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Prefixed to Parnell’s Poems
SUCH were the notes thy once-lov’d Poet sung, | |
| Till Death untimely stopp’d his tuneful tongue. | |
| Oh, just beheld and lost! admired and mourn’d! | |
| With softest manners, gentlest arts, adorn’d! | |
| Bless’d in each science! bless’d in ev’ry strain! | 5 |
| Dear to the Muse! to Harley dear—in vain! | |
| For him thou oft hast bid the world attend, | |
| Fond to forget the statesman in the friend; | |
| For Swift and him despised the farce of state, | |
| The sober follies of the wise and great, | 10 |
| Dext’rous the craving, fawning crowd to quit, | |
| And pleas’d to ’scape from Flattery to Wit. | |
| Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear | |
| (A sigh the absent claims, the dead a tear); | |
| Recall those nights that closed thy toilsome days, | 15 |
| Still hear thy Parnell in his living lays; | |
| Who, careless now of Int’rest, Fame, or Fate, | |
| Perhaps forgets that Oxford e’er was great; | |
| Or deeming meanest what we greatest call, | |
| Beholds thee glorious only in thy fall. | 20 |
| And sure if aught below the seats divine | |
| Can touch immortals, ’t is a soul like thine; | |
| A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried, | |
| Above all pain, all passion, and all pride, | |
| The rage of power, the blast of public breath, | 25 |
| The lust of lucre, and the dread of death. | |
| In vain to deserts thy retreat is made; | |
| The Muse attends thee to thy silent shade; | |
| ’T is hers the brave man’s latest steps to trace, | |
| Rejudge his acts, and dignify disgrace. | 30 |
| When Int’rest calls off all her sneaking train, | |
| And all th’ obliged desert, and all the vain, | |
| She waits, or to the scaffold or the cell, | |
| When the last ling’ring friend has bid farewell. | |
| Ev’n now she shades thy evening walk with bays | 35 |
| (No hireling she, no prostitute to praise); | |
| Ev’n now, observant of the parting ray, | |
| Eyes the calm sunset of thy various day, | |
| Thro’ fortune’s cloud one truly great can see, | |
| Nor fears to tell that Mortimer is he. | 40 |
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