But dost thou, Folly, mock the muse A wanderer’s mountain walk to sing, Who shuns a warring world, nor wooes The vulture cover of its wing? Then fly, thou cowering, shivering thing, Back to the fostering world beguiled To waste in self-consuming strife The loveless brotherhood of life, Reviling and reviled! Away, thou lover of the race That hither chased yon weeping deer! If Nature’s all majestic face More pitiless than man’s appear; Or if the wild winds seem more drear Than man’s cold charities below, Behold around his peopled plains, Where’er the social savage reigns, Exuberance of woe! His art and honours wouldst thou seek Embossed on grandeur’s giant walls? Or hear his moral thunders speak Where senates light their airy halls, Where man his brother man enthralls; Or sends his whirlwind warrants forth To rouse the slumbering fiends of war, To dye the blood-warm waves afar, And desolate the earth? From clime to clime pursue the scene, And mark in all thy spacious way, Where’er the tyrant man has been, There Peace, the cherub, cannot stay; In wilds and woodlands far away She builds her solitary bower, Where only anchorites have trod, Or friendless men, to worship God, Have wandered for an hour. In such a far forsaken vale,— And such, sweet Eldurn vale, is thine,— Afflicted nature shall inhale Heaven-borrowed thoughts and joys divine: No longer wish, no more repine For man’s neglect or woman’s scorn;— Then wed thee to an exile’s lot, For if the world hath loved thee not, Its absence may be borne. [86] In Catholic countries you often hear the church bells rung to propitiate Heaven during thunder storms. STANZAS TO PAINTING. O thou by whose expressive art Her perfect image Nature sees In union with the Graces start, And sweeter by reflection please! In whose creative hand the hues Fresh from yon orient rainbow shine; I bless thee, Promethéan Muse! And call thee brightest of the Nine! Possessing more than vocal power, Persuasive more than poet’s tongue; Whose lineage, in a raptured hour,[87] From Love, the Sire of Nature, sprung. Does Hope her high possession meet? Is joy triumphant, sorrow flown? Sweet is the trance, the tremor sweet, When all we love is all our own. But oh! thou pulse of pleasure dear, Slow throbbing, cold, I feel thee part; Lone absence plants a pang severe, Or death inflicts a keener dart. Then for a beam of joy to light In memory’s sad and wakeful eye! Or banish from the noon of night Her dreams of deeper agony. Shall Song its witching cadence roll? Yea, even the tenderest air repeat, That breathed when soul was knit to soul, And heart to heart responsive beat?