Yet, if my eager hand, in haste to rhyme, Should tack an empty couplet at a time, Great names who do the same I might adduce; Nay, some who keep such hirelings for their use. Need blooming Phyllis be described in prose By any lover who has seen a _rose?_ Who can forget heaven's masterpiece, her eye, Where, within call, the Loves and Graces lie? Who can forget her smile, devoid of art, Her heavenly sweetness and her frozen heart? How easy thus forever to compound, And ring new changes on recurring sound; How easy, with a reasonable store Of useful epithets repeated o'er, Verb, substantive, and pronoun, to transpose, And into tinkling metre hitch dull prose. But I--who tremble o'er each word I use, And all that do not aid the sense refuse, Who cannot bear those phrases out of place Which rhymers stuff into a vacant space--Ponder my scrupulous verses o'er and o'er, And when I write five words, oft blot out four. Plague on the fool who taught us to confine The swelling thought within a measured line; Who first in narrow thraldom fancy pent, And chained in rhyme each pinioned sentiment. Without this toil, contentment's soothing balm Might lull my languid soul in listless calm: Like the smooth prebend how might I recline, And loiter life in mirth and song and wine! Roused by no labor, with no care opprest, Pass all my nights in sleep, my days in rest. My passions and desires obey the rein; No mad ambition fires my temperate vein; The schemes of busy greatness I decline, Nor kneel in palaces at Fortune's shrine. In short, my life had been supremely blest If envious rhyme had not disturbed my rest: But since this freakish fiend began to roll His idle vapors o'er my troubled soul, Since first I longed in polished verse to please, And wrote with labor to be read with ease, Nailed to my chair, day after day I pore On what I write and what I wrote before; Retouch each line, each epithet review, Or burn the paper and begin anew. While thus my labors lengthen into years, I envy all the race of sonneteers. Hail, happy Scudére! whose prolific brain Brings forth a monthly volume without pain; What though thy works, offending every rule, Proclaim their author an insipid fool; Still have they found, whate'er the critic says, Traders to buy and emptier fools to praise.