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Title: The Task, and Other Poems

Author: William Cowper

Release Date: January 1, 2003 [EBook #3698]

Language: English

Credits:

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This eBook was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.

CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.

THE TASK

AND OTHER POEMS

BY

WILLIAM COWPER.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:

LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE.

1899.

INTRODUCTION.

AFTER the publication of his “Table Talk” and other poems in March, 1782, William Cowper, in his quiet retirement at Olney, under Mrs. Unwin’s care, found a new friend in Lady Austen.  She was a baronet’s widow who had a sister married to a clergyman near Olney, with whom Cowper was slightly acquainted.  In the summer of 1781, when his first volume was being printed, Cowper met Lady Austen and her sister in the street at Olney, and persuaded Mrs. Unwin to invite them to tea.  Their coming was the beginning of a cordial friendship.  Lady Austen, without being less earnest, had a liveliness that satisfied Cowper’s sense of fun to an extent that stirred at last some jealousy in Mrs. Unwin.  “She had lived much in France,” Cowper said, “was very sensible, and had infinite vivacity.”

The Vicar of Olney was in difficulties, with his affairs in the hands of trustees. The duties of his office were entirely discharged by a curate, and the vicarage was to let.  Lady Austen, in 1782, rented it, to be near her new friends.  There was only a wall between the garden of the house occupied by Cowper and Mrs. Unwin and the vicarage garden.  A door was made in the wall, and there was a close companionship of three.  When Lady Austen did not spend her evenings with Mrs. Unwin and Cowper, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper spent their evenings with Lady Austen.  They read, talked, Lady Austen played and sang, and they all called one another by their Christian names, William, Mary (Mrs. Unwin), and Anna (Lady Austen).  In a poetical epistle to Lady Austen, written in December, 1781, Cowper closes a reference to the strength of their friendship with the evidence it gave,—

“That Solomon has wisely spoken,—

‘A threefold cord is not soon broken.’”

One evening in the summer of 1782, when Cowper was low-spirited, Lady Austen told him in lively fashion the story upon which he founded the ballad of “John Gilpin.”  Its original hero is said to have been a Mr. Bayer, who had a draper’s shop in London, at the corner of Cheapside.  Cowper was so much tickled by it, that he lay awake part of the night rhyming and laughing, and by the next evening the ballad was complete.  It was sent to Mrs. Unwin’s son, who sent it to the Public Advertiser, where for the next two or three years it lay buried in the “Poets’ Corner,” and attracted no particular attention.

In the summer of 1783, when one of the three friends had been reading blank verse aloud to the other two, Lady Austen, from her seat upon the sofa, urged upon Cowper, as she had urged before, that blank verse was to be preferred to the rhymed couplets in which his first book had been written, and that he should write a poem in blank verse.  “I will,” he said, “if you will give me a subject.”  “Oh,” she answered, “you can write upon anything.  Write on this sofa.”  He playfully accepted that as “the task” set him, and began his poem called “The Task,” which was finished in the summer of the next year, 1784.  But before “The Task” was finished, Mrs. Unwin’s jealousy obliged Cowper to give up his new friend—whom he had made a point of calling upon every morning at eleven—and prevent her return to summer quarters in the vicarage.

Two miles from Olney was Weston Underwood with a park, to which its owner gave Cowper the use of a key.  In 1782 a younger brother, John Throckmorton, came with his wife to live at Weston, and continued Cowper’s privilege.  The Throckmortons were Roman Catholics, but in May, 1784, Mr. Unwin was tempted by an invitation to see a balloon ascent from their park.  Their kindness as hosts won upon Cowper; they sought and had his more intimate friendship, till in his correspondence he playfully abused the first syllable of their name and called them Mr. and Mrs. Frog.

Cowper’s “Task” went to its publisher and printing was begun, when suddenly “John Gilpin,” after a long sleep in the Public Advertiser, rode triumphant through the town.  A favourite actor of the day was giving recitations at Freemason’s Hall.  A man of letters, Richard Sharp, who had read and liked “John Gilpin,” pointed out to the actor how well it would suit his purpose.  The actor was John Henderson, whose Hamlet, Shylock, Richard III., and Falstaff were the most popular of his day.  He died suddenly in 1785, at the age of thirty-eight, and it was thus in the last year of his life that his power of recitation drew “John Gilpin” from obscurity and made it the nine days’ wonder of the town.  Pictures of John Gilpin abounded in all forms.  He figured on pocket-handkerchiefs.  When the publisher asked for a few more pages to his volume of “The Task,” Cowper gave him as makeweights an “Epistle to Joseph Hill,” his “Tirocinium,” and, a little doubtfully, “John Gilpin.”  So the book was published in June, 1785; was sought by many because it was by the author of “John Gilpin,” and at once won recognition. The preceding volume had not made Cowper famous.  “The Task” at once gave him his place among the poets.

Cowper’s “Task” is to this day, except Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” the best purely didactic poem in the English language.  The “Sofa” stands only as a point of departure:—it suits a gouty limb; but as the poet is not gouty, he is up and off.  He is off for a walk with Mrs. Unwin in the country about Olney.  He dwells on the rural sights and rural sounds, taking first the inanimate sounds, then the animate.  In muddy winter weather he walks alone, finds a solitary cottage, and draws from it comment upon the false sentiment of solitude.  He describes the walk to the park at Weston Underwood, the prospect from the hilltop, touches upon his privilege in having a key of the gate, describes the avenues of trees, the wilderness, the grove, and the sound of the thresher’s flail then suggests to him that all live by energy, best ease is after toil.  He compares the luxury of art with wholesomeness of Nature free to all, that brings health to the sick, joy to the returned seafarer.  Spleen vexes votaries of artificial life.  True gaiety is for the innocent.  So thought flows on, and touches in its course the vital questions of a troubled time.  “The Task” appeared four years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, and is in many passages not less significant of rising storms than the “Excursion” is significant of what came with the breaking of the clouds.

H. M.

THE TASK.

BOOK I.

THE SOFA.

[“The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the SOFA for a subject.  He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.”]

I SING the Sofa.  I, who lately sang

Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touched with awe

The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand,

Escaped with pain from that advent’rous flight,

Now seek repose upon a humbler theme:

The theme though humble, yet august and proud

The occasion—for the Fair commands the song.

Time was, when clothing sumptuous or for use,

Save their own painted skins, our sires had none.

As yet black breeches were not; satin smooth,

Or velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile:

The hardy chief upon the rugged rock

Washed by the sea, or on the gravelly bank

Thrown up by wintry torrents roaring loud,

Fearless of wrong, reposed his weary strength.

Those barbarous ages past, succeeded next

The birthday of invention; weak at first,

Dull in design, and clumsy to perform.

Joint-stools were then created; on three legs

Upborne they stood. Three legs upholding firm

A massy slab, in fashion square or round.

On such a stool immortal Alfred sat,

And swayed the sceptre of his infant realms;

And such in ancient halls and mansions drear

May still be seen, but perforated sore

And drilled in holes the solid oak is found,

By worms voracious eating through and through.

At length a generation more refined

Improved the simple plan, made three legs four,

Gave them a twisted form vermicular,

And o’er the seat, with plenteous wadding stuffed,

Induced a splendid cover green and blue,

Yellow and red, of tapestry richly wrought

And woven close, or needlework sublime.

There might ye see the peony spread wide,

The full-blown rose, the shepherd and his lass,

Lapdog and lambkin with black staring eyes,

And parrots with twin cherries in their beak.

Now came the cane from India, smooth and bright

With Nature’s varnish; severed into stripes

That interlaced each other, these supplied,

Of texture firm, a lattice-work that braced

The new machine, and it became a chair.

But restless was the chair; the back erect

Distressed the weary loins that felt no ease;

The slippery seat betrayed the sliding part

That pressed it, and the feet hung dangling down,

Anxious in vain to find the distant floor.

These for the rich: the rest, whom fate had placed

In modest mediocrity, content

With base materials, sat on well-tanned hides

Obdurate and unyielding, glassy smooth,

With here and there a tuft of crimson yarn,

Or scarlet crewel in the cushion fixed:

If cushion might be called, what harder seemed

Than the firm oak of which the frame was formed.

No want of timber then was felt or feared

In Albion’s happy isle.  The lumber stood

Ponderous, and fixed by its own massy weight.

But elbows still were wanting; these, some say,

An alderman of Cripplegate contrived,

And some ascribe the invention to a priest

Burly and big, and studious of his ease.

But rude at first, and not with easy slope

Receding wide, they pressed against the ribs,

And bruised the side, and elevated high

Taught the raised shoulders to invade the ears.

Long time elapsed or e’er our rugged sires

Complained, though incommodiously pent in,

And ill at ease behind.  The ladies first

Gan murmur, as became the softer sex.

Ingenious fancy, never better pleased

Than when employed to accommodate the fair,

Heard the sweet moan with pity, and devised

The soft settee; one elbow at each end,

And in the midst an elbow, it received,

United yet divided, twain at once.

So sit two kings of Brentford on one throne;

And so two citizens who take the air,

Close packed and smiling in a chaise and one.

But relaxation of the languid frame

By soft recumbency of outstretched limbs,

Was bliss reserved for happier days; so slow

The growth of what is excellent, so hard

To attain perfection in this nether world.

Thus first necessity invented stools,

Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs,

And luxury the accomplished Sofa last.

The nurse sleeps sweetly, hired to watch the sick,

Whom snoring she disturbs.  As sweetly he

Who quits the coach-box at the midnight hour

To sleep within the carriage more secure,

His legs depending at the open door.

Sweet sleep enjoys the curate in his desk,

The tedious rector drawling o’er his head,

And sweet the clerk below; but neither sleep

Of lazy nurse, who snores the sick man dead,

Nor his who quits the box at midnight hour

To slumber in the carriage more secure,

Nor sleep enjoyed by curate in his desk,

Nor yet the dozings of the clerk are sweet,

Compared with the repose the Sofa yields.

Oh, may I live exempted (while I live

Guiltless of pampered appetite obscene)

From pangs arthritic that infest the toe

Of libertine excess.  The Sofa suits

The gouty limb, ’tis true; but gouty limb,

Though on a Sofa, may I never feel:

For I have loved the rural walk through lanes

Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,

And skirted thick with intertexture firm

Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk

O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink,

E’er since a truant boy I passed my bounds

To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames.

And still remember, nor without regret

Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,

How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed,

Still hungering penniless and far from home,

I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,

Or blushing crabs, or berries that emboss

The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.

Hard fare! but such as boyish appetite

Disdains not, nor the palate undepraved

By culinary arts unsavoury deems.

No Sofa then awaited my return,

No Sofa then I needed.  Youth repairs

His wasted spirits quickly, by long toil

Incurring short fatigue; and though our years,

As life declines, speed rapidly away,

And not a year but pilfers as he goes

Some youthful grace that age would gladly keep,

A tooth or auburn lock, and by degrees

Their length and colour from the locks they spare;

The elastic spring of an unwearied foot

That mounts the stile with ease, or leaps the fence,

That play of lungs inhaling and again

Respiring freely the fresh air, that makes

Swift pace or steep ascent no toil to me,

Mine have not pilfered yet; nor yet impaired

My relish of fair prospect; scenes that soothed

Or charmed me young, no longer young, I find

Still soothing and of power to charm me still.

And witness, dear companion of my walks,

Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive

Fast locked in mine, with pleasure such as love,

Confirmed by long experience of thy worth

And well-tried virtues, could alone inspire—

Witness a joy that thou hast doubled long.

Thou know’st my praise of Nature most sincere,

And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

How oft upon yon eminence, our pace

Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne

The ruffling wind scarce conscious that it blew,

While admiration feeding at the eye,

And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene!

Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned

The distant plough slow-moving, and beside

His labouring team, that swerved not from the track,

The sturdy swain diminished to a boy!

Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain

Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er,

Conducts the eye along his sinuous course

Delighted.  There, fast rooted in his bank

Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms

That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut;

While far beyond and overthwart the stream

That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,

The sloping land recedes into the clouds;

Displaying on its varied side the grace

Of hedgerow beauties numberless, square tower,

Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells

Just undulates upon the listening ear;

Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote.

Scenes must be beautiful which daily viewed

Please daily, and whose novelty survives

Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years:

Praise justly due to those that I describe.

Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds

Exhilarate the spirit, and restore

The tone of languid Nature.  Mighty winds,

That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood

Of ancient growth, make music not unlike

The dash of ocean on his winding shore,

And lull the spirit while they fill the mind,

Unnumbered branches waving in the blast,

And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once.

Nor less composure waits upon the roar

Of distant floods, or on the softer voice

Of neighbouring fountain, or of rills that slip

Through the cleft rock, and, chiming as they fall

Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length

In matted grass, that with a livelier green

Betrays the secret of their silent course.

Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds,

But animated Nature sweeter still

To soothe and satisfy the human ear.

Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one

The livelong night: nor these alone whose notes

Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,

But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime

In still repeated circles, screaming loud,

The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl

That hails the rising moon, have charms for me.

Sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh,

Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,

And only there, please highly for their sake.

Peace to the artist, whose ingenious thought

Devised the weather-house, that useful toy!

Fearless of humid air and gathering rains

Forth steps the man—an emblem of myself!

More delicate his timorous mate retires.

When Winter soaks the fields, and female feet,

Too weak to struggle with tenacious clay,

Or ford the rivulets, are best at home,

The task of new discoveries falls on me.

At such a season and with such a charge

Once went I forth, and found, till then unknown,

A cottage, whither oft we since repair:

’Tis perched upon the green hill-top, but close

Environed with a ring of branching elms

That overhang the thatch, itself unseen

Peeps at the vale below; so thick beset

With foliage of such dark redundant growth,

I called the low-roofed lodge the peasant’s nest.

And hidden as it is, and far remote

From such unpleasing sounds as haunt the ear

In village or in town, the bay of curs

Incessant, clinking hammers, grinding wheels,

And infants clamorous whether pleased or pained,

Oft have I wished the peaceful covert mine.

Here, I have said, at least I should possess

The poet’s treasure, silence, and indulge

The dreams of fancy, tranquil and secure.

Vain thought! the dweller in that still retreat

Dearly obtains the refuge it affords.

Its elevated site forbids the wretch

To drink sweet waters of the crystal well;

He dips his bowl into the weedy ditch,

And heavy-laden brings his beverage home,

Far-fetched and little worth: nor seldom waits

Dependent on the baker’s punctual call,

To hear his creaking panniers at the door,

Angry and sad and his last crust consumed.

So farewell envy of the peasant’s nest.

If solitude make scant the means of life,

Society for me!  Thou seeming sweet,

Be still a pleasing object in my view,

My visit still, but never mine abode.

Not distant far, a length of colonnade

Invites us; monument of ancient taste,

Now scorned, but worthy of a better fate.

Our fathers knew the value of a screen

From sultry suns, and, in their shaded walks

And long-protracted bowers, enjoyed at noon

The gloom and coolness of declining day.

We bear our shades about us; self-deprived

Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread,

And range an Indian waste without a tree.

Thanks to Benevolus—he spares me yet

These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines,

And, though himself so polished, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade.

Descending now (but cautious, lest too fast)

A sudden steep, upon a rustic bridge

We pass a gulf, in which the willows dip

Their pendent boughs, stooping as if to drink.

Hence ankle-deep in moss and flowery thyme

We mount again, and feel at every step

Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft,

Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil.

He, not unlike the great ones of mankind,

Disfigures earth, and plotting in the dark

Toils much to earn a monumental pile,

That may record the mischiefs he has done.

The summit gained, behold the proud alcove

That crowns it! yet not all its pride secures

The grand retreat from injuries impressed

By rural carvers, who with knives deface

The panels, leaving an obscure rude name

In characters uncouth, and spelt amiss.

So strong the zeal to immortalise himself

Beats in the breast of man, that even a few

Few transient years, won from the abyss abhorred

Of blank oblivion, seem a glorious prize,

And even to a clown.  Now roves the eye,

And posted on this speculative height

Exults in its command.  The sheepfold here

Pours out its fleecy tenants o’er the glebe.

At first, progressive as a stream, they seek

The middle field; but scattered by degrees,

Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land.

There, from the sunburnt hay-field homeward creeps

The loaded wain; while, lightened of its charge,

The wain that meets it passes swiftly by,

The boorish driver leaning o’er his team,

Vociferous, and impatient of delay.

Nor less attractive is the woodland scene

Diversified with trees of every growth,

Alike yet various.  Here the gray smooth trunks

Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine,

Within the twilight of their distant shades;

There, lost behind a rising ground, the wood

Seems sunk, and shortened to its topmost boughs.

No tree in all the grove but has its charms,

Though each its hue peculiar; paler some,

And of a wannish gray; the willow such,

And poplar that with silver lines his leaf,

And ash far-stretching his umbrageous arm;

Of deeper green the elm; and deeper still,

Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak.

Some glossy-leaved and shining in the sun,

The maple, and the beech of oily nuts

Prolific, and the lime at dewy eve

Diffusing odours; nor unnoted pass

The sycamore, capricious in attire,

Now green, now tawny, and ere autumn yet

Have changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright.

O’er these, but far beyond (a spacious map

Of hill and valley interposed between),

The Ouse, dividing the well-watered land,

Now glitters in the sun, and now retires,

As bashful, yet impatient to be seen.

Hence the declivity is sharp and short,

And such the re-ascent; between them weeps

A little Naiad her impoverished urn,

All summer long, which winter fills again.

The folded gates would bar my progress now,

But that the lord of this enclosed demesne,

Communicative of the good he owns,

Admits me to a share: the guiltless eye

Commits no wrong, nor wastes what it enjoys.

Refreshing change! where now the blazing sun?

By short transition we have lost his glare,

And stepped at once into a cooler clime.

Ye fallen avenues! once more I mourn

Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice

That yet a remnant of your race survives.

How airy and how light the graceful arch,

Yet awful as the consecrated roof

Re-echoing pious anthems! while beneath,

The chequered earth seems restless as a flood

Brushed by the wind.  So sportive is the light

Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,

Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,

And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves

Play wanton, every moment, every spot.

And now, with nerves new-braced and spirits cheered,

We tread the wilderness, whose well-rolled walks,

With curvature of slow and easy sweep—

Deception innocent—give ample space

To narrow bounds.  The grove receives us next;

Between the upright shafts of whose tall elms

We may discern the thresher at his task.

Thump after thump resounds the constant flail,

That seems to swing uncertain and yet falls

Full on the destined ear.  Wide flies the chaff,

The rustling straw sends up a frequent mist

Of atoms, sparkling in the noonday beam.

Come hither, ye that press your beds of down

And sleep not: see him sweating o’er his bread

Before he eats it.—’Tis the primal curse,

But softened into mercy; made the pledge

Of cheerful days, and nights without a groan.

By ceaseless action, all that is subsists.

Constant rotation of the unwearied wheel

That Nature rides upon, maintains her health,

Her beauty, her fertility.  She dreads

An instant’s pause, and lives but while she moves.

Its own revolvency upholds the world.

Winds from all quarters agitate the air,

And fit the limpid element for use,

Else noxious: oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams

All feel the freshening impulse, and are cleansed

By restless undulation: even the oak

Thrives by the rude concussion of the storm:

He seems indeed indignant, and to feel

The impression of the blast with proud disdain,

Frowning as if in his unconscious arm

He held the thunder.  But the monarch owes

His firm stability to what he scorns,

More fixed below, the more disturbed above.

The law, by which all creatures else are bound,

Binds man the lord of all.  Himself derives

No mean advantage from a kindred cause,

From strenuous toil his hours of sweetest ease.

The sedentary stretch their lazy length

When custom bids, but no refreshment find,

For none they need: the languid eye, the cheek

Deserted of its bloom, the flaccid, shrunk,

And withered muscle, and the vapid soul,

Reproach their owner with that love of rest

To which he forfeits even the rest he loves.

Not such the alert and active.  Measure life

By its true worth, the comforts it affords,

And theirs alone seems worthy of the name

Good health, and, its associate in the most,

Good temper; spirits prompt to undertake,

And not soon spent, though in an arduous task;

The powers of fancy and strong thought are theirs;

Even age itself seems privileged in them

With clear exemption from its own defects.

A sparkling eye beneath a wrinkled front

The veteran shows, and gracing a gray beard

With youthful smiles, descends towards the grave

Sprightly, and old almost without decay.

Like a coy maiden, Ease, when courted most,

Farthest retires—an idol, at whose shrine

Who oftenest sacrifice are favoured least.

The love of Nature and the scene she draws

Is Nature’s dictate.  Strange, there should be found

Who, self-imprisoned in their proud saloons,

Renounce the odours of the open field

For the unscented fictions of the loom;

Who, satisfied with only pencilled scenes,

Prefer to the performance of a God

The inferior wonders of an artist’s hand.

Lovely indeed the mimic works of Art,

But Nature’s works far lovelier.  I admire,

None more admires, the painter’s magic skill,

Who shows me that which I shall never see,

Conveys a distant country into mine,

And throws Italian light on English walls.

But imitative strokes can do no more

Than please the eye, sweet Nature every sense.

The air salubrious of her lofty hills,

The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales,

And music of her woods—no works of man

May rival these; these all bespeak a power

Peculiar, and exclusively her own.

Beneath the open sky she spreads the feast;

’Tis free to all—’tis ev’ry day renewed,

Who scorns it, starves deservedly at home.

He does not scorn it, who, imprisoned long

In some unwholesome dungeon, and a prey

To sallow sickness, which the vapours dank

And clammy of his dark abode have bred

Escapes at last to liberty and light;

His cheek recovers soon its healthful hue,

His eye relumines its extinguished fires,

He walks, he leaps, he runs—is winged with joy,

And riots in the sweets of every breeze.

He does not scorn it, who has long endured

A fever’s agonies, and fed on drugs.

Nor yet the mariner, his blood inflamed

With acrid salts; his very heart athirst

To gaze at Nature in her green array.

Upon the ship’s tall side he stands, possessed

With visions prompted by intense desire;

Fair fields appear below, such as he left

Far distant, such as he would die to find—

He seeks them headlong, and is seen no more.

The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns;

The lowering eye, the petulance, the frown,

And sullen sadness that o’ershade, distort,

And mar the face of beauty, when no cause

For such immeasurable woe appears,

These Flora banishes, and gives the fair

Sweet smiles, and bloom less transient than her own.

It is the constant revolution, stale

And tasteless, of the same repeated joys

That palls and satiates, and makes languid life

A pedlar’s pack that bows the bearer down.

Health suffers, and the spirits ebb; the heart

Recoils from its own choice—at the full feast

Is famished—finds no music in the song,

No smartness in the jest, and wonders why.

Yet thousands still desire to journey on,

Though halt and weary of the path they tread.

The paralytic, who can hold her cards

But cannot play them, borrows a friend’s hand

To deal and shuffle, to divide and sort

Her mingled suits and sequences, and sits

Spectatress both and spectacle, a sad

And silent cipher, while her proxy plays.

Others are dragged into the crowded room

Between supporters; and once seated, sit

Through downright inability to rise,

Till the stout bearers lift the corpse again.

These speak a loud memento.  Yet even these

Themselves love life, and cling to it as he,

That overhangs a torrent, to a twig.

They love it, and yet loathe it; fear to die,

Yet scorn the purposes for which they live.

Then wherefore not renounce them?  No—the dread,

The slavish dread of solitude, that breeds

Reflection and remorse, the fear of shame,

And their inveterate habits, all forbid.

Whom call we gay?  That honour has been long

The boast of mere pretenders to the name.

The innocent are gay—the lark is gay,

That dries his feathers saturate with dew

Beneath the rosy cloud, while yet the beams

Of day-spring overshoot his humble nest.

The peasant too, a witness of his song,

Himself a songster, is as gay as he.

But save me from the gaiety of those

Whose headaches nail them to a noonday bed;

And save me, too, from theirs whose haggard eyes

Flash desperation, and betray their pangs

For property stripped off by cruel chance;

From gaiety that fills the bones with pain,

The mouth with blasphemy, the heart with woe.

The earth was made so various, that the mind

Of desultory man, studious of change,

And pleased with novelty, might be indulged.

Prospects however lovely may be seen

Till half their beauties fade; the weary sight,

Too well acquainted with their smiles, slides off

Fastidious, seeking less familiar scenes.

Then snug enclosures in the sheltered vale,

Where frequent hedges intercept the eye,

Delight us, happy to renounce a while,

Not senseless of its charms, what still we love,

That such short absence may endear it more.

Then forests, or the savage rock may please,

That hides the sea-mew in his hollow clefts

Above the reach of man: his hoary head

Conspicuous many a league, the mariner,

Bound homeward, and in hope already there,

Greets with three cheers exulting.  At his waist

A girdle of half-withered shrubs he shows,

And at his feet the baffled billows die.

The common overgrown with fern, and rough

With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deformed

And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom,

And decks itself with ornaments of gold,

Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf

Smells fresh, and, rich in odoriferous herbs

And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense

With luxury of unexpected sweets.

There often wanders one, whom better days

Saw better clad, in cloak of satin trimmed

With lace, and hat with splendid ribbon bound.

A serving-maid was she, and fell in love

With one who left her, went to sea and died.

Her fancy followed him through foaming waves

To distant shores, and she would sit and weep

At what a sailor suffers; fancy too,

Delusive most where warmest wishes are,

Would oft anticipate his glad return,

And dream of transports she was not to know.

She heard the doleful tidings of his death,

And never smiled again.  And now she roams

The dreary waste; there spends the livelong day,

And there, unless when charity forbids,

The livelong night.  A tattered apron hides,

Worn as a cloak, and hardly hides, a gown

More tattered still; and both but ill conceal

A bosom heaved with never-ceasing sighs.

She begs an idle pin of all she meets,

And hoards them in her sleeve; but needful food,

Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes,

Though pinched with cold, asks never.—Kate is crazed!

I see a column of slow-rising smoke

O’ertop the lofty wood that skirts the wild.

A vagabond and useless tribe there eat

Their miserable meal.  A kettle slung

Between two poles upon a stick transverse,

Receives the morsel; flesh obscene of dog,

Or vermin, or, at best, of cock purloined

From his accustomed perch.  Hard-faring race!

