WEAK and irresolute is man;
The purpose of to-day,
Woven with pains into his plan
To-morrow rends away.
The bow well bent, and smart the spring,
Vice seems already slain;
But passion rudely snaps the string,
And it revives again.
Some foe to his upright intent,
Finds out his weaker part;
Virtue engages his assent,
But Pleasure wins the heart.
'Tis here the folly of the wise
Through all his art we view;
And while his tongue the charge denies, His conscience owns it true.
Bound on a voyage of awful length,
And dangers little known,
A stranger to superior strength,-
Man vainly trusts his own.
But strength alone can ne'er prevail
To reach the distant coast;
The breath of Heaven must swell the sail,
Or all the toil is lost.
WHEN one who holds communion with the skies,
Has fill'd his urn where the pure waters rise,
And once more mingles with us meaner things,
'Tis even as if an angel shook his wings;
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide,
And tells us whence his treasure is supplied.
Он, for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more! My ear is pain'd,
My soul is sick with ev'ry day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is fill'd,
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart;
It does not feel for man.
The natural bond
Of brotherhood is sever'd, as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour'd like his own; and having power
T'enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other, mountains interposed,
Make enemies of nations, who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And worse than all, and most to be deplor'd,
As human nature's broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
Then what is man! And what man seeing this,
And having human feelings does not blush
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Just estimation, priz'd above all price;
I had much rather be myself the slave,
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
We have no slaves at home-then why abroad?
And they themselves once ferried o'er the wave
That part us, are emancipate and loosed.
Slaves cannot breathe in England: if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free;
They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through ev'ry vein
Of all your empire; that where Britain's power
Is felt, mankind may feel her Mercy too.
THE rose had been washed, just washed in a shower
Which Mary to Anna conveyed,
The plentiful moisture incumbered the flower,
And weighed down its beautiful head.
The cup was all fill'd, and the leaves were all wet,
And it seemed to a fanciful view,
To weep for the buds it had left with regret,
On the flourishing bush were it grew.
I hastily seized it, unfit as it was,
For a nosegay, so dripping and drowned,
And swinging it rudely, too rudely, alas!
I snapped it, it fell to the ground.
And such, I exclaimed, is the pitiless part
Some act by the delicate mind,
Regardless of wringing and breaking a heart
Already to sorrow resigned.
This elegant rose, had I shaken it less,
Might have bloomed with its owner awhile,
And the tear, that is wiped with a little address,
May be followed perhaps by a smile.
The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade,
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed, since I last took a view
Of my favourite field, and the bank where they grew;
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat,
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene, where his melody charm'd me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.
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