Stood for his country's glory fast, With more than mortal powers endow' Though his could drain the ocean dry, These spells are spent, and, spent with these, Genius and taste, and talent gone, For ever tomb'd beneath the stone, Where-taming thought to human pride!— The mighty chiefs sleep side by side. "Twill trickle to his rival's bier; O'er PITT's the mournful requiem sound, The solemn echo seems to cry,— "Here let their discord with them die. Rest, ardent Spirits! till the cries Not even your Britain's groans can pierce Then, O, how impotent and vain. This grateful tributary strain! Though not unmark'd from northern clime, Ye heard the Border Minstrel's rhyme : His Gothic harp has o'er you rung; The Bard you deign'd to praise, your deathless names has sung. Stay yet, illusion, stay a while, For all the tears e'er sorrow drew, And all the keener rush of blood, That throbs through bard in bard-like mood, Though all their mingled streams could flow- If but a beam of sober reason play. Prompt on unequal tasks to run, Thus nature disciplines her son: Meeter, she says, for me to stray, And waste the solitary day, In plucking from yon fen the reed, And watch it floating down the Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay, With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Of one, who in his simple mind, But thou, my friend, can'st fitly tell, Despising spells and demons' force, Holds converse with the unburied corse;1 He sought proud Tarquin in his den, The mightiest chiefs of British song Had raised the Table Round again,3 See Appendix, Note A. See Appendix, Note B. 66 3 Dryden's melancholy account of his projected Epic Poem, blasted by the selfish and sordid parsimony of his patrons, is contained in an Essay on Satire," addressed to the Earl of Dorset, and prefixed to the Translation of Juvenal. After mentioning a plan of supplying machinery from the guardian angels of kingdoms, mentioned in the Book of Daniel, he adds,— Thus, my Lord, I have, as briefly as I could, given your lordship, and by you the world, a rude draught of what I have been long labouring in my imagination, and what I had intended to have put in practice; (though far unable for the attempt of such a poem :) and to have left the stage, to which my genius never much inclined me, for a work which would have taken up my life in the performance of it. This, too, I had intended chiefly for the honour of my native country, to which a poet is particularly obliged. Of two subjects, both relating to it, I was doubtful whether I should choose that of King Arthur conquering the Saxons, which, being farther distant in time, gives the greater scope to my invention; or that of Edward the Black Prince, |