Fling roses on the cradle;
Mates to wait on the funeral state!
Pages to pour the wine!
And a requiem for Twenty-eight,--
And a health to Twenty-nine.
Alas! for human happiness,
Alas! for human sorrow;
Our Yesterday is nothingness,
What else will be our Morrow?
Still Beauty must be stealing hearts,
And Knavery stealing purses;
Still Cooks must live by making tarts,
And Wits by making verses;
While Sages prate and Courts debate,
The same Stars set and shine;
And the World, as it roll'd through Twenty-eight,
Must roll through Twenty-nine.
Some King will come, in Heaven's good time,
To the tomb his Father came to;
Some Thief will wade through blood and crime
To a crown he has no claim to;
Some Suffering Land will rend in twain
The manacles that bound her,
And gather the links of the broken chain
To fasten them proudly round her;
The grand and great will love, and hate,
And combat, and combine;
And much where we were in Twenty-eight,
We shall be in Twenty-nine.
O'Connell will toil to raise the Rent,
And Kenyon to sink the Nation;
And Sheil will abuse the Parliament,
And Peel the Association;
And the thought of bayonets and swords
Will make ex-Chancellors merry--
And jokes will be cut in the House of Lords,
And throats in the County Kerry;
And writers of weight will speculate
On the Cabinet's design--
And just what it did in Twenty-eight,
It will do in Twenty-nine.
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