e
flashes of epigrammatic smartness.

How shall I speak thee, or thy power address,
Thou God of our idolatry, the press?
By thee, religion, liberty, and laws
Exert their influence, and advance their cause;
By thee, worse plagues than Pharaoh's land befel,
Diffused, make earth the vestibule of hell:
Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise,
Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies,
Like Eden's dread probationary tree,
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.

Occasionally there are passages of higher merit. The episode of
statesmen in _Retirement_ has been already mentioned. The lines on the
two disciples going to Emmaus in _Conversation_, though little more
than a paraphrase of the Gospel narrative, convey pleasantly the
Evangelical idea of the Divine Friend. Cowper says in one of his
letters that he had been intimate with a man of fine taste who had
confessed to him that though he could not subscribe to the truth of
Christianity itself, he could never read this passage of St. Luke
without being deeply affected by it, and feeling that if the stamp of
divinity was impressed upon anything in the Scriptures, it was upon
that passage.

It happen'd on a solemn eventide,
Soon after He that was our surety died,
Two bosom friends, each pensively inclined,
The scene of all those sorrows left behind,
Sought their own village, busied as they went
In musings worthy of the great event:
They spake of him they loved, of him whose life,
Though blameless, had incurr'd perpetual strife,
Whose deeds had left, in spite of hostile arts,
A deep memorial graven on their hearts.
The recollection, like a vein of ore,
The farther traced enrich'd them still the more;

They thought him, and they justly thought him, one
Sent to do more than he appear'd to have done,
To exalt a people, and to place them high
Above all else, and wonder'd he should die.
Ere yet they brought their journey to an end,
A stranger join'd them, courteous as a friend,
And ask'd them with a kind engaging air
What their affliction was, and begg'd a share.
Inform'd, he gathered up the broken thread,
And truth and wisdom gracing all he said,
Explain'd, illustrated, and search'd so well
The tender theme on which they chose to dwell,
That reaching home, the night, they said is near,
We must not now be parted, sojourn here.--
The new acquaintance soon became a guest,
And made s