The Poems of Robert Bloomfield :: :: University of Virginia Library

The verse of gravel walks that tells,
With pebble-rocks and mole-hill swells,
May strain description's bursting cheeks,
And far outrun the goal it seeks.
Not so when ev'ning's purpling hours
Hied us away to Persfield's bowers:
Here no such danger waits the lay;
Sing on, and truth shall lead the way.
Here sight may range, and hearts may glow,
Yet shrink from the abyss below;
Here echoing precipices roar,
As youthful ardour shouts before;
Here a sweet paradise shall rise
At once to greet poetic eyes.
Then why does HE dispel, unkind,
The sweet illusion from the mind,
YON GIANT , with the goggling eye,
Who strides in mock sublimity?

Giants identified may frown;
Nature and taste would knock them down:
Blocks that usurp some noble station,
As if to curb imagination,
Which, smiling at the chisel's power,
Makes better monsters every hour.

Beneath impenetrable green,
Down, 'midst the hazel stems, was seen
The turbid stream, with all that past;
The lime-white deck, the gliding mast;
Or skiff with gazers darting by,
Who raised their hands in ecstasy.
Impending cliffs hung overhead;
The rock-path sounded to the tread,
Where twisted roots, in many a fold,
Through moss, disputed room for hold.

An immense giant of stone, who, to say the best of him, occupies a place where such personages are least wanted, or wished.