The Moral Bully

Yon whey-faced brother, who delights to wear     A weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair,     Seems of the sort that in a crowded place     One elbows freely into smallest space;     A timid creature, lax of knee and hip,     Whom small disturbance whitens round the lip;     One of those harmless spectacled machines,     The Holy-Week of Protestants convenes;     Whom school-boys question if their walk transcends     The last advices of maternal friends;     Whom John, obedient to his master's sign,     Conducts, laborious, up to ninety-nine,     While Peter, glistening with luxurious scorn,     Husks his white ivories like an ear of corn;     Dark in the brow and bilious in the cheek,     Whose yellowish linen flowers but once a week,     Conspicuous, annual, in their threadbare suits,     And the laced high-lows which they call their boots,     Well mayst thou shun that dingy front severe,     But him, O stranger, him thou canst not fear.     Be slow to judge, and slower to despise,     Man of broad shoulders and heroic size     The tiger, writhing from the boa's rings,     Drops at the fountain where the cobra stings.     In that lean phantom, whose extended glove     Points to the text of universal love,     Behold the master that can tame thee down     To crouch, the vassal of his Sunday frown;     His velvet throat against thy corded wrist,     His loosened tongue against thy doubled fist.     The MORAL BULLY, though he never swears,     Nor kicks intruders down his entry stairs,     Though meekness plants his backward-sloping hat,     And non-resistance ties his white cravat,     Though his black broadcloth glories to be seen     In the same plight with Shylock's gaberdine,     Hugs the same passion to his narrow breast     That heaves the cuirass on the trooper's chest,     Hears the same hell-hounds yelling in his rear     That chase from port the maddened buccaneer,     Feels the same comfort while his acrid words     Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds,     Or with grim logic prove, beyond debate,     That all we love is worthiest of our hate,     As the scarred ruffian of the pirate's deck,     When his long swivel rakes the staggering wreck!     Heaven keep us all! Is every rascal clown     Whose arm is stronger free to knock us down?     Has every scarecrow, whose cachectic soul     Seems fresh from Bedlam, airing on parole,     Who, though he carries but a doubtful trace     Of angel visits on his hungry face,     From lack of marrow or the coins to pay,     Has dodged some vices in a shabby way,     The right to stick us with his cutthroat terms,     And bait his homilies with his brother worms?