Ah, Clown! with what a welcome wert thou greeted,
    Hailed like a hero to some lighted city.
And Pantaloon, old fool! for ever treated
    Horribly ill, and looking not for pity.
Diamond-cut Harlequin, with magic heated,
    Least loved, yet luckiest, as in committee
We three acknowledged when the play was over,
For he was Columbine's accepted lover.

Shall Clown for ever rest unsung of bard?
    His notable profundity of pocket,
At once a garden and a poultry yard;
    Stored secretly with cracker, squib, and rocket;
Still yawning in abysm wide-barr'd,
    Enough to make all tradesmen strike their docket.
For every kind of bibible and edible,
With a digestion perfectly incredible.

Choice son of Mercury, whose cool mendacity
    Delighted us, delights us in perspective,
The laws are not for one of thy capacity;
    Thou bidd'st defiance to the 'cute detective,
So indiscriminate in thy voracity,
    Save when to grumblers giving sharp corrective,
Thy face of brass our golden age brings back again,
And sends us wandering in that dreamy track again.

Thou art not flesh and bone; no wife hast thou
    Who watches shudderingly the magic leap,
With hands clasped close, and anxious furrowed brow,
    Gasping to think that life should be so cheap,
No little ones sleep in thy homestead now,
    Whose daily bread thy nightly risks do reap;
Else art thou such a fighter in our battle
As seldom yet heard arms and harness rattle.

In vain of thee they write the grave biography,
    Telling us thou wert mortal and knew pain;
Thou livest in a world remote from geography,
    Somewhere between our earth and the inane—
To the blithe adolescent's mixed cosmography
    Familiar: o'er thy grave no starry wain,
When midnight whispers soft its bright wheel rolls,
Oh vernal presence to our passing souls!

So laugh, and have our love! Be'st thou, indeed,
    Mortal as we. Oh whither shall we turn,
When the young flowers of life are choked with weed,
    For one thing faithful in our ashy urn?
The gayest piper on our human reed,
    Of him the saddest lesson must we learn?
Alas! that he should e'er belie his paint!
Humanity seems in him almost a taint.

Boyhood and Manhood have their separate clown,
    And hard we find it from the first to part;
Yet tenderly to the latter, when well known,
    We cling, for he is of us, and the heart
Is not beguiled by fancy. Cheer the town
    For many a week, old favourite as thou art.
We owe thee much; ungrateful would not be;
And will remember thy humanity.

THE COMPLAINT OF THE OLD
MAGICIAN.

Whether from the realms of magic, self
brought, or perchance, by some involuntary
intuitive Abracadabra of my own accidentally
invoked; whether from the musty recesses of
my old books in the dusty, legendary corner
yonder, or whether merely from those innermost
chambers of the brain, whither the soul
strays, oft-times, to seek for that which never
was; whether from all, or any, or none of
these haunts, still there came, lately, and sat
down over against me the old Magician. He
had nor white beard, nor wand, nor
cabalistic figures inscribed on his dress; he did
not smell sulphureous, nor did my lamp burn
blue at his approach. Yet he was a
presence, in which was power and wisdom and
knowledge, and an importunity of charm to
which the deafest adder must have listened,
perforce. And there came out of him a
voice, mildly saying: I am that false belief,
as old almost as true belief, and, though false,
not incompatible with the existence of my
veracious brother. I am that superstition, or
fancy, or imagination, or fiction, as you, in
your clemency or severity, may call me,
which you have dwelt upon and cherished
and nourished against your reason, against
your convictions, against your experience,
since it was said, "Let there be light," and
since light was.

Unembodied as I am (thus to me the old
Magician), I yet take interest in the doings
of the material world. I peruse, not
unfrequently, the hebdomadal productions of the
press, and among other periodicals I often
see the one to which you contribute. Inflated
with conceit, and blinded by opiniation, you
lately undertook to commiserate and to point
out as a Case of Real Distress, one Mab or
Mabel, a shiftless jade, calling herself Queen
of the extinct kingdom of Fairyland—a kingdom
recently blotted out from the map by
the united efforts of the March of Intellect,
Transatlantic Go-a-headism, and the Society
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. You
said, truly, that Queen Mab had not a shoe
to stand upon, that she was brought very low,
that she was sadly reduced. I admit all that.
The nonsensical kingdom of Fairyland is
deservedly dismembered, and its subjects
relegated to the ballets of the London theatres,
there to wave branches of red foil, and smile
—while their hearts ache—for fourteen
shillings a week, finding their own shoes and
stockings. But, my son (the Magician
became familiar), you have enormously exaggerated
the power and influence of Queen Mab.
You have ascribed to her territories and
vassals she never possessed, and that never were,
in the remotest degree, tributary to her. You
gave her as lieges, demons, dwarfs, dragons,
dwergars, horrible spectres and creations that
belong only unto me—the Magician. You
have, not of malice I hope, but inadvertently,
confounded the kingdom of Fairyland with
the far more (once) potent, far more
distressed, far more reduced kingdom of Magic.
I am the case of real distress. I am the
Magician without a shoe to stand on.
My glory is departed—mine, Ichabod the
Magician.

Before faydom existed, was Magic, awful,
erect, weird, inscrutable. Magic stood in the