Page 46 - Poetry-Whimsy

Compared with a Cosmogony?
Or what—confess it, dearest Jones
Are many wives’ and children’s moans
To that loud cry of grief and woe
With which the learned world shall know
That it can never hope to see
The long-expected Volume Three?”

“Quite true,” sighed Jones. “And yet—and yet—
I think, dear Brown, that you forget
The theory of Average
As held in this enlightened age.
Had all the mighty men of old—
Kings, scholars, statesmen, heroes bold
Suffered untimely taking-off
With measles, croup, or whooping-cough,
Think you that this great earth would then
Have nourished only common men?
Had Homer died a stripling lad,
Should we have lost the Iliad?
Would Shakspere’s early, timeless death
Have cost us Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth?
The voice of reason answers, ‘No;
Wrong not prolific Nature so!’
Now, if this theory is true,
It must apply, dear Brown, to you;
And, fearless, you may leave behind
This master-product of your mind
(Though all unfinished, as you say),
Assured that, at no distant day,
Another will be found to do
The work so well begun by you.
But I—”
“Allow me!” struck in Brown.
“The ship is plainly going down;
And, ere she sinks beneath us, I
Would most decidedly deny
The theory of which you speak.
It is ingenious, but weak—
A vain though pleasing fallacy,
That never has deluded me.

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