EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there,
O whisper to your glass, and say,
“What wonder, if he thinks me fair?"
What wonder I was all unwise,

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.

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,

A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren :
Yet say the neighbors when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all

That

grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,

And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion !

And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,
And fiddled in the timber!

'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,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down,
Coquetting with young beeches;
And briony-vine and ivy-wreath
Ran forward to his rhyming,
And from the valleys underneath
Came little copses climbing.

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,
With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two

By rivers gallopaded.

Came wet-shod alder from the wave,
Came yews, a dismal coterie;

Each plucked his one foot from the grave,
Poussetting with a sloe-tree :

Old elms came breaking from the vine,
The vine streamed out to follow,

And, sweating rosin, plumped the pine
From many a cloudy hollow.

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
The random sunshine lightened!

O, nature first was fresh to men,
And wanton without measure;

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

I could not move a thistle ;
The very sparrows in the hedge
Scarce answer to my whistle;
Or at the most, when three-parts-sick
With strumming and with scraping,
A jackass heehaws from the rick,
The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound
Like sleepy counsel pleading:

O Lord! 't is in my neighbor's ground,

The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises,

And Works on Gardening through there, And Methods of transplanting trees, To look as if they grew there.

The withered Misses! how they prose
O'er books of travelled seamen,
And show you slips of all that grows
From England to Van Diemen.
They read in arbors clipt and cut,
And alleys, faded places,
By squares of tropic summer shut,

And warmed in crystal cases.