from Don Juan
Canto X
XIV
The lawyer and the critic but behold
The baser sides of literature and life,
And nought remains unseen, but much untold,
By those who scour those double vales of strife.
While common men grow ignorantly old,
The lawyer’s brief is like the surgeon’s knife,
Dissecting the whole inside of a question,
And with it all the process of digestion.
XV
A legal broom’s a moral chimney-sweeper,
And that’s the reason he himself’s so dirty;
The endless soot bestows a tint far deeper
Than can be hid by altering his shirt; he
Retains the sable stains of the dark creeper,
At least some twenty-nine do out of thirty,
In all their habits; — not so you, I own;
As Cæsar wore his robe you wear your gown.
XVI
And all our little feuds, at least all mine,
Dear Jefferson, once my most redoubted foe
(As far as rhyme and criticism combine
To make such puppets of us things below),
Are over: Here’s a health to “Auld Lang Syne!”
I do not know you, and may never know
Your face — but you have acted on the whole
Most nobly, and I own it from my soul.
XVII
And when I use the phrase of “Auld Lang Syne!”
‘T is not address’d to you — the more’s the pity
For me, for I would rather take my wine
With you, than aught (save Scott) in your proud city.
But somehow, — it may seem a schoolboy’s whine,
And yet I seek not to be grand nor witty,
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred
A whole one, and my heart flies to my head, —
XVIII
As “Auld Lang Syne” brings Scotland, one and all,
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams,
The Dee — the Don — Balgounie’s brig’s black wall,
All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall,
Like Banquo’s offspring; — floating past me seems
My childhood in this childishness of mine:
I care not — ‘t is a glimpse of “Auld Lang Syne.”
XIX
And though, as you remember, in a fit
Of wrath and rhyme, when juvenile and curly,
I rail’d at Scots to show my wrath and wit,
Which must be own’d was sensitive and surly,
Yet ‘t is in vain such sallies to permit,
They cannot quench young feelings fresh and early:
I “scotch’d not kill’d” the Scotchman in my blood,
And love the land of “mountain and of flood.”
