Milton, in sullen darkness, yields to fate,
And Tasso groans beneath the courtly weight;
Horace alone (the rogue!) his doom has miss'd,
And lies at ease upon the Pension List..

Round these, in tall imaginary chairs,
Imps ever grinning, sit my daily Cares;
Distaste, delays, dislikings to begin,
Gnawings of pen, and kneadings of the chin.
Here the Blue Dæmon keeps his constant stir,
Who makes a man his own barometer;

There Nightmare, horrid mass! unfeatur'd heap! Prepares to seize me if I fall asleep;

And there, with hands that grasp one's very soul, Frowns Headache, scalper of the studious poll; Headache, who lurks at noon about the courts, And whets his tomahawk on East's Reports.

Chief of this social game, behind me stands, Pale, peevish, periwigg'd, with itching hands, A goblin, double-tail'd, and cloak'd in black, Who, while I'm gravely thinking, bites my back.33 Around his head flits many a harpy shape, With jaws of parchment, and long hairs of tape, Threatening to pounce, and turn whate'er I write, With their own venom, into foul despite.

Let me but name the court, they swear and curse, And din me with hard names; and what is worse, 'Tis now three times that I have miss'd my purse.34

No wonder poor Torquato 35 went distracted, On whose galled senses just such pranks were acted; When the small tyrant, God knows on what ground, With dungeons and with doctors hemm'd him round.36

Last, but not least, (methinks I see him now!) With stare expectant, and a ragged brow, Comes the foul fiend, who-let it rain or shine,

Let it be clear or cloudy, foul or fine,

Or freezing, thawing, drizzling, hailing, snowing,
Or mild, or warm, or hot, or bleak and blowing,
Or damp, or dry, or dull, or sharp, or sloppy,
Is sure to come,-the Devil, who comes for copy.

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Yet see! e'en now thy wondrous charm prevails; The shapes are moved; the stricken circle fails; With backward grins of malice they retire, Scared at thy seraph looks and smiles of fire. That instant, as the hindmost shuts the door, The bursting sunshine smites the window'd floor; Bursts too on every side the sparkling sound Of birds abroad; th' elastic spirits bound; And the fresh mirth of morning breathes around. Away, ye clouds; dark politics, give place; Off cares, and wants, and threats, and all the race Of foes to freedom and to graceful leisure !-To-day is for the Muse, and dancing pleasure.

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,

Just hid with trees, and sparkling with a brook, Where through the quivering boughs the sunbeams shoot

Their arrowy diamonds upon flower and fruit, While stealing airs come whispering o'er the stream,

And lull the fancy to a waking dream!

There shouldst thou come, O first of my desires, What time the noon had spent its fiercer fires, And all the bow'r, with checker'd shadows strewn, Glow'd with a mellow twilight of its own.

There shouldst thou come, and there sometimes with thee

Might deign repair the staid Philosophy,

To taste thy fresh'ning brook, and trim thy groves, And tell us what good task true glory loves.

I see it now!--I pierce the fairy glade,

And feel th' enclosing influence of the shade.
A thousand forms, that sport on summer eves,
Glance through the light, and whisper in the leaves,
While every bough seems wedding with a sprite,
And every air seems hushing the delight,
And the calm bliss, fix'd on itself awhile,
Dimples th' unconscious lips into a smile.

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In vain. For now, with looks that doubly burn,
Shamed of their late defect, my foes return;
They know their foil is short, and shorter still
The bliss that waits upon the Muse's will.
Back to their seats they rush, and reassume
Their ghastly rites, and sadden all the room.
O'er ears and brain the bursting wrath descends,
Cabals, misstatements, noise of private ends,
Doubts, hazards, crosses, cloud-compelling vapours,
With dire necessity to read the papers,

Judicial slaps that would have stung Saint Paul,
Costs, pityings, warnings, wits; and worse than all
(Oh for a dose of Thelwall 37 or of poppy)
The fiend, the punctual fiend, that bawls for copy!
Full in the midst, like that Gorgonian spell,
Whose ravening features glar'd collected hell,
The well-wigg'd pest, his curling horror shakes,
And a fourth snap of threatening vengeance takes!
At that dread sight the Muse herself turns pale;
Freedom and fiction's self no more avail;

And lo! my Bower of Bliss is turned into a jail!

What then? What then my better genius cries:

Scandals and jails! All these you may despise.
Th' enduring soul, that, to keep others free,
Dares to give up its darling liberty,

Lives wheresoe'er its countrymen applaud,
And in their great enlargement walks abroad.
But toils alone, and struggles hour by hour,
Against th' insatiate, gold-flush'd Lust of Power,

Can keep the fainting virtue of thy land From the rank slaves that gather round his hand, Be poor in purse, and Law will soon undo thee; in soul, and self-contempt will rue thee.

Be

poor

I yield, I yield.—Once more I turn to you, Harsh politics! and once more bid adieu To the soft dreaming of the Muse's bowers, Their sun-streak'd fruits and fairy-painted flowers; Farewell for gentler times, ye laurell'd shades; Farewell, ye sparkling brooks and haunted glades, Where the trim shapes that bathe in moonlight eves, Glance through the light and whisper in the leaves,

While every bough seems wedding with a sprite, And every air seems hushing the delight.

Farewell, farewell, dear Muse, and all thy pleasure!

He conquers ease, who would be crown'd with leisure.

POWER AND GENTLENESS.

I'VE thought, at gentle and ungentle hour,
Of many an act and giant shape of power;
Of the old kings with high exacting looks,
Sceptred and globed; of eagles on their rocks,
With straining feet, and that fierce mouth and
drear,

Answering the strain with downward drag austere;
Of the rich-headed lion, whose huge frown
All his great nature, gathering, seems to crown;
Of towers on hills, with foreheads out of sight
In clouds, or shown us by the thunder's light,
Or ghastly prison, that eternally

Holds its blind visage out to the lone sea;
And of all sunless, subterranean deeps

The creature makes, who listens while he sleeps,
Avarice; and then of those old earthly cones,
That stride, they say, over heroic bones;

And those stone heaps Egyptian, whose small doors
Look like low dens under precipitous shores;
And him, great Memnon, that long sitting by
In seeming idleness, with stony eye,

Sang at the morning's touch, like poetry;
And then of all the fierce and bitter fruit
Of the proud planting of a tyrannous foot,--
Of bruised rights, and flourishing bad men,
And virtue wasting heavenwards from a den;
Brute force, and fury; and the devilish drouth
Of the fool cannon's ever-gaping mouth;
And the bride-widowing sword; and the harsh bray
The sneering trumpet sends across the fray;
And all which lights the people-thinning star
That selfishness invokes,-the horsed war,
Panting along with many a bloody mane.

I've thought of all this pride, and all this pain, And all the insolent plenitudes of power, And I declare, by this most quiet hour, Which holds in different tasks by the fire-light Me and my friends here, this delightful night, That Power itself has not one half the might Of Gentleness. 'Tis want, to all true wealth; The uneasy madman's force, to the wise health; Blind downward beating, to the eyes that see; Noise to persuasion, doubt to certainty ; The consciousness of strength in enemies, Who must be strain'd upon, or else they rise; The battle to the moon, who all the while, High out of hearing, passes with her smile; The tempest, trampling in his scanty run, To the whole globe, that basks about the sun; Or as all shrieks and clangs, with which a sphere,