"T is Providence alone secures

In every change both mine and yours.

I shall not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau
If birds confabulate or no.

Misses! the tale that I relate

This lesson seems to carry,

A Fable. Moral.

Pairing Time Anticipated.

Choose not alone a proper mate,

But proper time to marry.

That though on pleasure she was bent,

She had a frugal mind.

A hat not much the worse for wear.

Ibid.

History of John Gilpin.

Ibid.

Now let us sing, Long live the king!

And Gilpin, Long live he!

And when he next doth ride abroad,

May I be there to see!

The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.

Ibid.

To an Afflicted Protestant Lady.

United yet divided, twain at once:

So sit two kings of Brentford on one throne.1

The Task. Book i. The Sofa. Line 77.

Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds,

Exhilarate the spirit, and restore

The tone of languid nature.

Line 181.

The earth was made so various, that the mind

God made the country, and man made the town.2

Line 749.

1 BUCKINGHAM: The Rehearsal (the two Kings of Brentford). 2 See Bacon, page 167.

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,1
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more.

The Task. Book ii. The Timepiece, Line 1

Mountains interposed

Make enemies of nations who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one.

I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free!
They touch our country, and their shackles fall.2

Line 17.

Line 29.

Line 40.

Fast-anchor'd isle.

Line 151.

England, with all thy faults I love thee still,

My country!

Line 206.

Presume to lay their hand upon the ark

Of her magnificent and awful cause.

Line 231.

1 Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men! Jeremiah ix. 2.

Oh that the desert were my dwelling-place! - BYRON: Childe Harold, canto iv. stanza 177.

2 Servi peregrini, ut primum Galliæ fines penetraverint eodem momento liberi sunt (Foreign slaves, as soon as they come within the limits of Gaul, that moment they are free). — BODINUS: Liber i. c. 5.

Lord Campbell ("Lives of the Chief Justices," vol. ii. p. 418) says that "Lord Mansfield first established the grand doctrine that the air of England is too pure to be breathed by a slave." The words attributed to Lord Mansfield, however, are not found in his judgment. They are in Hargrave's argument, May 14, 1772, where he speaks of England as "a soil whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in.” — LOFFT : Reports, p. 2.

8 See Churchill, page 413.

Praise enough

To fill the ambition of a private man,

That Chatham's language was his mother tongue.
The Task. Book ii. The Timepiece, Line 235.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains

Which only poets know.1

Line 285.

Transforms old print

To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes
Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.

Reading what they never wrote,

Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,
And with a well-bred whisper close the scene.

Whoe'er was edified, themselves were not.

Line 363.

Line 411.

Line 444.

Line 606.

Variety 's the very spice of life.2

She that asks

Her dear five hundred friends.

His head,

Not yet by time completely silver'd o'er,
Bespoke him past the bounds of freakish youth,
But strong for service still, and unimpair'd.

Domestic happiness, thou only bliss

Of Paradise that has survived the fall!

Line 642.

Line 702.

Book iii. The Garden. Line 41.

Great contest follows, and much learned dust.

From reveries so airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.3

1 See Dryden, page 277.

Line 161.

Line 188.

2 No pleasure endures unseasoned by variety. — PUB. SYRUS: Maxim 406. 3 He has spent all his life in letting down buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again. — Lady Hol land's Memoir of Sydney Smith, vol. i. p. 259.

How various his employments whom the world
Calls idle, and who justly in return
Esteems that busy world an idler too!

The Task. Book iii. The Garden, Line 352.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.
I burn to set the imprison'd wranglers free,
And give them voice and utterance once again.
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate1 wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Line 566.

Book iv. The Winter Evening. Line 34.

Which not even critics criticise.

What is it but a map of busy life,

Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?

And Katerfelto, with his hair on end.

At his own wonders, wondering for his bread.
'Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,
To peep at such a world,
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd.

- to see the stir

Line 51.

Line 55.

Line 86.

While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.

Line 118.

O Winter, ruler of the inverted year! 2

Line 120.

With spots quadrangular of diamond form,
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,
And spades, the emblems of untimely graves.

In indolent vacuity of thought.

It seems the part of wisdom.

All learned, and all drunk!

1 See Bishop Berkeley, page 312.

2 See Thomson, page 356.

Line 217.

Line 297.

Line 336.

Line 478.

Gloriously drunk, obey the important call.

The Task. Book in. The Winter Evening, Line 510.

Those golden times

And those Arcadian scenes that Maro sings,
And Sidney, warbler of poetic prose.

The Frenchman's darling.1

Some must be great. Great offices will have
Great talents. And God gives to every man
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste,
That lifts him into life, and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordain'd to fill.

Line 514:

Line 765.

Line 788.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose,
No sound of hammer or of saw was there.2
The Winter Morning Walk. Line 144.
But war's a game which were their subjects wise

Book v.

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.

Line 733.

With filial confidence inspired,

Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say, My Father made them all!

Line 745.

Give what thou canst, without Thee we are poor;
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased

Line 905.

1 It was Cowper who gave this now common name to the mignonette.
2 No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung;
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.

HEBER: Palestine,

So that there was neither hammer nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard

in the house while it was in building. -1 Kings vi. 7.