To a Critic

R. H. S.

Song hath a catalogue of lovely things
Thy kind hath oft defiled,--whose spite misleads
The world too often!--where the poet reads,
As in a fable, of old envyings,
Crows, such as thou, which hush the bird that sings,
Or kill it with their cawings: thorns and weeds,
Such as thyself, ’midst which the wind sows seeds
Of flow’rs, these crush before one blossom swings.
But here and there the wisdom of a School
Unknown to these hath often written down
“Fame” in white ink the future hath turned brown;
When every beauty, heaped with ridicule,
In their ignoble prose, proved their renown,
Making each famous--as an ass or fool.