TO MY HONOURED KINSMAN,
JOHN DRYDEN,

OF CHESTERTON, IN THE COUNTY OF HUNTINGDON, ESQ.

[John Dryden, born in Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, 1631; died in London, 1st May, 1700. His first poem of any importance was written on the occasion of Cromwell's death, and appeared in 1658. He wrote a number of plays, The Wild Gallant being the first. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy contained the first acknowledgment, after the Restoration, of Shakspeare's supremacy. He was sometime laureate, but was dispossessed of that office at the Revolution, and Shadwell, whom he had bitterly satirized, was appointed in his stead. He wrote a great deal of prose and verse, original and translated. Of his works the most widely known in modern times are Absalom and Achitophel, a political and controversial poem, first published in 1681; The Hind and the Panther, a controversial poem in defence of the Romish Church, 1687; and Alexander's Feast, which is regarded as one of the grandest compositions in lyric poetry.]

How bless'd is he, who leads a country life,
Unvex'd with anxious cares, and void of strife!
Who studying peace, and shunning civil rage,
Enjoy'd his youth, and now enjoys his age;
All who deserve his love, he makes his own;
And, to be loved himself, needs only to be known.

Just, good, and wise, contending neighbours come
From your award, to wait their final doom;
And, foes before, return in friendship home.
Without their cost, you terminate the cause;
And save the expense of long litigious laws;
Where suits are traversed; and so little won
That he who conquers, is but last undone;
Such are not your decrees; but so design'd,
The sanction leaves a lasting peace behind;
Like your own soul, serene; a pattern of your mind.

Promoting concord, and composing strife,
Lord of yourself, uncumber'd with a wife;
Where, for a year, a month, perhaps a night,
Long penitence succeeds a short delight:
Minds are so hardly match'd, that even the first,
Though pair'd by Heaven, in paradise, were cursed.
For man and woman, though in one they grow,
Yet, first or last, return again to two.

He to God's image, she to his was made:

So, farther from the fount, the stream at random stray'd.

How could he stand, when put to double pain,
He must a weaker than himself sustain !
Each might have stood perhaps; but each alone;
Two wrestlers help to pull each other down.

Not that my verse would blemish all the fair;
But yet, if some be bad, 'tis wisdom to beware;
And better shun the bait, than struggle in the snare.
Thus have you shunn'd, and shun the married state,
Trusting as little as you can to fate.

No porter guards the passage of your door;
To admit the wealthy, and exclude the poor;
For God, who gave the riches, gave the heart
To sanctify the whole, by giving part;
Heaven, who foresaw the will, the means has wrought,
And to the second son, a blessing brought;
The first-begotten had his father's share;
But you, like Jacob, are Rebecca's heir.

So may your stores, and fruitful fields increase;
And ever be you blessed, who live to bless.
As Ceres sow'd, where'er her chariot flew;
As Heaven in deserts rain'd the bread of dew,
So free to many, to relations most,
You feed with manna your own Israel-host.

With crowds attended of your ancient race,
You seek the champaign sports, or sylvan chase:
With well-breathed beagles you surround the wood;
Even then, industrious of the common good;
And often have you brought the wily fox
To suffer for the firstlings of the flocks;
Chased even amid the folds; and made to bleed,
Like felons, where they did the murd'rous deed.
This fiery game, your active youth maintain'd:
Not yet by years extinguish'd, though restrain'd;
You season still with sports your serious hours;
For age but tastes of pleasures, youth devours.
The hare, in pastures or in plains is found,
Emblem of human life, who runs the round;
And, after all his wandering ways are done,
His circle fills, and ends where he begun,
Just as the setting meets the rising sun.

Thus princes ease their cares; but happier he,
Who seeks not pleasure through necessity,
Than such as once on slippery thrones were placed:
And chasing sigh to think themselves are chased.
So lived our sires, ere doctors learn'd to kill,
And multiplied with theirs, the weekly bill,
The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
Pity the generous kind their cares bestow
To search forbidden truths; (a sin to know ;)
To which, if human science could attain,
The doom of death, pronounced by God, were vain.

In vain the Leech would interpose delay:

Fate fastens first, and vindicates the prey.

What help from art's endeavours can we have!

