EPILOGUE. So, Lady Flora, take my lay, To shape the song for your delight, Like long-tailed birds of Paradise, That float through Heaven, and cannot light? Or old-world trains, upheld at court By Cupid-boys of blooming hue But take it earnest wed with sport, And either sacred unto you. ΑΜΡΗΙΟΝ. My father left a park to me, A garden too with scarce a tree, That grows within the woodland. O had I lived when song was great Nor cared for seed or scion ! And had I lived when song was great, "Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move, And flounder into hornpipes. The mountain stirred its busy crown, The birch-tree swang her fragrant hair, The bramble cast her berry, The gin within the juniper Began to make him merry, The poplars, in long order due, The shock-head willows two and two By rivers gallopaded. Came wet-shod alder from the wave, Each plucked his one foot from the grave, Old elms came breaking from the vine, And, sweating rosin, plumped the pine And was n 't it a sight to see, When, ere his song was ended, Like some great landslip, tree by tree, The country-side descended; And shepherds from the mountain-eaves Looked down, half-pleased, half-frightened, As dashed about the drunken leaves O, nature first was fresh to men, So youthful and so flexile then, You moved her at your pleasure. Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs! And make her dance attendance : Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs, And scirrhous roots and tendons. 'Tis vain! in such a brassy age But what is that I hear? a sound O Lord! —'t is in my neighbor's ground, They read Botanic Treatises, And Works on Gardening through there, And Methods of transplanting trees, The withered Misses! how they prose By squares of tropic summer shut, And warmed in crystal cases. |