A Portrait Of 1783
Your hair and chin are like the hair
And chin Burne-Jones's ladies wear;
You were unfashionably fair
In '83;
And sad you were when girls are gay,
You read a book about Le vrai
Merite de l'homme, alone in May.
What CAN it be,
Le vrai merite de l'homme? Not gold,
Not titles that are bought and sold,
Not wit that flashes and is cold,
But Virtue merely!
Instructed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(And Jean-Jacques, surely, ought to know),
You bade the crowd of foplings go,
You glanced severely,
Dreaming beneath the spreading shade
Of 'that vast hat the Graces made;'
So Rouget sang--while yet he played
With courtly rhyme,
And hymned great Doisi's red perruque,
And Nice's eyes, and Zulme's look,
And dead canaries, ere he shook
The sultry time
With strains like thunder. Loud and low
Methinks I hear the murmur grow,
The tramp of men that come and go
With fire and sword.
They war against the quick and dead,
Their flying feet are dashed with red,
As theirs the vintaging that tread
Before the Lord.
O head unfashionably fair,
What end was thine, for all thy care?
We only see thee dreaming there:
We cannot see
The breaking of thy vision, when
The Rights of Man were lords of men,
When virtue won her own again
In '93.
poem by Andrew Lang

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Romancing The Beard
What women are attracted to
Though to some it may seem weird
Is a man who has a curl-i-que
That we’ve come to call a beard
They seem to love what’s hair-ly
On the chin and down below
That hair they find so rarely
Is that hair that they can’t grow
They love that tickly feeling
When caressing bearded men
Those beards just send them reeling
For those men they have a yen
These ladies have this craving
For men with chin filled bristles
These men who do no shaving
Who have these chin filled frizzles
A beard can really dazzle
When covering a jawline
With it’s sexy kind of frazzle
It can dazzle any fraulein
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I only see clearly what I remember.
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A Boy's Trials
When I was but a little lad
One thing I could not bear,
It was to stand at mother's knee
And have her comb my hair.
They didn't keep boys' hair as short
As it's kept now-a-days,
And mine was always tangled up
In twenty different ways.
I'd twist my mouth and grit my teeth,
And say it wasn't fair-
It was a trial, and no mistake,
When mother combed my hair.
She'd brush and brush each stubborn curl
That grew upon my pate,
And with her scissors nip and clip
To make the edges straight.
Then smooth it down until it shone,
While I would grin and bear,
And feel a martyr through and through,
When mother combed my hair.
She'd take my round chin in her hand
And hold it there the while
She made the parting carefully,
Then tell me with a smile:
'Don't push your cap down on your curls
And spoil my work and care;
He is a pretty little lad
When mother combs his hair.'
I'd hurry out and rumple up
That mop of hair so thick-
A vandal, I, for she had worked
So hard to make it slick-
And wish I were a grown-up man
So nobody would dare
To put a washrag in my ears,
Or comb my tangled hair.
Heigho! now that I'm bald and gray,
Methinks I would be glad
To have her smooth my brow and cheeks,
And whisper, 'Mother's lad!'
A longing for the care-free days
Doth take me unaware;
To stand, a boy, at mother's knee
And have her comb my hair.
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The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
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Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
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