Quenched in dark clouds of slumber lie
The terror of his beak, and lightning of his eye.
Thee, the voice, the dance obey,
Tempered to thy warbled lay.
O'er Idalia's velvet green
The rosy-crowned Loves are seen,
On Cytherea's day,
With antic sports and blue-eyed pleasures,
Frisking light in frolic measures;
Now pursuing, now retreating,
Now in circling troops they meet:
To brisk notes in cadence beating
Glance their many-twinkling feet.
Slow melting strains their queen's approach declare:
Where'er she turns, the Graces homage pay,
With arms sublime, that float upon the air,
In gliding state she wins her easy way:
O'er her warm cheek, and rising bosom move
The bloom of young Desire, and purple light of Love.
Man's feeble race what ills await,
Labour and Penury, the racks of Pain,
Disease and Sorrow's weeping train,
And Death, sad refuge from the storms of Fate!
The fond complaint, my song, disprove,
And justify the laws of Jove.
Say, has he given in vain the heavenly Muse?
Night, and all her sickly dews,
Her spectres wan, and birds of boding cry,
He gives to range the dreary sky;
Till down the eastern cliffs afar,
Hyperion's march they spy, and glittering shafts of war.
In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight gloom,
To cheer the shivering native's dull abode.
And oft, beneath the odorous shade
Of Chili's boundless forests laid,
She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat,
In loose numbers wildly sweet,
4 Idalia, a district in the island of Cyprus, consecrated to Venus.
5 Cytherea. Venus, the goddess of love, is called Cytherea, from the island Cythera, which was dedicated to her.
6 Hyperion, a Greek epithet of the sun, or rather of the supposed god of the sun; it is almost literally translated by the phrase in Ossian's address to the sun, "O thou that rollest above!"
Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves.
Her track, where'er the goddess roves,
Glory pursues, and generous Shame,
The unconquerable mind, and Freedom's holy flame.
Woods that wave o'er Delphi's steep,
Isles that crown the ÆgeanR deep,
Fields that cool Ilissus9 laves,
Or where Mæander's10 amber waves
In lingering labyrinths creep,
How do your tuneful echoes languish,
Mute but to the voice of Anguish!
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around;
Every shade and hallowed fountain
Murmured deep a solemn sound;
Till the sad Nine, in Greece's evil hour,
Left their Parnassus" for the Latian1 plains:
Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant-power,
And coward Vice, that revels in her chains.
When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,
They sought, oh, Albion! next, thy sea-encircled coast.
Far from the sun and summer gale,
In thy green lap was nature's darling13 laid,
What time, where lucid Avon strayed,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face: the dauntless child
Stretched forth his little arms and smiled.
"This pencil take," she said, "whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year.
Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy!
This can unlock the gates of joy;
Of horror that and thrilling fears,
Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears."
7 Delphi, a city of ancient Greece, built on Mount Parnassus, and sacred to Apollo, the Grecian god of music and poetry.
8 Egean; the sea now called the Archipelago. Most of the Grecian lyric poets were natives of the islands of the Ægean.
9 Ilissus, a river of Athens; its banks
were the great resort of the Athenian poets and philosophers.
10 Mæander, a river of Asia Minor, celebrated for the windings of its stream.
11 Parnassus, a Grecian mountain, sacred to the Muses.
12 Latian, Italian; Rome was built in that part of Italy called Latium. 13 Nature's darling, Shakspeare.
Nor second he that rode sublime
Upon the seraph-wings of ecstacy,
The secrets of the Abyss to spy.
He passed the flaming bounds of place and time:
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
Behold, where Dryden's less presumptuous car,
Wide o'er the fields of glory bear
Two coursers of ethereal race15,
With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace.
Hark, his hands the lyre explore!
Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er
Scatters from her pictured urn
Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.
But, ah! 'tis heard no more.
Oh, lyre divine! what daring spirit
Wakes thee now? though he inherit
Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,
That the Theban eagle1 bear,
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air:
Yet oft before his infant eyes would run
Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray,
With orient hues, unborrowed of the sun:
Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way,
Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,
Beneath the good how far, but far above the great!
