est object's sight,
By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rusteling,
By a daisy whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me,
Than all Nature's beauties can,
In some other wiser man.
By her help I also now
Make this churlish place allow
Some things that may sweeten gladness
In the very gall of sadness.
The dull loneness, the black shade,
That these hanging vaults have made,
The strange music of the waves,
Beating on these hollow caves,
This black den which rocks emboss,
Overgrown with eldest moss,
The rude portals that give light
More to terror than delight,
This my chamber of neglect,
Wall'd about with disrespect,
From all these and this dull air,
A fit object for despair,
She hath taught me by her might
To draw comfort and delight.
Therefore, thou best earthly bliss,
I will cherish thee for this.
Poesie; thou sweet'st content
That ere Heav'n to mortals lent:
Though they as a trifle leave thee,
Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee,
Though thou be to them a scorn,
That to nought but earth are born:
Let my life no longer be
Than I am in love with thee.
Though our wise ones call thee madness,
Let me never taste of sadness,
If I love not thy maddest fits,
Above all their greatest wits.
And though some too seeming holy,
Do account thy raptures folly,
Thou dost teach me to contemn
What makes knaves and fools of them."

___
[6] Written in the Fleet Prison.
___

LECTURE V.
ON THOMSON AND COWPER.

Thomson, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolent of mortals
and of poets. But he was also one of the best both of mortals and of
poets. Dr. Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote "no line which
dying he would wish to blot." Perhaps a better proof of his honest
simplicity, and inoffensive goodness of disposition, would be that he
wrote no line which any other person living would wish that he should
blot. Indeed, he himself wished, on his death-bed, formally to expunge
his dedication of one of the Seasons to that finished courtier, and
candid biographer of his own life, Bub Doddington. As critics, however,
not as moralists, we might say on the other hand--"Woul