Volume 104 — AN IDYLL OF THE CROWD.

Come down, O Scribe, from yonder sniffy height; What pleasure lives in "sniff" (the Councillor sang), In sniff and scorn, the weakness of the "swells"? But cease to move so near the clouds, and cease To sit a votary of the "Great Pooh-Pooh"; And come, for Labour's in the valley, come, For Toil dwells in the valley, come thou down And watch him; by the dim slum threshold, he, Or hand in hand with poverty in the docks, Or black with stithy-swartness by the forge, Or troll-like in the mine; nor cares to walk With Wealth and Fashion in the parks and squares; But follow! Come thou down, and let the cold Cramp-headed cynics yelp alone, and leave The mugwump scoffers there to shape and sleek Their thousand paragraphs of acrid joke That like a squirting fountain waste in air: So waste thou not; but come; for hunger pale Awaits thee; haggard pillars of the hearth Appeal to thee; slum children call, and now The Crowd's astir, with every man a Vote To give him voice, and in that voice you'll hear Myriads of "movements" hurrying into "laws," The moan of men at immemorial ills, And murmuring of innumerable shes.