Me, men’s gay haunts delight not, nor the glow
Of lights that glitter in the crowded room;
But nature’s paths where silver waters flow,
Making sweet music as along they go,
And shadowy groves where birds their light wings plume,
Or the brown heath where waves the yellow broom,
Or by the stream where bending willows grow,
And silence reigns, congenial with my gloom.
For there no hollow hearts, no envious eyes,
No flatt’ring tongues, no treacherous hands are found,
No jealous feuds, no gold-born enmities,
Nor cold deceits with which men’s walks abound,
But quietness and health, which are more meet,
Than glaring halls where riot holds her seat.
S. R. J.
The New River at Hornsey.
The New River at Hornsey.
————The stream is pure in solitude,
But passing on amid the haunts of men
It finds pollution there, and rolls from thence
A tainted tide.
Southey.
My memory does not help me to a dozen passages from the whole range of authors, in verse and prose, put together; it only assists me to ideas of what I have read, and to recollect where they are expressed, but not to their words. As the “Minor Poems” are not at hand, I can only hope I have quoted the preceding lines accurately. Their import impressed me in my boyhood, and one fine summer’s afternoon, a year or two ago, I involuntarily repeated them while musing beside that part of the “New River” represented in the [engraving]. I had strolled to “the Compasses,” when “the garden,” as the landlord calls it, was free from the nuisance of “company;” and thither I afterwards deluded an artist, who continues to “use the house,” and supplies me with the drawing of this sequestered nook.