No More Learning

Happy the man whom the same humble place,
The hereditary cottage of his race,
From his first rising infancy has known,
And by degrees sees gently bending down
With natural propension to that earth
Which both preserved his life and gave him birth.
Him no false distant lights by Fortune set
Could ever into foolish wanderings get.
He never dangers either saw or feared;
The dreadful storms at sea he never heard,
He never heard the shrill allarms of war,
Or the worse noises of the lawyers' Bar.
No change of consuls marks to him the year;
The change of seasons is his calender.
The cold and heat Winter and Summer shows,
Autumn by fruits, and Spring by flowers he knows.
He measures time by landmarks, and has found
For the whole day the Dial of his ground.
A neighbouring wood born with himself he sees,
And loves his old contemporary trees.
He's only heard of near Verona's name,
And knows it, like the Indies, but by fame:
Does with a like concernment notice take
Of the Red Sea and of Benacus Lake.
Thus health and strength he to a third age enjoys,
And sees a long posterity of boys.
About the spacious world let others roam,
The Voyage Life is longest made at home.

COWLEY.

I append the version of a poet who was accounted in his time 'the best
translator since Pope'.

BLEST who, content with what the country yields,
Lives in his own hereditary fields;
Who can with pleasure his past life behold,
Whose roof paternal saw him young and old;
And, as he tells his long adventures o'er,
A stick supports him where he crawled before;
Who ne'er was tempted from his farm to fly,
And drink new streams beneath a foreign sky:
No merchant, he, solicitous of gain,
Dreads not the storms that lash the sounding main:
Nor soldier, fears the summons to the war,
Nor the hoarse clamours of the noisy bar.
Unskilled in business, to the world unknown,
He ne'er beheld the next contiguous town.
Yet nobler objects to his view are given,
Fair flowery fields and star-embellished heaven.
He marks no change of consuls, but computes
Alternate consuls by alternate fruits;
Maturing autumns store of apples bring,
And flowerets are the luxury of spring.
His farm that catches first the sun's bright ray
Sees the last lustre of his beams decay:
The passing hours erected columns show,
And are his landmarks and his dials too.
Yon spreading oak a little twig he knew,
And the whole grove in his remembrance grew.
Verona's walls remote as India seem,
Benacus is th' Arabian Gulph to him.
Yet health three ages lengthens out his span,
And grandsons hail the vigorous old man.
Let others vainly sail from shore to shore--
Their joys are fewer and their labours more.

F. FAWKES.




NOTE UPON THE SATURNIAN METRE


This metre is illustrated by Nos. 1-4 (? ), 5-6, 8, 10, 12-13 in this
selection. Three views have been taken of its character.

1. It was at one time supposed to be purely quantitative. This view had
the support of Bentley, who in the _Phalaris_ (226-8) identified the
Saturnian with a metre of Archilochus. [11] 'There's no difference at
all', he says blithely.