A forgotten poem by Henry Brooke ( Irish Dramatist/Novelist)
Taken from poetrynook.com http://www.poetrynook.com/poem/universal-beauty-book-3-lines-301%C3%B4%C3%A7%C3%B4400
Or cool recess of odoriferous shade,
And fan the peasant in the panting glade;
Or lace the coverture of painted bower,
While from the enamell'd roof the sweet profusions shower.
Here duplicate, the range divides beneath,
Above united in a mantling wreath;
With continuity protracts delight,
Imbrown'd in umbrage of ambiguous night;
Perspicuous the vista charms our eye,
And opens, Janus like, to either sky;
Or stills attention to the feather'd song,
While echo doubles from the warbling throng.
Here, winding to the sun's magnetic ray,
The solar plants adore the lord of day,
With Persian rites idolatrous incline,
And worship towards his consecrated shrine;
By south from east to west obsequious turn,
And moved with sympathetic ardours burn.
To these adverse, the lunar sects dissent,
With convolution of opposed bent;
From west to east by equal influence tend,
And towards the moon's attractive crescence bend;
There, nightly worship with Sidonian zeal,
And queen of heaven Astarte's idol hail.
" O Nature , whom the song aspires to scan!
" O B EAUTY , trod by proud insulting man,
" This boasted tyrant of thy wondrous ball,
" This mighty, haughty, little lord of all;
" This king o'er reason, but this slave to sense,
" Of wisdom careless, but of whim immense;
" Towards T HEE ! incurious, ignorant, profane,
" But of his own, dear, strange, productions vain!
" Then, with this champion let the field be fought,
" And nature's simplest arts 'gainst human wisdom brought:
" Let elegance and bounty here unite —
" There kings beneficent, and courts polite;
" Here nature's wealth — there chymist's golden dreams;
" Her texture here — and there the statesman's schemes;
" Conspicuous here let Sacred Truth appear —
" The courtier's word, and lordling's honour there;
" Here native sweets in boon profusion flow —
" There smells that scented nothing of a beau;
" Let justice here unequal combat wage —
" Nor poise the judgment of the law-learn'd sage;
" Tho' all-proportion'd with exactest skill,
" Yet gay as woman's wish, and various as her will. "
O say, ye pitied, envied, wretched great,
Who veil pernicion with the mask of state!
Whence are those domes that reach the mocking skies,
And vainly emulous of nature rise?
Behold the swain projected o'er the vale!
See slumbering peace his rural eyelids seal;
Earth's flowery lap supports his vacant head;
Beneath his limbs her broider'd garment's spread;
Aloft her elegant pavilion bends,
And living shade of vegetation lends,
With ever propagated bounty blest,
And hospitably spread for every guest:
No tinsel here adorns a taudry woof,
Nor lying wash besmears a varnish'd roof;
With native mode the vivid colours shine,
And heaven's own loom has wrought the weft divine,
Where art veils art; and beauties beauties close,
While central grace diffused throughout the system flows.
The fibres, matchless by expressive line,
Arachne's cable, or aetherial twine,
Continuous, with direct ascension rise,
And lift the trunk, to prop the neighbouring skies.
Collateral tubes with respiration play,
And winding in aerial mazes stray.
These as the woof, while warping, and athwart
The exterior cortical insertions dart
Transverse, with cone of equidistant rays,
Whose geometric form the F ORMING H AND displays.
Recluse, the interior sap and vapour dwells
In nice transparence of minutest cells;
From whence, thro' pores or transmigrating veins
Sublimed the liquid correspondence drains,
Their pithy mansions quit, the neighbouring chuse,
And subtile thro' the adjacent pouches ooze;
Refined, expansive, or regressive pass,
Transmitted thro' the horizontal mass;
Compress'd the lignous fibres now assail,
And entering thence the essential sap exhale;
Or lively with effusive vigour spring,
And form the circle of the annual ring,
The branch implicit of embowering trees,
And foliage whispering to the vernal breeze;
While Zephyr tuned, with gentle cadence blows,
And lull'd to rest consenting eyelids close.
Ah! how unlike those sad imperial beds,
Which care within the gorgeous prison spreads;
Where tedious nights are sunk in sleepless down,
And pillows vainly soft, to ease the thorny crown!
Nor blush thou rose, tho' bashful thy array,
Transplanted chaste within the raptured lay;
Thro' every bush, and warbled spray we sing,
And with the linnet gratulate the spring;
Sweep o'er the lawn, or revel on the plain,
Or gaze the florid, or the fragrant scene;
I know its haughty, but please read!:) its one of my favorites!
