"Oh blessed shades! oh gentle, cool retreat From all the immoderate heat In which the frantic world does burn and sweat! This does the Lion-star, Ambition's rage; This Avarice, the Dog-star's thirst assuage; Everywhere else their fatal power we see, They make and rule man's wretched destiny; They neither set, nor disappear, But tyrannize o'er all the year,-- Whilst we ne'er feel their heat nor influence here. The birds that dance from bough to bough, And sing above in every tree, Are not from fears and cares more free, Than we who muse or toil below, And should by right be singers too. What Prince's quire of music can excel That which within this shade does dwell? To which we nothing pay or give? They, like all other poets, live Without reward or thanks for their obliging pains; 'Tis well if they become not prey: The whistling winds add their less ardent strains, And a grave bass the murmuring fountains play. Nature does all this harmony bestow; But, to our plants, arts, music, too, The pipe, theorbo, and guitar, we owe, The lute itself, which once was green and mute; When Orpheus struck the inspired lute The trees danced round and understood, By sympathy, the voice of wood." Methinks I see great Dioclesian walk In the Salonian garden's noble shade, Which by his own imperial hands was made; I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk With the ambassadors, who come in vain To entice him to a throne again. "If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show All the delights that in these gardens grow, 'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay, Than 'tis that you should carry me away; And trust me not, my friends, if every day I walk not here with more delight Than ever, after the most happy fight, In triumph to the capitol I ride, To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god." Do we ask, on viewing the rural pictures which the Pastoral Poets afford us,--Whither is our modern civilization tending? What solid profits has it gained on the state of things they describe, seeing the primitive virtues and customs, once enjoyed by our ancestors, are fading,--the generosity, the cheer, the patriotism, the piety, the republican simplicity and heartiness of those times? Machinery is fast displacing the poetry of farm and fireside; the sickle, the distaff, the chimney-piece, the family institution, being superseded by prose powers; and, with their sway, have come slavery, pusillanimity, dishonor. I know there are reconciling compensations for all risks of revolution. For while the Demos thus takes his inch, Divinity secures his ell; so the garment of mankind comes the fuller from the loom in this transfer of labors. The fig leaf thus cunningly woven, costs fair honors, nevertheless, and we covet in our hearts the florid simplicity of times of sturdier virtues and unassailable integrity.[B]