Who comes to muse in solitude, and trace,
Through the rank moss revealed, her honored dust.
But not to Rome alone has fate confined
The doom of ruin; cities numberless,

Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, Babylon, and Troy,
And rich Phoenicia-they are blotted out,
Half-razed from memory, and their very name
And being in dispute.-Has Athens fallen?
Is polished Greece become the savage seat
Of ignorance and sloth? and shall we dare

*

*

*

*

And empire seeks another hemisphere.

Where now is Britain?-Where her laurelled names,
Her palaces and halls. Dashed in the dust.

Some second Vandal hath reduced her pride,
And with one big recoil hath thrown her back
To primitive barbarity.—Again,

Through her depopulated vales, the scream
Of bloody superstition hollow rings,

And the scarred native to the tempest howls
The yell of deprecation. O'er her marts

Her crowded ports, broods Silence; and the cry
Of the low curlew, and the pensive dash
Of distant billows, breaks alone the void.
Even as the savage sits upon the stone

That marks where stood her capitals, and hears
The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks
From the dismaying solitude.-Her bards
Sing in a language that hath perished;

And their wild harps, suspended o'er their graves,
Sigh to the desert winds a dying strain.

Meanwhile the arts, in second infancy,

Rise in some distant clime and then perchance

Some bold adventurer, filled with golden dreams,
Steering his bark through trackless solitudes,
Where, to his wandering thoughts, no daring prow
Hath ever ploughed before,-espies the cliffs
Of fallen Albion.-To the land unknown
He journeys joyful; and perhaps descries
Some vestige of her ancient stateliness;
Then he, with vain conjecture, fills his mind
Of the unheard of race, which had arrived
At science in that solitary nook,

Far from the civil world: and sagely sighs
And moralizes on the state of man.

Still on its march, unnoticed and unfelt,
Moves on our being. We do live and breathe,
And we are gone. The spoiler heeds us not.
We have our spring-time and our rottenness;
And as we fall, another race succeeds

To perish likewise.-Meanwhile nature smiles-
The seasons run their round-the sun fulfils
His annual course-and heaven and earth remain
Still changing, yet unchanged-still doomed to feel
Endless mutation in perpetual rest.

Where are concealed the days which have elapsed?
Hid in the mighty cavern of the past,
They rise upon us only to appal,
By indistinct and half-glimpsed images,
Misty, gigantic, huge, obscure, remote.

Oh it is fearful, on the midnight couch,
When the rude rushing winds forget to rave,
And the pale moon, that through the casement high
Surveys the sleepless muser, stamps the hour
Of utter silence, it is fearful then