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of Gosfield, with whom he visited the continent for several summers. He was next patronised by Frederick, Prince of Wales, then head of the Opposition, and by command of the prince, he wrote, in conjunction with Thomson, the mask of Alfred, which was performed in 1740, at Cliefden, the summer residence of his royal highness. In this slight dramatic performance-which was afterwards altered by Mallet, and brought upon the stage at Drury Lane in 1751-Rule Britannia first appeared; a song which, as Southey said, will be the political hymn of this country as long as she maintains her political power.' Whether Thomson or Mallet was the author of Rule Britannia is not quite settled. A competent critic, Mr Bolton Corney, ascribes it to Mallet, who indirectly claimed it as wholly his own composition, but his assertion carries little weight with it, and the lyric seems to breathe the higher inspiration and more manly and patriotic spirit of Thomson. The neat artistic hand of Mallet may, however, have been employed on some of the stanzas. In the same year (1740), Mallet wrote a life of Bacon, prefixed to an edition of the works of the philosopher. In 1742, he was appointed under-secretary to the Prince of Wales, with a salary of £200 per annum ; and a fortunate second marriage-nothing is known of his first-added to his income, as the lady had a fortune of seven or eight thousand pounds. She was daughter of Lord Carlisle's steward. Both Mallet and his wife professed to be deists, and the lady is said to have surprised some of her friends by commencing her arguments with: 'Sir, we deists.' When Gibbon the historian was dismissed from his college at Oxford for embracing popery, he took refuge in Mallet's house, and was rather scandalised, he says, than reclaimed, by the philosophy of his host. Wilkes mentions that the vain and fantastic wife of Mallet one day lamented to a lady that her husband suffered in reputation by his name being so often confounded with that of Smollett; the lady wittily answered: Madam, there is a short remedy; let your husband keep his own name.' On the death of the Duchess of Marlborough, it was found that she had left £1000 to Glover, author of Leonidas, and Mallet jointly, on condition that they should draw up from the family papers a life of the great duke. Glover, indignant at a stipulation in the will, that the memoir was to be submitted before publication to the Earl of Chesterfield, and being a high-spirited man, devolved the whole on Mallet, who also received a pension from the second Duke of Marlborough to stimulate his industry. He pretended to be busy with the work, and in the dedication to a small collection of his poems published in 1762, he stated that he hoped soon to present his grace with something more solid in the life of the first Duke of Marlborough. Mallet had received the solid money, and cared for nothing else. On his death, it was found that not a single line of the memoir had been written. In 1747, appeared Mallet's poem, Amyntor and Theodora. This, the longest of his poetical works, is a tale in blank verse, the scene of which is laid in the solitary island of St Kilda, whither one of his characters, Aurelius, had fled to avoid the religious persecutions under Charles II. Some highly wrought descriptions of marine scenery, storms, and shipwreck, with a few touches of natural

pathos and affection, constitute the chief characteristics of the poem. The whole, however-even the very names in such a locality-has an air of improbability and extravagance. In 1749, Mallet came forward as the ostensible editor of Bolingbroke's Patriot King-insulting the memory of his benefactor Pope; and the peer rewarded him by bequeathing to him the whole of his works, manuscripts, and library. Mallet's love of money and infidel principles were equally gratified by this bequest-he published the collected works of Bolingbroke in 1754* His next appearance was also of a discreditable character. When the government became unpopular by the defeat at Minorca, Mallet was employed (1756) in its defence, and under the signature of a Plain Man, he published an address imputing cowardice to the admiral of the fleet. He succeeded: Byng was shot, and Mallet was pensioned. The accession of George III. opened a way for all literary Scotsmen subservient to the crown. Mallet was soon a worshipper of the favourite Lord Bute. In 1761, he published a flattering poetical epistle, Truth in Rhyme, addressed to Lord Bute, and equally laudatory of the king and the minister. Of this piece Chesterfield said:

It has no faults, or I no faults can spy:
It is all beauty, or all blindness I.

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Astrea from her native sky beholds the virtues of the patriot king,' and summons Urania to sing his praises. Urania doubts whether a prince deserving but shunning fame, would permit her strains, but she calls upon all Britons to emulate their king, and, considering to whom such 'grateful lays' should be sent,

To strike at once all scandal mute,

The goddess found, and fixed on Bute! Such is the poor conceit on which the rhyme is built. Mallet afterwards dedicated his tragedy of Elvira (1763) to Lord Bute, and was rewarded with the office of Keeper of the Book of Entries for the port of London, which was worth £400 per annum. He enjoyed this appointment little more than two years, dying in London, April 21, 1765.

