It seems when this allotment was made out, There chanced to be an odd male and odd female,
But hear that several people take exception At the first two books having too much truth; Therefore I'll make Don Juan leave the ship
Who (after some discussion and some doubt
If the soprano might be doom'd to be male, Because the publisher declares, in sooth,
They placed him o'er the women as a scout) | Through needles' eyes it easier for the
Were link'd together, and it happen'd the
camel is
To pass, than those two cantos into families.
Tis all the same to me; I'm fond of yielding,
And therefore leave them to the purer page
Of Smollet, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding,
Who say strange things for so correct an age;
I once had great alacrity in wielding
My pen, and liked poetic war to wage,
And recollect the time when all this cant
Would have provoked remarks which now
it shan't.
As boys love rows, my boyhood liked a squabble;
But at this hour I wish to part in peace,
Leaving such to the literary rabble,
Whether my verse's fame be doom'd to cease,
While the right hand which wrote it still is
able,
Or of some centuries to take a lease;
The grass upon my grave will grow as long,
And sigh to midnight-winds, but not to song.
Of poets who come down to us through distance*
Of time and tongues, the foster-babes of
Fame,
Life seems the smallest portion of existence;
Where twenty ages gather o'er a name,
'Tis as a snowball which derives assistance
From every flake,and yet rolls on the same,
Even till an iceberg it may chance to grow,
But after all 'tis nothing but cold snow.
And so great names are nothing more than nominal,
And love of glory 's but an airy lust,
Too often in its fury overcoming all
Who would, as 'twere, identify their dust
From out the wide destruction, which en-
tombing all,
Leaves nothing till the coming of the just-
Save change: I've stood upon Achilles' tomb,
And heard Troy doubted; time will doubt
of Rome.
The very generations of the dead
Are swept away, and tomb inherits tomb,
Until the memory of an age is fled,
And, buried, sinks beneath its offspring's
doom:
Where are the epitaphs our fathers read?
Save a few glean'd from the sepulchral gloom
Which once-named myriads nameless lie | Oh! ye, who make the fortunes of all books
And there, with Georgians, Russians, and | Even Petrarch's self, if judged with due severity
Bought up for different purposes and Is the Platonic pimp of all posterity.
A crowd of shivering slaves of every nation, | At present weigh'd down by a doom whic And age, and sex, were in the market ranged; had Each bevy with the merchant in his station: O'erthrown even men, he soon began t Poor creatures! their good looks were sadly show
A kind of blunt compassion for the sad Lot of so young a partner in the woe, Which for himself he seem'd to deem n worse
Than any other scrape, a thing of course
|