We shift our chambers and our homes, To dwell where trouble never comes: Sylvia has left the city crowd, Against the court exclaims aloud, Flies to the woods; a hermit saint! She loathes her patches, pins and paint, Dear diamonds from her neck are torn; But humour, that eternal thorn, Sticks in her heart: she’s hurried still, ’Twixt her wild passions and her will: Haunted and hagged where’er she roves, By purling streams, and silent groves, Or with her furies, or her loves. Then our native land we hate, Too cold, too windy, or too wet; Change the thick climate, and repair To France or Italy for air. Happy the soul that virtue shows To fix the place of her repose, Needless to move; for she can dwell In her old grandsire’s hall as well. Virtue that never loves to roam, But sweetly hides herself at home. And easy on a native throne Of humble turf sits gently down. Without claiming then for Watts a pre-eminent place among those who are called poets, these citations will be sufficient to show that however he might disclaim the dignity, he deserved the designation. And there are poets whose eminence is in general more unquestioned, who deserve it less. He was unjust to himself in this particular; verse and rhyme fell from him easily, happily, naturally. Perhaps he succeeded least when he most ambitiously attempted; but he had a remarkable and pleasant power of instantly translating some sentiment which crossed his mind from the classics into English verse, as in those well-known lines,— Seize upon truth where’er ’tis found, On Christian, or on heathen ground. Amongst your friends, amongst your foes, The flower’s divine where’er it grows, Neglect the prickle and assume the rose. In which he elevates the sentiment of Virgil,— “Fas est ab hoste doceri.” Referring to his translations, it has been very justly said that he seldom translates or imitates a heathen poet but he either makes him a Christian in the end, or shows his deficiency in not being one. He consistently maintained throughout his writings, as a poet, the determination expressed in the lines— Thy name, Almighty Sire, and Thine, Jesus, where His full glories shine, Shall consecrate my lays.[13] His familiar method of remembering the signs of the Zodiac is an illustration of the rapid and neat way in which he could bind up knowledge in a verse: The ram, the bull, the heavenly twins, And next the crab the lion shines, The virgin and the scales; The archer, scorpion, and the goat, The man that holds the water-pot, The fish with glittering tails. And his receipt for the orderly conduct of Divine worship, for sustaining a mental effort in prayer, is useful, beautiful, and perfect: