The Poetical Works of John Langhorne :: :: University of Virginia Library

Oft, where old Air in conscious glory sails,
On silver waves that flow thro' smiling vales,
In Harewood's groves, where long my youth was laid,
Unseen beneath their ancient world of shade,
With many a group of antique columns crown'd,
In gothic guise such mansion have I found.

Nor lightly deem, ye apes of modern race,
Ye cits that sore bedizen Nature's face,

Of the more manly structures here ye view;
They rose for greatness that ye never knew!
Ye reptile cits, that oft have mov'd my spleen
With Venus, and the Graces on your green!
Let Plutus, growling o'er his ill-got wealth,
Let Mercury, the thriving god of stealth,
The shopman, Janus, with his double looks,
Rise on your mounts, and perch upon your books!
But, spare my Venus, spare each sister Grace,
Ye cits, that sore bedizen Nature's face!

Ye royal architects, whose antic taste,
Would lay the realms of Sense and Nature waste;
Forgot, whenever from her steps ye stray,
That folly only points each other way;
Here, tho' your eye no courtly creature sees,
Snakes on the ground, or monkies in the trees;
Yet let not too severe a censure fall,
On the plain precincts of the ancient Hall.

For tho' no sight your childish fancy meets,
Of Thibets' dogs, or China's perroquets;
Tho' apes, asps, lizzards, things without a tail,
And all the tribes of foreign monsters fail;
Here shall ye sigh to see, with rust o'ergrown,
The iron griffin and the sphynx of stone;
And mourn, neglected in their waste abodes,
Fire-breathing drakes, and water-spouting gods.

Long have these mighty monsters known disgrace,
Yet still some trophies hold their ancient place;
Where, round the Hall, the oak's high surbase rears
The field-day triumphs of two hundred years.

Th' enormous antlers here recal the day
That saw the forest-monarch forc'd away;
Who, many a flood, and many a mountain past,
Nor finding those, nor deeming these the last,
O'er floods, o'er mountains yet prepar'd to fly,
Long ere the death-drop fill'd his failing eye!

Here, fam'd for cunning, and in crimes grown old,
Hangs his grey brush, the felon of the fold.
Oft, as the rent feast swells the midnight cheer,
The maudlin farmer kens him o'er his beer,
And tells his old, traditionary tale,
Tho' known to ev'ry tenant of the vale.

Here, where, of old, the festal ox has fed,
Mark'd with his weight, the mighty horns are spread:
Some ox, O Marshall, for a board like thine,
Where the vast master with the vast sirloin
Vied in round magnitude—Respect I bear
To thee, tho' oft the ruin of the chair.

These, and such antique tokens, that record
The manly spirit, and the bounteous board,

Me more delight than all the gew-gaw train,
The whims and zigzags of a modern brain,
More than all Asia's marmosets to view
Grin, frisk, and water in the walks of Kew.