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 Landladys Nose
By Alexander Wilson (17661813)O
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.