As a boy, reserved and naughty;
As a youth, a coxcomb and haughty;
As a man, for action inclined;
As a greybeard, fickle in mind.--
Upon thy grave will people read:
This was a very man, indeed!
Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveler--
Riches I had! they faded from my view—
And troops of friends! but they deceived me too—
And fame! it came and went—a very breath;
While faith stood firm, and soothed the hour of death.
I.
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
II.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, 'You are not true.'
From the Greek of Plato.
Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled;--
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendour to the dead.
Praise in old time the sage Prometheus won,
Who stole ethereal radiance from the sun;
But greater he, whose bold invention strove
To emulate the fiery bolts of Jove.
A mackerel sky, a blood-orange sun,
and leaves drooping from the black limbs of oaks;
and thieving magpies, hell-mirroring rooks,
behind an old woman’s whispers and sighs—
sooty bricks with barbs around her heart
as she limps by, and I stop to jot it down.
The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull;
Each tugs it a different way,
And the greatest of all is John Bull.
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to.
The braziers, it seems, are preparing to pass
An address, and present it themselves all in brass,--
A superfluous pageant-for, by the Lord Harry!
They'll find where they're going much more than they carry.
