Where thick thy primrose blossoms play, Lovely and innocent as they,

O'er coppice lawns and dells,

In bands the rural children stray,

To pluck thy nectar'd bells;

Whose simple sweets, with curious skill, The frugal cottage-dames distil,

Nor envy France the vine, While many a festal cup they fill With Britain's homely wine.

Unchanging still from year to year,
Like stars returning in their sphere,
With undiminish'd rays,

Thy vernal constellations cheer
The dawn of lengthening days.

Perhaps from Nature's earliest May,
Imperishable 'midst decay,

Thy self-renewing race

Have breathed their balmy lives away
In this neglected place.

And O, till Nature's final doom,
Here unmolested may they bloom,
From scythe and plough secure ;
This bank their cradle and their tomb,
While earth and skies endure !

Yet, lowly Cowslip, while in thee
An old unalter'd friend I see,
Fresh in perennial prime;
From Spring to Spring behold in me
The woes and waste of Time.

This fading eye and withering mien
Tell what a sufferer I have been,

Since, more and more estranged,
From hope to hope, from scene to scene,
Through Folly's wiles I ranged.

Till, distanced in Ambition's race,
Weary of Pleasure's joyless chase,

My peace untimely slain,

'Twas Spring-my former haunts I found, My favourite flowers adorn'd the ground, My darling minstrels play'd;

The mountains were with sunset crown'd, The valleys dun with shade.

And still, in Memory's twilight bowers,

The spirits of departed hours,

With mellowing tints, portray

The blossoms of life's vernal flowers
For ever fall'n away.

Till youth's delirious dream is o'er,
Sanguine with hope, we look before,
The future good to find;

In age, when error charms no more,
For bliss we look behind.

THE ROSES.

ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND ON THE BIRTH OF HIS FIRST CHILD.

Two Roses on one slender spray

In sweet communion grew, Together hail'd the morning ray,

And drank the evening dew;

While, sweetly wreathed in mossy green,
There sprang a little bud between.

Through clouds and sunshine, storms and showers,

They open'd into bloom,

Mingling their foliage and their flowers,

Their beauty and perfume;

While, foster'd on its rising stem,

The bud became a purple gem.

But soon their summer splendour pass'd,

They faded in the wind;

Yet were these Roses to the last

The loveliest of their kind,

Whose crimson leaves, in falling round,

Adorn'd and sanctified the ground.