THE INVITATION 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 unfinished 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-crown’d ; 
O’er the gay lawn the flowery shrub dispread, 
Or 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-clad cell,? 
Emerging gently from the leafy dell ; 
By Fancy planned ; as once th’ inventive maid 
Met the hoar sage amid the secret shade ; 
1 A kind of an arbor on the side of a hill. 
2 A grotesque building, contrived by a young gentleman, who used on 
occasion to appear in the character of a hermit. 
