: 60 1 Restor'd: behold! the well-dissembled scene Oh! if thou hover'st round my walk, Calls from embellish'd eyes the lovely tear, While under every well-known tree, Or lights up mirth in modest cheeks again. I to thy fancied shadow talk, And every tear is full of thee; Should then the weary eye of grief, Beside some sympathetic stream, O'er the brute scene its ouran-outangs * pours; In slumber find a short relief, Detested forms! that, on the mind imprest, O visit thou my soothing dream! Corrupt, confound, and barbarize an age. “ Behold! all thine again the sister-arts, Thy graces they, knit in harmonious dance. Nurs'd by the treasure from a nation drain'd THE HAPPY MAN. Their works to purchase, they to nobler rouse He's not the Happy Man, to whom is given Their untam'd genius, their unfetter'd thought; A plenteous fortune by indulgent Heaven; of pompous tyrants, and of dreaming monks, Whose gilded roofs on shining columns rise, The gaudy tools, and prisoners, no more. And painted walls enchant the gazer's eyes; " Lo! numerous domes a Burlington confess : Whose table flows with hospitable cheer, For kings and senates fit, the palace see! And all the various bounty of the year; The temple breathing a religious awe; Whose valleys smile, whose gardens breathe the Ev'n fram'd with elegance the plain retreat, Spring, The private dwelling. Certain in his aim, Whose carved mountains bleat, and forests sing; Taste, never idly working, sa ves expense. For whom the cooling shade in Summer twines, " See! Sylvan scenes, where, Art, alone, pretends while his full cellars give their generous wines; To dress her mistress, and disclose her charms: From whose wide fields unbounded Autumn pours Such as a Pope in miniature has shown; A golden tide into his swelling stores : A Bathurst o'er the widening forestt spreads; Whose Winter laughs; for whom the liberal gales Stretch the big sheet, and toiling commerce sails ; When yielding crowds attend, and pleasure serves Ev'n not at all these, in one rich lot combin'd, Ingulfing more than founded Roman ways. Can make the Happy Man, without the mind; Lo! ray'd from cities o'er the brighten'd land, Where Judgment sits clear-sighted, and surveys Connecting sea to sea, the solid road. The chain of Reason with unerring gaze; Lo! the proud arch (no vile exactor's stand) Where Fancy lives, and to the brightening eyes With easy sweep bestrides the chafing flood. His fairer scenes, and bolder figures rise ; See! long canals, and deepend rivers, join Where social Love exerts her soft command, Each part with each, and with the circling main And plays the passions with a tender hand, Whence every virtue flows, in rival strife, SONG. Hard is the fate of him who loves, Yet dares not tell his trembling pain, Rush'd the still ruins of dejected Rome. But to the sympathetic groves, But to the lonely listening plain. Oh! when her footsteps next are seen In flowery tracts along the mead, In fresher mazes o'er the green, Ye gentle spirits of the vale, To whom the tears of love are dear, From dying lilies wast a gale, And sigh my sorrows in her ear. O, tell her what she cannot blame, Though fear my tongue must ever bind O, tell her that my virtuous flame Is as her spotless soul refin'd. Not her own guardian angel eyes * A creature which, of all brutes, most resembles man. With chaster tenderness his care, -See Dr. Tyson's treatise on this animal. Not purer her own wishes rise, Okely woods, near Cirencester. Not holier her own sighs in prayer. But if, at first, her virgin fear Oh! how I love with thee to walk, And listen to thy whisper'd talk, Which innocence and truth imparts, And melts the most obdurate hearts. A thousand shapes you wear with ease, Now wrapt in some mysterious dream, A lone philosopher you seem; Now quick from hill to vale you fly, For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove And now you sweep the vaulted sky; An unrelenting foe to love, A shepherd next, you haunt the plain, And when we meet a mutual heart, And warble forth your oaten strain. Come in between, and bid us part? A lover now, with all the grace Of that sweet passion in your face; Bid us sigh on from day to day, Then, calm'd to friendship, you assume And wish, and wish the soul away ; The gentle-looking Hartford's bloom, Till youth and genial years are flown, As, with her Musidora, she And all the life of life is gone ? (Her Musidora fond of thee) Amid the long withdrawing vale, But busy, busy, still art thou, Awakes the rival'd nightingale. To bind the loveless joyless vow, Thine is the balmy breath of morn, The