-

Well! be the graceless lineaments confest!
I do enjoy this bounteous beauteous earth;
And dote upon a jest

"Within the limits of becoming mirth ";
No solemn sanctimonious face I pull,
Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious,
Nor study in my sanctum supercilious
To frame a Sabbath Bill or forge a Bull.
I pray for grace, repent each sinful act,
Peruse, but underneath the rose, my Bible;
And love my neighbor far too well, in fact,
To call and twit him with a godly tract
That's turned by application to a libel.
My heart ferments not with the bigot's leaven,
All creeds I view with toleration thorough.
And have a horror of regarding heaven
As anybody's rotten borough.

I've no ambition to enact the spy
On fellow-souls, a spiritual Pry,

"T is said that people ought to guard their noses
Who thrust them into matters none of theirs ;
And, though no delicacy discomposes
Your saint, yet I consider faith and prayers
Amongst the privatest of men's affairs.
I do not hash the Gospel in my books,
And thus upon the public mind intrude it,
As if I thought, like Otaheitan cooks,
No food was fit to eat till I had chewed it.

On Bible stilts I don't affect to stalk;
Nor lard with Scripture my familiar talk, -
For man may pious texts repeat,
And yet religion have no inward seat;
"T is not so plain as the old Hill of Howth,
A man has got his belly full of meat

That must be lashed by law, wherever found,
And driven to church as to the parish pound.
I do confess, without reserve or wheedle,
I view that grovelling idea as one
Worthy some parish clerk's ambitious son,
A charity-boy who longs to be a beadle.
On such a vital topic sure 't is odd

How much a man can differ from his neighbor;
One wishes worship freely given to God,
Another wants to make it statute-labor,
The broad distinction in a line to draw,
As means to lead us to the skies above,
You say,
Sir Andrew and his love of law,
And I, the Saviour with his law of love.

Spontaneously to God should tend the soul,
Like the magnetic needle to the Pole ;

But what were that intrinsic virtue worth, Suppose some fellow, with more zeal than knowl. edge

Fresh from St. Andrew's college,

Should nail the conscious needle to the north?

I do confess that I abhor and shrink

From schemes, with a religious willy-nilly,
That frown upon St. Giles's sins, but blink
The peccadilloes of all Piccadilly, —
My soul revolts at such bare hypocrisy,
And will not, dare not, fancy in accord
The Lord of Hosts with an exclusive lord
Of this world's aristocracy.

It will not own a notion so unholy
As thinking that the rich by easy trips
May go to heaven, whereas the poor and lowly
Must work their passage, as they do in ships.

-

One place there is, beneath the burial-sod,
Where all mankind are equalized by death;
Another place there is, the fane of God,
Where all are equal who draw living breath; -
Juggle who will elsewhere with his own soul,
Playing the Judas with a temporal dole,
He who can come beneath that awful cope,
In the dread presence of a Maker just,
Who metes to every pinch of human dust
One even measure of immortal hope,
He who can stand within that holy door,
With soul unbowed by that pure spirit-level,
And frame unequal laws for rich and poor,
Might sit for Hell, and represent the Devil!

The humble records of my life to search,

I have not herded with mere pagan beasts;
But sometimes I have "sat at good men's feasts,"
And I have been "where bells have knolled to
church."

Dear bells how sweet the sounds of village bells
When on the undulating air they swim!
Now loud as welcomes! faint, now, as farewells!

I have not sought, 't is true, the Holy Land,
As full of texts as Cuddie Headrigg's mother,
The Bible in one hand,

And my own commonplace-book in the other;
But you have been to Palestine - alas !
Some minds improve by travel; others, rather,
Resemble copper wire or brass,
Which gets the narrower by going farther!

