Happy Birthday to the old Gent!
| How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind; Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude, And wreck the solace of the poet’s mood! Young Zeno, practic’d in the Stoic’s art, Rejects the language of the glowing heart; Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws; Condemns th’ effect whilst looking for the cause; Freezes poor Ovid in an ic’d review, And sneers because his fables are untrue! In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes, But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! Stay! vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast The graceful legends of the story’d past; Whose tongue in censure flays th’ embellish’d page, And scolds the comforts of a dreary age: Would’st strip the foliage from the vital bough Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou? Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye Discerns a Pantheon in… |
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