To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
    When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,
    She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain. 
    How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,
    Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers? 
    While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,
    And soft solicitation courts repose,
    Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
    Year chases year with unremitted flight,
    Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,
    Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush’d foe.

From this hubbub of words pass to the original.  ’Go to the Ant, thou Sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise:  which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.  How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard?  When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?  Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.  So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.’  Proverbs, chap. vi.

One more quotation, and I have done.  It is from Cowper’s Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk:—­

    Religion! what treasure untold
    Resides in that heavenly word! 
    More precious than silver and gold,
    Or all that this earth can afford. 
    But the sound of the church-going bell
    These valleys and rocks never heard,
    Ne’er sigh’d at the sound of a knell,
    Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared.

    Ye winds, that have made me your sport,
    Convey to this desolate shore
    Some cordial endearing report
    Of a land I must visit no more. 
    My Friends, do they now and then send
    A wish or a thought after me? 
    O tell me I yet have a friend,
    Though a friend I am never to see.

This passage is quoted as an instance of three different styles of composition.  The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre.  The epithet ‘church-going’ applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as objects of admiration.  The two lines ‘Ne’er sigh’d at the sound,’ &c., are, in my opinion, an instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper use, and, from the mere circumstance of the composition being in metre, applied upon an occasion that does not justify such violent expressions; and I should condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with me, as vicious poetic diction.  The last stanza is throughout admirably expressed:  it would be equally good whether in prose or verse, except that the Reader has an exquisite pleasure in seeing such natural language