At once they stoop and swell the lusty sheaves;
While through their cheerful band the rural talk, The rural scandal, and the rural jest,
Fly harmless, to deceive the tedious time, And steal unfelt the sultry hours away.
Behind, the master walks; builds up the shocks; And, conscious, glancing oft on every side His sated eye, feels his heart heave with joy. The gleaners spread around; and here and there, Spike after spike, their sparing harvest pick. Be not too narrow, husbandmen! but fling From the full sheaf, with charitable stealth, The liberal handful. Think, oh grateful think! How good the God of Harvest is to you;
Who pours abundance o'er your flowing fields — While these unhappy partners of your kind Wide-hover round you, like the fowls of heaven, And ask their humble dole. The various turns Of fortune ponder; that your sons may want What now, with hard reluctance, faint, ye give. The lovely young Lavinia once had friends; And fortune smil'd, deceitful, on her birth.
For, in her helpless years depriv'd of all, Of every stay save innocence and Heaven, She, with her widow'd mother, feeble, old, And poor, liv'd in a cottage, far retir'd Among the windings of a woody vale; By solitude and deep surrounding shades, But more by bashful modesty, conceal'd. Together thus they shunn'd the cruel scorn Which virtue, sunk to poverty, would meet From giddy fashion and low-minded pride; Almost on Nature's common bounty fed,
gay birds that sung them to repose,
Content, and careless of to-morrow's fare.
Her form was fresher than the morning rose,
When the dew wets its leaves; unstain'd and pure,
As is the lily, or the mountain snow.
The modest virtues mingled in her eyes,
Still on the ground dejected, darting all
Their humid beams into the blooming flowers;
Or when the mournful tale her mother told, Of what her faithless fortune promis'd once, Thrill'd in her thought, they, like the dewy star
Of evening, shone in tears.
Sat fair-proportion'd on her polish'd limbs, Veil'd in a simple robe, their best attire, Beyond the pomp of dress; for loveliness Needs not the foreign aid of ornament, But is when unadorn'd adorn'd the most.
Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self, Recluse amid the close-embowering woods. As in the hollow breast of Apennine, Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eye,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild,
So flourish'd blooming, and unseen by all, The sweet Lavinia; till, at length, compell'd By strong necessity's supreme command,
With smiling patience in her looks, she went To glean Palemon's fields. The pride of swains Palemon was, the generous, and the rich; Who led the rural life in all its joy
And elegance, such as Arcadian song Transmits from ancient uncorrupted times
When tyrant custom had not shackled man,
He saw her charming, but he saw not half The charms her downcast modesty conceal'd. That very moment love and chaste desire Sprung in his bosom, to himself unknown ;
For still the world prevail'd, and its dread laugh, Which scarce the firm philosopher can scorn,
Should his heart own a gleaner in the field;
And thus in secret to his soul he sigh'd: "What pity! that so delicate a form,
By beauty kindled, where enlivening sense And more than vulgar goodness seem to dwell, Should be devoted to the rude embrace
Of some indecent clown! She looks, methinks,
Of old Acasto's line; and to my mind
Recalls that patron of my happy life,
From whom my liberal fortune took its rise;
Now to the dust gone down his houses, lands,
And once fair-spreading family, dissolv'd.
"Tis said that in some lone obscure retreat,
Urg'd by remembrance sad, and decent pride,
Far from those scenes which knew their better days, His aged widow and his daughter live,
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