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Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

My Landlady’s Nose

By Alexander Wilson (1766–1813)

O’ER the evils of life ’tis a folly to fret,—

Despondence and grief never lessened them yet;

Then a fig for the world,—let it come as it goes,

I’ll sing to the praise of my landlady’s nose.

My landlady’s nose is in noble condition,

For longitude, latitude, shape, and position;

’T is as round as a horn, and as red as a rose;

Success to the hulk of my landlady’s nose!

To jewellers’ shops let your ladies repair,

For trinkets and knick-knacks to give them an air,

Here living carbuncles, a score of them glows

On the big massy sides of my landlady’s nose.

Old Patrick M’Dougherty, when on the fuddle,

Pulls out a cigar, and looks up to her noddle;

For Dougherty swears, when he swigs a good dose,

By Marjory’s firebrand, my landlady’s nose.

Ye wishy-wash buttermilk drinkers so cold,

Come here, and the virtues of brandy behold;

Here’s red burning Ætna; a mountain of snows

Would roll down in streams from my landlady’s nose.

Each cavern profound of this snuff-loving snout

Is furnished within, sir, as well as without;

O’er the brown upper lip such a cordial flows—

O the cordial brown drops of my landlady’s nose!

But, gods! when this trunk, with an uplifted arm,

She grasps in the dish-clout to blow an alarm,

Horns, trumpets, conches, are but screaming of crows,

To the loud thundering twang of my landlady’s nose.

My landlady’s nose unto me is a treasure,

A care-killing nostrum, a fountain of pleasure;

If I want for a laugh to discard all my woes,

I only look up to my landlady’s nose.