Ode To The Woods And Forests. By One Of The Board.

Let other bards to groves repair,         Where linnets strain their tuneful throats;     Mine be the Woods and Forests where         The Treasury pours its sweeter notes.     No whispering winds have charms for me,         Nor zephyr's balmy sighs I ask;     To raise the wind for Royalty         Be all our Sylvan zephyr's task!     And 'stead of crystal brooks and floods,         And all such vulgar irrigation,     Let Gallic rhino thro' our Woods         Divert its "course of liquidation."     Ah, surely, Vergil knew full well         What Woods and Forests ought to be,     When sly, he introduced in hell         His guinea-plant, his bullion-tree;[1]--     Nor see I why, some future day,         When short of cash, we should not send     Our Herries down--he knows the way--         To see if Woods in hell will lend.     Long may ye flourish, sylvan haunts,         Beneath whose "branches of expense"     Our gracious King gets all he wants,--         Except a little taste and sense.     Long, in your golden shade reclined.         Like him of fair Armida's bowers,     May Wellington some wood-nymph find,         To cheer his dozenth lustrum's hours;     To rest from toil the Great Untaught,         And soothe the pangs his warlike brain     Must suffer, when, unused to thought,         It tries to think and--tries in vain.     Oh long may Woods and Forests be         Preserved in all their teeming graces,     To shelter Tory bards like me         Who take delight in Sylvan places!