Mr. Bumble

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Mr. Bumble and Oliver Twist

Harold Copping

1924

Colour lithography

Approximately 7 x 5 inches (17.9 x 12.4 cm)

From Character Sketches from Dickens, facing p. 32, illustrating the following: "Oliver was then led away by Mr. Bumble from the wretched home . . . . And yet he burst into an agony of childish grief, as the cottage-gate closed after him. . . . . Mr. Bumble walked on with long strides; little Oliver, firmly grasping his gold-laced cuff, trotted beside him."

Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham

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Very early in the novel, the pompous beedle, Mr. Bumble, Dickens's satirical personification of the antiquated British laws that regulate the lives of the poor and underprivileged, removes the youthful protagonist from the only real home he has known in his first eight years of life, Mrs. Mann's "baby farm," and returns him to the penitentiary-like orphanage. In this first instalment of the novel (February 1837), Mr. Bumble accompanies a crying, disoriented Oliver on his ninth birthday from Mrs. Mann's establishment. The text accompanying Copping's realization of the scene on the high road, "Oliver Twist Returns to the House," occurs Chapter 1, "Treats of the Place where Oliver Twist was Born, and of the Circumstances attending his Birth."

Oliver in Copping's plate seems well enough dressed and curious about his destination rather than distraught at leaving Mrs. Mann's, possible represented by the cottage in the upper register, right. The cuff that Oliver graps is red rather gold, so that the overall effect (despite Bumble's determinedly aloof, upturned face) is far less meodramatic than any in George Cruikshank's original series of twenty-four etchings for the February 1837 through March 1839 serial run in Bentley's Miscellany, the earliest of which, "Oliver Asks for More," occurs in the orphanage after Copping's scene. In his first appearance in Cruikshank's plates, "Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney Taking Tea," he is hardly the formidable representative of the Law that Copping's exemplifies.

Matz's Commentary

Oliver Twist first appeared as a serial in Bentley's Miscellany during the years 1837-38. In it Dickens assailed the abuses of the poor-law and workhouse system. "I have yet to learn," he said, "that a lesson of the purest good. may not be drawn from the vilest evil. I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral, at least as well as its froth and cream." By his effort many of the evils of his own time were reformed or abolished, and Oliver Twist stands to-day as the indictment that brought about the change in the poor law system. Oliver Twist, an orphan, was born in a workhouse and left to the tender mercies of church-wardens and overseers. He was, a year or two later, "farmed out" with other boys to an old lady, Mrs. Mann, who lived three miles away, and who was paid by the Parish to " bring them up."

Oliver's ninth birth-day found him a pale, thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference. The first incident extracted from the story is his transference from Mrs. Mann back to "the house" under Mr. Bumble's guidance, and is followed by that incident which has become world-wide in renown, when he had the temerity to ask for more gruel.

References

Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University.

A Dickens Mystery Best Left Unsolved

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Stephanie J. Block, center foreground, as the title character in the current revival of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” based on a novel by Charles Dickens. More Photos »

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: November 22, 2012

CHARLES DICKENS, a lifelong ham, would have loved Rupert Holmes’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” now playing in a well-received Roundabout Theater Company revival at Studio 54.

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‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’

Excerpt: 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood'

Related

• Theater Review | 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood': Raising the Dickens in All of Us (November 14, 2012)

Original Broadway Review: 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' (Dec. 3, 1985)

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Rupert Holmes, creator of the musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” More Photos »

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Betsy Wolfe as Rosa Bud and Will Chase as John Jasper in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” More Photos »

The show is set in a Victorian music hall, where the actors, a second-rate touring troupe from London, are putting on their own, very hammy version of Dickens’s last, unfinished novel. Theirs is a world that Dickens knew well. From a young age he was stage-struck and for a while yearned to be an actor, not a writer. Even as he became an immensely successful novelist, he delighted in putting on amateur theatricals, usually starring himself, from his own scripts. And in his later years he became famous for the public readings he gave from his books both in England and in America. These weren’t stuffy 92nd Street Y sorts of evenings but dramatic one-man shows in which Dickens acted out all the parts with such passion that by the end he would be physically and emotionally spent.

