EPISTLE

“Good Poets, why so full of pain,

Are you sincere — or do you feign?

Love for your tribe I never had,

Nor penned three stanzas, good or bad.

At funerals, sometimes, grief appears,

Where legacies have purchased tears:

‘ Tis folly to be sad for nought,

From me you never gained a groat.

To better trades I turned my views,

And never meddled with the muse;

Great things I did for rising States,

And kept the lightning from some pates.

This grand discovery, you adore it,

But ne'er will be the better for it:

You still are subject to those fires,

For poets’ houses have no spires.

Philosophers are famed for pride;

But, pray, be modest — when I died,

No “sighs disturbed old ocean's bed,”

No “Nature wept” for Franklin dead!

That day, on which I left the coast,

A beggar-man was also lost:

If “Nature wept,” you must agree

She wept for him — as well as me.

There's reason even in telling lies —

In such profusion of her “sighs,”

She was too sparing of a tear —

In Carolina, all was clear:

And, if there fell some snow and sleet,

Why must it be my winding sheet?

Snows oft have cloathed the April plain,

Have melted, and will melt again.

Poets, I pray you, say no more,

Or say what Nature said before;

That reason should your pens direct,

Or else you pay me no respect.

Let reason be your constant rule,

And Nature, trust me, is no fool —

When to the dust great men she brings,

Make her do — some uncommon things.”