Gibbon anticipated that if ever his friend Mallet should attain poetic fame, it would be by his Amyntor and Theodora; but, contrary to the dictum of the historian, the poetic fame of Mallet rests on his ballads, and chiefly on his William and Margaret, which, written about the age of twenty-two, afforded high hopes of ultimate excellence. The simplicity, here remarkable, he seems to have thrown aside when he assumed the airs and dress of a man of taste and fashion. All critics, from Dr Percy downwards, have united in considering William and Margaret one of the finest compositions of the kind in our language. Sir Walter Scott conceived that Mallet had imitated an old Scottish tale to be found in Allan Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany, beginning:

There came a ghost to Margaret's door. The resemblance is striking. Mallet confessed only

Johnson's sentence on the noble author and his editor is one of his most pointed conversational memorabilia: Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderresolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly buss against religion and morality; a coward because he had not Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.'

-in a note to his ballad-to the following verse in Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle:

When it was grown to dark midnight,

And all were fast asleep,

In came Margaret's grimly ghost,

And stood at William's feet.

In the first printed copies of Mallet's ballad, the first two lines were nearly the same as the above

When all was wrapt in dark midnight,

And all were fast asleep.

He improved the rhyme by the change; but beautiful as the idea is of night and morning meeting, it may be questioned whether there is not more of the ballad simplicity in the old words.

William and Margaret.

'Twas at the silent solemn hour, When night and morning meet; In glided Margaret's grimly ghost, And stood at William's feet.

Her face was like an April morn
Clad in a wintry cloud;
And clay-cold was her lily hand
That held her sable shroud.

So shall the fairest face appear,

When youth and years are flown: Such is the robe that kings must wear, When death has reft their crown.

Her bloom was like the springing flower,
That sips the silver dew;
The rose was budded in her cheek,
Just opening to the view.

But love had, like the canker-worm,
Consumed her early prime;

The rose grew pale, and left her cheek,
She died before her time.

'Awake!' she cried, 'thy true love calls, Come from her midnight grave:

Now let thy pity hear the maid
Thy love refused to save.

'This is the dark and dreary hour

When injured ghosts complain; When yawning graves give up their dead, To haunt the faithless swain.

'Bethink thee, William, of thy fault, Thy pledge and broken oath! And give me back my maiden vow, And give me back my troth.

'Why did you promise love to me,
And not that promise keep?
Why did you swear my eyes were bright,
Yet leave those eyes to weep?

'How could you say my face was fair,
And yet that face forsake?
How could you win my virgin heart,
Yet leave that heart to break?

'Why did you say my lip was sweet,
And made the scarlet pale?
And why did I, young, witless maid!
Believe the flattering tale?

'That face, alas! no more is fair, Those lips no longer red:

Dark are my eyes, now closed in death,
And every charm is fled.

'The hungry worm my sister is;
This winding-sheet I wear :
And cold and weary lasts our night,
Till that last morn appear.

'But hark! the cock has warned me hence; A long and last adieu !

Come see, false man, how low she lies,
Who died for love of you.'

The lark sung loud; the morning smiled
With beams of rosy red :
Pale William quaked in every limb,
And raving left his bed.

He hied him to the fatal place

Where Margaret's body lay;

And stretched him on the green-grass turf That wrapt her breathless clay.

And thrice he called on Margaret's name,
And thrice he wept full sore;

Then laid his cheek to her cold grave,
And word spake never more!

The Birks of Invermay.

The smiling morn, the breathing spring,
Invite the tunefu' birds to sing;
And, while they warble from the spray,
Love melts the universal lay.
Let us, Amanda, timely wise,
Like them, improve the hour that flies;
And in soft raptures waste the day,
Among the birks of Invermay.

For soon the winter of the year,
And age, life's winter, will appear;
At this thy living bloom will fade,
As that will strip the verdant shade.
Our taste of pleasure then is o'er,
The feathered songsters are no more;
And when they drop and we decay,
Adieu the birks of Învermay!

Some additional stanzas were added to the above by Dr Bryce, Kirknewton. Invermay is in Perthshire, the native county of Mallet, and is situated near the termination of a little picturesque stream called the May. The 'birk' or birch-tree is abundant, adding grace and beauty to rock and stream. Though a Celt by birth, Mallet had none of the imaginative wildness or superstition of his native country. Macpherson, on the other hand, seems to have been completely imbued with it.

