AN ITALIAN SONG.

DEAR is my little native vale,

The ring-dove builds and murmurs there; Close by my cot she tells her tale

To every passing villager:

The squirrel leaps from tree to tree,
And shells his nuts at liberty.

In orange groves and myrtle bowers,
That breathe a gale of fragrance round,
I charm the fairy-footed hours
With my loved lute's romantic sound;
Or crowns of living laurel weave,
For those that win the race at eve.

The shepherd's horn at break of day,
The ballet danced in twilight glade,
The canzonet and roundelay
Sung in the silent greenwood shade:
These simple joys, that never fail,
Shall bind me to my native vale.

BB

Benign restorer of the soul !

Who ever fly'st to bring relief,

When first we feel the rude control

Of Love or Pity, Joy or Grief.

The sage's and the poet's theme,
In every clime, in every age;
Thou charm'st in Fancy's idle dream,
In Reason's philosophic page.

That very law which moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.

WRITTEN IN A SICK CHAMBER.2

1793.

THERE, in that bed so closely curtained round,
Worn to a shade and wan with slow decay,
A father sleeps! Oh hushed be every sound!
Soft may we breathe the midnight hours away!

He stirs yet still he sleeps. May heavenly dreams.
Long o'er his smooth and settled pillow rise;

Nor fly, till morning thro' the shutter streams,

And on the hearth the glimmering rushlight dies.

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1 The law of gravitation.

2 During the last illness of his father, who died at Newington Green, in the house where the poet was born.