920 ANNUAL REGISTER, 1803. 
Timing more punctual, unrecorded faéts. 
Recov’ring, and mis-stated setting right— 
Desp’rate attempt till trees shall speak again ! 
Time made thee what thou wast—king of the woods! 
And time hath made thee what thou art—a cave 
For owls to roost in! Once thy spreading boughs 
O’erhung the champaign, and the numerous flock 
That grazed it, stood beneath that ample cope 
Uncrowded, yet safe sheltered from the storm. 
No flocks frequent thee now ; thou hast outliv’d 
Thy popularity, and art become 
(Unless verse rescue thee awhile) a thing 
Forgotten, as the foliage of thy youth ! 
While thus through all the stages thou hast push’d 
Of treeship—first a seedling hid in grass ; 
Then twig; then sapling; and, as century roll’d 
Slow after century, a giant-bulk 
Of girth enormous, with moss-cushion’d root 
Upheav’d above the soil, and sides imboss’d 
With prominent wens globose—till at the last 
The rottenness, which time is charg’d to inflict 
On other mighty ones, found ako thee. 
What exhibitions various hath the world 
Witnessed, of mutability in all 
That we account most durable below! 
Change is the diet on which all subsist, 
Created changeable, and change at last 
Destroys them—skies uncertain, now the heat 
Transmitting cloudless, and the solar beam 
Now quenching, in a boundless sea of clouds— 
Calm and alternate storm, moisture and drought, 
Invigorate by turns the springs of life 
In all that live, plant, animal, and man, 
And in conclusion mar them. Nature’s threads, 
Fine passing thought, e’en in her coarsest works, 
Delight in agitation—yet sustain 
The force that agitates not unimpair’d, 
But worn by frequent impulse, to the cause 
~Of their best tone their dissolution owe. 
Thought cannot spend itself comparing still 
The great and little of thy lot, thy growth 
From almost nullity into a state 
Of matchless grandeur, and declension thence 
Slow into such magnificent decay. Neier 
me 
