Poor, yet industrious, modest, quiet, neat, Such claim compassion in a night like this, And have a friend in every feeling heart. Warmed while it lasts, by labor, all day long
They brave the season, and yet find at eve, Ill clad and fed but sparely, time to cool. 260 The frugal housewife trembles when she lights
Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear,
But dying soon, like all terrestrial joys;
The few small embers left she nurses well. And while her infant race with outspread hands
And crowded knees sit cowering o'er the sparks,
Retires, content to quake, so they be warmed.
Need help, denies them nothing but his Though lean and beggared, every twentieth
Plaintive and piteous, as it wept and wailed Its wasted tones and harmony unheard; 361 Fierce the dispute, whate'er the theme; while she,
Fell Discord, arbitress of such debate, Perched on the sign-post, holds with even hand
Her undecisive scales. In this she lays 365
A weight of ignorance, in that, of pride,
And smiles delighted with the eternal poise.
Dire is the frequent curse and its twin sound
The cheek-distending oath, not to be praised
As ornamental, musical, polite,
Like those which modern senators employ,
Whose oath is rhetoric, and who swear for
fame.
Impossible, when virtue is so scarce
That to suppose a scene where she presides
Is tramontane, and stumbles all belief.
No. We are polished now. The rural lass,
Whom once her virgin modesty and grace,
Her artless manners and her neat attire,
So dignified, that she was hardly less
Than the fair shepherdess of old romance,
Is seen no more. The character is lost. 420
Her head adorned with lappets pinned aloft
And ribbons streaming gay, superbly raised
And magnified beyond all human size,
Indebted to some smart wig-weaver's hand
For more than half the tresses it sustains;
Her elbows ruffled, and her tottering form
Ill propped upon French heels; she might be
deemed
To Nature's praises. Heroes and their feats
Fatigued me, never weary of the pipe
Of Tityrus, assembling as he sang
The rustic throng beneath his favorite beech.
Then Milton had indeed a poet's charms:
New to my taste, his Paradise surpassed 456
The struggling efforts of my boyish tongue
To speak its excellence; I danced for joy.
I marveled much that, at so ripe an age
As twice seven years, his beauties had then
first
460
Engaged my wonder, and admiring still,
And still admiring, with regret supposed
The joy half lost because not sooner found.
Thee, too, enamored of the life I loved,
Pathetic in its praise, in its pursuit
Determined, and possessing it at last
With transports such as favored lovers feel,
I studied, prized, and wished that I had
known
Ingenious Cowley: and though now, reclaimed
By modern lights from an erroneous taste.
I cannot but lament thy splendid wit
Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.
I still revere thee, courtly though retired,
Though stretched at ease in Chertsey's silent
bowers,
Not unemployed, and finding rich amends
For a lost world in solitude and verse.
'Tis born with all. The love of Nature's
works
Is an ingredient in the compound, man,
Infused at the creation of the kind.
And though the Almighty Maker has
throughout
That man, immured in cities, still retains
His inborn, inextinguishable thirst
Of rural scenes, compensating his loss
By supplemental shifts, the best he may? 515
The most unfurnished with the means of
life,
And they that never pass their brick-wall bounds
To range the fields, and treat their lungs with air,
Yet feel the burning instinct: over-head Suspend their crazy boxes planted thick 520 And watered duly. There the pitcher stands A fragment, and the spoutless tea-pot there: Sad witnesses how close-pent man regrets
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