Worthless are all such pilgrimages- very!
If Palmers at the Holy Tomb contrive
The human heats and rancor to revive
That at the Sepulchre they ought to bury.
A sorry sight it is to rest the eye on,
To see a Christian creature graze at Sion,
Then homeward, of the saintly pasture full,
Rush bellowing, and breathing fire and smoke,
At crippled Papistry to butt and poke,
Exactly as a skittish Scottish bull
Hunts an old woman in a scarlet cloke.

Around a cankered stem should twine,
Suppose the tender but luxuriant hop
What Kentish boor would tear away the prop
So roughly as to wound, nay, kill the bine?

The images, 't is true, are strangely dressed,
With gauds and toys extremely out of season;
The carving nothing of the very best,
The whole repugnant to the eye of Reason,
Shocking to Taste, and to Fine Arts a treason,
Yet ne'er o'erlook in bigotry of sect
One truly Catholic, one common form,
At which unchecked

All Christian hearts may kindle or keep warm.

Say, was it to my spirit's gain or loss,
One bright and balmy morning, as I went
From Liege's lovely environs to Ghent,
If hard by the wayside I found a cross,
That made me breathe a prayer upon the spot,
While Nature of herself, as if to trace
The emblem's use, had trailed around its base
The blue significant Forget-Me-Not?
Methought, the claims of Charity to urge
More forcibly along with Faith and Hope,
The pious choice had pitched upon the verge
Of a delicious slope,

To picture that cold pride so harsh and hard,
Fancy a peacock in a poultry-yard.
Behold him in conceited circles sail,
Strutting and dancing, and now planted stiff,
In all his pomp of pageantry, as if

He felt "the eyes of Europe" on his tail!
As for the humble breed retained by man,
He scorns the whole domestic clan, -
He bows, he bridles,

He wheels, he sidles,
As last, with stately dodgings in a corner,
He pens a simple russet hen, to scorn her
Full in the blaze of his resplendent fan!

"Look here," he cries, (to give him words,) "Thou feathered clay, thou scum of birds!". Flirting the rustling plumage in her eyes,

-

"Look here, thou vile predestined sinner,
Doomed to be roasted for a dinner,
Behold these lovely variegated dyes!
These are the rainbow colors of the skies,
That heaven has shed upon me con amore,
A Bird of Paradise ?- -a pretty story!
I am that Saintly Fowl, thou paltry chick !
Look at my crown of glory!

Thou dingy, dirty, dabbled, draggled jill!"
And off goes Partlett, wriggling from a kick,
With bleeding scalp laid open by his bill!

That little simile exactly paints
How sinners are despised by saints.
By saints! - the Hypocrites that ope heaven's
door
Obsequious to the sinful man of riches;
But put the wicked, naked, barelegged poor
In parish stocks, instead of breeches.

To his tuned spirit the wild heather-bells Ring Sabbath knells;

The jubilate of the soaring lark

Is chant of clerk;

For choir, the thrush and the gregarious linnet;
The sod's a cushion for his pious want;
And, consecrated by the heaven within it,
The sky-blue pool, a font.

Each cloud-capped mountain is a holy altar;
An organ breathes in every grove;
And the full heart's a Psalter,
Rich in deep hymns of gratitude and love!

Once on a time a certain English lass
Was seized with symptoms of such deep decline,
Cough, hectic flushes, every evil sign,
That, as their wont is at such desperate pass,
The doctors gave her over- to an ass.

Accordingly, the grisly Shade to bilk,
Each morn the patient quaffed a frothy bowl
Of asinine new milk,

Robbing a shaggy suckling of a foal,
Which got proportionably spare and skinny;
Meanwhile the neighbors cried, "Poor Mary
Ann!

She can't get over it! she never can !"
When, lo! to prove each prophet was a ninny,
The one that died was the poor wet-nurse Jenny.

Zetle crep' up quite undenarse

An' pecked on thin the winder In' there sot Stulby all alone

with no one

high to hender.

Such a paragon is woman
That, yow sed, it must be true
The is always weastly better
Than the best that the can do