II.

JUSTICE.

BY THOMAS SCOTT.

1

Forbid it, Heav’n, that e’er I eat

The bread of craftiness and wrong, A curse would poison all my meat,

As fatal as the viper's tongue.

2

I ne'er will raise a poor man's sigh,

His hire shall never swell my store; I dread the poor man's plaintive cry,

I fear the Father of the Poor.

3

If I in darkness (base misdeed!)

Assassinate my neighbour's fame; By me if innocency bleed,

Cancel from earth my hated name.

4

Ah! no; let me with strong delight

To all the tax of duty pay; Tender of ev'ry social right, .

Revering thy all-righteous sway.

Such virtue thou wilt ne'er forget,

In worlds where ev'ry virtue shares High recompence; tho' not of debt,

But which thy bounteous grace prepares.

III.

ADVERSITY.

BY THOMAS SCOTT.

1

How high our sanguine hopes we raise !

How hotly our desires pursue What fancy's magic glass displays

Enlarg'd and tempting to the view! These mortal objects of our love

Too closely twine about our heart, Seduce our souls from things above,

And hardly leave to God a part.

2

O bitter change! when Heav'n's kind hand

Snatches the fatal joy away, Our feeble reason scarce can stand Firm in affliction's stormy day.

L

We weep, we laugh, in mad extreme;

Here, all delight; all sadness there: Now on the mount of bliss we seem, Now in the quagmire of despair.

3 Stoics, who on your strength presume,

Could all your toiling wisdom find A light to cheer affliction’s gloom,

A balsam for the wounded mind :

In vain you hail him good and great,

Whose stedfast soul no ills can move; Boast him impregnable to fate, And equal to your mighty Jove.

4 Vain world, whose scenes of bliss and woe

Are shifting every fleeting hour; No longer shall our spirits owe Their peace, or trouble, to thy pow'r.

, Teach us, thou Comforter divine,

, Contentment; should our all be gone : Teach us submission meek as thine,

" Father, thy will, not mine be done."

IV.

DISAPPOINTMENT.

BY HENRY KIRKE WHITE.

1

Come, Disappointment, come!

Not in thy terrors clad ;
Come in thy meekest, saddest guise ;
Thy chastening rod but terrifies
The restless and the bad.

But I recline

Beneath thy shrine, And round my brow resign'd, thy peaceful

cypress twine.

2

Tho' Fancy flies away

Before thy hollow tread,
Yet Meditation in her cell,
Hears, with faint eye, the ling’ring knell,
That tells her hopes are dead;

And tho' the tear

By chance appear, Yet who can smile and say, my all was not

3

Come, Disappointment, come!

Tho' from hope's summit hurl'd,
Still, rigid Nurse, thou art forgiv’n,
For thou severe wert sent from heav'n,
To wean me from the world;

To turn my eye

From vanity, And point to scenes of bliss that never, never

die.

4

What is this passing scene?

A peevish April day!
A little sun-a little rain,
And then night sweeps along the plain,
And all things fade away.

Man (soon discuss'd)

Yields up his trust, And all his hopes and fears lie with him in

the dust.

5

Oh ! what is Beauty's power ?

It flourishes and dies;
Will the cold earth its silence break,
To tell how soft, how smooth a cheek,

Beneath its surface lies ?