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Of all that Nature in her bounty gave,
The wise to counsel, and the fair to save,
One wondrous man, by no dull rules confin’d,
Took all her realms, and left no track behind.
Not he, like moderns, trims the polish’d line,
To make one little taper neatly shine;
But, careless vast, with unexhausted fire,
Strikes every chord, and wakes the sounding lyre.

At once the monarch trembles on his throne,
The clown is merry, and the maid undone;
The ghost walks pale where midnight torches burn,
The lover sighs, the murderer feels the urn.
Here Falstaff laughs, enormous in his ease,
And robs the grave of half its power to please;
There Hamlet, musing in his sable room,
Makes Thought itself the minister of Doom.

What art was his? Not art’s mechanic part,
That counts the pulse, yet never finds the heart;
Not critic lore, by painful triflers taught,
The curdled milk of Aristotle’s thought.
He read not schools: he read the living breast,
Where kings are cowards, and where knaves are bless’d;
Where virtue trips, where guilt itself can pray,
And angels lose, and devils find, their way.

His faults? Be bold, ye little wits, and show
What spots are found upon the solar glow.
Yes, there are clouds: but clouds that, passing, fling
New lustre round the forehead of a king.
A line runs wild; a jest too gross appears;
Some phrase offends our lace-cuff’d later ears.
Yet, while we blame, the scene, with sudden start,
Leaps from the page, and clutches at the heart.

For Nature, not decorum, was his guide;
He stoop’d to earth, and mounted at her side.
No single age his empire can contain;
He rules the booth, the palace, and the plain.
The child may wonder, and the sage may pore;
The more we know, we only owe him more.
Each passion there its proper mirror sees:
The proud find torment, and the humble ease.