They pick their fuel out of every hedge,

Which, kindled with dry leaves, just saves unquenched

The spark of life.  The sportive wind blows wide

Their fluttering rags, and shows a tawny skin,

The vellum of the pedigree they claim.

Great skill have they in palmistry, and more

To conjure clean away the gold they touch,

Conveying worthless dross into its place;

Loud when they beg, dumb only when they steal.

Strange! that a creature rational, and cast

In human mould, should brutalise by choice

His nature, and, though capable of arts

By which the world might profit and himself,

Self-banished from society, prefer

Such squalid sloth to honourable toil.

Yet even these, though feigning sickness oft

They swathe the forehead, drag the limping limb,

And vex their flesh with artificial sores,

Can change their whine into a mirthful note

When safe occasion offers, and with dance,

And music of the bladder and the bag,

Beguile their woes, and make the woods resound.

Such health and gaiety of heart enjoy

The houseless rovers of the sylvan world;

And breathing wholesome air, and wandering much,

Need other physic none to heal the effects

Of loathsome diet, penury, and cold.

Blest he, though undistinguished from the crowd

By wealth or dignity, who dwells secure

Where man, by nature fierce, has laid aside

His fierceness, having learnt, though slow to learn

The manners and the arts of civil life.

His wants, indeed, are many; but supply

Is obvious; placed within the easy reach

Of temperate wishes and industrious hands.

Here virtue thrives as in her proper soil;

Not rude and surly, and beset with thorns,

And terrible to sight, as when she springs

(If e’er she spring spontaneous) in remote

And barbarous climes, where violence prevails,

And strength is lord of all; but gentle, kind,

By culture tamed, by liberty refreshed,

And all her fruits by radiant truth matured.

War and the chase engross the savage whole;

War followed for revenge, or to supplant

The envied tenants of some happier spot;

The chase for sustenance, precarious trust!

His hard condition with severe constraint

Binds all his faculties, forbids all growth

Of wisdom, proves a school in which he learns

Sly circumvention, unrelenting hate,

Mean self-attachment, and scarce aught beside.

Thus fare the shivering natives of the north,

And thus the rangers of the western world,

Where it advances far into the deep,

Towards the Antarctic.  Even the favoured isles

So lately found, although the constant sun

Cheer all their seasons with a grateful smile,

Can boast but little virtue; and inert

Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain

In manners, victims of luxurious ease.

These therefore I can pity, placed remote

From all that science traces, art invents,

Or inspiration teaches; and enclosed

In boundless oceans, never to be passed

By navigators uninformed as they,

Or ploughed perhaps by British bark again.

But far beyond the rest, and with most cause,

Thee, gentle savage! whom no love of thee

Or thine, but curiosity perhaps,

Or else vain-glory, prompted us to draw

Forth from thy native bowers, to show thee here

With what superior skill we can abuse

The gifts of Providence, and squander life.

The dream is past.  And thou hast found again

Thy cocoas and bananas, palms, and yams,

And homestall thatched with leaves.  But hast thou found

Their former charms?  And, having seen our state,

Our palaces, our ladies, and our pomp

Of equipage, our gardens, and our sports,

And heard our music; are thy simple friends,

Thy simple fare, and all thy plain delights

As dear to thee as once?  And have thy joys

Lost nothing by comparison with ours?

Rude as thou art (for we returned thee rude

And ignorant, except of outward show),

I cannot think thee yet so dull of heart

And spiritless, as never to regret

Sweets tasted here, and left as soon as known.

Methinks I see thee straying on the beach,

And asking of the surge that bathes the foot

If ever it has washed our distant shore.

I see thee weep, and thine are honest tears,

A patriot’s for his country.  Thou art sad

At thought of her forlorn and abject state,

From which no power of thine can raise her up.

Thus fancy paints thee, and, though apt to err,

Perhaps errs little when she paints thee thus.

She tells me too that duly every morn

Thou climb’st the mountain-top, with eager eye

Exploring far and wide the watery waste,

For sight of ship from England.  Every speck

Seen in the dim horizon turns thee pale

With conflict of contending hopes and fears.

But comes at last the dull and dusky eve,

And sends thee to thy cabin, well prepared

To dream all night of what the day denied.

Alas, expect it not.  We found no bait

To tempt us in thy country.  Doing good,

Disinterested good, is not our trade.

We travel far, ’tis true, but not for naught;

And must be bribed to compass earth again

By other hopes, and richer fruits than yours.

But though true worth and virtue, in the mild

And genial soil of cultivated life

Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there,

Yet not in cities oft.  In proud and gay

And gain-devoted cities, thither flow,

As to a common and most noisome sewer,

The dregs and feculence of every land.

In cities, foul example on most minds

Begets its likeness.  Rank abundance breeds

In gross and pampered cities sloth and lust,

And wantonness and gluttonous excess.

In cities, vice is hidden with most ease,

Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught

By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there,

Beyond the achievement of successful flight.

I do confess them nurseries of the arts,

In which they flourish most; where, in the beams

Of warm encouragement, and in the eye

Of public note, they reach their perfect size.

Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaimed

The fairest capital in all the world,

By riot and incontinence the worst.

There, touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes

A lucid mirror, in which nature sees

All her reflected features.  Bacon there

Gives more than female beauty to a stone,

And Chatham’s eloquence to marble lips.

Nor does the chisel occupy alone

The powers of sculpture, but the style as much;

Each province of her art her equal care.

With nice incision of her guided steel

She ploughs a brazen field, and clothes a soil

So sterile with what charms soe’er she will,

The richest scenery and the loveliest forms.

Where finds philosophy her eagle eye,

With which she gazes at yon burning disk

Undazzled, and detects and counts his spots?

In London.  Where her implements exact,

With which she calculates, computes, and scans

All distance, motion, magnitude, and now

Measures an atom, and now girds a world?

In London.  Where has commerce such a mart,

So rich, so thronged, so drained, and so supplied,

As London, opulent, enlarged, and still

Increasing London?  Babylon of old

Not more the glory of the earth, than she

A more accomplished world’s chief glory now.

She has her praise.  Now mark a spot or two

That so much beauty would do well to purge;

And show this queen of cities, that so fair

May yet be foul; so witty, yet not wise.

It is not seemly, nor of good report,

That she is slack in discipline; more prompt

To avenge than to prevent the breach of law:

That she is rigid in denouncing death

On petty robbers, and indulges life

And liberty, and ofttimes honour too,

To peculators of the public gold:

That thieves at home must hang; but he, that puts

Into his overgorged and bloated purse

The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.

Nor is it well, nor can it come to good,

That through profane and infidel contempt

Of holy writ, she has presumed to annul

And abrogate, as roundly as she may,

The total ordinance and will of God;

Advancing fashion to the post of truth,

And centring all authority in modes

And customs of her own, till Sabbath rites

Have dwindled into unrespected forms,

And knees and hassocks are wellnigh divorced.

God made the country, and man made the town.

What wonder, then, that health and virtue, gifts

That can alone make sweet the bitter draught

That life holds out to all, should most abound

And least be threatened in the fields and groves?

Possess ye therefore, ye who, borne about

In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue

But that of idleness, and taste no scenes

But such as art contrives, possess ye still

Your element; there only ye can shine,

There only minds like yours can do no harm.

Our groves were planted to console at noon

The pensive wanderer in their shades.  At eve

The moonbeam, sliding softly in between

The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish,

Birds warbling all the music.  We can spare

The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse

Our softer satellite.  Your songs confound

Our more harmonious notes.  The thrush departs

Scared, and the offended nightingale is mute.

There is a public mischief in your mirth;

It plagues your country.  Folly such as yours,

Graced with a sword, and worthier of a fan,

Has made, which enemies could ne’er have done,

Our arch of empire, steadfast but for you,

A mutilated structure, soon to fall.

BOOK II.

THE TIMEPIECE.

OH for a lodge in some vast wilderness,

Some boundless contiguity of shade,

Where rumour of oppression and deceit,

Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more!  My ear is pained,

My soul is sick with every day’s report

Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.

There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart,

It does not feel for man.  The natural bond

Of brotherhood is severed as the flax

That falls asunder at the touch of fire.

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin

Not coloured like his own, and having power

To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause

Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.

Lands intersected by a narrow frith

Abhor each other.  Mountains interposed

Make enemies of nations, who had else

Like kindred drops been mingled into one.

Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;

And worse than all, and most to be deplored,

As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot,

Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat

With stripes, that mercy, with a bleeding heart,

Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.

Then what is man?  And what man, seeing this,

And having human feelings, does not blush

And hang his head, to think himself a man?

I would not have a slave to till my ground,

To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,

And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth

That sinews bought and sold have ever earned.

No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s

Just estimation prized above all price,

I had much rather be myself the slave

And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.

We have no slaves at home—then why abroad?

And they themselves, once ferried o’er the wave

That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs

Receive our air, that moment they are free,

They touch our country and their shackles fall.

That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud

And jealous of the blessing.  Spread it then,

And let it circulate through every vein

Of all your empire; that where Britain’s power

Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.

Sure there is need of social intercourse,

Benevolence and peace and mutual aid,

Between the nations, in a world that seems

To toll the death-bell to its own decease;

And by the voice of all its elements

To preach the general doom.  When were the winds

Let slip with such a warrant to destroy?

When did the waves so haughtily o’erleap

Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry?

Fires from beneath and meteors from above,

Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,

Have kindled beacons in the skies, and the old

And crazy earth has had her shaking fits

More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.

Is it a time to wrangle, when the props

And pillars of our planet seem to fail,

And nature with a dim and sickly eye

To wait the close of all?  But grant her end

More distant, and that prophecy demands

A longer respite, unaccomplished yet;

Still they are frowning signals, and bespeak

Displeasure in His breast who smites the earth

Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice.

And ’tis but seemly, that, where all deserve

And stand exposed by common peccancy

To what no few have felt, there should be peace,

And brethren in calamity should love.

Alas for Sicily, rude fragments now

Lie scattered where the shapely column stood.

Her palaces are dust.  In all her streets

The voice of singing and the sprightly chord

Are silent.  Revelry and dance and show

Suffer a syncope and solemn pause,

While God performs, upon the trembling stage

Of His own works, His dreadful part alone.

How does the earth receive Him?—With what signs

Of gratulation and delight, her King?

Pours she not all her choicest fruits abroad,

Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums,

Disclosing paradise where’er He treads?

She quakes at His approach.  Her hollow womb,

Conceiving thunders, through a thousand deeps

And fiery caverns roars beneath His foot.

The hills move lightly and the mountains smoke,

For He has touched them.  From the extremest point

Of elevation down into the abyss,

His wrath is busy and His frown is felt.

The rocks fall headlong and the valleys rise,

The rivers die into offensive pools,

And, charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross

And mortal nuisance into all the air.

What solid was, by transformation strange

Grows fluid, and the fixed and rooted earth

Tormented into billows, heaves and swells,

Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl

Sucks down its prey insatiable.  Immense

The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs

And agonies of human and of brute

Multitudes, fugitive on every side,

And fugitive in vain.  The sylvan scene

Migrates uplifted, and, with all its soil

Alighting in far-distant fields, finds out

A new possessor, and survives the change.

Ocean has caught the frenzy, and upwrought

To an enormous and o’erbearing height,

Not by a mighty wind, but by that voice

Which winds and waves obey, invades the shore

Resistless.  Never such a sudden flood,

Upridged so high, and sent on such a charge,

Possessed an inland scene.  Where now the throng

That pressed the beach and hasty to depart

Looked to the sea for safety?  They are gone,

Gone with the refluent wave into the deep,

A prince with half his people.  Ancient towers,

And roofs embattled high, the gloomy scenes

Where beauty oft and lettered worth consume

Life in the unproductive shades of death,

Fall prone: the pale inhabitants come forth,

And, happy in their unforeseen release

From all the rigours of restraint, enjoy

The terrors of the day that sets them free.

Who then, that has thee, would not hold thee fast,

Freedom! whom they that lose thee so regret,

That even a judgment, making way for thee,

Seems in their eyes a mercy, for thy sake.

Such evil sin hath wrought; and such a flame

Kindled in heaven, that it burns down to earth,

And, in the furious inquest that it makes

On God’s behalf, lays waste His fairest works.

The very elements, though each be meant

The minister of man to serve his wants,

Conspire against him.  With his breath he draws

A plague into his blood; and cannot use

Life’s necessary means, but he must die.

Storms rise to o’erwhelm him: or, if stormy winds

Rise not, the waters of the deep shall rise,

And, needing none assistance of the storm,

Shall roll themselves ashore, and reach him there.

The earth shall shake him out of all his holds,

Or make his house his grave; nor so content,

Shall counterfeit the motions of the flood,

And drown him in her dry and dusty gulfs.

What then—were they the wicked above all,

And we the righteous, whose fast-anchored isle

Moved not, while theirs was rocked like a light skiff,

The sport of every wave?  No: none are clear,

And none than we more guilty.  But where all

Stand chargeable with guilt, and to the shafts

Of wrath obnoxious, God may choose His mark,

May punish, if He please, the less, to warn

The more malignant.  If He spared not them,

Tremble and be amazed at thine escape,

Far guiltier England, lest He spare not thee!

Happy the man who sees a God employed

In all the good and ill that chequer life!

Resolving all events, with their effects

And manifold results, into the will

And arbitration wise of the Supreme.

Did not His eye rule all things, and intend

The least of our concerns (since from the least

The greatest oft originate), could chance

Find place in His dominion, or dispose

One lawless particle to thwart His plan,

Then God might be surprised, and unforeseen

Contingence might alarm Him, and disturb

The smooth and equal course of His affairs.

This truth, philosophy, though eagle-eyed

In nature’s tendencies, oft overlooks;

And, having found His instrument, forgets

Or disregards, or, more presumptuous still,

Denies the power that wields it.  God proclaims

His hot displeasure against foolish men

That live an Atheist life: involves the heaven

In tempests, quits His grasp upon the winds

And gives them all their fury; bids a plague

Kindle a fiery boil upon the skin,

And putrefy the breath of blooming health.

He calls for Famine, and the meagre fiend

Blows mildew from between his shrivelled lips,

And taints the golden ear.  He springs His mines,

And desolates a nation at a blast.

Forth steps the spruce philosopher, and tells

Of homogeneal and discordant springs

And principles; of causes how they work

By necessary laws their sure effects;

Of action and reaction.  He has found

The source of the disease that nature feels,

And bids the world take heart and banish fear.

Thou fool! will thy discovery of the cause

Suspend the effect, or heal it?  Has not God

Still wrought by means since first He made the world,

And did He not of old employ His means

To drown it?  What is His creation less

Than a capacious reservoir of means

Formed for His use, and ready at His will?

Go, dress thine eyes with eye-salve, ask of Him,

Or ask of whomsoever He has taught,

And learn, though late, the genuine cause of all.

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still—

My country! and while yet a nook is left,

Where English minds and manners may be found,

Shall be constrained to love thee.  Though thy clime

Be fickle, and thy year most part deformed

With dripping rains, or withered by a frost,

I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies

And fields without a flower, for warmer France

With all her vines; nor for Ausonia’s groves

Of golden fruitage, and her myrtle bowers.

To shake thy senate, and from heights sublime

Of patriot eloquence to flash down fire

Upon thy foes, was never meant my task;

But I can feel thy fortune, and partake

Thy joys and sorrows with as true a heart

As any thunderer there.  And I can feel

Thy follies too, and with a just disdain

Frown at effeminates, whose very looks

Reflect dishonour on the land I love.

How, in the name of soldiership and sense,

Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth

And tender as a girl, all essenced o’er

With odours, and as profligate as sweet,

Who sell their laurel for a myrtle wreath,

And love when they should fight; when such as these

Presume to lay their hand upon the ark

Of her magnificent and awful cause?

Time was when it was praise and boast enough

In every clime, and travel where we might,

That we were born her children.  Praise enough

To fill the ambition of a private man,

That Chatham’s language was his mother tongue,

And Wolfe’s great name compatriot with his own.

Farewell those honours, and farewell with them

The hope of such hereafter.  They have fallen

Each in his field of glory; one in arms,

And one in council;—Wolfe upon the lap

Of smiling victory that moment won,

And Chatham, heart-sick of his country’s shame.

They made us many soldiers.  Chatham, still

Consulting England’s happiness at home,

Secured it by an unforgiving frown

If any wronged her.  Wolfe, where’er he fought,

Put so much of his heart into his act,

That his example had a magnet’s force,

And all were swift to follow whom all loved.

Those suns are set.  Oh, rise some other such!

Or all that we have left is empty talk

Of old achievements, and despair of new.

Now hoist the sail, and let the streamers float

Upon the wanton breezes.  Strew the deck

With lavender, and sprinkle liquid sweets,

That no rude savour maritime invade

The nose of nice nobility.  Breathe soft,

Ye clarionets, and softer still, ye flutes,

That winds and waters lulled by magic sounds

May bear us smoothly to the Gallic shore.

True, we have lost an empire—let it pass.

True, we may thank the perfidy of France

That picked the jewel out of England’s crown,

With all the cunning of an envious shrew.

And let that pass—’twas but a trick of state.

A brave man knows no malice, but at once

Forgets in peace the injuries of war,

And gives his direst foe a friend’s embrace.

And shamed as we have been, to the very beard

Braved and defied, and in our own sea proved

Too weak for those decisive blows that once

Insured us mastery there, we yet retain

Some small pre-eminence, we justly boast

At least superior jockeyship, and claim

The honours of the turf as all our own.

Go then, well worthy of the praise ye seek,

And show the shame ye might conceal at home,

In foreign eyes!—be grooms, and win the plate,

Where once your nobler fathers won a crown!—

’Tis generous to communicate your skill

To those that need it.  Folly is soon learned,

And, under such preceptors, who can fail?

There is a pleasure in poetic pains

Which only poets know.  The shifts and turns,

The expedients and inventions multiform

To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms

Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win—

To arrest the fleeting images that fill

The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast,

And force them sit, till he has pencilled off

A faithful likeness of the forms he views;

Then to dispose his copies with such art

That each may find its most propitious light,

And shine by situation, hardly less

Than by the labour and the skill it cost,

Are occupations of the poet’s mind

So pleasing, and that steal away the thought

With such address from themes of sad import,

That, lost in his own musings, happy man!

He feels the anxieties of life, denied

Their wonted entertainment, all retire.

Such joys has he that sings.  But ah! not such,

Or seldom such, the hearers of his song.

Fastidious, or else listless, or perhaps

Aware of nothing arduous in a task

They never undertook, they little note

His dangers or escapes, and haply find

There least amusement where he found the most.

But is amusement all? studious of song

And yet ambitious not to sing in vain,

I would not trifle merely, though the world

Be loudest in their praise who do no more.

Yet what can satire, whether grave or gay?

It may correct a foible, may chastise

The freaks of fashion, regulate the dress,

Retrench a sword-blade, or displace a patch;

But where are its sublimer trophies found?

What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaimed

By rigour, or whom laughed into reform?

Alas, Leviathan is not so tamed.

Laughed at, he laughs again; and, stricken hard,

Turns to the stroke his adamantine scales,

That fear no discipline of human hands.

The pulpit therefore—and I name it, filled

With solemn awe, that bids me well beware

With what intent I touch that holy thing—

The pulpit, when the satirist has at last,

Strutting and vapouring in an empty school,

Spent all his force, and made no proselyte—

I say the pulpit, in the sober use

Of its legitimate peculiar powers,

Must stand acknowledged, while the world shall stand,

The most important and effectual guard,

Support, and ornament of virtue’s cause.

There stands the messenger of truth; there stands

The legate of the skies; his theme divine,

His office sacred, his credentials clear.

By him, the violated Law speaks out

Its thunders, and by him, in strains as sweet

As angels use, the Gospel whispers peace.

He stablishes the strong, restores the weak,

Reclaims the wanderer, binds the broken heart,

And, armed himself in panoply complete

Of heavenly temper, furnishes with arms

Bright as his own, and trains, by every rule

Of holy discipline, to glorious war,

The sacramental host of God’s elect.

Are all such teachers? would to heaven all were!

But hark—the Doctor’s voice—fast wedged between

Two empirics he stands, and with swollen cheeks

Inspires the news, his trumpet.  Keener far

Than all invective is his bold harangue,

While through that public organ of report

He hails the clergy, and, defying shame,

Announces to the world his own and theirs,

He teaches those to read whom schools dismissed,

And colleges, untaught; sells accents, tone,

And emphasis in score, and gives to prayer

The adagio and andante it demands.

He grinds divinity of other days

Down into modern use; transforms old print

To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes

Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.—

Are there who purchase of the Doctor’s ware?

Oh name it not in Gath!—it cannot be,

That grave and learned Clerks should need such aid.

He doubtless is in sport, and does but droll,

Assuming thus a rank unknown before,

Grand caterer and dry-nurse of the Church.

I venerate the man whose heart is warm,

Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life,

Coincident, exhibit lucid proof

That he is honest in the sacred cause.

To such I render more than mere respect,

Whose actions say that they respect themselves.

But, loose in morals, and in manners vain,

In conversation frivolous, in dress

Extreme, at once rapacious and profuse,

Frequent in park with lady at his side,

Ambling and prattling scandal as he goes,

But rare at home, and never at his books

Or with his pen, save when he scrawls a card;

Constant at routs, familiar with a round

Of ladyships, a stranger to the poor;

Ambitions of preferment for its gold,

And well prepared by ignorance and sloth,

By infidelity and love o’ the world,

To make God’s work a sinecure; a slave

To his own pleasures and his patron’s pride.—

From such apostles, O ye mitred heads,

Preserve the Church! and lay not careless hands

On skulls that cannot teach, and will not learn.

Would I describe a preacher, such as Paul,

Were he on earth, would hear, approve, and own,

Paul should himself direct me.  I would trace

His master-strokes, and draw from his design.

I would express him simple, grave, sincere;

In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain,

And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,

And natural in gesture; much impressed

Himself, as conscious of his awful charge,

And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds

May feel it too; affectionate in look

And tender in address, as well becomes

A messenger of grace to guilty men.

Behold the picture!—Is it like?—Like whom?

The things that mount the rostrum with a skip,

And then skip down again; pronounce a text,

Cry—Hem; and reading what they never wrote,

Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,

And with a well-bred whisper close the scene.

In man or woman, but far most in man,

And most of all in man that ministers

And serves the altar, in my soul I loathe

All affectation.  ’Tis my perfect scorn;

Object of my implacable disgust.

What!—will a man play tricks, will he indulge

A silly fond conceit of his fair form

And just proportion, fashionable mien,

And pretty face, in presence of his God?

Or will he seek to dazzle me with tropes,

As with the diamond on his lily hand,

And play his brilliant parts before my eyes,

When I am hungry for the Bread of Life?

He mocks his Maker, prostitutes and shames

His noble office, and, instead of truth,

Displaying his own beauty, starves his flock!

Therefore, avaunt, all attitude and stare

And start theatric, practised at the glass.

I seek divine simplicity in him

Who handles things divine; and all beside,

Though learned with labour, and though much admired

By curious eyes and judgments ill-informed,

To me is odious as the nasal twang

Heard at conventicle, where worthy men,

Misled by custom, strain celestial themes

Through the prest nostril, spectacle-bestrid.

Some, decent in demeanour while they preach,

That task performed, relapse into themselves,

And having spoken wisely, at the close

Grow wanton, and give proof to every eye—

Whoe’er was edified themselves were not.

Forth comes the pocket mirror.  First we stroke

An eyebrow; next compose a straggling lock;

Then with an air, most gracefully performed,

Fall back into our seat; extend an arm,

And lay it at its ease with gentle care,

With handkerchief in hand, depending low:

The better hand, more busy, gives the nose

Its bergamot, or aids the indebted eye

With opera glass to watch the moving scene,

And recognise the slow-retiring fair.

Now this is fulsome, and offends me more

Than in a Churchman slovenly neglect

And rustic coarseness would.  A heavenly mind

May be indifferent to her house of clay,

And slight the hovel as beneath her care.

But how a body so fantastic, trim,

And quaint in its deportment and attire,

Can lodge a heavenly mind—demands a doubt.

He that negotiates between God and man,

As God’s ambassador, the grand concerns

Of judgment and of mercy, should beware

Of lightness in his speech.  ’Tis pitiful

To court a grin, when you should woo a soul;

To break a jest, when pity would inspire

Pathetic exhortation; and to address

The skittish fancy with facetious tales,

When sent with God’s commission to the heart.

So did not Paul.  Direct me to a quip

Or merry turn in all he ever wrote,

And I consent you take it for your text,

Your only one, till sides and benches fail.

No: he was serious in a serious cause,

And understood too well the weighty terms

That he had ta’en in charge.  He would not stoop

To conquer those by jocular exploits,

Whom truth and soberness assailed in vain.

Oh, popular applause! what heart of man

Is proof against thy sweet seducing charms?

The wisest and the best feel urgent need

Of all their caution in thy gentlest gales;

But swelled into a gust—who then, alas!

With all his canvas set, and inexpert,

And therefore heedless, can withstand thy power?

Praise from the riveled lips of toothless, bald

Decrepitude, and in the looks of lean

And craving poverty, and in the bow

Respectful of the smutched artificer,

Is oft too welcome, and may much disturb

The bias of the purpose.  How much more,

Poured forth by beauty splendid and polite,

In language soft as adoration breathes?

Ah, spare your idol! think him human still;

Charms he may have, but he has frailties too;

Dote not too much, nor spoil what ye admire.

All truth is from the sempiternal source

Of light divine.  But Egypt, Greece, and Rome

Drew from the stream below.  More favoured, we

Drink, when we choose it, at the fountain head.

To them it flowed much mingled and defiled

With hurtful error, prejudice, and dreams

Illusive of philosophy, so called,

But falsely.  Sages after sages strove,

In vain, to filter off a crystal draught

Pure from the lees, which often more enhanced

The thirst than slaked it, and not seldom bred

Intoxication and delirium wild.

In vain they pushed inquiry to the birth

And spring-time of the world; asked, Whence is man?

