1h Ol Sea 
THEAINVITATION TO SELBORNE, 
SEE SELBORNE spreads her boldest beauties round, 
The varied valley, and the mountain ground, 
Wildly majestic ! what is all the pride 
Of flats, with loads of ornament supplied ? 
Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense, 
Compared with Nature’s rude magnificence. 
Arise, my stranger, to these wild scenes haste ; 
The unfinish’d farm awaits your forming taste : 
Plan the pavilion, airy, light, and true; 
Through the high arch call in the length’ning view ; 
Expand the forest sloping up the hill ; 
Swell to a lake the scant, penurious rill ; 
Extend the vista, raise the castle mound 
In antique taste with turrets ivy-:rown'd ; 
O’er the gay lawn the flowery shrub dispread, 
Cr with the blending garden mix the mead ; 
Bid China’s pale, fantastic fence delight ; 
Or with the mimic statue trap the sight. 
Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still, 
The Muse shall lead thee to the beech-grown hill, 
To spend in tea the cool, refreshing hour, 
Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower ;* 
Or where the Hermit hangs the straw-zlad cell,+ 
Emerging gently from the leafy dell ; 
* A kind of an arbour on the side of a hill. 
+ A grotesque building, contrived by a young gentleman, who used on occasi_n to 
appear in the character of a hermit. 
