POET. What think I now? Even what I thought before;boasts though may deplore, What Still I repeat, words lead me not astray When the shown feeling points a different way. can say grace at slander's feast, Smooth And bless each haut-gout cook'd by monk or priest; So much for you, my friend! who own a Church, And would not leave your mother in the lurch! But when a Liberal asks me what I think— Scared by the blood and soot of Cobbett's ink, And Jeffrey's glairy phlegm and Connor's foam, In search of some safe parable I roamAn emblem sometimes may comprise a tome! Disclaimant of his uncaught grandsire's mood, I see a tiger lapping kitten's food: And who shall blame him that he purs applause, Yet not the less, for modern lights unapt, LINES TO A COMIC AUTHOR, ON AN ABUSIVE REVIEW. WHAT though the chilly wide-mouth'd quacking chorus From the rank swamps of murk Review-land croak: Men call'd him-maugre all his wit and worth, CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT. SINCE all that beat about in Nature's range, Or veer or vanish; why shouldst thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning thought! that livest but in the brain? Call to the hours, that in the distance play, The faery people of the future day- Still, still as though some dear embodied good, 66 I mourn to thee and say—" Ah! loveliest friend! * This phenomenon, which the author has himself experienced, and of which the reader may find a description in one of the earlier volumes of the Manchester Philosophical Trans MODERN CRITICS.* NO private grudge they need, no personal spite : The viva sectio is its own delight! All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, Disinterested thieves of our good name: THE poet in his lone yet genial hour Or rather he emancipates his eyes From the black shapeless accidents of size- Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole, actions, is applied figuratively in the following passage of the Aids to Reflection (p. 220):~ "Pindar's fine remark respecting the different effects of music, on different characters, holds equally true of Genius; as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as a spectre." * Biographia Literaria (Lond. 1817.), vol. ii. p. 118. Historie and Gests of Maxilian, Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1822. INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE.* NOW! it is gone. Our brief hours travel post, Each with its thought or deed, its Why or How: But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost 1830. FANCY IN NUBIBUS: OR THE POET IN THE CLOUDS. A Sonnet composed on the Sea-Coast.* O! IT is pleasant, with a heart at ease, To make the shifting clouds be what you please, Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold 'Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land! Or listening to the tide, with closed sight, Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand By those deep sounds possess'd with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. * Printed at the end of Specimens of the Table-talk of S.T.C. Lond. 1835, ii. 360. + Blackwood's Magazine, November, 1819. |