TO SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

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 pallet on your thumb,
Prepare the pencil and the tints-
We 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, Filled up becomes a paper kite. 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, steadfast eye, Fixed on his great and good ally. France flies the kite-'tis on the wingBritannia'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 shattered navies home; Repenting Holland learns to mourn The sacred treaties she has torn; Astonishment and awe profound Are stamped 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 friend
Prose answers every common end;
Serves, in a plain and homely way,
To express the occurrence of the day;
Our health, the weather, and the news,
What walks we take, what books we chuse,
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, couched 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 merit true,

When called to address myself to you.

ways, whose power

Brings forth that unexpected hour,

When minds that never met before

Shall meet, unite, and part no more:
It is the allotment of the skies,
The hand of the Supremely Wise,
That guides and governs our affections
And plans and orders our connexions:
Directs us in our distant road,

And marks the bounds of our abode.
Thus we were settled when
found us,
you
Peasants and children all around us,
Not dreaming of so dear a friend,
Deep in the abyss of Silver-End.
Thus Martha, even against her will,

Perched on the top of yonder hill;
And you, though you must needs prefer
The fairer scenes of sweet Sancerre,
Are come from distant Loire to choose
A cottage on the banks of Ouse.
of Providence quite new,

This page

And now just opening to our view,
Employs our present thoughts and pains
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
The blaze of a meridian day.

The works of man tend, one and all,
As needs they must, from great to small;

And vanity absorbs at length

The monuments of human strength.
But who can tell how vast the plan
Which this day's incident began?
Too small, perhaps, the slight occasion
For our dim-sighted observation;
It passed unnoticed, as the bird
That cleaves the yielding air unheard,
And yet may prove, when understood,
A 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 seemed 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."

THE FLATTING MILL

AN ILLUSTRATION

WHEN a bar of pure silver or ingot of gold
Is sent to be flatted or wrought into length,
It is passed between cylinders often, and rolled
In an engine of utmost mechanical strength.
Thus tortured and squeezed, at last it appears
Like a loose heap of ribbon, a glittering show,
Like music it tinkles and rings in your ears,
And, warmed by the pressure, is all in a glow.

This process achieved, it is doomed to sustain
The thump after thump of a gold-beater's mallet,
And at last is of service in sickness or pain
To cover a pill for a delicate palate.

Alas for the poet! who dares undertake
To urge reformation of national ill-
His head and his heart are both likely to ache
With the double employment of mallet and mill.

If he wish to instruct, he must learn to delight;
Smooth, ductile, and even, his fancy must flow,
Must tinkle and glitter like gold to the sight,

And catch in its progress a sensible glow.

After all, he must beat it as thin and as fine

As the leaf that enfolds what an invalid swallows; For truth is unwelcome, however divine,

And unless you adorn it, a nausea follows.

FRIENDSHIP

WHAT virtue, or what mental grace,
But men unqualified and base
Will boast it their possession?
Profusion apes the noble part
Of liberality of heart,

And dulness of discretion.

If every polished gem we find,
Illuminating heart or mind,
Provoke to imitation,

No wonder friendship does the same,
That jewel of the brightest flame,
Or rather constellation.

No knave but boldly will pretend
The requisites that form a friend,
A real and a sound one;
Nor any fool he would deceive
But prove as ready to believe,

And dream that he had found one.

Candid, and generous, and just,

Boys care but little whom they trust,—

An error soon corrected;

For who but learns in riper years
That man, when smoothest he appears,
Is most to be suspected?

But here again a danger lies,
Lest, having misemployed our eyes
And taken trash for treasure,
We should unwarily conclude
Friendship a false ideal good,
A mere Utopian pleasure.

An acquisition rather rare
Is yet no subject of despair;
Nor is it wise complaining,
If either on forbidden ground,
Or where it was not to be found,
We sought without attaining.