By Enfield lanes, and Winchmore’s verdant hill,
        Two lovely damsels cheer my lonely walk: 
        The fair Maria, as a vestal, still;
        And Emma brown, exuberant in talk. 
        With soft and Lady speech the first applies
        The mild correctives that to grace belong
        To her redundant friend, who her defies
        With jest, and mad discourse, and bursts of song. 
        O differing Pair, yet sweetly thus agreeing,
        What music from your happy discord rises,
        While your companion hearing each, and seeing,
        Nor this, nor that, but both together, prizes;
        This lesson teaching, which our souls may strike,
        That harmonies may be in things unlike!

WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE

(August 15. 1819)

I was not train’d in Academic bowers,
And to those learned streams I nothing owe
Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow;
Mine have been any thing but studious hours. 
Yet can I fancy, wandering ’mid thy towers,
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap,
And I walk gowned; feel unusual powers. 
Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech,
Old Ramus’ ghost is busy at my brain;
And my scull teems with notions infinite. 
Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach
Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen’s vein,
And half had stagger’d that stout Stagirite!

TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE “BLIND BOY”

(1819)

Rare artist! who with half thy tools, or none,
Canst execute with ease thy curious art,
And press thy powerful’st meanings on the heart,
Unaided by the eye, expression’s throne! 
While each blind sense, intelligential grown
Beyond its sphere, performs the effect of sight: 
Those orbs alone, wanting their proper might,
All motionless and silent seem to moan
The unseemly negligence of nature’s hand,
That left them so forlorn.  What praise is thine,
O mistress of the passions; artist fine! 
Who dost our souls against our sense command,
Plucking the horror from a sightless face,
Lending to blank deformity a grace.

WORK

(1819)

Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holyday-rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business in the green fields, and the town—­
To plough, loom, anvil, spade—­and oh! most sad
To that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood? 
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad
Task ever plies ’mid rotatory burnings,
That round and round incalculably reel—­
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel—­
In that red realm from which are no returnings;
Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye
He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day.