ON THE HIGH PRICE OF FISH.*
COCOA-NUT naught,
Fish too dear,
None must be bought
For us that are here:
No lobster on earth,
That ever I saw,
To me would be worth
Sixpence a claw.
So, dear Madam, wait
Till fish can be got
At a reasonable rate,
Whether lobster or not;
Till the French and the Dutch
Have quitted the seas,
And then send as much
And as oft as you please.
ON RECEIVING A BARREL OF OYSTERS.
A NOBLE theme demands a noble verse,
In such I thank you for your fine oysters.
The barrel was magnificently large,
But, being sent to Olney at free charge,
Was not inserted in the driver's list,
And therefore overlook'd, forgot, or miss'd;
For, when the messenger whom we dispatch'd
Inquired for the oysters, Hob his noddle scratched;
Denying that his waggon or his wain
Did any such commodity contain.
In consequence of which, your welcome boon
Did not arrive till yesterday at noon;
In consequence of which some chanced to die,
And some, though very sweet, were very dry.
Now Madam says (and what she says must still
Deserve attention, say she what she will),
On receiving a basket of fish from Mrs. Newton; intended to dissuade her from sending more till they were cheaper.
That what we call the diligence, be-case
It goes to London with a swifter pace,
Would better suit the carriage of your gift,
Returning downward with a pace as swift;
And therefore recommends it with this ain-
To save at least three days,-the price the same;
For though it will not carry or convey
For less than twelvepence, send whate'er you may,
For oysters bred upon the salt sea-shore,
Pack'd in a barrel, they will charge no more.
News have I none that I can deign to write,
Save that it rained prodigiously last night;
And that ourselves were, at the seventh hour,
Caught in the first beginning of the shower;
But walking, running, and with much ado,
Got home-just time enough to be wet through;
Yet both are well, and, wondrous to be told,
Soused as we were, we yet have caught no cold;
And wishing just the same good hap to you,
We say, good Madam, and good Sir, adieu!
IF John marries Mary, and Mary alone,
'Tis a very good match between Mary and John.
Should John wed a score, oh the claws and the scratches!
It can't be a match :-'tis a bundle of matches.*
TO SIR JOSHUA
DEAR President, whose art sublime
Gives perpetuity to time,
And bids transactions of a day,
That fleeting hours would waft away
To dark futurity, survive,
And in unfading beauty live,-
You cannot with a grace decline
A special mandate of the Nine-
Yourself, whatever task you choose,
So much indebted to the Muse.
Thus say the sisterhood: We come, Fix well your palette on your thumb, Prepare the pencil and the tintsWe come to furnish you with hints. French disappointment, British glory,
Must be the subject of the story.
First strike a curve, a graceful bow, Then slope it to a point below; Your outline easy, airy, light,
* One of the epigrams suggested by the Thelyphthora.
Fill'd up becomes a paper kitę.
Let independence, sanguine, horrid,
Blaze like a meteor in the forehead:
Beneath (but lay aside your graces)
Draw six-and-twenty rueful faces,
Each with a staring, stedfast eye,
Fix'd on his great and good ally.
France flies the kite-'tis on the
wing-
Britannia's lightning cuts the
string.
The wind that raised it, ere it ceases, Just rends it into thirteen pieces,
Takes charge of every fluttering sheet,
And lays them all at George's feet.
Iberia, trembling from afar,
Renounces the confederate war;
Her efforts and her arts o'ercome,
France calls her shatter'd navies
home.
Repenting Holland learns to mourn
The sacred treaties she has torn ;
Astonishment and awe profound
Are stamp'd upon the nations round;
Without one friend, above all foes,
Britannia gives the world repose.
A POETICAL EPISTLE TO LADY AUSTEN.
DEAR Anna-between friend and
Prose answers every common end; Serves, in a plain and homely way, Toexpress the occurrence of the day; Our health, the weather, and the news, What walks we take, what books we choose,
And all the floating thoughts we find Upon the surface of the mind.
