Nor thus concludes his labour; near the cot,
The reed-fence rises round some fav’rite spot;
Where rich carnations, pinks with purple eyes,
Proud hyacinths, the least some florist’s prize,
Tulips tall-stemm’d and pounced auriculas rise. 
   Here on a Sunday-eve, when service ends,
Meet and rejoice a family of friends;
All speak aloud, are happy and are free,
And glad they seem, and gaily they agree. 
What, though fastidious ears may shun the speech,
Where all are talkers, and where none can teach;
Where still the welcome and the words are old,
And the same stories are for ever told;
Yet theirs is joy that, bursting from the heart,
Prompts the glad tongue these nothings to impart;
That forms these tones of gladness we despise,
That lifts their steps, that sparkles in their eyes;
That talks or laughs or runs or shouts or plays,
And speaks in all their looks and all their ways. 
   Fair scenes of peace! ye might detain us long,
But vice and misery now demand the song;
And turn our view from dwellings simply neat,
To this infected Row, we term our Street. 
   Here, in cabal, a disputatious crew
Each evening meet; the sot, the cheat, the shrew;
Riots are nightly heard:  —­the curse, the cries
Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies;
While shrieking children hold each threat’ning hand,
And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand: 
Boys, in their first-stol’n rags, to swear begin,
And girls, who heed not dress, are skill’d in gin: 
Snarers and smugglers here their gains divide;
Ensnaring females here their victims hide;
And here is one, the Sibyl of the Row,
Who knows all secrets, or affects to know. 
Seeking their fate, to her the simple run,
To her the guilty, theirs awhile to shun;
Mistress of worthless arts, depraved in will,
Her care unblest and unrepaid her skill,
Slave to the tribe, to whose command she stoops,
And poorer than the poorest maid she dupes. 
   Between the road-way and the walls, offence
Invades all eyes and strikes on every sense;
There lie, obscene, at every open door,
Heaps from the hearth, and sweepings from the floor,
And day by day the mingled masses grow,
As sinks are disembogued and kennels flow. 
   There hungry dogs from hungry children steal;
There pigs and chickens quarrel for a meal;
Their dropsied infants wail without redress,
And all is want and woe and wretchedness;
Yet should these boys, with bodies bronzed and bare,
High-swoln and hard, outlive that lack of care —
Forced on some farm, the unexerted strength,
Though loth to action, is compell’d at length,
When warm’d by health, as serpents in the spring,
Aside their slough of indolence they fling. 
   Yet, ere they go, a greater evil comes —
See! crowded beds in those contiguous rooms;
Beds but ill parted, by a paltry screen
Of paper’d lath, or curtain dropt between;