Then spend your life in joy and sport, May yield, God knows, to strong temptation. Our courtier walks from dish to dish, · 179 190 200 1 Tips with silver: ' occurs also in the famous moonlight scene in the Iliad '-'Tips with silver every mountain's head.' No sooner said, but from the hall Rush chaplain, butler, dogs, and all: A rat! a rat! clap to the door'- Give me again my hollow tree, A crust of bread, and liberty!' 210 220 BOOK IV. ODE I. TO VENUS. AGAIN? new tumults in my breast? Ah, spare me, Venus! let me, let me rest! I am not now, alas! the man As in the gentle reign of my Queen Anne. Ah, sound no more thy soft alarms, Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms. Mother too fierce of dear desires! Turn, turn to willing hearts your wanton fires, To Number Five direct your doves, There spread round Murray all your blooming loves: Noble and young, who strikes the heart With every sprightly, every decent part; Equal, the injured to defend, To charm the mistress, or to fix the friend. He, with a hundred arts refined, Shall stretch thy conquests over half the kind; To him each rival shall submit, Make but his riches equal to his wit. 11 Then shall thy form the marble grace, (Thy Grecian form) and Chloe lend the face: His house, embosom'd in the grove, Sacred to social life and social love, Shall glitter o'er the pendant green, Where Thames reflects the visionary scene: Thither, the silver-sounding lyres 19 Shall call the smiling Loves, and young Desires; There, every Grace and Muse shall throng, Exalt the dance, or animate the song; There, youths and nymphs, in consort gay, Shall hail the rising, close the parting day. With me, alas! those joys are o'er; For me, the vernal garlands bloom no more. Adieu fond hope of mutual fire, The still believing, still-renew'd desire ; Adieu! the heart-expanding bowl, And all the kind deceivers of the soul! But why? ah, tell me, ah, too dear! Steals down my cheek th' involuntary tear? Why words so flowing, thoughts so free, Stop, or turn nonsense, at one glance of thee? Thee, dress'd in fancy's airy beam, Absent I follow through th' extended dream; Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms, 30 41 And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms; And swiftly shoot alang the Mall, Or softly glide by the canal, Now shown by Cynthia's silver ray, And now on rolling waters snatch'd away. Adieu!' how like Burns's lines, beginning "But when life's day draws near the gloaming, Farewell to vacant, careless roaming!" &c. PART OF THE NINTH ODE OF THE FOURTH BOOK. 1 LEST you should think that verse shall die, 2 Though daring Milton sits sublime, 3 Sages and chiefs long since had birth. Ere Cæsar was, or Newton named ; These raised new empires o'er the earth, And those, new heavens and systems framed. 4 Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride! YES; thank my stars! as early as I knew That all beside, one pities, not abhors; As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores. It brought (no doubt) the Excise and Army in: Catch'd like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how, But that the cure is starving, all allow. Yet like the papist's is the poet's state, Poor and disarm'd, and hardly worth your hate! 10 Donne:' Pope, it is said, imitated Donne's 'Satires' to show that celeprated men before him had been as severe as he. Donne was an extraordinary man-first a Roman Catholic, then a barrister, then a clergyman in the Church of England, and Dean of St Paul's,-a vigorous although rude satirist, a fine Latin versifier, the author of many powerful sermons, and of a strange book defending suicide; altogether a strong, eccentric, extravagant genius. |