All Paris keeping sacrament
Of musing or of melancholy,
Impatient of the next event,
To spend, to barter, to be spent ;—
I chuckled at the folly.
**T would that I were dead and damned,”’
Thinks every wiser human.
‘* Corpses have room, and men are jammed;
Those offer food, and these are crammed :—
And cheaper, too, is woman!”
I, being neither God nor ghost,
A mere caprice of matter,
Hop idly in the hideous host,
Content to chaff the uttermost,
To cackle and to chatter.
They bring their wreaths to deck the dead,
As skipping-ropes the devils use them.
One through the immortelles perks his head.
[These sights to ghosties are as bread ;
The luckless living lose them.]
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