There only minds like yours can do no harm.
Our groves were planted to confole at noon
The penfive wanderer in their fhades. At eve
The moon-beain, fliding softly in between
The fleeping leaves, is all the light they wish,
Birds warbling all the mufic. We can spare
The splendour of your lamps; they but eclipse
Our fofter fatellite. Your fongs confound
Our more harmonious notes: the thrush departs
Scared, and the offended nightingale is mute.
There is a public mifchief in your mirth;
It plagues your country. Folly fuch as your's,
Graced with a sword, and worthier of a fan,
Has made, what enemies could never have done,
Our arch of empire, stedfaft but for you,

A mutilated ftructure, foon to fall.

THE TASK.

BOOK II.

ARGUMENT OF THE SECOND BOOK.

Reflections suggested by the conclusion of the former book.-Peace among the nations recommended on the ground of their common fellowship in sorrow. Prodigies enumerated—Sicilian earthquakes.—Man rendered obnoxious to these calamities by sin.-God the agent in them.—The philosophy ihat stops at secondary causes reproved-Our own late miscarriages accounted for.-Satirical notice taken of our trips to Fontainbleau.—But the pulpit, not satire, the proper engine of reformation.-The Reverend Advertiser of engraved sermons.-Petit-maitre parson.-The good preacher.-Pictures of a theatrical clerical coxcomb.-Story-tellers and jesters in the pulpit reproved.-Apostrophe to popular applause. -Retailers of ancient philosophy expostulated with. -Sum of the whole matter.-Effects of sacerdotal mismanagement on the laity-Their folly and extravagance. The mischiefs of profusion.—Profusion itself, with all its consequent evils, ascribed, as to its principal cause, to the want of discipline in the universities.

THE TASK.

BOOK II.

THE TIME-PIECE.

OH for a lodge in fome vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppreffion and deceit,
Of unfuccefsful or fuccefsful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear

My foul is fick, with every day's report

pained,

Of wrong and outrage, with which earth is filled. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,

It does not feel for man; the natural bond

Of brotherhood is fevered as the flax,

That falls afunder at the touch of fire.

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin

Not coloured like his own; and having power

To enforce the wrong, for fuch a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands interfected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interpofed
Make enemies of nations, who had elfe
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And, worse than all, and most to be deplored
As hunan nature's broadeft, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With ftripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart
Weeps, when fhe fees inflicted on a beaft.
Then what is man? And what man, feeing this,
And having human feelings, does not blush,
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a flave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I fleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth,
That finews bought and fold have ever earned.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Juft eftimation prized above all price,

I had much rather be myself the slave,

And wear the bonds, than faften them on him. We have no flaves at home-Then why abroad? And they themselves once ferried over the wave, That parts us, are emancipate and loofed.