Why formed at all? and wherefore as he is?

Where must he find his Maker?  With what rites

Adore Him?  Will He hear, accept, and bless?

Or does He sit regardless of His works?

Has man within him an immortal seed?

Or does the tomb take all?  If he survive

His ashes, where? and in what weal or woe?

Knots worthy of solution, which alone

A Deity could solve.  Their answers vague,

And all at random, fabulous and dark,

Left them as dark themselves.  Their rules of life,

Defective and unsanctioned, proved too weak

To bind the roving appetite, and lead

Blind nature to a God not yet revealed.

’Tis Revelation satisfies all doubts,

Explains all mysteries, except her own,

And so illuminates the path of life,

That fools discover it, and stray no more.

Now tell me, dignified and sapient sir,

My man of morals, nurtured in the shades

Of Academus, is this false or true?

Is Christ the abler teacher, or the schools?

If Christ, then why resort at every turn

To Athens or to Rome for wisdom short

Of man’s occasions, when in Him reside

Grace, knowledge, comfort, an unfathomed store?

How oft when Paul has served us with a text,

Has Epictetus, Plato, Tully, preached!

Men that, if now alive, would sit content

And humble learners of a Saviour’s worth,

Preach it who might.  Such was their love of truth,

Their thirst of knowledge, and their candour too.

And thus it is.  The pastor, either vain

By nature, or by flattery made so, taught

To gaze at his own splendour, and to exalt

Absurdly, not his office, but himself;

Or unenlightened, and too proud to learn,

Or vicious, and not therefore apt to teach,

Perverting often, by the stress of lewd

And loose example, whom he should instruct,

Exposes and holds up to broad disgrace

The noblest function, and discredits much

The brightest truths that man has ever seen.

For ghostly counsel, if it either fall

Below the exigence, or be not backed

With show of love, at least with hopeful proof

Of some sincerity on the giver’s part;

Or be dishonoured in the exterior form

And mode of its conveyance, by such tricks

As move derision, or by foppish airs

And histrionic mummery, that let down

The pulpit to the level of the stage;

Drops from the lips a disregarded thing.

The weak perhaps are moved, but are not taught,

While prejudice in men of stronger minds

Takes deeper root, confirmed by what they see.

A relaxation of religion’s hold

Upon the roving and untutored heart

Soon follows, and the curb of conscience snapt,

The laity run wild.—But do they now?

Note their extravagance, and be convinced.

As nations, ignorant of God, contrive

A wooden one, so we, no longer taught

By monitors that Mother Church supplies,

Now make our own.  Posterity will ask

(If e’er posterity sees verse of mine),

Some fifty or a hundred lustrums hence,

What was a monitor in George’s days?

My very gentle reader, yet unborn,

Of whom I needs must augur better things,

Since Heaven would sure grow weary of a world

Productive only of a race like us,

A monitor is wood—plank shaven thin.

We wear it at our backs.  There, closely braced

And neatly fitted, it compresses hard

The prominent and most unsightly bones,

And binds the shoulders flat.  We prove its use

Sovereign and most effectual to secure

A form, not now gymnastic as of yore,

From rickets and distortion, else, our lot.

But thus admonished we can walk erect,

One proof at least of manhood; while the friend

Sticks close, a Mentor worthy of his charge.

Our habits costlier than Lucullus wore,

And, by caprice as multiplied as his,

Just please us while the fashion is at full,

But change with every moon.  The sycophant,

That waits to dress us, arbitrates their date,

Surveys his fair reversion with keen eye;

Finds one ill made, another obsolete,

This fits not nicely, that is ill conceived;

And, making prize of all that he condemns,

With our expenditure defrays his own.

Variety’s the very spice of life,

That gives it all its flavour.  We have run

Through every change that fancy, at the loom

Exhausted, has had genius to supply,

And, studious of mutation still, discard

A real elegance, a little used,

For monstrous novelty and strange disguise.

We sacrifice to dress, till household joys

And comforts cease.  Dress drains our cellar dry,

And keeps our larder lean; puts out our fires,

And introduces hunger, frost, and woe,

Where peace and hospitality might reign.

What man that lives, and that knows how to live,

Would fail to exhibit at the public shows

A form as splendid as the proudest there,

Though appetite raise outcries at the cost?

A man o’ the town dines late, but soon enough,

With reasonable forecast and despatch,

To ensure a side-box station at half-price.

You think, perhaps, so delicate his dress,

His daily fare as delicate.  Alas!

He picks clean teeth, and, busy as he seems

With an old tavern quill, is hungry yet.

The rout is folly’s circle which she draws

With magic wand.  So potent is the spell,

That none decoyed into that fatal ring,

Unless by Heaven’s peculiar grace, escape.

There we grow early gray, but never wise;

There form connections, and acquire no friend;

Solicit pleasure hopeless of success;

Waste youth in occupations only fit

For second childhood, and devote old age

To sports which only childhood could excuse.

There they are happiest who dissemble best

Their weariness; and they the most polite,

Who squander time and treasure with a smile,

Though at their own destruction.  She that asks

Her dear five hundred friends, contemns them all,

And hates their coming.  They (what can they less?)

Make just reprisals, and, with cringe and shrug

And bow obsequious, hide their hate of her.

All catch the frenzy, downward from her Grace,

Whose flambeaux flash against the morning skies,

And gild our chamber ceilings as they pass,

To her who, frugal only that her thrift

May feed excesses she can ill afford,

Is hackneyed home unlackeyed; who, in haste

Alighting, turns the key in her own door,

And, at the watchman’s lantern borrowing light,

Finds a cold bed her only comfort left.

Wives beggar husbands, husbands starve their wives,

On Fortune’s velvet altar offering up

Their last poor pittance—Fortune, most severe

Of goddesses yet known, and costlier far

Than all that held their routs in Juno’s heaven.—

So fare we in this prison-house the world.

And ’tis a fearful spectacle to see

So many maniacs dancing in their chains.

They gaze upon the links that hold them fast

With eyes of anguish, execrate their lot,

Then shake them in despair, and dance again.

Now basket up the family of plagues

That waste our vitals.  Peculation, sale

Of honour, perjury, corruption, frauds

By forgery, by subterfuge of law,

By tricks and lies, as numerous and as keen

As the necessities their authors feel;

Then cast them, closely bundled, every brat

At the right door.  Profusion is its sire.

Profusion unrestrained, with all that’s base

In character, has littered all the land,

And bred within the memory of no few

A priesthood such as Baal’s was of old,

A people such as never was till now.

It is a hungry vice:—it eats up all

That gives society its beauty, strength,

Convenience, and security, and use;

Makes men mere vermin, worthy to be trapped

And gibbeted, as fast as catchpole claws

Can seize the slippery prey; unties the knot

Of union, and converts the sacred band

That holds mankind together to a scourge.

Profusion, deluging a state with lusts

Of grossest nature and of worst effects,

Prepares it for its ruin; hardens, blinds,

And warps the consciences of public men

Till they can laugh at virtue; mock the fools

That trust them; and, in the end, disclose a face

That would have shocked credulity herself,

Unmasked, vouchsafing this their sole excuse;—

Since all alike are selfish, why not they?

This does Profusion, and the accursed cause

Of such deep mischief has itself a cause.

In colleges and halls, in ancient days,

When learning, virtue, piety, and truth

Were precious, and inculcated with care,

There dwelt a sage called Discipline.  His head,

Not yet by time completely silvered o’er,

Bespoke him past the bounds of freakish youth,

But strong for service still, and unimpaired.

His eye was meek and gentle, and a smile

Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard

Paternal sweetness, dignity, and love.

The occupation dearest to his heart

Was to encourage goodness.  He would stroke

The head of modest and ingenuous worth,

That blushed at its own praise, and press the youth

Close to his side that pleased him.  Learning grew

Beneath his care, a thriving, vigorous plant;

The mind was well informed, the passions held

Subordinate, and diligence was choice.

If e’er it chanced, as sometimes chance it must,

That one among so many overleaped

The limits of control, his gentle eye

Grew stern, and darted a severe rebuke;

His frown was full of terror, and his voice

Shook the delinquent with such fits of awe

As left him not, till penitence had won

Lost favour back again, and closed the breach.

But Discipline, a faithful servant long,

Declined at length into the vale of years;

A palsy struck his arm, his sparkling eye

Was quenched in rheums of age, his voice unstrung

Grew tremulous, and moved derision more

Than reverence in perverse, rebellious youth.

So colleges and halls neglected much

Their good old friend, and Discipline at length,

O’erlooked and unemployed, fell sick and died.

Then study languished, emulation slept,

And virtue fled.  The schools became a scene

Of solemn farce, where ignorance in stilts,

His cap well lined with logic not his own,

With parrot tongue performed the scholar’s part,

Proceeding soon a graduated dunce.

Then compromise had place, and scrutiny

Became stone-blind, precedence went in truck,

And he was competent whose purse was so.

A dissolution of all bonds ensued,

The curbs invented for the mulish mouth

Of headstrong youth were broken; bars and bolts

Grew rusty by disuse, and massy gates

Forgot their office, opening with a touch;

Till gowns at length are found mere masquerade;

The tasselled cap and the spruce band a jest,

A mockery of the world.  What need of these

For gamesters, jockeys, brothellers impure,

Spendthrifts and booted sportsmen, oftener seen

With belted waist, and pointers at their heels,

Than in the bounds of duty?  What was learned,

If aught was learned in childhood, is forgot,

And such expense as pinches parents blue

And mortifies the liberal hand of love,

Is squandered in pursuit of idle sports

And vicious pleasures; buys the boy a name,

That sits a stigma on his father’s house,

And cleaves through life inseparably close

To him that wears it.  What can after-games

Of riper joys, and commerce with the world,

The lewd vain world that must receive him soon,

Add to such erudition thus acquired,

Where science and where virtue are professed?

They may confirm his habits, rivet fast

His folly, but to spoil him is a task

That bids defiance to the united powers

Of fashion, dissipation, taverns, stews.

Now, blame we most the nurselings, or the nurse?

The children crooked and twisted and deformed

Through want of care, or her whose winking eye

And slumbering oscitancy mars the brood?

The nurse no doubt.  Regardless of her charge,

She needs herself correction; needs to learn

That it is dangerous sporting with the world,

With things so sacred as a nation’s trust;

The nurture of her youth, her dearest pledge.

All are not such.  I had a brother once—

Peace to the memory of a man of worth,

A man of letters and of manners too—

Of manners sweet as virtue always wears,

When gay good-nature dresses her in smiles.

He graced a college in which order yet

Was sacred, and was honoured, loved, and wept,

By more than one, themselves conspicuous there.

Some minds are tempered happily, and mixt

With such ingredients of good sense and taste

Of what is excellent in man, they thirst

With such a zeal to be what they approve,

That no restraints can circumscribe them more

Than they themselves by choice, for wisdom’s sake.

Nor can example hurt them.  What they see

Of vice in others but enhancing more

The charms of virtue in their just esteem.

If such escape contagion, and emerge

Pure, from so foul a pool, to shine abroad,

And give the world their talents and themselves,

Small thanks to those whose negligence or sloth

Exposed their inexperience to the snare,

And left them to an undirected choice.

See, then, the quiver broken and decayed,

In which are kept our arrows.  Rusting there

In wild disorder and unfit for use,

What wonder if discharged into the world

They shame their shooters with a random flight,

Their points obtuse and feathers drunk with wine.

Well may the Church wage unsuccessful war

With such artillery armed.  Vice parries wide

The undreaded volley with a sword of straw,

And stands an impudent and fearless mark.

Have we not tracked the felon home, and found

His birthplace and his dam?  The country mourns—

Mourns, because every plague that can infest

Society, that saps and worms the base

Of the edifice that Policy has raised,

Swarms in all quarters; meets the eye, the ear,

And suffocates the breath at every turn.

Profusion breeds them.  And the cause itself

Of that calamitous mischief has been found,

Found, too, where most offensive, in the skirts

Of the robed pedagogue.  Else, let the arraigned

Stand up unconscious and refute the charge.

So, when the Jewish leader stretched his arm

And waved his rod divine, a race obscene,

Spawned in the muddy beds of Nile, came forth

Polluting Egypt.  Gardens, fields, and plains

Were covered with the pest.  The streets were filled;

The croaking nuisance lurked in every nook,

Nor palaces nor even chambers ’scaped,

And the land stank, so numerous was the fry.

BOOK III.

THE GARDEN.

AS one who, long in thickets and in brakes

Entangled, winds now this way and now that

His devious course uncertain, seeking home;

Or, having long in miry ways been foiled

And sore discomfited, from slough to slough

Plunging, and half despairing of escape,

If chance at length he find a greensward smooth

And faithful to the foot, his spirits rise,

He chirrups brisk his ear-erecting steed,

And winds his way with pleasure and with ease;

So I, designing other themes, and called

To adorn the Sofa with eulogium due,

To tell its slumbers and to paint its dreams,

Have rambled wide.  In country, city, seat

Of academic fame, howe’er deserved,

Long held, and scarcely disengaged at last.

But now with pleasant pace, a cleanlier road

I mean to tread.  I feel myself at large,

Courageous, and refreshed for future toil,

If toil await me, or if dangers new.

Since pulpits fail, and sounding-boards reflect

Most part an empty ineffectual sound,

What chance that I, to fame so little known,

Nor conversant with men or manners much,

Should speak to purpose, or with better hope

Crack the satiric thong?  ’Twere wiser far

For me, enamoured of sequestered scenes,

And charmed with rural beauty, to repose,

Where chance may throw me, beneath elm or vine

My languid limbs, when summer sears the plains;

Or when rough winter rages, on the soft

And sheltered Sofa, while the nitrous air

Feeds a blue flame and makes a cheerful hearth;

There, undisturbed by folly, and apprised

How great the danger of disturbing her,

To muse in silence, or at least confine

Remarks that gall so many to the few,

My partners in retreat.  Disgust concealed

Is ofttimes proof of wisdom, when the fault

Is obstinate, and cure beyond our reach.

Domestic happiness, thou only bliss

Of Paradise that has survived the fall!

Though few now taste thee unimpaired and pure,

Or, tasting, long enjoy thee, too infirm

Or too incautious to preserve thy sweets

Unmixed with drops of bitter, which neglect

Or temper sheds into thy crystal cup.

Thou art the nurse of virtue.  In thine arms

She smiles, appearing, as in truth she is,

Heaven-born, and destined to the skies again.

Thou art not known where Pleasure is adored,

That reeling goddess with the zoneless waist

And wandering eyes, still leaning on the arm

Of Novelty, her fickle frail support;

For thou art meek and constant, hating change,

And finding in the calm of truth-tried love

Joys that her stormy raptures never yield.

Forsaking thee, what shipwreck have we made

Of honour, dignity, and fair renown,

Till prostitution elbows us aside

In all our crowded streets, and senates seem

Convened for purposes of empire less,

Than to release the adult’ress from her bond.

The adult’ress! what a theme for angry verse,

What provocation to the indignant heart

That feels for injured love! but I disdain

The nauseous task to paint her as she is,

Cruel, abandoned, glorying in her shame.

No; let her pass, and charioted along

In guilty splendour shake the public ways;

The frequency of crimes has washed them white,

And verse of mine shall never brand the wretch

Whom matrons now of character unsmirched

And chaste themselves, are not ashamed to own.

Virtue and vice had boundaries in old time

Not to be passed; and she that had renounced

Her sex’s honour, was renounced herself

By all that prized it; not for prudery’s sake,

But dignity’s, resentful of the wrong.

’Twas hard, perhaps, on here and there a waif

Desirous to return, and not received;

But was a wholesome rigour in the main,

And taught the unblemished to preserve with care

That purity, whose loss was loss of all.

Men, too, were nice in honour in those days,

And judged offenders well.  Then he that sharped,

And pocketed a prize by fraud obtained,

Was marked and shunned as odious.  He that sold

His country, or was slack when she required

His every nerve in action and at stretch,

Paid with the blood that he had basely spared

The price of his default.  But now,—yes, now,

We are become so candid and so fair,

So liberal in construction, and so rich

In Christian charity (good-natured age!)

That they are safe, sinners of either sex,

Transgress what laws they may.  Well dressed, well bred,

Well equipaged, is ticket good enough

To pass us readily through every door.

Hypocrisy, detest her as we may

(And no man’s hatred ever wronged her yet),

May claim this merit still—that she admits

The worth of what she mimics with such care,

And thus gives virtue indirect applause;

But she has burnt her mask, not needed here,

Where vice has such allowance, that her shifts

And specious semblances have lost their use.

I was a stricken deer that left the herd

Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt

My panting side was charged, when I withdrew

To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.

There was I found by one who had himself

Been hurt by the archers.  In his side he bore,

And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.

With gentle force soliciting the darts

He drew them forth, and healed and bade me live.

Since then, with few associates, in remote

And silent woods I wander, far from those

My former partners of the peopled scene,

With few associates, and not wishing more.

Here much I ruminate, as much I may,

With other views of men and manners now

Than once, and others of a life to come.

I see that all are wanderers, gone astray

Each in his own delusions; they are lost

In chase of fancied happiness, still woo’d

And never won.  Dream after dream ensues,

And still they dream that they shall still succeed,

And still are disappointed: rings the world

With the vain stir.  I sum up half mankind,

And add two-thirds of the remaining half,

And find the total of their hopes and fears

Dreams, empty dreams.  The million flit as gay

As if created only, like the fly

That spreads his motley wings in the eye of noon,

To sport their season and be seen no more.

The rest are sober dreamers, grave and wise,

And pregnant with discoveries new and rare.

Some write a narrative of wars, and feats

Of heroes little known, and call the rant

A history; describe the man, of whom

His own coevals took but little note,

And paint his person, character, and views,

As they had known him from his mother’s womb;

They disentangle from the puzzled skein,

In which obscurity has wrapped them up,

The threads of politic and shrewd design

That ran through all his purposes, and charge

His mind with meanings that he never had,

Or, having, kept concealed.  Some drill and bore

The solid earth, and from the strata there

Extract a register, by which we learn

That He who made it and revealed its date

To Moses, was mistaken in its age.

Some, more acute and more industrious still,

Contrive creation; travel nature up

To the sharp peak of her sublimest height,

And tell us whence the stars; why some are fixt,

And planetary some; what gave them first

Rotation, from what fountain flowed their light.

Great contest follows, and much learned dust

Involves the combatants, each claiming truth,

And truth disclaiming both.  And thus they spend

The little wick of life’s poor shallow lamp

In playing tricks with nature, giving laws

To distant worlds, and trifling in their own.

Is’t not a pity now, that tickling rheums

Should ever tease the lungs and blear the sight

Of oracles like these?  Great pity, too,

That having wielded the elements, and built

A thousand systems, each in his own way,

They should go out in fume and be forgot?

Ah, what is life thus spent? and what are they

But frantic who thus spend it? all for smoke—

Eternity for bubbles proves at last

A senseless bargain.  When I see such games

Played by the creatures of a Power who swears

That He will judge the earth, and call the fool

To a sharp reckoning that has lived in vain,

And when I weigh this seeming wisdom well,

And prove it in the infallible result

So hollow and so false—I feel my heart

Dissolve in pity, and account the learned,

If this be learning, most of all deceived.

Great crimes alarm the conscience, but it sleeps

While thoughtful man is plausibly amused.

Defend me, therefore, common sense, say I,

From reveries so airy, from the toil

Of dropping buckets into empty wells,

And growing old in drawing nothing up!

’Twere well, says one sage erudite, profound,

Terribly arched and aquiline his nose,

And overbuilt with most impending brows,

’Twere well could you permit the world to live

As the world pleases.  What’s the world to you?—

Much.  I was born of woman, and drew milk

As sweet as charity from human breasts.

I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,

And exercise all functions of a man.

How then should I and any man that lives

Be strangers to each other?  Pierce my vein,

Take of the crimson stream meandering there,

And catechise it well.  Apply your glass,

Search it, and prove now if it be not blood

Congenial with thine own; and if it be,

What edge of subtlety canst thou suppose

Keen enough, wise and skilful as thou art,

To cut the link of brotherhood, by which

One common Maker bound me to the kind?

True; I am no proficient, I confess,

In arts like yours.  I cannot call the swift

And perilous lightnings from the angry clouds,

And bid them hide themselves in the earth beneath;

I cannot analyse the air, nor catch

The parallax of yonder luminous point

That seems half quenched in the immense abyss:

Such powers I boast not—neither can I rest

A silent witness of the headlong rage,

Or heedless folly, by which thousands die,

Bone of my bone, and kindred souls to mine.

God never meant that man should scale the heavens

By strides of human wisdom.  In His works,

Though wondrous, He commands us in His Word

To seek Him rather where His mercy shines.

The mind indeed, enlightened from above,

Views Him in all; ascribes to the grand cause

The grand effect; acknowledges with joy

His manner, and with rapture tastes His style.

But never yet did philosophic tube,

That brings the planets home into the eye

Of observation, and discovers, else

Not visible, His family of worlds,

Discover Him that rules them; such a veil

Hangs over mortal eyes, blind from the birth,

And dark in things divine.  Full often too

Our wayward intellect, the more we learn

Of nature, overlooks her Author more;

From instrumental causes proud to draw

Conclusions retrograde, and mad mistake:

But if His Word once teach us, shoot a ray

Through all the heart’s dark chambers, and reveal

Truths undiscerned but by that holy light,

Then all is plain.  Philosophy, baptised

In the pure fountain of eternal love,

Has eyes indeed; and, viewing all she sees

As meant to indicate a God to man,

Gives Him His praise, and forfeits not her own.

Learning has borne such fruit in other days

On all her branches.  Piety has found

Friends in the friends of science, and true prayer

Has flowed from lips wet with Castalian dews.

Such was thy wisdom, Newton, childlike sage!

Sagacious reader of the works of God,

And in His Word sagacious.  Such too thine,

Milton, whose genius had angelic wings,

And fed on manna.  And such thine, in whom

Our British Themis gloried with just cause,

Immortal Hale! for deep discernment praised,

And sound integrity not more, than famed

For sanctity of manners undefiled.

All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades

Like the fair flower dishevelled in the wind;

Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream;

The man we celebrate must find a tomb,

And we that worship him, ignoble graves.

Nothing is proof against the general curse

Of vanity, that seizes all below.

The only amaranthine flower on earth

Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.

But what is truth? ’twas Pilate’s question put

To truth itself, that deigned him no reply.

And wherefore? will not God impart His light

To them that ask it?—Freely—’tis His joy,

His glory, and His nature to impart.

But to the proud, uncandid, insincere,

Or negligent inquirer, not a spark.

What’s that which brings contempt upon a book

And him that writes it, though the style be neat,

The method clear, and argument exact?

That makes a minister in holy things

The joy of many, and the dread of more,

His name a theme for praise and for reproach?—

That, while it gives us worth in God’s account,

Depreciates and undoes us in our own?

What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy,

That learning is too proud to gather up,

But which the poor and the despised of all

Seek and obtain, and often find unsought?

Tell me, and I will tell thee what is truth.

Oh, friendly to the best pursuits of man,

Friendly to thought, to virtue, and to peace,

Domestic life in rural leisure passed!

Few know thy value, and few taste thy sweets,

Though many boast thy favours, and affect

To understand and choose thee for their own.

But foolish man foregoes his proper bliss,

Even as his first progenitor, and quits,

Though placed in paradise, for earth has still

Some traces of her youthful beauty left,

Substantial happiness for transient joy.

Scenes formed for contemplation, and to nurse

The growing seeds of wisdom; that suggest,

By every pleasing image they present,

Reflections such as meliorate the heart,

Compose the passions, and exalt the mind;

Scenes such as these, ’tis his supreme delight

To fill with riot and defile with blood.

Should some contagion, kind to the poor brutes

We persecute, annihilate the tribes

That draw the sportsman over hill and dale

Fearless, and rapt away from all his cares;

Should never game-fowl hatch her eggs again,

Nor baited hook deceive the fish’s eye;

Could pageantry, and dance, and feast, and song

Be quelled in all our summer months’ retreats;

How many self-deluded nymphs and swains,

Who dream they have a taste for fields and groves,

Would find them hideous nurseries of the spleen,

And crowd the roads, impatient for the town!

They love the country, and none else, who seek

For their own sake its silence and its shade;

Delights which who would leave, that has a heart

Susceptible of pity, or a mind

Cultured and capable of sober thought,

For all the savage din of the swift pack,

And clamours of the field?  Detested sport,

That owes its pleasures to another’s pain,

That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks

Of harmless nature, dumb, but yet endued

With eloquence, that agonies inspire,

Of silent tears and heart-distending sighs!

Vain tears, alas! and sighs that never find

A corresponding tone in jovial souls.

Well—one at least is safe.  One sheltered hare

Has never heard the sanguinary yell

Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.

Innocent partner of my peaceful home,

Whom ten long years’ experience of my care

Has made at last familiar, she has lost

Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,

Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.

Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor

At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw-couch, and slumber unalarmed;

For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged

All that is human in me to protect

Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.

If I survive thee I will dig thy grave,

And when I place thee in it, sighing say,

I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

How various his employments, whom the world

Calls idle, and who justly in return

Esteems that busy world an idler, too!

Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen,

Delightful industry enjoyed at home,

And nature in her cultivated trim

Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad—

Can he want occupation who has these?

Will he be idle who has much to enjoy?

Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease,

Not slothful; happy to deceive the time,

Not waste it; and aware that human life

Is but a loan to be repaid with use,

When He shall call His debtors to account,

From whom are all our blessings; business finds

Even here: while sedulous I seek to improve,

At least neglect not, or leave unemployed,

The mind He gave me; driving it, though slack

Too oft, and much impeded in its work

By causes not to be divulged in vain,

To its just point—the service of mankind.

He that attends to his interior self,

That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind

That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks

A social, not a dissipated life,

Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve

No unimportant, though a silent task.

A life all turbulence and noise may seem,

To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;

But wisdom is a pearl with most success

Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.

He that is ever occupied in storms,

Or dives not for it or brings up instead,

Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize.

The morning finds the self-sequestered man

Fresh for his task, intend what task he may.

