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The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth

Has robb'd the neighboring fields of half their growth;
His seat, where solitary sports are seen,

Indignant spurns the cottage from the green;
Around the world each needful product flies,

For all the luxuries the world supplies:
While thus the land adorn'd for pleasure-all
In barren splendor feebly waits the fall.

As some fair female, unadorn'd and plain,
Secure to please while youth confirms her reign,

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Slights every borrow'd charm that dress supplies,

Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes

But when those charms are pass'd, for charms are frail. When time advances, and when lovers fail

She then shines forth, solicitous to bless,

In all the glaring impotence of dress.
Thus fares the land, by luxury betray'd:
In nature's simplest charms at first array'd—
But verging to decline, its splendors rise,
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise;

While, scourg'd by famine, from the smiling land
The mournful peasant leads his humble band —
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms-a garden, and a grave.
Where then, ah! where shall poverty reside,
To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
If to some common's fenceless limits stray'd
He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,
Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
And even the bare-worn common is denied.

If to the city sped—what waits him there?

To see profusion that he must not share ;

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To see ten thousand baneful arts combin'd
To pamper luxury, and thin mankind;
To see those joys the sons of pleasure know,
Extorted from his fellow-creatures' woe:
Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade,
There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;

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Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,
There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.

The dome where pleasure holds her midnight reign,
Here, richly deck'd, admits the gorgeous train-
Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square.
The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.
Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy:

Sure these denote one universal joy!

Are these thy serious thoughts?-ah! turn thine eyes

Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.

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She once, perhaps, in village plenty bless'd,
Has wept at tales of innocence distress'd-
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;
Now lost to all her friends, her virtue fled,
Near her betrayer's door she lays her head-

And, pinch'd with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour

When idly first, ambitious of the town,

She left her wheel, and robes of country brown.

Do thine, sweet AUBURN! thine, the loveliest train,

Do thy fair tribes participate her pain?

Even now, perhaps, by cold and hunger led,
At proud men's doors they ask a little bread.

Ah, no! To distant climes, a dreary scene,
Where half the convex world intrudes between,
Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,
Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.

Far different there from all that charm'd before,

The various terrors of that horrid shore;

Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,

And fiercely shed intolerable day

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