A Fairy Tale
On Hounslow Heath—and close beside the road,
As western travellers may oft have seen,—
A little house some years ago there stood,
A minikin abode;
And built like Mr. Birkbeck’s, all of wood:
The walls of white, the window-shutters green,—
Four wheels it had at North, South, East, and West
(Though now at rest),
On which it used to wander to and fro,
Because its master ne’er maintained a rider,
Like those who trade in Paternoster Row;
But made his business travel for itself,
Till he had made his pelf,
And then retired—if one may call it so,
Of a roadsider.
Perchance, the very race and constant riot
Of stages, long and short, which thereby ran,
Made him more relish the repose and quiet
Of his now sedentary caravan;
Perchance, he loved the ground because ’twas common,
And so he might impale a strip of soil
That furnished, by his toil,
Some dusty greens, for him and his old woman;—
And five tall hollyhocks, in dingy flower:
Howbeit, the thoroughfare did no ways spoil
His peace,—unless, in some unlucky hour,
A stray horse came, and gobbled up his bow’r!
But, tired of always looking at the coaches,
The same to come,—when they had seen them one day!
And, used to brisker life, both man and wife
Began to suffer N U E’s approaches,
And feel retirement like a long wet Sunday,—
So, having had some quarters of school breeding,
They turned themselves, like other folks, to reading;
But setting out where others nigh have done,
And being ripened in the seventh stage,
The childhood of old age,
Began, as other children have begun,—
Not with the pastorals of Mr. Pope,
Or Bard of Hope,
Or Paley ethical, or learned Porson,—
But spelt, on Sabbaths, in St. Mark, or John,
And then relax’d themselves with Whittington,
Or Valentine and Orson—
But chiefly fairy tales they loved to con,
And being easily melted in their dotage,
Slobber’d,—and kept
Reading,—and wept
Over the White Cat, in their wooden cottage.
Thus reading on—the longer
They read, of course, their childish faith grew stronger
In Gnomes, and Hags, and Elves, and Giants grim,—
If talking Trees and Birds revealed to him,
She saw the flight of Fairyland’s fly-wagons,
And magic fishes swim
In puddle ponds, and took old crows for dragons,—
Both were quite drunk from the enchanted flagons;
When as it fell upon a summer’s day,
As the old man sat a feeding
On the old babe-reading,
Beside his open street-and parlor door,
A hideous roar
Proclaimed a drove of beasts was coming by the way.
Long-horned, and short, of many a different breed,
Tall, tawny brutes, from famous Lincoln-levels
Or Durham feed;
With some of those unquiet black dwarf devils
From nether side of Tweed,
Or Firth of Forth;
Looking half wild with joy to leave the North,—
With dusty hides, all mobbing on together,—
When,—whether from a fly’s malicious comment
Upon his tender flank, from which he shrank;
Or whether
Only in some enthusiastic moment,—
However, one brown monster, in a frisk,
Giving his tail a perpendicular whisk,
Kicked out a passage through the beastly rabble;
And after a pas seul,—or, if you will, a
Horn-pipe before the basket-maker’s villa,
Leapt o’er the tiny pale,—
Backed his beefsteaks against the wooden gable,
And thrust his brawny bell-rope of a tail
Right o’er the page,
Wherein the sage
Just then was spelling some romantic fable.
The old man, half a scholar, half a dunce,
Could not peruse,—who could?—two tales at once;
And being huffed
At what he knew was none of Riquet’s Tuft;
Banged-to the door,
But most unluckily enclosed a morsel
Of the intruding tail, and all the tassel:—
The monster gave a roar,
And bolting off with speed increased by pain,
The little house became a coach once more,
And, like Macheath, “took to the road” again!
Just then, by fortune’s whimsical decree,
The ancient woman stooping with her crupper
Towards sweet home, or where sweet home should be,
Was getting up some household herbs for supper;
Thoughtful of Cinderella, in the tale,
And, quaintly wondering if magic shifts
Could o’er a common pumpkin so prevail,
To turn it to a coach;—what pretty gifts
Might come of cabbages, and curly kale;
Meanwhile she never heard her old man’s wail,
Nor turned, till home had turned a corner, quite
Gone out of sight!
At last, conceive her, rising from the ground,
Weary of sitting on her russet clothing,
And looking round
Where rest was to be found,
There was no house—no villa there—no nothing!
