For the blessings of the field,
For the stores the gardens yield,
For the vine’s exalted juice,
For the generous olive’s use;

     Flocks that whiten all the plain,
     Yellow sheaves of ripened grain,
     Clouds that drop their fattening dews,
     Suns that temperate warmth diffuse—­

     All that Spring, with bounteous hand,
     Scatters o’er the smiling land;
     All that liberal Autumn pours
     From her rich o’erflowing stores: 

     These to Thee, my God, we owe—­
     Source whence all our blessings flow! 
     And for these my soul shall raise
     Grateful vows and solemn praise.

     Yet should rising whirlwinds tear
     From its stem the ripening ear—­
     Should the fig-tree’s blasted shoot
     Drop her green untimely fruit—­

     Should the vine put forth no more,
     Nor the olive yield her store—­
     Though the sickening flocks should fall,
     And the herds desert the stall—­

     Should Thine altered hand restrain
     The early and the latter rain,
     Blast each opening bud of joy,
     And the rising year destroy: 

     Yet to Thee my soul should raise
     Grateful vows and solemn praise,
     And, when every blessing’s flown,
     Love Thee—­for Thyself alone.

ALEXANDER BARCLAY

(1475-1552)

Barclay’s reputation rests upon his translation of the famous ’Ship of Fools’ and his original ‘Eclogues.’  A controversy as to the land of his birth—­an event which happened about the year 1475—­has lasted from his century to our own.  The decision in favor of Scotland rests upon the testimony of two witnesses:  first, Dr. William Bullim, a younger contemporary of Barclay, who mentions him in ’A Dialogue Both Pleasaunt and Pietifull Wherein is a Godlie Regement Against the Fever Pestilence with a Consolation and Comforte Against Death,’ which was published in 1564; and secondly, Barclay himself.

Bullim groups the Muses at the foot of Parnassus, and gathers about them Greek and Latin poets, and such Englishmen as Chaucer, Gower, Skelton, and Barclay, the latter “with an hoopyng russet long coate, with a pretie hood in his necke, and five knottes upon his girdle, after Francis’s tricks.  He was borne beyond the cold river of Twede.  He lodged upon a sweetebed of chamomill under the sinamone-tree:  about him many shepherdes and shepe, with pleasaunte pipes; greatly abhorring the life of Courtiers, Citizens, Usurers, and Banckruptes, etc., whose daies are miserable.  And the estate of shepherdes and countrie people he accompted moste happie and sure.”  Deprived of its poetic fancy, this passage means that Barclay was a monk of the order of St. Francis, that he was born north of the Tweed, that his verse was infused with such bitterness and tonic qualities as camomile possesses, and that he advocated the cause of the country people in his independent and admirable ‘Eclogues,’ another title for the first three of which is ’Miseryes of Courtiers and Courtes of all Princes in General.’