Blush, grandeur, blush! proud courts withdraw
Ye little stars! hide your diminished rays.

And what! no monument, inscription, stone?
His race, his form, his name almost unknown?

your blaze!

Who builds a church to God, and not to Fame,
Will never mark the marble with his name:
Go, search it there, where1 to be born and die,
Of rich and poor makes all the history;
Enough, that virtue filled the space between;
Proved, by the ends of being, to have been.

Pope.

THE TRAVELLER'S HYMN OF GRATITUDE.?

How are thy servants blest, O Lord!
How sure is their defence!
Eternal wisdom is their guide,

Their help, Omnipotence.

In foreign realms, and lands remote,
Supported by thy care,

Through burning climes I passed unhurt,
And breathed in tainted air.

Thy mercy sweetened every soil,
Made every region please;
The hoary Alpine hills it warmed,
And smoothed the Tyrrhene seas.3
Think, O my soul, devoutly think,
How, with affrighted eyes,

Thou saw'st the wide-extended deep
In all its horrors rise:

(1) There, where, &c.-i. e. in the parish registry.

(2) "The earliest composition," says Burns, speaking of his eleventh or twelfth year," that I recollect taking pleasure in, was the Vision of Mirza,' and a hymn of Addison's beginning

'How are thy servants blest, O Lord!'

I particularly remember one half-stanza, which was music to my ear

For though in dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave.""

(3) Tyrrhene Sea-this sea, called also the Tuscan Sea, was accounted very dangerous by the Romans. It means here, of course, any dangerous sea.

Confusion dwelt in every face,
And fear in every heart;

When waves on waves, and gulfs on gulfs,
O'ercame the pilot's art.

Yet then from all my griefs, O Lord,
Thy mercy set me free;

Whilst in the confidence of prayer
My soul took hold on thee.

For though in dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave,

I knew thou wert not slow to hear,
Nor impotent to save.

The storm was laid, the winds retired,
Obedient to thy will:

The sea that roared at thy command,
At thy command was still.

In midst of dangers, fears, and death,
Thy goodness I'll adore;

And praise thee for thy mercies past,
And humbly hope for more.

My life, if thou preservest my life,

Thy sacrifice shall be;

And death, when death shall be my doom,

Shall join my soul to thee.

Addison.

SAMSON'S LAMENT OVER HIS BLINDNESS.1

O LOSS of sight, of thee I most complain!

Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepid age!
Light, the prime2 work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight

Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased;

(1) Some of Milton's most pathetic passages are due to his own loss of sight. He was blind for the last twenty-two years of his life, during which period "Paradise Lost.""Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes" (from which the above passage is extracted), were published.

(2) Prime-first; in allusion to the creation of light, which was the work of the first day, and there is perhaps a reference to its importance also.

Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me-
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark,' amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

Without all hope of day!

O first created beam, and thou great Word,
"Let there be light, and light was over all,"
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark

And silent as the moon,2

When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,

She all in every part, why was the sight
To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
So obvious and so easy to be quenched?
And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will through every pore?
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried but O yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave,
Buried, yet not exempt

By privilege of death and burial

From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs,

But made hereby obnoxious more

To all the miseries of life,

Life in captivity

Among inhuman foes.

Milton.

(1) Oh dark, dark, &c.-"Few passages in poetry," says Sir E. Brydges, “are so affecting as this; and the tone of expression is peculiarly Miltonic."

(2) Silent as the moon-a singular expression, taken from the Latin "silens luna," the silent moon, i. e. the moon when she does not shine.

(3) Hid in her, &c.-Hidden idly ("vacant") in the cave to which she (poetically) retires between one lunation and another.

THE MEDAL.

SEE the wild waste of all devouring years!
How Rome her own sad sepulchre appears!
With nodding arches, broken temples spread;
The very tombs now vanished like their dead!
Imperial wonders1 raised on nations spoiled,
Where, mixed with slaves, the groaning martyr toiled;
Huge theatres, that now unpeopled woods,
Now drained a distant country of her floods;
Fanes, which admiring gods with pride survey;
Statues of men, scarce less alive than they!
Some felt the silent stroke of mouldering age,
Some hostile fury, some religious rage:
Barbarian blindness, Christian zeal conspire,
And Papal piety, and Gothic fire:

Perhaps, by its own ruins saved from flame,
Some buried marble half preserves a name;
That name, the learn'd with fierce disputes pursue,
And give to Titus old Vespasian's due.

Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust
The faithless column, and the crumbling bust;

Huge moles, whose shadow stretched from shore to shore-
Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps―
Beneath her palm here sad Judea weeps.
Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little eagles wave their wings in gold.

(1) Imperial wonders-The poet here refers to the circuses, amphitheatres, &c., of Rome.

(2) Drained, &c.-In allusion to the naumachiæ, or mock sea-fights, which used to be represented in the Circus Maximus, the water for which, although derived immediately from the Tiber, might poetically be said to drain a distant country.

(3) Give to Titus, &c.-i. e. mistake a statue of Vespasian for one of Titus.

(4) Beneath her palm-the medals struck to commemorate the conquest of Judea represent a female figure sitting, bowed in sorrow, beneath a palm

tree.

L

ages

The Medal, faithful to its charge of fame,
Through climes and bears each form and name:
In one short view subjected to our eye,
Gods, emperors, heroes, sages, beauties lie.
With sharpened sight pale antiquaries pore,
The inscription value, but the rust adore;
This the blue' varnish, that the green endears,
The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years!
To gain Pescennius2 one employs his schemes;
One grasps a Cecrops in ecstatic dreams:
Poor Vadius, long with learned spleen devoured,
Can taste no pleasure since his shield was scoured;
And Curio, restless by the fair one's side,
Sighs for an Otho, and neglects his bride.

Pope.

JERUSALEM BEFORE THE SIEGE.3
TITUS SPEAKS.

IT must be

And yet it moves me, Romans! it confounds
The counsel of my firm philosophy,

That ruin's merciless ploughshare must pass o'er,
And barren salt be sown on, yon proud city.
As on this olive-crownéd hill5 we stand,
Where Kedron at our feet its scanty waters
Distils from stone to stone with gentle motion,
As through a valley sacred to sweet peace,
How boldly doth it front us! how majestically!
Like a luxurious vineyard, the hill-side
Is hung with marble fabrics, line o'er line,
Terrace o'er terrace, nearer still, and nearer

(1) This the blue, &c.-The blue tinge marks the silver, and the green, the copper medals.

(2) To gain Pescennius, &c.-In this and the following lines, the deep anxieties of the virtuoso antiquary are glanced at with happy raillery. The medals named are of course such as are very scarce and difficult to procure. Pescennius was a Roman Consul. The other names need no explanation.

(3) This fine view of Jerusalem is almost altogether taken from that given by Josephus. The description of the Temple, especially, is nearly verbatim.

(4) Ruin's merciless, &c.-This bold metaphor is also employed by Burns (see p. 78), and both writers probably derived it from Young. (See p. 407.) (5) Olive-crowned hill--Mount Olivet, east of Jerusalem.