HYMN TO ADVERSITY

  Daughter of Jove, relentless power,
  Thou tamer of the human breast,
  Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
  The bad affright, afflict the best! 
  Bound in thy adamantine chain,
  The proud are taught to taste of pain,
  And purple tyrants vainly groan
  With pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone.

  When first thy sire to send on earth
  Virtue, his darling child, designed,
  To thee he gave the heavenly birth,
  And bade to form her infant mind. 
  Stern, rugged nurse! thy rigid lore
  With patience many a year she bore;
  What sorrow was thou bad’st her know,
  And from her own she learned to melt at other’s woe.

  Scared at thy frown terrific, fly
  Self-pleasing Folly’s idle brood,
  Wild Laughter, Noise, and thoughtless Joy,
  And leave us leisure to be good: 
  Light they disperse, and with them go
  The summer friend, the flattering foe;
  By vain Prosperity received,
  To her they TOW their truth, and are again believed.

  Wisdom in sable garb arrayed,
  Immersed in rapturous thought profound,
  And Melancholy, silent maid
  With leaden eye, that loves the ground,
  Still on thy solemn steps attend;
  Warm Charity, the genial friend,
  With Justice, to herself severe,
  And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear,

  Oh, gently on thy suppliant’s head,
  Dread goddess, lay thy chastening hand! 
  Hot in thy Gorgon terrors clad,
  Nor circled with the vengeful band
  (As by the impious thou art seen),
  With thundering voice and threatening mien,
  With screaming Horror’s funeral cry,
  Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty: 

  Thy form benign, O goddess, wear,
  Thy milder influence impart;
  Thy philosophic train be there
  To soften, not to wound, my heart;
  The generous spark extinct revive,
  Teach me to love and to forgive,
  Exact nay own defects to scan,
  What others are to feel, and know myself a man.

  ELEGY

  WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD

  The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
  The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
  The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
  And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

  Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
  And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
  Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
  And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

  Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
  The moping owl does to the moon complain
  Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
  Molest her ancient solitary reign.

  Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
  Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
  Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.