Page:The Pleasures of Memory (Rogers).djvu/24

And as his youth in sweet delusion hung,
Where once a Plato taught, a Pindar sung;
Who now but meets him musing when he roves
His ruin'd Tusculan's romantic groves?
In Rome's great forum, who but hears him roll
His moral thunders o'er the subject soul?
And hence that calm delight the portrait gives:
We gaze on every feature till it lives!
Still the fond lover views the absent maid;
And the lost friend still lingers in his shade!
Say why the pensive widow loves to weep, ^m
When on her knee she rocks her babe to sleep:
Tremblingly still, she lifts his veil to trace
The father's features in his infant face.
The hoary grandsire smiles the hour away,
Won by the charm of Innocence at play;
He bends to meet each artless burst of joy,
Forgets his age, and acts again the boy.
What tho' the iron school of war erase
Each milder virtue, and each softer grace;
What tho' the fiend's torpedo-touch arrest
Each gentler, finer impulse of the breast;
Still shall this active principle preside,
And wake the tear to Pity's self denied.
The intrepid Swiss, that guards a foreign shore,
Condemn'd to climb his mountain-cliffs no more,
If chance he hears the song so sweetly wild, ⁿ
Which on those cliffs his infant hours beguil'd,
Melts at the long lost scenes that round him rise,
And sinks a martyr to repentant sighs.
Ask not if courts or camps dissolve the charm:
Say why Vespasian lov'd his Sabine farm; ^o
Why great Navarre, when France and freedom bled, ^p
Sought the lone limits of a forest-shed.
When Diocletian's self-corrected mind ^q
The imperial fasces of a world resign'd,