Whether inclement seasons recommend

His warm but simple home, where he enjoys,

With her who shares his pleasures and his heart,

Sweet converse, sipping calm the fragrant lymph

Which neatly she prepares; then to his book

Well chosen, and not sullenly perused

In selfish silence, but imparted oft

As aught occurs that she may smile to hear,

Or turn to nourishment digested well.

Or if the garden with its many cares,

All well repaid, demand him, he attends

The welcome call, conscious how much the hand

Of lubbard labour needs his watchful eye,

Oft loitering lazily if not o’erseen,

Or misapplying his unskilful strength.

Nor does he govern only or direct,

But much performs himself; no works indeed

That ask robust tough sinews, bred to toil,

Servile employ—but such as may amuse,

Not tire, demanding rather skill than force.

Proud of his well-spread walls, he views his trees

That meet, no barren interval between,

With pleasure more than even their fruits afford,

Which, save himself who trains them, none can feel.

These, therefore, are his own peculiar charge,

No meaner hand may discipline the shoots,

None but his steel approach them.  What is weak,

Distempered, or has lost prolific powers,

Impaired by age, his unrelenting hand

Dooms to the knife.  Nor does he spare the soft

And succulent that feeds its giant growth,

But barren, at the expense of neighbouring twigs

Less ostentatious, and yet studded thick

With hopeful gems.  The rest, no portion left

That may disgrace his art, or disappoint

Large expectation, he disposes neat

At measured distances, that air and sun

Admitted freely may afford their aid,

And ventilate and warm the swelling buds.

Hence Summer has her riches, Autumn hence,

And hence even Winter fills his withered hand

With blushing fruits, and plenty not his own,

Fair recompense of labour well bestowed

And wise precaution, which a clime so rude

Makes needful still, whose Spring is but the child

Of churlish Winter, in her froward moods

Discovering much the temper of her sire.

For oft, as if in her the stream of mild

Maternal nature had reversed its course,

She brings her infants forth with many smiles,

But, once delivered, kills them with a frown.

He therefore, timely warned, himself supplies

Her want of care, screening and keeping warm

The plenteous bloom, that no rough blast may sweep

His garlands from the boughs.  Again, as oft

As the sun peeps and vernal airs breathe mild,

The fence withdrawn, he gives them ev’ry beam,

And spreads his hopes before the blaze of day.

To raise the prickly and green-coated gourd,

So grateful to the palate, and when rare

So coveted, else base and disesteemed—

Food for the vulgar merely—is an art

That toiling ages have but just matured,

And at this moment unessayed in song.

Yet gnats have had, and frogs and mice long since,

Their eulogy; those sang the Mantuan bard,

And these the Grecian in ennobling strains;

And in thy numbers, Philips, shines for aye

The solitary Shilling.  Pardon then,

Ye sage dispensers of poetic fame!

The ambition of one meaner far, whose powers

Presuming an attempt not less sublime,

Pant for the praise of dressing to the taste

Of critic appetite, no sordid fare,

A cucumber, while costly yet and scarce.

The stable yields a stercoraceous heap

Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,

And potent to resist the freezing blast.

For ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf

Deciduous, and when now November dark

Checks vegetation in the torpid plant

Exposed to his cold breath, the task begins.

Warily therefore, and with prudent heed

He seeks a favoured spot, that where he builds

The agglomerated pile, his frame may front

The sun’s meridian disk, and at the back

Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge

Impervious to the wind.  First he bids spread

Dry fern or littered hay, that may imbibe

The ascending damps; then leisurely impose,

And lightly, shaking it with agile hand

From the full fork, the saturated straw.

What longest binds the closest, forms secure

The shapely side, that as it rises takes

By just degrees an overhanging breadth,

Sheltering the base with its projected eaves.

The uplifted frame compact at every joint,

And overlaid with clear translucent glass,

He settles next upon the sloping mount,

Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure

From the dashed pane the deluge as it falls.

He shuts it close, and the first labour ends.

Thrice must the voluble and restless earth

Spin round upon her axle, ere the warmth

Slow gathering in the midst, through the square mass

Diffused, attain the surface.  When, behold!

A pestilent and most corrosive steam,

Like a gross fog Boeotian, rising fast,

And fast condensed upon the dewy sash,

Asks egress; which obtained, the overcharged

And drenched conservatory breathes abroad,

In volumes wheeling slow, the vapour dank,

And purified, rejoices to have lost

Its foul inhabitant.  But to assuage

The impatient fervour which it first conceives

Within its reeking bosom, threatening death

To his young hopes, requires discreet delay.

Experience, slow preceptress, teaching oft

The way to glory by miscarriage foul,

Must prompt him, and admonish how to catch

The auspicious moment, when the tempered heat,

Friendly to vital motion, may afford

Soft fermentation, and invite the seed.

The seed selected wisely, plump and smooth

And glossy, he commits to pots of size

Diminutive, well filled with well-prepared

And fruitful soil, that has been treasured long,

And drunk no moisture from the dripping clouds:

These on the warm and genial earth that hides

The smoking manure, and o’erspreads it all,

He places lightly, and, as time subdues

The rage of fermentation, plunges deep

In the soft medium, till they stand immersed.

Then rise the tender germs upstarting quick

And spreading wide their spongy lobes; at first

Pale, wan, and livid; but assuming soon,

If fanned by balmy and nutritious air

Strained through the friendly mats, a vivid green.

Two leaves produced, two rough indented leaves,

Cautious he pinches from the second stalk

A pimple, that portends a future sprout,

And interdicts its growth.  Thence straight succeed

The branches, sturdy to his utmost wish,

Prolific all, and harbingers of more.

The crowded roots demand enlargement now

And transplantation in an ampler space.

Indulged in what they wish, they soon supply

Large foliage, overshadowing golden flowers,

Blown on the summit of the apparent fruit.

These have their sexes, and when summer shines

The bee transports the fertilising meal

From flower to flower, and even the breathing air

Wafts the rich prize to its appointed use.

Not so when winter scowls.  Assistant art

Then acts in nature’s office, brings to pass

The glad espousals and insures the crop.

Grudge not, ye rich (since luxury must have

His dainties, and the world’s more numerous half

Lives by contriving delicates for you),

Grudge not the cost.  Ye little know the cares,

The vigilance, the labour, and the skill

That day and night are exercised, and hang

Upon the ticklish balance of suspense,

That ye may garnish your profuse regales

With summer fruits, brought forth by wintry suns.

Ten thousand dangers lie in wait to thwart

The process.  Heat and cold, and wind and steam,

Moisture and drought, mice, worms, and swarming flies

Minute as dust and numberless, oft work

Dire disappointment that admits no cure,

And which no care can obviate.  It were long,

Too long to tell the expedients and the shifts

Which he, that fights a season so severe,

Devises, while he guards his tender trust,

And oft, at last, in vain.  The learned and wise

Sarcastic would exclaim, and judge the song

Cold as its theme, and, like its theme, the fruit

Of too much labour, worthless when produced.

Who loves a garden, loves a greenhouse too.

Unconscious of a less propitious clime

There blooms exotic beauty, warm and snug,

While the winds whistle and the snows descend.

The spiry myrtle with unwithering leaf

Shines there and flourishes.  The golden boast

Of Portugal and Western India there,

The ruddier orange and the paler lime,

Peep through their polished foliage at the storm,

And seem to smile at what they need not fear.

The amomum there with intermingling flowers

And cherries hangs her twigs.  Geranium boasts

Her crimson honours, and the spangled beau,

Ficoides, glitters bright the winter long,

All plants, of every leaf, that can endure

The winter’s frown if screened from his shrewd bite,

Live there and prosper.  Those Ausonia claims,

Levantine regions these; the Azores send

Their jessamine; her jessamine remote

Caffraria: foreigners from many lands,

They form one social shade, as if convened

By magic summons of the Orphean lyre.

Yet such arrangement, rarely brought to pass

But by a master’s hand, disposing well

The gay diversities of leaf and flower,

Must lend its aid to illustrate all their charms,

And dress the regular yet various scene.

Plant behind plant aspiring, in the van

The dwarfish, in the rear retired, but still

Sublime above the rest, the statelier stand.

So once were ranged the sons of ancient Rome,

A noble show, while Roscius trod the stage;

And so, while Garrick, as renowned as he,

The sons of Albion, fearing each to lose

Some note of Nature’s music from his lips,

And covetous of Shakespeare’s beauty, seen

In every flash of his far-beaming eye.

Nor taste alone and well-contrived display

Suffice to give the marshalled ranks the grace

Of their complete effect.  Much yet remains

Unsung, and many cares are yet behind

And more laborious; cares on which depends

Their vigour, injured soon, not soon restored.

The soil must be renewed, which often washed

Loses its treasure of salubrious salts,

And disappoints the roots; the slender roots,

Close interwoven where they meet the vase,

Must smooth be shorn away; the sapless branch

Must fly before the knife; the withered leaf

Must be detached, and where it strews the floor

Swept with a woman’s neatness, breeding else

Contagion, and disseminating death.

Discharge but these kind offices (and who

Would spare, that loves them, offices like these?)

Well they reward the toil.  The sight is pleased,

The scent regaled, each odoriferous leaf,

Each opening blossom, freely breathes abroad

Its gratitude, and thanks him with its sweets.

So manifold, all pleasing in their kind,

All healthful, are the employs of rural life,

Reiterated as the wheel of time

Runs round, still ending, and beginning still.

Nor are these all.  To deck the shapely knoll

That, softly swelled and gaily dressed, appears

A flowery island from the dark green lawn

Emerging, must be deemed a labour due

To no mean hand, and asks the touch of taste.

Here also grateful mixture of well-matched

And sorted hues (each giving each relief,

And by contrasted beauty shining more)

Is needful.  Strength may wield the ponderous spade,

May turn the clod, and wheel the compost home,

But elegance, chief grace the garden shows

And most attractive, is the fair result

Of thought, the creature of a polished mind.

Without it, all is Gothic as the scene

To which the insipid citizen resorts,

Near yonder heath; where industry misspent,

But proud of his uncouth, ill-chosen task,

Has made a heaven on earth; with suns and moons

Of close-rammed stones has charged the encumbered soil,

And fairly laid the zodiac in the dust.

He, therefore, who would see his flowers disposed

Sightly and in just order, ere he gives

The beds the trusted treasure of their seeds,

Forecasts the future whole; that when the scene

Shall break into its preconceived display,

Each for itself, and all as with one voice

Conspiring, may attest his bright design.

Nor even then, dismissing as performed

His pleasant work, may he suppose it done.

Few self-supported flowers endure the wind

Uninjured, but expect the upholding aid

Of the smooth-shaven prop, and neatly tied

Are wedded thus, like beauty to old age,

For interest sake, the living to the dead.

Some clothe the soil that feeds them, far diffused

And lowly creeping, modest and yet fair;

Like virtue, thriving most where little seen.

Some, more aspiring, catch the neighbour shrub

With clasping tendrils, and invest his branch,

Else unadorned, with many a gay festoon

And fragrant chaplet, recompensing well

The strength they borrow with the grace they lend.

All hate the rank society of weeds,

Noisome, and very greedy to exhaust

The impoverished earth; an overbearing race,

That, like the multitude made faction-mad,

Disturb good order, and degrade true worth.

Oh blest seclusion from a jarring world,

Which he, thus occupied, enjoys!  Retreat

Cannot, indeed, to guilty man restore

Lost innocence, or cancel follies past;

But it has peace, and much secures the mind

From all assaults of evil; proving still

A faithful barrier, not o’erleaped with ease

By vicious custom raging uncontrolled

Abroad and desolating public life.

When fierce temptation, seconded within

By traitor appetite, and armed with darts

Tempered in hell, invades the throbbing breast,

To combat may be glorious, and success

Perhaps may crown us, but to fly is safe.

Had I the choice of sublunary good,

What could I wish that I possess not here?

Health, leisure; means to improve it, friendship, peace,

No loose or wanton though a wandering muse,

And constant occupation without care.

Thus blest, I draw a picture of that bliss;

Hopeless, indeed, that dissipated minds

And profligate abusers of a world

Created fair so much in vain for them,

Should seek the guiltless joys that I describe,

Allured by my report; but sure no less

That self-condemned they must neglect the prize,

And what they will not taste, must yet approve.

What we admire we praise; and when we praise

Advance it into notice, that, its worth

Acknowledged, others may admire it too.

I therefore recommend, though at the risk

Of popular disgust, yet boldly still,

The cause of piety and sacred truth

And virtue, and those scenes which God ordained

Should best secure them and promote them most;

Scenes that I love, and with regret perceive

Forsaken, or through folly not enjoyed.

Pure is the nymph, though liberal of her smiles,

And chaste, though unconfined, whom I extol.

Not as the prince in Shushan, when he called,

Vain-glorious of her charms, his Vashti forth,

To grace the full pavilion.  His design

Was but to boast his own peculiar good,

Which all might view with envy, none partake.

My charmer is not mine alone; my sweets,

And she that sweetens all my bitters, too,

Nature, enchanting Nature, in whose form

And lineaments divine I trace a hand

That errs not, and find raptures still renewed,

Is free to all men—universal prize.

Strange that so fair a creature should yet want

Admirers, and be destined to divide

With meaner objects even the few she finds.

Stript of her ornaments, her leaves and flowers,

She loses all her influence.  Cities then

Attract us, and neglected Nature pines,

Abandoned, as unworthy of our love.

But are not wholesome airs, though unperfumed

By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt,

And groves, if unharmonious yet secure

From clamour and whose very silence charms,

To be preferred to smoke—to the eclipse

That Metropolitan volcanoes make,

Whose Stygian throats breathe darkness all day long,

And to the stir of commerce, driving slow,

And thundering loud with his ten thousand wheels?

They would be, were not madness in the head

And folly in the heart; were England now

What England was, plain, hospitable, kind,

And undebauched.  But we have bid farewell

To all the virtues of those better days,

And all their honest pleasures.  Mansions once

Knew their own masters, and laborious hands

That had survived the father, served the son.

Now the legitimate and rightful lord

Is but a transient guest, newly arrived

And soon to be supplanted.  He that saw

His patrimonial timber cast its leaf,

Sells the last scantling, and transfers the price

To some shrewd sharper, ere it buds again.

Estates are landscapes, gazed upon awhile,

Then advertised, and auctioneered away.

The country starves, and they that feed the o’er-charged

And surfeited lewd town with her fair dues,

By a just judgment strip and starve themselves.

The wings that waft our riches out of sight

Grow on the gamester’s elbows, and the alert

And nimble motion of those restless joints,

That never tire, soon fans them all away.

Improvement too, the idol of the age,

Is fed with many a victim.  Lo! he comes—

The omnipotent magician, Brown, appears.

Down falls the venerable pile, the abode

Of our forefathers, a grave whiskered race,

But tasteless.  Springs a palace in its stead,

But in a distant spot; where more exposed

It may enjoy the advantage of the North

And aguish East, till time shall have transformed

Those naked acres to a sheltering grove.

He speaks.  The lake in front becomes a lawn,

Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise,

And streams, as if created for his use,

Pursue the track of his directed wand

Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow,

Now murmuring soft, now roaring in cascades,

Even as he bids.  The enraptured owner smiles.

’Tis finished.  And yet, finished as it seems,

Still wants a grace, the loveliest it could show,

A mine to satisfy the enormous cost.

Drained to the last poor item of his wealth,

He sighs, departs, and leaves the accomplished plan

That he has touched and retouched, many a day

Laboured, and many a night pursued in dreams,

Just when it meets his hopes, and proves the heaven

He wanted, for a wealthier to enjoy.

And now perhaps the glorious hour is come,

When having no stake left, no pledge to endear

Her interests, or that gives her sacred cause

A moment’s operation on his love,

He burns with most intense and flagrant zeal

To serve his country.  Ministerial grace

Deals him out money from the public chest,

Or, if that mine be shut, some private purse

Supplies his need with an usurious loan,

To be refunded duly, when his vote,

Well-managed, shall have earned its worthy price.

Oh, innocent compared with arts like these,

Crape and cocked pistol and the whistling ball

Sent through the traveller’s temples!  He that finds

One drop of heaven’s sweet mercy in his cup,

Can dig, beg, rot, and perish well-content,

So he may wrap himself in honest rags

At his last gasp; but could not for a world

Fish up his dirty and dependent bread

From pools and ditches of the commonwealth,

Sordid and sickening at his own success.

Ambition, avarice, penury incurred

By endless riot, vanity, the lust

Of pleasure and variety, despatch,

As duly as the swallows disappear,

The world of wandering knights and squires to town;

London engulfs them all.  The shark is there,

And the shark’s prey; the spendthrift, and the leech

That sucks him.  There the sycophant, and he

That with bare-headed and obsequious bows

Begs a warm office, doomed to a cold jail

And groat per diem if his patron frown.

The levee swarms, as if in golden pomp

Were charactered on every statesman’s door,

‘BATTERED AND BANKRUPT FORTUNES MENDED HERE.’

These are the charms that sully and eclipse

The charms of nature.  ’Tis the cruel gripe

That lean hard-handed poverty inflicts,

The hope of better things, the chance to win,

The wish to shine, the thirst to be amused,

That, at the sound of Winter’s hoary wing,

Unpeople all our counties of such herds

Of fluttering, loitering, cringing, begging, loose

And wanton vagrants, as make London, vast

And boundless as it is, a crowded coop.

Oh thou resort and mart of all the earth,

Chequered with all complexions of mankind,

And spotted with all crimes; in whom I see

Much that I love, and more that I admire,

And all that I abhor; thou freckled fair

That pleases and yet shocks me, I can laugh

And I can weep, can hope, and can despond,

Feel wrath and pity when I think on thee!

Ten righteous would have saved a city once,

And thou hast many righteous.—Well for thee—

That salt preserves thee; more corrupted else,

And therefore more obnoxious at this hour

Than Sodom in her day had power to be,

For whom God heard his Abram plead in vain.

BOOK IV.

THE WINTER EVENING.

HARK! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge,

That with its wearisome but needful length

Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon

Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright;—

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,

With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks,

News from all nations lumbering at his back.

True to his charge the close-packed load behind,

Yet careless what he brings, his one concern

Is to conduct it to the destined inn,

And, having dropped the expected bag—pass on.

He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,

Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief

Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;

To him indifferent whether grief or joy.

Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,

Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet

With tears that trickled down the writer’s cheeks,

Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,

Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,

Or nymphs responsive, equally affect

His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

But oh, the important budget! ushered in

With such heart-shaking music, who can say

What are its tidings? have our troops awaked?

Or do they still, as if with opium drugged,

Snore to the murmurs of the Atlantic wave?

Is India free? and does she wear her plumed

And jewelled turban with a smile of peace,

Or do we grind her still?  The grand debate,

The popular harangue, the tart reply,

The logic and the wisdom and the wit

And the loud laugh—I long to know them all;

I burn to set the imprisoned wranglers free,

And give them voice and utterance once again.

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Not such his evening, who with shining face

Sweats in the crowded theatre, and squeezed

And bored with elbow-points through both his sides,

Outscolds the ranting actor on the stage;

Nor his, who patient stands till his feet throb

And his head thumps, to feed upon the breath

Of patriots bursting with heroic rage,

Or placemen all tranquillity and smiles.

This folio of four pages, happy work!

Which not even critics criticise, that holds

Inquisitive attention while I read

Fast bound in chains of silence, which the fair,

Though eloquent themselves, yet fear to break,

What is it but a map of busy life,

Its fluctuations and its vast concerns?

Here runs the mountainous and craggy ridge

That tempts ambition.  On the summit, see,

The seals of office glitter in his eyes;

He climbs, he pants, he grasps them.  At his heels,

Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends,

And with a dextrous jerk soon twists him down

And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.

Here rills of oily eloquence, in soft

Meanders, lubricate the course they take;

The modest speaker is ashamed and grieved

To engross a moment’s notice, and yet begs,

Begs a propitious ear for his poor thoughts,

However trivial all that he conceives.

Sweet bashfulness! it claims, at least, this praise,

The dearth of information and good sense

That it foretells us, always comes to pass.

Cataracts of declamation thunder here,

There forests of no meaning spread the page

In which all comprehension wanders lost;

While fields of pleasantry amuse us there,

With merry descants on a nation’s woes.

The rest appears a wilderness of strange

But gay confusion; roses for the cheeks

And lilies for the brows of faded age,

Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald,

Heaven, earth, and ocean plundered of their sweets.

Nectareous essences, Olympian dews,

Sermons and city feasts and favourite airs,

Ethereal journeys, submarine exploits,

And Katterfelto with his hair on end

At his own wonders, wondering for his bread.

’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat

To peep at such a world; to see the stir

Of the great Babel and not feel the crowd;

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.

Thus sitting and surveying thus at ease

The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced

To some secure and more than mortal height,

That liberates and exempts me from them all.

It turns submitted to my view, turns round

With all its generations; I behold

The tumult and am still.  The sound of war

Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me;

Grieves, but alarms me not.  I mourn the pride

And avarice that makes man a wolf to man;

Hear the faint echo of those brazen throats

By which he speaks the language of his heart,

And sigh, but never tremble at the sound.

He travels and expatiates, as the bee

From flower to flower so he from land to land;

The manners, customs, policy of all

Pay contribution to the store he gleans,

He sucks intelligence in every clime,

And spreads the honey of his deep research

At his return—a rich repast for me.

He travels and I too.  I tread his deck,

Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes

Discover countries, with a kindred heart

Suffer his woes and share in his escapes;

While fancy, like the finger of a clock,

Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.

Oh Winter, ruler of the inverted year,

Thy scattered hair with sleet-like ashes filled,

Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks

Fringed with a beard made white with other snows

Than those of age, thy forehead wrapped in clouds,

A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne

A sliding car indebted to no wheels,

But urged by storms along its slippery way,

I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,

And dreaded as thou art.  Thou hold’st the sun

A prisoner in the yet undawning East,

Shortening his journey between morn and noon,

And hurrying him, impatient of his stay,

Down to the rosy west; but kindly still

Compensating his loss with added hours

Of social converse and instructive ease,

And gathering at short notice in one group

The family dispersed, and fixing thought

Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares.

I crown thee king of intimate delights,

Fire-side enjoyments, home-born happiness,

And all the comforts that the lowly roof

Of undisturbed retirement, and the hours

Of long uninterrupted evening know.

No rattling wheels stop short before these gates;

No powdered pert proficients in the art

Of sounding an alarm, assault these doors

Till the street rings; no stationary steeds

Cough their own knell, while heedless of the sound

The silent circle fan themselves, and quake:

But here the needle plies its busy task,

The pattern grows, the well-depicted flower,

Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn,

Unfolds its bosom; buds and leaves and sprigs

And curly tendrils, gracefully disposed,

Follow the nimble finger of the fair;

A wreath that cannot fade, of flowers that blow

With most success when all besides decay.

The poet’s or historian’s page, by one

Made vocal for the amusement of the rest;

The sprightly lyre, whose treasure of sweet sounds

The touch from many a trembling chord shakes out;

And the clear voice symphonious, yet distinct,

And in the charming strife triumphant still,

Beguile the night, and set a keener edge

On female industry; the threaded steel

Flies swiftly, and unfelt the task proceeds.

The volume closed, the customary rites

Of the last meal commence: a Roman meal,

Such as the mistress of the world once found

Delicious, when her patriots of high note,

Perhaps by moonlight, at their humble doors,

And under an old oak’s domestic shade,

Enjoyed—spare feast!—a radish and an egg.

Discourse ensues, not trivial, yet not dull,

Nor such as with a frown forbids the play

Of fancy, or proscribes the sound of mirth;

Nor do we madly, like an impious world,

Who deem religion frenzy, and the God

That made them an intruder on their joys,

Start at His awful name, or deem His praise

A jarring note; themes of a graver tone

Exciting oft our gratitude and love,

While we retrace with memory’s pointing wand

That calls the past to our exact review,

The dangers we have scaped, the broken snare,

The disappointed foe, deliverance found

Unlooked for, life preserved and peace restored,

Fruits of omnipotent eternal love:—

Oh evenings worthy of the gods! exclaimed

The Sabine bard.  Oh evenings, I reply,

More to be prized and coveted than yours,

As more illumined and with nobler truths,

That I, and mine, and those we love, enjoy.

Is Winter hideous in a garb like this?

Needs he the tragic fur, the smoke of lamps,

The pent-up breath of an unsavoury throng

To thaw him into feeling, or the smart

And snappish dialogue that flippant wits

Call comedy, to prompt him with a smile?

The self-complacent actor, when he views

(Stealing a sidelong glance at a full house)

The slope of faces from the floor to the roof,

As if one master-spring controlled them all,

Relaxed into an universal grin,

Sees not a countenance there that speaks a joy

Half so refined or so sincere as ours.

Cards were superfluous here, with all the tricks

That idleness has ever yet contrived

To fill the void of an unfurnished brain,

To palliate dulness and give time a shove.

Time, as he passes us, has a dove’s wing,

Unsoiled and swift and of a silken sound.

But the world’s time is time in masquerade.

Theirs, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged

With motley plumes, and, where the peacock shows

His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red

With spots quadrangular of diamond form,

Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,

And spades, the emblem of untimely graves.

What should be, and what was an hour-glass once,

Becomes a dice-box, and a billiard mast

Well does the work of his destructive scythe.

Thus decked he charms a world whom fashion blinds

To his true worth, most pleased when idle most,

Whose only happy are their wasted hours.

Even misses, at whose age their mothers wore

The back-string and the bib, assume the dress

Of womanhood, sit pupils in the school

Of card-devoted time, and night by night,

Placed at some vacant corner of the board,

Learn every trick, and soon play all the game.

But truce with censure.  Roving as I rove,

Where shall I find an end, or how proceed?

As he that travels far, oft turns aside

To view some rugged rock, or mouldering tower,

Which seen delights him not; then coming home,

Describes and prints it, that the world may know

How far he went for what was nothing worth;

So I, with brush in hand and pallet spread

With colours mixed for a far different use,

Paint cards and dolls, and every idle thing

That fancy finds in her excursive flights.

Come, Evening, once again, season of peace,

Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!

