from Canto X

11

And why? Because She’s changeable and chaste.
     I know no other reason, whatsoe’er
Suspicious people, who find fault in haste,
     May choose to tax me with; which is not fair,
Nor flattering to “their temper or their taste,”
     As my friend Jeffrey writes with such an air:
However, I forgive him, and I trust
He will forgive himself;—if not, I must.

12

Old enemies who have become new friends
     Should so continue—’tis a point of honour;
And I know nothing which could make amends
     For a return to hatred: I would shun her
Like garlic, howsoever she extends
     Her hundred arms and legs, and fain outrun her.
Old flames, new wives, become our bitterest foes—
Converted foes should scorn to join with those.

13

This were the worst desertion:—renegadoes,
     Even shuffling Southey, that incarnate lie,
Would scarcely join again the “reformadoes,”
     Whom he forsook to fill the Laureate’s sty:
And honest men, from Iceland to Barbadoes,
    Whether in Caledon or Italy,
Should not veer round with every breath, nor seize,
To pain, the moment when you cease to please.

14

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.

15

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 Caesar wore his robe you wear your gown.

16

And all our little feuds, at least all mine,
    Dear Jeffrey, 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.

17

And when I use the phrase of “Auld Lang Syne”!
     ‘Tis not addressed 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,—

18

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—’tis a glimpse of “Auld Lang Syne.”

19

And though, as you remember, in a fit
     Of wrath and rhyme, when juvenile and curly,
I railed at Scots to shew my wrath and wit,
     Which must be owned was sensitive and surly,
Yet ‘tis in vain such sallies to permit,
     They cannot quench young feelings fresh and early:
I “scotched, not killed,” the Scotchman in my blood,
And love the land of “mountain and of flood.”

20

Don Juan, who was real or ideal,—
     For both are much the same, since what men think
Exists when the once thinkers are less real
     Than what they thought, for mind can never sink,
And ‘gainst the body makes a strong appeal;
     And yet ‘tis very puzzling on the brink
Of what is called Eternity, to stare,
And know no more of what is here than there:—