Gibbons but guesses, nor is sure to save:

But Maurus sweeps whole parishes, and peoples every grave;

And no more mercy to mankind will use

Than when he robb'd and murder'd Maro's muse.
Wouldst thou be soon despatch'd, and perish whole?
Trust Maurus with thy life, and M-lb-rn with thy soul

By chase our long-lived fathers earn'd their food;
Toil strung the nerves, and purified the blood;
But we, their sons, a pamper'd race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.

The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;
God never made his work, for man to mend.

The tree of knowledge, once in Eden placed,
Was easy found, but was forbid the taste;
O, had our grandsire walk'd without his wife,
He first had sought the better plant of life!
Now, both are lost: yet, wandering in the dark,
Physicians, for the tree, have found the bark:
They, labouring for relief of human kind,
With sharpen'd sight some remedies may find:
The apothecary train is wholly blind.
From files, a random-recipe they take,
And many deaths of one prescription make.
Garth, generous as his muse, prescribes and gives;
The shopman sells; and by destruction lives.
Ungrateful tribe! who, like the viper's brood,
From medicine issuing, suck their mother's blood,
Let these obey; and let the learn'd prescribe;
That men may die, without a double bribe:
Let them, but under their superiors, kill;
When doctors first have sign'd the bloody bill:
He 'scapes the best, who, nature to repair,

Draws physic from the fields, in draughts of vital air.

You hoard not health, for your own private use; But on the public spend the rich produce. When, often urged, unwilling to be great, Your country calls you from your loved retreat, And sends to senates, charged with common care, Which none more shuns; and none can better bear. Where could they find another form'd so fit, To poise, with solid sense, a spritely wit! Were these both wanting, (as they both abound) Where could so firm integrity be found?

Well-born, and wealthy; wanting no support, You steer betwixt the country and the court; Nor gratify whate'er the great desire, Nor grudging give, what public needs require. Part must be left, a fund when foes invade; And part employ'd to roll the watery trade: Even Canaan's happy land, when worn with toil, Required a Sabbath-year to mend the meagre soil. Good senators, (and such as you,) so give, That kings may be supplied, the people thrive. And he, when want requires, is truly wise, Who slights not foreign aids, nor over-buys; But, on our native strength, in time of need, relies. Munster was bought, we boast not the success; Who fights for gain, for greater makes his peace. Our foes, compell'd by need, have peace embrac'd: The peace both parties want, is like to last: Which, if secure, securely we may trade; Or, not secure, should never have been made. Safe in ourselves, while on ourselves we stand, The sea is ours, and that defends the land. Be, then, the naval stores the nation's care, New ships to build, and batter'd to repair.

Observe the war, in every annual course; What has been done, was done with British force.

Namur subdued, is England's palm alone;

The rest besieged; but we constrain'd the town:
We saw the event that follow'd our success;
France, though pretending arms, pursued the peace:
Obliged, by one sole treaty, to restore
What twenty years of war had won before.
Enough for Europe has our Albion fought:
Let us enjoy the peace our blood has bought.
When once the Persian king was put to flight,
The weary Macedons refused to fight:
Themselves their own mortality confess'd;
And left the son of Jove to quarrel for the rest.

Even victors are by victories undone;
Thus Hannibal, with foreign laurels won,
To Carthage was recall'd, too late to keep his own.
While sore of battle, while our wounds are green,
Why should we tempt the doubtful dye again?
In wars renew'd, uncertain of success,
Sure of a share, as umpires of the peace.

A patriot, both the king and country serves;
Prerogative, and privilege preserves:

Of each, our laws the certain limit show,
One must not ebb, nor t'other overflow:
Betwixt the prince and parliament we stand;
The barriers of the state on either hand:
May neither overflow, for then they drown the land.
When both are full, they feed our bless'd abode;
Like those that water'd once the paradise of God.

Some overpoise of sway, by turns they share;
In peace the people, and the prince in war;
Consuls of moderate power in calms were made;
When the Gauls came, one sole dictator sway'd.

Patriots, in peace, assert the people's right;
With noble stubbornness resisting might:
No lawless mandates from the court receive,
Nor lend by force; but in a body give.
Such was your generous grandsire; free to grant
In parliaments, that weigh'd their prince's want:
But so tenacious of the common cause,
As not to lend the king against his laws.
And, in a loathsome dungeon doom'd to lie,
In bonds retained his birthright liberty,
And shamed oppression, till it set him free.