But when a poet takes the pen, Far more alive than other men, He feels a gentle tingling come Down to his finger and his thumb, Derived from nature's noblest part, The centre of a glowing heart: And this is what the world, who knows No flights above the pitch of prose, His more sublime vagaries slighting, Denominates an itch for writing. No wonder I, who scribble rhyme To catch the triflers of the time, And tell them truths divine and clear, Which, couch'd in prose, they will not hear;
Who labour hard to allure and draw The loiterers I never saw,
Should feel that itching and that
tingling
With all my purpose intermingling,
To your intrinsic erit true,
When call'd to address myself to you.
Mysterious are His ways, whose
+ Mrs. Jones, Lady Austen's sister, who lived at Clifton Reynes. She was the wife of
Lady Austen's place in France.
Are come from distant Loire, to choose
A cottage on the banks of Ouse. This page of Providence quite new, And now just opening to our view, Employs our present thoughts and
To guess and spell what it contains:
But day by day, and year by year,
Will make the dark enigma clear;
And furnish us, perhaps, at last,
Like other scenes already past,
With proof, that we, and our affairs,
Are part of a Jehovah's cares;
For God unfolds by slow degrees
The purport of His deep decrees;
Sheds every hour a clearer light
In aid of our defective sight;
And spreads, at length, before the
soul,
A beautiful and perfect whole,
Which busy man's inventive brain
Toils to anticipate, in vain.
Say, Anna, had you never known The beauties of a rose full blown, Could you, though luminous your eye, By looking on the bud descry, Or guess, with a prophetic power, The future splendour of the flower? Just so, the Omnipotent, who turns The system of a world's concerns, From mere minutiæ can educe Events of most important use, And bid a dawning sky display
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For our dim-sighted observation;
It pass'd unnoticed, as the bird
That cleaves the yielding air unheard,
And yet may prove when understood
An harbinger of endless good.
Not that I deem, or mean to call
Friendship a blessing cheap or small:
But merely to remark, that ours,
Like some of Nature's sweetest
flowers,
Rose from a seed of tiny size,
That seem'd to promise no such
prize;
A transient visit intervening,
And made almost without a meaning,
(Hardly the effect of inclination,
Much less of pleasing expectation,)
Produced a friendship, then begun,
That has cemented us in one;
And placed it in our power to prove,
By long fidelity and love,
That Solomon has wisely spoken,— "A threefold cord is not soon broken."
WRITTEN IN RAINY WEATHER.
To watch the storms, and hear the sky Give all our almanacs the lie;
To shake with cold and see the plains In autumn drowned with wintry rains; 'Tis thus I spend my moments here, And wish myself a Dutch Mynheer;
I then should have no need of wit;
For lumpish Hollander unfit!
Nor should I then repine at mud,
Or meadows deluged by a flood;
But in a bog live well content,
And find it just my element;
Should be a clod and not a man,
Nor wish in vain for Sister Ann,
With charitable aid to drag
My mind out of its proper quag;
Should have the genius of a boor
And no ambition to have more.
THERE was a time when Etna's silent fire
Slept unperceived, the mountain yet entire;
When, conscious of no danger from below,
She towered a cloud-capped pyramid of snow.
No thunders shook with deep intestine sound
The blooming groves that girdled her around,
Her unctuous olives, and her purple vines,
(Unfelt the fury of those bursting mines)
The peasant's hopes, and not in vain, assured,
In peace upon her sloping sides matured.
When on a day like that of the last doom,
A conflagration labouring in her womb,
She teemed and heaved with an.infernal birth,
That shook the circling seas and solid earth.
Dark and voluminous the vapours rise,
And hang their horrors in the neighbouring skies,
While through the Stygian veil that blots the day,
In dazzling streaks the vivid lightnings play.
But oh! what Muse, and in what powers of song,
Can trace the torrent as it burns along?
Havoc and devastation in the van,
It marches o'er the prostrate works of man-
Vines, olives, herbage, forests disappear,
And all the charms of a Sicilian year.
Revolving seasons, fruitless as they pass,
See it an uninformed and idle mass;
Without a soil to invite the tiller's care,
Or blade that might redeem it from Despair.
Yet Time at length (what will not Time achieve?)
Clothes it with earth, and bids the produce live.
Once more the spiry myrtle crowns the glade,
And ruminating flocks enjoy the shade.
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