The town was enter'd. Oh Eternity!-
"God made the country, and man made
the town,"

So Cowper says-and I begin to be
Of his opinion, when I see cast down
Rome, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Nineveh―
All walls men know, and many never known;
And, pondering on the present and the past,
To deem the woods shall be our home at last.

Of all men, saving Sylla the Man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of
Kentucky,

Was happiest amongst mortals any where;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy'd the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.

Crime came not near him she is not the child
Of Solitude; Health shrank not from him for
Her home is in the rarely-trodden wild,
Where if men seek her not,and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as
beguiled

By habit to what their own hearts abhor
In cities caged. The present case in point I
Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety;

And, what's still stranger, left behind a name,

The free-born forest found and kept them
free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.

And tall and strong and swift of foot were
they,
Beyond the dwarfing city's pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the
prey

Of care or gain: the green woods were their
portions;

No sinking spirits told them they grew grey;
No fashion made them apes of her distortions;
Simple they were, not savage; and their
rifles,

Though very true, were not yet used for
trifles.

Motion was in their days, rest in their
slumbers,

And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;
Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers;
Corruption could not make their hearts her
soil;

The lust which stings, the splendour which
encumbers,

With the free foresters divide no spoil;
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.

So much for Nature:-by way of variety,
Now back to thy great joys, Civilization!
And the sweet consequence of large society,
War, Pestilence, the despot's desolation,

For which men vainly decimate the throng,
Not only famous, but of that good fame
Without which Glory's but a tavern-song-The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety,
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame, The millions slain by soldiers for their
Which hate nor envy e'er could tinge with
ration,
wrong;
The scenes like Catherine's boudoir at three

score

An active hermit, even in age the child
Of Nature, or the Man of Ross run wild. With Ismail's storm to soften it the more.

"Tis true he shrank from men, even of his The town was enter'd : first one column made

nation,

When they built up unto his darling trees,He moved some hundred miles off, for a station

Its sanguinary way good-then another;
The reeking bayonet and the flashing blade
Clash'd 'gainst the scimitar, and babe and
mother

Where there were fewer houses and more With distant shrieks were heard Heaven ease;

The inconvenience of civilization
Is,that you neither can be pleased nor please;
But, where he met the individual man,
He shew'd himself as kind as mortal can.

He was not all alone: around him grew
A sylvan tribe of children of the chace,
Whose young, unwaken'd world was ever

new,

to upbraid;Still closer sulphury clouds began to smother The breath of morn and man, where, foot by foot,

The madden'd Turks their city still dispute.

Koutousow, he who afterwards beat back (With some assistance from the frost and snow)

Napoleon on his bold and bloody track, Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace It happen'd was himself beat back just now. On her unwrinkled brow,nor could you view | He was a jolly fellow, and could crack His jest alike in face of friend or foe,

A frown on Nature's or on human face;

Though life, and death, and victory were | The Turks at first pretended to have scamper'd, But here it seem'd his jokes had ceased to Only to draw them 'twixt two bastiontake:

A savage sort of military martyr.
An English naval officer, who wish'd
To make him prisoner, was also dish'd :

But then the fact's a fact-and 'tis the part
Of a true poet to escape from fiction
Whene'er he can; for there is little art
In leaving verse more free from the
restriction

For all the answer to his proposition
Was from a pistol-shot that laid him dead;
On which the rest, without more inter-And that outrageous appetite for lies

Of truth than prose, unless to suit the mart
For what is sometimes call'd poetic diction,

mission,

Which Satan angles with,for souls,like flies.

The city's taken, but not render'd!—No!
There's not a Moslem that hath yielded
sword:

The blood may gush out,as the Danube's flow
Rolls by the city-wall; but deed nor word
Acknowledge aught of dread of death or foe:
In vain the yell of victory is roar'd
By the advancing Muscovite—the groan
Of the last foe is echoed by his own.

The bayonet pierces and the sabre cleaves,
And human lives are lavish'd every where,
As the year closing whirls the scarlet leaves
When the stripp'd forest bows to the bleak

air,

And groans;and thus the peopledCity grieves,
Shorn of its best and loveliest,and left bare;
But still it falls with vast and awful splinters,
As oaks blown down with all their thousand
winters.

It is an awful topic-but 'tis not
My cue for any time to be terrific:
For checquer'd as is seen our human lot
With good,and bad, and worse, alike prolific
Of melancholy merriment, to quote
Too much of one sort would be soporific; -
Without, or with, offence to friends or foes,
I sketch your world exactly as it goes.

And one good action in the midst of crimes
Is "quite refreshing"-in the affected phrase
Of these ambrosial, Pharisaic times,
With all their pretty milk-and-water ways,
And may serve therefore to bedew those
rhymes,

A little scorch'd at present with the blaze
Of conquest and its consequences, which
| Make Epic poesy so rare and rich.

Upon a taken bastion, where there lay
Thousands of slaughter'd men, a yet warm
group
Of murder'd women, who had found their way
To this vain refuge, made the good heart
droop

And shudder ;—while, as beautiful as May,
A female child of ten years tried to stoop
And hide her little palpitating breast
Amidst the bodies lull'd in bloody rest.

Two villanous Cossacques pursued the child | Up Johnson came, with hundreds at his back, With flashing eyes and weapons: match'd Exclaiming :-"Juan! Juan! On,boy! brace Your arm, and I'll bet Moscow to a dollar, That you and I will win St. George's collar.

Your Houris also have a natural pleasure
In lopping off your lately married men
Before the bridal hours have danced their
measure,

And spite of Johnson and of Juan, who
Expended all their Eastern phraseology And the sad, second moon grows dim again,
In begging him, for God's sake, just to show Or dull Repentance hath had dreary leisure
So much less fight as might form an apology To wish him back a bachelor now and then.
For them in saving such a desperate foe And thus your Houri (it may be) disputes
He hew'd away, like doctors of theologyOf these brief blossoms the immediate fruits.