Methinks I see thee in the streaky west,

With matron-step slow moving, while the night

Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employed

In letting fall the curtain of repose

On bird and beast, the other charged for man

With sweet oblivion of the cares of day;

Not sumptuously adorned, nor needing aid,

Like homely-featured night, of clustering gems,

A star or two just twinkling on thy brow

Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine

No less than hers, not worn indeed on high

With ostentatious pageantry, but set

With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,

Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.

Come, then, and thou shalt find thy votary calm,

Or make me so.  Composure is thy gift;

And whether I devote thy gentle hours

To books, to music, or to poet’s toil,

To weaving nets for bird-alluring fruit,

Or twining silken threads round ivory reels

When they command whom man was born to please,

I slight thee not, but make thee welcome still.

Just when our drawing-rooms begin to blaze

With lights, by clear reflection multiplied

From many a mirror, in which he of Gath,

Goliath, might have seen his giant bulk

Whole without stooping, towering crest and all,

My pleasures too begin.  But me perhaps

The glowing hearth may satisfy a while

With faint illumination, that uplifts

The shadow to the ceiling, there by fits

Dancing uncouthly to the quivering flame.

Not undelightful is an hour to me

So spent in parlour twilight; such a gloom

Suits well the thoughtful or unthinking mind,

The mind contemplative, with some new theme

Pregnant, or indisposed alike to all.

Laugh ye, who boast your more mercurial powers

That never feel a stupor, know no pause,

Nor need one; I am conscious, and confess.

Fearless, a soul that does not always think.

Me oft has fancy ludicrous and wild

Soothed with a waking dream of houses, towers,

Trees, churches, and strange visages expressed

In the red cinders, while with poring eye

I gazed, myself creating what I saw.

Nor less amused have I quiescent watched

The sooty films that play upon the bars

Pendulous, and foreboding in the view

Of superstition, prophesying still,

Though still deceived, some stranger’s near approach.

’Tis thus the understanding takes repose

In indolent vacuity of thought,

And sleeps and is refreshed.  Meanwhile the face

Conceals the mood lethargic with a mask

Of deep deliberation, as the man

Were tasked to his full strength, absorbed and lost.

Thus oft reclined at ease, I lose an hour

At evening, till at length the freezing blast

That sweeps the bolted shutter, summons home

The recollected powers, and, snapping short

The glassy threads with which the fancy weaves

Her brittle toys, restores me to myself.

How calm is my recess! and how the frost

Raging abroad, and the rough wind, endear

The silence and the warmth enjoyed within!

I saw the woods and fields at close of day

A variegated show; the meadows green

Though faded, and the lands, where lately waved

The golden harvest, of a mellow brown,

Upturned so lately by the forceful share;

I saw far off the weedy fallows smile

With verdure not unprofitable, grazed

By flocks fast feeding, and selecting each

His favourite herb; while all the leafless groves

That skirt the horizon wore a sable hue,

Scarce noticed in the kindred dusk of eve.

To-morrow brings a change, a total change,

Which even now, though silently performed

And slowly, and by most unfelt, the face

Of universal nature undergoes.

Fast falls a fleecy shower; the downy flakes,

Descending and with never-ceasing lapse

Softly alighting upon all below,

Assimilate all objects.  Earth receives

Gladly the thickening mantle, and the green

And tender blade, that feared the chilling blast,

Escapes unhurt beneath so warm a veil.

In such a world, so thorny, and where none

Finds happiness unblighted, or if found,

Without some thistly sorrow at its side,

It seems the part of wisdom, and no sin

Against the law of love, to measure lots

With less distinguished than ourselves, that thus

We may with patience bear our moderate ills,

And sympathise with others, suffering more.

Ill fares the traveller now, and he that stalks

In ponderous boots beside his reeking team;

The wain goes heavily, impeded sore

By congregating loads adhering close

To the clogged wheels, and, in its sluggish pace,

Noiseless appears a moving hill of snow.

The toiling steeds expand the nostril wide,

While every breath, by respiration strong

Forced downward, is consolidated soon

Upon their jutting chests.  He, formed to bear

The pelting brunt of the tempestuous night,

With half-shut eyes, and puckered cheeks, and teeth

Presented bare against the storm, plods on;

One hand secures his hat, save when with both

He brandishes his pliant length of whip,

Resounding oft, and never heard in vain.

Oh happy, and, in my account, denied

That sensibility of pain with which

Refinement is endued, thrice happy thou!

Thy frame, robust and hardy, feels indeed

The piercing cold, but feels it unimpaired;

The learned finger never need explore

Thy vigorous pulse, and the unhealthful East,

That breathes the spleen, and searches every bone

Of the infirm, is wholesome air to thee.

Thy days roll on exempt from household care,

Thy waggon is thy wife; and the poor beasts,

That drag the dull companion to and fro,

Thine helpless charge, dependent on thy care.

Ah, treat them kindly! rude as thou appearest,

Yet show that thou hast mercy, which the great,

With needless hurry whirled from place to place,

Humane as they would seem, not always show.

Poor, yet industrious, modest, quiet, neat,

Such claim compassion in a night like this,

And have a friend in every feeling heart.

Warmed while it lasts, by labour, all day long

They brave the season, and yet find at eve,

Ill clad and fed but sparely, time to cool.

The frugal housewife trembles when she lights

Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear,

But dying soon, like all terrestrial joys;

The few small embers left she nurses well.

And while her infant race with outspread hands

And crowded knees sit cowering o’er the sparks,

Retires, content to quake, so they be warmed.

The man feels least, as more inured than she

To winter, and the current in his veins

More briskly moved by his severer toil;

Yet he, too, finds his own distress in theirs.

The taper soon extinguished, which I saw

Dangled along at the cold finger’s end

Just when the day declined, and the brown loaf

Lodged on the shelf, half-eaten, without sauce

Of sav’ry cheese, or butter costlier still,

Sleep seems their only refuge.  For alas,

Where penury is felt the thought is chained,

And sweet colloquial pleasures are but few.

With all this thrift they thrive not.  All the care

Ingenious parsimony takes, but just

Saves the small inventory, bed and stool,

Skillet and old carved chest, from public sale.

They live, and live without extorted alms

From grudging hands, but other boast have none

To soothe their honest pride that scorns to beg,

Nor comfort else, but in their mutual love.

I praise you much, ye meek and patient pair,

For ye are worthy; choosing rather far

A dry but independent crust, hard-earned

And eaten with a sigh, than to endure

The rugged frowns and insolent rebuffs

Of knaves in office, partial in their work

Of distribution; liberal of their aid

To clamorous importunity in rags,

But ofttimes deaf to suppliants who would blush

To wear a tattered garb however coarse,

Whom famine cannot reconcile to filth;

These ask with painful shyness, and, refused

Because deserving, silently retire.

But be ye of good courage!  Time itself

Shall much befriend you.  Time shall give increase,

And all your numerous progeny, well trained,

But helpless, in few years shall find their hands,

And labour too.  Meanwhile ye shall not want

What, conscious of your virtues, we can spare,

Nor what a wealthier than ourselves may send.

I mean the man, who when the distant poor

Need help, denies them nothing but his name.

But poverty with most, who whimper forth

Their long complaints, is self-inflicted woe,

The effect of laziness or sottish waste.

Now goes the nightly thief prowling abroad

For plunder; much solicitous how best

He may compensate for a day of sloth,

By works of darkness and nocturnal wrong,

Woe to the gardener’s pale, the farmer’s hedge

Plashed neatly and secured with driven stakes

Deep in the loamy bank.  Uptorn by strength

Resistless in so bad a cause, but lame

To better deeds, he bundles up the spoil—

An ass’s burden,—and when laden most

And heaviest, light of foot steals fast away.

Nor does the boarded hovel better guard

The well-stacked pile of riven logs and roots

From his pernicious force.  Nor will he leave

Unwrenched the door, however well secured,

Where chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps

In unsuspecting pomp; twitched from the perch

He gives the princely bird with all his wives

To his voracious bag, struggling in vain,

And loudly wondering at the sudden change.

Nor this to feed his own.  ’Twere some excuse

Did pity of their sufferings warp aside

His principle, and tempt him into sin

For their support, so destitute; but they

Neglected pine at home, themselves, as more

Exposed than others, with less scruple made

His victims, robbed of their defenceless all.

Cruel is all he does.  ’Tis quenchless thirst

Of ruinous ebriety that prompts

His every action, and imbrutes the man.

Oh for a law to noose the villain’s neck

Who starves his own; who persecutes the blood

He gave them in his children’s veins, and hates

And wrongs the woman he has sworn to love.

Pass where we may, through city, or through town,

Village or hamlet of this merry land,

Though lean and beggared, every twentieth pace

Conducts the unguarded nose to such a whiff

Of stale debauch, forth-issuing from the styes

That law has licensed, as makes temperance reel.

There sit involved and lost in curling clouds

Of Indian fume, and guzzling deep, the boor,

The lackey, and the groom.  The craftsman there

Takes a Lethean leave of all his toil;

Smith, cobbler, joiner, he that plies the shears,

And he that kneads the dough: all loud alike,

All learned, and all drunk.  The fiddle screams

Plaintive and piteous, as it wept and wailed

Its wasted tones and harmony unheard;

Fierce the dispute, whate’er the theme; while she,

Fell Discord, arbitress of such debate,

Perched on the sign-post, holds with even hand

Her undecisive scales.  In this she lays

A weight of ignorance, in that, of pride,

And smiles delighted with the eternal poise.

Dire is the frequent curse and its twin sound

The cheek-distending oath, not to be praised

As ornamental, musical, polite,

Like those which modern senators employ,

Whose oath is rhetoric, and who swear for fame.

Behold the schools in which plebeian minds,

Once simple, are initiated in arts

Which some may practise with politer grace,

But none with readier skill!  ’Tis here they learn

The road that leads from competence and peace

To indigence and rapine; till at last

Society, grown weary of the load,

Shakes her encumbered lap, and casts them out.

But censure profits little.  Vain the attempt

To advertise in verse a public pest,

That, like the filth with which the peasant feeds

His hungry acres, stinks and is of use.

The excise is fattened with the rich result

Of all this riot; and ten thousand casks,

For ever dribbling out their base contents,

Touched by the Midas finger of the state,

Bleed gold for Ministers to sport away.

Drink and be mad then; ’tis your country bids!

Gloriously drunk, obey the important call,

Her cause demands the assistance of your throats;—

Ye all can swallow, and she asks no more.

Would I had fallen upon those happier days

That poets celebrate; those golden times

And those Arcadian scenes that Maro sings,

And Sidney, warbler of poetic prose.

Nymphs were Dianas then, and swains had hearts

That felt their virtues.  Innocence, it seems,

From courts dismissed, found shelter in the groves;

The footsteps of simplicity, impressed

Upon the yielding herbage (so they sing),

Then were not all effaced.  Then speech profane

And manners profligate were rarely found,

Observed as prodigies, and soon reclaimed.

Vain wish! those days were never: airy dreams

Sat for the picture; and the poet’s hand,

Imparting substance to an empty shade,

Imposed a gay delirium for a truth.

Grant it: I still must envy them an age

That favoured such a dream, in days like these

Impossible, when virtue is so scarce

That to suppose a scene where she presides

Is tramontane, and stumbles all belief.

No.  We are polished now.  The rural lass,

Whom once her virgin modesty and grace,

Her artless manners and her neat attire,

So dignified, that she was hardly less

Than the fair shepherdess of old romance,

Is seen no more.  The character is lost.

Her head adorned with lappets pinned aloft

And ribbons streaming gay, superbly raised

And magnified beyond all human size,

Indebted to some smart wig-weaver’s hand

For more than half the tresses it sustains;

Her elbows ruffled, and her tottering form

Ill propped upon French heels; she might be deemed

(But that the basket dangling on her arm

Interprets her more truly) of a rank

Too proud for dairy-work, or sale of eggs;

Expect her soon with foot-boy at her heels,

No longer blushing for her awkward load,

Her train and her umbrella all her care.

The town has tinged the country; and the stain

Appears a spot upon a vestal’s robe,

The worse for what it soils.  The fashion runs

Down into scenes still rural, but alas,

Scenes rarely graced with rural manners now.

Time was when in the pastoral retreat

The unguarded door was safe; men did not watch

To invade another’s right, or guard their own.

Then sleep was undisturbed by fear, unscared

By drunken howlings; and the chilling tale

Of midnight murder was a wonder heard

With doubtful credit, told to frighten babes

But farewell now to unsuspicious nights,

And slumbers unalarmed.  Now, ere you sleep,

See that your polished arms be primed with care,

And drop the night-bolt.  Ruffians are abroad,

And the first larum of the cock’s shrill throat

May prove a trumpet, summoning your ear

To horrid sounds of hostile feet within.

Even daylight has its dangers; and the walk

Through pathless wastes and woods, unconscious once

Of other tenants than melodious birds,

Or harmless flocks, is hazardous and bold.

Lamented change! to which full many a cause

Inveterate, hopeless of a cure, conspires.

The course of human things from good to ill,

From ill to worse, is fatal, never fails.

Increase of power begets increase of wealth;

Wealth luxury, and luxury excess;

Excess, the scrofulous and itchy plague

That seizes first the opulent, descends

To the next rank contagious, and in time

Taints downward all the graduated scale

Of order, from the chariot to the plough.

The rich, and they that have an arm to check

The licence of the lowest in degree,

Desert their office; and themselves, intent

On pleasure, haunt the capital, and thus

To all the violence of lawless hands

Resign the scenes their presence might protect.

Authority itself not seldom sleeps,

Though resident, and witness of the wrong.

The plump convivial parson often bears

The magisterial sword in vain, and lays

His reverence and his worship both to rest

On the same cushion of habitual sloth.

Perhaps timidity restrains his arm,

When he should strike he trembles, and sets free,

Himself enslaved by terror of the band,

The audacious convict whom he dares not bind.

Perhaps, though by profession ghostly pure,

He, too, may have his vice, and sometimes prove

Less dainty than becomes his grave outside

In lucrative concerns.  Examine well

His milk-white hand.  The palm is hardly clean—

But here and there an ugly smutch appears.

Foh! ’twas a bribe that left it.  He has touched

Corruption.  Whoso seeks an audit here

Propitious, pays his tribute, game or fish,

Wildfowl or venison, and his errand speeds.

But faster far and more than all the rest

A noble cause, which none who bears a spark

Of public virtue ever wished removed,

Works the deplored and mischievous effect.

’Tis universal soldiership has stabbed

The heart of merit in the meaner class.

Arms, through the vanity and brainless rage

Of those that bear them, in whatever cause,

Seem most at variance with all moral good,

And incompatible with serious thought.

The clown, the child of nature, without guile,

Blest with an infant’s ignorance of all

But his own simple pleasures, now and then

A wrestling match, a foot-race, or a fair,

Is balloted, and trembles at the news.

Sheepish he doffs his hat, and mumbling swears

A Bible-oath to be whate’er they please,

To do he knows not what.  The task performed,

That instant he becomes the serjeant’s care,

His pupil, and his torment, and his jest;

His awkward gait, his introverted toes,

Bent knees, round shoulders, and dejected looks,

Procure him many a curse.  By slow degrees,

Unapt to learn and formed of stubborn stuff,

He yet by slow degrees puts off himself,

Grows conscious of a change, and likes it well.

He stands erect, his slouch becomes a walk,

He steps right onward, martial in his air,

His form and movement; is as smart above

As meal and larded locks can make him: wears

His hat or his plumed helmet with a grace,

And, his three years of heroship expired,

Returns indignant to the slighted plough.

He hates the field in which no fife or drum

Attends him, drives his cattle to a march,

And sighs for the smart comrades he has left.

’Twere well if his exterior change were all—

But with his clumsy port the wretch has lost

His ignorance and harmless manners too.

To swear, to game, to drink, to show at home

By lewdness, idleness, and Sabbath-breach,

The great proficiency he made abroad,

To astonish and to grieve his gazing friends,

To break some maiden’s and his mother’s heart,

To be a pest where he was useful once,

Are his sole aim, and all his glory now!

Man in society is like a flower

Blown in its native bed.  ’Tis there alone

His faculties expanded in full bloom

Shine out, there only reach their proper use.

But man associated and leagued with man

By regal warrant, or self-joined by bond

For interest sake, or swarming into clans

Beneath one head for purposes of war,

Like flowers selected from the rest, and bound

And bundled close to fill some crowded vase,

Fades rapidly, and by compression marred

Contracts defilement not to be endured.

Hence chartered boroughs are such public plagues,

And burghers, men immaculate perhaps

In all their private functions, once combined,

Become a loathsome body, only fit

For dissolution, hurtful to the main.

Hence merchants, unimpeachable of sin

Against the charities of domestic life,

Incorporated, seem at once to lose

Their nature, and, disclaiming all regard

For mercy and the common rights of man,

Build factories with blood, conducting trade

At the sword’s point, and dyeing the white robe

Of innocent commercial justice red.

Hence too the field of glory, as the world

Misdeems it, dazzled by its bright array,

With all the majesty of thundering pomp,

Enchanting music and immortal wreaths,

Is but a school where thoughtlessness is taught

On principle, where foppery atones

For folly, gallantry for every vice.

But slighted as it is, and by the great

Abandoned, and, which still I more regret,

Infected with the manners and the modes

It knew not once, the country wins me still.

I never framed a wish or formed a plan

That flattered me with hopes of earthly bliss,

But there I laid the scene.  There early strayed

My fancy, ere yet liberty of choice

Had found me, or the hope of being free.

My very dreams were rural, rural too

The first-born efforts of my youthful muse,

Sportive, and jingling her poetic bells

Ere yet her ear was mistress of their powers.

No bard could please me but whose lyre was tuned

To Nature’s praises.  Heroes and their feats

Fatigued me, never weary of the pipe

Of Tityrus, assembling as he sang

The rustic throng beneath his favourite beech.

Then Milton had indeed a poet’s charms:

New to my taste, his Paradise surpassed

The struggling efforts of my boyish tongue

To speak its excellence; I danced for joy.

I marvelled much that, at so ripe an age

As twice seven years, his beauties had then first

Engaged my wonder, and admiring still,

And still admiring, with regret supposed

The joy half lost because not sooner found.

Thee, too, enamoured of the life I loved,

Pathetic in its praise, in its pursuit

Determined, and possessing it at last

With transports such as favoured lovers feel,

I studied, prized, and wished that I had known,

Ingenious Cowley: and though now, reclaimed

By modern lights from an erroneous taste,

I cannot but lament thy splendid wit

Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.

I still revere thee, courtly though retired,

Though stretched at ease in Chertsey’s silent bowers,

Not unemployed, and finding rich amends

For a lost world in solitude and verse.

’Tis born with all.  The love of Nature’s works

Is an ingredient in the compound, man,

Infused at the creation of the kind.

And though the Almighty Maker has throughout

Discriminated each from each, by strokes

And touches of His hand, with so much art

Diversified, that two were never found

Twins at all points—yet this obtains in all,

That all discern a beauty in His works,

And all can taste them: minds that have been formed

And tutored, with a relish more exact,

But none without some relish, none unmoved.

It is a flame that dies not even there,

Where nothing feeds it.  Neither business, crowds,

Nor habits of luxurious city life,

Whatever else they smother of true worth

In human bosoms, quench it or abate.

The villas, with which London stands begirt

Like a swarth Indian with his belt of beads,

Prove it.  A breath of unadulterate air,

The glimpse of a green pasture, how they cheer

The citizen, and brace his languid frame!

Even in the stifling bosom of the town,

A garden in which nothing thrives, has charms

That soothe the rich possessor; much consoled

That here and there some sprigs of mournful mint,

Of nightshade, or valerian, grace the well

He cultivates.  These serve him with a hint

That Nature lives; that sight-refreshing green

Is still the livery she delights to wear,

Though sickly samples of the exuberant whole.

What are the casements lined with creeping herbs,

The prouder sashes fronted with a range

Of orange, myrtle, or the fragrant weed,

The Frenchman’s darling? are they not all proofs

That man, immured in cities, still retains

His inborn inextinguishable thirst

Of rural scenes, compensating his loss

By supplemental shifts, the best he may?

The most unfurnished with the means of life,

And they that never pass their brick-wall bounds

To range the fields, and treat their lungs with air,

Yet feel the burning instinct: over-head

Suspend their crazy boxes planted thick

And watered duly.  There the pitcher stands

A fragment, and the spoutless tea-pot there;

Sad witnesses how close-pent man regrets

The country, with what ardour he contrives

A peep at nature, when he can no more.

Hail, therefore, patroness of health and ease

And contemplation, heart-consoling joys

And harmless pleasures, in the thronged abode

Of multitudes unknown, hail rural life!

Address himself who will to the pursuit

Of honours, or emolument, or fame,

I shall not add myself to such a chase,

Thwart his attempts, or envy his success.

Some must be great.  Great offices will have

Great talents.  And God gives to every man

The virtue, temper, understanding, taste,

That lifts him into life, and lets him fall

Just in the niche he was ordained to fill.

To the deliverer of an injured land

He gives a tongue to enlarge upon, a heart

To feel, and courage to redress her wrongs;

To monarchs dignity, to judges sense;

To artists ingenuity and skill;

To me an unambitious mind, content

In the low vale of life, that early felt

A wish for ease and leisure, and ere long

Found here that leisure and that ease I wished.

BOOK V.

THE WINTER MORNING WALK.

’TIS morning; and the sun, with ruddy orb

Ascending, fires the horizon; while the clouds,

That crowd away before the driving wind,

More ardent as the disk emerges more,

Resemble most some city in a blaze,

Seen through the leafless wood.  His slanting ray

Slides ineffectual down the snowy vale,

And, tingeing all with his own rosy hue,

From every herb and every spiry blade

Stretches a length of shadow o’er the field,

Mine, spindling into longitude immense,

In spite of gravity, and sage remark

That I myself am but a fleeting shade,

Provokes me to a smile.  With eye askance

I view the muscular proportioned limb

Transformed to a lean shank; the shapeless pair,

As they designed to mock me, at my side

Take step for step, and, as I near approach

The cottage, walk along the plastered wall,

Preposterous sight, the legs without the man.

The verdure of the plain lies buried deep

Beneath the dazzling deluge, and the bents

And coarser grass upspearing o’er the rest,

Of late unsightly and unseen, now shine

Conspicuous, and, in bright apparel clad,

And fledged with icy feathers, nod superb.

The cattle mourn in corners, where the fence

Screens them, and seem, half petrified, to sleep

In unrecumbent sadness.  There they wait

Their wonted fodder, not, like hungering man,

Fretful if unsupplied, but silent, meek,

And patient of the slow-paced swain’s delay.

He from the stack carves out the accustomed load,

Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft

His broad keen knife into the solid mass:

Smooth as a wall the upright remnant stands,

With such undeviating and even force

He severs it away: no needless care,

Lest storms should overset the leaning pile

Deciduous, or its own unbalanced weight.

Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned

The cheerful haunts of man, to wield the axe

And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,

From morn to eve his solitary task.

Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears

And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,

His dog attends him.  Close behind his heel

Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk,

Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow

With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;

Then shakes his powdered coat and barks for joy.

Heedless of all his pranks the sturdy churl

Moves right toward the mark; nor stops for aught,

But now and then, with pressure of his thumb,

To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube,

That fumes beneath his nose; the trailing cloud

Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.

Now from the roost, or from the neighbouring pale,

Where, diligent to catch the first faint gleam

Of smiling day, they gossiped side by side,

Come trooping at the housewife’s well-known call

The feathered tribes domestic; half on wing,

And half on foot, they brush the fleecy flood,

Conscious, and fearful of too deep a plunge.

The sparrows peep, and quit the sheltering eaves

To seize the fair occasion; well they eye

The scattered grain, and, thievishly resolved

To escape the impending famine, often scared

As oft return, a pert, voracious kind.

Clean riddance quickly made, one only care

Remains to each, the search of sunny nook,

Or shed impervious to the blast.  Resigned

To sad necessity the cock foregoes

His wonted strut, and, wading at their head

With well-considered steps, seems to resent

His altered gait, and stateliness retrenched.

How find the myriads, that in summer cheer

The hills and valleys with their ceaseless songs,

Due sustenance, or where subsist they now?

Earth yields them naught: the imprisoned worm is safe

Beneath the frozen clod; all seeds of herbs

Lie covered close, and berry-bearing thorns

That feed the thrush (whatever some suppose),

Afford the smaller minstrel no supply.

The long-protracted rigour of the year

Thins all their numerous flocks.  In chinks and holes

Ten thousand seek an unmolested end,

As instinct prompts, self-buried ere they die.

The very rooks and daws forsake the fields,

Where neither grub nor root nor earth-nut now

Repays their labour more; and perched aloft

By the way-side, or stalking in the path,

Lean pensioners upon the traveller’s track,

Pick up their nauseous dole, though sweet to them,

Of voided pulse, or half-digested grain.

The streams are lost amid the splendid blank,

O’erwhelming all distinction.  On the flood

Indurated and fixed the snowy weight

Lies undissolved, while silently beneath

And unperceived the current steals away;

Not so where, scornful of a check, it leaps

The mill-dam, dashes on the restless wheel,

And wantons in the pebbly gulf below.

No frost can bind it there.  Its utmost force

Can but arrest the light and smoky mist

That in its fall the liquid sheet throws wide.

And see where it has hung the embroidered banks

With forms so various, that no powers of art,

The pencil, or the pen, may trace the scene!

Here glittering turrets rise, upbearing high

(Fantastic misarrangement) on the roof

Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees

And shrubs of fairy land.  The crystal drops

That trickle down the branches, fast congealed,

Shoot into pillars of pellucid length

And prop the pile they but adorned before.

Here grotto within grotto safe defies

The sunbeam.  There imbossed and fretted wild,

The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes

Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain

The likeness of some object seen before.

Thus nature works as if to mock at art,

And in defiance of her rival powers;

By these fortuitous and random strokes

Performing such inimitable feats,

As she with all her rules can never reach.

Less worthy of applause though more admired,

Because a novelty, the work of man,

Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ,

Thy most magnificent and mighty freak,

The wonder of the North.  No forest fell

When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent its stores

To enrich thy walls; but thou didst hew the floods,

And make thy marble of the glassy wave.

