Ye friends to truth, ye statesman who survey 265
  The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay,
  ’T is yours to judge how wide the limits stand
  Between a splendid and an happy land. 
  Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore,
  And shouting Folly hails them from her shore; 270
  Hoards e’en beyond the miser’s wish abound,[21]
  And rich men flock from all the world around. 
  Yet count our gains.  This wealth is but a name
  That leaves our useful products still the same. 
  Not so the loss.  The man of wealth and pride 275
  Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
  Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds,
  Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds: 
  The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth
  Has robbed the neighboring fields of half
          their growth;[22] 280
  His seat, where solitary sports are seen,
  Indignant spurns the cottage from the green: 
  Around the world each needful product flies,
  For all the luxuries the world supplies;
  While thus the land adorned for pleasure all 285
  In barren splendor feebly waits the fall.

  As some fair female unadorned and plain,
  Secure to please while youth confirms her reign,
  Slights every borrowed charm that dress supplies,
  Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes; 290
  But when those charms are past, for charms are frail,
  When time advances, and when lovers fail,
  She then shines forth, solicitous to bless,
  In all the glaring impotence of dress. 
  Thus fares the land by luxury betrayed:  295
  In nature’s simplest charms at first arrayed,
  But verging to decline, its splendors rise;
  Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise: 
  While, scourged by famine from the smiling land,
  The mournful peasant leads his humble band, 300
  And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
  The country blooms—­a garden and a grave.

  Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,
  To scape the pressure of contiguous pride? 
  If to some common’s fenceless limits strayed 305
  He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,
  Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
  And even the bare-worn common is denied.

  If to the city sped—­what waits him there? 
  To see profusion that he must not share, 310
  To see ten thousand baneful arts combined
  To pamper luxury, and thin mankind;[23]
  To see those joys the sons of pleasure know
  Extorted from his fellow-creature’s woe. 
  Here while the courtier glitters in brocade, 315
  There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;
  Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,
  There the black gibbet glooms beside the way,
  The dome where pleasure holds her midnight