And dresses truth in fancy’s smiles: 
For not with hostile step you prest
Each foreign soil, a thankless guest! 
While travellers who want the skill
To mark the shapes of good and ill,
With vacant stare thro’ Europe range,
And deem all bad, because ’tis strange;
Thro’ varying modes of life, you trace
The finer trait, the latent grace,
And where thro’ every vain disguise
You view the human follies rise,
The stroke of irony you dart
With force to mend, not wound the heart. 
While intellectual objects share
Your mind’s extensive view, you bear,
Quite free from spleen’s incumb’ring load,
The little evils on the road—­
So, while the path of life I tread,
A path to me with briers spread;
Let me its tangled mazes spy
Like you, with gay, good-humour’d eye;
Nor at those thorny tracts repine,
The treasure of your friendship, mine.

Grange Hill, Essex.

PART
OF AN
IRREGULAR [Transcriber’s note:  Original “IRREGULAL”] FRAGMENT,
FOUND IN A
DARK PASSAGE OF THE TOWER.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The following Poem is formed on a very singular and sublime idea.  A young gentleman, possessed of an uncommon genius for drawing, on visiting the Tower of London, passing one door of a singular construction, asked what apartment it led to, and expressed a desire to have it opened.  The person who shewed the place shook his head, and answered, “Heaven knows what is within that door—­it has been shut for ages.”—­This answer made small impression on the other hearers; but a very deep one on the imagination of this youth.  Gracious Heaven! an apartment shut up for ages—­and in the Tower!

  “Ye Towers of Julius!  London’s lasting shame,
  By many a foul and midnight murder fed.”

Genius builds on a slight foundation, and rears beautiful structures on “the baseless fabric of a vision.”  The above transient hint dwelt on the young man’s fancy, and conjured into his memory all the murders which history records to have been committed in the Tower; Henry the Sixth, the Duke of Clarence, the two young princes, sons of Edward the Fourth, Sir Thomas Overbury, &c.  He supposes all their ghosts assembled in this unexplored apartment, and to these his fertile imagination has added several others.  One of the spectres raises an immense pall of black velvet, and discovers the remains of a murdered royal family, whose story is lost in the lapse of time.—­The gloomy wildness of these images struck my imagination so forcibly, that endeavouring to catch the fire of the youth’s pencil, this Fragment was produced.

PART
OF AN
IRREGULAR FRAGMENT,
FOUND IN A
DARK PASSAGE OF THE TOWER.

I.