In such a palace Aristaeus found

Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale

Of his lost bees to her maternal ear.

In such a palace poetry might place

The armoury of winter, where his troops,

The gloomy clouds, find weapons, arrowy sleet,

Skin-piercing volley, blossom-bruising hail,

And snow that often blinds the traveller’s course,

And wraps him in an unexpected tomb.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose.

No sound of hammer or of saw was there.

Ice upon ice, the well-adjusted parts

Were soon conjoined, nor other cement asked

Than water interfused to make them one.

Lamps gracefully disposed, and of all hues,

Illumined every side.  A watery light

Gleamed through the clear transparency, that seemed

Another moon new-risen, or meteor fallen

From heaven to earth, of lambent flame serene.

So stood the brittle prodigy, though smooth

And slippery the materials, yet frost-bound

Firm as a rock.  Nor wanted aught within

That royal residence might well befit,

For grandeur or for use.  Long wavy wreaths

Of flowers, that feared no enemy but warmth,

Blushed on the panels.  Mirror needed none

Where all was vitreous, but in order due

Convivial table and commodious seat

(What seemed at least commodious seat) were there,

Sofa and couch and high-built throne august.

The same lubricity was found in all,

And all was moist to the warm touch; a scene

Of evanescent glory, once a stream,

And soon to slide into a stream again.

Alas, ’twas but a mortifying stroke

Of undesigned severity, that glanced

(Made by a monarch) on her own estate,

On human grandeur and the courts of kings

’Twas transient in its nature, as in show

’Twas durable; as worthless, as it seemed

Intrinsically precious; to the foot

Treacherous and false; it smiled, and it was cold.

Great princes have great playthings.  Some have played

At hewing mountains into men, and some

At building human wonders mountain high.

Some have amused the dull sad years of life

(Life spent in indolence, and therefore sad)

With schemes of monumental fame, and sought

By pyramids and mausoleum pomp,

Short-lived themselves, to immortalise their bones.

Some seek diversion in the tented field,

And make the sorrows of mankind their sport.

But war’s a game which, were their subjects wise,

Kings should not play at.  Nations would do well

To extort their truncheons from the puny hands

Of heroes whose infirm and baby minds

Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil,

Because men suffer it, their toy the world.

When Babel was confounded, and the great

Confederacy of projectors wild and vain

Was split into diversity of tongues,

Then, as a shepherd separates his flock,

These to the upland, to the valley those,

God drave asunder and assigned their lot

To all the nations.  Ample was the boon

He gave them, in its distribution fair

And equal, and he bade them dwell in peace.

Peace was a while their care.  They ploughed and sowed,

And reaped their plenty without grudge or strife,

But violence can never longer sleep

Than human passions please.  In every heart

Are sown the sparks that kindle fiery war,

Occasion needs but fan them, and they blaze.

Cain had already shed a brother’s blood:

The Deluge washed it out; but left unquenched

The seeds of murder in the breast of man.

Soon, by a righteous judgment, in the line

Of his descending progeny was found

The first artificer of death; the shrewd

Contriver who first sweated at the forge,

And forced the blunt and yet unblooded steel

To a keen edge, and made it bright for war.

Him Tubal named, the Vulcan of old times,

The sword and falchion their inventor claim,

And the first smith was the first murderer’s son.

His art survived the waters; and ere long,

When man was multiplied and spread abroad

In tribes and clans, and had begun to call

These meadows and that range of hills his own,

The tasted sweets of property begat

Desire of more; and industry in some

To improve and cultivate their just demesne,

Made others covet what they saw so fair.

Thus wars began on earth.  These fought for spoil,

And those in self-defence.  Savage at first

The onset, and irregular.  At length

One eminent above the rest, for strength,

For stratagem, or courage, or for all,

Was chosen leader.  Him they served in war,

And him in peace for sake of warlike deeds

Reverenced no less.  Who could with him compare?

Or who so worthy to control themselves

As he, whose prowess had subdued their foes?

Thus war, affording field for the display

Of virtue, made one chief, whom times of peace,

Which have their exigencies too, and call

For skill in government, at length made king.

King was a name too proud for man to wear

With modesty and meekness, and the crown,

So dazzling in their eyes who set it on,

Was sure to intoxicate the brows it bound.

It is the abject property of most,

That being parcel of the common mass,

And destitute of means to raise themselves,

They sink and settle lower than they need.

They know not what it is to feel within

A comprehensive faculty, that grasps

Great purposes with ease, that turns and wields,

Almost without an effort, plans too vast

For their conception, which they cannot move.

Conscious of impotence they soon grow drunk

With gazing, when they see an able man

Step forth to notice; and besotted thus

Build him a pedestal and say—Stand there,

And be our admiration and our praise.

They roll themselves before him in the dust,

Then most deserving in their own account

When most extravagant in his applause,

As if exalting him they raised themselves.

Thus by degrees, self-cheated of their sound

And sober judgment that he is but man,

They demi-deify and fume him so

That in due season he forgets it too.

Inflated and astrut with self-conceit

He gulps the windy diet, and ere long,

Adopting their mistake, profoundly thinks

The world was made in vain if not for him.

Thenceforth they are his cattle: drudges, born

To bear his burdens, drawing in his gears,

And sweating in his service.  His caprice

Becomes the soul that animates them all.

He deems a thousand, or ten thousand lives,

Spent in the purchase of renown for him

An easy reckoning, and they think the same.

Thus kings were first invented, and thus kings

Were burnished into heroes, and became

The arbiters of this terraqueous swamp;

Storks among frogs, that have but croaked and died.

Strange that such folly, as lifts bloated man

To eminence fit only for a god,

Should ever drivel out of human lips,

Even in the cradled weakness of the world!

Still stranger much, that when at length mankind

Had reached the sinewy firmness of their youth,

And could discriminate and argue well

On subjects more mysterious, they were yet

Babes in the cause of freedom, and should fear

And quake before the gods themselves had made.

But above measure strange, that neither proof

Of sad experience, nor examples set

By some whose patriot virtue has prevailed,

Can even now, when they are grown mature

In wisdom, and with philosophic deeps

Familiar, serve to emancipate the rest!

Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone

To reverence what is ancient, and can plead

A course of long observance for its use,

That even servitude, the worst of ills,

Because delivered down from sire to son,

Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.

But is it fit, or can it bear the shock

Of rational discussion, that a man,

Compounded and made up like other men

Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust

And folly in as ample measure meet,

As in the bosoms of the slaves he rules,

Should be a despot absolute, and boast

Himself the only freeman of his land?

Should when he pleases, and on whom he will,

Wage war, with any or with no pretence

Of provocation given, or wrong sustained,

And force the beggarly last doit, by means

That his own humour dictates, from the clutch

Of poverty, that thus he may procure

His thousands, weary of penurious life,

A splendid opportunity to die?

Say ye, who (with less prudence than of old

Jotham ascribed to his assembled trees

In politic convention) put your trust

I’ th’ shadow of a bramble, and recline

In fancied peace beneath his dangerous branch,

Rejoice in him and celebrate his sway,

Where find ye passive fortitude?  Whence springs

Your self-denying zeal that holds it good

To stroke the prickly grievance, and to hang

His thorns with streamers of continual praise?

We too are friends to loyalty; we love

The king who loves the law, respects his bounds.

And reigns content within them; him we serve

Freely and with delight, who leaves us free;

But recollecting still that he is man,

We trust him not too far.  King though he be,

And king in England, too, he may be weak

And vain enough to be ambitious still,

May exercise amiss his proper powers,

Or covet more than freemen choose to grant:

Beyond that mark is treason.  He is ours,

To administer, to guard, to adorn the state,

But not to warp or change it.  We are his,

To serve him nobly in the common cause

True to the death, but not to be his slaves.

Mark now the difference, ye that boast your love

Of kings, between your loyalty and ours.

We love the man; the paltry pageant you:

We the chief patron of the commonwealth;

You the regardless author of its woes:

We, for the sake of liberty, a king;

You chains and bondage for a tyrant’s sake.

Our love is principle, and has its root

In reason, is judicious, manly, free;

Yours, a blind instinct, crouches to the rod,

And licks the foot that treads it in the dust.

Were kingship as true treasure as it seems,

Sterling, and worthy of a wise man’s wish,

I would not be a king to be beloved

Causeless, and daubed with undiscerning praise,

Where love is more attachment to the throne,

Not to the man who fills it as he ought.

Whose freedom is by sufferance, and at will

Of a superior, he is never free.

Who lives, and is not weary of a life

Exposed to manacles, deserves them well.

The state that strives for liberty, though foiled

And forced to abandon what she bravely sought,

Deserves at least applause for her attempt,

And pity for her loss.  But that’s a cause

Not often unsuccessful; power usurped

Is weakness when opposed; conscious of wrong,

’Tis pusillanimous and prone to flight.

But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought

Of freedom, in that hope itself possess

All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength,

The scorn of danger, and united hearts,

The surest presage of the good they seek. [127]

Then shame to manhood, and opprobrious more

To France than all her losses and defeats,

Old or of later date, by sea or land,

Her house of bondage worse than that of old

Which God avenged on Pharaoh—the Bastille!

Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,

Ye dungeons and ye cages of despair,

That monarchs have supplied from age to age

With music such as suits their sovereign ears,

The sighs and groans of miserable men!

There’s not an English heart that would not leap

To hear that ye were fallen at last, to know

That even our enemies, so oft employed

In forging chains for us, themselves were free.

For he that values liberty, confines

His zeal for her predominance within

No narrow bounds; her cause engages him

Wherever pleaded.  ’Tis the cause of man.

There dwell the most forlorn of humankind,

Immured though unaccused, condemned untried,

Cruelly spared, and hopeless of escape.

There, like the visionary emblem seen

By him of Babylon, life stands a stump,

And filleted about with hoops of brass,

Still lives, though all its pleasant boughs are gone.

To count the hour bell and expect no change;

And ever as the sullen sound is heard,

Still to reflect that though a joyless note

To him whose moments all have one dull pace,

Ten thousand rovers in the world at large

Account it music; that it summons some

To theatre, or jocund feast, or ball;

The wearied hireling finds it a release

From labour, and the lover, that has chid

Its long delay, feels every welcome stroke

Upon his heart-strings trembling with delight;—

To fly for refuge from distracting thought

To such amusements as ingenious woe

Contrives, hard-shifting and without her tools;—

To read engraven on the mouldy walls,

In staggering types, his predecessor’s tale,

A sad memorial, and subjoin his own;—

To turn purveyor to an overgorged

And bloated spider, till the pampered pest

Is made familiar, watches his approach,

Comes at his call, and serves him for a friend;—

To wear out time in numbering to and fro

The studs that thick emboss his iron door,

Then downward and then upward, then aslant

And then alternate, with a sickly hope

By dint of change to give his tasteless task

Some relish, till the sum, exactly found

In all directions, he begins again:—

Oh comfortless existence! hemmed around

With woes, which who that suffers would not kneel

And beg for exile, or the pangs of death?

That man should thus encroach on fellow-man,

Abridge him of his just and native rights,

Eradicate him, tear him from his hold

Upon the endearments of domestic life

And social, nip his fruitfulness and use,

And doom him for perhaps a heedless word

To barrenness and solitude and tears,

Moves indignation; makes the name of king

(Of king whom such prerogative can please)

As dreadful as the Manichean god,

Adored through fear, strong only to destroy.

’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower

Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,

And we are weeds without it.  All constraint,

Except what wisdom lays on evil men,

Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes

Their progress in the road of science; blinds

The eyesight of discovery, and begets,

In those that suffer it, a sordid mind

Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit

To be the tenant of man’s noble form.

Thee therefore still, blameworthy as thou art,

With all thy loss of empire, and though squeezed

By public exigence, till annual food

Fails for the craving hunger of the state,

Thee I account still happy, and the chief

Among the nations, seeing thou art free,

My native nook of earth!  Thy clime is rude,

Replete with vapours, and disposes much

All hearts to sadness, and none more than mine;

Thine unadulterate manners are less soft

And plausible than social life requires.

And thou hast need of discipline and art

To give thee what politer France receives

From Nature’s bounty—that humane address

And sweetness, without which no pleasure is

In converse, either starved by cold reserve,

Or flushed with fierce dispute, a senseless brawl;

Yet, being free, I love thee; for the sake

Of that one feature, can be well content,

Disgraced as thou hast been, poor as thou art,

To seek no sublunary rest beside.

But once enslaved, farewell! I could endure

Chains nowhere patiently; and chains at home,

Where I am free by birthright, not at all.

Then what were left of roughness in the grain

Of British natures, wanting its excuse

That it belongs to freemen, would disgust

And shock me.  I should then with double pain

Feel all the rigour of thy fickle clime;

And, if I must bewail the blessing lost

For which our Hampdens and our Sidneys bled,

I would at least bewail it under skies

Milder, among a people less austere,

In scenes which, having never known me free,

Would not reproach me with the loss I felt.

Do I forebode impossible events,

And tremble at vain dreams?  Heaven grant I may,

But the age of virtuous politics is past,

And we are deep in that of cold pretence.

Patriots are grown too shrewd to be sincere,

And we too wise to trust them.  He that takes

Deep in his soft credulity the stamp

Designed by loud declaimers on the part

Of liberty, themselves the slaves of lust,

Incurs derision for his easy faith

And lack of knowledge, and with cause enough.

For when was public virtue to be found,

Where private was not?  Can he love the whole

Who loves no part? he be a nation’s friend

Who is, in truth, the friend of no man there?

Can he be strenuous in his country’s cause,

Who slights the charities for whose dear sake

That country, if at all, must be beloved?

—’Tis therefore sober and good men are sad

For England’s glory, seeing it wax pale

And sickly, while her champions wear their hearts

So loose to private duty, that no brain,

Healthful and undisturbed by factious fumes,

Can dream them trusty to the general weal.

Such were not they of old whose tempered blades

Dispersed the shackles of usurped control,

And hewed them link from link.  Then Albion’s sons

Were sons indeed.  They felt a filial heart

Beat high within them at a mother’s wrongs,

And shining each in his domestic sphere,

Shone brighter still once called to public view.

’Tis therefore many, whose sequestered lot

Forbids their interference, looking on,

Anticipate perforce some dire event;

And seeing the old castle of the state,

That promised once more firmness, so assailed

That all its tempest-beaten turrets shake,

Stand motionless expectants of its fall.

All has its date below.  The fatal hour

Was registered in heaven ere time began.

We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works

Die too.  The deep foundations that we lay,

Time ploughs them up, and not a trace remains.

We build with what we deem eternal rock;

A distant age asks where the fabric stood;

And in the dust, sifted and searched in vain,

The undiscoverable secret sleeps.

But there is yet a liberty unsung

By poets, and by senators unpraised,

Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the power

Of earth and hell confederate take away;

A liberty, which persecution, fraud,

Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind,

Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more:

’Tis liberty of heart, derived from heaven,

Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind,

And sealed with the same token.  It is held

By charter, and that charter sanctioned sure

By the unimpeachable and awful oath

And promise of a God.  His other gifts

All bear the royal stamp that speaks them His,

And are august, but this transcends them all.

His other works, this visible display

Of all-creating energy and might,

Are grand, no doubt, and worthy of the Word

That, finding an interminable space

Unoccupied, has filled the void so well,

And made so sparkling what was dark before.

But these are not His glory.  Man, ’tis true,

Smit with the beauty of so fair a scene,

Might well suppose the Artificer Divine

Meant it eternal, had He not Himself

Pronounced it transient, glorious as it is,

And still designing a more glorious far,

Doomed it, as insufficient for His praise.

These, therefore, are occasional, and pass;

Formed for the confutation of the fool

Whose lying heart disputes against a God;

That office served, they must be swept away.

Not so the labours of His love; they shine

In other heavens than these that we behold,

And fade not.  There is Paradise that fears

No forfeiture, and of its fruits He sends

Large prelibation oft to saints below.

Of these the first in order, and the pledge

And confident assurance of the rest,

Is liberty; a flight into His arms

Ere yet mortality’s fine threads give way,

A clear escape from tyrannising lust,

And fill immunity from penal woe.

Chains are the portion of revolted man,

Stripes and a dungeon; and his body serves

The triple purpose.  In that sickly, foul,

Opprobrious residence, he finds them all.

Propense his heart to idols, he is held

In silly dotage on created things

Careless of their Creator.  And that low

And sordid gravitation of his powers

To a vile clod, so draws him with such force

Resistless from the centre he should seek,

That he at last forgets it.  All his hopes

Tend downward, his ambition is to sink,

To reach a depth profounder still, and still

Profounder, in the fathomless abyss

Of folly, plunging in pursuit of death.

But ere he gain the comfortless repose

He seeks, and acquiescence of his soul,

In heaven renouncing exile, he endures

What does he not? from lusts opposed in vain,

And self-reproaching conscience.  He foresees

The fatal issue to his health, fame, peace,

Fortune, and dignity; the loss of all

That can ennoble man, and make frail life,

Short as it is, supportable.  Still worse,

Far worse than all the plagues with which his sins

Infect his happiest moments, he forebodes

Ages of hopeless misery; future death,

And death still future; not a hasty stroke,

Like that which sends him to the dusty grave,

But unrepealable enduring death.

Scripture is still a trumpet to his fears:

What none can prove a forgery, may be true;

What none but bad men wish exploded, must.

That scruple checks him.  Riot is not loud

Nor drunk enough to drown it.  In the midst

Of laughter his compunctions are sincere,

And he abhors the jest by which he shines.

Remorse begets reform.  His master-lust

Falls first before his resolute rebuke,

And seems dethroned and vanquished.  Peace ensues,

But spurious and short-lived, the puny child

Of self-congratulating Pride, begot

On fancied Innocence.  Again he falls,

And fights again; but finds his best essay,

A presage ominous, portending still

Its own dishonour by a worse relapse,

Till Nature, unavailing Nature, foiled

So oft, and wearied in the vain attempt,

Scoffs at her own performance.  Reason now

Takes part with appetite, and pleads the cause,

Perversely, which of late she so condemned;

With shallow shifts and old devices, worn

And tattered in the service of debauch,

Covering his shame from his offended sight.

“Hath God indeed given appetites to man,

And stored the earth so plenteously with means

To gratify the hunger of His wish,

And doth He reprobate and will He damn

The use of His own bounty? making first

So frail a kind, and then enacting laws

So strict, that less than perfect must despair?

Falsehood! which whoso but suspects of truth,

Dishonours God, and makes a slave of man.

Do they themselves, who undertake for hire

The teacher’s office, and dispense at large

Their weekly dole of edifying strains,

Attend to their own music? have they faith

In what, with such solemnity of tone

And gesture, they propound to our belief?

Nay—conduct hath the loudest tongue.  The voice

Is but an instrument on which the priest

May play what tune he pleases.  In the deed,

The unequivocal authentic deed,

We find sound argument, we read the heart.”

Such reasonings (if that name must needs belong

To excuses in which reason has no part)

Serve to compose a spirit well inclined

To live on terms of amity with vice,

And sin without disturbance.  Often urged

(As often as, libidinous discourse

Exhausted, he resorts to solemn themes

Of theological and grave import),

They gain at last his unreserved assent,

Till, hardened his heart’s temper in the forge

Of lust and on the anvil of despair,

He slights the strokes of conscience.  Nothing moves,

Or nothing much, his constancy in ill;

Vain tampering has but fostered his disease,

’Tis desperate, and he sleeps the sleep of death.

Haste now, philosopher, and set him free.

Charm the deaf serpent wisely.  Make him hear

Of rectitude and fitness: moral truth

How lovely, and the moral sense how sure,

Consulted and obeyed, to guide his steps

Directly to the FIRST AND ONLY FAIR.

Spare not in such a cause.  Spend all the powers

Of rant and rhapsody in virtue’s praise,

Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,

And with poetic trappings grace thy prose

Till it outmantle all the pride of verse.—

Ah, tinkling cymbal and high-sounding brass

Smitten in vain! such music cannot charm

The eclipse that intercepts truth’s heavenly beam,

And chills and darkens a wide-wandering soul.

The still small voice is wanted.  He must speak,

Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect,

Who calls for things that are not, and they come.

Grace makes the slave a freeman.  ’Tis a change

That turns to ridicule the turgid speech

And stately tone of moralists, who boast,

As if, like him of fabulous renown,

They had indeed ability to smooth

The shag of savage nature, and were each

An Orpheus and omnipotent in song.

But transformation of apostate man

From fool to wise, from earthly to divine,

Is work for Him that made him.  He alone,

And He, by means in philosophic eyes

Trivial and worthy of disdain, achieves

The wonder; humanising what is brute

In the lost kind, extracting from the lips

Of asps their venom, overpowering strength

By weakness, and hostility by love.

Patriots have toiled, and in their country’s cause

Bled nobly, and their deeds, as they deserve,

Receive proud recompense.  We give in charge

Their names to the sweet lyre.  The historic muse,

Proud of the treasure, marches with it down

To latest times; and sculpture, in her turn,

Gives bond in stone and ever-during brass,

To guard them, and to immortalise her trust.

But fairer wreaths are due, though never paid,

To those who, posted at the shrine of truth,

Have fallen in her defence.  A patriot’s blood

Well spent in such a strife may earn indeed,

And for a time ensure to his loved land,

The sweets of liberty and equal laws;

But martyrs struggle for a brighter prize,

And win it with more pain.  Their blood is shed

In confirmation of the noblest claim,

Our claim to feed upon immortal truth,

To walk with God, to be divinely free,

To soar, and to anticipate the skies!

Yet few remember them.  They lived unknown,

Till persecution dragged them into fame

And chased them up to heaven.  Their ashes flew

—No marble tells us whither.  With their names

No bard embalms and sanctifies his song,

And history, so warm on meaner themes,

Is cold on this.  She execrates indeed

The tyranny that doomed them to the fire,

But gives the glorious sufferers little praise.

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,

And all are slaves beside.  There’s not a chain

That hellish foes confederate for his harm

Can wind around him, but he casts it off

With as much ease as Samson his green withes.

He looks abroad into the varied field

Of Nature, and, though poor perhaps compared

With those whose mansions glitter in his sight,

Calls the delightful scenery all his own.

His are the mountains, and the valleys his,

And the resplendent river’s.  His to enjoy

With a propriety that none can feel,

But who, with filial confidence inspired,

Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye,

And smiling say—My Father made them all!

Are they not his by a peculiar right,

And by an emphasis of interest his,

Whose eye they fill with tears of holy joy,

Whose heart with praise, and whose exalted mind

With worthy thoughts of that unwearied love

That planned, and built, and still upholds a world

So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man?

Yes—ye may fill your garners, ye that reap

The loaded soil, and ye may waste much good

In senseless riot; but ye will not find

In feast or in the chase, in song or dance,

A liberty like his, who, unimpeached

Of usurpation, and to no man’s wrong,

Appropriates nature as his Father’s work,

And has a richer use of yours, than you.

He is indeed a freeman.  Free by birth

Of no mean city, planned or e’er the hills

Were built, the fountains opened, or the sea

With all his roaring multitude of waves.

His freedom is the same in every state;

And no condition of this changeful life

So manifold in cares, whose every day

Brings its own evil with it, makes it less.

For he has wings that neither sickness, pain,

Nor penury, can cripple or confine.

No nook so narrow but he spreads them there

With ease, and is at large.  The oppressor holds

His body bound, but knows not what a range

His spirit takes, unconscious of a chain;

And that to bind him is a vain attempt,

Whom God delights in, and in whom He dwells.

Acquaint thyself with God if thou wouldst taste

His works.  Admitted once to His embrace,

Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before;

Thine eye shall be instructed, and thine heart,

Made pure, shall relish, with divine delight

Till then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought.

Brutes graze the mountain-top with faces prone,

And eyes intent upon the scanty herb

It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow,

Ruminate, heedless of the scene outspread

Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away

From inland regions to the distant main.

Man views it and admires, but rests content

With what he views.  The landscape has his praise,

But not its Author.  Unconcerned who formed

The paradise he sees, he finds it such,

And such well pleased to find it, asks no more.

Not so the mind that has been touched from heaven,

And in the school of sacred wisdom taught

To read His wonders, in whose thought the world,

Fair as it is, existed ere it was.

Nor for its own sake merely, but for His

Much more who fashioned it, he gives it praise;

Praise that from earth resulting as it ought

To earth’s acknowledged Sovereign, finds at once

Its only just proprietor in Him.

The soul that sees Him, or receives sublimed

New faculties or learns at least to employ

More worthily the powers she owned before;

Discerns in all things what, with stupid gaze

Of ignorance, till then she overlooked,

A ray of heavenly light gilding all forms

Terrestrial, in the vast and the minute

The unambiguous footsteps of the God

Who gives its lustre to an insect’s wing

And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds.

Much conversant with heaven, she often holds

With those fair ministers of light to man

That fill the skies nightly with silent pomp

Sweet conference; inquires what strains were they

With which heaven rang, when every star, in haste

To gratulate the new-created earth,

Sent forth a voice, and all the sons of God

Shouted for joy.—“Tell me, ye shining hosts

That navigate a sea that knows no storms,

Beneath a vault unsullied with a cloud,

If from your elevation, whence ye view

Distinctly scenes invisible to man

And systems of whose birth no tidings yet

Have reached this nether world, ye spy a race

Favoured as ours, transgressors from the womb

And hasting to a grave, yet doomed to rise

And to possess a brighter heaven than yours?

As one who, long detained on foreign shores,

Pants to return, and when he sees afar

His country’s weather-bleached and battered rocks,

From the green wave emerging, darts an eye

Radiant with joy towards the happy land;

So I with animated hopes behold,

And many an aching wish, your beamy fires,

That show like beacons in the blue abyss,

Ordained to guide the embodied spirit home

From toilsome life to never-ending rest.

Love kindles as I gaze.  I feel desires

That give assurance of their own success,

And that, infused from heaven, must thither tend.”

So reads he Nature whom the lamp of truth

Illuminates.  Thy lamp, mysterious Word!

