DRYDEN.

War, he sung, is toil and trouble;
Honour but an empty bubble;

Never ending, still beginning,
Fighting still, and still destroying:

If the world be worth thy winning,
Think, O think, it worth enjoying:

Lovely Thais sits beside thee,
Take the good the gods provide thee.
The many rend the skies with loud applause;
So Love was crowned, but Music won the cause.

The Prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gazed on the fair

Who caused his care

And sighed and looked, sighed and looked,
Sighed and looked, and sighed again:

At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,
The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.

VI.

Now strike the golden lyre again,
A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.
Break his bands of sleep asunder,

And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.
Hark, hark, the horrid sound

Has raised up his head:
As awaked from the dead,

And amazed, he stares around.

Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries,

See the furies arise:

See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,

And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!

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Behold a ghastly band,
Each a torch in his hand!

Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,
And unburied remain
Inglorious on the plain :
Give the vengeance due
To the valiant crew.

Behold how they toss their torches on high,
How they point to the Persian abodes,
And glittering temples of their hostile gods.
The princes applaud, with a furious joy ;
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,

To light him to his prey,

And, like another Helen, fired another Troy.

VII.

Thus long ago,

Ere heaving bellows learned to blow,
While organs yet were mute;

Timotheus, to his breathing flute,
And sounding lyre,

Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.
At last divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame;

The sweet enthusiast, from the sacred store,
Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

Or both divide the crown;
He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.

DRYDEN.

BARRY CORNWALL.

The Poor-House.

1.

CLOSE at the edge of a busy town,

A huge quadrangular mansion stands;
Its rooms are all filled with the parish poor;
Its walls are all built by pauper hands;
And the pauper old and the pauper young
Peer out, through the grates, in sullen bands.

II.

Behind, is a patch of earth, by thorns

Fenced in from the moor's wide marshy plains; By the side, is a gloomy lane, that steals

To a quarry now filled with years of rains : But within, within! There Poverty scowls, Nursing in wrath her brood of pains.

Enter and look! In the high-walled yards
Fierce men are pacing the barren ground:
Enter the long bare chambers;-girls

And women are sewing, without a sound; Sewing from dawn till the dismal eve,

And not a laugh or a song goes round.

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IV.

No communion-no kind thought
Dwells in the pauper's breast of care ;
Nothing but pain in the grievous past;

Nothing to come but the black despair-
Of bread in prison, bereft of friends,
Or hunger, out in the open air!

V.

Where is the bright-haired girl, that once

With her peasant sire was used to play? Where is the boy whom his mother blest,

Whose eyes were a light on her weary way? Apart--barred out (so the law ordains,)

Barred out from each other by night and day.

VI.

Letters they teach in their infant schools;

But where are the lessons of great God taught? Lessons that child to the parent bind

Habits of duty-love unbought?

Alas! small good will be learned in schools
Where Nature is trampled and turned to nought.

VII.

Seventeen summers, and where the girl

Who never grew up at her father's knee? Twenty autumnal storms have nursed

The pauper's boyhood, and where is he? She earneth her bread in the midnight lanes: He tailath in obeing hy the Southern Sea.

BYRON.

VIII.

O Power! O Prudence! Law! look down
From your heights on the pining poor below!
O sever not hearts which God hath joined
Together, on earth, for weal and woe.
O Senators grave, grave truths may be,
Which ye have not learned, or deigned to know

IX.

O Wealth, come forth with an open hand!
O Charity, speak with a softer sound!
Yield pity to Age-to tender Youth-

To Love, wherever its home be found!

But I cease, for I hear, in the night to come,
The cannon's blast, and the rebel drum,
Shaking the firm-set English ground!

EGERIA! Sweet creation of some heart
Which found no mortal resting-place so fair
As thine ideal breast; whate'er thou art,
Or wert, a young Aurora of the air,

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