The Law of Nature.
Thou by whose works, deeds, reign with wonders fraught,
The brave and wise their duty shall be taught,
Who with unaltered brow alike look down
On life and death, the cottage and the crown;
With force like thine my wavering soul inspire,
Spread o'er me rays of that celestial fire,
Which owes to sacred reason all its light,
By prepossession dimmed and turned to night.
On darkness which o'erspreads the world below,
Let's strive some light however faint to throw.
Our first of studies in our early age,
Was courtly Horace with Boileau's chaste page.
In them you sought with philosophic mind,
The true and beautiful at once to find;
Oft with instructive and with moral lines,
Brightly each finished composition shines;
But Pope possessed of genius more refined,
What lightly they skimmed knew how to find.
Light into the abyss of being first he brought,
And man by him to know himself was taught.
A trivial now, and now a useful art,
Verse is in Pope divine, it forms the heart.
What need we know that Horace hired to praise
Octavius in vile, prostituted lays,
When from the night's polluted joys he rose,
Insulted Crispinus in measured prose?
22
