Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 6.djvu/35

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DON JUAN.
5

'T is poetry—at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the dog-star rages—
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.


V.

You—Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion
From better company, have kept your own
At Keswick, and, through still continued fusion
Of one another's minds, at last have grown
To deem as a most logical conclusion,
That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:
There is a narrowness in such a notion,
Which makes me wish you 'd change your lakes for Ocean.


VI.

I would not imitate the petty thought,
Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice,
For all the glory your conversion brought,
Since gold alone should not have been its price.
You have your salary; was 't for that you wrought?
And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise.[1]
You 're shabby fellows—true—but poets still,
And duly seated on the Immortal Hill.


VII.

Your bays may hide the baldness of your brows—

Perhaps some virtuous blushes;—let them go—

    antithesis of Imagination and Fancy contained in the Preface to the collected Poems of William Wordsworth, published in 1815. In the Preface to the Excursion (1814) it is expressly stated that "it is not the author's intention formally to announce a system."]

  1. Wordsworth's place may be in the Customs—it is, I think, in that or the Excise—besides another at Lord Lonsdale's table, where this poetical charlatan and political parasite licks up the crumbs with a hardened alacrity; the converted Jacobin having long subsided into the clownish sycophant [despised retainer,—MS. erased] of the worst prejudices of the aristocracy.

    [Wordsworth obtained his appointment as Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland in March, 1813, through Lord Lonsdale's "patronage" (see his letter, March 6, 1813). The Excursion was dedicated to Lord Lonsdale in a sonnet dated July 29, 1814—

    "Oft through thy fair domains, illustrious Peer,
    In youth I roamed ...
    Now, by thy care befriended, I appear
    Before thee, Lonsdale, and this Work present."