MARK AKENSIDE,

The author of The Pleasures of Imagination, one of the most pure and noble-minded poems of the age, was of humble origin. His parents were dissenters, and the Puritanism imbibed in his early years seems, as in the case of Milton, to have given a gravity and earnestness to his character, and a love of freedom to his thoughts and imagination. MARK AKENSIDE was the son of a respectable butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he was born, November 9, 1721. An accident in his early years-the fall of one of his father's cleavers, or hatchets, on his foot-rendered him lame for life, and perpetuated the

recollection of his lowly birth. The Society of Dissenters advanced a sum for the education of the poet as a clergyman, and he repaired to Edinburgh for this purpose in his eighteenth year. He afterwards repented of this destination, and, returning the money, entered himself as a student of medicine. He was then a poet, and in his Hymn to Science, written in Edinburgh, we see at once the formation of his classic taste, and the dignity of his personal character:

That last best effort of thy skill,
To form the life and rule the will,
Propitious Power! impart ;
Teach me to cool my passion's fires,
Make me the judge of my desires,
The master of my heart.

Raise me above the vulgar's breath,
Pursuit of fortune, fear of death,

And all in life that's mean;
Still true to reason be my plan,
Still let my actions speak the man,
Through every various scene.

have been a caricature of Akenside. The description, for rich humour and grotesque combinations of learning and folly, has not been excelled by Smollett; but it was unworthy his talents to cast ridicule on a man of high character, learning, and genius. Akenside died suddenly of a putrid sore throat, on the 23d of June 1770, in his 49th year, and was buried in St James's Church. With a feeling common to poets, as to more ordinary mortals, Akenside, in his latter days, reverted with delight to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne. In his fragment of a fourth book of the Pleasures of Imagination, written in the last year of his life, there is the following beautiful

passage:

O ye dales

Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where
Oft, as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene, some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands!
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream!
How gladly I recall your well-known seats
Beloved of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wandered through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.
Nor will I e'er forget you; nor shall e'er
The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice
Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim
Those studies which possessed me in the dawn
Of life, and fixed the colour of my mind
For every future year: whence even now
From sleep I rescue the clear hours of morn,
And, while the world around lies overwhelmed
In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts
Of honourable fame, of truth divine
Or moral, and of minds to virtue won
By the sweet magic of harmonious verse.

The spirit of Milton seems to speak in this strain of lofty egotism!*

A youth animated by such sentiments, promised a manhood of honour and integrity. The medical studies of Akenside were completed at Leyden, where he took his degree of M.D. May 16, 1744. Previous to this he had published anonymously his Pleasures of Imagination, which appeared in January of that year, and was so well received that a second edition was called for within four months. The price demanded for the copyright was £120, a large sum; but Dodsley the publisher having submitted it to Pope, the latter advised him not to make a niggardly offer, 'for this was no everyday writer.' The success of the work justified alike poet, critic, and publisher. The same year Akenside in a poetical epistle attacked Pulteney under the name of Curio, but desirous of some more solid support than the Muse, he commenced physician at Northampton. The ground was preoccupied, and he did not succeed. He then published a collection of Odes, and in The Pleasures of Imagination is a poem seldom January 1746, he engaged to contribute to Dods- read continuously, though its finer passages, by ley's Museum an essay and review of new books frequent quotation, particularly in works of critionce a fortnight, for which he was to receive cism and moral philosophy, are well known. Gray £100 per annum. He continued also to practise censured the mixture of spurious philosophyas a physician, first at Hampstead, and afterwards the speculations of Hutcheson and Shaftesburyin Bloomsbury Square, London, and he published which the work contains. Plato, Lucretius, and several medical treatises. At Leyden he had formed even the papers by Addison in the Spectator, were an intimacy with a young Englishman of fortune, also laid under contribution by the studious author. Jeremiah Dyson, Esq. which ripened into a friend- He gathered sparks of enthusiasm from kindred ship of the most close and enthusiastic description: minds, but the train was in his own. The pleasand Mr Dyson-who was afterwards clerk of the ures which his poem professes to treat of, 'proHouse of Commons, a lord of the treasury, &c-ceed,' he says, either from natural objects, as had the generosity to allow the poet £300 a year. from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring After writing a few Odes, and attempting a total fountain, a calm sea by moonlight, or from works alteration of his great poem-in which he was far of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a from successful-Akenside made no further efforts statue, a picture, a poem.' These, with the moral at composition. In 1757, appeared the enlargement and intellectual objects arising from them, furnish of the First Book of his Pleasures of Imagination, of the Second Book in 1765, and a fragment of an intended Fourth Book was published after his death. The society of the poet was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients, exposed him occasionally to ridicule. The physician in Peregrine Pickle, who gives a feast in the manner of the ancients, is supposed to

Thus Milton in his Apology for Smectymnuus: Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught; then with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish, obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations. See also the fine passage ante, page 330.

abundant topics for illustration; but Akenside compromised his dignity, though he blended dealt chiefly with abstract subjects, pertaining sweetness with its expression.

