Backbone
Air:
Put's Original California Songster
Sacramento: Gardiner & Kirk, 1854
To dress, and sit, and walk genteelly,
To bow with easy grace;
To speak in accents soft and mealy,
To wear a studied face;
These, and like goodly gifts and graces,
Are well enough, I own;
But what we want in this soft age,
Is bone, backbone!
A heart to feel, a mind to think,
Despite each base control;
A tongue to speak, a hand to work
The purpose of the soul:
By these and other goodly tokens
It may be surely known,
If this or that, within his body
His bone, backbone!
Give me a man that's all a man,
Who stands up straight and strong,
Who loves the plain and simple right,
And will not yield to wrong;
Who deals with firm, untrembling hand,
Gives every one his own—
O! a blessed thing in anybody,
Is bone, backbone!
Published as a Poem in The Home: A fireside Monthly Companion by Denis Oliver Crowley, (Beadle & Adams, Buffalo, 1857).