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With smileless look a spectre form
Advancing seem'd t' appear,
White Fancy toll'd the death-bell slow
Across my startled ear:

Full well I knew its fearful sound,

That sternly seem'd to say,

"Go speed thee to the grass green sward,
For thou must die to day."—

ODE TO THE MEMORY OF CHATTERTON.

Hunc inopem vidistis Athenæ

Nil præter gelidas ausæ conferre cicutas.

JUVENAL.

ILL-FATED youth, adieu; was thine a breast
Where fell Despair might fix her dark resolve,
To mar thy simple heart,

And snatch thee from the world?

Whilst Fancy finds a friend, and Genius charms,
With eagle-eye, and high-aspiring thought,
Thy sainted memory

Shall ever sacred live.

When Spring, with scanty vest and maiden smile,
Leads on the sprightly months and infant year,
Her tears of morning dew

Shall wet thy death-bed cold:

When jocund Summer with her honied breath (Sweetening the golden grain and blithsome gale) Displays her sun-burnt face

Beneath the hat of straw,

The lily's hanging head, the pansy pale, (Poor Fancy's lowly followers) in meek Attire, shall deck thy turf,

And withering lie with thee.

When sober Autumn with lack-lustre eye
Shakes with a chiding blast the yellow leaf,
And hears the woodman's song

And early sportsman's foot;

When naked Winter, like a Pilgrim grey,
Of veriest rude aspect and joyless brow,
Calls for the carol wild,

And trims the social fire,

Remembrance oft in Pity's pensive ear,
At silent eve shall sorrowing toll thy knell,
And tell to after days

Thy tale, thy luckless tale.

EPITAPH*.

Passenger,

To be the first in informing you

that over these ashes

No tear was ever shed, and that for many
years,

This turf has wanted a signature,

Is a silent satisfaction to the anonymous writer
of this testimony.

For a moment let oblivion withhold
her exultation:

With sorrow and sincerity,

This plain stone is inscribed (by one whom
he never saw)

To the memory of the Reverend
PETER ELKINTON,

A man

Of much genius, and many virtues,
Whose lot it was in this world
To live in neglect without a comfort,
And to die in solitude without a friend.
Great God!

Are not these things noted in thy book!

When the above Epitaph was written, the author was unacquainted with the many acts of friendship which Mr. Elkinton received from the Rev. R. Parr, of Norwich.

WRITTEN AMIDST THE RUINS OF BROOMHOLM PRIORY, IN NORFOLK.

BROOMHOLM,

OLM, thy vaulted roofs and towers sublime,
Yield to the gradual touch of silent time,
Whose luckless stole in dusky mantlings spread,
Veils the fair prospect of thy once famed head,
And all thy beauty now but dim appears,
Through the dark backward of a thousand years.
Scared at the blast that hollow from the main
Molests with sullen pause her ancient reign,
By the wan moon-beam oft the bird of night
Lengthens her feral note, and wheels her flight
O'er the cold limbs that ever mouldering lie,
Beneath the winter's wind and summer sky.
What though in vain with curious eye we trace
The tarnish'd semblance of the sacred place,
With eye profane its fading tints explore,

That mark the features of the days of yore,
And fain would eager snatch from ruffian time
The moss-grown fragment of a monkish rhyme;
What though no more at early dawn of day,
Eve's misty hour, or twilight's trembling ray,
With ken full blithe the mariner espies
Thy glittering domes and massy towers arise * ;
Far from the dizzy mast he looks in vain,
And longs to see his native shore again.
What though no scanty path we here descry,
To cheer with foot of man the sorrowing eye,

* This Priory was formerly a sea-mark.

Rough from the grasp of age thy walls deride
The slighter symmetry of modern pride,
Fancy, still fond, presents the long-drawn aile,
And feels the brooding genius of the pile;
Her magic spell th' emblazon'd arms supplies,
And gives the gorgeous pane a thousand dyes;
Rebuilds the trophied tomb of many a knight
With high hung helm and ponderous spear bedigh:
Still the damp shrines a grateful awe inspire,
Pale burn the lamps, and rapt the stoled choir,
Still the loud organ's peal I seem to hear,

That wakes the slumbering soul, and tills the ravish'd ear.

PROSTITUTED HONOUR; OR, LOTHARIO;

A CHARACTER.

UNMASK'D by censure, unrestrain'd by fear,

Shall low-born vice its shameless forehead rear?
From honour's height look down with saucy brow,
On all the grovelling world that toils below,
At poverty's lone cot dare wag its tongue,
And scorn the dirty dunghill whence it sprung?
Thanks to those powers who gave me to deride
Wealth's swelling port, and tinsel'd meanness, pride.
Silent I cannot view with patient eye

Pageants like these that stink and flutter by.
In days of yore with valour for her guide,
Justice alone preferr'd the worth she tried;

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