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 slant- ing ray
Slides ineffectual down the snowy vale, And tinging 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, I 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 shape- less 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
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, 71 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
O'erwhelming all distinction. On the flood, Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight Lies undissolved; while silently beneath, And unperceived, the current steals away. 100 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 con
Shoot into pillars of pellucid length, And prop the pile they but adorned before. Here grotto within grotto safe defies
The sunbeam; there embossed and fretted wild,
The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes
Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain 120
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, 130 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 Aristæus 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
Sofa and couch and high-built throne august.
The same lubricity was found in all, And all was moist to the warm touch; a
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 mausolean pomp, Short-lived themselves, to immortalize 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 would not play at. Nations would do well
To extort their truncheons from the puny hands
Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds 190 Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world. When Babel was confounded, and the
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
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 250 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
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, 269 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
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 ma- ture
In wisdom, and with philosophic deeds 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, 310 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 In the shadow of a bramble, and reclined 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
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 mere attachment to the throne,
Not to the man who fills it as he ought. Whose freedom is by suffrance, 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
1 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 stigmatize such sentiments as no better than empty declamation; but it is an ill symptom, and peculiar to modern times.
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