The Palace of Humbug

3Number 1

4I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

5And each damp thing that creeps and crawls

6Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

7Faint odours of departed cheese,

8Blown on the dank, unwholesome breeze,

9Awoke the never ending sneeze.

10Strange pictures decked the arras drear,

11Strange characters of woe and fear,

12The humbugs of the social sphere.

13One showed a vain and noisy prig,

14That shouted empty words and big

15At him that nodded in a wig.

16And one, a dotard grim and gray,

17Who wasteth childhood's happy day

18In work more profitless than play.

19Whose icy breast no pity warms,

20Whose little victims sit in swarms,

21And slowly sob on lower forms.

22And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,

23Where flowers are growing wild and rank,

24Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.

25All birds of evil omen there

26Flood with rich Notes the tainted air,

27The witless wanderer to snare.

28The fatal Notes neglected fall,

29No creature heeds the treacherous call,

30For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.

31The wandering phantom broke and fled,

32Straightway I saw within my head

33A vision of a ghostly bed,

34Where lay two worn decrepit men,

35The fictions of a lawyer's pen,

36Who never more might breathe again.

37The serving-man of Richard Roe

38Wept, inarticulate with woe:

39She wept, that waiting on John Doe.

40"Oh rouse", I urged, "the waning sense

41With tales of tangled evidence,

42Of suit, demurrer, and defence."

43"Vain", she replied, "such mockeries:

44For morbid fancies, such as these,

45No suits can suit, no plea can please."

46And bending o'er that man of straw,

47She cried in grief and sudden awe,

48Not inappropriately, "Law!"

49The well-remembered voice he knew,

50He smiled, he faintly muttered "Sue!"

51(Her very name was legal too.)

52The night was fled, the dawn was nigh:

53A hurricane went raving by,

54And swept the Vision from mine eye.

55Vanished that dim and ghostly bed,

56(The hangings, tape; the tape was red happy

57'Tis o'er, and Doe and Roe are dead!

58Oh, yet my spirit inly crawls,

59What time it shudderingly recalls

60That horrid dream of marble halls!