undergone above thirty considerable large impressions, and are still in very high repute amongst all ranks.

He ransacks the mansions of the dead, turns the grave into a pulpit, and makes putrefaction and mortality preach lessons to the living.——He surveys, with Newtonian exactness, the starry expanse and the countless radiant worlds that roll in the nocturnal sky; from these he investigates the glory and perfections of the creating and sustaining God; and from these he enhances the wonders of Redeeming Love.

-He mounts the believer on the summit of creation, as upon a stupendous eminence, to enlarge his prospect, and exalt his conceptions of the majesty and glory of that God, who redeemed his Church with his own blood.- When imagination itself, with all the assistance of science, is lost in the immensity and awful grandeur of the works of nature; immediately he contracts the universe into a span, and the enormous orbs into fleeting atoms, or the small dust that remains in the balance when the works of redemption are brought in view.

Thus, he unites the most improved philosopher with the sound believer; and makes reason and nature subservient to faith and revelation. Whilst he allows reason its freest in

quiry and fullest scope, he gives up with none of the peculiarities of the gospel; but holds forth with the clearest light, and in various points of view, these truths wherein the offence of the Cross consists.

May these heavenly doctrines, and precious truths, which flowed in such copious gladdening streams from his lips and pen, be transmitted pure and unadulterated, to the latest posterity; and may that divine Spirit, which gave them their proper energy and influence upon his heart and life, ever act company them to remotest ages.

ON HIS

MEDITATIONS.

IN these lov'd scenes what rapturous graces shine,
Live in each leaf, and breathe in ev'ry line!
What sacred beauties beam throughout the whole,
To charm the sense, and steal upon
the soul!
In classic elegance, and thoughts-his own,
We see our faults, as in a mirror shown:
Each truth in glaring characters exprest,
All own the twin-resemblance in their breast:
His easy periods, and persuasive page,
At once amend, and entertain the age:
Nature's wide fields all open to his view,

He charmes the mind with something ever new:
On Fancy's pinions his advent'rous soul
Wantons unbounded, and pervades the whole:
From death's dark caverns in the earth below,
To spheres, where planets roll, or comets glow.

See him explore, with more than human eyes,
The dreary sepulchre, where Granville lies:
Converse with stones, or monumental brass,
The rude inscriptions-or the painted glass:
To gloomy vaults descend with awful tread,
And view the silent mansions of the dead.

To gayer scenes he next adapts his lines,
Where lavish Nature in embroid'ry shines:
The jess'mine groves; the woodbine's fragrant bow'rs.
With all the painted family of flow'rs:

There, Sacharissa! in each fleeting grace,
Read all the transient honors of thy face.
With equal dignity now see him rise
To paint the sable horrors of the skies;
When all the wide horizon lies in shade;
And midnight-phantoms sweep along the glade:

All nature hush'da solemn silence reigns,
And scarce a breeze disturbs the sleeping plains.
Last, yet not less, in majesty of phrase,
He draws the full orb'd moon's expansive blaze;
The waving meteors trembling from on high,
With all the mute artillery of the sky:
Systems on systems, which in order roll
And dart their lambent beams from pole to pole.
Hail, mighty genius! whose excursive soul
No bounds confine, no limits can control:
and whose mind can rove,
expatiates,
eye
Through earth, through ether, and the realms above;
From things inanimate can direct* the rod,
In just gradation, to ascend to GOD.

Whose

Taught by thy lines, see hoary age grows wise,
And all the rebel in his bosom dies:

Ev'n thoughtless youth, in luxury of blood,
Fly the infectious world, and dare-be good:
Thy sacred truths shall reach th' impervious heart:
Discord shall cease, Disease forget to smart:
Ev'n malice, love, and calumny commend;
Pride beg an alms, and av'rice turn a friend.
Center'd in CHRIST, who fires the soul within,
The flesh shall know no pain; the soul, no sin;
Ev'n in the terrors of expiring breath,
We bless the friendly stroke, and live-
Oxford, April 28th, 1748.

