| |
| YE little snails, | |
| With slippery tails, | |
| Who noiselessly travel | |
| Along this gravel, | |
| By a silvery path of slime unsightly, | 5 |
| I learn that you visit my pea-rows nightly. | |
| Felonious your visit, I guess! | |
| And I give you this warning, | |
| That, every morning, | |
| I ’ll strictly examine the pods; | 10 |
| And if one I hit on, | |
| With slaver or spit on, | |
| Your next meal will be with the gods. | |
| |
| I own you ’re a very ancient race, | |
| And Greece and Babylon were amid; | 15 |
| You have tenanted many a royal dome, | |
| And dwelt in the oldest pyramid; | |
| The source of the Nile!—O, you have been there! | |
| In the ark was your floodless bed; | |
| On the moonless night of Marathon | 20 |
| You crawled o’er the mighty dead; | |
| But still, though I reverence your ancestries, | |
| I don’t see why you should nibble my peas. | |
| |
| The meadows are yours,—the hedgerow and brook, | |
| You may bathe in their dews at morn; | 25 |
| By the agèd sea you may sound your shells, | |
| On the mountains erect your horn; | |
| The fruits and the flowers are your rightful dowers. | |
| Then why—in the name of wonder— | |
| Should my six pea-rows be the only cause | 30 |
| To excite your midnight plunder? | |
| |
| I have never disturbed your slender shells; | |
| You have hung round my agèd walk; | |
| And each might have sat, till he died in his fat, | |
| Beneath his own cabbage-stalk: | 35 |
| But now you must fly from the soil of your sires; | |
| Then put on your liveliest crawl, | |
| And think of your poor little snails at home, | |
| Now orphans or emigrants all. | |
| |
| Utensils domestic and civil and social | 40 |
| I give you an evening to pack up; | |
| But if the moon of this night does not rise on your flight, | |
| To-morrow I ’ll hang each man Jack up. | |
| You ’ll think of my peas and your thievish tricks, | |
| With tears of slime, when crossing the Styx. | 45 |
| |
