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.

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It is not seemly, nor of good report,

That she is slack in discipline; more prompt

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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 centering all authority in modes
And customs of her own, till Sabbath rites

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Have dwindled into unrespected forms,

And knees and hassocks are well-nigh divorced.

God made the country, and man made the town;

What wonder then that health and virtue, gifts

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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, what enemies could ne'er have done,
Our arch of empire, steadfast but for you,
A mutilated structure, soon to fall.

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BOOK II.

THE TIME-PIECE.

ARGUMENT.-Reflections suggested by the conclusion of the former book-Peace among the nations recommended on the ground of their common fellowship in sorrow-Prodigies enumerated-Sicilian earthquakes-Man rendered obnoxious to these calamities by sin-God the agent in them-The philosophy that stops at secondary causes reproved-Our own late miscarriages accounted for-Satirical notice taken of our trips to Fontainbleau-But the pulpit, not satire, the proper engine of reformation-The reverend advertiser of engraved sermons-Petitmaître parson-The good preacher-Picture of a theatrical clerical coxcomb-Story-tellers and jesters in the pulpit reproved-Apostrophe to popular applause-Retailers of ancient philosophy expostulated with-Sum of the whole matter-Effects of sacerdotal mismanagement on the laity -Their folly and extravagance-The mischiefs of profusion-Profusion itself, with all its consequent evils, ascribed, as to its principal cause, to the want of discipline in the universities.

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 of its own decease,
And by the voice of all its element,

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,

* Alluding to the late calamities in Jamaica,
↑ Aug. 18, 1783.

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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 pertorms 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

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ICO

* Alluding to the fog that covered both Europe and Asia during the whole summer of 1783.

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.

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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.

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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.

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