To a well-known Musical Critic, remarkable ! 0 -! of you we complain For exposing those ears to the wind and the rain. A Musical Critic of old fell a-pouting When he saw how his asinine honours were sprouting; Thy judgment much worse, and thy perkers as ample, ΕΓΩΕΝΚΑΙΠΑΝ. [The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.] The Categorical Imperative, or the Annunciation of the New Teutonic God, ETENKAIIIAN: a dithyrambic Ode, by Querkopf Von Klubstick, Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymnasio. **** Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus, (Speak English, friend!) the God Imperativus, Here on this market-cross aloud I cry : I, I, I! I itself I ! *Morning Post, January 4, 1798. The form and the substance, the what and the why, All souls and all bodies are I itself I ! All I itself I ! (Fools! a truce with this starting!) All my He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin !" The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right, To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus! * The Briage Street Committee. An Impromptu. Jack Stripe Eats tripe, It is therefore credible That tripe is edible. * Biographia Literaria, Lond. 1817, vol. i. pp. 148, 149 note. And therefore perforce And as Nick is too slow Is the pride of the city : And 'tis association That alone saves the nation From death and damnation.* To Nature. It may indeed be phantasy when I Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; So let it be; and if the wide world rings * Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S.T. Coleridge, Lond. Moxon, 1836, vol. i. pp. 90, 91. Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise What boots to tell how o'er his grave She wept that would have died to save ; Just shakes the ripe drop from the rose- Oh woman! nurse of hopes and fears, Thy soul in blameless mirth possessing; More lovely still those tears suppressing.† So Mr. Baker heart did pluck— And did a-courting go ! And Mr. Baker is a buck; For why? he needs the doe.‡ Lines in a German Student's Album. [The Germans, of all mortals the most imaginative, take extraordinary delight in their albums; and Coleridge being a noticeable Englander, and a poet withal, was not unfrequently requested to favour with a scrap of verse persons who had no very particular claims * Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. C., vol. i. P. 144. † Ib., vol. ii. p. 75. Ib., vol. ii. p. 21. upon his muse. As a specimen of the playful scintillations of this gifted man upon such occasions, I subjoin the following quatrain, which he wrote when about to leave the University in the Stammbuch of a Göttingen student who had the same course of lectures (Collegium) with him *]: “We both attended the same College, Where sheets of paper we did blur many, EPIGRAM ON KEPLER. From the German. No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high Whene'er the mist that stands 'twixt God and thee That intercepts no light and adds no stain,- DISTICH. From the Greek.§ Jack finding gold left a rope on the ground; *Carlyon's Early Years and Late Recollections. + The Friend, p. 231. On the Constitution of the Church and State, by S. T. Coleridge. Lond. 1830, p. 227. § Omniana, 1812, vol. ii. p. 123. |