of negro wench and stable boys, He taught the gentle art of perjury, To get convictions every vice employs.
This reminds me of Longfellow (it is so different):
I’m an expert. I raise chickens, so I know about a “quill,” How it writes and what you think of while you sign a note or “bill,” I’ll appear against or for you; either side without regard, I can tell my favorite rooster by his claw marks in the yard. Two wings this fowl possesses; o-“pinions” two have I There’s one for you, or one for him, for any who will buy. Like him, I love to “scratch” in dirt. I’m crooked as his walk, I “plume” myself, and like my hens I cackle when I talk, I’m “hatching” out a plot just now, really it’s very funny, It’s all a guess—ridiculous—but then, I need the money.
Some lyrics found their way into those columns. Here is only one of them, for I fear your interest, like the newspaper itself, has ceased:
Painted by sunlight, all the brightness caught, From out the sky and to my prison brought. No vision, essence, song, so sweet by half, As smiles to me from out her photograph.