“Perhaps in some far-distant shore
There are who in these forms delight;
Whose milky features please them more,
Than ours of jet thus burnished bright;
Of such may be his weeping wife,
Such children for their sire may call,
And if we spare his ebbing life,
Our kindness may preserve them all.”

Thus her compassion Woman shows: 
Beneath the line her acts are these;
Nor the wide waste of Lapland-snows
Can her warm flow of pity freeze:  —
“From some sad land the stranger comes,
Where joys like ours are never found;
Let’s soothe him in our happy homes,
Where freedom sits, with plenty crown’d.

’Tis good the fainting soul to cheer,
To see the famish’d stranger fed;
To milk for him the mother-deer,
To smooth for him the furry bed. 
The powers above our Lapland bless
With good no other people know;
T’enlarge the joys that we possess,
By feeling those that we bestow!”

Thus in extremes of cold and heat,
Where wandering man may trace his kind;
Wherever grief and want retreat,
In Woman they compassion find;
She makes the female breast her seat,
And dictates mercy to the mind.

Man may the sterner virtues know,
Determined justice, truth severe;
But female hearts with pity glow,
And Woman holds affliction dear;
For guiltless woes her sorrows flow,
And suffering vice compels her tear;
’Tis hers to soothe the ills below,
And bid life’s fairer views appear: 
To Woman’s gentle kind we owe
What comforts and delights us here;
They its gay hopes on youth bestow,
And care they soothe, and age they cheer.

1807

“The birth of flattery”.

Omnia habeo, nec quicquam habeo;
Quidquid, dicunt, laudo; id rursum si negant, laudo id quoque;
Negat quis, nego; ait, aio;
Postremo imperavi egomet mihi
Omnia assentari. 
                                           Terence, in Eunuch.

’Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery is the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to taste a bit. 
                             Swift.

------------------------------

The Subiect—­Poverty and Cunning described—­When united, a jarring Couple—­Mutual reproof—­the Wife consoled by a Dream—­Birth of a Daughter—­Description and Prediction of Envy—­How to be rendered ineffectual, explained in a Vision—­Simulation foretells the future Success and Triumphs of Flattery—­Her power over various Characters and Different Minds; over certain Classes of Men; over Envy himself--Her successful Art of softening the Evils of Life; of changing Characters; of meliorating Prospects and affixing Value to Possessions, Pictures, &c.  Conclusion.