The readings may partly explain why “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was never completed. During the months he was writing it, Dickens broke a longstanding rule about not doing a reading tour while also working on a book. Already in poor health, and taking laudanum both to help him sleep and for pain in his legs, he exhausted himself and died of a stroke in June 1870, worn out at the age of 58.

Though it didn’t become known until the early 20th century, Dickens had also been living with a secret, one that overlaps with the mystery in “Drood” — and in this, the bicentennial of his birth, several new books throw additional light on it.

Set in the fictional cathedral town of Cloisterham, “Drood” is mainly the story of an opium-addicted choirmaster, John Jasper, secretly in love with Rosa Bud, the fiancée of his nephew, Edwin Drood, who disappears on Christmas Eve, under suspicious circumstances, shortly before the book breaks off. (Only 6 of a planned 12 serial installments were completed.) There is some dark, psychosexual atmosphere and a couple of nice comic moments, but by Dickens’s usual standards the book feels thin and underimagined.

That has not kept if from being an object of fascination. Almost from the moment the book was published it became a literary parlor game to solve its mystery, or three mysteries, really: Is Drood truly dead, and if so, who killed him? And who is the strange character Datchery, who turns up late in the tale, apparently in disguise?

There have also been countless attempts to finish the story. These include a dramatic version by Dickens’s son Charley and an 1873 book by a Vermont printer and con artist named Thomas James, who professed to have channeled Dickens through a medium, allowing him to finish “Drood” with the author’s “spirit-pen.” In a preface James also claimed to have in psychic readiness a brand-new Dickens novel, “The Life and Adventures of Bockley Wickleheap,” which he said “bid fair to equal anything from his pen while on earth.”

Mr. Holmes said recently that while growing up in Rockland County, N.Y., he was fascinated by the unfinishedness of “Drood.” He would pick up the book, look at the last page and imagine Dickens dropping dead right then and there. But he didn’t actually read the novel until sometime in the ’70s, when, now a successful record producer (for Barbra Streisand, among others) and writer of pop hits like “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” he began it on a train ride to Chicago.

“I said to myself, ‘You know, this has many of the key ingredients of a musical,’ ” he recalled. “The protagonist is a choirmaster, possessed, we’re told, of a voice angels themselves might envy. He plays the organ. He’s madly in love with his vocal student, Rosa Bud, so there’s every reason for him to sing to her, and her to sing to him.”

He wrote a few early songs for a “Drood” musical, Mr. Holmes added, but the piece was unremittingly bleak, and there was the problem of what to do about the ending. He abandoned it and didn’t return to “Drood” until the early ’80s, when Joseph Papp, the head of the Public Theater, and his wife, Gail Merrifield, encouraged him to try again.

He solved the bleakness problem by imagining “Drood” as a show within a show performed in a Victorian music hall. And he solved the ending problem by not solving it.

Halfway through the second act in his version of “Drood,” which moved from the Public’s Delacorte Theater to Broadway in 1985, the audience votes for a villain and on the identity of Datchery, and as often as not it does so not according to logic or the likelihood of guilt but out of affection for one or another member of the cast. The script, like an ingenious piece of clockwork machinery, can accommodate multiple possibilities, many of them highly unlikely.

Mr. Holmes doesn’t like to spoil the fun by revealing his own ideas about the mystery, but when pressed, he said he believed, as most scholars do, that John Jasper almost certainly killed Edwin Drood. Jasper is by far the most interesting character in the book. (Drood is by comparison something of a pill, and the reader feels no great loss when he disappears.)

In an important 1940 essay, one that changed the way Dickens was viewed by critics, Edmund Wilson wrote about the strain of dualism that runs all through the novels, counterbalancing good and evil, sometimes within a single character. No one illustrates this more than Jasper, who is practically a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure: a religious man, a gifted musician, a kindly uncle, but also an opium addict, a vindictive lover and someone driven by sexual obsession.

