*Oh! Sovereign of the willing foul,

Parent of fweet and folemn-breathing airs,

Enchanting shell! the fullen Cares,

And frantic Paflions hear thy foft controul.

On Thracia's hills the Lord of War,

Has curb'd the fury of his car,

And dropp'd his thirsty lance at thy command.
+ Perching on the fceptred hand

Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king
With ruffled plumes, and flagging wing:
Quench'd in dark clouds of flumber lie
The terror of his beak, and lightnings of his eye.

Thee

• Power of harmony to calm the turbulent fallies of the foul. The thoughts are borrowed from the firft Pythian Ode of Pindar.

+ This is a weak imitation of fome incomparable lines in the fame Ode.

1. 3.

*Thee the voice, the dance, obey,

Temper'd to thy warbled lay.

O'er Idalia's velvet-green

The rofy-crowned Loves are feen

On Cytherea's day,

With antic Sports, and blue-eyed Pleasures,

Frifking light in frolic measures;

Now pursuing, now retreating,

Now in circling troops they meet:

To brifk notes, in cadence beating,

+ Glance their many-twinkling feet.

Slow melting strains their Queen's approach declare: Where'er the turns the Graces homage pay. With arms fublime, that float upon the air.

In gliding State the wins her eafy way:

O'er

* Power of harmony to produce all the graces of motion in the body.

+ Μαρμαρυγὰς θηεῖτο ποδῶν· θαύμαζε δὲ θυμῶ.

Homer. Od. O.

O'er her warm cheek, and rifing bofom, move

The bloom of young Defire, and purple light of Love.

II. I.

+ Man's feeble race what Ills await,

Labour and Penury, the racks of Pain,

Disease, and Sorrow's weeping train,

And Death, fad refuge from the ftorms of Fate f The fond complaint, my Song, difprove,

And juftify the laws of Jove.

Say, has he giv'n in vain the heav'nly Mufe è

Night, and all her fickly dews,

し

Her

* Λάμπει δ' ἐπι πορφυρίησι

Παρείησι φῶς ἔρωτος. Phrynichus apud Athenaum.

To compenfate the real and imaginary ills of life, the Mufe was given to Mankind by the fame Providence that fends the Day, by its chearfut prefence to difpel the gloom and terrors of the Night.

Her Spectres wan, and Birds of boding cry,

He gives to range the dreary fky:"

* 'Till down the eastern cliffs afar

Hyperion's march they fpy, and glitt'ring fhafts of

war.

II. 20

In climes beyond the folar § road,

Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains

roam,

The Mufe has broke the twilight-gloom

To chear the fhiv'ring Native's dull abode.

And

*Or feen the Morning's well-appointed Star Come marching up the eastern hills afar.

Cowley.

Extenfive influence of poetic Genius over the remoteft and most uncivilized nations: its connection with liberty, and the virtues that naturally attend on it. [See the Erfe, Norwegian, and Welfh Fragments, the Lapland and American fongs.]

And oft, beneath the odʼrous fhade

Of Chili's boundless forefts laid,

She deigns to hear the favage Youth repeat

In loose numbers wildly sweet,

Their feather-cinctured Chiefs, and dusky Loves.

Her track, where'er the Goddess roves,

Glory purfue, and generous Shame,

Th' unconquerable Mind, and Freedom's holy

* Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep,

Ifles, that crown th' Ægean deep,

Fields,

Progrefs of Poetry from Greece to Italy, and from. Italy to England. Chaucer was not unacquainted with the writings of Dante or of Petrarch. The Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt had travelled into Italy, and formed their tafte there; Spenfer imitated the Italian writers; Milton improved on them: but this School expired foon after the Reftoration, and a new one arofe on the French model, which has fubfifted ever fince.