“They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees.
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jackdaws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And everyone said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore.’ ”

From the pedestrian excursion of the “Table and the Chair,” we cannot resist making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:—

“So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
‘See, the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air!’

“But in going down an alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.

“Then they whispered to each other,
‘O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we’ve taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!’
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads,
Till they toddled to their beds.”

“The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World” follows next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate persons who have not perused the original: “During the daytime Violet chiefly occupied herself in putting saltwater into a churn, while her three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter, which it seldom if ever did.” After journeying for a time, they saw some land at a distance, “and when they came to it they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five hundred and three feet high.” In a later passage, we read how “by-and-by the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found.” Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object which “on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection, seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an armchair made of sponge-cake and oyster-shells.” This turned out to be the “Cooperative Cauliflower,” who, “while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him with mingled affection and disgust … suddenly arose, and in a somewhat plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers … till he finally disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of undeveloped asthma and a great appetite.”

In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of “Nonsense pure and absolute” in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a delightful anecdote illustrative of the “persistently absurd report” that the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of “Nonsense.” In this volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third division is styled “Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures,” although there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite illustrations are those of the “Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on his Head, for fear he should bite anybody,” and the “Visibly Vicious Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in Vellum.” In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear’s books, we meet not only with familiar words, but personages and places—old friends like the Jumblies, the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore, and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses, graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear’s absurd creations. So again in the “Pelican Chorus” there are some charming lines:—

“By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around,” etc.

The other nonsense-poems are all good, but we have no space for further quotation, and will take leave of our subject by propounding the following set of examination questions which a friend who is deeply versed in Mr. Lear’s books has drawn up for us:—

What bearing may we assume the foregoing couplet to have upon Mr. Lear’s political views?

—The London Spectator.

Nonsense Books

A Book of Nonsense

There was an Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry;
So he made them a Book, and with laughter they shook
At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

Dedication

To the
great-grandchildren, grandnephews, and grandnieces
of Edward, 13th Earl of Derby,
this book of drawings and verses
(The greater part of which were originally made and composed for their parents,)
As dedicated by the author,
Edward Lear.

London, 1862.

Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures

There was an Old Man with a nose,
Who said, “If you choose to suppose
That my nose is too long, you are certainly wrong!”
That remarkable Man with a nose.

There was a Young Person of Smyrna,
Whose Grandmother threatened to burn her;
But she seized on the Cat, and said, “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous Old Woman of Smyrna!”

There was an Old Man on a hill,
Who seldom, if ever, stood still;
He ran up and down in his Grandmother’s gown,
Which adorned that Old Man on a hill.

There was an Old Person of Chile,
Whose conduct was painful and silly;
He sat on the stairs, eating apples and pears,
That imprudent Old Person of Chile.

There was an Old Man with a gong,
Who bumped at it all the day long;
But they called out, “Oh, law! you’re a horrid old bore!”
So they smashed that Old Man with a gong.

There was an Old Man of Kilkenny,
Who never had more than a penny;
He spent all that money in onions and honey,
That wayward Old Man of Kilkenny.

There was an Old Man of Columbia,
Who was thirsty, and called out for some beer;
But they brought it quite hot, in a small copper pot,
Which disgusted that man of Columbia.

There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a Bee;
When they said, “Does it buzz?” he replied, “Yes, it does!
It’s a regular brute of a Bee.”

There was an Old Lady of Chertsey,
Who made a remarkable curtsey;
She twirled round and round, till she sank underground,
Which distressed all the people of Chertsey.

There was a Young Lady whose chin
Resembled the point of a pin;
So she had it made sharp, and purchased a harp,
And played several tunes with her chin.

There was an Old Man with a flute—
A “sarpint” ran into his boot!
But he played day and night, till the “sarpint” took flight,
And avoided that Man with a flute.

There was a Young Lady of Portugal,
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree to examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.

There was an Old Person of Ischia,
Whose conduct grew friskier and friskier;
He danced hornpipes and jigs, and ate thousands of figs,
That lively Old Person of Ischia

There was an Old Man of Vienna,
Who lived upon Tincture of Senna;
When that did not agree, he took Camomile Tea,
That nasty Old Man of Vienna.

There was an Old Man in a boat,
Who said, “I’m afloat! I’m afloat!”
When they said, “No, you ain’t!” he was ready to faint,
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.