TO WILLIAM HAZLITT.

Et modò quà nostri spatiantur in urbe Quirites,
Et modò villarum proxima rura placent.

MILTON, Eleg. 7.

Enjoying now the range of town at ease,
And now the neighb'ring rural villages.

DEAR Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such

That it seems to feel truth, as one's fingers do

touch,

Who in politics, arts, metaphysics, poetics,

To critics in these times, are health to cosmetics,

And nevertheless,

or I rather should say,

For that very reason,

-can relish boy's play,

And turning on all sides, through pleasures and

cares,

Find nothing more precious than laughs and fresh

airs;

One's life, I conceive, might go prettily down
In a due easy mixture of country and town;→
Not after the fashion of most with two houses,
Who gossip, and gape, and just follow their spouses,
And let their abode be wherever it will,

Are the same vacant, house-keeping animals still ;-
But with due sense of each, and of all that it

yields,

In the town, of the town,-in the fields, of the

fields;

In the one, for example, to feel as we go on,

That streets are about us, arts, people, and so on

In t'other, to value the stillness, the breeze,

And love to see farms, and to get among trees.

Each his liking, of course,-so that this be the rule.

For my part, who went in the city to school,
And whenever I got in a field, felt my soul in it
-Spring, so that like a young horse I could roll in it,
-My inclinations are much what they were,

And cannot dispense, in the first place, with air;
But then I would have the most rural of nooks
Just near enough town to make use of it's books,
And to walk there, whenever I chose to make calls,
To look at the ladies, and lounge at the stalls.

To tell you the truth, I could spend very well Whole mornings in this way 'twixt here and Pall

Mall,

And make my gloves' fingers as black as my hat, In pulling the books up from this stall and that:Then turning home gently through field and o'er style,

Partly reading a purchase, or rhyming the while, Take my dinner (to make a long evening) at two, With a few droppers-in like my Cousin and you, Who can season the talk with the right-flavour'd attic,

Too witty, for tattling,-too wise, for dogmatic ;Then take down an author, whom one of us men

tions,

And doat, for a while, on his jokes or inventions; Then have Mozart touched, on our bottle's com

pletion,

Or one of your fav'rite trim ballads Venetian:Then up for a walk before tea down a valley,

And so to come back through a leafy-wall'd alley,

In which the sun peeping, as into a

chamber,

Looks gold on the leaves, turning some to sheer

amber:

Then tea made by one, who (although my wife she

be),

If Jove were to drink it, would soon be his Hebe; Then silence a little, a creeping twilight,

Then an egg for your supper, with lettuces white, And a moon and friend's arm to go home with at night.

Now this I call passing a few devout hours

Becoming a world that has friendships and flow

ers;

That has lips also, made for still more than to chat

to;

And if it has rain, has a rainbow for that too.