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(From The Task)
RANK abundance breeds, | |
| In gross and pampered cities, sloth and lust | |
| And wantonness and gluttonous excess. | |
| In cities vice is hidden with most ease, | |
| Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught | 5 |
| By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there | |
| Beyond the achievements of successful flight. | |
| I do confess them nurseries of the arts, | |
| In which they flourish most; where, in the beams | |
| Of warm encouragement, and in the eye | 10 |
| Of public note, they reach their perfect size. | |
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| Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaimed | |
| The fairest capital of all the world, | |
| By riot and incontinence the worst. | |
| There, touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes | 15 |
| A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees | |
| All her reflected features. Bacon there | |
| Gives more than female beauty to a stone, | |
| And Chatham’s eloquence to marble lips. | |
| Nor does the chisel occupy alone | 20 |
| The powers of sculpture, but the style as much, | |
| Each province of her art her equal care. | |
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| With nice incision of her guided steel | |
| She ploughs a brazen field, and clothes a soil | |
| So sterile with what charms soe’er she will | 25 |
| The richest scenery and the loveliest forms. | |
| Where finds Philosophy her eagle eye, | |
| With which she gazes at yon burning disk | |
| Undazzled, and detects and counts his spots? | |
| In London. Where her implements exact, | 30 |
| With which she calculates, computes, and scans, | |
| All distance, motion, magnitude, and now | |
| Measures an atom and now girds a world? | |
| In London. Where has commerce such a mart, | |
| So rich, so thronged, so drained, and so supplied, | 35 |
| As London,—opulent, enlarged, and still | |
| Increasing London? Babylon of old | |
| Not more the glory of the earth than she, | |
| A more accomplished world’s chief glory now. | |
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