Since this is the season of giving, three baubles here by which to be
cheered. Prompting perhaps also the query: Our treatment of such themes
ought now to be intensely specific in comparison, were we to wish to feel
like materialists -- -is- it, on the whole? Could it be, maybe, that in
the absence of pointed attention to particular parts of world management,
modern poetry has contrived to make -abstraction- seem anodyne merely?
I see the world of trade emerge
From ocean's solitude! What fury fires
My breast! The flood, the flood retires,
And owns its future sovereign! Urge
Thy destined way; what countless pennants stream!
(Or is it but the shadow of a dream?)
(William Lisle Bowles. Coleridge had a THING for him.)
Trade's the source, sinew, soul of all;
Trade's all herself; hers, hers, the ball;
Where most unseen, the goddess still is there:
Trade leads the dance, Trade lights the blaze;
The courtier's pomp, the student's ease!
(Edward Young. Was known to lucubrate.)
With such mad seas the daring Gama fought,
For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
Incessant, labouring round the stormy Cape;
By bold ambition led, and bolder thirst
Of gold. For then from ancient gloom emerged
The rising world of trade: the Genius, then,
Of navigation, that, in hopeless sloth,
Had slumber'd on the vast Atlantic deep,
For idle ages, starting, heard at last
The Lusitanian Prince; who, Heaven-inspired,
To love of useful glory roused mankind,
And in unbounded commerce mix'd the world.
(James Thomson. This is from the summer of his seasons. Ah, yesterday )
Useful glory, eh.
Useful and glorious, k
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