The Palace of HumBug
Lays
of
Mystery,
Imagination,
and
Humor
Number
1
I
dreamt
I
dwelt
in
marble
halls,
And
each
damp
thing
that
creeps
and
crawls
Went
wobble-wobble
on
the
walls.
Faint
odours
of
departed
cheese,
Blown
on
the
dank,
unwholesome
breeze,
Awoke
the
never
ending
sneeze.
Strange
pictures
decked
the
arras
drear,
Strange
characters
of
woe
and
fear,
The
humbugs
of
the
social
sphere.
One
showed
a
vain
and
noisy
prig,
That
shouted
empty
words
and
big
At
him
that
nodded
in
a
wig.
And
one,
a
dotard
grim
and
gray,
Who
wasteth
childhood’s
happy
day
In
work
more
profitless
than
play.
Whose
icy
breast
no
pity
warms,
Whose
little
victims
sit
in
swarms,
And
slowly
sob
on
lower
forms.
And
one,
a
green
thyme-honoured
Bank,
Where
flowers
are
growing
wild
and
rank,
Like
weeds
that
fringe
a
poisoned
tank.
All
birds
of
evil
omen
there
Flood
with
rich
Notes
the
tainted
air,
The
witless
wanderer
to
snare.
The
fatal
Notes
neglected
fall,
No
creature
heeds
the
treacherous
call,
For
all
those
goodly
Strawn
Baits
Pall.
The
wandering
phantom
broke
and
fled,
Straightway
I
saw
within
my
head
A
vision
of
a
ghostly
bed,
Where
lay
two
worn
decrepit
men,
The
fictions
of
a
lawyer’s
pen,
Who
never
more
might
breathe
again.
The
serving-man
of
Richard
Roe
Wept,
inarticulate
with
woe:
She
wept,
that
waiting
on
John
Doe.
“Oh
rouse”,
I
urged,
“the
waning
sense
With
tales
of
tangled
evidence,
Of
suit,
demurrer,
and
defence.”
“Vain”,
she
replied,
“such
mockeries:
For
morbid
fancies,
such
as
these,
No
suits
can
suit,
no
plea
can
please.”
And
bending
o’er
that
man
of
straw,
She
cried
in
grief
and
sudden
awe,
Not
inappropriately,
“Law!”
The
well-remembered
voice
he
knew,
He
smiled,
he
faintly
muttered
“Sue!”
(Her
very
name
was
legal
too.)
The
night
was
fled,
the
dawn
was
nigh:
A
hurricane
went
raving
by,
And
swept
the
Vision
from
mine
eye.
Vanished
that
dim
and
ghostly
bed,
(The
hangings,
tape;
the
tape
was
red
happy
‘Tis
o’er,
and
Doe
and
Roe
are
dead!
Oh,
yet
my
spirit
inly
crawls,
What
time
it
shudderingly
recalls
That
horrid
dream
of
marble
halls!
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll, (born January 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England—died January 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey), English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). His poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the highest order.