O true descendant of a patriot line,
Who, while thou shar'st their lustre, lend'st them thine,
Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see;

'Tis so far good as it resembles thee:
The beauties to the original I owe;
Which, when I miss, my own defects I show.
Nor think the kindred-muses thy disgrace;
A poet is not born in every race.
Two of a house, few ages can afford;
One to perform, another to record.
Praise-worthy actions are by thee embraced;
And 'tis my praise, to make thy praises last.
For even when death dissolves our human frame,
The soul returns to Heaven, from whence it came;
Earth keeps the body, verse preserves the fame.

the value of time is only relative; and that clocks, with all their humdrum regularity, are but respectable delusions. There are times with us all, when in a concave mirror we see a minute distorted into long hours; and, again, in the convex glass the long hours dwindle to a point. When summoned by peremptory duty from a warm bed upon a keen, frosty morning, how precious are the last five minutes of snoozledom! You live introspectively all through them: you chew the cud of your own cosiness. Then comes the wrench: in a moment you are in the cold tub, careless and forgetful of repose, So, when the hour is come for rising after our long life-sleep, we beg another hour in vain. A minute yet remains: only one. Each second is an epoch; divided into distinct and awful intervals. The senses are preternaturally quickened, as under the first influence of ether, and you hear the beating and the pulsing of some great inner-world machinery; the terrible ticking of some eternal timepiece. The hour strikes, and in a moment we are up to our necks in water; in the water of a cold, deep river: in a moment we have forgotten all the past, even the friends that now are weeping at the bed-side: in a few more moments they will have forgotten us, to be themselves in due turn forgotten.

The pebble on the beach neither lives nor dies; and we can but imperfectly describe the conditions of its actuality by negational terms. The trees of the forest lead an unconscious life through leafy ages: they toil not, neither do they spin: in the pleasant spring-tide they don gradually their green robes: in the rich and sad autumn they pass slowly into beautiful decay; slowly and noiselessly, like dreams. The lower type of animals most probably have no anticipatory fears of death, but may pass almost painlessly into inanimate matter out of semi-vegetable life.

As

I passed yesterday, in the neighbourhood of Leith, a public slaughter-house. A flock of sheep were going one by one up an inclined gangway into an upper room of unpremeditated death. They were pushing each other upwards, to the yelping music of two collie-dogs, in apparent eagerness to follow their leader. each in turn would stand upon the gangway's upper ledge, too soon he would solve the secret of the horrible charnel-house. Too soon; and too late. For Ba-ba is the cry behind; which interpreted would mean: "Move on, and let us see what's to be seen." They would see it soon enough, poor bleating simpletons; and then there would be the last Ba-ba and the babbling o' green fields.

The higher animals, and especially such as have been highly educated by companionship with man, have unquestionably some dim idea of the last change. Man alone is prescient of all its horrible concomitants; can predict with a fearful accuracy the gradations of the humbling analysis. In the face of these terrible considerations, may we not expect some comfort to be derived from reflections upon our spiritual nature?

Comfort?-comfort there might have been, but for our suicidal propensity of turning blessings into curses. We may safely premise that, in respect of philanthropy, any one sect of Christians is in advance of any body whatsoever of other religionists. Yet there is not a single sect of Christians, but that peoples its particu lar hell with by far the greater portion of the outer-lying world, and no inconsiderable portion of its own adherents. So covetous are we of pain; so greedy of sorrow; so dissatisfied with the diseases and mischances of life, and the death that inevitably crowns all, that in our most serious and meditative moods we revel in prefigurements of eternal, unutterable, and all but universal misery. From our little noisy pulpits we wag wise pows, and condole in an exhilarating way with our credulous congregations on the steady approach of our common doom. We build in air a world-wide, spiritual scaffold, and erect thereon innumerable gibbets, and comfort one another with detailed speculations on the phases of the never-ending strangulation. We stand upon our little platforms of life and time, and over the edge peer curiously and shudderingly into the dark, outer void; and through the magnifying lenses of fear and imagination descry therein, or seem to descry, ghastly and hideous forms of physical and spiritual decomposition.

And it were not so very sad that we should do all this, if the doing so made us in the least sad. But the unspeakable sadness of it all is, that the process gives a general though undefined thrill of pleasurable satisfaction.

