Walk sober off, before a sprightlier age Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage: Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease, Whom folly pleases, and whose follies please. THE FIRST ODE OF THE FOURTH BOOK TO VENUS. AGAIN? new tumults in my breast? Ah, spare me, Venus! let me, let me rest! As in the gentle reign of my queen Anne. Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms. Turn, turn to willing hearts your wanton fires: There spread round Murray1 all your blooming loves; Noble and young, who strikes the heart With every sprightly, every decent part; To charm the mistress, or to fix the friend : Shall stretch thy conquests over half the kind : 1 Afterwards Lord Mansfield. Make but his riches equal to his wit. (Thy Grecian form) and Chloe lend the face: His house, embosom'd in the grove, Sacred to social life and social love, Shall glitter o'er the pendent green, Where Thames reflects the visionary scene: Shall call the smiling loves and young desires; And all the kind deceivers of the soul! Absent I follow through th' extended dream; And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms, And swiftly shoot along the mall, Or softly glide by the canal; Now shown by Cynthia's silver ray, And now on rolling waters snatch'd away. THE NINTH ODE OF THE FOURTH BOOK OF HORACE. A FRAGMENT. LEST you should think that verse shall die Taught on the wings of truth to fly Though daring Milton sits sublime, Sages and chiefs long since had birth And those new heavens and systems fram'd. Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride! In vain they schem'd, in vain they bled! SATIRES OF DR. JOHN DONNE, DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S, VERSIFIED. Quid vetat et nosmet Lucilî scripta legentes HOR. SATIRE II. YES, thank my stars! as early as I knew That all beside one pities, not abhors; As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores. I grant that poetry's a crying sin; It brought (no doubt) th' excise and army in: Catch'd like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how, But that the cure is starving, all allow. Yet like the papist's is the poet's state, Poor and disarm'd, and hardly worth your hate! The gilded puppets dance and mount above: Heav'd by the breath th' inspiring bellows blow; Th' inspiring bellows lie and pant below. One sings the fair; but songs no longer move; No rat is rhym'd to death, nor maid to love: In love's, in nature's spite the siege they hold, And scorn the flesh, the devil, and all but gold. These write to lords, some mean reward to get, As needy beggars sing at doors for meat: Those write because all write, and so have still Excuse for writing, and for writing ill. Wretched, indeed! but far more wretched yet Is he who makes his meal on others' wit: 'Tis chang'd, no doubt, from what it was before; His rank digestion makes it wit no more: Sense pass'd through him no longer is the same; For food digested takes another name. I pass o'er all those confessors and martyrs, Act sins which Prisca's confessor scarce hears. |