True to his charge, the close packed load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined inn;
And having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch!
Cold and yet cheerful; messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indifferent whether grief or joy.
Houses in ashes and the fall of stocks.
Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains
Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
His horse and him, unconscious of them all."
And yet, notwithstanding this, and so many other passages that seem
like the very marrow of our being, Lord Byron denies that Cowper was a
poet!--The Mail-Coach is an improvement on the Post-Boy; but I fear it
will hardly bear so poetical a description. The picturesque and dramatic
do not keep pace with the useful and mechanical. The telegraphs that
lately communicated the intelligence of the new revolution to all France
within a few hours, are a wonderful contrivance; but they are less
striking and appalling than the beacon fires (mentioned by Aeschylus,)
which, lighted from hill-top to hill-top, announced the taking of Troy
and the return of Agamemnon.
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