If from your elevation, whence ye view
Distinctly scenes invisible to man,

And systems of whose birth no tidings yet
Have reached this nether world, ye spy a race
Favoured as ours, transgressors from the womb,
And hasting to a grave, yet doomed to rise,
And to possess a brighter heaven than yours?
As one who long detained on foreign shores
Pants to return, and when he sees afar

His country's weather-bleached and battered rocks
From the green wave emerging, darts an eye
Radiant with joy towards the happy land,
So I with animated hopes behold,

And many an aching wish, your beamy fires,
That show like beacons in the blue abyss,
Ordained to guide the embodied spirit home,
From toilsome life to never-ending rest.

The Task, Book V.

POLITICAL.

THE MISERIES OF KINGS.

I PITY kings whom worship waits upon
Obsequious, from the cradle to the throne;
Before whose infant eyes the flatterer bows,
And binds a wreath about their baby brows;
Whom education stiffens into state,

And death awakens from that dream too late.
Oh! if servility, with supple knees,

Whose trade it is to smile, to crouch, to please,-
If smooth dissimulation, skilled to grace

A devil's purpose with an angel's face,-
If smiling peeresses and simpering peers,
Encompassing his throne a few short years,—
If the gilt carriage and the pampered steed,
That wants no driving and disdains the lead,—
If guards, mechanically formed in ranks,
Playing, at beat of drum, their martial pranks,
Shouldering and standing, as if struck to stone,
While condescending majesty looks on,—
If monarchy consist in such base things,
Sighing, I say again, I pity kings!

To be suspected, thwarted, and withstood,
Even when he labours for his country's good,-
To see a band called patriot for no cause
But that they catch at popular applause,
Careless of all the anxiety he feels,

Hook disappointment on the public wheels,

With all their flippant fluency of tongue,
Most confident, when palpably most wrong,-
If this be kingly, then farewell for me
All kingship, and may I be poor and free!
To be the Table Talk of clubs up stairs,
To which the unwashed artificer repairs,
To indulge his genius after long fatigue
By diving into cabinet intrigue

(For what kings deem a toil, as well they may,
To him is relaxation and mere play) ;-

To win no praise when well-wrought plans prevail,
But to be rudely censured when they fail,—
To doubt the love his favourites may pretend,
And in reality to find no friend,—

If he indulge a cultivated taste,

His galleries with the works of art well graced,
To hear it called extravagance and waste;
If these attendants, and if such as these,
Must follow royalty, then welcome ease!
However humble and confined the sphere,
Happy the state that has not these to fear.

Table-Talk.

BRITISH FREEDOM.

-TELL me, if you can, what power maintains

A Briton's scorn of arbitary chains?

That were a theme might animate the dead,

And move the lips of poets cast in lead.

B. The cause, though worth the search, may yet

elude

Conjecture and remark, however shrewd.