Which whoso sees, no longer wanders lost

With intellect bemazed in endless doubt,

But runs the road of wisdom.  Thou hast built,

With means that were not till by Thee employed,

Worlds that had never been, hadst Thou in strength

Been less, or less benevolent than strong.

They are Thy witnesses, who speak Thy power

And goodness infinite, but speak in ears

That hear not, or receive not their report.

In vain Thy creatures testify of Thee

Till Thou proclaim Thyself.  Theirs is indeed

A teaching voice; but ’tis the praise of Thine

That whom it teaches it makes prompt to learn,

And with the boon gives talents for its use.

Till Thou art heard, imaginations vain

Possess the heart, and fables, false as hell,

Yet deemed oracular, lure down to death

The uninformed and heedless souls of men.

We give to chance, blind chance, ourselves as blind,

The glory of Thy work, which yet appears

Perfect and unimpeachable of blame,

Challenging human scrutiny, and proved

Then skilful most when most severely judged.

But chance is not; or is not where Thou reign’st:

Thy providence forbids that fickle power

(If power she be that works but to confound)

To mix her wild vagaries with Thy laws.

Yet thus we dote, refusing, while we can,

Instruction, and inventing to ourselves

Gods such as guilt makes welcome—gods that sleep,

Or disregard our follies, or that sit

Amused spectators of this bustling stage.

Thee we reject, unable to abide

Thy purity, till pure as Thou art pure,

Made such by Thee, we love Thee for that cause

For which we shunned and hated Thee before.

Then we are free: then liberty, like day,

Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from heaven

Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.

A voice is heard that mortal ears hear not

Till Thou hast touched them; ’tis the voice of song,

A loud Hosanna sent from all Thy works,

Which he that hears it with a shout repeats,

And adds his rapture to the general praise.

In that blest moment, Nature, throwing wide

Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile

The Author of her beauties, who, retired

Behind His own creation, works unseen

By the impure, and hears His power denied.

Thou art the source and centre of all minds,

Their only point of rest, eternal Word!

From Thee departing, they are lost and rove

At random, without honour, hope, or peace.

From Thee is all that soothes the life of man,

His high endeavour, and his glad success,

His strength to suffer, and his will to serve.

But, oh, Thou Bounteous Giver of all good,

Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown!

Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor,

And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.

BOOK VI.

THE WINTER WALK AT NOON.

THERE is in souls a sympathy with sounds,

And as the mind is pitched the ear is pleased

With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave;

Some chord in unison with what we hear

Is touched within us, and the heart replies.

How soft the music of those village bells

Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet, now dying all away,

Now pealing loud again, and louder still,

Clear and sonorous as the gale comes on.

With easy force it opens all the cells

Where memory slept.  Wherever I have heard

A kindred melody, the scene recurs,

And with it all its pleasures and its pains.

Such comprehensive views the spirit takes,

That in a few short moments I retrace

(As in a map the voyager his course)

The windings of my way through many years.

Short as in retrospect the journey seems,

It seemed not always short; the rugged path,

And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,

Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.

Yet feeling present evils, while the past

Faintly impress the mind, or not at all,

How readily we wish time spent revoked,

That we might try the ground again, where once

(Through inexperience as we now perceive)

We missed that happiness we might have found.

Some friend is gone, perhaps his son’s best friend

A father, whose authority, in show

When most severe, and mustering all its force,

Was but the graver countenance of love;

Whose favour, like the clouds of spring, might lower,

And utter now and then an awful voice,

But had a blessing in its darkest frown,

Threatening at once and nourishing the plant.

We loved, but not enough, the gentle hand

That reared us.  At a thoughtless age allured

By every gilded folly, we renounced

His sheltering side, and wilfully forewent

That converse which we now in vain regret.

How gladly would the man recall to life

The boy’s neglected sire! a mother too,

That softer friend, perhaps more gladly still,

Might he demand them at the gates of death.

Sorrow has since they went subdued and tamed

The playful humour; he could now endure

(Himself grown sober in the vale of tears)

And feel a parent’s presence no restraint.

But not to understand a treasure’s worth

Till time has stolen away the slighted good,

Is cause of half the poverty we feel,

And makes the world the wilderness it is.

The few that pray at all, pray oft amiss,

And, seeking grace to improve the prize they hold,

Would urge a wiser suit than asking more.

The night was winter in his roughest mood,

The morning sharp and clear; but now at noon

Upon the southern side of the slant hills,

And where the woods fence off the northern blast,

The season smiles, resigning all its rage,

And has the warmth of May.  The vault is blue

Without a cloud, and white without a speck

The dazzling splendour of the scene below.

Again the harmony comes o’er the vale,

And through the trees I view the embattled tower

Whence all the music.  I again perceive

The soothing influence of the wafted strains,

And settle in soft musings, as I tread

The walk still verdant under oaks and elms,

Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.

The roof, though movable through all its length,

As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed,

And, intercepting in their silent fall

The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.

No noise is here, or none that hinders thought:

The redbreast warbles still, but is content

With slender notes and more than half suppressed.

Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light

From spray to spray, where’er he rests he shakes

From many a twig the pendant drops of ice,

That tinkle in the withered leaves below.

Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,

Charms more than silence.  Meditation here

May think down hours to moments.  Here the heart

May give an useful lesson to the head,

And learning wiser grow without his books.

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,

Have ofttimes no connection.  Knowledge dwells

In heads replete with thoughts of other men;

Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,

The mere materials with which wisdom builds,

Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,

Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.

Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells

By which the magic art of shrewder wits

Holds an unthinking multitude enthralled.

Some to the fascination of a name

Surrender judgment hoodwinked.  Some the style

Infatuates, and, through labyrinths and wilds

Of error, leads them by a tune entranced.

While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear

The insupportable fatigue of thought,

And swallowing therefore without pause or choice

The total grist unsifted, husks and all.

But trees, and rivulets whose rapid course

Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,

And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,

And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time

Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,

Deceive no student.  Wisdom there, and truth,

Not shy as in the world, and to be won

By slow solicitation, seize at once

The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.

What prodigies can power divine perform

More grand than it produces year by year,

And all in sight of inattentive man?

Familiar with the effect we slight the cause,

And in the constancy of Nature’s course,

The regular return of genial months,

And renovation of a faded world,

See nought to wonder at.  Should God again,

As once in Gibeon, interrupt the race

Of the undeviating and punctual sun,

How would the world admire! but speaks it less

An agency divine, to make him know

His moment when to sink and when to rise

Age after age, than to arrest his course?

All we behold is miracle: but, seen

So duly, all is miracle in vain.

Where now the vital energy that moved,

While summer was, the pure and subtle lymph

Through the imperceptible meandering veins

Of leaf and flower?  It sleeps: and the icy touch

Of unprolific winter has impressed

A cold stagnation on the intestine tide.

But let the months go round, a few short months,

And all shall be restored.  These naked shoots,

Barren as lances, among which the wind

Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes,

Shall put their graceful foliage on again,

And more aspiring and with ampler spread

Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost.

Then, each in its peculiar honours clad,

Shall publish even to the distant eye

Its family and tribe.  Laburnum rich

In streaming gold; syringa ivory pure;

The scented and the scentless rose; this red

And of a humbler growth, the other tall,

And throwing up into the darkest gloom

Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew,

Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf

That the wind severs from the broken wave;

The lilac various in array, now white,

Now sanguine, and her beauteous head now set

With purple spikes pyramidal, as if

Studious of ornament, yet unresolved

Which hue she most approved, she chose them all;

Copious of flowers the woodbine, pale and wan,

But well compensating their sickly looks

With never-cloying odours, early and late;

Hypericum all bloom, so thick a swarm

Of flowers like flies, clothing her slender rods,

That scarce a leaf appears; mezereon too,

Though leafless, well attired, and thick beset

With blushing wreaths investing every spray;

Althæa with the purple eye; the broom,

Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed

Her blossoms; and luxuriant above all

The jasmine, throwing wide her elegant sweets,

The deep dark green of whose unvarnished leaf

Makes more conspicuous, and illumines more

The bright profusion of her scattered stars.—

These have been, and these shall be in their day,

And all this uniform uncoloured scene

Shall be dismantled of its fleecy load,

And flush into variety again.

From dearth to plenty, and from death to life,

Is Nature’s progress when she lectures man

In heavenly truth; evincing, as she makes

The grand transition, that there lives and works

A soul in all things, and that soul is God.

The beauties of the wilderness are His,

That make so gay the solitary place

Where no eye sees them.  And the fairer forms

That cultivation glories in, are His.

He sets the bright procession on its way,

And marshals all the order of the year.

He marks the bounds which Winter may not pass,

And blunts his pointed fury.  In its case,

Russet and rude, folds up the tender germ

Uninjured, with inimitable art,

And, ere one flowery season fades and dies,

Designs the blooming wonders of the next.

Some say that in the origin of things,

When all creation started into birth,

The infant elements received a law

From which they swerve not since; that under force

Of that controlling ordinance they move,

And need not His immediate hand, who first

Prescribed their course, to regulate it now.

Thus dream they, and contrive to save a God

The encumbrance of His own concerns, and spare

The great Artificer of all that moves

The stress of a continual act, the pain

Of unremitted vigilance and care,

As too laborious and severe a task.

So man the moth is not afraid, it seems,

To span Omnipotence, and measure might

That knows no measure, by the scanty rule

And standard of his own, that is to-day,

And is not ere to-morrow’s sun go down.

But how should matter occupy a charge

Dull as it is, and satisfy a law

So vast in its demands, unless impelled

To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,

And under pressure of some conscious cause?

The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused

Sustains and is the life of all that lives.

Nature is but a name for an effect

Whose cause is God.  He feeds the secret fire

By which the mighty process is maintained,

Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight

Slow-circling ages are as transient days;

Whose work is without labour, whose designs

No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts,

And whose beneficence no charge exhausts.

Him blind antiquity profaned, not served,

With self-taught rites and under various names

Female and male, Pomona, Pales, Pan,

And Flora and Vertumnus; peopling earth

With tutelary goddesses and gods

That were not, and commending as they would

To each some province, garden, field, or grove.

But all are under One.  One spirit—His

Who bore the platted thorns with bleeding brows—

Rules universal nature.  Not a flower

But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain,

Of His unrivalled pencil.  He inspires

Their balmy odours and imparts their hues,

And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes,

In grains as countless as the sea-side sands,

The forms with which He sprinkles all the earth.

Happy who walks with Him! whom, what he finds

Of flavour or of scent in fruit or flower,

Or what he views of beautiful or grand

In nature, from the broad majestic oak

To the green blade that twinkles in the sun,

Prompts with remembrance of a present God.

His presence, who made all so fair, perceived,

Makes all still fairer.  As with Him no scene

Is dreary, so with Him all seasons please.

Though winter had been none had man been true,

And earth be punished for its tenant’s sake,

Yet not in vengeance; as this smiling sky,

So soon succeeding such an angry night,

And these dissolving snows, and this clear stream,

Recovering fast its liquid music, prove.

Who then, that has a mind well strung and tuned

To contemplation, and within his reach

A scene so friendly to his favourite task,

Would waste attention at the chequered board,

His host of wooden warriors to and fro

Marching and counter-marching, with an eye

As fixt as marble, with a forehead ridged

And furrowed into storms, and with a hand

Trembling, as if eternity were hung

In balance on his conduct of a pin?

Nor envies he aught more their idle sport,

Who pant with application misapplied

To trivial toys, and, pushing ivory balls

Across the velvet level, feel a joy

Akin to rapture, when the bauble finds

Its destined goal of difficult access.

Nor deems he wiser him, who gives his noon

To Miss, the Mercer’s plague, from shop to shop

Wandering, and littering with unfolded silks

The polished counter, and approving none,

Or promising with smiles to call again.

Nor him, who, by his vanity seduced,

And soothed into a dream that he discerns

The difference of a Guido from a daub,

Frequents the crowded auction.  Stationed there

As duly as the Langford of the show,

With glass at eye, and catalogue in hand,

And tongue accomplished in the fulsome cant

And pedantry that coxcombs learn with ease,

Oft as the price-deciding hammer falls

He notes it in his book, then raps his box,

Swears ’tis a bargain, rails at his hard fate

That he has let it pass—but never bids.

Here unmolested, through whatever sign

The sun proceeds, I wander; neither mist,

Nor freezing sky, nor sultry, checking me,

Nor stranger intermeddling with my joy.

Even in the spring and play-time of the year

That calls the unwonted villager abroad

With all her little ones, a sportive train,

To gather king-cups in the yellow mead,

And prank their hair with daisies, or to pick

A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook,

These shades are all my own.  The timorous hare,

Grown so familiar with her frequent guest,

Scarce shuns me; and the stock-dove unalarmed

Sits cooing in the pine-tree, nor suspends

His long love-ditty for my near approach.

Drawn from his refuge in some lonely elm

That age or injury has hollowed deep,

Where on his bed of wool and matted leaves

He has outslept the winter, ventures forth

To frisk awhile, and bask in the warm sun,

The squirrel, flippant, pert, and full of play.

He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,

Ascends the neighbouring beech; there whisks his brush,

And perks his ears, and stamps and scolds aloud,

With all the prettiness of feigned alarm,

And anger insignificantly fierce.

The heart is hard in nature, and unfit

For human fellowship, as being void

Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike

To love and friendship both, that is not pleased

With sight of animals enjoying life,

Nor feels their happiness augment his own.

The bounding fawn that darts across the glade

When none pursues, through mere delight of heart,

And spirits buoyant with excess of glee;

The horse, as wanton and almost as fleet,

That skims the spacious meadow at full speed,

Then stops and snorts, and throwing high his heels

Starts to the voluntary race again;

The very kine that gambol at high noon,

The total herd receiving first from one,

That leads the dance, a summons to be gay,

Though wild their strange vagaries, and uncouth

Their efforts, yet resolved with one consent

To give such act and utterance as they may

To ecstasy too big to be suppressed—

These, and a thousand images of bliss,

With which kind nature graces every scene

Where cruel man defeats not her design,

Impart to the benevolent, who wish

All that are capable of pleasure pleased,

A far superior happiness to theirs,

The comfort of a reasonable joy.

Man scarce had risen, obedient to His call

Who formed him from the dust, his future grave,

When he was crowned as never king was since.

God set His diadem upon his head,

And angel choirs attended.  Wondering stood

The new-made monarch, while before him passed,

All happy and all perfect in their kind,

The creatures, summoned from their various haunts

To see their sovereign, and confess his sway.

Vast was his empire, absolute his power,

Or bounded only by a law whose force

’Twas his sublimest privilege to feel

And own, the law of universal love.

He ruled with meekness, they obeyed with joy.

No cruel purpose lurked within his heart,

And no distrust of his intent in theirs.

So Eden was a scene of harmless sport,

Where kindness on his part who ruled the whole

Begat a tranquil confidence in all,

And fear as yet was not, nor cause for fear.

But sin marred all; and the revolt of man,

That source of evils not exhausted yet,

Was punished with revolt of his from him.

Garden of God, how terrible the change

Thy groves and lawns then witnessed! every heart,

Each animal of every name, conceived

A jealousy and an instinctive fear,

And, conscious of some danger, either fled

Precipitate the loathed abode of man,

Or growled defiance in such angry sort,

As taught him too to tremble in his turn.

Thus harmony and family accord

Were driven from Paradise; and in that hour

The seeds of cruelty, that since have swelled

To such gigantic and enormous growth,

Were sown in human nature’s fruitful soil.

Hence date the persecution and the pain

That man inflicts on all inferior kinds,

Regardless of their plaints.  To make him sport,

To gratify the frenzy of his wrath,

Or his base gluttony, are causes good

And just in his account, why bird and beast

Should suffer torture, and the streams be dyed

With blood of their inhabitants impaled.

Earth groans beneath the burden of a war

Waged with defenceless innocence, while he,

Not satisfied to prey on all around,

Adds tenfold bitterness to death by pangs

Needless, and first torments ere he devours.

Now happiest they that occupy the scenes

The most remote from his abhorred resort,

Whom once as delegate of God on earth

They feared, and as His perfect image loved.

The wilderness is theirs with all its caves,

Its hollow glens, its thickets, and its plains

Unvisited by man.  There they are free,

And howl and roar as likes them, uncontrolled,

Nor ask his leave to slumber or to play.

Woe to the tyrant, if he dare intrude

Within the confines of their wild domain;

The lion tells him, “I am monarch here;”

And if he spares him, spares him on the terms

Of royal mercy, and through generous scorn

To rend a victim trembling at his foot.

In measure, as by force of instinct drawn,

Or by necessity constrained, they live

Dependent upon man, those in his fields,

These at his crib, and some beneath his roof;

They prove too often at how dear a rate

He sells protection.  Witness, at his foot

The spaniel dying for some venial fault,

Under dissection of the knotted scourge;

Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells

Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs

To madness, while the savage at his heels

Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury spent

Upon the guiltless passenger o’erthrown.

He too is witness, noblest of the train

That wait on man, the flight-performing horse:

With unsuspecting readiness he takes

His murderer on his back, and, pushed all day,

With bleeding sides, and flanks that heave for life,

To the far-distant goal, arrives and dies.

So little mercy shows who needs so much!

Does law, so jealous in the cause of man,

Denounce no doom on the delinquent?  None.

He lives, and o’er his brimming beaker boasts

(As if barbarity were high desert)

The inglorious feat, and, clamorous in praise

Of the poor brute, seems wisely to suppose

The honours of his matchless horse his own.

But many a crime, deemed innocent on earth,

Is registered in heaven, and these, no doubt,

Have each their record, with a curse annexed.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart,

But God will never.  When He charged the Jew

To assist his foe’s down-fallen beast to rise,

And when the bush-exploring boy that seized

The young, to let the parent bird go free,

Proved He not plainly that His meaner works

Are yet His care, and have an interest all,

All, in the universal Father’s love?

On Noah, and in him on all mankind,

The charter was conferred by which we hold

The flesh of animals in fee, and claim,

O’er all we feed on, power of life and death.

But read the instrument, and mark it well;

The oppression of a tyrannous control

Can find no warrant there.  Feed then, and yield

Thanks for thy food.  Carnivorous, through sin,

Feed on the slain, but spare the living brute.

The Governor of all, Himself to all

So bountiful, in whose attentive ear

The unfledged raven and the lion’s whelp

Plead not in vain for pity on the pangs

Of hunger unassuaged, has interposed,

Not seldom, His avenging arm, to smite

The injurious trampler upon nature’s law,

That claims forbearance even for a brute.

He hates the hardness of a Balaam’s heart,

And, prophet as he was, he might not strike

The blameless animal, without rebuke,

On which he rode.  Her opportune offence

Saved him, or the unrelenting seer had died.

He sees that human equity is slack

To interfere, though in so just a cause,

And makes the task His own; inspiring dumb

And helpless victims with a sense so keen

Of injury, with such knowledge of their strength,

And such sagacity to take revenge,

That oft the beast has seemed to judge the man.

An ancient, not a legendary tale,

By one of sound intelligence rehearsed,

(If such, who plead for Providence may seem

In modern eyes) shall make the doctrine clear.

Where England, stretched towards the setting sun,

Narrow and long, o’erlooks the western wave,

Dwelt young Misagathus; a scorner he

Of God and goodness, atheist in ostent,

Vicious in act, in temper savage-fierce.

He journeyed, and his chance was, as he went,

To join a traveller of far different note—

Evander, famed for piety, for years

Deserving honour, but for wisdom more.

Fame had not left the venerable man

A stranger to the manners of the youth,

Whose face, too, was familiar to his view.

Their way was on the margin of the land,

O’er the green summit of the rocks whose base

Beats back the roaring surge, scarce heard so high.

The charity that warmed his heart was moved

At sight of the man-monster.  With a smile

Gentle and affable, and full of grace,

As fearful of offending whom he wished

Much to persuade, he plied his ear with truths

Not harshly thundered forth or rudely pressed,

But, like his purpose, gracious, kind, and sweet.

“And dost thou dream,” the impenetrable man

Exclaimed, “that me the lullabies of age,

And fantasies of dotards such as thou,

Can cheat, or move a moment’s fear in me?

Mark now the proof I give thee, that the brave

Need no such aids as superstition lends

To steel their hearts against the dread of death.”

He spoke, and to the precipice at hand

Pushed with a madman’s fury.  Fancy shrinks,

And the blood thrills and curdles at the thought

Of such a gulf as he designed his grave.

But though the felon on his back could dare

The dreadful leap, more rational, his steed

Declined the death, and wheeling swiftly round,

Or ere his hoof had pressed the crumbling verge,

Baffled his rider, saved against his will.

The frenzy of the brain may be redressed

By medicine well applied, but without grace

The heart’s insanity admits no cure.

Enraged the more by what might have reformed

His horrible intent, again he sought

Destruction, with a zeal to be destroyed,

With sounding whip and rowels dyed in blood.

But still in vain.  The Providence that meant

A longer date to the far nobler beast,

Spared yet again the ignobler for his sake.

And now, his prowess proved, and his sincere,

Incurable obduracy evinced,

His rage grew cool; and, pleased perhaps to have earned

So cheaply the renown of that attempt,

With looks of some complacence he resumed

His road, deriding much the blank amaze

Of good Evander, still where he was left

Fixed motionless, and petrified with dread.

So on they fared; discourse on other themes

Ensuing, seemed to obliterate the past,

And tamer far for so much fury shown

(As is the course of rash and fiery men)

The rude companion smiled as if transformed.

But ’twas a transient calm.  A storm was near,

An unsuspected storm.  His hour was come.

The impious challenger of power divine

Was now to learn that Heaven, though slow to wrath,

Is never with impunity defied.

His horse, as he had caught his master’s mood,

Snorting, and starting into sudden rage,

Unbidden, and not now to be controlled,

Rushed to the cliff, and having reached it, stood.

At once the shock unseated him; he flew

Sheer o’er the craggy barrier, and, immersed

Deep in the flood, found, when he sought it not,

The death he had deserved, and died alone.

So God wrought double justice; made the fool

The victim of his own tremendous choice,

And taught a brute the way to safe revenge.

I would not enter on my list of friends

(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,

Yet wanting sensibility) the man

Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.

An inadvertent step may crush the snail

That crawls at evening in the public path;

But he that has humanity, forewarned,

Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.

The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight,

And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes

A visitor unwelcome into scenes

Sacred to neatness and repose, the alcove,

The chamber, or refectory, may die.

A necessary act incurs no blame.

Not so when, held within their proper bounds

And guiltless of offence, they range the air,

Or take their pastime in the spacious field.

There they are privileged; and he that hunts

Or harms them there is guilty of a wrong,

Disturbs the economy of Nature’s realm,

Who, when she formed, designed them an abode.

The sum is this: if man’s convenience, health,

Or safety interfere, his rights and claims

Are paramount, and must extinguish theirs.

Else they are all—the meanest things that are—

As free to live and to enjoy that life,

As God was free to form them at the first,

Who in His sovereign wisdom made them all.

Ye, therefore, who love mercy, teach your sons

To love it too.  The spring-time of our years

Is soon dishonoured and defiled in most

By budding ills, that ask a prudent hand

To check them.  But, alas! none sooner shoots,

If unrestrained, into luxuriant growth,

Than cruelty, most devilish of them all.

Mercy to him that shows it, is the rule

And righteous limitation of its act,

By which Heaven moves in pardoning guilty man;

And he that shows none, being ripe in years,

And conscious of the outrage he commits,

Shall seek it and not find it in his turn.

Distinguished much by reason, and still more

By our capacity of grace divine,

From creatures that exist but for our sake,

Which having served us, perish, we are held

Accountable, and God, some future day,

Will reckon with us roundly for the abuse

Of what He deems no mean or trivial trust.

Superior as we are, they yet depend

Not more on human help, than we on theirs.

Their strength, or speed, or vigilance, were given

In aid of our defects.  In some are found

Such teachable and apprehensive parts,

That man’s attainments in his own concerns,

Matched with the expertness of the brutes in theirs,

Are ofttimes vanquished and thrown far behind.

Some show that nice sagacity of smell,

And read with such discernment, in the port

And figure of the man, his secret aim,

That oft we owe our safety to a skill

We could not teach, and must despair to learn.

But learn we might, if not too proud to stoop

To quadruped instructors, many a good

And useful quality, and virtue too,

Rarely exemplified among ourselves;

Attachment never to be weaned, or changed

By any change of fortune, proof alike

Against unkindness, absence, and neglect;

Fidelity, that neither bribe nor threat

Can move or warp; and gratitude for small

And trivial favours, lasting as the life,

And glistening even in the dying eye.

Man praises man.  Desert in arts or arms

Wins public honour; and ten thousand sit

Patiently present at a sacred song,

Commemoration-mad; content to hear

(Oh wonderful effect of music’s power!)

Messiah’s eulogy, for Handel’s sake.

But less, methinks, than sacrilege might serve—

(For was it less?  What heathen would have dared

To strip Jove’s statue of his oaken wreath

And hang it up in honour of a man?)

Much less might serve, when all that we design

Is but to gratify an itching ear,

And give the day to a musician’s praise.

Remember Handel! who, that was not born

Deaf as the dead to harmony, forgets,

Or can, the more than Homer of his age?

Yes—we remember him; and, while we praise

A talent so divine, remember too

That His most holy Book from whom it came

Was never meant, was never used before

To buckram out the memory of a man.

But hush!—the muse perhaps is too severe,

And with a gravity beyond the size

And measure of the offence, rebukes a deed

Less impious than absurd, and owing more

To want of judgment than to wrong design.

So in the chapel of old Ely House,

When wandering Charles, who meant to be the third,

Had fled from William, and the news was fresh,

The simple clerk, but loyal, did announce,

And eke did rear right merrily, two staves,

Sung to the praise and glory of King George.

—Man praises man; and Garrick’s memory next,

When time has somewhat mellowed it, and made

The idol of our worship while he lived

The god of our idolatry once more,

Shall have its altar; and the world shall go

In pilgrimage to bow before his shrine.

