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68
AN ODE TO FRIENDSHIP.
[Inscribed to M. H. Kennedy, M. D.]
Sister of Peace, all beauteous and sincere,
Who gives the sigh and sympathetic tear;
More lovely than the first created flower,
Which issued sweets in Eden's nuptial bower;
Wrapt in a milk-white vest,
By Purity and all the Graces drest;
With aspect brighten'd o'er by modest glee.
Chas'd by the motley ills which goad our life,
To generate a pang or waken strife,
I fly, meek nymph, to thee.
Wandering with Innocence thou oft art seen,
When Cynthia's silver ray
Beams at the death of day,
On the still hamlet's smoothly shaven green.
Thou shun'st the noise of busy Folly,
And all those baneful haunts of wily men,
Where Pride and Pow'r usurp the social den:
Engendering pallid Melancholy,
For many a fraudful year has onward flown,
To Ruin's ebon throne.
69
To bless their mirth and dignify their state;
Time was when Honor's sons were men of note;
When nobles justified what genius wrote;
And Britain's Barons bold,
Would eagerly unfold
Their ample gates, to chear the way-worn throng,
Assuage their thirst, or vindicate their wrong.
Seize ruthless kings opposing human good,
And sate the nation with a tyrant's blood:
Or led by holy zeal to Syria's strands,
Moisten her parched soil with brutal gore,
And blissfully restore
To Zion's daughters all their antient lands;
But now the spear hangs useless in the hall,
The helmet moulders and their glories fall:
As Fate's bleak minions did impart
Some adamantine atoms to the heart,
Or ossified that chord, which once was known,
When touch'd, to feel for horrors not its own.
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