Blind dreamer! Thinkest thou Fancy e'er A wife-a word that's much to me, Or when man's chafed, can smile to flight Woe worth thee, Fancy! who shall meet ED. How young and how comely— Lo! look on him now, How stedfast his eye And how tranquil his brow; The gift of his ladye-love Glitters full gay, As down, like the eagle, He pours on his prey. Go, sing it in song; And go, tell it in story— He went in his strength And returned in his glory. 9 EPISTLE FROM ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ. TO ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. WELL, Heaven be thanked! friend Allan, here I am, So let me hope; where Time upon my head And when this poor frail earthly tabernacle Shall be dissolved. . (it matters not how soon Or late, in God's good time ;) . . where I would fain Needless it were to say how willingly I bade the huge metropolis farewell; Its dust and dirt and din and smoke and smut, Weary of hurried days and restless nights; Watchmen, whose office is to murder sleep, When sleep might else have "weighed one's eyelids down ;" Rattle of carriages, and roll of carts, And tramp of iron hoofs; and worse than all, (Confusion being worse confounded then With coachmen's quarrels, and with footmen's shouts) My next door neighbours, in a street not yet For then had we, from midnight until morn, Inverted, topsy-turvying night and day, Tax them more heavily than thou hast charged Escaping from all this, the very whirl Of mail-coach wheels, bound outwards from Lad Lane, Was peace and quietness; three hundred miles Of homeward way, seemed to the body rest, And to the mind repose. Donne did not hate More perfectly that city. Not for all Its social, all its intellectual joys, (Which having touched, I may not condescend Wherein I learnt in infancy to love The sights and sounds of Nature; wholesome sights, Gladdening the eye that they refresh; and sounds, Which when from life and happiness they spring, And yonder Solway shores; a poet thou, A poet to his home, when.. making thus Might seem perversely or unkindly done, . . Fortune hath set his happy habitacle Among the ancient hills, near mountain streams And lakes pellucid; in a land sublime And lovely, as those regions of romance, Where his young fancy in its day dreams roamed, Expatiating in forests wild and wide, Loegrian, or of dearest Faery land. Yet, Allan, of the cup of social joy No man drinks freelier; nor with heartier thirst, Nor keener relish, where I see around Faces which I have known and loved so long, |