As Mr. Holmes pointed out, Jasper also bears a certain resemblance to his creator, for at the time of writing “Drood,” Dickens, one of the most admired and beloved men in England, seemingly a model of kindness, decency and probity, had been living a double life for years.

In 1858 Dickens announced in his magazine Household Words that he was separating from Catherine Hogarth, his wife of 22 years. He also leaked to the press an even uglier and nastier letter, in which he cruelly and falsely claimed that Catherine was a neglectful mother unloved by her children. His friends and contemporaries were astonished and upset; some of the more cynical assumed he must be having an affair with Catherine’s younger sister, Georgina, who stayed on with the family as housekeeper.

But not for decades did it begin to emerge that in 1857 Dickens had begun a relationship with an innocent-seeming 18-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan (or Ellen Lawless Ternan, to give her full name, which, as Wilson pointed out, is oddly echoed by the name of one of the important characters in “Drood,” Helena Landless.) They met in a theater, where she was acting in ‘The Frozen Deep,” a melodrama written by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and soon he was keeping her in a series of lodgings in England and France.

The most comprehensive account of the Ternan affair is Michael Slater’s new book, “The Great Charles Dickens Scandal,” which describes how the secret became known and how the public reacted, though Mr. Slater doesn’t go very deeply into the nature of the arrangement itself.

In his masterly, if eccentric, 1990 biography, Peter Ackroyd insisted that Dickens never consummated his relationship with Ternan, and that the arrangement was entirely platonic — this in spite of evidence that Dickens, the father of 10 children with a wife whom he didn’t particularly care for, was as energetic about sex as he was about everything else.

The latest big biography, by Claire Tomalin (who also wrote an earlier book about Ternan), assumes that the relationship almost certainly was sexual and tracks in great detail when and where Dickens and Ternan were together. And in “Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens,” out this month, Robert Gottlieb goes one step further and suggests that most likely, as Dickens’s daughter Kate and son Henry believed, there was an 11th child, a son born to Ternan in France, probably in January or February, 1863, and who died a few months later.

If Mr. Gottlieb is right, then Dickens at the time of writing “Drood,” still unable to acknowledge Ternan publicly, must have been carrying an incalculable weight of shame and guilt, and it’s reasonable to assume that the relationship had by then taken on a much darker, more regretful character. (Ternan later married a clergyman and claimed that the idea of intimacy with Dickens revolted her.)

The novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” is a long way from touching on things like a secret pregnancy and a premature infant death, but it’s full of secrets, sorrow, anger and shame. Jasper, an older man in love with a younger woman who is sickened by his touch, hates himself but can’t help himself.

Mr. Holmes’s version is an altogether happier affair, which is another reason it would have appealed to Dickens. It’s just playacting, the character of the stage manager reminds us, and we can do it again tomorrow night and have it all come out differently.

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VOLUME I

DAWN, MORNING, YOUTH, REVOLT

by Romain Rolland

Translated by Gilbert Cannan

PREFACE

"Jean-Christophe" is the history of the development of a musician of genius. The present volume comprises the first four volumes of the original French, viz.: "L'Aube," "Le Matin," "L'Adolescent," and "La Révólte," which are designated in the translation as Part I—The Dawn; Part II—Morning; Part III—Youth; Part IV—Revolt. Parts I and II carry Jean-Christophe from the moment of his birth to the day when, after his first encounter with Woman, at the age of fifteen, he falls back upon a Puritan creed. Parts III and IV describe the succeeding five years of his life, when, at the age of twenty, his sincerity, integrity, and unswerving honesty have made existence impossible for him in the little Rhine town of his birth. An act of open revolt against German militarism compels him to cross the frontier and take refuge in Paris, and the remainder of this vast book is devoted to the adventures of Jean-Christophe in France.

