To Plutus
By John Langhorne
Great god of wealth, before whose sacred throne
Truth, honour, genius, fame, and worth lie prone!
To thy throng’d temples take one votary more:
To thee a poet never kneel’d before.
Adien the gods that caught my early prayer!
Wisdom that frown’d, and Knowledge fraught with care;
Friendship that every veering gale could move;
And tantalizing Hope, and faithless Love!
These, these are slaves that in thy livery shine:
For Wisdom, Friendship, Love himself is thine!
For thee I’ll labour down the mine’s dark way,
And leave the confines of enlivening day,
For thee Asturia’s shining sands explore,
And bear the splendors of Potosi’s ore;
Scale the high rock, and tempt the raging sea,
And think, and toil, and wish, and wake for thee.
Farewell the scenes that thoughtless youth could please;
The flowery scenes of indolence and ease.
Where you the way with magic power beguile,
Bassora’s deep, or Lybia’s deserts smile.
Foes of thy worth, that, insolent and vain,
Deride thy maxims, and reject thy reign;
The frantic tribe of virtue shall depart,
And make no more their ravage in my heart,
Away ‘The tears that pity taught to flow!’
Away that anguish for a brother’s woe!
Adieu to these, and every tiresome guest,
That drain’d my fortunes, or destroy’d my rest!
Ah, good Avaro! could I thee despise?
Thee, good Avaro; provident and wise?
Plutus, forgive the bitter things I’ve said!
I love Avaro; poor Avaro’s dead.
Yet, yet I’m thine; for Fame’s unerring tongue
In thy sooth’d ear thus pours her silver song:
‘Immortal Plutus! god of golden ease!
Form’d every heart, and every eye to please!
For thee Content her downy carpet spreads,
And rosy Pleasure swells her genial beds.
‘Tis thine to gild the mansions of Despair,
And beam a glory round the brows of Care;
To cheat the lazy pace of sleepless hours
With marble fountains, and ambrosial bowers.’
O grant me, Plutus, scenes like those I sung,
My youthful lyre when vernal fancy strung.
For me their shades let other Studleys rear,
Though each tree’s water’d with a widow’s tear.
Detested god!—forgive me! I adore.
Great Plutus, grant me one petition more.
Should Delia, tender, generous, fair, and free,
Leave love and truth, and sacrifice to thee;
I charge thee, Plutus, be to Delia kind,
And make her fortunes richer than her mind.
Be her’s the wealth all Heaven’s broad eye can view;
Grant her, good god, Don Philip and Peru.
