GEORGE CRABBE
From THE LIBRARY
When the sad soul, by care and grief oppressed,
Looks round the world, but looks in vain for rest;
When every object that appears in view,
Partakes her gloom and seems dejected too;
Where shall affliction from itself retire?
Where fade away and placidly expire?
Alas! we fly to silent scenes in vain;
Care blasts the honours of the flowery plain:
Care veils in clouds the sun's meridian beam,
Sighs through the grove, and murmurs in the stream;
For when the soul is labouring in despair,
In vain the body breathes a purer air.
* * * * *
Here come the grieved, a change of thought to find;
The curious here, to feed a craving mind;
Here the devout their peaceful temple choose;
And here the poet meets his fav'ring Muse.
With awe, around these silent walks I tread;
These are the lasting mansions of the dead:—
'The dead!' methinks a thousand tongues reply,
'These are the tombs of such as cannot die!
Crowned with eternal fame, they sit sublime,
And laugh at all the little strife of time.'
* * * * *
Lo! all in silence, all in order stand,
And mighty folios first, a lordly band;
Then quartos their well-ordered ranks maintain,
And light octavos fill a spacious plain:
See yonder, ranged in more frequented rows,
A humbler band of duodecimos;
While undistinguished trifles swell the scene,
The last new play and frittered magazine.
* * * * *
But who are these, a tribe that soar above,
And tell more tender tales of modern love?
A novel train! the brood of old Romance,
Conceived by Folly on the coast of France,
That now with lighter thought and gentler fire,
Usurp the honours of their drooping sire:
And still fantastic, vain, and trifling, sing
Of many a soft and inconsistent thing,—
Of rakes repenting, clogged in Hymen's chain,
Of nymph reclined by unpresuming swain,
Of captains, colonels, lords, and amorous knights,
That find in humbler nymphs such chaste delights.
Such heavenly charms, so gentle, yet so gay,
That all their former follies fly away:
Honour springs up, where'er their looks impart
A moment's sunshine to the hardened heart;
A virtue, just before the rover's jest,
Grows like a mushroom in his melting breast.
Much too they tell of cottages and shades.
Of balls, and routs, and midnight masquerades,
Where dangerous men and dangerous mirth reside,
And Virtue goes——on purpose to be tried.
These are the tales that wake the soul to life,
That charm the sprightly niece and forward wife,
That form the manners of a polished age,
And each pure easy moral of the stage.