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EPISTLE TO ROBERT EARL OF OXFORD AND MORTIMER PREFIXED TO PARNELL’S POEMS - Alexander Pope, The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope [1903]

Edition used:

The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Cambridge Edition, ed. Henry W. Boynton (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903).

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


EPISTLE TO ROBERT EARL OF OXFORD AND MORTIMER

PREFIXED TO PARNELL’S POEMS

    • Such were the notes thy once-lov’d Poet sung,
    • Till Death untimely stopp’d his tuneful tongue.
    • Oh, just beheld and lost! admired and mourn’d!
    • With softest manners, gentlest arts, adorn’d!
    • Bless’d in each science! bless’d in ev’ry strain!
    • Dear to the Muse! to Harley dear—in vain!
    • For him thou oft hast bid the world attend,
    • Fond to forget the statesman in the friend;
    • For Swift and him despised the farce of state,
    • The sober follies of the wise and great,10
    • Dext’rous the craving, fawning crowd to quit,
    • And pleas’d to ’scape from Flattery to Wit.
    • Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear
    • (A sigh the absent claims, the dead a tear);
    • Recall those nights that closed thy toilsome days,
    • Still hear thy Parnell in his living lays;
    • Who, careless now of Int’rest, Fame, or Fate,
    • Perhaps forgets that Oxford e’er was great;
    • Or deeming meanest what we greatest call,
    • Beholds thee glorious only in thy fall.20
    • And sure if aught below the seats divine
    • Can touch immortals, ’t is a soul like thine;
    • A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
    • Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
    • The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
    • The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.
    • In vain to deserts thy retreat is made;
    • The Muse attends thee to thy silent shade;
    • ’T is hers the brave man’s latest steps to trace,
    • Rejudge his acts, and dignify disgrace.30
    • When Int’rest calls off all her sneaking train,
    • And all th’ obliged desert, and all the vain,
    • She waits, or to the scaffold or the cell,
    • When the last ling’ring friend has bid farewell.
    • Ev’n now she shades thy evening walk with bays
    • (No hireling she, no prostitute to praise);
    • Ev’n now, observant of the parting ray,
    • Eyes the calm sunset of thy various day,
    • Thro’ fortune’s cloud one truly great can see,
    • Nor fears to tell that Mortimer is he.40