Full many a melancholy night

* He watch'd the slow return of light;

And sought the powers of sleep, To spread a momentary calm

O'er his sad couch, and in the balm

Of bland oblivion's dews his burning eyes to steep.

Full oft, unknowing and unknown,
He wore his endless noons alone;
Amid th' autumnal wood

Oft was he wont, in hasty fit,
Abrupt the social board to quit,

And gaze with eager glance upon the tumbling flood.

Beckoning the wretch to torments new,

Despair for ever in his view,

A spectre pale, appear'd;

While, as the shades of eve arose,
And brought the day's unwelcome close,

More horrible and huge her giant-shape she rear'd.

"Is this," mistaken Scorn will cry,
"Is this the youth whose genius high

Could build the genuine rhyme?
Whose bosom mild the favouring muse
Had stor'd with all her ample views,
Parent of fairest deeds, and purposes sublime."

Ah! from the muse that bosom mild
By treacherous magic was beguil'd,
To strike the deathful blow:
She fill'd his soft ingenuous mind,

With many a feeling too refin'd,

And rous'd to livelier pangs his wakeful sense of wo.

Though doom'd hard penury to prove,
And the sharp stings of hopeless love;
To griefs congenial prone,
More wounds than nature gave he knew,
While misery's form his fancy drew

In dark ideal hues, and horrors not its own.

Then wish not o'er his earthy tomb
The baleful nightshade's lurid bloom
To drop its deadly dew;
Nor oh! forbid the twisted thorn,
That rudely binds his turf forlorn,

With spring's green-swelling buds to vegetate anew.

What though no marble-piled bust

Adorn his desolated dust,

With speaking sculpture wrought?

Pity shall woo the weeping nine,

To build a visionary shrine,

Hung with unfading flowers, from fairy regions brought.

What though refus'd each chanted rite ?
Here viewless mourners shall delight

To touch the shadowy shell:

And Petrarch's harp that wept the doom
Of Laura, lost in early bloom,

In many a pensive pause shall seem to ring his knell.

To soothe a lone, unhallow'd shade,
This votive dirge sad duty paid,

Within an ivied nook :

Sudden the half-sunk orb of day
More radiant shot its parting ray,

And thus a cherub-voice my charm'd attention took:

"Forbear, fond bard, thy partial praise; Nor thus for guilt in specious lays

The wreath of glory twine:

In vain with hues of gorgeous glow
Gay fancy gives her vest to flow,

Unless truth's matron-hand the floating folds confine.

"Just heaven, man's fortitude to prove, Permits through life at large to rove

The tribes of hell-born wo:

Yet the same power that wisely sends
Life's fiercest ills, indulgent lends

Religion's golden shield to break the embattled foe.

"Her aid divine had lull'd to rest

Yon foul self-murderer's throbbing breast,

And stay'd the rising storm:

Had bade the sun of hope appear

To gild his darken'd hemisphere,

And give the wonted bloom to nature's blasted form.

"Vain man! 'tis heaven's prerogative

To take, what first it deign'd to give,

Thy tributary breath :

In awful expectation plac'd,

Await thy doom, nor impious haste

To pluck from God's right hand his instruments of death." Thomas Warton.

TO SUPERSTITION.

Hence to some convent's gloomy isles,
Where cheerful daylight never smiles:
Tyrant! from Albion haste, to slavish Rome;
There by dim tapers' livid light,
At the still solemn hours of night,

In pensive musings walk o'er many a sounding tomb.

Thy clanking chains, thy crimson steel, Thy venom'd dart, and barbarous wheel, Malignant fiend! bear from this isle away, Nor dare in error's fetters bind

One active, free-born British mind;

That strongly strives to spring indignant from thy sway.

Thou bad'st grim Moloch's frowning priest
Snatch screaming infants from the breast,
Regardless of the frantic mother's woes;
Thou led'st the ruthless sons of Spain
To wond'ring India's golder plain,

From deluges of blood where tenfold harvests rose.

But lo! how swiftly art thou fled,
When reason lifts his radiant head!
When his resounding, awful voice they hear,
Blind ignorance, thy doting sire,
Thy daughter, trembling fear, retire;

And all thy ghastly train of terrors disappear.

So by the Magi hail'd from far,
When Phœbus mounts his early car,

The shrieking ghosts to their dark charnels flock;
The full-gorg'd wolves retreat; no more

The prowling lionesses roar,

But hasten with their prey to some deep-cavern'd rock.

Hail then, ye friends of Reason, hail,

Ye foes to Mystery's odious veil!

To Truth's high temple guide my steps aright,
Where Clarke and Wollaston reside,
With Locke and Newton by their side,
While Plato sits above enthron'd in endless night.

Joseph Warton.

CHAPTER V.

FROM the best days of the literary club, to those poets who now are most conspicuous in the public view, there was thought to have been a great dearth of English poetry. Cowper and Sir William Jones can hardly be said to have belonged to the first class, nor exactly to the second. Cowper had taste and talents, with highly respectable acquirements. Some of his poetry is sweet, and all of it honest and moral. The readers of his poetry always rise from the perusal of his graver poems with improvement and delight. There is a perfume in virtuous thoughts that lasts long, and never entirely perishes. Cowper preaches admirably in verse. We should, perhaps, have had much more from his pen, if the demon of melancholy had not been suffered to seize upon, and chain down his mind for many a year.