His creator has said that he has always conceived and thought of the life of his hero and of the book as a river. So far as the book has a plan, that is its plan. It has no literary artifice, no "plot." The words of it hang together in defiance of syntax, just as the thoughts of it follow one on the other in defiance of every system of philosophy. Every phase of the book is pregnant with the next phase. It is as direct and simple as life itself, for life is simple when the truth of it is known, as it was known instinctively by Jean-Christophe. The river is explored as though it were absolutely uncharted. Nothing that has ever been said or thought of life is accepted without being brought to the test of Jean-Christophe's own life. What is not true for him does not exist; and, as there are very few of the processes of human growth or decay which are not analysed, there is disclosed to the reader the most comprehensive survey of modern life which has appeared in literature in this century.

To leave M. Rolland's simile of the river, and to take another, the book has seemed to me like a, mighty bridge leading from the world of ideas of the nineteenth century to the world of ideas of the twentieth. The whole thought of the nineteenth century seems to be gathered together to make the starting-point for Jean-Christophe's leap into the future. All that was most religious in that thought seems to be concentrated in Jean-Christophe, and when the history of the book is traced, it appears that M. Rolland has it by direct inheritance.

M. Rolland was born in 1866 at Clamecy, in the center of France, of a French family of pure descent, and educated in Paris and Rome. At Rome, in 1890, he met Malwida von Meysenburg, a German lady who had taken refuge in England after the Revolution of 1848, and there knew Kossuth, Mazzini, Herzen, Ledin, Rollin, and Louis Blanc. Later, in Italy, she counted among her friends Wagner, Liszt, Lenbach, Nietzsche, Garibaldi, and Ibsen. She died in 1908. Rolland came to her impregnated with Tolstoyan ideas, and with her wide knowledge of men and movements she helped him to discover his own ideas. In her "Mémoires d'une Idéaliste" she wrote of him: "In this young Frenchman I discovered the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound grasp of every great intellectual manifestation that I had already found in the greatest men of other nationalities."

The germ of "Jean-Christophe" was conceived during this period—the "Wanderjahre"—of M. Rolland's life. On his return to Paris he became associated with a movement towards the renascence of the theater as a social machine, and wrote several plays. He has since been a musical critic and a lecturer on music and art at the Sorbonne. He has written Lives of Beethoven, Michael Angelo, and Hugo Wolf. Always his endeavor has been the pursuit of the heroic. To him the great men are the men of absolute truth. Jean-Christophe must have the truth and tell the truth, at all costs, in despite of circumstance, in despite of himself, in despite even of life. It is his law. It is M. Rolland's law. The struggle all through the book is between the pure life of Jean-Christophe and the common acceptance of the second-rate and the second-hand by the substitution of civic or social morality, which is only a compromise, for individual morality, which demands that every man should be delivered up to the unswerving judgment of his own soul. Everywhere Jean-Christophe is hurled against compromise and untruth, individual and national. He discovers the German lie very quickly; the French lie grimaces at him as soon as he sets foot in Paris.

The book itself breaks down the frontier between France and Germany. If one frontier is broken, all are broken. The truth about anything is universal truth, and the experiences of Jean-Christophe, the adventures of his soul (there are no other adventures), are in a greater or less degree those of every human being who passes through this life from the tyranny of the past to the service of the future.

The book contains a host of characters who become as friends, or, at least, as interesting neighbors, to the reader. Jean-Christophe gathers people in his progress, and as they are all brought to the test of his genius, they appear clearly for what they are. Even the most unpleasant of them is human, and demands sympathy.

The recognition of Jean-Christophe as a book which marks a stage in progress was instantaneous in France. It is hardly possible yet to judge it. It is impossible to deny its vitality. It exists. Christophe is as real as the gentlemen whose portraits are posted outside the Queen's Hall, and much more real than many of them. The book clears the air. An open mind coming to it cannot fail to be refreshed and strengthened by its voyage down the river of a man's life, and if the book is followed to its end, the voyager will discover with Christophe that there is joy beneath sorrow, joy through sorrow ("Durch Leiden Freude").

