Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change his place;

Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for

power,

By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour;

Far other aims his heart had learned to prize,

More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.

His house was known to all the vagrant train;

He chid their wanderings but relieved their pain:

The long-remembered beggar was his guest,

Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;

The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,

Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed;

The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sat by the fire, and talked the night away, Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,

Shouldered his crutch and showed how fields were won.

Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,

And quite forgot their vices in their woe; Careless their merits or their faults to

scan,

His pity gave ere charity began.

Thus to relieve the wretched was his

pride,

And e'en his failings leaned to Virtue's side;

But in his duty prompt at every call,

He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all;

Beside the bed where parting life was laid,

And sorrow, guilt, and pain by turns dismayed,

The reverend champion stood. At his control

Well had the boding tremblers learned

to trace

The day's disasters in his morning face; Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee

At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;

His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the

green:

Around the world each needful product flies,

For all the luxuries the world supplies; While thus the land adorned for pleasure all

In barren splendour feebly waits the fall. As some fair female unadorned and plain,

Secure to please while youth confirms her reign,

Slights every borrowed charm that dress supplies,

Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes;

But when those charms are past, for charms are frail,

When time advances, and when lovers fail,

She then shines forth, solicitous to bless, In all the glaring impotence of dress. Thus fares the land by luxury betrayed: In nature's simplest charms at first arrayed,

But verging to decline, its splendours rise,

Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise; While, scourged by famine from the smiling land

The mournful peasant leads his humble band,

And while he sinks, without one arm to

save,

The country blooms-a garden and a

grave.

Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,

To 'scape the pressure of contiguous.

pride?

If to some common's fenceless limits strayed,

He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,

Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth

divide,

And even the bare-worn common is

denied.

If to the city sped-what waits him there?

To see profusion that he must not share; To see ten thousand baneful arts combined

To pamper luxury, and thin mankind; To see those joys the sons of pleasure know

Extorted from his fellow-creature's woe. Here while the courtier glitters in brocade,

There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;

Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,

There the black gibbet glooms beside the

way.

The dome where pleasure holds her midnight reign

Here, richly deckt, admits the gorgeous train:

Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square,

The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.

Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy!

Sure these denote one universal joy!
Are these thy serious thoughts?-Ah,

turn thine eyes

Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.

She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest, Has wept at tales of innocence distrest; Her modest looks the cottage might

adorn,

Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn:

Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,

Near her betrayer's door she lays her head,

And, pinch'd with cold, and shrinking

from the shower,

With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour,

When idly first, ambitious of the town, She left her wheel and robes of country

brown.

Do thine, sweet Auburn,-thine, the

loveliest train,

Do thy fair tribes participate her pain? Even now, perhaps, by cold and hunger led,

At proud men's doors they ask a little bread!

Ah, no! To distant climes, a dreary

scene,

Where half the convex world intrudes between,

Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,

Where wild Altama murmurs to their

woe.

Far different there from all that charmed before

The various terrors of that horrid shore; Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,

And fiercely shed intolerable day; Those matted woods, where birds forget to sing,

But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling; Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned,

Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;

Where at each step the stranger fears to wake

The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,

And savage men more murderous still

than they;

While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies,

Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies.

Far different these from every former

scene,

The cooling brook, the grassy vested green,

The breezy covert of the warbling grove, That only sheltered thefts of harmless love.

Good Heaven! what sorrows gloomed that parting day,