As sickly plants betray a niggard earth,
Whose barren bosom starves her generous birth,
Nor genial warmth, nor genial juice retains
Their roots to feed, and fill their verdant veins;
And, as in climes where Winter holds his reign,
The soil, though fertile, will not teem in vain,
Forbids her germs to swell, her shades to rise,
Nor trusts her blossoms to the churlish skies:
So draw mankind in vain the vital airs,
Unformed, unfriended, by those kindly cares
That health and vigour to the soul impart,
Spread the young thought, and warm the opening heart,
15 race. In these lines an effort is made to express the stately march of Dryden's lines.
16 Theban eagle. Pindar, the greatest of the ancient lyric poets, was a native of Thebes.
So fond instruction on the growing powers
Of nature idly lavishes her stores,
If equal justice, with unclouded face,
Smile not indulgent on the rising race,
And scatter with a free, though frugal, hand,
Light golden showers of plenty o'er the land:
But tyranny has fixed her empire there,
To check their tender hopes with chilling fear,
And blast the blooming promise of the year.
The spacious animated scene survey,
From where the rolling orb that gives the day,
His sable sons with nearer course surrounds,
To either pole, and life's remotest bounds.
How rude soe'er the exterior form we find,
Howe'er opinion tinge the varied mind,
Alike to all the kind, impartial Heaven
The sparks of truth and happiness has given:
With sense to feel, with memory to retain,
They follow pleasure, and they fly from pain;
Their judgment mends the plan their fancy draws,
The event presages, and explores the cause:
The soft returns of gratitude they know,
By fraud elude, by force repel the foe,
While mutual wishes, mutual woes endear
The social smile, and sympathetic tear.
Say, then, through ages by what fate confined,
To different climes seem different souls assigned?
Here measured laws and philosophic ease
Fix and improve the polished arts of peace.
There industry and gain their vigils keep,
Command the winds, and tame the unwilling deep.
Here force and hardy deeds of blood prevail;
There languid pleasure sighs in every gale.
Oft o'er the trembling nations from afar
Has Scythia breathed the living cloud of war;
And, where the deluge burst, with sweepy sway,
Their arms, their kings, their gods, were rolled
away.
As oft have issued, host impelling host,
The blue-eyed myriads from the Baltic coast,
The prostrate south to the destroyer yields
Her boasted titles, and her golden fields,
With grim delight the brood of winter view
A brighter day, and heavens of azure hue,
Scent the new fragrance of the breathing rose,
And quaff the pendant vintage as it grows.
Proud of the yoke, and pliant to the rod,
Why yet does Asia dread a monarch's nod,
While European freedom still withstands
The encroaching tide that drowns her lessening lands,
And sees far off, with an indignant groan,
Her native plains and empires once her own?
Can opener skies and suns of fiercer flame,
O'erpower the fire that animates our frame,
As lamps, that shed at eve a cheerful ray,
Fade and expire beneath the eye of day?
Need we the influence of the northern star,
To string our nerves, and steel our hearts to war?
And where the face of nature laughs around,
Must sickening virtue fly the tainted ground?
Unmanly thought! what seasons can control,
What fancied zone can circumscribe the soul,
Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs,
By reason's light on resolution's wings,
Spite of her frail companion, dauntless goes
O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows?
She bids each slumbering energy awake,
Another touch, another temper take;
Suspends the inferior laws that rule our clay;
The stubborn elements confess her sway;
Their little wants, their low desires, refine,
And raise the mortal to a height divine.
Not but the human fabric from the birth,
Imbibes a flavour of its parent earth.
As various tracts enforce a various toil,
The manners speak the idiom of their soil.
An iron race the mountain-cliffs maintain,
Foes to the gentle genius of the plain:
For where unwearied sinews must be found,
With side-long plough to quell the flinty ground,
To turn the torrent's swift-descending flood,
To brave the savage rushing from the wood,
What wonder, if, to patient valour trained,
They guard with spirit what by strength they gained?
And while their rocky ramparts round they see,
The rough abode of want and liberty,
(As lawless force from confidence will grow,)
Insult the plenty of the vales below?
What wonder, in the sultry climes that spread
Where Nile, redundant o'er his summer bed,
From his broad bosom life and verdure flings,
And broods o'er Egypt with his watery wings,
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