1731-1800.
THE TASK.
Book i. The Sofa.
God made the county, and man made the town.[20]
Book ii. The Timepiece.
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never roach me more.
Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one.
England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.
Praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,
That Chatham's language was his mother tongue.
There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know.
Variety's the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavor.
Book iii. The Garden.
Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that hast survived the fall!
How various his employments whom the world jails idle; and who justly in return
Esteems that busy world an idler too!
Book iv. Winter Evening.
And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
'Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,
To peep at such a world; to see the stir
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd.
Book v. Winter Morn in a Walk.
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
Book vi. Winter Walk at Noon.
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;
And as the mind is pitched, the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touched within us, and the heart replies.
Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,
And Learning wiser grow without his books.
Tirocinium.
Shine by the side of every path we tread
With such a lustre, he that runs may read.
Retirement.
Built God a church, and laughed His word to scorn.
How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude!
But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper, Solitude is sweet.
Conversation.
A fool must now and then be right, by chance.
John Gilpin.
That, though on pleasure she was bent,
She had a frugal mind.
To dash through thick and thin.
A hat not much the worse for wear
Lines to his Mother's Picture.
O that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Walking with God.
What peaceful hours I once enjoyed?
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void,
The world can never fill.
VERSES,
Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk.
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.
O Solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
But the sound of the church-going bell
Those valleys and rocks never heard,
Never sighed at the sound of a knell,
Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared.
How fleet is a glance of the mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight,
The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-winged arrows of light.