The applause of listening senates to command,
  The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
  And read their history in a nation’s eyes,

Their lot forbade:  nor, circumscribed alone
  Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne. 
  And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
  To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of luxury and pride,
  With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
  Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool, sequestered vale of life,
  They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet even these bones, from insult to protect,
  Some frail memorial still, erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
  Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered Muse,
  The place of fame and elegy supply;
And many a holy text around she strews,
  That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
  This pleasing, anxious being e’er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
  Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
  Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E’en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
  E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of the unhonored dead,
  Dost in these lines their artless tale relate,
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
  Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,—­

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
  “Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing, with hasty step, the dews away,
  To meet the sun upon the upland lawn: 

“There, at the foot of yonder nodding beech,
  That wreathes its old, fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
  And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
  Muttering his wayward fancies, he would rove;
Now, drooping, woeful-wan, like one forlorn,
  Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.

“One morn, I missed him on the customed hill,
  Along the heath, and near his favorite tree: 
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
  Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he: 

“The next, with dirges due, in sad array
  Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne:—­
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
  ’Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”

The epitaph.

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth,
  A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown: 
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
  And Melancholy marked him for her own.