He

more to philosophy than to poetry. He did not seek to graft upon them human interests and passions. In tracing the final causes of our emotions, he could have described their exercise and effects in scenes of ordinary pain or pleasure in the walks of real life. This does not seem, however, to have been the purpose of the poet, and hence his work is deficient in interest. seldom stoops from the heights of philosophy and classic taste. He considered that physical science improved the charms of nature. Contrary to the feeling of another poet (Campbell) who repudiates these 'cold material laws,' he viewed the rainbow with additional pleasure after he had studied the Newtonian theory of lights and colours :

Nor ever yet

The melting rainbow's vernal tinctured hues
To me have shone so pleasing, as when first
The hand of Science pointed out the path

In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west
Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil
Involves the orient.

Akenside's Hymn to the Naiads has the true classical spirit. He had caught the manner and feeling, the varied pause and harmony, of the Greek poets, with such felicity, that Lloyd considered his Hymn as fitted to give a better idea of that form of composition, than could be conveyed by any translation of Homer or Callimachus. Gray was an equally learned poet, perhaps superior his knowledge was better digested. But Gray had not the romantic enthusiasm of character, tinged with pedantry, which naturally belonged to Akenside. He had also the experience of mature years. The genius of Akenside was early developed, and his diffuse and florid descriptions seem the natural product-marvellous of its kind -of youthful exuberance. He was afterwards conscious of the defects of his poem. He saw that there was too much leaf for the fruit; but in cutting off these luxuriances, he sacrificed some of the finest blossoms. Posterity has been more just to his fame, by almost wholly disregarding this second copy of his philosophical poem. In his youthful aspirations after moral and intellectual greatness and beauty, he seems, like Jeremy Taylor in the pulpit, an angel newly descended from the visions of glory.' In advanced years, he is the professor in his robes; still free from stain, but stately, formal, and severe. The blank verse of the Pleasures of Imagination is free and well modulated, and seems to be distinctly his own. Though apt to run into too long periods, it has more compactness of structure than Thomson's ordinary composition. Its occasional want of perspicuity probably arises from the fineness of his distinctions, and the difficulty attending mental analysis in verse. He might also wish to avoid all vulgar and common expressions, and thus err from excessive refinement. A redundancy of ornament undoubtedly, in some passages, takes off from the clearness and prominence of his conceptions. His highest flights, however-as in the allusion to the death of Cæsar, and his exquisitely wrought parallel between art and nature-have a flow and energy of expression, with appropriate imagery, which mark the great poet. His style is chaste, yet elevated and musical. He never

Aspirations after the Infinite.

Say, why was man so eminently raised
Amid the vast creation; why ordained
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run
The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds;

To chase each partial purpose from his breast:
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,

The applauding smile of Heaven? Else wherefore burns
In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope,
That breathes from day to day sublimer things,
And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardour to embrace
Majestic forms; impatient to be free,
Spurning the gross control of wilful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring? who but rather turns
To Heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?
Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains, through empires black
with shade,

And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
To mark the windings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve
The fated rounds of Time. Thence far effused,
She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs
Exulting measures the perennial wheel
Of Nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,
Invests the orient. Now, amazed she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrived in sight of mortal things.
Even on the barriers of the world, untired
She meditates the eternal depth below;
Till half-recoiling, down the headlong steep
She plunges; soon o'erwhelmed and swallowed up
In that immense of being. There her hopes
Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,
Power's purple robes, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment: but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,
Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear.
And infinite perfection close the scene.

Patriotism.

Mind, mind alone-bear witness, earth and heaven!—
The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand
Sit paramount the Graces; here enthroned,
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,
Invites the soul to never-fading joy.

Look, then, abroad through nature, to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense;
And speak, O man! does this capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove,

When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the father of his country, hail!
For lo! the tyrant prostrate on the dust,
And Rome again is free! Is aught so fair
In all the dewy landscapes of the spring,
In the bright eye of Hesper, or the morn,
In Nature's fairest forms, is aught so fair
As virtuous friendship? as the candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just?
The graceful tear that streams for others' woes,
Or the mild majesty of private life,
Where Peace, with ever-blooming olive, crowns
The gate; where Honour's liberal hands effuse
Unenvied treasures, and the snowy wings
Of Innocence and Love protect the scene?

Taste.

