This folio of four pages, happy work! Which not ev’n critics criticise; that holds Inquisitive Attention, while I read, Fast bound in chains of silence, which the fair, Though eloquent themselves, yet fear to break, What is it, but a map of busy life, Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns? Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks, Births, deaths, and marriages--------------- ------------------------The grand debate, The popular harangue, the tart reply, The logic, and the wisdom, and the wit, And the loud laugh-------------------------- Cat’racts of declamation thunder here; There forests of no meaning spread the page, In which all comprehension wanders lost; While fields of pleasantry amuse us there, With merry descants on a nation’s woes. The rest appears a wilderness of strange But gay confusion; roses for the cheeks, And lilies for the brows of faded age, Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald, Heav’n, earth, and ocean, plunder’d of their sweets, Nectareous essences, Olympian dews, Sermons, and city feasts, and fav’rite airs, Æthereal journies, submarine exploits, And Katerfelto, with his hair an end At his own wonders, wand’ring for his bread. ’Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat, To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd; To hear the roar she sends through all her gates, At a safe distance, where the dying sound Falls a soft murmur on th’ uninjured ear. Thus sitting, and surveying thus, at ease, The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced To some secure and more than mortal height, That lib’rates and exempts us from them all. This is an agreeable and true picture, and, with like felicity, the poet paints the bearer of the newspaper. Hark! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge, That with its wearisome but needful length Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright;-- He comes, the herald of a noisy world, With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks News from all nations lumb’ring at his back. True to his charge, the close pack’d load behind Yet careless what he brings, his one concern Is to conduct it to the destin’d inn; And, having dropp’d th’ expected bag, pass on. He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch, Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some; To him indiff’rent whether grief or joy. Methinks, as I have always thought, that Cowper here missed the expression of a kind feeling, and rather tends to raise an ungenerous sentiment towards this poor fellow. As the bearer of intelligence, of which he is ignorant, why should it be “To him indiff’rent whether grief or joy?”