Might never reach me more! My ear is pain'd, My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is fill'd. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart-
It does not feel for man; the natural bond Of brotherhood is sever'd as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour'd 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.
TRUE AND FALSE NATURE-WORSHIP.
THEY love the country, and none else, who seek For their own sake its silence and its shade: Delights which who would leave, that has a heart Susceptible of pity, or a mind
Cultured and capable of sober thought, For all the savage din of the swift pack, And clamours of the field? Detested sport, That owes its pleasures to another's pain; That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks Of harmless nature, dumb, but yet endued With eloquence that agonies inspire
Of silent tears and heart-distending sighs! Vain tears, alas! and sighs that never find A corresponding tone in jovial souls.
MAN in society is like a flower
Blown in its native bed: 'tis there alone His faculties, expanded in full bloom, Shine out; there only reach their proper use. But man, associated and leagued with man By regal warrant, or self-join'd by bond For interest sake, or swarming into clans Beneath one head for purposes of war,
Like flowers selected from the rest, and bound And bundled close to fill some crowded vase, Fade rapidly and, by compression marr'd, Contracts defilement not to be endured.
Hence charter'd boroughs are such public plagues; And burghers, men immaculate perhaps In all their private functions, once combined, Become a loathsome body, only fit
For dissolution, hurtful to the main. Hence merchants, unimpeachable of sin Against the charities of domestic life, Incorporated, seem at once to lose
Their nature, and the common rights of man; Build factories with blood, conducting trade At the sword's point, and dyeing the white robe Of innocent commercial justice red.
Hence, too, the field of glory, as the world Misdeems it, dazzled by its bright array, With all its majesty of thundering pomp, Enchanting music, and immortal wreaths, Is but a school where thoughtlessness is taught On principle, where foppery atones
For folly, gallantry for every vice.
Now from the roost, or from the neighbouring pale, Where, diligent to catch the first faint gleam Of smiling day, they gossip'd side by side, Come trooping at the house-wife's well-known call The feather'd tribes domestic. Half on wing, And half on foot, they brush the fleecy flood, Conscious, and fearful of too deep a plunge. The sparrows peep, and quit the sheltering eaves To seize the fair occasion. Well they eye The scatter'd grain, and thievishly resolved To escape the impending famine, often scared As oft return, a pert voracious kind. Clean riddance quickly made, one only care Remains to each, the search of sunny nook, Or shed impervious to the blast. Resign'd To sad necessity, the cock foregoes His wonted strut, and, wading at their head With well-consider'd steps, seems to resent His alter'd gait and stateliness retrench'd.
How find the myriads, that in summer cheer The hills and valleys with their ceaseless songs,
Due sustenance, or where subsist they now?
Earth yields them nought: the imprison'd worm is safe Beneath the frozen clod; all seeds of herbs
Lie cover'd close, and berry-bearing thorns That feed the thrush (whatever some suppose), Afford the smaller minstrels no supply.
The long protracted rigour of the year
Thins all their numerous flocks. In chinks and holes
Ten thousand seek an unmolested end,
As instinct prompts, self-buried ere they die.
The very rooks and daws forsake the fields,
Where neither grub, nor root, nor earth-nut now Repays their labour more; and perch'd aloft By the wayside, or stalking in the path, Lean pensioners upon the traveller's track,
Pick up their nauseous dole, though sweet to them, Of voided pulse, or half-digested grain.
The streams are lost amid the splendid blank, O'erwhelming all distinction. On the flood, Indurated and fix'd, the snowy weight Lies undissolved; while silently beneath, And unperceived, the current steals away. Not so, where scornful of a check it leaps The mill-dam, dashes on the restless wheel, And wantons in the pebbly gulf below : No frost can bind it there; its utmost force Can but arrest the light and smoky mist That in its fall the liquid sheet throws wide.
And see where it has hung the embroider'd banks With forms so various, that no powers of art, The pencil, or the pen, may trace the scene: Here glittering turrets rise, upheaving high (Fantastic misarrangement!) on the roof
Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees And shrubs of fairyland. The crystal drops That trickle down the branches, fast congeal'd,
Shoot into pillars of pellucid length,
And prop the pile they but adorn'd before.
Here grotto within grotto safe defies
The sunbeam: there emboss'd and fretted wild, The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain The likeness of some object seen before.
Thus Nature works as if to mock at Art,
And in defiance of her rival powers: By these fortuitous and random strokes Performing such inimitable feats,
As she with all her rules can never reach. The Winter Morning Walk.
ENGLISH AND FRENCH MANNERS.
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume; And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science, blinds The eyesight of discovery, and begets In those that suffer it a sordid mind, Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit
To be the tenant of man's noble form.
Thee, therefore, still, blameworthy as thou art, With all thy loss of empire, and though squeezed By public exigence, till annual food
Fails for the craving hunger of the state, Thee I account still happy, and the chief Among the nations, seeing thou art free.
My native nook of earth! thy clime is rude, Replete with vapours, and disposes much All hearts to sadness; and none more than mine : Thine unadulterate manners are less soft
And plausible than social life requires, And thou hast need of discipline and art To give thee what politer France receives From nature's bounty-that humane address
« EelmineJätka » |