The theatre, too small, shall suffocate

Its squeezed contents, and more than it admits

Shall sigh at their exclusion, and return

Ungratified.  For there some noble lord

Shall stuff his shoulders with King Richard’s bunch,

Or wrap himself in Hamlet’s inky cloak,

And strut, and storm, and straddle, stamp, and stare,

To show the world how Garrick did not act,

For Garrick was a worshipper himself;

He drew the liturgy, and framed the rites

And solemn ceremonial of the day,

And called the world to worship on the banks

Of Avon famed in song.  Ah! pleasant proof

That piety has still in human hearts

Some place, a spark or two not yet extinct.

The mulberry-tree was hung with blooming wreaths,

The mulberry-tree stood centre of the dance,

The mulberry-tree was hymned with dulcet airs,

And from his touchwood trunk the mulberry-tree

Supplied such relics as devotion holds

Still sacred, and preserves with pious care.

So ’twas a hallowed time: decorum reigned,

And mirth without offence.  No few returned

Doubtless much edified, and all refreshed.

—Man praises man.  The rabble all alive,

From tippling benches, cellars, stalls, and styes,

Swarm in the streets.  The statesman of the day,

A pompous and slow-moving pageant, comes;

Some shout him, and some hang upon his car

To gaze in his eyes and bless him.  Maidens wave

Their kerchiefs, and old women weep for joy

While others not so satisfied unhorse

The gilded equipage, and, turning loose

His steeds, usurp a place they well deserve.

Why? what has charmed them?  Hath he saved the state?

No.  Doth he purpose its salvation?  No.

Enchanting novelty, that moon at full

That finds out every crevice of the head

That is not sound and perfect, hath in theirs

Wrought this disturbance.  But the wane is near,

And his own cattle must suffice him soon.

Thus idly do we waste the breath of praise,

And dedicate a tribute, in its use

And just direction sacred, to a thing

Doomed to the dust, or lodged already there.

Encomium in old time was poet’s work;

But, poets having lavishly long since

Exhausted all materials of the art,

The task now falls into the public hand;

And I, contented with a humble theme,

Have poured my stream of panegyric down

The vale of Nature, where it creeps and winds

Among her lovely works, with a secure

And unambitious course, reflecting clear

If not the virtues yet the worth of brutes.

And I am recompensed, and deem the toil

Of poetry not lost, if verse of mine

May stand between an animal and woe,

And teach one tyrant pity for his drudge.

The groans of Nature in this nether world,

Which Heaven has heard for ages, have an end.

Foretold by prophets, and by poets sung,

Whose fire was kindled at the prophets’ lamp,

The time of rest, the promised Sabbath, comes.

Six thousand years of sorrow have well-nigh

Fulfilled their tardy and disastrous course

Over a sinful world; and what remains

Of this tempestuous state of human things,

Is merely as the working of a sea

Before a calm, that rocks itself to rest.

For He, whose car the winds are, and the clouds

The dust that waits upon His sultry march,

When sin hath moved Him, and His wrath is hot,

Shall visit earth in mercy; shall descend

Propitious, in His chariot paved with love,

And what His storms have blasted and defaced

For man’s revolt, shall with a smile repair.

Sweet is the harp of prophecy; too sweet

Not to be wronged by a mere mortal touch;

Nor can the wonders it records be sung

To meaner music, and not suffer loss.

But when a poet, or when one like me,

Happy to rove among poetic flowers,

Though poor in skill to rear them, lights at last

On some fair theme, some theme divinely fair,

Such is the impulse and the spur he feels

To give it praise proportioned to its worth,

That not to attempt it, arduous as he deems

The labour, were a task more arduous still.

Oh scenes surpassing fable, and yet true,

Scenes of accomplished bliss! which who can see,

Though but in distant prospect, and not feel

His soul refreshed with foretaste of the joy?

Rivers of gladness water all the earth,

And clothe all climes with beauty; the reproach

Of barrenness is past.  The fruitful field

Laughs with abundance, and the land once lean,

Or fertile only in its own disgrace,

Exults to see its thistly curse repealed.

The various seasons woven into one,

And that one season an eternal spring,

The garden fears no blight, and needs no fence,

For there is none to covet, all are full.

The lion and the libbard and the bear

Graze with the fearless flocks.  All bask at noon

Together, or all gambol in the shade

Of the same grove, and drink one common stream.

Antipathies are none.  No foe to man

Lurks in the serpent now.  The mother sees,

And smiles to see, her infant’s playful hand

Stretched forth to dally with the crested worm,

To stroke his azure neck, or to receive

The lambent homage of his arrowy tongue.

All creatures worship man, and all mankind

One Lord, one Father.  Error has no place;

That creeping pestilence is driven away,

The breath of heaven has chased it.  In the heart

No passion touches a discordant string,

But all is harmony and love.  Disease

Is not.  The pure and uncontaminated blood

Holds its due course, nor fears the frost of age.

One song employs all nations; and all cry,

“Worthy the Lamb, for He was slain for us!”

The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks

Shout to each other, and the mountain-tops

From distant mountains catch the flying joy,

Till nation after nation taught the strain,

Each rolls the rapturous Hosanna round.

Behold the measure of the promise filled,

See Salem built, the labour of a God!

Bright as a sun the sacred city shines;

All kingdoms and all princes of the earth

Flock to that light; the glory of all lands

Flows into her, unbounded is her joy

And endless her increase.  Thy rams are there,

Nebaioth, [170] and the flocks of Kedar there;

The looms of Ormus, and the mines of Ind,

And Saba’s spicy groves pay tribute there.

Praise is in all her gates.  Upon her walls,

And in her streets, and in her spacious courts

Is heard salvation.  Eastern Java there

Kneels with the native of the farthest West,

And Æthiopia spreads abroad the hand,

And worships.  Her report has travelled forth

Into all lands.  From every clime they come

To see thy beauty and to share thy joy,

O Sion! an assembly such as earth

Saw never; such as heaven stoops down to see.

Thus heavenward all things tend.  For all were once

Perfect, and all must be at length restored.

So God has greatly purposed; who would else

In His dishonoured works Himself endure

Dishonour, and be wronged without redress.

Haste then, and wheel away a shattered world,

Ye slow-revolving seasons!  We would see

(A sight to which our eyes are strangers yet)

A world that does not dread and hate His laws,

And suffer for its crime: would learn how fair

The creature is that God pronounces good,

How pleasant in itself what pleases Him.

Here every drop of honey hides a sting;

Worms wind themselves into our sweetest flowers,

And even the joy, that haply some poor heart

Derives from heaven, pure as the fountain is,

Is sullied in the stream; taking a taint

From touch of human lips, at best impure.

Oh for a world in principle as chaste

As this is gross and selfish! over which

Custom and prejudice shall bear no sway,

That govern all things here, shouldering aside

The meek and modest Truth, and forcing her

To seek a refuge from the tongue of strife

In nooks obscure, far from the ways of men,

Where violence shall never lift the sword,

Nor cunning justify the proud man’s wrong,

Leaving the poor no remedy but tears;

Where he that fills an office, shall esteem

The occasion it presents of doing good

More than the perquisite; where laws shall speak

Seldom, and never but as wisdom prompts,

And equity, not jealous more to guard

A worthless form, than to decide aright;

Where fashion shall not sanctify abuse,

Nor smooth good-breeding (supplemental grace)

With lean performance ape the work of love.

Come then, and added to Thy many crowns

Receive yet one, the crown of all the earth,

Thou who alone art worthy! it was Thine

By ancient covenant, ere nature’s birth,

And Thou hast made it Thine by purchase since,

And overpaid its value with Thy blood.

Thy saints proclaim Thee King; and in their hearts

Thy title is engraven with a pen

Dipt in the fountain of eternal love.

Thy saints proclaim Thee King; and Thy delay

Gives courage to their foes, who, could they see

The dawn of Thy last advent, long-desired,

Would creep into the bowels of the hills,

And flee for safety to the falling rocks.

The very spirit of the world is tired

Of its own taunting question, asked so long,

“Where is the promise of your Lord’s approach?”

The infidel has shot his bolts away,

Till, his exhausted quiver yielding none,

He gleans the blunted shafts that have recoiled,

And aims them at the shield of truth again.

The veil is rent, rent too by priestly hands,

That hides divinity from mortal eyes;

And all the mysteries to faith proposed,

Insulted and traduced, are cast aside,

As useless, to the moles and to the bats.

They now are deemed the faithful and are praised,

Who, constant only in rejecting Thee,

Deny Thy Godhead with a martyr’s zeal,

And quit their office for their error’s sake.

Blind and in love with darkness! yet even these

Worthy, compared with sycophants, who kneel,

Thy Name adoring, and then preach Thee man!

So fares Thy Church.  But how Thy Church may fare,

The world takes little thought; who will may preach,

And what they will.  All pastors are alike

To wandering sheep resolved to follow none.

Two gods divide them all, Pleasure and Gain;

For these they live, they sacrifice to these,

And in their service wage perpetual war

With conscience and with Thee.  Lust in their hearts,

And mischief in their hands, they roam the earth

To prey upon each other; stubborn, fierce,

High-minded, foaming out their own disgrace.

Thy prophets speak of such; and noting down

The features of the last degenerate times,

Exhibit every lineament of these.

Come then, and added to Thy many crowns

Receive yet one as radiant as the rest,

Due to Thy last and most effectual work,

Thy Word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.

He is the happy man, whose life even now

Shows somewhat of that happier life to come;

Who, doomed to an obscure but tranquil state,

Is pleased with it, and, were he free to choose,

Would make his fate his choice; whom peace, the fruit

Of virtue, and whom virtue, fruit of faith,

Prepare for happiness; bespeak him one

Content indeed to sojourn while he must

Below the skies, but having there his home.

The world o’erlooks him in her busy search

Of objects more illustrious in her view;

And occupied as earnestly as she,

Though more sublimely, he o’erlooks the world.

She scorns his pleasures, for she knows them not;

He seeks not hers, for he has proved them vain.

He cannot skim the ground like summer birds

Pursuing gilded flies, and such he deems

Her honours, her emoluments, her joys;

Therefore in contemplation is his bliss,

Whose power is such, that whom she lifts from earth

She makes familiar with a heaven unseen,

And shows him glories yet to be revealed.

Not slothful he, though seeming unemployed,

And censured oft as useless.  Stillest streams

Oft water fairest meadows; and the bird

That flutters least is longest on the wing.

Ask him, indeed, what trophies he has raised,

Or what achievements of immortal fame

He purposes, and he shall answer—None.

His warfare is within.  There unfatigued

His fervent spirit labours.  There he fights,

And there obtains fresh triumphs o’er himself,

And never-withering wreaths, compared with which

The laurels that a Cæsar reaps are weeds.

Perhaps the self-approving haughty world,

That, as she sweeps him with her whistling silks,

Scarce deigns to notice him, or if she see,

Deems him a cipher in the works of God,

Receives advantage from his noiseless hours

Of which she little dreams.  Perhaps she owes

Her sunshine and her rain, her blooming spring

And plenteous harvest, to the prayer he makes

When, Isaac-like, the solitary saint

Walks forth to meditate at eventide,

And think on her who thinks not for herself.

Forgive him then, thou bustler in concerns

Of little worth, and idler in the best,

If, author of no mischief and some good,

He seeks his proper happiness by means

That may advance, but cannot hinder thine.

Nor, though he tread the secret path of life,

Engage no notice, and enjoy much ease,

Account him an encumbrance on the state,

Receiving benefits, and rendering none.

His sphere though humble, if that humble sphere

Shine with his fair example, and though small

His influence, if that influence all be spent

In soothing sorrow and in quenching strife,

In aiding helpless indigence, in works

From which at least a grateful few derive

Some taste of comfort in a world of woe,

Then let the supercilious great confess

He serves his country; recompenses well

The state beneath the shadow of whose vine

He sits secure, and in the scale of life

Holds no ignoble, though a slighted place.

The man whose virtues are more felt than seen,

Must drop, indeed, the hope of public praise;

But he may boast, what few that win it can,

That if his country stand not by his skill,

At least his follies have not wrought her fall.

Polite refinement offers him in vain

Her golden tube, through which a sensual world

Draws gross impurity, and likes it well,

The neat conveyance hiding all the offence.

Not that he peevishly rejects a mode

Because that world adopts it.  If it bear

The stamp and clear impression of good sense,

And be not costly more than of true worth,

He puts it on, and for decorum sake

Can wear it e’en as gracefully as she.

She judges of refinement by the eye,

He by the test of conscience, and a heart

Not soon deceived; aware that what is base

No polish can make sterling, and that vice,

Though well-perfumed and elegantly dressed,

Like an unburied carcass tricked with flowers,

Is but a garnished nuisance, fitter far

For cleanly riddance than for fair attire.

So life glides smoothly and by stealth away,

More golden than that age of fabled gold

Renowned in ancient song; not vexed with care,

Or stained with guilt, beneficent, approved

Of God and man, and peaceful in its end.

So glide my life away! and so at last,

My share of duties decently fulfilled,

May some disease, not tardy to perform

Its destined office, yet with gentle stroke,

Dismiss me weary to a safe retreat

Beneath the turf that I have often trod.

It shall not grieve me, then, that once, when called

To dress a Sofa with the flowers of verse,

I played awhile, obedient to the fair,

With that light task, but soon to please her more,

Whom flowers alone I knew would little please,

Let fall the unfinished wreath, and roved for fruit;

Roved far and gathered much; some harsh, ’tis true,

Picked from the thorns and briars of reproof,

But wholesome, well-digested; grateful some

To palates that can taste immortal truth;

Insipid else, and sure to be despised.

But all is in His hand whose praise I seek,

In vain the poet sings, and the world hears,

If He regard not, though divine the theme.

’Tis not in artful measures, in the chime

And idle tinkling of a minstrel’s lyre,

To charm His ear, whose eye is on the heart;

Whose frown can disappoint the proudest strain,

Whose approbation—prosper even mine.

THE DIVERTING HISTORY OF JOHN GILPIN;

SHOWING HOW HE WENT FARTHER THAN HE INTENDED,

AND CAME SAFE HOME AGAIN.

JOHN GILPIN was a citizen

Of credit and renown,

A train-band captain eke was he

Of famous London town.

John Gilpin’s spouse said to her dear,

“Though wedded we have been

These twice ten tedious years, yet we

No holiday have seen.

“To-morrow is our wedding-day,

And we will then repair

Unto ‘The Bell’ at Edmonton,

All in a chaise and pair.

“My sister and my sister’s child,

Myself and children three,

Will fill the chaise; so you must ride

On horseback after we.”

He soon replied, “I do admire

Of womankind but one,

And you are she, my dearest dear,

Therefore it shall be done.

“I am a linen-draper bold,

As all the world doth know,

And my good friend the Calender

Will lend his horse to go.”

Quoth Mistress Gilpin, “That’s well said;

And, for that wine is dear,

We will be furnished with our own,

Which is both bright and clear.”

John Gilpin kissed his loving wife;

O’erjoyed was he to find

That though on pleasure she was bent,

She had a frugal mind.

The morning came, the chaise was brought,

But yet was not allowed

To drive up to the door, lest all

Should say that she was proud.

So three doors off the chaise was stayed,

Where they did all get in;

Six precious souls, and all agog

To dash through thick and thin.

Smack went the whip, round went the wheels,

Were never folk so glad;

The stones did rattle underneath

As if Cheapside were mad.

John Gilpin at his horse’s side

Seized fast the flowing mane,

And up he got, in haste to ride,

But soon came down again;

For saddle-tree scarce reached had he,

His journey to begin,

When, turning round his head, he saw

Three customers come in.

So down he came; for loss of time,

Although it grieved him sore,

Yet loss of pence, full well he knew,

Would trouble him much more.

’Twas long before the customers

Were suited to their mind.

When Betty, screaming, came down stairs,

“The wine is left behind!”

“Good lack!” quoth he; “yet bring it me,

My leathern belt likewise,

In which I bear my trusty sword,

When I do exercise.”

Now Mistress Gilpin (careful soul!)

Had two stone bottles found,

To hold the liquor that she loved,

And keep it safe and sound.

Each bottle had a curling ear,

Through which the belt he drew,

And hung a bottle on each side,

To make his balance true.

Then over all, that he might be

Equipped from top to toe,

His long red cloak, well brushed and neat,

He manfully did throw.

Now see him mounted once again

Upon his nimble steed,

Full slowly pacing o’er the stones

With caution and good heed!

But, finding soon a smoother road

Beneath his well-shod feet,

The snorting beast began to trot,

Which galled him in his seat.

So, “Fair and softly,” John he cried,

But John he cried in vain;

That trot became a gallop soon,

In spite of curb and rein.

So stooping down, as needs he must

Who cannot sit upright,

He grasped the mane with both his hands,

And eke with all his might.

His horse, who never in that sort

Had handled been before,

What thing upon his back had got

Did wonder more and more.

Away went Gilpin, neck or naught;

Away went hat and wig;

He little dreamt, when he set out,

Of running such a rig.

The wind did blow, the cloak did fly,

Like streamer long and gay,

Till, loop and button failing both,

At last it flew away.

Then might all people well discern

The bottles he had slung;

A bottle swinging at each side,

As hath been said or sung.

The dogs did bark, the children screamed,

Up flew the windows all;

And every soul cried out, “Well done!”

As loud as he could bawl.

Away went Gilpin—who but he?

His fame soon spread around—

He carries weight! he rides a race!

’Tis for a thousand pound!

And still, as fast as he drew near,

’Twas wonderful to view

How in a trice the turnpike men

Their gates wide open threw.

And now, as he went bowing down

His reeking head full low,

The bottles twain behind his back

Were shattered at a blow.

Down ran the wine into the road,

Most piteous to be seen,

Which made his horse’s flanks to smoke

As they had basted been.

But still he seemed to carry weight,

With leathern girdle braced;

For all might see the bottle-necks

Still dangling at his waist.

Thus all through merry Islington

These gambols he did play,

And till he came unto the Wash

Of Edmonton so gay.

And there he threw the wash about

On both sides of the way,

Just like unto a trundling mop,

Or a wild goose at play.

At Edmonton, his loving wife

From the bal-cony spied

Her tender husband, wondering much

To see how he did ride.

“Stop, stop, John Gilpin!—here’s the house!”

They all at once did cry;

“The dinner waits, and we are tired.”

Said Gilpin, “So am I!”

But yet his horse was not a whit

Inclined to tarry there;

For why?—his owner had a house

Full ten miles off, at Ware.

So like an arrow swift he flew,

Shot by an archer strong;

So did he fly—which brings me to

The middle of my song.

Away went Gilpin, out of breath,

And sore against his will,

Till at his friend the Calender’s

His horse at last stood still.

The Calender, amazed to see

His neighbour in such trim,

Laid down his pipe, flew to the gate,

And thus accosted him:—

“What news? what news? your tidings tell:

Tell me you must and shall—

Say why bareheaded you are come,

Or why you come at all.”

Now Gilpin had a pleasant wit,

And loved a timely joke;

And thus unto the Calender

In merry guise he spoke:

“I came because your horse would come;

And if I well forebode,

My hat and wig will soon be here;

They are upon the road.”

The Calender, right glad to find

His friend in merry pin,

Returned him not a single word,

But to the house went in;

Whence straight he came with hat and wig,

A wig that flowed behind,

A hat not much the worse for wear,

Each comely in its kind.

He held them up, and, in his turn,

Thus showed his ready wit,—

“My head is twice as big as yours;

They therefore needs must fit.

“But let me scrape the dirt away

That hangs upon your face;

And stop and eat, for well you may

Be in a hungry case.”

Says John, “It is my wedding-day,

And all the world would stare,

If wife should dine at Edmonton,

And I should dine at Ware.”

So turning to his horse, he said,

“I am in haste to dine;

’Twas for your pleasure you came here,

You shall go back for mine.”

Ah, luckless speech, and bootless boast!

For which he paid full dear;

For while he spake, a braying ass

Did sing most loud and clear;

Whereat his horse did snort as he

Had heard a lion roar,

And galloped off with all his might,

As he had done before.

Away went Gilpin, and away

Went Gilpin’s hat and wig;

He lost them sooner than at first,

For why?—they were too big.

Now Mistress Gilpin, when she saw

Her husband posting down

Into the country far away,

She pulled out half-a-crown.

And thus unto the youth she said,

That drove them to “The Bell,”

“This shall be yours when you bring back

My husband safe and well.”

The youth did ride, and soon did meet

John coming back amain,

Whom in a trice he tried to stop

By catching at his rein;

But not performing what he meant,

And gladly would have done,

The frighted steed he frighted more,

And made him faster run.

Away went Gilpin, and away

Went postboy at his heels,

The postboy’s horse right glad to miss

The lumbering of the wheels.

Six gentlemen upon the road

Thus seeing Gilpin fly,

With postboy scampering in the rear,

They raised the hue and cry:

“Stop thief! stop thief!—a highwayman!”

Not one of them was mute;

And all and each that passed that way

Did join in the pursuit.

And now the turnpike gates again

Flew open in short space,

The tollmen thinking, as before,

That Gilpin rode a race.

And so he did, and won it too,

For he got first to town;

Nor stopped till where he had got up

He did again get down.

Now let us sing, “Long live the king,

And Gilpin, long live he;

And when he next doth ride abroad,

May I be there to see!”

AN EPISTLE TO JOSEPH HILL, ESQ.

DEAR JOSEPH,—five and twenty years ago—

Alas, how time escapes!—’tis even so—

With frequent intercourse, and always sweet

And always friendly, we were wont to cheat

A tedious hour—and now we never meet.

As some grave gentleman in Terence says

(’Twas therefore much the same in ancient days),

“Good lack, we know not what to-morrow brings—

Strange fluctuation of all human things!”

True.  Changes will befall, and friends may part,

But distance only cannot change the heart:

And were I called to prove the assertion true,

One proof should serve—a reference to you.

Whence comes it, then, that in the wane of life,

Though nothing have occurred to kindle strife,

We find the friends we fancied we had won,

Though numerous once, reduced to few or none?

Can gold grow worthless that has stood the touch?

No.  Gold they seemed, but they were never such.

Horatio’s servant once, with bow and cringe,

Swinging the parlour-door upon its hinge,

Dreading a negative, and overawed

Lest he should trespass, begged to go abroad.

“Go, fellow!—whither?”—turning short about—

“Nay.  Stay at home; you’re always going out.”—

“’Tis but a step, sir; just at the street’s end.”

“For what?”—“An please you, sir, to see a friend.”

“A friend!” Horatio cried, and seemed to start;

“Yea, marry shalt thou, and with all my heart—

And fetch my cloak, for though the night be raw

I’ll see him too—the first I ever saw.”

I knew the man, and knew his nature mild,

And was his plaything often when a child;

But somewhat at that moment pinched him close,

Else he was seldom bitter or morose.

Perhaps, his confidence just then betrayed,

His grief might prompt him with the speech he made;

Perhaps ’twas mere good-humour gave it birth,

The harmless play of pleasantry and mirth.

Howe’er it was, his language in my mind

Bespoke at least a man that knew mankind.

But not to moralise too much, and strain

To prove an evil of which all complain

(I hate long arguments, verbosely spun),

One story more, dear Hill, and I have done.

Once on a time, an emperor, a wise man.

No matter where, in China or Japan,

Decreed that whosoever should offend

Against the well-known duties of a friend,

Convicted once, should ever after wear

But half a coat, and show his bosom bare;

The punishment importing this, no doubt,

That all was naught within and all found out.

Oh happy Britain! we have not to fear

Such hard and arbitrary measure here;

Else could a law, like that which I relate,

Once have the sanction of our triple state,

Some few that I have known in days of old

Would run most dreadful risk of catching cold.

While you, my friend, whatever wind should blow,

Might traverse England safely to and fro,

An honest man, close buttoned to the chin,

Broad-cloth without, and a warm heart within.

TO MARY.

THE twentieth year is well-nigh past

Since first our sky was overcast,

Ah, would that this might be the last!

My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,

I see thee daily weaker grow—

’Twas my distress that brought thee low,

My Mary!

Thy needles, once a shining store,

For my sake restless heretofore,

Now rust disused, and shine no more,

My Mary!

For though thou gladly wouldst fulfil

The same kind office for me still,

Thy sight now seconds not thy will,

My Mary!

But well thou playedst the housewife’s part,

And all thy threads with magic art

Have wound themselves about this heart,

My Mary!

Thy indistinct expressions seem

Like language uttered in a dream;

Yet me they charm, whate’er the theme,

My Mary!

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,

Are still more lovely in my sight

Than golden beams of orient light,

My Mary!

For could I view nor them nor thee,

What sight worth seeing could I see?

The sun would rise in vain for me,

My Mary!

Partakers of thy sad decline,

Thy hands their little force resign;

Yet gently prest, press gently mine,

My Mary!

Such feebleness of limbs thou prov’st,

That now at every step thou mov’st

Upheld by two, yet still thou lov’st,

My Mary!

And still to love, though prest with ill,

In wintry age to feel no chill,

With me, is to be lovely still,

My Mary!

But ah! by constant heed I know,

How oft the sadness that I show,

Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe,

My Mary!

And should my future lot be cast

With much resemblance of the past,

Thy worn-out heart will break at last,

My Mary!

FOOTNOTES.

[127]  The author hopes that he shall not be censured for unnecessary warmth upon so interesting a subject.  He is aware that it is become almost fashionable to stigmatise such sentiments as no better than empty declamation.  But it is an ill symptom, and peculiar to modern times.—C.

[170]  Nebaioth and Kedar, the sons of Ishmael, and progenitors of the Arabs, in the prophetic scripture here alluded to may be reasonably considered as representatives of the Gentiles at large.—C.

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Table of Contents

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Task, and Other Poems, by William Cowper

The Task AND OTHER POEMS

INTRODUCTION.

The Task.

BOOK I. THE SOFA.

BOOK II. THE TIMEPIECE.

BOOK III. THE GARDEN.

BOOK IV. THE WINTER EVENING.

BOOK V. THE WINTER MORNING WALK.

BOOK VI. THE WINTER WALK AT NOON.

THE DIVERTING HISTORY OF JOHN GILPIN;

AN EPISTLE TO JOSEPH HILL, ESQ.

TO MARY.

FOOTNOTES.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE