Imatges de pàgina
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A benefactor to mankind.

Both read the Bible day and night,

But thou read'st black where I read white.

ΙΟ

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When they had wandered three days long,
These were the words upon his tongue:

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"No earthly parents I confess;

I am doing my Father's business."
When the rich learnèd Pharisee
Came to consult him secretly,

Upon his heart with iron pen

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He wrote, "Ye must be born again."

He was too proud to take a bribe;

He spoke with authority, not like a scribe.

He says with most consummate art,

"Follow me; I am meek and lowly of heart,
As that is the only way to escape
The miser's net and the glutton's trap."
He who loves his enemies betrays his friends:
This surely is not what Jesus intends,
But the sneaking pride of heroic schools,

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And the scribes' and Pharisees' virtuous rules;

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He had only to say that God was the Devil,
And the Devil was God, like a Christian civil,
Mild Christian regrets to the Devil confess

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For affronting him thrice in the wilderness,

He had soon been bloody Caesar's elf,

And at last he would have been Caesar himself.

Jesus was sitting in Moses' chair;

They brought the trembling woman there.
Moses commands she be stoned to death:
What was the sound of Jesus' breath?
He laid his hand on Moses' law;
The ancient heavens, in silent awe,
Writ with curses from pole to pole,
All away began to roll.

The Earth trembling and naked lay
In secret bed of mortal clay;

On Sinai felt the hand divine
Putting back the bloody shrine;
And she heard the breath of God,
As she heard by Eden's flood:
"Good and evil are no more!

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What labour yields, and what, that labour past,

Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last,

What form the real picture of the poor,

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Demand a song-the Muse can give no more.

Fled are those times when, in harmonious strains,
The rustic poet praised his native plains;
No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,

Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse:

ΤΟ

Yet still for these we frame the tender strain;
Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal-
The only pains, alas, they never feel.

On Mincio's banks, in Cæsar's bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the Golden Age again,
Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?
Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains,
Because the Muses never knew their pains.
They boast their peasants' pipes; but peasants now
Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough,

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And few amid the rural tribe have time

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To number syllables and play with rhyme:

Save honest Duck, what son of verse could share
The poet's rapture and the peasant's care,
Or the great labours of the field degrade

With the new peril of a poorer trade?

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From this chief cause these idle praises spring-
That themes so easy few forbear to sing,
For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask;

To sing of shepherds is an easy task:

The happy youth assumes the common strain,
A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain;
With no sad scenes he clouds his tuneful prayer,
But all, to look like her, is painted fair.

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I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms;
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place,
And see the mid-day sun with fervid ray

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No: cast by Fortune on a frowning coast,

Which neither groves nor happy valleys boast,
Where other cares than those the Muse relates,

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And other shepherds dwell with other mates,
By such examples taught I paint the cot
As Truth will paint it and as bards will not.
Nor you, ye poor, of lettered scorn complain:
To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain;
O'ercome by labour and bowed down by time,
Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtles round your ruined shed?
Can their light tales your weighty griefs o'erpower,
Or glad with airy mirth the toilsome hour?

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1780?-83.

FROM

1783.

THE BOROUGH

THE SEA

Turn to the watery world! But who to thee
(A wonder yet unviewed) shall paint-the sea?
Various and vast, sublime in all its forms,
When lulled by zephyrs or when roused by storms;
Its colours changing when from clouds and sun
Shades after shades upon the surface run;
Embrowned and horrid now, and now serene
In limpid blue and evanescent green;
And oft the foggy banks on ocean lie,

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Lift the far sail, and cheat th' experienced eye.
Be it the summer noon: a sandy space

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The ebbing tide has left upon its place;
Then, just the hot and stony beach above,

Light twinkling streams in bright confusion move
(For, heated thus, the warmer air ascends,
And with the cooler in its fall contends);
Then the broad bosom of the ocean keeps
An equal motion, swelling as it sleeps,
Then slowly sinking, curling to the strand,
Faint, lazy waves o'ercreep the ridgy sand,
Or tap the tarry boat with gentle blow,
And back return in silence, smooth and slow;
Ships in the calm seem anchored, for they glide
On the still sea, urged solely by the tide.

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Art thou not present, this calm scene before,
Where all beside is pebbly length of shore,

And far as eye can reach it can discern no more?
Yet sometimes comes a ruffling cloud to make
The quiet surface of the ocean shake,
As an awakened giant with a frown

Might show his wrath and then to sleep sink down.
View now the winter storm! Above, one cloud,
Black and unbroken, all the skies o'ershroud;
Th' unwieldy porpoise through the day before
Had rolled in view of boding men on shore,

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And sometimes hid and sometimes showed his form,
Dark as the cloud and furious as the storm.
All where the eye delights yet dreads to roam,
The breaking billows cast the flying foam

Upon the billows rising; all the deep

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Is restless change, the waves so swelled and steep

Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells,

Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells.

But nearer land you may the billows trace,
As if contending in their watery chase,

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May watch the mightiest till the shoal they reach,
Then break and hurry to their utmost stretch;

Curled as they come, they strike with furious force,

And then, re-flowing, take their grating course,

Raking the rounded flints, which ages past

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Rolled by their rage, and shall to ages last.

Far off the petrel in the troubled way

Swims with her brood or flutters in the spray;

She rises often, often drops again,

And sports at ease on the tempestuous main.

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High o'er the restless deep, above the reach

Of gunner's hope, vast flights of wild ducks stretch;

Far as the eye can glance on either side,

In a broad space and level line they glide;

All in their wedge-like figures from the north,

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Day after day, flight after flight, go forth.
Inshore their passage tribes of sea-gulls urge,
And drop for prey within the sweeping surge;
Oft in the rough opposing blast they fly
Far back, then turn and all their force apply,

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