Those are the last words of M. Rolland's life of Beethoven; they are words of Beethoven himself: "La devise de tout âme héroïque."

In his preface, "To the Friends of Christophe," which precedes the seventh volume, "Dans la Maison," M. Rolland writes:

"I was isolated: like so many others in France I was stifling in a world morally inimical to me: I wanted air: I wanted to react against an unhealthy civilization, against ideas corrupted by a sham élite: I wanted to say to them: 'You lie! You do not represent France!' To do so I needed a hero with a pure heart and unclouded vision, whose soul would be stainless enough for him to have the right to speak; one whose voice would be loud enough for him to gain a hearing, I have patiently begotten this hero. The work was in conception for many years before I set myself to write a word of it. Christophe only set out on his journey when I had been able to see the end of it for him."

If M. Rolland's act of faith in writing Jean-Christophe were only concerned with France, if the polemic of it were not directed against a universal evil, there would be no reason for translation. But, like Zarathustra, it is a book for all and none. M. Rolland has written what he believes to be the truth, and as Dr. Johnson observed: "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it…."

By its truth and its absolute integrity—since Tolstoy I know of no writing so crystal clear—"Jean-Christophe" is the first great book of the twentieth century. In a sense it begins the twentieth century. It bridges transition, and shows us where we stand. It reveals the past and the present, and leaves the future open to us….

GILBERT CANNAN

 

 

 

Gilbert Cannan

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Gilbert Cannan (25 June 1884 – 30 June 1955) was a British novelist and dramatist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Family 4 Works 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Early life

Born in Manchester of Scottish descent, he got on badly with his family, and in 1897 he was sent to live in Oxford with the economist Edwin Cannan. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge; he started on a legal career, but turned to writing in 1908, after a short spell as an actor.

Career

Cannan worked first as a translator, and reviewed in London publications. Many of his novels are in part autobiographical, and fit into a novel sequence the Lawrie Saga, around the character Stephen Lawrie. Samuel Butler was a major influence on his fiction. In 1914, the novelist Henry James in an article in The Times named Cannan as one of four significant up-and-coming authors, alongside D.H. Lawrence, Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole.^[1]
He was employed as a secretary by J. M. Barrie, working with him in their efforts against censorship of the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain. A relationship developed in 1909 between Cannan and Barrie's wife Mary (née Ansell), a former actress who felt neglected in her marriage. Cannan had been wooing Kathleen Bruce, who at the same time was receiving advances from explorer Robert Falcon Scott. When Bruce decided to marry Scott, Mary Barrie's sympathy for Cannan developed a momentum of its own. Her husband sought to be reconciled, but relented and divorced her in a high-profile case, and she and Cannan were married in 1910. Cannan was caricatured as Mr. Gunn, a minor character in George Bernard Shaw's 1911 drama Fanny's First Play.

Gilbert Cannan at his Mill by Mark Gertler

During World War I he was a pacifist and then conscientious objector, and was involved in the National Council Against Conscription. He used his experiences in later novels, making the character Melian Stokes in Pugs and Peacocks a portrait of Bertrand Russell. He had known Ottoline Morrell from before the war. During it he moved in her circle, introducing her to D.H. Lawrence, and knew also Dora Carrington, Dorothy Brett and the artist Mark Gertler. Cannan's book Mendel was based on Gertler's early life (Mendel being his Yiddish given name), and explored his relationships with C.R.W. Nevinson and Carrington. Gertler painted Gilbert Cannan and his Mill; the picture is now in the Ashmolean Museum. The mill was at Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, where Cannan was living in 1916, and which attracted a number of his intellectual circle (including Lawrence and his wife Frieda, and Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry). The picture also shows the Cannan's two dogs, Sammy on the left and a Newfoundland dog Luath whose coat was copied for Nana, the dog who served as the Darling children's nurse in Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up.^[2] In 1916, partly in response to the devastating effects of the war and the threat of conscription, Cannan suffered a mental breakdown, an experience which he vividly described in his book, The Release of the Soul.^[3]
His marriage ended in 1918 when he had an affair with Gwen Wilson. However, she married Henry Mond in 1920 while Cannan was lecturing in the United States. Exotically for the time, Cannan lived with her and her new husband in a ménage à trois in their home, Mulberry House, in Smith Square, Westminster.
After the war Cannan devoted himself to writing, translation work and travel but another mental breakdown in 1923 proved untreatable. He became a mental patient at The Priory Hospital, Roehampton. He then spent the rest of his life confined to Holloway Sanatorium near Virginia Water where he died of cancer on 30 June 1955.^[4]

