Walk sober off, before a sprightlier age
Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage: Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease, Whom folly pleases, and whose follies please.
BOOK IV. ODE I.
To Venus.
AGAIN? new tumults in my breast?
Ah, spare me, Venus! let me, let me rest!
I am not now, alas! the man
As in the gentle reign of my queen Anne.
Ah! sound no more thy soft alarms,
Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms.
Mother too fierce of dear desires!
Turn, turn to willing hearts your wanton fires: To number five direct your doves,
There spread round Murray all your blooming loves; Noble and young, who strikes the heart
With every sprightly, every decent part;
Equal the injur❜d to defend,
To charm the mistress, or to fix the friend:
He, with a hundred arts refin'd,
Shall stretch thy conquests over half the kind:
To him each rival shall submit,
Make but his riches equal to his wit.
Then shall thy form the marble grace,
(Thy Grecian form) and Chloe lend the face:
His house, embosom'd in the grove,
Sacred to socail life and social love,
Shall glitter o'er the pendent green,
Where Thames reflects the visionary scene:
Thither the silver-sounding lyres
Shall call the smiling loves and young desires;
There every grace and muse shall throng,
Exalt the dance, or animate the song;
There youths and nymphs, in consort gay,
1 Shall hail the rising, close the parting day.
With me, alas! those joys are o'er;
For me the vernal garlands bloom no more,
Adieu! fond hope of mutual fire,
The still-believing, still-renew'd desire :
Adieu! the heart-expanding bowl,
And all the kind deceivers of the soul!
But why? ah! tell me, ah! too dear,
Steals down my cheek the' involuntary tear?
Why words so flowing, thoughts so free,
Stop, or turn nonsense, at one glance of thee?
Thee, dress'd in fancy's airy beam,
Absent I follow through the' extended dream;
Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms,
And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms, And swiftly shoot along the mall,
Or softly glide by the canal ;
Now shown by Cynthia's silver ray,
And now on rolling waters snatch'd away.
BOOK IV. ODE IX.
A Fragment.
EST you should think that verse shall die
Which sounds the silver Thames along,
Taught on the wings of truth to fly
Above the reach of vulgar song;
Though daring Milton sits sublime,
In Spenser native muses play;
Nor yet shall Waller yield to time,
Nor pensive Cowley's moral lay-
Sages and chiefs long since had birth
Ere Cæsar was or Newton nam'd ;
These rais'd new empires o'er the earth,
And those new heav'ns and systems fram'd.
Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride!
They had no poet, and they died.
In vain they schem'd, in vain they bled!
They had no poet, and are dead.
Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's,
Quid vetat et nosmet Lucili scripta legentes
Quærere, num illius, num rerum dura negarit
Versiculos natura magis factos, et euntes
Mollius?
YES, thank my stars! as early as I knew
This town, I had the sense to hate it too; Yet here, as ev'n in hell, there must be still One giant-vice, so excellently ill,
That all beside one pities, not abhors;
As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.
I grant that poetry's a crying sin;
It brought (no doubt) the' excise and army in:
Catch'd like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how,
But that the cure is starving, all allow.
Yet like the papist's is the poet's state,
Poor and disarm'd, and hardly worth your hate!
Here a lean bard, whose wit could never give
Himself a dinner, makes an actor live:
The thief condemn'd, in law already dead,
So prompts and saves a rogue who cannot read.
Thus as the pipes of some carv'd organ move,
The gilded puppets dance and mount above:
Heav'd by the breath the' inspiring bellows blow;
The' inspiring bellows lie and pant below.
One sings the fair; but songs no longer move;
No rat is rhym'd to death, nor maid to love:
In love's, in nature's spite, the siege they hold,
And scorn the flesh, the devil, and all but gold.
These write to lords, some mean reward to get,
As needy beggars sing at doors for meat:
Those write because all write, and so have still
Excuse for writing, and for writing ill.
Wretched, indeed! but far more wretched yet
Is he who makes his meal on others' wit:
'Tis chang'd, no doubt, from what it was before;
His rank digestion makes it wit no more:
Sense pass'd through him no longer is the same;
For food digested takes another name.
I pass o'er all those confessors and martyrs,
Who live like S-tt-n, or who die like Chartres,
Out-cant old Esdras, or out-drink his heir,
Out-usure Jews, or Irishmen out-swear;
Wicked as pages, who in early years
Act sins which Prisca's confessor scarce hears.
Ev'n those I pardon, for whose sinful sake
Schoolmen new tenements in hell must make;
Of whose strange crimes no canonist can tell
In what commandment's large contents they dwell.
One, one man only breeds my just offence,
Whom crimes gave wealth, and wealth gave impu.
dence:
Time, that at last matures a clap to p-x;
Whose gentle progress makes a calf an ox,
And brings all natural events to pass,
Hath made him an attorney of an ass.
No young divine, new-benefic'd, can be
More pert, more proud, more positive, than he.
What further could I wish the fop to do,
But turn a wit, and scribble verses too?
Pierce the soft labyrinth of a lady's ear
With rhymes of this per cent. and that per year
Or court a wife, spread out his wily parts,
Like nets, or lime-twigs, for rich widows' hearts;
Call himself barrister to every wench,
And woo in language of the Pleas and Bench?
Language which Boreas might to Auster hold,
More rough than forty Germans when they scold.
Curs'd be the wretch, so venal and so vain,
Paltry and proud as drabs in Drury-lane.
'Tis such a bounty as was never known,
If Peter deigns to help you to your own,
What thanks, what praise, if Peter but supplies!
And what a solemn face if he denies !
Grave, as when prisoners shake the head, and swear
'Twas only suretyship that brought 'em there.
His office keeps your parchment fates entire,
He starves with cold to save them from the fire;
For you he walks the streets through rain or dust,
For not in chariots Peter puts his trust:
For you he sweats and labours at the laws,
Takes God to witness he affects your cause,
And lies to every lord in every thing,
Like a king's favourite-or like a king.
These are the talents that adorn them all,
From wicked Waters ev'n to godly *..
Not more of simony beneath black gowns,
Nor more of bastardy in heirs to crowns.
In shillings and in pence at first they deal,
And steal so little, few perceive they steal;
Till like the sea, they compass all the land,
From Scots to Wight, from Mount to Dover strand:
And when rank widows purchase luscious nights,
Or when a duke to Jansen punts at White's,
Or city-heir in mortgage melts away,
Satan himself feels far less joy than they.
Piece-meal they win this acre first, then that,
Glean on, and gather up the whole estate;
Then strongly fencing ill-got wealth by law,
Indentures, covenants, articles, they draw,
Large as the fields themselves, and larger far
Than civil codes, with all their glosses, are;
So vast, our new divines, we must confess,
Are fathers of the church for writing less.
But let them write, for you each rogue impairs
The deeds, and dext'rously omits ses heires:
No commentator can more slily pass
O'er a learn'd unintelligible place;
Or in quotation shrewd divines leave out
Those words that would against them clear the doubt.
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