BY A PHYSICIAN.

-in death.

CELESTIAL meditant! whose ardors rise,
Deep from the tombs, and kindle to the skies;
How shall an earthly bard's profaner string
Resound the flights of thy seraphic wing?
When great ELIJAH, in the fiery car,
Flam'd visible to heav'n, a living star;
A seer remain'd to thunder what he knew,
And with his mantle caught his spirit too.

In allusion to the custom of shewing curious objects, and particularizing their respective delicacies, by the pointing of a

rod.

1

Wit, fancy, fire, and elegance have long Been lost in vicious or ignoble song:

Sunk from the chastely grand, the pure sublime,
They flatter'd wealth and pow'r, or murder'd time.
'Tis thine their devious lustre to reduce,

Το prove their noblest pow'r, their genuine use;
From earth-born fumes to clear their tainted flame,
And point their flight to heav'n-from whence they came,
O more than bard in praise! to whom belong
Harmonious style and thought, in rhymless song:
Oft, by their friendly conduct let me tread
The softly whisp'ring mansions of the dead:
Where the grim form calcining hinds and lords,
Grins at each fond distinction pride records.
Dumb, with immortal energy they teach,
Lifeless, they threaten, mould'ring as they preach
To each succeeding age, through ev'ry clime,
The span of life, and endless round of time;
Hence may propitious melancholy flow,
And safety find me in the vaults of woe.
While ev'ry virtue forms thy mental feast,
I glow with fair sincerity at least:

I feel (thy face unknown) thy heart refin'd,
And taste, with bliss the beauties of thy mind,
Collecting clearly, through thy sacred plan,
What reverence of God! what love to man!

O! when at last our deathless forms shall rise,
And flow'rs and stars desist to moralize;
Shall then my soul, by thine inform'd survey,
And bear the splendors of essential day?
But while my thoughts indulge the glorious scope,
(My utmost worth beneath my humblest hope)
Conscience, or some exhorting angel, cries,
"No lazy wishes reach above the skies.
Would you indeed the perfect scenes survey,
And share the triumphs of unbounded day,
His love-diffusive life with ardor live;
And die like this divine contemplative."
London, July 9th, 1748.

Ꭰ .

BY A PHYSICIAN.

TO form the taste, and raise the nobler part,
To mend the morals, and to warm the heart;
To trace the genial source, we nature call,
And prove the GoD of Nature friend of all:
HERVEY for this his mental landscape drew,
And sketch'd the whole creation out to view.

Th' enamell'd bloom, and variegated flow'r,
Whose crimson changes with the changing hour;
The humble shrub whose fragrance scents the morn,
With buds disclosing to the early dawn;

The oaks that grace Britannia's mountain's side,
And spicy Lebanon's superior* pride;

All loudly Sov'REIGN EXCELLENCE proclaim
And animated worlds confess the same.

The azure fields that from the extended sky,
The planetary globes that roll on high,
And solar orbs of proudest blaze combine,
To act subservient to the great design.
Men, angels, seraphs, join the gen'ral voice;
And in the Lord of Nature ALL rejoice.
HIS, the great Winter's venerable guise,
Its shrouded glories and instructive skies ;†
His, the snow's plumes, that brood the sick'ning blade;
His, the bright pendent, the impearls the glade,
The waving forest, or the whisp'ring brake,
The surging billow, or the sleeping lake.
The SAME, who pours the beauties of the spring,
Or mount's the whirlwind's desolating wing.
The SAME, who smiles in nature's peaceful form,
Frowns in the tempest, and directs the storm.

"Tis thine, bright preacher, to improve the age; "Tis thine, whose life's a comment on thy page, Thy happy page! whose periods sweetly flow, Whose figures charm us, and whose colors glow, Where artless piety pervades the whole, Refines the genius and exalts the soul.

The Cedar.

Referring to the Winter-Piece.