No house!
The change was quite amazing;
It made her senses stagger for a minute,
The riddle’s explication seemed to harden;
But soon her superannuated nous
Explain’d the horrid mystery;—and raising
Her hand to heaven, with the cabbage in it,
On which she meant to sup,—
“Well! this is Fairy work! I’ll bet a farden,
Little Prince Silverwings has ketch’d me up,
And set me down in some one else’s garden!”
’Tis strange how like a very dunce,
Man—with his bumps upon his sconce,
Has lived so long, and yet no knowledge he
Has had, till lately, of Phrenology—
A science that by simple dint of
Head-combing he should find a hint of,
When scratching o’er those little poll-hills,
The faculties throw up like mole-hills;
A science that, in very spite
Of all his teeth, ne’er came to light,
For though he knew his skull had grinders,
Still there turned up no organ finders,
Still sages wrote, and ages fled,
And no man’s head came in his head—
Not even the pate of Erra Pater,
Knew aught about its pia mater.
At last great Dr. Gall bestirs him—
I don’t know but it might be Spurzheim—
Tho’ native of a dull and slow land,
And makes partition of our Poll-land;
At our Acquisitiveness guesses,
And all those necessary nesses
Indicative of human habits,
All burrowing in the head like rabbits.
Thus Veneration, he made known,
Had got a lodging at the Crown;
And Music (see Deville’s example)
A set of chambers in the Temple;
That Language taught the tongues close by,
And took in pupils thro’ the eye,
Close by his neighbor Computation,
Who taught the eyebrows numeration.
The science thus—to speak in fit
Terms—having struggled from its nit,
Was seized on by a swarm of Scotchmen
Those scientifical hotch-potch men,
Who have at least a penny dip,
And wallop in all doctorship,
Just as in making broth they smatter
By bobbing twenty things in water:
These men, I say, made quick appliance
And close, to phrenologic science;
For of all learned themes whatever,
That schools and colleges deliver,
There’s none they love so near the bodles,
As analysing their own noddles;
Thus in a trice each northern blockhead
Had got his fingers in his shock head,
And of his bumps was babbling yet worse
Than poor Miss Capulet’s dry wet-nurse;
Till having been sufficient rangers
Of their own heads, they took to strangers’.
And found in Presbyterians’ polls
The things they hated in their souls!
For Presbyterians hear with passion
Of organs joined with veneration.
No kind there was of human pumpkin
But at its bumps it had a bumpkin;
Down to the very lowest gullion,
And oiliest skull of oily scullion.
No great man died but this they did do,
They begged his cranium of his widow:
No murderer died by law disaster,
But they took off his sconce in plaster;
For thereon they could show depending,
“The head and front of his offending”:
How that his philanthropic bump
Was mastered by a baser lump;
For every bump (these wags insist)
Has its direct antagonist,
Each striving stoutly to prevail,
Like horses knotted tail to tail!
And many a stiff and sturdy battle
Occurs between these adverse cattle,
The secret cause, beyond all question,
Of aches ascribed to indigestion,—
Whereas ’tis but two knobby rivals
Tugging together like sheer devils,
Till one gets mastery, good or sinister,
And comes in like a new prime-minister.
Each bias in some master node is:—
What takes M’Adam where a road is,
To hammer little pebbles less?
His organ of Destructiveness.
What makes great Joseph so encumber
Debate? a lumping lump of Number:
Or Malthas rail at babies so?
The smallness of his Philopro—
What severs man and wife? a simple
Defect of the Adhesive pimple:
Or makes weak women go astray?
Their bumps are more in fault than they.
These facts being found and set in order
By grave M. D.’s beyond the Border,
To make them for some months eternal,
Were entered monthly in a journal,
That many a northern sage still writes in,
And throws his little Northern Lights in,
And proves and proves about the phrenos,
A great deal more than I or he knows:
How Music suffers, par exemple,
By wearing tight hats round the temple;
What ills great boxers have to fear
From blisters put behind the ear;
And how a porter’s Veneration
Is hurt by porter’s occupation;
Whether shillelaghs in reality
May deaden Individuality;
Or tongs and poker be creative
Of alterations in th’ Amative;
If falls from scaffolds make us less
Inclined to all Constructiveness:
With more such matters, all applying
To heads—and therefore head-ifying.