My tongue within my lips I rein;
For who talks much, must talk in vain.
We from the wordy torrent fly;
Who liftens to the chatt'ring pye?
Nor would I, with felonious flight,
By ftealth invade my neighbour's right.
Rapacious animals we hate;
Kites, hawks, and wolves, deferve their fate.
Do not we juft abhorrence find
Against the toad and ferpent kind?
But envy, calumny, and spite,
Bear ftronger venom in their bite.
Thus ev'ry object of creation.
Can furnish hints to contemplation;
And from the most minute and mean,
A virtuous mind can morals glean.
Thy fame is juft, the fage replies;
Thy virtue proves thee truly wife.
Pride often guides the author's pen ; :
Books as affected are as men :
But he who ftudies nature's laws,
From certain truth his maxims draws; 7
And thofe, without our schools, fuffice
To make men moral, good, and wife.
As thus the fnows arife; and foul, and fierce,
All winter drives along the darken'd air;
In his own leofe-revolving fields, the swain
Difafter'd ftands; fees other hills afcend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes,
Of horrid profpect, fhag the trackless plain:
Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formlefs wild; but wanders on
From hill to dale, ftill more and more astray;
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,
Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of
home
Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth
In many a vain attempt. How finks his foul!
What black despair, what horror fills his heart!
When for the dufky fpot, which fancy feign'd
His tufted cottage rifing through the fnow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track, and bleft abode of man;
While round him night refiftless closes fast,
And ev'ry tempeft howling o'er his head,
Renders the favage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind,
Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep,
A dire descent; beyond the pow'r of frost,
Of faithlefs bogs; of precipices huge,
Smooth'd up with fnow; and what is land, unknown, What water, of the still unfrozen fpring,
In the loose marfh or folitary lake,
Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.
These check his fearful fteps, and down he finks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death
Mix'd with the tender anguish nature shoots
Through the wrung bofom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unfeen.
In vain for him th' officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children peeping out
Into the mingled ftorm, demand their fire
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife, nor children more shall he behold,
Nor friends, nor facred home. On ev'ry nerve
The deadly winter feizes; fhuts up fenfe;
And o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the fnows, a stiffen'd corse Stretch'd out, and bleaching in the northern blaft.
Ah, little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, pow'r, and affluence furround, They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;
Ah little think they, as they dance along,
How many feel, this very moment, death
And all the fad variety of pain.
How many fink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame. How many bleed,
By fhameful variance betwixt man and man.
How many pine in want, and dungeon glooms,
Shut from the common air, and common use
Of their own limbs. How many drink the cup
Of baleful grief or eat the bitter bread
Of mifery. Sore pierc'd by wintry winds,
How many fink into the fordid hut
Of cheerless poverty. How many shake
With all the fiercer tortures of the mind,
Unbounded paffion, madness, guilt, remorse.
How many, rack'd with honest paffions, droop
In deep retir'd diftrefs. How many stand
Around the death-bed of their dearest friends,
And point the parting anguish. Thought fond man
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills,
That one inceffant ftruggle render life,
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appall'd,
And heedlefs rambling impulse learn to think;
The confcious heart of charity would warm,
And her wide with benevolence dilate;
The focial tear arife, the focial figh;
And into clear perfection, gradual blifs,
Refining still, the focial paffions work.
MUTT'RING, the winds at eve, with blunted
Blow hollow-bluft'ring from the fouth. Subdu'd,
The froft refolves into a trickling thaw.
Spotted the mountains fhine; loose fleet defcends,
And floods the country round. The rivers fwell,
Of bonds impatient. Sudden from the hills,
O'er rocks and woods in broad brown cataracts,
A thousand fnow-fed torrents shoot at once!
And where they rush, the wide refounding plain
Is left one flimy wafte. Those fullen feas
That wash'd th' ungenial pole, will reft no more
Beneath the shackles of the mighty north;
But, rousing all their waves, resistless heave.
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