Family

The poet May Wedderburn Cannan and her sister, writer Joanna Cannan, were cousins of his, daughters of the academic Charles Cannan (Dean of Trinity College, Oxford, and Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press); as was Professor Edwin Cannan, the noted LSE economist (and brother of Charles Cannan); Joanna's daughter Diana Pullein-Thompson was his biographer. Joanna Cannan's son, Denis Cannan also followed in his footsteps, becoming a dramatist in his own right.

Works

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Gilbert Cannan

• Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland (1910–1913) translator
• Peter Homunculus (1909) first novel
• Heinrich Heine's Memoirs, edited by Gustav Karpeles (1910) translator
• Devious Ways (1910) novel
• Little Brother (1912) novel
• The Joy of the Theatre (1913) essays
• Four Plays (1913)
• Round The Corner (1913) novel
• Love (1914)
• Old Mole (1914) novel
• Old Mole's Novel (1914) novel
• Satire (1914)
• Young Earnest – The Romance Of A Bad Start In Life (1915)
• Samuel Butler: A Critical Study (1915)
• Windmills: A Book of Fables (1915) fantasy
• Three Pretty Men (1916) novel
• Mendel: a story of youth (1916) novel, closely based on Mark Gertler's early life
• Everybody's Husband (1917) play, performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre with incidental music by Maurice Besly
• The House with the Mezzanine, and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (1917) translator with S. S. Koteliansky
• The Stucco House (1917) novel
• Freedom (1917)
• The Anatomy of Society (1919)
• Time and Eternity (1919)
• Pink roses (1919)
• My Life (1920)
• Pugs and Peacocks (1921)
• Sembal (1922)
• Annette and Bennety (1922)
• Noel – An Epic in Seven Cantos (1922)
• Seven Plays (1923)
• House of Prophecy (1924)
• Diary of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, translator

Notes

1. ^ Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance (2009), 182.
2. ^ Birkin, Andrew, J. M. Barrie and The Lost Boys, Constable & Co, 1979
3. ^ Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance (2009), 254.
4. ^ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTcannanG.htm Spartacus Educational

References

• Gilbert Cannan: a Georgian prodigy (1978) Diana Farr (Diana Pullein-Thompson)
• Haycock, David Boyd (2009). A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War. London, Old Street Publishing. ISBN 978-1-905847-84-6.

External links

• Works by Gilbert Cannan at Project Gutenberg

Robert Burns Poem -"To a Mouse"

Murphy’s Law

If anything can go wrong, it will.

會出錯的事，早晚會發生。

誰是真正的墨菲？

在墨菲定律這個名詞出現之前，人類就已知道這種現象。1786年，蘇格蘭詩人 Robert Burn寫道：「不管是老鼠或人，都注定易生差錯。」*

《讀者文摘‧是天意還是巧合》1998年6月號，頁99

*懷疑是他著名的

. The best laid schemes o’ mice and men
    Gang aft agley
Robert Burns 1786

Robert Burns Poem -"To a Mouse"

 

To a Mouse - A Poem by Robert Burns

(Written by Burns after he had turned over the nest of a tiny field mouse with his plough. Burns was a farmer and farmers are generally far too busy to be concerned with the health of mice. This poem is another illustration of Robert Burn's tolerance to all creatures and his innate humanity.)

Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!