heart from pleasure to delude, Just as the dew-bent rose is born ; To join the gentle to the rude. And while meridian fervors beat, Thine is the woodland dumb retreat; For once, O Fortune, hear my prayer, But chief, when evening scenes decay, And I absolve thy future care ; And the faint landscape swims away, All other blessings I resign, Thine is the doubtful soft decline, Make but the dear Amanda mine. And that best hour of musing thine. Descending angels bless thy train, Plain Innocence, in white array’d, Before thee lists her fearless head : Religion's beams around thee shine, O NIGHTINGALE, best poet of the grove, And cheer thy glooms with light divine : That plaintive strain can ne'er belong to thee About thee sports sweet Liberty ; Blest in the full possession of thy love: And rapt Urania sings to thee. O lend that strain, sweet nightingale, to me! Oh, let me pierce thy secret cell! And in thy deep recesses dwell; 'Tis mine, alas! to mourn my wretched fate : Perhaps from Norwood's oak-clad hill, I love a maid, who all my bosom charms, When Meditation has her fill, Yet lose my days without this lovely mate; I just may cast my careless eyes Inhuman Fortune keeps her from my arms. Where London's spiry turrets rise, Think of its crimes, its cares, its pain, Then shield me in the woods again. And love and song is all your pleasing care : TO THE But we, vain slaves of interest and of pride, REV. MR. MURDOCH, RECTOR OF STRADDISHALL, IN SUFFOLK, 1738. O mourn with me, sweet bird, my hapless flame. Thus safely low, my friend, thou canst not fall : Here reigns a deep tranquillity o'er all; Men, woods, and fields, all breathe untroubled life Then keep each passion down, however dear; Trust me the tender are the most severe. Hail, mildly-pleasing Solitude, Guard, while 'tis thine, thy philosophic ease, Companion of the wise and good, And ask no joy but that of virtuous peace; But, from whose holy, piercing eye, That bids defiance to the storms of Fate, The herd of fools and villains fly. High bliss is only for a higher state. AMBROSE PHILIPS. AMBROSE Puilips, a poet and miscellaneous / who found his own juvenile pastorals undervalued, writer, was born in 1671, claiming his descent from sent to the same paper a comparison between his an ancient Leicestershire family. He received his and those of Philips, in which he ironically gave education at St. John's College, Cambridge; and, the preference to the latter. The irony was not attaching himself to the Whig party, he published, detected till it encountered the critical eye of Adin 1700, an epitome of Hacker's life of Archbishop dison ; and the consequence was, that it ruined the Williams, by which he obtained an introduction to reputation of Philips as a composer of pastoral. Addison and Steele. Soon after, he made an at- When the accession of George I. bronght the tempt in pastoral poetry, which, for a time, brought Whigs again into power, Philips was made a Westhim into celebrity. In 1709, being then at Copen-minster justice, and, soon after, a commissioner for hagen, he addressed to the earl of Dorset some the lottery. In 1718, he was the editor of a periverses, descriptive of that capital, which are re- odical paper, called “ The Freethinker." In 1724, garded as his best performance; and these, together he accompanied to Ireland his friend Dr. Boulter, with two translations from Sappho's writings, created archbishop of Armagh, to whom he acted stand pre-eminent in his works of this class. In as secretary. He afterwards represented the county 1712 he made his appearance as a dramatic writer, of Armagh in parliament; and the places of secrein the tragedy of “The Distrest Mother,” acted at tary to the Lord Chancellor, and Judge of the PreDrury-lane with great applause, and still considered rogative Court, were also conferred upon him. He as a stock play. It cannot, indeed, claim the merit returned to England in 1748, and died in the folof originality, being closely copied from Racine's lowing year, at the age of seventy-eight. “ Andromacque;" but it is well written, and skil. The verses which he composed, not only to fully adapted to the English stage. young ladies in the nursery, but to Walpole when A storm now fell upon him relatively to his pas- Minister of State, and which became known by the torals, owing to an exaggerated compliment from ludicrous appellation of namby-pamby, are easy and Tickell, who, in a paper of the Guardian, had made sprightly, but with a kind of infantile air, which the true pastoral pipe descend in succession from fixed upon them the above name. Theocritus to Virgil, Spenser, and Philips. Pope, The starving wolves along the main sea prowl, TO THE EARL OF DORSET. And to the Moon in icy valleys hówl. O'er many a shining league the level main Here spreads itself into a glassy plain : No gentle breathing breeze prepares the spring, The face of Nature in a rich disguise, No birds within the desert region sing. And brighten'd every object to my eyes : The ships, unmov'd, the boisterous winds defy, For every shrub, and every blade of grass, While rattling chariots o'er the ocean fly. And every pointed thorn, seem'd wrought in glass ; The vast Leviathan wants room to play, In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, And spout his waters in the face of day. While through the ice the crimson berries glow. The birds, dismiss'd, (while you remain,) What frenzy in my bosom rag'd, And by what care to be assung'd? What gentle youth I would allure, Whom in my artful toils secure ? Who does thy tender heart subdue, Tell me, my Sappho, tell me who? The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield, meads : Though now he shuns thy longing arms, Celestial visitant, once more WILLIAM COLLINS. i WILLIAM Collins, a distinguished modern poet, of disorder in his mind, perceptible to any but himwas born at Chichester, in 1720 or 1721, where his self. He was reading the New Testament. “I father exercised the trade of a hatter. He received have but one book," said he, “but it is the best." his education at Winchester College, whence he en- He was finally consigned to the care of his sister, in tered as a commoner of Queen's College, Oxford. whose arms he finished his short and melancholy In 1741, he procured his election into Magdalen course, in the year 1756. college as a demy; and it was here that he wrote It is from his Odes, that Collins derives his chief his poetical “ Epistle to Sir Thomas Hanmer," poetical fame ; and in compensation for the neglect and his “Oriental Eclognes ;" of both which with which they were treated at their first appear. pieces the success was but moderate. In 1744, he ance, they are now almost universally regarded as came to London as a literary adventurer, and va- the first productions of the kind in our language, rious were the projects which he formed in this with respect to vigor of conception, boldness and capacity. In 1746, however, he ventured to lay variety of personification, and genuine warmth of before the public a volume of “Odes, Descriptive feeling. They are well characterized in an essay and Allegorical ;” but so callous was the national prefixed to his works, in an ornamented edition pubtaste at this time, that their sale did not pay for the lished by Cadell and Davies, with which we shall printing. Collins, whose spirit was high, returned conclude this article. “He will be acknowledged to the bookseller his copy-money, burnt all the un- (says the author) to possess imagination, sweetness, sold copies, and as soon as it lay in his power, in- bold and figurative language. His numbers dwell demnified him for his small loss; yet among these on the ear, and easily fix themselves in the memory. odes, were many pieces which now rank among the His vein of sentiment is by turns tender and lofty, finest lyric compositions in the language. After always tinged with a degree of melancholy, but not this mortification, he obtained from the booksellers possessing any claim to originality. His originality a small sum for an intended translation of Aristotle's consists in his manner, in the highly figurative garb Poetics, and paid a visit to an uncle, Lieutenant- in which he clothes abstract ideas, in the felicity of Colonel Martin, then with the army in Germany. his expressions, and his skill in embodying ideal The Colonel dying soon after, left Collins a legacy creations. He had much of the mysticism of poetry, of 20001., a sum which raised him to temporary and sometimes became obscure by aiming at imopulence; but he now soon became incapable of pressions stronger than he had clear and well-definid every mental exertion. Dreadful depression of ideas to support. Had his life been prolonged, and spirits was an occasional attendant on his malady, with life had he enjoyed that ease which is necessary for which he had no remedy but the bottle. It was for the undisturbed exercise of the faculties, he about this time, that it was thought proper to con- would probably have risen far above most of his fine him in a receptacle of lunatics. Dr. Johnson contemporaries." paid him a visit at Islington, when there was nothing! ; |