FAIR thoughts of good, and fantasies as fair! Why is it your content to dwell confined In the dark cave of meditative mind, Nor show your forms and colours otherwhere? Why taste ye not the beautiful free air Of life and action? If the wintry wind Rages sometimes, must noble growth be pined, And fresh extravagant boughs lopped off by care? Behold the budding and the flowering flowers, That die, and in their seed have life anew; Oh! if the promptings of our better hours With vegetative virtue sprung and grew, They would fill up the room of living Time, And leave the world small space to nourish weeds of crime. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...IMPRESSION by EDMUND WILLIAM GOSSE CITY ROOFS by CHARLES HANSON TOWNE LINES FROM A PLUTOCRATIC POETASTER TO A DITCH-DIGGER by FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS A SONG OF PROGRESS by ALEXANDER ANDERSON TO MISS DIXON by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD AIR AN' LIGHT by WILLIAM BARNES |