The Works of John Hookham Frere In Verse and Prose ::

From mental mists to purge a nation's eyes;
To animate the weak, unite the wise;
To trace the deep infection that pervades
The crowded town, and taints the rural shades;
To mark how wide extends the mighty waste
O'er the fair realms of Science, Learning, Taste;

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To drive and scatter all the brood of lies,
And chase the varying falsehood as it flies;
The long arrears of ridicule to pay,
To drag reluctant dulness back to-day;
Much yet remains.—To you these themes belong,
Ye favour'd sons of virtue and of song!

Say, is the field too narrow? are the times
Barren of folly, and devoid of crimes?

Yet, venial vices, in a milder age,
Could rouse the warmth of Pope's satiric rage:
The doting miser, and the lavish heir,
The follies and the foibles of the fair,
Sir Job, Sir Balaam, and old Euclio's thrift,
And Sappho's diamonds with her dirty shift,
Blunt, Charteris, Hopkins—meaner subjects fired
The keen-eyed Poet, while the Muse inspired
Her ardent child—entwining, as he sate,
His laurell'd chaplet with the thorns of hate.

But say,—indignant does the Muse retire,
Her shrine deserted, and extinct its fire?
No pious hand to feed the sacred flame,
No raptured soul a poet's charge to claim?

Bethink thee, Gifford; when some future age
Shall trace the promise of thy playful page;—
“The hand which brush'd a swarm of fools away,
Should rouse to grasp a more reluctant prey!”—
Think then, will pleaded indolence excuse
The tame secession of thy languid Muse?

Ah! where is now that promise? why so long
Sleep the keen shafts of satire and of song?
Oh! come, with taste and virtue at thy side,
With ardent zeal inflamed, and patriot pride;
With keen poetic glance direct the blow,
And empty all thy quiver on the foe:—

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No pause—no rest—till weltering on the ground
The poisonous hydra lies, and pierced with many a wound.

Thou too!—the nameless Bard,—whose honest zeal
For law, for morals, for the public weal,
Pours down impetuous on thy country's foes
The stream of verse, and many-languaged prose;
Thou too!—though oft thy ill-advised dislike,
The guiltless head with random censure strike,—
Though quaint allusions, vague and undefined,
Play faintly round the ear, but mock the mind;—
Through the mix'd mass yet truth and learning shine,
And manly vigour stamps the nervous line;
And patriot rage the generous verse inspires,
And wakes and points the desultory fires!

Yet more remain unknown:—for who can tell
What bashful genius, in some rural cell,
As year to year, and day succeeds to day,
In joyless leisure wastes his life away?
In him the flame of early fancy shone;
His genuine worth his old companions own;
In childhood and in youth their chief confess'd,
His master's pride, his pattern to the rest.
Now, far aloof retiring from the strife
Of busy talents, and of active life,
As from the loop-holes of retreat he views
Our stage, verse, pamphlets, politics, and news,
He loathes the world,—or, with reflection sad,
Concludes it irrecoverably mad;
Of taste, of learning, morals, all bereft,
No hope, no prospect to redeem it left.

Frere.

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