In the days when men would stand together in the shade and argue a dog's tail off, it was a favourite occupation of the old philosophers to define, chronologically, geographically, and circumstantially, the conditions of perfect happiness. We have no time now-a-days for such idle speculations. We are pulling down our old barns and building greater ones: we are grovelling on the ground before a golden image, like that set up of old in the plain of Babylon: we are searching for a vulgar and ignoble philosopher's stone. But supposing we could give the time and pains required for the considera

tion of the old question, should we find the problem an easy one?

Childhood cannot be esteemed happy, as being an age that, apart from the troubles of teething, is a continued lamentation and a cry. Educational traditions sit as a nightmare on the elastic spirits of boyhood. Youth and early manhood bring heat of blood and immature judgment to cope with the perilous temptations of the unknown world. Over professional life in manhood broods an universal Grundyism; and commercial life is crenellated by a corroding covetousness. We might look to religion for consolation, were it not that the usually received doctrines represent divinity as sterner than the sternest of all human judges, and mankind as a set of hopeless and incorrigible scoundrels. We are sailing in a shut-up ark over a wide sea, fathomless and shoreless. Send out Hope like a dove, and it will come back with no green leaf in its bill. Let us open the narrow door-way, the one window, and end our misery by a plunge into the deep sea. Nay: we are so numerous and disorderly a crew, that we should only trample each other to death in the effort to get out. Let us sit still in the cabin and wait the end. What? are we to go drifting on and on, until we are starved or suffocated; until our melancholy bark, with its ghastly crew of sitting skeletons, is picked up and opened by mariners of the new order; mariners to whom are reserved the new heavens and the new earth, after the subsidence of our troubled waters? Heaven forbid sit still, and wait in hope. One day or other we shall come bump upon Mount Ararat. Yea, surely; one day or other.

We are, indeed, weak creatures, moving ever onwards beneath some irresistible pressure towards an inevitable gulf. From time to time we catch a fleeting glimpse of happiness; but misfortunes cling to us like burrs; and sorrow clothes us with a Nessus-shirt of pain. In the morning we are green and grow up: in the evening we are cut down, dried up, and withered. But is there no balm in Gilead? Hath philosophy no anodyne, and religion no herb of healing?

Let us cease complaining; and consider awhile the dignity, and majesty, and sublimity of our human nature. Let us draw comfort, as in a bucket, from the well of tears. For our weakness is our strength, and our shame our glory. It is the unspeakable sadness of our common lot that gives that lot whate'er of sweetness and of beauty it can call its own. The angels in heaven, amid their monotone of grand, eternal praise, must look, not with

pity, but with an almost envying wonderment at the spectacle of a son weeping beside his dead mother, or of a father staring down into the new grave of his dead son.

Good men have told us that the Infinite made himself finite, and that the Omnipotent divested himself of power, to save a ruined world. They have only given us half the reason. If a world could not be saved by less than such a sacrifice, by only such a sacrifice could Divinity win love. The Hand that guides the stars and wields the thunderbolt might enforce obedience and strike terror; but Omnipotence is not omnipotent in respect of love. Nay, even goodness is not lovable; but admirable only, unless it be crowned with sorrow and girdled round about with infirmity.

Divinity was not perfect until when the Lord wept: there was a culmination of Godhead when the Man-Christ was agonized in the garden; when his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. There went a shudder of awful joy throughout the universe, when the dying lips said,—“It is finished-."

So grand a thing is human sorrow: so grand, and terrible, and sublime, and holy.

THE COMFORTER.

Oh! thou who dry'st the mourner's tear,
How dark this world would be,

If, when deceived and wounded here,
We could not fly to thee!

The friends who in our sunshine live,
When winter comes are flown;
And he who has but tears to give,

Must weep those tears alone;

But thou wilt heal that broken heart,

Which, like the plants that throw
Their fragrance from the wounded part,
Breathes sweetness out of woe.

When joy no longer soothes or cheers,
And even the hope that threw
A moment's sparkle o'er our tears,
Is dimm'd and vanish'd too;

Oh who would bear life's stormy doom,
Did not thy wing of love
Come brightly wafting through the gloom
One peace-branch from above.

Then sorrow, touch'd by thee, grows bright
With more than rapture's ray;

As darkness shows us worlds of light
We never saw by day.

THOMAS MOORE