What, then, is taste, but these internal powers
Active, and strong, and feelingly alive
To each fine impulse? a discerning sense
Of decent and sublime, with quick disgust
From things deformed or disarranged, or gross
In species? This, nor gems nor stores of gold,
Nor purple state, nor culture can bestow;
But God alone, when first his active hand
Imprints the secret bias of the soul.
He, mighty Parent! wise and just in all,
Free as the vital breeze or light of heaven,
Reveals the charms of nature. Ask the swain
Who journeys homeward from a summer day's
Long labour, why, forgetful of his toils
And due repose, he loiters to behold

The sunshine gleaming, as through amber clouds,
O'er all the western sky; full soon, I ween,

His rude expression and untutored airs,
Beyond the power of language, will unfold
The form of beauty smiling at his heart,

How lovely! how commanding! But though heaven
In every breast hath sown these early seeds
Of love and admiration, yet in vain,
Without fair culture's kind parental aid,
Without enlivening suns, and genial showers,
And shelter from the blast, in vain we hope
The tender plant should rear its blooming head,
Or yield the harvest promised in its spring.
Nor yet will every soil with equal stores
Repay the tiller's labour; or attend
His will, obsequious, whether to produce
The olive or the laurel. Different minds
Incline to different objects: one pursues
The vast alone, the wonderful, the wild;
Another sighs for harmony, and grace,

And gentlest beauty. Hence when lightning fires
The arch of heaven, and thunders rock the ground;
When furious whirlwinds rend the howling air,
And ocean, groaning from his lowest bed,
Heaves his tempestuous billows to the sky,

Amid the mighty uproar, while below
The nations tremble, Shakspeare looks abroad
From some high cliff superior, and enjoys
The elemental war. But Waller longs
All on the margin of some flowery stream
To spread his careless limbs amid the cool
Of plantane shades, and to the listening deer
The tale of slighted vows and love's disdain
Resound soft-warbling all the livelong day:
Consenting zephyr sighs; the weeping rill
Joins in his plaint, melodious; mute the groves;
And hill and dale with all their echoes mourn.
Such and so various are the tastes of men.

O blest of heaven! whom not the languid songs Of luxury, the siren! not the bribes

Of sordid wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils
Of pageant honour, can seduce to leave

Those ever-blooming sweets, which from the store
Of nature fair Imagination culls

To charm the enlivened soul. What though not all
Of mortal offspring can attain the heights
Of envied life; though only few possess
Patrician treasures or imperial state;
Yet Nature's care, to all her children just,
With richer treasures and an ampler state,
Endows at large whatever happy man
Will deign to use them. His the city's pomp
The rural honours his. Whate'er adorns
The princely dome, the column and the arch,
The breathing marble and the sculptured gold,
Beyond the proud possessor's narrow claim,
His tuneful breast enjoys. For him the spring
Distils her dews, and from the silken gem
Its lucid leaves unfolds: for him the hand
Of autumn tinges every fertile branch
With blooming gold and blushes like the morn.
Each passing hour sheds tribute from her wings;
And still new beauties meet his lonely walk,
And loves unfelt attract him. Not a breeze
Flies o'er the meadow, not a cloud imbibes
The setting sun's effulgence, not a strain
From all the tenants of the warbling shade
Ascends, but whence his bosom can partake
Fresh pleasure, unreproved. Nor thence partakes
Fresh pleasure only: for the attentive mind,
By this harmonious action on her powers,
Becomes herself harmonious: wont so oft
In outward things to meditate the charm
Of sacred order, soon she seeks at home
To find a kindred order, to exert
Within herself this elegance of love,

This fair inspired delight: her tempered powers
Refine at length, and every passion wears
A chaster, milder, more attractive mien.
But if to ampler prospects, if to gaze
On nature's form, where, negligent of all
These lesser graces, she assumes the port
Of that eternal majesty that weighed

The world's foundations: if to these the mind
Exalts her daring eye; then mightier far

Will be the change, and nobler. Would the forms
Of servile custom cramp her generous power;
Would sordid policies, the barbarous growth

Of ignorance and rapine, bow her down
To tame pursuits, to indolence and fear?
Lo! she appeals to nature, to the winds
And rolling waves, the sun's unwearied course,
The elements and seasons: all declare
For what the eternal Maker has ordained
The powers of man: we feel within ourselves
His energy divine: he tells the heart,

He meant, he made us to behold and love
What he beholds and loves, the general orb
Of life and being; to be great like him,
Beneficent and active. Thus the men
Whom nature's works can charm, with God himself
Hold converse; grow familiar, day by day,

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