'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,

Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung

He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove

He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move, And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirred its busy crown,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down,
Coquetting with young beeches ;
And briony-vine and ivy-wreath
Ran forward to his rhyming,
And from the valleys underneath
Came little copses climbing.

The birch-tree swang her fragrant hair, The bramble cast her berry,

The gin within the juniper

Began to make him merry,

The poplars, in long order due,
With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two

Came wet-shod alder from the wave,
Came yews, a dismal coterie ;

Each plucked his one foot from the grave,
Poussetting with a sloe-tree :

Old elms came breaking from the vine,
The vine streamed out to follow,

And, sweating rosin, plumped the pine
From many a cloudy hollow.

And wasn't it a sight to see,

When, ere his song was ended, Like some great landslip, tree by tree, The country-side descended;

And shepherds from the mountain-eaves
Looked down, half-pleased, half-frightened,

As dashed about the drunken leaves
The random sunshine lightened!

O, nature first was fresh to men,
And wanton without measure;

So youthful and so flexile then,

You moved her at your pleasure. Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs! And make her dance attendance:

Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs,

'Tis vain! in such a brassy age

I could not move a thistle;
The very sparrows in the hedge
Scarce answer to my whistle;

Or at the most, when three-parts-sick
With strumming and with scraping,
A jackass heehaws from the rick,
The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound
Like sleepy counsel pleading:

O Lord! 't is in my neighbor's ground,
The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises,

And Works on Gardening through there, And Methods of transplanting trees, To look as if they grew there.

The withered Misses! how they prose
O'er books of travelled seamen,
And show you slips of all that grows
From England to Van Diemen.
They read in arbors clipt and cut,
And alleys, faded places,

By squares of tropic summer shut,

Came wet-shod alder from the wave,
Came yews, a dismal coterie;

Each plucked his one foot from the grave,
Poussetting with a sloe-tree:

Old elms came breaking from the vine,
The vine streamed out to follow,

And, sweating rosin, plumped the pine
From many a cloudy hollow.

And was n 't it a sight to see,

When, ere his song was ended, Like some great landslip, tree by tree, The country-side descended;

And shepherds from the mountain-eaves

Looked down, half-pleased, half-frightened,

As dashed about the drunken leaves
The random sunshine lightened!

O, nature first was fresh to men,
And wanton without measure;
So youthful and so flexile then,

You moved her at your pleasure.
Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs!
And make her dance attendance:

Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs,

'Tis vain! in such a brassy age

I could not move a thistle;
The very sparrows in the hedge
Scarce answer to my whistle;
Or at the most, when three-parts-sick
With strumming and with scraping,
A jackass heehaws from the rick,
The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound
Like sleepy counsel pleading:

O Lord! - 't is in my neighbor's ground,
The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises,

And Works on Gardening through there, And Methods of transplanting trees, To look as if they grew there.

The withered Misses! how they prose
O'er books of travelled seamen,
And show you slips of all that grows
From England to Van Diemen.
They read in arbors clipt and cut,
And alleys, faded places,
By squares of tropic summer shut,