THEY try to persuade me, my dear little sprite,
That you are not a daughter of æther and light,
Nor have any concern with those fanciful forms,
Who dance upon rainbows and ride upon storms,
That, in short, you're a WOMAN, your lip and your
breast
As mortal as ever were tasted or prest!
But I will not believe it-No, Science to you
I have long bid a last, and a careless adieu;
Still flying from Nature to study her laws,
And dulling delight, by exploring its cause,
You forget how superior for mortals below
Is the fiction they dream to the truth that they know.
Oh! who, that has ever had rapture complete,
Would ask How we feel it, or why it is sweet;
* The Invisible Girl was an acoustical Deception, exhibited in Leicester Fields. From a glass globe, suspended in the midst of a room, and having no apparent communication with any thing else, a female conversed with the spectators in four languages, and played upon the Piano Forte: her breath might even be felt. Had the lines here reprinted no external sign by which to discover their author, the internal evidence would justify their being ascribed to the elegant translator of Anacreon. EDITOR.
How rays are confin'd, or how particles fly
Through the medium refin'd of a glance or a sighIs there one who but ONCE would not rather have known it
Than written, with HARVEY, whole volumes upon it?
No, no-but for you, my Invisible love,
I will swear you are one of those spirits that rove
By the bank, where at twilight the Poet reclines,
When the Star of the West on his solitude shines,
And the magical fingers of Fancy have hung
Ev'ry breeze with a sigh, ev'ry leaf with a tongue :
Oh! whisper him then, 'tis retirement alone
Can hallow his harp, or ennoble its tone;
Like with a veil of seclusion between,
His song to the world let him utter unseen,
And like you, a legitimate child of the spheres,
Escape from the eye to enrapture the ears!
Sweet agent of mystery! how I should love,
In the wearisome ways I am fated to rove,
For ever to have you invisibly nigh,
Inhaling for ever your song and your sigh! 'Mid-the crowds of the world, and the murmurs of
I could sometimes converse with my nymph of the air,
And turn with delight from the clamorous crew,
To steal in the pauses, one whisper from you!
Oh! come, and be near me; for ever be mine;
We shall hold in the air a communion divine,
As pure as, of old, was imagin'd to dwell,
In the grotto of Numa or Socrates' cell!
And oft, at those lingering moments of night,
When the heart is weigh'd down, and the eye-lid is light,
You shall come to my pillow, and tell me of love,
Such as Angel to Angel might whisper above!
Oh spirit!—and then, could you borrow the tone
Of that voice, to my ear so bewitchingly known,
The voice of THE ONE upon earth, who has twin'd
With her essence for ever my heart and my mind;
Tho' lonely, and far from the light of her smile,
An exile, and weary, and hopeless the while,
Could you shed for a moment her voice on my ear,
I will think at that moment my Cara is near;
That she comes, with consoling enchantment to speak,
And kisses my eye-lid and sighs on my cheek,
And tells me the night shall go rapidly by,
For the dawn of our hope, of our Heaven is nigh!
Sweet spirit! if such be your magical pow'r,
It will lighten the lapse of full many an hour,
And let Fortune's realities frown as they will,
Hope, Fancy, and Cara may smile for me still!
In vain to melt that heap of snow,
Which keeps your virgin heart so cold,
Soft Pity caus'd the tear to flow
Vain as the As my sad hopeless tale I told.
Then cease to pity; for your eye,
Your radiant eye, and breast, appear
More lovely heaving with a sigh,
And brighter glistening through a tear.
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