Placid Pug, and Other Rhymes — Hymn for Humble People

HYMN FOR HUMBLE PEOPLE

|THE staunch and strenuous Serpent spends his time `In the safe field of serpentine pursuits, Rightly considering it a social crime `To parody the ways of other brutes.

= Scorning the fraud of alien aspirations, `The snobbishness that apes another class, Proud, and yet conscious of his limitations, `He bites the dust and grovels in the grass.

= The moral food that keeps him down is Force, `Force to confine his fancies to their beds.

[Illustration: 028] Makes him the laughing-stock of quadrupeds.

= No weak attempt to carol like the Lark, `Fore-doomed to failure and to ridicule, Troubles his life; he does not wish to bark, `Has no desire to amble like a Mule.

= Having no legs he does not try to walk, `But keeps contentedly his native crawl;

Having no voice he does not strive to talk, `Much less to bellow or to caterwaul.

= Mark the inevitably reached result: `To balance the advantages he missed, In three departments he may yet exult `To be the only perfect specialist.

= Three arts are his: to writhe, to hiss, to creep.

`The Toad's tenacity, the Wombat's wiles, Or the keen cunning of the crafty Sheep `(And all are artists in their various styles),= Would vainly challenge them.

He reigns supreme `In these the fields of his activity, And reigning so defies the envious Bream, `Who sneers and shrugs and sniggers in the sea.

= Type of the wise, who roar but never foam `(If they can help it) at the mouth, except When night and morn they brush their teeth at home `With pallid powder for that purpose kept.

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