Memoir of Robert, Earl Nugent With Letters, Poems, and Appendices: By Claud Nugent: With Twelve Reproductions from Family Portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough and Others |
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AN ODE.
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 | Memoir of Robert, Earl Nugent |  |
AN ODE.
[On Stow, the Muse's happy theme]
By THE SAME.
I
On Stow, the Muse's happy theme,Let fancy's eye enamour'd gaze;
Where through one nobly simple scheme,
Ten thousand varying beauties please.
There patriot-virtue rears her shrine,
Nor love! art thou depriv'd of thine.
II
Mark where from Pope's exhaustless vein,Pure flows the stream of copious thought,
While nature pours the genial strain,
With fairest springs of learning fraught;
The treasures of each clime and age,
Grace and enrich his sacred page.
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III
So while through Britain's fields her ThamesProlific rolls his silver tide;
The tribute of a thousand streams
Swells the majestic river's pride;
And where his gen'rous current strays,
The wealth of either world conveys.
IV
Far other is that wretch's song,Whose scanty rill devoid of force,
With idle tinklings creeps along,
A narrow, crooked, dubious course:
Or foul with congregated floods,
Spreads a wide waste o'er plains and woods.
V
In action thus the mind express'dHigh soars in Pope the true sublime:
A Stow unfolds a Cobham's breast,
A Bavius crawls in doggrel rhyme.
Through all their various works we trace
The greatly virtuous, and the base.
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