ON COMPLEATING HIS SEVENTY-FIRST VOLUME.
TILL as young Mem'ry fills her spacious urn,
Thy labours, URBAN, gratefully return:
Again from Recollection's honey'd flore
Refreshment springs, more vivid than before;
Her vernal vest in varied colouring wrought,
Her fober brow with added wisdom fraught,
She o'er thy pages sheds a cheerful light,
And bids the landscape every view unite
All that attracts the ever-active mind
Within utility's wide rage confin'd;
All that the Sage adopts, or Patriots own,
To raise the cottage, or fupport the throne;
To lend humanity its utmost grace,
And bind each bleffing to the human race,
With liberty conjoin'd, "that loves the laws,"
And spurns mad licence, and her anarch cause;
Which once dissolving every nobler tie,
Wealth, Genius, Virtue, equal in her eye,
Her curse to render still the more compleat,
At length expels Religion from her feat:
So, when the fun obtrudes his blazing light,
The guilt-ftruck wretch prefers the shades of night!
But now, excluded from the haunts of men,
That Dragon system seeks its darksome den;
New Temples rise where victims lately scream'd,
And incense curls where deadly meteors gleam'd;
The weary mind is by the Cross sustain'd,
And Hope consoles where Doubt alone complain'd;
Sweet Concord, and the charities of life,
Discord fubdue, and never-ending strife;
And where Divifion, many-tongu'd, was heard,
One common off 'ring owns one common Lord,
These, and the wond'rous changes of the year,
That far exceed the Muse's narrow sphere,
In URBAN's ample pages still display
Whate'er refines the intellectual ray,
Informs the judgment, or exalts the sense,
All that to notice claims the just pretence,
While Science reasons, or while Fancy ftrays,
Or liberal Criticism awards the bays:
Thus ev'ry year, for ev'ry taste is given,
Whate'er can sweeten life, or antedate a heaven.