Volume 100 / Act 2 — A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS!

When you're lying awake, with a horrid headache (to adopt a suggestion of GILBERT's), When too freely you've dined, or too heavily wined, or munched too many walnuts or filberts; When your brain is 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 cannot 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 your house, nor yet (if she's "savvy") keep out of! What is "Hymen's halter"? I fidget and falter! The Beaks seem to palter and fumble. In such a strange fashion, I fly in a passion, and vow that the world is a jumble. Law seems a wigged noodle, as tame as a poodle, the whole darned caboodle (as 'ARRY sees) Is ructions and "rot," and our "rulers" a lot of confounded old foodles and Pharisees! Yes, that's what I think about Marriage and Drink—if you may call it thought, which with frenzy is fraught, and gives me a "head" like bad whiskey; whose dread is on me day and night, makes me wake in a fright, from visions most solemn of column on column of such "printed matter" and paragraph chatter, as makes me feel flatter than cold eggless batter upon a lead platter—as mad as a hatter, and who will relieve me? Can anyone? I tell you it's dreadful to face a whole bedful of spectres and spooks (born of papers and books) with, most horrible looks, limbs contorted in crooks, and bat-wings with big hooks, which haunt all the nooks of tester and curtain, and which, I am certain, will drive me insane if some one can't explain where the mischief we are, 'midst the jumble and jar of factions and fads, of crotchets and cads, of Tolstois and Jeunes, and Ibsens (whose lunes are more lunatic still). Oh, I'd learn with a will from any or aught, who could bring me, fresh caught, with lucidity fraught (what so long I have sought) a Clear Comforting Thought—though a Penny One!