For many a league the wanderer's borne,
By forest, wood, mead, mountain, plain,
Till, carried never to return,
'Tis buried in the boundless main.
Thus Aristippus forms his plan :
To every change of times and fates
His temper he accommodates;
Not where he will, but where he can,
A daily bliss he celebrates.
An osier on the stream of time,
This philosophic wanderer,
Floating through every place and clime,
Finds some peculiar blessing there;
Where'er the winding current strays,
By prosperous mount or adverse plain,
He'll sport till all his jocund days
Are lost in life's eternal main.
Let worldlings hunt for happiness
With pain, anxiety, and strife,
Through every thorny path of life,
And ne'er the' ideal fair possess.
For who, alas! their passions send
The fleeting image to pursue,
Themselves their own designs undo,
And in the means destroy the end.
But I a surer clue have found,
To guide me o'er the mazy ground:
For, knowing that this deity
Must ever rove at liberty
Through Fancy's visionary road,
I never Wisdom's schemes employ
To find her in one fix'd abode,
But where I meet her I enjoy ;
And, being free from strife and care,
Am sure to meet her every where.
SHOULD Supercilious censors say-
'His youth is waning, 'tis not time
For Aristippus now with rhyme
To while the useless hours away;'
I might reply do no more
Than what my betters did before;
That what at first my fancy led
This idle business to pursue,
Still makes me prosecute the trade,
Because I've nothing else to do.
But to the candid, Tom, and you,
A better reason I could give,
To whom a better reason's due;
That in these measures I convey
My gentle precepts, how to live,
Clearer than any other way;
For in the powers of poetry
Wit, truth, and pleasure blended lie
As, in Italia's fertile vales,
On the same tree, whilst blossoms blow,
The ripen'd fruits nectareous grow,
Fed by warm suns and freshening gales.
Divinest art to mortals given!
By thee the brave, the good, the wise,
The fair, the learn'd, and witty rise,
From earth's dull sod, and people heaven.
Nor be❜t to thee imputed blame,
That ever barking calumny,
And filthy mouth'd obscenity,
Have oft usurp'd thy injured name:
Alas! the drops which morning sheds
With dewy fingers on the meads,
The pink's and violet's tubes to fill,
Alike the noxious juices feed
Of deadly hemlock's poisonous weed,
And give them fatal power to kill!
Imagination loves to trace
Reason's immortal lineaments
In fiction's necromantic face,
When probability assents.
The fairest features fiction wears,
When most like truth the' enchantress looks,
As sweet Narcissa's shade appears,
In silent lakes and crystal brooks,
So like the life, we scarcely know
Where last to fix our wavering love;
Whether upon the form below,
Or on the real nymph above.
In each we see an angel's face,
Though for the substance breathe our sighs,
Whilst we the shadowy image trace
In the clear wave, with longing eyes.
But should you ask me, why I choose,
Of all the laurel'd sisterhood,
The' inhabitants of Pindus' wood,
The least considerable muse?
The violets round the mountain's feet,
Whose humble gems unheeded blow,
Are to the shepherd's smell more sweet
Than lofty cedars on its brow.
Let the loud epic sound the' alarms
Of dreadful war, and heroes sprung
From some immortal ancestry,
Clad in impenetrable arms
By Vulcan forged; my lyre is strung
With softer chords, my muse more free
Wanders through Pindar's humbler ways
In amiable simplicity:
Unstudied are her gentle lays,
She asks no laurel for her brows:
Careless of censure or of praise,
She haunts where tender myrtle grows;
Fonder of happiness than fame;
To the proud bay prefers the rose,
Nor barters pleasure for a name.
On Nature's lap reclined at ease,
I listen to her heavenly tongue,
From her derive the power to please,
From her receive the' harmonious time,
And what the goddess makes my song,
In unpremeditated rhyme
Mellifluous flows, whilst young desire,
Cull'd from the' Elysian bloom of spring,
Strews flowers immortal round my lyre,
And Fancy's sportive children bring,
From blossom'd grove and lilied mead,
Fresh fragrant chaplets for my head.
The most, though softest of the Nine,
Euterpe, muse of gaiety,
Queen of heart-softening melody,
Allures my ear with notes divine.
In my retreat Euterpe plays,
Where Science, garlanded with flowers,
Enraptured listens to her lays,
Beneath the shade of myrtle bowers.
This pleasing territory lies
Unvisited by common eyes,
Far from the prude's affected spleen,
Or bigot's surly godliness,
Where no coquettes, no jilts are seen,
Nor folly fetter'd fops of dress;
Far from the vulgar, high and low,
The pension'd great man's littleness;
Or those who, prone to slavery, grow
Fit tools of other's tyranny,
And, with a blind devotion, bow
To wooden blocks of quality;
Far from the land of argument,
Where, deep within their murky cells,
Figures and bloated tropes are pent',
And three legg'd syllogism dwells;
Far from the bubble blowing race,
The schoolmen subtle and refined,
Who fill the thick skull's brainless space
With puffs of theologic wind;
And all the grave pedantic train,
Which fairy-genius longs to bind
Hard with a comment's iron chain.
But, whilst such drones are driven away,
my beloved retreat remain
The fair, the witty, and the gay.
Here the soft patriarch of the loves, Honey'd Anacreon, with the doves
1 See Les Ombres of Gresset.
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